BOB: Barron's Own Blog

[Barron Family Adventures] Assessment and Me

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 14:38:00 -0500

Barron Family Adventures has posted a new item, 'Assessment and Me'

It seems that we measure everything, don’t we?

From mile markers on the side of the road to wedding anniversaries, it seems that our species has a penchant for taking aim, shooting, and then determining, documenting, and communicating the level of performance or progress toward the goal. Maybe we are inherently competitive, insecure and in need of validation, or shrewd managers of effort bent on investing our scarce resources only in those opportunities that bear the best odds of returning a handsome profit for our labors.

Regardless, assessment is a very real and constant part of our everyday lives, irrespective of our station in life. As a practitioner and student of Technical Communication & Rhetoric, I am particularly concerned with assessment: crafting messages appropriately and delivering them well, identifying and describing desired behaviors, eliciting actionable responses and deftly guiding audience members toward the intended (yet often elusive) targets.

This summer I enrolled in a course on assessment, intending to achieve the following goals:

to identify the various domains in higher education where I must assess with diligence, consistency, and accuracy (current and future)
to associate these domains with the most appropriate (efficient and effective) known assessment strategies and tools
to creatively and collaboratively imagine new (and thoughtfully refine old) approaches for assessment
to examine, apply, and evaluate these approaches

Your advice and comments are welcome along the way; I will be posting my assignments and reflections here all along the way. Check back often to, um … er, assess my progress toward these (ambitious) goals.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

You may view the latest post at http://barronfam.com/?p=659 You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Joshua Barron josh@barronfam.com

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Tue, 8 Sep 2009 23:29:00 -0500

The following abstract is from my information gathering about experiential learning courses that address communication theory, civility, and ethics.

Untitled

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Mon, 3 Aug 2009 17:05:00 -0500

Download now or listen on posterous

Memo.m4a (1916 KB)

Posted via email from Barron's posterous

Hello

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Mon, 3 Aug 2009 01:49:00 -0500

Posted via SMS from Barron's posterous

Life ... Disconnected

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Sun, 2 Aug 2009 07:49:00 -0500

Right now it is early on Sunday morning, and for whatever reason, my body woke me up early, and my mind started spinning at 1000 mph. Almost against my own will, I leapt from bed and, having had no Internet available at this particular spot on the earth (we don't have dial-up service at home, through Ttu, no broadband by cable or phone out here, and no cell phone coverage thanks to a nice little bluff that blocks all signal from the closest cell tower ... which isn't at all close, BTW).

Anyhow, it is beautiful out here, the kids and dogs haven't even stirred yet and the gray matter upstairs is firing on all cylinders.

Okay, so i'm trying to figure out how to capture them all as fast as they're coming, using the tools that I have available. As MacGyver looks to his Swiss Army knife, so I look to my ... IPhone. Now, before Apple can fill you with thoughts like, "there's an app for that," I remind you that I have no connection whatsoever and need to capture ideas quickly.

Thanks to 3.0.... I'm not out of luck. This location stuff is great, and I love google webapps optimized for mobile as much as anyone, but what comes to my rescue? VoiceMemo and the hope of future email posting to the blog to get my sharing fix and to record my momentary brilliance for all of eposterity.

Thanks also to an app I downloaded while we waited for dinner to come through that glorious window they built into the side of Taco Villa ... BlogPress!

This stores to the iPhone so I can transcribe the voicememos and then upload when we happen to return to the connected realm.

So I'm posting this now, and will follow it quickly with my voice memos for transcription later as time allows.

Here they come to you ... From the tiniest corner of the dock that is (momentarily) giving me no bars, but still shows a smidgen of an AT&T connection.

Gotta love early morning miracles... Now, just gotta keep from dropping this $300 imiracle gadget in the still beauty that is so mesmirizing out here.

-- Post From My iPhone

Top 10 Must Follow Web Blogs + 6 Web News Repositories

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 09:25:00 -0500

Wow --- I've been reading through some of these websites, and they're really challenging my design skills. Check it out.

Top 10 Must Follow Web Blogs + 6 Web News Repositories

Shared via AddThis

Sending to BOB

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:18:00 -0500

I finally have a system setup for submitting my Ph.D. student-related blog posts to a separate blog hosted by Google at barronsown.blogspot.com. I used this great little utility to export my old posts, convert them to Blogger, then uploaded them there. Then, I’ve setup posting to that blog using Blogger’s Mail2Blogger functionality, and subscribed that email address as an automatic recipient of posts on my family blog (www.barronfam.com) that are marked with the category of “Ph.D. Studies.”

So … we’ll see if it all actually works. :)

Pictures of TTU Advising Center

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:48:00 -0500

In this post you'll see pictures of the Texas Tech University Advising Center front office, where I work. In my class, #mobilerice, I was asked to take some photos of the digital signage used to provide coverage of our continually updated RSS feeds (sources include @g00dAdvice, www.actt.ttu.edu/blog, CNN, ESPN, the Daily Toreador, TTU Emergency Updates, www.prelaw.ttu.edu/go, www.fgc.ttu.edu/go, www.discovery.ttu.edu/go, www.calendar.ttu.edu and the TTU Communications and Marketing Division.

Especially you'll notice the date on some of the crowd pics was January 20, 2009, when Barak Obama was inaugurated as president. We used the live Facebook/CNN feed from their web site, and had a lot of passersby stop between classes (and skip class, admittedly) to experience an historic moment with us. It was really quite exciting to see their interest and to provide them (and all of our staff, too) with a window out of work/school into the rest of our world, all from the TTU Advising Center's front office. Yep, very cool.

View all

Get your own

Doing My Homework #1

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Tue, 9 Jun 2009 18:22:00 -0500

What do you want to build?
I want to build the world's simplest iPhone application ... wait ... that has already been done ... click the image here for more on that from my favorite twitter-er, Pete Cashmore (or more accurately, by Mashable.com).

Okay, so then, what should I build? Hmm... this article makes a good case for data visualization applications, and this article gives an introduction to some of the new features that will be available to us to exploit on the iPhone 3Gs (and the upgraded iPhone 3G) as of 17 July.

Certainly stuff to think about. If you can stand the 13:45 video, there's a lot more hype and yes, admittedly, geekedly neat things that we could use in some cool new app ... if we (me) were super developers.By the way, I'm thinking that those readers of this blog who can handle a quarter hour of Apple might also get something out of an hour and a half of Google. You've really got to watch the 1:20:00 video of the new Google Wave. It's going to change it all. Seriously.

Well heck, while I'm promo-ing Mashable, I should just link you directly to the iPhone category where I'm getting most of the good stuff I'm taking time to write about here. [http://mashable.com/tag/iphone-apps/]

Okay, okay, so I'm thinking that an iPhone application that helps a student calculate their GPA, including some calculations for Grade Replacements, etc., would be useful. Especially if v1.0 was built in such a way as to provide an extensible skeleton that could actually allow students to enter their classes, assignments (with due dates) and their relative weights, and using realistic expectations, to calculate real-time the changes made as they increase or decrease their confidence in their preparedness for an exam, etc.

Maybe even the application could connect with study groups and resources using Facebook or other social media applications.What do you think?

What's a "blobject" as it relates to your project? (iPod Philosophy, Chapter 2)
Okay - I'm officially and literally laughing out loud. Note the tweets I've left on the status of my books. So, obviously I've not yet read the iPod book yet, but I do have the pentultimate in online resources ... wikipedia.

Why am I laughing ... to answer Dr. Rice's question literally, a blobject is ... no ... you're going to have to read it for yourself, if you can stand the possible neologism ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blobject.

So I've made an assumption that the intention was "blogject" and I may be (and probably am) entirely wrong, but the rest of this post is on blogjects ... Without the text to inform me, I went to the web ... http://rooreynolds.com/2008/04/24/blogjects-and-tweetjects/.

The article says that we currently have "gizmos," that the future is "spime," and that "blogjects" possess the real estate in between. Reading here, especially some of the comments below the article, makes me think a lot about big brother watching as we work to make so much more information and interaction publicly available.

As it relates to my project, a blogject would be some data summary that receives posts of students' confidence levels and projected GPAs and tweeted some information when crossing threshold levels to alert university resources into a proactive mode, monitor student perceptions on their own performance as it relates to the season of the semester, assignments graded, exams given, etc. If appropriately allowed, an aggregator could identify the geographical proximity of students who are interested in studying for the same classes and show mashups of campus maps of where on campus you are most likely to find students enrolled in the same coursework as you are taking.

What model mobile manifestifact excites you? Why?
Again, without the text, I'm totally guessing here, but I love those Sprint commercials that say, right now, this is happening, and this many people are doing this. The coolest is their little application that shows a "big bowl of now" [http://now.sprint.com/widget/]

One more that I love, among all the products from Digg Labs, is Swarm [http://labs.digg.com/swarm/]. I just think it is really amazing to watch and see the realtime data be reported about what folks are digging. There's so much cool stuff out there.

You know, this makes me think, hey - we collect real-time data all the time at work, and report it with real-time reports at www.advising.ttu.edu/stratplan. I could write a script (and run via a cronjob) to tweet the "busy-ness" level of the Advising Center based on the number of students entering and exiting the facility, appointments being seen, etc. Hmmm.. something to think about.

Okay, now back to reading that PDF file for tomorrow night's discussion.

Regards,
JRB.

English 5376.001/D21/D31: Reading/Writing for Mobile Devices (Summer2009)

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Mon, 1 Jun 2009 05:19:00 -0500

I've decided that, to more fully document the ENGL 5376 course expectations and my own progress, I should start by copying down Dr. Rice's syllabus. The following content is all his, posted here for my record-keeping and memory-jogging. So here goes ...

Course Description

The rhetorical triangle has traditionally included reader, writer, and text. Mobile devices implicate time and space as well. How does location and screen space impact information creation and distribution? What are best practice site and app designs? In what ways are Web 2.0 and multimedia technologies being used? What is convergence culture and the impact of ubiquitous tools on reading and writing? This special topics course will explore these questions. The course requires ready access to a web-enabled mobile device. Mac and PC users are both welcome. Students will create a website designed for a mobile device, and/or an iPhone/iPod Touch app. Required books include:

D.E. Wittkower's iPod and Philosophy: iCon of an ePoch (2008)

John Palfrey and U.R.S. Gasser's Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (2008)

Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008)

Additional recommended resources include Amy C. Kimme Hea's Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers (2009), and any iPhone SDK develpment book. Additional readings provided as needed.

Instructor

Dr. Rich Rice can be reached through rich.rice@ttu.edu (email), ricrice@gmail.com (email large files), ricrice2000 (YahooIM), 806.741.0678 (phone), twitter, facebook, blogger, or iMuLL. Office hours by appointment. Our course meets 10 Wednesdays via freeconferencecall.com at 6pm CST, beginning June 3, 2009. (1) Dial (605) 475-4825; (2) Code 593180#. (Recording code is 548371#.)

Learning Objectives

The objective of the humanities in general is to expand knowledge of the human condition and human cultures, especially in relation to behaviors, ideas, and values expressed in works of human imagination and thought. Through study in disciplines and subjects such as technical communication, rhetoric, and new media, students engage in critical analysis and develop an appreciation of the humanities as fundamental to the health and survival of any society. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to demonstrate thinking and skills related to the following:

Compare various reading and writing for mobile devices and discuss their implications for practice in the academy as well as the workplace. Measurement: observation and analysis of class discussion.

Critically analyze mobile artifacts. Measurement: observation and analysis of discussion and completion of high-quality written assignments.

Synthesize readings into an expression of the student's approach to class projects. Measurement: observation and analysis of discussion. Completion of high-quality informal and formal writing assignments.

Manage projects through iterative design. Measurement: successful planning and development of a mobile device rhetoric project.

Develop reading/writing for mobile device products. Measurement: successful completion and reflective writing over a mobile device project.

Requirements

I accept revisions on all work, but my time to offer substantial feedback gets limited as the semester draws on. Revised work may not increase in grade, but it will never decrease in grade. I reserve the right not to accept late work. Requirements:

Class/Blog/Twitter Participation. Complete class phone discussion over readings and ongoing work each week; I will offer questions for blog posts and phone discussions. Tweet at least once a day, and comment on others' tweets and blog posts as much as possible. (30%)

Project. Complete a reading/writing for mobile devices project. Suggested options: an iPhone App, a page designed to be read on a mobile device, audio and/or video-rich page for class or work... (40%)

Analysis. Complete an analysis report of the project, including directions for sustaining and/or replication. (10%)

Reflection. Complete a reflective essay identifying the value of reading and writing for mobile devices in the context of your ongoing and/or future work, using evidence from class discussions, blog posts, and tweets to support your claims. (20%)

Readings/Schedule

Purchase these three books: Wittkower, Palfrey/Gasser, and Jenkins. The following is subject to change. Additional readings will be provided.

June 3

Today we'll kick off the course with a friendly mobile phone conference call. Please phone in from a unique location each week if possible. You do not need to be in front of a computer, but on occasion you might want to bring notes. Please have iPod Philosophy read by June 10's class call. We'll finish building our class syllabus after tonight's call. Be thinking about what sort of project you want to build this summer. If you haven't already, send rich.rice@ttu.edu your Twitter, Blogger URL, and Homepage, and each of us should subscribe to one another's Twitter and Facebook. Set our Twitter accounts to come ping your cell phone when each of us tweet. Let's "remediate twitter" a bit during class calls and if you're productively multitasking while in class, say so. Can be random. Say something like "Rich is watering trees" if indeed you're Rich, and you're watering trees. Might get old after a while, but I want us to think a lot about location and knowledge-making. Interesting concept with Glucose Monitoring from Brett. See Lifescan as well. We held our course from our kitchen, garden, work office, basement, airplane, rental car line, and other places this evening. Talked some about GoogleDocs as a possibility in a few weeks, too. Looks like we may be going with #mobilerice or #5376 for Twitter. We'll determine our hash for Twitter soon. See http://ow.ly/7SsZ for an explanation of hash tags (thanks, Julie).

June 10

See if you can finish iPod and Philosophy by class. Also, read Saran, et al., "Use of Mobile Phones in Language Learning: Developing Effective Instructional Materials. Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Wireless, Mobile and Ubiquitous Technologies in Education (WMUTE2008), Beijing, China." For your blog:

What do you want to build?

What's a "blobject" as it relates to your project? (iPod Philosophy, Chapter 2)

What model mobile manifestifact excites you? Why?

I like http://freerice.org for mobile because it's productive, educational, and, well, freeing for me. Julie recommenda Nambu for social messaging reading for macs users. Userful for researching trends on social networks. Arthur has pointed out a nice definition of "blobjects, blogjects, and tweetjects" at rooreynolds.com. Arthur also noted Twubs.com for #hashtag work. Alex Hosterman, an online Ph.D. student, pointed out Pogue is working on a book comprised of Tweets. Joshua has been researching iStanford from Stanford's Journalism program. Rich is impressed by ACU's iPhone/iPod to all Freshman program, especially the advising aspects. Brett found myGeoDiary this week. Tool for telling stories based on location. Read, if you have time, Stephen Johnson's piece for this month's Time Magazine: "How Twitter Will Change the Way the Way We Live." Here is this week's conference call.

June 17

Read NPR's discussion on cell phone use. Read Edutopia's Digital Generation Project Overview Video. Read Steven Johnson's "Infinity Imagined" from the text Interface Culture, and Greg Ulmer's "Interface Impressions" from his book Internet Invention. For your blog post for this Wednesday:

What role does interface play in reading and writing for mobile devices?

What are some of the best interface designs you've seen for mobile devices (best app/page), and what makes them so user-friendly?

Read NGMOCO, a site listing new games that involve location. Sent to #mobilerice by Brett. Read "ACU Mobile Learning" and think about the potentional for mobile computing systemwide. Another Twitter reader for your computer, cross-platform, is Tweetdeck. Worth exploring. See if you can finish up iPod Philosophy, and begin on Digital Natives.

June 24

The author of iPod Philosophy will be joining our conversation today. For today's blog post please brainstorm questions for Wittower. Let's use GoogleDocs, which Joshua has set up. Joshua recommends checking out GoogleWave, too. Liz shared a trailer to the documentary Objectified in #mobilerice; worth looking at. Read Kafkaz's TechRhet-L post, "Tenure in an Digital Era." Read W3C: Relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Finish up Digital Natives. Rich is at the CW2009 Conference this week. Shared the SmartCasting Interface concept at the conference. The conference hashtag is #cw09. Might begin reading Convergence Culture. If you want the RSS Feed for our class conferences, see http://www.freeconferencecall.com/itunes/podcast.asp?id=6054754825:593180.

July 1

Read "Kindergarten Is the Model for Lifelong Learning" (Edutopia). I recommend subscribing to this magazine. Read "ITForum-L thread, 'Creating Mobile Phone Apps'. Should be halfway through Convergence Culture. Bloggerino prompage:

What is a digital native, and how does what you know about DNs impact what you want to produce in this course?

Are there differences between how some people use mobile devices and how others use them?

Any follow-up thoughts to our guest last week?

July 8

Read Rich Rice's "iRhetoric Placeshifting." Read William Mitchell's "Replacing Place" from The Digital Dialectic. Finish reading Convergence Culture. Might read "Anonymity Project: The PostSecret Effect" on YouTube. Read "Mobile Digital Storytelling." For your blog post this week:

Ideally you would have time to usability test the product you produce. What, exactly, is usability testing?

Any form of communication should begin with the audience in mind. Talk about who your intended users for your class project are, what their needs are, if they have characteristics of digital natives, etc., and then find one. Interview the student (yes, can be through Twitter), gather information and reflect on it in your blog. How does this information change and/or reinforce what you're beginning to produce?

If you have suggested readings for the class, please email them my way. Thanks. And, if you haven't already, you might take a look at Apple's XCode. I mentioned during class, theoretically, it reminds me of Manovich's term "transcoding." Jenkins, too, picks up on the concept.

July 15

Thoughts for readings? Keep working on Convergence. As I mentioned during class last Wednesday, I'd like us to go through Convergence Culture methodically this week, and then the subject matter of our readings for the last three week, pretty much, should be our own artifacts. Please also read the email message "Response to Michael re blogs" from ITForum that came across my desk July 8th. Gives a good perspective about journals and social networking, which we talked about some with Liz's work with Intercom last week. Brett found "The Next Frontier for the Media and Wireless Industry_Diamond Consultants" this week, which is a whitepaper exploring wireless media and gaming. Please read.

July 22

TBA

July 29

TBA

August 5

Final project due by midnight. We'll go over them during class.

hello world

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Sun, 31 May 2009 23:57:00 -0500

Trying blogger out on my own site (?)

JRB's Teaching Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Mon, 2 Feb 2009 08:19:00 -0600

I believe in student engagement, exploration, empowerment, equipping, and encouragement to be baseline elements in the educational environment; without these, grades may be given, but learning is unlikely.
I believe that the role of a teacher is best executed when a thoughtful, deliberate, and insightful educator chooses to set aside position and put on the role of co-learner, guide, and fellow-explorer.
I believe that learning is a process, not a destination; that the teacher has a sacred responsibility to his pupils, and that status is not necessarily determined by enrollment in a class or deliberate selection, but by proximity, opportunity, visibility, and transparency.
I believe in action research as a way of being; that teachers have an obligation to themselves, their colleagues, and their profession to be in the pursuit of continual improvement and investigation that informs understanding and constructively critiques their own educational practice.
I believe that effective clinical supervision requires a willing educator with a learner's heart and mind to repeatedly make himself painfully vulnerable, as a tangible expression of his commitment to personal and professional excellence. Within the environment of a committed teaching team, I believe clinical supervision brings to bear the opportunity to act on the insights and creativity of other professionals whose exhortations are delivered in the light of accurately understanding the real context of the local situation.
I believe that a curriculum must include and clearly communicate its primary learning outcomes so its instructor can be constantly reminded of and guided by the course objectives. I believe that learning should always be assessed, but that the goal setting activities in classrooms should be a collaborative effort, with buy-in and socialization of the expected norms and articulated classroom mores for student (and instructor) behavior.
I believe in multiple intelligences and that all students have a fundamental need for stimulation and challenge in each of these areas.
I believe in active learning, including collaborative work, provided that thoughtful and perceptive controls are put in place to ensure that strengths-based student contributions remain in healthy balance with (appropriate) challenges that invite students beyond their own horizons of perceived ability.
I believe that achievement is a factor of motivation and opportunity, and is most ready to be realized at the intersection of communication and a teacher's leadership by example.
I believe in scaffolding as a powerful approach to teaching. I believe in and strongly support constructivist understanding of student learning. In this, I believe it is imperative that each learner be appropriately supported at all points in the educational environment, including the deliberate withdrawal of supports to prompt student growth and self-sufficiency.
I believe that educators have the responsibility for inviting students into an understanding of the content's global and specific relevance. This is most readily facilitated as students engage problem-based learning scenarios and reflective self-assessment activities in which they personally apply the concepts, (pseudo-)tangibly experience the benefits and challenges of their actions, then think critically and evaluate honestly about their own performance.
I believe that expectations of assessment should always be made clear so students understand where they stand in their own journey toward learning, and that assessments should be objective, clear and formalized (rubric, scorecard, etc.) to improve consistency in grading, challenge and correct where necessary, and to reinforce and prompt further growth, especially self-directed learning.
I believe in the responsibility of teachers as civic leaders and character educators by virtue of their prominence and proximity to students' own identification, prioritization, and articulation of personal values. As teachers "at the will of the state," I believe we are responsible to personify the highest standards of ethics, character, appreciation of diversity, commitment, excellence, and personal integrity.
I believe in the importance of balancing carefully between accommodating student weaknesses or leading them to actively engage their areas of weakness, disability, and struggle.
I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and assert that there is no place for harassment, discrimination, derision, disdain, and condescension. This is not to say, however, that I believe teachers can abdicate their responsibility to be honest and forthcoming with students; rather, I assert that honesty is best communicated within the context of a healthy instructor-pupil relationship.

On Web 3.0 and 4.0

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:24:00 -0500

YouTube - Web 3.0, Web 2.0, and Web 1.0

New Media [In My Future Work]

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Sun, 1 Jun 2008 14:55:00 -0500

My future work is still very much in question, though as a potential new faculty member, I can certainly imagine life as a professor, wherein I am able to utilize new media to facilitate high traffic and high quality of student engagement that prompts deeper learning and application in the long run. In the meantime I will benefit substantially from the opportunities afforded by this course. I will continue to explore the words/labels/concepts/ideas that have previously been floating there aimlessly. I am especially interested in learning more about multi-discipliinary programs around the country.

New Media [In My Ongoing Work]

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Sat, 31 May 2008 11:46:00 -0500

Now the part that really gets my heart pumping … the practical application.

Thus far in this assignment, I have utilized the following media:

1. storytelling and an overall conversational style

2. a distracting visual device as metaphor for inconvenience

3. larger, more engaging font faces

4. color

5. descriptive images which define specific relationships

6. a subtle photograph to visually evoke a sense of intensity, surprise, and even annoyance that often accompanies the arrival of change

7. some cute clip art, so I can make a point about one of my pet peeves: the inappropriate inclusion of cute clip art, or a variety of media when it is done just for the sake of using a variety of media or being cute

8. internet content to extend the argument via simple hyperlink (to an audio file, nonetheless,) and a hyperlinked image to induce the same reader response

9. internal document linking to provide the reader with an optional non-linear reading experience.

My coup de grâce is the video clip from 60 minutes, included immediately above, which is an interesting and slightly frightening introduction to properly framing the use of new media in my current work.

Each day in my profession, I observe how the efficacious use of media is being driven by other forces that are hard at work. Again, que market economics for a cameo … in every scene. In aⁿ recession economic downturn, with supply and demand in office, my job, and more substantially, continuation of funding for most institutions of higher education rely substantially on some oversimplified bottom-line metrics. Research, however, confirms that the process of generating the highest caliber of academic excellence is not exactly comparable to the process required to generate your standard 18-25 year-old widget with a Millenial complex. How will we be successful? Engagement. Call it what you want, but effective (as it is being measured) education will require better communication with the technosavvy clientele that we have created. It has been said that, in every advising appointment, students are really asking three questions:

1. Do they know? (Accurate Information)

2. Are they there? (Accessibility)

3. Do they give a damn? (Care and Esteem)

As an educator, I represent the institution’s best effort to ask another set of equally important questions:

1. Who are you? (Self-Awareness)

2. Where are you headed? (Goal-Setting and Self-Direction)

3. What do you need and who can help you? (Self-Inventory, Requirements Inventory, and Resource Identification)

Answering these questions and arriving at the positive outcome we desire (while besting the required bottom line measures), will require new ways of doing business. The desired outcomes necessitate the use (and reuse) of remediated tools, practices, and methods, modularized and highly variable content that is specific to the individual, and content and venues that have been transcoded into the new media realms that are so appealing and widely utilized by the typical incoming student. Scarcity of resources will require us to utilize the tools at hand to effectively communicate with students, strategically prompt student learning at every opportunity, and then reinforce, redirect and celebrate with students, respectively.

Conclusions

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Sat, 31 May 2008 06:45:00 -0500

So there it is … my entire treatise on why “new” media is really just today’s version media. Reflectively I’m thinking that the Peitho has simply found a few new tools for her cosmetics case, but that underneath, she’s still the same old temptress she always was. She’s only expanded her market share to engage and engulf the masses, and blogging under the pseudonym of rhetor247urwy. Not that this diminishes her power in any way … only that it makes it all the more important to observe her at work, chuckle at her missteps, learn from her mistakes, and capitalize on her successes. Capitalization is happening … so why not us? [See image above.]

Transcoding & Variability

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:09:00 -0500

When traveling on any highway, it is important to recognize that principles the principles of traffic are also generally applicable when one grows and moves to a golf cart , bumper cars, or dune buggy (if so fortunate), and the collective principles learned at this level also carry forward as some of the foundational knowledge used to provide the needed skill for operating a full-sized automobile. And so the progression continues as one operates a gas-guzzling SUV, a trailer-hauling truck, and even a forward moving aircraft.

As a metaphor, this progression is roughly applicable to the principle of transcoding in media. When communicators take a principle, rule, or standard process of communication and apply it or build upon it in a new environment, they can be understood to have successfully transcoded it. This has been happening for ages, as described in the introduction of this paper, but as advances in media build upon advances in media, we are far more aware of successful transcoding and become more likely to experience, value, and attempt it ourselves. Bearing a variety of aliases in other realms and disciplines, e.g., best practices, aspirational models, et al, but these are all really januvian faces of observation and learning as they occur in varying phases of maturity.

Variability, Manovich’s fifth principle of new media, also finds its role in our allegorical mass transit system as an innumerable list of potential destinations, routes, speeds, lane changes, and a myriad of other options like style, make, model, and color of vehicle, windows up or down, radio or not, etc., etc., ad nauseum. But is this a new development in communication, language, and media? As we use varying approaches in styles, voices, and writing we express the variability that is available to the communicator. While it is true that certain forms and specifics may prove more effective, or may be legislated to be correct, the reality is that they are merely effective because they fulfill expectations. As popular transportational convenience leads to the blazing of new cow-paths in a grassy meadow, so too do conventions of communication meander with the needs and desires of the audiences who seekallusion to utilize them. No longer must the lover and business executive both labor in the bulk of their communications, convention and instantaneous feedback provide for quick clarification upon misunderstanding and the expansion upon request where proven necessary. The language, style, and structure that is correct is that which proves most effective. Any practitioner of communication … everyone … can attest to this. What makes variability so much more pervasive in the world today is, again the economic value of customization. If you can afford the tab, you can purchase your steak and require the chef to prepare it to taste. Thankfully for the common man like me, what was once reserved for an elite few has now been popularized by Burger King (“Have it your way.”). Variability seems to be ultimately personified in in the standardized practice of audience analysis and its younger sibling, usability. And so it is that the common man like me can also produce a highly customized publication like this in place of a standard paper produced to the highest of APA standards. Moreover, I didn’t have to procure an entire printing press, design team, and technical staff to get it done. End product: my reflective content delivered in a way that communicates more about me, and hopefully, about the learning that has taken place through the course experience. If this desired end isn’t readily achieved, with the media chosen, then, as the lover scorned and executive who hears his Trump-esque boss say with panache, “You’re fired,” I will mourn my poor mark with the standard 15-second-in-car-drive-off-interview and a lot of pouting. J/K. LOL. :)

Modularity and Automation

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:03:00 -0500

Letters are, themselves, a symbolic representation of an intangible concept that is used to aid in passing communication from one person to another. From movable type and Gutenberg’s printing press in the early to mid second millennium, I would argue that the increase in widespread modularity of content, method, and mechanism serve as standardized pavers and combustible fuel for the rapid increase in traffic on the information superhighway.

Automation, in the metaphor I am building here, can be represented by an automobile. As computers have become more reliable in their counting, the electronic automation of complex processes has allowed for quick reuse of content. As the vehicle is powerless without its fuel, so the rapid and valuable mechanized manipulation of modular letters, sentences, paragraphs, pages, images, and moving images relies on the combination of modularization and automation.

Numerical Representation

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:36:00 -0500

As Pheidippides, the greek runner of old, made his way uphill from the battle of Marathon to Athens, there must have been some point where he imagined the future of Nike (running shoes) and Caterpillar (highway construction equipment). Years later, as the Romans constructed a network of roads to facilitate commerce, did Pliny, Archimedes, or Apollodorus of Damascus ever imagine the reach and speed of information superhighway that would eventually follow them? Unlikely. And yet, maybe not. Manovichâ€™s discussion of numerical representation and mathematical manipulation is the current equivalent to the efforts undertaken years ago by the Roman empire. They developed a well-constructed message, hired, trained and supported resilient and efficient couriers, and retained talented translators.
While counting is as old as fingers and toes, humankind has been busy with other pursuits, generally because we can. Computers, on the other â€œhand,â€ can not. They can only count, but they do it very, very well. With their amazing counting ability comes the capability of creating specific symbolic representations for everything. Thus, numerical representation allows for systematic modification, modulation, automation, manipulation, and reuse of content and processes. Numerical representation is germane to the information superhighway as was the invention of the wheel in the pedestrian age.

On New Media

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:31:00 -0500

New Media Defined [Generally]

Ah, the big question, “What is it, really?” Honestly, I continue to wrestle with that very question. To use a new media asset to assist in answering the question, I’ll refer to the commercial shown in class, where the 1800’s era business consultants are looking for better ways to do things, and one comes up with a novel solution, only to be chased down by the mob who is yelling, “Witch!”

I’m not bringing up the commercial to take up space, rather, to provide the opportunity to discuss the first image I have included in this document. Provided by Th!nkMap™, the Visual Thesaurus, these two images demonstrate well the one new media tool that assists the user to visualize complex semantic relationships between words, much as creative connections are done in the neural space. You will notice that the first image begins with word “medium,” not actually the word “media” as one might anticipate. As the image illustrates, the medium is closely related to the spiritualist, long valued for the ability to transport and translate important messages. Working around the image in a circular fashion, the word is also connected to states of being, hence the difficulty of describing a specific point in the metamorphosis of communications across time. Because humans are temporal, tangible things, the medium must necessarily deal with and utilize real matter, emotion, or the more convenient metaphor or symbol to effectively get the point across.

So, historically speaking, communication has generally been best when it happens face to face, between those who have worked out a complex system of understanding. Working such a thing out requires a substantial investment of time and trust, and there it is … market economics. Just as you probably didn’t appreciate having to read across the “BAM” gap up above, the scarcity of resources and transfer of wealth rears its ugly head to encourage improvement in communication. Who was it that said, “Necessity is the mother of invention?” Basically, all of humanity shares a general distaste (and in some cases a full-fledged loathing) for running. we value and appreciate “better” aka new mediums. Again, because we are temporal beings, we invented the written word to save our thoughts and adventures for all of posterity to enjoy. Similar need for improved trust and proofs of veracity brought about new tools to take the place of physical proximity, e.g., the royal seal, personal signature, courier, and postal employee. Today this may not seem very sophisticated, but if we are honest and humble, we must acknowledge that society is still doing the same thing, just improving the method and, er, the media. Tablets became scrolls, stories became books, hand-written became machine printed, stories and books became graphic novels, movies, and syndicated sit-coms, village gossips became newspapers, and the courier finally gave way to email.

And our pocketbooks and bellies have felt the effect. Improved media gave way to better communication within peoples, between groups, and eventually across all varieties of cultural divides. Again, the transfer of wealth, like mosquitos in tall grass, thrives as improved media greases the wheels of commerce.

The understanding of new media is, in my opinion, best understood when gazing carefully through the lens of philosophy, while feeling around with one hand to find the best available tool for the job. Strangely, it often feels like the right tool is just beyond reach for the current situation.

Because the philosophical thought of the current era is widely characterized as being progressive, aka “postmodern,” it seems unlikely that the we may fully understand new/current/modern media without understanding more deliberately that media which is of the past. Manovich, in The Language of New Media, offers a seemingly ironic maxim. He holds that, to actually understand what new media is, we must fully engage in understanding what it is not.

Strangely, however, I did not find his text to generally lead this reader very far in discoursing the negative space of new media. Rather, he invested much energy in examining five general elements that frequently characterize new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.

As personified by our first in-class discussion when we addressed each of these five items, new media can not be definitively expressed or constrained by these. Our collective post-modernity has taken root and progressed into full bloom; we, myself included, reject the authoritative position in favor of the more generally palatable relativism of inclusion.

Lanham, in a four-word title, The Economics of Attention, confirms my earlier assertions about the effect of market economics on media. As we have moved from agrarian to urban, agricultural to industrial, then into service and now a knowledge economy, the courier of old becomes the negotiator, mediator, and knowledge broker with his own stake in the transaction of communicating. How does he do it? Let’s look back at Manovich’s five elements.

Reflections on Thursday's Class

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:47:00 -0500

In lieu of waiting for the technology to be completely set up, which generally takes a little time, we went ahead today and built the database structure in Microsoft Access, as that structure can easily be ported over into the full Microsoft SQL Server. I especially thought that Dr. Kemp's presentation was thought-provoking with regard to the use of New Media in improving student retention through increased engagement, multiple styles of learning, and context-specific, individualized instruction and reteaching. I'm curious about other similar applications where the iPod can be used to improve the communication of important course content to students at their point of need.

Dr. Kemp articulated the research question as, "How do conceptual differences affect people's connection with instructional content?" He then simplified the question to answer his typical colleagues' question, "So, why all this technology?" His specific answers included:

First year composition students are from the most vulnerable population of university students.
75% of teachers are doing a good job => technology can assist in the improvements of this.
The student profile is always changing, and this group of students is not made up of the same type of student as we've seen in years past. Specifically:

Technology appeals to these folks, generally speaking.
Anything appealing increases the engagement factor
These students are often the least acclimated to the university learning expectations and university environment.
Many of these students are the least academically prepared, and they really need a quality learning experience to boost them forward toward academic success.

There are certain ecological qualities that can be improved in the student/teacher content encounter (note: it's not necessarily going to happen in the classroom).
Learning is enhanced through repetition.

Dr. Kemp uses Skype and AudioHijackPro ($28) plus iTunes plus Fission to do his interviews for the podcasts they use in the composition courses.

The future of the projects we viewed include:

Peer to peer assistance, advice, etc.
Library of files to become open source to encourage widespread instructor input and expansion of content covered.

Reflections on Wednesday's Class

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:49:00 -0500

Great progress on our project ... great teamwork in dividing and conquering! It was amazing to see the sheer number of tasks completed by our group overnight from the previous class period. I had the pleasure of working with Cynthia on mapping the data for construction of the database to be used in the system, and for someone who had never done that kind of work before, she certainly caught on quickly. It was good to have the intro to Photoshop, but I'm still wondering when I'm going to find the time to dive into the intermediate and advanced feautres that I'm really interested in using.

Final Project Prep - Aspirational Models & More

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:08:00 -0500

Aspirational Models

http://polisci.la.psu.edu/graduate/directory.html - Basic list of Grad Students (many of which are TAs) with optional links to websites as they have them available.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/graduate/student.html - Just a quick list with email addresses, but a good feature in the sorting of students by year.
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/academics/doctorate/usp/students/index.html - Demonstrates marketing purposes and grouping of cohorts.
http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Doctoral.aspx - Database driven profiles with pics ... nothing too special here.
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/advising/staff.php - Nothing too special here either, however, I happen to know the back-end of this application because I inherited it. Worth looking at because it can be the bones of a much more robust application, written in PHP, running on a MySQL database.

& More ...

Technical Communication - Strengths

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Tue, 13 May 2008 06:47:00 -0500

A concise list of my Technical Communication strengths:

Application Design

Requirements Gathering
Features/Functionality
User Interface

Project Management
Brainstorming/Creative Thinking
Concept Transplantation
Knowledge Management/Knowledge Transfer
Thinking Strategically while Acting Practically
Moving Ahead Quickly

5365 Basecamp Site

noreply@blogger.com (JRB) — Tue, 13 May 2008 05:58:00 -0500

So as usual, I had trouble sleeping early this morning, and woke up remembering Basecamp. This is one of my favorite Web 2.0 applications that is designed to easily facilitate collaboration between members of a project team. So I set up a Basecamp site for the ENGL 5365 class to see if it would be helpful in collaborating on our final class project.

I'll be curious to see if they agree that it is a useful tool, or if they have a different take on the matter.

Anyhow, here's the handy link for me to remember how to log in: http://5365.grouphub.com

-jrb.