a thaumaturgical compendium

This from the Celebrity Collage page. If I could only tell you how many times I’ve been in a restaurant and had people coming up to ask if I was Brad. It starts out amusing, but then just gets old.

It’s a little scary to think that the Edublog Awards are in their third year. I’m really happy that both James Farmer and Josie Fraser have so ably kept the awards going. I tried at an early stage, but it never would have happened (and continued to happen!) without their dedication. Just as I originally noted, I think it’s important to have these awards in order to demonstrate the value of blogging in education and to provide folks with some stellar examples.

So be sure to head over there and nominate some edubloggers. Nominations close at the end of the month, but do it now so you don’t forget.

I plan on checking out the Expo hosted this Friday by CUNY’s New Media Lab and Intermedia Arts Group: Bending technologies in and out of Academia. The site describes it thusly:

Featuring presentations by ground-breaking electronic composer Morton Subotnick with an interview by David Grubbs, and a performance by the creators of This Spartan Life, a talk show residing in the online Halo© multiplayer universe.

This exciting participatory event will showcase artists, students, and scholars who are mixing media technologies in unusual ways,

Participants will include CUNY faculty working in the field of experimental media, The Graduate Center’s Intermedia Arts Group, researchers from the New Media Lab, and special guests “This Spartan Life.”

Good, but strange:

The grad students this semester are keeping me busy with some really excellent blogging. It’s all aggregated here. Go read one of them and pass them a comment. Don’t worry, they aren’t that scary outside of Halloween… mostly.

Happy Election Day.

I’m one of many people not voting. I know, people died for that right. I also know that I don’t like ritual for the sake of ritual, and my vote really doesn’t matter much. Especially in a district where there are not a lot of chances of an upset. I suppose I could register out of my office in Connecticut, but you know, voter fraud and all that. But rational choice does not explain my lack of casting a vote.

Nor does serious worries over the voting process. When I was in seventh grade, I wrote a program that allowed students to vote for student elections. People shuffled in to the voting machine (a Commodore 64—yes, I’m that young) and clicked on their candidates of choice. While writing the program, for a moment I realized the power involved. There was no paper record—I could change the election. I didn’t. Instead, in order to avoid any appearances of impropriety, I even abstained from voting. I only wish I had the confidence in today’s voting machines that I had in my own. But that’s not why I didn’t vote today.

I sent in my voter registration card twice after moving to Manhattan. Each time I got a new, blank voter registration card back in the mail. No note, no indication of why. I’m guessing it is because I kept telling them that I was already registered back in western New York. But, I thought, maybe they had me down and were just sending me a new form each time for some strange paperwork reason. My wife got her voter card in the mail, and an indication of where to vote. I waited. Nothing. I should have been more vigilant about it, and I’m sure I could try to do something (provisional ballot?) now. But the truth is that my velleity in combination with an apparent bureaucratic snafu has led to my soft disenfranchisement.

Maybe I just tried to register for the wrong party. I’m going to try registering Republican and see if it “sticks.” I’ve registered with all sorts of parties in the past—I’m a bit of a party hopper—but I’m about the right age to turn Republican. Besides, I dig the whole “small government” thing. Doesn’t seem to be a big part of the platform lately, but maybe I can help bring it back. Though registering Republican might interfere with being able to vote for this guy.

Update: I’m not the only one, though clearly the lazier!

I help out with technical matters for the Association of Internet Researchers. Anyone who does social research on the internet knows about the AIR-L listserv. As a graduate student, it was a bit of a lifeline. At the time, people interested in the social aspects of networked technology were fewer and farther between, and this was a great meeting of minds and resource to draw on. Like other collaborative resources, it depends on the good will of those who are a part of it. But I also feel protective of that community because it has helped me personally as a scholar.

Someone who goes by Dr. W. Reid Cornwell is attempting to bootstrap what he is calling The Center for Internet Research. I cannot criticize the effort to have a “center.” I dig centers. And at first glance, it certainly appears to have a lot of backing. It claims to be “allied” with a number of prominent organizations, including the Internet Society and the EFF. Of course, it also claims to be “allied” with AoIR, which it certainly is not. On the “Directors & Advisors” page, it lists a number of heavyweights that would lend it credibility, including Vint Cerf, a father of the internet and currently a VP with Google, among others. One of the people on that page assures me that they have no association with the organization, and so again I wonder to what degree all of these people are really involved, but on its face, it looks to be a serious undertaking. There is a surprising lack of actual research on the site, but the same might be said of other such centers.

Surprising, then, is the behavior of its “principal scientist,” Cornwell. Some of his posts on AIR-L were innocuous. I play the troll often enough to know that there is often value in the approach, and appreciated the opportunity for interaction. Trolling isn’t always a terrible thing. Unfortunately, he took this beyond the limits of professionalism: taking on multiple identities and insulting other discussants. Once booted from the list (after seemingly interminable handwringing), he has made a post claiming that he was given short shrift by the Association. Of course, he seems to have missed the point: AIR-L is not a public street corner, but a community. And like a friendly neighborhood bar, when someone gets a bit drunk, starts insulting the other patrons, and airing their private email, he is asked to leave. No hard feelings: you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

I would just as well assume Mr. Cornwell is gone and forgotten. But there are two things mitigating against this. First, there is his center. Academics are a trusting lot, and they may not take the time to ask about, say, where the principal scientist did his graduate work, or what his scholarly background is. They might assume that the organizations the center is “allied” with are actually substantially related to the center.

The second is that he has likened AoIR to a star chamber, presumably because he thinks that he should have been guaranteed some form of due process before being booted from the list. It’s not surprising: if you’ve ever seen someone bounced from a club, you know that this is the usual refrain as they are ushered out the door. In fact, I wrote to a colleague very soon after Cornwell began posting on AIR-L predicting that his entire effort was to be kicked out of AoIR in order to be able to cast himself as a rebel and a maverick. Because of many of his posts on the list, he has managed to cast himself, to an audience of more than 1700 people who do work in this area, as little more than an annoyance and poorly informed about some of the core issues. Luckily, those posts speak for themselves.

Perhaps it is revealing that he allies himself with Lachlan Brown, a notorious troll who was also removed from AoIR, and ran into difficulties on other lists as well. Cornwell wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last, AoIR troll. While Cornwell very clearly stated he wanted nothing more to do with the list, future trolls may be less willing to remove themselves. What, then, is to be done? In the end, it has to come down to valuing the discussion and the community over the individual. Unlike a blog, where rants (like this one!) can cascade out without forcing themselves on an audience, a listserv is a more delicate beast.

This is cho-cool. How long before you can have one of these at home. (The process, not the furniture, I mean. The furniture is already on sale.)