It recently came to my attention that a video camera has been set up at Vassar College to be streamed into SecondLife. I first encountered the device when I went to the Vassar island in SL. It took some significant software sleuthing to uncover the URI of the offending and offensive device. I find the undocumented practice of surveilling a public space at Vassar College extremely disturbing. Have the students and faculty who walk across the Library Lawn every day been told that they are being filmed and broadcast to the world? My research into the matter indicates that this has not been discussed in any public manner. How does this filming enhance the teaching, learning, and research that happens at Vassar? I do not think filming and streaming into SL has any academic merit.
I post the link to the camera here. I would buy the argument that, by posting this, I am violating privacy even more than whoever installed the camera. I would respond that the content is fully accessible to anyone in SecondLife. Further, I hope this shames the responsible individuals into removing the offending device permanently.
A number of years ago, students taking a course in the Media Studies Development Project approached me about performing "open and transparent surveillance" of the Media Cloisters. My understanding was that the camera would be set up in the space with clear signs outlining when and how the camera would be used. It was also made clear that the footage would be used for in-class presentation. All footage not used for the presentation would be destroyed. This idea was shot down, justifiably, because the Media Cloisters was a space set aside for unfettered use of technology. Surveillance of users of the space, it was felt, would create an unfriendly atmosphere.
I won’t go into the use of SecondLife at Vassar beyond stating that I am skeptical of the pedagogical value. The Vassar MOO and MOOssiggang engage students much more dramatically in the building of space, the writing of text, the display of imagery, and computer-mediated communication than SL currently can. Yes, the technology of the mid-90s doesn’t have the whiz-bang factor of SL, but the pedagogy was sound.
I hope that faculty, students and administrators at Vassar look carefully at what they are allowing with this ongoing filming of the campus. Yes, I know that the images are from a great distance, that they are of fairly low quality, and that some may argue that Vassar is a public space. I think these arguments area slippery slope and fallacious. Cheaper, higher quality cameras will become available. Vassar is a private institution, and has a commitment to protect the privacy of its faculty, staff, and student.
If I go to reunion this year, I will be staying away from the Library Lawn.
So the blogosphere is abuzz about the hostess on The View who demonstrated tremendous ignorance with regard to the shape of the earth. You can watch the full clip here.
The signal:noise problem on YouTube comments means that things get missed. So I am reposting my comment here.
in all fairness, at least the clip ends with the celebutard saying, "baby, we have to go to the library". proper respect for that move. and its true. take yourself and your kids to the library. often. nothing else to it. the more your read, even if its tripe, the more you think, the more you will be able to think critically about the information that gets pushed at you every day.
I barely caught her final statement at the end, and I’m glad the original poster did not cut that out, and that I was listening so passively that I wasn’t completely incensed by her ignorance. No, this does not redeem her totally by any stretch, but it does go in the right direction. Read, folks. Read with your kids. Take them to libraries. Take them to bookstores. Donate time or money to libraries. Have your kids donate time or money. "Think of the children." Take them reading.
Been so busy with work, home, dog, commute, and visitors from other-space that I have thoroughly neglected this space. With that as my excuse, and I am sticking with it, consider this a mini-post to touch on some educational/technology topics that have been filling my days to brimming over.
Using Drupal to rapidly prototype a site on a cultural competency curriculum.
In cleaning my house, I found an early copy of the Digital Tour of Poughkeepsie DVD I produced with Leonard Nevarez at Vassar over the last three years. I hope to post some clips, stills, and a write-up describing the project, its goals, and the techniques we used to get it done.
Meg Stewart at Vassar posted the abstract of the talk she, Mary Ann Cunningham, and Kirsten Menking gave on April 20, 2007, in San Francisco at the American Association of Geographers meeting on using virtual globes in higher education. This is based in part on the many presentations that Meg and I gave together over the last year to faculty, students, and staff. The official conference proceedings abstract is here. They were kind enough to include me as a co-author of the talk.
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 bloggingtools 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.
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 »
I lost a lot of time before and during college to the Sid Meier game Civilization. I played it extensively in German during my time in Germany. I assumed, based on the creator’s name, that it was a German game. My vocabulary grew as I played. I always cite this as an example of the pedagogical value of games.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled on the OpenTTD project. This is an open source port of Transport Tycoon. I don’t yet know if there is any pedagogical value to this game, but Jay and I are going to play it until we find out. If you want to join us, shoot me a smoke signal.
Brilliant! Having worked in desktop support, this guys manner is perfect. Patience. Its new. Help them relax. I call it “having a good computer-side manner”. In this case, of course, its “having a good book-side manner.”
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