Technology and Culture

Culturecat.com and culturecat.org now point here! Ah, I'd been meaning to do that for some time. My new host has Fantastico, so pretty soon I'm going to install phpWiki, Moodle, and possibly WordPress. I'm curious about the Image Galleries and Project Management tools too. Got any recommendations?

I have to make a poster for a poster session at this conference at which I'm presenting. A couple of choices, then: Go to campus and use PhotoShop and/or PageMaker, or sit around the apartment and download and learn GIMP, which I'd been meaning to do anyway. Not the most intuitive program I've ever used. The main thing I need to know, which I haven't yet found in the documentation, is how to insert (or place) a smaller image into a larger image. Anyone know how?

Alas, it would have been faster to drive to campus.

Well, trying this again. Comments will be back on soon, but unfortunately, it's necessary that trackbacks must go for good. All the spam traffic was taking down the new server too. Sorry for the melodrama, but this was along the lines of having my mouth duct-taped shut.

Anyway, I'm more than happy to put in "trackbacks" manually. If you ever respond to one of my posts and normally would have sent a trackback, please email me instead with the URL to your post, and I'll put the link in myself.

I'm up and running with a new hosting service, so I'm hoping this $p@/\/\ thing won't be a problem anymore, thanks to this Rapid Reflex hookup. It's a pretty nice plan I have, the True MultiSite™ Plan. It's about the same amount I paid before.

Well, I'm back up from another attack, at least for the time being. Aargh, why me?

Via Infocult, the kickoff of Academic Commons, which, as a combination discussion forum/quarterly journal, looks to be a very valuable resource. From the first edition page:

Academic Commons (http://www.academiccommons.org) offers a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College (http://liberalarts.wabash.edu), Academic Commons publishes essays, reviews, interviews, showcases of innovative uses of technology, and vignettes that critically examine technology uses in the classroom. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. We want this site to advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources.

Academic Commons also provides a forum for academic technology projects and groups (the Developer's Kit) and a link to a new learning object referatory (LoLa). Our library archives all materials we have published and also provides links to allied organizations, mailing lists, blogs, and journals through a Professional Development Center.

The first issue of the quarterly looks very interesting. The pieces that pique my interest the most are these:

Technology & the Pseudo-Intimacy of the Classroom: an interview with University of Illinois-Chicago's Jerry Graff

http://academiccommons.org/commons/interview/graff

Graff's interest in "teaching the conflicts" as a way of rescuing higher education from itself has recently been replaced by a profound worry that higher ed is becoming increasingly irrelevant to American culture. We checked in to see what role Graff thinks technology might play in these unsettling times.

Copyright 101 by Richard Lanham, UCLA

http://academiccommons.org/commons/essay/lanham-copyright-101

The pervasiveness of digital media has so altered the nature of authorship and ownership that questions of intellectual property have become matters of core concern for our students and our contemporary culture. Lanham argues that these issues require an academic response, and that a basic course in copyright -- "Copyright 101" -- represents a first step in this process.

Cross-posted to Kairosnews and CCCC-IP.

There's a new double issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on "Online Communities" and "Computer-Mediated Collaborative Practices." Give it a read if you're interested in one or more of those topics. In the latter theme, there's an article on the use of IM in collaboration. I had hoped to see a case study of wiki use as well, but maybe no one submitted one. At least Wikipedia gets a mention in the introduction to the "Online Communities" theme.

You might have noticed that my site has been down. Well, I got another spam flood, and Open Source Host had to take down my site because it was bringing down the server, again. Apparently requiring people to register doesn't really make me immune to spam floods, as (if I understand correctly) it's the SQL queries that are the problem, even if the queries result in an "access denied," as these did. They might have to take down the site again, so please bear with me.

As an aside, I was checking out the Uncyclopedia today and thinking Jenny and Jeff would appreciate it (via Metafilter). Edited to add some of my favorite entries: Making up Oscar Wilde Quotes, Bacon fat, Baby, and You Have Two Cows. Oh, and one more: the Wikipedia entry. Hilarious.