No more slacking

Well, Jason, I haven’t known you all that long, but maybe you should listen to your friends. Maybe you’ve become something of a fuck-up. I mean, I, for one, did not choose a life that was defined by what I did for a living, so I would never lecture you on that. But this is the cold hard facts of life, neighbor. You spend the bulk of your day doing something for money. Welcome to America. So start looking for what it’s going to be. Who cares what it is? Find something that makes you happy, it’s not a vision quest. And by that I mean, look harder than you are.

– Advice from a character in James Rosen’s new novel, I Just Want My Pants Back.

(I have to admit, I had a hard time enjoying this novel. Jason is supposed to be a lovable scamp, I think, but he reminds me too much of some students I run across, putting off adulthood indefinitely, smoking and drinking their way into perpetual oblivion. The quote above puts my frustrations into the mouth of one of the characters, but I guess I found Jason a hard guy to care too much about. I may have the above quote printed up so that I can hand it out to students who seem to think that life–if not their parents–will somehow provide for them.)

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Remaindered Links

Build me.Some of these are new, others old…
* Agoraphobics rejoice: Google now has street level photos. Here’s my apartment. The very slight creepiness is way outbalanced by the coolness factor. If I had checked this out before I went to trade in my cable box at a nondescript building, I could have saved myself a couple of seconds of rechecking the address.
* Geogreeting pulls alphabetamorphic buildings from Gmaps and spells stuff out. It even shows you where the buildings are on a map. Very cool.
* Very much looking forward to a Diamond Age miniseries
* I wonder if no email Fridays would just lead to more anxiety about what is going missing.
* This case, a lawsuit against the Internet Archive for crawling an individual’s site, is one that needs to be watched closely.
* Not every day you get compared to compared to Severus Snape

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Second Life Best Practices in Education

SL Best PracticesSpent part of my day in Second Life at the Best Practices in Education Conference. Was great to hear about others’ experiences. Some was stuff I had already learned the hard way, but even then, it was worth the reminder.

One of the recurring themes, which came up in Kenny Hubble’s presentation, among others, was how to provide some sense of order. Just like any class, you need to be very clear about what is and is not acceptable. Given that students feel special freedoms in virtual worlds, need to remind them to experience those freedoms (littering, dancing, stripping, sex) outside of classrooms and class times. In other words, treat it like real life. One of the suggestions was there is a “hand-raising chair” that allows students to raise their hands easily in class, for example.

On the other hand, why replicate RL settings in Second Life? Given that a lot of the rules do go out the window in second life, I think it’s important to try to keep some things the same to cushion students entry into the world. This is one of the reasons I usually make my avatar look a bit like me, and why I will likely track down that hand-raising chair. Nonetheless, I hope that we can move quickly away from these structures and that there are ways of encouraging students to take things in their own direction. Actually, one of the reasons I am eager to teach in Second Life is precisely that the “strangeness” gives students permission to experiment in ways the physical classroom may not.

That bleeds into how to sell this to administrators. A lot of people have had the experience of asking their universities for support only to get blank stares, then having an evangelist on the administrative side “get it,” and ask why the campus is so slow on getting in-world. I suspect, given that IBM and others are making virtual environments a major part of their business (at least on the training and education side), campuses will be slowly coming around. But the recurring theme is that you cannot tell people what Second Life is, they have to experience it. Actually, I’m not sure that is entirely the case. I think good use of video might be an even better stand-in, from the perspective of persuading institutional involvement. I’m going to record much of what we do in our fall class and what other people are doing, and try to put together a “best of” reel to help sell the idea of an island in-world.

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How to do a link analysis

I was lucky enough to be able to have dinner last night with Han Woo Park and his lovely wife, which is even better than having dinner with Han solo (… yeah, sorry, Han). He is in New York for the NetSci conference. He has a longstanding interest in hyperlink networks, and that continues to be something I am interested in as well. In fact, one of the most common sorts of questions I get over email is regarding some of the mechanical aspects of doing this kind of work. That is, the question is rarely about the theory or ideas behind examining hyperlink networks, since these are generally available in published work. Instead, it is about what sort of software to use, how to define things, where to get started, and how to do the analysis.

So, I have decided, despite too many projects already scheduled for this summer, to do a short mini-investigation of a particular network, and blog my progress with an eye to details that might be useful for others doing this kind of work. This isn’t a cooking show: nothing has been baked ahead of time. It may–as too much of my research does–end in total disaster. I expect wrong turns.

I also expect it to take a while. This is something I will do in the spare 10 minutes I have, as a break between other things. So, progress may come a bit slowly. In part, I’m hoping this will be something I can point people to when they ask about some of these things.

I want it to be a real project, rather than just some demo stuff. I’ll upload any data I have as I move along.

What kind of hyperlink network do I want to investigate? I have a few projects waiting in the wings. One has to do with blogging behaviors, and though I am eager to start that project, some of the details there are probably not as generalizable. Instead, I want to look at more fixed, traditional websites. I am going to draw on some initial brainstorming I had with Maria Garrido exactly four years ago over wet burritos by the San Diego bay. (Damn, and I can’t even remember my students’ faces when I meet them outside of the classroom.)

We had finally capped off our work on mapping grassroots networks that were associated with the Zapitista movement. If you are interested in that work, you can find it as a chapter in the Cyberactivism book, or you can read an earlier version of that paper (pdf), presented at the Association of Internet Studies conference. We decided that the natural next step would be to compare this emerging internetworked set of sites for grassroots groups to the network of sites for the more traditional governmental and non-governmental organizations.

My working hypothesis is that these more established sites will feel more like the sites of traditional automobile companies in that they will attempt to remain “sticky” and not link outside. Since I will be collecting data from these sites, I’ll try to look not just at the hyperlinks, but at some other factors that might help to explain why the network is the way it is.

My rough plan of attack, though apt to change, is thus:

1. Do a very preliminary literature review. I’m actually going to talk about the mechanics of this as well, since it will give me a chance to point my students in this direction. I have to say that this will be a “light” literature review. Mainly, I want to (a) make sure I’m not doing something that has already been done and (b) see if there are any interesting observations that I might be able to fit into my own work.

2. Decide on what to collect (archive).

3. Decide on how to collect it, and collect it.

4. Do some manipulations on my local data that will allow me to analyze the network (assuming there is one!).

5. Do some loose exploratory analysis of the network.

6. Look for possible explanations.

7. Write it up and present it, if the outcome is worthy.

There are a couple of things to note here. I far prefer what some call “exploratory” work to the more traditional hypothesis testing that is the norm in the social sciences. I generally am curious about something and pursue it. That helps me to remain interested in the project. There is the downside, which is I sometimes end up with garbage. Well-designed projects yield interesting results no matter what the data, but this one may not.

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