Process: one/day

Following Cole's lead, a little reflection about the One Post a Day project.

I agree with him in that it helps focus a concept to the point of sharing succinctly, but the down side I'd share is that I certainly have less time.

In fact, today's the first night in a week that I haven't had obligations other than this post. Well, I do, but they're not as pressing/scheduled as the others have been. Haven't even touched WoW in that time, in fact.

And I also suspect that quality suffers.

From memory, my blog output has generally been best when it's one or two a week. That gives me some time to percolate on a subject rather than just tossing it out there for the sake of having something up for the day.

And in fact, after the obligation of one-a-day is over, I suspect I'll take a hiatus to get things back to normal, and then try to go back to a schedule of that sort.

One a week is manageable. One a day is pressure, and it's not a good kind of pressure considering everything else I've got going on. But I've made it this far, so I'll (be trying to) finish out the month.

Geology and tech: the end is the beginning is the end

I think I prefaced over this last weekend that I wasn't going to have a theme with this entry in mind.

I started college as a geology major. Somewhat obviously, I didn't stick with it, but it's still a great interest of mine.

Some of you know and some of you don't that I have an MFA in Creative Writing. So a lot of my so-called "personal" reading is actually keeping up on that end of things for me.

And to combine both interests, I recently read Threshold, by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's very much in a genre I used to write--a pseudo-magical realism, if magical realism in literature could be divorced from its Latin American roots (which it can't be, really). It starts out gritty, modern, and then wanders gently into science, myth, urban legend, and a particular superstitious nature you find in the south.

But my main point in addressing the experience of reading this book was the following passage, voiced by our narrator, Chance, who was in college as a geology major at the time:

"Can you think of anything else I could do with my life that could ever possibly be half this splendid, half this important? I'm learning to read, Deke, and not just the handful of things men have been around long enough to write down. The history of the whole damned planet is written in rocks, just lying there waiting for us to learn how to read the words." - p. 177

It's this urge that drives me, strangely enough, in my current work as well.

I'm learning to read in a larger sense than I've ever read so far. And to some extent this was an evolution: I did, after all, start on email quite awhile ago, then moved to forums, then Livejournal, then Blogger, then Facebook/MySpace, then Twitter, and Google Reader and the big feeds (Slashdot, BoingBoing, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, etc) got stuck in there somewhere too (and I may be skipping steps, of course: on the multimedia end, Flickr and YouTube are two examples, but I'm talking about text here, in the main).

But in terms of an educated and informed community that I can have face-to-face contact with and shares my academic/work interests, this is a first (which might be, I might add, because my college/grad work had little to do with technology). Not just casual friends giving updates on their lives, but I get a touch of friendliness and personality alongside the theory.

So I get these fantastic ideas as well as the context surrounding them: the problems that were faced to prompt them to come up with these ideas. It's good stuff.

But larger than that, and for a longer period of time, I've been learning to read people and their interaction with technology; learning to read the evolution of society due to technology's influence; learning to read how technology is changing our minds and changing our spaces.

I'm reading the future. I've already learned to read the past.

So between geology and tech, I feel like I've got the span of things.1 And while this current tech iteration is more minute than an atom in a drop in a bucket in terms of geologic time, it's monumental for us living in it.

And I get to read it. And better yet, write some of it.

[1]Oroboros.

Meta on the level.

You may have cycled back here to find a flood of new posts. More than usual, anyway.

Most of it is explained here, but the gist of it is that a colleague put us up to the challenge of writing a post per weekday in August and I'm giving it a whirl.

I set up Ubiquitous Connectivity to be the primary place those posts will go, but I also decided to copy/paste them over here.

So yes, these are very much theory/work-related, but I figured the folks over here would appreciate them, so I'll save you the trouble of checking both blogs.

August challenge

Taking up Cole's challenge of a post a day for August, according to the rules outlined there. Me and Daniel and Shannon so far, as far as I've seen.

Love to say more on the matter, but I've got a meeting in a second here. One thing to share before I go: I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations and also was fed a video of Shirky talking about his book by someone in my network (the section about flash mobs is especially engaging: "nothing says dictatorship like arresting people eating ice cream," for example).

And the commentary I'd like to add is that this is, to some extent, what we're doing. Someone has an idea, puts the call out there to see if anyone's interested, and people throw their hats into the ring, cooperatively arranging taxonomies (er, folksonomies, really) to tag and aggregate content, resulting in a pool of information and new ideas being created.

It's what I've seen in action growing slowly over a year, accelerated by the TLT Symposium and Twitter, sparked further by TweetMeets and BS Breakfasts and Bookclub, and burst into full flame (as far as I can tell) in Learning Design Summer Camp here at Penn State. And I'm convinced that this is the way to do it.

But it's happening this way (or similarly, at least) elsewhere: EduWeb happened recently, and people were Tweeting and videostreaming (alternate) and liveblogging sessions, and it was almost as good as being there, minus a significant amount of in-person networking and fun. But it can be done. I've been caught up in this plus Jeffrey Veen's idea of an audience ombudsman for conferences and trying to figure out how this works in purely-online communities.

And it really goes back to the idea of an alpha user, I think. But the thing is that we've got a bunch of them here at Penn State.

More to develop on this idea. But it will have to hold: I've got a meeting for our campus tour podcast project coming up.

non-update update

I know, I know: I've been terrible about updating the blog part of this blog. Micro-blogging, though, I can manage pretty darn regularly: round-about once a day. Check the Twitter feed on the right of the blog (the original, not the LJ feed-type-thing) if you really want updates. Warning: they're really, really mundane most of the time.