pedablogical

For Win or Mac: Rip a CD as one continuous MP3 in iTunes – Lifehacker

Rip a CD as one continuous MP3 in iTunes – Lifehacker—while I am not trying to rip an opera to my iPod, this could still be quite handy, especially for some partitioned audio books that I have that always want to play out of order.

CW2006 Presenation: Lakoff DVD

I’ve watched the companion DVD to the Elephant book, How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff, several times this evening—for lazy reasons, as it seemed much easier than slogging all the way through the book and I needed to feel like I was accomplishing something. The video is really to short to be very helpful. It’s as if Lakoff decided to read the outline to us. Very little explanation. I was hoping for more, especially for what I paid for it. Oh well.

Still much to figure out, and I’ve pulled a number of books off of the shelf. At some point, I acquired The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media by Raymond Gozzi, Jr., and apparently I need to skim through it. Ir worries me too that I don’t know how Media Ecology fits into my A/B scheme. I keep running into it,and it feels as if it’s just beyond what I’m doing. But it troubles me that it keeps coming up. How can I possibly work anything else into this craziness?

In the News: Beeks reading program is a success

NRVToday.com – Beeks reading program is a success—from the world of strange things from my hometown. Apparently, a bearded dragon is a lizard. While I’m sure that kissing such a lizard is harmless to the human, I do wonder what the hell that poor lizard thought.

TechRhet: Internet Debate: Preserving User Parity

NPR : Internet Debate: Preserving User Parity—isn’t it interesting that people don’t care to notice that there are fundamental race/class barriers to digital access, but if the conversation is about commercial access, everyone is outraged? Well, if you define everyone their way.

lost dna

When I notice a stray piece of hair or a jagged, torn fingernail fall to the ground, often I think that I should scoop it up, catch it from its fall and put it in my pocket. I must keep the evidence that I was there so no one can trace me. Must stay unknown and unseen. This thought of invisibility happens most often in places where anyone would expect me to be—my car, my house, my office. Maybe it’s just that I don’t pay attention in other spaces. Or maybe it’s in those spaces that I most need to disappear to ease it all away.

CW2006 Presentation: More Heidegger

My knowledge of theory could be bound in nutshell, but for some reason I’m investigating Heidegger. Mostly, I think I just feel smart when I hear the sound of the word in my head. So this morning, instead of getting ready for work, I procrastinated and googled for [heidegger technology]. For no particular reason that I recall, I chose the third link: Professor Hubert Dreyfus. It turned out to be far to long to read when I was supposed to be in the shower, but I did scroll it a bit and found this (I wish there were a way to insert a named anchor in someone else’s page):

In a quite different domain, in a talk at Berkeley on the difference between the modern library culture and the new information-retrieval culture, Terry Winograd notes a series of oppositions which, when organized into a chart, show the transformation of the Modern into the Postmodern along the lines that Heidegger described. Here are a few of the oppositions that Winograd found:

LIBRARY CULTURE	INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL CULTURE
Careful selection a. quality of editions b. perspicuous description to enable judgment c. authenticity of the text	Access to everything a. inclusiveness of editions b. operational training to enable coping c. availability of texts
Classification a. disciplinary standards b. stable, organized, defined by specific interests.	Diversification a. user friendliness b. hypertext–following all lines of curiosity
Permanent collections a. preservation of a fixed text b. browsing	Dynamic collections a. intertextual evolution b. surfing the web

It is clear from these opposed lists that more has changed than the move from control of objects to flexibility of storage and access. What is being stored and accessed is no longer a fixed body of objects with fixed identities and contents. Moreover, the user seeking the information is not a subject who desires a more complete and reliable model of the world, but a protean being ready to be opened up to ever new horizons. In short, the postmodern human being is not interested in collecting but is constituted by connecting.

Either I’m losing my mind and totally lost, or I am completely on target and have a 500-page treatise to write. The columns are backwards from my notes—Winograd has B-A, and I have A-B. The need for “control of objects” in Winograd’s Library Culture parallels the Information Architecture control over agency that Marilyn Cooper identified in the CCCC session. The “protean being ready to be opened up to ever new horizons” is a more positive reading of the organic and systemic Information Ecologies. Library Culture is the “strict father,” and Information-Retrieval Culture is the “nurturing parent.”

As I said, I either suddenly undertand everything, or I’m totally lost and making things up.

C&W 2006 Presentation: Conference Info

Because I keep finding links and then forgetting where they are, I created C&W2006: The Unauthorized Collection, where I have linked to everything I have found for the conference. Now perhaps, I won’t keep losing my links.

C&W 2006 Presentation: the Heidegger . . .

I’ve been thinking about the Heidegger quote in my sleep it appears, and I can’t help but think it’s wrong or at least wrongly applied here. While I can clearly see ways that it applies to some of the items in the B column, I’m not at all sure that I can extend it to everything.

That means that I’ve spent the last hour digging for Heidegger. I have this shelf of theory books that I frequently think about trying to get rid of for shelf space. I can’t bring myself to dumping them in the usual used books places though because there are some books there that would be very useful to a grad student. As a result, they just sit on my shelf over there, in my way. I pulled all of the anthologies off this morning, but didn’t find any Heidegger essays sadly.

I checked the technorhet books, and while there are some that may help with this process, the Heidegger essay I need (“The Question Concerning Technology”) was no where. So off to Amazon. $14.00 could get me The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. I just hate having to buy a whole book for one 32-page essay. :\ bleh.

So back to lazy research, and behold, I found the essay online! Okay, I know that this is some copyright violation, but I’m using it anyway. I compared it to the pages of the essay that Amazon has available online, and the transcription looks accurate. Also found an online guide to the essay which might be useful, but which at present is mostly pissing me off because of the silly, unexplained iconography.

Having not read anything, which is of course the worst time to try to guess what something means, I have this feeling, as I mentioned above, that it’s not an either-or thing. If the Heidegger fits, it fits the columns in a post-structuralist both-and sort of way. I just haven’t quite figured out how yet.

C&W 2006 Presentation: Musings

I’ve been sitting around trying to figure out my presentation for Computers and Writing. That means, of course, that I’ve been fidgeting with trying to find information on the conference online, researching this and that, and other “prewriting” activities.

Yesterday, I sadly realized that I actually have to read the Lakoff book very soon. So I’ve been trying to plug through it, but I’m not making much progress. Not because it’s hard to read, but because I’m having a hard time figuring out how I’m going to connect something that is so firmly grounded in Republican-Democratic political ideology to my ideas about technological literacy. In my heart, I just feel like I’m going down some crazy road, where none of this really will make sense. If anyone comes to the session, they’ll just wonder where I got the crack that helped me come up with these ideas.

I seem to be taking more breaks from reading than actually reading, so I’ve been at the computer. I posted that question about computer teaching space names on TechRhet, thinking that since Lakoff is talking about the process of naming perhaps that would be the thing that would tie the elephants to the laptops. I’ve been compiling the names in a spreadsheet, and the answers are, indeed, interesting. Still, I don’t think that I have seen the fundamentally important difference in language use that fits Lakoff’s discussion of language. Sigh.

So I decided to reread my notes from the last CCCC session that I attended: M.20: Info-Ecology, Info-Architecture: Growing and Designing Rhetoric for Critical Technography. That was about an hour and a half ago, and as I read my notes I had this sudden realization. I had -one of those moments-. An epiphany? I don’t know what to call it. I don’t have them often, and the most vivid one came when I was studying for my master’s exam and suddenly realized how everything related to everything else. At that moment, I knew that I understood and that no further amount of studying would make any difference. You could have given me any 4 texts to relate, and I would have been able to do it.

That’s that it felt like. Suddenly, I thought that I saw how everything connected and made sense—technology, architecture/ecology, elephants. My notes aren’t all that complete however; so I used the lazy researcher’s friend. Either I completely understand, or I am totally lost.

	A	B
M.20 session	information ecology, loss of agency organic human interaction with technologies Dickie: "we need a citizenry that understands the best way to live"	information architecture, control of agency human control of interaction with technologies
wikipedia	Quotes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_ecology: “Information ecology” often is used as metaphor, viewing the informational space as an ecosystem. describe and analyze information systems from a perspective that considers the distribution and abundance of organisms, their relationships with each other, and how they influence and are influenced by their environment.	Quotes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_architecture: The practice of structuring information (knowledge or data) for purpose In the context of web design (or design for related media) Information Architecture is defined by the Information Architecture Institute as The structural design of shared information environments. The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability. An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape. designing the architecture around the needs and capabilities of the intended user audience.
Lakoff’s explanation of national politics via the family metaphor	nurturing parent ". . . children are born good and can be made better. The world can be made a better place, and our job is to work on that. The parents’ job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others." (12) Values in "a community as in a family": freedom; opportunity; prosperity;, fairness; open, two-way communication; community-building, service to the community, and cooperation in a community; trust; and honesty. (13) Types of progressives. #3 of 6, "Environmentalists think in terms of sustainability of the earth, the sacredness of the earth, and the protection of native peoples." (14).	strict father "Children [citizens] are born bad, in the sense that they want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good." (7) "the strict father [government] is a moral authority who knows right from wrong" (7). Government takes the role of the father, knowing right from wrong, and making decisions that reward those who are self-reliant, those "whose prosperity reveals their discipline and hence their capacity for morality" (9).
Cindy’s Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century	Technological literacy "refers to the complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved in operating linguistically within the context of electronic environments, including reading, writing, and communicating. The transformed term, critical technological literacy, suggests a reflective awareness of these social and cultural phenomena." (148)	"The prevailing cultural understanding of the term as simple competence with computers" (xx).
K12 literacy education	whole language instruction "instructional philosophy which focuses on reading as an activity best taught in a broader context of meaning. Rather than focusing on reading as a mechanical skill, it is taught as an ongoing part of every student’s existing language and life experience. Building on language skills each student already possesses, reading and writing are seen as a part of a broader ‘whole language’ spectrum."	phonics, NCLB, standards, testing, “scientifically-based” reading instruction, direct instruction picture the guided reading instruction shown in the clips where GWB is observing a classroom read "The Pet Goat" while the planes fly into the WTC.
tengrrl’s musing	organic, holistic	structured, determined

Um, that’s more than enough for now. I started trying to get this explained hours
ago. It’s 2 am now. But I do have to summarize somehow. I’m not trying to set
up a Good/Bad dichotomy here, especially not as it might apply to the CCCC session
on info ecologies versus info architecture. I’m trying to look at the way that
metaphors and language fall out in these discussions and to think about how the
metaphors that are chosen influence the ways that instruction and learning is
(or is not) sustained. I’m still not at all sure how that works. It’s just that
I think I finally figured out how everything parallels the dichotomy that Lakoff
set forth.

I think, also, that we are close to the dangers of technological thinking
that Heidegger explains—totally via Cindy’s explanation: "When humans have
a technological understanding of the world, we see technology in a very narrow
way: as a tool for solving problems, as a means to an end" (140). "As humans
adopt this ‘instrumental’ understanding of technology, we also begin to think
that all problems can be solved with technology and that the newest technology
is all we need to master the natural environment as well" (141). And finally,
"This way of ‘enframing’ the world (20) becomes dangerous when it limits
our repertoire of response to a ‘single way’ (32) and when our other ways of
understanding the world atrophy and disappear" (141). I think, and I really
emphasize think there, that that Heidegger might well fall into the B
column, the strict father view, with its singular focus on good and scientifically-determined
ways of doing things, without attention to other existing ways. i think…

I no longer know where any of this is going. I’m not sure how it relates in any
way to my
original C&W abstract. Hell, I’m not even sure if it makes any sense
to anyone other than me. On that one level, as I typed hours ago, it feels like
I suddenly know how everything relates to everything else. On the other, I’m
not at all sure what it means or if it’s even right. It’s 2:21 now. Perhaps it’s
time to sleep on it.

Secrets

Sometimes, I honestly think these [one and two] stupid postcards are me. Damn you PostSecret.