Alec posted a link to this a few days ago, and I finally got around to watching the video. It’s Professor Michael Wesch’s presentation to the Library of Congress, where he talked about the anthropological effects he observed after producing his awesome video essay The Machine is Us/ing Us.
The presentation is a fantastic, rich, and deep investigation into the connections and their effects on communication and media. Free up 55 minutes and watch the whole thing.
It’s been just over a week since I decided to make Twitter a read-only medium. I haven’t posted a single tweet, and have only scanned Twitter a handful of times in that week.
And I haven’t missed it one bit.
I’ve been having many more IM chats with the people I care about. I’ve been conversing more via email. I’ve been writing more blog posts. I haven’t dropped offline. I haven’t disconnected. All I’ve done is lengthen the feedback loop - no more constant reloading of Twitter.com to see if there are updates. No more composing tweets while offline. Just a healthy balance, and a reconfiguration of the social connections.
I’ve been having a fair number of spam comments get tgrouh the filters on my blog. I’ve tried Akismet. I’ve tried SpamKarma2. I’ve tried Akismet AND SpamKarma2. Still, I get over a dozen spam comments published on my blog every day (and hundreds successfully killed by the filters on a typical day).
It doesn’t sound like much of a problem - a dozen or two spams to deal with every day - but it makes keeping a blog with open comment posting more tedious than it needs to be. I shouldn’t have to fear leaving a computer for extended periods of time, nor dread returning to connectivity after a couple of days to sift through the crap that got through (and hopefully not accidentally nuke any valid comments).
This article is currently on the WordPress admin dashboard, so people who obsessively check their WordPress admin page will have seen it already. But, it’s worth pointing to the article again as it outlines some things to consider when using WordPress as a CMS. I’m still a pretty hardcore Drupal guy - I use it for dozens of website projects, and it’s the Officially Supported Web Content Management System on campus (YAY!) - but there’s just something so nice, clean, and elegant about the WordPress UI.
I thought the MS Surface table computer prototype was pretty laughable, but they’ve managed to take the awkwardness up a notch with the Sphere prototype. All of the wonderful distortion of a spherical projection, combined with the limited shared visible space around the sphere to impede collaboration. Wonderful. So now I can view a distorted photograph, but the person next to me sees an oblique partially obscured view of the same photograph - unless they’re on the other side of the sphere, then they see nothing. And vice versa.
I’m turning twitter into a read-only medium (for me). I’m not deleting anything. I’m not going anywhere. I just need to cut down on the noise and shallow superficial connections that just aren’t real. Twitter’s just a website. It’s not like it’s real, or important.
If anyone needs me, I’m really easy to get in touch with. And I’ll periodically monitor summize to see if anyone is sending stuff to my now-silent (but still active) account…
Now that I’ve updated ucalgaryblogs.ca to WordPress MultiUser 2.6, the cool new native iPhone and iPod Touch blogging app will work. Just point it to your blog(s), give it login credentials, and you’re off and running!
What’s cool is that now all of my blogs can be managed via my iPod Touch using a native application!
For example, I used dlnorman.ucalgaryblogs.ca as the blog address, and gave it my login info. It will work with multiple blogs, too - but each blog needs to be configured separately.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Real keyboard, connected to iPod Touch via USB through iPod Camera Connector accessory.”][/caption]
I want this. Well, maybe with a slimmer keyboard. Possibly a foldable version of something the size of the Apple Wireless Keyboard (pictured below). Doesn’t have to actually BE wireless, though. I’d be FINE with a USB cable, and even with slapping rechargeable batteries in the keyboard to prevent an additional power draw from the iPod Touch…
I’m going to rethink the sessions a bit. Maybe they’ll evolve into more of a storytelling thing - picking a shot and talking about the story behind it, and how the shot was composed, taken and processed… Something like that might be more interesting for everyone, rather than just duplicating a set of screencasts.
Well THIS is the best mobile blog posting interface I’ve used. Thanks to Automattic for the app!
It also supports offline writing of new posts (but not of editing existing posts without an active connection). Very cool. I’ll be using this app a LOT!
Here’s a screenshot of the blog post/edit interface:
I’ll keep this rant short. I don’t know what the future of education is, or will be, but I do know that it’s not “web 2.0” despite the hype.
Education is, always has been, and always will be, about the acts of teaching and learning. It is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a form of technology. It is not a suite of distributed online tools, no matter how buzzword compliant they might be.
