Message or Massage?

Now that my Wiki is up and running, just could not resist the temptation to revisit Marshall McLuhan. If you click on the image at left, you can read it more clearly. For those who came of age post-Internet, here is a tutorial: http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/. Lest we think that anything be completely original, McLuhan anticipated not only the demise of print media as we know it, as exemplified by the current painful metamorphosis of traditional newpapers, but also coined the term "Global Village" long before it was a defunct--or was that "de-funked"?--old-hippie store near the West Bank of the Mississippi.
McLuhan's most oft-quoted aphorism (pithy phrase) is "The medium is the message..." The title is usually incorrectly cited, due to a typo which left his influential book being entitled The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan did not object to the typo, and liked the ambiguity. " Mass-age?" ..or maybe "massage" of one's brain by various media...or...? Re "message" vs. "massage" - maybe some of the media specialists (or others) had courses in "Media Studies" or the like in high school or college? Gratefully, I was spared the tortured discourse of academics who specialize in some permutation of "Media/Gender/Cultural Studies" (akin to "21st-Century Intellectual Basket Weaving 101").
But the real message here is about McLuhan and what we have been up to all year in MILI. We are fully-formed adults. Our students are not. We cannot underestimate the force exerted by the new media on the shaping of their ability to reason, on their relationships to others, and their supposed "ownership" of their knowlege and educations. The media that they and we use are the real message and are shaping us in ways that we still do not fully understand.
As for the myth of the "global village," watch for another post. It's really all about the money, always has been, and always will be in the end. You did notice that PBWiki has "gone uptown" with its logo so as to attract more solid, paying customers, didn't you? Very few people in the real world of business would ever take a cute little "pb sandwich" logo seriously for long!

Just when I thought that I hated Twitter...

Just when I thought that I hated Twitter and was determined not to write any more about it, two minutes ago, the following article popped up. It's about a University of Wisconsin neuroscience researcher who found a way to help people with neural injuries communicate via Twitter solely with their brains.
Since I have a student who suffered a severe spinal cord injury last summer, I can see that this would be life changing:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/22/twitter.locked.in/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

2.0 Memes and Cyber-Poverty

There is an old Middle-Eastern proverb that I heard a long time ago, ironically, from a Brazilian: "The caravan passes, and the dogs sit in the dust, barking."
It resurfaced today in a piece on cyberscience-fiction author Bruce Sterling--"Let Them Eat Tweets" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19wwln-medium-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Tweets&st=cse. Didn't know about him before, since I am neither a "techie" nor a sci-fi fan. In case you are wondering, as I was, what "memes" are in a cyber-context--here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme.
I do, however, feel vindicated in not jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and for keeping my cellphone private. (When the inevitable terrorist attack occurs that knocks out the transmission towers, I will still have my land line).
The "law of the pendulum" never fails. If something swings from "cutting-edge" to "mass-market," its value declines. It is Sterling's contention that "Connectivity is poverty," i.e. that most people now cannot afford privacy, and that those of us who cannot unplug are suffocated by the barrage of incessant, often superfluous online communications that run many of our lives these days.
Bottom line: If you are really "All That," then no one can get you on your cell phone and you don't even bother with Twitter unless you are planning to make money from others' use of it, to wit, Oprah. PS--Don't her personal assistants already have enough to do?

Googlelamania, the Brave New World of Intellectual Piracy

Have you ever read a description of the Google HQ lobby? There is a projector wall in the lobby of Google's HQ of searches scrolling in real time. Your searches are not private, any more than your house valuation , the details of its location, your image on "Street View" cameras, or the tracking of your searches for marketing insights.
It's no wonder that our students have trouble understanding the concept of "intellectual property" when we promote the use of Google tools, while Google does not pay a representative portion of the work of news organizations (among other things) that it uses without permission.
For the full reflections on how Google is changing the face of journalism with "targeted" marketing based on an ad model that "understands your history," in the words of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, see today's New York Times editorial by Maureen Dowd: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/opinion/15dowd.html?_r=1&ref=opinion.
When "editors" and "publishers" become anonymous, and news is "target-marketed" based on the tracking of individual Internet searches, the potential expands for the abuse of intellectual property rights and freedom. Anyone worried yet?

Climbing the Ladder - Electronic Portfolios (Thing 16)

The concept of eFolio Minnesota is wonderful--a versatile tool for students and job-seekers. The idea of posting a portfolio on line is up-to-the-minute, but I am not convinced that it is any more effective than blindly sending out numerous resumes in the the hopes of attracting attention.
Good marketing is usually targeted marketing, not a random shot in cyberspace.
The appearance of the efolio site is bland and its "feel" is rather jumbled and "institutional". Some sections are more applicable to student purposes than others, and some of the links are print-heavy and cluttered. If I were either a student or a job seeker, I might find threading my way through the site layout discouraging. Having explored similiar sites when I was a job-seeker, I found having to dig through pages and pages of "helpful" hints about resumes and interviewing rather tedious and ultimately of little use. It's sad but true that personal contacts are still the way that most people get into their schools of choice and/or win employment.
The "MN Online" link is good for general information about the MNSCU system--a kind of "one-stop shop" for those seeking courses or campus information. That could be a boon to students and families researching college options. The Monster.com link appears the most appealing for younger users in style and substance. These tools are certain to evolve with time and competition.

Down the Rabbit Hole (Thing 21 - Podcasting)

Podcasting has great potential for many different applications. Its newness makes it vulnerable to the randomness that afflicts many of the current resources, and wide open to slick commercialism. As I've said before, more talk does not ensure better talk. The following are the results of my trip down the podcasting "rabbit holes" of a few sites as I try to plan my implementation of a podcast assignment for next quarter. My goal in structuring the assignment is to link the classroom with the Spanish-speaking community in the Twin Cities, and to link the podcasts to my webpage and the student-oriented Wiki that I am building.

But first, a review of the reference sources:

Let's start with the best: I have already been using the BBC podcasts all year for listening comprehension development. I also have them linked to my webpage so students can access them at any time. The people who produce those podcasts obviously not only speak well--they also know how to write well. That's why they don't just babble. The Educational Podcast Directory is a wonderful resource--content-rich, well-organized. The "Intercultural and Cross-Cultural Communication" sections are excellent for World Language teachers. I plan to spend a lot more time there. It would be exciting to be able to use Skype in MPS, as some nice models on the site illustrate.

Now, to the questionable:
Podcast.com was inaccessible; Podcast.net could not be located; Podcastalley.com featured links such as "Open Source Sex" and "Dan Carlin's Hardcore"; Yahoo Podcasts mostly highlighted popular music and did not seem particularly deep ; another was Podcast Awards, offering such winning links as "Midwest Teen Sex Show." Hmmmm...

As usual, check out all sites before recommending them to students! There are more sites "mushrooming" every day, but most look like advance "feelers" for commercial exploitation. Who knows how many of them may even be around in even six months' time.

Request for Comments or "How the Internet Got Its Rules"

I never knew how the original Internet protocols were designed and implemented, and how they shaped what we now take for granted. Today is the 40th Anniversary of the "Request for Comments." The R.F.C.s were born in 1968, long before the WWW (or email!), and were memos written (and often shared via the U.S. Postal Service and Xerox machines) among nascent computer scientists to share ideas and information about early network protocols. Although the original R.F.C.s are now obsolete, they evolved into the standard method of publishing Internet protocol standards. What they meant for the average- to below-average-skilled user like me is that they were foundational to an Internet culture valuing transparency, the free exchange of ideas and vetting by peer review. In forty short years, that's a major accomplishment. To read more, see the following by Stephen Crocker, the originator of the R.F.C.s.: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html?ref=opinion