The Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary.

You better watch it. (Found on Lessig’s blog.)

One of the coolest things these folks are doing is soliciting content and remixes from the community of viewers. Have a camera and computer? Film your thoughts on the subject and post them GooTube (that is, Google Video or YouTube) with the tag “net neutrality”. Or download the video for Final Cut Pro and create your own mix.

I admit that I am coming late to the wiki party. Sure, I have played with a lot of them: MediaWiki, ZWiki, TWiki, Wicked, yadda yadda. I would play, then go back to the blogging tools for online writing, or Plone for anything more than just writing. I saw the power and flexibility of this corner of the read/write web, but I was unable to reconcile the anarchic qualities of Wiki-ness with the (relatively) modest needs of pedagogy and scholarship.

Last weekend, the crank pulley on my car fell off on a rural road in the cell-phone-service-free region of the southern Catskills late on a bitter-cold night. (Heroes) Jay, Jed, and Renee helped me out of a difficult and potentially dangerous situation. As I waited for the parts and repairs, I played around with GTDTiddlyWiki, a single-file javascript/xhtml/css non-linear hypertext authoring wiki system that incorporates David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” principles into TiddlyWiki. I organized my work projects, my home projects, and started to use it to store thoughts for this blog. Like Gmail before it, GTDTW has changed my relationship with the web browser.

Yesterday, I spent a little bit of time gathering the disparate chunks of information I have found useful in my (relatively) new job at Columbia. The motivation was, again, getting stuck in the mountains. I had limited landline service, a mobile phone with dying batteries, and a laptop. I was able to call out and let folks at CCNMTL know that I wasn’t going to be in, but I desperately wanted needed the contact information for everyone I could possibly need to reach out and touch.

Using the web-data on the CCNMTL site, I wrote the contact list up as a TiddlyWiki document, linked the email addresses, and formatted it so it is easier for me to read. Between Firefox’s “Find” and TiddlyWiki’s built-in search, I can find numbers as quickly as if I were using high-end CRM software.

I then grabbed the most difficult document to retrieve from Columbia’s web site: the Inter Campus Shuttle Bus Schedule. Trust me, it can take five minutes to find it, by which time you have missed your bus. I threw that data into a TiddlyWiki table. No more scrambling to find the data.

Another great feature talked about elsewhere is the embedded print stylesheet. One of my first tasks today will be to print out the contact list and the shuttle schedule at the smallest legible size to keep in my wallet for emergencies. GTDTiddlyWiki’s print stylesheet uses open bullets for lists, a useful feature for those who like to check off done items. Further information on the uses of GTDTiddlyWiki can be found here and here.

So now, how does this really impact me. My commute (a favorite topic here) takes advantage of a number of tools. Vienna, a great FLOSS RSS aggregator keeps me up to date on news, blogs, and mailing lists. Democracy gives me TV and video. SBAGEN, another FLOSS application, is a binaural beat generator that I leave running while I do other things. Mmmm, open chakras. GTDTiddlyWiki and TiddlyWiki linked together are my writing and organizing tools.

Dropping the WikiBar javascript into the TiddlyWiki html file enables some basic wysiwyg editing. I was able to drop that code into TiddlyWiki, but not GTDTiddlyWiki.

But what about the pedagogical value? If I were still supporting students and faculty in the humanities, I would suggest that it could be a great note taking tool on a memory stick.  I got into technology through hypertext fiction written in Storyspace. I know folks are using TiddlyWiki to write hypertext fiction, and MediaWiki to write massively-multi-author HTF. What about patient charts? These could then be encrypted to preserve confidentiality. How about learning objects? Oh, and the low-hanging fruit, how this post started as an email to a former colleague: you could author your entire site in a read/write single-file wiki and post it readonly to the web. There has to be some value in that for higher education. Gone would be the days of a six month wait to have your content updated.

Chime in, please. I am trying to sort through these ideas.

Puppy Pi’s first birthday is March 14. My parents, going above and beyond, ordered a Grand Carpet Mill, which they brought up on Saturday morning. As I assembled it, Pi kept walking all over the parts and standing on the running surface. He explored every aspect of the device, henceforth known as the “puppy-torture9000″, and was curious to see what happened next. His favorite parts were, of course, the box in which the thing was shipped. It wasn’t hard to assemble, but conversation, pup, and events conspired to make the total assembly time about one hour. Before we went for lunch, I placed him on it and held his collar while he ran for a little. After lunch, I took this video with the work MacBook Pro:

Please don’t call the ASPCA on me. He really seems to enjoy it.

I read about Twitter on one of the feeds I read using Vienna the other day. I thought, “Neat, but I don’t really see a use for it personally, much less pedagogically.” I may have even said that out loud. I clicked through and looked over the site. And I moved on to another tab. I had also seen something on D’Arcy Norman’s site about Yahoo! Pipes, and Jay (any day now) had talked about Pipes earlier in the week. Another tool I clicked through to, played for a few minutes, and left open in a tab. Read the rest of this entry »

I watched Light Criticism using Democracy this morning. Wonderful piece.

Using a content management system to promote collaborative writing in the sciences (and beyond)

NERCOMP Annual Conference 2006

View the slideshow. (Web-based using S5)
Download the PowerPoint. (524 KB)

by Ken Bolton, Eric Eberhardt and Cristian Opazo — last modified 2006-03-27 16:58

A pretty sweet tool, Democracy Player is an application mashup of perenial favs VLC and BitTorrent, plus a lightweight web browser (gecko?) for finding potential broad/vod/pod/vlog casts. In theory, this tool lowers the bar for content producers to distribute their video. You post video content to the Democracy Player and anyone who downloads it from you immediately starts seeding it out to any other interested viewers. The more people download, the faster your content gets distributed to new viewers. Read the rest of this entry »

HarryRoseman.com is a combination portfolio and social networking tool for the professor and sculptor Harry Roseman. Harry is also an avid photographer of his works and friends. We used the Zope/Plone stack and a lightly modified version of the PloneLightBoxJS product.

Chris Joslyn did the hacks to LightBox. Michael Pepe-Mooney modified the skin to make it slightly less Plone-ish. Me? I managed the project, the content, and Harry.

The best thing about this project has been watching Harry go, “Ah ha!” He totally gets it now, and makes changes and additions almost daily.

We justified using Media Cloisters resources for what was pretty obviously a portfolio project thusly:

1. The project content could be used as a teaching and reference platform in art history and studio art courses.
2. With modifications to the LightBoxJS, a hide/show button could be added to hide and reveal the metadata, making it potentially as useful a study guide as Luna, an analog slide library, or Gardner’s Art Through the Ages.
3. The students working on this would develop skills in Plone and CSS which would be applied to future projects.

Gnosh is a meta-search tool that Mike Richwalsky and I initially hacked together after eating chinese one evening at CET’s Social Software User’s Group workshop two years ago. Specifically, Gnosh meta-searches the social software tools out there, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, and returns the top hits from each one. I dropped off of the project, but Mike certainly seems to have gotten it somewhere. Mad props!

“The things people say about you are true.”

You can take it however you want. I think I would be flattered. Some people, I can imagine, would be violently offended. You use this, or variations, e.g. “What they say about you…”, cut me a check.