I kept poking around and finally I found the link to join IS 347.  It is amazing what a little thought and gumption can get you!

Now I've joined the "official website for the class" and this one.  I feel complete. 

Next post will be the real assignment post.

Not the most intuitive setup.  Anyway to join I had to click the Claremont Conversation Online banner above. 

Next ignore the lower part about inputting a name and email and waiting for confirmation etc.

Instead input your cgu username and password in the space provided at the left. Now you are logged into Claremont Conversation Online.

* In order to join the IS 347 community.  Go to the community page and click the "To Join this Community" link on the left.

 

Hope this saves others some time. 

Here's the presentation, "The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less" about why more choices reduces the experience.  It's supposedly very good.  Let me know what you think. 

Here is the link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200&

Nice. I just joined the community and became a member....w/ no name .

Did I miss something?

Brian... what if this was an emergency? You're leaving me hanging here pal.

This book brings together various historical essays ranging from 1941 to 1994. These essays talk about evolution of the modern media and its roots. A quick look at these articles show the inter-disciplinary nature of the book because there is a jump across disciplines with respect to the ideas regarding to an ongoing research on new media. From this perspective, the book considers new media as “the mix between older cultural conventions for data representation, access and manipulation and newer conventions of data representation, access, and manipulation. My favorite article in this book is “As We May Think” written by Vannevar Bush in 1945. My research focuses on the use of social software to facilitate collaborative knowledge construction by group of users who do not posses all the expertise for a certain action and according to my knowledge “As we may think” is the earliest reference that talks about people using computers to collaborate with each other. This article basically talks about a device called Memex which resembles today’s PCs and its benefits to groups. For anyone who is interested in the historical aspect of media, I would highly recommend the following blog which traces the evolution of social of social software from 1945 (Bush’s article) to 2000’s and future thoughts. The name of the blog is Tracing the Evolution of Social Software and its link is http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/10/tracing_the_evo.html  

Another essay that I am interested in is “The End of Books”. The institute for the future of the book (http://www.futureofthebook.org/) has various ideas about this topic and their tool is similar to what I intend to use in my research. However, I have doubts about this vision. A recent research article I read, “The affordances of anchored discussion for collaborative processing of academic texts”, written by Pol et al. (2006) described an IT system which cross-linked a discussion article to a threaded discussion by anchoring every posting to a selection from a discussion article. The purpose of this system was to advance college students understanding of a subject matter because it was predicted that this system would motivate students to more often read the relevant section of an article before giving an elaborative or constructive feedback. However, study subjects preferred to use hard copy which had negative impact on the expected outcome. I guess what matters is how intuitive a system is. Personally, I like to take my hard copy book and read it at the beach.  In conclusion, I think anyone who uses computers regularly may find at least one historical article interesting in this book.

Well, since my textbooks haven’t arrived (and I bet once I click submit, the Fedex guy shows up), I’ll blog (btw, why is blog still showing as misspelled in MS Word?) about the articles we read last week.

In Danah Boyd’s article we are brought back to what it was like to be a teenager in high school. Oh, I can remember it as if it were yesterday. Not really, but I do remember that period of my life as a tumultuous time of identity searching and authoritarian oppression. We remember how our identity was defined by others as much as it was defined by ourselves (Boyd 2007). However, unlike kids of today, we didn’t have online social networks but relied on meeting at the 7-Eleven one town over or the abandoned field, as to not be spotted by our hypocritical elders who damned drinking and smoking as acts of the devil. We played loud punk rock representing what music we liked (and also to act tough). We wore mohawks and plaid pants to show the style of our group and those groups we sought to be like. And many of us carried skateboards even though we didn’t know how to skate. Although we certainly didn’t fit in with the masses we did find the need to fit in with our own peer group.

While not all kids are abandoning the local 7-Eleven (as there are much more today than there were in my time but most have “No Loitering” signs), many are bringing their identities online. Instead of playing the loud music, they post videos of their favorite bands. Instead of heading down to the local thrift store to purchase pants that once belonged to an 80 year old man, they rely on elaborate collages of their favorite bands, artists and authors, ‘found’ across the internet.

But taking and displaying this content is not a one-time thing and kids must be savvy about picking and choosing what content they prominently display, finding the content that will best help them to 'fit in'. They also need to be savvy about updating their pages regularly because teenagers are fickle and what was popular yesterday might not be popular tomorrow. Teenagers are also becoming savvy in hiding their online identities from what I have called authoritarian regimes such as their parents, principles and faculty. 

Nevertheless, I don’t necessarily have an opinion on whether all this is good or bad. It's certainly healthier than downing 40oz bottles of malt liquor at the local junk yard. However, when we drank as youths only hurt our bodies. Now as teenagers begin keeping semi-permanent profiles online, they run the risk of having this data come back to haunt/hurt themselves. One can only wonder when the first MySpace president will be elected (or that president that has had their entire life documented online). 

One a side note, did anyone see the Family Guy (yes, I watch Family Guy) episode airing Jan 20^th?  In this episode Stewie (the maniacal baby) bets Brian (the talking dog) that he can become the most popular kid in high school. He makes a great statement about how he formed his identity on MySpace. I couldn’t find the audio or video but it basically talks about how teenagers form their identity by ‘ripping off’ the content of ‘authorities’ across the web. (Funny stuff)

Reference

Boyd, D. (2007) "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life." MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning - Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Has anyone ever watched the “Did you know” videos on YouTube? Well there are about a hundred different versions with different music, different graphics, but they are all basically the same. Here is a link if the embed doesn't work: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U.

 

 

First, I would like to inform everyone that you can read this whole book online from author’s web site (http://www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf).

 

In this book, the author considers new media from various perspectives such as cinematic perspective and computer games. I think an important underlying idea in this book is to define what is unique about new media. From this perspective, the author states that new media represents a convergence of computing and media technologies. Furthermore, the author identifies five principles of new media: Numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. The first principle implies that new media objects are programmable because they can be subjected to algorithmic manipulation. The author also provides brief information about the process of digitization in this section. The second principle means that new media objects consist of discrete elements. However, these elements maintain their separate identities when combined into large-scale objects. This principle reminds me the mediawiki mods we installed in the IS346 class because these mods were stored separately in the extensions folder and they could be modified at any time without changing the core mediawiki installation. According to Manovich, these two principles allow the third principle (automation), which indicates removing human intentionality from the creative process “at least in part” (p. 32). Today many photo editing programs have this feature. For instance, Photoshop automatically corrects scanned images to improve quality. The fourth principle, variability, suggests that new media objects are “not fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions” (p. 36). It appears that customization and scalability form the basis of this principle. The last principle, transcoding, points to translating a new media object into another format, which has implications for compatibility.

In some parts, I had difficulty understanding the book because I was not sure which computer users the author was talking about. For instance, there were sections about computer games and virtual reality. Also, do not forget the part on cinema. I think the author intends to talk to broad audience due to the many forms of new media objects.