DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

I have a very crap myspace account. I only opened it to see how it worked etc. I don’t pay much attention to it,
But looking at it today I discovered a new link to a site which lets you load in your photos to make slide shows. It is here.

This is what I did. Display of some street art.

In the meantime Flickr has added functionality to its site letting you make collections and letting you display your images differently on your home page, like this.

I have phases where I really like particular words or phrases.

For ages I liked ‘counter-intuitive’; I liked the sound and I liked the meaning. I liked the idea of something transgressing or challenging expectations and assumptions. I liked the way it is an unusual word, but possible to understand even if you have never heard it before.

When my daughter was about 5 she asked me what my favourite word was. I told her it was ‘incarnidine’ - just because I thought she wanted to know an unusual word. Anyway of course I asked her the same question back and she answered

“Hellandbuggeration”.

This is of course very rude and she heard it from my Mum. Anyway family traits aside ….

My favourite words at the moment are:

Palimpsest
Apophenia
Provenance

I like the words as I like the concepts they refer to.
They all involve an idea I am interested in at the moment.

In a way, ‘palimpsest’ refers to texts that have a visible history; the word originally was used to simply describe scrolls or parchments where original text had been scraped away and a new one written on the top. There would be tracings of the old script still visible. I like this idea of the old and new co-existing. The idea of layered histories, layered narrative and the present being suffused with the past.

There is even a palimpsest group on Flickr here. It is obviously something many people are interested in … and it seems that some are extending the idea of text as being something other than just words… like this.

I have contributed some pictures to the group including this one:

I am amazed it has not been painted over.

The next word’apophenia‘ is about the bringing together of ideas that seem disassociated. As wikipedia will have it: Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

Maybe I have apophenia but I do see a connection between apophenia and palimpsest - since it is so often the case that when history seeps through to the present (as in palimpsest) it seems alien somehow. Sometimes the way history jars with the present makes it seem unconnected - but may actually be closely connected in some way. We may not always know the derivation of words we use in daily life - but they often have a history of meanings that have adapted over time and then come to mean something new. They have travelled a journey of usage and come to signify something differently.

such as this:

Arranged into topics from business to war to flowers, the author explains the most likely origins behind everyday words and expressions. “Laconic,” for example, means brief and blunt. Its origins, more than 2600 years ago, take it back to the Greek Wars. The Laconians, when told by an ambassador that “if we come to your city we will raze the walls and kill everyone.” The Laconians reply? “If.”

(Taken from here.)

Finally I like the word ‘provenance’ ; it is a term originally used by art historians to refer to the ‘biography’ or history of an artefact, such as a picture. The provenance of something describes the sources from which something comnes - where the work of art has been, who owned it, etc.

I like to think about the ways in which things carry stories within them so that they are meaningful not just because of what purpose they serve now, but because of their history and previous uses etc. I like to think about the ways in which the past is inscribed in the present.

Strangely enough, I am interested in all these ideas in relation to social networking and online texts as we can now see connections being made across texts which weave meanings together and bring together ideas and sites together in many new configurations. We can easily link to other people, other texts and ideas. We can embed old texts into new ones.

On the Internet there is a criss crossing and patchworking going on that seems to defy boundaries and logic. One moment a text can stand independently and in the next minute it can appear in someone’s blog; or on a wiki; or even in many places all at once. And you can pull threads through the networks to trace the paths back, or to trace new paths ahead.

It is all very exciting and DYNAMIC.

I even found MY hands here on wikipedia.

I love wikipedia.
I love the way anyone can contribute.
You can contribute in many languages.
You can look up practically anything you are interested in - and it is usually there … like

this;
and this;
and this.

(I love street art). …

If you want to you can register on wikipedia and start adding to the knowledge base by editing a page. It is as easy as ABC (which is not easy for everyone.)

But

sometimes

Someone had deleted all the ‘proper’ text and replaced it with ‘Alison Krauss causes cancer.’ (And I doubt the veracity of this claim).

But the wiki community quickly sorted out the silliness and the text was back in order within the hour. (I this kind of incident is a small price to pay for the uptodateness - especially in comparison to the staid and non contemporaneity of leather bound tomes on library shelves - The Encyclopedia Britannica goes out of date before it is printed.)

With so many people reading and contributing to wikipedia I think it manages to be a dynamic and incredibly uptodate encyclopedia; but no doubt it does enshrine certain idelogical values.

And some people have had ENOUGH . They have set up their own wiki which is more Christian; more Conservative and apparently more pro American.

And so what ever you think of these values, at least they are explicit that they have them.

Ladies and Gents I give you…. Conservapedia.

And funnily enough you will notice Conservapedia has (ahem) used very similar software to wikipedia. .

And of course wikipedia describes Conservapedia … like this.

So knowledge is not neutral. We know that.

But at least open collaboration and shared writing on wikipedia is an attempt to be inclusive.

And finally, for your information, this is how Conservapedia defines street art.

What do you think of THAT??

Oh well. (And you might like to read Dana Boyd’s take on wikipedia). She is a great commentator of all things apophenia.

Henry Jenkins is producing a series of excellent videos which will be just great for the new online MA in New Literacies.

Here is Henry Jenkins talking about his project:

See here for example the series on video blogging - how to do it and why….

Anya mentioned the PEW website where I have discovered a LOAD of useful papers, research based stuff, plenty of quantitaive data, that will be invaluable for my presentation in Swansea later this month…

Anyway … time for a smoothie … mango and raspberry

Originally uploaded by iz*source.

Oh how lovely on Valentine’s day …

But there is no need for us to forget what we are REALLY here for … the lurve of WEb 2.0

You Tube is NOT just videos of people at weddings . It is a rich resourrce for info of all kinds. Here are two useful bits about web 2.0

I really like this one:

This one is a bit less funky but a bit more controversial.

Found this website for people who have good strong family values but still like using the Internet (is there really such a family?)

One of its guarantees is that it is:
Consistent with commonly-held family values. Most parents don’t want their kids watching ads for beer companies, casinos and the like. So even though they frequently have entertaining videos (this is intentional, of course), they won’t be featured here.

So yeah. Go here and have fun (or not as the case may be.)

You can get a MASTERS degree without ever leaving your home!!
It is for people working in literacy education - maybe teachers; maybe advisors; maybe in the community; in a policy capacity; in learning centres … or something else.

You can do the course all purely online and it will be led by the most FUN people.
(Who can also be serious)

Details of the course here.

Go on … have a look.

You get to use web 2.0 and learn about it at the same time. You get to research things that you are doing in your own professional practice.

ReadingFaust
Originally uploaded by tommigodwin.

Earlier this week I gave a short presentation about Web 2.0  and its relevance to English teaching… 

As is always with these things I came away thinking more closely about issues that were raised in questions and discussion. By doing a presentation it shakes you out of your smug comfort zone a bit. I think that after a while of living with my own ideas and evaluations of my experiences, I forget to articulate for everyone the processes I have been through to get to the viewpoints that I have. In other words I sometimes forget to explain properly and simply assume that everyone else is thinking what I am thinking and have learned things that are similar. So it is good for me to get out of my box every now and then and listen to people. 

So yeah … I was showing a series of blogs like this,  this and  this . I mentioned that Riverbend’s blog has also been published as a book .

and also that one of the things I like about the web is that you can see lots of people’s perspectives  and experiences-such as seeing life in Baghdad from a number of viewpoints. 

But then one person pointed out that I was taking a lot on trust and that the sites may be fake; i.e. they may not be written by the people who say they are writing them.  This is of course true and there have been cases where people have had fun this way doing ghost writing (as they do in novels too, for example) or writing ‘as if’ someone else. Sometimes they have been clear about this from the start that they are writing ‘in role’ or under a pseudonym … but others have been found out and had to confess - for example Lonelygirl15’s video blog.

 But back to my Web 2.0 presentation thingie. The example that was cited was this blog  from which I had just shown one screenshot. I was quite staggered really as I had never questionned its authenticity and I think that is because I have read it for so long.  And in fact it was only when I drove away after the presentation that I started to go over in my mind how I just KNEW that this blog was for real …. . I started t think about how I had come to my viewpoint and the journey I had travelled. I have somehow developed a way of finding blogs (etc) that I trust.

I began to think about how I have somehow created a kind of way of guaging authenticity and so on; how I do carry out some checks in a fairly sub-conscious way. I have decided hat these are the key elements: 

1. The reputation of the person which is seen through their associations with others… the blogroll; the comments; the links to other sites; evidence of the person’s engagement with communities both on and ofline.
2. The length of time the person has been blogging / flickring (etc.)
3. The consistency in what they say, how they say it - the use of language.
4. Photographic images of their life and others in it.

 This is how it happened with tommigodwin:

 Firstly just as with people I meet face to face, my default position is trust. There is something too, to be said about associations and the affinity space. So on a blog, one can look at blogrolls and other hypertext links to see if/how the person is networked with others. One reads the blogs of others and sees the complexity of the network - and if it is quite complex, it is hard to fake. Also if that person is associated with another blogger you trust - well, that helps too. There are a number of interesting links on the Sentinel 47 blogroll. Just reading through the blog and following links off the blogroll etc, I not only could read around the ‘affinity space’ but also found tommigodwin’s Mum’s blogs here. (She is ‘in’ education, has lots of blogs and is into cultural theory and digital media like me; moreover she has lots of the same links on her blogroll as I do!!) . Now I did not do this survey in order to check out authenticity .. but it all starts to accumulate as a picture one can trust It happens on a fairly subconscious level I think; it is only when one is challenged by suspicion that you start to re-count how you ‘know’ things. (I am glad I was questioned as it made me think about how I evaluate authenticity online.)

But then I also remember how I had initially come to see this blog having found a picture of a soldier reading Faust on Flickr.  And I  looked at many of the images on this Flickr account so I could see the extent of the real life being depicted.   When you see a set of images like this for example, it seems impossible to dispute authentcity.  These points all refer to my ‘Number 1′ and ‘4′ above.

Secondly I have built up an impression that has accumulated over time. The time issue is crucial I think; but of course on blogs time can be condensed so you can read across months in a short sitting. So you can scan across past posts and then see posts go up bit by bit as the days go on; this embedding in real time and so on is possibly also a good test .. are the blog posts reflecting aspects of things which we know to be the case in that time and place where the blog is set? I guess this is a ‘currency’ test.

Then thirdly  there is the language thing which is harder to describe; sometimes we think someone is a bit ‘fake’ in a f2f encounter just because of how they phrase things - maybe they are inconsistent or over- effusive or SOMETHING. This is all on a pretty subconscious level I think to do with previous experiences and encounters with others. Maybe also it is to do with what is talked about. (I guess this is the same radar we use to check out lying when we meet f2f with someone.)  

Now, I am not surprised that someone should say to me that we should be suspicious of what we read online; I think that it is true we must read with care. When I write this I am not being cross with the person who asked the question and am not trying to win an argument. I am being critical of my lack of refelxivity. What I am saying here is that I am sometimes not a very aware researcher/presenter as I do not always realise/articulate why I believe something. So I was grateful for the questions asked of me.  I had simply shown a screenshot of a blog and expected people to understand all the depth of the full text which went across years of blogposts and across out of the site into Flickr and into other people’s blogs too. I needed to describe all of that.

There are important things that need to be carefully articulated about how it is that we can develop skills to fathom whether something or somone is being genuine online. And we need to be able to teach this kind of thing … it is about being critical readers of texts.

Postscript…

Funny thing is, Rosa has recently utterly refused to watch the news on tv as she says it is the National Lies. Now I CAN see her point; and having moved from a position (when she was about 5)  where she believed the weather man decided what weather we had, and that the news readers told only facts, she has now gone all out into a mode of suspicion. There is a happy medium to aim for I guess and we just need to be alert to the notion that the TRUTH might not actually be OUT THERE, but there are many versions to sift through.

What wikis do and what blogs do is show us that here are many ways of seeing and being. More on wikis (and search engines)  later I think. That’s enough for now.