Is video inherently flawed, or is this consolidation in operation?

Thanks Josie for pointing this out to me. For teachers concerned with feedback, this is a key question: two really, because the consolidation question is separate from the question of the affordances of the medium. I am interested in the affordance question but do not know the answer. I do know that it is easier to write than to speak in most of the environments I work in. Or, that is, I find it easier. In open plan working environments or coffee shops or trains the rattle of the keys is normal (and normalised), whereas speaking out loud at a computer is not. Telephone conversation is becoming more acceptable, but monologues on dictaphones are more annoying. For me the heavy overhead of video is in part having a studio-like environment in which to work as well as having and knowing how to use the tools. I follow Change da channel on Youtube. He gets regular video commentary. He is great (imo). The video commentary: well, my mother said if you don’t have anything nice to say… Let’s say the discourse is just not made much richer. I have adopted Twitter and blogging and a little IM on Skype and discussion forums. Each tweaks the old epistolary conventions, allowing for more or less dialogue, more or less reflection, more or less extension. I have tried adding audio into the mix, recording feedback for students. It should work. It really should. But, I find myself going blub blub blub and having to re-record. Maybe I need elocution lessons? Video magnifies the blub blub blub effect: is my hair OK? And one is expected to be clothed. In epistolary conventions (and on the Internet) no one knows you are a dog (or naked, or wearing a torn Metallica t-shirt). The visual semantics have to be taken into account, as do the expectations of the audience. Some of my students wouldn’t mind the t-shirt. Others would prefer more professional garb when getting commentary on their 52%. With epistolary conventions I can write properly dressed prose from a scholar’s office no matter where I am or how (or if) I am dressed. On video I have to look as well as sound the part. Even my accent has to be taken into account. Video is inherently different. I find it much harder to use.

Oh yes. And, there does appear to be consolidation in operation: see, e.g. Research and Markets, “Internet Video – Conditions of Profitability” http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/660784

there is a visitors vs. residents issue here (to borrow David White’s categorisation of online users). Twitter is a tool for residents. It’s about people being immersed. It’s about people “living a percentage of their life online“. When visitors get hold of Twitter they see it as a tool to get a job done when the need arises

Andy Powell makes a passing, tongue-in-cheek comment about the world having two kinds of people. Here he means Twitter visitors and Twitter residents. But he jokes about two other kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t. My knees jerk when presented with binaries, and the Internet, of which Twitter is but a part is too complex for binary classification systems, though they may remain useful for discussion purposes. With Twitter there are all sorts of residents and all sorts of visitors. I am reminded of Vermont, a pleasant, hilly, rural, poor corner of northern New England in the US, where tourism is an important industry. Since the 19th century visitors came from the sweltering coastal cities of New York, Boston and Philadelphia in the summer, spawning the term “summer people”. Summer people owned houses or rented but left when the cool nights turned cold and their homes (and school and work) called. But, some liked it up north so much they stayed spawning the term “all-year summer people”: no more rooted than the migrant visitors. Some all-year summer people had kids and raised them in Vermont. Were they local? “Just because a cat has kittens in the oven, don’t make them biscuits,” said the locals, and gave rise to “second-generation summer people”.

There are all kinds of Twitter residents: those who follow celebrities and those who don’t; those who protect their profile (all year summer people as far as I am concerned) and those who don’t; those who strive for thousands of followers, those who use it for research, those for whom it is purely frivolous. And, there are all sorts of visitors. There are the coach tours and the backpackers; new-age travellers and tourists; travel writers and thse who send postcards home. For a lot of us Twitter is our postcard home, and a little like the turtle’s shell: a piece of home we carry with us.

Iran’s epic political conflict reflects a thirty-year arc of revolution now using state power to crush its own children, says Hazem Saghieh.

Open Democracy can be relied on for a rigorous analytical approach to the issues of the day, well referenced and argued.

The purpose of this paper is simple. We wanted to explore retweeting as a conversational practice. In doing so, we highlight just how bloody messy retweeting is. Often, folks who are deeply embedded in the culture think that there are uniform syntax conventions, that everyone knows what they’re doing and agrees on how to do it. We found that this is blatantly untrue. When it comes to retweeting, things get messy.

This is a well written and useful paper for more than just the authors’ core aim of analysing retweeting. It provides a useful introduction to the sociology of Twitter and research into Twitter practices.

It is worth a cross link to Paul Carr’s comment in his Guardian blog on Twitter etiquette: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/03/not-safe-for-work-twitter-10-commandments

Though this is a very different genre it addresses the same phenomenon of emergent etiquette practices in new social media.

Though I was briefly a Twitter sceptic, I have been using the service for over two years and remain convinced that, with a few other key aspects and applications, it is among those things that makes the Internet uncontrovertably (for me) a *good* thing.

EvidenceNet – which is to be a new repository for evidence in support of good teaching and learning practice, including resources, events and “networks” (in other words you can search EvidenceNet to find groups and organisations of interest).

Thanks to Sarah Currier for drawing my attention to Evidence net. This is to be a focused repisotory of evidence for good teaching and learning practice. Should be very useful for PCTHE practitioners.

More and more, sites are serving consumers streams of information rather than static web pages. And today’s browsers aren’t set up to help us filter and digest this new format. So I started TweetDeck with a focus on Twitter but a bigger vision, to become a new browser for the real-time Web

and I love that Tweetdeck’s blog is on Posterous and that now Tweetdeck updates Facebook. It is a shame Flickr isn’t the photo sharing site of preference in this collection of apps

If we represented truly the worst-case scenario, then copyright infringement can’t be a really big problem, because we don’t have that much

I think the lesson here is that fair use practice in education has to lead legislation, not be driven by it. MIT has led the OER movement. As a pioneer and as a sponsor of “openism” it has probably tread further than many lesser institutions have dared; thereby defining the space within which use can be considered “fair” ahead of those who are more risk averse.

Is the book dead? Can the Six Sisters of publishing rescue books? Will publishers find a new profit model? Can bookstores survive the internet? Can writers make a living? What about e-books? Is Kindle the beginning and end of the revolution? Will Google Books be literature’s savior or executioner? Where does Scribd.com fit in?

A prediction piece illustrating how “netboox” will take over the publishing industry. A balanced utopian/dystopian vision of a plausible near future. I like the bookstore cafe bar copyshop performance-space convergence.

A Virginia Circuit Court judge dismissed a lawsuit this morning against George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media.

Thomson Reuters Inc. had sued the university in a Virginia court in September for at least $10-million in damages, claiming that Zotero, a free software tool created by the university, made improper use of the company’s EndNote citation software.

Thank you to Stephen Downes for drawing attention to this story. Not sure what the implications may be, yet, but comments and sidebars draw parallels with Blackboard.