Thoughts

The twentieth century was a time of great expansion of representational modes. The development of photography, sound recording, moving images, movies, radio, and television has led to our culture being increasingly dominated by human-made semiotics. However, during most of the past century, the need for elaborate skills and equipment meant that cost limited authorship in these new representational modes, as it did for the more established mode of print. Despite, or perhaps because of, these gatekeepers, audiences were educated in these new representational modes simply by passive immersion. These new modes were not widely or systematically studied in how they represented (rather than simply as crafts to be learned for a limited few producers/authors) until the last quarter of the past century.

In the twenty-first century we (and our students) are in Ong’s “secondary orality” as more and more of us take in information holistically from the semiotic sea that surrounds us, rather than analytically and reflectively from printed text. At the same time, the representational gatekeepers of expensive complex equipment and skills have been largely removed. The ubiquitous computer and Web have created tools that are increasingly “affordable” and “user-friendly” which allow us (and our students) to individually create in the new representational modes developed in the twentieth century - photography, sound recording, moving images, movies, radio, and television, - as well as in the traditional alphanumeric print. And we can publish our work online to a worldwide (potential) audience.

How do we teach (and test) in this rapidly evolving semiosis? How do we shape curriculum for digital natives while we are still immigrating into the digital world ourselves? Are our students thinking and/or learning differently than we do or did? And if so, how? Is a photographic essay “equal” to a word-processed essay for teaching and/or for showing a student’s knowledge? And what about a sound and/or video documentary? Will our students learn more or more deeply from such representational modes than from text? Even if we focus exclusively on written text, as I will, what are the changes in writing brought by word-processing and the Web?

The computer is not a typewriter and the Web is not a collection of books. Teaching academic writing and business communication currently demands teaching the tool as well as the process, and teaching the visual as well as the verbal impact of structuring language. I believe we teachers of writing (and teachers using writing) must step off the dock of past practices into our digital boats and launch ourselves into this shifting semiosis.

After many years of teaching using the chalkboard and overhead, I was pushed into teaching academic writing and business communications using the computer and Web. For 10 years now I have been teaching Ontario post-secondary students, both college and university, how to communicate using the online computer – and learning from them. Since the late Nineties, I have been teaching using a Course Management System where I develop materials and then my students access them online, and in this process teach me how to teach online. In the last three years, I have seen radical changes in how the young, even the computer-reluctant young, combine writing and the computer. I have been learning about this new curricular space and how to shape it using the knowledge of the digital natives I encounter and helping those around me, whether labeled “teacher” or “student” to navigate in and through this shifting semiosis.

Not Enough Time

Now, as I wait for a student who is overdue, I am grabbing some time to blog. Using Paint on the IBM the school provides for those using computers in their teaching, I give you my current descriptive image. I should be marking, but ... this is my break!

Bush, for four more years :-(

Caught between resenting the bad name being given by fundamentalists of all stripes to religion, and fear that their passion will destroy much that I value, I spend my time marking papers, fearing that my suggestions will go unheeded.

It's November. On dark days, I wilt; on sunny days, I can try to keep going.

An old poem:

November in School

In November, everything crashes -
files are lost,
cars slide into each other,
suiciding squirrels shut down generators

and I
am late for school.

In November, people weep -
assignments fail,
teachers and students snarl,
work done is less than hoped,

and more,
much more, is required.

In November, we fear -
even if Christmas ever comes,
even if spring only hides behind
the winter we have to endure,

we have lost
whatever we came here to find.

Time Flies

Time flies when I have taken on a lot of work. On the one hand I love teaching. On the other, marking is a part of teaching.

I had a wonderful rant yesterday. I was lecturing on how literacy has changed our very way of being in the world, the way our psychology is shaped. I was charged up with my understanding of Ong and Havelock and a rich sense of what they meant and I flowered into the moment and engaged the students.

I've felt this before; it is the sweet moment of teaching/learning. I can reach them, hold them, and then release us from a kind of electric exchange. It is what I felt when I "saw" the golden chords reaching from my fingers and touching the students when I taught English as a Second Language in the top floor of a converted warehouse. It is what I experienced in some of my poetry classes. It has been rare for me lately as I struggled mired in enmeshing change. I love it, but I can only prepare for it; i can't command it.

It is something to do with oral rhetoric. It is a moment of wholeness and fullness. It is a psychic embrace. I am grateful for the moment and the experience. I hope they are too.

Windows xp Ate My Files

Good thing I kept my backup CD and it wasn't too out-of-date. Today, in class, as I tried to show my class that you have to be careful where you save your files, I was surprised to discover that my largest, most important folder had simply disappeared from 'My Documents" and all the other folders were shortcuts. "Search" didn't find my lost folder for me.

When I went to the technicians, they muttered that xp hade done this to others too!!!!! They found some of my missing folders, but not all of my files. My backup CD helped, but this leaves me scared. Obviously I can't save anything important and back it up on my IBM; it simply can't be trusted.

Back in the Classroom, Again

I have been reassured and delighted to discover that my joy in the classroom still exists. After only one (very soul-destroying) term of teaching over two years of study and other projects, I am back in the classroom again. What I am enjoying so much is feeling like I belong, and can connect with my students. I hadn't realized how much I'd been afraid that I had lost my classroom "presence." It feels like home; I feel alive in my art. I love to teach, to really get my students grasping the content and skill I am teaching. It's a joy to activate their understandings and performances.

I suppose this is the honeymoon phase of my return. I only have limited marking so far, and the students aren't stressed yet with some possibly acting out. We'll see what the future brings, but right now, I am satisfied!

Very Bad, Very Bad

Today was my first day back at school as a teacher since last December, and it was very messy. But I must have some positive feelings about being back because when I played around in Illustrator and created this image, I liked it even though it seemed kind of not-negative.

I cancelled my first class, because my laptop wouldn't start, (for the second time since Window xp has been installed.) The students didn't have access to their computer lab accounts without their user names and passwords, and the new registration software isn't working very well, and they hadn't received the letters telling them what they are. I could have looked up their information one by one, but my laptop wouldn't start - have I mentioned that?

The printer doesn't have the new software installed so xp won't print to it, and I like to print out things like class lists and topical outlines. Even after I got a new hard drive and re-installed all my info, I couldn't print. No matter, I couldn't get at my class lists because the new software, changed my name (I use my second; it used my first) and so wouldn't let me read my data.

Then I went to another campus for another course, but the program is moving and was neither at their old spot, nor their new one in a quite unfinished building. It took me an hour to find that out!

I did not have a good day.

My Thinking Tool

I'm more dependant than I'd thought. I start teaching on Tuesday, and so I have to prepare. I am using WebCT for 5 of my courses, even though I'm only required to for 2. The other 3 I have chosen to use WebCT as a Learning Management System (LMS) because I like the orderly way it contains all my course materials and makes information available to my students. I felt in control.

The school WebCT technician has been doing the changeover from the summer courses and upgrading our version, and for serious personal reasons had to be away unexpectedly while WebCT was unavailable. So I had other work to do, right? Yes but I couldn't think! Yesterday my courses were available, and I worked intensively all day, accomplished a lot, and felt in tune and coherent. I love feeling that way. I love looking at my course sites and tweaking them. I love creating them. It makes me feel creative and powerful! (Go figure! Some people just have weird needs ;-> or that's what I used to think.)

During the evening as I continued enjoying this energy surge, I made a few connections. While I was blocked from setting up my coursees in WebCT, I couldn't think and plan. Separate files to work on weren't enough. I couldn't think about classes, I couldn't plan my classes without my thinking tool for teaching - my computer and WebCT. And the other course I have at another institution, there's no WebCT there. So what have I started doing, even though I'm pressed for time? I'm creating a web site, of course, to support the class, and my thinking!

avatar

avatar,
originally uploaded by Semiotic Explorer.

So this is how I imagine myself as a cyber-explorer, learning .... or fiddling around ;->

I hate summer colds!

I hate summer colds! I can't think through my thick sinuses and scratchy throat. I've sent out messages requesting what I need to know to plan my fall courses, and had no replies. Just as well, because I can't think anyhow, and I have no energy.

All too soon, I will be very busy. Ah! A teacher's life ;->

Images, RSS feeds, & News Readers

Well yesterday I either worked very hard or did nothing at all; I can't decide which.

When I saw the picture icon on the Blogger Posting window, I just had to try it out. The least complex method seemed to be to use Google, find a suitable image, and use the code offered and the url of the image. It worked. As web stuff gets more user friendly, I move towards it by learning a few more "technical" moves. Picture a woman running, arms outstretched, towards an open laptop rushing through the air towards her. They embrace.

Spurred on by this success, I looked up definitions for RSS, worked on setting up the RSS feed for this, my blog. To find out if I had been successful, I clicked on the icon, took the link, and created a new channel in my Mac News Aggregator. It worked!!!! So now I'm going to start collecting educational blog channels. ZOWIE! I'm not sure what I'm doing but I'm doing it.

Phil's Film Workshop 10th Anniversary - Camping Resolutions!

I resolve never again to -

• use a tent with the floor space of 2 air mattresses
  
• sleep in a tent I can't stand up in
  
• stay in a tent more than 2 fields away from the porta-potty
  
• sleep on air mattresses over 20 years old and unchecked for air leaks

However, the people were a pleasure, the food was great, the films were interesting, and seeing dawn and hearing a distant farmer call out "co-boss, co-boss, co-boss" to his cows reminding me of my grandparents farm - priceless!

Print: From Tyranny to Democracy

From Walter Ong's writings, I learned the term"chirographic" - that's handwriting, - and its impact is different from print's. Writing raises consciousness, Ong says, and I believe that's true both culturally and individually.

I remember friends who were studying for their PH.D.s in Education saying that getting their degrees had a profound impact on them, that it changed them deeply. I nodded, of course, and thought maybe they were exagerating. Now, I'm beginning to understand what they said. Part of it is simply the reaction from people around who honour and value this achievement, but reading Walter Ong has convinced me that it is also the impact of the prolonged meditation that writing a thesis is. People are changed, - I am feeling the change of attitudes towards me, and a complex of awareness that my writing has created within me.

The most important seed of my writing was my learning to write using a computer and word processing software. My handwriting blocked my writing because I regarded it as visually inadequate, signalling low status thinking and it was physically difficult too. Also, my years of intense reading and the academic culture had caused me to think that the only "real" writing was that which was printed. Books were "real writing" and handwritten notes were just rough notes, no matter how much I had tried to do a good job of writing.

Because of the material structure of publishing, few people got to be published. It was expensive and complex to do and so there were many gate-keepers. Thus, the tyranny of print, more visible now as the stranglehold of published is being loosened and lessened. Word processing, desktop publishing, web sites, and blogs are creating a new democracy of print, where individuals with access to comparatively inexpensive equipment and communication links can present their ideas, thought, words, to a much broader audience with few, if any, gatekeepers.

This is creating a new understanding of communication using print. Using keyboarding and software knowledge (and online computers) is different from using chirograhpically produced text and the publishing industry. We are learning this new thinking/communication tool, and beginning to understand that it affects us profoundly.

Walter Ong - My Hero!

I'm reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy and it feels like writing my thesis was preparation for reading his work. This was published in 1982, but it is even more relevant today, IMHO.

I read Patricia Sullivan's article Practicing Safe Visual Rhetoric on the WWW (available at http://austen.sla.purdue.edu/handa.html) and found an interesting reference to Ong. I think Olson's The World on Paper also references Ong. In any case, I bought Orality and Literacy and I am captivated, wowed, hooked.

More later.

More Authors than Audience?

Are the young blog writers spending more time creating/composing their work, both text and visual, than they are in reading the work of others? In the environment we now live within, it's entirely possible that overall more time is spent authoring than audiencing. This is a kind of reversal to what has happened in sound.

I remember my parents, when I was a child, singing in the basement below my bedroom. My Mom played the piano and Dad plus their two closest friends, my "aunt" and "uncle" sang hymns in harmony. All of them were in the choir except my Dad. They didn't listen to records or radio all that much. They were more performers than audience.

So, too, in the Sixties, I had some musician friends who liked to "jam" anytime they could find someone else to sing or play with them. They, however, were more audience than performers because they also spent hours listening to records and other musicians.

Since Gutenberg, despite private letters and business documents with small and private readership, the "publishing" of written work has been highly circumscribed with both economics and elite judges limiting which work could move into the public spere (like music recordings now.) Now with the ease of access to the web, people can "publish" their writing with little to no interference. Blogs are only one way of published. Theses and novels and commentary are all to be found on the web. The personal writer rules.

In music something quite different is happening. Relatively little personal music making is to be found on the web, especially as compared to the huge trade in copies of professionally made popular music. It is almost the opposite of books. There are books up on the web, but in very small proportion compared to blogs and personal journals.

On the web, with the written word, there are more authors than audiences; with music there are more audiences than performers. Why? And how is Karaoke different? Is it audience, performer, or hybrid?

Restricting the Semiotic Palette

I've been thinking about what would have to happen for me to produce an article for a scholarly journal. I can't just take an excerpt of my thesis and send it along because journals restrict the semiotic palette. I'm limited to the font of their choice, and only one font. There are no pictures or colours. That means everything has to be done through words, and only words.

It's possible; I've done it before. And I suspect that money is part of the issue, although I also suspect that the innate conservatism of scholary journals dictates that no effort is made to innovate semiotically.

I feel caught between how I want to and can communicate information and concepts and knowing that I must work in an limited medium. I used to think that scholarship was all about exploring the the novel, about seeing possibilities and connections. I know there are some pockets where this happens, but it's like I have to wear a girdle and gloves and a navy-blue uniform instead of the comfortable but professional clothes that allow me to focus on my work without energy draining into a useless, limiting formality.

Watching TV Ads

I see a lot of car ads during the news and the 10:00 dramas I tend to watch, and I'm noticing the way text is integrated as part of the visual. In one, the text moves from the back of the centre to occupying centre screen, and the text itself is slightly off kilter. It's almost at an angle showing perspective, and not quite. The end result is, the irregularity draws the eye.

In another, the words drop in and move, centre screen, part of the movement that holds the viewer's eye. This is text as a visual "character," as a visual element more than as words carrying information. This is the new multisemiotic of our age.

Spring Colds

Spring colds are the pits. Sinuses blocked equals a sluggish mind. Runny eyes and nose are uncomfortable and unattractive; (my mate got it first and gave it to me!)

Others - Learning to Write

So I was talking to a friend yesterday and mentioned my thesis being about how to write, and referred to how I learned to write - joined printing and having to get "good enough" to get a straight pen and ink, and what a struggle that was. She related and began talking about how discouraging her messy-looking handwriting was when she was struggling to learn. Then, without a word from me, she said "What did they expect? All the written work we saw was in books and looked neat and finished." Exactly. My point. As children learning to write, we were immediately diminished and discouraged by our inability to achieve what we thought was the standard, something that looked like the books we were asked to read.

I was not the only one feeling this way! In fact, my wanting to have my writing look like a book may have been the norm!Think about it, when you are taught to cook, you are supervised, do it slowly and simply, but end up with food, something edible. The same thing when you learn to knit or sew, or build or repair. What you end up doing as you learn is create something that, while perhaps not up to a high standard, is never-the-less recognizable as close to a product in daily use.

My friend and I shifted into talking about our late-teen, early-twenties daughters, both of whom have their own blogs and spend hours online. The text they practice and the text they see have a unity and connection that ours never did. They read books too, but I suspect they don't hold them in the reverence that we did/do. They use and see text as part of a communicative system that they are tightly tied into, and that gives them a real discourse community, a far better learning situation than the required writing that always seemed inadequate both because of its appearance (not a book) and because it was observed as a performance where style and correctness mattered more than meaning.

I wonder how the increased amounts of time in casual "texting" will affect how they write in more formal situations?

Reading Has Always Been Postmodern

Historically, as soon as many people were reading the same text, exactly the same text as replicated mechanically, they began to disagree on what that text meant. (And perhaps even before, the source of so-called heresies lay in disagreements about what texts "meant.") But with increasing numbers of people reading the same texts, their different "readings" became obvious. And it's easy to understand why. Text, as the postmoderns have vigorously pointed out, is not absolute. The words stay the same but the reader(s) change.

If you read a story, you read it from your point-of-view and that affects how you "understand" it. If you read a newspaper, your point-of-view on what has happened is shaped by who you are and what you have experienced. The same person at different ages "sees" the meaning differently. Age, gender, race, class, nationality, profession, - all these shape how textual (and visual) stories are "taken."

Both the law and science have implicitly known this since their inceptions. Language is slippery; that's the basis of rhetoric. The law tries to be absolutely clear, and lawyers and judges make their livings interpreting it. The rigidities and formulas of scientific writing are simply attempts to avoid multiple interpretations.

I remember teaching my classes that a business letter that had more than one possible interpretation was poorly written, and that a poem or story that had only one interpretation possible was poorly written. Different writing for different purposes, and in certain situations being open to interpretation is a strength not a weakness.

So readers have always and will always interpret text, and thus have always and will always have different readings. It's inevitable. The questions the postmoderns ask us to reflect on, as I understand them, are "Do I understand myself to be an interpreter and not the sole correct authority?" and "How do we decide who, and on what basis, can be an authority whose interpretation can be trusted/allowed/accepted?"

In this age of doubt, litigation, individualism, those are confounding questions.

Representation and Replication

Sometime in the 1600s, the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, and mass replication of text became possible. Suddenly humanity was on a new path. Previously hand-copied books were of necessity rare, and those who could read were also rare. Caxton moved the printed page from posters into books, and reading objects became more complex. In western culture, the Bible and a few other books had been preserved and studied, but that kind of studying was, in many ways, more like meditation, like lectio divina, rather than what we would call reading today.

The association of reading with the Bible and the development of Protestantism led to a immense campaign for universal literacy - everyone should be able to read so they could read the Bible. At the same time, science was developing, as the spread of reading and books led to the spread of knowledge and/or ideas about what constituted knowledge. Reading became increasingly prevalent and important because of the exact and widespread replication of textual objects, that is, books.

This incremental growth in reading and readers had an interesting impact on readers. They disagreed with each other about what the text "meant." And therein lies my next snippit.

I'm an Owner!

Long time, no whatever, write and read, I guess. I been existing (and I do mean "existing") without a computer of my own. Used my husband's till he got home from his trip. Then used the old IBM clunker in his study, and the open access one in the part-time teacher's lounge. Looking up my mail in two different webmails was awkward and inefficient, so I didn't look as often. Writing without access to all my files was a pain. Printing up my thesis on Jim's computer kept him from using it to edit, so I felt pressured and guilty. All-in-all, I felt limited and even lonely without my computer prosthesis.

Now I have my very own iBook G4, and it's almost fully set up to my desire. I still have a couple of things to sort out, but I can write emails, and get emails without fussing with webmails. I can write up documents. I have PowerPoint problems, but I'm sure I can get that worked out. I like the keyboard, and I love the interface. At the moment, I am a happy camper, especially because I can now get back to writing here!

Needing Help!!!

So I decided to ignore my other responsibilities and focus on editing my thesis so I could get it done before I have to return this computer. I was working my way diligently through my edits when I noticed that a page reference was missing. I knew what the page was from my edited copy to I just added it in. Then I noticed another page reference was missing so I tried to get into "Edit Citations" to see if I had added it, but, although there was a space before the period, the computer said there wasn't a citation there to edit. When I clicked on a citation that included the author's name and the publishing date, but not the page, there, in the editing field, was the page reference.

I checked several others. Consistently the page references weren't showing in the document but had been added in the editing field. What-to-do? What-to-do? After much exploring and manual reading, it seemed to me that it must be something to do with Output Styles. So repeatedly I tried to open APA 5. The little icon that signals that something is opening appears then a quick flash of a field which immediately disappears. So I can't change anything to get the pages to show. Which means I have a problem because I have to have the pages references there when I print up the next version for my final committee meeting.

I use Google to get to EndNote, find "Technical Support" and describe the problem. The page says that they guarantee a response within 3 working days. That should be just about when I have to turn this computer back to its owner.

I'm tired of fighting with software!!!!!

Working at Work Avoidance

The first time I heard about EndNote I was fascinated. A software that does all the finicky detail work of citing and building a bibliography! I was immediately sold. As soon as I was back at school, despite the cost, I picked up a student version. Anything to free myself from bibliographic hell.

For a long time I was enthralled by filling out the reference cards, citing while I wrote, and then checking my References which kept magically growing. And EndNote took care of the nasty APA details. I did have a few problems. I'm a tad manual-adverse and figuring out some of the steps I had to take took some time. By-and-large, though, I was happy with the way EndNote worked.

Then the first of my computer migrations happened, and I had to migrate across platforms. To keep using EndNote I had to purchase a Mac upgrade for my Windows version. What a messy experience! I emailed and ordered it from a pleasant memail help-person. First he sent me a Windows upgrade, then a Mac 5 for OS 9, and finally, finally EndNote 6 for OS X. Lots of emailing there and the guy was apologetic about the confusion and I got to keep the various CDs and manuals.

I'm a bit detail adverse too, and I avoided learning about APA, figuring the software would take care of all that for me. Luckily my thesis supervisor is kind and supportive. As he told me things like, no author's name here, and page number there, I worked with the manual enough to figure it out a little bit here and a little bit there. Worked for me.

It took me a while to figure out how important the library is, and that an alias is not a library. I did lose one version of my thesis library, but a backup existed and I was able to get it and add in the references I'd lost. It wasn't too bad, except for the anxiety attach I had until I got the backup installed. So, ... I learned a lot.

Then I had to move to another Mac, an iBook, and now I'm back to a second G4. The good news is my institution issues me computers; the bad news is there's a lot of change. As a result, the good news is, I am forced to learn a lot. Now I am squatting temporarily on my mate's G4 while he's travelling. While I was trying to edit my thesis, EndNote would either not open, or "unexpectedly quit" over and over and over. I tried all kinds of variations; nothing worked. But all the elements showed up in Word undertools and in the icon bar. They just wouldn't open.

I began feeling a bit anxious. I pulled out the manual. Didn't find it helpful. I uninstalled and reinstalled the program. Still kept quitting. Went to the EndNote site, and found the FAQ. After stumbling through the list of questions for a while, I found one that seemed to fit. It told me to get a free download to update EndNote 6 for OS X. I did, and in one of the most common of the current cliches, the rest is history. More or less.

On the computer previous to this one, the iBook, EndNote developed the twitch of whenever I put in a citation, the rainbow ball would spin and spin, then suddenly the last page of the references would be on the screen. I scroll back up to the page I was on and edit the citation, whereupon the same thing would happen. The bad news is this happens for every single citation. The good news is I'm mostly finished and don't have to add too many more citations. And the other good news is that I've learned how to use the scroll bar to find the heading and page number with it. Learning by accident.

So, is that work avoidance, or simply a different kind of work? Don't know, don't care, would rather play with the computer than work out where commas go and where periods go and type it all up manually.

I can cite while I write again and I know more about how to use EndNote. I'm sure I must be avoiding some work.

The Digital Disconnect

One of the things I've learned through putting up a few sites is that it is actually quick and easy to fix or update a single page, and then upload it to its site. You don't have to take months. I've also noticed that it's more interesting to create a new site than update an old one. Which may be why there's a lot of out-of-date stuff up there on the web. So what?

So an institution should figure out how to keep its web site up-to-date, especially when it comes to a page referring to someone who has died. I don't know why it has to be a secret who is in charge of getting the web changed when something has changed. The presisdent of the institution must have better things to do with his time than redirecting concerns about seriously out-of-date material to the one in charge of the technitions who will actually make the changes. Why don't institutional web sites encourage their employees to help them by having, in a prominent spot, an address where problems could be directed?

Why not use the interest of people in their part of the institution by encouraging their participation rather than discouraging them! I suspect that many people including managers have no idea how simple small changes are. It's part of the great digital disconnect where people who don't understand make decisions, or don't make decisions because they don't know how things work!

Okay, So Maybe It's Font Heck!

It's weird. My thesis prints up okay, and the larger size fonts look okay, but any font I try in the smaller sizes looks ugly and messy. It's a bit like a reversion to an earlier computer screen that doesn't look like the page it preludes. But it looks okay when printed, so that's what counts right now for me.

Rain and disappearing snow - the dirty end of winter.

There is such a wide range of computer knowledge around nowadays. Many of the people I'm supposed to work with just don't do computers, and what's available for them in the institution is old and unsupported. Yesterday, as I am (I hope temporarily) without computer at my institution, I went into a teacher "lounge" to use one of the computers. OS X was on the system, but everytime I tried to send a message in webmail on the school portal, both Internet Explorer and Safari would simply close. So I tried the other computer, and someone had shut it down and I have no idea what the user name and password are and who to ask. So I gave up and came home to my borrowed but wonderful machine.

At the same time, I know that a former supervisor (not mine) had very limited computer skills and at least two totally high end computers for his exclusive use. Status indicators rather than tools. Tant pis!

The whole question of learning and computers is both fascinating and central to our culture. How do we learn, and how do we learn to use computers to do what we want to and need to? How do we get techies to learn design and communication, and those who who have skills and knowledge to communicate to learn how to use the computer? No complete and perfect answer is posible, and the learner and the environment are as central as computer availability.

Stuck in Font Hell

How come a font that is supposed to be part of OS X is there in name only! How come my beautiful thesis looks stupid and ugly now! What do I have to do to get the font I want! I can't find it anywhere to download.

Got to go and keep on trying, until the call from the Oscars becomes impossible to ignore.

The Monstrous Aspect of Technology!

If I didn't love the computer so much I'd hate it. I crashed a Mac iBook! Didn't mean to, but apparently I drained the battery printing my 282 page document several times without always being plugged in. Then I put it to sleep before the battery had re-charged enough. Pop! and it went into a coma. Luckily the technician was smart and kind and rescued my my data onto 2CDs before performing hard-drive to hard-drive resusitation so I could hand it back into IT central. Now I'm writing on a borrowed computer, but hey, it's a PowerBook G4 and I love the feel of the keyboard.

What I really care about is a place to keep making adjustments on my thesis. So I borrowed this computer, after checking to see if it had Lucida Grande, the font I use most. I didn't think to check for Lucida Handwriting which I also use. I saw the words "Lucida Grande" in the list of fonts and assumed I was home free. Tonight when I finally got my EndNote properly installed (don't ask) and opened my thesis document, it looked funny. I looked at the font closely. It says "Lucida Grande" but it isn't. Not even close. And "Lucida Handwriting" isn't there at all.

There must be some way around this, but I keep remembering when I moved my thesis over from the IBM laptop to the first PowerBook and found that the Lucida fonts I'd been using weren't on the Mac. I had to reformat all my "voices." It took AGES! I liked the name Lucida, and the looks of Ludica Grande so I adapted to and adopted that BUT I really don't want to do that again.

I used the Minotaur at the centre of the technological labyrinth as a metaphor about learning to use the computer. The Minotaur was created out of a deep desire through the use of "technology:" the "blind" Daedalus built so Pasiphae could have her "way" with the white bull her husband had seized from Posidon. Now imprisoned by more Daedalus-built technology, the labyrinth, I was set to prove the Minotaur was wonderful and not a Monster. Now I'm not so sure.

Technology is wonderful until you have to deal with its montrous side, its difficulties.

Whoops!

Oh, well. some experiments do not totally work, as you can see below.

I will try again another day, another place.

An Experiment in Cutting & Pasting HTML

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style="font-weight: bold; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif;" size="+1">Playing with WYSIWYG Web Authoring and cut&paste of HTML

style="vertical-align: top; background-color: rgb(255, 204, 153);"> I went to a presentation today on using the Discussions feature of WebCT. It was fascinating. But what I really loved and what I was really fascinated by was the possibility of cutting and pasting HTML code created in a WYSIWYG course authoring program, in this case Mozillas Composer. I realized that I could use the same feature in my blog, as Im displaying here. I am on a different computer which for some reason does not show an apostrophe for the apostrophe key, but an e with an accent, so I have to write this with no apostrophes or quotation marks until I figure out how to fix it. I had a problem with the computer I was using and a wonderful (I hope) technician says he has saved all my data. I will find out for sure tomorrow. For now, I am playing with this other computer, which belongs to the person I live with who is currently on the other side of the world, in India, innoculating children against polio as part of the Rotory campaign to eradicate polio worldwide. So here is my experiment; let us see how it works!

The Details, the Details!

I'm having trouble stopping making adjustments to my thesis, and the printing process is driving me crazy. After deciding to ignore the rule about using small roman numerals for the first section and printing up one copy, I set to work and figured out how to do that, so I'm keeping that first copy for myself, and will just write in the correct pagination. Since then, with the colour cartridge running out and then the black cartridge running out twice, I've had to deal with delays and irritations!

As well, I had to print up a bunch of separate pages to replace the ones that were messed up colour-wise during the last bit of the colour cartridge. After I put those into that copy, I realized that there were extra blank pages and I had better check through page-by-page. I hate that kind of detail! But I did it.

Then I realized that the next copy was significantly thinner than the others. Page-by-page checking showed that somehow the missing pages that I had printed up had been left out of this printing!!! So, more individual pages printed up.

Then I got the three copies I had cerloxed and took two into my supervisor's office, one for him, and one for another committee member; the one for the external, I'll take in on Thursday when I have a class, and I'll courier the fourth to my other committee member.

This part of the thesis journey is like being at the airport on the way home. After planning, travelling, holidaying and then packing for the return, I am waiting to have my baggage checked and be called to board the plane - the slowest and most boring/irritating part of the process. But there's no escaping it, so I better find a way to make meaning from it.

Just Abandon It!

A piece of writing is never finished; it is merely abandoned. I can't remember who said that but it is definitely true. I keep fiddling with it. I just change that phrase. Then I remember something my supervisor said and change something else. I get bugged by the numbering and spend a few hours figuring out how to start with small roman numerals then switch to Arabic. I finally got it figured out and printed up the next two copies. That felt good. It took about a day each at the speed my printer goes, and partway through the third copy, the colour started changing and I had to get a new colour cartridge.

So here I am printing up my supposedly finished thesis, fiddling with it, and then getting the numbers done right. Then, in checking for what pages I'll have to reprint to get the colour right, I discover an almost blank page where the picture has shifted right in the middle of the document. I don't want to reprint all the second halves. I think. Finally I decide to add a little bit more text and another picture so I will have the right page number when the next chapter starts.

At this point I'm getting tired and irritated with the thesis and printing it up, and I know what I should have done; I should have printed up a (cheap) non-colour copy (commercially and quickly) and checked and edited it carefully before I printed up the colour ones. Next time. That's one reason I really like web pages; they're so easy to correct and upload. Paper has to be replaced after any corrections.

Today I printed up the fourth copy, and I think it's okay. I don't have the energy to check at this point, but I will print myself up a copy before the oral and go over it very carefully. Tomorrow I will get all four copies cerloxed and take three of the copies in and give to my supervisor so he can distribute them. I'll courier the fourth to my other committee member myself.

I haven't heard back from anybody about the dates for the oral. I hope I do soon, but I am impatient.

I heard Dr. Jonathan Butler speak on suffering today. Interesting.

How Important is the Numbering?

I finished my thesis today. Wrote out the Abstract. Generated the Table of Figures. Wrote out the Acknowledgements and the Dedication. All finished!!!! And I start printing the whole thing out - making 4 copies - as soon as I finish this blog. On a home printer that takes a while per page. I expect to take hours and perhaps days getting this all done.

I didn't follow the instructions concerning the numbering. I've had trouble adding and or changing the numbering before, and don't want to risk a catastrophic collapse of my file. Is that silly paranoia? I have a copy attached to a message, safe in cyberspace, and a copy burned on a disk. Maybe I should give it a try?

I dreamed about returning to work last night. I was in a new office with a bed in it. What does that mean? It was rather barren and people from another department that I "knew" - in the dream but not in life - kept coming in because this was their office too. There was one guy, and he was really upset because it was going to be a noisy place and could only work where it was quiet. I offered to get the bed moved out and give him whatever space he wanted in the area I had been in. Is that my "male energy" and is he a whiner who gets women to give him what he want? Or does dream interpretation not work that way? I don't know. I am just worried about what will happen when I go back I guess.

My mate/significant other/life partner/ whatever leave for foreign climes tomorrow for a month. I'm curious about how I will react and feel; guess I'll be finding out soon.

Do Introverts Read More?

I've been wondering if being an introvert is part of why I read so much. It would be a logical assumption. If you enjoy people only in small doses, and you like being by yourself (and have a limited interest in TV) reading would be the perfect way of spending time. I've been able to figure this out because only some of my reading is "status" reading. I have a taste for pulp fiction. No, I have a need for non-challenging, low-brow reading.

When I am overstimulated by people or fraught events, I calm down by losing myself in a book with a strong and familiar plot. Going over the same ground plot-wise, with different details and costumes, takes all the chaotic feelings and thoughts and smoothes them into a meditative peacefulness, and then I can sleep.

I read interesting, challenging informative books during the day, and pulp in the evening and sometimes late into the night. I don't read just to learn more; I read to affect my affect. (Sorry, couldn't resist play with the verb and the noun which look alike but are pronounced differently!) I read because it's an enjoyable way to spend time, not to benefit or boast. (I often, as here, don't reveal exactly what kind of pulp fiction I indulge in. Lots of judgmental attitudes here, eh?) Knowing that I read for reasons that don't get me "points' in the status game is what caused me to wonder if reading is a function of my being an introvert. Guess I'll never know unless someone sends me some stories about why they read or some research data.

Polishing the Jewel

I've been writing a thesis for a year and a half, and incubating it for at least 20 years. Now I have been given the final edits to deal with, and they will make it stronger and clearer. Part of what I am doing is creating an exploration of the semiotic possibilities of writing text using a word processor. We are years beyond the typewriter, but still trapped in that semiotic space. I want to move beyond barren black text on white pages with font choices treated as irrelevant.

I want to bring the semiotic choices of writing with a word processor more clearly into view; I think this is another dimension of reading text. There are words strung together, then there is the appearance of the text and what that adds to the meaning. There is a dimension beyond this, and that is when text and meaning move onto the computer screen and hyperlinking, audio, and moving images are added in. This is not the third dimension, but something that offers infinitely more choices and possibilities to the authors and readers. This blog is a tiny step in that direction, learning enough of how to manipulate HTML to choose the colours I want and adding the occasional hyperlink.

But before I move into that larger and more complex semiotic space, I must complete my artfully shaped study of how I got to where I am now, my thesis.

Hearts and Chocolate

Red everywhere and hearts. St. Valentine's Day must be approaching and the information is semiotically omnipresent. Why? Because it's a commercial holiday, a glorification of romantic love. Red for passion and hearts to signify love. And women's underwear to suggest sexuality, which is now read as central to Valentine's Day.

I have read that originally St. Valentine had nothing to do with sexuality and passion, that the love being referred to was compassion, that he gave his coat to a poor homeless person and froze to death himself. How come the semiotic meaning of St. Valentine has shifted so radically?

My first impulse is to blame big business and commercial interests, but I think the semiotic shift pre-dates that. Maybe I'm confusing it with another holiday, but didn't Shakespeare have a Valentine's Day song in one of his plays? I remember my shock when I realized what the lyrics, "Let in a maid that out a maid never departed more," meant, a sad or cynical lament for lost virginity. Not really romantic. No hearts, flowers, or chocolate, and just the scarlet of a "scarlet woman", or maybe the brownish red of virgin blood. The red roses of passion replacing the bloodless white roses of purity - symbolism is such a rich aspect of how we think and understand.

When I was younger I thought to be pure and objective in my thinking I had to excise corrupted and corrupting symbols from my heart-mind. Now I know that I can't do that. I can only look at them and see what they say to me and the others who surround me. Then, perhaps, I can define them slightly differently and shift their meaning somewhat.

It's just a day. It's just a commercial shill. It's just a story from church history. It's just a marker Shakespeare used to delineate the paradox of passion which often, sadly, lacks the "com" prefix. It's just an appeal covering a multitude of hungers, for the love that sees us, for the comfort and pleasure of the body that moves with and through the heart, for the sign that shows others that we are loved and lovable, for the sign that tells us that we are indeed lovable. How silly to make it important. How intensely inevitable its importance is.

Offer compassion to others.

Symbols and Meaning

We are a species who live through meaning. We use symbols to tie things, ideas, concepts, feelings etc. together. This means that; that means something else.There is a sound that matches a bunch of squiggles (called "letters") that "points to" something else. A sound symbol = a visual symbol = a "real" thing or feeling or concept, which may "stand for" something else which some of us may associate with something different again. This is how we communicate?!?

On CBC News tonight, a story about teaching infants who aren't deaf to sign because they can communicate through signing at 8 or 9 months, much before they can use their tongue and lips to enunciate words. Human children can use language before they can talk; they can sign at a very young age. Think of those months of frustration before we could get our parents and others to understand what we wanted, even though we had language tools.

There is some speculation that this early "languaging" can affect the brain and make kids smarter. The researcher warns that parents who take the trouble to learn and teach signing to their kids are also providing a rich environment otherwise. So the kids who were signed with at an early age having higher I.Q.s than the non-signing kids may simply be the result of having a richer environment and more parental attention.

What I find truly fascinating is how early and intense our need to use symbols for communicating is. Humans are the species who connect. We link. We construct meaning. We try to share meanings and symbols. We connect sounds with things to connect what we "think" with other humans. We connect in order to connect. Meaning is what we live for and through.

And it is never a simple one-to-one connection. There are tones, nuances, hidden links, and surprising new readings - because we can't read each other's minds. If we are both "coming from the same place" we may be able to communicate very thoroughly with very few words and/or signs. Vygotsky, I think, points out that couples who have long been together can sometimes know what their partners are thinking with almost no overt communication, but that is knowledge of the person and the situation more than "mind-reading."

Post-modernism, as I understand it, is fascinated by how we create meaning, how we communicate. The first book that really helped me understand how people use language was Word Play by Peter Farb, and what I remember most clearly is his example of how an authority figure could use language to demean to hold power. When someone implicitly "defines the situation" they rule. The "other" is ruled by the assumptions established.

Two people, angry at each other - Who is the aggressor? The one who tells about how the other hurt her feelings, or the other who is surprised by the accusations which don't match her memory of what happened? Is it simply a misunderstanding or is the one presenting herself as the victim of the other making a rather nasty power play? Who is the aggressor, the one who labels the other as an aggressor or the accuser? One signals innocence, and the other is the screen on which she projects her malevolence.

"She doth protest too much."

Symbols and interpretation = meaning, which causes actions which create more use of symbols and continuing interpretations, which all adds up to stories and plots.

Shifting Semiosis

Just in case you were wondering my title means and why I chose to use it - here's some info.

I've just spent a couple of years studying arts-based educational research, narrative inquiry, postmodern thought, and the pedagogical use of technology. Great fun, and fascinating. Part of what I discovered was that the visual aspect of text, and the visuals with text were increasingly a significant part of what readers desired, and what technology gives us the capacity to produce. With word-processing I can use all different styles and sizes of font, in all kinds of colours, plus I can easily find and/or adapt and/or create images to add. Great on paper, even more intense on the screen.

Over many years I had kept hearing/reading the word "semiotic" and wasn't sure what it meant. I did my usual research, and just tried to guess the meaning from the context. At one point I think I even looked it up. - http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=semiotic

It seemed to be important to all those academics who talk in code, but I got my first real grasp of the meaning when someone told me that reading a person's clothes and appearance was using semiotics to understand what they were saying about who they are.

In the late Sixties, early Seventies, long hair on young guys meant they were hippies and therefore girls could trust them. By the end of the Seventies, the semiotics had shifted, and long hair on guys usually meant they were greasers or bikers, and only foolish girls would risk trusting them. We don't wear uniforms, but we do wear costumes that identify us. Look at a teen's clothes and you can figure out their taste in music, usually.

Well it's the same with the appearance of text on the page and screen. Font style and size and colour say something to readers before they actually start reading the words. Readers have expectations and are starting to establish their interpretation of the meaning of the text before they decode even one word. Here's an example; just glance but don't read what follows. What is it?

she looks, listens, but doesn't see
and doesn't feel. She trusts whispers,
and ignores my eyes.

i can't change another's heart,
or open her eyes.

Did you say or think "poem?" You made that judgment simply from the layout of the words. You made a rhetorical recognition and oriented yourself to continue reading through that lens.

Back to "Shifting Semiosis." I believe that our world culture is undergoing a profound perceptual shift. Photography, film, and recorded sound have changed how we perceive. Sight and sound are no longer either "real" and "present" in a "natural" way. Now they can be shaped, altered deliberately, artistically, to have an impact on how we understand the world to be. Writing in a black font gave words a virtually invisible embodiment, and "objective" power, now shaped images and manipulated sound have that power. If we want to be able to "see" and "hear" as clearly as possible when standing in an embodied position, we have to learn how to see what we see and hear what we hear.

By using the capacities of the word processor (and printers), we can play with the appearance of text. This is good because it's a small way to help ourselves and our readers "read" with more awareness. Or so I believe.

In this era while our semiosis is shifting, playing with text and the appearance of text is a way to stay alive to the changes in how we use and read signs to play with meaning.

Sometimes What You See Isn't What Others Get!

So yesterday I had some time to spare at the school where I study, as opposed to the school where I teach. So I decided to work on my blog in their computer lab. The only Macs they had were OS 9 or whatever you call the OS before OS X, but they were pretty colours. I sat down at one of the hot pink ones and opened Netscape, but it was a really old Netscape, one with a lighthouse and something curling around it as an icon. I ignored that and got myself to the "Create New Post" area and began writing.

I'm still getting used to writing knowing that although no one seems to be looking at my blog, people might, and what do I want to be public about. And yesterday I had a strange keyboard, and even though it's still QWERTY, my fingers aren't as intuitive. So I was making strange on about two levels, but I wrote and enjoyed it.

The screen didn't have the bold, italics, link, and spell check icons that exist on my up-to-date Netscape at home, but I figured I can manage without them by using my limited HTML and my own double-checking of my spelling. That was okay. And it was okay that I was writing in a field with a different font and different coloured-font than would appear on the screen. I've learned to be used to that. But what I didn't expect, especially as I had been extolling my design choices, was that the screen would look very different than what I saw on my home screen.

The title background was much smaller and an ugly tone of the colour. There was no side frame and the links were messily displayed below all my entries. The font was different, and the width of the text, something I want to be no wider than the text in a normal-sized hard-covered book, went all across the screen. It looked ugly and amateurish. I was so disappointed.

I am assuming that the old version of Netscape was the source of the problem. What I don't understand is why the school where I study hadn't updated their version. Afterall, it can be downloaded for free. I don't know enough technically to understand if they can't because of the old OS, which does cost money to update, or because no one ever sits down and does the downloading.

I guess I'm spoiled where I teach because our laptops are kept at least up to the next to the most recent versions of software, so I'm used to a fairly current workspace. And maybe I should count my blessings and be grateful. It is so much easier to learn in an up-to-date environment with support easily accessible.

Aesthetic Learning

So I spent hours last night playing with my blog. I changed templates a couple of times, then when I settled on one that kept my text relatively narrow, within the glance range for reading, I changed all the colours. That was fun and I love the result. I used QuickColor - http://kohaistyle.com/scripts/quickcolor/ - to find and chose harmonizing colours. I'll probably do it again in a few days. Maybe move from purples to reds, and gain more control over altering the code in the template. It's all fun.

So colour is really important to me, and text-breaks, so that the screen looks readable, not like a massive brick wall to be loosened and decoded. And font, too. Is this font too big? Does it make what I'm writing look childish? I want to be readable and respected, taken seriously. I realize I'm already challenging that by writing in dark purple, but I love the colour and it's dark enough to be pass for "dark" rather than "purple." Many people "read" purple semiotically and subconsciously see i t as revealling something about the character of the writer.

Do you?

Have you figured out anything about who I am?

• gender;
  
• age;
  
• economic status;
  
• educational level;
  
• nationality;
  
• computer knowledge; and/or
  
• character?
  

What do you base those assumptions on? Can you identify where you find the clues?

That's it for today, on a computer in the school lab, on an unfamiliar computer platform.

How Visual is Text, and Why?

So I sucessfully changed my blog's colour. Does it say more? Is it more me? I think so.

I'm using this blog as a learning project and each day hope to both post and make new changes in the appearance and/or functionality of the blog. I have never liked orange and even the amber shades don't really appeal to me. I have always, and I mean always, going back to at least being four years old, loved many of the purple shades. The one I chose I find aesthetically satisfying. Plus there's the satisfaction of finally figuring out where in the template to add in the right numbers to get what I wanted.

I am not from the technical end of learning the computer; HTML is not a natural language for me. I am from the communication and aesthetic crowd, and I only learn what technical stuff I have to be able to do what I want. My one advantage is that I have a good ability at seeing possibilities. Then I'm stuck with figuring out the technical aspects that I have to deal with and/or learn in order to achieve what I want. It's phenomenologically difficult.

I find code truly ugly and difficult to read; possibly being slightly dyslexic has added to this. However, from time to time I have tried to learn a little when I really wanted to do something and knew that there is a way, using HTML. For example, when I saw a fellow teacher (or "professor" as we were designated in one round of contract bargaining in my system) when I saw this fellow teacher use bullets in her WebCT postings, I was driven to learn the HTML for bullets. (I love bullets; they force information into such neat clear packages.)

Any techies out there are probably laughing at such a minor piece of learning, but hey, I'm honest and it was another little piece of knowhow acquired.

Anyway, to change the colour of my blog,

• I found out how to get to the code;
  
• I found out the RGB code for the colour I wanted;
  
• I tried out that code where I thought it belonged in the HTML, using cut and paste;
  
• I checked the preview to see if the colour of the title had worked; and
  
• I reversed the edit and then repeated that step until I got the title's colour changed.
  

A minor step (would the techies please stop laughing!) but it got me there, and made me feel happy, and, yes, smart.

Two-Handed Writing

I used to be a handwriter, squeezing out poems and plans, wishing I could type or get printed, but knowing that would never happen. Then I was pushed into learning about linguistics and how people learn to write and think about writing. At the same time, I decided to use the Bank Street Writer word pro myself so I could get used to it, and know enough about it to use with writing-phobic students. I discovered my own prose voice; I discovered writing my way.

Now I look at screens and pages and think about the text interface, and how appearance communicates and how images are increasingly central in our culture. I wonder when audio will be recognized. I wonder how all this affects education and, more importantly, learning.