Always Love, Hate Will Get You Every Time

Music:
Nada Surf - Always Love

Oh Blogger, how I've ignored you. Please don't hate me. I'm terribly sorry. It's just that I've been so busy lately, what with school and work and everything. I'm thinking of you as I listen to this song. I swear I'll change, Blogger. Why don't we go to a movie Saturday, just you and me? I'll be a better person, I swear. I love you Blogger. Do you still love me?

For this web article thing...I've got three ideas. I'd like to know what seems like it would be the most interesting...I think I'm leaning towards one of the three, but I'm not going to say which one it is. First I want to know what everyone else thinks.

Idea One
The first idea is to write a web article based on what I gave my talk on at AoIR in Chicago, the idea of copyright/copyleft, and ownership on the internet. The article would be based on ideas discussed by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig (www.lessig.com) and focus mainly on the difference in mindset between older generation and younger generation teachers and students in terms of what constitutes ownership...for example, if an article is "published" exclusively on the internet, do the same rules for citation apply as if the article were published in an academic journal? Or, in a more pop culture sense...what are the copyright issues relating to mashups and remixes of songs? Who owns the remix, the original artist or the remixer? Is the remixer entitled to use the original artists recording with or without permission? Some answers are more difficult than they seem.

Idea Two
The second idea focuses on those mindset differences mentioned in Idea One, but with a little bit of a broader scope. What are mindsets and mindset differences? How does composition instruction change when the teacher and students are of different mindsets? How can we take these mindset differences and use them to teach and learn more effectively?

Idea Three
The third idea is to focus on the nature of internet reviews on sites like amazon.com or cduniverse.com. These reviews are mostly by purchasers of the item and not professionals. What are the differences between professional and user reviews? How does one judge whether a user review is effective and/or worth considering when deciding on an item to purchase? What are the benefits of reviews such as this versus professional reviews, and what are the drawbacks?

Any and all comments are appreciated.

--Josh

But Maybe Tomorrow, I'll Find My Way Home...

If I happen to not be in class tomorrow, you can blame Bill Clinton. Also, you can probably find me in the back of the Vaughn-Eames lot, wandering around with picket signs and singing ballads about the lack of respect Kean has for it's students...but that's a political rant for a non-enligsh-class oriented blog...

Before Tuesday's class, I had never used Mozilla ( ), barely heard of it, didn't really know what it was. Still kind of don't know what it is for that matter.

On the other hand, you'd have to be living on Neptune, in a dark cave, with your hands in your ears singing "LA LA LA LA LA" really loudly for the last fifteen years to have not heard of Microsoft ( ).

The assignment was to visit both websites and attempt to navigate through the links, and see what happens. Can you get out of the site? Can you get from one to the other? Are the links, like Burbules mentioned in his article, really bi-directional? Can you go from a link on Mozilla to Microsoft, and then back again from Microsoft to Mozilla?

The answer was a shocking no. (sarcasm people, work with me here) Microsoft's website was unsurprisingly restrictive, allowing you to navigate through Microspfts (admittedly somewhat vast) selection of products and self-championing articles. Microsoft's website acts as though competitors don't exist (I'd make some kind of monopoly joke here but that's old hat by now).

Mozilla's, on the other hand, readily links to outside sources. It's aparent on the front page, which links to an article about Mozilla on a different website. Articles about Microsoft, on the other hand, seem difficult to locate, if they're around at all. I have a feeling (though I cannot prove it, because I can't seem to find any) that if there are articles about Microsoft written by a third party on Microsoft's site, they're hosted on the site itself, not linked to the author's site.

One of the more amusing differences was that when you search Mozilla on Microsoft's website search bar, you come up with a ton of different Microsoft products and services, but no mention of Mozilla whatsoever. If you type in Mozilla's web address - www.mozilla.org - you get next to no responses at all.

Flip back to Mozilla's site and the search terms Microsoft and www.microsoft.com result in direct links to Microsoft's homepage.

While it has less to do with the links themselves, what I found most amusing was the "legal" section located on each website. Just the titles of the different sections alone tell the story of what different companies and different agendas are present with Mozilla and Microsoft. Microsoft's legal section contains subheads such as "Settlement Program", "Software Piracy", and "Intellectual Property" (aparently Microsoft owns 'technical know-how'). Mozilla's legal page brings you to various versions of the "Mozilla Public License". Needless to say, Mozilla's legal page seems like the friendly neighborhood ice cream shop compared to Microsoft's scare-the-living-crap-out-of-you double-barbed-wire-maximum-security prison ward feel.

I know that we weren't supposed to assume that Microsoft was going to be big and bad and controlling and evil, but their website makes it difficult NOT to come away with that feeling of being trapped in a portal of corporate hell.

--Josh
A cookie to the first one to correctly guess the song that is the title of this post. An idea stolen directly from Eric Bloggy McBlog Smith. Apologies Bloggy.

I Have Been Good, I Understood Like A Machine

For some reason everything we've read or mentioned in this class has reminded me of Ray Kurzweil's book The Age Of Spirital Machines and, by association, Our Lady Peace's amazing album Spiritual Machines, which is loosely based on the book and features Kurzweil himself on some tracks. I highly recommend both. Also, Our Lady Peace will be playing at Webster Hall in New York City on Tuesday the 27th. I will be going, you should too. /endplugs

So the discussion is a Mr. Michael Heim and his article VR101.

Let me just say right now that it seems that in general, everyone had a much easier time with this article than the previous Woolley article on Cyberspace. Which makes me wonder what exactly in the hell am I missing? I feel entirely...lost on this one.

Which is not to say that I don't get it (I think I do) or that I didn't like it (an easier read than senor Woolley for sure), but maybe I just don't...like the idea as much? I don't know if I can fully explain why, but this article has made my life a living hell (well, as much as my life that has been directed by this class, anyway, which seems to be less than it needs to be...if that made any sense at all...it's a confession that I haven't been putting the time into this thing that I should have, sorry).

Heim explains that VR can be divided into two definitions, a 'weak' definition (the overall bastardization of the term 'virtual' by advertising and media in general) and a a 'strong' definition (the technological and scientific definitions).

Heim also discusses the three I's involved in VR: Immersion, Information Intensity, and Interactivity. Like just about everyone else that I've read so far, my interest also lays in the Immersion area...the idea of being completely "in" a synthetic reality. Eric mentioned in his post about being immersed in music, which is definiately a type of immersion I can relate to, those times when you're listening to music (live or on CD) and you're completely...in...the music. It's really kind of sad that this is an english class and I can't come up with a better description of that state of mind, but it's late. I'll try to delve further into this immersion thing next time, for now I think I'm saving it for the essay, heh.

--Josh
No matter what you say, No matter what you do
No matter what, I'm always right there behind you
Our Lady Peace - Right Behind You (Mafia) Spirital Machines

Woolley and Cyberspace

The differences between the face to face conversation, the chat room conversation, and the paragraph summary of Benjamin Woolley's "Cyberspace" (in which he attempts to define "cyberspace" [or does he?]...well, might as well start with the obvious:

The paragraph was entirely focused on one person's (mine, who whoever was writing) interpritation of what Wooley was trying to say. There was no one to steer you away from what may or may not be true. You read it, you figured what you figured, and you wrote it. Entirely first-person. No interactivity, an audience of one (the teacher), focused solely on that article. Short and to the point, one might say. Completely academic.

The face-to-face discussion of Wooley's article allowed for a little bit more freedom. A greater number of ears listening, but a greater number of ideas being generated at the same time. The teacher is there and moderating, guiding the conversation and for the most part keeping it on topic, but you have the freedom to say what you think, use what others have said to form new ideas, and so on. The audience is greater than in the paragraph (ultimately the largest of the three), the interactivity also climbs, and the focus widens. While the number of voices being heard was greatly increased, it was still moderated, and was still something of a teacher-student scenario where not everyone contributed, and some contibuted quite a bit. All of the information being bound about was recorded on the board for anyone to copy down, as opposed to the paragraph, where only the writer and the teacher knew what was said, and the chat room, where only those in the chat and the teacher knew what was said.

As for the chat room conversations...while the audience was smaller, the focus was whatever you and your peers came up with. The teacher-student aspect was gone entirely (well, almost entirely), and the interactivity was the main idea. As easy as it was to get off topic, each member of the chat kind of tried to take a role as moderator, effectively keeping us on track through most of the conversation. As time started to wind down, we started to get a little more focused on coming up with a concrete definition (though, ironically, we never actually did, it seems...). The information and ideas we reflected off each other lead to some debate and relaxed academic discussion, and was probably my favorite of the three (and I have a feeling probably the favorite of most in the class as well...)

--Josh

In the beginning...

First post, just to make sure it works alright. My first time using Blogger...seems pretty easy so far, maybe I'll create a personal one as time goes on. But for now, the class...

--Josh