Hal Spacejock Support Crew

Recently, I stumbled across best-selling Australian author Simon Haynes, creator of the 'Hal Spacejock' series. Simon's writing places him firmly and proudly in the company of my all-time favourites, ie: Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Robert Rankin, Tom Holt and Rob Grant. The fact that I was only vaguely aware of such talent from a fellow Australian is criminal.

Simon is a writer of great humorous science-fiction, a developer of great open-source software and - as it turns out - a provider of great advice to wannabe-writers everywhere, which is how I discovered him.

So when Simon proposed a grass-roots, memetic experiment (well ... more precisely, an innocuous viral marketing scheme), I wanted in. Besides - he offered freebies!

Therefore, I sow the seed:




I joined Hal Spacejock's Support Crew

I didn't pay anything,
I didn't sign anything,
and I didn't read the fine print.
Just like Hal!

No space pilot can exist in a vacuum (hah!), and behind every successful pilot there's a talented and dedicated support crew.

Hal Spacejock is one of the least successful space pilots in the history of the galaxy, and a worldwide support crew is needed just to get him off the ground.

Grab Hal's Goodies!
| Join the team | - - - - - - - - - | Hal who? |

Hal Spacejock ... Après moi le wreckage

Online mainline

The Age reports that there's apparently now a recognisable
internet addiction, with 1 in 8 participants of a recent study displaying one of a range of symptoms similar to those used to determine drug/alcohol addiction. The study seemed to focus mainly on escapist aspects of the internet - particularly online gaming.

What I find really interesting about this article (in addition to the fact that The Age seemed to find no irony whatsoever in advertising 'The Beer Bible' on the same page) is whether similar signs of addiction might be observable in other forms of escapism - particularly in other media.

Could fantasy fiction or sci-fi be addictive? Am I a Discworld junkie? Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Star Trek have all triggered cult followings - are these obsessions actually compulsions for some of us?

Blog neglect

Funny ... you ignore a blog for a few months - albeit for a completely justifiable reason - and all of a sudden one of your favourite tools become redundant.

TagCloud originally excited me due to the ease with which it could be integrated into a blog sidebar - but since its currently getting an overhaul, all Splat's sidebar contains is an image linking directly to TagCloud's 'top 100'. A friend of mine tells me that this overhaul has been going on for months - and believes that the end result will be a user-pays system.

So much for the utopian, democratic and - most attractively - free nature of web 2.0 tools, eh? We all knew it was only a matter of time!

(By the way, TagCloud - I'm more than happy for you to prove both me and my friend wrong on this one.)

TagCloud - visual distraction of the day

This might be old news to some, but I've just discovered TagCloud - which, apparently, is "an automated Folksonomy tool". More from the site:

Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

As a first attempt, I have created 'SplatCloud', and included just the top 20 tags [for the sake of space and reader sanity] in the Sidebar - just below my blogroll.

The full 250 tags in my cloud can be viewed here, but be warned - the automated extraction on TopCloud's behalf means that weirdness can pop up occasionally. For example, it took me ages to determine what the heck 'bacon' had to do with any of my subscriptions!

[For similar reasons, I had to remove my various news subscriptions from the cloud to avoid future occurrences of 'Peter Costello'.]

Quite fun - and a nice way to display the casting of your blog-net to the world.

'There's something in the air'

The Nov/Dec 2005 edition of EDUCAUSE Review featured a great article on podcasting by Gardner Campbell, Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington.
The article discusses many potential benefits and applications of podcasting, including:

• providing courseware with convenience and portability
• fostering enthusiasm in both current and potential students
• showcasing lecturers and curriculum to the University community and the general public
• providing a range of pedagogical opportunities:
  - preparation and revision
  - collaboration and peer-learning
  - assistance with grammar/syntax
  - communicative power of voice.

Some excerpts of interest:

Imagine a busy commuting student preparing ... for class by listening to a podcast on the drive to school, then reinforcing the day’s learning by listening to another podcast, or perhaps the same podcast, on the drive back home.

Imagine a professor reading aloud a series of poems over the summer in preparation for a fall seminar in which his readings will help students overcome obstacles of language and syntax in this difficult verse.

Imagine a liberal-arts university supplying its community, and the world, with “profcasts” of classes and presentations delivered by its talented instructors - not to give away intellectual property but to plant seeds of interest and to demonstrate the lively and engaging intellectual community created by its faculty in each course.

In some respects, podcasting is not even new: both streaming and downloadable audio are as old as the World Wide Web, and the RSS specification that enables podcasting has been around for several years. What’s new about podcasting is the ease of publication, ease of subscription, and ease of use across multiple environments, typically over computer speakers, over a car stereo, and over headphones - all while the listener is walking or exercising or driving or traveling or otherwise moving about.

More and more students come to school with these skills ... These are the tools of their native expressiveness, and with the right guidance and assignments, they can use these tools to create powerful analytical and synthetic work. Yet even such digitally fluent students need to learn to manipulate their multimedia languages well, with conceptual and critical acumen, and we in higher education do them a disservice if we exclude their creative digital tools from their education.

As Jon Udell has noted, “When all the players are bloggers, podcasters, and screencasters, the game can be taken to a whole new level.” Those of us in higher education owe it to our students to bring podcasting and other rich media into our courses so that they can lift their learning to a whole new level too.

Inspiring stuff - and one of the best ‘podcasting primers’ I have come across to date.

eLearning 2.0 pedagogy

The more excited I become about encouraging the integration of blogs, wikis and podcasts into eLearning, the more important it becomes to pause for breath once in a while and consider pedagogical issues. Two articles I have recently discovered deal with wiki pedagogy and podcasting pedagogy.

As soon as I get a chance to do some exploring, I'll hopefully follow this up with some pedagogical views on blogging and aggregating. Damn it - I might even write something myself!

The Joys of Shallow Thinking

In this post, George Siemens raises the question of how we change our behaviour in an attempt to combat information overload. George's suggestion that we are becoming 'shallow learners' resonates nicely with 'information foraging' - one of those theories that makes me go all funny.

Information foraging describes the set of behaviours we employ to find and assess information - and has been informed largely by anthropological and ecological foraging theories more typically applied to food seeking behaviours. A nice primer is available here.

I love drawing similarities between our quests for food, money and information - that the same instincts can evolve to keep up with the changing nature of capital - and the adoption of 'shallow' skimming behaviour suggests to me that we are adapting to our evolving environment to become more proficient foragers.

Desire lines and cattle tracks

I found this article a while ago, and just remembered it as an appropriate addition to Splat.

According to several comments at the bottom of the article [and as expanded on quite thoroughly here], the phenomenon exemplified at UC Berkeley is known as 'desire lines'.

Desire lines are - apparently - those paths that pedestrians wear down when we 'break the rules' by deviating from the more formal, purpose-built footpaths and roadways in public spaces, such as parks or school/university campuses. Having walked along the well-worn cattle tracks you find criss-crossing paddocks, I suspect they have a rural, cross-species appeal also.

As well as providing powerful food-for-thought to urban designers, desire lines are a nice reminder to information designers that people do not always behave in the ways that we expect. They do not necessarily follow the paths we lay out for them [despite what we may perceive to be the advantages of such a course of action], and will gladly deviate from these routes if they can see a more direct way of getting to where they are going.

Conclusion: Design on the basis of what the learner/user does - rather than what you expect them to do.

eLearning 2.0

The web is changing - and so is the way that we use it.

Blogs and Wikis are making it easier than ever before to become an information producer, while RSS aggregators are streamlining the steps required to be an information consumer.

"Oh no!" cry the advertising execs. "They're not using it the way they should!"

Interestingly, we're using it exactly how we should be: at least according to Tim Berners-Lee's orignal intention.

What we're not doing is using it in the manner that eCommerce has come to expect. We no longer 'click here' and go where we are told to as often as we once did, which is potentially wreaking havoc with advertising revenues based upon web-use predictability.

Instead, we take control and individualise our personal 'web experience'. We generate our own content quickly, easily and cheaply with Blogs. We collaborate and contribute to the 'infosphere' with Wikis. We filter the bits of the web that we want to visit with RSS aggregators. We share our preferences with others via social networking sites.

All this change and talk has led to the concept of 'Web 2.0' - a new web, based on this new behaviour. Educational designers and developers are therefore thinking about the implications of 'eLearning 2.0'.

In an eLearning 2.0 world, how will we provide content? How will students access it? What will they do with it? How can we best meet their needs?

Stephen Downes has recently taken up the challenge of raising these questions and more, resulting in in a fantastic eLearn Magazine article.

Stephen ties together a broad range of ideas and developments in a clear and concise article, and provides in-line and cited links to an immense range of background material.

A great read - and one that should be considered a compulsory primer to 'the next big thing' in eLearning.

Intelligent design and Negative information

It seems that the 'intelligent design' argument has come to Australia, with The Age contributing this and this to the public debate. Without getting too carried away with my personal stance on the issue, let's just say that I'm rapidly becoming a staunch supporter of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

Anyway, thanks to the musings of MaryAnn Johanson over at Geek Philosophy on the subject of intelligent design, I was rather excited to stumple across the hypothesis that information can be negative.

I love the idea that exposure to certain information [game shows for example - or psuedoscientific theories, perhaps] can leave the recipient knowing less than they did beforehand.