XplanaZine

Teachers are always in a hurry - and ready to make compromises based on that. If you need a handout for your 3 o’clock class, and it is already 2:45, you might have time to spellcheck the document, but you won’t necessarily have time to read it out loud to make sure that you find the miss steaks that thee spellchecker cant sea. And if you publish that handout on the Internet, to make it available to the students who miss class, the handout will indeed be available for them - miss steaks and all.
Obviously, the scholarly publishing process works rather differently. It is driven by pressures of punctiliousness rather than the start of class fifteen minutes from now. The author is given ample opportunity to correct mistakes, a copy editor may be involved, and then there are the proofs prior to publication (and perhaps a proofreader, in addition to the copy editor). The presence of typographical errors is grounds for suspicion as to the scholarly quality of the project as a whole (indeed, the Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews, a great online service, will regularly include a recitation of the typographical errors found in a book, with a judgment as to their seriousness, e.g. “Within the first few pages — and of course elsewhere — I observed a number of typographical lapses, none really serious, but all at least vaguely disturbing.”) Continue reading ‘Publishing - and Proofing - on the Internet’

There is an increasing influx of new gadgets in the market all the time. Well, I like gadgets. They are useful, fun, interesting, they help me to learn and also help me in my work. I can be more efficient, more creative; in other words they are part of my life. Many people call them toys and the appellation is accompanied with either an affectionate smile, or a smirk, or a glimmering desire in their eye, or even a cold dismissive stare. I understand why they call them toys but I never saw them that way. I just never categorize them. Giving them a single label would be so unfair for they touch too many areas of life. But attaching many labels is inconvenient because it would require an intricate cross-indexing method. Nevertheless, the toy label itself inspires several philosophical thoughts. Continue reading ‘MYTH OF SISYPHUS — Gadgets, Toys, Games and Other Pragmatic Fears’

So what does QUIA have to do with models for digital scholarship? The ever-diligent Stephen Downes makes it clear that I need to explain more clearly what is at stake here, and in what ways the fragile digital objects of teachers are both similar to the objects produced by scholars but also different from them. As Stephen Downes commented: “Well, let’s not go overboard. I give my items a title, an authorship, and a date. That should be enough, shouldn’t it?” And yes, as a minimum for teachers and as a minimum for scholars, title, author, date are useful information. Continue reading ‘Digital Scholarship, Digital Teachership: The Case of QUIA’

“How do we anticipate and address the technical needs of fragile digital objects over time?” That’s Abby Smith, in her online article New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive? That notion of “fragile digital objects” is really challenging. I love going up to the History of Science Collection here at OU, where the gorgeous and amazing books (including many incunabula) are kept in their own special vault, with all kinds of special foam props and other soft and squishy tools to help take good care of them. There are actually pop-up books from five hundred years ago that have survived, their pop-ups intact, illustrating complex geometrical principles with a delicate paper art. Their fragility is something you are palpably aware of - but in a sense the digital objects we are dealing with today are far more fragile, far less likely to be able to convey their message so clearly five hundred years from now. Abby Smith provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of this problem, and the serious consequences it has for scholars who are compiling online materials, scanning, digitizing, and editing their own digital archives, even on a small scale. It is a great article; highly recommended! Continue reading ‘Teachers and Scholars and Their Fragile Digital Objects’

I sat back and visualized a link entitled the ‘Myth of Sisyphus.’ I felt absolutely impelled to click on it. Then I looked deeper in me and realized I was also automatically conditioned to not let anything I read make a real difference. Everything was already marred by the same otioseness and futility permeating the myth. And yet, I see myself being compelled to read on by the same compulsion we find in Sisyphus. There is a moment in time where hope prevails and it overpowers the hopelessness of a predicted outcome. After all, the future doesn’t exist yet and predictions may be proven wrong. It’s the eternal hope that perhaps this time things will be different, perhaps this time the spell will be broken, or, the gods will finally retract the sentence. Continue reading ‘MYTH OF SISYPHUS — – Why Sisyphus? Living, growing and the search for meaning’