A blog about digital rhetoric that asks the burning questions about electronic bureaucracy and institutional subversion on the Internet.
Friday, October 08, 2010
PowerPointing Things Out
Although PowerPoint is often associated with hierarchical office or military culture of command and control, its easy format for digital composition and remixing makes it an appealing tool of institutional subversion as well. This month the controversy has to do with a PowerPoint presentation created by recent Duke graduate Karen Owen, who created "An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the role of horizontal academics. As the New York Times explains in "Duke Winces as a Private Joke Slips out of Control," Owen created a "fake thesis" in the PowerPoint medium about her sexual conquests as an undergraduate, which included an analysis of the sexual endowment, prowess, and skill of thirteen student athletes, which was illustrated in her slideware presentation with bullet points and a bar chart. A gallery of the images from her original document is available online, although facial features and identifying information has been deleted. As someone who went to school with memoir writers like Elizabeth Wurtzel and Tad Friend who listed boudoir buddies in their literary works, I think about what this genre might say about this kind of catalogue. Does it indicate a degeneration of cultural production or does it indicate a lack of seriousness given to one's own drama more appropriate to the digital rhetoric of youth?
Since I have an entire chapter in the Virtualpolitik book about PowerPoint, which specifically addresses the function of this new digital genre in military culture, I was interested to see "We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint" in the New York Times.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.
Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.
Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.
“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”
Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.
“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.
In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”
The lead example in the New York Times piece is a slide about military strategy in Afghanistan that was shown to General Stanely McChrystal, who opined that "when we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."
The slide in question was actually developed by the PA Consulting Group. Not addressed in the NYT article is the role of global consulting firms that specialize in a mix of IT, strategic planning, and public relations in shaping new digital genres and cater to the U.S. military, which I also write about in the first and second chapters of the Virtualpolitik book. I also argue in the third chapter of the book that military culture is also attracted to virtual reality simulations, because they offer a similar sense that reality can be controlled and ordered by computational media.
The Guardian's Datablog has challenged its readers to see if they can "do any better" in representing such complex information with a more elegant solution. They reference Julian Bolger's reading of the graphic in his Global Security Blog, which delivers the following witty opinion and caveat about informational distraction.
The diagram has an undeniable beauty. Done the right way (embroidered perhaps) it would make a lovely wallhanging and an ideal gift for the foreign policy-maker in your life. But it is a bit of a red herring.
The Washington Post reports in "RNC's finance director behind controversial fundraising pitch" that a "confidential and crude" PowerPoint presentation that included a depiction of President Obama as a socialist Joker embarrassed the party enough to inspire leader Michael Steele to publicly apologize for their gaffe in digital rhetoric. Although the presentation was originally attributed to a low level "staffer," the actual author was veteran Republican political operative Robert Bickhart. The PowerPoint presentation, which is available at this website from Politico.com, also contains Photoshopped images of congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, along with heart-shaped diagrams that situate "true believers" and arguments for putting "fun" in "fundraising."
This video created by the students of Lynn Schofield Clark mocks how poorly interactive technologies are understood by faculty members and how adopting new instructional gizmos might only contribute to student disengagement, particularly when PowerPoint, Skype, and mass multiple-choice clickers only replicate the worst trends in classroom re-education of faculty.
Note also that some of the inspiration for this collaborative assignment is credited to Virtualpolitik friend Michael Wesch, according to this blog posting from the Wired Campus.
IndieCade, the international independent games festival that is being held this year in Culver City, has attempted to avoid some of the controversies about the jury process that helped doom the similarly themed SlamDance games festival. Of course, by putting Brenda Brathwaite's analog game about the Holocaust, Train, front and center, organizers were trying to still emphasize their willingness to feature challenging content.
A number of the games attempted to refine what Rosalind Picard has called "affective computing" that engages in some way with the user's emotional state. Given the structural difficulties with gauging a user's emotions, more often this translated into games about representing emotional expression.
I was pleased to see designer Erik Loyer among the finalists with his iPhone "opertoon" Ruben + Lullaby, a wordless interracial love story in which mobile phone users can intervene in the couple's fight by shaking the phone to get the characters more agitated or smoothing the screen to calm them down. Unlike the interactive story Façade, which might invite comparison by critics, the actors in Loyer's argument are depicted more as elements in a procedural musical composition than as intelligent agents acting out complex agendas in AI-generated conversation. I had the privilege to work with Loyer this summer at the NEH-Vectors Summer Institute on "Broadening the Digital Humanities" and was happy to hear that he would be working with the database of film clips in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and developing techniques for scholarly annotation. Given his work with Sharon Daniel on her testimony-based pieces, he would seem to be an ideal choice.
Also in the IndieCade line-up was Jamie Antonisse who won acclaim at the Meaningful Play conference for his painfully lyrical game about terror, typing, and genocide, Hush. Now Antonisse is working with Skip Rizzo, who I write about in the Virtualpolitik book in connection with his virtual reality simulation designed for Iraq veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Apparently Antonisse is assisting Rizzo in working on an interactive experience that emphasizes game play for post-operative physical rehabilitation with action oriented around breathing exercises and a spirometer input device. Those who know the breath-based digital work of VR artist Char Davies may be interested in the development process of this game.
This year Antonisse comes to IndieCade with Spectre, a game in which the aged hero encounters a nonlinear sequence of memories. (See above.) In Spectre, the player navigates through the memories in search of "bright" events rather than "dark" episodes of shame and misery by playing a series of mini-games, many of which involve platform mazes. Antonisse is also part of the Peanut Gallery independent studio started by USC students, which also put out Andre Clark's multiscreen game Minor Battle that mixes on-screen and off-screen altercations as players vie for position in the physical space around game play.
There were other games about childhood memories and conflicts with arguing couples in the mix. Aether, which is described as a dreamlike game about "childhood and escapism," also allows its protagonist to escape being grounded with a male parent and female parent on opposite sides of a planet, by taking advantage of a game mechanic. The psychoanalytic dimensions of the Little Red Riding Hood story get played out in The Path, which I saw previewed at GDC, where sexual coming of age meets the structure of wandering off the path in games like World of Warcraft to encounter monsters and acquire game capital.
Given what some have called "polygon porn" and the push for hyperrealistic, multi-colorful, textured products with the perfect scattering of light, the festival's choice of two black-and-white games signals an interest in reaction and constraint. You can check out Closure and Gray from their links.
The developers of the unlikely Half-Life 2 mod Dear Esther boasted of over thirty thousand downloads and a vigorous fan base willing to engage in a story based on exploration, non-linear soundclips, and romance. Set on a seemingly abandoned island, this development research project out of the University of Portsmouth, UK. describes itself as "interested in first person gaming - particularly, using mods to explore questions about gaming that you can't answer by just analysing commercial releases or theorising about them."
There were also a few so-called "serious games" in the festival. I had seen MIT's Akrasia, a game that dramatizes drug dependency, at GDC. I've also followed the Global Conflicts series about journalism in conflict zones, which is premiering a new title about Latin America. (See above.)
But the Austrian team from the 2-D MMO Papermint was much more representative of the playful ethos of the conference. They have recruited the Birmingham-based designer who created the IndieCade graphics to experiment with immersive play without the apprenticeship requirements of 3-D modeling. Conference postergirl Erin Robinson brought her game Nanobots to the festival, which had an even stronger colorful hand-drawn aesthetic.
Poster girls aside, the closest I came to a celebrity sighting was meeting Jim Munroe, creator of not only IndieCade's Everybody Dies but also the very teachable machinima film about the Grand Theft Auto games, My Trip to Liberty City.
Not ready for prime time was the video from Blast Theory from their alternate reality game You Get Me, since it wasn't yet running by the preview. This game about a hybrid of tag and truth or dare that brings different class cadres in close contact with each other didn't have video up on the first night.
Having covered how academics struggled with the genre of the high-speed slide-oriented Pecha Kucha talk, I was impressed with Richard LeMarchand of Naughty Dog's ability to encourage presenters to put in strong performances in a frenetic series of what he called "mini micro-talks" that only allow 12 slides total and 16 seconds per slide of commentary. Even presenters who were non-native speakers of English or who bent Lemarchand's rules about the number of time or the use of purely still images still finished their talks right on time.
Last year at back-to-school night, I complained about how PowerPoint software had become such an important part of my son's teachers' presentations to the public that I was concerned that one-to-many forms of corporatized communication might also be stifling interactions in the classroom. This year, only one teacher used PowerPoint slides, and it was a modest sequence of just four rectangles of information rather than a pecha kucha style barrage of text and images. Instead, most of her presentation came in the form of a dazzling display of three flares representing different placeholders in the chemical spectrum while the music from 2001 boomed in the background. Other teachers directed their parents to personal websites or to their Twitter feeds, although some contingents of teachers still use delivery points with highly standardized features like new.schoolnotes.com or schoolfusion.com that are more depersonalized than DIY solutions. As a parent I was concerned to see at least one teacher at Lincoln Middle School directing students to an online textbook site for skill-and-drill quizzes and distant learning videos. California students may be soon getting far too much of that, so we wouldn't want to start the automation of education any earlier.
I live within walking distance of a local tourist magnet, Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade. At night the street fills up with street performers: jugglers, break dancers, balloon twisters, musical child prodigies, sidewalk preachers, and other temporary stars. Last night, among the acordionists and bucket drummers, I noticed the presence of those with digital projectors, who were using the hardware for persuasive purposes. For example, an animal rights group was showing a film that showed treatment of domestic pigs, and a creationist had a PowerPoint presentation cued up.
Before the Bush administration is history, it's time to look back to 2008, as we did in 2007 and 2006, to award our annual prizes here at Virtualpolitik for the very worst in government digital media making, from embarrassing online videos to truly terrible taxpayer-funded computer games.
In 2009, it's true we'll miss out on having a McCain White House that had the potential to make federal content-creation even worse, since the Republican campaign brought us sublimely awful Internet experiences like McCain Space and Pork Invaders to insult our intelligence. But at least we can savor one last time how a bumbling Bush presidency managed to trip up on the information superhighway time and time again in 2008.
Worst Internet Event
Henry Jenkins has written about how the Internet supposedly fosters transmedia experiences in which print, broadcast media, and content on distributed computer networks nourish a rich media ecology of participation and specialized knowledge and spur conflict, dialogue, and debate.
The painful Briefing 2.0 with U.S. Department of State Spokesman Sean McCormack was apparently intended to emulate aspects of the popular YouTube/CNN debates by having Internet users submit questions to powerful stakeholders and government experts, but this twenty-nine minute spectacle of cluelessness received fewer viewers -- by a factor of seven -- than this spontaneous video of my kids playing the Atlantic City Pipe Organ. Forget skateboarding dogs, this video was trounced even by bad Sponge Bob impressions, high school poetry readings, and "How to Plot a Point on a Graph." It would have been bad enough if McCormack was performing solo for a webcam in his bedroom, but there was an entire room full of dumbfounded reporters present at the event, who were apparently forbidden from asking questions themselves, even though this was ostensibly a press conference. It's really cringe-inducing to see McCormick struggle with his statements about "fun" and "foreign policy" and take credit for "something I started three years ago," as though that made him an savvy old hand.
Worst Government YouTube Channel
Most government YouTube channels attract relatively few viewers, especially since comments are often disabled and video responses are frequently forbidden. The channel for the Transportation Security Administration is a rare exception, since the curious flock to watch videos that represent the most currently hated of federal agencies. During a time in which the public wants to be reassured that vigilant oversight is taking place in "highways, railroads, buses, mass transit systems, ports and the 450 U.S. airports," it is appalling to see that almost all of the content on the TSA's channel focuses on justifying the "security theater" that takes place in the airport x-ray and metal detector lines. Even there, rather than rapidly update travelers with good instructional videos about new and current regulations, like those produced by many state DMVs, attention is paid to the "Simplifly" program and other ridiculous passenger self-sorting procedures rather than what to pack and how to pack it. For example, I've learned more from Ian Bogost about laptop transport than any of the supposed how-to videos on this site. Also, check out the bad green screen in their TSA "Why?" infomercials and the fact that comments have been disabled on their "lost and found testimonial" clips.
Worst Government Blog
Web logs could be such a great tool for personalizing complex policy issues and demonstrating how different government officials perform their duties throughout the country and throughout the world, so that public servants could be humanized in ways that might attract the best and the brightest to the profession. Alas, that is very rarely the case, even in blogs from diplomats in far-flung places, a genre that has been perfected by the British foreign service but seems poorly understood by our own U.S. State Deparment. Perhaps not the worst but certainly typical is The Mongolian Monitor, which actually contains the following example of its subliterate prose:
In the morning and early afternoon of October 28th the GoM-World Bank sponsored "Economic Growth Conference" was successfully conducted with an impressive list of internationally recognized speakers analyzing different national mineral sector policy frameworks.
This is from a guy who is in fricking Mongolia not the Rotary Club in Dayton, Ohio! He's in the exotic land of yurts, throat singing, nomadic horsemen, National Geographic spreads, and uneasy negotiations with nearby superpowers China and Russia. He's in a place where he might have said something substantive after a 2008 throwaway item that began "On July 1st, a riot broke out in the capital of Ulaanbaatar in response to opposition concerns about election fraud during the June 29th Parliamentary election vote." And yet the USAID author of this blog often goes months without posting.
Worst Government Computer Game
One could make an entire career out of critiquing misguided attempts to combine the fun of computer game play with the public information efforts of the organs of state authority. (And certainly I've tried.) But what's the fun of seeing the worst of game mechanics foisted on citizens young and old with an Internet connection at taxpayer expense. Because it is so far from being a game that anyone would want to play FEMA's Disaster Discovery, which combines dreary multiple choice testing with tedious board game action, deserves special attention.
Worst Government PowerPoint Presentation
You can make a really interesting electronic slideshow about global warming. Ask Al Gore. See a movie called An Inconvenient Truth. It's definitely doable with the right understanding of digital rhetoric. And yet on the USGS site you can find a series of almost unwatchable pre-fabricated PowerPoint presentations developed by the United Nations on the subject: One Planet, Many People that include every cheesy animation from the Microsoft corporation that reduces the scientific and humanistic argument to bullet points and crowded slides. Check out the terrible verse on the slide above. (Click to enlarge.)
Worst Government Website for Children
The site for adults isn't half-bad, so its discouraging to see that the Federal Reserve Kids Page is so lousy. Young people need to understand economics, although it is a subject often skipped in teach-to-the-test No Child Left Behind curricula. So it's terrible to see what is essentially a bad FAQ rewritten for an audience of morons representing fiscal policy to the young.
Worst Government Website Overall
I've awarded the prize to the Department of Homeland Security two years in a row now, so it is time to recognize the irony that the Federal Communication Commission is apparently incapable of communicating on the World Wide Web. Have fun looking for videos of the hearings or even transcripts. I challenge you to find anything but the bare-bones agendas of those meetings in clunky Word and only slightly less clunky PDF formats. With some ingenuity you may be able to find your way to this page with pay-per-view content from the public agency and proprietary technologies that seem to require this long "help" page. Compared to government websites with RSS feeds and open APIs, one would think that this site intentionally refused to recognize the advent of Web 2.0 years ago.
Online counters that are designed to be posted on blogs and other websites are used for a number of political purposes from tracking the national deficit to tallying fatalities in Iraq. This online ticker that tracks Colombian tariffs and publicizes the country's unwillingness to participate in free trade agreements is actually posted on a government website for the US Department of Agriculture, a site that also presents this PowerPoint slideshow about the subject that was apparently intended somehow to appear on paper bags. The page also has a jab at the Democratic congress from the executive branch, since it includes a tag line that argues that "foreign policy" is too important to be left to "politicians." As the press release that accompanies the ticker explains, it is intended to spur legislation and attack the administration's opponents as partisan operatives:
Today, the Bush Administration launched a tool for Americans to see just how much money is being paid to Colombia in tariffs for our products going into their country, while the Colombian products arrive on our shores duty free!
President Bush sent Congress legislation to implement the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. (FTA) The House changed the rules in the middle of the game, delaying a vote to implement the agreement. This important agreement would provide a level playing field for America's farmers, ranchers and businesses. Instead, the House is continuing to work against the best interests of the American people.
As the year comes to a close, it's time for my list of annual online worsts to recognize spectacular failures in government digital media-making.
For inspiration, you can check out the "winners" of the Foley awards for 2007 and 2006. I'm hoping for good entries in categories like "Worst Government Website," "Worst Taxpayer-Funded Videogame," and "Worst PowerPoint Presentation to Congress."
In "New European Digital Library Proves Too Popular," The Chronicle of Higher Education explains the fate of Europeana, a new multidigital library portal, which crashed catastrophically when its servers could not handle the traffic from worldwide interest in its collections, which include not only libraries but also museums from throughout the continent. This PowerPoint-style explanation for a librarians' conference explains some of the organizational and logistical challenges faced by the group, including issues involving branding the project and negotiating consensus in the face of emerging technologies of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 with interfaces for widgets and APIs.
The Virtualpolitik book has a chapter about national digital libraries that looks at the politics of this kind of digitization and includes material from an interview with former BNF chief Jean-Noël Jeanneney.
A mass e-mail with a chain mail admonition is widely circulating with this PowerPoint presentation about the Holocaust. It contains a number of very graphic images of corpses in the death camps that many might normally be filtered out by those concerned about NSFW or "not safe for work" content.
One recipient of the e-mail in the group I was in was skeptical about its message for reasons very different from those one would suspect from the Holocaust deniers who might dispute the truth of its historical information. (The PowerPoint begins with a photograph of Dwight D Eisenhower and his call for documenting the genocide of the Jews.) This person referred the group to a number of Internet resources that contradicted its claim that European textbook manufacturers were removing references to the Holocaust from their curricular materials.
It is mostly disturbing when the Holocaust is being used as a mean to spread false rumors.
Before taking for granted any suspicious information spread virally over the net I urge you to ascertain its veracity.
The fact is that the United Kingdom has NOT erased the Holocaust from its curriculum. Just Google "United Kingdom - Holocaust - Curriculum" and you'll find plenty of information dispelling this distorted piece of news. As Lenin once said "a lie told often enough becomes the truth!".
This seemingly racist PowerPoint presentation, a variant of which also appears here, is making the rounds of Republican mass e-mails in the informal economy of political gift exchange that also involves photoshopped images and other digital files that are not archived on websites that can be traced to established orders of ownership and authorship. With the structure of a childish knock-knock joke, it depicts former Harvard Law Review editor and University of Chicago law school professor Barack Obama as a cartoonish dialect-speaking bugaboo proclaiming "Eyes yo new Prezident."
Now that Salon has compiled the punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election, it seems that dismissing a PowerPoint presentation created by an Obama strategist as hubris was a fundamental error. The Red States Blue PowerPoint by David Plouffe is also available on the YouTube site of the candidate as an understated rallying call to volunteers. It is interesting to see how Plouffe deploys PowerPoint software to represent the "enthusiasm gap" in a 3-D bar chart.
The instructional technology movement that has become an integral part of staffing and building design on many college campuses has also taken on a much more prominent role in K-12 education. This evening I attended the parents' back-to-school night at Lincoln Middle School, and I was struck by how many teachers were using corporal presentation technologies, particularly digital slideware. Only the music teacher spoke to parents without an electronic aid. English, history, math, and science teachers all had PowerPoint presentations prepared for the rooms of expectant parents. The art teacher used overheads, but they were created with a digital printer, and the physical education teacher showed parents a tour of his HTML website. (From this same PE teacher I learned that YouTube had been blocked by the school's computer administrators and that this often created problems in showing particular game plays, dance steps, or modes of physical activity imported to the U.S. from other countries.)
Many teachers were actively involved in online video production with student participation: two math teachers were busy creating "Mathcasts" starring Tuesday afterschool students, and the PE teacher offered to upload videos of his charges performing to a password-protected site, where only parents could view only their particular children engaged in the fitness curriculum. Many others also showcased tablet PCs purchased by class gifts or by grant monies. I thought that a science teacher's use of her document camera was particularly notable: she not only used it to show experiments to the class that would otherwise be difficult to see -- such as a seed growing in a plastic cup -- but she also thought to use the document camera as a way to display the appearance of model student work, particularly in the area of scientific illustration in which explanatory clarity might be far more important than artistic polish.
Having been a veteran of many parents' nights, however, I was struck by the fact that far fewer parents asked questions of the teachers than I had seen in previous years and how much the technology reinforced the one-to-many character of the exchanges that did take place. Parents were far more likely in this situation, it seemed, to behave as passive spectators rather than active participants.
I also wondered about the ways that these technologies decrease the physical proximities of teachers to their pupils when students never have a reason to gather around the instructor's desk to see something small and singular and about how the optics of wonder can be reshaped by even a laudatory use of a document camera. Yes, by keeping students seated, these technologies reduce disruption, but they also relegate students to an audience at some remove from the pedagogical show.
As the London Times points out, this McCain's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was an "anti-speech" in which the backdrop, which turned a "bilious green" was a distraction from his words of professed patriotism. An ABC blog entry "McCain Green Screen - By Design or Accident?" points out the odd insertion of the apparatus of computer-generated visual effects, the green screen or blue screen in McCain's appearance, is ironic, given the McCain Green Screen Challenge on the Colbert Report earlier this year, in which viewers were encouraged to remix the content using McCain's digital footage. (Many of the results are posted on YouTube.)
As if that weren't enough, apparently McCain's staffers really love the Google search engine. Not only was it used to vet the party's pick for Vice President, the Los Angeles Times notes in "McCain and that North Hollywood middle school," it seems to have been used to find an image of Walter Reed Hospital for the backdrop, although the building depicted is actually Walter Reed Middle School.
Update:Tama Leaver has posted some humorous variations that are based on the thought experiment of McCain borrowing the presentation styles of others. At "Presidential Presentation Zen," there is both an MBA PowerPoint and an Apple Keynote version.
Dennis Jerz points out that two men from the Typo Eradication Advancement League have been banned from national parks for making corrections in permanent marker to a hand-painted historical sign. In the era of Microsoft Word the notion of line-editing by making physical corrections to material text may seem anachronistic, but on a cached copy of their website they explain their rationale as follows:
This March through May, we, sworn members of TEAL, will be taking a road trip around the country to stamp out as many typos as we can find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language. We do not blame, nor chastise, the authors of these typos. It is natural for mistakes to occur; everybody will slip now and again. But slowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed. We believe that only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.
(However, Jerz also points out Jonathan Beecher Field's argument in "Why Doesn't Plagiarism Matter?" that scrupulousness about the integrity of the written word seems to be waning, if the support of recent vice presidential candidate Joe Biden is any measure of the Zeitgeist.)
Virtualpolitik pal Eames Demetrios will need to remember to be careful about his mechanics, grammar, spelling, and usage in the markers that he is leaving to commemorate events in the alternate reality he has created through his Kymaerica project. According to this review, Demetrios is also using PowerPoint to expound about this evolving site-specific narrative.
Honorarium is "an autobiographical art game" from game studies academic star Ian Bogost, which has the following objective: "Assemble lectures to present. If you do well enough, you can unlock invitations to travel and speak."
As a pixelated Bogost character performing simple pattern recognition tasks, you pick up and assemble the blocks that match the given electronic slide on the screen. In the game, you can give talks at home or in various cultural capitals and experience all the fun of Bogost's appearance at a recent Software Studies pecha kucha event.
It's instructional technology week here again at Virtualpolitik, even though it is summer, and your faithful reporter should be enjoying the benefits of her academic schedule and lazily sipping margaritas with her toes in the sand.
On Tuesday, I visited the class of USC colleague Mark Marino, where I gave a talk about Internet fame. It was interesting to see how Marino is using students' familiarity with widget-based interfaces to teach small classes. He's currently refining a Pageflakes based tool to solicit more student participation, which I will link to later this summer when it is ready for public view.
In contrast, on Thursday the focus was on large classes, as our campus presented a recap of the recent UC 21st Century conference at UC Davis. From the standpoint of pedagogy, it seemed like there were two major themes in the UCI sessions: 1) the evolution of "hybrid" courses that aim to use technology with live lecture-hall style teaching in ways that are very different from distance learning models and 2) consciousness-raising about the perils of what has been called "PowerPoint abuse" in higher education by The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which faculty become overdependent on one-to-many presentation technologies that often foster passivity and/or resentment of redundancy. (I heard at least one plug for SlideRocket for faculty looking for an alternative, but it sounded like most people still used the Microsoft standard despite its obvious disadvantages to instructors.)
Professor Michael Leon discussed ways to "personalize" large classes of pre-medical students. Leon argued that science classes could sustain class blogs like this one or use tools like this to seize on occasions for learning through updates of "news" or postings on"forums," that online demos such as this one were often more effective than static materials in textbooks, that chemistry homework could be easily personalized so that each student would have a different problem set, and that "garage demos" on YouTube could provide the "library of digital video clips" that faculty have been waiting for. Of course, given the complicated politics of proprietary technologies and intellectual property that YouTube represents, Leon also had a number of life hacking tips for his fellow professors. He advised them to find clips using the flythrough features of PicLens, reformat them into more sharing or PowerPoint friendly formats using Zamzar, and then edit them in MPEG-4 format using Squared 5.
Much of the practical guidance for large classes also focused on the use of "clicker" technologies, in which students answer questions and give feedback to provide data measuring participation and learning outcomes that can be monitored and aggregated from the front of the lecture hall. As Professor Philip Collins explained, our campus had been remarkably patient in experimenting with this technology through trial and error, long after other UC campuses had dismissed the technology as impractical. After rejecting hardwired and infrared clickers, early adopters settled on radio frequency models, although even they admitted that the fact that clickers were often carried in purses and laptop bags where jostling turned them on and off caused many students to complain about dead batteries.
There were also presentations about the UC Irvine about the Open Courseware Initiative and the web portal at UCI for these materials. Although MIT is still a clear leader in the field as far as the number of online courses and pedagogical materials, hundreds of other campuses have joined the movement according to Dean of Continuing Education Gary Matkin. Matkin argued that the low commercial value and the high social value of digital content created at universities should make them particularly likely to be contributers. (To get a sense of the technological habits of the UC Irvine students who attend the physical campus in comparison to what you might believe about your own students, you can check out this recent large-scale survey.)
When I think "Internet," I don't immediately think "terrorism," but apparently that's not always true of our elected representatives.
After the disastrous 2006 House Intelligence Committee hearing on "Terrorist Use of the Internet," at which a fan film with a humorous soundtrack was mistakenly shown as key evidence of jihadist digital recruiting techniques, one might hope that lawmakers would refrain from overemphasizing the opportunistic rhetoric of criminality when it comes to characterizing the policy implications of distributed information technologies. Unfortunately that is still not necessarily the case.
I am particularly sorry to see The Simon Wiesenthal Center joining the bandwagon and appearing before Congress with witnesses who are known to have for-profit agendas to further Internet monitoring and filtering. Last month the center sent a witness to testify during a hearing on "Hate in the Information Age" in connection with an "iReport" that they issued on "Online Terror + Hate: The First Decade." As Harvard psychiatric faculty members Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson point out, high profile reports and hearings often give more undeserved publicity to hate games and websites than they would otherwise have. The fact that the "Border Patrol" game is featured on the cover of the Wiesenthal Center report will probably bring more players to the site to shoot at cartoon characters of undocumented workers, players who would not otherwise have this opportunity.
As a rhetorician, I'd also give low marks to director Mark Weitzman for his bad purple PowerPoint slides, which can be seen in the YouTube video below. (I also note that I don't endorse the conspiratorial sentiments of the poster of this footage on YouTube, although I included it in this blog entry, because I think it's helpful for readers to see the full visual context of Weitzman's oratorical performance that is intended to stir anti-Internet fear.)
Weitzman appeared with Georgetown professor Bruce Hoffman, who argued in his statement that DIY production tools were also to blame: The weapons of terrorism today, accordingly, are no longer simply the guns and bombs that they always have been, but now include the mini-cam and videotape, editing suite and attendant production facilities; professionally produced and mass-marketed CD-Roms and DVDs; and, most critically, the lap-top and desk-top computers, CD burners and e-mail accounts, and Internet and worldwide web.
Hoffman at least was addressing the issue at hand, unlike the horrible self-promoting DOPA-champion Perry Aftab, who I've written about on Virtualpolitik before. Amazingly Aftab isn't content with only banning social networking sites from schools and libraries, despite the fact that such sites are often key for family communication for low-income young people who can't afford long distance telephone calls. According to her statement she seems to suggest that schools should have policies that consider barring "access to any non-educational site from school computers." Of course, this rigid separation of "educational" and "non-educational" digital media flies in the face of the work of many prominent literacy specialists, most obviously James Paul Gee in his work on videogames.
The panel also included Rita Katz of the SITE Institute, a private intelligence-gathering service that has come under fire in a New Yorker article for providing biased translations of anti-US materials from the Middle East. Katz has been very successful generating press for her work. It is interesting to see how a relatively small proportion of Internet traffic can get so much attention in the public sphere. Last month, The New York Times carried two stories about online hate: "Tracking Hate 2.0 on the Web" and "Al Qaeda Warrior Uses Internet to Rally Women."
Part of the context of the November hearing involved the recent almost unanimous passage of H.R. 1955, which has spurred some interesting YouTube videos of opposition, such as this one, which uses an online dictionary as a source, or this one in which the author admits to being inebriated. The revision history of the Wikipedia article on the bill also shows the opinions of a vocal and Internet-savvy minority. In response to some of these objections, the committee has issued a fact sheet.
