Intro Interactive – Online

This Module

All of the following must be completed by midnight (your local time) of the last day of the module.

• Listen to a lecture on what an ICT is and why we call it interactive communication. see below
• Read the syllabus. link
• Write a post on your blog introducing yourself (or your alter ego). see below
• Add this blog and the Regular Reads to your aggregator, then pick at least one more blog to add, and tell us about it on your blog. see below
• Read Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, July. link
• Read Licklidder, J.C.R. (1968). Computer as a communication device. Science and Technology. pdf (starting p. 21)
• Watch the Engelbart Demo. link
• Write a response to the readings and video on your blog. see below
• Create an account on twitter, and tweet something with the #501dc hashtag. see below
• Write a self-assessment for the unit. see below

Audio Lecture

This lecture provides a bit of background and foundation leading up to the period in which interactive computing begins.

If you download each of these MP3s you should be able to listen to them from your computer or any MP3-capable device.

Full lecture: mp3.
Full lecture at ~125% speed: mp3

Contents:

1. Yawn mp3
2. Nonhuman mp3
3. Getting Interactive mp3
4. Media Determinism mp3
5. Print Revolution mp3
6. Information Society mp3
7. Networks mp3
8. Documents mp3
9. Computing mp3
10. Chocolate mp3

Referenced in the lecture / more information:

• Robert Krulwich, “The Quest to Design the Perfect Yawn,” Krulwich on Science, NPR.org
• QUBE article at Wikipeida
• IMDB page for the movie Clue
• Wikipedia article on Choose-your-own-adventure books
• DOE “factsheet” on Yucca labeling: “The monumental task of warning future generations”
• Renaissance Computer?, compares the printing press to the digital computer
• Wikipedia on Claude Chappe (with a picture of the station with articulated arms)
• IMDB page for the movie Blade Runner
• The Stanford Encycloped of Philosphy on Turing Machines
• The Loebner Prize is for the program that does best on the Turing Test, and the most recent winner is Elbot
• The 501 theme is “Los Alamos Traffic,” by flopsy.

Introductions

By now, you should have received via email the username and password for your blog on the quicm.net server. If you’ve forgotten, you can always log in to your blog at an address like:

http://something.quicm.net/blog/wp-admin

where your user domain is “something.” Your login name is “admin” and your password is whatever I sent to you, or something different if you’ve changed it. (You can always request, on the login page, that a new password be emailed to you.)

Once you log in, you are in the “back end” (or “dashboard”) of the blog: this is where you control what appears to the world. For now, click on Posts and then Add New. Type in a felicitous title, and write out a few words telling us why you are here, what you are interested in, and what you hope to get out of the semester.

I want to push you to remember from the outset that you are writing for a public audience. Within a day, or less, your post will start showing up on Google searchers. Choose what you say for maximum effect. How can you get people to start reading and to keep reading. Not just those in the class, but those from a small public audience you will likely develop.

Even if you are writing “in character”–that is, if you have picked a pseudonym–you can probably tell us quite a bit without making yourself identifiable in other contexts. Realize, however, that the shield of anonymity is not as thick as you might at first assume. (Just ask Ms. Cutler.) So probably not the time to tell us about who you have buried in your basement. Nonetheless, tell us something about you and why we should be interested in what you have to say. Be bold.

Along the same lines, you are welcomed and encouraged to change the look and feel of your blog to better reflect your own tastes and to encourage visitors.

When you are done writing your post, hit “Publish.” And you have now just shown that freedom of speech belongs to those who have a Wordpress install.

OK, a few notes.

First, you are probably writing in the “Visual” tab. There is a tab up on the top for “Visual” or “HTML.” It used to be that you wouldn’t write in the edit window, because inevitably, you would accidentally close that window and lose your carefully crafted post. That’s no longer the case, because Wordpress periodically saves your work, just as Word does. If you look in the lower right-hand corner of the edit window (the window where you type), you will see when your draft was last saved.

Some people still prefer to type in Word and copy over. You are welcome to do this, but if you do, I recommend you paste into the “HTML” window rather than the “Visual” window. The formatting in Word seems to show up in Wordpress in very strange ways otherwise.

Also note that if you are writing in the “HTML” window, it is expected that you will put double spaces between paragraphs. If you are writing int he “Visual” window, it will do this for you.

In either window, you will see at the top a bunch of buttons. These do pretty much what you expect they might, including allowing you to upload images and link to things. I strongly recommend that you include hyperlinks where appropriate. Consider, also, including images whenever appropriate, as this increases the visual appeal of your blog. But be sure that you either have the rights to these images, or can make a reasonable claim to fair use.

You may want to look through First Steps With Wordpress. Or, for the very basics, take a look at these videos by “designHQ”:

There are a lot of guides to being a better blogger out there. I hope you’ll post about those you run into. I would recommend the following two as starting points:

Finally, in the past, some with blogging experience have asked whether their introduction can be made as an “about” page. Yes, that’s a fine idea.

• Mahoney, D. A. (2002). How to write a better weblog. A list apart. link
• How to Blog Effectively (2009). Webdesigner Depot. link

Aggregating

One of the things I’m asking you to do in your first week is set up an aggregator and add some things to it. But lets not get ahead of ourselves. First, what is an aggregator?

An aggregator is also sometimes called a “feed reader” which leads us to wonder, what is a feed? A feed is a machine-readable version of a regularly updated site. When the site changes, the feed is updated, and programs can check these feeds and show them to you. (Another word for feeds is RSS, but I am trying to get away from that, since it isn’t as clear and descriptive as “feed.”)

I’m going to recommend you set up an aggregator on Google Reader. There are lots of others, but Reader is my current favorite. Once you set up an account, you can subscribe to several sites. Subscribing on Reader is pretty easy, since it will go out and find the feeds for you. If you put the URL of the site in Reader as a subscription, it should be able to go out and autofind the feed.

What should you sign up for? Naturally, it’s a good idea to add this blog. I would also recommend adding the blogs I’ve listed over to the right as “Regular Reads.” You may also want to add the blogs of some of your colleagues in the class. Sometime in the first week, once everyone has named their blogs and made their first entries, all of those blogs should be listed under “501dc Blogs”.

Finally, you should add at least one other feed–one (or more) that you think is particularly interesting. Then post to your blog, and let us know about your aggregating experience, and what your “extra” feeds are, and why you added them.

Now, rather than running around the web trying to find out what’s new, you just have to go to your aggregator.

Response Paper (blog post)

The response paper or seminar paper is the mainstay of graduate courses in the humanities and social sciences. It is a bit like a mini-review essay. It asks the participant to critique and reply to a particular reading. Throughout my own graduate career, more than half of the courses I took had periodic response papers due, and they almost never told you what was expected. They sometimes included questions, but more often, they asked you to come up with your own questions to answer. There is method to this ambiguity: response papers represent an opportunity to discover your own voice, draw upon your own intellectual history and reading, and integrate ideas in a unique way. Basically, you are using the readings and materials as a springboard for your own ideas and critiques. I cannot tell you how to write the perfect response paper any more than I can tell you how to paint your own masterpiece.

That said, I can offer some hints and directions, some things that a response paper should and shouldn’t have:

• A response paper should tell a story. When you do the readings and engage in other material, you should absolutely be pulling out observations and otherwise make note of how the reading makes you feel. You should be looking (and copying/highlighting/underlining) passages that you can use as evidence in your response paper. But simply copying those into an unordered list of observations is not enough. Having analyzed the materials, your paper should endeavor to synthesize your observations into a whole. You should choose your most intriguing ideas and weave them into a story; ideally into a story that draws from most or all of the materials, as well as outside sources and personal experiences.
• A response paper should have an argumentative thesis, and this should be stated explicitly. You should be presenting a point of view, and a point of view that you can demonstrate with evidence. If I get to the end of the first paragraph and don’t know what your thesis is, you need to revise that first paragraph.
• While you are arguing for a particular case, it shouldn’t just be opinion. I don’t particularly care if you like or agree (or dislike or disagree) with the readings, unless you can use that opinion toward the readings to form a strong case, backed with clear evidence. In other words “I thought this was dumb,” doesn’t get us very far, but “here’s where the author is wrong, and here’s a better alternative argument,” is good.
• Terrible title “Response paper #3.” Great title “The Remarkable Case of the Missing Breadcrumbs.” Try for interesting titles–followed by interesting responses. I should be able to identify your response papers without too much difficulty because of the content and frequent reference back to the assigned material. If I can’t, that is a problem.
• The very first sentence of your response paper should grab the reader’s attention and refuse to let go. A response paper without a good hook won’t hold the interest of your reader.
• Likewise, each paragraph should have a clear topic sentence. I should be able to say in a few words what the paragraph is attempting to do and why it is important to the rest of the response paper.
• Your response paper should be interesting to a reader not in the class. That doesn’t mean you should recapitulate the readings–you are not writing Cliff’s Notes (or at least not for your response paper). Because you are introducing an innovative and creative idea that you have come up with while engaging the materials, you should be able to convince someone who hasn’t engaged in this stuff to try to.
• Use hyperlinks. We are writing on the web, and hyperlinks strengthen your argument. Likewise, use of images and video, when appropriate, can make your response stronger. One student in a previous class made very nice use of appropriate video clips to provide examples of what she was arguing.
• Use examples. I expect you will be writing responses that are fairly conceptual, which is a good thing, but anchor these in real examples from the real world.
• Use subheadings. The response papers need not be very long, but they will probably be long enough to require subheads. Especially when writing for the web, subheadings increase the scannability of your writing and are strongly recommended. If you go on for three or four paragraphs without a subhead, it becomes more difficult on a screen.
• Double-space between paragraphs, and do not indent. People reading the web expect this as the norm. It also avoids the problems of the “wall of text.”
• Read others’ blogs first. If you are merely repeating their arguments–even unintentionally–your response it redundant. If, on the other hand, they write something similar to your own thinking, and you can link to their entry (to the permalink for their entry), you’ve killed two birds with one stone.
• When you cite the readings, you may use whatever method you most prefer. The ideal is to be able to hyperlink to the appropriate article or book–but don’t hyperlink to sites that require the course password, as this will only be helpful to those who are in the course. So, if it’s passworded, find a site on the web that will help people locate the article for themselves, or for a book, link to the appropriate Amazon page, or something similar.
• There are no particular length requirements for the response paper. A response paper is too long when it is longer than necessary to describe your ideas. If it is too long, it is unlikely your peers in the class will give it a careful reading. TL;DR. It is too short when you have failed to say something interesting, or when you have said something interesting, but failed to provide evidence and a compelling argument to go with it. In my experience, the best response papers tend to be longer than the worst (but just because it is long doesn’t make it good, to be sure).
• You might find this PDF explaining a response paper, and this PDF of an example of one, to be helpful resources.
• The rubric for grading your blogs generally applies also to the response paper. In addition, I will be looking for a demonstration that you have read and understood the readings; that you have formed a strong, well-supported argument; that you have structured your essay well, drawing on possible criticism and deflecting any problems, providing a clear roadmap of what is to come early on in the essay and strong introductions and conclusions; and that you have crafted a clear and well-organized entry, devoid of problems in style, diction, grammar, and spelling.

Twitter

Two years ago, very few people had actually even heard of Twitter. That’s changed, and now most of you have probably at least heard of Twitter, and many probably have used it.

There are a couple of ways of understanding Twitter. If you understand how blogging works, then you might think of Twitter as a micro-blog: a collection of very short blog posts.

Or maybe it’s like texting, but CCing the world.

Or maybe it’s like the “awareness” function of Facebook and other social networking sites, without all the rest of the junk.

In any case, what is really a very basic tool has become popular–perhaps in part because it is so simple. Signing up is easy, just go to the site and get an account. And actually “tweeting” is easy too: just type in the box. And this is where most users of Twitter stop. Yes, it’s easy, but what’s the point? Without a community of others following you, it seems pretty silly to tweet. (If no one hears your tweet, have you even really tweeted?)

So, you want people to “follow” you; that is, you want them to pay attention to what you have “tweeted.” How do you do that? Well, you could tell people in your Facebook network that you are tweeting. Or you could add it to your signature on emails. Or you could indicate it on the “about” page of your blog. If your on TV, you can tell your listeners. Heck, maybe you can even beat out Ashton Kutcher.

Or you can follow people and hope they might follow you back. These days, that’s less likely, because folks might assume you are a spammer until you prove otherwise. Finally, you can “retweet” interesting posts you see. This may lead folks to follow you.

But generally: say something interesting! No one cares what you had for breakfast. Think about how to be original in less than 140 characters.

When you tweet something related to the class, but sure to include #501dc somewhere in the post.

Once you have your account set up, be sure to blog about it, so that I and your classmates can follow you. And if you are ambitious, you might want to install a plugin that publishes your tweets to your blog sidebar (like we’re doing for this site).

And you may want to follow @halavais and @quicm.

Finally, this site has some great advice on making good use of Twitter, and you may want to give TweetDeck a try, both because it makes Twitter easier, and because it provides a nice example of using Adobe’s AIR platform. O’Reilly has a guide out, or you might want to take a look at Mashable’s free guide.

Self-Assessment

Part of what we are doing here is trying to learn stuff, and one of the best ways to do that is to try to keep track of what you are learning, how that process occurs, and how to do it better. All education is learning how to learn, but that is particularly true of graduate school. Although it’s not fair to say that knowledge “in your head” doesn’t matter for graduate education, far more important is how quickly you can come to terms with a new challenge, figure out how something works, or employ a new tool.

At the end of each module, I ask you to take a moment to assess your performance on the tasks you’ve undertaken. This is probably not to foreign to you if you’ve worked somewhere with a formal review. Generally, you are asked to review yourself, and then go over that review with whomever you report to. (In fact, in other classes I employ something closer to the now popular 360 review. If you want to, feel free to identify students you think are doing particularly well or poorly, and why you think so.)

What should you include? Be concise and address whether you think you’ve learned something important during the module, and if so, what it is. Direct me to what you think your best work was, and take a look at the rubric and decide where your work falls on that continuum. If you found something particularly useful or particularly frustrating to your learning process (and frustrating is not the same as challenging, although they are close cousins), let me know.

Send your self-assessment to me as soon as you are done with all of the requirements, but no later than Sunday at midnight. This triggers me to look over your work and put together a grade. If you don’t send me a self-evaluation on time, I’ll assume you are dropping the module.

Questions?

If you have any questions, be sure to post them below.