The Internet Course

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Reverend

Is it really the beginning of week 3 of the semester already? Between a rough re-entry from Italy, a couple of snow days, catching up on my day job, and a stomach flu, the new course Paul Bond and I are teaching this semester has been woefully neglected on the bava. This post will try and remedy that.

Paul and I have teamed up again to teach the entry-level Computer Science course CPSC 104, also known as THE INTERNET COURSE. The course provides students with an overview of the history, technical infrastructure, and cultural implications of the internet as a communication revolution. Here is the catalog description:

A survey of the technology and issues underlying the use of the Internet for communication, resource discovery, research, and dissemination of information in multimedia formats. Topics include an introduction to Internet protocols, Internet history and development, electronic mail, use and functions of a Web browser, accessing Internet services and resources, using the Internet for research, Website design and implementation, and social, legal, and ethical issues related to using the Internet.

We are planning on covering all these topics and more, but we’ve decided to take a different approach. Rather than a predefined syllabus with a list of our handpicked readings, we’ve decided to take the first two weeks of class and have the students select the readings. What I love about this approach is that it challenges the popular idea that a course is defined by the pre-selected readings, resources, textbooks, etc. Is that really the case? What if a course were from the very beginning about students contributing to the discussion by critically selecting the sources that make-up the experience. That’s exactly what we’ve done thanks to Paul’s vision for the course. During week 1 we had the class consider how to vett resources with the help of the UMW Library’s CRAAP test video animated by the great Giulia Forsythe and narrated by UMW English professor Gary Richards. CRAAP is an acronym that provides some guidelines for selecting good sources on a topic: currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose.

After we discussed the basics of the CRAAP test in our second class, we broke the roadmap for the class up into eight topics:

  • where it comes from
  • how it works
  • creation/consumption
  • intellectual property/fair use
  • privacy/openness
  • digital identity
  • social/economic/cultural impacts
  • where it’s going

The rest of this class was spent brainstorming subtopics for each of the eight topics. This was an invigorating session because everyone was providing a wide range of solid subtopics that would help them get started on their research. By the end of the hour and fifteen minutes each student was assigned two topics for which they would need to find six readings (3 for each of their two topics) in a weeks time.

Paul came up with a pretty cool system for the submission of these readings so that we could vett them according to the guidelines of the CRAAP test. Paul setup a Google form for students to add their sources that you can see on the course site here. Once they submitted their readings, we color-coded them green, yellow, or red in the spreadsheet based on whether they are good to go (green), questionable (yellow), not acceptable (red). The students can get the feedback on the course site, and return to the library for more and better research if necessary. They need to have at least 3 green sources, and justify anything that is yellow. Paul lays out the system in far better detail in his post “Talking CRAAP.”

The final part of this process is that the students have to summarize the articles they found and tag them with the appropriate topic before publishing them to their blog. After that they will syndicate into the course site and we’ll have 140+ articles linked and summarized as by the beginnign of week 3. What’s more, the articles can be filtered by topic. Paul was inspired by an experiment Michael Wesch did back in 2009. Whereas  it reminds me of some of the work Michael Caulfield is doing currently with his Water106 idea around crowdsourced articles fed into a hub around a specific topic.

I’m really excited by this new approach. We’ll be playing with concept maps this coming week, and after that, for the next 6-8 weeks the students will form panels accordingly to their topics and discuss the readings they found on their topics as a way of interrogating the historical, technical, and cultural elements of THE INTERNET.

Posted in The Internet Course | Tagged | 8 Comments

Feeding Reddit

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Reverend

Screen Shot 2014-01-23 at 1.49.22 AMFollowing up on my last post, I actually was able to syndicate all the Reddit threads I have upvoted into a subsite of bavatuesdays: reddit.bavatuedays.com. I haven’t upvoted any comments just yet, so we’ll see if they come along as well. This was simple to do because Reddit provides an excellent guide to how feeds work on their site.You can pretty much get a feed for anything you append .rss to.

Screen Shot 2014-01-23 at 1.00.31 AM

As for your more personal information like threads and comments you’ve liked, disliked, hidden, etc., they have private RSS and JSON that you can access and feed out to another space, which is what I did. Dead simple.

Screen Shot 2014-01-23 at 1.00.07 AM

Now that I have aggregated my tumblr re-blogs, starred posts in my reader, and the threads I liked on Reddit, I’m ready to start imagining how to start mashing it all together so that it can be a constant stream of what I’m digging online.

Posted in Reddit, rss, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Sharing My Favorite RSS Feeds

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Reverend

I wrote about my foray into the self-hosted world of feed readers with Tiny Tiny RSS earlier this month, and I have to say it gave me some satisfaction to read that Martin Hawksey is giving this oepn source feedreader another spin. If it’s good enough for Martin, then who is the Bava to complain? Plus, it seems he’s already making the application better—power to the feed people!

I’ve been attending to my feeds pretty religiously since I setup my reader. I even started to work out a system for regularly starring articles I want to share and/or come back to later. This is very similar to how I use Tumblr, and all the posts I reblog on Tumblr are automatically syndicated into a subsite of bavatuesdays: tumblr.. I wrote about this setup a while back, and the reasoning behind it was to push all the posts on Tumblr back to my own site so I could archive them. Nothing too crazy.

Now that I have more than 230 starred posts (and I can forsee many more), I figured I should start doing something similar for these posts what I did for the Tumblr posts. Turns out it was easy enough to accomplish because Tiny Tiny RSS provides a feed for just about everything, including all my starred articles. I grabbed the feed (as demonstrated below) and pull it into a another subsite of bavatuesdays: favorites..

Screen Shot 2014-01-23 at 12.13.56 AM

Once you click the RSS icon you get a public feed for your starred articles anyone can see. I put this URL into FeedWordPress on favorites. and everything I star in the reader syndicates to a subsite of my blog.

Screen Shot 2014-01-23 at 12.11.35 AM

Now I wonder if I can do something similar with Reddit because that would be the holy trinity: feed reader, Tumblr, and Reddit.

This has got me thinking that I might need to consider how I want to start tracking and archiving my distributed work on the web a bit more. I’m using Tumblr and my feedreader to filter posts I want to share and/or save. I’m imagining this is how I’ll be using Reddit as well. What I would like to do is come up with a set of categories and labels that brings all of my favorites on these services into a common space on bavatuesdays, and from there I can both archive them as well as share them out. I’ll keep toying with the possibilities, but if nothing else it’s got me trying to seamlessly push everything I share on these networks back to my own site simulataneously. It’s how the web should work. Seamlessly archiving the stuff we do while out and about on our own home sites shouldn’t be extra work, it should be fluidly built into the process.

Update: One issue I discovered is that only 57 of the 230+ posts from my starred folder of the feedreader syndicated. I’ll have to see what’s up with that.

Posted in rss | Tagged | 13 Comments

Pigeons, Vaporettos, and Masks

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Reverend


My family and I spent close to four weeks in Italy over the Winter break. We go every two or three years to visit Antonella’s family and friends, and often remain in Trento for most of the trip. That was the case this time as well, but we did manage to take a few short trips to Verona, Trieste, Venice, and Milan. I have to say Trieste is a city ready to be re-discovered. It’s an absolutely gorgeous bordertown on a hill, overlooking the adriatic, and featuring some truly mindblowingly beautiful cafes.

Nonetheless, this short post is not about Trieste, but rather the city of water: Venice. went went theie on New Year’s Eve, and aalking out of the train station into Venice is probably one of my most memorable moments I’ve ever had while travelling. It’s like you’ve immediately entered another world—and it’s all right there immediately. I imagine it’s what someone must feel like coming out of Penn Station for the first time in New York City. We took a bunch of videos while in Venice, in fact I intentionally took more video than photos on this trip because I wanted the kids to actually hear and see themselves in these other places (as well as their relatives). So, below are a few videos I culled, there are scores more that I’ll put online sooner or later, and maybe I’ll even get to uploading some of the images to Flickr. I actually uploaded some of the images to my Flickr account, nothing like writing inspiring one to do!

Anyway, below are a few videos of of a few sights during the day-trip.

Psycho Pigeons in Venice
Piazza San Marco may be the most stunning square in Italy, but don;t let that fool you—it’s the pigeons that keep people coming back. The pigeons in this square are insane, they will land cover you like a swarm of bees if you have corn kernels in your hand, and it jsut turns out there are people there willing to sell them to your children for 2 Euro a handful as we soon learned.

Venice by Vaporetto
The gondola get all the attention for their iconic place in the city’s image, but the best and cheapest way to see Venice from the water is by water taxi (or vaporetti). It might seem excessive to may 7 euro for a water taxi ride, but it lasts for an hour and provides an awesome view of the city from the water. Below is a video of Piazza San Marco from the water, we caught the vaporetto right out of venice, and the view is awesome.

Eyes Wide Shut
Finally, we went looking for a venetian mask-making workshop for the kids and came across the mask shop that worked on the costume design for Stanley Kubrik’s Eyes Wide Shut. They had a bunch of wild steampunk masks in the window, and browsing the store was a lot of fun—they had some amazing designs.

Steampunk Masks

A look around the shop

Posted in family, fun, Italy, travel | Leave a comment

Reclaim Workshop

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Reverend

I was invited to give a talk at the Sloan-Consortium’s 7th Annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning. I’ll be talking about Domain of One’s Own, Reclaim Hosting, web thinking,  and some of the amazing possibilities we’re starting to see emerge as a result of the work we’ve done thus far. In fact, Jon Udell’s recent post about names and meaning when it comes to URLs ties nicely into the idea Martha Burtis had regarding naming your own domain as a metaphysical endeavor. This semester is going to be all Domain all the time, and for that I’m very excited. I’ll be giving a playful, experimental version of this talk in Atlanta for the Domain Incubator at Emory University in just over a week. And while the two presentations will be distinct talks, I have an idea of trying to incorporate revanchist 1980s NYC b-movie themes into both—but we’ll see if that works. Actually, it doesn’t really matter what I talk about because the real gold for the Domain Incubator conference, as Tim Owens just announced, will be the open and forkable documentation on Github that will narrate how the entire Domain of One’s Own project has been setup, run, and maintained.

Anyway, the good folks organizing the Sloan conference also gave me the opportunity to run a workshop. I jumped at the chance because I want to see if I can’t get a roomful of folks not only up and running on Reclaim Hosting , but also comfortable with manging their own slice of a web server and various applications in two or three hours. I think I can, and this workshop is going to be the test. Anyway, below is the description I submitted, and I would love any feedback. Would your sign-up for this workshop if you read the description? Does this sound like something a faculty member, technologist, or adminsitrator might even be interested in? I want to start getting at the idea that setting up your own domain and web host is not jsut abut a protfolio (though it’s that too) , but it’s a portal into a broader approach to thinking like the web at the personal, communal, and institution scale.

This workshop will provide attendees a focused session to get up and running with  your own domain name and web hosting account. By the end of this session you will have gotten the following:

  • Your own domain name (i.e. jimgroom.com)
  • Your own web hsoting account (with instruction of how to manage it)
  • Instructions for installing at least one open source application on your web server (such as WordPress, Omeka, etc.)
  • Instructions for publishing original content to your space.

Sounds crazy, right? But it’s not, taking control of your online presence and managing your own domain and web space has never been easier. The goal of this workshop is to provide faculty, technologists, and administrators a hands-on overview of how the web works from the inside-out. In a moment when everyone is talking about controlling your data, learning to code, and web literacy—a sandbox space like this is invaluable for taking the first steps in truly interrogating how to think like the web.

Posted in Domain of One's Own, presentations, reclaimopen | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

L.O.B.

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Reverend

Or, LEGIONS OF BOOM!

Why Boom? Well, because of hits like this by Seattle Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor:

Kam Chancellor hit in NFL Championshi

Yesterday Miles and I finally got to watch a couple of NFL playoff games. Miles has become a major Seahawks fan this year, and he finally got to donn his Russell Wilson jersey for the Conference Championship. It’s amazing how much he has learned about the game thanks to Phil Simms tutelage on Madden 25, but that’s a whole ‘nother post. The season was rudely interrupted in mid-December for us because we left for a month-long trip to Italy. Surprisingly the NFL is not really a thing there. They’ll catch up, they’re still figuring out the internet too 😉

Marshawn Lynch 40-yard Touchdown run

Marshawn Lynch 40-yard Touchdown run

The first game of the day, Bronocs/New England, was a sleeper, even though I love a good sad Brady game. Luckily, the Seahawks/49ers game was anything but. It was a classic defensive battle, and it was right down to the wire. What’s more, we both love Marshawn Lynch, so when he broke free for a  40-yard touchdown run late in the third quarter we went nuts.

GlaringHighlevelAsp

Richard Sherman’s tip to seal the win and a trip to the Super Bowl

The lynchpin and spokesman for the Legion of Doom, Richard Sherman, had himself quite a game. The self-acclaimed best cornerback in the league backed it up, and shut down whomever he faced. What’s more, he tipped a pass by Colin Kaepernick to Michael Crabtree in the endzone during the final seconds of the game that ensured the Seahawks a trip to the Super Bowl. It was an intense moment, as Crabtree’s reaction to Sherman after the play suggests. But to be fare, Sherman talks a lot of trash, so a pat on the ass must seem little consolation.

sherman1

Sherman approaches Crabtree after the win-sealing play

Did I mention Sherman talks a lot of trash?

Richard Sherman all choked up

Richard Sherman all choked up

But the best part of the game was Richard Sherman going ballistic in this post-game interview—the man is excited, and this isn’t your typical “I want to thank Jesus” interview as you’ll quickly discover.

What struck me is how the post-game interview was in dialogue with (or maybe even fueled by) the commercial he stars in for Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones that aired during the game. In the ad Sherman is being interviewed by the media which quickly turns on him with increasingly overt racist attacks—ending in “how do you feel about your reputation as a thug?” The link between Dre, the violent rap culture of LA in the 90s (Suge Knight anyone?), and Sherman himself growing up in Compton during that era is pretty powerful—even though they’re selling you headphones in the end. Maybe I am overreading, but the commerical seems to frame some of the larger issues that are gnawing away at the culture of the NFL around questions of violence, race, owoer, money, etc. I’m not going to try and make or take any trite or moral lessons from it because that’s above my blogging pay grade, but I do love football even more when it is forced, even for a second, to recognize it’s problematic place within the empire.

The other thing that was fun about this game is I was following it both on television and through Reddit. In fact, all the media in thsi post was discovered on Reddit. I’m meeting with a group of UMW Computer Science students sometime this week to explore a Reddit-inspired theme and/or plugin(s) for the work happening on UMW Domains. And while I’ve played around the edges of Reddit, I figured it was hightime to commit—and I was pretty blown away. As the game was happening the commentary, images, and GIFs were flowing like wine. It seemed like ds106 for everything 🙂

I started to realize how powerful community forums could be when framed for a critical mass of people, not unlike what Mike Caulfield has been talking about recently in regards to state-wide edtech stuff. I have to eat crow here a bit because I was of the mindset forums were dead, even though folks like Howard Rheingold have been arguing eloquently and intelligently for their role for a very long while. I am looking forward to playing with Reddit a lot more, because if this Fight Club video I found on the Movies sub-reddit featuring a digitally removed Tyler Durden yesterday is any indicator, those forum hills are filled with gold 🙂 Who knew? I guess millions and milliosn of people besides me

Posted in fun | Tagged , , , , , , | 16 Comments

The Highs and Lows of Swimwear

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Reverend
Image of Beach Policeman:1922

Image credit: Shorpy’s “Beach Policeman:1922”

This above image published on Shorpy’s archival photo blog back in 2007 just came across my radar thanks to UMW über-librarian Jack Bales. Below is the description:

June 30, 1922. Washington policeman Bill Norton measuring the distance between knee and suit at the Tidal Basin bathing beach after Col. Sherrill, Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds, issued an order that suits not be over six inches above the knee.

After a quick search I realized you can see a number of bathing suit arrests back in the day. While searching around a bit more I found this image of a bathing mask that’s nothing short of disturbing:

Full-Face-Swimming-Mask-1

Full Face Swimming Mask

This is the stuff of horror film legend! Who knew swimwwear had such a checkered and frightening past?

Posted in Archiving, fun, images | Leave a comment

Big Fan!

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Reverend

big_fan

One day I will get back to this blog, but in the meantime just remember I’m a BIG FAN of yours!

Posted in fun | Leave a comment

National Register Rap

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Reverend

Four Historic Preservation students at UMW created a rap video in which they outline how the National Register for Historic Places actually works. What’s more, they openly—albeit very politely—express a few frustrations with some of the beureacratic disconnects that seem to bog down the National Park Services administration of this process. This group project was part of the Survey and Preservation Planning capstone course taught by professor Andi Livi Smith. She blogged about the rap video yesterday, and explains how the video went viral: 

Yesterday the National Trust posted the video on their Facebook page, and then people started tweeting… By the end of the evening, I was forwarded an email that had been passed around from NPS staff, with this message, among others: “NPS loves it”. The comments on the NTHP Facebook post were also all enthusiastic. Many commended the video for being so informative. Quite a few alums of the program also showed some #UMW #HISP pride.

Not bad for a video for a class put up on the YouTubes 😉

For those in the UMW-know, there is a special guest appearance by legendary Historic Preservation professor Gary Stanton. He is definitely O.G. UMW Historic Pres. He’s a veritable fount of awesome, and few students who have had him will disagree. Earlier today he sent me an email noting how quickly the video got taken up on social media, pointing to an email chain of replies that made its rounds throughout the federal offices of note. He made the simple and powerful point that it would have been next to impossible for him to get the same message across to the administrative brass at the National Parks Service through traditional means. And he’s exactly right, and that’s seems to be at least part of what these four students are rapping about. UMW nerd rap #4life.

Gary Stanton Rap

On a more personal note, Gary will be retiring after next year. This is a sad reality I am gearing up for. I will sorely miss his presence at UMW when he does retire because he’s one-of-kind: his course sites are akin to national archives when it comes to resoures, his work with Fredericksburg’s local archival resources has been shamefully overlooked by the unviersity for years, his stories about all things American Folklore are amazing, and his dedication to the craft of teaching may be unparalled.

So losing someone like Gary is huge. But I think Gary would be the first to agree that much of the Jedi force he has brought to the department can also be found in Andi. She represents a very bright future for the department’s long tradition of excellence. I can’t help put compare the deep similarities of both Gary’s and Andi’s passion for what they do everyday. In fact, I’ve seen very few academic departments in my long life in higher education that are as congenial, dedicated, and alive with the force of awesome as UMW’s Historic Preservation—and I haven’t even mentioned Doug Sanford yet! So bravo to the students for making this video. Bravo to the Historic Preservation department that continues to cultivate a culture of excellence and fun simultaneosuly. And bravo to Andi Livi Smith who is jist on a sick professional tear that is so fun to be witnessing.

Posted in umw, video | 1 Comment

The Academic GIF

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Reverend

GIF from In the Mood for Love

I wrote several months ago about the experience of working alongside UMW’s Chinese History scholar Sue Fernsebner to start imagining how she might integrate animated GIFs into a curriculum centered around film analysis. I tongue-and-cheek referred to it as GIFiculum, or GIF as curriculum. Sue has been doing some serious work on this front, and she recently emailed me about how she will be re-structuring her Chinese History through Film course to make the GIF work central to the film analysis in the final paper. Framing it, to use Sue’s words, as “an exercise in visual and thematic analysis.” How cool is this?

A few of us from DTLT will be heading to her class around mid-semester to run a workshop for the students on creating GIFs. This is something Andy Rush and I did last semester and it was a blast. There will also be a GIF Awards ceremony the final week of the course to collectively analyze and discuss what makes an effective “visual and thematic analysis” in this medium.

What’s so cool about this for me is that all that play around the GIFs that was part of the ds106 open course/communty over the past few years could easily have been written off by faculty as a waste of time. So to see it being thoughtfully integrated into a history curriculum that reinforces some of the basic elements of visual literacy and reading media is awesome. This is exactly what we should be be doing as an intellectual community, and with faculty like Sue Fernsebner there’s no reason it can’t be a lot of fun! This is very good omen to start the Spring semester.

What’s more, given that Sue has an extremely popular Tumblr about Chinese Culture and History, I would imagine the next iteration of this course might be to open it up for broader feedback on students’ work as well as an invitation for GIF analysis from the web at large. This course would be a brilliant candidate for a ds106-like course hub that bleeds onto the web ins ome pwoerful ways. Who doesn’t like to watch, learn, and share about film?

FInally, this semester there are some excellent new films on the syllabus: Happy Together (1987), Devils on the Doorstep (2000), In the Mood for Love (2000). It should be an amazing class—Sue Fernsebner is the real deal Holyfield!

In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn’t want to share… you know what they did? They went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud. And leave the secret there forever.

 

Posted in dtlt, film, umw | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments