Portal: Re-conceptualizing Virtual Space

Posted on February 19, 2007 by Reverend

All right, I’ll try and make this one quick. This Summer our student-aide and gaming extraordinaire, Joe McMahon, showed me a new game from the creators of Half-Life 2 called Portal, which is due out in Fall 2007. (Joe just recently started up his own blog titled Pedagaming -be sure to check it out.) The trailer for this game, which you can view below, promises something unique for the gaming experience. I’m not sure I can explain this adequately, so watch the trailer to get a demonstration.




What gets me so excited about this promised experience is that all my hard work to get orientated in virtual spaces over the years has to be re-thought, re-learned, and even more importantly re-conceptualized. We recently downloaded and set-up Doom and Quake Arena (see Joe’s post here) and I was struck by how familiar I was with the built environment of these games. When I first played games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D it took me forever to negotiate the various levels. In fact, these were the spaces in which I first learned to navigate a three-dimensional virtual world. Having played these games more recently, I find that 13 years later I am extremely well-trained to navigate these worlds adeptly. Enter the game Portal, it promises that I will once again have to re-conceptualize this virtual space in real and complex ways, and I am very, very excited about this prospect!

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Getting My Moose On: Blogs as a Web Publishing Framework

Posted on February 18, 2007 by Reverend

OK, so I am gonna have to earn my keep during my stay up North, for the folks of Northern Voice have been nothing but golden thus far. In particular, I want to give a gigantic shout out to Brian Lamb– who has bent over backwards to make sure that everything runs smoothly during my stay, as I am sure he is for the 250 other folks attending. He is redefining the limits of hospitality -and I will be sure to try and push those boundaries even further upon my arrival;) Thanks for everything, Brian!

So I finally got around to thinking about the Moose Camp and how I might be able to share some of the fun work we have been doing at UMW. So, I wrote up a rough proposal in the open NV wiki , that originally focused on WordPress as a Content Management System. About an hour after I posted this to the wiki Alan swept in and helped me re-frame the proposal by leaving key links to other blogs (not just WordPress) that have been re-purposed for various uses above and beyond the blog (I particularly like his More than Cat Diaries as well as the NMC Virtual Worlds site. So, an hour after posting my rough ideas I already have resources, and an ongoing collection of del.icio.us links via Alan. But that’s not it, soon after D’Arcy stops by and says the following:

Jim – I’d be happy to demo some Drupal stuff. Should we expand the title to not be so WP-centric? This ain’t your fathers blogging platform. 🙂

So not only have I been given key resources on the topic I proposed, but soon after that the CMS gauntlet is thrown at my feet. D’Arcy calls me out for being such a WordPress groupie, and promises to keep me honest. How cool is this? So, I go back to the wiki today -because that’s what I do now- and I see that Candace, who has proffered a topic on distinguishing between wikis, blogs and CMSs, has struck her proposal in order to integrate it more directly with this one. So, now there are four of us involved in thinking through blogs, wikis and CMSs more broadly than I originally imagined, while at the same time each of us can draw from the specifics of our own varied experiences with each of these tools. This is the promise of social networks in living color. Four people, separated by thousands of miles and a million and one other things to do, are cobbling together the framework for an informal presentation at an un-conference that is embedded in the very process that we are working through. Even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow (luckily there are no buses in Fredericksburg), I could still say that NV has lived up to its ideal of fostering the possibilities of these small, meaningful connections between people and ideas.

This brings me to my next point, I am a bit worried that my over zealousness about using WordPress as a CMS to re-frame teaching and learning may focus too much on the technicalities of WordPress. Originally, I thought it would be cool to create a WordPress Multi-User install, and have the participants work together to create their own website/youtube/flickr-like spaces using a few hacks, K2, and some widgets. But after reading a few comments on the wiki and looking at past NV conferences, I think the genius of this conference is its focus on the human, rather than the technical, element of blogging. It has already been humanized further by three people’ contributions that helped me re-think my insistence on a specific application or tool. I believe, for my part, I need to focus on what makes working through the particulars of WP or K2 of any value to the larger questions surrounding blogging. What does such a proposal offer the folks who will be participating? Is this an opportunity to re-think the limits and possibilities of the blog? Or, maybe it’s way to understand the human forces behind blogging as part of a larger, more powerful movement to re-define publishing more generally? Do we need to re-conceptualize blogs within a larger framework of individuals publishing within several mediums with overlapping modalities as key to tracing the radical changes in the realm of authorship and publishing we are witnessing all around us?

“Can I get a witness?!!”

What do you think about these questions? Too much? Too little? Just right? More importantly, what would you consider an essential part of the “human element” (sorry for this term) of thinking through wikis, blogs and CMSs? I really would like to know -for I don’t want to miss the forest for all the beautiful WordPress trees.

Posted in WordPress, wordpress multi-user | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Scrap: Making Propaganda Movies at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology

Posted on February 16, 2007 by Reverend

I was just talking with a colleague about the NMC’s Online Conference on Web Video, via Alan, and it reminded me of a quite cool project designed by Jim Spadacinni over at Ideum. The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology has a new virtual exhibit, the American Image, that features the work of John Collier Jr., the 1930s and 40s photographer. This very cool site not only uses a flickr mash-up to display the collection of Collier’s public domain images, but it also features a Propaganda Filmmaker. It’s amazing how quick and easy it has become for visitors to fashion their own video narratives by dragging and dropping some thumbnails. I contributed my own 2 cents, see the video below, and it took me all of about 5 minutes.




So, as we are currently thinking through a proposal for the NMC over here at UMW, we started to knock around the idea of how the very nature of composition across the disciplines might change in light of these new ways to construct video-based narratives without the overhead of Avid, Final Cut Pro, or some of the other professional video editing tools. And with the access to unbelievable footage via archive.org (and other resources), are we ready to start re-thinking the nature of composition on our campus? You can write papers, sure, but you can also author Vapers (or video papers) -tapping into another medium for creating meaning through formal elements such as juxtaposition, syntax, and style. Hmmmm, do we see a paper proposal (“Vapers: notes towards the future of interdisciplinary composition”) in all of this?

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Contemporary Etymologies: A Closer look at the Linguistic Derivation of the Internet Pipes

Posted on February 16, 2007 by Reverend

Given all the attention surrounding Yahoo Pipes, I took it upon myself to do a little research into the contemporary etymology of this idiomatic terminology for the internets. Now, regardless of whether you understand the internet as a series of pipes or tubes -both have one thing in common: plumbing. And, lo and behold, I found an early manuscript dating back to the mid-1980s that begins to shed some light on this fascinating linguistic marriage of the age-old water conduit and the relatively recent phenomenon of streaming, particularized data.

understanding_computer_tech

While pockets of humanity began to be placed in corporate cubicles, this process of alienation was further exacerbated by the arrival of inanimate boxes made of wires, circuits, and cords. These strange objects came with their own foreign language that forced this newly formed cubicle culture to quickly adopt an entirely new vocabulary. In order to make sense of these rapid changes, they drew upon more quotidian metaphors to make these outlandish machines seem more familiar. In fact, the image reproduced above is from a cubicle circa 1985 -clearly suggesting that as computers became increasingly more common in the workplace, a process of metaphorical translation from the unknown to the grossly familiar was already well underway.

Interestingly enough, one of the earliest instances of these vernacular re-naming rituals focuses upon the relationship between a computer and household plumbing. I would argue that such a discovery may help shed some light on the linguistic roots of our culture’s current dependence upon the plumbing metaphor to define and articulate the inner-workings of the vast, de-centralized network of computers that are talking to one another round the clock.

In an effort to raise awareness of these linguistic links, I would ask each of you to click on the image above and print out the high-resolution version. Then hang it up in your cubicle, thinking of it not only as legend for the struggles of the recent past -but also as a map for the future of the brave new world of the wide, wide web. Grounding our current conversations in a commonly accepted and sanitary vision for the future, is the key to coming to terms with that history that both defines and liberates us all.

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The digital five ring binder and much more

Posted on February 14, 2007 by Reverend

5ringAll right, I have to blog about this again because I really think we are there. It all may need a little fine-tuning but not that much. I have been talking about WordPress Multi-User and the ability to feed numerous student blogs into a class portal of sorts that serves as a feed aggregator for all the virtually distributed student work for a particular course. Well, I got all the RSS feeds for the students’s blogs working fine with the BDP RSS plugin. This plugin basically publishes the most recent posts from all of the distributed blogs to a more centralized WordPress page. I was even able to add a comprehensive list of class blogs -that also serves as a tool to scan the most recent posts for each student blog- using the Optimal plugin. (See the play-by-play hack for integrating these plugins into WPMU here.) Additionally, I used BDP RSS once again to collect all the RSS feeds for comments throughout the class blogs in order to display the most recent commenting activity on this RSS driven class portal. Here is an example of this in action. As you can see, both the aesthetic and the logic of the interface is replicating a blog, the only difference is that this blog has 20 to 30 distributed student authors whose work is feeding into a central space that makes reading, commenting and sharing ideas that much easier. So far, soooo good!

The final test was category feeds for each of the student blogs so that they could be using one blog for several courses by feeding their work out to the appropriate course portals. And…. it is a cinch! If each student creates and uses categories to organize each of the course blog posts, then they can simply use the appropriate category feeds to send them on their merry way. (This may prove a little trickier for comments, but I am working on that one.) In other words, let’s say Juana wants to feed out to Professor X’s Global History Course portal, all she has to do is set up a category for global history, distinct from her econ 101 category and Bio 200 category, and she’s all set. Her global hisotry posts will be accessible from that feed. If, for example, she was to name the category “global” the following URL would serve as the RSS feed in WPMU: http://blogs.umw.edu/juana/category/global/feed/

That’s it, all of her Global History posts would now be sent to the class portal, and the same would be true for the rest of the students in her class. Meanwhile, she has a centralized space for all of her courses that she can carry over, archive, share, etc. This pushes the possibilities of WordPress beyond any course specific structure allowing for tremendous potential outside of the traditional classroom as well. You can decorate with flickr, entertain with YouTube, and wow your friends and family with the latest plugins. You can use it to promote work you’re proud of and bury the work you are not -it is your space, you own it, you maintain it, and you can make it better. I think this is it, we have all been talking about these possibilities for some time and I really believe the are not only possible, but seconds away from being ready for a larger-scale pilot. The questions surrounding whether a blog or e-portfolio or LMS or this or that is the tool, or some combination thereof seems somewhat irrelevant to me these days. The blog can quickly and easily be a portfolio or a LMS or whatever, and, even better, it plays relatively well with forums and wikis too!

What would shore this up for me in terms of a Fall 2007 roll-out (and remember that I have no power so these ideas of grandeur are solely the opinions of a peon) is a centralized space that allows students to go to a page on WPMU and enter the appropriate RSS feed for each of their class portals (I’m thinking drop-down menu, one field for the feed, and see ya). As an administrator, I am already using BDP RSS to make this all happen and from what I can tell it shouldn’t be too difficult to protect this self-service page so that only instructors and students can access it. This would evenly distribute the work of collecting and managing all these feeds to each individual user. I really believe that this is eminently doable, I mean the RSS BDP code has already been written for WP, it just has to be modified and made semi-public so that we can scale it effectively. As Scarlet O’Hara is my witness, we’ll never go hungry again- -for we are all about to feed to heart’s content!

Posted in wordpress multi-user | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

My Bloody Valentine

Posted on February 13, 2007 by Reverend

Orlando Bloom Artwork via Netflix

I recently got a Netflix film packaged in what I thought was a cheesy Valentine’s day ad (see above image). I was partially right, it was cheesy a holiday-inspired ad, the only rub was that it was being passed off as art because it was created by the legendary Orlando Bloom, a.k.a. Legolas. All right, I don’t want to be overly critical because I’m no art critic -although I know when it sucks- and the donations are going to a good cause… yadda, yadda, yadda. But enough already with mainstream Hollywoood actors as psudeo-renaissance figures who can excel in any artistic medium. I mean come on, hasn’t the sad state of Hollywood already suffered enough from the disastrous trend that every celebrity who makes two or three relatively successful films has somehow earned the right to direct an “important” film? Enough already, please -you’re choking out any fragment of creativity that might be left in the aging dinosaur known as Hollywood.

Ok, now that I got that off my chest, here’s my little holiday themed nod to great art and two degress of separation…

One of my favorite low-budget, Canadian slasher films, My Bloody Valentine…

…inspires another My Bloody Valentine, one of the great bands of the 1980s and 90s, right up there with the Pixies.

(The above video feature’s My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” put to random road footage taken by AmpleWarning -a very cool homemade music video via YouTube)

Happy Valentine’s Day all you lovers!

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Notes Towards an Open Source University

Posted on February 12, 2007 by Reverend

Jerry over at Running with Scissors posted our ELI 2007 talk “Notes Towards an Open (Source) University” here. If nothing else, it may be an interesting case study of the orations of a lunatic versus those of a well-grounded, articulate instructional technology specialist.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

WPMU Hacks for BDP RSS, Optimal, & YouTube

Posted on February 12, 2007 by Reverend

In my previous post I failed to detail how I hacked WPMU in order to include BDP RSS & Optimal in a static page and embed YouTube videos in posts. Sorry for this oversight, below you will find the play-by-play (soon to be ported over to bavawiki).

Integrating BDP RSS & Optimal into a WP Page
In a one-off WP install this would not be a hack because you could use the Exec-PHP plug-in to quickly and easily execute the requisite PHP code for BDP RSS and Optimal in a page or post. However, WPMU intentionally disables the Exec-PHP plugin, effectively forbidding the administrator from executing PHP in pages and posts. Therefore, we have to do some minor surgery. The way I got the PHP to work in a static page is by inserting it into a custom page template (one of several ways I am sure, and not necessarily the prettiest). Here’s how:

  • To create a new page template, copy the code from the page.php file in your theme directory. (Note: I am using K2 -this may be slightly different for other themes -but the logic should be similar.) Copy the code into a blank document in your favorite text editor and include the following line of code at the very beginning of your new template:

    In the space that says “Name your template here” name the template. For example, “John Smith’s English 101”.

  • Once you have done this, find the following lines of code in the file:

    Most Recent Posts

    And copy the BDP RSS php code on the line after this code. It should look like this for the K2 theme:

    Most Recent Posts


    Presto, that should paste the BDP RSS feeds into the page content, just save the file with the name of your choice with a *.php extension and copy it into your current themes directory. You can the select it from the “Page-Template” drop-down menu in the right-hand sidebar when creating a new page.

    Please note that you have to customize your own BDP RSS settings according to your own output logic.

  • I chose to put the Optimal plugin code in the sidebar, but have enabled the sidebar widgets, I can’t really customize this space as I would like, namely only have the optimal plugin display. So, I further hacked this template to only put the PHP code for the optimal plugin in the sidebar. Replace the code in this template with the following code:

    List of Class Blogs with posts

    A couple of notes here, I am using blogbridge (thanks to Darcy) to publish the OPML file for each class.

    Please note, once again, that you are going to have to customize your own link and settings for the optimal plugin.

  • Finally, I understand that such a process may be a tad bit laborious for a large number of classes as it stands now. But this is a work-around until there is a safe, manageable way to execute PHP code with pages and posts in WPMU. Until then, think of this as a shortcut to keep the testing and experimenting real time.

Integrating YouTube into WPMU

  • This one’s a little shorter, this hack was offered by the user malandry on the WPMU forums here. Warning: there are some potential security risks for allowing embed tags in a post, so if you don’t control who is using your blogs to some degree, I would highly recommend not including the YouTube hack for WPMU.

May the force be with you, and have fun!

Posted in WordPress, wordpress multi-user | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

One Tool to Rule them All: the BLOG!

Posted on February 10, 2007 by Reverend

I was listening to Darcy Norman on PSU’s ETS Talk 16 (props to Cole Camplese and company), and something he said really struck home with me. To very loosely paraphrase Darcy: ed tech folks need to concentrate on providing concrete examples of how the fundamental Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs and wikis, can forge compelling online communities for teaching and learning. That’s it, Darcy! -relatively simple and all too often overlooked. When working with faculty we need to consider how far we have come with what most would agree is the driving logic behind this new wave of teaching and learning technology: blogs. How compelling have our experiments been? Can we scale them? Are they easy? Do they really enhance teaching and learning?

ELS BlogsAfter listening to these sage words, I re-visited a project I have been working on for the past three weeks or so with Gardner Campbell. I am going to scoop him just a little (I’ve been know!), but all for the greater good of humanity. Gardner and I had tested Lyceum last Summer in an attempt to integrate Multi-user blogging into a couple of courses. We had some success, but he left for the University of Richmond and I started experimenting with wordpress.com. Upon his return, he mentioned that he was interested in playing with WordPress Multi-User for a class or two, and with no further adieu it was setup and the experiment was re-kindled. We installed WPMU 1.0 for the English Linguistics and Speech department and created the ELS Blogs Multi-User space for the department as a test run. His Film/Text/Culture class has been the first to adopt the blogs and boy have they gone ballistic. Including YouTube videos, screen shots, deep and reflective examinations of the texts, and a larger community of sharing and thinking -kinda like the compelling examples Darcy mentions. And while ELS Blogs has not been opened up to the entire ELS department, students started creating blogs for other classes in the space, in particular independent studies -imagining no better space to track their independent work on a topic over the course of a semester. Then it hit me, this is it -between Gardner’s unbelievable work with his own class and the unsolicited initiative of a few students, the compelling examples for a larger infrastructure of departmental (or even university-wide) multi-user blogging spaces.

The trick has always been how do we organize the students personal blogs around courses? -for with this model the student is the primary unit of focus and the course a unifying secondary layer, the complete opposite of BlackBoard and their ilk. Well, after being inspired by Darcy’s comments I revisited the ELS Blogs space and slapped in two plugins I had already talked about on this blog, BDP RSS and Optimal, in order to feed the students’ blogs into a separate course space. You can see an example of these two plugins working to create a class portal of sorts feeding from WPMU here. Wham, bam, thank you WordPress!

The question then arises, can each student have this one blog space for several classes each semester and feed to different course receptacles using category feeds? I think it is possible, and that will be my next experiment. In fact, Gardner had already suggested to me in conversation that each student should have one blog that they use each semester (almost like a five-ring binder), wherein they feed their respective comments, thoughts and ideas for each course using agreed upon tags, or category feeds, or what have you. Well, with WordPress Multi-User and/or Lyceum we are there. And what I love about it all, is that it remains focused on the one fundamental tool: the blog. More particularly, this tool, as it is packaged by WordPress, is a cinch to use and can integrate all the other tools like podcasting and vodcasting seamlessly. I think we are coming real close to those concrete. compelling examples that Darcy mentions and, better yet, they are becoming increasingly more scalable every day.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

Ohhhhhhhhh Canada!

Posted on February 9, 2007 by Reverend

It’s been official for a couple of days now, I am going to Northern Voice. I have been relatively quiet because I have had to do some fancy footwork to make the arrangements, for I really didn’t believe my half-baked post would result in the fame and fortune I am now faced with. I’d like to thank all the kind folks at Northern Voice for taking my post in good fun and offering me an unbelievably cool opportunity. In particular, thanks go to Brian and Cyprien for encouraging me to apply. Also, thanks go to the folks at UMW, particularly Martha Burtis and Chip German, for aiding and abetting a known blogging outlaw. Seems like I won’t be sleeping in the MacKenzie brothers’ beer van after all! Although, even if I didn’t get all this support, I had another plan that I was dreaming up -take a look at the video below to see my inspiration.

Update: after reading this published post it sounds like I am recieving an academy award, I love how nuts I have become.
I am all fired up!

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