a thaumaturgical compendium

Techcrunch has a writeup on the startup WebMynd, a Firefox add-on that records each website you visit to your hard-drive. The idea is that you have something of a personal archive. It’s free to archive for a week, and $20 to archive for a year.

This is a great idea, of course—after all, I’ve advocated for it for years. I recognize the effort for the commercial nature here, but this is crying out for an open alternative. Why?

With a small addition, it solves some major problems with archiving the web:

1. Selection. Obviously, those pages that are visited most frequently will be most frequently archived. It’s not the case that only the popular material is worth archiving or caching, but because it requires no hand-selection—or rather that selection is invisible—it is a good alternative.

2. Bandwidth. No crawlers but humans. Bandwidth isn’t a huge concern for the web hosts (though a large part of my traffic is bots), but it certainly is for the archiver, who has to try to suck the web down a single pipe.

3. Storage. Yes, storage has come down in price, but it’s still expensive. To paraphrase The Streets, a zettabyte don’t come for free.

What this means is that you would need to set up an infrastructure for sharing individual indexes, and then allow for P2P archive searches. It’s not a simple problem, but it is definitely a tractable one. The result would be a kind of holographic memory of the web: knock out half the internet, and it would still exist on the hard-drives of the remaining accessible client computers on the web.

I got a kick out of some of these responses of faculty to their RateMyProfessor comments. Some are pretty amusing. They share what seems like the prevailing view: don’t trust what you see on RMP because it is clearly biased, and if you have a complaint, come talk to your instructor, and you might actually have an effect on your experience in the classroom.

I am very into being a good teacher, but I’m not sure how well student evals reflect this. I may just be stinging from a recent set. Like most faculty, I zero in on the negative evaluations (best way to improve the course? “new curiculum [sic]. new instructor”), but the ideal seems to me to be what a colleague at Buffalo recommended: do reviews five years after graduation. If a student says that a course was taught them something then—rather than just before final exams—I think it probably carries a bit more weight.

The other course I’m teaching this semester—also distance—is formally titled “Communication, Media, and Society.” Is it only because I am in the field that I think that title might as well be shortened to “Stuff.” It’s hard to think what it doesn’t cover. In past incarnations, I’ve left it to the students to brainstorm a syllabus on the first day, and then largely teach the course to each other. Most (though not all) really liked the outcome of that process, despite initial doubts. There may be a way to do that online as well, but I wanted to provide a little more structure the first time it is taught online.

As a result, the course is focusing on the question of the future of the various media professions: journalist, PR professional, marketer, film maker, etc. Of course most of these only emerged as professions in the 20th century, and so it’s not surprising that they are changing rapidly with the introduction of new models of media. But I think changes in this area also reflect wider social and technological changes.

The question, of course, is what book to use as a text, since there isn’t one really. And so, we are writing one. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried this. Several years ago, one of the Communication Theory courses took a crack at a Communication Theory textbook on Wikibooks. I wasn’t thrilled by the final product, but I hadn’t expected to be—at least not entirely. The idea was that each year I’d come back and we’d add and revise chapters, but I haven’t taught a communication theory course since. It’s now a “featured book” on the Wikibooks site, and I think the experience was a good one. So we will be writing the book (and running the course) at a course wiki.

Of course we’ll also be drawing on a number of readings and lectures. Here is the assignment for the first module, including my initial lecture as an MP3.

(Apologies to Gorey for the image. See my syllabus for a citation.)

My partner and I have, at times, discussed the reconstruction of music from the 1980s. She knows a lot of music that just never made my radar, and vice-versa. And neither of our understandings of what constitutes “80s music” corresponds directly with what is now considered “oldies” collections. (I still get a kick out of the idea that some of the undergrads coming into school weren’t even born in the 80s.)

We hypothesize that this is because, at the time, I was in Southern California listening to new wave & punk stuff on KROQ (“Rock of the 80s”), while she was in the more House-influenced Chicago area. It may have just been what we were into, though.

The reconstruction is much more interesting when it is contextualized, and there is something especially fascinating about this three-hour chunk of MTV loaded onto Google Video, commercials and all. Of course, there’s the Police and Prince, and Brian Setzer doing an MTV promo, and then there’s gems like The Tubes’ “Monkey Time,” which I remember when I see it, but otherwise would never think to include in my 80s collection. It’s too easy to forget that the “Best of the 80s” really does allow us to conveniently forget “The Rest of the 80s.”

“...and, the way it looks now, Pink Floyd is pretty much on break…”

Oh, and how many images of Mickey Mouse show up in this short chunk? Today, we’d just assume it was product placement. Now, you don’t see Mickey unless it’s clearly making money for Disney.

(Originally posted here, and you can find the second half of the broadcast there, which includes a Sansui ad with KITT doing the voiceover.)

You may have noticed I have abandoned the idea of going all audio here. I’ve also decided not to echo every post from my grad courses here, but instead to do more periodic posts. And the periodicity will be rather long, since this semester’s classes are set up on a two-week cycle, in order to prepare for the shift from 16-week semesters down to 7-week courses. I know: yikes.

Today, allow me to introduce you to the Introduction to Interactive Communication Course, designed to be the first course people take when they come into the program. As former students know, I’ve taught some initial version of the “first graduate course” for about seven years now, in three different graduate programs. I like it because it is always, in some way, a survey, and it gives me the chance to try to set a trajectory for students’ graduate programs. I don’t know how successful I am at that, though, since many students end up thinking of it as that strange anomalous course we took at the beginning of the program. In fact, now that we are shifting the program, I think we need to be thinking about the curriculum again to make sure we are covering all our bases and not being more redundant than absolutely necessary, but that’s fodder for another post.

Like most of my grad courses, this one is blog-centric. The main course blog for the course may be found here, along with the start of a blogroll as students get their blogs set up. The assignment for the initial two-week “module,” may be found here, and includes a longish introductory talk and a shorter “nuts & bolts” overview of the syllabus. As the syllabus notes, the course provides a bit of a sampling of what the program is about, though the focus is less on design (found in more of the courses) and more on some form of overall social understanding of what interactive communication is and what it does.

As always, I’m trying something new with the classes this semester. (At some point, I’ll write about my experiments with Facebook as courseware last semester.) At the suggestion of an instructional designer, I’m trying self-assessments for each unit, to hopefully be able to get a better read on what students are getting out of the course—or not getting out of it—at each stage. I’ll let you know how that goes. Be sure to check out the participants’ blogs, once we get rolling, and I will likely point you to posts I think are interesting along the way.

No, no, not me. Or at least not except during the summers and weekends. But there is a fun-looking one-day conference on May 16th called Going Solo, all about the process of becoming a successful freelancer in a world that seems to be moving us all in that direction. They have some well-known speakers lined up and are looking for some other possibilities.

I would love to head out to Lausanne for the day and spend the rest of the weekend skiing. School’s out by then, but I’m afraid the Falcon 50 is scheduled for its annual, and I really can’t be bothered with commercial carriers these days.