vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Laughter and perhaps HCI

These days on my tibook I run a second monitor in my office. The set up is standard, tibook in front of me and monitor behind and a bit higher and I set it up as a second screen with the menu bar on the top screen. I used to have the menu bar on the laptop, even though it was the lower screen since it sort of felt like that was ‘the’ computer and where the menu ought to live. Except of course I kept accidentally mousing out of it all the time into the top screen. But what I really enjoyed was when you wanted to move an application window onto the top screen you had to get a run up while dragging because the application window has a ‘sticky’ feature so that when it bumps into the menu bar on the lower screen it stays there. Without some added speed it won’t (literally) jump across.

This did just make me laugh because I wanted Safari to go up there and it really didn’t want to. Perhaps because I have about 8 tabbed windows in Safari, and so it is now ‘weighted’ as 8 application windows!? Anyway, I enjoyed the physical interface that this actually produced. Gone now, since this is when I realised the stickiness would go away if I simply moved the menu to the top screen.

A minor and personal moment where my HCI paradigm (computer = screen = location of menu) is entirely arbitrary and unnecessary.

GMail and Centralised Networks

Google’s Gmail system proposes to provide a gigabyte of storage for each user, and to leverage Google’s search expertise to facilitate finding and retrieving your email. What they promise is impressive, and while some have raised some privacy concerns, it is upping the ante from what hotmail first promised. The difference, of course, is that it is Google, and unlike Hotmail ‘gets’ the network (for example by making the Google API available).

Which brings me to one of my current pet peeves. Centralised IT and the appropriate administrative of services for teaching and learning. Here at RMIT we provide student email accounts, they are limited to something like 6 or 10MB total storage and they expire once a student graduates (or fails or otherwise leaves the university). In other words they are too small to be useful (we have a university that thinks nothing of sending over 1MB of attachments with emails for example), and are temporary. They are treated accordingly by the students.

This year our central IT team prevented all access to hotmail, yahoo and possibly one or two other major free webmail providers. The rationale was largely about virus’ as attachments, and traffic aka bandwidth. The problem with this is that students reasonably regard their RMIT addresses as disposable, so while we have coerced them into using them, we actually provide very little to justify that coercion. For many this is trivial. For those of us interested in network literacies and responsibilities it is frustrating as we host things like alumni email lists which are diluted since RMIT doesn’t let our students use their ‘real’ email addresses on campus, which are the addresses we need them to use to subscribe to our lists simply because they will then follow our students postgraduation. This is just the IT side of life long learning, the difference I guess is that in our program we mean it.

The along comes something like gMail. A email address that has plenty of storage, is permanent if the user wishes it to go (so follows the student post graduation) and is provided by a company that ‘gets’ the network. Why shouldn’t our students simply migrate to this system? Why shouldn’t we let Google pay for the provision of this service, if they’re willing? In a networked world a single institution must provide infrastructure and access to the network, but does not have to provide all the bits that run on that network.

Geeks with Kids

Got this via Slashdot where kids at Legoland (temporary URL) can where a wi-fi wrist band and parents can SMS to get their location. Yes, it is surveillance, but potentially a positive form of surveillance as any parent with young kids knows. Not because I can check where they are but because I can now let them wander, more or less, knowing that I can find them if I need to. What would be more impressive, and useful, is if the kids could also nominate to send a SMS to their parents to come and collect them, for whatever reason (bored, hungry, frightened).

Now we just need the Uni. of Aarhus multimedia crew to develop a research proposal that lets you track the movements of these kiddies in real time, much like biologists with fish, birds, seals, whales, wolves, and so forth.

Remote Blogging

Ben Saunders is skiing solo from Russia to Canada, via the North Pole (don’t try this at home kids) and he’s blogging the trip, more or less (found via Dylan Kinnett). This is a good example of some of the very simple ways in which personal Content Management Systems make significant things possible, and perhaps inaugurates a new blog genre, extreme blogging?

I wrote some time ago about nomadic blogging, and the ways in which the network follows you. I don’t think any one has blogged from space, yet, but it won’t be long.

Speed, not Haste

Yesterday I was running another ‘intro to research blogs’ for some postgraduate students and in my haste to post and then remove content from my blog I deleted the manifesto, which had 3 comments and 2 trackbacks. Ecto had the originally, but would only let me post it as a new entry since, not unreasonably, the old entry no longer existed.

“Less haste, more speed”, as an elderly tool maker regularly pointed out to me in the factory I used to work in.

A Manifesto For Responsible Creative Computing v.0.3

This manifesto now has its own blog:
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~knetlit/
The aim is to develop a conversation via a blog around the ideas in it…

context
We teach students who work in the creative industries. In creative computing contexts the products and processes of these industries are soft artifacts. They may be ideas, interfaces, or media. All remain malleable , before, during and after completion.

Their graduate computing context consists of small enterprises where IT skills are distributed amongst the work group. These skills are informal and self developed. There is no IT department and IT systems are self managed. It is common for graduates in these industries to be self employed.

This manifesto defines how we use computers in teaching and learning for creative industries in these contexts.

manifesto

• Creative computing is being creative with a computer/network, not being creative on a computer/network.
• Creative computing requires computer and network literacy. This literacy is analogous to, and as significant as print literacy.
• Computer literacy is not the same as knowing how to use professional software.
• Network literacy is not the same as knowing how to Google.
• Network literacy is the ability to engage with and represent yourself within the network.
• Computer literacy is synonymous with network literacy.
• This literacy is demonstrated in the responsible use of computers which understands that the network includes social, ideological, legal, political, ethical and ecological contexts.
• Computer literacy requires basic understanding of the principles of human-computer interaction.
• This literacy is demonstrated in the ability to transfer knowledge between computing environments.
• These literacies are learnt by doing.
• Breaking, gleaning and assembling is a theory of praxis for these literacies.
• Learning happens when things work, different learning occurs when things don’t work.
• These literacies are an essential requirement for responsible creative computing in pervasive digital networks.

Adrian Miles and Jeremy Yuille.

Just one particular morning

It is Saturday morning, I’ve swept and mopped all of our floors (they’re a deeply dark hardwood), am listening to a CD while scripting a new interactive movie, and notice outside a chorus of magpies. Magpies are very common, but when Stuart and Nancy were here as visiting scholars in 1998 they couldn’t get over them. I don’t think they ever heard them sing, from such an ordinary bird it is beautiful. It is a good Saturday.

Van Gogh (three)

A last and I think final version of the Amsterdam come Van Gogh vog series, Van Gogh Three. Like the previous one this too has the soundtrack (it is the same soundtrack), but now it is user controlled. It starts playing when the movie loads, but when you click the video window the soundtrack stops. Clicking this video pane also restores the video and so removes the jpeg gallery that is also a part of the movie. To view the jpegs, and to hear the soundtrack, simply mouse out and into the movie again, and the soundtrack is re-enabled, and the jpeg appears. To change jpegs you have to mouse out and in each time, to return to the video, simply click the video. After the experience of the first two vogs it just made more sense in terms of the structure of the work to allow the user to control more of the work, or at least if not control (which is, lets face it, a misleading and theoretically opportunistic term) then to force (which is what we really mean by control) the user to have to work for the work to work.