Poet Ponders the Digital

Teaching colleagues, especially those in "New Media" and the "Digital Humanities," might find the pattern below interesting. The image is the report for activity on an academic mailing list from 1999 to present. Similar patterns are visible when I check other mailing lists. It's like the USENET statistics. Where are people going to discuss academic topics?  I left the WPA-L and other lists, because they were too often off-topic and/or not about scholarship and pedagogy. I didn't enjoy the mailing lists anymore. The fun was gone, though a core set of users remained active on other issues. Maybe that's the problem for all online spaces: they become insular.  The loss of RSS from some sites also reduced my connection to academic discussion. I really miss having easy access to RSS, and don't like Twitter or Facebook as my news feeds. From 2002 through 2010 was an active, exciting time for online communities. That's eight or nine y...

What happened to the blogosphere? Why is the USENET dead? How did Yahoo and Google groups (listserv-like services) wither so quickly? Why is podcasting struggling? The answers to some of the above questions are simple: USENET was killed because ISPs feared being sued for the amount of illegal files being distributed via the newsgroups. Groups and listservs died thanks to a mix of spam and inconvenient delivery methods. Who doesn't stuggle to manage a flood of email as it is, without mailing lists? Forums require frequent visits, and the "loudest," most annoying members drive the curious and open-minded away. Forums are now for true believers… arguing about ideological purity. Podcasts and music downloads have lost ground to streaming audio and audio-on-demand services. It's still "podcasting" in a form, but through larger services like iHeartRadio and TuneIn. Blogging and forums are the saddest loss, to me, though I miss the USENET programming ne...

Like most educators interested in technology and pedagogy, I have followed the digital revolution down many dead-end paths. We want to believe in publishing (and sharing) for the masses, but I'm less convinced today than I was twenty years ago that the masses want to share serious ideas. The masses want to share kitties, their latest meals, breaking celebrity gossip, and photos they will regret sharing almost as soon as the images enter the data stream. Blogger. Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. I have five semi-active Blogger-based blogs. My wife and I have a less active writing blog. I have Facebook pages for the blogs, Twitter feeds, and two Tumblr accounts. The traffic to the blogs is in decline, from thousands of weekly visits to a few hundred. The Facebook pages are also trailing off, as Facebook seeks to charge for promoting content. Twitter just annoys me, with an endless stream of automated tweets. I do have one account from which I follow real people posting real,...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 29, 2011 Deadline October 2011 Issue Artists Gather Online: The Valley’s Virtual Art Colonies Not long after the first artist used charcoal and ground seeds to create the first cave painting, the first critic arrived on the scene. Having stated a mastodon could create better artwork, the critic then left the artist alone in his cave. I am certain that within months, a handful of prehistoric artists met around a fire to reassure each other that critics were simply Neanderthals without any artistic abilities. Over the following centuries, artists gathered in various places. Among the more popular settings where author’s met were cafés, restaurants and unemployment lines. Being an artist has never been easy and it is only occasionally profitable. It’s little wonder that artists need to gather and commiserate. After gathering, artists find themselves reenergized. The support of your creative peers makes it a little less terrifying to expose...

Internet Sacred Text Archive (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 1, 2011 Deadline September 2011 Issue Virtual Theology: Comparative Religion Goes Digital Among the books in my personal library are several shelves of religious texts and scriptures from a variety of world religions. While most of my library consists of various Christian and Judaic texts, I also own a number of Qurans; Hindu Vedas, Puranas and Bhagavad Gita; some of the Buddhist texts known as Buddhavacana Sutras and Pali vinaya; and other texts from different faiths and philosophies. My preference for physical books for reading does not extend to research. Not that long ago I would have a concordance on hand to cross-reference words and phrases within a Bible or other scripture. There are concordances for Qurans and Sutras, but like Christian Bibles, the concordances differ by translation. If a poem, novel or other literary work referred to something from a religious tradition, I...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley February 28, 2011 Deadline April 2011 Issue Crawling the Crafters’ Web Beading, quilting, knitting and various other crafting hobbies occupy, literally, a fair amount of space in our household. My wife enjoys assembling bracelets and necklaces, creating jewelry that easily matches items we’ve seen in stores and at craft fairs. Handmade items are given and received as gifts in both of our families; my mother and sister-in-law both quilt and sew. One thing I’ve learned about crafters is that they respect the handmade projects of other crafters. It is a community with a passion for supporting each other, too. These artisans are small business owners, too, selling their crafts. There is no better way to show your support for arts and crafts than buying items made by the men and women at local craft fairs. My wife and I visit craft fairs several times a year. During the winter months, there are fewer such markets. But fog, rain and even snow do not s...

The word "community" is overused in academic fields, but it is the best word for what it on my mind today. I closed a Web server this week on which I had created a Drupal and MediaWiki site on special education. The site was functional for about two years, which is an eternity online. The reality is that online communities come and go so rapidly that what was popular a year or two ago is often "inactive" now. There are dozens of Yahoo groups that are dedicated to special education. Most of these were active five years ago, but have since fallen out of favor with users. Just as the Usenet groups and most "listservs" have faded away in the last five years, so have many online forums. The Internet has accelerated the speed with which a community grows, propers, and then declines. The timeline of the Internet is punctuated by technologies and business ideas that were "hot" for a moment. When is the last time you used IRC or read a newsgroup? Remember...

This year has been a study in contrasts. I chose to teach a traditional technical writing course in the fall and a hybrid course during the spring semester. The differences in student projects, the quality of their analyses, and general attitudes is remarkable. I know research found no easily quantified differences in learning outcomes. However, I think anyone could compare the group projects between these courses and see a difference in the products. While the lessons learned and the facts students retain might be similar, the results do demonstrate something. Some elements of are "intangible" because they are social and philosophical. For example, groups struggled online, even with guidance and gentle remainders to establish schedules and routines. In the traditional course, groups developed stronger bonds and worked together frequently. It should be noted that the face-to-face (F2F) students exchanged more e-mail and chatted more often than the students on the officia...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 2009 Issue March 30, 2009 Virtual Romances, Real Complications “He was in my guild. Probably the best thief I’ve ever met.” When I began approaching acquaintances for a column about finding romance online, I expected to hear stories like you see in the television commercials. You know the commercials: the matchmaking service finds the perfect match based on math and science. “We chatted online while plotting strategies. He was clever, funny, and I just knew I had to get to know him outside the game.” As it turns out, my friends are either skeptical of the hype or they are too cheap to pay for online matchmaking. Instead, the people I know have found online romance when they haven’t been searching for love, proving the old truism about love finding you. Apparently, love can find you between heists in virtual worlds. Since I am not an online gamer — I play Scrabble, Word Jong, and Chessmaster on a Nintendo DS — I had no idea people were me...

As some of us mourn (complain) the state of the Internet, I wonder how we can teach students to write and think in ways that rise above the [choose your own description | rancor ] they read on DailyKos, Free Republic, Town Hall, MoveOn... et al. Agree or disagree, the Web is home to a lot of angry tirades that would fail a basic debate course. Though I consider myself “moderate” and want more fun and less politics in my life, I understand that many of my colleagues cannot resist being political in their courses. What they don’t admit is that they might be tolerating weaker logic from those students expressing views that are aligned with the instructor. The students might be learning that weak, but passionate, arguments are acceptable if they support the dominant positions within their classroom communities. I worry that we might be little more than an echo chamber, suggesting to students that virtual shouting matches are acceptable. A post on the DailyKos did summarize my feeling...

Ivanhoe, California I am from Ivanhoe, California , and believe growing up in a small, Hispanic, farming community has influenced most of my decisions. Before viewing my slide show, I think you should know about the place I call home. Population (year 2000): 4,474 Median resident age: 24.9 years California median age: 33.3 years Ivanhoe median household income in 2005: $29,700 California median household income in 2005: $53,629 Ivanhoe median house/condo in 2000: $76,900 Ivanhoe median house/condo in 2005: $159,100 California median house/condo in 2005: $477,700 The ethnic composition of Ivanhoe also shaped my views on social issues: Races in Ivanhoe Hispanic 76.2% Other race 40.4% White Non-Hispanic 21.8% Two or more races 9.5% American Indian 2.0% As you can tell, it is not what people imagine of California. My wife and I uploaded some of our photos of the area around Ivanhoe, which I have marked as a slideshow on Flickr . Somewhere in storage I have photos of Ivanho...