I actually parachuted in and out of EDUCAUSE, and I was my usual strange self at conferences. I really can’t seem to bring it together when I go to these things, my head space gets a bit confused and I withdraw a bit. I’m going to have to work on this. The session Gardner and I co-presented on Educational Publishing Platforms went pretty well, and that was all Gardner’s doing, He was in his best impromptu mode and he carried me beautifully through the presentation, for I was admittedly not on my game at all. The highlight, however, was a recorded conversation Gardner and I had later on Wednesday with Gerry Bayne about EDUPUNK. It was kind of a last minute arrangement, and it turned about to be a raucous, free-wheeling conversation that covered a tremendous amount of ground over the course of an hour. It’s after discussions like that that you know you are talking with a great teacher and an extremely generous intellectual soul. I’ll be looking back fondly on that moment for a while hereafter.

There is one more highlight that I am almost scared to admit, I was completed transfixed by the vendor section. It was huge and salespeople were hawking their wears in some crazy ways. The first cat I saw when I walked in was an HP salesman with a bright yellow blazer who was performing his pitch like a circus act. I then headed right over to the BlackBoard booth to find out how “Web 2.0″ NG would prove to be, and from what I saw it is just a little bit of ajaz with a single-sign on adapter that provides links to Sakai and Moodle courses—what a strange reason to proclaim your openness so boldly before the first day of the conference, again! Nonetheless, I couldn’t help myself. And once I was in the commercial Gulf Stream I couldn’t stop thinking about that scene in Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) wherein Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is walking around the various booths at a Surveillance Convention talking to random people, while at the same time you can see he is all at once visibly estranged, paranoid, and fascinated by the space he is wandering through. In fact, it is that walk through the vendor exhibits at EDUCAUSE that may stick with me longer than anything else, it was like watching a room full of Gatsby’s throw their last party. So in the interest of exorcism, I’ll reproduce the scene from The Conversation in which Coppola frames Harry Caul’s wonderful discomfort with the commercialized bastardization of the quality of his profession so that a few scheming, idea-stealing businessmen and women can make a few bucks

“And the haunting distribution of a million light particles from an edupunkin shall lead the way.”

Image Credit: Tom Woodward flexing his creaivity as usual with his wordpress edupunkin photo.

Yesterday I was asked by a good friend and mentor the following question: “What’s next?” And it made me stop and think, I guess since I don’t have a Ph.D. and I’m in “IT” I should be thinking about an administrative position, right? I mean you can’t be an instructional technologist forever, right? It’s just a position you take until you become a bonafide administrator or decide to head back into teaching, it’s a liminal identity that ultimately one must surrender to make more money or have more independence or have a bit more power, right?

Well, I answered quite frankly that I really don’t want to do anything else. I do not want to be an administrator, it would completely divorce me from where my particular strengths lie: getting people excited about what they do and helping them muster the courage to experiment wildly. I really, really like what I do a lot, and I think I’m pretty good at it. In fact, I’m better at it than I have been at anything else I have ever done, perhaps with the exception of watching movies. But, there’s no future in it, right?  I mean, come on Reverend, you’re an instructional technologist for Christ’s sake. I’d say 99.99999999999% percent of the population has no idea what that title means, and 99.9% of the instructional technologists aren’t too sure either. Well, that’s what I am, and the more I look around the world of educational technology the prouder I am of this fact. But thinking of how to articulate this idea was immediately daunting. I really don’t have the energy at the moment to write it all up or re-think why I need to say how this question has moved me to the point of reflection and deep consideration.

Well, luckily I don’t have to, because Matt Gold (a dear friend) did something special for me today. He pointed me to a post I wrote almost a year ago that addresses this question head-on. It’s a post I had all but forgotten about, yet he remembered it and commented upon it this very evening (when I needed it most) as if he were intentionally pushing me to re-read it–which his too kind comments actually did. So, taking my inspiration from Matt I am going to “radically re-use” my own thoughts from an old post to answer the question of what an instructional technologist is, at least in my feeble mind. (As an aside, I don’t think I have ever realized the full power of blogging my ideas regularly for the last three years until this evening, where my own ideas come back to lift my spirits in a existential moment of uncertainty and exhaustion, so thank you Matt from the bottom of my heart!)

_______________

What is an instructional technologist?

The difficulty of such a question is in many ways tied up with the larger problems with such a conference as EDUCAUSE, and actually framed quite clearly the heart of the presentation Gardner Campbell and I gave yesterday: it all depends on whether you want to focus on teaching and learning within a community or the ease and efficiency of administrating a system?

The answer to this question will ultimately decide whether or not one professor or ten professors or an entire campus is willing to use dynamic, loosely joined open source tools like WPMu, Drupal, MediaWiki, etc. If the focus is on administration and not teaching and learning than an enterprise, “turn-key” solution like BlackBoard will work perfectly. And you can spend all your time talking about the technical details of the proprietary system’s latest features or even its unbelievably bad “blog” and “wiki” building blocks, or how “open” it pretends to be, etc. I really can’t (or rather won’t) argue with anyone on this count, for the two ideas are conceptual forks in an approach to the digital landscape of education. But if and when one chooses the enterprise CMS more times than not that choice has more to do with administration than teaching and learning. And as a result of such a choice the role of the instructional technologist is effectively limited to routinized training that demonstrates the limited capabilities of any one system. All of which effectively makes the instructional technologist an administrative assistant providing technical help. It is the still birth of a profession that is still gestating. Little or no imagination goes into this process and the limits of possibility are always already defined by the technology mandated. A position that should be exploratory and imaginative is reduced to the administrative realm in the name of efficiency and doing the greatest good for the largest number.

Let me be entirely clear here, an instructional technologist should not, I repeat should not, be an administrator. To conflate the roll of an instructional technologist with administrative work is to sap it of its transformative vitality. Instructional technologists should do three things, and do them well: 1) work closely with faculty on imagining possibilities, 2) live within the latest technologies and 3) imagine and experiment with possibilities regularly. The less time an instructional technologists spends thinking about administering a system, the more time he or she can actually do these three things. This is, without question, the reason why WordPress Multi-user has been so appealing for UMW. The administrative onus is shifted to the teacher and the student. They have their own space that they control. It becomes their charge to think through the possibilities of the system, rather than being told how it works. They have to discover what works, how it works, and why it works. It is this transformative process that is all too often relegated to system managers rather than intelligent people who live in the interstitial spaces of ideas and imagination like students and instructors. It is in this liminal spaces of thinking through and imagining what such a tool can do (rather than being overly concerned with how to actually do it) that our work happens. This is when the possibilities are imagined and old conceptions and new directions coalesce and by extension morph.

In my current job I don’t administer UMW Blogs, I build community and interact with both professors and students on a regular basis. I’m not so much concerned with the technology (and if an instructional technologist isn’t—should students and faculty be?), rather I am an interested and engaged participant in the transparent intellectual life of the university. That is what an instructional technologist must do! There is no other definition that makes sense. The conversations about teaching and learning’s intersection with technology is the inspiration undergirding what has been taking place for the last several years at Mary Washington, and has in many ways fueled the transformation through a larger grass roots effort. The change starts with a conversation, not with a directive. The transformation is imagined, not administered.

Which leads me to my final musings on this topic after the presentation. The point at which I start administering systems or training folks on BlackBoard on a regular basis is the moment I walk away from this occupation. There really is no reason why anyone off the street who has read the respective CMS manual can’t do that as well as me. And I would gladly defer to them. To become an administrator and/or to fashion oneself as a leader means to often extract yourself from the actual relations that are the basis for re-imagining the space of teaching and learning. Why aren’t instructional technologists understood as something other than either one of these categories? You don’t need to be a leader to be a great instructional technologist who catalyzes change in an environment. Moreover, you really shouldn’t be administering anything because it would be taxing the invaluable time spent imagining and exploring the innumerable possibilities of these tools with faculty.

There is no question we are in an absolutely fascinating moment of flux in this field, and what becomes ever more apparent is that the role of the instructional technologist at campuses is understood as transitional at best. A job that will prepare you for a directorship, a higher degree, or some other administrative position in IT. Such a conception of this crucial role is in many ways defined by the hierarchical system of academia much like teaching and learning with technology is defined by learning management systems like BlackBoard: it’s limited in its structural imagination. While I was speaking with people at the conference about their own situations and the administrative route of academia I became evermore certain that budgets, meetings, and management more generally are important for numerous reasons, but in the end often compete with the time-intensive work of fostering conversation and inspiring imagination throughout the community more generally about teaching and learning with technology. And while the right management can foster the conditions for this conversation, the point is that what we are talking about is doing it, not constantly re-visiting the fact that technology and pedagogy “might” have a future on campus. For that is in many ways a given, it is the type of experience a professor or student imagines where a majority of the work still needs to be done. That is the invaluable role of an instructional technologist, and he or she may very well be one of the most crucial figures on college campuses today.

Yet, the position has been circumscribed and denigrated by IT directives and administrative exigencies to the point that this desperately needed space for freedom and experimentation on campuses around the world has become one of obedience, fear, and “service.” And I put service in quotes here because while my role is to serve the faculty and students, as well as to foster a community of openness, tolerance, and exploration (which I value dearly, and firmly believe is the role of everyone who works on a college campus–or in education more generally), an instructional technologist can only accomplish this in their particular field by being granted the freedom to follow their own imaginative and critical ideas about this constantly emergent space. Right now, this is seldom the case, and to be quite frank with you, I have seen the other possibilities out there, and they are meager at best. Mary Washington is one of very few models for what an instructional technology outfit should be doing on a college campus, and the UMW professors are arguably the best example of how faculty should be partnering with instructional technologists to explore the implications of the changing landscape of publishing, discourse, media, and socially created knowledge that everywhere surrounds us.

Instructional Technologists of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your BlackBoard chains!

Dave Lester did a fine job of compiling a long list of Universities that are using WPMu in one capacity or another. It’s a great list, and there are at least 40 institutions on there I had no idea about. Add to this list the work Mario Núñez-Molina did last year and add a few additions to his list and you may very well have over 100 institutions using this application. And as the recent comment on his post suggest from the University of Melbourne, there are probably a heck of a lot of international universities that are using this application that we have no idea about.

Now, Mario went above and beyond and made a slide show of screen shots for every install–I do love his fanaticism and I can completely relate He just turned his diigo bookmarks tagged wpmu_university into a slide show, pretty cool.

Yet another trend I’ve noticed with UMW Blogs is that courses and random groups are consciously publishing their articles with a far greater audience in mind than their specific class. Not only are many sites aimed at the UMW community, but also at the wide world beyond it. A great example is Uncle Lumpy’s Down-Home Art Blog and Pancake Emporium. This is a wild class experiment that has emerged on UMW Blogs wherein all the authors are blogging under personae (check out the very entertaining contributors page for a few examples). It’s a healthy mix of local art news, pancake recipes, and a Q & A column with Uncle Lumpy himself—which I think is awesome. I’m just patiently waiting for the actual arrival of the blabberized version of the Uncle Lumpy Q&A. What becomes immediately apparent is that the unknown souls behind this project are marking another trend, the conscious move of creating a news and entertainment space that moves well beyond the classroom and out to the community more generally. I love Uncle Lumpy!

One of the most interesting elements of UMW Blogs is the way in which things kinda happen on their own accord, and the publishing environment takes on a life of its own. For example, I track a lot of the posts and comments that go through the system, and what I have begun to recognize is that clubs and organizations at Mary Washington are using this space to get their announcements out by using this system to create quick and easy websites with built-in syndication.

So, why not aggregate all the announcements into one space and make things easy for the community to discover, view, and subscribe to? Well, thanks to the wonders of RSS and a WordPress spam plugin it’s a cinch. Check out the UMW Clubs and Organizations blog, which features the latest posts from contributing clubs and organizations at UMW, along with a list of the contributing groups. Additionally, if any club or organization wants to add their site (which can be hosted on UMW Blogs or any other service with a feed), it’s a simple form to fill out to get their announcements syndicated into this site.

I have blogged regularly about mapping domains on WordPress Mulit-User for over a year now.  And it is with great pleasure that I announce the first instance of a mapped domain on UMW Blogs (which is actually a mapped subdomain).  UMW’s pioneering History department has decided to create a site on UMW Blogs to build an information/community site for their department which will provide the latest news, announcements, and events for current students, alumni, etc. They have a Bluehost account where they do a lot of their own departmental experimentation  http://umwhistory.org), and they—more specifically Sue Fernsebner and Jeff McClurken—wanted to know if we could map a domain to their UMW Blogs site in order to have a URL that is in line with the logic of this space and that doesn’t have that pesky word “blogs” in it. Well, if we will it, it is no dream!

In fact, we really didn’t want to map the entire domain umwhistory.org to UMW Blogs because that would throw off all the other sites they have on various subdirectories and subdomains already. So, what we did is created a subdomain ( http://home.umwhistory.org) and just mapped that, which left all the other subdomains and subdirectories on their Bluehost account unaffected. And voila, UMW Blogs can allow people to buy (or is it lease?) their own domains and map them to their own blog space.

For me, this realizes one of the most powerful elements of a publishing platform like UMW Blogs: it re-enforces that this space is the wide-open web, not some insular, monolithic campus CMS or LMS. This feature opens up the conception and perception of UMW Blogs as the open web to some great degree; it makes people feel like the space is truly their own and that they are out there framing their own work. On top of that, they can take advantage of all of UMW Blogs’s innumerable plugins and themes, while allowing them to capitalize on our first rate service And all this without having to worry about doing their own upgrades or backups. And with their own domain name they can frame their own professional portfolio, website or blog on UMW Blogs, and should they ever need or want to export their site to another service (or even get their own web hosting account) the transition would prove that much more seamless. Mapping domains is the acknowledgment that the work people are doing in this community is their own, and the technological infrastructure should be flexible, robust, and easy enough to enable anyone who wants to control their online identities do it in the most effective and intelligent way possible. We are affording them one way to both build and preserve their personal archive of intellectual work, and we need to see the technology we choose as an extension of such an act of good faith!

OK, so how do you do it? It’s remarkably easy, first go download and install Donncha’s Domain Mapping plugin on your WPMu setup. (For server admins: to make it easy on yourself, change the documentroot line in httpd.conf to the directory where you have WPMu installed, that way any domain that points to your IP address will by default point to your WPMu installation, making the sign up process for your users seamless, and any work on your end minimal at best.) After that, I simply called up Bluehost and asked them to add a CNAME for the subdomain http://home.umwhistory.org and point it at the IP address for UMW Blogs. They had it done in less than a minute, the whole thing was really a cinch. (For more about this read the FAQ on Domain Mapping at WordPress.com.)

Well, I guess I gotta get going on my formative 10 because what has taken me almost eight months, has taken D’Arcy Norman all of three days. I find it interesting how much a formative 10 can tell you about someone, for example given D’Arcy’s first three films it’s pretty obvious he’s a science nerd Now me, kinda like Uli, I’m a nihilist, and it is, indeed, exhausting.

Escape from New York is a no-brainer for the formative 10, this movie may very well be the most perfectly conceived plot ever filmed, and it is without question my favorite film storyline of all time. Interestingly enough, John Carpenter is responsible for two of my formative ten, this one as well as the The Thing (which I recently blogged). Moreover, Assault on Precinct 13 would have been a shoe-in for the formative 15 and I blogged it as a kind of preview to this series many moons ago. It’s interesting that this exercise has brought into sharp focus just how important John Carpenter has been in my early years of film watching, and I’d just like to thank him for helping to make me such a huge fan of the form.

So, what now? I could talk about how cool Isaac Hayes was as the Duke of New York or how much I dug the terrorists that hijacked the Air Force 1 at the beginning of the film or how Harry Dean Stanton’s role as Brain remains one of his most memorable for me (”Unless you know exactly, precisely where it is…”) or even the crazy haired sidekick to the Duke of NY who hisses in a most peculiar way. I could do all this, and I haven’t even gotten to Snake Plissken yet. Or, I could show you a series of clips that capture the essence of this film. So, OK, dim the lights and get ready for some YouTube, roll ‘em please:

The voice over (which is Jamie Lee Curits) at the beginning of the film sets up the situation brilliantly.

And here is the hissing maniac that shows off the President’s finger (love this guy!):

Scene wherein Hauk (played by the immortal Lee Van Cleef, the ultimate badass) recruits Snake for the mission to rescue the President from the prison that is Manhattan Island:

There’s the scene where the cannibalistic Mole People come out of the ground and grab Season Hubley, this was possibly the most memorable scene of the whole film for me at the time.

The Duke of NY (A#1) (played by the late Isaac Hayes) doing a little target practice with the President of the US (played by Donald Pleasance who is genius in this film, I might add).

Couldn’t find the scene of Brain (played by the legendary Harry Dean Stanton, perhaps my favorite actor of all time) on YouTube I wanted, so I will settle for when he stabs the crazy-haired hissing freak (the character is actually named Romero).

And there are many many more scenes in this film that make it simply amazing. In fact, I believe that it is still one of the best paced and consistently compelling action films ever made. Escape from New York, arguably Carpenter’s best, and maybe the last truly great American film ever made

Patrick Murray-John has been working tirelessly over the last month to realize an extremely exciting possibility for marrying the Semantic Web with WPMu, although this experiment is by no means limited to this application. What he has been doing is scraping the available data from the uber RSS feed of public blogs from the UMW Blogs Tags Site, and pulling it into a suite of semantic web tools provided by MIT’s Simile project (namely Exhibit and Timeline).

“Why?” you ask. Well Hondo, because these tools provide the means to visualize and connect the activity on UMW Blogs in new ways, check out the Timeline of UMW Blogs posts over the last two weeks here. Or look at how a tool like Exhibit provides interesting ways for creating a more comprehensive directory of users, tags, and posts (something WPMu just can’t do extensively). The alphabetized Bloggers Exhibit that has a weighted tag cloud for each letter of the alphabet which lists usernames, or take a peek at the Blogs Exhibit that does the same thing with Blog titles.

Moreover, we now have a way to collect all the images uploaded to UMW Blogs in one place, and a gallery of top ten lists for those blogs with the most images, audio files, or videos. What this means is we now have a series of alternative means for capturing and mnpulating dta for UMW Blogs that will allow us to search, discover, and make connections more easily than we could previously. We are at the beginnings of this experiment in some ways, yet in others we simply just have to style and re-theme the data accordingly and we are ready to unleash it on the UMW Blogs community to see how they use it and what value it brings to further build upon this already robust publishing platform. Is this what the trendy discussions about Web 3.0 is all about (besides the pervasive idea of cloud computing which is in many ways upon us)?  Finding ways to marry the power, ease, and usability of Web 2.0 tools with the promise of discoverability, visualization, and deep connections that the Semantic Web has promised? I guess we’re about to find out here at UMW.

Update: D’Arcy informed me that “the flickr link was just crawled by google or technorati - no magic connection.” One can dream I guess

I just got a notification of an incoming link from a Flickr photo on my blog. I have to believe this is a new feature, am I right? Probably part of the overhaul they have been working on lately. I’ve never seen a pingback from a Flickr photo before, so when this photo (shown below) taken by D’Arcy Norman (which has a link to a post of mine in the description) showed up in the incoming links section of my blog, I was pretty excited.  Think about it, we can now cite and reference blogs from within Flickr with links in descriptions to further connect these loosely joined resources online. Now, I wonder if it works in reverse as well—can you see a linkback from this blog in your Flickr account D’Arcy?  That would be the kicker, wouldn’t it?

The image with the link to a post in the description:

The linkback notification on my blog:

And interesting development to say the least, Flickr just became a whole lot more powerful in my mind.

This newly minted law which calls for the creation of a ‘Copyright Czar,’ (”an unconstitutional violation of Separation of Powers”) is exactly what we have been waiting for, is it not? Just more charity on the part of the US Government to help big money through these troubling financial times. Moreover, it will ensure that the people are once again divested of their rights, and accountable to monied interests alone. God bless it!!!

I love this punk song, which is an original composition and performance by one very cool nine year old.

I have to say it, Kirby is a DIY godhead, so very, very EDPUNK!

That damn Judges has posted a Lucio Battisti video before me, how good is he?

So to teach that meddling kid a lesson, the bava gives you 3x the Judges.

And I’ll one up Judges by throwing in a classic scene featuring an Italian figure even greater than Battisti, the comic genius Totò (as great as Chaplan or any other comic figure of the 20th century) featured here singing in “Are We Men or Corporals?” (Siamo uomini o caporali?).

The gauntlet has been thrown, Brad

TorrentFreak’s at it again (my new, favorite EduBlog) and this time an article by Enigmax, Textbook Torrents has closed shop just three months after it found itself in the spotlight thanks in part to Jeffrey Young’s Chronicle article “Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers.” In fact, the site immediately was taken offline by its web host (Dreamhost) on July 5th (four days after the article was written), but re-emerged a month later. This time it seems this particular site is done for good.

But, it’s closing begs the question of whether or not the hydra effect will come into play. This site has been shut down, but will three more re-emerge in its stead? The demand for a “service” like Torrent Textbooks is undeniable:

January 2007 saw the birth of TextBook Torrents, a relatively small site initially, offering a BitTorrent tracker dedicated to the indexing of textbooks. In 6 months the site had accumulated 10,000 members. Just 3 months later, the number of users had doubled to 20,000 and by January 2008 the membership doubled again to an impressive 40,000. By the end of June 2008, almost 70,000 members were registered at TextBook Torrents and more and more people were becoming aware of its existence.

And all of this based on a technology that for many is still considered “technically difficult” (which it is ever increasingly simple), and these numbers represent the amount of users a month before the site was picked up by The Chronicle, SlashDot, and several other mainstream media outlets. So, in little over a year and a half a relatively unknown site sees exponential growth with 70,000 members. What might this forecast for the future of textbooks? All too often we have focused the P2P conversations around the music and movie industries, but I think this recent development frames a huge question to the textbook publishing industry: Do you follow the lead of the MPAA and RIAA (read Dodo Bird) and persecute your consumer? Or do you start to re-think your product on some fundamental levels? Moreover, do you finally start to take the Open Content movement seriously? For there can be no question that its audience is growing exponentially given that people are finally getting fed up with being robbed by the exorbitant prices of textbooks (and the economic climate will only expedite this process). And, finally, what would it mean for the publishers to consider the implications of open content?

TorrentFreak’s Ben Jones reports that UC Santa Cruz has decided to fight the RIAA’s  lawsuits aimed at their students by throwing a wrench in their methods:

Santa Cruz (UCSC) has put a spanner in the procedural works of the RIAA litigation machine. As explained best in the article published a few months ago by RIAA ‘nemesis’ Ray Beckerman, the John Doe lawsuits are often just a legal ploy to get names and addresses, prior to starting a new campaign, and pre-litigation settlement.

However, UCSC has successfully argued that under the law – specifically the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) – there are restrictions on the conditions for releasing student’s personal details, even in cases where there is a court subpoena. In this case (UMG Recordings v Doe), the court has ruled that the subpoena must have a ‘reply by’ date that is long enough to allow the university to notify the target of the subpoena, and their parents. This can give them the chance to get legal advice which can put them in a stronger position with the RIAA than getting a letter/demand out of the blue.

A new use for FERPA? A law that is certainly open for interpretation, and one which very well may serve to truly protect students and foster sharing, rather than being used as a blanket excuse to prevent a cross campus conversation using blogs, wikis, and their ilk. I like the new uses for what is often a wet blanket.

I got an early birthday present today from the Bionic Teacher, and all I can say is thank you, thank you, thanks you. Tom is not only one of the most creative dudes I have had the pleasure of working with in this field (despite him being K12 and everything ), but he may very well be the funniest. Here’s to bringing down the CMS on the eve of my 37th (see all you edupunk critics, I’m no where near 40 yet, you suckers). Let the CMS burn, baby, burn!!!

Update: And then there is Peter Naegele’s riff on another Tom Woodward original:

photo credit: Criterion

For the first part of this semester I was in over my head with UMW Blogs. We had come up with the idea (through covert communication with other schools not to be named ) to use FeedWordPress as a syndicating engine. Quite simply, that students create their own blogs and tag posts for their respective courses, which would automatically republish them in an aggregating course blog.

For example, Sue Fernsebner’s History 299 course would tag relevant posts 08fern299, and those posts would be automatically re-posted in the course blog. How are they re-posted automatically? Well, Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin collects all posts, tags and categories into one blog  http://tags.umwblogs.org), that by extension gives a single feed for all tags through the WPMu environment. You can see all of professor Fernsebner’s class blog posts one that blog here: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/
And if you just smack the term “feed” at the end of the above URL you then have an RSS feed for every post in UMW Blogs that has the tag 08fern299: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/f…
Now, FeedWordPress just consumes this feed and republishes all the distributed posts in one blog and allows the permalink to point back to the students original blog post on their blog. Perfect, right?

Well, almost. Fact is that the .2.x version of the Sitewide Tags was not actually working with FeedWordPress that well. What was happening was that FeedWordPress was not updating correctly and the permalinks would only point to the post on the course blog, effectively erasing the link back to the student blog. The only way to fix this was to go into the course blog and delete the posts that didn’t link back to the student blog, and update the feed again which works when you manually pull the feed but not when it is automatically pulled in (which was the root of the problem). Well, this issue is no more, the latest version of Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin 0.3.1 fixes the issue with FeedWordPress and has put UMW Blogs back in the Syndicating cloud (I was worried there for a second, and I don’t miss all the duct tape fixes at all).

The moral of the story? It didn’t take long for the WPMu community to make things right, and it didn’t cost UMW anything but a little bit of experimentation, patience, and sharing. I mean who’s afraid of the open source wolf? These times demand many things, and one of them is cooperation and sharing, not fear and closing down. Open source is not proprietary

I have been on a Thomas Jefferson kick lately. Given this, I was really excited to read Peter Rock’s recent post “Jefferson, ideas, property, and the constitution”, which discusses the fallacious logic that ideas can be treated as property.

So, this got me thinking about Jefferson’s idea of permanent revolution, or that “every generation needs a new revolution.” A true mark of genius given the moment he was living. So last night I actually came across a scene in the HBO minseries John Adams (sorry Luke, I lied, I have forsaken Mad Men for John Adams -ironic?) which proffers Jefferson’s informal articulation of this idea, which is a fascinating one for me given the times we live in.

I don’t know which album cover blew me away more:

“Number of the Beast”

Or “Killers”

I think it would have to be “Killers” because I was younger and more impressionable. Not to mention the fact that I would stare at it for hours wondering about all the shady happenings in the windows behind Eddie and his victim (click on image for a larger view of some of the window crazies).

And, if I were forced to choose a single album cover it would have to be “Aces High,” Eddie as a WWII fighter pilot confused me for years after wards, I mean wasn’t he a murderous monster?

Update, I maye have to reprise my Aces High idea after re-discovering the “Somewhere in Time” single album cover, a little bit of “Maiden Runner”?

Thanks to endless fount of genius that is Carole Garmon, here’s a video of a 13 year drummer named Hannah, and she rocks out pretty hard. You can see all here videos on YouTube here, but I choose Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” because it rules.

256 screens of pure and total perfection on Pac-man? I want to be this guy!

The only man ever to play a perfect game on Pac-man

Link love goes to the Judges for sharing this gem on the Facebook.

About a week or so ago I got Robert Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country which I have been totally digging. The book has been reinforcing an informal education I’ve been getting through my various conversations with Folklorist Gary Stanton and Musician/Artist Kent Ippolito (who gave me the book –thanks Kent!) on early 20th century American music. It’s a series of sporadic discussions, and it has been a lot of fun for me to listen to some music from the various genres (which all seem to share some interesting relations) from the 1920s and 30s –which is the focus of Crumb’s book.

Crumb's Hereoes of Blues, Jazz, and Country

Crumb’s sketches of the artists are wonderful, my favorite is the one below of Sleepy John Estes. And each image is accompanied by a very short (one to two paragraph) discussion of the artist and their particular musical strengths along with how many “sides” they recorded ( a side of a 78 album was anywhere from 2:30 to 3:30 minutes long, which basically meant the length of popular song).

Sleepy John Estes

Anyway, along with the amazing assortment of Crumb’s interpretations of the artists there is a CD that features a sampling of their songs. I hadn’t heard any of them before except one, which was part of the soundtrack from O' Brother Where Art Thou, which was Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” found for your listening pleasure on YouTube here, and embedded below:

Skip James’ career is fascinating, here is a brief excerpt as told by his Wikipedia article:

As is typical of his era, James recorded a variety of material — blues and spirituals, cover versions and original compositions — frequently blurring the lines between genres and sources. For example, “I’m So Glad” was derived from a 1927 song by Art Sizemore and George A. Little entitled “So Tired”, which had been recorded in 1928 by both Gene Austin and Lonnie Johnson (the latter under the title “I’m So Tired of Livin’ All Alone”). James changed the song’s lyrics, transforming it with his virtuoso technique, moaning delivery, and keen sense of tone. Biographer Stephen Calt, echoing the opinion of several critics, considered the finished product totally original, “one of the most extraordinary examples of fingerpicking found in guitar music.”

Several of the Grafton recordings, such as “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues”, “Devil Got My Woman”, “Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader”, and “22-20 Blues” (the basis for Robert Johnson’s better-known “32-20 Blues”), have proven similarly influential. Very few original copies of James’s Paramount 78s have survived.

[[The Great Depression struck just as James’ recordings were hitting the market. Sales were poor as a result, and James gave up performing the blues to become the choir director in his father’s church. Skip James himself was later ordained as a minister in both the Baptist and Methodist denominations, but his involvement in religious activities was sketchy.

For the next thirty years, James recorded nothing and drifted in and out of music. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In 1964 blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. According to Calt, the “rediscovery” of both Skip James and of Son House at virtually the same moment was the start of the “blues revival” in America. In July 1964 James, along with other rediscovered performers, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Several photographs by Dick Waterman captured this first performance in over 30 years. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon, and Vanguard labels and played various engagements until his death in 1969.

The release of his song about “hard times” coincided precisely with the Great Depression, making the market for his recording evaporate and his musical career that much tougher. Yet the song captures the haunting uncertainty of difficult times, while simultaneously providing a reassuring voice of someone who has not only endured them, but created something great within them.

photo credit: Invisible Hour

With questions looming about our post-modern malaise despite increased connectivity, the hyped hive mind, ever greater access to resources online, we still often find ourselves paralyzed agents in the undertow of information. With such realizations at times like these I try to take refuge in the little battles that are fought and seemingly won.

For example, over the last year TorrentFreak has been covering a focused, yet distributed, network of people that are fighting for their rights to share and access our digital culture freely. It’s a fringe battle (and it has been criminalized accordingly), yet TorrentFreak’s coverage of the rise and fall of MediaDefender is always an uplifting story for me, kinda like the Rudy of the 21st century piracy stories.

In short, MediaDefender is (and by the looks of their stock, soon to be was) a goon anti-piracy company hired by the MPAA, RIAA, and several other media production companies to “stymie peer-to-peer (P2P) traders through a variety of methods including posting fake files online, recording individuals who contribute copyrighted material, but also marketing to individuals using P2P networks” (link). They launched their very own video upload service called “miivi.com” for the sole purpose of trapping people into uploading copyrighted material, and then nailing them for it. A massive leak of MediDefender’s internal email correspondence over a year ago brought some of their highly questionable methods to light, and has since crippled the company to the point that a year later they are on the verge of bankruptcy (a process aided and abetted by their own missteps). This suggests the power of a distributed network to stand up and fight back. I’m often inspired by this story, yet at the same time I’m not a hacker nor a pirate. I’m just a meek instructional technologist who works at a public institution and wants to see the web as a space where culture can be shared and discussed freely so that we can better critique and understand the world we live in —is that so wrong?! I mean, what can I do?

Well, a recent series of articles on TorrentFreak by Ben Jones dealing with tackling campus piracy offers some ways of thinking about this. I particularly like his most recent article titled “Tackling Campus Piracy with FUD,” wherein he traces the use of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) at universities as a means of dealing with piracy on campus:

In many ways [FUD] is the cheapest and easiest anti-piracy method. It doesn’t rely on facts, but on careful releases of information, and calculated small acts.

A small act could be starting a rumor or giving an interview to a student newspaper. Such tactics are cheap and often have much better returns than costly (and ultimately useless) technology-based methods. They also have the added advantage that if they don’t work, it doesn’t tend to count against you. That is, unless you’re caught at it.

The article goes on to detail the recent use of FUD at Elon University in Greensboro, NC.

In a file-sharing piece last week in the student newspaper, the strategy of intimidation was plain to see. If you are unaware of the law regarding copyright infringement, however, you might be taken in.

The article starts with talk of rumors, concerning all manner of things designed to instill fear; RIAA reps roaming the campus, being able to backtrack to things that happened years ago. Rumors that lead to uncertainty (how far back? Will that include something I did?) as well as doubt (anything I can do about it?).

Throughout the article, Assistant Vice President for Technology Chris Fulkerson makes it clear that students should be very careful. However, he’s not afraid to tweak the facts a little, or tell outright lies, for that matter. At one point he states that the fine is “$250,000 per infraction” which is a complete lie. As regular readers and followers of US copyright infringement cases know, the maximum damages that can be awarded per infraction is $150,000 not $250,000 (USC Title 17, § 504 (c)(2)). The most they have managed to get in these cases is $9,250, but even that turned out to be too much.

Of greatest worry was his position on the details of students. Fulkerson has said that when/if the RIAA asks for names and details that correspond to an IP, the university will hand them over if the person can be identified. As the RIAA’s strategy is to file many lawsuits, and try and force a settlement (by making it cheaper to settle than to contest), handing over details is in the worst possible interests of the students, and may be illegal. Regardless of its legality, or how true the statement is in practice, the impact of the statement is chilling to many students.

It is alarming that universities might increasingly become the space for the cultivation and dissemination of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (a reality they are arguably designed to counter). The American people are no strangers to such a method recently, to be sure, for we have been deeply embedded in the politics of FUD for the last 8 years, a logic which is flowering in its most horrific logical extreme currently. So, while I don’t understand the economic crisis and I can’t see my way through the current malaise of national leadership,  I can be an advocate for fighting FUD on campus. it should be an integral part of my job, given that I am in the business of teaching and learning, of helping to open up the classroom viz-a-viz the web. So, I’ll leave despair for another day, and be on my merry fighting way.

I saw the following post on WFMU by Brian Turner this morning (which has since has gone missing for some reason), and it confirmed my every fear: Hollywood has been confirmed DOA

Hollywood: Two Words

from WFMU’s Beware of the Blog by Brian Turner

Check, please.

That’s right, Beverly Hills Chihuahua grossed $29 million this weekend, taking the top place.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Disney’s canine comedy, edged out Shia LaBeouf’s Eagle Eye to take the top spot at the U.S box office this weekend.

The film about a wealthy pooch from Beverly Hills who finds herself lost while on vacation in Mexico stars Drew Barrymore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Andy Garcia, and George Lopez.

North American Box Office Top Ten:

1. “Beverly Hills Chihuahua,” $29 million.
2. “Eagle Eye,” $17.7 million.
3. “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” $12 million.
4. “Nights in Rodanthe,” $7.4 million.
5. “Appaloosa,” $5 million.
6. “Lakeview Terrace,” $4.5 million.
7. “Burn After Reading,” $4.08 million.
8. “Fireproof,” $4.07 million.
9. “An American Carol,” $3.8 million.
10. Religulous, $3.5 million.

This is why I look forward to the release of video games, or recent additions to UBUWEB and the Internet Archive.  The era of our pop culture as told by Hollywood is dead. The Wire is without question the best series I have seen in the last 20 years, better than anything from Hollywood or even all the other series from HBO. Moreover, the recent sensation over AMC’s Mad Men is over rated in my opinion. I watched the first 9 episodes of season 1, and by the fouth episode was burnt on how “correct” the show is. It tries to implicate the viewer by re-framing all the racism, sexism, and religious intolerance at work in the late 50s, early 60s, yet it is far too academic. It’s argument is clear, and there is none of the moral ambiguity and more complex examination of a system that frames the impossibilities of a moment like The Wire. The push to make sure the viewer doesn’t mistake the 1950s and 60s as the good old days, seems empty when it erases the complex realities of those who lived then, just to capitalize on the issues that make good drama now. I don’t know, Mad Men justs seems like a paper some one wrote about advertising in the golden age, and how screwed up it was from our vantage point, and then decided to adorn it with some two-diminsional characters and turn it into a TV series. A blanket critique of the 1950s and 60s is as much an interpretation of that moment as an unchecked glorification of it, and neither make for a comeplling narrative.

It’s Funny the things you begin to find once you explore a certain subject. And I have been thinking more and more about this as it pertains to learning on the web, versus the kind of radically open (yet in many ways traditional) models that are on everyone’s mind these days. I’ve been out of love with the course model these days, rather I have been consumed by all things survivalist for the last month or so. This is not based on any class, nor is it rooted in a theory or extensive research. Rather it’s an idea cum metaphor that Brian Lamb (once again) inspired while we were having an unwieldy conversation about our COSL conference demonstration. It’s born of a kind of creative compulsion to imagine narratives for the work we do, and it is at it’s core fun.

So with that preface out of the way which is the basis of a much longer post brewing, I just wanted to share something I recently discovered via UBUWEB in my incessant search for all things related to Survivalism. This one is tangential, yet central at the same time. The Survival Research Labs (SRL)

…has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations in the United States and Europe. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.

I love the whole concept, and in the video below, Virtues of Negative Fascination (1985-86) “is a documentary covering the performance activities of Survival Research Laboratories, Mark Pauline, Matt Heckert and Eric Werner, from 1985-1986.” It features a number of these mechanized presentations as well as an incisive look into the political logic behind such a group. Yet, another gem from UBUWEB, and more fuel for the survivalist fire. Enjoy.

Download Virtues of Negative Fascination

“Embedded!”

In this episode the EdTech Survivalist tries to help a war buddy unembed himself from the web. But first he has to help him navigate a long, abusive history of being at the mercy of centralized IT, a reality that might just push Johnny Embed over the embedding edge.

Credits:
Tom Woodward, my confirmed partner in crime, brilliantly portrays Johnny Embed, and is responsible for all his own effects and camera work.

Serena Epstein is the technical/artistic wizard who has consistently aided and embedded me with the camera work and editing, any and all mistakes in this department are squarely hers

Jon Udell has mentioned the idea of Syndication-Oriented Architecture a couple of times over the the last year of so. One of the things I’ve been trying to spell outabout UMW Blog is how it in many ways is trying to approximate a Syndication-Oriented Architechture using a very hodgepodge collection of plugins and widgets.

What does this mean? Well, for me it means that a university publishing platform shouldn’t only be limited to the sites created within that system (in our case WordPres Multi-User), but rather should be able to incorporate work that students and faculty may be doing on other, externally hosted services that are RSS-enabled—like, for example, Blogger,  WordPress.com, Drupal, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

In other words, folks within the campus community should be able to add their feeds to a publishing platform like UMW Blogs and have what they are doing on their own spaces join the general flow of the syndicated data already in UMW Blogs. They should appear in the site wide RSS feed (or even a single class feed); they should show up in the flow of data on the front page; and they should also be searchable in the WPMu archive. Yet, it shouldn’t necessarily be a republishing of their work to another blog space they need to create and maintain, but rather a quick way to drop of their feed so that their work is discoverable by the UMW Blogs community, leaving a trace of their work that will lead people within the community (or a specific class) back to their own space, wherever it is hosted.

We’ve been experimenting with this in a couple of ways recently using Feed WordPress on the Tags blog for UMW Blogs (the tags blog is automatically created when you install Donncha’s Sitewide Feed Tags Page plugin). For example, I can bring in the all the posts for three course being taught by professor Zach Whalen (which he is hosting on his own site in Drupal) by simply adding the feed for each of the courses. The posts are automatically brought into the Tags blog and the permalink directs the user back to the original post in the Drupal course site. The categories can also be imported, comments can be turned off,  and you can assign a specific tag for each of the courses if you want to make the work more visible in the tag cloud.  Additionally, the posts will show up both on the front page and in the searchable archive.*

So, here’s another example of this in action, Andy Rush has created a pretty bitchin’ New Media blog, and he is hosting it outside of UMW Blogs. Yet, what he blogs about there is of great use and interest to the UWM Blogs community. So, all we have to do is grab his feed, add it to Feed WordPress in the Tags blog, and tag it New Media. After that all his posts will be automatically syndicated into UMW Blogs, and they will also be tagged New Media so that he might be discovered in the tag cloud.  Further more, his posts can all be found in the searchable archive, which is just really the search field for the Tags blog.You can see his posts in the  UMW Blogs archive here.

Next step is creating something like a self service widget for Feed WordPress so that mebers of a WPMu community can add their feed (or feeds), tag it, categorize it, and then we’re off to the races.  The end result is that anyone can publish anywhere as long as it has a valid feed, and their work can still be accessible and searchable by their community as well as the world at large.

Now, with all that said, exploring and discovering work on UMW Blogs is still not that easy, you have to see the flow in real time, or wade through hundreds and hundreds of posts in the sitewide feed.  So, my next post on UMW Blogs will be looking at the experimental work Patrick Murray-John is doing with MIT’s Simile Project which he is documenting  vernacularly here and more technically here (I’m like a fish out of wter when it comes to the Semantic Web). Andrew Murphy of Metapizza nails it, “Put in an interested use of metadata and web 3.0 and we’re flying …” That is the logic behind this experiment. How might we be able to make the work happening on UMW Blogs easier to search, browse and filter using Semantic Web tools from the Simile Project like Exhibit? It seems the next logical step to try and open up this space further, and try and make the amazing amount of work being done more apparent and finadable by the community at large.

____________________

* Much of this is inspired by Bill Fitzgerald’s Drupal setup that he outlines here, and while Drupal can do this much better than WPMu, I still think the ease and feel of the individual spaces provided by WPMu makes it worth the extra work, but that is really just a matter of preference and comfort level in the end.

As much as I love the internet, I have to be frank, it has never really come close to the magic that is reading the b-movie rag that is Filmfax. I may be wrong here (but I’m not), there is really no comparing the articles, black and white images, and endless ads (that are often as enjoyable as the articles themselves) in Filmfax with the b-movie blogs and websites I have come across on the internet.

This may seem counter-intuitive, or just plain nostalgic (guilty as charged), given that on the internet you can embed clips from YouTube, emblazon your posts with screen shots in technicolor, or even link to a million and one resources on any given movie or personality. But for me all the internet’s power pales in comparison when it comes to a well imagined and executed issue of Filmfax, just like the most recent one I received in the mail.

The cover image says it all…

For a while now I have had two dreams: the first is to have my own movie rental store that kicks ass and brings back the old gold of the early 80s movie stores, and the second was to create a space online that is as thoughtful and engaging around movies, tv, and retro-culture as Filmfax. But I get the feeling sometimes that neither may be possible any more. I mean look at that issue of Filmfax above, it has a four page article about They Saved Hitler's Brain, which is based on a 60s low-budget film that was re-edited with footage added in the early 70s when it was released on television.

Add to that another article that catches up with Holly Marshall (Kathleen Coleman in real life), the young girl from the 1970s TV series Land of the Lost. Which brings back some amazing memories of sitting in front of the television at 4 pm on school days waiting for the Sleestaks to emerge from the depths of the endless caves, creatures who were simultaneously cheesy and deeply creepy.

And what about the ads in Filmfax, the ads, the ads, the ads! I men check out this ad titled “Wasn’t the Future Wonderful” selling retro model rockets.

And where else can you get a page full of Italian Sword & Sandal b-movies?

How do you compete with this kind of genius? So, just like last year, this year I have one, and only one, thing on my list for my birthday: a year long subscription to Filmfax. It’s gonna be another good year!

Shawn Miller from Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology re-published my post “The UMW Blogs Story,” that chronicles the work we have been doing over the last several years. I am pretty excited that the approach of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies is providing others with fodder for thought. The group here at UMW is second to none in my mind, and we play just as hard as we work. But I’m not sure this post is about the people I work with, though I love them each and every one of them.

But the work on UMW Blogs is just one example amongst many. So as a follow-up I wanted to take a moment to point out some of the work other people at other institutions have been doing with publishing platforms (often called “blogging” platforms ).

There’s Mario Nùñez-Molina’s RUM Edublogs (who was the first person I started collaborating with while doing ELS Blogs back in Winter 2007). His advice, guidance, and help was (and continues to be) invaluable to the work we were doing at UMW, and his own publishing platform at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez has an attractive new front page, and is doing some great things with syndication in the “planeta” blogs.

Cole Camplese’s thoughts about re-imagining a blogging platform as far more has been immensely useful for us here at UMW. His team’s work is always about pushing the limits of these tools to be far more than just a blog, and PSU Blogs is probably one of the best examples of this, I highly recommend Cole’s posts on thinking about campus-wide blogging platforms as publishing spaces/portfolios here and here, as well as a syndicated publishing framework here –important conceptual stuff.

Barbara Sawhill and Ryan Brazell’s work at Oberlin College with blogging and the languages (though a quick look at the “Class Sites” tab suggests many more departments) frames one of the most important conversations in my mind: how can language departments all of the country (if not the world) be tapping a publishing platform like this to harness the unbelievably rich archive for language learning that is the open web?

Mikhail Gershovich and Luke Waltzer have launched Baruch Blogs this semester and it is a beauty. I particularly love the Baruch Teaching blog they have created which features a number of professors sharing their thoughts and opinions about the best approaches for teaching in a variety of scenarios. What an excellent idea for a blog! You can see it here or read Luke’s post about it here.

D’Arcy Norman’s stealth launch of U. Calgary Blogs has quickly been delivering the goods. I’m jealous already at how slick and pimped his WPMu install is –those folks at UCalgary are spoiled with this guy! He has also been thinking honestly through the value of a campus blogging platform, and what it might mean as a learning community publishing platform as well as a vehicle for Open Education. Plus, once D’Arcy gets started on something, you know the tips, tweaks, and general tech goodness is soon to follow, making him the Reverend’s most strategic convert

I recently peaked over at Laura Blankenship’s Blogs at Bryn Mawr, I love the new theme, but more than that I am amazed at how they seem to be planning on using this space as a way of bringing together their campus community as well as the alumni from all over the country, if the “Who’s Blogging at Bryn Mawr” sidebar widget is any indicator. Using a blogging platform as a space for allowing the students, faculty, and staff to create quick and easy club and organizations spaces is a huge. This is a space to watch in my mind, we are finding much of the same activity here at UMW and I think it marks a changing tide in just how popular and powerful a user-friendly and open publishing platform will be on campus.

Esther White’s recent work on Smith College Blogs is opening up some interesting ways to both think creating a dynamic front page for a campus blogging platform as well as using blogs as sites for faculty to create there own personal sites.

And then there is Tony Hirst at the Open University who is developing ways of turning a such a blogging platform as WPMu into an automated publishing platform fueled RSS from the course sites created at Open Learn. In short, a way for other institutions with flexible publishing platforms to pull in these resources as re-arrange, edit, and re-contextualize as they see fit. A mashup engine for educational resource that can be pulled in in a matters of seconds, that is one potential road we can imagine in our quest for simple, syndicated publishing platforms.

In short , “what we have here is the non-failure to communicate.” Above is a distributed group of people doing awesome work at their respective institutions and sharing it widely. What comes out of this is a loosely formed community of folks that have together framed one way of thinking about the future of sharing the work done online quickly and easily with very little overhead. What we have here is a community dedicated to sharing and openness, a model for open education that is firmly embedded in the an institution’s community, yet always already within the community of the open web. Feeds from other campus blogs, online resources, etc. can be brought in easily and shared readily, but that’s the subject of my next post….

Well, back in May my loving children broke a pair of glasses that I had owned and worn for almost twelve years. Since then, I have been wearing glasses with only one arm, primarily out of necessity and a staunch refusal to buy a crap pair of glasses.  And while I flirted with the idea of playing the contact game, in the end it isn’t my bag. I have to admit that for the first month or so it felt kind of weird walking around with one-armed glasses. I often tried to tape them up or hide the lack with a hat or a fake hippie wig. But time is  a funny thing because now, over four months later, I have become pretty comfortable with my one-armed glasses—I almost feel kinda like the one-armed boxer. Eventually my colleagues and neighbors stopped asking me when I was going to get them fixed, and I stopped caring even if and when they did ask. I figure it’s a kind of mental training for the tough times that lay ahead (in fact I have been in such training most of my adult life).

So, having survived for 120 days with one-armed glasses I am excited to both announce and introduce a new, integral member of the bava family. After searching on EBay for just a half hour today I found the perfect eyeglasses for the low, low price of $39.99! So tonight marks the beginning of a new and improved era of bava eyewear that, my children allowing, will last for the next decade. So, without further ado, here are the new and improved (and specially reinforced) bavaframes:

That was then….

….and this is now (actually last week at the NuArt theater in LA–my favorite!):

Stephen Geoffreys delivering his classic line from Fright Night (1985).

I have a longer post, a kind of “opus” tracing the impact of the VCR on b-movies during the 80s. I’ll save the details for later, but while doing my extensive research I came across a gem from the past: TerrorVision. I re-watched it again last night, and I had totally forgotten the Grandfather (played by the great Bert Remsen) was a survivalist. He had his own bomb shelter and artillery room built into the basement of the home, and he was pushing a survivalist campaign for sustainable food, namely eating lizard tails given they will always grow back. And early moment of survivalism in film, pre-dating the 1987 b-movie The Survivalist and Burt Gummer first appearance in Tremors in 1990.

Anyway, TerrorVision is wonderful 80s camp, an experience I was afforded by browsing the shelves of a local, independently owned video store (the likes of which populated strip malls across America during the 1980s) for the most outlandish cover and tagline. The era of the independently owned video store is all but gone, but its legacy may have made possible one of the greatest periods in variegated film consumption ever known to a generation of waylaid youth. OK, I guess I gotta write the post after that teaser, but until then check out the trailer for TerrorVision, or watch the whole thing on YouTube in 9 easy pieces. Also, the theme song for the movie composed and performed by the Fibonaccis is an 80s gem in its own right.

TerrorVision Trailer

TerrorVision Theme Song

During these strange political times I have found myself returning in thought to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia for some reason. Don’t ask me why, for I am not entirely sure, but I do have to say that this work continually blows my mind. This might by the third or fourth time I have read it through, and there are a number of passages that truly leave me in awe thinking about just how nuts Jefferson was for better and for worse, which I think is the true mark of genius.

Anyway, this is post is neither an apology nor an indictment of Jefferson, just a reflection on one of his observations about the custom of naturally inducing abortions and contraception amongst Native American women in Query 6: “Minerals”:

They [Native Americans] raise fewer children than we do. The causes of this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance. The women very frequently attending the men in their parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after.

What strikes me about this passage is just how sanguinely Jefferson remarks on this practice, which today is one of the hallmark issue that divides the US along “conservative” and “liberal” lines (I put these terms in quotes because I really don’t know what they mean in our moment anymore). Yet, for Jefferson it is a practice that is both naturalized and contextualized within a particular cultures relationship to “circumstance” and necessity. This passage does not highlight this as a savage practice of the other, nor is the explanation for this practice to be understood as ” a difference of nature.” In fact, I think the Notes is fascinating in that Jefferson is trying to reclaim the humanity of the Native Americans (despite the fact they have been al but decimated and removed from the 13 colonies) while at the same time struggling with that of the African American slave.  Possibly the most famous passage from the Notes is this bit from Query 14: “Laws”:

To emancipate all slaves born after passing the act. The bill reported by the revisors does not itself contain this proposition; but an amendment containing it was prepared, to be offered to the legislature whenever the bill should be taken up, and further directing, that they should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of houshold and of the handicraft arts, feeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. to declare them a free and independant people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants; to induce whom to migrate hither, proper encouragements were to be proposed. It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. [My emphasis]

This may be the most insane political plan ever dreamed up (both politically and finanically), to send all slaves back to Africa to start a state of their own under the guidance of the US. A colonial state premised on prejudices and a difference of nature that can never be overcome. In many ways the election that is happening to us now makes me think that so many of the claims here, and the violent history out of which this nation was born, might begin to expose and heal the centuries of scars. I don’t want to ignore the potential power of the moment, and the historical precedent that reverberates deeply within it, yet I am afraid of the machine. Of the surety that it is not about nature, which Jefferson grants the Native Americans though refuses the African Americans, but circumstance. The circumstance of a nation and a people caught between two parties that are both chin-deep in corruption as is made all too clear by the current bi-partisan push for an ill-defined bailout of corporate greed, reminiscent of the post-9/11 push for an international witch hunt that manifested itself as the war in Iraq. And that corruption extends well beyond Capitol Hill into many a home across this fair land. The circumstances are bigger than any one candidate, but I want to try an honor the historic moment of Obama’s candidacy while simultaneously wonder if All the President's Men hasn’t already written the script for this movie?

The following questions come from an email conversation Shawn Miller and I had about the genesis and guiding logic of UMW Blogs. Shawn is a member of Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology, and the group is interested in hearing more about the ways we are using blogs here at Mary Washington. If all goes well an edited version this post will also be published on the CIT blog as a way of introducing the means and methods behind UMW Blogs to the Duke campus. Pretty groovy!

Tell us about UMW blogs (brief overview) - when? what was the decision process?

First and foremost, I don’t do brief very well

UMW Blogs is quite simply a web-based publishing platform for the Mary Washington academic community. The distinction between a blog and a more loosely defined publishing platform is actually important because while some people on UMW Blogs use it for what is commonly thought of as blogging, many more use it for a wide range of purposes that often don’t quite match the underlining logic of a blog (see here for a number of examples). So to call it a series of blogs in many ways doesn’t capture the more complex reality, it’s more akin to a dynamic online publishing space for students, staff, and faculty alike.

The official birth date of UMW Blogs is August 27th, 2007, but unlike Athena it didn’t just jump from the head of Zeus one day. It came out of numerous iteration cycles with a variety of free and open source applications. It was born out of a culture of experimentation at UMW more generally, and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) specifically. The defining experiment was Gardner Campbell’s choice to get all the instructional technologists external web hosting accounts so they could rapidly test and develop several different emerging open source applications such as MediaWiki, WordPress, Drupal, etc. In short, a sandbox approach to exploring educational technologies (you can hear Gardner explain this in three minutes here or a more lengthy presentation by the DTLT group here). Moreover, this approach embraced the best tools already freely available on the web (which were not necessarily limited to open source solutions) for sharing videos, images, bookmarks, and documents such as YouTube, Flickr, and delicious, and Writely (which is now Google Docs).

I think the driving logic behind the experiment—and Gardner, Martha Burtis, Jerry Slezak, Andy Rush, and Patrick Murray-John can all correct me if I am wrong—was to imagine what takes place in the classroom at a university as not external to what was happening already on the wide open web more generally, but rather in constant dialogue with the conversations and resources that already exist out on the web. Moreover, by exploring this avenue more fully the experience in the classroom could only be augmented by the networked approach of thinking and sharing openly on the web. The move towards openness with these Web 2.0 tools at UMW was not so much premised on a pre-determined ideological impetus, but a push for developing the best framework for sharing resources and publishing easily on the web for an entire intellectual community. In many ways openness comes as a serendipitous extension of such a framework, illustrating the point that the architecture of most Course Management Systems (and university websites more generally) are built upon a vision of controlling an image and locking down ideas rather than sharing and opening them up to the world at large. Openness is as much a function of design as it is of any set of beliefs. One might truly desire to be open, but have no means through the web-based publishing tools provided by their campus’s IT department to truly enable the kind of access requisite for allowing others to both find and re-purpose their work and ideas easily–kind of like what Emmanuel Wallerstein says about the impossibility of being a communist in world system controlled and dominated by capitalism.

UMW Blogs is one of many project to come out of the process outlined above, and it certainly is not the end of the road. The group vision was, and still is, to enable the UMW community to take control of and manage their own work, identities and spaces online. One of the things we really like about UMW Blogs os it allows people throughout the community to take ownership of their own work, they control their space to some great extent. For example, they can use their blogs for personal reflection, to frame an eportfolio (here’s a nice student example), they can delete their own work at will, and export their data on the fly and re-import to their own space or a commercial blogging system like Blogger or WordPress.com. Moroever, the syndicated framwork we are using allows instructors and students who are using external applications to easily add their RSS feeds to UMW Blogs so that their work can become part of the searchable and discoverable flow of data. That is the key, don’t try and create a space that locks anyone in to one university tool, rather build a system that can, to quote Whitman, “contain multitudes.” This idea of empowering the community with their own tools for framing the work they do during their time at UMW epitomizes DTLT’s appraoch to instructional technologies (and approach not unique to us in fact, but that was heavily influenced early on by many, many others around the internet such as Alan Levine, Bryan Alexander, Barbara Ganley, Stephen Downes, Brian Lamb, Laura Blankenship, D’Arcy Norman, to name just a few). One practice that has highlighted the importance of managing and developing your voice online has been Ume Blogs’s ability to integrate all the individual threads into a larger, syndicated (or is it syncopated?) chorus of learning on campus. UMW Blogs has brought us closer to that vision than we have been heretofore, but there is still a way to go. Nonetheless, after three years of one-off WordPress blogs and MediaWiki installations, the move towards a larger, integrated campus-wide publishing platform was as much a necessity as it was an experiment.

-Does UMW blogs take the place of a standard LMS for UMW?

No, it doesn’t replace our standard Learning Management System (LMS) which is BlackBoard Basic. UMW Blogs is not a mandate from the administration. In fact, we’re still trying to make sure everyone knows it’s very much an experimental space. Despite this fact, the interest has been so great that it has become a de facto enterprise system simply based on numbers: we currently have 1954 users on campus (out of a population of roughly 4,000), and more than 1800 blogs. Those numbers are far more than the 100 or 200 blogs we were hoping for last fall.

The growth has been phenomenal and much of that might be because the system is not mandated, nor is it cordoned off for a special few. Such facts have no small impact on the community that uses UMW Blogs. It’s active, variegated, experimental, and highly entertaining. Over the last 12 months over 75 UMW faculty have signed up for UMW Blogs, and almost 100 courses have used (or are currently using) this publishing platform in some fashion. And I stress some fashion for often no two courses use it the same exact way, much like the fact that no two professors teach in the same exact way.

For example, Dr. Gardner Campbell’s Milton Seminar this Summer has pushed the limits for his class by pushing them to use their own blogs, and pulling (or feeding) their work into a central aggregated course blog. Professor Steve Greenlaw’s freshman seminar on Globalization is an excellent example of a distributed course sites using all kinds of tools like WordPress.com, Flickr, delicious, and YouTube. Professor Mara Scanlon Asian American Literature course blog used the space as a space where students could choose where they did the work, and built the course resources (such as a syllabus, assignments, etc.) around the active blog space. Professor Sue Fernsebner’s Cultural History of Late 20th Century China provides a centralized course space for the professor to publish announcements and reading questions while at the same time providing pages for tracking all the students’ research blogs. Professor John Morello has used the space for his speech course to allow his class to share and comment on each others video-taped speeches. Our provost, Nina Mikhalevsky, has been using UMW Blogs for two of her course sites for both sharing course materials and creating a dynamic forums via the blog posts. Additionally, Professor Steven Gallik is using UMW Blogs as digital laboratory notebooks for his Cell Biology course, harnessing the power of syndication for his Online Laboratory suite (find out more about this project here).

Yet, all that said it does not replace our LMS because there are several things it cannot do (all of which might be more of a blessing than a curse):

• It cannot integrate into Banner and other institutional data systems.
• It cannot provide pre-populated lists of students and courses for professors.
• You cannot have a testing/quizzing module, nor do you have a grade book.

The logic behind UMW Blogs is a loosely coupled system that gives the community the ability to publish and share online, it is not (nor do we necessarily believe it should be) contorted to meet the the administrative concerns that are often better dealt with by course management systems. Let’s face it, learning management systems are seldom about learning, and primarily deal with administrative overhead.  And that’s fine, but for really powerful and compelling examples of learning, LMSs are probably the last place one would look online if, indeed, one could look at all.

Finally, in terms of the hosting and administration of UMW Blogs, it is hosted off campus and for the first year it was on a shared server and cost us $30 a month. This year we hae it on a dedicated server with nightly backups to an alternate site and it currently costs us about $400 a month. And if a campus wanted to offload the hosting and maintenence entirely, James Farmer’s EduBlogs Campus might be an excellent, cost-effective alternative. The cost of any campus publishing endavor like this should be far more in terms of people working with the faculty and students for imagining ways of using these tools rather than infrastructure and administrative overhead. Howabout that for a cost effective and sustainable model in these troubled economic times!

-What sort of faculty have been interested in participating? Feel free to hit us with some stats.

In many ways the range of faculty has been interesting. It isn’t simply the ase that the most tech savvy folks are using UMW Blogs, as is often the case with new media. Rather, it has attracted those faculty who want to do something online, and want it to be both simple and aesthetically pleasing. This is where such a system has become a tremendous asset for the professors. It is often no harder than writing an email, and the ability for them to maintain full control over their space and make it look the way they want has made it very appealing to a wide range of people. This includes working committees, staff organizations, student organizations, and faculty who want to create online resources for their professional presentations and research. It has offered a low-threshold entry point for many who have been previously uncomfortable with the web, while providing the room for experimentation and customization that keeps those who understand the web intimately continually intrigued and engaged.

Want some stats? Check out a previous post of mine that offers some insight from the beginning of September about overall site usage, posts, comments, etc.

-What have the general faculty and student reactions been?

So far, the reviews have been rather favorable, and the number of people using it might be one indication of this. The dialogue around the tool is wide open, and we are constantly getting feedback about tweaking things and ironing out some interface issues. But most of the conversations center around how to further push the limits of using this space for teaching and learning, which might suggest we have gotten beyond the question of whether or not it’s functional and onto the issues of how we can make it even better as a space for syndicating the amazing stuff happening around campus.

-Since many (all?) the blogs are public, how do you deal with privacy concerns? Along that same thread - have any of the blogs received ‘outside’ attention/feedback/collaboration?

Making blogs public or not is determined on a case-by-case basis by the user. Not everything published on UMW Blogs is open, and every person controls the extent to which others sees what they create. This is essential to the logic of such a system. We wanted to put as much responsibility and control in the hands of those managing their own space as possible. The logic behind the model is that someone who wants to share their work freely can do so as easily as someone who wants to control who sees their work. What is radical about this is the idea of choice built into the system, the ability of controlling permissions and access in LMSs and CMSs is often far more difficult than it should be, and emphasizes just how they were designed around the logic of control and administrative management rather than openness and sharing.

That said, I would imagine most of the sites are open to the public, but that has less to do with the system than the culture. It is made easier given our choice of platforms, but the faculty and students often understand this space as a resource made freely available as part of the mission of a public university. Below I’ll point to a few of the class projects that have intentionally created resources for the world at large:

• Jeff McClurken’s Digital History course sites researched created by students have become heavily trafficked resources by the local community (check out the Historical Markers student site);

• Marie McCallister’s Eighteenth-Century Audio have become a resource that has collected and contributed hundreds of audio files to the internet more generally;

• Claudia Emerson’s Literary Journals projects that provides students the ability to envision, solicit entries and create a web-based literary journal over the course of a semester.

If you followed any of the links above, you may have noticed that many of these sites are not blogs at all, but dynamic websites for publishing research, media, and creative works for the world at large.

-In terms of using blogs (and in this case Wordpress) is the main thing the platform (ie: Wordpress makes so many things possible) or the concept (ie: blogs have a flexible nature to them)?

The application we are using, WordPress Multi-User, is indeed a blogging engine, but we have found its open-ended possibilities and simplicity make it far more. It’s a highly flexible and accessible platform that the UMW community can use for anything from publishing dynamic personal web pages to managing courses, or sharing audio and video on the fly to framing eportfolios. So, its ease-of-use and built-in syndication works well for what we are trying to accomplish, and hence was the tools of choice.

All that said, the concept of an open and flexible syndicated publishing platform is far more important than any one application. Moreover, the willingness of faculty and students to experiment has been the key element for something like UMW Blogs to garner the impressive response and buy-in we have had over the past year.

-What sort of plugins/extras/widgets (RSS feeds, Flickr widgets, special help with themes) does your department and/or others at UMW provide?

This is a tough one to answer because we have so many plugins, widgets and themes (I can give you an idea, but an exhaustive list might well be impossible). Our method for themes and plugins is that we basically test themes and plugins before we add them to the system to make sure they don’t crash our installation. We are open to people in the community requesting both themes and plugins if they need more functionality or a different layout. Our group either helps them find it (often when we are working with a specific professor who expresses a particular need), or we take the larger communities requests and  recommendations and test them out to make sure there are no issues.

Part of the genius of this system is that additional functionality comes at no extra cost. More importantly, such a system encourages faculty and students to explore the framework and think about what they would like to see and go out and find it. In that very act there is a different relationship to how you frame the educational experience online.

For a list of regular plugins we offer on UWM Blogs see this post, for WordPress Multi-User specific plugins see this post (which is generally accurate, but a but outdated now), and for a list the the themes (although not an exhaustive list) see James Farmer’s Farms 100 Big Ones Theme Pack for WPMu.

Ok, that’s it! If I missed anything or was less than clear (which is often the case), just let me know and I will clarify and expound where appropriate. Thanks for providing the opportunity to think closely about what exactly UMW Bogs is all about, I always relish the opportunity

While I was trying to record the most recent EdTech Survivalist video, I was hacked by an alter-ego I thought had been laid to rest long ago. So forgive the quality of this recent installation, but I was shanghai’d in to giving a more instructive, albeit confusing, explanation of the syndication oriented framework of UMW Blogs. I’m not responsible for any of the propaganda in the following video, and given Tom “Catfish” Woodward has expressed interest in further involvement, I’m sure there will be a number of new and improved EdTech Survivalist videos coming this way over the next several weeks.  In the mean time, all I can do is apologize for the following aberration.

Anarcho Syndicatin’alism

From the latest issue of Wired:

Who knew it was a noun?

Thanks to Jerry Slezak for getting me started all over again

I have to give some love to the work Esther White is doing with WPMu at Smith College Blogs, it is well worth a look. She has shared her process for customizing the front page, which details some very cool hacks. Moreover, today she posted about using WPMu as a space for faculty bio pages and personal blogs/sites.

I just met with some folks from College Relations to talk about how they could use WordPress for faculty bios, which got me totally amped! They want to make faculty responsible for updating their own bios, which was being done with Adobe Contribute, with much resistance from the faculty….We settled on this for a plan: College Relations folks will administer a Faculty blog with one page for each faculty member with a bio….Faculty members can also update their personal pages/blogs and link back to them from their bio’s on the Faculty blog if they’re into that sort of thing. We also discussed ways to get the RSS feed from their personal blog to show up on the bio page….

Very cool stuff, and the plugin for bringing in faculty RSS feeds may very will be aggr. It’s this kind of thing that just further reinforces how useful it is to share what happens in our work regularly. Moreover, it illustrates how key it is for colleges to have a simple, powerful publishing application that will allow this to happen more readily. Looks like Esther is taking care of this for Smith College, so bully for her.

“Fishing with Tom”

In our first episode we were ever so lucky to catch up with Dixie’s most impressive edtech survivalist Tom “Catfish” Woodward. We tunneled all the way down to the swamps of Slocum, Alabama to find him, and we were duly rewarded with some invaluable gems about trotlining RSS to feed the entire family fresh knowledge on a daily basis. Bon appetit!

Credits: Special thanks to Catfish for giving so freely of his limited time and unlimited genius. And once again thanks go to Serena Epstein for applying her special touch.

Hat tip to Mikhail Gershovich for the link.

I have to apologize for this post ahead of time, but after talking with the great Carole Garmon about Kienholz (see my previous post for context), she recommended I watch Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi (1992). The video from YouTube below is an edited version that, as the uploader notes(the original is 51 minutes long), “these are just some of my favorite scenes, most of the film contains material which YouTube would redeem offensive.” This film is not just disturbing, but absolutely nuts. Here’s Paul McCarthy description of it:

A collaborative work based on Joanna Spyri’s novel, Heidi. The entire work consisted of a fabricated set, a group of partial and full life-size rubber figures, two large backdrop paintings, and a video tape shot entirely on the set….We were interested in imitating film and television production, and exaggerating the fractured process of film. The intention was to create convoluted associations between Heidi, the purity myth in America and Europe and the media view of family life, horror movies and ornamentation - the grandfather, Heidi and Peter, a rural family. Grandfather is abusive and senile. Peter is retarded. Heidi is Madonna and the sick girl is a vision. (Quoted from the ArtTorrents blog.

So, it’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets the tried and true classics of western children’s tales and Saturday Morning kids’ television. But, unfortunately it is far more disturbing than anything Tobe Hooper could ever dream up. It seems to me to be almost the limits of taste and all things holy. So with that long disclaimer behind me, let taste be damned and prepare yourself for an endless supply of nightmares:

Once again the Internet Archive delivers the goods. Check out this amazing documentary by June Steel about Edward Kienholz's retrospective exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1966. I first discovered Kienholz thirty years later in LA at this 1996 retrospective of Kienholz’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This exhibit blew me away, and may very well be the most powerful exhibit I have visited to date.

Image from Roxy's Installation

Kienholz’s (and this refers to both Edward and his wife and long-time collaborator Nancy Reddin Kienholz) sharp social critique, crude yet affectionate vision of humanity, accompanied with an insanely detailed and textured attention to things, to stuff, makes viewing his assemblage and installations a kind of being. A being similar to occupying the darkest, most hidden spaces of our culture. It is almost as if you are sneaking into a crime scene or stumbling upon the long abandoned movie set of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Their mix of everyday, found materials and horrific human mutations within the most realistic of spaces makes him the perfect b-movie artist in my mind, yet he is far more than that. I kind of think of him as the contemporary of folks like George Romero and Tobe Hooper.

And I haven’t even gotten to the documentary by June Steel yet, which is an absolute ball to watch. She does an excellent job of capturing the opening of this show at the LACMA which was surround by controversy, particularly given the graphic nature of Kienholz’s most famous works which the documentary takes you brilliantly, including Roxy’s (1961-62) (an installation of a brothel –a masterpiece of the highest order in my mind), Back Seat Dodge ‘38 (1962) (a truly sensuous and disturbing piece), The Illegal Operation (1964) (an early artistic critique of backroom abortions), and The Birthday (1964). Be sure to check out the part of the documentary where the film crew gets the different reactions from the white and black patrons responses to Roxy’s (the Brothel installation) , it is a brilliant moment in film more generally.

I have to say it, this is a must see!

Ours is by no means a monopoly on dark times. I came across this audio of Bertolt Brecht being “interviewed”  at the House for Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings on October 30th, 1947 on this awesome Internet Archive blog post. The questioning by the committee is frightening, and while Brecht’s answers may at times seem comical (as they did to the audience of the hearing), I can’t begin to imagine how frightening this interrogation must have been after what he saw happen to his own country on the National Socialist party.

Yet, the fact that Brecht testified at all in from of this committee was controversial:

Initially, Brecht was one of 19 witnesses who declared that they would refuse to testify about their political affiliations. Eleven members of this group were actually questioned on this point but, as Brecht later explained, he did not want to delay a planned trip to Europe, so he followed the advice of attorneys and broke with his earlier avowal. On 30 October 1947, he appeared before the committee and testified that he had never actually held party membership.^[55]

He never returned to theUS after that “trip” to Europe, and was blacklisted from Hollywood. He seems to have made an interesting figure at the hearings nonetheless:

During his appearance before the committee, Brecht wore overalls and smoked an acrid cigar that made some of the committee members feel slightly ill. He made wry jokes throughout the proceedings, punctuating his inability to speak English well with continuous references to the translators present, who transformed his German statements into English ones unintelligible to himself.

The Internet Archive delivers yet again. Enjoy a grim piece of American political history and satirical drama:

Download An excerpt from Brecht and the HUAC

I stumbled upon a bizarre WPMu comments bug today (it may also effect single WP installs, but I’m not sure). Here’s the skinny, if you include to: with two trailing spaces, you will not be able to post a comment on UMW Blogs or bavatuesdays. I’m not sure this is true for all WPMu sites, and I guess others would have to test it for certainty, but it is definitely the case on the two WPMu installs I have tested it on. As soon as you try and post the comment containing the to: with two trailing spaces it will throw a 404 error. Think I’m kidding? Try and comment here with a to: and two spaces, I dare you, hippie. Heck, I’ll even give you 100 bucks if it gets through.

Thanks go to Patrick for knowing about this bug and helping me trouble shoot it, I would have been flummoxed without him.

Update: Even more bizarre is that I tried posting this post with the to: and two trailing spaces and it wouldn’t let me publish the post either, it just threw a 404 error. Wow, what a strange, strange bug.

Dave the Spazz of WFMU’s Beware of the Blog just posted on Hank Williams, I can’t pretend to know too much about Williams, but what I’ve heard of him is pretty phenomenal.  So the recording of a live performance by Williams in Sunset Park, PA on July 13th, 1952 was pretty educational. From his music I always imagined him as this dark and brooding figure (which I’m sure he was to some degree), but what’s great about this recording is how funny he is.  He tells a joke/anecdote about a guy who was in the doghouse with his wife, so he sent her a letter enclosing a check payable for a 1,000 hugs and kisses. Only to receive a letter back from his wife letting him know the iceman cashed that check this morning Also, the music is pretty awesome as well. And perhaps a hymn is in order, “I Saw the Light” is wonderful. There is also a bit where he’s pushing his song books towards the end of the performance, offering autographs. Seemed like quite a different, personable venue for an icon of 20th century popular music.

Anyway, here it is:

Download Hank Williams performing in Sunset Park, PA on July 13th, 1952

photo credit: fatbwoy

Lest we forget technology is as much about control as it is innovation, check out this article on TorrentFreak about the state sponsored trojans used to tap Skype calls. The other side of the Gothic and horrific when it comes to the web has as much more to do with centralized control and power then the omnipresent tales of the lone wolf, psychopath predator. What makes it scarier is that we provide the framework and funds through which they control us!

The article below is republished in its entirety from TorrentFreak.

The spokesperson of the German Pirate Party saw his house raided after the party published a leaked document which showed that the government uses a homemade “trojan” to wiretap Skype conversations. In addition, a server from another party member was seized.

The Pirate Party is known for it’s battle against the ever increasing government surveillance on the public. So, when an anonymous whistleblower sent them a internal document which showed that the government went as far as installing trojans on computers, they didn’t hesitate to publish it.

German authorities weren’t too happy about the leak, which might be illegal according to a criminal law specialist, and went after the source. Earlier this week police searched the home of the Pirate Party spokesperson where they hoped to find more information. In addition to the home search, a server from another party member was seized. The server, however, was fully encrypted, so chances are low that it will uncover the whistleblower.

In a response, Andreas Popp, Chairman of the Bavarian Pirate Party said: “A brave person leaks documents to the Pirate Party, to inform the public about a procedure of the Bavarian Government, which is highly likely to violate the constitution. Now this persons is hunted like a criminal. Private rooms are raided, servers get seized.”

Pirate Parties around the world will continue to speak out against these, and other privacy threats. The trojan in question (German) was able to tap into Skype calls and intercept traffic to encrypted websites.

Because the future is now…

Find out more about surviving the coming apocalypse here.

Hippies Wail for Dead Trees
When I call you a hippie, this is exactly the kind behavior I am referring to

Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.

I couldn’t resist highlighting this feature UMW Blogs post on the bava as well, particularly given that by reading Robert Lynn’s article I learned who termed the phrase McCarthyism. Gotta love both UMW Blogs and them there Redbaiters!

Robert “Roblog” Lynn has an excellent post about the art and career of political cartoonist Herbert Block. As is often the case, I am always learning fascinating stuff from the magic that is UMW Blogs, and the Roblog is consistently an excellent source of both information and inspiration. He’ll be spending this year thinking about “the structure of newspaper comics” and he starts off with a look at the National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective of Block’s work. Here’s an excerpt from his post:

Going by the trade name of Herblock, he coined the term “McCarthyism,” now a required vocabulary word for every 11th grade American history student, and gave us some of the most memorable images of Richard Nixon ever drawn. The exhibition includes his minimal set of drawing supplies and the beautifully goofy bronze National Cartoonist Society’s Rueben Award (named after Rube Goldberg. It looks sorta like this). Most interesting of all is the opportunity to see how the artist worked–the still visible non-photo-blue pencil drawings, his large, fluid sketchy inkings, and the frequently whited out and taped over faces he corrected again and again and again.

Read the rest of the post here.

Thursday night I had the good fortune of spending an evening with Kent Ippolito, who is one of Fredericksburg’s foremost treasures. He is an amazing musician, cartoonist, and person. As is often the case, when we get together with Kent I badger him about music. I think this impulse stems from the fact that this is one of the many realms where I am truly ignorant, but one of the few that I really don’t want to be. We talked about a whole bunch of great stuff, and then I asked him about my recent discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and yodeling. He brought up Merle Haggard immediately (thanks Brian Lamb for making me seem knowledgeable) who he said was indelibly influenced by Rodgers and has the single greatest voice in Country music. But then he busted out The DeZurik Sisters, and all I could say is “Oh wow!”

Check out their wikipedia article, it’s impressive, and here are a few tidbits about the oft-tagged “Cackle Sisters”:

• The DeZurik Sisters were the first women to become stars on both the National Barn Dance and the Grand Ole Opry, largely a result of their original yodeling style.
• Inspired by….the sounds of the animals and birds around them, they developed an astonishing repertoire of high, haunting yodels and yips that soon had them winning talent contests all over central Minnesota.
• In 1936, they signed a contract to appear regularly on Chicago radio station WLS’s National Barn Dance, and were hired in 1937 to perform on Purina Mills’ Checkerboard Time radio show, where they sang as The Cackle Sisters.
• In 1938, the sisters recorded six songs for Vocalion Records: “I Left Her Standing There” (Vocalion 4616-A), “Arizona Yodeler” (Vocalion 4616-B), “Sweet Hawaiian Chimes” (Vocalion 4704-A), “Guitar Blues” (Vocalion 4704-B), “Go To Sleep My Darling Baby” (Vocalion 4781-A) and “Birmingham Jail” (Vocalion 4781-B). Those six songs were the only tracks the duo would ever commit to vinyl, although some recordings exist of their appearances on Checkerboard Time.

Here are two of those Vocalion recordings, my favorite so far is “I Left Her Standing There,” but the “Arizona Yodeler” is no slouch either. Do yourself a favor and give them a listen, you may be blown away by the marvels of the human voice.

“I Left Her Standing There”

The Arizona Yodeler

Now, as is true with just about everything of real cultural worth, the WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has a rich compilation of the DeZurik Sisters radio recordings from the Checkerboard Time Radio Show recordings out of Chicago the posted back in august, 2007.

Here are a couple of gems from those posted:

Download The Yodel Lady

Download I Ain’t Getting No Place

Download Peach Pickin’ Time in Georgia

Download Dude Cowboy

After uploading the final speech from First Blood to YouTube, I was immediately delivered a copyright notice from Google and Lionsgate. Here is what it looks like:

Click for larger version you can view in its entirety.

To quote:

Lionsgate has claimed some or all audio and visual content in your video First Blood (1982). This claim was made as part of the YouTube Content Identification program.

Your video is still live because Lionsgate has authorized the use of this content on YouTube.
Your video “First Blood (1982)” is still available because Lionsgate does not object to this content appearing on YouTube at this time.

As long as Lionsgate has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video’s page.

Lionsgate claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

So, looks like Lion’s gate doesn’t mind folks uploading pieces of their movies to YouTube as long as they can track the stats.

In truth, the biggest thing that bugs me about this policy is that it doesn’t apply to pieces of all films and that they don’t allow others to embed in their sites. Videos on YouTube, particularly feature films, are about contextualizing a discussion, not about watching a film. It is a form of quoting and I want to give credit and rights, but I also want to be able to discuss the culture within which I have lived and continue to live with a certain amount of freedom.

Particualrly, I don’t want to have to worry about being sued or targeted as a criminal because I enjoy discussing movies with others. This policy seems to me an interesting experiment towards acknowledging and negotiating how people are using YouTube to frame such conversations (another reason why embedding is key). The stats remain, and more importantly an online community is discussing and thinking about their film, which means they will probably find some way to see it it its highest resolution, particularly if they are movie fans. And as with most movie fans, it most likely means buying or renting the DVD. How easy are they making this process?

So, am I being naive here? Has this been going on for a while with official notices letting you know they know, but also that it is kosher under certain conditions?

Just watched First Blood (1982) for the first time in many years in preparation for an upcoming conference presentation. I have to admit I’m not sure if Stallone's final speech is the greatest acting I’ve ever seen, or the worst. You be the judge.

And for a wonderful take on this monologue, check out the Macintalk Fred voice reciting this speech as set to a running series of Caravaggio's paintings —makes it seem like a Shakespearean classic. Brilliant! The clip below is why I love the internet to no end.

"Buckle your seat belts, here comes the future" used courtesy of Darkmatter

…I love Tony Hirst! And let there be no confusion, the stuff he is doing at OpenLearn makes me giddy with excitement. Case in point, take a look at the latest developments in the OU Course Spamming saga he and his people have whipped up. I really am lucky to be working when I am, and along side the folks that I am. These are exciting times!

In fact, I saw this bit on Slashdot about the Commonwealth of Virginia’s interest in Open Source textbooks for Physics, and the first thing I thought about was Tony’s imaginings for syndicating resource via subjects and mixing and matching along the way. This is the “flexibook” that article is referring to, and the distribution and the platform for mashability should be just as important as the licensing. Moreover, you can invest far more in the content than the distribution because it ain’t that expensive.

Come on people, let’s break this whole thing wide open, the time is upon us now!

Finding Steve Wheeler’s presentation on EDUPUNK for a F-ALT fringe meeting today was a nice reminder for me that so many of the associations this idea took on over the course of a couple of months really do still resonate deeply with me. I believe Steve’s idea of “unleashing the anarchy of the web” is a perfect way to think about what makes this moment of DIY teaching and learning in relationship to the more traditional institutional framework of course delivery rather radical.

Stephen Downes and George Siemens Connectivism course marks a rather important moment in this regard, and with the web as your classroom, and your blog (or your tool of choice) as your notebook, who the hell is stopping you from thinking and learning what you want?! And then taking the next logical step and sharing it freely far and wide. Therein lies the real danger and threat of such an approach.

So thanks Steve for the reminder that EDUPUNK was a wee bit more than a meme gone awry, although it was that too.

Image courtesy of eggman.

Coney Island’s Astroland has officially closed this past Sunday, September 7th, 2008, after 46 years of operation. Seems it has been bought up by a developer for $30 million, and the times they are a changing in Coney Island. Read more about the details on the Gothamist here. It’s a sad occasion for a great city whose best attractions and spaces have been devoured by developers. At least the Atlantic Yards development scam was slowed and may be in some doubt as to its future.

I’ll miss you Astroland, the world just won’t be the same without Dante’s Inferno.

Image courtesy of WallyG

In stark contrast to the Uncle John Scruggs video, check out this video of Jack Johnson’s Jazz band performing “Tiger Rag” on December 21, 1929 in the great city of New York, NY.

Now, I’m not sure how much you know about Jack Johnson, but if you are new to this phenomenal figure of the early twentieth century, I strongly urge you to read more about him on Wikipedia here. I first learned about Johnson from a Christmas Present I got back in 1999, the book published by ESPN titled “Sports Century,” which was also a series of documentaries on the network. The first chapter of this book is dedicated to Johnson, and after I read it I was amazed by this monumental figure, who may very well be one of the great characters of the last century. His story inspires nothing short of awe, and while he was by no means a saint, his accomplishments in the face of wide spread racism accompanied by his staunch refusal to accept the status quo are remarkable to say the least. He is probably best known as boxing’s first black Heavyweight Champion of the World from 1908 to 1915. And for good reason, for such this title was deeply segregated:

His efforts to win the full title were thwarted as world heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries refused to face him. Blacks could box whites in other arenas, but the world heavyweight championship was such a respected and coveted position in America that blacks were not deemed worthy to compete for it. Johnson was, however, able to fight former champion Bob Fitzsimmons in July 1907, and knocked him out in two rounds.

He eventually did win the title by defeating Canadian Heavyweight champion Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia in 1908. To quote his Wikipedia article again:

After Johnson’s victory over Burns, racial animosity among whites ran so deep that even a socialist like Jack London called out for a “Great White Hope” to take the title away from Johnson — who was crudely caricatured as a subhuman “ape” — and return it to where it supposedly belonged, with the “superior” white race. As title holder, Johnson thus had to face a series of fighters billed by boxing promoters as “great white hopes.”

He did get to face Jeffries after all in on July 4th, 1910 in what is termed “the Fight of the Century”:

James J. Jeffries came out of retirement and said, “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.” Jeffries had not fought in six years and had to lose around 100 pounds to try to get back to his championship fighting weight.

At the fight, which took place on July 4, 1910 in front of 22,000 people, at a ring built just for the occasion in downtown Reno, Nevada, the ringside band played, “All coons look alike to me”. The fight had become a hotbed of racial tension, and the promoters incited the all-white crowd to chant “kill the nigger”. Johnson, however, proved stronger and more nimble than Jeffries. In the 15th round, after Jeffries had been knocked down twice for the first time in his career, his people called it quits to prevent Johnson from knocking him out.

The “Fight of the Century” earned Johnson $225,000 and silenced the critics, who had belittled Johnson’s previous victory over Tommy Burns as “empty,” claiming that Burns was a false champion since Jeffries had retired undefeated.

So with all of this sports background to contextualize the “Galveston Giant’s” career, it is wild for me to see Jack Johnson in the video above conducting a Jazz band at a club in Harlem, New York in 1929. In fact, Johnson owned and operated his own club in Harlem for three years from 1920-1923 until he sold it to Owen "the Killer" Madden in 1923, and soon after it became the legendary Cotton Club).  He was also known for his involvement with white women throughout his public career, one of the greatest race taboos which was in many ways responsible for his arrest and imprisonment for “transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes.” It is always interesting for me to think about a figure like Johnson as the Heavyweight Champion of the World in 1915, the same year D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation redefines film narrative, with the controversial theme being very much the horror of inter-racial sexual relationships.

So, to hear Johnson referring to his boxing career, as well as to watch him conduct and shadow box to the music is quite an experience, particualrly since this man embodies an era and so many of the most complex issues of the US throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

The above footage was taken by the Fox Movietone News, in Powahatan, VA on November 8, 1928. According to USC’s Center for Southern African American Music:

Uncle John Scruggs was born a slave, [and] is a good example of white-influenced black music as it probably sounded at the end of the 19th century. He is performing the folk ballad “Little Log Cabin Round the Lane” in a minstrel style.

Whereas, according to the “for old times sake” blog, “[Scruggs'] music is an example of an Afro-American banjo playing tradition than predates that of white settlers in the Appalachians.”

Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta has some interesting things to say about Uncle John Scruggs, particularly the tradition of black banjo playing and the significance of the “Uncle” in front of this performers name at the time. He also has some interesting things to say about minstrelsy and its enduring popularity amongst black and white audiences through the 1950s.

This video clip not only captures some amazing music, but the setting itself (with the children dancing and chickens feeding) seems like an almost archetypal vision for how our culture has come to think about the post-bellum conditions for black share croppers in the South, and all of this right here in our own Virgineyeyeah.

Here is a wild moment in film/TV history via the ever entertaining Classic Television Showbiz blog. The two video clips below are from a 1977 episode of “The Mike Douglas Show,” featuring interviews with Star Wars cast members Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and Harrison Ford. The film is still in theaters at the time of the interviews, and you can kind of tell by the conversations that it is already gaining a sacred, wondrous space in the popular imagination.

One take away for me is how cool Mark Hamill seems, and what a blowhard Harrison Ford is. To be honest, I have held a deep grudge against Ford ever since Charles Bronson died back in 2003. Why? Well, because I read in the New York Post that when asked about his feelings about the passing of a fellow action star legend and thoughts on Bronson’s career, Ford was quoted as responding with something like the following, “Well, I was never much of an action film fan myself, so I can’t comment too much on his career.” What?! Is that your eulogy for the great Charlie Bronson? Pathetic. Now he may have been misquoted, it was the New York Post mind you, but how can I live with such a paltry, pompous ass quote as a remembrance of the great Charlie Bronson? I’m scarred for life.

Anyway, here’s the clips.

I do enjoy working at a university, for on a regular basis new cultural gems come my way. I’ve been working with Gary Stanton on his “Memory and Culture in American Vernacular Music,” and through this course I came upon Jimmie Rodgers, also known as “the father of country.” A quick search on YouTube delivered a short film featuring Rodgers titled The Singing Brakeman (1929). Since I starting watching The Singing Brakeman early yesterday morning, I’ve been transfixed by this guys style.

I’m sure those folks who know something about the history of music are yawning by now, but this musician and film was a wild discovery for me. Watching him perform “The Blue Yodel” (also known as “T is for Texas”) immediately made me think how much his style embodied the best of both Robert Johnson and Hank Williams –not a light combination of 20th century musical legends. More than that, he yodels. The guy yodels like there is no tomorrow and it’s beautifully tortured. In this short eight minute film he sits sheepishly in front of the camera with his guitar, throwing in some brilliantly subtle riffs, and making just about everything else on the screen disappear but his sound.

The film features three tunes, “Waitin’ for a Train,” “Daddy and Home,” and “Blue Yodel.” They are all good, but “The Blue Yodel” is an absolutely amazing tune.  I have to republish the lyrics below because it reads like a blues song of the highest order, and th yodels and his quitar licks bring it to the next level in my mind —not to mention his pronunciation of Georgia as “Georgie.” Here it is the video of “Blue Yodel”:

What I particularly like about this nine minute film is the way it depicts Jimmie Rodgers as a railroad worker stopping in for a cup of coffee and belting out three amazing songs while waiting for his train. Rodgers came from a family of railroad workers, and was one himself before contracting tuberculosis. What’s more, he’s one of the earlier popular music stars (although he had a rather short career) during a historical moment when mass media was exploding; distribution of his music could be mediated more widely than ever before given the popularity of film, the emergence of radio, and high quality recordings. The film kind of captures this transitional space, a Mississippi country boy waiting for his coffee framed for an entire nation in a short film that is staged, but not all that unreal. He’s not a celebrity in the sense we might understand it now, but rather local musician reaching the world at large. Makes me think (hope?) that in our moment the opposite trend might be at work, celebrity fading and the re-emergence of the local musicians given the means of capturing and distributing have changed so radically that the role of the musician as global pop star is finally seen as more of a manipulated marketing product of the artificial forces of capital than the capturing and fostering of a talent.

Lyrcis for “The Blue Yodel, No. 1″

You’ll notice these lyrics are different than the those he sings in the video, and there were several different versions of this tune, suggesting a kind of constantly riffing and improvisation. A fluid, arbitrary process of interpretation.

I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
Oh, yeah, I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
Said, T for old Thelma
The gal who made a wreck out of me

Well, if you don’t want me momma
You sure don’t have to start
Ah, if you don’t want me momma
You sure don’t have to start
‘Cause I can get more women
Than a passenger train car

Yeah, I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
Whoa, T for Texas
T for Tennessee
I said, T for old Thelma
The gal who made a wreck out of me

I’m gonna buy me a pistol
Just as long as I am tall
I’m going to buy me a pistol
Just as long as I am tall
I’m gonna shoot down old mean Thelma
Just to watch her jump and fall

I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
T for old Thelma
The gal who made a wreck out of me

Gonna buy me a shotgun
With a great long shiny barrel, oh yeah
I’m gonna buy me a shotgun
With a great long shiny barrel
Gonna shoot down that rounder
That stole away my girl

I’m going where the water
Tastes like cherry wine
Yeah, I’m going where the water
Tastes like cherry wine
‘Cause the water down here in Georgia
Tastes like turpentine

I said T for Texas
T for Tennessee
Oh I said, T for Texas
T for Tennessee
I said T for old Thelma
The gal who made a wreck out of me
Oh yeah, women make a fool out of me

When putting a series of videos in a post or page with Anarchy Media Player, I get the following bug when viewed in Firefox 3:

Anarchy Media Player, Firefox 3 bug

Seems like one or two videos will show up, then the subsequent videos show just a part of the play button, and no sign of the video anywhere. Are others having a similar issue? I tested it on more than one WPMu install, and the same issue occurs in both. Seems like it is triggered when there are several videos in one post.

I also tested it on Safari, where the videos show up fine. Any ideas?

As if you need any more proof that the BAM’s film programming isn’t far and away the best out there, check out the just finished Four-Pack of Carpenter series. These folks are good…very, very good! What I would have given to have been in the BAM for eight hours consuming all of this 35 mm magnificence. It’s probably better that Matt “old gold” Gold didn’t tell me until after the fact, cause I would have just been depressed for four days straight.

4-Pack of Carpenter at the BAM

The four films by John Carpenter they showed are Big Trouble in Little China (1986), The Thing (1981), They Live (1988), and Escape from New York (1982). Now, I just got done praising the programmers, and I stand by that, but I for one think Big Trouble in Little China and They Live are kinda weak spots in the line-up. Big Trouble in Little China is one of those beloved Carpenter films (for many a favorite) that I never really cared for or understood why so many people liked it so much. I mean let’s be honest, if you are going to have a small retrospective of Carpenter, the four films would have to be Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Thing —am I right? Of course I am, Halloween, while not my favorite (that would be an even tie between The Thing and Escape from NY), has to be Carpenter’s most perfect film. It framed the aesthetic, pacing, and camera angles for a whole decade of horror films, and it features unbelievable performances by both Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence. In fact, I watched it yet again recently and remain amazed just how well it stands up in every way, it’s the Carpenter film.

Now, I know They Live is going through a renaissance of sorts as of late and I’m all for it, fun film and a great plot concept with the consumer/message zombie/monster thing. Yet, it pales in comparison to the pure philosophical genus of The Thing, or the brilliant plot frame and post-apocalyptic setting of Escape from NY. In fact, I think Big Trouble in Little China and They Live are lesser Carpenter because they move into the intentionally corny, a facet of his film makiing that by the time we come to a film like Escape from LA renders it unwatchable. Carpenter’s films were always a bit comic book and hokie, it was one of the things I love about all the movies in my 4-pack. It just seems by the time he got to Big Trouble in Little China by the mid-80s the move from horror/sci-fi master to mediocre b-comedy was complete, and the latter didn’t really wear to well on him.

OK, I’ll admit it. This is really just hair splitting, I understand that, I would have gladly gone to all four films with butter-filled popcorn, Coke, and Dots in hand, greedily stuffing myself while consuming the true beauty of 35 mm Carpenter. Such a response may be a result of my intense dejection that I wasn’t at the BAM to witness all this first hand. At the same time, we have to maintain a standard for our b-movies, or else everything just becomes artistic schlock And as an unintentional side effect, this post has helped me figure out my dream job(s): I would run UMW Blogs on the side, and regularly attend and blog every film being shown at the BAmMon a regular basis for the rest of my natural life. That, my friends, would be heaven. Sometimes I miss Brooklyn, but I always miss the BAM Cinematèk (looks like the got ride of the whole Cinematèk thing, and are just going with BAM Cinema now–glad they dropped the elitist European name with accent, this is America damn it! We invented film!!!).

Two weeks into the semester and UMW Blogs is a non-stop post party.

Blog Activityon UMW Blogs as of 9-6-08

And while I get excited about the activity and the overall usage, it’s often the tidbits that get me going. Like Fumanchu’s random video post about the Triadic Ballet from the 80s.

UMW Blogs is about a different kind of teaching and learning resource, it’s the interstitial space of sharing that happens between people, and that’s why it’s unique in its beautiful chaos. It’s not about collecting institutional data, or some staged brochure for the world at large. It’s a complex series of intersecting roads that have no routinized map for learning. Rather, an online community driven by the engines of inquiry which randomly seeks out inspiration in the most unsuspecting spaces. Together we have built a highway leading to nowhere and, to misquote Gus Haynes from the final episode of the fifth season of The Wire, “we just want to see something new everyday.”

Serena Epstein produced a magical mashup re-contextualizing Little Mermaid by setting it to the soundtrack of the Risky Business trailer for professor Anand Rao’s Visual Rhetoric course. Behold the magic of this brilliant mashup; Ariel is framed in a whole new light!

I liked Sean Penn in Fast Times a Ridgemont High, Jeff Spicoli was possibly one of the single most beloved and influential film characters of the 80s. But it wasn’t until seeing him in Bad Boys that I became a huge fan of the early Penn. Now he ain’t much of a director, and his latest film Into the Wild (2007) confirms that without question (was it simply a bad Eddie Vedder music video that forced Hal Holbrook to run up a mountain?). So, in tribute to my favorite Sean Penn role as the Chi-town badass Irishman Jimmy O’Brien, here’s a hard hitting clip from Bad Boys.




Produced in 1973 [by Richard Serra and Carlotta Ray Schoolman], “Television Delivers People” is a seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through “entertainments,” for the benefit of those in power-the corporations that maintain and profit from the status quo. Television emerges as little more than a insidious sponsor for the corporate engines of the world.

A historical lesson for the potential futures of the internets?

Thanks you Nessman for making my day!

Image courtesy of Looking for Fish tacos at ELI 2006, aka CogDog.

Well, I have finally gotten a free minute to get this all down, and get it down I will in hopes that I can drum up some help and support in working through a couple of the issues we’re having with FeedWordPress. So, here goes my state of the union address for FeedWordPress syndicating student work to class blogs on UMW Blogs….

First, FeedWordPress is the real deal, it is a solid interface, not too complicated, works out-of-the-box without cron plugins, and makes syndication a breeze. (D’Arcy overviews it beautifully here). Combine this simple syndication with all the tag and category feeds made available by Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin and you got the goods, EDUGLU-o-rama! As the great Mara Scanlon said after we demonstrated the power of FeedWordPress for her Ethics and Literature course today, “This is getting so much easier!” And that it is, she suffered through the days of BDP RSS and the untold issues with WP-Autoblog last year with character and fortitude, and her recognizing this afternoon that the syndication angle is coming together was a morale boost, for she doesn’t compliment ed tech stuff often or lightly.

So, I’m really excited. I can see some real potential and power here, we have over 15 classes using some version of FeedWordPress syndication, and for the most part it works seamlessly, enter one feed for a class tag, and the course blog populates itself, aggregating the student blog posts tagged accordingly. All is good….well, almost good.

Here are some of the issues we have run up against in the last week, in order of gravity:

1) For a few classes we are actually feeding the posts in with comments turned off and the permalink sending the reader back to the original blog. This works well when the feed is first syndicated in FeedWordPress. However, after that the subsequent posts that are pulled in link within the course blog, the permalink no longer send the reader back to the original post on the student’s blog. This sucks! This was a way to allow posts to aggregate in one place, but lead the rest of the class back to the student’s space, particularly useful if the class is subscribing to the course blog feed, for all the feeds will immediately take the reader to the student’s blog, a way to aggregate feeds from a variety of sites off one feed (a kind of tag specific OPML feed for class sites). So, this one is major, and it ain’t working as of now

2) This may be related to number one, but for several feeds that I click on that have been aggregated via FeedWordPress I get the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_insert_category() in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/sitewide-tags.php on line 120

Making me think there may be a correlation between the FeedWordpress issues and the Sitewide Tags plugin. Anyone experience anything similar to this?

3) After FeedWordPress is activated and up and running, if you try and create a Link (just a plain old link in the Write–>Link tab) it actually creates a new, malformed feed in FeedWordPress. Bizarre. This doesn’t necessarily hurt anything that I know of, and I stress that I know of.

4) FeedWordPress doesn’t pull in tags from syndicated posts. Not a huge deal for us right now, but it would be useful.

5) The creation of categories from syndicated posts doesn’t work out-of-the-box. You have to actually update the rss-functions.php and rss.php files using the two they provide in the MagpieRSS Upgrade folder that comes with the FeedWordPres plugin (thanks for pointing this out, D’Arcy).

Ok, that’s it. I’m gonna post a modified version of this on the WPMu forums as well to see if anyone knows anything. The plugin author, Charles Johnson, seems to have been busy with other things and hasn’t upgraded his plugin for WP/Mu 2.6+, and frankly the guys built it out and supported it brilliantly. And once your plugin becomes popular, it must seem like as much as a burden as a service to constantly update and maintain it, I’ve seen it happen with a number of good syndication plugins which makes me nervous. We need to support these folks, and help them develop it out, or contribute accordingly.

So, there it is. FeedWordPress is about as close as we’ve come to realizing the syndication bus in major way, mad props to Andre Malan for turning me onto it again at Norther Voice this past February, and if anyone has any ideas for making it work a bit more consistently don’t be shy.

Oh yeah, one more thing.

The BDP RSS widget Andre Malan created for allowing people to add their feeds to a site via BDP RSS would make even more sense these days for FeedWordPress.

Well, I have been sucked into the UMW Blogs vortex. The first week or so just thrills me to no end, people start coming out of the woodwork, and I have fun commenting, reading, and getting a sense of what’s in store. it also makes me marvel just how much cool stuff is happening all around campus, and the syndication framework really bring that into sharp focus (but more on this in technical detail in my next post).

So, I have met with almost twenty faculty during the first week of classes alone about UMW Blogs, and this project seems to really be generating some serious interest and excitement. The utility and imaginative power of such a framework is becoming more and more apparent, or at least I think it is (but don’t trust me). I spoke with five different classes about the system this week, and had four workshops on UMW Blogs for faculty—all of which had very healthy attendance.

So, this post is not so much about the consumerism behind RSS feeds and UMW Blogs, but rather one particular class I talked with this week. American Studies professor Krystyn Moon is teaching a course on Consumerism this semester, and she had a brilliant idea for using blogs for their studies: have the students collaborate on a shopping blog, not unlike Gizmodo or Cool Hunting or Uncrate, wherein they can examine and inhabit a contemporary form like blogs for mediating consumption. So, I gave them an overview of UMW Blogs on Wednesday, but started the discussion talking about the Internet Archive, and all the amazing resources that lay in wait for them. As I tried to navigate to archive.org to give them a quick sampling, the network began to choke on campus (and choked it did for most of the first week). So, I thought my moment to get them hooked came and went.

But, but, but, but, this weekend I figured why do I need to be there to show them what’s there? They all have blogs now, and they all feed into professor Moon’s class blog, so why not just post the quick possibilities of the Internet Archive on the course blog? That would be easy enough, and it provides me the possibility of sharing resources centrally for any specific class without being their necessarily. Blogging for classes as a form of support/presentation? I love that!

Anyway, here is my post to the class on Industrial films dealing with Consumerism at the Internet Archive’s Prelinger Archive:

As I mentioned on Wednesday, the Internet Archive’s Prelinger Archive may prove a really rich source for you over the semester.

Check out the videos under the consumerism tag on the Prelinger Archive tag cloud.

Note: The videos may take a minute or so to load.

There is “In the Suburbs,” a 1957 advertising sales promo film extolling 1950s suburbanites as citizens and consumers.

Download In the Suburbs

Here is a reel of classic 50s and 60s television commercials.

Download Television Commercials 1950s-1960s

Or the two part series “Consumers Want to Know” from 1960.

Download Consumers Want to Know, Part 1

Or even the strangely bizarre and gendered “Consuming Women” (1967).

Download Consuming Women

Or this 1955 gem “A Word to the Wives” about two women who trick their husbands into buying a new kitchen.

Download A Word to the Wives

Anyway, enjoy the Archive.

Jim

How much to you love it that the Prelinger Archive has a tag cloud now?

Today it really hit me that UMW Blogs is back and roaring. I rolled through the jungle filled with RSS and picked lovingly from the fruit of connected people thinking about wild stuff. And I knew it for sure when I read Jesse Kopp’s first blog post of the semester:

From the makers of last summer’s smash hit “The Stove That Ate Sylvia Plath” comes “When Dishwashers Attack”–so blood spillingly, bone chillingly thrilling that you may never feel safe with kitchen appliances again. Anne Scaldwell (Sigourney Weaver) and Peter Boilsworthy (Matt Damon) are excited about renovating the kitchen in their newly purchased and well-isolated beach house, but soon after moving in, they discover their old Kenmore dishwasher has very different plans… Coming to a theater near you this September.

Jesse is an amazing thinker and blogger, and his work with Carole Garmon last year in her Video Art class was awesome. In fact, she had some wonderful folks pushing the boundaries, currently missing the Roblog, but loving the rise of a whole new year with new discoveries. Shannon is back at it and will be discussing William Faulkner an Toni Morrison for literature and Grapes of Wrath in her US Film History course with the great Jeff McClurken (who is all about honor). And Serena proves her literary acumen by caricaturing the mighty Reverend, and her sharp and exacting voice makes me marvel at her ability, and feel a bit self-conscious about my WordPress habits

And professor Sue Fernsebner pushes the boundaries with a full blown FeedWordPress site for her Historical Methods course.  And already the students are taking their research sites and the ideas to the next level, check out how Nick Ford’s imagines his own vision of history and teaching which is punctuated by a punishing quote from Orwell’s 1984:

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

That’s right, school is back in session, and everyone’s getting ready to imagine. And that is what Gardner Campbell nails in his presentation at the UCEA pre-conference; it’s a masterpiece of the first order, and in it he notes beautifully that on top of and between every open course resource is not only content, but the mindface of the people you think with. The pushing of ideas and the experience of learning that makes it intoxicating. He noted the openness as not opposed to or at odds with the resources, but an integral part of the design of education and a faith that puts us one step closer to a manifestation of a kind of real school. He’s on to something. The interstices of experience, the moment that happens between structures and beyond localized routines of learning. A commitment to the life of the mind and a sense of comunity, not to some abstracted notion of excellence. I makiing my committment, I’m gonna read Faulkner’s The Wild Palms (maybe my favorite of his, maybe), watch some John Ford, re-visit Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and promise myself I will get at Marx’s Capital sooner or later.  The year’s begun, and just like every Fall of my life til now, I’m excited to learn.

It’s been hectic on the Mary Washington campus these last few days, and in all the hustle and bustle of classes starting up a pretty honor for one of our faculty was announced. Professor Claudia Emerson was named the poet laureate of Virginia by Governor Kaine on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008.

I couldn’t be more excited for both Claudia and the University of Mary Washington. She is an awesome teacher, brilliant poet, and a downright cool person. Her tireless work ethic captures what I find so inspiring about UMW’s faculty in general, despite a tremendous load of work she refused to stop innovating and imagining beyond the pale.

And should you ever be lucky enough to find yourself near Claudia’s gravitational pull, she’ll most certainly reel you in and start talking about words, figures, and etymologies. She’ll throw out wild ideas and make you re-think your assumptions with an offhanded comment that opens up the complex problems and possibilities of our shared language. I often come away from a conversation re-thinking the encrusted words I have enshrined and come to lean too much upon for meaning.

What’s more, to hear her talk about her hometown Chatham, Virginia is really like something out of a Faulkner novel. She represents what I had always imagined was unique about an artist, a relentless openness married to an unforgiving return to what matters most. And to be honored the poet laureate of her home state must be an amazing honor for her, and I would just like to add to that the following: Rock on, Claudia!

…this is how I’m feeling right about now:

And kinda like this:

	Yo La Tengo - Deeper Into Movies
	Found at skreemr.com

And even a little like this:

	The Roots - Double Trouble
	Found at skreemr.com

Oh yeah, and this:

	Unwound - We Invent You (Extended)
	Found at skreemr.com

All amped up!

OK, I’m officially in full blown UMW Blogs blogging mode, I will most likely prove insufferable for the next month or so, and that’s just the way it is, suckas!

Steve Harris Stalinism Blog (Oh what a header)

Today I actually gave my first advanced training session on WordPress to a group of five faculty. And I have to say it was a ball. Professors Steve Harris (History), Michael Killian (Biology), Betsy Lewis (Spanish), Andrew Dolby (Biology), and Zach Whalen (English/New Media Studies) were nice enough to remain polite through a kind of abstract session on UMW Blogs as syndicated publishing platform. Because all of these faculty were to some degree familiar with UMW Blogs, and could navigate the application rather well, we went through a few quick questions about uploading and the new interface and then proceeded to focus on how the syndicated logic of a course blog works. Exactly how does WPMu re-publish students work form their own space into a course blog? What kind of setup allows the student to compose and publish their work on their own blog/academic portfolio space yet feed it out easily?.

These are the questions we wrestled with, and I figured I’d blog the details of this setup for other mavericks WordPress users like Professors Sue Fernsebner and Jeff McClurken who will likely be adopting a similar method. So what follows is a tutorial for creating a syndication rich course blog using sitewide tags and FeedWordPress.

Here it is (is that The Roots I hear on the headphones or is it Yo La Tengo?):

For a while now we have been using BDP RSS at UMW Blogs for aggregated course blogs, but with that plugin out of development for a while now, it is time to explore some other aggregating options. The heirs to the spam aggregating plugin WP-Autoblog (long defunct) are WP-O-Matic and FeedWordPress. Given the elegance and simplicity of FeedWordPress it is the republishing aggregator of choice at UMW Blogs these days. What does it do?  Well, quite simply it republishes a post (or several posts) from one blog into another, and provides a series of option to customize the republishing of a feed.

So, take this plugin (which I will go into more detail on below) and marry it with Donncha’s new Sitewide Tags Page plugin, which generates feeds for sitweide tags from a WPMu install. In other words, every time a person uses a shared tag on a post in their own blog, it automatically becomes part of a larger feed for that tag. So, if students for History 101 tag all their posts for this class hist101 in their own blogs, a sitewide feed on that tag will be generated, and it will look like this:

 http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/hist101/fee…

So, that url above contain the posts from every student blog tagged with hist101, groovy, right?

OK, so the tag needs to be unique and students need to remember to use, but if those things happen, then this is one single feed for an entire distributed class that could consist of as many as 30 blogs. And this is where the details of FeedWordPress come in handy.  So, we have the feed for all the student blog posts relevant to History 101, all we need to do now is activate the plugin FeedWordPress and do the following:

1. Go to the Syndication tab in your WordPress stall that is created once you activate the plugin and add your sitewide tag feed, and click syndicate.



Click on image for larger view

2. If the feeds work swell, no errors, then click the syndication button.



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3. After that, go to the Syndication–>Options Subtab and customize the options for your feed (make sure it updates automatically and you consider if you want the permalink to take people back to the student blog, etc.



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4. Categories for syndicated posts do work (attention WPMu über admins: I learned this thanks to the ever wise D’Arcy Norman, you just have to do the Magpie RSS Upgrade included with the plugin). You can have the feed you are syndicated come into its own category or even include the categories the students use in their posts. I still can’t get this plugin to include tags fro the original post, however.


Click on image for larger view

5. Comments and ping can be enabled or disabled (you may want to disable them if you want people to comment on the student’s own blog (this is where changing the permalink option to original post might be useful). You all can choose the author settings here.

6. After it is customized to your liking, you can then return to the main syndication tab, and check the radio box aligned with this link and click the “Upgrade checked links”  button. And the posts will start a feeding




Click on image for larger view

If you would like to get a sense of what a course blog like this might look like, take a look at the master course blog wrangler Gardner Campbell’s phenomenal Milton Seminar course taught this summer. I love his design, and he has the permalink going back to the student’s blog, while aggregating all the distibuted comments for all the students blogs in the sidebar. Gardner used FeedWordPress to great effect, and while this blog isn’t feeding off of one sitewide tag feed, there were few enough students so that Gardner could add the students’ feeds manually to the FeedWordPress plugin.

Gardner Campbell's Attack of the Summer Miltonauts course blog

Now, imagine the sitewide tag feed for Gardner’s blog as just one less step to do, and one giant step towards complete automation. We are getting there people!!! Die BlackBoard die

I’m a fan of TorrentFreak, it’s one of those rare blogs that streams interesting news on a very specific subject and openly acknowledges its biases while providing the reader with a ton of information to fend for themselves. In fact, I have come to think of TorrentFreak as one of the outposts in a war over our culture and piracy that goes generally unacknowledged in the educational sphere. We talk a lot about licensing and open resources in educational technology, but I think the 5000 pound elephant in the room that is the internecine battle over cultural distribution for the 21st century is being waged silently on the margins.

Interestingly enough, Ben Jones has recently completed Part 2 of a TorrentFreak exclusive on “Tackling College Piracy” (see Part 1 here). In it he touches on the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008 which recently passed. The article examines how it is being enforced at one particular campus, highlighting what colleges and universities will be dealing with in regards to deterring filesharing (which isn’t always illicit!). Here is the wording of the act as it specifically pertains to illegal filesharing on campus:

Section 495
Includes among the duties of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, monitoring the adequacy of total need-based aid available to low- and moderate-income students. Authorizes the Committee through FY2011.
(Sec. 495A) Requires IHEs to: (1) make information available to their students and employees regarding the illegal downloading and distribution of copyrighted materials (campus-based digital theft); and (2) develop plans to provide alternatives to, and deter, such illegal downloading.
Authorizes the Secretary to award competitive grants to IHEs for the implementation of programs to prevent the illegal downloading and distribution of intellectual property.
Authorizes appropriations for such grant program for FY2009-FY2013.

Interestingly enough, deterring illegal downloading of files in Section 495 has become the responsibility of universities and colleges. They need to “develop plans to provide alternative to, and deter” illegal filesharing. And while the repercussions of what happens if they refuse to comply are still unclear, the Electronic Frontier points out there is still some MPAA pirate lobbyists that believe that the withholding of federal funding to schools that don’t comply is totally appropriate. A thought more disturbing given the gross inaccuracy of the MPAA takedown notices as they stand now with bitTorrent clients, how do they know? And, moreover, why is it the universities and colleges’ responsibility to police this activity for the MPAA and RIAA? (It’s their market, and they have profited tremendously off of it.) Such deterrents for universities and colleges will ultimately lead to industry standard traffic shapers that cost a fortune and will most likely fail to accomplish their intended goal. Why the hell was this written into a federal educational act that could potentially cut aid to schools and students wrongly accused of illegal downloading?

Well, maybe not so much silently as surreptitiously (to refer back to the first paragraph after that long digression), for ambiguous, fear-inspired verbiage like that found in the College Opportunity and Affordability Act just further puts the entertainment industries in a position of malevolent power that will ultimately prove technically futile, but tax many a college and college student in the mean time. Yet, I firmly believe that that is exactly the point of this legislation, it is a temporary stay during this particular moment of uncertainty for content distribution mechanisms. These industries are depending on fear and terror while they feerishly work with ISPs, economists, programmers, and network engineers to develop the new economy/currency through which they can conquer and control the distribution of the culture they package. And this brings me to the point of this post

I read for the first time today about a new technology known as P4P, or also known as Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P. To quote Wikipedia:

P4P, or Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P, is a method for internet service providers (ISPs) and peer-to-peer (P2P) software to optimize peer-to-peer connections. P4P is being touted as a method that can save an ISP significant costs - the current P2P model may have a peer sending data across the world while a nearby peer is receiving data from across the world - when theoretically they could be transmitting the data locally. Beyond saving an ISP money, P4P proponents argue that using local connections also speeds up download times for P2P downloaders by between 2 and 4 times.

The P4P working group has participants from the ISP, Movie/Content, & P2P industries. It is focused on helping ISPs handle the demands of large media files and enabling legal distribution - they are building what they believe will be a more effective model of transmitting movies and other large files to customers. The working group is not endorsing or opposing the illegal download of copyright material, commonly associated with P2P networks.

This working group is basically coming up with a method that will supposedly relieve the strain on the poor ISPs (a theme we will revisit), while enabling “legal distribution.” Interesting how the next line is sure to point out the working group “is not endorsing or opposing the illegal download of copyright material.” If that was really the case, why stress “legal downloads” immediately before this disclaimer? Why not just say downloads?

Anyway, this new technology sounds in some ways to Harvard’s Tribler P2P experiment. The article in TorrentFreak that introduced me to P4P, and its potential underbelly, led me to this recent press release from the University of Washington about their active involvement, along with Yale University, helping the P4P working group come up with a solution that seems like it will ultimately empower the media and content distributors.

Here is a bit from the newsletter at UW which you can find in its entirety here:

Peer-to-peer networking, or P2P, has become the method of choice for sharing music and videos. While initially used to share pirated material, the system is now used by NBC, BBC and others to deliver legal video content and by Hollywood studios to distribute movies online. Experts estimate that peer-to-peer systems generate 50 to 80 percent of all Internet traffic. Most predict that number will keep going up.

Tensions remain, however, between users of bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer systems and struggling Internet service providers.

To ease this tension, researchers at the University of Washington and Yale University propose a neighborly approach to file swapping, sharing preferentially with nearby computers. This would allow peer-to-peer traffic to continue growing without clogging up the Internet’s major arteries, and could provide a basis for the future of peer-to-peer systems. A paper on the new system, known as P4P, will be presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications meeting in Seattle.

“Initial tests have shown that network load could be reduced by a factor of five or more without compromising network performance,” said co-author Arvind Krishnamurthy, a UW research assistant professor of computer science and engineering. “At the same time, speeds are increased by about 20 percent.”

“We think we have one of the most extensible, rigorous architectures for making these applications run more efficiently,” said co-author Richard Yang, an associate professor of computer science at Yale.

The project has attracted interest from companies. A working group formed last year to explore P4P and now includes more than 80 members, including representatives from all the major U.S. Internet service providers and many companies that supply content.

Notice the “struggling Internet Service Providers” sentiment again, compared to the greedy and voracious P2P user—what an objective image of the situation. And then we have the University of Waahington and Yale University providing this working group of Media Lobbyists and ISPs with a potential mean for controlling filesharing and endangering Net Neutrality. This is the real warzone in technology at the moment, the earch for the means by which to monetize and commodify bandwidth and media distribution. David Wiley mentioned the New York Times opinion piece that frames bandwidth providers as OPEC 2.0. Stating that “Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy.” Yet, these are the very same, poor struggling folks whose profit are being drained by those greedy P2Pers. So, what do they do? They team up with the MPAA, RIAA, and other content providers, put together a working group and employ the intellectual talent from the very same universities around the country that they obsessively target for illegal downloading activity. Insane!

It reminds be of the emergence of American Studies departments in the US during the 1950s, they were enclaves for Cold War rhetoric and nationalism, a space for defining the essential and unique qualities of the US that make it special, unique, superior, and somehow immune to the commun ist disease. Well, let’s face it, these companies are using universities and colleges as the battle/testing grounds for both shaping minds and inspiring fear in the rising adults while at the same time depending on these institutions’ intellectual firepower to help them re-imagine a new means to control and commodify the distribution systems they ignored for decades while the future moved forward. I find it all very disheartening, and while P4P may end up being a bust (it probably will be), the long, drawn out siege upon universities and colleges by ISPs, the entertainment industry, and now government legislation continues.

Well, it’s 1:26 am on August 25th, officially the first day of classes for the new school year at UMW, and this is how I’m starting it. I’m tired of this bullshit, and I’m gonna blog them as much as I can because the fist is getting tighter and we need to become more and more like sand.

I have been mentioning DSader a lot lately on this blog, and that’s mainly because I have been deep into WordPress Multi-User mode for a couple of weeks now. And between the upgrade to 2.6 and the general overhaul of plugins, themes, etc., I find I’ve devoted no insignificant amount of time to plugin hunting –a truly enjoyable activity. For many of my most valuable WPMu plugins, I continually find I am utilizing DSader’s work. He wrote the following plugins that I can name off the top of my head: Userthemes (a must), Sitewide “Three-in-One” Multi Widget panel, Toggle Admin Menus Sitewide, and the indispensable More Privacy Options, to name a few.

So, there is no question DSader has been a veritable mensch when it comes to sharing with the WPMu community, and I’d like to say thanks. But before I even can he comes out with an updated version of his Sitewide Comment Tracking plugin for WPMu that reminds me just how deeply indebted I am to his work. If you haven’t tested it, I highly recommend it. It tracks the comments you have left on numerous blogs within the WPMu community. So, for example, If I leave comments on various blogs, I can track them from the Comments–>My Comments tab. It provides an awesome interface to quickly scan where you’ve commented and who has responded, an amazingly powerful feature for a controlled, yet deeply distributed architecture like WPMu.

Here’s what it looks like:

DSader's My Recent Comments plugin for WPMu

Think about it, this is an amazing way to let faculty and students know how they can track response to their comments easily, something which isn’t all that easy in the regular blogosphere. So an engineered improvement to make the community potentially more manageable.  And so many of DSader’s plugins are just like that, it’s as if he were programming for UMW, he comes from an educational setting and it’s amazing how many of our needs and desires are met and satisfied by his work

Update: While writing this I received an email from him telling me the Sitewide 3-in-1 Widget panel has been updated, with a bug or two fixed, Is DSader sick or what? What can I say, it’s people like him that make this whole thing so much funner and cooler. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

Last semester, Professor John Morello’s “Communication and Political Campaigns” class did something interesting with UMW Blogs. Rather than thinking of the class blog as a semester long activity for writing and reflecting (which is always good), he used it for one specific assignment. The blog provided a space where students could upload, categorize, and receive feedback on their own recorded “surrogate speeches” that support one of the various candidates for the then upcoming Virginia Primary.

John Morello's Speech 311 Video Site

Keeping in line with the small pieces loosely joined philosophy, all the speeches were uploaded to YouTube, and then embedded in a post on the class site. What you have is not so much a blog as it is a broadcasting engine where students can easily post media and receive feedback from the class.

I want to stress the fact that John is not at all seduced by the shininess of the tool or sermons about technology as the future of education, being UMW’s debate coach for many a year he could easily dismantle anything resembling an argument I tried to throw his way. Rather, I think he uses it because it’s straightforward, handles embedded video seamlessly, and provides an easy way for students to aggregate, organize, and comment on videos without completely relying on a decentralized tool like YouTube. UMW Blogs is just the publishing framework it all fits into.

This Summer I had the good fortune of working with professor Angela Gosetti-MurrayJohn and the students of her “The Classical Tradition” course. I would like to say I came up with some original and elaborate EdTech scheme to change the world through mediated mean, but I didn’t. However, Angela did by pushing her class to explore a variety of digital tools for relating their work. And I just happily obliged by pretending to be a dog, and barking about 50 ways you could present a digital story with free Web 2.0 tools.

During the session where I talked to the class about these tools, I channeled Alan Levine’s presentation on the 50 Ways resource that he gave at Northern Voice 2008—which was a gem. I found myself laughing hysterically when he went to the Blabberize homepage and showed the Llama speaking with a thick, comical Indian accent. I stuck with me, so I tried it out on this group and lo and behold everyone was laughing hysterically and I felt good. Nonetheless, I still wrote Blabberize off as a pretty useless tool, and went on to my own personal favorites once I had their attention like YouTube, FlickrSlidr, etc.

So when I saw a group from the class that was working on the theme “War in the Aeneid“ and had incorporated Blabberize effectively into their web-based, multimodal narrative of The Aeneid and war, I was intrigued.  Here it is below, featuring none other than Vergil himself:

Now, that is an entertaining and intelligent use of this seemingly silly technology to set the stage for a dynamic, media-rich site dedicated to The Aeneid. What’s more, this group utilized a number of embeddable resources from YouTube and Comiqs to highlight and contextualize their presentation while at the same time enriching their own readings. Alan’s 50 Ways is the resource that keeps on giving and, as an added bonus, just about every tool that has embed code available works with UMW Blogs, making it the Web 2.0 Digital Storytelling publishing platform par excellence

UMW Blogs has got a brand new bag, with no small assistance from Andy “EDU” Rush nation who turned me on to the beautiful theme PrimePress (Andy’s the go to theme guy without a question), along with Serena Epstein an Jerry Slezak who provided the gorgeous header images of the UMW campus. The redesign took a couple of days with some on and off work, and before I get into the details of that, I wanted to take a quick poll. PrimePress offers you two different looks, and I wanted to know which one people preferred.

Here is UMW Blogs with the gray background:

And here it is with the white background:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Now for the anatomy of the redesign of UMW Blogs. I have to say that a year ago this time I had spent many a long hour trying to get everything working on the front page of UMW Blogs. I blogged the process for creating the front page here, and talked extensively about the elaborate hack to get sitewide tags and a sitwewide archive here.

This time around, my life was significantly easier, and I think that’s a testament to how far the WPMu community has come over the last year. It never ceases to amaze me how folks like Donncha, D Sader, andrea_r, Andre Malan, and Enej Bajgoric, amongst many, many others, have made the creation of a state of the art publishing platform for Mary Washington elegant, simple, and powerful as hell. So, it’s people that have little or nothing to do with UMW that have enabled truly cutting edge publishing possibilities for little money and even less programming know how.

The Home Page

The homepage for the redesign really captures just how much easier things have become, and also point to some necessary re-aligning of plugins, resources, and syndication. For example, the previous version of UMW Blogs front page was almost entirely driven by the BDP RSS plugin for aggregation, in this iteration it has all but disappeared. I am keenly aware that the developer for this awesome plugin hasn’t updated it in over a year, and while it still works swimmingly in version 2.6 (a testament of the solid coding), I’m not sure how much long it can hold out, and I’m afraid its time to move on. That’s were two plugins I have already blogged about recently have allowed me to move on with little or no separation anxiety: Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin and D Sader’s “3-in-1″ widget.

Between these two plugins I can have the 10 most recent posts, a sitewide tag cloud, and an archive in my front page sidebar (these features would have been impossible for me last year, and now it is as two plugins and a customizable widget). Moreover, Donncha’s Sitewide Tag goodness powers, the Recent Posts, Tags, and Archives pages of UMW Blogs that I will get to in more detail below.

As I mentioned already, PrimePress is the theme, and the header images are homegrown.  The login is a little bit of PHP code Patrick Murray-John whipped up, and you can download it here and drop it into your sidebar should you need it.

Finally, the blog for the UMW Blogs homepage blog will be the site we use for the feature articles that chronicle and share the activity, cool blogs, and course projects that are happening throughout the UMW community.

Courses, Support, and Contact Pages

The Courses page is pretty straightforward, and it is going to be a directory of courses being hosted on UMW Blogs, and it will be up nd running by Monday.  I have some idea of how I am going to feed this stuff in, but for the most part it will be relatively traditional directory of courses being taught around campus using this publishing platform, but I have some more thinking to do here–any recommendations?

The Support pages are awesome, and this marks for me one of the most significant leaps forward over the last year. namely, the Bliki has arrived people! And that is thanks to the awesome work of Brian Lamb’s UBC rat pack of developers like Andre Malan and Enej Bajgoric. The are working on integrating MediaWiki and WPMu as a kind of symbiotic distributed publishing framework, which Brian talked about in a screencast here. The fruit of this syndication rich framework has made my life a million times easier thank to Enej’s plugin Wiki Inc, which basically take an article from a MediaWIki installation and republishes it seanlessly on a WordPress page.  So all the documentation for UMW Blogs done in MediaWiki can now effortlessly be pulled into a page on the home blog for UMW Blogs. So the pages for support like the FAQ, WordPress Guide, and “10 Ideas for Using UMW Blogs” are all MediaWiki articles posing as blog pages—bliki bling bling!

Wiki Inc Plugin for WordPress

And then there is the Embed MediaWiki Sections plugin that allows you to copy and paste a section of a wiki article into a blog post or page, kinda like YouTube embedding for MediaWiki content. I played with this one a bit earlier this Summer, but haven’t got back to it yet.  Not sure if all the bugs are out, but I’m convinced this  will make things insanely interesting for the holy grail of the Bliki, which is just another name for a distributed publishing framework that can be collaborative, simple, and polished all at the same time.

The Contact page is the Dagon Design Secure Form Mailer plugin inserted in a page, simple, secure, and customizable.

News, Sitewide Tags, and Archives

The the News tab on the Front page links to the UMW News Blog, which is actually a separate blog from the home blog  http://news.umwblogs.org) which gives it its own feed, and a separate way to pull in the RSS feed in the home page sidebar. The trick to making it integrate seamlessly is just dressing it up in the same theme with the same widgets and hacked the navigation menu to match that on the homepage of UMW Blogs. Simple.

The Sitewide Tags tab also links out to another blog, which is actual the blog which is automatically created through Donncha’s Sitewide Feeds plugin I mentioned earlier. This site changes the game in my mind, and it provides everything from sitewide posts, tags, categories, and archives in one fell swoop. It rules, and I simply dressed this site up in the same theme as the home page, and hacked the navigation menu accordingly.  Moreover, if you go to the front page of the tags.umwblogs.org blog you’ll see th most recent post, which on the front page has been substituted with featured blogs. The Tags tab is just a page on the tags.umwblogs.org blog that has a Simple Tags tag cloud running, which will by default collect all the tags from around UMW Blogs, as well as provide a working feed for each tag (major possibilities here!).

The Sitewide Archives tab does much of the same thing, but this is just using a hacked version of the archive template for PrimePress that will allow people to search all of UWM Blogs, see posts archived by month (or day or year), as well as the last 100 posts that have come through the system.

And voila! That’s it! All the hacking and kludging I had to do last year has been replaced by clean and elegant solutions that make this years model a step up indeed.  We couldn;t have done it without the community, so a big thanks to all of you making WPMu about as bitchin a publishing engine as I’ve seen.

Now, the semester is poised to start, and it’s time to make this baby sing with 1500 new blogs.  Let’s get ‘em!

I already mentioned that Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin was going to make a whole lot of things much, much easier.  Well, DSader wrapped all the awesomeness into one bitchin’ plugin for WPMu: Sitewide “three-in-one” Multi Widget Panel. I discovered it through James Farmer’s WPMU.org (already proving an invaluable resource) and I just had to test it out. Lo and behold, it works like a charm as long as you remember to install Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin.

What’s more, DSader notes that this plugin can also be edited to…

pull from multiple blogs by editing one line of code ("clones" the widget output while applying the same widget control options to each clone):
<code>
`$featured_blogs = array($options['blog_id']); // Clone multiple panel outputs such as ...
// $featured_blogs = array($options['blog_id'],3,354);`
(inspired by http://dailytestimony.net/plugins/)

In other words, there may be a way to select a specific number of blogs from a WPMu installation that can be fed into a specific tag cloud. Now this would be an awesome plugin in and of itself, for it could provide a way to aggregate tags for a series of distributed student blogs for a course, which could then be presented back on the mother blog as the course tag cloud. Something similar to what I was imagining way back when in this post.

Anyway, awesome work fromDSader and if you’re itching to see the plugin in action, I have it running on UMW Blogs already

As a follow up to my last post, I also tested out mapping subdomains with CPanel on a WPMu installation using Donncha’s Domain Mapping plugin. And surprise, surprise, just about the same method works for mapping just a subdomain to a blog on WPMu. To clarify, when I say mapping just a subdomain I mean mapping just one part of a domain, rather than the entire domain. For example, I don’t want the domain jimgroom.org to only host one WordPress blog because I plan on using this domain name for other things like a MediaWIki or even Drupal installation:) So, all I do is create a subdomain such as blog.jimgroom.org and map that to a blog on my WPMu installation.

Assuming the domain is already pointed to your host and you are using CPanel like me, just create the subdomain and point the document root to your WPMu installation. In the following example I added a subdomain blog to jimgroom.org and then pointed it to my WPMu installation using the Document Root field (which is at public_html/wpmued-org for my personal installation).

After you do this, you can map subdomains for all your favorite domain names to one WPMu installation and save yourself the headache of updating numerous blogs on numerous domains that need numoerous updates and themes and plugins and whatnot. One installation to rule them all!

Well, I have written a bunch about domain mapping on WPMu over the last year or so. Up and until tonight I have been using Richard Bui’s tutorial here along with David Dean’s Multi-Site Manager Plugin. The combination of the two have worked great for me thus far, and I liked that with this combination each mapped domain could act like its own, stand-alone WPMu install—with each domain have the possibility of unlimited dynamic subdomains—a feature I’m not so sure is available with this plugin. That said, you did have to be brave enough to muck around in the database.

Well, that was then, this is now. Donncha just released a plugin that brings domain mapping for WPMu to the masses in the form of a simple, easy-to-use plugin. Is Donncha on a roll or what? Last month it was the Sitwewide Tags Plugin (though it’s much more than the name suggests) which kicks major ass. This week it is the Domain Mapping Plugin, which is for many the Holy Grail for WPMu admins.

So, I just got around to testing it out on a WPMu install that uses [[CPanel], and it is actually pretty painless, though not entirely automated. Keep in mind this will only work for installation that have sub-domains setup, no love for sub-directories just yet.

Here is how I got it to work with CPanel:

After you install the plugin you will find the Domain Mapping subtab under the Manage tab. Once you go there you will see the following:

Domain Mapping Subtab

The logic here is simple, each WPMu blog will have access to this subtab once the plugin is installed. If someone has a blog on your system and they have a domain they want to map, they would need to do two things:

1) From where ever they purchased their domain, they would need to point their domain to the nameservers of the WPMu install. For example, if your WPMu install was hosted on Bluehost, they would need to point them to NS1.BLUEHOST.COM AND NS2.BLUEHOST.COM.

2) After that, they will need to go tot the Manage–>Domain Mapping tab and specify the IP address of the WPMu site and have them put in their domain. (You can decide how you want to share the IP address with them.)

That’s it on their end, pretty simple. But on the admin end there is one more step if you are using CPanel.

You need to create an addon domain for the mapped domain and point it to the directory with the WPMu installation. For me it looked like this:

Add Domain Trick in Cpanel

You can see that the domain is added normally, but the document root is changed to point to the actual directory with the WPMu installation. After that, it works like a charm. Now, this was simple and awesome, and for folks who aren’t using CPanel it will probably work automatically once someone points their domain to the correct IP address. But with CPanel there is one extra step, and while a relatively easy one, it does rule out strict automation of the mapped domains. But, th upside is that at the end of the day even I can map domains with out hacking Apache settings or putting our WPMu install in imminent danger. Disco!

So, can UMW Blogs map domains now? Well, I gues we can now, can’t we

Image courtesy of Robjtak

Los Angeles is a fine town. I lived in its tepid embrace for over seven years, and I have to say it was probably seven of the best film years of my life. I think I saw as many movies in that time span as the occasional film viewer sees in a lifetime, it was a non-stop love affair. I met a ton of great people who were extremely knowledgeable about film, truly loved the medium, and enjoyed talking, and eventually arguing, about movies. That’s my kind of town. And while I often compared LA to New York while I was there—let’s face it NYC owns LA when it comes to Pizza and baseball—when it comes to film there is no comparison: LA kicks New York City’s ass up and down Hollywood Blvd. Enough said.

The theaters in LA are probably the best in the world, and the fact that there are still so many pristine single screen film houses standing is one of the great rewards of being the center of the movie industry for almost a century. Just thinking about Mann’s Village Theater or Mann’s Bruin Theater, or my personal favorite in Westwood Mann’s National Theater makes me long for yesteryear. There was also the Majestic Crest Theater in Westwood that was independently owned and had a full blown constellation on the ceiling you could watch shine before the feature started (it even had shooting stars that raced across the artificial sky).

And then there’s the Cineramadome in Hollywood that captured the magnificence of 70mm films like no other theater can. Of course you can’t forget Mann’s Chinese (where I saw the re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy with the unnecessary effects) and El Capitan theaters in Hollywood amongst many others. It is a veritable moviegoers mecca. What does NYC have in comparison? The Angelika? Please, that may be the single worst theater in the US, not only does it signify the downfall of that great city to shallow cafe culture and style, but it’s screens are tiny and the subway rumbles through the entire film like a bad bass line. The Film Forum is a little better, but not much. The only place to see a movie in NYC is the BAM in Brooklyn, and while I love that movie house to no end, it has nothing on even the lesser theaters in LA in terms of ambiance and single house heaven, but it does have the most innovative and exciting film programming I have ever seen in either NY or LA (and it’s film programming that this never ending post is really going to be about). But, when I really think about it, I’d have to say my all time favorite theater in LA is the Nuart, it is by no means the best theater in LA but it just reminds me so much of the Century’s Baldwin theater up the block from my house while growing up. The two don’t necessarily look alike, but they had the same candy (Dots!) and popcorn, and when I would sit down in a seat before a movie at the Nuart I felt strangely like I was home again at the Baldwin, even though Thomas Wolfe assures us we can’t ever go back there again—and I believe him because boy did he ever try and get back in his novels.

Image courtesy of MV Jantzen

Ok, but that is a long-winded way to introduce this post which has been brewing in my mind ever since I read this post at Joe Valdez’s The Distracted Globe (he watches and writes about a ton of great films) in which he was partaking in the 12 Movie Meme started by Piper at The Lazy Eye Theatre (a very fun movie blog). The logic is pretty simple, yet it struck me as quite brilliant: if you were asked to choose a sequence of 12 different double features at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles what would they be? This is an extra special find for me, because I lived about three blocks from this theater for almost two years and saw many a great double feature there. And while the seats were some of the most uncomfortable in movie house history, the programming was both intelligent and very fun. Always an argument in the way the films were paired. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of their film calendar to get a clearer sense of what I mean, sometimes it was fun just to think about the relationship the two movies being linked had in common, at times it was clear and beautiful like with Aguirre Wrath of the Gods and Fitzcarroldo or Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. But others were less clear to me at the time like Body Heat and the original The Postman Always Rings Twice or Rosemary's Baby and The Brood (a double feature I actually saw at UCLA’s Melnitz theater–another favorite of mine in LA–under the bill of Maternal Nightmares, but let me pretend here in my blog, will ya)?

After obsessively thinking about my program for the last 24 hours—because you know I had to do one—I came up with a bit of a theme. For as we know, every good film program, just like every good syllabus or amusement park, has to have a theme. Mine was Bava…Mario Bava. The reasons for Bava are as follows: a) I dig his films and b) he experimented with so many different sub-genres that it makes this particular program not only fun but wide-ranging in its potential appeal. More than that, the influences between Bava and other “great” films and filmmakers would ultimately make the program far more diverse than if I focused on my 12 favorite movies (possibly the worst approach). The restriction of sticking with Bava actually gave me a grand theme as well as a series of sub-themes to explore and experiment with through genres, directors, and actors.

So, here are the twenty films (I couldn’t stop at 12) I would choose for a month of programming at the now “New Bava Beverly.” Below are my picks with a brief rationale, or at least I think it will be brief, I mean I want it to be brief, I swear.

The first double bill would have to start with both James Whale and Mario Bava’s masterpieces respectively: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Black Sunday (1960). Bava’s Black Sunday is an homage to the beautiful black and white Gothic horror film classics of the 1930s. The Bride of Frankenstein is not only one of the most beautiful made by Universal Studios during this period, filled with the transcendent sets and ghastly graveyard scenes, but in many ways as wild and ludicrous as Black Sunday. The two seem a perfect fit, and frame two directors at the very height of their genius.

View the trailer for The Bride of Frankenstein here and for Black Sunday here.

Bava wasn’t afraid to dabble in sword and sandal movies, and Hercules in the Haunted World (1961) is one of the cult favorites of this genre. While not necessary his greatest film, It remains one of the most popular and appreciated films of a relatively poor lot. Bava’s trippy settings and haunting atmosphere sets the film apart from the usual cheap standards. That is, of course, until you start dealing with Ray Harryhausen’s animation in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), another sword and sandal film that may very well be the most famous and best simply because of the genius animation by Harryhausen, featuring the Skeleton fighting sequence, perhaps some of the greatest special effects ever to be filmed.

View the tailer for Hercules in the Haunted World here and for Jason and the Argonauts here.

I chose Alfred Hitchcock’s first version of  The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) because it has Peter Lorre in it, which is his first film role since leaving Nazi Germany (suggesting Hitchcock’s genius that much more given he was the first to cast him). And interesting fact here is that Lorre doesn’t yet know English so he is speaking all his lines phonetically. It’s wonderful to watch. Also, I must admit, I’m not a  Jimmy Stewart or a Doris Day fan—who star in the 1950s version—and would much prefer to watch Lorre in just about anything any day of the week than suffer through another gosh, golly or shucks by Stewart. There….I finally said it on this blog.

As for Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) I think it is one of his most beautiful films, perhaps his most beautiful after Black Sunday, and the header image of this blog is proudly taken from this gem. What’s more, it is commonly thought of as the first filmed Giallo, which is an Italian term that literally means yellow. And due to the yellow covers of these pulp novels, the term was used to describe an entire genre of novels and films in Italy during the 50s and 60s. The novels consisted of sensational fiction that often brought together the thriller, horror, and sexploitation genres. This is Bava’s last movie filmed in glorious Black and White, a medium he excelled in and wouldn’t ever come close to surpassing in color except, perhaps, in Planet of the Vampires (more on that soon).

Trailer for The Girl Who Knew Too Much here.

Pulling out all stops, I went for the episode films. I would love to do some research on episodic films like the two featured here: Black Sabbath (1963) and Trilogy of Terror (1975). I was toying with the idea of including Cat's Eye or Creepshow, but I think Trilogy of Terror as a series of three shorts really comes closest to the vision of Bava’s Black Sabbath, and as an added bonus it has the psychotic African Fetish Doll–which will be a major draw, believe you me I’m fascinated by the idea of several short films within a film, and the relationship their order and organizations plays to plot and theme, just like with a good book of short stories. The American version of Black Sabbath was expurgated and reorganized, basically removing the Lesbian relationship from the Telephone episode, toning down the violence, and re-ordering the sequence of the films. Which, for many, kills the effect of the three films. I haven’t seen the Italian version yet, so until I do I’ll stick with the US version. I think these episodic films are a fun genre that isn’t played with nearly enough, so The New Bava Beverly will bring you six short films at the price of two long ones.

Trailers for Black Sabbath here and Trilogy of Terror here (not a trailer but beautiful clip from this classic).

Thanks to Bava, we can even feature one of the greatest science fiction films, Alien (1980).  And while Planet of the Vampires (1965) may be of for those of a particular taste (the beginning scene is ten of the most bizarre moments you will ever spend), I still hold that it is one of the most beautiful films shot in color.  Absolutely stupendous effects and lighting, not to mention the coolest space suits ever worn by any astronaut of any age. Genius. A few critics actually link the atmospheric landscape, lighting, and mood in Planet of the Vampires to Ridely Scott’s Alien (1980).  And while I don’t think there has been an acknowledged inheritance on the part of Scott, watching the two films side-by-side would offer an interesting opportunity to see what these very differently paced and imagined Alien films have in common.

Trailers for Planet of the Vampires here and for Alien here.

Roy Colt and Jack Winchester (1970) is Bava’s only foray into the Spaghetti Western. And by no means one of his better films, it is a spoof on the genre and pushes it to its most insane limits. There is a fight scene between the two main characters named in the film’s title (played by Charles Southwood and Brett Halsey) that last for well over five minutes. It’s drawn out to the point of absolute absurdity. More than that, there are a few cinematic gems as Bava turns his eye to the Western landscapes of the film. The film is spoofing the by then well-established Spaghetti Western genre, and lead characters are quite similar to the acting team of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, both of whom became internationally recognized with the film that re-inspired the moribund Spaghetti Western during the 70s: They call Me Trinity (available on Google Video its entirety given it is in the public domain—haven’t seen the high quality version on the Internet Archive yet—but I strongly encourage you to watch the opening sequence of this film, it’s a blast).

No trailer available for Roy Colt and Jack Winchester. Trailer for They Call me Trinity is here.

Pushing the obscure genre boundary angle even further, Bava did a film titled Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) which provides a kind of Agatha Christie setting and plot without the wise and savvy detective, and far more gruesome murders. The plot of Five Dolls focuses around “a group of people who have gathered on a remote island for fun and relaxation. One of the guests is a chemist who has created a revolutionary new chemical process, and several of the attending industrialists are eager to buy it from him.”

A plot line which reminded to me to some degree of of favorite of mine when I was a kid, Evil Under the Sun (1982), which also features a group of wealthy people who steal away to an exotic island and find one amongst themselves dead. And while Evil Under the Sun concerns itself with culture, deductive reasoning and detective work, Five Dolls just kills off the decadent richies, which has its benefits

No trailer available

Bava invented the Slasher film! What else can I say here?  Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971) is the proto-type for the Slasher films of the late 70s and 80s (and the more I started thinking about this today the more I thought so must The Texas Chainsaw Massacre be then too). Friday the 13th was the film it most reminded me of given the similarities in camp settings, and the fact that both film’s have a somewhat unexpected and deeply disturbing ending.

Trailers for Twitch of the Death Nerve here and for Friday the 13th here.

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) is the classic film told from varying viewpoints that beautifully demonstrated all the complex theoretical beauty of the hermeneutic problems undergirding testimony, perspective, and narrative more generally. So, why not pair this classic with an Italian Sex Comedy done from four different perspecitves that retraces a date that has conceivably gone wrong from four different perspectives.  Four Times That Night (1973) is a monument of 70s style and expression. The film centers around an apartment, and the shag rugs, turntables, and generally awesome furniture and colors is not to be under emphasized.  The space of the bachelor pad and consumerism looms large in this film (as it does in the sex comedies of the 50s with Rock Hudson). Yet, at the same time, Four Times That Night flirts with a disturbing vision of how the night might have gone wrong, channeling some of Rashomon’s darker moments.

Trailer for Rashomon here and a trailer for Four Times That Night is not readily available.

Finally, as a grand finale I’m pairing Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) with Bava’s Rabid Dogs (1974). Both of these films might be seen as prime examples of the increasing escalation of violence in cinema that characterized the early 70s. The graphic and realistically filmed rape scenes in both films makes them both highly controversial and extremely hard to watch. Both are characterized by an acute claustrophobic aesthetic, and mark the dark visions of masculinity gone animal. Rabid Dogs marks an interesting moment in Bava’s films, wherein he firmly moves outside of the fantastic/gore/absurd sub-genre pieces to a stark, realistic film about violence. It marks a bitter, dark ending to his career—it’s actually his penultimate film—which in many ways reflects how he felt about his work’s reception over the years. It’s his final masterpiece, and a difficult one to manage given how terrible its ultimate vision of the world becomes when stripped down to the raw free of fantastic effects and far out visuals.

Trailers for Straw Dogs here and for Rabid Dogs here.

OK, that’s it. I did it, and I’m all fired up about it!

I watched John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath (1940) last night and I have to say it is a masterpiece of the highest order. The film both blew my mind and deeply touched me on so many levels I just can’t sort them all out right now. I’m confused. So, until then, here are a few highlights from a film that must have been as relevant and deeply human back in 1940 as it was last night.

The scene at the beginning of the movie when Tom Joad (played brilliantly by Henry Fonda) encounters the ex-preacher Jim Casey (John Carradine) for the first time frames the entire film. The scene is wonderfully rich and complex in its existential humor, setting up the overarching logic of the film: honest doubt and life’s dire uncertainties are not anathema to hope and possibility. Not understanding our condition is a crucial element to being within it, to embracing it. To decide to go on while not understanding is the greatest act of faith. Similar to Estragon’s claim in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” More than that, the preacher’s lost spirit haunts me like a second skin these days.

And there’s Muley (an Oklahoma sharecropper like the Joads) being told he needs to get off his land. This scene beautifully captures the ever receding logic of responsibility and individual accountability under capital. What makes the land “our’n”?

The scene between Tom Joad and Ma Joad (played flawlessly by Jane Darwell) was an almost impossible one for me to watch. The moment captures the parting between mother and son, a strange apotheosis of Tom Joad into the canon of freedom fighters for social justice which is sealed by his “I’ll be there” speech. Yet, despite these moments of poetry, there is still no clear understanding on the part of either son or mother, and the anguish at the separation remains terribly real for both of them. This scene painfully reminded me of just how much I miss my mother, and how deeply I long to look into her eyes once again and talk to her about the world I see.

Ma Joad delivers the final thoughts of the film. A brilliant ending to the preceding dark and disturbing vision of the world. The final lines about “the people” made me realize how Ford takes the film version of the novel to another level. It is his ability to marry stock characters with profound philosophical vision that drives the engine of hope that is the Joad family throughout the film.

That final scene reminds me of something Mrs. Jorgensen said in The Searchers (1956), another Ford classic:

It just so happens we be Texicans. Texican is nothin’ but a human man way out on a limb, this year and next. Maybe for a hundred more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever. Some day, this country’s gonna be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.

I’ve been upgrading a number of different WPMu installations. And while the upgrades I did for WPMu 2.6 installations that ran on dynamic subdomains went smoothly, two installations I upgraded that run on subdirectories (a result of them being hosted on shared hosting that would do dynamic subdomains) ran into problems. The upgrade seemed to go fine, but when I tried to login into a blog other than the main blog (or even login as another user) it simply remains on the login screen that redirects to itself for all blogs except main.

I did a quick search and found this forum thread which suggests I’m not alone with this issue. I deleted all my plugins and mu-plugins,  cleared the cache and threw out the cookies. I even spent some time in the wp-config file, and double checked my .htaccess settings, all to no avail.  I’m sure a fix is forthcoming, or at least a hack, but until then I would perhap hold off on upgrading to WPMu 2.6 if you are using subdirectorties. I make this post because after the pollyanna screencast about upgrading to WPMu 2.6 I posted previously, I want to make clear that the upgrade was only tested with dynamic subdomains, not subdirectories.

The inimitable Andy Rush (a.k.a. EduRush) and I have been working diligently to create a whole slew of screencasts documenting the new interface for WPMu 2.6. We’ve finished a whole bunch of them over the last week or so and published them on the now official UMW Blogs Screencasts site, so below is a list of the ones we have created. They’re all under a Creative Commons license, and while they’re currently published as SWF files, we will be uploading them all to Blip shortly. Keep in mind that these screencasts are specific to the UMW Blogs installation, but they still may prove useful for anyone who wants to point people to a quick overview of the administrative backend, the changes between versions WPMu 1.3.3 and 2.6, and a very tab-specific discussion of the how to manage a WordPress blog.

Screencasts » Support Videos

• Overview of New Admin Interface in UMW Blogs
• Overview of the Write Tab
• Overview of Manage Tab
• Overview of the Design Tab
• Overview of Comments Tab
• Overview of Settings Tab
• Overview of the Plugins Tab
• Overview of Users Tab
• Creating a UMW Blog
• Changing your password on UWM Blogs

Now the difference between Andy’s screencasts and mine are easily discernible: he is the consummate professional and I’m the consummate hack. Andy’s are brief, no-nonsense, and precise poems, whereas mine are meandering, overly long, fraught with missteps, and bad jokes (the Overview of the Comments tab is an excellent example of this). That openly acknowledged, I really enjoyed this process because it forced me to approach this application, which I’ve inhabited deeply for almost two years, from the perspective of a novice. What I discovered along the way are some issues that I need to focus on to make UMW Blogs that much easier.

For example, I expected the screencast that provides an overview of the Design Tab to be straightforward and simple, yet I found that working with a wide array of themes, widgets, plugins, and dsader’s Userthemes is not always as simple as I preach. Take the fact that if someone changes the theme, they may lose the Meta login sidebar element that could totally throw off someone who is not familiar with the application.

Additionally, while DSader’s Userthemes Revisited plugin is a huge asset for UMW Blogs and I love that he has developed it out, it also presents a potential difficulty for users. Specifically because the Userthemes shows up in the Design tab up for everyone and anyone who has their own blog. And while only people who are enabled by an admin can hack their theme, anyone can still activate Userthemes and effectively lose the functionality of the built-in theme viewer. This could potentially confuse someone who activates a theme through Userthemes, and then deletes that theme and returns to the theme viewer they won’t see anything at all. What happens is that the system themes have effectively been disabled. It would be nice if when a user deleted a (or all) themes activated through the Userthemes subtab that they could once again access the system theme through the themes subtab.

Additonally, the relationships between sidebar widgets and plugins in Wordpress is not as clear as it could be. When new users activate a plugin they often have to know to go into the Settings tab to configure the plugin and, quite often also need to drag a plugin-specific widget into the sidebar for the functionality to appear on the site.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that WordPress demands that users explore the possibilities by providing them a place to experiment and play with the application. And I wouldn’t sacrifice that for a clean experience by any means. That said, these screencasts helped me see some of the obstacles I had been overlooking for people who are coming to this application fresh, and I have to start working on ways to keep the possibilities all the features it provides while making the interface rabbit holes hard to fall down.

Feeds listed by aggr.

A couple of months back I happened upon the American Museum of the Moving Image’s Moving Image Source, which is an online publication featuring articles about film, television, video games, actors, and more. The posts are written by critics and scholars from around the world, and the wde range of writers who all bring various perspectives to the online journal captures a certain amount of wonderful unpredictability.  You never know what the next article will be about, and I like that a lot.

In fact, It has been a ton of fun reading the articles, and my only complaint is that I wish you didn’t have to login to comment; I just can’t seem to get up the inertia to fill out another sign-up form. That said, I spent an hour or two on the site tonight fling rom article to article, and while I have a bigger post brewing about Annette Insdorf’s article “Seeing Doubles,” I got quickly pulled into a series of interesting articles through simply browsing the last two months worth of articles, which amounts to 44 posts—wow! that’s an impressive amount of good content being solicited by and published through a museum site on a regular basis! Is there another museum that is doing anything half as ambitious in terms of openly publishing scholars and critics?

Well, while I’m at it, below is the tale of the tape from the two hours tonight I spent reading articles about everything from queer cinema to black exploitation cinema to avant garde and the mashup to The Wire and Balzac. Now there’s some range I can dig on.

I really enjoyed Sam Adams retrospective look at Derek Jarman’s career titled “Look Back in Anger.” Particularly the discussion of the complex poetics of the politic in his The Last of England (a film I saw back in the early 90s at a Jarman retrospective at the Nu-Art theater on Santa Monica Blvd in beautiful Los Angeles, a magical theater where I saw many a great film—I actually saw a midnight showing of Spider Baby there—but I’ll return to the Nu-Art in some other post). Adams points out the poetic ambivalence in this masterpiece beautifully with the following quote:

The Last of England, known at one point under the working title Victorian Values, was a blunt attack on Thatcher’s promise to restore the mores of an earlier time. But the movie is not reducible to a one-sided polemic. Jarman’s vision of a bombed-out Britain, a landscape of industrial wreckage and blood-red skies, is founded on an unspoken and only briefly glimpsed ideal of an unsullied past, most poignantly realized in the footage of Jarman’s grandparents, filmed before he was born. In mourning a past Jarman never knew, the movie surpasses even the party of Thatcher in its idealistic vision of a bygone time, even as it rages against the country’s rightward drift. No wonder one of his Jubliee collaborators called Jarman “a radical Tory.”

Also, Ed Halter’s “Recycle It: A look at found-footage cinema, from the silent era to Web 2.0″ is an interesting discussion of the history of re-mixing and re-using found-footage is awesome. The article has some great links to various historical footage and resources, and it even links out to the Duvet Bros. classic re-mix Blue Monday, which Halter describes as follows:

A masterwork of this postpunk moment is the Duvet Brothers’ Blue Monday (1984), which sets images from the Thatcher-era miners’ strike to the tune by New Order, turning the forlorn synth-pop love song into a lament for a people’s broken relationship with its government.

An excellent overview for thinking through the political, social, and avant-garde roots of the mashup.

Additionally, there is an entire series of articles being publishing on the Moving Image Source about The Wire. And given my marathon viewing of all five season in June and July, I indulged in the scholarly press Nelson George’s discussion “Across Racial Lines” is an interesting article that examines the art of writing race in the TV series The Wire, and argues, rightly I think, that it may very well be the single best protracted discussion of race in a mini-series since Roots.

Dana Pollan’s article “Invisible City” compares The Wire to the literary universe of a Balzac novel, a comparison that is both accurate and useful for thinking about the series. I think the discussion of Balzac and The Wire hits the mark, and gets at the de-centered, vibrant universe that characterizes that series. Unlike Pollan’s initial comparison in this article which juxtaposes the final scene of Straw Dogs and the final scene in season 1 of The Wire, a relationship that is completely lost on me–and I am a huge fan of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. An example which highlights some of the less impressive tone of the writing in several of these articles. They’re often trying to throw in these relations, allusions, and connections that sometimes work and sometimes fail, but rarely have a kind of animated voice behind them. A site like this is invaluable, but it also illustrates some of the key differences between blogging and critical and scholarly writing, and I can’t say the latter might benefit from some stronger opinions, zealous affectation, and a few more far out comparisons.

There’s also a series of video clips that provide a voice-over analysis of the title sequence for The Wire by Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee, and Matt Zoller Seitz. The first video “Extra Credit, Part 1″ starts out kind of stilted and unimpressive for the analysis of the titles for Season 1, but get increasingly looser and more compelling by the time you hit the second and third season titles analysis. And by the fourth and fifth they’re on top of their game. You can find all of them here, and they are well worth watching. The authors hit the mark on numerous points about the show as told by the titles, and bring some fascinating readings of the various details packed int the credits that are easily overlooked. I love this example of a very close, well argued visual reading of the title sequence, great stuff.

…I would be going to WordCamp 2008 like the great Alan Levine, but being only a bava—which in fact is not only the surname of my favorite film director but also Italian for drool—I’m not. So, after reading Alan’s recent call for examples of WordPress in education I tried to add my 50 cent, but Alan’s blog was intentionally blocking my long, link-filled comment of utter genius because he is petrified of the Reverend’s wrathful range, as one should be.

But never fear faithful reader, for the Reverend has got his own publishing platform, and can make the good word know the world round. That’s right folks, “I’m comin’ up, comin’ up, so you better you better get this party started.” So, with no more saccharine fan fare, here is my addition to Alan’s call for examples that was maliciously blocked to keep the right reverend from making it clear that education is where WordPress is poppin’ like no other field. And if the folks at WordPress don’t start paying us mind, we’re going to make a mass exodus to LiveJournal very, very soon! Transcript of my aborted missive to the dog follows:

All right, I have couple of things for you dog.

First, the current ground swell of universities adopting WPMu for all kinds of cool things. Here is a list compiled by Mario A. Núñez Molina, and stolen by the bava:

 http://bavatuesdays.com/universities-usi…

And then there is the Pickering Institute  http://bavatuesdays.com/pickering-instit…

The dude at Plymouth State in New Hampshire who is using WP as an OPAC for the university library:
 http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11133

The MacCaulay Honors College launching WPMu as e-portfolios:
 http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/

David Wiley’s use of WordPress.com, and the kick off of the whole spam educational blogging technique you love so much  http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of…

Literary Journals with WordPress by Pulitzer Prize winning Claudia Emerson (who rules!). Below are two examples of a possible seven:
 http://ecollective.umwblogs.org/
 http://noncejournal.elsweb.org/
(Some background on this project here: http://bavatuesdays.com/nonce-journal/)

Steve Gallik’s Lablogs and Data-Blogging (a wonderful example of WP as Lab Notebooks)
 http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/…
Some background on this project here:
 http://bavatuesdays.com/umw-lablogs-aggr…

Marie McAllister’s Eighteenth Century Audio site, which basically has students recording themselves reading poetry, then uploading them to Librivox and linking to them in this WP Blog:
 http://ecaudio.umwblogs.org
(Some background on this project here: http://bavatuesdays.com/eighteenth-centu…)

Jeff McClurken’s work with Digital History: http://digitalhistory.umwblogs.org

I particularly like this one for it really is a site with no search functionality, yet still effectively acts as an easy engine for finding over 100 historical markers:
 http://fredmarkers.umwblogs.org

The now graduated UMW student Roblog, whose blog is an ideal example of a student portfolio:
 http://roblog.umwblogs.org

And Brad Efford, whose blog is an example of just how amazing students are with this stuff (he was also part of Gardner’s Film/text/Culture experiment mentioned below):

 http://blogs.elsweb.org/nsftmfx

Just about everything Gardner Campbell has done with blogging (you’ll agree with me there I’m sure):
 http://miltonsummer08.umwblogs.org/
 http://intronewmediastudies08.umwblogs.o…
 http://rocksoulprog.umwblogs.org/

Gardner’ grand experiment which I think is one of the best yet. Basically students used each others blog posts throughout the semester as research and fodder for their final papers, which were written as posts, and used trackbacks as attribution and quotes. Brilliant

 http://blogs.elsweb.org/class-feeds/prof…

Gardner talks about this experiment here:
 http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/…

Then there is Barbara Ganley’s unbelievable work, but she used MovableType

Ok, I have more, but you only have a little bit of time

Here is one for the strange WPMu bugs division. I had tested the upgrade to WPMu 2.6 for UMW Blogs pretty thoroughly, but there was one small thing I missed. Which manifested itself as an error message, shown below, every time I tried to upload an image or document.

Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter in …./public_html/wp-includes/wpmu-functions.php on line 1586

Given that upload images and documents is not an insignificant feature for UMW Blogs, I was a bit concerned. So, I searched high and low on the forums and elsewhere for a solution, but all to no avail. Finally, I asked the ever great Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding—whose stint with me in grad school has gained him nothing but an endless stream of code questions for over three years now—if this was a problem with the .htaccess file given this fix for the issues with uploading images on WP 2.5 which had a similar error message. But given it was a PHP error it seemed unlikely, or so Zach informed me So, he did me an ace and looked at the code and asked me the following two questions:

Zach: Have you set an option for upload_filetypes?
Me: Yes, jpg jpeg png gif mp3 mov avi wmv midi mid pdf rtf doc xls ppt docx xlsx odt ods swf m4v
Zach: Is there a trailing space or a leading space?

Disco! There was a trailing space in the Upload File Types field in the Site Admin–>Options tab. I got rid of the trailing space and the upload error went away. Now that is code diagnostic prowess, two questions and my problem was fixed, it would have taken me all night and I would have sacrificed those wee hours of blogging bliss too. But, I was spared the knife again thanks to my betters. One day I will learn how to read PHP code, but until then I’ll just have to hail Zach!

Recently I have been working with a French professor who had been playing around in Blogger, and was thinking abut using a blog in his class. I got to see some of the finer features in Blogger, and I really liked the fact that this professor could choose the default language for administrative backend and theme. So after we talked, I decided to see how easy or hard this is for WPMu given I had never tried it. Well, it’s simple to have one WPMu install support different default languages on a blog-by-blog basis.

Here’s how…

• Create a languages folder in in the wp-content folder.
• Search the “WordPress in Your Language” Page on the Codex for the languages you want.
• Once I found the languages I was interested in—Italian, French, Spanish, and German for now—I went to the Wordpress download site and got a copy of the latest download in each language. For example, here is WordPress 2.6 in Spanish.
• Once I downloaded it, I went to the wp-content/languages folder in the WP 2.6 files in Spanish and grabbed the following file es_ES.mo.
• I then proceeded to grab a similar set of files for Italian ( (it_IT.mo)), French, (fr_FR.mo), German (de_DE.mo), by going to the 2.6 download for the latest WP install released in that language.
• After you collect the *.mo files for the languages you want, copy them into the wp-content/languages folder created on your blog and that’s it.
• You can now select the default language for any given blog from one of five options in the Settings–>General tab.

Blog language Options

Everything should be this easy The Hery-Dev blog has a plugin that simplifies this feature by including a system related to the languages available. There are a few things I don’t like about this new plugin as it stands now:

• It gives you no way to return to the default language ( in this English) once you’ve selected another language it
• It doesn’t actually changes the Bog language feature in the Settings. The default settings remains in the Settings’–>’Options’ page.
• The straight-up language selection tool in the Settings tab is pretty damn easy to begin with.

All that said, it’s pretty cool that foreign language professors and students have the ability to choose their language as they see fit.Here are the four *.mo files I am using if you want to test drive this for WPMu 2.6.

Finally, not all themes will work with this option on the front end, but I will try and pinpoint those that do. Seems like Sadish’s CityScape does, so I imagine a number of his others themes might as well—which is a damn good start.

Andy Rush and I sat down yesterday morning and did a “live” screencast of the process for upgrading UMW Blogs from WPMu 1.3.3 to 2.6. It was conceived as a straightforward video for an easy process, but even easy is hard for a moron like me. So forgive all the upgrading bloopers and blunders. This video might be enjoyed more as a cautionary tale of what not to do when upgrading than an informative how-to. It’s availabe for anyone who is considering doing an upgrade but is concened or nervous about the prospect.  In fact, the upgrade is quite painless in the end.

I tweaked the documentation for UMW Blogs to reflect the administrative back end changes for WPMu 2.5 & 2.6. I figured this may be helpful to some folks that are using this application and might need some screen shots, quick documentation, etc.  It’s all Creative Commons, so no need to ask, just pilfer and pillage at will. Additionally, I put most of the screen shots on the UMW DTLT Flickr account so that folks can use what ever they need. Andy Rush and I will be turning to the videos soon, but as of now they haven’t been updated.

If anyone else is doing documentation of their own, it would be useful if you could share what you’ve got so far. I imagine seeing some other examples of how people are approaching this would help fill in the gaps that remain with the UWM Blogs FAQ and WordPress Guide. If you are so inclined just leave a link in the comments or e-mail me the URL of the site at jimgroom_at_gmail.com.

On a recent post about Clash of the Titans, Andy Best made a comment I’ve been coming back to over and over again since. The comment was the following:

And by the way, Jim, keep on plugging D&D, that game was solely responsible for getting me to read and develop in the face of school being boring and oppressive.

This idea immediately propelled me up into the attic, rifling though boxes in the insulated heat to find my copy of the Monster Manual, one of the greatest books of the 1970s. I found it, and I have been re-reading it for the last week or so, rather than reading Capital, Volume 1 as I have been promising myself. But I don’t really feel too bad about my choice, for this book is blowing my mind and framing Andy’s comment about reading and developing in ways I hadn’t imagined. In fact, it’s forcing me to re-visit why this book has remained quietly lodged in the ether of my psyche like a psionic Thought Eater for almost thirty years.

I started with the explanatory notes that introduce the logic of the Monster Manual, basically laying out how to read this book. These notes act as a kind of legend for deciphering the very particular vocabulary around the monster profiles, defining terms such as damage, alignment, % in liar, hit points, etc. The very first definition of this manual is pretty wild, it’s a brief explanation of the term “monster:”

The term “monster” is used throughout this work in two manners. Its first, and most important, meaning is to designate any creature encountered — hostile or otherwise, human, humanoid, or beast. Until the encountering party determines what they have come upon, it is a monster. The secondary usage of the term is in the usual sense: a horrible or wicked creature of some sort. Thus, a “monster” is encountered during the course of a dungeon expedition, and it is discovered to be an evil high priest, who just might turn out to be a monster in the other sense as well. Note, however, that despite this terminology, human (and such kin as dwarves, elves, gnomes, half-elves, and halflings) always use the matrix for humans when attacking, even if such humans were encountered as “monsters” in the course of an adventure.

I love this definition of “monster.” It becomes a kind of catch-all phrase for anything that is unknown or foreign, whether or not it’s human. A fascinating frame that resonates with the logic of the Age of Discovery and Exploration wherein those initially encountered in the New World narratives were always monstrous, deformed, and somehow other than human, despite their humanness. The moment between the encounter and the determination of what was encountered is a fascinating one—how long does it last? How does the very idea of the monster become something else entirely with this first and most important definition of monstrosity—which is really a definition of something that can’t be immediately understood.

So, this definition pushed me to look further into the idea of monstrosity, something that fascinates me anyway. And I found a book of essays called The Horror Reader that offers up a few theories of monstrosity. One of them is from Aristotle, which suggest that “Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity, since in these cases nature has strayed from the generic types.” Aristotle then goes on to draw a parallel between monstrosity and females as departures for the male norm. And such a definition of monstrosity, women, and birth seems to be at the very heart of of the Horror genre. From Mary Shelley’s monstrous conception of <em>Frankenstein</em> to Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Cronenberg's The Brood (1979). Maternal monstrosity and this idea of the progeny as somehow different from the parents, becomes tied up with the actual imagination of the woman as the imaginative producer of monstrosity, a deformed birth, as Marie Helene-Huèt points out, becomes the manifestation of a woman’s “unfulfilled desires and hidden passions” (The Monstrous Imagination 88).

An idea which reminds me of one of the single most compelling moments of monstrous births framed as a public warning and divine testimony to the danger of America’s first true radical: the antinomian preacher Anne Hutchinson. A woman whose philosophy posed a grave and immediate threat to the Puritan “City Upon a Hill.” (As a side note, the trial of Anne Hutchinson is perhaps the most compelling read of all Puritan literature, and frames her genius in the face of intolerance and tyranny stunningly, you can read an excerpt here.) After Hutchinson is banished for the danger she represents to the social fabric, the Puritan governor John Winthrop reports publicly that she has given “monstrous birth” to “twenty-seven several lumps of man’s seed,” which becomes a way of justifying her exile and offering a divine punishment for her unholy difference—her ideas and radical spirit are physically manifested as monstrous.

Thanks to Gardner Campbell this meandering through the monstrous can take on epic proportions given a series of ideas that a recent reading of another Monster Manual in its own right, namely Book II of Paradise Lost, proffers the imagination. Particularly when Sin describes the incestuous birth of her son and brother Death:

Alone, but long I sat not, till my womb
Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown
Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes. [ 780 ]
At last this odious offspring whom thou seest
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way
Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transform’d: but he my inbred enemie [ 785 ]
Forth issu’d, brandishing his fatal Dart
Made to destroy: I fled, and cry’d out Death;
Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’d
From all her Caves, and back resounded Death.
I fled, but he pursu’d (though more, it seems, [ 790 ]
Inflam’d with lust then rage) and swifter far,
Mee overtook his mother all dismaid,
And in embraces forcible and foule
Ingendring with me, of that rape begot
These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry [ 795 ]
Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv’d
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me, for when they list into the womb
That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw
My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth [ 800 ]
A fresh with conscious terrours vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find. [Link.]

How is that for monstrous birth, “odious offspring,” and “inbred enemies”!

Yet, I digress, for monstrous maternity is just one, albeit a particularly rich and telling, way of how we deal with fear, uncertainty, difference, power, and subversion. The Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual makes the idea of everything undetermined somehow monstrous (which makes the idea of birth and monstrosity even more telling and fascinating). A kind of general, sweeping idea of paranoia at the idea of otherness. And idea that makes the secondary definition offered by the Manual, or the more traditional idea of the monster as a “horrible and wicked” creature somehow wanting. And interestingly enough, in the very next sentence after offering this more popular definition, the uncertainty of what is or is not monstrous creeps back into this explanation, imbuing any clarification with a deep ambivalence.

Thus, a “monster” is encountered during the course of a dungeon expedition, and it is discovered to be an evil high priest, who just might turn out to be a monster in the other sense as well.

The evil high priest is only a “monster,” seemingly given his human affiliation, because he is unknown. But as soon as this definition of monstrosity is established, it is immediately qualified by the idea that this priest may very well turn out to be a monster in the “other sense.” The horrible, wicked sense? Or the undesignated sense of otherness that looms far larger than such a definition can control or maintain, yet at the same time beautifully opens up. Here the idea of monstrosity is not so much premised on the physical difference between things: some kind of unholy lack of resemblance. Rather, the monster may be monstrous in some “other sense,” some invisible sense that is not necessarily easily to determine. What does horrible and wicked look like? How do you determine these characteristics? Are they physically defined?

It reminds me of one of my top three films of all time: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Perhaps one of the greatest situations in all of cinema, The Thing is rooted in an idea of monstrosity you can not immediately see. The monster (or is it the alien?) takes the shape and attributes of its victims down to every last detail. The distinctions are impossible to determine though visual or social interaction. Making the moment when they come up with a blood test one of the most compelling scenes in cinema of all time for me.

The physical blood test provides a reprieve from the ultimate horror and monstrosity, namely the idea that there is no way to truly distinguish between what is monstrous and what is not. It has no easily determined shape or form, it could be any of us—the great contribution of Invaders of the Body Snatchers (1955). A kind of general malaise of monstrosity that is indeterminable, but ever present.

And all of this from the first, “clarifying” paragraph from a manual dedicated to the idea of monstrosity. A work of art in every sense of the word, it is without question an imaginative fount of wonder. And while I’m easily sidetracked by the definition of monster it tries to provide, there is no question how deeply this book forced concepts on the mind of a hapless ten year old that created a certain sense of confusion. What does it mean that a Manticore has the alignment of Lawful Evil and a Centaur that of Neutral Chaotic Good? How do I hold these seeming antithetical ideas in harmony to make sense of this monstrous world? I remember working though this with a friend who was far smarter than me, how took the occasion to suggestion that the words lawful and evil aren’t necessarily contradictory. What a valuable lesson.

Yet, it was the profiles and images in the Monster Manual that made me want to understand this strange moral world of monsters. I would spend hours reading the descriptions of the monsters, determining their point system, and obsessing over the illustrations, all of which suggests the way this kind of text introduced a whole new way of imagining in relationship to numbers, text, images, and often maps as well. The Monster Manual is a truly unique work of the imagination, and I can’t tell you how fun it was to re-visit creatures like the Lurker Above, the image of which falling on an unexpecting victim always intrigued me how powerful this monster was.

And there was Mimic, a monster that can “perfectly mimic stone or wood” but cannot stand the sunlight. I just loved the image of the Mimic posing as a treasure chest, while at the same time cocking its fist prepared to knock the unassuming adventurer flat out.

And there was also the Mind Flayer, who crazy tentacled head, and psionic brain eating abilitie downright frightened me.

And a personal favorite were the more quotidian Lizard Men—who were always a personal favorite, especially since I paid my friend’s brother a dollar a figure to paint my Lizard Men lead figurines, it was worth it.

So, Andy, I think I have an idea of what you meant by your comment, and in fact it is funny how much re-reading this stuff brings back so much of that original wonder in the face of all things monstrous.

Has anyone seen this yellow button? I have been waiting patiently for what seems like months for the little yellow Anarchy button to appear in my Rich Text Editor for WP & WPMu version 2.5+, but no no avail. So as we are getting ready to upgrade UMW Blogs, I was wondering if anyone found a solution. I looked here, here, and here, but all active questions and development seem at a stand still.  This is a bummer for me, because the Anarchy Media Player is without question the easiest and quickest way to insert all kinds of video and audio by simply copying and pasting a link. It helped make the overhead for including media into posts and pages seamless, one of the strongest selling points for WPMu on campus. Anyone figure out a workaround, or have the quick code to make it a tag? I imagine it can be done because the plugin still works if you use the Media button in the code/html view of the text editor.

And while I’m at it, where’s the add an image icon in WPMu 2.6? This one:

It’s gone away, and the default Add media option in WPMu 2.6 visual text editor only has the gray asterisk sans the image, video, and music icons, which I added through this hack here (though I am beginning to wonder why because the video and music icons don’t do much good because all they do is provide a link—they don’t embed anything).

Visual Text Editor for WPMu 2.6 (hacked to show icons)

And while I was able to get Viper’s Quicktags Plugin for YouTube and various other vicdeo services working with a hack (thanks Luke), it messes with the Visual Text Editor to such a degree that it almost becomes too much labor in the long run. Has anyone else experienced these issues?  Moreoever, has anyone else found a solution?

Image thanks to characterzero99

“As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of “do it yourself.” Marshall McLuhan, from the Essential McLuhan.  Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone. Routledge 1997. Page 283.

I started my morning off with an IM Chat with Mikhail Gershovich who sent me the quote above which seems unbelievably timely, as if it were written in the recent wake of the EDUPUNK apocalypse. In fact, Gardner Campbell, whose recent post on blogging and method is a must read for anyone using blogs in education, has been talking about the necessity for re-visiting McLuhan since teaching his Intro to New Media Studies class. I’ve meant to do this, but as time would have it, I opted for re-watching classics like The Road Warrior and C.H.U.D. to further the debate. Yet the quote above inspired me to re-visit a video I found a couple of months back on the Media Funhouse blog (a wonderfully eclectic media blog) which linked to a debate between Marshall McLuhan and Norman Mailer on the CBC television show “The Summer Way” back in 1968.

Well, I can’t thank Mikhail enough for the push to re-visit this video, because the conversation between these two thinkers is unbelievably timely. Moreover, it seals the fact that I have to start reading McLuhan en masse sooner rather than later—he is absolutely wonderful in this discussion. I won’t ruin the clip for you, but below I have transcribed a few morsels that I will be feeding off for a while.

For example, their first exchange is absolutely mind bending:

Mailer: “Look Marshall, we’re both agreed that man is accelerating at an extraordinary rate…into a super technological world, if you will. And the modes and methods through which men instruct themselves and are instructed are shifting in extraordinary ways…”

McLuhan: “We’ve gone into orbit.”

Mailer: “Well, but at the same time there’s something profoundly auto-erotic about this process and it’s sinister for that reason…”

McLuhan: “It’s psychedelic…when you step up the environment to those speeds, you create the psychedelic thrill. The whole world becomes kaleidoscopic, and you go inward, by the way, it’s an inner trip not an outer trip.”
________
Or this gem…

McLuhan: “Whenever a new environment goes around an old one there is always terror. We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature, it is no longer the natural world, it’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist…the environment is not visible, it’s electronic.
______
Or this…

McLuhan: “Every age creates as an Utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy. The present is the—and this will delight you Norman—the present is only faced in any generation by the artist. The artist is prepared to study the present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life, and therefore it is anti-Utopian, it is a world of anti-values. And the artist who comes into contact with the present produces an avant-garde image that is terrifying to his contemporaries.”
______
And this…

McLuhan: “An electronic world re-tribalizes man”
______
Also this, especially if you can look beyond the insistence of the male pronoun…

McLuhan: “The contemporary artist is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task, for heaven’s sake. The absolute indispensability of the artist is that he alone in the encounter with the present can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the century awareness to tell us what the world is made of. He’s more important than the scientist, than scientists will be waking up to this shortly and will be resorting en masse to the artist’s studio in order to discover the forms of the material they are dealing with…the scientist lives in a world of matching, and his idea of proof or verification is just the idea of matching evidence against evidence. When somebody doesn’t match but makes a new breakthrough, this is just as disturbing to the scientist as to the educator.”
______

So with that, I leave you with the video, which is a wonderful way to spend a half-an-hour of your day, I promise. And it re-confirms for me just how relevant McLuhan can be for my thinking about educational technology, as well as what a metaphorical tripper he once was and still is.

If you have a problem with the embedded video, view the original here.

Image thanks to Lulu Vision

Here at UMW we have been going through a CMS Review. It has been a pretty interesting project, and while I only tangentially involved, I have been following the basic rhetorical thrust of the sales pitches from companies like Desire2Learn, BlackBoard, and Angel (well be getting in-house demos of Sakai and Moodle next week).

As any faithful reader of the bava may have already guessed, I’m not particularly a fan of Course Management Systems. But, at the same time, I am beginning to understand the perceived need for them in higher ed. I find it interesting that most of the questions in a CMS review center around issues of the gradebook and quiz functionality, which seems to really highlight—as Jerry would argue rightly, I think—that these systems are predominantly about administrative management of courses rather than teaching and learning. Fair enough, I should just swallow my medicine then, right? Maybe, and I’m trying to become more amiable and compliant. I really am, I swear.

But humor me for second. This evening I was thinking about a particular strand of NYC movies such as The Warriors (1979) Times Square (1980), Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), C.H.U.D. (1984), Alphabet City (1984), Crocodile Dundee (1986), Bright Lights, Big City (1988), State of Grace (1990), New Jack City (1991), and several others. While these films represent a wide range of genres, they have something in common in my mind which is a filmic framing of New York City as a wilderness, a frontier of crime, violence, and more generally fear. A vision feeding upon the perception of New York City during the 60 and 70s —with the white flight to the suburbs—as a reflection of the state of general “decline” of urban centers (we can understand that decline in a whole host of race and class-inflected ways). Just think about the title of the film Fort Apache, The Bronx, which alludes to John Ford’s Western classic starring John Wayne titled Fort Apache (1948) (though Ford’s film is far more sympathetic and complex a look at the Native Americans than Fort Apache, The Bronx is of the inhabitants of the South Bronx), it is a self-defined frontier film relocated back to the cities of the East Coast. During the late 70s, throughout the 80s, and into the 90s (when the process is just about complete), a new battle for a return of “civilization” in America’s “once great” cities emerges. It is the rise, in several different forms, of the “urban jungle” film, a space that must be exposed, condemned, and re-conquered—and film was one place this happened.

Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier does a phenomenal job of examining the details of “urban renewal” as deep-rooted shift in both the political economy and culture of U.S. cities during the late twentieth century. The very language of the process of gentrification of urban areas has taken on the frontier imagery of the West: urban pioneers, urban homesteaders, urban cowboys, etc. Films like those above trace this shift in myriad ways, and capture the cultural impact of re-framing American cities as frontiers of crime, violence and difference that need to be both civilized and assimilated, which more often than not means the undesirable element of any given city need to be made invisible, hidden from public view, which C.H.U.D. does a wonderful job at suggesting with the transformation of the displaced populations of NYC living under the city in old Subway tunnels (also known as Mole People, a reality compounded in the 80s when President Reagan put the majority of America’s mentally ill patients from clinics, hospitals, and treatment centers around the country on the streets) into monsters that were created by the very government that tried to hide them (I love this movie!). And there is more to say about each of these films, I mean Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee is just the kind of rough and exotic cowboy needed to fight the rampant crime in NYC, and ultimately he liberates the city and himself from the violence that often characterizes any frontier (frontier, in my mind, proving a a very different linguistic formulation than the more nuanced and complex idea of a borderzone which examines the flow of fluid identities through space). And I could talk about all these movies at length, but that is another post, or series of posts, about New York City gentrification in the movies. Suffice it to say, you can read movies as social, political, and cultural traces of the re-imagining of the urban centers as frontiers that need to be subdued, and which are re-claimed and occupied by the middle and upper-classes during the late 90s and 00s.

So what the hell does any of this have to do with educational technology and CMSs? Everything, in my mind. Course management systems as we know them today emerged roughly 10 to 15 years ago (with the watershed year being 1997) as a means of creating virtual learning environments. The very logic of these environments was to create applications that could manage the administration, delivery, and discussion based components of a course online. About this time the CMS became ubiquitous in higher ed as a possibility for managing document distribution, rosters, forums, etc. Companies like BlackBoard emerged as all-in-one solutions for managing courses online due to the relative difficultly of using the open web in the late 90s given the unilateral nature of content delivery, limited access to the web, and the general difficulty designing and maintaining one’s own space. Course management systems fit a need, they were designed for a learning environment that posed a high threshold of difficulty for two-way participation.

Yet, over the the next ten years the web becomes a far more conducive space for dynamic interaction and participation, while at the same time internet penetration throughout the Western world becomes more and more ubiquitous. At the same time applications that offer similar functionality as course management systems begin to emerge at a fraction of the cost of centralized, proprietary systems. And the interest in emerging technologies with different approaches begins to appear, the early interest in learning object repositories and metadata might be understood as a foil to the parallel interest that emerges a bit later on with blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.—with the ease and simplicity of the later seemingly winning out over the labor intensive and static model of the former (I am treading on unfamiliar ground here, so feel free to fire away). So what we have here is a failure to communicate the emergence of a frontier in educational technology, the space of harnessing the possibilities for teaching and learning on the open web that are no longer limited to the logic of an outdated system like the CMS that provides a controlled space for basic interaction online around course materials given the apparent limitations of the early web. Yet, the logic of such a system morphs into a logic of institutional control, security, and convenience. What changes is not the actual underlying technology of CMSs as outdated systems of delivery and management centered around a course, but the general sense that the internet is a dangerous place (which it is) and teaching and learning needs to be cordoned off from that (which is questionable). The design of CMSs don’t change over this period of time, but their logic and raison d’etre does. And while the power of tools such as blogs, wikis, and RSS for creating engaging, interactive spaces for collaboration and discussion made simpler with syndication technology like RSS is amde more and more apparent, the rhetoric of fear, terror, and a protected and centralized space for teaching and learning becomes vocalized more and more.

So, what happens? The companies that make the CMSs gentrify the frontier, they try and assimilate the power of these tools within a controlled space that is safe, closed, and convenient. It is two pronged attack exploiting fear and protection of the students and teachers along with a promise of a centralized convenience and peace of mind. So, like the artists that moved into SOHO and the Lower East Side of NYC in the 60s and 70s, their pursuit of an affordable and diverse alternative to mainstream logic ultimately paves the way for capital to roll in and develop and gentrify these neighborhoods, eliminating most, if not all, of the original spaces that made them interesting and compelling to begin with. This is the lot of educational technology right now, those professors, IT folks, and instructional technologists who pioneered the field of educational technology on the open web over the last decade are watching their work be incorporated into a machine that is selling them back the fruits of their experimental labors as a shiny product that elides the very context of its relevance. Course management systems are the sterile environments of gentrified and wealthy cities like New York’s Manhattan that has very little left of its original luster, and what can be discovered comes at a cost that is prohibitive to the everyday citizen. The machine is, indeed, using us!

Are there alternatives? Is such a move irreversible? I don’t know, but when I read Barbara Ganley and trace her thought I do have hope for different models of thinking about teaching and learning within a digital framework. There are new frontiers emerging, and I want to be on them.

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So….so so so so so so, it’s time for a little walk down WPMu history lane. Last year at this time I was desparately scrambling for a way to have sitewide tags for UMW Blogs. I found the solution in Dr. Mike’s hack shared on the WordPress forums here, but it was a kind of a mess even then. Yet, the concept was brilliant, a separate site that allows you to archive, search, and create a tag cloud for categories through a good ol’ spamming plugin. —DIY ingenuity at work given the limitations of WPMu at the time. The set up ran on a separate single install of WordPress that was pulling in the sitwewide feed from WPMu (thanks to It Damager –who has disappeared along with his Sitwewide feed plugin) and running it through the outdated Wp-Autoblog plugin, as well as a plugin for re-directing the permalink to the original blog it was fed in from (a process I detailed here). Moreover, once I got this hacked concept straight in my head and installed it, the WP-Autoblog plugin and the Sitewide feed plugin had to be further modified to work. Add to that the fact that when I updated UMW Blogs from 1.2.x to 1.3.3 the category were no longer pulled into the separate WP site properly, effectively breaking the tag cloud. Making the whole thing at least a partial bust right around February. In short, it was an extremely smart hack on Dr. Mike’s part, but in the long run it became more of a nightmare than an asset.

So, as soon as I saw the MuTags plugin for WPMu sitewide tags from Mr. Henry I jumped on that, and made that the default tag cloud for UMW Blogs, and used Dr. Mike’s hack as an archive for posts throughout the environment (sans categories). But Mr. Henry’s MuTags had two problems: it had no sitewide feed for each tag, and it couldn’t incorporate categories into the tag cloud. Moreover, when we bought the $50 extension for the plugin which allowed feeds for each tag, I found the feeds to be pretty poorly parsed and ugly But I was hopeful enough to blog it, and when Stephen Downes took issue with our paying $50 bucks for this functionality I wore all black for weeks and couldn’t sleep at night (this was before he discovered and broadcasted the beauty that is EDUPUNK —welcome back Stephen ).

So, that kind of brings us up to date, and it is also when a new era begins for WPMu. Because all the functionality I needed at least three plugins for, a separate WordPress installation, a brain surgeon, and a hammer to make work have all been bundled into one little WPMu plugin developed and shared by the inimitable Donncha: Sitewide Tags Pages for WPMu. This plugin gives you all the functionality that the original hack did, namely a searchable archive of posts and sitewide categories with feeds, but adds a few as well such as sitewide tags (which are really tags not categories called tags –we have figured out the difference, right?) and sitewide feeds for tags, a built-in “spamming tool” that just republishes the post from throughout the environment onto one blog in your WPMu environment at the URL http://tags.yourblog.com. And more than that, the permalink points to the original blog and the author is immediately populated in the tags blog making the whole process seamless and clean. Not to mention the fact that given it is a blog within your WPMu environment you don’t have the overhead of a separate install with outdated versioning because you don;t want to surrender the archiving functionality all together.

So, how to use this? First off, keep in mind Donncha has made it backward compatible for older versions of WPMu, but I would recommend using it on 2.6 only, for it seems there are still some glitches on older versions (at least WPMu 1.3.3). Here is how I am thinking about using it on UMW Blogs. As a sitewide category/tag cloud with feeds galore, which will actually be useful for syndicating class content as I talked about in the e-portfolios post