CIA

Radio 8

Usually, I'm the first one in our little community to jump on the bandwagon of new collaborative tools -- but I see that Chris has already beat me to the punch tonight by downloading Radio 8 and setting up a new blog on Userland. I downloaded Radio 8 once I saw that it was available -- but have not installed it since I am already a Radio 7.0.1 user who would be very unhappy if Radio 8 ends up being too buggy to use. (I depend on Radio 7.0.1 to write this blog and tonight, there have already been a number of bug reports -- or reports of confusion.) Of course, don't we all have better things to do on a Friday night than to blog and debug Radio 8???

As it turns out, I just installed Radio 8 on my old notebook running Win98. I created a Radio blog and created a story (not great literature...), all of which was created on my notebook and then "streamed up" to the server running at Userland ("the cloud"). I'm with Chris in that I still want to keep using my old blog -- and that unless there a compelling features in Radio 8, I won't be leaving Manila.

Phillip Long on OCW

OpenCourseWare: Simple Idea, Profound Implications (Syllabus Magazine). This is the most useful article I've read about MIT's OpenCourseware project. Long clears away some common misunderstandings about OCW and puts forth the arguments for OCW, especially as a wonderful contribution to our digital cultural, educational, and intellectual commons.

Those of us hungry for details on the functionality of OCW are given a tidbit:

Ultimately, the OCW Web resource will host the materials for more than 2,000 classes taught at MIT, presented with a coherent interface that will include sophisticated search algorithms to explore additional concepts, pedagogies, and related attributes across the site as well as within a course.

Missing from the initial coverage on OCW were answers to how OCW would package its materials. We now get a little more insight in the article but should not be surprised by the mention of learning objects:

A corollary to the time-constrained faculty member is the requirement that learning objects created for a course must be found suitable for other purposes, such as OCW. Faculty members cannot be expected to create content twice, once for teaching and again for presentation to the broader academic public. Thus, a second objective for the project is understanding the requirements for transformation of learning objects from their in-class instructional use to their representation as meaningful content for those interacting out of the context of the faculty/student/course/setting intersection.

We at the IU are also trying to figure out "the requirements for transformation of learning objects from their in-class instructional use to their representation as meaningful content for those interacting out of the context of the faculty/student/course/setting intersection" -- and also how to transform digital materials into learning objects in the first place. (Lynn describes some of the early work we have started on this front as we develop the Berkeley Open Learning Environment.)

And all of us who are concerned about the privitization of digital content to the impoverishment of the intellectual and cultural life of our society will be gratified to read:

Faculty members at MIT, as well as other universities, are concerned that their intellectual property may be locked away from their peers, as well as potential students, behind proprietary barriers. Participating in OCW is a proactive statement that “reflects the idea that, as scholars and teachers, we wish to share freely the knowledge we generate through our research and teaching” (Miyagawa, 2001). As Vest noted, “OpenCourseWare looks counterintuitive in a market-driven world.” Indeed.

Analysis of Newstand

A surprising lesson in digital content. Since I was looking into subscribing to the Toronto Globe and Mail via Newsstand, I am intrigued to hear good comments about the form from this article. [link from J. D. Lasica]

DRM is good for us

Chronicle of Higher Education: "Stan Liebowitz, a professor of managerial economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, argues in support of technologies that limit consumers' access to copyrighted material in a forthcoming book tentatively titled Internet Cents and Nonsense. Unlike many intellectual-property scholars, Mr. Liebowitz says that such "digital rights management" technologies would not give too much power to the creators of new works. He believes that charging consumers each and every time they want to use digital material is an efficient economic model."

This book might be a useful counterpoint to Lessig and others' works--though it's hard to tell how much Liebowitz will deal with fair use in an academic/intellectual context. (I was hoping that a course outline of his would provide some insight into this question.)

Private and Public Writing Spaces

Thanks, Chris, for asking a question that has already generated good discussion: "Do you always use a weblog to write for an audience? Do you also blog for yourself, too?"

My answer to come throughout the day -- and it probably change too. I've thought a lot about this topic off and on -- so I appreciate the opportunity to collect my thoughts right now.

My immediate response is to want to write about how my private and public writing spaces interact. I have kept personal journals sporadically for about twenty years. I've always thought that when it comes to weblogging, there are many things that require some careful reflection in a safe space (for example, my journal) before airing out on my blog. I kinda imagined that I would write in my journal, edit for appropriateness, and then publish it to my blog (or some other place) if I deemed it worthy of sharing with the "public". I still think that this would be a useful and productive way to write but have encountered a number of barriers. The first ones are technical in nature (I've written about this before -- I just have to find the references) and have been fairly obvious to me from the start. Perhaps a more challenging barrier is that I can't necessarily just write for myself and then expect that writing to be comprehensible to others. The idea that I'd write a section in my journal and then hit a button to publish it was certainly naive. When I write in my journal, I take shortcuts. I don't explain things that are obvious to me (but which would be a mystery to others, even those who know me well.) I use a private language. I don't worry about letting certain things slip out. I'm trying to be completely honest. When I write for the public, I try to be honest too -- though not comprehensively so. I need to unpack more of the context. I need to avoid personal lingo. I worry more about how I will look, whether I'm making a fool of myself. You know, it's one thing to say that I'm foolish (while appearing wise) and another thing to demonstrate my foolishness outright!

More later...

[6:40pm] I'm at home, wishing that I could get through to a friend in China to wish her a very happy birthday. Since I can't through, I thought, "hey, I should continue the blog entry from this morning. So where was I?....

I've been writing my blog in chunks, resulting in a website that is (hopefully) locally coherent, but perhaps globally chaotic. I also have multiple audiences in mind -- consciously or unconsciously -- when writing this blog: myself, members of the my immediate small blogging community, people interested in Bach, educational technologists, software developers on campus, my friends who don't anything about blogging.....all being addressed in the same website. I've thought about keeping separate blogs for these different audiences but haven't found an easy way to do so, without causing myself undue work and without destroying the integrity of the interconnections among all the stuff I write about. I guess the bottom line is that at this moment, the primary audience for my blog is myself and then the small group of people who know me for some reason and who have some interest in what I'm thinking. These people have been part of a community conversation and so can fill in some of the gaps in context that others who part of this cozy group would not get. Moreover, my blogging friends can ask me a question or comment to me in passing if they want to respond to my blog.

Dec Feb

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