Atrophy

Atrophy--the word that has been on my mind all too often as of late. It sits back there like the incessant buzz of a fly over my head while I'm trying to take a nap. Alright, enough of the lame similes, but in all honesty atrophy has been on my mind a lot lately, not so much the word as much as the concept.

As of this post I have been in an intellectual limbo for a little more than a year now. At least that's how I feel. After graduating from BYU in April 2012, I found myself slipping into a dangerous level of cognitive inactivity brought on by the lack of interesting classes to take or a job that challenged me to think creatively and solve problems. This was the very reason I went back to school in the first place. I didn't want to get stuck in a job that didn't require me to think, or worse, a job that didn't challenge me at all. This idea of atrophy has weighed more and more heavily on my mind and my spirit as time has gone by, so I decided to try to do something about it.

Perhaps cognitive inactivity is small exaggeration. I still read. I still follow politics and news and think about the problems we face in this modern world. I still try to inform myself. But there is a serious lack of a forum for me to express my thoughts or a reason to wrestle with a concept or problem and really wrap my mind around it. Once, for a few months I felt this as I did a long-term substitute assignment earlier this year where I was effectively the teacher because let's face it, most substitute jobs consist of watching the same videos (educational or otherwise) ad nauseam or sitting students down to do packets. Not the most challenging job. Those two or three months as a long-term sub were nice, but now I feel an itch, a pulling toward rediscovering habits of writing and learning that I have been too lazy or to distracted to continue.

My proposal, a promise to myself more than anything, is this. Write. If I can't write daily, at least 5 days a week should be enough. Read. Read more actively. In other words do more than just read. Ask questions, find answers, analyze, interpret. All that stuff I was doing in college. Learn. Take on new topics that I am curious about and teach myself, and share on this blog the things that I am learning and the path I take to do it.

Hopefully this works for me. My first project for myself is the study up on Nietzsche.  I've learned a little about his philosophies but I'm curious to know more. Additionally I've got several books lined up that I plan on reading and sharing excerpts and impressions as I go along.

To find these different posts, look at the tabs at the top of the page. On the Home page I will post regular topics and daily information and any miscellaneous posts that don't fit in the other tabs.

What I hope to gain from this: Strengthen lifelong learning habits, clarity in thinking and analyzing, greater ease in expression, and form a daily writing habit.

Please, if you would like to comment or question or answer anything that I write on this blog, you are more than welcome to do so. I appreciate insight and different points of view.

Learning Outcomes

How fast time has gone by. I almost can't believe that the semester is over, but let me tell you that I am ready for a break.  Next semester is my last semester of classes at BYU and in the winter I'll be doing my student teaching.  I think that this class has been a great preparation for using tech when I'm teaching, and I've learned a lot about writing and research.  So, as the semester ends, it's time to look at the learning objectives and see how I did.  Our learning objectives were centered around three important aspects of writing in the digital age.
1. Consume.  2. Create.   3. Connect. 

Consume:  I've learned how to use the internet in conjuction with traditional libraries and databases to find what others are saying about the work I am studying.  During the semester I've searched for information with Google, Twitter, Goodreads forums, fansites, and Diigo bookmarks just to name a few sources.  The value to this is that we can filter our information by finding people who are invested in our research and have already done some of the work on their own. They can be great sources for finding information about a topic of research.  This enhances the research we can do in the library with its databases of scholarly journals.

Create:  I've learned that creating can be part of the process of discovery, but it also gives our research a valid outlet.  Authentic projects have been the name of the game, and that is what we have done with our eBook. I've created content with my blogging and with my Diigo account that has helped me and could also be of use to other people who are trying to learn more about Douglas Adams or making eBooks or even using digital tools and media.  By creating we add our part to a massive conversation and exchange of knowledge that is the nature of both the internet and scholarly writing.  I didn't only consume information about my book either.  I spent hours consuming information and learning about InDesign in preparation for the eBook we would be making.  Blogs and youtube videos and social bookmarks were a great help with finding and consuming that information.

Connect:  I've connected with many people this semester.  First, I've never worked more closely nor been more involved with my classmates work as I have this semester.  It has been great to see their blogs and learn about Borges or Comics or pig farming as the semester has gone by.  Also, the level of collaboration that has taken place has had me emailing, chatting and pestering almost every one of my fellow students in the course as we tried to get this eBook done. It has been a great experience and I have learned a lot.  Connecting with others?  Well, as a class we have been connecting with others to share our work with them.  I had several friends on facebook tell me they were interested in the book we've written and I also sent out a recommendation to some of my friends on Goodreads. Hopefully they will read it and love it and share it with others who are interested.  This is the point of connecting.  This is the way that all of our research and writing and hard work pays off in the end.  Someone will find it useful and share it with others who will also find value in it. It's so exciting.

I think that I've done pretty well this semester.  I've worked hard at getting my writing done and writing often.  I did a lot of research and learned more than just writing skills.  I think that the things I've taken from this class with be assets in my future career.

Our eBook has arrived

Writing about Literature in the Digital Age is now online and available for download.  I wont lie, it has been a pretty stressful and at times frustrating experience, but it has been one that I will always remember with a smile.  My assignment for our eBook was to write a chapter (like everybody else) and to work on the Design Team with Ben Wagner and Annie Ostler to get our book put together in an organized eBook, preferably in the ePUB, MOBI and PDF formats.  These formats, it was decided, would make our eBook available to the most people without requiring us to make too many different versions. Sounds exciting right?  It was, but oh was it hard to do.

We decided to use Adobe's InDesign CS5 to compile and format our eBook into the ePUB and PDF formats.  From the ePUB we converted to a MOBI format for Kindle and I have to say all three formats came out quite nice.  Several different versions of our free eBook can be downloaded here.  Also, if you are on Goodreads, you can download the book here. If you like it, please remember to give us a good rating.

So, what goes in to making  an eBook with InDesign?  It's not as simple as you think.  I'll talk a little about our process.

I'm blogging in my Writing About Literature class?!

image by Blogging Librarian

Why did I take English 295 Writing about Literature? Because I had to.  I would not have taken this class otherwise.  Fortunately, when I signed up for this class I saw that Dr. Burton was teaching one section and decided to add his class, hoping to see some new fun technology in use.  The class I signed up for was nothing I thought it was going to be.  I think, in fact, that all of us were confused as we walked into a computer lab for an English class.  It turned out that this class would focus on writing in a digital culture for a digital audience.  I loved the idea and have been having a great time.

The one question I've asked myself is why this class is hiding in a writing about literature section if it is so much more than that.  Forget the advanced writing requirement.  I would have taken this class on my own if I'd have known it existed.  I think that if this class were advertised better, there would be students lining up outside of Dr. Burton's office to take it.  This type of writing is relevant because it has a larger audience than one person, and that is what makes the class so enjoyable.  Without explicitly asking, I have come to the conclusion that this class must be a pilot program to see how it would work, if it is worth doing at all.

I may be off with this, but I think that most people in this class have found it to be a good one, and one with definite benefit.  So why is it hiding in the English 295 category?  Could it be possible to have this class taught regularly under its own category?  This would advertise it to students and let them know that this type of writing class is available to them.  I'm sure that many would prefer this class to many other writing classes offered at BYU.

I was thinking about this today as I left class and was hit by a great idea.  Our collaborative project for the semester could be to help push this class out of the pilot program and into the regular curriculum.  Why don't we, as a class, prepare a presentation that uses the skills we are learning to show the powers that be at BYU what exactly the value of this class is, and how we, as students, feel about having this class available to us?

What do you think?  Would this be something worth doing?  I feel that it has real-life value with a possibility of real-life results.  I haven't taken the idea much further than this.  I just thought I'd throw it out there to everybody else to see what they have to say on the matter.

What do we do when tech fails?

Technology has done so much to improve our lives.  There are so many things that have become easier and more available to us in this age because of the internet and the tools we have at our disposal.  So what happens when that technology fails us?

I imagine that I have been as frustrated as most because of blogger's downtime the last day or two.  When you get used to having easy access to a technology it can almost be a tragedy when that access is temporarily cut off.  Of course, having blogger turned off for a few days really doesn't qualify as a tragedy by any stretch of the imagination, but what happens when other tech fails?

It was just a week or so ago that Amazon's access to their online storage was out of service.  This means that people couldn't get their movies and music that they have purchased and left on the cloud.  The cloud is touted as the end all be all of portable media and information but I have always had my doubts.  I can store my things on the cloud and wont have to worry about losing my information if my hard drive fails, but if my movies are in the cloud, what do I do when I'm in a place that has no connectivity?  Furthermore, what if my hard drive or other device fails? How will I access my information?  The cloud is a great resource for us to have but I think that I will always want my hard copy of books, movies, and other types of information and data simply because a book with paper pages will always be accessible.

I'm not saying I don't support the use of the cloud.  I'm just thinking out loud about the inconvenience of having our information and entertainment exclusively in digital formats.

Crowdsourcing = Good Policy?

 

Yesterday I was talking with Amy Whitaker about the digital culture book I am reading, Crowdsourcing, by Jeff Howe.  We were talking about how the crowd can usually produce some great ideas and function more effectively than even a group of top experts, given that the crowd is somewhat familiar with the subject in question.  Amy brought up a great point, and one that I have been thinking about since last week

How would crowdsourcing improve politics?

I think it would be interesting to see what the crowd could do with important issues like heath care, immigration reform, budgets, and many other aspects that congress works at but just isn't able to get done.  It would make for an interesting experiement.

I am still working this idea over and hope to write more about it later, but I thought I would throw it out there to see what the readers of this blog think about the subject.  I used the email me link on Jeff Howe's blog Crowdsourcing to ask this same question.  When I get an answer I will let you know what was said and further talk about my thoughts on the subject.