Tag: ED654

Bling your Blog

I have been working with WordPress sites since 2009. So, I initially shied away from this extra-credit assignment.  However, I never really liked the orange of my previous theme. I selected it to go with the header picture of fall in Maine. I could have picked a complementary color instead, blue to the orange foliage, and modified that template in that way.

However, I’ve never done much with a left-hand menu, so this theme looked significantly different.  I wanted as well to have a new header image that reflects where I am living. I am a little troubled that the Twitter widget never comes out of the dark bottom part of the image. I did adjust the font color for the menu element to a darker color. I will continue to experiment with that and see if going lighter on the font color works better.

I also installed the plugin Autoptimize — which optimizes your website, concatenating the CSS and JavaScript code, and compressing it. We will see if the site loads any quicker as a result.

 

Essential Elements of Digital Literacy: II

Essential Elements of Digital Literacy: II

by
Tue, Jun 20 2017 01:51:23

Essential Elements of Digital Literacy: II

Rich Reflections

  1. Belshaw, D. (2014). The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies. Retrieved from <digitalliteraci.es>
  2. Chapter 6
  3. Treating memes as a case study in digital literacy is a brilliant approach. Moreover, we can now see the elements of ambiguity and the eight elements of information literacy, which Belshaw offers, at play.
  4. Thumbnail for Meme - WikipediaMeme – Wikipedia

    The word is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins.[3]
    wikipedia

  5. Most digital literacy frameworks are overly prescriptive and have an undue focus upon procedural factors in using design tools, the conceptual understanding of what is involved is equally important, Creating and remixing memes successful forces individuals to understand these conceptual elements while using procedural skills.

  6. Giphy
    ·

    Fri, Jun 19 2015 08:24:08

  7. Indeed, this chapter gives me a great deal of insight into the pedagogy of the ED 654 class for which we are doing this assignment and reading. The speed of creativity, speed of publishing, speed of feedback, (dead meme, or viral) variety of mediums, the complexity of identifying resources and organizing them, of finding and participating in affinity circles, these are well mirrored in the class website. Now, does my discomfort with this necessarily situate me on the visitor:resident continuum as just a dabbler? Does, my lack of interest and participation in some of these "formats" "communities" etc. disqualify me from literacy or citizenship? Alternatively, am I participating in a way and to a degree that is personally adequate and satisfying?
  8. Visitors and Residents: Open Practice

    jiscnetskills
    ·

    Thu, Jun 05 2014 13:54:50

  9. Another question to unpack regards my trying on the alternative self of Instructional Designer. If, I do not have this immersion if I am unaware of what is occurring online then how can I possibly be responsive to teachers and learners in that environment?
  10. Chapter 7
  11. In Digital Storytelling, I engaged in making my first“remix/mashup” online. Moreover, I thoroughly enjoyed the creative process. So, my ears perked up on this chapter.

  12. The central difference between the digital and analog worlds that I have experienced during my lifetime has to do with reverence. There appears to be a finality about analog communication and media that does not translate to the digital world. Part of that may be to do with the ease of manipulating bits and bytes but a great deal of it is attitudinal. Remixing, re-appropriation and riffing off other people’s work just seems to be part of what we do as human beings. Instead of that being hidden, as to some extent was previously, this has been for grounded as a positive thing in the web era.

  13. I like this thought. I do think that Belshaw is onto something. Nevertheless, before we move too quickly, I think it is important to remember analog has a similar experience I think however, it is more ephemeral and hence, may never make it to a medium that can sit beside the “work.”
  14. Yet, I think it is interesting to slow down and think about our analog past, and our canonical past, before we move too quickly. Is it possible that counter-examples do make it into the canon the reverent, at least in public, hold them up as a negative example, perhaps Francois Rabelais and, Jonathan Swift who sit perversely in the Canon?
  15. Thumbnail for François Rabelais - WikipediaFrançois Rabelais – Wikipedia

    Biography[edit]
    wikipedia
  16. Thumbnail for Jonathan Swift - WikipediaJonathan Swift – Wikipedia

    Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish[1] satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.[2]
    wikipedia
  17. Many of the painterly isms from the late 19th and early 20th century might fit here too. We understand fauvism and cubism as masterful and exemplary of modern art at the turn of the last century. But they were in their moment remixing, re-appropriating, and riffing against the canon as it stood at that moment.

  18. wikimedia
    ·

    Sat, Jun 17 2017 22:33:57

  19. Thumbnail for Armory Show - WikipediaArmory Show – Wikipedia

    Among the many exhibitions that have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, the Armory Show typically refers to the International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors in 1913, the first large exhibition of modern art in America.
    wikipedia
  20. Certainly, thousands of musical improvisations at drunken after parties riffed off “works.” Song lyrics sang in corner taverns remixed to suit local taste and issues. Ephemeral, but widespread and widely participated in.
  21. The internet leaves traces that previously vanished into time.
  22. I think this is perhaps a more seminal moment again like the insight about the printing press in Chapter 2. We like to talk about the ephemeral nature of the internet, bit rot, and dead links, 404 errors. Indeed, librarians and archivist are concerned with the volume of content and the rate of change. But, online the traces last longer than just last night's sing-along at the corner pub.
  23. Thumbnail for Reflections by Bob Heath - Wiki | The Essential Elements of Digital LiteraciesReflections by Bob Heath – Wiki | The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies

    Belshaw, D. (2014). The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies. Retrieved from
    digitalliteraci
  24. Perhaps, like God, the Canon is dead, and the internet killed it/them. Moreover, we all bear witness that they died pecked to death by ducks, remixed, re-appropriated, and riffed off.
  25. Chapter 8
  26. What a fascinating shift from digital literacies to web literacies I was caught by surprise. I was operating as if digital literacy included web literacy. I see and experience the greatest complexity online not in what I can produce on my local machine. The categories he suggests for web literacies “Exploring, Building, and Connecting” are presented as unlike the eight elements of digital literacy, comparing apples and oranges. Alas, in the end, I just disagree, this is an unnecessary proliferation of theory. Those three categories can easily be subsumed into the eight elements. To my way of thinking the web, the larger environment is the most complex and hence the eight elements are best for describing that complexity. So, no I do not find this turn convincing nor compelling.
  27. Turning to coding… I recall in the old days of the internet back in 1997 a person had to learn HTML to make web pages. CSS had not been invented yet, nor JavaScript and certainly not PHP. In the intervening time, we have seen programs that help one code like HTMLKit, and I think even more important content management programs like WordPress, and Drupal, which have rendered knowledge of web coding unnecessary. Oh, occasionally, I will toggle between the HTML editor and text editor and modify the HTML, but that is mostly a conceit. Returning to gaming, many games came with landscape editors and other tools that allowed a person to create scenarios and maps without knowing a“word” of code.
  28. So, I think it is important to be cautious here too. I just want to slow our rush to treat coding as the panacea that it probably is not.That said, I love that I have the skill and that it enriches my experience of the web. Frequently, I will left click and select “view page source” to see how or why something is so. I just want to be more cautious than many folks who uncritically praise the practice of coding. It rankles a bit like the outside in prescriptions and lists of attributes of “netizenship” vitamin pills just because they are good for us.
  29. Chapter 9
  30. I am content with Belshaw’s welcome to the reader to rip and remix his book. Certainly, he offers some summary and an appreciative thank you to the reader for their time.
  31. However, for me his welcome to remake the book is refreshing. I like very much that he authored the book online and in real time taking comments and feedback and that in the end, he returns the content to the internet. I think this casts a very postmodern sense of authorship and is completely fitting. We are past the self-reflective theorizing of the 1990's and instead, postmodernity is taken for granted.

Where are you now?

I refer to my Yawp post which I began concerning the work done by David White, & Alison Le Cornu on Visitors and Residents in online engagement. As well my Make and Share SoundCloud “podcasts.”

Initial Ruminations on Digital Citizenship

Digital Citizenship Redux

Thank you, Chris, for not needing me to duplicate work.

I think the Initial Ruminations on Digital Citizenship “podcast” is closest to the assignment as given. I will have to contest a bit that imagining that we start from whole cloth on any topic is a little simplistic.  So, I do not apologize for citing my sources.

Your Choice Assignments: Think About Your Thinking

  • Think About Your Thinking 

Online Self/Embodied Self

In crafting the audio for the Make and Share, I fell into this manner of speaking. I like it markedly better than the real/virtual phrasing of our divided experience. We seem to forget that our night time dreaming is real too, for one example, even if it is fantastical. I had not fully articulated the idea previously despite Skip’s assignments on web presence, but I am intrigued by the notion that we have an avatar online it is faceted by our sites of participation and yet is cumulative. In truth, it is similar to stories we tell about our embodied selves, lawyer, Mother, etc.. However, it is more abstracted. I think I mean by this Schumacher’s criticism/observation that a face-to-face conversation was meaningfully different from a phone call. I think his point was two-fold that we have evolved and made ourselves human in part because of our face-to-face conversations. Only of late has our communication technology become so sophisticated that we can lose track of it. Schumacher felt that rather than taking it for granted, and worse assuming an artificial posture at the outset of our inquiry we, to more precisely engage in our investigations, instead needed to inhabit our bodies first. Unfortunately, this abstracted avatar can be taken for granted too, as well its fictive origin, and we can become seduced by our participation in a representation of an altogether different event. Chris, you raise an interesting issue and that is our cyborg enhancement of our embodiments, or more subtle is our organic improvement of our embodiments. We have a long history of augmentation for beauty and this likely will continue.  Certainly, one category of this is therapeutic. But, we are on the verge of augmentation for performance both cyborg and organic and that likely will call our notions of fundamental embodiment and being deeply into question.

 

Your Choice Assignments: Search & Research

Digital Humanities

Just having completed Skip Via’s ED 677 Digital Storytelling class, it made sense to start with this topic.

Definition:

Bryan Alexander offers a working definition: “Simply put, it is telling stories with digital technologies. Digital stories are narratives built from the stuff of cyberculture” (Alexander, 2010, Loc 110 of 3318). I think there is a subtle difference between these two sentences. The first sentence is broadly inclusive.  And so content creators who purchase a sailboat and document their adventures online and content creators who stream MMO gameplay are both engaged in digital storytelling according to the first sentence. Alexander’s second sentence I think modifies the first, focusing the definition on being more exclusively online, “stuff of cyberculture.” I think this turn privileges the MMO streamer’s story. This is a turn with which I do not easily resonate.  Rather, it is our shifting back and forth between our online selves and our embodied selves that describe this historic moment for humanity. Perhaps in a few years with AI and robotics have lightened the burden of our embodied selves we will have a fuller sense of entirely digital humanities.

Pausing, because my undergraduate degree is in humanities it seems reasonable to ask what that meant previously? “Humanities” were those fields of inquiry other than math, science and social science. So for example, poetry, painting, theater, and writing both essay and creative, were some of the inquiries that traditionally informed the “humanities.” Hence, why I at the outset reached back to the storytelling of last semester. In summary, these were inquiries that tried to make sense of our human being. And, that detail, I think is why I hold out for a notion of digital humanities at this time that explores our shifting between online and embodied selves.

That said, it is prescient and relevant to anticipate a future where we live almost entirely online. Celebrating Alexander’s foresight, we can begin to predict a “digital humanities built from the stuff of cyberculture.” I recall studying, in the 1990’s, with an artist who was using fractal geometry to create images, or perhaps to let a computer create images, original each of them. His struggle to define “art” at that moment was interesting, but taking it the next turn, what happens when computers refer to images constructed by computers to craft subsequent images? When humans view these images what impact might that have on our person? The computers lack emotion, certainly, AI may become sophisticated enough as to offer us a convincing simulation but that is not the same thing as passion or desperation or any other distinctly human trait.  Will we use our unburdening to become distinctly human, or will we just consume and gradually retreat from our human being?

The Wikipedia article on Digital Humanities is particularly useful in term of its “values and methods” section. If we are going to define something as “new” part of that newness necessarily needs be methods, for the postmodernist in me, I love the blurring that is implicated in these methods, for example, one tells a story, and is at once writing literary criticism as well.  Treating programming languages as languages and discovering the poetry in them is fascinating as well, as examples.

Historically the arts are driven by patrons and donors, and happily, we see that the National Endowment for the Humanities has a subsite devoted to the Digital Humanities. The Office of Digital Humanities despite its unfortunately glum name offers access to grant funding and a wealth of information about projects and research.

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education provides both a catalog of resources and debate around the relative accessibility of digital humanities as a turn in one’s professional scholarship. One might say that this article is itself a practice in digital humanities since it curates other catalog’s of resources as well. It is a criticism/observation of higher education’s moment.

centerNet is an international resource for digital humanities scholars. It catalogs the locations of centers of study around the world.

The online journal “Digital Humanities Quarterly” has been published since 2007, they describe themselves saying, ” open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.” A quick review of recent articles shows a pretty even split on doing digital humanities and on methodological self-reflexion as one would expect from a youthful cluster of research.

Digital Humanities although a commonplace in higher education and academic libraries is perhaps less ubiquitous a notion among the general public. This article again captures the unsettled moment in higher education. Interestingly reporting on an MLA presentation from a community college professor simultaneously advocating for digital humanities and celebrating how the lack of funding at her home institution forces her to be precise in her disciplinary practice. Other comments point to the joint practicing of scholarship by professors and students, changes in publishing, the article ends with a salute to the media literacy that grows out of digital humanities scholarship offering that as a pretty good reason to be involved on its own.

I think these articles were interesting because my approach to Digital Humanities was focused on what ordinary people were doing online with SoundCloud, Storify, YouTube for examples. I was thinking about the production of music, art, and storytelling, not about the scholarship of and around those activities. The scholarship, however, does an interesting thing to our traditional notion of humanities because the practices blur some of the clear lines between social science and humanities or math and humanities and that is fascinating.

References

Alexander, B. (2011). The new digital storytelling: Creating narratives with new media. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger.

Digital Humanities. (2017, Jan. 26). In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 28, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

Bessette, L.S. (March 14, 2017).Digital Humanities Training Opportunities and Challenges, In The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved May 28, 2017, http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/digital-humanities-training-opportunities-and-challenges/63709

Fenton, W. (JANUARY 13, 2017). Digital Humanities: The Most Exciting Field You’ve Never Heard Of, In PC Mag. Retrieved May 28, 2017, http://www.pcmag.com/commentary/350984/digital-humanities-the-most-exciting-field-youve-never-hea