[ Locus Communis ] Twitter as Digital Commonplace

I gave a talk today at the International Digital Media and Arts Association annual conference. I almost always upload the slides for my talks, but because of the format for this conference--where presentations were limited to ten minutes--I decided to simply screencast the full talk and share it here.

I had a great time at the conference overall, and our panel fostered some excellent discussion. At just under ten minutes, the video takes some time to load; as always, I welcome feedback, questions, and discussion!

[ Locus Communis ] Twitter as Digital Commonplace from Brian McNely on Vimeo.

CMD, RFID, QR, and Touch at iDMAa 2009

I spent some time over at the Center for Media Design during a break in the International Digital Media and Arts Association conference yesterday, and I had an opportunity to play around with the excellent integration of cross-platform media and information flow here at the conference. (If you have any interest, we've been blogging many of the conference sessions over at the iDMAa 2009 site).

Below are a couple of videos showing how iDMAa and the Center for Media Design have thoroughly integrated conference data (presenters, locations, abstracts) into the places, spaces, and ubiquitous devices that mediate our conference experience...

iDMAa 2009 :: Android, Surface, and QR from Brian McNely on Vimeo.

iDMAa 2009 :: RFID Integration from Brian McNely on Vimeo.

:: repurposed ::

:: repurposed ::

:: repurposed :: is a blog exploring rhetorics, places, and publics from a group of researchers at Ball State University. It goes live tomorrow, though a preview version with a few posts are currently available. There are still some design issues to sort out, and some final preparations related to content.

While many of the contributions to the site will be from students in my senior seminar, the driving idea and impetus is the production of a sustainable and meaningful space for the ongoing discussion of the complex relationships between language, placemaking, and publics. Over the next few weeks, we expect to consistently have between 15 and 20 posts each week, and we are soliciting occasional guest posts from a variety of disciplinary and professional domains. We see this as a post-disciplinary endeavor, one which is ultimately focused on better understanding how we make meaning in and through our public places.

To that end, the site will consider wayfinding activities, architecture, mapping, ubiquitous computing and context-aware environments, the social production of place and the social construction of place, alleys and interstices, landmarks, edges, paths, and nodes, public discourse, walking, bikes, skateboards, autos, and the many ways that human beings repurpose their environments--discursively, materially, affectively--in order to make meaning.

Please consider adding :: repurposed :: to your feed reader or bookmarks. If you're interested in contributing--once or occasionally--on any aspect of rhetorics, places, and/or publics, please don't hesitate to contact me.

The Sartorialist

If you've been reading this blog for any reasonable length of time, you're already no doubt aware that when it comes to certain things I can be slow on the uptake.

For example, only recently have I discovered The Sartorialist, certainly not a secret to the blogosphere. In fact, my discovery engine for such things being what it is, the find was purely serendipitous; apparently The Sartorialist is fond of shooting photos of stylish everyday cyclists, and my introduction to the blog was via Cyclelicious.

One day a couple of months ago I finally wandered over to the site, gave it a quick look, and added it to Reader. Since then, my jaw has dropped no less than 10 or 12 times. It's not as if I'm someone versed in the nuances of personal style or the vicissitudes of elegance and fashion. I'm clearly not. Nor am I even all that interested in the clothing and presentation which are integral to each post, yet I acknowledge their collective import.

What makes this blog stunning is it's (apparent) virtuoso simplicity:

On the Street....Left Bank, Paris

On the Street....Cheap & Chic, Milano

On the Street....Rue du Marche St. Honore, Paris

On the Street....One More Time, Milano

On the Street....Milan Now, Milan

Instead of fashion photography, I see expertly composed images of interesting people in interesting places. I see broader publics, architecture, city life. And I see post after post of perfect light. In my limited experience as a photographer, nothing could be more important. In nearly every post, the most important details are surfaced. As I noted above, it's only an apparent simplicity.

This is an amazing blog, one that I wish I had been following long ago.

Extending the Classroom: Conversations, Content, and Microblogging with Twitter

I had the opportunity to give a fun talk today about using Twitter in educational settings. I was able to present in the brand new Schwartz Digital Complex in Bracken Library, as part of Ball State's Tech4U series. I was also able to make use of an impressive visual display that allowed me to stream tweets in Seesmic, a hashtag search on FriendFeed, and my own slides simultaneously (I actually brought a class to the "learning pod" section of this fantastic facility on Tuesday and shot some video, which I'll upload soon).

The talk essentially mashed together ideas from some other research projects and presented some new material geared toward pedagogical approaches and student engagement.

This last bit was perhaps the most interesting, as it drew from the Ball State University Fall 2008 "Making Achievement Possible" survey of first-year students. The MAP Works survey indicates that 46% of first-year BSU students spend between 30 minutes and two hours on social networking websites each day. A full 40% of students spend 2 or more hours each day on such sites. My sense is that these numbers are underreported.

In other words, 86% of our first-year students, as of 2008, are spending time every single day with communities that look like this:

Creative Commons image by luc legay on Flickr.

I asked: as an educator, where are you in that picture? Where are the influential scholars and teachers in your field? Do we see their avatars represented in the social networks where our students are spending their time? Should they even be there in the first place?

I don't have any easy answers to those questions, but I did suggest some ways that faculty at Ball State can incorporate microblogging into their curricula and pedagogies. I've embedded the slides from today's talk below, and as always, I'm happy to provide a transcript as well. Tommy and Ben from the Center for Media Design were there shooting some video, and I assume it will eventually surface at some point; when it does, I'll link to it!

Backchannel Persistence and Collaborative Meaning-Making

Last week I had the pleasure of delivering a paper relatively close to home, at the 27th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC), at Indiana University in Bloomington. I was especially excited to be on a panel with Shaun Slattery of DePaul University, and Jason Swarts of North Carolina State University--two scholars that I hold in high esteem.

Our panel explored the traces of literate activity that are surfaced and archived in new media writing environments, and which lead to the construction of "fact" on Wikipedia, and the development of provisional knowledge in microblogging platforms. All three papers called on Actor Network Theory and/or Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a way to frame and trace computer supported collaborative work.

I added some theoretical frameworks that are likely too much for a 6,000 word manuscript. I like what I have here, but it's meant to be the start of something much more substantial. In short, my paper amounts to a longish position piece which aims to establish a theoretical framework for tracing meaning-making in persistent backchannel platforms (such as Twitter).

The official published version, should you be able to navigate behind the paywall, is available through the ACM portal. The full proceedings--which include excellent papers from Shaun, Jason, and a number of other fantastic researchers--can also be accessed through ACM. I've uploaded a pre-publication version of the paper to Scribd, and it's available below:

Backchannel Persistence and Collaborative Meaning-Making

Finally, I've embedded the slides for my presentation as well. If you've seen me present in the past, you'll know that I take a minimalist approach to slidedecks, favoring images over alphabetic text. So, if you'd like the script that accompanies the slides, let me know!

Considering Charles Mudede

My feed reader is mostly all business. I read items in the order they arrive--not by topic, not by blog--oldest to newest, in a great big tangled mess of interestingness.

The usual suspects are there: every major tech blog you can think of (and some you probably can't), stuff on ubicomp and mobile computing, academic blogs from colleagues in my field and someday colleagues in other fields, and feeds from architecture, urban planning, design, and computer science. There are, however, a few feeds pointed in other directions, mostly toward popular culture.

Of these "other" feeds, one of my favorites is The Stranger's SLOG (and its musical accomplice, Line Out). I read The Stranger for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I find the writing entertaining and because I love Seattle.

Charles Mudede is an associate editor at The Stranger, and a faculty member at Pacific Lutheran University. He's also a key reason why I read SLOG with interest.

Mudede's posts are anomalies to a certain extent; they stand out by virtue of their juxtaposition to the mass of posts published each day on SLOG. This is not to say that the other posts aren't entertaining, informative, and even heady; they often are--perhaps just as often as they are not--and I am often inclined to celebrate both eventualities.

But Mudede's posts are something different, and they always stand out within the feed. In this sense, his posts benefit from the juxtaposition.

Take Marxism and Insects for example. In between posts on Seattle politics or sex advice from Dan Savage, Mudede surfaces with a post that cobbles together Capital, the machinations of queen bees, Iranian politics, and Althusser's notion of the Ideological State Apparatus.

His posts are often pithily thought-provoking. Ideology Today contends that the national fuss over identity theft keeps us stridently and earnestly focused "on the least of [our] worries."

And then there's one of my favorite posts in recent memory, The Difference. A brief meditation on philosophy and representation through the forgotten Foucault and the remembered Foucault.

To consider Mudede in the midst of the madness is to consider a sharp arithmetic of cogitative concision: 2 fragments + 2 photos + 2 sentences = Foucauldian heuristic.

That commenters often seem befuddled, frustrated, and pissed off cements my admiration.

Long live Mudede, and long live SLOG.

Twitter and Commonplace Books

Since 2006, I have been thinking through various iterations of a digital commonplace book. First, a little background on the traditional practice of commonplacing...

As early as the 14th Century in the west, literate populations began to cobble together bits of information--quotes, measures, thoughts, arguments, summaries, responses--on paper, an increasingly ubiquitous resource. These "note books" eventually came to be known as commonplace books, and they were a predicated upon tenets of classical rhetoric. George Eliot kept a commonplace book; so did Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, and E.M Forster, among many, many others.

The Digital Commonplace

While people continue to keep journals--both offline and on--the online sourcing and collection of information and contemporary digital reading practices have provided different affordances for the same kinds of work accomplished in the traditional commonplace book. Delicious, Digg, Reader, FriendFeed--all of these tools enable knowledge curation practices which remediate the work of commonplacing to a certain extent. And the affordances are strikingly different: greater access to massive amounts of information, far flung, and harder to filter. If these affordances can be managed effectively, new communications tools can revive commonplacing in a significant way (in fact, if you're reading this, you are very likely already engaged in the kinds of digital commonplacing I am suggesting...).

As I mention above, I have been trying to develop the idea of digital commonplacing in concert with research on recursion in writing studies (and more recently, ambient research). For example, in 2006 my first-year writing students used a modified version of the WebCT discussions area to produce a (quasi) stream of short reading responses and thought pieces that eventually built from and played off of one another. Today, platforms like FriendFeed and Twitter afford commonplacing activities in ways that are persistent, searchable, copyable, and easily shareable.

A key, of course, is positioning the platform so that it can be effective for this kind of work.

I'm still thinking through these ideas, and I'll be discussing Twitter as digital commonplace book at the upcoming International Digital Media and Arts Association annual conference (iDMAa), held this year on my home campus of Ball State University. The abstract for that talk elaborates a bit on these ideas, and is embedded below. As always, I welcome feedback!

Locus Communis: Twitter as Digital Commonplace

Google Wave :: First Impressions

As someone who's been eagerly anticipating the initial public rollout of Google Wave, I waited with much anxiety and baited breath as the distribution of invites were pushed later and later into the evening of 9/30. I went to bed still hopeful, and awoke early to see my invite on 10/1.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a great deal of time to work in Wave yesterday, but I started to get some interesting things done with the platform this morning. I've embedded a screencast below which details some of the basics and some first impressions of the service.

Rule #1 of Wave: find people to wave with. No contacts on Wave is probably akin to being the first person with a Compuserve email address.

Google Wave Demo :: First Impressions from Brian McNely on Vimeo.

:: Update ::

Things are really moving fast in Wave, now that the contact list is growing. I've added a brief screencast to provide some insights into realtime public collaboration within Wave:

Google Wave :: Public Conversations from Brian McNely on Vimeo.

"Coursesourcing" a Blog Post: Sample Tools of the Digitally Literate

This post begins on Etherpad as a way for my Intro to Digital Literacies students to collaborate and share some of the tools we've recently discussed in class. These various tools and sources can be used to promote digital literacy, and are simultaneously tools used by the digitally literate. We hope that some of these tools will be helpful to you!

Notepad++ is a text editing tool. Notepad++ supports several languages and has various translating options. Notepad++ promotes an eco friendly environment by optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness.-Brian

Blogger is a sweet blog site. Make a blog and follow me. Tyler

Twiddla can be used to colaborate in group online meetings with the same function as a traditioal whiteboard. Twiddla can make conferencing, project brainstorming and homework editing easier and more accessible. -Sam

Diigo is a great tool to bookmark web pages and interact with your bookmarked sites by highlighting and making notes. Diigo is also very funtional because it is based online, therefore you can visit your bookmarked sites from any computer. ~Lindsay

Delicious is a bookmarking website that may be used as a tool to organize and store favorite webpages within a web based community from any computer that has access to the internet. It also provides the possibility of sharing these sites with others and learning about new sites from other members' lists. ~Nadine

Flickr is where you can upload, edit, and share your photos. You can also make cards and photo books. ~Katie

Evernote lets you store searched items and look them up for later use. ~Briana

Wetpaint is specifically for designing websites about things that you are interested in. Check out websites about your favorite tv shows,etc. ~Erin

Tumblr is a website that can be used to post pictures, video clips, text, and music from anywhere on the web. One can even upload and post media that is located on their harddrive. ~Eric.

wikidot now it is easier to make website and you can share with your friends!! With using wikidot, make your own world. Yookyung.

The Impossible Cool was a very nifty website of impossibly cool people. It's also a great example of a Tumblr website. ~Ashley

Good Reads is an awesome place to see who else is reading what you're reading! ~Kelly

Google Reader is how I keep track of the blogs I read and other websites that are important to me. It is easy to use and is a one-stop spot for everything I want to read online! ~Hannah

Praxeological Paradise is a unique and informative political blog for opinionated college students. Register for an account Blogger here. ~ Katie

:: Update ::

I finally got around to screencasting some of the collaborative writing which resulted in the post above. Using Etherpad's slider function, I spent a couple of minutes contextualizing our collaborative writing activity.

Coursesourcing a Blog Post from Brian McNely on Vimeo.