Poet Ponders the Digital

The first developers of IBM PC computers neglected audio capabilities (first IBM model, 1981). (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley December 10, 2012 Deadline January 2013 Issue Dinosaur Me: An Attitude from the Past “Dude, you’re like a dinosaur of the PC era. PCs aren’t cool. We only use them to create phone apps.” My students declared me a dinosaur after I suggested they should experiment with more software and programming tools on their personal computers. What about playing games on PCs? When I was in college, serious gamers assembled impressive PC systems. “Consoles are better. Who wants to mess with computer hardware?” I asked about the Web. “Dedicated apps on smartphones are better. Use the Facebook or Twitter app on your phone, not some cluttered Web page. Dude, seriously, you’re a PC dino.” When a student calls you a dinosaur, even in jest, it seems like a good moment for reflection. As the classroom emptied into the foggy night, I ...

I tend to answer questions when asked, often without pausing long enough to consider the best wording — or even if I should answer. This semester, I'm teaching a course that uses Wikis to explore collaboration. The students are struggling with the Wiki format and some of the concepts. You'd be wrong if you thought users of Wikipedia understood how the system functions. I mentioned that installing and maintaining any content management system (CMS) was a good skill to have. A student then asked about job skills currently in demand. He was told by someone that some specific tools were in demand, while others were not. The tools and skills he was told are valuable are absolutely, positively not highly-valued based on a simple search of tech-focused job sites. And, of course, I said so. Sorry, but Visual Basic isn't going to land you at the top of the field. (There are still companies using VB for database applications, but C# is a better choice in my view.) And while ...

Monday night, I spent an hour reviewing basic Word skills with my students. One student asked why she needed to learn the "right" way to use Word, when nobody cared if you used spaces instead of tabs, hit return instead of inserting page breaks, and manually numbered your pages. I was stunned, to say the least, that anyone — especially a child of the digital age — could suggest software skills aren't important. Learning to use any application effectively eventually saves time and improves your work. If you learn how to use Word moderately well, you save minutes a day, and those minutes become hours over a month. Learning any application's features opens up new possibilities. I tell my students that letting Word automate some tasks frees more time to focus on the words instead of the formatting. To me, this is a self-evident observation: I would rather spend time writing rather than formatting. And then, on Wednesday, I received an official departmental syllabus ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 5, 2012 Deadline December 2012 Issue You Need Backups: The Benefits of Off-Site Storage Hurricane Sandy reminds us that in a matter of minutes everything in a building can be destroyed. Though we can predict some disasters, others come quickly and without warning. My wife and I have lived in places with earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and blizzards. Those are only some of the natural disasters that can upend lives. And then, there are the unfortunate events beyond nature. When things do go so horribly wrong, they take possessions and memories. Sometimes, the losses include computer hardware and storage media. In a serious disaster, the best place for personal and business data is somewhere far, far away from the event. Yet, most of us don’t have off-site backups of important data. It is time to adopt an off-site backup strategy. Because all storage media fail, my wife and I do all we can to maintain backups of important data. I have th...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 8, 2012 Deadline November 2012 Issue RSS Feeds: The Best Way to (not) Surf the Web Surfing the World Wide Web on a daily quest for the latest news is inefficient and frustrating. I read stories from at least a dozen technology sites and the experience can be annoying. From too many advertisements to videos that start automatically, I don’t like the websites. Why go from site to site when you can have latest news gathered conveniently in one place? No, I’m not suggesting you follow every news site on Google+ or Facebook. My Facebook feed is too cluttered to be useful for serious research and nobody I know uses Google+ on regular basis. There is a better solution for news junkies, though. The best way to read headlines is to use RSS feeds. With RSS, you can have the latest stories from your favorite news sources collected and organized in one location. I can open my RSS application and the latest headlines from more than 100 sources are ...

WETAKEYOURCLASS.COM-  We Take Your Online Class! We Do Your Homework, Tests, Classes For You! What needs to be written about the above link and dozens more like it? Online and distance education are at least slightly more prone to cheating, and I wonder if they are not significantly more prone to dishonestly than their traditional and hybrid counterparts. Students have been able to purchase papers for as long as instructors have assigned papers. We all know that friends "help" each other, and sometimes even parents help compose a paper. Yet, buying a paper reveals a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of an education. Now, we have to deal with students buying class attendance. Forget cheating on tests or buying papers, students aren't even attending the online lectures. Cheating is bad enough, but at least if you were in a classroom there was a chance (maybe only a slight chance) that you would learn something. You might hear one new idea, one inspiring comm...

A few years ago, a colleague and I at the University of Minnesota helped our students launch a Wikibook project on professional and technical writing. The link to the project is: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professional_and_Technical_Writing I am posting this to two blogs, one on rhetoric and one on digital pedagogy, with the hope that someone out there has a class that could reboot this project and bring it back to life. I had only four students in my technical writing course this spring, at a small private university, and they edited a few pages. However, the project needs to be much larger than four students every other year if it is going to thrive. My view is that students in a variety of courses could update and expand the project. The book needs material on ethics, communication theory, visual design, style guides, and more. I'm sure there are dozens of topics that could be tackled by students. Please, consider asking your students to contribute to this project. ...