Winding down

With a bit of a whimper. Chaos in Info Technology project: great topic (folksonomies), ambivalence about platform. Tumblr - what was so seductive about Tumblr? Why would you try to do a class project in it? Time waster #1.

Zoho Notebook - any reason why you're just not working for me? You seemed so promising, until your fonts just sat and laughed. And why can I only see a tiny portion of working screen? Disappointment #2.

TinyGrab - I really liked you, and felt sorry you were hacked into this month. But it was a real distraction when I downloaded you, started an account, innocently entered my command to screen capture - and nothing happened. I wish you all the best, really. But you're frustration #3.

SlideRocket - so you're the one I ended up with. No offense, but slide presentations are kind of slick (slick-and-maybe-shallow, I mean). But hey, hot interface you've got there!

Definitely tech(ish) these past couple of weeks, and not tech(y).

Presenting slides!

If I think about it, slide presentations are pretty old-fashioned, even if created online with the capability of fancy invites, transitions, remote viewing, and whatnot. You've still got basic rectangles (slide-shaped, in fact), moving in a neat path that may as well be originating from a slide carousel. I better appreciate what Prezi is trying to do - that webby, non-linear stuff. Only I can't do Prezi on my PC.

That's a preface to my first (!) traditional slide presentation, online or otherwise. Zoho Show is part of a big suite of cloud applications, and worked without a hitch. I imagine corporations and students doing projects will keep the old slide format alive for quite a while longer.

Antique hardware

Not antique, exactly, but I'm definitely not one of the 47% of American adults using a mobile device to get news and information. I'm using a desktop, it's 6 years old, and has an old-fashioned monitor which is big everywhere except where needed, meaning backwards and not screenwise. As previously noted, it freezes whenever I go into Prezi (although as a friend kindly enlightened me, this is due to its processor "speed," not the paltry memory). Now that I'm reading online so much for classes, it would be nice to enter the 21st century and get a small laptop, so I'm not stuck in the corner of my bedroom.

Just holding out for more netbooks with the new processors to appear, although the HP Pavilion dm1z is very tempting already...

The pre-digital world, boxed

I try not to over-indulge my nostalgia, but sometimes it's warranted. Looking for records to help fill out my IDT application (my library school GPA from 25 years ago...?), I opened an old box of papers for the first time in many years. No luck with the school records, but the things there were a window into a different universe: dozens of long letters, postcards from vacations, notebooks with scribbles from job and apartment searches, notes passed in high school, college papers typed on onionskin (complete with pencilled-in corrections), and on and on.

In one class we're reading parts of the book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (David M. Levy), which has some intensely personal chapters on the paper document. I'd thought he was being a bit romantic, but am now feeling exactly the same.  There has been something lost from the age of familiar handwriting, sometimes squeezed into the confines of a carefully-chosen card, its physicality shockingly alive after so many years.

tiddly (wiki)

I confess that before taking my social media class, I was clueless about any wikis other than Wikipedia. I had no idea people had jobs where they're busily collaborating, or lives where they're coordinating camping trips. But a professor is posting his classes in tiddlywiki, so I decided to use it as the platform for my recent project. If you're a little information-geeky and enjoy indexing, structuring information, and links galore, head on over! (No, no, I'm not being sarcastic - really, it was kind of fun.)

There are all kinds of plug-ins, coding, etc. that I completely ignored, but Tiddler Toddler was enough to get me going, and tiddlyspot is kind enough to give free web hosting, so there you go!  There are also other wiki platforms that look more like websites, if you insist on a little more WYSIWYG and visual allure.

The New York Times - oh, dear

My reaction to the Times's much-commented upon new digital subscription plan evidently matches the norm: entry point at $195/year? Better to have started at $5/month. At first I thought "No way" - but my attachment to the paper, which was always in our house as I grew up, are deep, so I'll see what deals they have up their sleeve.  The Times is my homepage, and I agree it's fair to pay something.

My even greater alarm, however, centers on their peculiar interpretation of how people use the web. They make distinctions among articles arrived at through Google - vs. though social media - vs. directly from their site. No one uses the web this way, and in fact it's contrary to what hypertext is all about. If I can't click through freely, why tease myself by going there at all? I care about the future of the Times, and actual news reporting, and hope they can get this right.

The Google cloud

I know I'm awfully late to this, but my previous exposure to "the cloud" was limited to Google documents popping up unexpectedly on our library PCs (students: not sure how to prevent this, but your confidential writings are not necessarily private when done on public PCs. Ditto on the stuff you print out and leave in the copier. Please be more careful. But I digress).

So it's good news that one class requires all work to be available somewhere in the internet ether, meaning that I've now used Google docs, spreadsheets, and sites. It's a relief to finally understand how these work, and create a little website without any anguish:

(sigh) Maybe it's not Facebook...

...maybe it's me. Am I a sociopath, or just a garden-variety, antisocial hermit? Social networking just isn't happening. Sad to say, this isn't a technological issue, but something deeper and darker (sob). You can always learn a new skill, but changing your communication style (or lack thereof) is a different animal. "Keeping in touch" just isn't my default mode.

Best to focus on using networks as a source of information and professional contact, because it's otherwise putting me in the doldrums.

Prezi and my poor PC

Prezi is this very impressive "zooming presentation editor," as they put it.  You enter text, images, or web links, size them how you like, group them together, and create a viewing path to tell your story.  Your objects are clickable to zoom, whether you're presenting to a group or just leaving your show on the web.  Here's the intro:



I used it for a project, and found it pretty intuitive (once I figured out the magic of hidden frames to control groupings and focus on portions of images). Only problem - my poor old PC's 512 MB of memory couldn't handle it, stomped its little foot, and froze me out. Emergency move to husband's laptop ensued.

P.S. Look, I embedded a video!

Jing!

Capturing a snapshot of a website, and putting it up on another website, seemed like something really fancy.  But then we used Jing in one of my classes, and it was simple!  We're even taping Jing screencasts to critique each other's work, which is a little nervewracking in other ways, but still simple. This is the kind of technology that would have been hard for me to find on my own, because I wouldn't even have known to call it a "screen capture."

I don't "get" Facebook

So, for my course in social media, I've created a Facebook account to try and understand what it's all about. Uploaded a picture, tried to make sure there's nothing personal on there, figured out how to get my name in the web address (a text message - really? Do people actually find Facebook user-friendly?), friended my husband, who I'm pretty sure was my friend anyway, and now...what?  It seems I'm supposed to 1) troll around for friends 2) post something 3) link to something 4) like something.  I'm not getting what the basic activity is here.  I guess social networks make more sense to people who are actually sociable.  Oops.

It's a start...

Somewhere, after e-mail but before smartphones and Twitter, I lost my technological way.  It wasn't a big deal at first - so what if I didn't have a blog - but now, like Rip van Winkle, I'm waking up to find that everything has changed. Some tipping point has been passed. People (other people) no longer "go online," but live online, and carry it with them everywhere.


I'm not sure how far I'll go to join them, but unlike my 86-year-old father, who is happily ignoring the computer age, I do need to understand what they're all experiencing.  I'm not a technophobe; heck, I used to explain Gophers at library Internet trainings, and still remember the awe I felt at an early demonstration of Netscape. I'm glad to have those memories, but it's time to move on.


In three weeks of classes at the SUNY IDT (Information Design and Technology) master's bootcamp program, I've learnt more than I thought possible.  This blog is here to chronicle that journey, both in school and the rest of my life, and maybe to practice some new tricks.  As I scolded my elderly PC (512 MB of memory, thankyouverymuch) as it struggled with the Prezi website for an IDT project, "If I can do it, so can you!"  Well, it couldn't do it, and I moved to my husband's laptop instead. But I won't take that as an omen, and hope this journey will be a cheerful one.