ETEC540: The changing spaces of reading and writing.

I thought this was kind of interesting and fun to play with. Sitepal suggests that the speech capability of the avatar keeps customers more engaged and at your site longer. I’ve been using recordings of sample problems posted onto a moodle site and getting similar feedback from students.
Tris

Ever since I was little I have been fascinated by the shapes and look of the letters of the alphabet. I used to doodle the letters in all different sizes, “fonts” and colours whenever I got a chance. I even taught myself to write with both my right and left hands, just to see how different the letters might look!
One day, I was surfing youtube and came across this video. I think it’s great for several reasons. I love the fluidity with which the older brother creates his letters – they look like works of art! I also love watching the younger brothers attemts to recreate the letters. His are equally beautiful but in a different way. I think one of the greatest privileges a primary teacher has is that of watching little people learn these most basic building blocks of our culture.
I hope you all enjoy the video, too!
Cari Wilson

While ETEC 540 is not a course about typography per se, it has indirectly renewed my interest in the art of arranging type. I’ve just started reading Ellen Lupton’s book Thinking With Type.

On literally the first page she introduces the idea, “typography is what language looks like”. To gain a visual sense of what this means and an idea of the concepts covered in the book have a look at the following video from the Vancouver Film School:

As students of ETEC*540, we have been asked to make use of two online text technologies – the Wiki and Social Bookmarking.
The folks at Common Craft have produced two light and fun videos explaining these two technologies in a very clear way.

First the Wiki and next Social Bookmarking with del.icio.us

Common Craft has also produced additional videos on RSS, Social Networking, and New Light Bulbs.

I was recently reminded of the online screencast, Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie by Jon Udell. The subject of which is Udell’s exploration of the dynamics behind collaborative online authorship. I’ve always intended to go view the video but never got around to it. The first time that I had heard of it was back in 2006.
In 2006 I attended the Ontario Universities Computing Conference (OUCC) held at the University of Guelph. Tim Bray delivered one of the two keynote speeches that year. Bray discussed, among other things, Wikipedia. He used the Heavy Meltal Umlaut as one example of the process by which publishing and scholarship takes place. The keynote use to be available in podcast form from the 2006 OUCC site, however, someone has gone and removed all existence of it from the web – such is the nature of the Internet, I guess. So that others can listen to it, I have been able to locate the podcast in my files and have made it available for download. I suppose it actually pays to never throw out any podcast downloads.
In this podcast, Bray offers an interesting and poignant commentary on the Internet that speaks to university scholarship, Wikipedia, authority, and the act of being an authority on the web. Perhaps the most interesting subject is the dichotomy between book form referenced publishing and Wikipedia. Bray considers traditional publishing to be a process of kill, cook, and freeze while Wikipedia to be cyclic process that is never ending. Ultimately I feel this holds importance for the future of literacy. It is in this light that Bray delves into the future of books, academic journals and the peer review process.
The audio file is just over one hour in length but is a very enjoyable listen. I would caution, however, that it might encourage you to begin contributing to Wikipedia or even to start your own blog.
Download mp3.

I’m embedded the Google Video link to Douglas Adam’s Hyperland, and the one in the link below does not see active anymore. It is pretty common for links to migrate over the course of time, so it is often a good idea to do searches at the original hosting site (in this case Google Video), when a link goes dead. Let’s see how long this one lasts!

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7190175107515525470[/googlevideo]
Jeff

Perhaps inspired by the now-legendary medieval helpdesk video, a riff on 15th Century email:

This is snagged off the Textologies newswire, and the comments added by Print is Dead blogger Jeff Gomez don’t pull any punches on the significance of the jokes:

In the “15th Century Email” video, the guy understands the technology enough to use it (when he makes a mistake, he knows to use the DELETE key to correct his mistake), but instead of just correcting the one mistake he then erases the entire letter and starts from scratch, the way you would crumble up a piece of paper and start all over again. And when eBook programs try to keep the experience of “turning” virtual pages, it shows they’re reacting the same as the man in the video; they understand (and want to exploit) the idea of electronic reading and digitization, but the fact that they retain the idea of turning “pages” means they’re missing out on the bigger experience. Once eBooks and digital reading can get beyond this thinking, the book will then be truly redefined, and the idea of reading will be finally revolutionized. Until then, like “15th Century Email,” we’re just using new technology in an ancient way.

Sometimes it takes a look in the rearview mirror to remind ourselves that a medium as familiar to us as the printed book was once some new-fangled and rather disruptive technology. Take a look at the video below and you’ll see a very funny take on a technical support call for the book 1.0.
If the embedded video doesn’t work for you, you can view it directly from YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ[/youtube]

Jeff

I haven’t had a chance to watch the full movie version of Hyperland closely yet (available as of today on Google Video), but what I’ve seen convinces me that this will be a nice complement to our study of hypertext later on in the semester for ETEC540. It covers much of the same history we will be reading — Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Xanadu, the Media Lab… And based on previous iterations of the course, I’m willing to wager we have at least a couple of rabid Douglas Adams fans in our cohort.

Gestating off-screen, adding an ironic sheen to the proceedings, is the yet-to-be-realized World Wide Web, which would both embody and explode the vision of hypertext under consideration.

Update: Oook rightfully points to Hyperland’s Wikipedia entry for useful context.

(Via Boing Boing. Cross-posted to Abject Learning.)

Boing Boing alerts us to this debate between Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia’s founder and chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation) and Dale Hoiberg (senior vice president and editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica). There seems to be some legitimate animus bubbling below the surface… which adds some spice to a fairly clear summary of the respective positions, and I’d say both articulate their points quite well. Thinking of Wikipedia as something of a synecdoche for open environments and loosely-structured practices, it’s a fun mental exercise to apply these arguments to a broader academic context. Play to win exciting prizes!

Earlier: Jimmy Wales to Beijing: Wikipedia won’t censor

(Cross-posted to Abject Learning)