calebnavidson

And yet this can be such an isolated space. So few voices, and responses deferred in time, asynchronously.

Ah, I may be projecting my feelings about Kate onto this medium, more or less aptly.

More on images: this article on Flickr emphasizes gameplay in creative design. I had not thought of Flickr as a game or game-influenced before, but there's certainly a ludic component to it, now that I look at it from this new perspective.

I wonder what learning technologies would look like, designed from a game stance.

There were more computer problems than I had anticipated! I barely had time to finish working on that one faculty project. I hope that professor gets pedagogical mileage out of those images, especially when they are focusing on, up the projection.

That reminds me of my earlier post on Flickr. Unlike text, there is something immersive about richer media, like sound and video. Even images, though, have that power to allure, fascinate, even amaze.

I know Kate loves that Oscar Wilde novel about the haunted picture, which stores up the subject's accumulated horrors. I wonder how much the Gothic depends on these weird, focused, amazing images.

I now have a new computer. I have gone through three - three! - machines during this past week. Each one had decided to offer me chaos rather than a desktop. Whirling designs, clicking sounds, splashes of color... almost enough to make me switch. Almost.

And great. Now Kate's into spiritualism. This is worse!

I am joking about the last part.

Some readers have asked about the cryptic communications from Kate.
Here is one example, received from her email account.

Following up on my earlier post about Flickr and learning this service should engage visual learners especially. I can imagine assignments based on visual literacy and the composition of pictures. Faculty with a visual emphasis should feel comfortable presenting images as part of curriculum, and to use the full panoply of Flickr’s social tools – discussion hanging from each image, tags aggregated folksonomically to aid in concept surfacing and identification.

For general faculty and students (i.e., those with learning styles other than visual), I can see Flickr supporting visual literacy exercises, as well as all sorts of pictures which aid in visualizing content. Question: how easy is it to export image content with attendant tags and discussion to other formats, such as a zip folder?

I am fascinating by some of the possibilities involving recursion. For example, I could do a screen cap of a Flickr page in order to illustrate some principle of layout or interaction. Then upload that image to my Flickr account. Pictures within pictures, tales within tales.

It was chilling to see those words on my blog. My Livejournal had been invaded, with a dark splotch staining the space.

It is a form of impersonation. Someone else spoke with my voice, and placed their words alongside my face. My own speaking was still, overridden, silenced.

It was… asocial software, exacting pain precisely to the extent that the blog grounds my self and my connection with other people. The thing would not hurt so much if it had not been so good at getting me to feel.

But I do not want to know who did this. No. Stopping there keeps me from the abyss. Oh my Kate.

I will resume posting shortly.

After that strange, horrible post, I decided to step back from the blogosphere for a bit.

The hiatus is over.

What is this?!

What do you think of the various free email services currently available? I've been looking into Hotmai and Yahoo mail. Kate recommended Gmail to me, a while ago.

You are warned.

Cease aiding her.

Kate’s recent communications have become cryptic. Her website is very strange, consisting entirely of curious statements and, well, puzzles, for lack of a better term.
Kate Schedoni? are you reading this? please?
Additionally, the weird noises I noted earlier have returned. In my office, I hear sounds from the hallway. In contrast, the campus parking lot, always noisy, has become muted. I detect individual sounds, such as the click of metal on concrete, or the dripping of water (and it has not rained for days, curiously).

I wonder if publishing a LiveJournal makes one more likely to voice anxieties…

I have selected Flickr as a project to explore, following my previous note about social objects in education. Flickr is a fine example of social object networking, centering around photographs published, exchanged, commented upon, tagged, and syndicated. Under my impending consideration: the Flickr mechanism, various examples, and a search for educational instances.

It may be fruitful to approach blogs as networks of “social objects”. Social software connects individuals, but is sometimes anchored by objects of shared desire.

In teaching and learning, what are such objects? The curriculum is not, generally speaking, beyond (limited) faculty partisanship. Discussions are not objects themselves. So what would anchor social networking among students, teachers, and staff?

Perhaps I should look into some object-focused social software services to explore further, such as Flickr.

My apologies for that last post. I am quite fine. I thank you for the concern shown through blog comments and email. I was merely disturbed by noises in the hallway. Upon inspection, nothing was revealed.
Kate's flight has spooked me, to be honest.
…but I must confess to a case of the nerves. I could have sworn I heard muttering in the hallway, and multiple forms in the shadows. I did not smell rain.

I worry that Kate has gone too far. She usually contacts me after travel, but has not done so yet. How far has she voyaged? Maybe Kate is flying to southern Italy, or east to the Balkans.

Wait – who goes there? I will answer the door.

Looking at the Wikipedia, and reading Yochai Benkler’s paper on education and open source content, I am wondering if teachers are institutionally compelled to collaborate on microcontent. We edit the wikipedia, and can tweak documents. But it is harder for many academics to create larger works together.
I suspect this stems in part from the two cultures cultural divide. Scientists are predisposed to collaborative inquiry. Indeed, we can look at the early Royal Society, where a distributed network of interested parties developed many projects, ideas, and papers. Like a collective detective, these scientists identified and explored problems.

Kate, where are you going? I know your Gothic obsession could lead you to strange places. Transylvania, perhaps.

Based on that last picture you sent, your destination could be England, to explore ancient abbeys, a fortification, or perhaps a wuthering height.

I do not know what "ICED NOSH" refers to, however.

I have been reading the Radcliffe novel you gave me. If The Italian is supposedly "mother Radcliffe"'s most tightly plotted novel, I shudder to think about working my way through the evil schemes of Montoni. I do enjoy the comedy, though, as well as the superstition-mocking, and the very nicely portrayed villain. Very funny indeed, Kate! I hope your father was, ah, somewhat gentler.

I will follow your entreaties to learn more about Gothic literature. The things one does for friends...

After the last email from her, with the strange attachment, I have not heard from Katherine.

Furthermore, I can’t find Kate’s pages. I know how much they nean - meant? - to her. There is nothing on archive.org, either. What is she doing?

I have been rereading a provocative article by a leading intructional technology expert, where he calls for "Elearning 2.0". There is much to consider there, so I will note some starting points here.

First, Downes emphasizes networks over closed environments. Blog-allied technologies enable distributed learning, distributed conversations, discovery processes, and team-based composition.
This reminds me of open ecologies (perhaps linked to the information ecology concept?).
If this is correct, our academic pedagogies need to shift. Well, perhaps the humanities can learn from the sciences, where we have been working much more collaboratively for some time. i.e., co-authored articles are the norm, and lab work is not very individualistic.

Second, and speaking of sciences, what happens to peer review? I am not convinced that collective scrutiny and publication maintains the baseline of peer review's quality assurance. Wisdom can emerge from crowds, but if no crowd is summoned, the object remains unscrutinized, its quality isolated, a cipher.