Announcing the Social Software in the Academy Workshop, to take place at USC Annenberg Center, May 14-15, 2005 (CORRECTED DATE). The workshop is being organized by myself, danah boyd, Todd Richmond, Mimi Ito, and Justin Hall.
Please check out the Call for Participation! The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2005.
From Wired: The Web, Not the Death of Language:
[College students] had multiple conversations, they said, because of time constraints, and also because focusing on just one IM conversation would be "too weird."
The quote comes from work done by Naomi Baron on college students' use of IM. David Crystal, author of Language and the Internet (a dated but interesting read - and I totally disagree with him rolling synchronous and asynchronous chat into one category called "chatgroups," though I suspect this would change if a new edition of the book were to come out) is also quoted as being enthusiastic about the amount of written language generated on the Internet and the affordances that offers for studying language.
Oh. Denim comes from France. de Nimes.
(thought for the day. :))
So, not a whole lot of action going on here the past few days. Kinda busy, and also looking at apartments for a possible move. I have, however, been blogging over at my other blog, newlit. It's for a class at school, so it's very topic focused (adolescents and new literacies) but if that's your thing, you might be interested in taking a look. And I'd love feedback!
...and if you can identify this correctly, I'll give you $100. Swear to god.
Listening to Brian Lehrer, topic is two sketchy actions by the Bush administration. The first focuses on an article in today's NY Times:
In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials
reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin
Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline
hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously
undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission.
...
The Bush administration has blocked the public release of the full,
classified version of the report for more than five months, officials
said, much to the frustration of former commission members who say it
provides a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation
system.
Blocked until after the elections, mind you.
The second topic is Jane Mayer of the New Yorker's investigative piece on "extraordinary rendition," the government's policy of outsourcing interrogation to countries with interrogation policies that are not acceptable under US standards - outright torture. It appears as though the policy was begun by the CIA under the Clinton Administration, which is pretty disappointing. The Bush Administration has greatly expanded the program post 9/11, and refuses to talk about it.
Jane Mayer asks, where is the accountability? Why haven't more heads rolled in Washington? Why, indeed.
The Gates at Central Park, Christo & Jeanne-Claude's much-publicized temporary art installation that involves placing over 7,000 gates along the pathways of Central Park in New York City, is opening this weekend. Should be pretty stunning. Check out The Gates blog for visitor reactions and photos.
Well, tomorrow night I'm very very excited to be making my Lincoln Center "debut," singing in the chorus for the Little Orchestra Society's performance of Victor Herbert's operetta Sweethearts. The soloists are wonderful, and Lynn Redgrave is narrating. It's going to be a lot of fun. And like a ten year old in a candy store, I'm just really psyched to be singing on stage in Alice Tully Hall.
I've been a musician since third grade, was a music nerd in high school (cello and voice), and this is the sort of thing that we music nerds dream about. I kind of burned out on music in high school - I was in a magnet program at a public school, which meant music class 3 or 4 times a week, plus lessons, orchestra, chamber ensembles, string orchestra, chorus... - and decided not to pursue music seriously (not that I flatter myself that I could have), but have been playing in orchestras or singing with choruses all through college and after, just for fun. All in all, that's almost 20 years of music.
But I have to say that it has been really hard fitting in a commitment to music now that I'm in a doc program - I was actually feeling guilty this morning for being in a dress rehearsal when I should have been reading for class tonight. And that really makes me incredibly sad, because I feel like I shouldn't have to give up a piece of myself to pursue a graduate degree - and it also makes me sad that I lost perspective and bought into the idea that I have to. Because god damn it, I will not have my priorities dictated to me by convention.
So, anyway, if you're in the New York City area, come by Alice Tully Hall tomorrow night. I'll be in the front row of the chorus, blue shirt, enjoying the experience.
I love looking through my referrers, it's always an adventure. I get a fair amount of traffic from search engines. The searches that brought the last three people to my blog:
- no social life in grad school
- transvestites caught
- where are nyc transvestites
I can attest to the no social life in grad school thing, but I'm afraid I have no idea where the nyc transvestites are...
Howard Rheingold is teaching a class at Stanford this semester called Toward a Literacy of Cooperation. The course wiki is the hub of the class and is offered as a way for non-Stanford students to participate in the course:
Stanford students and anyone anywhere interested in learning about the emerging interdisciplinary study of cooperation is welcome to participate in this group blog.
It's certainly interesting that the course, in which I assume Stanford students are enrolled and therefore paying course fees, is so available to non-paying students (there's even a video feed of the lectures). Two things strike me here: 1) the course isn't seen as a threat to the institution b/c the (paying) Stanford students must consider themselves to be getting something out of the experience that the online students aren't, which means that 2) it provides an interesting model for universities to engage in "distance learning" by opening up on-the-ground courses to participation via the Internet.
