• I really like this post from Tenured Radical, which is largely about facebook, faculty meetings, and school starting. In particular, this line is spot-on:

If I can say I learned anything it was that faculty really ought not to complain about their students not listening properly and asking questions that have already been answered, because we are, as a genus, just as flawed in this respect as they are. Probably more so because we are more likely to ask questions at……great…….length.

• A new cafe, Snakes and Lattes, in Toronto has opened that is attempting to eschew laptops (no wireless there) and get people to actually interact with each other. The Torontoist covers it here.

• Inside Higher Ed has a great discussion about the textbook industry.

• Recently a man was prosecuted for videotaping a police officer and posting it online. The charges are that videotaping violates wiretapping laws, which seems flat out ridiculous. I’m reminded of David Brin’s The Transparent Society, in which he argues for reciprocal transparency. My major critique of his argument is that he doesn’t take seriously enough power relations. In an ideal world, sure we’d share information with powerful figures (law enforcement, corporations, etc.) if they shared the same information with us. But the world’s not ideal: crappy police actions can still be protected by crappy laws. The police have privacy in public that isn’t afforded others. (If I do something in public and it’s videotaped, the owner can post it online without a problem.)

• Profhacker has a new Teaching Carnival up! Lots of awesome blog posts to check out.

Here are a few posts I’ve written:

On Tuesday I wrote a post about handing out the iPads to students.

I also posted a few pictures of students first getting their iPads.

Today I wrote about what I learned from our frustrating day of setting up apps and such.

I’m excited for the rest of the term, as frustrating as the technical problems have been. Anyone who is interested can see what applications and workflow systems we’ve decided to use. Additionally, the course website is here. Also, I’ll close with a screenshot of a note I wrote while reading Chapter 5 of Mike Markel’s Technical Communication (9th edition).

PS: I wrote this post using the WordPress app on my iPad.

• Penn State in my technical writing course and for instructors in the technical writing teaching training course (Onward State story)

• Notre Dame in a project management course (Notre Dame News)

• Illinois Institute of Technology gives iPads to all undergrads (TechCrunch)

• Seton Hill gives iPads to all undergrads (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)

• Reed College is conducting a formal experiment (Chronicle Wired Campus)

• North Carolina State‘s library is checking out iPads to students for four-hour time periods (NCSU library web page)

• University of Maryland‘s Digital Cultures and Creativity (DCC) living and learning program will be giving its students iPads (UM Newsdesk)

• Stanford University is giving iPads to incoming medical students (Stanford Daily)

• George Fox University is giving students the choice of an iPad or MacBook (cost included in tuition) (George Fox News & Events)

• Oklahoma Christian University already offers students an iPhone or iPod Touch, but students can now upgrade to an iPad for an additional fee (Oklahoma Christian University AlumNews)

• Duke will be distributing iPads to grad students in a course on field research (Campus Technology)

• Long Island University is giving iPads to incoming first-year students and transfer students (Long Island University Press Release)

• Oklahoma State is running a pilot project with the iPad in business and media courses (OK State Spears School of Business)

• Northwest Kansas Technical College is giving each full time student an iPad (NWKTC)

• Chicago State University is giving all incoming students an iPad (Chicago State University Freshmen Registration)

• Williston State (North Dakota) is giving full-time professors iPads (Chronicle Wired Campus)

A pretty good list. Let me know in the comments if there’s a school I missed.

Bruns’s Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond is a solid argument about how the Internet is changing the way we produce content. Bruns explains that content creation online “operate[s:] along lines which are fluid, flexible, heterarchical, and organized ad hoc as required by the ongoing process of development” (1). He argues that the term “production” is outmoded for much online content creation because it implies a final product, instead of an ongoing process of creation. He proposes that we understand content creation online as produsage to highlight how the roles of consumer and user are disappearing, replaced by a system where “the distinction between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance” (2). This change in creation processes is made possible by develops of the Internet as a media. Bruns specifically points to differences between the Internet and previous mass media: an increased access to the means of production and distribution, the ease of peer-to-peer communication, and the ability to share, manipulate, modify, and edit content (13-14).



Bruns outlines four principles of produsage that signify when it works best: 1) open participation and communal evaluation; 2) a fluid heterarchy that leads to an ad hoc meritocracy; 3) creation of unfinished artifacts through granular changes; and 4) the development of communal property that results in individual rewards (particularly social capital) (24-30).



After extended discussions of open software creation, citizen journalism on blogs, and wikipedia, Bruns turns to how “we [. . .:] identify, collate, process, evaluate, combine, and synthesize the diverse range of content now available to us from a variety of sources” (171). Bruns explores metadata — data collected about usage, information, and behavior, often through automation, or through links and tags (174, 178-179). The book is a rather extensive and detailed discussion of various aspects of online produsage. Worth a read (or a skim, at the very least — the book seems to get repetitive at points, but offers some useful insights).



A few quotes on new media and developing relationships: “The social, collaborative basis of the content creation communities engaged in produsage also indicates this: in produsage projects, the object of the communal effort is almost always as much the development of social structures to support and sustain the shared project as it is the development of that project itself” (23). “content creation is an act of maintenance and construction (of both content and the social relationships among participants) at least as much as it is one of production” (23).



Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang 2008.


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A member of Notre Dame’s ePublishing Working Group, Angst is debuting the University’s first and only class taught using Apple’s new wireless tablet computer to replace traditional textbooks. The course is part of a unique, year-long Notre Dame study of eReaders, and Angst is conducting the first phase using iPads, which just went on sale to the public in April.

My students are receiving their iPads tomorrow. Exciting!

Here’s the survey I had my students take this week:

The survey asks questions related to computer usage because my students will be using the iPad (and, for instance, I wanted to know if they owned a computer or have experience with similar devices like the iPhone or iPod Touch). The last question (about Twitter and AIM) was purely curiosity.

Here’s the quiz I administered today:

How this works:

1. Log into Google Docs with a google account (if you don’t have one, it’s easy to set up)

2. Go to “Create New” (the drop down menu on the left side) and select “Form”

3. Give your form a title (e.g., “Quiz over Chapter 1″) and description if you want. Enter as many questions as you desire. Each question has a title (this is where I usually put the question) and help text (which isn’t necessary). Questions can be in the form of text (a very small box they enter text in), a paragraph of text, multiple choice, checkboxes (for multiple answers), or a drop down list (choose from list).

4. I suggest making your first question: Name. (I almost forgot to do this.) If you want to reorder questions, you can drag the questions up and down in the form editing tool.

5. Email form (a button toward the top of the editing page): you can email this form to anybody you want. What I did: I emailed it to myself, so that I had the link for the form in my inbox. Then, about a minute before class, from the podium, I copied the URL from my email and pasted it into an email to my students through ANGEL.

6. Once students have completed the survey or quiz, you can go to docs.google.com, click on the appropriate file name, and then go to File—>Download as–>Excel File (within the webpage). Then you have an excel file with everyone’s answers that you can easily browse through to summarize or grade.

7. Another cool feature: if you’re still in the spreadsheet file in Google Docs, and you used multiple choice answers, you can get a few info-graphics on the responses. Go to Form–>Show summary of Responses. A window will pop up with a summary of the responses, but the most useful one to me is seeing how people answered multiple choice questions, in pie chart form (this gave me a quick view: ah, all but two got that the revision in question 4 was about conciseness).

I hope these directions are clear and helpful.

• Composition instructors know it can be difficult to teach using a handbook. How do we approach the text as a useful resource for students? All too often it’s easy to assign pages from a handbook for students to read, or to provide links to online resources and move on, assuming students are going to go there on their own. Rebecca Moore Howard provides ten principles of teaching with a handbook, a useful list that stresses teaching how to use the handbook—a lifelong skill for writers. She has more on what she’s doing in class with the handbook.

• One of the first things those who are new to Penn State learn is that PSU’s Webmail sucks. It’s not pretty to look at, it’s not organized well, emails can get buried easily and are hard to see, the organizational scheme isn’t very “intuitive” — those who have used gmail usually respond to the interface: “Wow, why don’t they code this like gmail — or switch over!” I prefer to forward my psu email to gmail and download it to my Mac Mail client and iPad Mail. Onward State has a recent post with links on how to do just that.

• Blogrolls are a thing of the past, and Traci Gardner provides some reasons why. She doesn’t discuss the increased use of RSS readers, though a reader brings that up in the comments. I don’t think I’ve updated my blogroll in two years or so — perhaps I’ll put that on my to-do list. Gardner also provides a a list of almost 70 blogs in rhetoric and composition.

• Many of us use caffeine to keep our energy up, or to keep our energy stable, or to just survive. Here’s an interesting Death by Caffeine tool to find out how much caffeine it would take to kill you. You can choose your caffeine of choice (many many options!), enter your weight, and find out. I drink mostly brewed coffee (black), and it would take 92 cups to kill me of an overdose, according to this. Or, if I went to Starbucks and got tall coffees, 38 cups of them. It’s not healthy to drink as much coffee as I do, but now I can rest assured that I’m no where near deadly levels.

obviously, the timestamp is wrong, but otherwise, it looks pretty cool.

This is my first post from my iPad for this blog. I’ve owned an iPad since April or May 2010, but I’m constantly learning what I can do with it and how I can interact with it as a work environment. It’s a wonderful toy, as almost every reviewer will comment, but teachers, writers, and information workers are still considering how this device might be useful as a work environment. Throughout this term, we’ll be exploring the possibilities and limitations of the device for technical writing work.

How has this device been integrated into my work so far? Well, it’s been fun trying to figure out what I can accomplish, and how to accomplish it, on the iPad. For instance, I used Pages to revise the syllabus for this course. While some of this work was fairly easy to do, I ran into certain problems: tables imported from Microsoft Word documents don’t seem to sit as nicely in the document as I’d like, tables created in Pages might move when I export it as a .doc file, and fonts aren’t embedded nicely when the file is exported as a .pdf file. (In fact, I’ve found that some Helvetica can’t be read at all in Adobe Acrobat Reader.)

Here’s my iPad, my coffee, and a print copy of our textbook as I worked on the schedule. Formatting tables got difficult, and now, as I’m finalizing the syllabus, I’m wondering if tables was a poor decision, as they might not export nicely. I’m going to keep playing with this to see what I can do.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:W Beaver Ave,State College,United States

There’s a new iPad app called Inkling that looks really cool, and i wish Markel was on there. Here’s a video: