Five Thirty Eight Calls It
Yes we did!
As I post this, Florida hasn’t been called yet. I realize I’m being ridiculously premature with this. But it’s different this time. It’s not 2000. It’s different.
Everything is different now.
PBS Engage Social Media Advisory Board Meeting
Last week I went to D.C. to visit PBS. Super fun. Folks there are putting together the PBS Engage social media initiative, which is meant to harness the powers of social media for good and not evil. Thanks to my friend Kristen Taylor, I was invited to consult with the team and help them brainstorm ideas for how they can best use social computing tools to collaborate and communicate with PBS fans and contributors. We had a great time thinking through all the possibilities; I’m looking forward to working with the team throughout this phase of the project and beyond.
The project is still in its infancy but I recommend checking out the blog and its Twitter feed, both great places to learn more about what they’re working on. There are lots of great people involved, too, including my new favorite people on the web: Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf from Epic Fu. I’m also getting more and more interested in thinking about media literacy in relation to grassroots journalism efforts, as exemplified by Mark Glaser and the folks I met from his team at MediaShift. And last but not least is the Video Your Vote project. I’ll be interested to track what happens with that and with the votereport Twitter feed on election day.
Oh and I forgot to mention that the meeting was held at PBS headquarters in the Ken Burns Conference Room. Srsly. So awesome. There were many jokes about slow pans of still images.
Obama, the Mixtape
Microsoft Social Computing Symposium
Just returned from a trip to Seattle and Redmond, Washington. I was there for the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium, a small meeting of professionals, academics, and researchers interested in current and future directions in social computing. It was a terrific collection of people and I feel so lucky to have gone. Topics covered:
- social objects
- alternate reality games
- geo-location devices and applications
- privacy
- virtual worlds
- distributed cognition
- passively multiplayer online game (PMOG)
- ethics of sharing online
- usability
- architecture
And many others, but I’m posting this quickly since I’m batting a lot of balls at the moment. Thanks to everyone who attended and made it a super place to be for a couple of days. It’s a fantastic opportunity for me to learn new things and ponder connections between ideas. And now, back to the game. The balls, they’re coming faster than I can hit them. Gah.
Voter Registration Flowchart
In case it’s not well known, I am a fan of flowcharts. I enjoy photos of weird, contextualized, and (usually) handmade signs, too, but flowcharts appeal to my nerdy personality.
A friend of mine sent this to me the other day. I love its timeliness of course, and I love the fact that “receive” is spelled wrong several times. I also love its size–it is clearly meant to cover a lot of wall space. But most of all I like that its done by college students in an effort to register their peers. Way to go, young enterprising college students. Down with apathy!
Photo courtesy of vastibadastoy via Flickr.
Course Description: Digital Cultures and Social Media
Although I still need to work out the full reading schedule, I wrote up a brief description of my spring graduate seminar. The generic course name is English 654: Advanced Studies in Rhetoric, Writing, Technology, and Culture. My subtitle is Digital Cultures and Social Media.
I have to say thanks to colleagues who have been very open about publishing their syllabi online. I know that doing so has come a questionable activity–both professionally and legally–but given this area of study, I treat that activity seriously. Therefore I thank Howard Rheingold for sharing his Virtual Communities syllabus and course materials so that all of us can share in his (and his students’) expertise. His course has an anchor in sociology, however, so mine will vary considerably from his. Instead, we will focus on what Henry Jenkins calls “applied humanism,” a term used to describe the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, where I was a postdoctoral fellow the past two years.
And so, here is what the course is about. I decided not to go the traditional route of listing a string of authors’ names (especially since I’m a long way off from finalizing that list) and instead landed on a series of keywords. Since the course is trans-disciplinary, these keywords are probably more helpful to potential students than authors’ names are, anyway. I hope that’s helpful.
How does meaning-making happen in and around the contexts of contemporary social media? In what ways are affinities for these media enabling us to think differently about what it means to read, write, and participate? While much has been made about both media consumption and production, we have yet to understand what it means to participate in situated digital cultures.
This course is a fair split between both thinking about and using social and digital media. Students will be expected to keep up with a theory-rich reading schedule as well as rapidly-moving immersion in several media tools. So while this is a theory-based seminar, students must be prepared to work toward fluency in, for example, microblogging, commenting, tagging, and remixing. The goal is not just production but participation within a variety of contexts. In other words, it is not enough to know how to edit an entry on Wikipedia; we need to learn about and understand the Wikipedia community and what our edits mean within that context.
Although most readings will be freely available online, there are four print texts required for the course: Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You; Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture; Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s Digital Literacies; and Annette Markham and Nancy Baym’s Internet Inquiry. We will also engage with theoretical texts and empirical studies from scholars in communications, journalism, media studies, engineering, law, psychology, sociology, and the learning sciences. Please email the instructor for a link to the full list of authors.
Keywords for this course: wiki; blog; twitter; flickr; file-sharing; creative commons; free culture; fans; participatory culture; SMS; tagging; virtual worlds; videogames; grassroots media; play; identity; networks; smart mobs; LOLcats; xkcd; 4chan; Facebook; MySpace; del.icio.us; memes; YouTube.
xkcd nails it once again
thank you, randall munroe, for this.
Heroic dog iz heroic.
Maybe I was just in a good mood, or maybe I was in a bad mood. I dunno. But this made me very happy today.
Things are going well and I’m starting to actually feel like I live here. It’s quite different from Boston in so many good ways. People are ridiculously friendly, things are wicked cheap, and you can get fresh fruit and vegetables whenever and wherever you want.
It’s also quite different from Boston in many not-so-good ways. Nobody stops for you when you walk across the street. I’ve nearly been hit a few times. There are lots and lots of skateboards on campus. I’ve nearly been hit a few times. People drive more recklessly here. I *was* hit.
It’s been a good few weeks, aside from the car-being-hit incident, the monsoons, and the aforementioned computer theft. It’s nice to be in a super sunny spot, and I’m getting used to the heat. I confess I do enjoy the palm trees and swimming pools as well.
All in all, heroic professor iz heroic.
My Article in Computers and Composition is Out
Shameless self-promotion: my article “The Design of the Game: Writing Games, Teaching Writing” has just been published in Computers and Composition, an Elsevier journal. It’s available from Science Direct by clicking here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/87554615 Check your libraries too! Just in case you can’t find it through your library, you can email me for an offprint or download it from here.
Here’s the abstract:
This article makes both conceptual and empirical arguments for why composition scholars and teachers ought to take notice of how video games are designed and developed in such a way as to make them so compelling. Thinking about games’ design principles as an analogy for composition curricula, I argue that video game designers and developers discuss and approach their design processes in many of the same ways writing teachers do. Data presented are taken from several years’ worth of ethnographic interviews, observations, and artifact analyses from within the game design and development community. This paper demonstrates how one of the designers from this ongoing study builds on his knowledge of games as distinctly interactive meaning-making spaces, noting that this approach to game design fits well with a re-thinking of the task of designing writing and learning spaces.
We Knew it Would Happen Eventually
Oh my. Just– oh geez. Poor Liz Lemon.
In other news, the Twitterverse has exploded over the Sarah Palin thing, starting a Chuck Norris Facts-like meme that just kept on rolling all day yesterday. This morning I woke up to this, which explains it all. I guess that’s a good idea, eh? Start a meme, let it roll, and then post a website that brings the brand back to you. Very enterprising, young grasshopper.
I love the Internet. So, so much.
