brettoppegaard.com

Fort Vancouver Mobile in The Columbian

2012-01-26T12:26:00.001-08:00

My primary research project, based upon the Fort Vancouver Mobile app, was featured in a front-page and Sunday centerpiece of The Columbian recently, a story which covered many of the basics of the project and illustrates why we are so excited about the potential of the work. In short, we are the first group in the country working with the National Park Service on the creation of interpretive mobile apps, rather than wayfinding or expositional apps. We are creating all of our own media, doing all of our own coding, making new app designs, sharing our workshop with the public (through the FVM blog), and learning and having a lot of fun along the way. If you would like to know more, or to help us beta test in the coming months, as we prepare for the public launch in June, please contact me at fortvancouvermobile(AT)gmail.com.

Glass, and how it could change our future technologies

2012-01-03T13:54:00.000-08:00

Ignore the annoying product placement parts, and this is an interesting piece of futuristic thinking, that doesn't seem too far in the future:

Dissertation defense: Oct. 19, 2011

2011-10-08T19:15:00.001-07:00

Big day coming up! I'll be defending my dissertation: "The Fort Vancouver Mobile Project: Action Research in Net Locality" on Oct. 19 in Lubbock, Texas.

Public art at Texas Tech University

2011-07-30T01:21:00.000-07:00

Texas Tech University's Spanish Renaissance-themed campus was described by James Michener as "the most beautiful west of the Mississippi, until you get to Stanford," and part of that appeal today is its public art collection. That artwork was deemed one of the Top 10 university collections in the U.S. by Public Art Review magazine in 2006.

For the past three years, during my annual residencies in Lubbock, I have been trying to find all of the pieces throughout the campus, which is Texas-huge, the second largest contiguous campus in the nation. This past May, I finally was able to locate all of them. Here are a few photos from my HTC Thunderbolt of several of them, plus other sights from my time on the campus:

Self portrait, showing the sun color and terrain type

This sculpture is in the courtyard of the English building, where I spent most of my time.

The Masked Rider is one of the two TTU mascots (the other one looks like Yosemite Sam).

Book person in front of the union building

A detail from the Tornado of Ideas sculpture

The Tornado of Ideas

Prometheus Bound

Driftwood horse

Bell tower

One of the large portal sculptures around

Another portal

Will Rogers

People, frozen in time ...

More people

More shapes

More patterns and shapes

Former TTU president

This is probably the most interesting piece on campus

Masked Rider again

Details from a building

The big neon Double-T on the side of the football stadium

Another wild horse sculpture

This is a mosaic inside the football stadium; really cool in person, but hard to photograph; the size of a stadium wall

These only can be seen as symbols from above, looking out the football stadium windows

The view from the president's skybox

I'm in the reflection of this one

This old barn is in the middle of campus, a reminder of the ag days

One of the hardest ones to find; these are gigantic, too

The seal at the entrance to campus

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

2011-05-17T19:13:00.001-07:00

Changing Education Paradigms by Ken Robinson

2011-05-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

Divergent thinking in education systems:

Find the Future game at the New York Public Library

2011-04-02T21:46:00.000-07:00

This looks like it will be an alternate reality game of some sort, connecting physical objects with an interactive expression of ideas, related to those objects. The trailer sure does make it look exciting:

MIT-sponsored Start-Up Demo pitch session

2011-03-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

This just came out on the Mobile Portland list, from Rob Wilcox, could be helpful to some:

"Northwest Demo is sponsored by the MIT Enterprise Forum and you will be demoing to the Alliance of Angels, Keiretsu Forum, Puget Sound Venture Club, Seraph Capital Forum, TacomaAngel Network, the ZINO Society, media and individual investors.
From the announcement You have two weeks left to submit your entry. Deadline is Friday, April 8th. Click here for more details. While this event can certainly help your chances for financing, it is primarily a DEMO event, not a financing pitch. Therefore, we ask that you adjust your summary accordingly by telling us WHY it will be a great DEMO. Based on your submissions, 10 to 12 companies will be selected to present to our screening committee. From there, the committee will select the companies that will demo their product or service at the Northwest Startup DEMO – Spring 2011 event to be held on May 12th. Here's the click here, sorry for breaking your analytics: http://www.mitwa.org/apply-northwest-startup-demo-spring-2011?

Reacting to the Past games

2011-03-09T11:25:00.000-08:00

The next step for the Fort Vancouver Mobile project and its descendants is to go beyond even interactive and immersive storytelling, at least as envisioned, and push users into this kind of broader experience, Reacting to the Past games, in which users can play different roles and respond in uniquely personal ways to a historic moment. That will take a lot more work, and much more grant money. But that is the vision I'm following.

TED talk by Layar co-founder

2011-02-01T14:33:00.000-08:00

Found this short demo by Claire Boonstra, co-founder of Layar, just before its launch. Hard to believe that was such a short time ago (Layar seems like the old guard at this point), but the video is a good primer for those just starting to look at augmented reality interfaces.

TEDxAmsterdam: Layar from TEDxAmsterdam on Vimeo.

An early look at mobile interpretation in museums

2011-01-14T09:51:00.000-08:00

Museums & Mobile 2011, Survey Results.

View more presentations from Loic Tallon.

Pilot study on media in The Village at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site

2010-12-06T23:45:00.000-08:00

Here is a summary of my pilot study findings, comparing media exposure (a mobile app, a brochure, or wayside signs only) in The Village at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Not statistically significant but some promising potential appears.

The desktop presentation:

The raw PPT

A thought about time and information

2010-12-05T09:58:00.001-08:00

Had this moment of clarity today: There is no past. There is no future. There is only the present moment and the filtered reflections of bygone symbols mixed with projections of symbols and situations we might yet face.

Tracing rhetorical "audience" through time

2010-11-27T14:04:00.000-08:00

A podcast tracing the idea of rhetorical "audience" back through time, and across fields, including politics and education, and how I value this concept in my teaching.

Audience podcast

Consubstantiality, or finding common ground with words

2010-11-19T16:26:00.000-08:00

Burke's concept of consubstantiality, covered in an earlier blog post, is inspiring a podcast from me in response to the darkening binary political environment in America today. Are we Democrats, or Republicans, ... or are we Americans? Even better, are we humans? Or the best: Are we inhabitants of Earth? Each label we apply to ourselves (or others) limits the whole, or screens the whole, as Burke might say, obscuring the Truth. It seems to me that we could divide ourselves in any number of ways that would easily rival or surpass the true differences that separate the big political parties, both of which, at their hearts, are corporatist and militarist.
Finding common ground, rather than wedging apart (dividing and conquering, I suppose) meant to Burke looking for words to end "warfare," literally and figuratively. I interpret this as finding the parts where we agree, focusing on those, and building a sense of togetherness, despite other areas of difference. Is this Pollyanna-ish nonsense that never could work in reality? What if, as an earlier commentator on this blog suggested, both sides don't want to get along, and one wants to wield a stick, rather than a carrot? These are issues facing the two big political parties today, particularly the Democrats. President Obama addressed this topic of binary discourse in his press conference after the recent elections, in which Republicans made large gains in Congress. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's reply? The American people want our parties to work together "to put aside the left-wing wish list." That doesn't really sound like working together, now, does it? ... This upcoming podcast will include commentary on Burke's consubstantiality concept and the many similar ideas that have come before it in the history of classical rhetoric, as well as modern examples of powerful people, such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller, suggesting that maybe what the world needs now is a little less partisanship (when haven't we heard that cry?) and more efforts to find common ground among the people of our country, to rebuild trust in the government, which is, by the way, us, not a them.

Ways to get audio or video from YouTube.com

2010-11-18T14:04:00.000-08:00

For various media projects I have been working on lately, I have needed to remix material on YouTube.

For video, I suggest trying YouTubeDownloader, which I think has a pretty good reputation for what it does, grabbing the YouTube file and producing an FLV file for download.

And, for audio, I just ran across an interesting site that seems to simply convert sound from YouTube. The site is called FLV2MP3.com, because YouTube files are stored as FLV files, and the most common audio compression is MP3. To get the MP3, then, you just copy and paste the YouTube URL into the box on FLV2MP3, press the convert button, and the mp3 pops right out. From there, you can embed it, download it, whatever. ...

Foucault and Archaeology of Knowledge

2010-11-12T23:39:00.000-08:00

Michel Foucault envisioned discourse as an artifact that could be dug up and examined, as from a particular period and place, a methodology of sorts that he called "Archaeology of Knowledge." From that, per James Herrick, he could determine what kinds of information could be known -- and said -- as "a matter of the social, historical and political conditions under which, for example, statements come to count as true or false."
Reading that recently inspired me to look again at the 2003 piece "Narrative Archeology" by Jeremy Hight, related to an emerging element of modern discourse: geolocation. Or, in other words, when a piece of discourse becomes directly connected to a place through a mobile device. That technological development seems to strengthen the Foucault metaphor, as Hight writes that "A city is a collection of data and sub-text to be read in the context of ethnography, history, semiotics, architectural patterns and forms, physical form and rhythm, juxtaposition, city planning, land usage shifts and other ways of interpretation and analysis. The city patterns can be equated to the patterns within literature: repetition, sub-text shift, metaphor, cumulative resonances, emergence of layers, decay and growth. A city is constructed in layers: infrastructure, streets, population, buildings. The same is true of the city in time: in shifts in decay and gentrification; in layers of differing architecture in form and layout resonating certain eras and modes in design, material, use of space and theory; in urban planning; in the physical juxtaposition of points and pointers from different times. Context and sub-text can be formulated as much in what is present and in juxtaposition as in what one learns was there and remains in faint traces (old signs barely visible on brick facades from businesses and neighborhood land usage long gone or worn splintering wooden posts jutting up from a railroad infrastructure decades dormant for example) or in what is no longer physically present at all and only is visible in recollection of the past." Digital historical interpretation that brings the past back to the present, flattens spacetime and allows history to be read fresh therefore seems to be an emerging extension of Foucault's ideas, worth juxtaposing.

Rhetoric as an end to warfare

2010-11-05T22:31:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Burke considers finding common ground among people -- along the lines of consubstantiality, or identification -- as the only answer to our most pressing problem as humans, which is the alienation, or division, we feel from others.
In "A Rhetoric of Motives," per James Herrick, Burke writes: "If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man's very essence."
As I am still feeling the bruises of yet another civil war-like political season, I wonder if Americans now have passed the point of no return in terms of consubstantiality. I don't feel hopeful at all that we can reach a period again in which we debate political issues together as Americans, trying to create the best country in the world, as opposed to Party A or Party B grasping for power and trying to dictate the ways in which the people in the other party live, which they really don't want to do.
It seems so long ago, in 2000, when a legitimate case could have been made that Republicans and Democrats were pretty much in the same place on many issues, arguing positions at least in the vicinity of each other. Ralph Nader made the case that the two parties were inseparable in ideas on the table, which was considered a bad thing. Of course, both parties at the time were concerned with a lot of negative matter, such as maintaining power and the two-party system, and feeding their corporate lamprey, and giving breaks to the rich, and a host of other slimy situations. But today, after about a decade of dramatically divisive rhetoric -- at first meant to separate the parties, but then manipulated as power grabs -- what are we left with in the ruins?
As Burke imagined, warfare! ... The bloody, bitter, hostile, horrible, hate-filled discourse of division. Unfortunately, mud-slinging, hate and character-assassination wins elections, and as long as it does, I suppose, politicians will go that route (they are, after all, politicians). But what do we as Americans get left with? Does anyone really feel good about the state of America right now? Does anyone feel like we are in this big community together?
Or do we feel divided? West Coasters versus East Coasters? City folk versus country folk? The intellectual elite versus the real people (who, apparently, are the ones you would want to sit down and drink a beer with)? War mongers / pacifists, who need to "man up." Capitalists / Socialists. Etc. Where is this getting us? Maybe instead we should be returning to Burke's suggestion of trying to find common ground, not as a form of pacifying "the enemy," which is us, by the way, but as a form realizing we are all working toward similar goals of creating a dynamic and fascinating place to live, where we can raise healthy and intelligent and happy children, and pursue what we want, when we want and how we want, and spend our lives enjoying each other, not dreading or hating each other. We don't live in two Americas. We aren't as different as we might feel that we are. We have differences, of course, but what would be the alternative, pure conformity? We all want a great country and great people and happiness. I think everyone should demand a resurgence of a rhetoric of unity from our leaders, not division. And vote out those who just continually tear us apart. That doesn't mean we eliminate debates, or differences of opinion, but we focus on the ground we share. We focus on rhetoric that brings us together. We don't focus on gaining power and leverage to boss others around. We focus on wielding words that unite us, and we return to Burke's noble effort "toward the elimination of warfare."

Platonic dialogue on a contemporary issue

2010-11-05T01:35:00.000-07:00

Aristotle as Dumbledore?

2010-10-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

I have a huge stack of books around here, begging for my attention, but I couldn't pass by this title on the library shelf the other day: "Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts."
I have been reading a lot about Aristotle in English 5361, Theories of Invention in Writing, and simultaneously reading the Harry Potter series, so I naturally was curious about what David Baggett and Shawn E. Klein had to say in combining the two. I've just been skimming at this point, but I did spend some time looking over the indexed parts related to Aristotle, which seem primarily related to his moral philosophy. Aristotle judged people on actions, the authors argue, not words (hear that sophists?!), especially when good deeds are done because they are good and right, not because they bring some sort of reward. Another interesting point the authors made was that all of the important decisions we encounter in life take place in an emotional context. Aristotle would say, the authors contend, that a reasonable person gives emotions the "appropriate" weight, and to be virtuous, via the Doctrine of the Means, a response should not be too excessive or deficient in terms of emotions. Relating that to rhetoric, I think of the balance Aristotle creates in his artistic proofs of Ethos, Logos and Pathos. In Aristotle's view, the perfect rhetorical argument provides an ideal balance of those proofs, addressing authority of the viewpoint, a logical expression of the information and emotional touchstones. I hadn't really thought about this before, because emotional rhetorical appeals seem to be the default for many, if not most, people, but what happens to rhetoric without emotions? Is such expression even possible? Building or degrading authority or character -- the ethos -- seems to inherently provoke an emotional response from the audience, such as "that's not fair" or, "yeah, that person is a bum," even if that's not a core part of what's delivered. An argument without logic would provoke an emotional response of, "someone is trying to trick me." I can imagine many arguments without logic. In fact, those seem to come up quite often. And I can imagine many arguments that strip away the ethos, purposively, to get to the "root" of the issue, as in, it doesn't matter who is saying this, it just matters that it is being said. But emotions, and pathos, seem practically unavoidable. Another interesting point made by this book is that evil can be intelligent, such as Lord Voldemort, but it can't be wise. Dumbledore is quoted as saying that Voldemort's knowledge of magic is "perhaps more extensive than any wizard alive," but Aristotle argues that a person must be knowledgeable and do noble deeds for the sake of being good to truly be wise (and virtuous). Many of the, ahem, highly flawed characters in the books I have read so far -- Gilderoy Lockhart comes to mind -- wield rhetoric in self-serving, sophistic ways. So is Dumbledore, then, really a veiled representation of Aristotle? Hmmm ...

Platonic dialogue in the works

2010-10-22T22:14:00.000-07:00

In an effort to create a contemporary (or relatively contemporary) Platonic dialogue, I have been working on piecing together journals and letters related to a Hawaiian pastor's calling to Fort Vancouver in the mid-1800s. This pastor, William Kaulehelehe, ended up being in the center of an international conflict at the fort, as a loyal British subject ousted from his home on the banks of the Columbia River, as the U.S. Army tried to bring order to the frontier in the Pacific Northwest. That's a much longer story, but my hope with this part of the dialogue is to present the rhetoric of the period as it influenced his decision but also as it reflected attitudes of the period, and rhetorical strategies.
I'm using the Twitter format as an inspiration and basically taking the actual historic text and adapting it only slightly to the faux-Twitter format.
First comes the script, a draft of which follows, with the analysis to come:

@RevBeaver: @HudsonsBayCo An ordinary, respectable countryman @FortVancouver, with his wife, might promote good behaviour of Sandwich Islanders

@ChiefFactor John (John McLoughlin): Need a trusty educated Hawaiian of good character to read the scriptures and assemble his people for public worship.

@GerritJudd (adviser to the Hawaiian king): @ChiefFactorJohn Wm. R. Kaulehelehe, @WRKaulehelehe!

McLoughlin: Need him to teach, too. And interpret.

Judd: Not as well-qualified as the first person selected but @WRKaulehelehe has good character, is faithful, industrious, and a skillful teacher. High recommendation.

McLoughlin: 10 pounds per annum

Judd: @WRKaulehelehe in regular standing as a member of the church. Wife accompanies him, no doubt will prove herself useful.

McLoughlin: 40 pounds per annum

Judd: @WRKaulehelehe @MaryKaai Go to the Columbia District? 3-4 weeks voyage away. Parish awaits.

Kaulehelehe: Aloha! @KawaiahaoChurch Aloha! @FortVancouver

And I'm working on a delivery prototype that will end up looking something like this:

Bringing order through language, a la Pico

2010-10-15T21:47:00.000-07:00

Just two paragraphs about a Renaissance rhetorician named Pico in James Herrick's "The History and Theory of Rhetoric," p. 162, made me wonder if I hadn't stumbled across some of the forgotten roots of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kenneth Burke.
The paragraphs describe Pico as an Italian humanist, with the "conviction that humans employ language to order the world and to work cooperatively within it." Language, in Pico's mind, gives humans the freedom to create their destiny and choose their paths in life, as a unique trait of the species. Our power to choose, and to create civilization, he reasoned, is a direct consequence of our "linguistic capacity" and our abilities to "probe the 'miracles concealed in the recesses of the world, in the depths of nature, and in the storehouses and mysteries of God.'"
There might not be a direct connection, but I sense traces of Wittgenstein's language games (the contextual symbolic manipulation traditions we use to bring order to the world) and Burke's symbolic action (the connecting and disconnecting of symbols as a form of sense making) in those overview statements. I would need to read more by Pico and directly compare and contrast those thoughts to the other two. But that could be an interesting exercise in philosophical genealogy.

Print / The Renaissance, Internet / The Digital Age

2010-10-09T21:14:00.000-07:00

I asked a question in class recently about rhetoric in the Renaissance era of European history, in terms of how much the printing press had fueled the massive changes of that time period. It had made me wonder how similar the Internet era of American history is, and in what ways the digital age is akin to the shifting of human culture that happened around the Renaissance. I thought I had read something connected to that somewhere, and I finally found again today the piece that must have been lodged in my brain.

Clay Shirky, a NYU professor, is on my personal list of Top 10 thinkers right now in relation to new media, and I highly recommend his books "Here Comes Everybody" and "Cognitive Surplus." But the following paragraph actually was in a pro-con piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, opposite Nicholas Carr, which I recently used as a discussion prompt in one of my Creative Media and Digital Culture courses:

"Print fueled the Protestant Reformation, which did indeed destroy the Church's pan-European hold on intellectual life. What the 16th-century foes of print didn't imagine—couldn't imagine—was what followed: We built new norms around newly abundant and contemporary literature. Novels, newspapers, scientific journals, the separation of fiction and non-fiction, all of these innovations were created during the collapse of the scribal system, and all had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range and output of society."

Just that one paragraph raises so many more thoughts and questions for me, such as: Are there parallels between the Church's pan-European hold on intellectual life and the mainstream media's hold on intellectual life in the United States before the Internet? Are the Luddites of this age any different, or are these people who complain about technology just another perpetual human archetype? Because of the historic changes during the Renaissance, can we now, with confidence, predict that new communication forms will increase the intellectual range and output of our society in the long run, despite the many not-so-smart displays that also will come with that growth (people admittedly do a lot of stupid things with new technology today)?

I might be hypersensitive to the technology bashing, but I think that the Internet truly is changing us, and our capabilities, and transforming us -- yes, evolving us -- into a different sort of animal, just as the printing press and printed word did for people half a millennium ago. Do you see parallels as well? Or am I just not thinking deeply enough about this?

New York Times story on museum apps

2010-10-03T10:35:00.001-07:00

Lots of interesting information here about other folks trying to apply mobile technology to "museums."

From Picassos to Sarcophagi, Guided by Phone Apps

Onward to TwHistory!

2010-10-01T21:13:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I have been working on a sort of TwHistory project, or historical interpretation through Twitter, for the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site as part of the content for the Fort Vancouver Mobile module based on William Kaulehelehe.
One of the TwHistory founders, Tom Caswell, has corresponded with me about this idea and given me some advice. A great resource in getting started with this sort of thing can be found on the TwHistory site here, as a FAQ.
One of the first steps in this process is to create your story's Twitter characters. So I have been chipping away at those characters needed to recreate the conversation, through letters, that brought Kaulehelehe to the fort.

Here is my list so far:
@KanakaWilliam, where the main story will take place
@RevBeaver, a smarmy reverend involved in the story
@ChiefFactorJohn, John McLoughlin, the chief factor of the fort
@GerritJudd, the missionary in Hawaii who recommended Kaulehelehe to the fort Kaulehelehe – @WRKaulehelehe, the protagonist
@GHAtkinson, another smarmy reverend involved in the story
@MaryKaai, wife of William Kaulehelehe
@KawaiahaoChurch, the church where William came from
@RevSamuelDamon, yet one more reverend
@HudsonsBayCo, the organization that ran the fort

Once I finish the script, I will plug the lines into Twitter, and voila, the conversation will come to life again, at least in theory. I'll let you know how it goes.

Rhetorical analysis of the SPJ Code of Ethics

2010-10-01T18:13:00.000-07:00

5361 (Rice) Assignment No. 1 from Brett Oppegaard on Vimeo.

Analysis of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics

2010-09-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

Because my TwHistory idea seems to fit better under the guidelines of the second assignment in Dr. Rich Rice's Engl 5361 class (Theories of Invention in Writing), I'm going to first focus on a rhetorical analysis of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics.
Journalism and rhetoric are soulmates, I suppose, in the ways in which we frame our vision of the society we experience through media. News media portray (and magnify) such a tiny fragment of life that the rhetorical emphasis is profound, and I wondered what basis upon which do we build our discourse. Are we Platonic idealists, or sophist pragmatists?
This code could help to form a better understanding of that position. It is meant to guide journalistic decisions toward a better community of practitioners but also a better society as a whole, a very Athenian ideal.
My analysis will examine the rhetorical choices made in the document itself, looking for direct connections to the classical foundations of rhetoric and to particular rhetors that separate those two primary positions of thought.
It's important to also note that this code is a voluntary commitment for journalists to make. It is not enforced in any way by a central institution, which means its power, fittingly enough, is purely rhetorical. It provides a framework for a messy and complicated job, and the execution of the framework typically involves a dialectic process, since no document ever could possible cover all of the variations of possible actions a journalist could take. Most ethical discussions in a newsroom are not black and white. They are in essence Platonic dialogues, searching for an agreed upon truth, in which extensive discussion leads to a moment of enlightenment, decision and action.
My analysis will be offered as a short slideshow video, prompting thought about the division between sophistry and Platonic idealism in the modern world.

Shape-shifting of the mobile phone

2010-09-24T16:41:00.000-07:00

The mobile phone is getting physical, or blending into the physical world. ... This TEDTalk looks at what could be next.

HistoryPin

2010-09-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

Fascinating to see something like HistoryPin emerge, especially with a Google partnership, and the engine that comes behind that:

Very promising idea. Geolocated augmented reality data with mobile devices has been difficult to get to work properly on a large scale in the past, such as with Wikitude and Layar. I assume the AR overlays are the logical progression of where this service is going long term, although it appears also to be a desktop system as is. But if you test this out, let me know how it works for you and what you think.

Trying to tap the idea of a Tweet story

2010-09-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

I think it was the John Quincy Adams Twitter feed, created by the Massachusetts Historical Society about a year ago, that first caught my attention. I had been using Twitter as a note-taking/sharing service for several months, but this exposed another interesting application of the service to me: Twitter as a way to tell stories.
Over the next few months, I every so often came across other groups or people trying the platform for storytelling, including the folks at TwHistory, sinking The Titanic again and recounting the 1847 Pioneer Trek of Mormon settlers and recreating Gettysburg. I also since have seen more attempts at this, even from purely fictional (and comedic) directions, such as the recutting of the film "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" as a string of Tweets (they also incorporate FourSquare, but that's another blog post).
Anyway, when Dr. Rich Rice's Theories of Invention in Writing course this semester offered me an assignment involving creating a piece of rhetoric to be analyzed, "such as a scene from a movie," I thought this is just the excuse I need to try my own version of TwHistory (I really like that term) and to combine it with my work at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, and the Fort Vancouver Mobile project.
So I have this historical anecdote in hand, dug up by the project's assistant director Jon Nelson. This story, told through a variety of documents generated by different people, is related to the first module of the FVM project, recounting how Hawaiian pastor William Kaulehelehe was contacted and brought to Fort Vancouver in the mid-1800s. My plan is to create Twitter accounts for all of those characters and then tell the story, through their real words, via this modern form, then analyze the rhetoric they used to bring Kaulehelehe from his tropical paradise to this rainy frontier outpost. This all also will be delivered through a node in the Kaulehelehe module of the Fort Vancouver Mobile project, so I might end up creating a Twitter-like service to pull it off, just to give me a bit more control of the output. But we'll see.
To analyze the piece rhetorically, I plan to put together the story and have pop-up bubbles on a Camtasia-like presentation provide commentary on the rhetoric. How does that sound?

Platonic or sophistic?

2010-09-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

Reading recently Plato's disparagement of the sophists, including the debate of Absolute Truth versus relative truth, it reminded me of the contemporary remnants of a similar polarizing discussion in social science, or the positivist versus the naturalistic perspectives. To begin with, I think a middle ground is possible, in which relative truths help us, through dialectic, reach toward greater truths that are closer to the ideal of Truth. I also think positivist and naturalistic approaches work best in tandem, rather than in opposition. But as a pragmatist, I think Absolute Truth is unattainable, and the naturalistic / sophist approach fits much better with navigating reality, particularly when studying the complexities of communication -- mixing humans, messages, channels and context. The sophists clearly needed more training on ethics (or more concern with it), but, the core of their beliefs, that each position in an argument can be presented persuasively, could be used as part of the dialectical process rather than considered outside of it. If we are dealing with humans, I think, truth has to be thought of as relative and negotiated, just because virtually everything we do is mediated or filtered through symbols or compressed and manipulated in some way. The only way to truly recount something in history is through a time machine, and even people who witness the same scene at the same time from very similar perspectives will interpret what happened differently. Multiply that scenario by 7 billion people, and the search for Truth almost seems laughable (sorry, Plato!). But, like every Utopian dream, or ideal, that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to reach for it. Maybe the Truth just hasn't been revealed to us (or maybe it's just me). And it all will be clear one day, when we have evolved our knowledge base broadly enough to really understand things. Until then, I think being highly aware of the screen of symbols and the use of rhetoric, in all of its forms, different perspectives, etc., bring us closer to an understanding of Truth, in that we live a socially negotiated and mediated existence, and that virtually every stimulus that reaches us is then interpreted through the paradigm we have built throughout our lives.

Overviews of rhetoric

2010-09-03T12:47:00.001-07:00

Recently read two overviews of rhetoric, covering thousands of years in the field:
Herrick, J. (2004). The history and theory of rhetoric. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
And Bizzell, P., & Herzberg, B. (2001). The rhetorical tradition: Readings from classical times to the present (2nd ed.). Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press.

Each of which raised many questions that I am assuming will be handled later in the books, but a few immediate thoughts on what I read:
Wayne Booth, a prominent literary studies critic, is quoted in Herrick as saying that rhetoric holds "entire dominion over all verbal pursuits. Logic, dialectic, grammar, philosophy, history, poetry, all are rhetoric." Then, what form of expressions, exactly, aren't rhetoric? I understand a rock isn't rhetoric, but when I start expressing thoughts about the rock in some way, talking about it, photographing it, classifying it, stacking it in a particular way, etc., then that is all rhetoric, right? What about a list of random words, or numbers, is that rhetorical in some way, because I am expressing the randomness of it all, and that there is such a thing as randomness (because order is a human construction) and giving rhetorical order by such nonorder? If everything we express is rhetoric, that seems sort of limiting to talk about, so I'm looking for ideas about where the line gets drawn, at least from Booth's perspective (and that of others who similarly propose a very large tent for this field).
Herrick also argues that rhetoric is "response-inviting." This seems contrary to much of the political speech I think about, intended to either be so vague as meaningless or so coded as to mean certain specific things to certain special interest groups or meant to present a defensible position, but I just don't think of rhetoric as always promoting interaction. Propaganda, for example, would have to be rhetoric, and I don't think of it as particularly welcoming to debate. I like the idea of rhetoric and its soulmate argumentation inducing more speech, but to imply that it "is" response-inviting seems a bit broad to me. Am I wrong?
On a related subject, in Herrick's section about rhetoric as community building, I wondered if the wedge tactics employed so skillfully by both major political parties today aren't the dysfunctional side of this coin that will lead to our country's, and our community's, ruin. We keep splitting ourselves up into binary issues, focusing incessantly on how we are different more than we are alike, and that might work for politicians trying to degrade the ethos of their opponents, but I think it is clearly tearing us down as a nation. If we are always voting for the least worst option, then we are never voting for the best option, and I think the worst of rhetoric -- neo-sophists? -- is at the heart of that characterization.
Bizzell and Herzberg, by the way, offer the all-important "canons" of rhetoric as:
1. Invention
2. Arrangement
3. Style
4. Memory
5. Delivery
Which made me think there must be a better arrangement of that, at least in terms of an anagram. So here are some options, courtesy of this Internet anagram maker:
These are the MAIDS of rhetoric, keeping everything tidy.
MAD IS you who forgets the canons of rhetoric!
DAM IS the word I say when I remember the canons, like, "Dam, I can remember those canons!"
AS DIM as I might be, I can remember the canons.
And so on ...
In terms of acronyms, by the way, I noticed someone in the MOO used ELP for Aristotle's three forms of persuasive appeal: Ethos, Logos, Pathos. So if I ever need ELP remembering that, ...
One last side note. Herrick states that rhetor should be pronounced RAY-tor. This is the first time I have heard it described that way, and every time I have heard someone pronounce it, they have said rhet-OR, or RHET-or, but never RAY-tor. If rhetoric is pronounced rhet..., then why would it be RAY, or should it be RAY-tor-ic? Help! I don't want to be the one dumb guy at a conference who keeps mispronouncing a core term of the field.

Assignment ideas for English 5361

2010-08-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

Here are a few proposals:

1. An iterative progression, from Assignment No. 1 to No. 3, building a multimodal presentation that maybe starts with textual discourse and then expands into other media, such as video or audio (podcast).

2. A formal debate of classical perspectives. A scenario is introduced in the MOO, and students are given a specific theoretical lens through which to examine and analyze the situation. Maybe pit two contrasting schools of thought, having half the students argue one side and half the other.

3. A profile of a person in the field and a presentation of that person's primary contribution. Maybe pick a "Top 10" rhetoricians list, Aristotle, Foucault, Burke, etc., and have each of us pick one and give a summary or introductory presentation on that person and the primary contributions to the field.

4. Creating a case study of contemporary expression and looking at it through various classical perspectives. So we could create a new piece of rhetoric, in whatever form (in my case, say, a snippet of historical interpretation delivered through a mobile device) and then examine the skeleton of the piece from the inside, through the perspective of either a specific rhetorical paradigm or a cluster/school of thought.

5. Or how about something that extends rhetorical theory into visual rhetoric, like maybe a thorough examination of an image using the classical perspectives on rhetoric as a foundation of the analysis.

Mobile Apps: Shifting Dynamics of a Digital World

2010-08-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

Some interesting perspectives shared during this panel on mobile apps at the Commonwealth Club:

What is "mobile"?

2010-07-26T10:15:00.001-07:00

This term, I think, needs better defining before we can really study the technology in meaningful ways:

Untitled from Brett Oppegaard on Vimeo.

Future readings

2010-07-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

I'm near the end of Dr. Craig Baehr's 5365 course at Texas Tech, Studies in Composition: Internet Writing, and I want to note some of the many interesting topics raised in that class that deserve further review:

* Othermindedness, hypertext and networked writing forms, prompted by Michael Joyce. Joyce is a creative and provocative author (and, in essence, I think, a futurist) who can see the potential for new writing forms emerging in our networked technological environment. If, as I believe, the human experience is a narrative experience, Joyce pictures that sort of paradigm as a free-flowing and abstract series of connections that each of us uniquely can make, ever so easily, informed by a growing number of channels of increasingly interconnected media. Joyce's disorienting style, mirroring the twists and turns hypertext, could very well be the standard writing style of the future, but it certainly is difficult to go from where we are now, with traditional linear stories, to Joyce's visions, even with a high interest level in exploring that ground. My sense is that some parameters are healthy for a story. I would even argue those parameters are essential for sense-making. Maybe that is the author's role in the future, just to set up boundaries, and characters, and an environment within which to operate? But a completely open-ended story, like surfing the Internet feels, doesn't seem to me to make enough connections to the author, or authors, to qualify. I prefer stories less restricted than, say, Choose Your Own Adventure books, which typically offered just a couple of choices per juncture. But a juncture that offers unlimited choices also is problematic, I think, in terms of engaging with a story. How many choices should be available? What scope should a story have, can it have? It is impossible to generalize, but I think my readings in the future will be looking for more examinations into the story scope and open structure questions.

* New media theories. Dr. Baehr and Dr. Bob Schaller (of Stephen F. Austin State University) recently released a book called "Writing for the Internet," and the second chapter struck me as a provocative overview of the struggle academics are having with the idea of "new media." What is new media? I think I can identify media, as something mediated, but what is new? That seems to be a much trickier question. And what makes "new media" different than "old media"? There are all sorts of attractive entry points in this discussion, including critical theory (which "seeks change in the dominant social order," Littlejohn and Foss, 2008) and who the authors note are considered the "Mount Rushmore" of the field, at least from a mass communication viewpoint: Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan. I have read a lot of McLuhan and Postman but only a few articles or chapters by Ong and Innis. Ong, in particular, intrigues me with his concept of Second Orality, because I have been looking for a way to connect orality with mobile devices. If you have any other suggestions of places to look, please comment and let me know. Technological determinism, or the idea that technology inherently shapes our culture and society, also is a profound path to follow.

* The Sociosemantic Web by Peter Morville. While I have been aware of meta-tagging for a long time, I didn't think there was much importance to it, until I considered the ramifications outlined by Morville. The concept reminds me quite a bit of Clay Shirky's description of Wikipedia, and how the collective work of millions, mostly little by little, can create an invaluable resource for all of humankind. Tags, placed on data by anyone, can help us all tap into the collective wisdom of the world, and build toward the fabled semantic web. These self-regulated folksonomies do a job that no company could ever afford, to make sense of and give order to everything on the Internet. This is particularly helpful in the less capitalistic areas of information, places where people are enjoying knowledge just for the simple sake of knowing things about what they are interested in, or toppling the information monolith. More power to that!

Expectations of the visual media today

2010-07-16T21:07:00.000-07:00

It wasn't that long ago, really, that websites were primarily text. I remember thinking we were doing something quite innovative in the mid-1990s, when a photographer and I put together a primarily visual section of a news story online, essentially a slide show, with maybe 20 images (a typical news story in print might have three to five accompanying images, at most). Such an effort today (at least the posting online part) could be done by a child, almost effortlessly. I also recall thinking espn.com was doing something quite innovative a couple of years ago, when it started streaming its video content online on its home page. Now, when I want to watch a highlight of something I'm interested in viewing, I certainly don't hang around for 22 minutes on SportsCenter, waiting for a five-second clip. I go to the espn.com website, find what I want, and leave in less than a minute, usually. That approach has a certain efficiency that I love but also a direct path that I loathe, aware that while taking that line I will never stumble upon something else interesting along the way, something that I might not even know I want to know. In a supermarket metaphor, if I could get my carrots without walking past the cookies, I might be better off, but I might not, and vice versa. That walking of the path -- at least in news, not commercialism -- is helpful to keeping your mind open to the world of knowledge bubbling up around you. You might never know when some little piece can trigger an important thought (or at least something you think could be important), and the partisanship chasm that has developed between the two major political parties in America almost certainly has been nurtured by neither side ever really having to listen to the other anymore. But that's another topic. Visual media on the web today must deliver what I want, when I want, with increasing quality. A grainy YouTube video was fine two or three years ago, but not anymore. I'm disappointed with anything but HD. I also want basic controls, being able to stop the stream, reverse, skip to the next segment, etc. I don't necessarily want to insert my commentary in whatever I see, like what Viddler (viddler.com) offers, although I do appreciate that option. For now, I'm content just with high quality video and basic remote control options. I do like to have embedding code available, in case I want to share, and I suppose, the day will come, when I do want to jump into the stream, and add tags and commentary to everything I watch. I'm just not there yet. But the web is already, and it will never goes backward in terms of its visual emphasis. I can't imagine anymore, for example, the allure of an all-text website (except, of course, my text-heavy www.mobilestorytelling.net, which has only two images at this point, a banner and a photo of the iPhone; that, by the way, is more of a time issue than design decision). If you can show me any that purposively are going back to more text, please share.

The Creative Process - What It's Really Like

2010-07-11T19:07:00.001-07:00

From murraythenut.com, making the rounds at Texas Tech.

How am I a reflection of the digital tools I use?

2010-07-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

In creating the list of digital tools I use right now, several thoughts about identity came to mind. I seem to be in transition from commercial software to a fully open source existence, emanating from the cloud.

I recently dropped several Microsoft products (or only use them in case of emergencies) in favor of OpenOffice and the Google toolkit, especially the Chrome browser and Google Docs. FreeMind, Audacity, Skype, FileZilla, iTunes, etc., all of which I think are important programs for me to have right now, all of which are free and open source. The lone commercial holdouts for me are Adobe's Creative Suite (especially InDesign and Photoshop) and EndNote (although I was on the fence in the beginning between EndNote and Zotero; if I had to do it over again, I might have went with Zotero, but I think it's too late in the dissertation process now to switch). Quality level is the primary reason I stay with those programs. As soon as I have an open source option of similar quality with CS4, I assume I would switch.

Cost is a factor, too, since CS4, for example, is about $700, and that's with a student discount. I think EndNote was about $150, again, with a discount. I know these companies need to make money, but, as a consumer at least, I have a hard time justifying that much cost for basic digital products (with no packaging or delivery costs). I prefer the "freemium" model, in which I get to use basic services for free, but if I am using the software for particularly complicated, or proprietary, actions, that give the software its business niche, then I don't mind paying for it. What I don't like paying for is the basic functions, like saving a photo without a watermark. I wouldn't even mind the commercial model of this system, I suppose, if the versioning wasn't such a rip off.

As an example, I bought CS4 about a year ago, and now Adobe wants me to pay full price to upgrade to CS5, for just a few new features. I don't think that's fair. Honda doesn't come back to me a year or two after I buy a new car and say, "You know, we've added a lot of features to later models, and your car just won't be compatible with the roads in the near future." Instead, as long as I can find gas and spare parts, that Honda should work just fine for the rest of my life. Why can't my computers and software work that way, particularly when I buy top-end products?

Microsoft has pulled this versioning trick on me too many times to count (pushing me through all of the versions of Windows), building obsolescence into new versions of software and hardware, forcing customers, like me, to either upgrade or lose the functionality that we already had bought (Chrome OS, where are you?). I find the business model offensive. So, in reflection, I think my tool choice demonstrates that I am fed up with the heavy-handed capitalistic money grab of the system.

The sneaky commercialization of "free" software also is concerning. I was listening to Pandora yesterday, and, for the first time for me, an audible advertisement played. It was a shock to hear that ad for McDonald's. I found it so abrasive that I immediately turned Pandora off and plan to uninstall it soon, if that policy doesn't change quickly.

Pandora just plays music in a genre, based on similar musicians, like an Internet radio station. It really doesn't do anything so special, except play without advertisements (and, at times, introduce me to a new artist, just like a radio station). So now that it is playing with advertisements, I find very little use for it, and will turn back to public radio stations (without advertisements), or other commercial-free Internet radio, or play from my CD collection, which I have digitized and imported into iTunes (yes, saving the hard copies, with respect for copyright concerns). If nothing else, I think, my choices for digital tools show I am moving away from corporate control systems and further embracing the wonders of the altruistic collective (for as long as that lasts).

Tools in my digital toolbox (today)

2010-06-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

As I reflected recently on the digital tools I use now, versus, say two years ago, it struck me just how fast all of those things in the toolbox have changed. I know, it's cliche to say everything is changing fast, but everything is changing fast, gal-darnit.

For example, I looked at the computer I migrated from two years ago and was surprised to see very little of the same software that feels so familiar and comfortable to me now on my new machine.

For writing, I only keep Microsoft Office around anymore for emergencies (can I dislike that bloated piece of junk more? Well, there is IE, too, and Vista; I'm sensing a pattern ...) I now typically use OpenOffice but am already beginning to become a bigger and bigger believer in GoogleDocs and working from the cloud.

Google also has won me over with its browser Chrome. Chrome is so fast and sleek and, well, just amazingly fantastic, I can't imagine going back to Mozilla, and I won't even mention that bloated piece of junk IE. Can the Chrome OS get released soon enough? I would love to get rid of that bloated piece of junk Windows 7 (already unceremoniously dumped that bloated piece of junk Vista).

Anyway, in terms of core tools that I use professionally, Adobe's Creative Suite also quickly has become essential. I bring out Photoshop and InDesign almost daily and used Flash and Dreamweaver to design a couple of my key web sites. The full version of Adobe Acrobat has become really handy, often, and I use Premiere for video editing.

None of those tools were on my old machine, except OpenOffice (yet I still was using Microsoft Office at that time, due to compatibility issues with OO that since have been resolved). Two years ago, I wasn't using EndNote, or Twitter, or Skype or iTunes, all of which I use just about daily now. And this doesn't take into account the mobile apps on my Android phone, which is less than two years old, either. Audacity, the open source audio editing program, might be the tool with the most longevity right now for me. I definitely prefer open source software. Not just because I am a poor student. But I think there is something vibrant and special about software developed for the love of the software, not for profits.

Part of all of this, I suppose, is related to the ripening of my dissertation studies, but I also remember just a few months ago exploring both mind mapping and Venn diagram software and determining I would never have a use for either of those. Turns out, the mind mapping software (FreeMind, specifically) just this week turned out to be the exact tool I needed to help me organize my dissertation reading list. I was feeling frustrated with the list, and EndNote, as great as that is, just wasn't allowing me to visualize what I needed to do to string a thread through my reading list. So, in a moment of frustration, I thought I would give mind mapping another shot and ended up downloading FreeMind. I watched a couple of short web tutorials on YouTube and then started playing around with it. I don't know now if I could ever have even continued the reading list without it. I feel like telling everyone I know. So I am, at least those few who read this blog and actually would continue this far into such a rambling post. And the even fewer of you who have a reading list to plug into it, but for those of you who do, this is for you!

Through FreeMind, I not only was able to visualize my sourcing tree for the dissertation, but I have been able to score the sources in terms of list value, and mark the pieces I still need to read, and get copies of. Emboldened, then I thought I would try a quick Venn diagram of my unifying themes for the dissertation, and amazingly enough, that sort of worked, too.

So what's next? What do I want to bring into the toolbox, or pick up afresh? Maybe Final Cut Pro. ... I think Adobe Premiere is OK as a video editor. But I sense there could be something much better. I have heard so many good things about Final Cut Pro (also that it is difficult to learn). I would like to work more on my video editing, which is something that communicators of all types will need to be better at in the future. I enjoy doing that kind of work, too. Is there an opensource video editor that actually works well? Maybe I'll look into that first. Otherwise, I'll soon start looking for Final Cut Pro tutorials.

Putting a theoretical foundation under mobile storytelling

2010-06-27T09:10:00.001-07:00

One weakness I have noticed in discourse about mobile devices -- and mobile storytelling in particular -- is a general lack of a specific theoretical foundation from which to build. There are many, many new media theories, and, of course, general communication (or old media) theories, and there are innumerable theories from related fields, such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. But what are the theories that are key to mobile media? That's a difficult question to answer.

The best source I have found so far to start such a discussion is "Digital Cityscapes," edited by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel Sutko (e Silva, A., & Sutko, D. (2009). Digital cityscapes: Merging digital and urban playspaces: Peter Lang Pub Inc.). That collection has six articles in the first section, from a variety of authors, focused primarily on theory. I also have found a smattering of articles that address the core issues of the field to some degree. But, again, the information is scarce. Part of that is just the infancy of the field, but I also think part of that is scholars mostly working on the micro level at this point (myself included), instead of taking the time to step back and look more generally about holistic issues related to the "mobile" life.

So I have begun to work on making broader theoretical connections, at least in terms of mobile storytelling, and soon will start posting about them here as well as linking them to www.mobilestorytelling.net. I might even try to eventually develop those thoughts into a book article or chapter. But first, a paper. ...

The initial step in this paper-producing process is to determine what I really want to know about the theoretical connections across the mobile realm. Actually, there is a step before that. I first have to determine what I don't want to know about.

As a social scientist, I am not particularly interested in hardware specifications and manufacturing or model developments, such as the differences between the iPhone GS and the iPhone 4. I appreciate those, and I follow them on a consumer level, and I want mobile devices to keep gaining new abilities. But that's not want I want to write about.

Privacy concerns are integrated into user-generated content and mobile storytelling, but I think of those as ancillary to my studies at this time. Even though I am highly interested in location awareness, I am not focusing on achievement games, like FourSquare, or object location finding, via geocaching, or similar wayfaring, unless it is related to uncovering an embedded story, or something I think of as the "airrative," or story embedded in the air.

Back to the original issue, I'm not sure what theory or theories can cover all of that and the rest of it, but it's not my intent to find a master theory. At least not yet. I first want to look closely at storytelling with mobile devices, particularly nonfiction storytelling, which I anticipate being the core of my dissertation. So what does that involve?

Thinking of this as a relatively contained academic paper, or article, or chapter, and not as the basis of a lengthy dissertation just on theory, I started to look at all of the various realms this could include, such as cyberspace theory, museum studies, cognitive theory, immersion theory, etc.

I'm not sure where this will lead, but I plan to start by doing a literature review of the key theories in the realms in which I think the overlap is most critical. Those general areas are:

* New Media
* Locative Media
* Narrative Theory
* Interaction Theory

Here is a very quick Venn diagram that shows some points of overlap among those four, particularly in the realms of sharing information (stories) and connecting in social ways:

I also am interested in relations to spacetime and game design, but I think I have enough to consider for now. My plan is to take these four broad areas mentioned above and search through them for direct mobile storytelling ties, ones that I think inform the field, as a way to help to develop broader theoretical connections. I'm really not sure how this will turn out, until I begin. That's part of the fun. ... So onward!

Workspace and its story

2010-06-23T15:42:00.001-07:00

Just struck me that my workspace now includes four PCs and an iMac, plus several mobile devices, such as an Android phone and iPods, with cameras and other electronic gear all over. So what is my main monitor sitting on? A printed version of "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" and a Sunset magazine encyclopedia of Western gardens. I think I need to get outside more this summer.

Where do interesting academic paper prospects come from?

2010-06-22T17:32:00.001-07:00

Dr. Fred Kemp of Texas Tech University calls such opportunities within the collective mind "disturbed knowledge," as opposed to the "shared knowledge," or the ideas we mostly agree upon.

This disturbed knowledge, according to Kemp, generally originates from one of five sources, or a combination of these:

1. There's a gap in the disciplinary knowledge;
2. Something about the disciplinary knowledge is just wrong;
3. Something about the disciplinary knowledge needs explanation, expansion, or further defense;
4. Some notable person in the field needs a revised or enlightened assessment;
5. The field itself needs a new branch or corollary or peripheral addition.

If your academic paper doesn't offer disturbed knowledge, then it probably is time to question again why you are bothering.

Digital or media literacy

2010-06-19T17:47:00.001-07:00

After looking over several models and definitions of digital / media literacy, including the overly complicated graphic above, it seems clear that the phrases "digital literacy" and "media literacy" have become nearly synonymous. I tend to think of digital literacy as more device oriented, like being able to operate a smart phone, and media literacy as being able to decipher the messages -- textual, audio, video, etc. -- delivered through such devices. But the literature I read recently about the concepts doesn't seem to back such simple delineation (maybe I should make my argument in this matter). In fact, I think the scholarship muddies the pool from many different directions, making any distinctions between the two terms virtually meaningless. So maybe it would be more worthwhile to spend energy envisioning different levels of digital/media literacy, starting with a base level and an advanced level.
At the base level, users would be able to competently operate digital communication devices. That is not just being able to turn a device on, which, of course is an important first step, but base level users would be able to carry out all core functions of a device in the ways the device was designed to be used. Those core functions would be defined by the accompanying literature, suggesting the capabilities of the device and providing instructions for carrying out those tasks. A person who can turn on a cell phone and call/answer calls would not necessarily have a base level of literacy, unless that person also, for examples, could check voice mail, text message, take a picture with the phone, etc. That's not to say the person must be able to successful carry out every single task that the device is capable of performing, but the person should be able to perform the core tasks, either the talking points on the marketing, or the most substantially addressed functions in the user manual. I do realize that is a slippery definition of a parameter, but case by specific case, I think the line would be relatively easy to find for any particular device, with some limited subjectivity on the exact place to draw it, which would be besides the point anyway.
The advanced skills do not relate to how obscure the function might be but instead to the analysis, synthesis and creativity required to envision and execute the expression (think of the top point of Bloom's taxonomy pyramid). That would include generating new uses for the device that are not explicitly stated in the official accompanying materials. It would include symbol analysis and manipulation with the device, and it would include significant expansion of the capabilities described as uses for the devices. And by devices, I mean digital tools, so a piece of software would be a device, just as a scanner or cell phone would be. In some cases, then, a device will be used within a device, or they would be combined in new ways. I see this all as part of the shroud of technology, in which even the creators of devices can't foresee how they will be used and to what extent. A primary example of that was the initial press conference unveiling the iPod, hosted by Steve Jobs of all people, in which the device was described primarily as a portable hard drive (yet one that also could hold music). Apple, probably the most clairvoyant of mainstream new media companies, also didn't envision the computing appeals of the iPhone (originally rebuffing apps and emphasizing that the iPhone was not intended to be a mini-computer). And so on. The users who took these devices and made them do what they wanted, rather than follow the prescription of the company, should be considered as having advanced digital literacy. Advanced digital literacy also means having an awareness of what sources of information can be trusted, or how to check sources, before believing what can be seen. A general skepticism would be part of this skill set, yet also with the wherewithal to triangulate sources of information, or dig deeper into the information, to determine who is saying what and for what reason(s), to help gauge the credibility and weight. I'm starting to slip into a wide range of descriptors, that could be classified as "advanced," so suffice to circle around and say that, in general, advanced skills involve analysis, synthesis and creativity, while base skills essentially involve following directions and traditional social conventions.
In five to 10 years, advanced users, I think, will need to be know one skill above all others: the skill to learn.
If we look backward 10 years, there would be no hint of Facebook (2004), or five years, no Twitter (2006). Every year, it seems, a new technology appears that significantly shifts the communication/media landscape, or at least shakes it up. So I think it will become increasingly important for people to develop the advanced skill of ever-learning, to be open to learning new things, while those who can't keep up, or give up (I just am not going to learn another new program, or buy another new device!) will be left behind and fall further back each successive year. What might seem rebellious and cool, in a Luddite sort of way, really will become self destructive socially.
Well, this learn-to-learn philosophy was starting to sound too much like an echo in my mind, so I began looking around at some of the recent books I have read, and found the following in Seymour Papert's "The Children's Machine," which clearly inspired what I wrote just a few sentences ago:
"It's often said that we are entering the information age. This coming period could equally be called the age of learning. The sheer quantity of learning taking place in the world is already many times greater than in the past. ... Today, in industrialized countries, most people are doing jobs that did not exist when they were born. The most important skill determining a person's life pattern has already become the ability to learn new skills, to take in new concepts, to assess new situations, to deal with the unexpected. This will be increasingly true in the future. The competitive ability is the ability to learn."
When I try to imagine the future, those thoughts keep coming to mind, and I suspect that concept will be as clear as anyone can get.

"Writing for Scholarly Publication" by Anne Sigismund Huff

2010-06-14T20:20:00.001-07:00

Just finished this book by Huff, professor of strategic management at the University of Colorado - Boulder. Well written, chatty and mind focusing. I do not intend to summarize the whole work or even promise to mention its most salient or provocative points (you will need to read it to determine those for yourself). But it did provoke some thoughts in me about the composition of academic scholarship, such as these:

* Huff's theme: Scholarly publication is a conversation. She gives great advice to find related articles in the journals of the field and says to imagine your work as a conversation with those pieces and their authors, a discussion around which many people at the party might gather. Most academic articles, frankly, are those boring small talks, in which someone drones (maybe even you), and you eventually want to stab the skewers into your ears. This reminds me of the sick attraction journalists have with the inverted pyramid. Formulaic writing has its place, of course, and every piece can't break the formula every time. Yet creativity within the formula should be possible, or the formula should be abandoned, especially in articles of this length and with this much time and energy put into them. Think about the traditional approach of telling readers what you are going to tell them, telling them and the telling them what you told them. I could understand that approach in some cases, like with elementary school students. But I don't think that's the academic market. Instead, as Huff rightly suggests, get to the point and then if you feel the desire to circle back around again, at least say something new in the second passing.

* Ideas are cheap (p. 14). Execution of ideas is where the capital is formed. This is becoming a new media creed, and I think this is where the people who argue that technology is making us "dumber" are walking around with bags on their heads. Information sharing has changed so dramatically that it is like learning the world is not flat. It probably always has been this way, that execution of ideas trumped ideas themselves, but now, the access to collective intelligence has destroyed our cognitive measuring tools. We always have measured how smart we are on an individual scale, yet now, tapping the collective effectively and efficiently (think media literacy, or calculators) creates a different sort of intelligence, and it's not the idea generation that is the issue, it's who can do something with the ideas. Hmmm, this is not coming out like I imagined. I'll try again. Ideas and even the first few levels of execution of ideas are so cheap now that they have virtually no cost to the producer (think about the cost of this now rambling blog post). Yet some people are able to turn ideas into something that's clearly worthwhile, and that does have value. Is the intelligence, then, in generating the idea, executing the idea or monetizing the idea? I can see this is getting way too fuzzy and long, so I'll work more on the ideas later. It won't cost me anything.

* Quit thinking about it and write it. And finish it. Again, completion of an idea doesn't cost anything. But, if nothing else, it has high value to me, or at least much higher value than the great American novel in my head, or the half-finished journal articles in my drawers or the letter to the editor that I never sent, etc. And someone else also might find the work valuable.

* Huff said, "keep the pipeline full," with individual articles, co-authored articles, mainstream pieces, niche pieces, efficiently getting work through your system without hitting dry patches. I think that is a highly beneficial strategy. As a staff writer for daily newspapers, I always kept literally hundreds of ideas at hand, maybe a few dozen that I had thought about to some extent and then another dozen at least that were in various stages of development, from background reading to interviews having been done to drafts completed. This kept productivity high for me but never made producing feel like a burden, because I almost always was working on what I wanted to do. If I felt inspired to write, I did. If I didn't feel like writing, I would make an interview call, or read some background, or whatever I felt like doing (or the least painful thing), and because something in my pipeline always was near completion, or ripened to the point of submission, the editors generally didn't hassle me much. That approach also is a great way to avoid "writer's block," since when I have felt blocked as a writer, I never felt blocked as a reader, or as an interviewer. In those ways, something related to publication always has been flowing for me.

* Be interesting (p. 47). Do we really have to tell writers this? If you have read many academic journals or newspapers, you know the answer. This probably should be the first filter applied. If you can't say something interesting, ...

* Make assertions about earlier work that reflects your judgement and agenda. And define key terms and new terms (p. 90). These both are critical writing techniques rarely used to full potential. If you are going to comment on someone else's scholarship, it seems much more interesting to actually comment on it, rather than just note it exists. Sometimes, a list of other scholars doing work on a particular line of inquiry can be enough, I suppose, or maybe it's a tip of the hat. But it might be richer to present an entry point into the exemplar, like a hyperlink made out of words. And terminology is significantly underrated in writing of all sorts. If you don't establish the key terms, master terms, whatever you want to call them, then it will be difficult to follow your lines of thought as you envision them.

Because the writing is so smooth, Huff's book is easy to read quickly. It also is helpful in a variety of ways. If nothing else, it offers clarity. All of those little details, nuances, tangents that actually muddle and distract the writing process, especially early in the iterations, slough off under Huff's straightforward approach with the end in mind.

Walter Ong's Secondary Orality and its relationship to mobile devices

2010-06-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

Mobile devices offer us a variety of new abilities that might not be so new but also might be exponentially more powerful in the modern form.

That's a bit confusing, even to me, so I'll back up and try again. For many months, maybe even a year, I have been thinking that there are important foundational connections between mobile devices and oral traditions. Mobile devices, such as the iPhone, can be aware of our location, spatial features around us, the context of the situation, including what has happened to us before and what relationships we have with other people in the area, and so on. Which all sounds really amazing, until you think that any person interacting with another person (or crowd) could very well do the same thing without a machine.

In lecturing, for example, I might know quite a bit about my audience, including names, motivations and even how many times a particular audience member has heard me give this sort of talk before. I can connect socially with these people, be chatty, walk around the auditorium and talk to each individual. But what I can't do, and where the mobile devices show immense potential, is perform that same personalized routine simultaneously for thousands of different people at once, nurturing a collective and open and collaborative environment endlessly at all hours of the day, generously responding to each individual, all while giving the impression that this sort of feedback is authored and tailored just for the single recipient experiencing it.

Along those lines, it caught my attention when Walter Ong's Second Orality was mentioned briefly, starting on page 7, in:

Baehr, C., & Schaller, B. (2009). Writing for the internet: A guide to real communication in virtual space: Greenwood Press.

Among the intriguing traits identified by Ong (1982), and capsulized by Baehr and Schaller, is that oral culture speakers often adapted their storytelling in response to audience reaction. Could that be the origins of interactive storytelling? Location, spatial and contextual awareness are critical components in mobile delivery, but they also seem monumentally relevant to oral cultures. In turn, Ong's theories are definitely now on my reading list. Here are the sources I plan to find and examine:

From the Baehr and Schaller book:

Ong, W. (Ed.). (1967). The presence of the word: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word: Routledge New York.

And a collection of various articles that make reference to mobile technology and secondary orality and new media, such as:

Potts, J. (2008). Who’s afraid of technological determinism? Another look at medium theory. Fibreculture Journal, 12.

Hartnell-Younga, E., & Vetereb, F. (2008). A means of personalising learning: Incorporating old and new literacies in the curriculum with mobile phones. Curriculum Journal, 19(4), 283-292.

Joyce, M. (2002). No one tells you this: Secondary orality and hypertextuality. Oral Tradition, 17(2).

Any other suggestions?

When I get through those, I'll report back what I find.

Does the Internet make you smarter or dumber?

2010-06-10T21:32:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post in the past week published a binary pro/con arguing that the Internet makes us "smarter"/"dumber," starting with Clay Shirky's "smarter" piece, published on June 4. Shirky, a NYU prof, is just about to release a new book called "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age."

Nicholas Carr on the next day, June 5, authored the "dumber" piece. Carr recently released a book called, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

Shirky also wrote a provocative book in 2005, called "Here Comes Everybody," that gives many examples of how openness on the Internet is making the world a better informed and mobilized place, maybe not a more capitalistically lucrative place, but a better place nonetheless.

I certainly feel Shirky has a much stronger base for his argument, which he presents solidly in his book, but his essay in this publication comes across as flippant, like the question is too bothersome to even answer.

Carr instead goes straight for the empirical and physiological hammer, saying "a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the Net, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is also turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers."

His premise -- that we don't spend hour after hour alone with books anymore, which is making us evolve into idiots -- seems somewhat ironic contained in a generalist essay at less than 1,300 words. It also seems questionable at its core, since my understanding of the Internet is that it has inspired a resurgence in reading. All kinds of reading. News media organizations, for example, are attracting millions and millions of readers beyond what they ever were able to reach with print editions. Those organizations just can't make money off of it. So is this is capitalism issue, or a reading issue?

Shirky mentions the typical response by societies to foundation-shaking technologies. The first step is denial, of course, and that things were always better "in the olden days." Marshall McLuhan in his short booklet "The Medium is the Massage," has a passage about the pastoral myth generated by railroad expansion, in which the demonization of urban areas conveniently obscured the hardships of homesteading. The only medium I think truly lived up to those fears was television, just because of the way it was used by corporatists to turn people into consumption machines. When I watch public broadcasting, or the less commercialized sporting events, or even some of the benign content on the cooking channel, I can see the neutral skeleton of the machine, which could be used for so much more good. But this is not my rant about television. Back to the Internet, and does it make us smarter?

Shirky and so many others, including Henry Jenkins and Howard Rheingold, have made compelling cases in recent years about the superpowers that the Internet creates within us (and communally), giving us opportunities like never before to expend our cognitive surplus. But one aspect that doesn't seem to get much attention in this debate is the measuring tools of the non-monetary benefits (or costs).

In other words, how are we deciding if we are "smarter" or "dumber"? In what ways, and by whose yardstick?

Carr, for example, writes:

"Only when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information are we able to associate it 'meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory,' writes the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel."

I'm not sure how Kandel is measuring this, but, at least from the context of the rest of Carr's piece, I suspect this is another look through the elitist paradigm that pooh-poohs any intellectual gains outside of the privileged class and its narrow measuring tools. People who are not Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientists might not necessarily need deep and meaningful thought about a particular topic to feel like they know enough (and more than they would have without the Internet) to move on to something else.

This overall debate is fraught with complexities that simply can't be addressed in a combined 2,500 words, which makes the format questionable. These pieces could, though, start a much more "meaningful" discussion about what we value in knowledge, how we measure intelligence and how technological determinism plays a part in our evolution as a species, even physiologically, as Carr suggests.

As a new media practitioner and educator, the answer to this question of whether the Internet is making us "smarter" or "dumber" seems simplistically stupid, which is maybe why Shirky gives such a half-hearted effort.

Carr's summaries of "empirical data" meanwhile, without transparent access to the methods and results of those studies, again, seems ironically shallow.

How about providing hyperlinks to the original studies, so we can judge Carr's conclusions for ourselves? Oh, wait, that would just make us dumber.

How teens use cell phones

2010-05-05T15:37:00.001-07:00

By Ethan Bloch of Flowtown:

History of Location Technology

2010-04-09T11:44:00.001-07:00

In a quick graphic form, by Shane Snow, for Mashable:

Evolution of cell phones in the 2000s

2010-04-05T18:55:00.001-07:00

Via: Cell Phones

Fort Vancouver Mobile content moving to a new forum

2010-03-28T13:43:00.001-07:00

Because the Fort Vancouver Mobile project is starting to gain steam, I have created separate blogs just for that.

The first one is a behind-the-scenes look at the project, primarily for the production team and other mobile technology researchers.

It can be found here: FortVancouverMobileSubRosa.blogspot.com, or the simpler URL: FortVancouverMobile.net.

Sub rosa, by the way, was an ancient sign of secrecy, in which a rose was hung above the doorway (translation = "under the rose"), pledging participants of a meeting to keep the contents confidential. I, of course, am taking the polar opposite approach, opening up the process to everyone who is interested, but I like the symbolism of the label anyway.

Long-term funding for the Fort Vancouver Mobile project

2010-03-10T15:22:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to put together an organizational chart that keeps track of funding options available for the Fort Vancouver Mobile project. I'm starting here with a Gantt chart, using Open Project, but I just don't think this helps much, even if it was filled out in more depth. While the overlapping periods of involvement are interesting, I really would like to have a tool that charts deadlines, application periods, resources needed (such as letters of commitment, matching funds, resumes from participants, etc.) and the other aspects of this work, including when single sourcing could come into play (and when I already have completed an application for this group in previous years). I also would like to see in visual form the overlapping periods of grant preparation, to try to avoid those as much as possible, or at least to be prepared for the extra work.

Any suggestions on alternatives to the Gantt for this, preferably with open source software, or at least through a common program that I already have, such as Access or Excel?

Google SketchUp

2010-03-05T06:19:00.001-08:00

Another example of Google's free technology creating interesting digital information:

Athens, Greece, in 3D

Fort Vancouver Mobile: Starting a discussion on narrative threads

2010-03-03T14:41:00.000-08:00

Here is a memo I shared with the Fort Vancouver Mobile team recently to get them to start thinking about specific stories we could tell with this new technology.

Do you think this document sufficiently inspires thought about the potential stories?

What more would you want to know before engaging in a discussion about this matter?

Fort Vancouver Mobile: Orientation PPT

2010-02-23T14:35:00.001-08:00

Here is the PPT I will use on Feb. 24 to orient our founding partners on the Fort Vancouver Mobile project:

Fort Vancouver Mobile intro

Fort Vancouver Mobile: RQ (2nd draft)

2010-02-20T13:39:00.000-08:00

Here's another attempt at my dissertation research question (with guidance from, among others, Dr. Rich Rice):

What constitutes the best practices of mixed reality design when blending mobile interactive narrative with location-based historical interpretation? In what ways do these practices impact users?

What do you think? ... Still seems a bit wordy to me, with too many adjectives and clauses. Might also still be too broad. I would like to make it more concise and direct. Will keep working on it.

Draft of grant language

2010-02-15T15:47:00.000-08:00

To create a strong grant proposal, particularly on the federal level, I need to highly refine the first couple of paragraphs to meet the needs of the funder. Here's a rough draft for the Fort Vancouver Mobile project:

Mobile technology is changing the ways in which we access and expect information. But how is this changing us in the process? And what are we losing along the way?
The Fort Vancouver Mobile research project not only is examining new approaches and documenting best practices in the study of a variety of mobile-oriented humanities, it also is developing innovative uses of this emerging technology field for public programming and education, mixing traditional and new media, creating a mixed reality that promises to engage people in our shared history in immersive and interactive environments. That will include making accessible a variety of digital resources and assets.

Fort Vancouver Mobile: Project timeline

2010-02-07T21:23:00.000-08:00

As the Fort Vancouver Mobile project now emerges from incubation, it's time to start putting some specific goals and a timeline in place. Here are the plans right now for 2010, but these mostly are rough dates, which likely will be adjusted as we go:

Feb. 24 -- Initial meeting to bring together all of the interested participants in one room. This critical session will provide an overview of the project, start making connections among the partners, lay out the resources available, start the brainstorming of specific content production, set goals and make plans for what's ahead.

March 14 -- Choose the initial historic storyline in The Village, upon which to base the first round of mobile interactive narrative tests. Begin in-depth research on that storyline and organizing the script, storyboard, production and distribution models.

March 15 -- Dissertation research question formalized.

March 23 -- Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant application due.

May 1 -- Dissertation preproposal due.

June 1 -- Complete the script and storyboards for first test project, with production and distribution models in place.

June 19-20 -- Bridgade Encampment, special event at the fort. Complete the third and final segment of the user survey. Use that information to tailor and adjust the story in progress.

July 1 -- Gather feedback on script and storyboards. Refine, refine, refine.

July 17-18 -- Soldier's Bivouac, special event at the fort.

Aug. 1-23 -- Major content creation period, plus editing, implementation and testing. At the end of this period, there will be something significant to use as a proof of concept.

Aug. 18 -- America's Historical and Cultural Organizations / Media Makers grants, through the National Endowment for the Humanities are due.

Aug. 23 -- WSU Vancouver digital storytelling class, focused on the development of the Fort Vancouver Mobile project, begins.

Sept. 18 -- Campfires and Candlelight Tour, special event at the fort, the most attended annual event, with a crowd of about 5,000 expected. Beta test project, if ready.

Oct. 9 and Oct. 23 -- Tales of the Engage, the first major fort event based in The Village area; our goal is to at least have something really solid and ready to continue beta testing during this event, preferably test on Oct. 9, then retest on Oct. 23.

Dec. 11 -- Christmas at the Fort, special event.

Dec. 13 -- WSU Vancouver digital storytelling class ends.

Dec. 15 -- Doctoral coursework complete.

Fort Vancouver Mobile: The research question

2010-02-04T19:27:00.001-08:00

It's time to get serious about not just a research question, but the research question, the one that will shape my work on the Fort Vancouver Mobile project and be the engine of my dissertation. Since I like to work transparently, I thought I might as well post the drafts and progression of that question here, for feedback (and in case it might help someone else develop ideas of their own).

I have to start somewhere, so here are my initial thoughts on the question.

This project, at least at this point, is expected to be an experimental study intended to validate the hypothesis that mobile devices offer unprecedented potential for delivering immersive and interactive narratives. That, of course, is too broad, even for a dissertation, and it doesn't really say anything. "Potential" takes me nowhere, and what I really want to study is the creation and audience response to mobile content, compared to other kinds of media.

Just producing mobile content right now, in a form that is usable and coherent and accessible, could be a complex and exasperating undertaking. There is no industry-standard platform to deliver mobile interactive narratives. There aren't even many good options in that regard.

And then the questions start emerging about a genre of place, where setting takes on a level of importance potentially equivalent to character and plot, or maybe even more important than those pillars of storytelling, because place / space is what distinguishes mobile as new and different than any other medium. It seems like the most important questions about the field will be focused on place / space in a mixed-reality environment, with one foot in the real world and one in the digital universe. These devices now allow awareness of location but also of spatial relationships to other things and context of all sorts, from user profiles to environmental conditions. How is that different than anything else humans have experienced before? The potential paths of discovery appear endless.

To create a descriptive and analytical study of this sort invariably will mean also leaving a lot of work for later. That is a liberating perspective, I think, in that I don't have to answer every question I can imagine. I just need to start by answering one good one.

I originally was inspired by this field not because I love talking on my cellular telephone. In fact, that is my least favorite ability of the mobile communication device. Instead, I find it endlessly fascinating that virtually all of the information of the world can be delivered to me wherever I am, illuminating whatever intrigues me at that second, especially in relation to something I am experiencing first hand in real space. From my extensive study of narrative, and belief that it is the core perspective through which humans view the world (or as each person sees the next event as the next chapter in a life story), I also am curious about what the combination of that information delivery style with such omnipresent data could lead to, in terms of immersion in knowledge and generation of wisdom. Delving into such territory alone, though, like sitting in the back of the library reading book after book from the shelves, doesn't seem nearly as interesting as an interactive environment could be. Each additional person brought into the story could dramatically affect the dynamic of the content, the interplay, the experience itself. How could collective intelligence in such a situation accomplish amazing feats that we could never even approach individually?

More pragmatically, I wonder what this environment will look like, be like. A game? That thought keeps coming back to me. If it's not a game, at least in the broad sense, with familial relations to other games, as Wittgenstein envisioned that term, then what motivates users?

It seems to me that the concept of edutainment starts to enter the picture here. Before I continue this thought, a bit of background. The Fort Vancouver Mobile project does have certain parameters in place to make it attractive to a variety of partners, including the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. In that regard, the content to be created and studied needs to be based on either the historical importance of the site, which was the end of the Oregon Trail in the early days, or the regional and national significance of the area related to the reign of the Hudson's Bay Company and the initial U.S. Army presence in the Northwest. So while some people in this field are looking purely at fiction within mobile games, and creating interesting projects like that, my intent is to work as much as possible in the realm of nonfiction, with some creative flexibility inherent in historical reconstructions. Back to the edutainment concept, I envision people coming to the Fort Vancouver site wanting to learn more about the place. That information can be delivered in many ways, from brochures to ranger lectures to living history presentations. A mobile content experience could be another option, and, in that respect, I want to find out how such material can be delivered most effectively and powerfully while also learning about how it is received, hopefully identifying best practices for increasing motivational interests. In other words, how can interactive mobile content be developed best, enriching the visitor experience in unique ways, while encouraging further involvement in this type of content, compelling deeper and deeper exploration of the material?

Those are some of my initial thoughts. That covers a lot of ground, not all of which I will be able to study. And here is a first draft of the research question, a starting point in such an investigation:

Does the intersection of place and space, as accessed through mobile interactive narrative, increase a user's interest, engagement and motivation toward related knowledge about a subject?

Fort Vancouver Mobile mission statement

2010-01-31T23:48:00.001-08:00

As part of organizing the Fort Vancouver Mobile project and turning it into a highly successful grant magnet, I need to develop a strong mission statement that presents a clear purpose but also illustrates how this project manages the change in the world generated by mobile technology.
In brainstorming this thought, I started by simply playing around with mission as an acronym (lame, yes, but a starting point nonetheless):

M – Mobility and movement, users are moving around the space; what makes this project so fascinating and new is that elaborate digital content now can be delivered to users on demand, or by the author's command, based on an awareness of location, spatial factors and context as those evolve in real time as people move around in a mixed environment that simultaneously blends virtual and real spaces.
I – Interactive, users respond to the machine, the author, the content and each other and participate in creating the experience, including collaboration that could develop into classifiable collective intelligence ... generated on the fly.
S – Storytelling, all of this really happens as part of a larger story. Purely informational content, the signposts of the digital world, are not nearly as interesting as the ways in which mobile content can be packaged as interactive stories and games. Focus needs to remain on the story, the characters, the plot and the setting; maybe the setting in this new genre takes on more importance than in any other form before.
S – Simplicity, this should be simple to use and simple to get started and simple to engage with; usability has to remain at the forefront of a user-centered design to get people to even try this out. I don't want to challenge people with the technology. I want to challenge them with the content, and how and when they receive the content, and how that affects their experience. I don't want users to be stuck and frustrated just trying to get this thing to work.
I – Immediacy, the goal is media transparency, with the user's space not limited to the screen or reality but a perfect blend of both. Ideally, the mobile device eventually would begin to feel like another tool for navigating and understanding and appreciating the space on a more evolved level of humanity.
O – Occurring simultaneously, a hybrid of real and virtual space interwoven; this content shouldn't encourage the user's eyes to be endlessly locked down on a screen or be so useless that users never think about it. Maybe it should be like a friend along for the journey, one you want to keep chatting with about what you are doing and seeing.
N – Numin-ousity! Inspired by this journal article: Cameron, C. and J. Gatewood (2003), "Seeking Numinous Experiences in the Unremembered Past." The authors state that numinous (new term to me) experiences at historical sites are those that create deep connections with objects and places. That's part of our goal, too!

Now, can I boil those sorts of ideas down to a single statement in support of this project?

How about this for a first draft: "The Fort Vancouver Mobile project serves as a cutting-edge research laboratory for developments in mobile content creation that emphasize location, spatial and contextual awareness in relation to interactive and mixed-reality storytelling experiences, particularly those that take advantage of the new abilities of mobile technology to illuminate important regional and national historical narratives."

Dissertation funding

2010-01-25T23:42:00.000-08:00

I would like to be writing this post about pre-dissertation funding, but those sources seem to be covered primarily by general scholarships, not based on what kind of research is being done. It's yet another carrot dangling to get through the doctoral coursework and the qualifying exam and preproposal and get on to the bigger fish. Trust me, I want to get to that phase as soon as I can. But while I'm in the coursework section, learning so much and enjoying my classes, it would be helpful to get some seed money to develop dissertation ideas. I would like to be working on various pilot studies at this point, making sure I am on the right track, yet without the dedicated funding and with bills to pay, I think this creates a hole in the support system of higher education.
That said, it is so much simpler now to search for funding sources and scholarships. During my undergraduate and even graduate years, I recall spending many, many hours in front of microfiche and microfilm trying to find the same kinds of information that I now can locate in less than 5 seconds on Google.
"Grant Seeking in an Electronic Age" by Mikelonis, Betsinger and Kampf has a section of the book (pp. 104-107) dedicated to searching for dissertation funding, and it appears that funding sources are much more interested in your work once you get to the dissertation phase. One of the best tips in this section, I think, is the idea that you should ask colleagues and mentors about funding sources, before spending hours upon hours searching the Internet. This kind of information seeking could very well be the most efficient. There also are a variety of sites listed that could be of some help, including FirstGov.gov, which now redirects to usa.gov. It also mentions Kartoo.com, which as far as I can tell is out of business. But its strategies for developing keywords and searching the web strategically appear to be sound, although also not particularly enlightening.

Fort Vancouver Mobile: Need statement

2010-01-24T15:50:00.000-08:00

For potential funders out there:

Within the decade, more people around the world will be accessing the Internet through mobile devices than from their desktops. Capable of so much more than just telephony, this new generation of interconnected mobile devices will be able to track location of users and be aware of contextual information, such as where they have been before, what they have looked at and where they are headed next.
In the world of historical interpretation, this opens up a mind-blowing number of possibilities, including interactive narratives that immerse users in a particular time and place and even within a specific character. Information no longer has to be written in brochures or displayed on interpretive panels or wall screens, and costumed interpreters don’t have to be performing on site every hour to have round-the-clock edutainment.
Some within the field are becoming aware of these possibilities, but the race still is on to create the first mobile app for a national park service site. The chance still is there to break that ground and lead the federal government's historical interpretation efforts into this immense new digital world, to suitably enough be pioneers in generating this augmented reality, which is destined to become a standard operating procedure of historical sites in the future.
The Fort Vancouver National Historic Site -- the only historic site in the Portland, Ore., metropolitan area -- has been doing extensive research, under the direction of Texas Tech University doctoral student Brett Oppegaard, on mobile storytelling and tourism, from delivery methods and platforms to interactive narrative structure. Clark County's government recently awarded Oppegaard, also an adjunct lecturer at Washington State University Vancouver, a $9,000 grant to purchase the industry-standard audio equipment needed to generate this high level of mobile content. Various partners on the 12-member production team also are bringing professional level equipment into the mix as well, but there still are a few integral main parts needed to make the production process run smoothly and generate commercial-level quality: An industry-standard video camera and video monitoring system, including a tripod, which costs about $9,600, and a Macintosh-based video editing and media storage system, with the industry-standard Final Cut Pro software on it, which costs about another $8,000.
The team is in place, including several nationally renowned journalists with experience in multimedia content production and prominent regional historians, including a curator and an archaeologist. The opportunity is ripe, like looking to the west and seeing nothing but an uncharted frontier. This project just needs a few more pieces of equipment to leap into action, get the wagons moving and change history.
We are gaining new partners and supporters regularly, but we need you to take one of these larger leaps of faith while the iron is hot. Please consider covering the costs of the Macintosh editing and media storage system, about $8,000, which then would be donated to Washington State University Vancouver's Digital Technology and Culture program at the end of its use at Fort Vancouver. Thank you for your consideration.

Fort Vancouver Mobile: The problems it will solve

2010-01-24T11:27:00.000-08:00

Fort Vancouver Mobile is the umbrella label I use now to talk about the various efforts underway by our team at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site to embed digital mobile content that augments the physical representations of the fascinating array of history that has happened in that particular location, on the north bank of the Columbia River, just north of Portland, Ore. This was the spot where the Pacific Northwest’s "first hospital, school, orchard, library, grist mill, saw mill, shipyard and dairy were all established," according to the fort's records.

Our primary goal is to generate mobile interactive narratives, or stories that visitors to the site can immerse themselves in, through a connection with a mobile communication device. We also have been examining and researching various other modes of information sharing and platforms, from QR (quick response) codes to mobile social networking systems.

Before I write more about those specific efforts, I think it's important to define what problems we are trying to solve with this project.

To begin with, the fort's collection and archives contain more than 2 million artifacts, yet only 10 percent of those (or about 200,000 items) are available for viewing, according to the fort. The other 90 percent, or about 1.8 million items, can't be exhibited for a variety of reasons, including lack of display space. A digital solution not only could bring more items directly into the palms of visitors, by allowing downloads to mobile devices, for example, but this approach also gives on-demand access and mobility to that information and imagery, which could greatly improve its usefulness throughout the park, creating more connectivity among the items and stories that include them.

The fascinating stories of this place also are an underdeveloped resource at this point, due to lack of resources to share them. The ideal situation might be living history performances in all buildings every hour the fort is open, but without the resources of Colonial Williamsburg, the fort has to rely on occasional living history outreach mixed with other means of telling its stories, such as park ranger chats, brochures, wayside signs, etc. Digital content could complement the efforts already underway at the site, with additional content that is engaging and educational in other ways, including a facsimile of living history, with anecdotes and stories captured in video and audio for on-demand and on-location playback.

Another significant issue at the fort is the difficulty of attracting and maintaining the interest of young, technologically inclined folks, say between 16 and 35 years of age. This is anecdotal at this point, but teenagers touring the site often are seen wearing iPod earphones or text messaging on their cell phones rather than looking around at the wonders of the site. If that focus could be redirected toward some sort of edutainment-type program, in which visitors immersed themselves into a fort story through their devices, maybe while also being socially connected to friends doing the same thing, it could change the dynamic considerably in the fort's (and history's) favor.

Those three issues seems to be key driving factors for us in developing mobile content at the fort. There are secondary reasons for it, of course, which I will address later. But those give us our base driving factors from which to build our content. Are there other, more important problems we could solve with digital content at the fort at this time? If you have ideas, please post them here. Thanks!

What does the Fort Vancouver Mobile project need in terms of resources in 2010 and beyond?

2010-01-12T23:19:00.001-08:00

After many months of planning and groundwork, the Fort Vancouver Mobile project I'm coordinating at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site is starting to emerge into public view. That's because the first of what I hope to be many financial backers, the Clark County Historical Promotions committee and Clark County Commissioners, recently awarded the project a $9,000 grant. This in turn triggered the project's official sponsor, Washington State University Vancouver, to link a fall 2010 class in the Digital Technology and Culture program to this project. I also have been surprised at the volume of interest generated just from the grant announcement in the local newspaper and various WSU publications. It's clear that people are highly intrigued by the idea of offering engaging mobile content at the site to share historical information and stories through devices, such as the iPhone or Android phones.
While I have gathered a talented and trusted group of people to work on this, initial informal brainstorming sessions with some of them have shown that there are way more great ideas than we have the capacity to perform this year. Which makes me wonder how much I should expand this project, and how quickly?
The initial goal for me was simply to develop a laboratory for my research into mobile interactive narratives as I pursue my doctorate degree in technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University. Yet the support I have received for this idea from Chief Ranger Greg Shine as well as DTC co-directors Dene Grigar and John Barber -- and the many others who have been instrumental in the project's development so far -- has been energizing.
That leads back to the main question I have at this time. Should I keep focused only on the dissertation needs and pursue resources strictly to that end? Or, while I have this wind in my sails, should I start reaching out toward potential funders with a bigger message in mind, one that could make the fort and this project a model for historical tourism sites in this country?

Black Friday in Hazel Dell

2009-12-11T18:02:00.001-08:00

Mirror Worlds

2009-11-28T22:22:00.000-08:00

At Georgia Tech University's Augmented Reality Lab:

Dissertation on "games in place"

2009-11-18T00:50:00.001-08:00

Stumbled onto this short video, which seems within the realm of my dissertation research. Thought it would be worth posting and following up soon with the author, John Martin, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Visualizing augmented reality - a pilot

2009-11-03T06:05:00.000-08:00

Here are some ideas from a company called Najork about how AR could change the way things look in the world:

Augmented reality business cards

2009-11-03T05:27:00.000-08:00

Yet another example of how augmented reality can change business communication (but don't you think the guy on the left of this card at least could have dressed up a bit for the occasion?)

A digital magazine to Flyp over

2009-10-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

This interview with Flyp editor Jim Gaines shows not everyone is asleep at the wheel in journalism circles. Here's the video description:

"FLYP is an independent media startup trying to reinvent the magazine online, not just by posting print/image/sound/video content to a website, but by rethinking what digital story-telling and the next-generation magazine might become. The presentation/design aesthetic is built into the architecture of the story, intended not just to make a story look pretty, but to pull a visitor deeper into the ideas or narratives. Text, image, sound and video are elements to be juggled based on their effectiveness in telling pieces of a story. No one element consistently dominates. Navigation through articles is meant to suggest a kind of digitally tactile sensibility.

Even though its physical form is ephemeral electrons, FLYPs origins are anchored in the physicality of the traditional magazine. Each story is a small multimedia production project in itself. Text is important on this site, but image, sound and video arent just supporting media; various media take turns in the lead, depending on the story or idea. FLYP tries to combine the high-design richness of a glossy print magazine with the dynamic potential of a media-rich website in ways that suggest that a general-culture publication can be a compelling window on culture. Editor-in-chief Jim Gaines was formerly managing editor of People, Life and Time magazines."

Innovative ideas about augmented reality interfaces, without markers

2009-09-22T15:11:00.000-07:00

This research project at the University of California - Santa Barbara shows how far we have come in this technology in just a few months.

Mobile Storytelling at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site - Audience Evaluation

2009-09-13T12:28:00.000-07:00

Here is the first section of the survey I have been conducting to evaluate the potential mobile audience and its needs and wants at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site:

Questions 1-10

Click Here to take survey

And here is the second set of questions (11-18):

Click Here to take survey

At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry

2009-08-25T21:58:00.000-07:00

Keynote speech by Bruce Sterling of Wired:

Video: Bruce Sterling's Keynote - At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on Vimeo.

Maptor, not just a flashlight

2009-08-25T16:17:00.000-07:00

Also an augmented reality map projector (warning: video accompanied by breezy Muzak-like track):

iTacitus

2009-08-15T04:09:00.000-07:00

Another platform emerges for augmented reality storytelling:

KickStarter.com

2009-08-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

Those looking for ways to microfund small projects might want to consider KickStarter, which uses Amazon.com's payment system to process "venture" capital.

Using augmented reality to fix a BMW

2009-08-10T23:02:00.001-07:00

This is sort of strange in a cyborgian way (think of the mechanics in the shop all walking around with these sorts of goggles on), but it demonstrates a practical use for augmented reality:

The inevitable Augmented Reality t-shirt

2009-08-04T05:51:00.000-07:00

Knew this was coming ...

PaperTweet3d: Augmented Reality T-shirts from squidder on Vimeo.

yellowBird -- 360 degree immersive video

2009-08-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

This is fascinating. You can click and move around the 360-degree view -- not a static one -- within the crowd at a concert. Seems like there could be a lot of innovative uses for this kind of technology.

Another perspective on Chris Anderson's "free"

2009-07-23T22:33:00.001-07:00

Wired editor Chris Anderson is making the rounds to promote his book "free," this time on The Colbert Report. It's an interesting argument to make.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Chris Anderson

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Mark Sanford

"Base Ball" at the Fort

2009-07-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

Local filmmaker Mark Dodd recently shot and edited this clip of me playing "base ball" as part of a historic reenactment at the Fort Vancouver National Site in Vancouver, Wash. Thanks for sending it this way, Mark!

Wired's Chris Anderson talking about "free"

2009-07-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

Fascinating interview with Wired's editor, on Charlie Rose show (Free is here to stay; But what's the pet for our penguin?):

U.S. Debt Clock

2009-07-22T10:32:00.000-07:00

This is mesmerizing.

More advances in digital holograms

2009-07-21T01:31:00.001-07:00

I'm trying not to get too sidetracked on these, but the development of this technology is a fascinating realm of augmented reality. Here are a couple of projects by a grad student from Japan, named Julien Pilet, doing work at the EPFL labs in Switzerland:

And this one:

Jeff Watson presentation on locative media and responsive environments

2009-07-21T01:23:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon this slideshow of a recent Jeff Watson lecture that had some interesting factoids about locative media:

Locative Media And Responsive Environments

View more presentations from Jeff Watson.

Combining augmented reality and social networking

2009-07-10T21:41:00.000-07:00

Found this application (and video) that supports the concept:

Topps 3D Live - Another AR example

2009-07-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

This takes the digital hologram past the model and display phase and into simple manipulation of the hologram, augmented reality for a mass market. This has to be one of the earliest commercial ventures into this realm. If you know of any others, please post them.

Digital holograms via Flash

2009-07-08T13:32:00.001-07:00

I have no idea what I could do with something like this in a practical sense, but it will be fun to think of possibilities:

IBM Seer at Wimbledon 2009

2009-07-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

American giant IBM gets into the augmented reality game at Wimbledon:

Mobile storytelling project at Fort Vancouver National Site

2009-07-05T17:31:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a new mobile storytelling project in the vicinity of the Fort Vancouver National Site in the Portland, Ore., area, where the Oregon Trail ended for many settlers.

As part of this, I'm conducting a survey of the potential audience and trying to determine what will work best, including the technology to use, the format of the content and the core narrative structure that will have the biggest impact and leave the most flexibility in terms of artistic expression.

In preparation of the survey, I interviewed a neighbor, Dave Griffith, who has an iPhone 3G and an interest in local history. He graciously is allowing me to put a summary of his responses on the blog as well, in case it might provide insights to anyone else working on mobile storytelling projects.

To begin with, he noted, the iPhone doesn't allow applications to run in the background, which means a potential audience member would have to have the appropriate program loaded on the right device and have it ready to go to even start engaging with an interactive mobile presentation. Those are a lot of obstacles to overcome, including trying to create a universal medium when standards are evolving and shifting and each mobile device right now has different applications to do different things.

Let's say, though, that we can create a mobile presentation that can be accessed by the majority of the devices -- including the iPhone, the G1, the Palm Pre and the BlackBerry Storm -- and that they all, or most of them, can use the material in the same basic ways. Griffith's point extends to the idea that somehow these people are going to need to know to have the specific application loaded and ready to go, and any technical glitches between the application and the material will be negligible. How would this mobile story be publicized, especially at the location? How can this material be accessed by the most people, in the easiest way? Those are important questions.

If he could access such a piece, Griffith said he would like that to be a multimedia blend of text, images and video, not just a chunk of text, or a photo or a video. He was intrigued by ideas I floated about following in the footsteps of history while a nonfiction anecdote played itself out, or by interactive mysteries or games, that could be broadly labeled as historical fiction. But when I brought up the possibilities of social networking as part of that, including interacting with other participants as they followed along with the story as well, he said he did not have an interest in taking the idea that far and that he likely wouldn't use such a feature.

In terms of specific content that would interest him, he leaned toward contextual enrichment via real maps, photos of artifacts and journal entries, plus other information that provided details of the ways in which people, especially famous or quirky people, lived in the mid-19th century, when Fort Vancouver was at its apex in history. Yet he thought it also would be fun to experience that kind of material as part of a game, or mystery, or tour, particularly one that was family-oriented and would include children in the process.

All good fodder to keep in mind for later steps.

Born Digital

2009-07-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

Just finished "Born Digital" by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, which addresses the idea that people born after 1980, when computers emerged, dubbed "digital natives," haven't known anything but digital technology, so they therefore live differently than those born before 1980. The World Wide Web, by the way, didn't appear until 1991, even though it seems now like it's been part of our lives forever.

I read somewhere recently, too, that the gap between generations right now is the greatest since the Vietnam war era, with the country having a distinct split on the direction it should follow.

The "Born Digital" book covers many of the issues and ideas that have emerged from this fissure -- related to such topics as privacy, quality of information, pirating, learning and innovation -- in layman terms. Even though it was written by a couple of attorneys, and it's about a technical field, the writing style and language clearly were aimed at a mainstream audience. Sometimes, I found that tedious, in terms of repetition and unneeded context. But I suspect those who haven't read much in this field would need that framework to understand the points.

That said, here are a few excerpts from the book I found interesting:

* In 2006, Tower Records liquidated, and by 2008, iTunes was the largest music retailer in the U.S.

* If you are not a digital native, you still can be a "digital settler," helping to shape this new world, even though you weren't born into it.

* If the VCR didn't ruin the movie business, why will digital file sharing kill the music industry?

* "I think the reason why print magazines are still very popular is because you kind of have the feeling, okay, this is like one issue, and this is what happened this week. And on the Internet ... there's no beginning and no end. -- An 18-year-old Harvard student."

* In 2007 alone, 161 billion gigabytes of digital content was created, or 3 million times the amount of information in all of the books ever written. Experts predict in 2010, the world will produce nearly a trillion gigabytes of digital content.

* A person's short term memory can only hold seven items at once.

* When people are overloaded with information, they tend to respond with simpler and shorter messages. Hmmm, Twitter?

The chapters on digital dossiers and information overload were the most striking to me, making me rethink some of my views on sharing information online as well as the ways in which I handle the glut of knowledge. The authors use the metaphor of a tattoo as a way to think of something a young person might leave in cyberspace that will haunt them the rest of their lives.

Much of this confirms my mantra on web design: simple, straightfoward and clean. As I work on building brettoppegaard.com into that vision, and transform it for mobile screens, (and the more I use mobile apps on my G1), I'm getting convinced that the less complexity, the better.

- Brett

Two new augmented reality apps

2009-06-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

New augmented reality apps for G1, Layar, and for iPhone, ARToolWorks; story is here, and video is below; this sort of location-awareness evolution is happening right now:

Clay Shirky: How social media can make history

2009-06-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

Quite a bit of interesting information about the innovative disruption of social media in this video lecture, from TED and tech writer Shirky:

"Metareality" begins to emerge

2009-06-26T21:49:00.000-07:00

Check out this application, Wikitude, and BNET story about it:

Mobile storytelling presentation

2009-06-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

Would like to have the audio as well, but the slides have some interesting notes on them to look further into:

Mobile Digital Storytelling at Cheil Worldwide, Seoul

View more presentations from rudydw.

"The Perfect Thing" by Steven Levy; more iPod worship

2009-06-19T08:53:00.000-07:00

After reading "iPod and Philosophy," edited by D.E. Wittkower, I was curious about other books on this topic of the iPod and the impact it has had on American society.

That led me to "The Perfect Thing" by Steven Levy, part of which I had read in Wired a couple of years ago. Levy, a senior writer for that magazine after serving as the chief technology writer for Newsweek, writes an engaging introduction about the behind-the-scenes intricacies of the launch of the iPod, only a month after Sept. 11, 2001, and how even Apple didn't know quite what they had (the iPod originally was touted as a music player and, in almost the same breath, an alternative hard drive for computers).

Dylan Wittkower, editor of iPod and Philosophy, will be a guest in my Texas Tech class next week, and reading Levy's work, as well as reflecting back on Wittkower's collection, I wonder about the techniques used by writers in this rapidly-changing field to avoid commodification of their work.

Wittkower's book was published last year, but there are only two mentions of the iPhone, sort of an extension of the iPod, which actually might turn out to have an even bigger impact on society. The raves (and there are many, many statements that gush) about the iPod now seem almost quaint in the wake of the iPhone, G1 and the like.

Levy's book, written in 2006 and updated in April 2007, seems even more in a time capsule, because it talks about the iPhone in prerelease state (first ones were sold in June 2007). Unfortunately for Levy, though, without the foresight, he whiffs at its potential and implications.

Levy did get to use an iPhone, in highly controlled circumstances, before he wrote about it. He did praise its improvement of the cell-phone experience, its sensors, antenna and such. Levy also criticized the lack of storage on the phone, which already has been corrected, and the AT&T collaboration, which hasn't.

Here is one of his strongest comments about the potential of the iPhone, misunderstanding its impact just like so many people discounted the iPod before it:

The iPod "made us want to hear more songs. ... Will the iPhone encourage us to ... make more phone calls? I don't want more phone calls. I want fewer; and when I'm on the road, or staring at hummingbirds in my garden, I don't want any. In fact, if you take into consideration the universal loathing that comes from being around people who talk on cell phones, it can be argued that if the iPhone encourages more conversations, it will have done us a universal disservice. At least iPod users keep to themselves."

And "It will be tough for Apple to match the iPod as a life-changing, and world-changing, phenomenon."

Levy does use qualifying phrases, such as "it can be argued" and "it will be tough," that temper the mistakes he makes. But I wonder, and will ask Wittkower next week, how he approaches the ever-changing nature of writing about technology and cutting-edge concepts. Particularly with the publishing cycle of a book, which can take a year or more to get to shelves, how do technology writers deal with this aspect of their work, to keep ideas fresh and engaging, even when they get dated almost before the ink dries)? Besides disclaimers, any ideas?

GoogleWhack!

2009-06-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

Ran across a strange book in the library recently about an activity called "Googlewhacking." That means to find a two-term phrase on Google that has only a single hit, which apparently has the odds of one in three billion (if you don't believe the author, Dave Gorman, give it a try).

Gorman found these:

Francophile Namesakes
Dork Turnspit
Unicyclist Periscopes
Ammonite Googolplex
Pomegranate Filibusters

I suppose as soon as the Google spiders find those here, the particular GoogleWhacks will be ruined. But that's part of the fun, I guess. If you think the list sounds like gibberish, there are some rules, such as the words must be real and found in dictionary.com, or some other reference source like that.

Gorman then traveled around the world investigating the people behind the bizarre web sites that created the GoogleWhack. One in particular was a site, "dork" and "turnspit" in Googlewhack terms, that showed ordinary photographs of women with their dogs. That's it. Just women adjacent to dogs. Nothing creepy, unless you consider the activity of collecting such images bizarre. Gorman met the creator of the site, and he seemed relatively normal, just a person who likes to collect something odd.

Isn't this part of what makes the Internet so amazing?

The art of the interface

2009-06-15T23:45:00.000-07:00

Thinking about interfaces reminded me of the mantra, probably started by Michelin, that emphasizes the only thing touching the ground is the tires. Well, in the world of web sites, the only thing touching the users is the interface, and if that doesn't work well, they will not be back.

But what does that phrase mean, "work well"? Is it strictly usability and utility? Can an interface actually be artistic and challenging and add a layer of meaning on its own? I think so, but that doesn't mean most of the web users are ready for such a development. In short, I suspect that we still are in an era of getting used to the possibilities of interfaces. Significant experimentation and artistic expression can't really come until everyone understands the rules. Once those common guidelines are established, the artists will come along and break them in fascinating ways. At this point, I suspect, most of the experimentation gets written off quickly as someone screwing up. In hindsight, some of the interfaces being created today will be groundbreaking work. But we seem to still be too close to the beginning of all of this to appreciate what we have.

While I enjoy complicated and provocative interfaces in theory, and I do like those on some web sites, I have to add that strange navigation and obscure references and labels frustrate me quickly, too. I have to be in the mood to explore for those types of pages to work, and most of the time, I'm simply on a mission to seek and process information quickly. I just don't have a lot of time right now to try to figure out the whims of the web designer.

If I had more time, which might never happen again, and if I really was interested in a site, I probably would have fun tinkering around with an innovative page. But, again, usually I'm in a hurry to find what I want, and I would guess that most people are operating in today's world with that kind of mindset.

When it comes to mobile applications (I have a G1 Android phone), interfaces have to be even simpler, because the screen is so much smaller and the devices, frankly, are more foreign. That doesn't leave much room for experimentation at this point, and I think it would be a death wish to try to create an expressive mainstream interface on a mobile device at this point in the medium's development. Maybe down the road.

Right now, I really like the simplest and most straightforward mobile interfaces. In particular, I like the ones that use the congealing standards, hearkening back to the early days of the Xerox PARC desktop (whence came the familiar WIMP -- Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing device) or the early Apple computers, the genesis of computer conventions highlighted in the conclusion of Steven Johnson's book "Interface Culture."

Some of the best interfaces on my G1 right now:

Shop saavy (allows bar codes to be scanned by the phone's camera, then produces lowest prices for the items listed on the web as well as in nearby stores, located by GPS) -- Press the icon, a list of five actions appear (search for a product, which involves taking a picture of its barcode, wish list, history, settings and price alerts, another cool feature that will let the user know when the item price has dropped to the point specified by the user. Even though this application is mind blowing in how it changes the shopping experience, it was so simple to use that I just started pressing clearly marked buttons and having amazing amounts of information appear.

Shazam (listens to a song, then identifies it, loading a screen that gives access to more info, chance to download, etc) -- This amazing program can listen to a song coming out of a radio and identify it. I couldn't believe it, until I tried it. But I was thrown off the first time by the two options this app gives me when I start it: "Tag Now" and "My Tags." I had no idea what either one was, so I just pressed the Tag Now button, and a circular bar started going around on my screen, with a text label of "listening." Of course, I wasn't ready to make this work with those kinds of constructions. But, after I understood the system from that first time through and the errors I made, the second time was easy. I've found it was a learnable system that I haven't forgot yet.

Flixster (shows movies playing in the area, times, theater address via GPS, ratings of critics and Flixster users, trailers, etc) -- I'd say that the interface design of this app begins with the name of the icon, using "Movies" rather than Flixster. I have so many apps that I might not remember what one called Flixster might do, but I certainly am able to look up movies with this program, which is why I spot it so easily under that label. Then again, it's simple, simple, simple and straightforward to access a lot of information. I don't want to explore an artist's mind with this thing, I just want to know when the movie starts.

Mobile phones and modern education techniques at Abilene Christian University

2009-06-15T23:16:00.001-07:00

One of the colleges in Texas, and there are many, really embracing new technology in the classroom:

ACU Mobile Learning from ACU Videos on Vimeo.

Thinking differently about teaching and the learning environment

2009-06-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

This video -- created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University -- really challenged my conceptions of a modern classroom and made me think differently about the classes I teach and how I should be doing that, especially in a Digital Technology and Culture program: