Audrey Watters

Changes and Priorities

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:50:45 PST

I've heard it a lot lately: "Wow, you are writing for a lot of publications now, huh." I heard it from teachers at Educon. I heard it (funnily enough) from Apple after I wrote a lot (of not so nice things). And it's true. Not counting Hack Education, my work appeared in 6 different publications in the month of January.

All the work has been a blessing and a curse. I've long bemoaned the fact that few people were paying enough attention to education technology -- other than to extol the virtue of whatever hot new startup was crowned "disruptive" by Silicon Valley, of course. And so to suddenly to find myself in such high demand has been incredibly gratifying. I know that I offer a very different voice than other writers (either education writers or tech writers) who tend to be -- in turn --uncritical technophiles and naive technophobes.

But even if my ferocity is boundless, my energy is not, and I've had a sense that it's getting more and more fragmented the more and more places I write. There's too much at stake right now for me not to be loud and critical and focused, out at the forefront of all of this technological change, asking all the questions that really need to be asked about why and where we're headed.

As such, I'm making some big shifts in where I work and what I do.

As I've written about before, it's never been particularly easy to me to figure out how to make money and maintain my integrity. I do think that part of that conundrum comes from the many years I spent in academia where -- for better or worse -- we're indoctrinated with the notion that "the mission" matters more than "the money." And you know what, I really do believe that: I'd rather be poor and radical than rich and complacent. I'd rather be a thorn in the side of the powerful players than shut up, smile and play their game. I'd rather piss everyone off in the course of my work than suck up to those with deep pockets and long tentacles. That being said, there are trade-offs to be made with this stance, and I must focus on what matters: the future of open education, the future of open technologies, and the future of the open Web.

So here are the projects that I'm prioritizing:

1. Hack Education
2. Data and analytics
3. Web and computer literacy for everyone
4. Hackathons as/for education

What that looks like in practice:

You'll find me writing more on Hack Education in lieu of other ed-tech blogs, thanks in no small part to a new project I'm undertaking for Mozilla. It's a project (no surprise) that ties in to #3 -- Web literacy for everyone. More details coming soon.

I'll be writing more for O'Reilly Radar too. I've been working as one of the organization's data correspondents for a while now, but as the interest and innovation continues in "big data," there's an increasing demand for my work there. Intellectually, this work is a real challenge for me as my background is neither in engineering nor statistics. But I love it nonetheless -- not just because it makes my brain bleed. It's because I feel as though battle for control of data and analytics will be one of the most important ones we face in coming years, and I'm glad to do so under the O'Reilly Media umbrella, a publication that I trust for pushing technology forward thoughtfully and equitably.

I'll be traveling more with Kin Lane too, and his work as the API Evangelist is taking him to a bunch of hackathons. Me, I stand on the sidelines noting the absence of women and the absence of real problem-solving. I've long been tracking on a variety of hackathon models -- Startup Weekend, for example -- but there are a lot of reasons why what we're doing in the hackathon space right now doesn't feel quite right. How can we bring more people -- including problem owners and real problem solvers -- to the table? How can we make sure we're not just trying to replicate Silicon Valley (for better or worse) in other locales?

Stay tuned...

Photo credits: Antonio Picascia

Copyrights and Wrongs

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:49:23 PST

This website hasn't "gone black" today, despite my opposition to both SOPA and PIPA, two proposed pieces of legislation that will "break the Internet." Honestly, I forgot to tell the IT department (um, that would be my boyfriend and me) to shut things down. Some radicals we make, huh. But since this blog is still up and running and accessible today, I best make the most of it and write a little rant…

Some of the biggest tech companies and websites "went black" today to protest SOPA and PIPA. The English language version of WIkipedia is offline. The Oatmeal, Mozilla, Boing Boing, Reddit, O'Reilly Media, MIT's admissions page, McSweeneys, Flickr, and Google are all either offline or featuring some sort of "oppose SOPA" message. There's a lot of self-congratulatory back-patting now too, particularly as it appears that several initial supporters of the bills are changing their minds.

But before we become too pleased with the power of the Interwebz to sway Congress, let's look at another branch of government and the decision that the Supreme Court handed down today. In a 6 to 2 ruling that public domain works can be given retroactive copyright protection. The ruling upholds Congress's decision to add another 20 years to copyright terms, meaning that foreign works like Peter and the Wolf can be removed from the public domain. As PaidContent's Jeff Roberts writes, the Supreme Court concluded its ruling "by stating that copyright terms are a political decision for Congress to make."

In other words, copyright law is always already political. ("The Law" tends to be so.) And as such, copyright law is always already in the hands of those with the loudest voices and deepest pockets. The protests today are meant to demonstrate that The Internet has a loud voice. And certainly the tech industry has deep pockets. In noting his opposition to SOPA on his own Facebook status update, Mark Zuckerberg says he and his company want politicians who are more "pro-Internet." Incidentally, Google and Facebook spent record amounts of money on lobbying efforts last year.

I suppose we can believe that those lobbying efforts are in the best interest of The Internet, but I think we'd be fools to do so. I trust lobbyists little, whether they're lobbyists for MGM or lobbyists for Microsoft (I chose those two for their alliterative value. I would add others but as Wikipedia's down today and I can't seem to think of a record label or Hollywood studio that starts with the letter G to pair with Google, so there ya go). When lobbyists for Hollywood and the record industry say they speak on behalf of content creators, I balk. As a content creator myself, I can assure you, they do not speak for me. So I feel the same way when technology industry lobbyists say they speak for The Internet. "Don't Be Evil" shouldn't be confused with "Don't Mess With Our Business Model."

We (geeks) tend to equate The Internet with The Public, and as such I would say our voices are (potentially) collectively powerful. ("The Public" tends to be so. Ideally.) It does help, sure, that the ubiquity of Internet access and the importance of Internet access (for work, for communication, and for looking up info on Wikipedia) makes us strong enough and angry enough to take a stand against this destructive legislation and to contact our elected representatives en masse. Hooray for "click here to send your Congressman a message" messages!

There are plenty of abhorrent elements of PIPA and SOPA that run counter to important legal tenets -- "due process" being one of them. But until we re-examine carefully some of our fundamental legal tenets about intellectual property, these sorts of whacky legislative efforts aren't going to go away. No matter what happens to these two bills, this fight isn't over. The Supreme Court's decision today makes that perfectly clear.

One of the great benefits of the Internet and the Web is the ease with which all of us now can be content creators and distribute our content worldwide. We humans have always been creators of original works and we've always been borrowers of others' ideas, even in the good old analog days. But when the distribution networks for most "media" were controlled by large corporations -- the publishing industry, the record labels, the film studios -- it was unlikely that anyone noticed that I'd carefully pulled together 20 of my favorite songs and made a mix-tape for my best friends or that I'd taken the scissors to a Rolling Stones magazine and used the words and images to make a 'zine or that I'd taken scenes from other famous movies and recreated them in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Oh wait. That wasn't me. That was some famous Hollywood director.

I think Clay Shirky is right when he says that the industries that are backing SOPA and PIPA have never wanted us to be creators. They prefer us as consumers. And let's remember: copyright law was not originally meant to protect content creators but rather to protect those who owned the printing presses. For many centuries now, the new content industries that sprung up were able to use these property protections to serve their needs.

The Internet has changed things: scarcity, remixability, reusability, citation, distribution. And while creation and sharing have been democratized by the Internet, shifting the power away from those who control the printing presses (in their analog and digital and metaphorical form), the laws surrounding IP clearly have not.

Learning to Build

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:22:20 PST

Some changes in my websites lately:

I've moved from Go Daddy to Hover for DNS and domain registry. (A decision long overdue but made because of the company's support for SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.) It wasn't a tough process but it was rather annoying and time-consuming thanks to the little road-blocks Go Daddy put up in the way. (Step-by-step: 1. Unlock the domains at GoDaddy. 2. Initiate the transfer at Hover. 3. Add the authentication code from GoDaddy (you can request this via email). 4. Update the DNS information on Hover once the transfer goes through -- this took almost a full week.) Hover is very helpful and will also walk you through the process over the phone.

I've moved from Wordpress to a CMS of Kin's design. It's part of a larger effort to make smarter use of the data that underlies our work -- me, writing/talking, and him, writing/talking/hacking.

But now I'm starting to hack too. I've been talking about it for a long time, and I've tried various approaches (online classes, books, etc) -- but now I have a real project: my own websites.

I've heard lots of people say that building a website isn't really programming. And no doubt, most of what I'm doing is simply furthering my HTML and CSS skills -- these are mark-up languages and not programming languages. I have spent a long time working with the HTML in specific blog posts, but now I'm having to handle the design of the entire site -- footers, headers, right columns, and so on. The new system (and I should add here, the extremely patient boyfriend) is enabling me to tinker with PHP and JavaScript too.

Photo credit: Flickr user Matt Mets

Your Public Library Loan Expires Soon... A Note from Amazon

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 15:19:49 PST

I don't think I like this. I wouldn't mind an email from my local library, reminding me about due dates. But I don't want Amazon intervening, suggesting I buy a copy rather than renew or return it.

2011: A Retrospective of Me

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:00:22 PST

(Cross-post at techgypsi.es)

2011 has been a phenomenal year for me, both personally and professionally. For that, I am incredibly grateful.

I began the year as a technology journalist, agitating for more and better and smarter coverage of education technology. And rather than just grouse and grumble, I finally took the steps necessary to provide just that. I quit writing at two major publications mid-year (this one and this one) so that I could focus (almost entirely) on education. I put a great deal of energy into Hack Education, trying to create the sort of site I'd want to read.

I can talk at length about the economics and politics of this decision: freelance employment and contractual, intellectual labor; self-employment and no benefits as a single mom; no "stake" in the company that your pen has created; whatever� It was a weird year for technology blogging, as Ben Parr rightly point outs. He would know; he (like a lot of us) quit.

And so what did we learn from all this? My lesson for the year: doing something, writing something that matters matters. Following your passions, writing your passions makes for more passionate writing obviously. But it also makes for smarter writing. Readers do notice. Readers do care. In the words of situationist Raoul Vaneigem,

"Ceux qui parlent de r�volution et de lutte de classes sans se r�f�rer explicitement � la vie quotidienne, sans comprendre ce qu'il y a de subversif dans l'amour et de positif dans le refus des contraintes, ceux-l� ont dans la bouche un cadavre."
(People who talk about revolution and struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, those that fixate on page views, those that sacrifice passion for stock options, those without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.)

Pretty sure that's what he said. Then again, my French is super-rusty. And it's been a while since I studied or translated situationist texts. Dissertation stuff, ya know.

Me, I did choke on the corpse this year and found that my writing flourished -- particularly at Hack Education -- when I spat out the gristle of tech blogging.

As such my work also appeared in a number of new places this year: O'Reilly Radar, Edutopia, Inside Higher Ed, e-Literate, and MindShift. I also helped my boyfriend edit and published a book. I began a weekly ed-tech podcast withSteve Hargadon, one of the people I have long admired in my field.

I spent the year on the Interwebz, true, but I accessed it from a lot of different locations, traveling as much as possible -- mostly between Eugene, Oregon and San Francisco. Strangely, I found myself frustrated with both cities -- the Ducks and the Valley -- and their vision of education, technology, community, accreditation, football, money, whiteness, privilege. I was happy to go/be elsewhere. In 2011 I went to: Philadelphia, Boston, Denver, New York City, Manhattan Beach, Berkeley, Lansing, Seattle, Portland, St. Louis, Washington DC, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Monica, Ashland Oregon, Cave Junction Oregon, Blue Hill Maine, Casper Wyoming.

I attended the following conferences/events: Educon, Opencourseware Consortium's annual meeting (and MIT OCW's 10 year anniversary), THATCamp Great Lakes, ISTE 2011, LEGO Education STEM Roundtable, Google I/O, Strata NY, Where 2.0, Startup Weekend EDU (Seattle, SFx2, and DC), Startup Weekend Philly, RWW2Way, Imagine Cup Finals, OSCON, Glue, Maker Faire, Web 2.0 Expo, ASCD, Launch Conference. I got a press pass to hear the President speak.

I saw the following bands: Deer Tick, Widespread Panic, Janes Addiction (at Google I/O no less). (Wait. What. the. Fuck. That's it?! I worked way too hard this year.)

I won an award! Media Predicts. I was nominated for an Edublog award and MindShift was nominated for an ONA award. I also hit Techmeme and the front page of Reddit for the first time with Hack Education -- no, those are not awards per se. But the Internet voted. And I won. (Except when my site was unreachable due to traffic; then I lost).

I turned 40 this year. And that's an odd thing in a culture that really privileges youth -- "don't trust anyone over 30" is no longer just a hippie maxim. (See: The Higher Ed Bubble.)

And with that, thank you, Steve Jobs, for countering the prevailing notion in Silicon Valley that younger is necessarily better. Thanks for demonstrating that you can be your most creative after 40. Thanks too for arguing that the "intersection of technology and the humanities" matters -- with all the emphasis on science and engineering, we neglect art, creativity and beauty.

I won't lie: my heart broke a little when Steve Jobs died this year. It broke for all the beautiful technology today and all the touch points Apple (and Pixar) provided throughout my life (the Apple IIe, the iPod, the iPhone and so on).

My heart also broke because I fucking hate cancer. I have watched Steve Jobs become skeletal over the past few years, and I've recognized the symptoms: liver and pancreatic cancer. I've seen its devastation before.

On that note, Isaiah graduated high school this year. Considering everything that he and I have been through over the course of the last 6 years, holy shit, this was a huge accomplishment. I am infinitely proud of my kid, and I'm excited to watch what he decides to do -- now, as an 18 year old, sure, as well as in the future. Right now, it's not college. (Again, see: The Higher Ed Bubble.)

My education and his education: this colors most everything that I do or say or write about our education system at both the K-12 and the college level. That's my big disclosure, I guess -- in a year of very odd tech blogger disclosures.

With all the hullaballoo that comes with that, I'm grateful that I was able to cultivate a strong readership this year. And I'm very grateful that Tina Barseghian was one of my readers. When she offered me the opportunity to write for KQED MindShift (an NPR blog on how technology is shaping how we learn), she was the first person -- other than my boyfriend -- to really validate my writing about ed-tech. Bonus: she paid me to do so.

And ah, the boyfriend. Without Kin, very little of this would be possible. He supported me with the tech and the travel. He put up with my demands for burgers and beer. He's been the best possible travel companion and intellectual sparring partner. He understands what it's like to be from a small town, and he moves with the same determined hustle that I do to make it big and -- and this is crucial -- to make change. I feel like I've really started doing both with my writing this year.

And with that, I can't wait for 2012...

My Best of 2011

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 06:00:07 PST

I wrote a lot this year. Here are my favorites:

How the Library of Congress is Building the Twitter Archive

This was my big journalism "win" of the year. I'd been stewing on a follow-up story about the Twitter archives since the big announcement in 2010 about the startup's donation. One year later, what was happening to the project? What were the challenges? Who would have access to the archive? My interview with Martha Anderson, the head of the library's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP), and Leslie Johnston, the manager of the NDIIP's Technical Architecture Initiatives, appeared in O'Reilly Radar in June. Exclusive! (link)

Mr. Callahan: The Best Teacher I Ever Had

The title says it all. This story also appeared in The Huffington Post and on George Haines' blog. (link)

The Public Library, Reimagined

Wow, I love this. Librarian Lauren Smedley is building a Fab Lab -- a fabrication laboratory -- at the Fayetteville Free Library where she works. The Fab Lab includes a Makerbot (a 3D printer) and soon a CNC Router and laser cutter. There will be computers and classes -- library as community makerspace. The library is housed in an old furniture factory and the building has a "history of making," says Smedley, which adds this wonderful level of awesome to an already awesome story. The story appeared in MindShift in November (but was picked up and cited in multiple places). (link)

What Do Kids Say Is the Biggest Obstacle to Technology at School?

I wrote a lot about education technology this year, but I actually had very little opportunity to talk to students (particularly K-12 students) -- something I hope to rectify in 2012. This particular story was based on the results of the Speak Up 2010 survey, which found among other things that kids listed 1) Web filters and 2) the banning of cellphones as the biggest barriers to effective use of technology at school. I'd say this story shaped some of my focus this, particularly when it came to tracking on filtering and BYOD. The story appeared on ReadWriteWeb in April. (link)

You Can't Always Get What You Want: Apple's Disappointing Music Announcements at WWDC

There's a really long story behind this blog post about Apple's iCloud announcement -- tech blogging, sausage-making stuff. I wrote it way too late, crammed way too many music references into it. And yet somehow it sat at the top of Techmeme for almost a full day. Ah, Apple blogging. The story appeared on ReadWriteWeb in June. (link)

Read, Written, Resigned

This post felt good to write. Enough said. Published here at the end of July. (link)

My Top 10 of 2011 series

Yes, this is sort of cheating since this lumps together 11 posts: the top 10 ed-trends and the top 10 ed-tech startups. I put a lot of thought and care and energy into these posts, and I learned a lot in the process of researching and writing them -- I have a much better grasp of the landscape, I think, for doing so. (link)

How Data and Analytics Can Improve Education

One of my new writing gigs this year was as a data correspondent for O'Reilly Radar. And some of the most interesting interviews I conducted sprung from that assignment. My favorite was with George Siemens, and I found myself returning to the story time and again to read and reference what he said about the future of data and learning analytics. This interview appeared in Radar in July. (link)

The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy

One of my most successful stories this year, this was my attempt to explain the myriad of reasons why Khan Academy gives many educators pause: his connections to Bill Gates' ed-reform efforts, his embrace of gamification, and his recapitulation of old models of lecturing in a new digital video format. There's a lot to like about Khan Academy, don't get me wrong. But let's not go overboard here with proclaiming that YouTube has brought forth the math messiah. The story appeared on Hack Education in July. (link)

Codecademy and the Future of (Not) Learning to Code

I stand by my profanity in this story. But I'll gladly be proven wrong as I hope we really all do better when it comes to building (and lauding) ed-tech startups. The story appeared on Hack Education in October. (link)

Photo credits: Flickr user Joel Montes de Oca

2011: My Personal Tech Tools

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:21:06 PST

After churning out a rather epic series of year-end blog posts over on Hack Education, I'm fairly burnt out on 2011 retrospectives. But it's the last week of the year, and as such I've been spending the time accomplishing various tasks long outstanding on my To Do list. And like it or not, as a tech writer, that does mean a good deal of cataloging what I wrote and where I went and what I spent and how I managed to pull it all off.

This post simply chronicles what technology I used this year. (I thought I wrote something similar last year, but I can't seem to find the post)

Hardware

Used:

iPhone 4
MacBook Pro
Chromebook (Meh. But I'm keeping it as our emergency-backup computer -- it's perfect for that as we store all our files in the cloud and it'll work for either Kin or I should a problem arise with our Macs)
Kindle

Ditched:

iPad (iPads are awesome. I am a poor freelance writer. I sold it)
Samsung Galaxy Tab (sold it)
Kindle Fire (bought it, returned it immediately)

Software

My technology toolbox actually changed very little this year. Many of the "hot new apps" just failed to stick. I didn't love Spotify, despite all the hype. I tried both Amazon and Apple's new cloud storage platforms, but I wasn't dazzled by either. (I do still buy my digital content from Amazon and use it on my Apple devices.)

Other than music and e-books, I still rely almost entirely on Google products: Gmail, Google Reader (oh and damn you Google for screwing with one of my most important and loved tools this year), Google Calendar, Google Sites, Google Talk, Google Maps, Google Voice,Google Analytics, Google Docs, Google, Chrome. Add to the list this year, Google Plus.

I actually found myself using Evernote a lot more this year in lieu of Google Docs when it came to my writing. That's in no small part because of Evernote's better offline capabilities. With all the flying I did this year, I definitely had a lot of time to sit and work on stories without having Internet access.

I continue to use Pinboard for bookmarking what I find online. (RIP Delicious.) I continue to use Foursquare to bookmark where I travel.

Twitter remains my favorite social/information network -- alongside Google Reader of course, this is where I get my news. I moved away from Tweetdeck this year, as I just couldn't take the Adobe Air app any longer. I use Yorufukurou now (thanks to the recommendation of Tim Carmody). It has a clean look, integrates with Growl. Yay. It is a native app, not a Web app. Boo.

I'm still on a quest for the perfect To Do app. (Note: do not pitch me To Do app stories. See: what I write about nowadays). I started using Things, and I do like it a lot. There's a lot of flexibility with how you set up your projects and tasks. There's an iPhone app and a Mac app. Syncing is sorta stupid between the two. And there's no Web app, alas.

One of my favorite new apps from the year is indeed a Web app: ifttt. If This, Then That. ifttt lets you hook up various Web 2.0 services and automate all sorts of tasks � you can send your Tweets to Evernote, for example, or send starred items from your Google Reader to Instapaper. (I wrote about it here.)

Every time I visit Facebook, I often mutter that I need to automate my posts to that site. My usage of Facebook has waxed and waned this year. Well done, Facebook you tricky bastards, for introducing something like Subscriptions for luring me back to the site, if only to post links to my writing.

Far less important to me this year than last: Netflix and Instagram. What I predict will be less important to me in 2012: Skype and Flickr.

Return to Sender: Why I Shipped My Kindle Fire Back to Amazon

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:59:28 PST

I boxed up my new Kindle Fire today and sent it back to Amazon. "Was it really that bad?" people asked me on Twitter. Yes, it was. It was neither an adequate tablet nor an adequate e-reader. Note the adjective there: "adequate." I didn't return the Kindle Fire because it failed to live up to the iPad. I returned it because, for $200, it failed to live up to the older and cheaper Kindle models. It failed to live up to the reading experience of the Kindle app on the iPhone.

* * * I bought an iPad on the day it was first released. It was an incredible device in its first iteration -- remember that, when people say "Oh, but this is just the first generation Kindle Fire."

However as time went on, as much as I loved the iPad, I found myself using it fairly infrequently -- to read books via the Kindle app, to watch Netflix as a "second screen" while I worked on my Mac, to review educational apps. It just wasn't worth my dragging around another device as I traveled. I already carry a Chromebook in addition to my Mac, as my "backup computer" -- I've never found myself able to be a fully functional blogger on the iPad.

So this fall, I sold my iPad on Craigslist. I also got rid of the Samsung Galaxy Tab I was given at Google I/O (my son took it). I figured I would just buy a Kindle to replace the iPad. I really just wanted an e-reader, and while I have used the Kindle app on my iPhone since then, I'm always wary, particularly when traveling of wearing down the precious battery in my phone.

Then the Kindle Fire was announced and I figured that, hey, for $199 I could have both an e-reader and a second screen for streaming Netflix. I pre-ordered one right away.

When I read the initial reviews of the device this week, I thought about canceling my order. But I figured that we tech journalists are hypercritical sorts; I figured folks were just playing up the device's shortcomings. But read Macro Arment's "human review of the Kindle Fire and you'll see that this isn't just the case of the over-gadgetized Engadgetry being fussy. The Kindle Fire is, as Arment argues, "a bad game player, a bad app platform, a bad web browser, a bad video player, and, most disappointingly, a bad Kindle."

* * * I'm reluctant to hand the keys over to my digital world over to any one company, and as such, I actually use all the big three technology companies to host and handle my consumption and creation of media.

I do love Google, and I would say that much of my work world relies on Google's productivity tools: Gmail, Google Reader, and sometimes Google Docs (I've recently started using Evernote more than GDocs, admittedly). I've had an Android phone and an Android tablet, but neither "stuck." I tried Google Music when it first was released, but without integration with my iPhone, I wasn't that thrilled.

Much of my media consumption relies on Amazon: I buy my MP3s and e-books there. I use the Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player to store those things, but much like with Google Music, haven't fully transferred my whole library there as there's no integration with the iPhone. If I'm going to buy something -- an actual "thing" -- I'm apt to use Amazon, and I've been an Amazon Prime member for a while now. I also use Amazon Web Services for my blogs as well as for general file storage.

But when it comes to hardware, it's Apple all the way. I use a Mac, and I love my iPhone. I never bought a lot of music from iTunes, and honestly I'm not that sold on the new iCloud or iTunes Match. But when it comes to the choice of apps, the Apple ecosystem can't be beat. Nor can it be beat when it comes to easy-to-use, reliable devices.

* * * My dad recently bought an iPad. He was convinced he needed one after visiting my little brother and seeing his 2 year-old granddaughter and 5 year-old grandson use an iPad. My dad isn't computer-literate at all, even though my brother had given him an old PC of his. He never quite "got it," and since the computer was located in an upstairs bedroom, my aging dad just wasn't going to make the trek up and down the stairs to use it. He "got" the iPad right away. It's lightweight. He can take it into the kitchen; he can carry it into the living room. He can take it with him when he visits his aunt in a nursing home -- no more need to print out photos of the grandkids. He can FaceTime with the grandkids. He's already cancelled the DVD-version of his Netflix subscription. He's canceling all his magazine subscriptions. He said he'd cancel cable if he could watch the Broncos live on the iPad.

The iPad is the perfect device for him.

Honestly, it was probably the perfect device for me too.

* * * I shipped the Kindle Fire back today and sat looking at the Amazon website at my choices for a Kindle. Considering the amount of money I've invested in e-books, it's hard to leave the Amazon ecosystem. That's a good reminder about the dangers of putting all your digital eggs into one DRM-restricted basket -- hell, that's why I never bought music from iTunes. It's why I'm reluctant to give up owning digital media to have access via subscription.

I'd like to have a Kindle so I can check out the Amazon Prime Lending Library -- it seems like a perk that, as a long-time Prime customer -- I should get to utilize. I'd like to have a Kindle so I can have a lightweight e-reader -- one that's easy-to-use, easy-on-the-eyes, lightweight with a long battery life. It doesn't need to provide access to my Google world; it doesn't need to replicate an iOS experience. Not if it's just simply an e-reader.

But if it's a tablet, something that the Kindle Fire claims to be, then it needs to do all of that and more. And the Kindle Fire doesn't meet even the most minimal of standards.

Occupy Wall Street: A Few Notes on Protest Theatre

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 08:40:06 PDT

I was in New York City on Thursday. It was just a brief trip, but I made the time nonetheless to go down to Zuccotti Park where the Occupy Wall Street Movement has its base camp.

I can't say "it's nothing like the mainstream media reports" as I don't watch the mainstream media. Like an increasing number of people, I get my news from the Internet -- from Twitter, from blogs, from YouTube.

But what I can say, as someone who has spent a long time both studying protests and participating in them, is that Occupy Wall Street strikes me as "nothing like" anything I've seen in recent years.

Of course, there hasn't been a lot of protesting in this country in recent years. The widespread anti-global capitalism protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s were largely silenced after September 11, when the federal government and the Patriot Act made it all too clear to activists that their speech and actions weren't just political dissent. These were acts of subversion. In some cases, they were acts of terrorism.

It wasn't just the most vocal or radical or theatrical of political activists that curbed their activities in the last decade or so. I think Americans in general have fallen prey to the propaganda that by expressing our first amendment rights -- and yes, expressing them angrily in public and in the streets -- that we are contributing to the country's downfall rather than to its survival.

But Americans are angry. The Occupy Wall Street Movement seems to have tapped into what's been seething between the surface for at least a decade now -- anger made worse by the financial crisis, by bailouts for bankers while foreclosures, bankruptcy, and personal debt soars.

Despite the anger, what I saw at Occupy Wall Street struck me as very different than the anger I've seen at other protests. It was anger unleashed as... vibrant and engaging discussion. That's a kind of protest theatre very different than marches or riots or plays. Yes, there were signs. Yes, Occupy Wall Street has slogans. Sure, there were strange and startling costumes.

But mostly, there were "average folks" -- people in business suits, tourists, students, retirees. Occupy Wall Street is comprised of people all ages, class backgrounds, ethnicities. The issues people were protesting seemed just as varied: corporate money in politics, student loan debt, police brutality.

That diversity has led some observers to criticize Occupy Wall Street and say that it's demands are unclear, it's efforts unfocused. But I think that that diversity is actually a strength. I think there is great power in people from different backgrounds, with different "beefs" to come together.

Occupy Wall Street is by no means the first time that's happened. I remember distinctly being struck by that same diversity -- in people and in issues -- at the anti-WTO protest in Seattle in 1999. As one account from the event described it:

"There were small farmers from Korea, human rights advocates from Burma and Columbia [sic], California farmworkers, 300 costumed sea turtles, Chinese Falun Gong practitioners, several hundred nurses from Canada, Oregon fisherman. . . . The Sierra Club's giant green banner �Make Trade Clean, Green, and Fair' was almost lost amidst large union banners, and signs promoting the Green Party, the New Party, the Labor Party, the Communist Party and Free Mumia. Earth Island Institute had a huge inflated sea turtle, and Greenpeace had a 50 foot long green condom, advocating �safe trade.'"

The word traditionally used to describe this is "solidarity," but in a paper I wrote about narrative, performance and protest (PDF), I argued that

"This 'solidarity' is political unity and accord, but it is also a manifestation of Victor Turner's notion of 'communitas.' In the ritualized and transformative performance of protest, the participants experience a reduction in difference (both social and ideological), and an enhanced sense of community. Kershaw posits that protest can create radical liminality that moves beyond subversion and resistance; I want to propose a 'radical communitas' ?? the constitution of a coalition from diverse, even oppositional forces."

That's a lot of academic jargon in one paragraph, perhaps. (It was an academic paper, after all.) And as I watched those present at Occupy Wall Street interact, I felt confident that I had assessed all this correctly -- there's something about protesting together that can bring together this powerful coalition.

What's interesting to me is that when you "occupy" rather than just "protest," you extend and strengthen these sorts of temporal connections and coalitions. In my article, I argued that these relationships were extended via post-protest narratives (at the time, back in 1999, these occurred mailed by via email, listserves, and Indymedia.) But today, we have social media to spread "the word." We have Twitter. We have YouTube. The mainstream media's version of events may matter less. (Think about how the anti-WTO protests were portrayed, for example.) But just as importantly, the protesting that people are engaged in with Occupy Wall Street isn't "a day of action." That action is sustained.

Occupations are a different sort of protest theatre than marches or riots. Occupations stake a territorial claim (Wall Street is a highly symbolic one, clearly). They invite participation. They include the dialogue and discussion as part of the theatre itself; spectators become actors.

Ada Lovelace Day: Laura Blankenship

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:43:03 PDT

It's Ada Lovelace Day today, time to celebrate a woman in science, technology, engineering or mathematics who has inspired you. I've been stewing about who to write about for the past few days. I meet a lot of female engineers, scientists, technologists and mathematicians in my line of work -- but never enough. I'm sick of making jokes about there never being a line for the women's bathroom at tech events. It's just not funny.

I think there a lot of things we can do to get more women into tech, but I believe one of the keys is getting girls into tech. That means teachers and parents need to ignite, encourage and support girls' interests in technology, engineering, science and math.

That's just one of the reasons why Laura Blankenship inspires me. She's a mom and a teacher and the author of the Geeky Mom blog. It's through the blog that I originally "met" Laura -- a long long time ago when we were both English PhD students.

And no doubt, that Laura has a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition but is now a K-12 computer science teacher is a compelling story for me (the literature PhD drop-out now working as an education technology journalist). Although Laura did take a computer science class or two in college (and, okay, married an engineer), she isn't "formally trained" in programming. But she's built websites and programs, learning what she needs to know and driving her own education forward.

And now, in turn, teaching computer science to girls.

That takes a certain sensibility in and of itself -- one we need to cultivate in educators, not just in students. How do you get girls to join a robotics club, for example? Chances are, it might not be by building "kill-bots." It also takes skill -- and in the case of teaching technology, always learning new skills. I'm always impressed that Laura is taking on new challenges: whether it's learning new programming languages, brushing up on her math chops, or assigning herself tech projects that make her think through the kinds of assignments she's giving to her students. It takes a great deal of humility, I'd say too, to admit to students that you don't necessarily know the answer, the language, the script, the shortcut, but that you'll learn alongside them as you figure things out.

All this takes a hacker mentality that I think explodes how we traditionally think about STEM education. And I think we need more of that -- much, much more of that and a lot more teachers like Laura -- to, in turn, get more girls engaged in tech.

Here's to the crazy ones...

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:07:09 PDT

My first computer wasn't an Apple. It was a TI-99, and that was the machine on which I first learned BASIC. But I remember when my grandpa bought my brother and me an Apple IIe a few years later. I remember him -- an eighth grade drop-out himself -- marveling as my brother and I un-boxed and assembled it. My grandpa turned down our offer to explain to him what we were doing, insisting he was too old but muttering that this machine he'd brought into our house was magical, crazy, dangerous -- and it was "the future."

That's the thing about Apple products, and the thing about Steve Jobs too. Magical, crazy, dangerous, different.

Apple isn't merely technology as science and engineering; it's technology as art. It isn't simply technology as a productivity tool. It's technology as pleasure. It isn't simply about technology as information; it's about technology and learning. It isn't about technology as being the purview of boys in the basement (or in the garage); it's about technology that anyone -- grandparents and toddlers -- can use.

The only other time when I've cried like this over the death of someone who I've never met was was when Jim Henson died in 1990. Jim Henson helped shape my mind as a child; Steve Jobs, my mind as an adult. Once upon a time, I would've said that everything I needed to know, I learned on Sesame Street (or maybe the Muppet Show). And now I have to admit that everything I need to know, I find via my iPhone.

So "here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

Thank you for everything, Steve Jobs. You certainly changed my world.

The Best I Wrote (& Didn't Write) This Week

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 14:42:40 PDT

The Best I Wrote

Consumers are buying more and more e-books. But how will libraries move from print to digital? In a story for MindShift, I interview several librarians about the challenges school libraries face: School Libaries Struggle with E-Book Loans

The Best I Didn't Write

Taylor Branch's look at college athletics in the latest issue of The Atlantic is a must read. It's a lengthy piece, but a thorough one. This is an important issue, one of many that should make us question the value and the meaning of higher education: The Shame of College Sports

The Best I Wrote (& Didn't Write) This Week

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:03:37 PDT

I'm re-instituting what was once (and briefly) a regular series and weekend ritual for me here: going through the stories I wrote during the week and showcasing a few of my favorites. I also highlight the best stories that I didn't write.

The Best I Wrote

How can we help make municipal data open? Christopher Groskopf is engaged in a very cool project in a small town he's moving to: "Hack Tyler, Texas" I interviewed him for a story in O'Reilly Radar: The new guy wants to hack the city's data

How can we rethink accreditation? I interview Mozilla's Erin Knight about the Open Badges Project: Master a new skill? Here's your badge

Lots of interesting news this week regarding open content: JSTOR opened up more of its "Early Journal Content" to users. Michael Hart, founder of one of the most important open sources on the Web, Project Gutenberg, passed away. And in the midst of all that, I published a piece at Edutopia: Teaching copyright in an age of computers and mashups

The Best I Didn't Write

Nieman Lab's C. W. Anderson weighs in on the Techcrunch kerfuffle and the future of journalism: Information's Triumph? Three ways Techcrunch challenges ideas of journalism

Scott McLeod takes on a recent NYT article about education technology with a fabulous response to the notion that the way we judge whether or not kids are learning is via test scores: Schools, technology, test scores, and the New York Times

The edited version of Hacking the Academy was published this week. Hacking the Academy -- also known as "One Week, One Book" -- was created last year when some 200 authors contributed over 300 blog articles and Tweets to the project. The collection is well-worth reading, as are Dan Cohen's thoughts on its production: Some thoughts on the Hacking the Academy process and model

August is the Cruelest Month

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:15:06 PDT

T.S. Eliot was wrong. August, not April, may well be the cruelest month.

August marks the end of summer. August marks the new school year. It is -- the end of summer for those of us in the northern hemisphere -- a month of beginnings and endings.

I was born August 20, near the end of August. Just when my life began, summer ended. Growing up, there were a lot of August birthday parties that my best friends couldn't attend: family vacations and what have you. You see, during August, everyone crams in those last minute trips, forcing themselves to unwind, to relax -- if such things are possible -- to get away before the routine of autumn takes hold. August, even in its sunniest, always contains the calendrical pressures of returning back-to-work and back-to-school.

August seven years ago, back-to-school meant that my family would have health insurance again. I was a graduate student then, with a 9 month contract and no pay and no benefits over the summer months. August meant a paycheck and insurance -- and so back-to-school 2005, my then-husband Anthony could finally visit the doctor for some digestive issues that had been plaguing him all summer. He figured it was indigestion. The doctor recognized immediately: it was cancer.

Liver cancer, and then pancreatic cancer, and then lung cancer. And then 11 months later, Anthony died. August 29, 2005. Six years ago today. The same day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. His parents, I should note, but damn, I am skipping a lot of the story here, lived in Louisiana.

For me and for many many others who have felt the devastation that these storms bring, I will insist: August is the cruelest month.

In August 2005, 9 nine days before Anthony died, I turned 34. This year, I turned 40.

This year -- this month, of course -- our son Isaiah moved into his own place. He graduated from high school and turned 18 this June. A happier month, I should note, with gentler weather and a pearl gemstone.

Please -- let me make this really clear right now -- nobody needs to comment here by saying "I'm so sorry." We are born. We die. In August as in every single month of the year.

But for me, birth and death seem to revolve around August -- literally, figuratively.

A lot of things have occurred this month for me -- personally, professionally -- to mark both beginnings and endings. My son has moved out. I've got rid of almost all my possessions as I've prepared to live more nimbly and lightly, sure, but also to live on the road.

I'm striking out this month on my own in a lot of ways as an ed-tech journalist, having left ReadWriteWeb at the end of July. I watch my son, striking out on his own and wishing that he had the same confidence and clarity. But it's up to him now to learn. Ah, the cruelty of August.

Despite a lifetime of parenting him, I recognize so powerfully now the millions of ways in which I've failed to prepare him for what's next even though it's felt for the last seven years at least, that he knows too much about life and death already. But now, when it comes to the minutiae of adulthood, damn, I could fill notebooks full of tips and pointers and instructions. And even though, as I said, I got rid of almost every possession, including a massive book collection, I went through each title with care before I took it to the secondhand store, thinking specifically "should Isaiah read this." Needless to say, he now has a library that blends his own J.K. Rowling collection with a fair number of beat poets and the obligatory Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And that's all I can do now, I guess: point him to others, to elders and remind him that the world is cruel, sure, but you must move forward -- endings are beginnings and so it goes.

It's not always beautiful. It's rarely poetic. Sometimes endings feel like just that. The end. When there's a storm, sometimes there's a rainbow at the end. Fresh air and flowers unfolding and such. And sometimes, when there's a storm, there's just devastation -- you look around at what's left behind.

For me, this August marks an amazing transformation. It's an end, no doubt -- the end of having a kid at home, the end of living in Eugene permanently, the end of my fourth decade on this planet. I've had to sort through boxes and baggage and memories and fears this month. Cruel, but there you have it. Now both my son and me are on to see what next we can become...

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma � which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. -- Steve Jobs, 2005

Read, Written, Resigned

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 19:27:44 PDT

It was a little over a year ago when I left my job at the ed-tech non-profit ISTE to become a freelance writer. Lots of folks said I was crazy. But I worked my ass off, and I've been more successful at this than I could have dared imagine. I've written for a number of publications, including ReadWriteWeb; I've been quoted, cited, lauded, lambasted, shit-talked, Techmeme'd, retweeted with the best of 'em.

But now (go ahead, call me crazy again) I'm leaving ReadWriteWeb.

Writing for the blog has opened a lot of doors for me, and I'm thankful to Richard MacManus for offering a PhD Candidate (dropout) in Comparative Literature a chance to write about Web technology. (Although in some ways, wrapping your head around Derrida or MapReduce, it's the same damn mindfuck.)

During my stint at ReadWriteWeb, I've met amazing entrepreneurs; I've learned a lot about the tech world -- the technology, the business, and the business of tech blogging. Over the course of my time at the publication I've penned 1200 some-odd blog posts.

Among those posts, no doubt my favorite -- and my best -- have been the ones on educational technology. In fact, the first piece I wrote for ReadWriteWeb was on the 2010 National Educational Technology Plan. At the time I remember thinking, "I can't believe none of the other tech blogs have covered this story!"

What I learned -- and what I continue to be reminded of with unfortunate frequency: the tech blogosphere really doesn't notice education stories. Not really. Not unless teachers do something untoward on a blog. Not unless a tech CEO, past or present, makes a major education-oriented donation. Not unless there's an rumored iPhone 5 angle involved.

When it comes to education technology, I'm often told that it's just a "fringe" interest. It's just "my personal passion." It's actually a $88 billion a year industry... but hey, who's counting. It's something that impacts each and every one of us -- whether we have children in K-12 or in college or not. It's an area where there is a tremendous amount of innovation happening right now -- teachers, technology, startups, students. And it's an area that continues to be plagued with a number of political and structural problems. That means there are tons of great stories, and because this is the metric that seems to matter to some folks, it's an area that when I cover it, tends to get a lot of page-views.

As a technology journalist and -- as I say in my Twitter profile -- a recovering academic, I've tried to shed some light on the good and the bad in education technology: Web filtering, learning management systems, digital textbooks, educational apps, cellphones in the classroom, open educational resources, programming languages for kids.

It matters. It all matters. The stakes seem higher than ever -- with the explosion of consumer technology, with the gutting of education budgets, with the renewed interest in the part of the private companies and investors in the space.

Rest assured: I will continue to cover the education space. Hopefully now I can devote more energy to it, beefing up my writing at Hack Education. (I did recently hit Techmeme with a Hack Education post, and I was cited in Wired as "Hack Education's Audrey Watters.") You'll still find my education reporting at KQED's ed-tech blog MindShift and my tech coverage at O'Reilly Radar.

Tim O'Reilly once told me he saw O'Reilly as an education company. That's not really surprising. After all, how many of us have learned various programming languages and the like from O'Reilly books? And see, that's the thing: teaching and learning isn't something that just happens in the classroom. The Internet has torn down the walls of the classroom, whether teachers or ed-tech companies like it or not. Ed-tech needn't be the ghetto'd products that could never make it on the consumer market. And luddite educators just won't cut it any longer. With the explosion of information and knowledge and data and such, "education" plus "technology" is something that all of us -- technologists, writers, educators, students alike -- should take seriously.

Regardless -- and apologies for the digression. I didn't mean to write a rant, just a resignation notice -- as of the end of this week, you won't see my byline at ReadWriteWeb. Maybe there will be new publications where you'll find me. We'll see. Such is the life of the freelance writer. And so with that, it's back to the hustle to get my stories out there. Because there are a lot of important stories to tell and there couldn't be a more committed person to tell them.

Photo credits: Flickr user Simon G

Spotify: A Skeptic's Review

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:12:56 PDT

I haven't ever been that interested in music subscription or streaming services. My reasons are severalfold: I own an extensive music collection. I have what I can best describe as "eclectic" music tastes, and I like to support local bands -- both of which makes it hard to find an online service that can accommodate my tastes, my interests, my record collection. I like to make my own playlists, not listen to what the radio DJ or recommendation engine decrees is on the turntable next.

I had hoped that Apple could solve the streaming issue -- I say Apple here simply because as a Mac, iPhone and iPad user, that seems like the obvious company to do so for me. Due to the amount of music I own, there's no way to fit everything onto my mobile devices, and I've devised a fairly elaborate system of keeping the playlists I do put onto them fresh and full of favorites. Now, if I could have access to a streaming service comprised solely of all the songs I own, I'd probably be interested, but it looks like the new "iTunes in the Cloud" will store, but not stream, your record collection. Ah well. As I wrote in my review of Apple's recent music announcements at WWDC, "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

With all the hype around the European music subscription service Spotify, I decided to give it a try when it launched stateside this week. After all, as rest of that Rolling Stones lyric goes, "if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need."

Does Spotify Meet My Music Needs?

I recently sat down and calculated the amount of money I spend each month on new music, and it's at least $10. The $9.99 per month subscription to Spotify makes sense financially then. This premium version gives me access to the Spotify catalog for unlimited, high bit-rate streaming -- on my Mac and on my mobile devices, both on and offline. I can also, of course, play my own MP3s as well. I'm not crazy about the Spotify UI, but hey -- it's the listening, not the look that matters (maybe).

Spotify's catalog is fairly solid (particularly if you're interested in music from the major labels.) According to my RWW colleague Sarah Perez, iTunes has about 18 million songs in its catalog, with Spotify boasting around 15 million. That's well ahead of other comparable services, such as Rdio (8.5 million songs) and MOG (11 million). Overall, I've been pretty pleased with the selection on Spotify but I did notice some of the bands I like were missing from Spotify: Arcade Fire and Delta Spirit, to name two.

And that's typically the major argument against these sorts of services: if they don't have the music you want, then why bother?

Does Spotify Offer What I Want?

Will that $9.99 subscription meet my musical needs, or will I still find myself buying albums? I ask that question not just in terms of having choice but also of having control. And it's the latter that gives me the most pause.

I worry about vendor lock-in. See, I'm opposed to DRM in part for this very reason. I want to own MP3s -- files that work across music players -- not files in some proprietary format. I figure if I buy an album (or an e-book, but that's another story), it's mine. It's mine to listen to how and when and where I want. It's mine to share with friends.

I worry that, with Spotify, I'm trading control for convenience. I'm still reluctant to give up ownership of music because I'm not sure we really know the implications that come from only renting access to digital content, particularly since the record labels are utter bastards. What happens if contracts with the labels aren't renewed? What happens if Spotify goes out of business? The company, it's worth pointing out, is not yet profitable, and another RWW colleague of mine, John TItlow asks if its business model is even sustainable. If I decide to terminate my subscription, how do I get my music out? Oh sure, I haven't bought anything here. But I have created playlists; I've starred my favorites. Even those aren't really "mine," it seems, without a solid plan for data portability.

As it stands, I'll keep my Spotify subscription this month. And maybe I'll renew it. But I remain pretty skeptical that this is "the right answer" for music. Not yet, at least.

A Few Thoughts On Using Google Plus

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:39:55 PDT

I felt somewhat late to the plussing party as I was at ISTE 2011 when Google+ was launched on Tuesday. I got an early invite (Thanks, Marshall), but didn't even log in until my flight back to the west coast late Wednesday night (Thanks, in-air WiFi). (Sidenote: how bizarre that I feel like a late early adopter of G+ because I didn't check it out in the first 24 hours.) No doubt because I was headed back from a 22K educator event, my initial thoughts have been about how Google+ could work for teachers and students.

My first reaction: It has great potential. My worries: widespread adoption and Web filtering. You can read my RWW write-up here.

What I didn't really address in that piece were my trepidations about relocating my education-oriented and tech-oriented social networks elsewhere -- namely from Twitter to Google+. I follow hundreds of educators and techies on Twitter. I just rolled over my 5000th Twitter follower. Must I relocate that all to Google+?

Well, no. I needn't. New network means, well, new network. People will come to Google+ or they won't. I'll build a network there or I won't. I needn't replicate Twitter or Facebook or even my Gmail contacts list there. It's still early (it's still just a "field trial), and even though some of the louder voices in tech are full of high praise for the site, that doesn't mean it's going to necessarily be a hit.

But damn, I like it. I see how G+ could easily be a hit at last for a social effort from Google. It has offers a lot of things that I really like: a nice UI, granular controls for sharing, video chat, messaging, photos, and a notification system that, because I'm an avid user of Google's suite of tools (Gmail, Reader, Docs), is hard to ignore.

I'm intrigued by this new network, particularly in what it means in terms of sharing, and I'm already seeing some of the new and different ways -- as a family member, as a journalist, as an ed-techie, etc -- I'll be able to communicate by having a particular Circle as my interlocutors. Heck, I got my mom to join, as it's perfect for the sharing she already does via Picasa (She's not on Facebook).

It feels quite conversational on Google+ so far, but like I said, it's early. We haven't all hooked up auto-posting and moved along, continuing to push our updates primarily to Facebook and Twitter. And as it stands, I'd wager a good three-quarters of the posts on Google+ are about the service itself. (The rest is Sergey Brin's photos.)

Some random thoughts:

G+ versus Facebook. Facebook has already lost the battle for my time and interest. I rarely visit the site, and even less rarely share things there. I've tried to convince Facebook friends to check out Twitter, where up 'til the launch of Google+, I spent most of my social networking energies, but most of them have viewed Twitter with suspicion and hostility. And at this stage, I just don't feel like evangelizing Google+ (or Twitter, quite frankly. Don't get me started there) to that Facebook crowd. I've already moved my social efforts away from Facebook, with the knowledge that if I desperately need to know what's happening with the members of my high school graduating class, I know where I can find them.

Broadcasting: Sharing links is probably 85% of what I do on Twitter (most of it links to my writing), and I don't think -- for now -- that my behavior on Twitter will change. But I haven't decided yet what my broadcast strategy will be for Google+. I hated that sense with Buzz that everything there was simply an aggregation of things posted elsewhere. Will I post all my links to Google+? (I haven't so far.) Will I post them as public, or will I post them only to certain Circles? How will this targeted and limited method of sharing change how information is spread? (I ask that in terms of journalism and in terms of education.)

Sparks: So far, Sparks is the least fleshed out of Google+'s features. I haven't been terribly impressed with the content that it's uncovered for the few topics I've selected (education technology, e-books, libraries, and open source), but I haven't tried following the suggested topics like sports cars or recipes. Go figure. Sparks could be interesting (and ugh, that seems to be the gist of a lot of my review of G+ -- "the potential" -- ah, how it reminds me of my thoughts about Wave.)

Google Reader: And speaking of feeds, what will happen to Google Reader? Will I be able to easily share to Google+? I'd like that a lot, and I'd probably share that way before even Tweeting a link quite honestly. And again, I love the idea of being able to share with just certain folks (as those who follow me on Google Reader know, I share a lot of Star Wars stuff, something that I can now spare you from). Of course, Google Reader doesn't have so I'm curious to see how or if it's actually integrated into the G+ fold. [Insert "death of RSS" claim here]

+1 Button: I haven't added the +1 button to this blog and to Hack Education. I guess that's on the To-Do list now, even though I have serious button fatigue and even though I'm not clear where "plussing" will fit in -- as a social action or for social search.

The Intuitive Tablet: Android or iPad?

Fri, 13 May 2011 17:26:38 PDT

Part of the magic of the iPad, promises Steve Jobs, is the ability for any age group with any tech experience to pick up the device and quickly understand how to use it. There's something about the touchscreen, something about the swipe that is far more intuitive, he argues, than the keyboard or the mouse.

But is that just an iPad thing?

Me, I confess, I'm drawn to Apple devices. I want to like Google's Android devices -- "open" and all that -- but I just don't.

I have an iPhone and an Android phone. Such is the world of a technology journalist. Until quite recently, the latter piece of hardware was necessary as the AT&T iPhone was frequently utterly unusable in San Francisco, and I'd have to fire up the ol' Verizon Android in order to make a call (or, just as likely, check in on Foursquare). But even though it was often the only way for me to get a cellphone or 3G signal in the Bay Area (and for that I guess I'm supposed to be grateful), I curse the Android. I curse the hardware. I curse the OS. I curse the apps. It's all inferior and far less intuitive than the iPhone.

And it's not just me that feels that way. I can trot out any number of other examples of people who, just as Steve Jobs predicted, move effortlessly into the world of iOS device. Case in point: I spent last weekend up in Maine with my little brother and family. My brother had just bought himself an iPad, and I was fascinated to watch my nephew (4.5 years) and my niece (23 months) use the device. These are two children who live in a fairly non-consumer, non-tech world (my little brother's house is off the grid and there's no TV, for example) but who, within a week's time, had figured out how to manipulate the iPad -- swipe, select apps, open and close folders, adjust the volume, and -- with brand new apps that I showed them -- quickly understand "the rules" for how most apps function. I was pretty impressed, particularly when my nephew was able to offer running commentary about the apps designed to trick kids into making in-app purchases.

Intuitive, right? Easy for anyone to use.

That was what I grumbled on Tuesday night as I tried to boot up the new Android Galaxy tablet that I'd received at Google IO. Why, with the iPad, you simply plug the damn thing into iTunes and there you go (let's just pretend, shall we, that that's an option for everyone). My uptake on the Android tablet was slow -- me, a technology journalist and, I won't lie, someone really rooting for Google to make a good show of things in the mobile space. But I struggled to get logged into the device. I struggled to find and download the apps I wanted. And as I did so, I couldn't help but mutter that this was precisely the sort of thing that Steve Jobs would never tolerate and that allowed him to lay claim to the whole "iOS is intuitive" argument. Silly, frustrating Android -- yet again.

And so today, having returned home from my travels, I presented my teenage son with the choice: take my iPad or take my Android tablet. I don't need two tablets, after all. And he grabbed the Samsung Galaxy without hesitation. He has an Android phone already. He uses Google Docs at school. He has a Gmail account, while we still share an iTunes account for the household. For him, the Google-branded tablet made sense.

And for him, the device was intuitive. He quickly navigated to the Android Market. He downloaded the apps he wanted (first up: Facebook). He cursed his old Windows machine, and he cursed iTunes for not easily syncing his music to the new device (note: he did not curse Google). He pronounced that he's ditching his Windows desktop (although I will note here that he does love Xbox, so all is not lost with the youth, dear Microsoft). He said that he loves the new tablet, that he's never played with a piece of technology that was so easy to use.

He's never played with an iPad or an iPhone -- not really. But he probably won't now. He's found what's intuitive for him. For him, it's Android, even though for me, it's Apple.

Crossing the HuffPo Picket Line

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:08:47 PDT

As a strong supporter of workers' rights and workers' solidarity, I don't want to cross a picket line. So a call for a writers' strike against the Huffington Post, and now a lawsuit, put me in a difficult position as, from time to time, I do write for the publication. However, even prior to this latest legal hullaballo, I've thought a lot about whether I want to continue to do so, ever since HuffPo was acquired by AOL earlier this year.

My hesitation is not simply because the HuffPo doesn't pay its bloggers. HuffPo's strategy of aggregating and compressing others' content gives me pause as well. I mean, it's genius. A $300 million acquisition's worth of genius. But I do wonder about its implications on the economics of journalism and freelance writing. The potential "exploitation" here doesn't just include "workers" -- unpaid bloggers -- but other publications whose content is aggregated and reprinted on HuffPo.

This was all common practice prior to the acquisition, of course. But it's stuck in my craw more lately, now that HuffPo is part of AOL, a name that's still synonymous to me with an online world of dial-up conformity, walled off from the rest of the Internet. But hey, that's me. And let's not forget, AOL also owns Techcrunch, a blog with which one of my paid writing gigs competes.

Me & My False Consciousness

Even though all these things make me tend to say, "No, I won't write for Huffington Post anymore," I flinch at Jonathon Tasini's lawsuit against Arianna Huffington. I think it's ridiculous, even insulting. And it's dangerous. By that, I mean that in our current anti-union political climate, it's troubling to hear the rhetoric of the labor movement (and worse yet, slavery) applied to what seems to me a pretty ridiculous lawsuit. Yes, I've had blog posts published on the Huffington Post (actually, HuffPo has reprinted a few RWW pieces too), but I never worked for them. I never expected financial remuneration for the writing I did there.

I am a freelance writer, so of course I want to get paid for what I do. I do, with the publications with which I have contracts. But I never had a contract with HuffPo. When I posted there, it was sporadic. It was volunteer. When there's a contract between a writer and a publication, there are requirements about deadlines, post counts, word counts, assigned topics, quality, pay. When there's no contract, you post what you want, when you want.

There is no contract with HuffPo, other than the unwritten one that you contribute there for free in exchange for a wide distribution of your work. It sucks, I suppose, if you get neither the pay nor the fame and recognition. But you don't have to write there as a blogger (so, in my I'm-not-a-lawyer-legal opinion, you don't get to sue). Moreover, sometimes you don't get the choice about your work appearing there, if HuffPo reprints a piece you've written elsewhere (frustratingly, never with your name as the byline, but the name of the publication).

Pitching Stories, Weighing Publications

As a writer, I'm always working on a number of different stories, and as a freelance writer, I'm always weighing where to submit them. Sometimes -- topically, contractually -- it's obvious. But some stories aren't quite the right fit for any of the outlets that pay me; some stories I simply want to put on my own blog; and yes, in the past some stories have seemed like the right fit for HuffPo: I thought they deserved a larger platform than my blog, so I submitted them there.

I could shop these sorts of stories, I suppose. And as my career as a freelance writer develops (I've only been doing this for a year), I'm sure I'll have more opportunities to do precisely that. But right now, it's a lot easier to just post them on HuffPo (where it's worth noting that I do retain all rights to my work) and convince myself I'll be paid in page-views.

That's a trade-off I've been willing to make, for better or worse -- albeit not that often. After all, I'm pretty busy being paid to write.

This Is What Solidarity Looks Like?

Does that mean I fail to have solidarity with my fellow bloggers? That's a bitter pill for a rabble-rouser like me to swallow. But then again what do "writers as a class" (in the sense of a class action lawsuit, sure, but in the socio-economic sense too) look like nowadays anyways -- not just with HuffPo but with a myriad of other online publishing opportunities that undermine "the old masters" and give workers the power to control their own labor (and/or be exploited by "the new masters"?

In Which I Finally Add The Facebook "Like" Button To My Websites

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 11:41:06 PDT

I spent much of yesterday afternoon addressing my Facebook profile and making a "fan" page. That sounds terribly vain, I realize. It also sounds a little hypocritical since I've long been a critic of Facebook and have eschewed any sort of Facebook button or integration on any of my blogs.

But there are a couple of things that have made me reconsider, least of which being Facebook's recent push to get journalists to use its site as much as they do Twitter. While I can't quite see that happening -- Twitter is a crucial tool for the work I do in following and gathering news -- there's really no denying the power that Facebook has as a distribution network. As I try to build my freelance writing career, I'd be foolish to ignore it.

So I made a journalist page. You can like me (or not). If nothing else, it's a way to deal with Facebook friend requests from people who I don't really know. I don't want to ignore Facebook entirely, but as a public persona (eek) I think it's easier to interact with Facebook through a page rather than a profile. I must admit, my attention to the latter is sparse.

While I was dealing with my Facebook presence, I decided to go ahead and add the "Like" button to Hack Education. But if I was going to do that, I figured I might as well go "all in" and fully integrate Facebook's open graph protocol into my blog. Simple, right? Just insert some code into the WordPress header, single.php and functions.php files. Oh and create a Facebook application. Not so simple, frankly. Coding is frustrating.

I think I have it working now, all except it pulling in a thumbnail of an image from the blog post. (I have it pulling a static image of my awesome gargoyle logo instead).

I don't plan to push every story I write to Facebook (something I do with Twitter). But I'm going to try to keep the Audrey Watters / Journalist page up-to-date with some of best stories of the week. And similarly, I'll see how much I utilize the platform to broadcast stories from Hack Education. Really, I'm hoping that others on Facebook do the work for me, if that makes sense -- sharing my stuff but then finding where they can find my work (hint: not on Facebook. On the blogs for which I write).

The Best Stories I Wrote (And Didn't Write) This Week

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 22:30:20 PDT

My favorite (and most successful) story this week -- What Do Kids Say Is the Biggest Obstacle to Technology at School -- looked at the Speak Up 2010 survey, in which students did just that: had a chance to speak up about how technology is (and isn't) being used for teaching and learning at their schools. Their main beefs: cellphone bans and Internet filters.

I am a huge proponent of the mobile phone (and not the tablet) as the tech tool we need to emphasize. That survey seemed to indicate that parents agree, the vast majority saying they'd pay for a phone and a data plan for their kids if they could use them at school. Um, hello. That's parents saying they're willing to equip their kids with a pocket computer. Let's make that happen.

But instead we ban. We ban the cellphone, and we erect these walls around the Internet on school campuses. "For the sake of the children," of course.

No doubt, filters are a huge obstacle for teachers and students -- something we don't talk about nearly enough. ("We" -- whoever that is.) Well, I talked about it several times this week, in a follow-up story I wrote about filtering for NPR's MindShift blog and one that I contributed some reporting to.

As for the best stories I didn't write, well, tune in next week. I have several I'm working on -- for RWW, for MindShift, and now to the latest place where you'll be able to find my writing: O'Reilly Media's Radar blog.

Image credits: Flickr user vinod velayudhan

Erasing the National Writing Project

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 16:50:22 PDT

Sadly, I could write a rant a day for the next few weeks about what's getting an axe in the federal budget. It seems as though, rather than addressing what are the core issues of what's wrong with revenue and expenditure in this country (e.g. corporations pay no taxes, defense spending is ludicrous), we're chipping away at some of the lesser-known (but I'd argue, invaluable) programs that are supported by the federal government.

As a writer, I'd be remiss to not add my voice to those who are horrified that the National Writing Project has been defunded. Horrified, stunned, concerned, angered, disappointed, rankled -- ah, the verbs at my disposal. Thank you, literacy. Thank you, authors and educators who have helped me hone my craft.

On March 2, President Obama signed a bill that stripped the project of its federal funding (along with several other educational programs, including Reading is Fundamental), putting at jeopardy a program that provides professional development to educators at all grade levels -- from preschool to college -- and in all content areas. These educators in turn help millions of students in this country become better writers.

I taught writing (and by that, I mean Writing) for 2 years. I taught literature, film, and folklore for 5 (and by that, I mean writing). I worked as the University of Oregon's Literacy Initiative volunteer coordinator for 1 year (a project that supported community literacy). I invoke this background here because these sorts of efforts, not all clearly associated with the teaching of writing per se, coincide to a certain extend with the diverse practices that the National Writing Project supports.

The project addresses writing across the curriculum, across writing styles and forms, throughout our lives. And it helps teachers become better teachers of writing, and one of the most important ways it does this is by building a community of writers and teachers, engaged in a discussion of writing theory, research, and practice.

Writing isn't just about school essays. Writing isn't just about test scores. Strong writing skills are necessary to craft emails and resumes. The NWP understands that. After all, if you cannot write, you have no voice. If you have no voice, you have limited agency. Is that really the message this government wants to send?

The Best Stories I Wrote (And Didn't Write) This Week

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 22:13:39 PDT

The Best Stories I Wrote

I had the great pleasure of interviewing The Minecraft Teacher this week for a story for NPR's MindShift. As the moniker suggests, the Minecraft Teacher uses Minecraft in his elementary school classroom. He and his class have built some amazing worlds with an amazing game, one that encourages open-endedness and exploration.

The folks at Miami University Augmented Reality Research Group have built a prototype for a very cool augmented reality app that can help librarians with shelf-reading, identifying books that are misplaced on the shelf and pointing to the place where they belong. Here's my story at ReadWriteWeb.

The Best Stories I Didn't Write

My colleague Curt Hopkins was in charge of April Fools Day posts at RWW. "Chiliphone Changes Color of This One Button" is a work of art -- hilarious right up to the point where I spend a lot of time as a technology journalist having to pretend like a give a shit about just that sort of minutiae.

Over at Alas! A Blog, Mandolin tackles the Jacqueline Howett controversy. Howett was a self-published author to took it upon herself to "correct" reviewers who dared critique her use of language. Her meltdown was one of those Internet rubber-necking moments, where you just couldn't turn away. Mandolin takes issue with some of the ensuing debates about how "kids these days" just don't know grammar.

Photo credits: Flickr user Welcometoalville

I Went to Grad School for a PhD in Literature & All I Got is This Lousy Situationist App [Review]

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:52:05 PST

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth." -- Raoul Vaneigem

With all the sturm und drang about the Internet's potential for revolution and repression, I can't believe that the arrival in the iTunes store of the Situationist App has gone so unnoticed. Wait. Yes I can. I blame Charlie Sheen. Society of the spectacle and whatnot.

"Launch of the first anarchist iPhone app," read the subject line of the email pitch I received on Monday. Not surprisingly, that caught my attention.

But I opened the email and discovered that the app in question was a Situationist one. I had to chuckle, because even as a tech journalist, there's just no escaping that unfinished PhD. My French translation exam was pulled from La soci�t� du spectacle, and much of my work drew heavily on Situationist theory.

I knew it would be impossible for me to write an app review for ReadWriteWeb without delving into that theory and without sounding a tad screechy and pedantic.

So I did the next best thing as a recovering academic. I made snide comments to myself when the few blogs that did mention the app's release didn't talk at all about Situationism. They did not mention the spectacle, the d�tournement, the d�rive, or most pertinent perhaps to this new app, "the situation." There was no discussion of the "revolution of everyday life."

As I thought about such revolutions being spurred on by an iPhone app, I chuckled even more, terribly amused by my own little jokes about what Guy Debord's reaction would be to the whole thing. They're terrible jokes actually. Mean ones. Look what graduate school did to me.

The email pitch for the Situationist app described it as "more of a political satirical app" and only offers this for historical background: "It is named after the movement that sparked the May 68 Paris riots, the Situationist International, and is the brainchild of Benrik, artists and authors of the satirical bestseller 'This Book Will Change Your Life'."

That is the great revolutionary promise of the Situationist "situation" -- transforming your life. The app draws on the Situationist idea that the creation of liberatory situations can help free us -- even if just temporarily -- from (political, social, religious, capitalist) constraint. "Boredom," as the Situationist slogan goes, "is counter-revolutionary." Situations, on the other hand, are radical, radicalizing, revolutionary.

Cue: and now "there's an app for that."

The Situationist app is geo-based, alerting users when they're in the vicinity of one another and prompting them to interact in a random (but pre-selected) situation:

"Hug me for 5 seconds exactly." "Give me the money in your left pocket." "Tell me I'm beautiful." "Let me inspect the contents of your bag for bombs and such." "Ask me what I think of the war." "Help me rouse everyone around us into revolutionary fervour and storm the nearest TV station."

You can suggest additional situations, which are all moderated before being approved. And "you can of course report anything dodgy." Vive la... something.

It's not fair, I'll admit, to lambaste an iPhone app for failing to be revolutionary -- I mean, come on. It's an iPhone app ("revolutionary" would be HTML 5 for sure!). And the Situationists themselves fared little better when it came to overthrowing the system. "The Situationists disbanded prematurely," reads the iTunes description of the app. That's not a political condemnation on the part of the developers, but rather a lament as apparently Debord and the gang missed out on "the greatest opportunity to subvert daily life in a long while: the mobile phone."

RIP Situationism. Oh, and RIP Audrey's dissertation.

Image credits: "Angry Birdsky" by bortwein75

Got A Story For Me? Here's How To Get My Attention

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:57:58 PST

Like most folks, I suffer under the weight of an inbox that never empties. I'm not sure that tech journalists get more emails than any other professions do, but we seem to be a bunch of whiny bitches about it, and as folks who email us really do want something in return -- ya know, a story -- it makes sense, I guess, that we get to set some ground rules and offer some recommendations about what works and what doesn't work for getting our attention.

I Hate Email

I receive hundreds of emails a day, although admittedly I filter the ones that go to tips@readwriteweb.com directly into a folder that I sometimes glance at but more often simply mark all as read.

But even the messages addressed directly to me stack up. I'm not always fast to read them, and if it's not a conversation (in other words, if it's just a pitch), I'm even slower to respond.

Even though I tend to use my email inbox as a "to do" list, of sorts, sending me an email doesn't guarantee that you're "in." There are far better ways to catch my attention -- to send me a tip, to pitch me a story, to connect and communicate with me -- particularly if we have never spoken before. (Of course, if we have talked before and I've dropped the ball on a story, I'm sorry. You should pester me. Just not, maybe, via email.)

Alternatives to Email

Despite my loathing of email, I do spend my day tuned in to a multitude of other digital communications: RSS and Twitter primarily. And that's where I tend to get most of my story ideas. So blog and tweet -- that's your best bet for catching my attention.

Follow me on Twitter. Have an interesting bio -- particularly one that addresses my main interests and beats -- and I'll follow back. @ me, and you'll find I often respond.

CC me on a tweet, particularly one that links to a good blog post. I'm always adding new blogs to my feeds. Unlike my propensity to mark all read in email, I don't often do that in Google Reader. I'm more likely to give a cursory read to at an update to your blog (or better yet, save it to read in full later) than I am to glance at an email.

Use the contact forms here on this blog and on Hack Education. That shows me you've taken the 30 seconds or so that it takes to do a little bit more research about who I am (hopefully) than simply blasting out mass emails to every technology journalist in your Rolodex.

Know My Beat

I care deeply about education. If you are an ed-tech company, particularly a startup, I want to talk to you.

My background is in academia: politics, literature and folklore. So if you're working with e-readers, digital and cultural literacy, storytelling and/or social change, I'm interested in hearing about your projects.

I'm a big supporter of open source. I have a long history of activism and involvement in social justice movements. And I want to support women in technology and women entrepreneurs. Fall into one of those buckets, and hey, let's chat.

That isn't to say that if you don't fall into one of those topics that I don't care. But please, pay attention to what I cover, (or what ReadWriteWeb covers), and don't pitch me on stories that demonstrate you have no idea who I am or what I do. Don't think that because I'm a girl that I want to write about fashion. Check how many times I've written about dating apps or funny kitty videos. No really, go on. Check.

A Special Note to Teachers and Students and Political Activists

Contact me anytime.

My Contact Info

Twitter: @audreywatters Skype: audreywatters Gmail: audrey.watters@gmail.com Google Voice: 541.357.7007