Poet Ponders the Digital

Earlier this semester, there was a "glitch" with the Blackboard shell for my writing course. I had spent hours and hours uploading content, organizing the shell, and trying to perfect the course. And then it was gone. The Blackboard team eventually restored most, but not all, of the content. It was a tough reminder that online systems are, like all computing systems, imperfect. Systems crash. Databases get corrupted. Things go wrong and you need a contingency plan. The Blackboard bungle left my students frustrated and has cost me more than few hours. While I had copies of all materials, they were scattered about my hard drive. I didn't want to duplicate files, which I thought would waste space. I sometimes used "links" (aliases) to original files, as a compromise. On my computer, which is backed up to three external drives and mirrored to another computer, I now have a directory system that aligns with my Blackboard shell. There are folders for each w...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 4, 2013 Deadline December 2013 Issue Tablet Time: When Less is Best My next computer will be a tablet. Yes, I called it a computer because today’s tablets can replace a notebook system for many routine tasks. Though I sometimes need the power and features of a notebook or desktop computer, a tablet is perfect for surfing the Web, answering email, reading books and viewing presentations. When I upgraded from a 12-inch notebook to a 15-inch laptop, the portable computer replaced my desktop system. In return for the extra screen real estate and significant computing power, my carrying case gained weight. Walking across a university campus, the 5.6 pounds of a MacBook Pro plus the weight of its power supply and two video adapters starts to feel like 20 pounds. Most days, I don’t need the power of a laptop in my classroom. I use the laptop to show slides and pages of articles while lecturing. Students do ask to review work and grades, so ...

Online education is an accommodation to life's realities. For years I denied that online education was in many ways inferior to physical campuses. But, now that I'm working at a research university, my views are evolving. There simply are things that online education cannot do. Denying the differences, the strengths and weaknesses of various "locations" of education, can lead us to become promoters of either online or physical campuses. We should instead admit the space in which an institution exists matters. I once argued that online degrees awarded by leading universities could improve a regional economy. Now, I admit that the most a handful of degrees can do is improve the lives of a fraction of residents. A quick tangent: most online degrees aren't from leading universities. I've taught in an online program at a regional university and online was not equivalent to the on-campus degree. I don't blame the instructors who did all they could to ma...

English: Apple IIe computer (enhanced version) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 7, 2013 Deadline November 2013 Issue Apple Tech is Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary Technology revolutions are not as sudden as people believe. Not even Apple has released successful revolutionary products every year or two. “The Myth of Steve Jobs’ Constant Breakthroughs” by Harry McCracken, appeared on Time Magazine ’s Techland site in September, 2013 (http://techland.time.com/). McCraken examines the myth of “revolution” that has lingered after the death of Jobs. You have to feel sorry for chief executive Tim Cook and lead designer Jonathan (“Jony”) Ive, as they try to live up to mythology. Apple, as a company, has a mixed history of innovation. My wife and I are an Apple household. We own an iMac , Mac mini, a collection of MacBook Pro models, iPhones , iPods , and an iPad. Apple dares to deliver products that its designers and engineers want, not what cust...

Back to school means back to Blackboard. My frustration with most learning management system (LMS) platforms is well known. The administration of a class, depending on your institution, is often left to the instructor. This includes layout and design choices that I have long believed should be standardized, at least minimally, at the institution level. Because instructors can do everything from the "massive single page" dump of materials to atomized folders by week or topic, students end up trying to relearn navigation of the system with each new course. I'm now teaching at a top university with the best Blackboard install I've used. It still has problems, of course, but it is much better than any previous version and installation I've used. I theorize that part of this is streamlining the tool choices and layout options. Requiring few choices of the instructor lets me focus on the course, not the website. There might be a model shell at the university, b...

Back to school means back to the battles with Blackboard (I've posted on that plenty of times). Even if BB was the perfect learning management system, there would still be the days spent planning and organizing online content for a new course. This week, I'm gathering the reusable materials I will upload and preparing new materials. By next week, the shell for the writing course I'm teaching will be reasonably complete. My summer was meant to be spent learning to program in Objective-C. It was also meant as a time to finished a research project and revise an academic book chapter. None of those things happened. Life in the digital age doesn't seem to give us more time, but it does give us more potential tasks. My to-do list kept growing faster than I could complete projects. Maybe it is a time management issue. I completed a lot of tasks in the last few months, many of them creative writing projects. I also am preparing a new website complementing my creative inte...

Video games are written, before and during the coding process. They are, after all, stories — from the simple story of a hungry "Pac-Man" avoiding ghosts to the complex stories of modern massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Yet, some of the aspiring game developers I've met don't quite appreciate how important storytelling is to game success. Blood and guts in high-def will only carry a game so far. During my early years as a computer geek, I'd sit at my VIC-20 keyboard and create text-based adventure games in BASIC. I continued to do this well into college, because there is something about writing a text adventure that forces you to consider the storyline of a game carefully. While text adventures have declined in popularity, graphical first-person games are still constructed as stories beneath the fancy rendering. The tool I've used in the classroom to teach video game writing is Inform [ http://inform7.com ]. The Inform website...