The joke's on us

On these recent summer nights, our household has been arranging itself as follows: Noel and I in the living room, watching TV, working, knitting, and/or reading; Cady Gray in Archer's room, watching Twitch, playing Steam, chatting with friends online, drawing, roleplaying; and Archer in the front room, keeping up with his various YouTube-based "camps." Every once in awhile Archer will pop up from the couch and go running into his room to tell CG something, or come into the living room to tell us something -- he's had a thought about how Ten Words of Wisdom is working out, or has just learned an amusing fact on Numberphile.

Last night he jumped up, hustled down the hallway, burst into his room and said "Hello!" Except CG wasn't in his room. She was in the living room with us, talking about Romeo And/Or Juliet. All three of us watched and listened, bemused, as he ran past and shouted "Hello!" to an empty room. Then we burst into laughter.

Archer came in and stood in the doorway, smiling uncontrollably. We were laughing at his mistake, at something he had done that turned out to be funny. But -- and here's the important thing -- he wasn't angry or frustrated with us, or even embarrassed about the mistake. He was enjoying the fact that we found it amusing, because he found it amusing too. He grinned and commented happily on the error, recognizing that his assumption had gone hilariously awry. He knew we weren't laughing at him, even though, y'know, we were laughing at what he did. He was having as much fun as we were.

I looked at that smile and thought how remarkable it was. For a boy who had to consciously practice being aware of how others saw him, putting himself in their shoes, and tailoring his actions accordingly, it represented how very far he's come.

And those YouTube camps he watches hours upon end? They're part of it. He emulates the YouTubers who play gamemaster to their subscribers, creating "object shows" where cartoon icons like Golf Ball and Cat Bed compete in Survivor-like competitions, earning points and being eliminated. These channels don't just entertain him passively; he learns from them (and from the feedback they incorporate into the ongoing game) how to manage interactions. His earliest efforts were based on popular marble-race videos made using the software physics engine Algodoo, combined with animated Wacky Races-style cartoons like Battle for Dream Island. But at the same time as his Keynote animation skills develop, so do his interactive instincts, all propelled by his simultaneous interests in designing a good game and keeping his subscribers happy.

Just look at what's going on in his most recent camp, Battle for Regal Planet (here's a video from 10 months ago, and here's one from last week after an Undertale-inspired design reboot). He's even started narrating his TWOW-homage Realm of Fifty Characters, just like his hero carykh. Listen to how smooth and expressive that narration is. He writes it all out, but it's full of dramatic twists. He's clearly aware of his listeners and pitches his presentation to their expectations, needs, and entertainment.

Years ago as we were trying to imagine our #robotboy's future, I hoped that computer interaction, with its throttled stream of cues and information, would allow him to make progress in socialization. Today I'm amazed at how that has happened, in realms I never could have foreseen.

Replay ruins everything

At some point during almost every football game Noel and I watched this season, he had to endure the same rant from me. It's the replay rant. There are ancillary rants, but they are all related to the replay rant. I can sum it up with the title of this post, although of course there are so many nuances.

Here are some of the things replay has ruined:

1. Pace. It's very possible that replay is what prevented Oregon from competing in the national championship on Monday.
2. Refereeing. All calls are provisional now. I even heard the color announcer Monday night praising the referees for making a call precisely to provoke a review so they could see what really happened.
3. The rulebook. The infamous Calvin Johnson rule is only one example. Verities on which I have built my life -- the ground cannot cause a fumble, for instance -- are now subordinate to bizarre standards that stretch the definitions of "catch," "fumble," "possession," and even "move" into absurdity.
4. Touchdowns. Even though the new rules require players to "control the ball" all the way through their fall to the ground and beyond, the "break the plane" standard for touchdowns means that as soon as the ball pierces that barrier, nothing that happens thereafter matters. Players shove the ball toward the plane knowing that even if it leaves their hands, they still score.
5. Consequences. Coaches have challenges, which was supposed to keep the play moving on the field so that every incident wasn't litigated in replay. But now referees call for reviews much more often than coaches, and certain plays are automatically reviewed, so the coaches don't have to make those calculations about whether it's worth it to challenge.

Tennis is the only sport I know where replay -- in the form of the Cyclops -- has actually improved the game, helping the officials "get it right" without destroying the athletes' pacing and provoking an infinite regress of arguments. Baseball is moving in football's direction, even after only one season; the idea that a replay of a close play at first is more likely to yield the truth than the ump watching the foot and listening for the ball to hit the glove is a fantasy. And it's a dangerous one -- a fantasy that insists that higher frame rates and better definition and more detailed rules will result in more justice, when what it actually does is disintegrate the event under examination until it is completely lost.

If I ever teach that class on philosophy of sports again, I'm going to hold a class full of students hostage with that rant. I hope somebody in the league offices is wise and powerful enough to ski off this slippery slope before then.

One shivering step at a time

One of the great things about getting back into the semester routine is that my exercise and eating habits level out a bit. I'm making my first concerted effort to lose weight in many, many years, and I've been looking forward to the day when I could start counting on that two-mile walk every morning: taking CG to school, swinging back by the house to pick up my stuff, then heading to the office. It's a lot easier to get to my 10,000-step goal when I start every weekday that way.

So I watch the weather like a hawk, because storms or dangerous conditions can derail that exercise I count on. And dangerous conditions might be present tomorrow morning, with overnight temperatures forecast to go as low as 11 degrees. I'm going to have to make up those 6500 steps somewhere else tomorrow.

When I say that I'm making a concerted effort to lose weight, this is what I mean. For many years -- including here on this blog -- I've been following the No-S Diet. It certainly kept me from getting out of control. But it's a rule of thumb, a way to give yourself structure so you don't overdo it. It's not -- at least in the way I handled it -- a goal-based system that holds you accountable for results.

It's not like I haven't known I'm overweight. The Wii Fit Balance Board made sure of that, along with every BMI chart that got handed to me at an employee wellness meeting. I won't even mention the way the mirror disapproved. But the thing that made the consequences of that real to me were the cholesterol numbers that came back from a blood screening. Researching how to lower them, the first thing on every list was "lose weight." Time to get serious, then.

For me, having a plan and a program is fun. I love systems and collect them obsessively. Systems for time management, workflow, organization -- they energize me. Finding the best system is fun. Implementing it turns on my reflective and assessing capacities, keeping me alert and aware of my own reactions. Living within a system is soothing. At its best, an elegant, well-designed system delights me on a daily basis.

So of course I made my New Year's resolution into a system -- an ecosystem, really, with quantified-self tools old and new feeding into the plan. I was already using a Fitbit to set step and climbing goals for each day, Runkeeper to track walks and jogs, and Gym Hero to record strength training (uh oh, looks like that last one might be about to hit the skids -- hasn't been updated in 18 months). Years of reading about various diet schemes made it clear to me that the only thing that mattered was calories -- more out than in, the weight comes off. MyFitnessPal integrated with the tools I was already using, calculated a daily calorie allowance for me, and provided a food diary so I could keep myself within it. Noel, really rolling the dice but coming up a big winner, got me an Aria scale for Christmas. I couldn't even wait to start until after the holidays, so enticing was this system.

In some ways, the system provides a kind of satisfaction that makes it hard for me to feel deprived. Gamification really works on me. A badge, a smiley-face, a cheer from an online friend, keeping my graphs in the green -- those stupid rewards matter, for whatever reason. I dreaded getting serious about losing weight for years, and hoped futilely that by exercising more or cutting out dessert, it would be enough. I was afraid of feeling constantly deprived, constantly aware of what I wasn't getting to have or do -- a depressing prospect. But my dread was misplaced. It's not like that at all. And the realization that all I really have to do is keep going like I have been these last three weeks, and slowly but surely my goal will come into sight, a goal that once seemed unattainable without drastic measures -- well, that produces a kind of euphoria that even my most-loved foods would be hard-pressed to match.

New toys

I like my gadgets.  When I get a new one, I tend to obsess about it.  I want to play with it for hours at a time, find out all its secrets, put it through its paces.  It tends to invade my dreams; I fall asleep thinking about its shiny newness, imagining everything I could do with it, and slide imperceptibly into sleep without changing subjects.

Sometimes the gadgets arrive in bunches, though.  Right now my sewing machine is front and center in m consciousness.  I think about its mechanisms and possibilities in all my idle moments; I wish I could spend more time investigating how it works and enjoying its well-engineered beauty.  But today a new gadget came in the mail -- a digital camera.

My trusty Canon Powershot S400 (vintage 2004) seems to be about at the end of its useful life, after many years of wonderful service.  So when I got an e-mail from Canon offering a discount on refurbished newer models, I read a bunch of online reviews and made my choice -- an SD1200 IS.  Today it came, and it's so beautiful.  I thought my old Canon was small (and compared to the film cameras it replaced in my life, it was), but this one is slimmed down so far it's quite hard to believe.  I want to pop in a memory card and a battery pack and see what she can do.

Only a few problems with that scenario.  Battery needs to charge ... memory card hasn't yet been bought.  No time for photography until the weekend anyway.  The weekend when I'd also like to be sewing, an enterprise that will require more trips to the fabric store, research on the internet ... hm.  Maybe I can find a way to combine both gadgets in one gluttonous, self-indulgent Saturday afternoon.  If my memory card arrives in time.

Six times a year

I believe in the purpose-built device.  As opposed, you see, to the all-purpose device.  I find great pleasure and utility in having a Kindle that is built for reading.  Sure, I could read e-books on my phone or my computer screen, but that's not what those devices were built for, and so reading long passages on them has significant drawbacks.  If I value reading, then I don't want to struggle through the compromise it takes it read on a device that will present e-books, but not well.  I want a purpose-built device so that it disappears and doesn't constitute a barrier to my work.

For years now I've had a tablet PC at work.  I insist on it because there are six times a year, at minimum, that nothing other than tablet technology will do.  Those are the three student essays I typically need to grade every semester.  I want to receive the papers electronically and give them back electronically.  And although I could type up my comments or use Word's track-changes feature to interpose them, I find this process extremely clunky.  I just want to write on the page, cross out things, add things, bracket things, make marginal notes.  And so only a tablet will do.

I like my tablet PC (Lenovo's X series of ThinkPad tablets) just fine.  But my current X200 died for the second time today, the predictable victim of connections through the swiveling hinge.  I can always tell when I'm in trouble -- the swivel suddenly becomes difficult, and after pushing the screen into place, a few days later, the tablet pen won't move the cursor anymore.

So I took it to the help desk, and I expect to get it back with a new motherboard again in a few days.  But it's made me wonder whether the hybrid nature of the tablet PC (it's both a laptop and a tablet) makes it especially vulnerable to this problem -- and whether it is almost time to go with a new purpose-built device for this important task of grading essays in a natural, speedy, and paperless way.  I wonder whether it is time to get an iPad.

A few weeks ago I did some poking around to see if any teachers were grading papers on the iPad, and I saw that some people have cobbled together little ad hoc suites of apps that annotate PDFs or Pages documents.  I don't want to spend time inventing something, really.  I just want to grab a tablet and write on a paper that I can then send back to the student in a form they can read.

How about it, iPad owners and instructor or editor types?  Are you using the iPad to mark up text?  How do you do it, and do you think this use of the device is ready for prime time?

Mod Incons

A while back, Noel coined the phrase "modern inconvenience" to describe an exasperating occurrence inextricably connected to a technology or aspect of modern life unknown to our forebears.  And a few weeks ago, I wrote about the pleasures afforded by connecting Instapaper.com to my Kindle so that long essays found on the web could be transferred to a device on which they are readable and portable -- where I consume them on my terms.

There's one big modern inconvenience associated with this plan: sites that don't have a single-page option for viewing long pieces.  Without all the text on one page, Instapaper can't do its magic.

Now it's not like I'm asking for the world to change to fit the way I want to navigate it.  A single-page option, even if it's just a reduced-graphics print version, is pretty much standard issue for any magazine or newspaper that posts multi-page articles.  Which means that when there isn't one, I sit and fume for a second or two wondering why that site hasn't joined the rest of us in the 21st century.  Then I skip the article and resign myself to never reading it.

What's your modern inconvenience?

Keeping the conversation going

A movie nerd discussion group in which I've lurked for many, many years has started a conversation about changing formats. The intermittently active community interacts through the venerable medium of the listserv, also known as an e-mail list, a Yahoo! Group, and so forth. You're all familiar with them, I'm sure. To post a message, you send an e-mail to the group address, and the listserv program e-mails it to everyone in the group individually.

Way back in the early part of this decade, I gave a conference presentation about the relative merits of listservs ("push" technologies, so-called because the information is pushed into the e-mail inboxes of each user) and courseware sites ("pull" technologies, which rely on the inherent attractiveness or value of the information contained therein to draw users onto the site).

The advantages of listservs primarily lie in their convenience. The conversations come directly to you via e-mail, and you don't have to make any special effort to follow along. If you want to participate, it's as simple as replying to the e-mail.

But there are some hidden pitfalls. Members may post messages that others consider uninteresting or annoying -- and without leaving the group, there's no way to stop them from cluttering the inbox. Active conversations often get "out of sync," with members posting replies meant specifically for one or a few users, while cross-talk goes on under the same subject heading unrelated to that exchange. Although posting is easy, posting etiquette -- discouraging top-posts, judicious quoting, what counts as appropriate listserv fodder -- is correspondingly difficult to enforce.

Enter the forum, or bulletin board -- an online destination where discussions are threaded, recorded, and most importantly, ordered. Unlike the afterthought archives page of a listserv -- how could you expect anything else from a push technology? -- the pull technology of a forum means that the unit of conversation is the thread, not the post (or the e-mail). They're searchable, they're flexible, they're constructive at their best and contained at their worst, and several conversations can go on at once with people checking in only on those that interest them.

But they're inconvenient, because people have to change their behavior to use them. They have to go to the forum; they have to seek out the conversation. Now there are ways to get activity pushed to you -- most forums allow you to subscribe to an area or a thread to get notified of new posts; even better is a daily digest of new and most active threads, e-mailed to all users. But it's not the same as every message from every member of the group just dropping onto your desktop.

I happen to think that the benefits of the latter outweigh the convenience of the former. Yet I'm under no illusions about the drawbacks. I'm in favor of the move, especially since the group has been pretty dead for a long time. On a forum, the group will change. For better, for worse, who can say -- but it will be different because the communication medium will be different, just as a telephone conversation has different rhythms and nuances than a meeting in a diner.

Modern inconveniences

Noel wrote a blog post on the A.V. Club decrying an annoyance no futurist, no matter how visionary, could ever have foreseen: Shuffle fail. Specifically, this is when you hear "Abacab" on your iPod and realize that it's not shuffling but playing all your music in alphabetical order.

I frequently find myself drawing back from the edge of frustration by reminding myself that in an earlier era, I wouldn't have had the convenience that is now creating my anger by not working as planned. In this I attempt to follow the wisdom of Louis C.K.: It's going to space. Give it a second.

Here are my modern inconveniences. What are yours?

• Going to the washer to transfer its load to the dryer, only to find that I forgot to shut the lid and therefore the spin cycle didn't happen.
• Having to go inside of the gas station to pay because the credit card reader on the pump is out of order (or, heaven forbid, absent entirely).
• Not being able to connect to the hard drive attached to our wireless network.
• Local programs or events for which no information is available on the web.
• Yahoo! Shopping.
• Books with no "Look Inside" feature on Amazon. (Less annoying because of the novelty factor, but on the rise: Newly published books with no Kindle edition.)
• Songs for which the same incorrect lyrics are posted on every lyric site on the web.
• Convenience stores that aren't open seven days a week. (Similarly: Fast food outlets that are closed on holidays.)
• People with no Facebook profile picture, network, or location information, making them hard to eliminate when you're trying to find that one particular John Q. Smith you went to high school with.

A shift in perspective

Our perceptive local critic and professional associate Phillip Martin wrote a feature about a Kindle Amazon gave him for a ten-day trial. (Can't give you a link, unfortunately; it's behind a subscriber wall.) I read it with interest as a Kindle convert.

And what I found was that it's very hard to evaluate the impact a Kindle will have on your reading habits unless you become a Kindle user. Ten days isn't going to cut it, because in ten days you don't reshape your expectations and your behaviors. You don't download a month's or a year's worth of reading material, because you don't have a month or a year. You don't download any books at all that you have to pay for. You don't go to the trouble of grabbing free books as text files off Project Gutenberg and sending them to your Kindle's free conversion e-mail address. You don't do any of this because you've only got the thing for ten days. There's no sense making any investment at all -- in time or money -- to make the thing, you know, actually useful. There's no sense in putting more content on the machine than you could read in a few sittings.

So what you do is evaluate the interface. How does the text look? How do the controls work? How does the experience of using it feel?

Only you're not actually using it. You've got it at arm's length. You're not going to become a Kindle person -- you're keeping your journalistic objectivity. And I know how this sounds, but the Kindle can only be measured by how it changes you as a reader once you've begun using it for your reading.

I got a massive thousand-page book in the mail a few days ago. Over the next couple of weeks I plan to read it. But when I packed my briefcase this morning, struggling to turn that concrete block of a book in some direction so it would fit, I wished it were on my Kindle, right alongside the other book I need to read for next week. Why am I carrying huge tomes of information around as separate physical objects when their contents could so easily be combined with hundreds of others on one device?

I'm not really trying to heap scorn on those who "don't get it." Heck, I just joined the majority of people in the world by getting a cell phone; clearly I didn't get it for almost two decades. But I know that now that I have one, I'm going to have a different relationship to telephony, connectivity, and information than I did before. I couldn't know who that person would be by trying out a phone for ten days. Only by committing to become cellular-enabled Donna -- at least provisionally -- can I know whether that's a person I would want to be.

Joining the human race

I did it. And it wasn't as hard as I thought it might be.

Today at lunch I was confessing to a staff member that I'd made it my goal to get myself a cell phone by the end of the summer. After we got back to the office, I decided -- why wait? I know where the AT&T store is. I'm going to lick this sucker once and for all.

I walked in with some trepidation. Anything where credit checks and two-year contracts are involved seems pretty complicated to me. But Kari walked me through it with ease. She got me the 15% discount and waived activation fee to which holders of my university's ID are entitled. She asked the right questions and was patient when my cell phone virginity got in the way.

In thirty minutes I walked out with ... a SIM card. And a cell phone number. The phone itself isn't kept in stock at the store, but ordered on a per-case basis. Mine ought to be here next week, if all goes well.



I know people who get iPhones tend to get excited. (A number of the people I follow on Twitter have posted a series of such comments as "Tracking number says it will be delivered today!" and the like.) And they're people who already have cell phones. For me, this is like a leap into another century -- a futuristic world where people have wristwatch communicators and carry movie screens in their pockets.

I'm glad I have a week to get used to the idea. Although I don't know if you can ever really prepare yourself to become a whole new person. A cell phone person.

Bandwagon's in the garage, but I'm finally on it

I twitter and plurk, Facebook and Skype, blog and ravel. But there's one piece of communications technology I haven't yet adopted.

The cell phone.

Fifteen years ago, when cell phones were first becoming everyday accessories (rather than accoutrements for the rich who wanted to be able to make telephone calls from their cars or construction sites), I decided that I didn't care to be available twenty-four hours a day, at the beck and call of anyone with my number. It was the age of Caller ID and e-mail. We got to decide who we communicated with, and when. Carrying a phone around seemed like a step backwards in that trend toward control.

I still feel that way, actually. I'm annoyed enough by students' phones going off in class or in conferences that I'm reminded all over again why I don't want to be a slave to the ring. It amazes me when I'm in a meeting and the convener's phone chimes. Invariably he looks guilty and apologizes while he checks it. Ten seconds later, as the night follows the day, the voicemail notification blurps, and he apologizes again. Why would I want to set myself up for that kind of embarassment and exasperate those around me, when I could just check my home or office voicemail as soon as I return?

We do have a mobile phone -- a prepaid one that we turn on only when we leave the kids with a sitter, or when we're traveling. For weeks at a time it goes untouched. We got it when Archer was born, for emergencies only, and that's the way it's remained. I love paying for more minutes once a year to keep the number rather than paying every month on a contract.

But my days of bopping around town untethered to the telephone system are numbered. I'm second in command at my unit. I need to be reachable when I'm at lunch or at the library or walking across campus. Intellectually I've known this for a while -- at least a couple of times a year when I help organize big events and everyone exchanges numbers like jewel thieves synchronize their watches -- but it wasn't brought home to me until last month. When our seniors give their presentations, I'm typically not scheduled to preside over one of the six or seven rooms where they happen throughout the day; my boss and I are free to float around and visit multiple rooms to hear a variety of students. Nobody told me any different this spring, so I just checked the schedules to make a list of the presentations I wanted or needed to attend. As they began, I was over at Starbucks getting a drink and doing some grading. As I made my way back toward the office about twenty minutes later, my boss intercepted me on the lawn and told me I was supposed to be moderating one of the rooms. Fortunately I only missed one presentation, but what I suddenly realized was what would have happened to 99% of people in that situation. As soon as somebody was noticed to be missing, she'd be called on her cell phone.

Only I don't carry a cell phone. Nobody knew where I was. My boss had to go looking for me on foot, hanging around our building until he spotted me coming.

There was no excuse for not being reachable, I realized. No excuse for being off the grid when I'm responsible for doing my part to keep the place running. I can't let my decades-old preferences inconvenience others who reasonably expect everyone to have a cell phone.

So before the summer's out, I'm biting the bullet. Now if I'm going to carry a cell phone, I'm going to carry a Cell Phone -- an iPhone. The TracFone is going to die a natural death, and we're leaping into the smartphone world with both feet. My timing is good, since iPhone prices just went down. But lemme tell ya, the AT&T contracts just make my blood run cold. A c-note a month or more for the privilege of being in touch? A two-year contract? It's exactly these kind of service plans, where you get locked into a money drain month after month after month, that made me feel so superior about my prepaid phone. I hate monthly bills, I hate debt, I hate not having control and feeling like my bank account's being siphoned regardless of whether I'm getting what I want or need.

And I can't quite imagine how I'll get acclimated to the cell phone world. I'd like to get the cheapest calling plan available and add unlimited texting, so I can do as much communicating as possible that way rather than by voice. But ... I've never texted. Would people text me? Whom would I text?

That's where I'm at, and I could sure use some advice. I'm confessing this, my most galling sin of technological omission, to you my readers. Have mercy, and give me the benefit of your experience, please.

Highway to the sky

After reading a CoolTools review of the Garmin Nuvi 350 -- "As of now, the Garmin Nuvi 350 is the starter car nav device to get" -- I decided it was finally time to join the GPS revolution. Previously our technophiliac household batted for the Luddites in two major areas: satellite car navigation, and cell phones. Now we're just holding out on the cell phone, and as of a few days ago, we were wavering. (Our cell is a prepaid TracFone that stays in its charger unless there's a babysitter with the kids or one of us is on a trip.)

We got the Nuvi for Christmas, but it's a measure how rarely we go anywhere other than our extremely familiar small town that we didn't install it for a few months thereafter. A few times we've used it to navigate in Little Rock; Noel used it to locate ATMs and his parents' new house on his trip to Nashville earlier this week; and today I turned it on to get guidance to my boss's house, where we were holding an administrative retreat.

I've been to that house, which is in a neighboring town some 20 miles from here, a few times since my boss built a house and moved there about 18 months ago. But it's still unfamiliar territory, nestled in a maze of subdivision roads in a hilly, confusing, still-expanding development. For a moment after I turned it on and entered the address, I was concerned; the only "Seminole" that came up was "Seminole Cir," and my boss (and Google Maps) gives his street as "Seminole Lane." You know how subdivisions are -- there could be both a Seminole Circle and Lane, unrelated to each other, somewhere within that complex of neighborhoods.

But I decided to trust the nav system at least until it got me to my boss's town, figuring that I would know if it recommended a wrong turn off the main drag since I could easily remember that far. I also sneaked a peek at Google Maps directions before I left, so when the Nuvi told me to turn on Odom South, I knew that the two were in agreement. And to my surprise, the robotic female voice guided me straight to Rick's house without missing a beat. Turns out its brain is smarter than the mapmakers who can't decide whether his street is a Circle or a Lane.

Late adopter that I am, I'm still astonished that my car is connected to a satellite uplink. Twenty years ago, surely the idea that satellite triangulation of location would someday be accurate enough and consumer-friendly enough to know whether your car is on the road or in the parking lot was hard to fathom. So much technological capacity that would once have been fiercely guarded and restricted to military applications has become available for everyday use. The next step, of course, is for us to get so used to this stuff that we lose patience when it's not available or doesn't work. For that, we need Louis CK's words of wisdom: It's going to space. Give it a second.

The revolution is not a tea party

I've talked with a number of colleagues and students about the frustration I expressed in this post a few days ago. And a couple of cogent thoughts -- okay, one metaphor and one cogent thought -- have emerged from those discussions.

• The way my students use language in their everyday writing for me is natural, unstudied, instinctual. It's the language they learned at their mothers' breasts. So why does it become like material translated from English to Japanese to Swedish back to English when they write in the context of a formal paper? I think it's like social behavior. We all learn very early how to act at the dinner table. In a few years, we don't have to think about it anymore -- it comes naturally. But imagine that you get invited to a tea party with the Queen of England. In your anxiety over the alien formality of that occasion, it's not just the new points of etiquette that you don't know -- it's the stuff you adhere to purely by reflex in other situations. You don't just agonize over bowing and using proper address; you also stumble over taking a cake from the plate or stirring sugar into your teacup. The distance you perceive between the everyday manners that suffice in normal life, and the extreme and unknown points of behavior necessary for tea with the Queen, make you forget how to act according to those everyday manners. You also forget to treat the occasion as essential communal. Instead, you anxiously place it in the category of ritual. The focus becomes scrupulous behavior rather than making a connection with another human being. In the same way, faced with the formal academic essay, students become so paralyzed by the mysterious and exacting nature of the assignment -- as unconnected to the writing they do so naturally every day as the royal audience is to coffee with friends -- that they forget how to write a simple sentence. They also forget to treat the occasion as essentially communicative. Instead, they see it as a hurdle to be passed, a hole to be filled, a minefield of potential errors to be tiptoed through.
  


• Why is it, then, that the twice-weekly journals I get from those same students contain such good writing? It occurs to me that the medium in which they are writing may provide a clue. When they write journals to me, they go to an online community and start a new thread. The entire apparatus of the technology is geared toward conversation. No one posts on such a system without wanting to be read, expecting to be read. The structural orientation of the medium is toward communication; the reader is inevitably anticipated in the writing process. What about the medium of the word processor? I contend that the message of this technology is entirely different. For the novice writer, the reader is not felt to be present. The blank page invites monologue, not dialogue. I know that seasoned writers don't experience it this way, but I'm not talking about seasoned writers. I'm talking about young people who write constantly, but almost always in those media of dialogue and conversation. How would such a person respond to the blank page and the blinking cursor? Would they intuitively write to communicate? Does the technology invite such an approach -- does it structurally encourage it? Or does it create the hole to be filled, the echo chamber of one's own voice, the absence of anyone else -- of an audience -- whose comprehension needs to be taken into account?
  

Plurking, Twittering, Gmail chatting, Facebooking, iChatting

Like most of us, the places where I'm supposed to update my status have proliferated. I can keep my tweets and Facebook statuses synced, and supposedly the same thing is available through the Plurk Facebook app, though I've never been able to get that to load.

But what I really want is a Plurk-like timeline journal where I can keep both public and private updates at once. You see, I'm on Plurk because I'm on some projects where the team uses it to keep in touch. I see the potential in the application to be something I've wanted for a long time -- a desk journal of sorts where I can jot down decisions made, people met with, outcomes of conversations -- anything I might need to look up later when people ask "what happened with that? when? who was involved?" Plurk's searchability and automatic timestreaming make it a natural for that.

However, it looks like I don't have the option to plurk something only to myself. I can either make all my plurks personal (nobody else ever sees anything I post, which removes the functionality of communicating with a team), or I can make them all available to the group (my friends or the world at large). There are "private" plurks, but they must be shared with at least one person or group. I tried to create an empty group, but Plurk wouldn't allow it. I tried to share the private plurk with my own username, but the search for me came up empty.

It seems the only way for me to have it all with Plurk is to create a second Plurk identity. I can then share my desk-diary plurks with that alter ego. The only reason I hesitate to do this is its inelegance.

Backpack now has a journal feature which seems to be more what I'm looking for (although I'd miss the wonderfully intuitive Plurk timeline). Yet I don't want to add another journaling application to my already-full journaling agenda.

Any suggestions?

On beyond e-mail

For those of us over forty, electronic mail has revolutionized our lives. We communicate more frequently, and with more clarity and accountability, than when paper or the telephone served as our primary media. Items to be read and acted upon wait patiently in inbox, yet remain accessible from almost any remote location. If we've been smart enough to move to an e-mail platform that keeps conversations together in one message stream (like Gmail) and has no attachment size limit (like Gmail), and is robustly searchable (like Gmail), then we use our e-mail account as our external brain -- it keeps track of what we decided and who we contacted and what information we shared, and it never forgets.

But it's always the case that when we adopt a tool, even one as powerful as e-mail, we become aware of its limitations. E-mail is good for broadcasting information to a group of people, but it's not good for conducting conversations among more than two people. Some are responding to earlier messages after the conversation has moved on, because their e-mail client (unlike Gmail) lists all the messages separately, and they tend to start with the oldest one and deal with them in order. Some forget to hit "reply all" and end up starting a side conversation without meaning to, then not understanding why their contribution wasn't heard by everyone (or the opposite -- they meant (or should have intended) to start a side conversation, but mistakenly (or unwisely) sent their reply to the whole group). Documents to be read and annotated, when sent by e-mail, cannot have the annotations easily collected -- the e-mail exchange ends up with multiple attached documents, all different, that someone will have to compare and sort out. Sending large documents to an e-mail list typically runs into server limitations at somebody's end, necessitating breaking apart the attachments into smaller chunks and resending (creating the potential for version confusion). And not everyone is in the practice of saving e-mail indefinitely; almost certainly for some participants the record of decisions reached, information shared, issues raised gets destroyed (or becomes difficult to find) within a relatively short period of time.

Yet all these shortcomings of e-mail represent kinds of communication that organizations need to conduct all the time. No single tool solves all of them and delivers the universality of e-mail. So we decide to live with the limitations in order to avoid asking people to learn and utilize new tools -- online workspaces, document libraries, wikis, bulletin boards.

For people of a certain age -- mine -- we feel powerfully modern asking, "could you e-mail that to me?" (or worse, "Can you e-mail that to everyone in the group?"). But it's frequently the case that our 1993 suggestion is actually a bad idea in this twenty-first-century world, where there are betters tools to address the particular communication need (i.e., "Can you share that Google document with me?", "Can you start a thread about that in our Yahoo! group?", "Can you post that on the wiki?"). Yes, these changes require the flexibility to learn new processes, something in shorter and shorter supply as we age. But why should my personal limitations be the determiner of how my organization does business?

A like-minded colleague and I have spent most of the meeting discussing effective communication (and planning to take the discussion to the next level by working on a project and grant to showcase its pedagogical implications). Here are some of the features of effective organizational communication I've gleaned from this weekend's work:

1. Effective communication is distributed. Various persons empowered with leadership and participation roles in the organization need to be given appropriate levels of ability to initiate and carry out communication directly, without passing through an administrative, staff, or technological bottleneck.
2. Effective communication is structured. Brainstorming space/time is needed, but not all space is brainstorming space/time. Structure sends us important messages about the goal of the communication, and about the nature of the process that will achieve that goal.
3. Effective communication is targeted. Not all information is needed by everyone. The more information that is relevant to me is cluttered by or buried under irrelevant information, the less likely it is that I'll absorb and be able to act on the relevant information.
4. Effective communication is cross-referenced. Links lead to complete previous discussions or decisions, which are pithily summarized in the present communication. Links lead to background information or possible models for action, which are pithily summarized in the present communication.
5. Effective communication is archived. The previous discussions, decisions, versions, etc., must be available to be referenced.
6. Effective communication is efficient. Time spent reiterating, resending, getting the new participants up to speed, going off-topic, etc., is time that is not available for doing productive work.
   

Some lessons we apparently haven't learned

• If you are an expert in educational technology, you should know better than to put 300 words of text on a powerpoint slide for us to read while you also want us to be listening to you.
• You might want to plug your computer in for your presentation so it doesn't shut down in the middle.


• Pointedly, the student presentation on Powerpoint that immediately follows these technical difficulties points out how uninspiring and distracting it is when a professor has to spend time fiddling with and apologizing for the technology before giving the lecture.


• The same student presentation mentions the distracting and unnerving cell-phone-ringing-in-the-classroom phenomenon -- commenting ironically on the white-haired professor in the front row half an hour earlier who not only dug out his ringing cell phone during the presentation, but answered it without leaving his seat.


• It's really hard to believe -- and disheartening -- that after the wowzer keynote presentation by Derek Powazek on harnessing the power of online community, we have a presentation about why a course should use online discussions followed by one about how not to use Powerpoint. During two successive presentations that really pushed the envelope about how to develop the rhetoric of student empowerment into a reality -- Rick and Phil's visions of a disintermediated, collaborative Honors 2025 followed by Derek's evangelism for the wisdom of crowds and the transformation of passive audiences into creators and organizers -- the response was overwhelmingly fearful. Students need lectures! This will devalue the great books! Web-based voting and ranking systems reduce truth to a popularity contest! We spent our careers becoming experts and now we're going to be rendered redundant! Now in the presentations in the paper session that follows, we're back where people are comfortable ... tools rather than ideas, widgets rather than structures, how-to's rather than why-to's. We've got to keep pushing on this. It's not about what program to use or what plug-in to buy -- it's about how technology provides a medium that shapes, for good or ill depending on how intentional you are, your community's participation in your mission. It's about how technology sends a message about your values and goals. It's about getting rid of the layer of unfulfilled or contradictory rhetoric between your community and their educational experience.


• My favorite part of my job is my discussions with my fellow administrators, Phil and Rick. (My second favorite part is being in the classroom with students. My third favorite part is realizing that something I said to a student made a difference in their work or their life.) We are three people excited about doing more for students, infecting the whole university with our passions, thinking big, imagining new structures, reinventing existing traditions. Together we are ready and eager to make it all real. My least favorite part of my job is dealing with people who dig in their heels and don't want to change anything. People who are skeptical of anything new, automatically. People who would rather rehash past debates and explain how everything went wrong than think about what to do next. People who'd rather not hear about the mission of their institution because it might indict their teaching and practice as out of step with the mission, or worse (and this absolutely happens) in direct contradiction to that mission. My intense dislike for dealing with this attitude is a problem for me -- because my academic colleagues by nature are very conservative and independent. They do not want to be told what to do, and they do not want to change what they do. That attitude is on full display here at NCHC, as evidenced by the last bullet. And so I have roller-coastered from euphoria at Derek's magnetic, arresting, and wholly inspiring presentation, to crushing despair at the petty, rudimentary, and unreflective information (if you can call it that) that people here are so much more comfortable with. Unfortunately, without a structure for this organization and its meeting that puts those values of innovation, rigor, and challenge front and center in every aspect, we'll continue to be a feel-good weekend with a big party where everybody gets patted on the back for having "Honors" attached to their titles, and nobody has to submit to any tough questions about what that means.