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One of the slides Steve Jobs showed has this on it:

iPad: Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price. Starting at $499.

I think that’s absolutely true. I’ve been lusting for the iPad for years.

I’ve tried to be funny about it, and patient, but this is exactly what I want. I mostly want it to read ebooks; I’m delighted that most iPhone applications will work well, and I’ve been assured by the developers of some of my favorite applications for reading stuff on the iPhone that they are going to support the larger screen asap. You can find Apple’s official iPad site here.

For those of you in a cave, here are the basics:

• 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
• 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch
• 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chipWireless and Cellular
• Wi-Fi model
• Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n)
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology
• Digital compass

The Wifi Model comes out around the end of March, world wide; the G3 + WiFi about a month after that. In terms of pricing, the basic Wifi model with 16GB is $499.00. The 32 GB model is $599, and the 64 GB iPad is $699.00. When the 3G + WiFi models emerge, they’ll each be $130.00 more. There are two prepaid data plans from AT and T; 250MB/month for $14.99, or unlimited for $29.99.

Apple’s own accessories include a dockable keyboard, and a case.

As for me, I’d line up right now to buy one. I note that I’m not a “Apple released it; I gotta buy it” sort. The only Apple products I ever bought on initial release or earlier were my first generation 5 gig iPod (which still works, thank you very much) and my iPhone, which yes, I lined up to get. I’d buy the iPad now, were the cash available. I note, by the way, I wasn’t all that far off from what they released in this parody post from last year. I’d still like 180GB storage, and FireWire, but I’m awfully happy with what they’ve done. The two things that genuinely surprised me are the iBooks application and ebook store, and the iWork for iPhone. That’s sweet. I’m awfully excited, and off to learn more about ePub as an ebook file format; what I remember of it is that it’s not very good at internal links, images, or media handling. I’m still waiting for a media rich ebook that can do what Voyager did back in 1994 with MacBeth. I think this might be the best device I’ve seen for high quality media rich hypertext ebooks.

I began this blog as a way to learn about blogs and blogging for instruction and scholarly interaction and outreach. My first post is here, on blogging and what it is and what it might be good for.

I began this blog using Blogger, which I quite liked, and still like, but thought I’d try using Radio, lured in part by teh Categories option. Using Radio was pretty awful. The support was non existent, the only good documentation was written by a horribly treated user, and the Mac UI was, I think, designed by someone who thought it was Windows with prettier colors.

I moved to MovableType, and liked it much better, for a while, but then Six Apart got very odd about pricing, and the updates kept breaking previous templates, so I moved to WordPress, and created lisaspangenberg.com as a “professional” site. I’ve also slightly changed the purpose of this blog; IT began out of my interest in Instructional Technology. I’d been the Instructional Technology Coordinator at UCLA’s Humanities Division for several years, working with LMSs (WebCT) and having determined that WebCT and Blackboard were both hideously awful, I wanted to try using opensource CMS and blogging systems instead because the tended to have decent UIs, support, and they actually worked.

Since then, I’ve finished my Ph.D., I’ve used Blogger and LiveJournal and WordPress for teaching, and worked in a software production environment creating and managing the work flow for content-driven media-rich brain games for seniors. I’ve tech edited a stack of consumer Mac books, been a super moderator and sys admin for a very large and active writers’ forum (Absolute Write; if you write you should go there and look around) and blogged for a lot of different publishers and companies.

My scope for this blog has consequently changed. So has the title. IT: Technology, Language and Culture.

Thanks guys, all you people writing about technology and language and culture and pedagogy, I’ve learned a lot from you. I’m looking forward to another eight years.

As educators, we spend a great deal of time trying to teach students how to research, how to use sources, and, perhaps most importantly of all, how to tell a good source from a bad one. I know how to help students do this in person, where we can work with lots of practical examples; I used to think it was possible to actively teach source evaluation online. I’ve created guides and handouts on source evaluation, as well as linked to other guides, like this one on “Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask” from UC Berkeley.

Of late, I’ve grown less sure that it’s possible to teach resource evaluation remotely, and more sure that it’s a skill that many people desperately need.

I’ve spent the last year working as a paid blogger. I’m writing about a variety of subjects in which I have some expertise, and I’m blogging much as I do on my own sites. I strive for accuracy and specificity, I provide citations, and I link to solid sources.

But my peers are much less likely to link to sources, or provide citations; and when they do link to a source, more often than not, it’s one that I’d identify as a resource to avoid. I note that most, if not all, my blogging colleagues are college educated, and many have graduate degrees. But increasingly, I’m noticing not only my colleagues’ blog posts have citation problems, but others’ blog posts and articles by professional journalists (both on line and in print), and discussion forum posts that demonstrate that the writers can’t actually tell if a resource is decent, or utter crap.

Here’s an example of a source a fellow paid blogger linked to in a post about Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The piece “Frankenstein: Themes, Images and Metaphor Birth, Biology and the Feminist Angle in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” is from a Suite 101 site; pretty much anyone who is functionally literate in English can (and does) post on Suite 101. That’s generally true of most content sites, and I’m not meaning that as a slam; I think it’s a virtue. That said, there are problems with treating all content, from all sources, as equally valid. This piece opens with this sentences:

In 1818 Shelley created a much loved Gothic novel, Frankenstein, which she would use as a medium to present her ideas and thoughts on birth, biology and feminism. Birth is, for most women, considered to be one of the most important, precious and life-changing event ever to be experienced. Mary Shelley, in her novel Frankenstein took this theme and distorted it in order to produce one of the most famous gothic novels ever written.

There are some minor infelicities; much-loved needs a hyphen, Frankenstein isn’t the actual title of the novel, nor is it italicized as a title. But the real problem is that the ideas are trite, and that they are expressed as a string of prepositional phrases. There’s the ugly duplication in “ideas and thoughts,” and a fair amount of “hesitation” padding—“for most women,” “considered to be,” and then more synonym phrases—“precious and life-changing event ever to be experienced.”

And of course, there’s the paucity of thought inherent in the assertion itself—and the disconcerting agreement problem inherent in “considered to be one of the most” to modify “event,” in the singular.

No one is perfect, and heaven knows, I can’t spell or proof my own prose. I make mistakes all the time. But those two sentences were bad enough, given the absence of content, that I read them and wondered “who wrote this?”

The author is a grad student enrolled in a Comparative Literature M.A. program in London.

In other words, if you don’t know enough about Mary Shelley or her novel to realize that the piece is stupid, if you aren’t a sophisticated enough reader to know that the English is less than acceptable in terms of basic grammar and syntax (never mind style), then the author appears to have legitimate “credentials.”

I’m also noticing another issue related to an inability to evaluate a source; a phenomenon that researchers call the Dunning-Kruger Effect; that’s when “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it” (Kruger, Justin and David Dunning. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 77 no. 6 (1999): 1121–34). Essentially, as blogger Patrick Nielsen Hayden notes (quoting Kieran Healy):

[A]s a famous paper by Kruger and Dunning showed, people who are bad at what they do are generally also incapable of understanding that they suck&hmdasand this directly contributes to inflated self-perception. So, incompetence tends to make people cocky and people prefer cocky judgements over demonstrated expertise, which is pretty much the worst of both worlds.

On a community forum post recently, a mother explaining why she is against vaccination for her kids wrote:

I’ve read over thousands of pages of actual studies that were conducted on the individual adjuvents and attenuated viruses and bacterials. History of vaccines, of disease, demographics with a medical jargon book at hand if I didn’t understand something. I’ve read all the inserts to the vaccines, I’ve watched the vaccine (aka drug companies) companies. I’ve come to my conclusion that vaccination is not for me or mine.

This is someone who thinks Internet research—research she can’t understand without a specialized dictionary—gives her the same sort of qualifications as someone with an M.D. One reason I know that she isn’t an M.D. is that she gets basic science facts wrong, repeatedly, refers to outdated descriptions of how vaccinations are made, and thinks this site is a medically researched and scientifically valid site.

I don’t really have a solution on an individual level. But I do think one of the things we can do, all of us, as writers and educators, is keep providing better sources, better links and as kindly and gently as possible, point out why a particular citation is less than respectable. At least that way, by linking to good sources, we’ll eventually drive the lesser citations down in search engine rankings.

Michael Cohen’s new edition of Take Control of Syncing Data in Leopard is out. You can buy and download the .pdf book from the Take Control site here. These are absolutely the best designed .pdfs of any sort I’ve every seen, and this particular book is a lucid easy to follow step by step guide to controling the way your synchable data moves between your Macs and other devices—including iPhones, iPods, PDAs and cell phones. This is a completely revised edition, from the ground up. You can buy the book for $10.00

You can read all about it here, and download a sample here.

Tony Woodlief has written a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, opinion piece about why he and his spouse have chosen to homeschool their children. He writes, in part:

The reason we’ve broken with tradition, or perhaps reverted to a deeper tradition, is not because we oppose sex education, or because we think their egos are too tender for public schools. It’s because we can do a superior job of educating our children. We want to cultivate in them an intellectual breadth and curiosity that public schools no longer offer.

Somewhere there is now an indignant teacher typing an email to instruct me about his profession’s nobility. Perhaps some public schools educate children in multiple languages and musical instruments, have them reading classic literature by age seven, offer intensive studies of math, science, logic, and history, and coach them in public speaking and writing. The thing is, I don’t know where those schools are.

I think were I to have children, I’d want to do much the same thing. Not so much because my own K-12 experience was mostly horrendous, but because of the education I received from my over-educated, intellectually curious book-loving parents. They encouraged me, and provoked me, and fed my brain and mind, while most of the time I was, quite honestly, just parked in a holding pattern by well-meaning but over-worked teachers. (Granted, there were some exceptions: Mr. Muchnick, and Virgina Hall, to name two).

Had I stayed in high school, I would have graduated in 1980. My high school was, and is, one of the better ones in N.H., but I was essentially warehoused. I spent every spare moment in the library, and in the Keene Public Library, the tiny Westmoreland public library, the Brattleboro Public Library . . . not to mention reading pretty much everything else I got my eyes near, and being regularly “fed” books by my older siblings.

But, for a variety of reasons, despite some wonderful teachers, like Mr. Jobin, endlessly patient in French, I was invisible in high school; my guidance counselor told me that I wasn’t college material, and suggested I attend Colby Sawyer for a secretarial degree, where I could meet a nice young doctor from Dartmouth.

It’s much worse now, where “No child left behind” has frequently resulted in a cult of mediocrity.

Go read what Woodlief has to say. He makes a lot of sense.

My friend Dawn also works in IT. We both have had badges to wear at work, and we both attend conferences, where you also wear badges. Mostly the badges are on fiber-lanyards, and whether you’re at a jeans-and-t-shirt SF con, or IT conference, you look like a dork. And if you’re wearing business wear, a lanyard pretty much destroys your professional look. Dawn, a beader, has come up with a nifty alternative: beaded badge lanyards. Dawn hand-makes and custom designs necklaces using a variety of natural precious and semi-precious stones, glass, crystal, and metal beads. The necklaces can be easily, and quickly transformed into badge lanyards, and then back to a necklace again. You can even purchase (or commission) matching bracelets and earrings. What’s cool is that there are a number of different lanyard-and-badge-holder styles, including one with a retractor for swipe cards. She makes eye-glass chains too.

Do go look at Dawn’s Etsy store, and her Flickr pages. There’s something for every taste, style, and budget, and it’s not too soon for your holiday shopping.

James D. Macdonald, SF author and exceedingly experienced online moderator (remember Yog Sysop? That’s him) offers some rules for moderation under the heading:

Here’s what moderators need to know:

• a) Sure, there’s freedom of speech. Anyone who wants it can go start their own blog. On Yog’s board, Yog’s whim is law.
• b) Yog is an ancient ghod of chaos and evil. And he doesn’t like people very much.
• c) Moderation is a subjective art, and the moderator is always right.
• d) The moderator may have minions. They need to have a private area where they keep the buckets of Thorazine and the cold-frosty bottles of cow snot.
• e) The minions speak with the voice of Yog. Yog backs his minions up.
• f) There is always someone awake, and in charge, when Yog isn’t around in person. The minions know who the Duty Yog is.
• g) If someone starts off as a spammer, troll, or flamer, he is a spammer, troll, or flamer forever and is liable to instant deletion/banning with no recourse and no appeal.
• h) If the moderator ever needs inspiration, he can re-read Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and recall that the posters are sinners and he is Ghod.
• i) Rules? In a knife fight? Yog and his minions have standards, but they don’t need to tell the posters, lest some of them attempt to game the system. Attempting to game the system is, all on its own, a deletable offense.
• j) ALL CAPS posts are deleted on sight, unread. Mostly ALL CAPS POSTS are ALL CAPS.
• k) Anyone who doesn’t space after punctuation marks is insane, and can be deleted/banned on sight.
• l) Personal attacks against Yog and his minions are ignored. Personal attacks against anyone else are deletable on sight.

See the original post at Making Light and be sure to read the comments, too.

Tor, my favorite fantasy/sf publisher, has just gone public with their new Web site, one that has been re-designed with community engagement with content as a core principle. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor, and one of the founding bloggers at Making Light, has a fabulous essay on blogging.

In the blog post Nielsen Hayden opens with this simple but elegant explanation of the core concept behind blogging and community content:

Effective blogging is a combination of good personal writing and smart party hosting. A good blog post can be a sentence long, or three pages long; what matters is that it encourages further conversation.

Go read the rest of his post; it’s one of the best meditations on blogging and digital communication I’ve ever read.

I’ve copied the following, with permission, from a post on an online forum. The original poster is a professional educator and adminstrator in a graduate program which relies on online instruction. I think the post asks some good questions.

It will come as no surprise to anyone here that the biggest challenge I face is not in finding excellent teachers who know their subject cold. Rather, it’s (you got it) finding people with all of that going for them who can write in the way that you have to in order to give of yourself, show yourself, online.

My big hiring mistakes have all had the same thing in common — they all glide around classrooms like they’ve spent a lifetime in the theater (i.e., they’re great “performers” and know their stuff so cold that they can hold students spellbound for three hours)… but ask them to commit that to paper, and it’s just no go. We’ve always given our own graduate faculty first crack at writing these courses… usually disastrous, because they’re as bad at writing what they do as they are good at doing it!

Asking for writing samples has been a waste of time… it’s just plain not the same genre, and there’s absolutely nothing to be gained from their last article in The Journal of American YouPickIts.

The same thing happens from time to time with the folks who tend the discussions in the class… they don’t know how to show or give themselves to students in their writing… and that’s what it takes when teaching and learning relationships have to happen and develop in print.

How can I “screen” those applicants with credentials and teaching success for their ability to function online, whose persona in print reflects an appreciation for the very specific art of being able to “talk” in black and white like they do in a classroom? Or am I doomed to a lifetime of having to endlessly edit the stuff of people who know something I need them to share, so that it doesn’t put my students into a coma?

What suggestions can we offer about finding applicants who will excel at online instruction?

Yes, I’ve changed blogging tools.

Again.

I began this blog in January of 2002, using Radio Userland; I eventually moved to MovableType, and now, I’m using WordPress.

I’ve also changed the location; I was over here, at digitalmedievalist.com, but I’m finally realizing I need to distinguish the scholarly me from the geek me, because it’s awfully confusing to would-be employers.