My friend and fellow doc student Ulises is teaching a class at TC this fall called Social Software Affordances. He's posted a link on his blog to the syllabus, and is requesting feedback. It's new on a couple of levels for a TC class, both in content and in structure - with the structure actually built around the content. Radical.
August 2005 Archives
This NYC Police Dept flyer caught my eye last evening as I dined on a jumbo slice at Koronet. I was interested that it specifically named iPods, a particular brand of music players, as being dangerous to display - because of its popularity, of course, but still. Then my friend pointed out the line directly below this. I'm not sure that it's clear in the photo; it reads:
"If you choose to wear your iPod, cell phone or PDA clipped to your belt for all the world to see as some kind of 21st century status symbol, remember that may not be the best safety practice."
Ha! There's something funny (in a few different senses of the word) about the NYC Police Dept. calling us all out on our materialistic, status-hungry, 21st century ways. Oddly enough, if you read a little further down the poster, it says
"Using the white [iPod] headphones while out in public is advertising that somewhere on your person you are carrying an item worth over $300 that has the capability of holding over 10,000 songs - certainly a temptation for any theif."
Which sounds a lot like ad copy to me. The whole thing's just weird.
After moving into a new apartment, and taking a few days for just lazing around, I'm now slowing getting back into the mindframe of classes. I'm only taking 3 classes this fall, using a certificate of equivalency to give me full time status while I begin work on my dissertation proposal (gulp!). There's one class that I'm particularly excited to be taking (here's where the nerd part comes in): Readings in communication theory and social thought
I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see that the profs are using a Plone implementation to deliver the course content. The layout of the thing makes much more sense than the crappy Blackboard/Prometheus implementation that TC uses, materials are more easily accessible, and the vast majority of readings are online as pdfs - without having to jump through the hoops of going through the library. Simple, clean, and efficient. Ahhhh. My only complaint is that we're not getting to Foucault and Bourdieu until the spring...
I'm getting ready to leave Vermont in a few days, but first, a summer classic: the Addison County Fair & Field Days, home of cuddly animals, farm equipment, short shorts, and fried dough. For all that, however, the demolition derby is top on the list of things to see. For those of you city folk who have never been to a country fair, demo derby = cars on fire. Well, if you're lucky anyway. A Volvo station wagon won the first derby I ever attended, and I've been hooked ever since.
if:book has an interesting post that draws attention to the phenomenon of individual blogs that come together under a single banner, à la Gawker (one of the first to do so). As if: book points out, bloggers have found ways to form communities and/or affinity groups across blogs for a while now, via blogrolls, discussions across blogs, quoting, etc. This may be something different:
"...what happens when blogs choose to aggregate themselves under a single masthead? What happens when the voices decide to group together in a chorus? Do they then become a newspaper? A magazine? A union? A league? A society? It may not yet have a name, but some blogs have in fact started banding together to form a new kind of hybrid publication that is difficult to define."
