a thaumaturgical compendium

My partner, Jamie, was in a center-court box last night watching Sharapova trounce Vinci and Roddick fight his way past Gimelstob. I, of course, gave up my seat to make last minute changes in the syllabi for my two grad seminars this semester: Introduction to Interactive Communication and Virtual Worlds.

Introduction to Interactive Communication

This seminar is designed to provide a foundation for the MS in Interactive Communication program, introducing the theory and practice of interactive communication, and establishing the organizational and research skills demanded by the field. As a field of study and as a profession, interactive communication is only just emerging, and there is no clear fixed tradition or discipline. There is, however, a collection of ideas about what interactive communication means, and how it works. Our focus during the semester will be on engaging these ideas, providing each student with a broad idea of how to take apart social and interactive systems, how to reassemble them in more effective ways, and how to track the current state of the art in interactive technologies.

Throughout the semester, we will be touching on the meaning of interactive communication and the deeper questions of why things work the way they do. We will also be looking at how to uncover the current trends, and predict opportunities for yourself and your organization. We will not be spending as much time on the practical elements of production technique, or on structured approaches to managing such production in an organization, as these are treated in more detail in later coursework. As a survey, we are interested in the big questions, and how to integrate a broad set of ideas into a useful group of conceptual relationships for each student.

Syllabus: PDF

Virtual Worlds

Over the last year or so, there has been a great deal of attention paid to a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) called Second Life; a period of media hype that is slowly coming to a close. Despite the seeming fifteen minutes of fame enjoyed by Second Life, it remains an outstanding example of a genre of social computing that has a long history, and is likely to have a long future. Virtual environments are here to stay, and there is an opportunity right now for communication professionals who are able to understand and work within these environments. Those businesses and individuals who are using Second Life today are acquiring a set of concepts and skills that are likely to be applicable to similar environments well into the future.

This seminar is designed as a practical introduction to MUVEs, with a special focus on Second Life, which will be at once the place where we work, and one of our objects of study. We will be reading some of the theory surrounding MUVEs, as well as more practical literature. By the end of the semester, participants in the seminar should be not only competent residents and creators in Second Life, but understand the social and business dynamics of virtual worlds, and be able to plan and execute a substantial project in-world.

Syllabus: PDF

I don’t like Blackboard, and I don’t know why.

That’s not entirely true. I have several reasons I don’t like Blackboard, but I don’t know whether they are reasonable, or they are just rationalizations of a deeply irrational dislike for the software product.

Allow me to begin by saying I don’t hate Blackboard. I don’t feel the same way about it as I feel about, say, liver, shiokara, or Bill O’Reilly. I feel about it much the way I feel about small, yappy-type dogs: fine if you like them, and glad they exist, but I don’t seek them out. Why?

First of all, I have yet to use a Blackboard install that wasn’t slow, at least under heavy use. Now, it may be that this is an issue with Oracle—at least I think it requires an Oracle back-end. Yes, I realize that these systems get a lot of traffic, but it’s not particularly CPU-intensive traffic. Much of this should be cache-and-go. Maybe the penalty for a “do everything” CMS is that it does it on its own time frame.

Second, the interface for the instructor is not particularly attractive or intuitive. Frankly, the Blackboard sites I have designed are simple enough that students would have no problems, but it should be much easier than it is to set up a basic boilerplate class. And adding a banner to a badly organized site is like putting a fresh coat of paint on a dead horse. Why not provide the ability to use your own CSS? (Can you do this?) Why not make it possible to put everything on the first page rather than requiring six clicks to get anywhere?

Third, it’s not as easily extensible as I would like it to be. Of course, most universities love this. The more you can tie the hands of your users, the less chance of security breaches and crashing the system as a whole. But look at what opening up Facebook has done for their popularity. If you were able to easily create plug-ins that individual instructors could create and use, it might be a bit better.

Fourth, it leads to a teaching monoculture. Everyone uses it. Of course, this is also one of the advantages of Blackboard. All of the students have used it at some point and are likely using for other classes. But it also tends to mean that it is hard to try new things or new ways of thinking about using technology in the classroom and out of it. Of course, you can try the one-foot in and one-foot out approach, but integrating work tends to be much harder. So, you are required to buy into the cult of instructional design. Don’t get me wrong: instructional designers do some great work, but it also tends to create an orthodoxy that is an anathema to a flexible, progressive, and diverse learning community. My faculty is strong because of the differences in the way we teach, and Blackboard tends to pave over those differences.

Fifth, it isn’t transparent. One of the reasons I got into blogging for classes is that it allowed for our work to be open to the wider community and the wider world. I think that’s important, and Blackboard doesn’t. Now, when I mention this, BbBoosters note that I can open the class to make it public (depending on how Blackboard is set up on your campus), and that all of the things I like to do: blogs, wikis, etc., are available on Blackboard. It’s true, Blackboard has hobbled versions of each of these tools, but the reason they are hobbled is that they are not a part of the wide, open, web. I can’t sign up for an RSS feed out of my class announcements, or have good inter-wiki links. Part of the reason I use these tools is precisely that they can be used in contexts outside of the university.

Sixth, it isn’t free. Yes, some of this is complaining about how much it costs, since it ends up eating up a substantial part of the information technology budget for many universities, but I am more concerned with the “free as in speech” issues rather than the “free as in beer” issues. At the same time that many universities are following MIT’s lead in providing open access to their teaching materials, Blackboard is not only making the default organization of such materials closed, they have made some pretty outrageous patent claims.

It’s the last two that are particularly irksome, I think. Given the existence of free and open tools like Sakai and Moodle, it just seems dumb to spend money on Blackboard. I guess that the same could be said of Microsoft Vista and various versions of Linux for the desktop. Both are flawed in various ways, but despite this, people are willing to spend money on the Microsoft product. I suspect that the reason people continue to use Blackboard is the reason I am typing this on a computer running Windows (XP—not upgrading to Vista). Namely, because it is the easy choice, relatively risk-free, and familiar. Blackboard knows how to sell to school administrators, and that is part of their product.

Because of some changes afoot in my own program, I will be making a lot more use of Blackboard. Way back when they were first talking about blogging, I volunteered (through my university) to serve on an advisory board for the development of their blogging product, but was never taken up on the offer (unfortunately). As long as we are using Blackboard, I figure we should make it as usable as possible. For the courses that are offered via Blackboard, I fully intend on becoming a Blackboard uber-user, extracting every drop of value out of the product I can, because that’s what my students deserve. Perhaps more familiarity will demonstrate that my opinion is misplaced, or that my opinions formed in using Blackboard several years ago are now antiquated. Updates to come over time…

I’ve been saying “no thank you” to the increasingly ubiquitous receipt checkers at the doors of (mostly) big-box stores. It’s insulting and an inconvenience. Generally, the guards are pretty nice about it. At Bed, Bath, & Beyond, they kind of shrug, and smile. At CompUSA, they actually shout after you like you are the criminal they assume you to be. I’ve even successfully said no thank you to the TSA at JFK, when they wanted to see my ticket for the third time (once before security, once going through the metal detector, and then again leaving security). Actually, in that case I would have complied if the person had been even minutely polite.

An incident at the Naperville outlet of TigerDirect somehow doesn’t surprise me. A customer said “no thank you” to guards who wanted to see her receipt, and was detained and verbally harangued. She called 911, but the police officer refused to charge the guard and manager with false imprisonment. I have to say, under the same conditions I would have walked out of the store and I doubt that a guard would be able to physically restrain me, but I’m kind of a jerk that way. Anyway, I’ve been in that store, and it feels a bit like a prison. I’ve gotten some pretty good bargains from TigerDirect in the past, it’s too bad I can’t in good conscience order from them any more.

I’m not sure that “no thank you” is enough any more, so I’ve printed up two versions of slips of paper to keep in my pocket, and to hand to guards who have this thankless job. The first one reads:

To the General Manager:

I have handed this paper to your security employee who has requested to see my receipt following a purchase, a request I politely refused. I recognize that this employee is doing the job you have assigned, and this should not be seen as an indication that this person has done anything but a fine job.

However, I am insulted by your practice of treating every customer as a potential thief. Note that this lack of goodwill results not only in my future choice of other, more customer-oriented stores over your own, it also results in significant negative word-of-mouth advertising regarding my shopping experience. Consider that you will have to spend substantial amounts of revenue in advertising for new customers with each customer you lose to this charade.

I sincerely hope you will reconsider your policy of checking receipts at the door. I recognize that shoplifting and other forms of loss are a challenge to retail establishments, and I encourage you to take measures—including increasing the number and training of sales associates—to reduce loss. Insulting your customers is the wrong approach.

I figure you can add your signature and contact information or not, as you like. Here it is in a convenient pdf, along with a less subtle version. (via Boing)

This blog is rated… PG?

That doesn’t quite explain why I’m blocked by major filters. The rating changes depending on what is on the main page. I have a feeling that if it slurped up my archives, it would get a different rating, but even my cyberporn category only gets us down to an R. I’m not sure that a blog that fails to reach NC-17 is really playing to its full potential. (via Froomkin)

Meant to post about this earlier, but I was on a WNPR call-in program this morning, Where We Live, talking with Kristine Nowak and John Dankowski. The show was about social networking sites and high school students. I muddled through. There is an MP3 if you are curious.

Posting will continue to be sporadic over the next month, as I continue to juggle about six different deadlines, in addition to all the stuff that goes along with the start of the school year. But in the midst of this it was nice to hear from some of my old colleagues about a paper we put together while I was still a student at the University of Washington. It was presented at a conference, and I thought it was an interesting paper, but I had pretty much forgotten about it.

Nice thing about historical work, as opposed to web-related research, is that it actually has a little bit of a shelf-life. After some massaging by the lead authors, it was recently published in the Howard Journal of Communications. I’m still not used to the idea of articles with seven different authors—almost feels like a hard-science citation!—but thanks to some good management and a bunch of very easy-to-work with folks, it was a rewarding, learning experience. The paper also speaks, I think, to the degree to which the status quo is maintained and frames discussions of race in contemporary contexts.

Some details:

Spratt, M., Bullock, C.F., Baldasty, G., Clark, F., Halavais, A., McCluskey, M., & Schrenk, S. (2007). News, Race, and the Status Quo: The Case of Emmett Louis Till. Howard Journal of Communications, 18(2).

Using inductive and deductive framing analysis, the authors examine how 4 newspapers covered a key event sparking the civil rights movement – the 1955 murder of Emmett Till – in an effort to gauge how the press covers events that are part of larger social ferment. The Daily Sentinel-Star (Grenada, Mississippi), Greenwood Commonwealth (Mississippi), Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Defender varied in intensity of coverage, use of sources, and attention to crime news and, as a result, framed the story differently. The African American Defender defended Emmett Till’s reputation, focused on larger issues of civil rights, and provided a clear argument for social reform. The 3 mainstream dailies defined the case primarily as one in which the victim invited his own death; they provided little or no support for reform. In this case, an advocate press seemed better able to give voice to those who challenged an entrenched status quo. By examining initial coverage of the Till case, we can better understand the news reporting traditions and devices that shaped (and continue to shape) narratives about the struggle for racial equality and justice.

Over the last several years, a number of researchers have written about the hyperlinked structure of the web and how it changes over time. It appears that the natural tendency of the web (and of many similar networks) is to link very heavily to a small number of sites; the web picks winners. Or, to be more accurate, the collective nature of our browsing picks winners. As users forage for information, they tend to follow paths that are, in the aggregate, predictable.

Huberman notes that not only are the surfing patterns of the web regular, the structure of the web itself exhibits a number of regularities, particularly in its distribution of features. The normal distribution of features found everywhere—the bell-shaped curve we are familiar with—is also found on the web, but for a number of features, the web demonstrates a “power law” distribution. George Kingsley Zipf described a similar sort of power law distribution (Zipf’s Law) among words in the English language, showing that the most frequently used English word (“the”) appears far more often than the second-most frequently used word (“a”), which appears far more often than the third-ranked word, and so on (Yes, yes, I know: Zipf is ranks and so it’s different, but not different enough to matter for this discussion.) This distribution—magnitude inversely proportionate to rank—has shown up in a number of places, from the size of earthquakes to city populations.

The number of “backlinks,” hyperlinks leading to a given page on the web, provides an example of such a distribution. If the number of backlinks were distributed normally, we would expect for there to be a large number of sites that had an average number of backlinks, and a relatively small number of sites that had very many or very few backlinks. For example, if the average page on the web has 2.1 backlinks, we might expect that a very large number of pages have about two backlinks, and a relatively small number to have one or zero backlinks. In practice, a very large number of pages have only a single backlinks, a much smaller number of two backlinks, and an again much smaller number have three backlinks. The average is as high as 2.1 because of the small number of sites that attract many millions of backlinks each. Were human height distributed in a similar fashion, with an average height of, say, 2.1 meters, we would find most of the globe’s population stood under a meter tall, except for a handful of giants who looked down at us from thousands of kilometers in the sky.

Huberman notes that this distribution is “scale-free”; that is, the general nature of the distribution looks the same whether you are examining the entire World Wide Web, or just a small subset of pages. I have been blogging for several years, and each blog entry ends up on its own page, often called a “permalink.” I took a look at the last 1,500 of my posts, to see how many backlinks each one received. The first figure to the right shows a ranked distribution of incoming links, not including the first-ranked posting. The vast majority (1,372) of these 1,500 pages do not have any incoming links at all. Despite this, the average number of backlinks (=”inlinks” in the figure) is 0.9, driven upward by the top-ranked posts. Incidentally, as the second graph shows, the number of comments on each of these entries follows a similar distribution, with a very large number of posts (882) receiving either a single comment or none at all. In order to make these figures more legible, I have omitted the most popular post, entitled “How to Cheat Good,” which was the target of 435 backlinks by August of 2007, and had collected 264 comments.

One reason to explain why such a distribution exists is to assume that there were a few pages at the beginning of the web, in the early 1990s, and each year these sites have grown by a certain percentage. Since the number of pages that were created has increased each year, we would assume that these older sites would have accumulated more links over time. Such an explanation is as unlikely on the web as it is among humans. We do not grow more popular with every year that passes; indeed, youth often garners more attention than age. There are pages that are established and quickly become “hits,” linked to from around the web. While it cannot explain the initial rise in popularity, many of these sites gain new backlinks because they have already received a large number of backlinks. Because of the structure of the web, and the normal browsing patterns, highly linked pages are likely to attract ever more links, a characteristic Huberman refers to as “preferential attachment.”

Take, for example, my most popular recent posting. The earliest comments and links came from friends and others who might regularly browse my blog. Some of those people linked to the site in their own blogs. Eventually, it came to the attention of several widely read and popular blogs, including Michael Froomkin’s “Discourse.net” and Bruce Schneier’s “Schneier on Security.” Someone noticed it on the latter blog, and a link was posted to it from “Boing Boing,” a very popular site with millions of readers. Naturally, many people saw it on Boing Boing and linked to it as well, from their blogs and gradually from other web sites. Eventually, I received emails telling me that the page had been cited in a European newspaper, and that a printed version of the posting had been distributed to a university department’s faculty.

It is impossible for me or anyone else to guess why this particular posting became especially popular, but every page on the web that becomes popular relies at least in part on its popularity for this to happen. The exact mechanism is unclear, but after some level of success, it appears that popularity in networked environments becomes “catching.” The language of epidemiology is intentional. Just as social networks transmit diseases, they can also transmit ideas, and the structures that support that distribution seem to be in many ways homologous.