This article, called “Why it’s time to dump the Web 2.0 sobriquet once and for all,” does a great job of summarizing why we don’t know where we are, but explaining why. The Internet has always been about communication, really. More and more people realize that, and although it’s not made explicit, that insight underlies almost everything said here.

Tags: technology, communication

It’s interesting the things we do when we don’t have time to do them.

I’m really grading stuff–really, I am. At this exact moment, though, my brain is fuzzed, everything I’m reading might as well be in Chinese, so I took a moment to download and install a “new” browser.

As with most things, it’s not really new. The developers of Flock have been at it for awhile. But it’s starting to get more notice, mainly because of its structure designed to manage the myriad social networking tools that seem to define Web 2.0.

Since it’s based on Firefox, it is both familiar and new. Those myriad tools take some figuring out, but only because of how many there are, not because of difficulty. In fact, everything seems pretty intuitive. For instance, I am using the built-in blog editor (in the browser, remember) to compose this blog post.

So far I have found only two drawbacks: some Firefox extensions work with Flock, but not all. I have some favorites, at least one of which may be a dealbreaker if it doesn’t work. I don’t know yet–quite literally, I installed this thing 10 minutes ago, and I’m already up and running with it, which bodes well.

The other things is very, very minor. When I edit my blog using its own WYSIWYG editor, the link button lets me set a target (in effect, it lets me specify whether the new link will load in a new window or replace the one it came from). The Flock editor does not. It’s really very minor because I’m an old HTML guy and know how to code that directly. It’s just slightly annoying to have to switch over to “Source” view to do so.

Just found another, that may be resolved when I post. There is a window to add tags, but not a way to apply WordPress categories. I suspect blogs are moving toward tags rather than categories anyway; we’ll see. [Update: It let me pick a category on posting! I’m impressed. They seem to have thought of everything, including letting me pick which blog it gets posted to. This editor, therefore, would allow you to use the same interface for multiple blogs, whether your own hosted or one on a service such as blogger.com. I’ll have to see if it will pop up for me to edit an existing post.]

Tags: technology, browser, social networking, communication

So, as part of the Instructional Technology Conference at MTSU, I got myself a Twitter account.

I’m still trying to figure out what to do with it.

Some of my colleagues are exploring the concept of “microblogging” for educational purposes, and Twitter comes into it. Twitter is an application of the simple concept: “Tell what you are doing now, in 140 characters or less.” Such posts are called “tweets.”

This can lead to lots of mundane postings, such as “Brushing my teeth.” On the other hand, its short format forces you to focus, which has obvious educational implications. It also fosters awareness–“what are you doing now” is one of the simple research methods used in qualitative research. Researchers who use such methods have to come up with ways to remind participants to notice what they are doing a record it. Twitter devotees do this automatically. (They can get downright obsessive about it, especially since you can set up your Twitter account to receive text messages from your cell phone. Note: don’t do this if you have to pay on a per-text-message basis. Experienced tweeters tell me the charges can add up fast.)

As is often the case with me, I seem to be in this odd middle ground between cutting-edge technology and old-fogey practice. I was one of the first people in my circle of friends to get a computer, but one of the last to finally give in an allow Windows to be installed on any computer of mine (I used to say I would not let viruses on my computer). Once I gave in, though, I skipped right over Window 3.11 (which was the current version at the time) and went straight to the new-fangled Windows 95.

You get the picture.

I have the Twitter account, and I’ve figured out how it works. But a) I do have a cell phone, but my texting costs me per message; b) I’m on a computer all the time, but I seldom think to post a tweet (as readers of this blog can tell, it takes some doing for me to remember to make a blog post, much less something as fleeting and frequent as a tweet; and c) tweeting seems to fit into the style ubiquitously known as multi-tasking, and I am a dedicated concentrator. I’m too focused on what I’m doing to constantly stop and tell the world what I’m doing.

There’s more to it than that, of course. By following other tweeters, you assemble a page that uniquely represents a community of sorts. I suspect it can effectively replace the old-fashioned diary, at least in the sense of noting what happened when. (For thoughtful diary-like entries, we’ll have to turn to the middle-fashioned blog.) Several news professionals are tweeters, and by following them you can get truly up-to-the-minute news pointers–headlines, in essence, usually with links to the longer, more-detailed story if you are interested in it. (Just as you can tweet from your cell phone, you can set Twitter to notify you whenever a new tweet is posting from those you follow, or even have it send the tweet as a text message to your cell phone. You really want to avoid that if you pay for incoming text messages.)

Newsworthy or not, I’m going to tweet a link to this post when I’m finished.

I guess the most accurate thing I can say is that I’m still trying to figure out what you can do with it. I’d be glad to hear any thoughts from people on how they use or might use Twitter.

When I returned from the Instructional Technology Conference I mentioned earlier, I found a press release waiting for me. I’m sure I received it because of still officially being a writer for The Metaverse Messenger, although thanks to my daughter’s situation I haven’t written for them for months now. (I hope to remedy that soon.) The release was announcing an event inside Second Life in which The Tech Museum of Innovation, “one of the nation’s premier science and technology museums,” planned to hold an awards ceremony announcing the winners of the virtual exhibit creation contest as well as the winners of the special “Best Of” $1,000 cash prizes for best-in-SL, most educational, best collaboration, and best overall virtual exhibits.

I missed the ceremony by a few minutes, tied up with college business. I will find out about the winners later and hope someone took some pictures–the M2 gets dibs on the story because they forwarded me the press release. But I want to tell you three things about it for our purposes here:

1. That’s some serious money! When they say $1,000, they mean in US dollars, not Lindens.
2. The press release came from Ogilvy Public Relations. If you know anything about PR, you know they are heavy hitters in the PR business. Just the fact that they were involved indicates to me that someone is taking this SL business very seriously.
3. If you poke around their museum in SL a bit, you’ll not only see some impressive examples of what’s possible in SL; you can also learn something about how to do it yourself.

If you already have the SL client installed on your computer, you can get to their Island by clicking the following link:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Tech/197/159/38

If you have any problem with that at all, just start your SL software and log in, then open a map and enter “The Tech” as the search term. Once the map has located the island, enter 197, 159, 38 in the little boxes at the bottom of the right-hand control panel.

We have been “down,” at least as far as posting, for months. Honestly, the most recent post below was written back in January, and I thought it was posted (I edited it to include the paragraph about the Instructional Technology Conference, which is current). While I was at the conference and looking at the blog, I realized that the “I’m back” post didn’t post. Tried it again, and failed.

I’m pretty handy with PHP, but I just don’t have the time to troubleshoot right now. Fortunately, WordPress, the software that powers this blog, came out with a new version just a few days ago. Upgrading seems to have fixed the issue.

If anyone has been reading these pages lately, you know it hasn’t been updated in a long, long time. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but it might be worth knowing the basic cause.

I am privileged to be the father of a child with an extremely rare chromosomal disorder. For the last 3 1/2 years, we have had a 24/7 care regimen that was wearing us down just the way water wears down a rock. At the end of fall semester, she was hospitalized for 52 days.

Ultimately, we were finally able to get nursing care for her at home. However, to mix metaphors horribly, we were worn down worse than an old pencil, and we are still recovering from long-term exhaustion. One of the casualties in all that has been this blog.

I’m not telling you that I will suddenly start posting at the old rate again. As I said, I’m still recovering. But I’m finding a little energy, that I think will enable me to start up again. This may be of particular interest to people who attended a workshop I helped facilitate at the Instructional Technology Conference at Middle Tennessee State University.

Many of you have heard that Second Life is going to figure into our common book project at PSTCC this year. I noticed right after the close of the SLPSTCC Balloon Festival that amazing builder Infiniti Mirihi had started on creating the reproduction in SL of Bleak House, also known as Confederate Memorial Hall.

For folks who don’t know about any of this, our college has begun choosing a common book to use as the basis for a number of academic activities across disciplines in order to provide an intellectual “hanger” for students to tie disparate courses together. This year, we are using David Madden’s Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War.

The action takes place in various places around the nation as it existed during the Civil War, but a lot of it centers around Knoxville, specifically the Battle of Fort Sanders. Though it is a novel, it is based in history. It is a fact that Union General William P. Sanders was a notable casualty of this battle, felled by a sharpshooter’s round at a distance of several hundred yards. According to the Bleak House Web page, “The Confederate sharpshooters were using British Whitworth rifles that cost 12 – 15 hundred dollars each at the time. The rifles were known to be used with telescopic sights; and, with their hexagonal bores, were accurate at over 1,000 yards.”

Reportedly the house has seen extensive renovations and additions over the years since the Civil War. Infiniti’s work in Second Life is based on blueprints of the original 15-room mansion and photographs taken during the Civil War period, with the intention of providing a view of the house that has not been seen in real life for over 100 years.

You can see the progress on the build by checking in from time to time at the PSTCC Sandbox, where the work goes on. Come to WindingRiver Campus 1 (116, 81, 27) or following this SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/WindingRiver%20Campus1/116/81/27.

The first SLPSTCC Balloon Festival was held last Saturday, and I believe it was a great success. We had 21 unique visitors, including a mix of balloonists, students, faculty, and faculty from other colleges.

Frequently, we had four or five balloons in the air at the same time, giving visitors rides around our two Islands. A number of helpful people made this possible, but in particular Jasper Dogpatch, president of the SL Balloon Club, rallied his own members and provided encouragement and support to attendees who decided to try piloting a balloon themselves.

I also was reminded what a small world we really live in. Balloon club member Zek Eros attended the event because it was an event supported by the club. Only after he arrived on our Island did he recognize the logo and realize it was for his alma mater! Zek obtained a degree from PSTCC and now works just up the road.

At the end of the event, we had the anticipated “balloon parade” around the two Islands, but it wound up with a different-than-anticipated flavor, including a couple of regular balloons along with a flying couch (piloted by Variessa Kenzo) and a magic carpet (piloted by Jasper Dogpatch). Finally, after festivities officially ended, Zek Eros gave remaining visitors a ride on his dirigible, which appeared huge to us, but was, he assured us, his “smaller one.”

The only downside was that we had enough avatars and balloons together at the same time to occasionally lead to some lag. Without scripts, a typical sim can support around 40 avatars, but the balloons themselves are fairly script-heavy and take more resources because of the use of physics, so, in effect, we were at capacity.

Cliché it might be, but it seems appropriate: a good time was had by all.

Our real life balloon festival comes up in less than a week, and our SL event led at least three people to say they intend to attend. I’m already looking forward to next year.

Note: I will post some photos here as soon as I work with them a little.