Alexandra Samuel's RSS Feed http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/414 en 3 reasons to check out the latest research on social media and food http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/3-reasons-check-out-latest-research-social-media-and-food <p><em>Read the original post at <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/toolbox/3-reasons-to-check-out-the-latest-research-on-social-media-and-food">3 reasons to check out the latest research on social media and food</a>.</em></p><p></p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">In the past, ethnicity and family traditions dictated the foods we prepared; we bought our groceries at a neighborhood store; we learned our recipes from “mom” or a cookbook; and we ate our meals together around a table. In contrast, today social media introduces us to new tastes, cuisines and possibilities; we source food via multiple channels including restaurants and online, often basing our decisions on the recommendations of friends; we learn recipes and techniques from TV shows, websites, blogs and online videos; and it is normal to eat with computers, phones, televisions and, increasingly, alone and often without a table.</p> <p>That is from the executive summary of <a href=" http://www.hartman-group.com/publications/reports/clicks-cravings">Clicks & Cravings: The Impact of Social Technology on Food Culture</a>, a new research study from the Hartman Group. It’s worth a look because:</p> <ol> <li>It’s a focused snapshot of how the very uses of social media that we most eagerly embrace — like integrating it into our passions, hobbies and meals — are also the uses that can most profoundly disrupt crucial social ties and relationships. Calling my mom for her advice on whatever I’m cooking remains one of our strongest ways of connecting; it’s the one place where my desire for advice and my mom’s desire to be heeded consistently align. Yes, I consult Epicurious, but if I listened to Epicurious users instead of my mom, I’d have to give my mom absolute authority over some other aspect of my life, like how I dress. (Hello, ankle-length skirts!)</li> <li>It demonstrates the value of focusing social media research on a narrow slice of culture change. As social media permeates more and more of our work and personal lives, big-picture, across-the-board analyses must be complemented by targeted investigations of specific areas of social media’s impact.</li> <li>Food is good. Social media is good. Food + social media? Delicious.</li> </ol> <p>Read more about better living with social media by visiting <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com">Love your life online</a></p><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=rG6U_fh6BjE:25btDuQ0YgQ:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=rG6U_fh6BjE:25btDuQ0YgQ:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=rG6U_fh6BjE:25btDuQ0YgQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=rG6U_fh6BjE:25btDuQ0YgQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=rG6U_fh6BjE:25btDuQ0YgQ:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/rG6U_fh6BjE" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/3-reasons-check-out-latest-research-social-media-and-food#comments food research social media toolbox Wed, 29 Feb 2022 02:52:28 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31647 at http://www.simcentre.ca Embodying the spirit of Mozilla in an ebook creation process http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/embodying-spirit-mozilla-ebook-creation-process <div class="field field-type-text field-field-summary"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> <p>The process of designing and developing the <em>Learning, Freedom and the Web </em>ebook reflected the very qualities of learning innovation that are described in the book itself.</p> </div> </div> </div> <blockquote> <p>The web doesn't function without the ability to look under the hood, get your hands dirty, and fix what doesn’t work. But these kinds of freedoms weren't born in the 20th century. They are central elements for the flourishing of all intellectual life. And learners, especially, could use a little more freedom.</p> </blockquote> <p>That's part of the definition of freedom you'll find in <a href="http://learningfreedomandtheweb">Learning, Freedom and the Web</a>, a new book authored by Anya Kamenetz and participants of the <a href="http://commonspace.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/festivalreport></a>2010 Mozilla Festival</a> that will officially <a href=">launch in an online event next week</a>. It's a definition that reflects the book's exciting portrayal of the messy business of learning in the 21st century: Learning as something you engage with actively, as opposed to something you just receive. Learning as something hands-on as well as intellectual. Learning that happens in rooms full of eager participants, or unfolds in the spaces of the open web.</p> <p>Mozilla's definition of freedom also provides an excellent description of the process that went into creating the ebook version of this title. In partnership with the <a href="http://mozilla.org">Mozilla Foundation</a><a></a>, the <a href="http://simcentre.ca">Social + Interactive Media Centre</a> at <a href="http://ecuad.ca">Emily Carr</a> undertook the development of an ebook as part of its research into epublishing. Working with Emily Carr design faculty members Jonathan Aitken and Celeste Martin, four Emily Carr students rolled up their sleeves and did everything from imagining what an ebook could look like, to actually coding page after page of the final title.</p> <p>Both the design and the development process were deeply collaborative, in a way that reflects the way open source teams often work and prepares students for a lifetime of collaboration. During the design phase, student designers Briana Garelli, Justin Alm, Amy Wang and Danielle Hall worked with Kamenetz and the Mozilla team, including Mark Surman, Ben Moskowitz and print book designer Chris Appleton. Together they through the ways in which the print and ebook versions needed to align stylistically, in order to reflect a common project. At the same time, the technical challenges of designing a truly cross-platform ebook structured certain aspects of the design approach.</p> <p>When it came time to actually build that title, the students did what LFW might suggest: they took the challenge into their own hands by finding online resources that allowed them to learn the basics of HTML5 on their own. Sharing both these resources and their initial code, they helped one another solve design and programming challenges and develop a basic navigation structure and CSS layout. Over the course of a long and intense summer, Justin turned the initial prototype into a fully working title, getting guidance and coding support from Allen Pike at <a href="http://steamclocksw.com">Steam Clock Software</a>. Amy Wang created a set of animated, unfolding "how-tos" that are featured in different parts of the book.</p> <p>The ebook development project turned out to be such a good example of the kind of learning strategies described in LFW that it made its way into the final title as its own how-to. <a href="http://learningfreedomandtheweb.org/ebook/thefuture.html#46">How to create an ebook</a> walks readers through the steps they can take to build a book just like they one they are reading, including <a href="https://github.com/benrito/lfwbooksite">access to the source code itself</a>. When Mozilla defines Freedom as the ability to look under the hood, they really mean it.</p><div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-related-projects"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> <a href="/projects/learning-freedom-web-ebook">Learning, Freedom and the Web ebook</a> </div> </div> </div> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/embodying-spirit-mozilla-ebook-creation-process#comments collaboration design ebook mozilla Epublishing Fri, 13 Jan 2022 06:10:30 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31618 at http://www.simcentre.ca Learning from online graffiti, even if you’re not a community manager http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/learning-online-graffiti-even-if-you%E2%80%99re-not-community-manager <p><em>Read the original post at <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/world/learning-from-online-graffiti-even-if-youre-not-a-community-manager">Learning from online graffiti, even if you’re not a community manager</a>.</em></p><p></p><p><strong><em>Today’s practice: When you find an online comment or contribution that </em>truly<em> annoys you, put it on your desktop or bulletin board. It’s your own personal classroom for learning about difference, and practicing tolerance.</em></strong></p> <p>When companies, organizations or individuals set up their first social web presences, one of the things they often worry about is <a href="http://www.socialsignal.com/blog/rob-cottingham/dont-delete-online-criticism-embrace-it">how to handle online criticism</a>. In most cases, the now-recognized best practice is to err on the side of tolerance, accepting that some level of online criticism is part of life, and that the most effective and credible responses often come not from the community manager, but from the community itself.</p> <p>That takes care of things as far as community managers are concerned, but what about social media users? I often hear from regular people (i.e., folks who are not communications or web professionals) who struggle with online criticism, too. The hostility of many online conversations feel inhibiting, a point that Frances Bula emphasized during our recent <a href="http://www.cstudies.ubc.ca/community/lifelong-learning-series.html">social media panel at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism</a>. News and political sites, in particular, have become infamous for the inflammatory tone of their comment threads. And who feels energized by reading or participating in a social web site that is full of ad hominem attacks, profanity or garden-variety stupidity?</p> <p>But I was reminded this week that one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure, when one of my favorite user-generated conversations was wiped clean. In this case, the conversation wasn’t online: it was on the walls of the ladies’ room just down the hall from my office.</p> <p>As I have previously blogged, the <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/world/bathroom-graffiti-meet-social-media">quality of this bathroom graffiti</a> has been one of the great delights of working at an art university. Many of its most inspired images and phrases have made it into my Twitter feed over the past few years, as you can see on the <a href="http://www.twylah.com/awsamuel/topics/graffiti">delightful gallery that got automagically curated by Twylah</a>.</p> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p><div id="attachment_21125" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 184px"> <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/loo-graffiti.png"><img class="size-full wp-image-21125" title="loo-graffiti" src="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/loo-graffiti.png" alt="Bathroom wall with dryer turned into person" width="184" height="227" /></a> <p class="wp-caption-text">Before</p> </div></td> <td></td> <td> <p><div id="attachment_21124" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 184px"> <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/clean-loo.png"><img class="size-full wp-image-21124" title="clean-loo" src="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/clean-loo.png" alt="Freshly painted bathroom" width="184" height="227" /></a> <p class="wp-caption-text">After</p> </div></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Many, but not all. When a visiting conference and an accompanying fresh coat of paint took hold in our building this week, we lost treasures like “Whatever turns me on, I put up my nose” (accompanied by a pretty remarkable drawing of a person with a penis up her nose) and “You are beautiful and perfect just the way you are” (which I’d been planning to transplant to my gym, where the message is much-needed).</p> <p>The penis-filled nose, in particular, was cited by one of my colleagues as a drawing we were better off without. And I get it: that image was a lot to take, especially if you’re just trying to nip out for quick mid-meeting pee.</p> <p>But it’s the moments when we are confronted by something outside our comfort zone — by something ugly, transgressive or simply rude — that often produce the greatest growth. The obscene image, the idiotic blog comment, the hostile post on a Facebook wall: they get under our skin. They irritate us until we find a way to understand why somebody would write that, until we grapple with the painful reality that people are <em>profoundly</em> different from one another, until we grow a thicker skin.</p> <p>So the next time you find yourself wishing that a website moderator would exert firmer control over a web space or presence, look more closely at the comment or contribution that is irritating you the most. Bookmark it, reread it, turn it into your desktop picture, mull over and ruminate on it. Make the most annoying parts of the social web into the parts that you know most intimately, and silently thank the Internet’s most egregious trolls for delivering a lesson in comprehending human difference.</p> <p>Read more about better living with social media by visiting <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com">Love your life online</a></p><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=X2INM0jMSkw:IEZuI6aASUk:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=X2INM0jMSkw:IEZuI6aASUk:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=X2INM0jMSkw:IEZuI6aASUk:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=X2INM0jMSkw:IEZuI6aASUk:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=X2INM0jMSkw:IEZuI6aASUk:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/X2INM0jMSkw" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/learning-online-graffiti-even-if-you%E2%80%99re-not-community-manager#comments community Self Fri, 09 Dec 2021 03:46:52 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31574 at http://www.simcentre.ca Let your team choose project software for your online collaboration http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/let-your-team-choose-project-software-your-online-collaboration <p><em>Read the original post at <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/career-work/let-your-team-choose-project-software-for-your-online-collaboration">Let your team choose project software for your online collaboration</a>.</em></p> <p><a class="post_image_link" title="Permanent link to Let your team choose project software for your online collaboration" href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/career-work/let-your-team-choose-project-software-for-your-online-collaboration"><img src="https://img.skitch.com/20111208-8mbdxsu8a9aynindf86441h3q3.png" alt="Cartoon: Why don't you collaborate by yourself for a little while?" width="378" height="313" class="post_image alignright remove_bottom_margin"></a></p> <p>How many project software tools does it take to collaborate effectively?</p> <p>If you’re anything like me, your answer might run to the double digits. I mean, how can you work with someone unless you can communicate through a combination of e-mail, Twitter, Skype, SMS, and chat? How can you share work in progress and avoid duplicate effort unless the whole team uses Google Docs, DropBox, a shared Evernote notebook, a collection of citations in Zotero, MindMeister for mindmapping, a board of images on Pinterest, a common folder of Google Reader feeds and an agreed-upon tag in delicious? How will you keep track of your tasks and time unless you’re all using Basecamp and Harvest? And let’s be honest, how viscerally annoying will you find it to watch your new teammates take screenshots without using Skitch, update their status without using HootSuite or access PDFs without using Papers?</p> <p>Lest you think I exaggerate, I have foisted everything except Harvest upon one or another of my Emily Carr colleagues this past year. As far as I’m concerned, the first two weeks of any project should be dedicated to the sign-up process and learning curve that will turn my new team-mates into Web 2.0 productivity nerds.</p> <p>Strangely, however, some of the people I work with seem to be more interested in getting our project done than in choosing or learning the project software tools that I insist are absolutely required in order to work effectively. And since I notionally recognize that the term “collaboration” isn’t just a category of software, but also a philosophy and practice of working closely and respectfully with other human beings, I have tried to open my mind just a tiny bit to the possibility that not every aspect of group work requires a different web application.</p> <p>What I’ve learned is that the geekiest person in the group is not, in fact, the right person to drive collaborative software choices. In fact, if you’re a passionate early adopter, you’re probably the <em>last</em> person who should drive which software gets used. After all, your early adopter-ness means you are both experienced and skilled at learning new software; you’re also much more likely to be familiar with the tools your colleagues like to use than they are to be familiar with yours.</p> <p>So instead of jumping in with your awesome lifechanging software picks, how about hanging back and seeing how the rest of the team likes to work? Find out what they use already — most often a combination of Google Docs, email, and sometimes Twitter or Evernote — and then take the lead in strategizing how to use it for this particular project. And if you’re working together over an extended period of time, and the tools your colleagues like using are failing in some very obvious ways, then and only then can you think about introducing one or two tools that can maybe fill the most painful gaps.</p> <p>The beauty of this strategy is that when you avoid overwhelming your collaborators with a tidal wave of new software, you actually create some space for them to notice and get interested in the tools you use. Maybe they are still taking notes in Word, but they see you using Evernote; maybe they are trading files by keychain, but get intrigued by your use of Dropbox; maybe they are writing down their appointments in an actual paper calendar (I actually do have several colleagues who do that!!) until they see the jaw-dropping beauty that is Calvetica.</p> <p>People, when that day comes, you will be ready. And until then, you and your favorite software tools will just have to collaborate on your own.</p> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=9eaced0b-2e91-4d76-b0c9-69560b39928c" style="border: none; float: right;" class="zemanta-pixie-img"></div> <p>Read more about better living with social media by visiting <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com">Love your life online</a></p> <div class="feedflare"><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=ZP-YRnUoYkQ:sJmMNQhF9E8:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=ZP-YRnUoYkQ:sJmMNQhF9E8:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=ZP-YRnUoYkQ:sJmMNQhF9E8:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=ZP-YRnUoYkQ:sJmMNQhF9E8:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=ZP-YRnUoYkQ:sJmMNQhF9E8:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></a></div> <p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/ZP-YRnUoYkQ" width="1" height="1"></p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/let-your-team-choose-project-software-your-online-collaboration#comments career online collaboration productivity project software teamwork Collaboration Thu, 08 Dec 2021 07:24:42 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31571 at http://www.simcentre.ca What is an ebook? 6 questions about the future of books http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/what-ebook-6-questions-about-future-books <p><em>Read the original post at <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/toolbox/what-is-an-ebook-6-questions-about-the-future-of-books">What is an ebook? 6 questions about the future of books</a>.</em></p><p></p><p>Tonight Emily Carr students presented 5 ebook prototypes developed over the course of this semester in an ebook design course. As the students presented their work, and members of the local business, tech and creative communities responded to them, it was clear that we are grappling with a common set of fundamental questions raised by the emergence of ebooks. Here are the 6 crucial questions we need to address as authors, publishers, designers and readers:</p> <ol> <li>How can ebooks take advantage of the design, multimedia or functional opportunities provided by web-enabled tablet devices like the iPad, Android tablet or Kindle Fire?</li> <li>Does social interaction enhance or distract form the reader experience?</li> <li>Who is the author of an ebook? The content creator, the editor/curator,the designer or the developer? If the user contributes content, comments or self-directed navigation, is the user an author too?</li> <li>If you break the page page-turning metaphor, how to you cue the reader/user about how to navigate the book?</li> <li>What is the ebook equivalent of printing on archival paper? How do you build an ebook to last?</li> <li>What is the difference between an ebook and a website? What is essential to preserving “bookness”? Does it matter?</li> </ol> <p>It was this last question that most troubled and preoccupied the people in the room. We are eager to pin down the definition of “ebook”, to draw the line between website and app and ebook, or to agree unambiguously to throw these terms out. Our anxiety about defining what makes a book speaks to the value our society places on the traditional codex, and the opportunities (as well as the dangers) that come from transcending it.</p> <p>Read more about better living with social media by visiting <a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com">Love your life online</a></p><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=DhWDgHjfhQo:zo9hnybgAwE:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=DhWDgHjfhQo:zo9hnybgAwE:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=DhWDgHjfhQo:zo9hnybgAwE:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=DhWDgHjfhQo:zo9hnybgAwE:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=DhWDgHjfhQo:zo9hnybgAwE:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/DhWDgHjfhQo" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/what-ebook-6-questions-about-future-books#comments ebooks Emily Carr publishing SIM Centre toolbox Wed, 07 Dec 2021 02:43:13 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31570 at http://www.simcentre.ca 15 best practices for managing your first (or subsequent) web development project http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/15-best-practices-managing-your-first-or-subsequent-web-development-project <p></p><p>Back in the day, the only real way to have an online conversation was to build your own blog or online community. These days, many people, companies and organizations have their first taste of online conversation and social media through pre-established social networks like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.</p> <p>But eventually, you might outgrow what you can do with those sites alone, or decide you want to have a new kind of conversation that is best supported with an online community of your own. When that day comes, you’ll face the painful, terrifying and thrilling experience of building a website — if not with your own bare hands, then through the efforts of an in-house web development team or web development company.</p> <p>It’s a process that is always challenging, but never more so than the very first time you undertake the job of managing or supervising a development process, even if it’s as a client rather than as a developer. You don’t know what to expect, you don’t know what questions to ask, and you don’t know who is responsible for what. So let me offer a very partial set of observations and insights into the development process, which may make your first time out a little less overwhelming — and which may help experienced web-heads refine their approach, too:</p> <ol> <li><em>Developer hours are your new hard currency.</em> If you’re managing a development process, you need to treat each developer hour like it’s a bar of gold. If this is your first dev process and you’re working with experienced developers (if this is your first dev process, I <em>really</em> hope you are working with experienced developers) then they probably cost your company or client somewhere between 2-5x what you get paid per hour. Unless you’re dealing with an infinite budget, that means you have to be careful about where you spend those hours and dollars — and even if the dollar constraint isn’t tight, you’ll find that a good developer typically has other demands and will offer you only so many hours, so use them wisely. Once you start seeing your development hours as very, very precious, a lot of other development principles follow….</li> <li><em>You are </em>supposed<em> to be the bottleneck.</em> One of the challenging aspects of the client or project manager role is that you turn into a bottleneck: there’s a steady flood of incoming tasks for the dev team, which you’re supposed to pass along, only you feel like you can’t feed them to the dev team fast enough. You’re the bottleneck, which we are told is a bad thing, so you feel terrible. But here’s the secret to your role in the development process: you are <em>supposed </em>to be a bottleneck. By slowing the rate at which incoming tasks flow to the dev team, you allow them to work on the priorities that have already been established. While you may need to feed them some occasional additional tasks, particularly after a period of testing, it’s your job to filter all those incoming requests so only the essentials make it to the dev team.</li> <li><em>Ticket your tasks.</em> Web development companies typically use tools like Unfuddle to track their outstanding development tasks including bugs that need fixing. If you’re working with a development team that will give you direct access to their ticketing system, you  may find it easiest to feed your tasks directly into the system; most of the time, however, the dev team will want you to give them tasks in some other form, so they can enter them into the ticketing system with all the details they need in order to address the task correctly. But you can create your own de facto ticketing system by religiously writing each incoming issue down in a single place, using a consistent format that allows you to review all issues and prioritize the ones that will go forward to the dev team. I recommend doing this in a spreadsheet (if you want others to see what’s already on the list, use Google Docs) or using a task/project management system (like Basecamp).</li> <li><em>Review and prioritize.</em> If you’re “ticketing” all the incoming questions, bug reports and change requests in a single spreadsheet or task list, you can review that list on a weekly or daily basis to decide on which items will get forwarded to the dev team. (Weekly for most of the process, daily when you are in the final phase of quality assurance and launch.) The closer you are to launch, the higher your threshold for what gets prioritized: if you’re just a few days from launch, the only things that should be addressed are the 5-alarm fires.</li> <li><em>Batch your questions, bugs and change requests. </em>It’s very easy for a web development process to get overwhelming, if only due to the volume of email it generates. (A project management tool that includes threaded messaging, like Basecamp, can help a lot.) If you are relying on email to send requests to your dev team, try to limit yourself to one email a day unless you are facing a major emergency. Ask your dev team to do the same — to reply to all your questions in one email per day (or week), replying to each line item/question directly underneath that question, so you see that each issue is addressed (even if it’s just to say that the dev team has now added that bug to their ticketing system). (You may want to agree that they can reply to each ONE email from you with up to TWO or even THREE emails from them: the first email to answer all the questions they can answer off the top of their heads, the follow-up email(s) to address any outstanding issues that require further investigation.</li> <li><em>Snap your glitches.</em> Part of the secret to communicating with a dev team is communicating clearly about what problems you are having or what you need done. That’s a bit of a Catch-22 when you’re new to web development, because you don’t necessarily know how to describe what you are looking at. So don’t try — take a screenshot instead, and send that to the dev team in your next batch of requests/bug reports! Use a tool like Skitch, and you’ll be able to draw an error on the part of the screen that is puzzling you, or to write a short note directly onto the screenshot noting your concern. Just make sure your screenshot includes the URL of the page you’re looking at. (The easiest way to do this is by including the top of your browser in the screenshot.)</li> <li><em>Google your problems.</em> If you are doing hands-on work as part of the site development process, such as authoring or loading content, you may run into problems that <em>could</em> be bugs — or could just be things you don’t yet know how to handle. Before you ask your dev team for their (expensive) help, try googling your problem: if you’re getting a specific error message, google that, or if you’re just trying to figure out how to do something, google the task along with the name of the web tool you’re working in (e.g. “WordPress how to insert image in post”). Unless you are working with a custom-built or obscure tool, the odds are good that somewhere on the web, someone will have done an <em>awesome </em>job of explaining how to do the thing you are trying to do, or how to fix the thing you are trying to fix.</li> <li><em>Give up quickly.</em> The flip side of batching your concerns is that you <em>know</em> you will be in touch with your dev team every couple of days. So if googling your problem doesn’t yield a quick answer, don’t keep slamming your head into a brick wall. Add your question to the batch you will be sharing with your dev team later today or this week, and then set the task or problem aside until you send your next batch of questions and get the answers your need.</li> <li><em>Define what constitutes an emergency.</em> Talk with your dev team about what constitutes an emergency, so that you agree on what calls or emails simply can’t wait for the next batch. Normally that will include any issue that prevents users from accessing a significant part of the site (either because it’s a very important part, or a very large chunk) , an issue that produces a visible and embarrassing bug (like a huge missing image on your home page),  or an issue that creates some kind of  legal liability (like disclosing private user information). And agree with your dev team on how to reach them quickly if you <em>do</em> face an emergency: email? tweet? SMS? call? Whatever your communications mechanism, it should be a channel that can get a response in less than 1 hour anytime during business hours, and ideally well into the night. (But remember, that channel will only stay open and responsive if you are only<em>very</em> careful not to abuse it. If you have “emergencies” on a regular basis, either you are too quick to call your dev team, or they aren’t doing a good job of keeping your site bug-free.)</li> <li><em>Schedule a standing check-in call.</em> Email is great, and project management software is even greater. But there is <em>nothing</em> to keep you in sync with your dev team like regular phone calls. Scheduling can be tricky, so set up a time for a regular weekly call or meeting as soon as your work gets underway, and increase that frequency to at least 2x/week (possibly even daily) for the last couple of weeks leading up to launch (those daily calls can be short, but can help to quickly address urgent issues). Keep a separate queue of issues to discuss during your next call, and take 15 minutes to prioritize that list just before you have your weekly check-in, so that your most important issues get addressed even if you run out of time.</li> <li><em>Build a buffer.</em> Just as your job is to serve as a buffer between your site’s users and your web team, you may find that you need a buffer between you and all those authors/users. Don’t feel like you need to address every single question or suggestion as it rolls in: set up an auto-reply if you must (“thanks for your email, someone will reply soon”) and then do a daily (or for smaller sites, twice weekly) review of incoming reports, feedback, info requests etc. Decide which of these should be transferred to the queue for your dev team (if any), which you can and should reply to in detail yourself, and which can either be ignored or get a non-personalized follow-up (“We’ve reviewed your suggestion and will consider it for our longer-term marketing plans.)</li> <li><em>Pay attention to what your dev team says is easy or hard.</em> This is a longer-term investment, but unless you are going into web development yourself, the most useful thing you can know about how to build websites is what’s easy and what’s hard. That varies substantially from platform to platform and even version to version, but if you think you’re going to be working with the same web development tools or content management system in the future, it’s worth learning about what is easy to fix and what’s complicated. This is <em>not</em> intuitive, since things that often seem incredibly simple (changing wording on a field, adding a checkbox to a form) can turn out to be very tough, and things that seem hard (adding a rating system, displaying related tweets) could turn out to be incredibly easy. The more you listen to what your dev team says is easy or hard, the better you’ll be at prioritizing items during future dev projects (because you’ll know to prioritize easy-but-important tasks over hard-and-important ones).</li> <li><em>You will not get it right.</em> Even if you take all the foregoing to heart, your website (and especially your first website) will be full of shortcomings — if not outright errors and bugs. That’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong: it’s a sign you’re doing it <em>right. </em>If you waited until every last problem was fixed, you’d never launch. Better to get your site up on its wobbly legs as soon as possible -to “launch crappy”, as we used to say — and to start learning from your users before you invest any more money in building functionality they’ll never use, editing pages they’ll never look at, or fixing glitches they’ll never notice.</li> <li><em>Get a mantra. </em>When we were building our very first client website, our client gave us a crucial piece of advice: iterate. In other words, get it done, get it live, and start learning. We printed out that one word — ITERATE — and plastered it on the wall of our office as a touchstone. Choose the touchstone that will help you remember that you’re not trying to build the perfect website, and put it where you’ll see it every day.</li> <li><em>Enjoy. </em>One of the things my non-web friends often say they envy about my work is that I actually make stuff. This used to seem kind of funny to me, because I grew up in a world where making stuff meant actual physical stuff like cars and clothes. But with so many of my friends working in professional fields where there is truly no tangible work product — just ideas shared, organizations improved, people made less neurotic — I’ve come to see the miracle of a job that actually creates a visible outcome that other people can visit, experience and participate in. Looking at the site you’ve been part of and thinking, hey!! I helped to make that!! is <em>almost</em> the coolest part of building your own social website.</li> </ol> <p>But not quite. Because the actual coolest part comes when your part is done, at least for now, and all those community members start moving in and posting content and talking and actually using this thing you thought you built. Because that’s when you realize you didn’t actually build a site at all: you built an invitation. And now other people are accepting that invitation, and using it to build something far more personal, meaningful and alive than anything you could ever have imagined.</p> <p><strong>What bits of wisdom would <em>you</em> pass along to someone working on a web development project for the first time? Please do share your thoughts in the comments below, or tweet them and link to this page in your tweet.</strong></p> <div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=LBxrkkj7shg:bjTtYjlNOEw:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=LBxrkkj7shg:bjTtYjlNOEw:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=LBxrkkj7shg:bjTtYjlNOEw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=LBxrkkj7shg:bjTtYjlNOEw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=LBxrkkj7shg:bjTtYjlNOEw:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/LBxrkkj7shg" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/15-best-practices-managing-your-first-or-subsequent-web-development-project#comments best practices career project management web development Fri, 02 Dec 2021 07:39:50 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31565 at http://www.simcentre.ca Do ebooks help or hurt children’s literacy? http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/do-ebooks-help-or-hurt-children%E2%80%99s-literacy <p></p><p><img style="float: right;" src="https://img.skitch.com/20111122-8memfjd443sx72jerjd1pp325r.png" alt="Grandmother with child on iPad" width="302" height="200"></p> <blockquote><p>Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books. This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones. They freely acknowledge their digital double standard, saying they want their children to be surrounded by print books, to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals.</p></blockquote> <p>So the New York Times reports in an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/business/for-their-children-many-e-book-readers-insist-on-paper.html">article today on resistance to ebooks for young children</a>. It’s an interesting challenge for ebook developers, particularly since children’s ebooks have been the standard-bearers for the interactive and graphical possibilities of tablet-native titles. In part because storybooks are shorter than adult titles, they’ve demonstrated far more creativity than the initial generation of adult ebooks, featuring everything from simulated pop-ups to reading aloud to touch-triggered animations.</p> <p>But it’s a great example of how an app’s greatest strength will typically also be its greatest liability. Precisely because children’s ebooks have been so successful in blurring the line between book and app, and between narrative and game, they can lose the perceived purity of the reading experience. Our emphasis on reading as the cornerstone of education and learning means that parents resist anything that appears to distract from or dilute that reading experience — particularly if it feels like that new paradigm of evil, Video Games.</p> <p>We owe it to our kids to rethink this idea that books and readings are not only distinct from, but antithetical to, gaming. Gaming is the environment in which our kids will spend a good portion of their school years, and which may also define much of their adult work lives as software developers become more successful at integrating game mechanics into other on- and offline activities.  We can best serve our kids if we not only embrace gaming as part of literacy, but also find ways to integrate it with the traditional literacy of reading.</p> <div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=X9qTUf50ibA:sPqYzxLzBrQ:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=X9qTUf50ibA:sPqYzxLzBrQ:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=X9qTUf50ibA:sPqYzxLzBrQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=X9qTUf50ibA:sPqYzxLzBrQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=X9qTUf50ibA:sPqYzxLzBrQ:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/X9qTUf50ibA" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/do-ebooks-help-or-hurt-children%E2%80%99s-literacy#comments children ebooks family New York Times Tue, 22 Nov 2021 07:26:45 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31544 at http://www.simcentre.ca Do ebooks help or hurt children's literacy? http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/do-ebooks-help-or-hurt-childrens-literacy <div class="field field-type-text field-field-summary"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> <p>The New York Times reports on the last bastion of resistance to ebooks: the parents of young kids.</p> </div> </div> </div> <blockquote><img src="https://img.skitch.com/20111122-8memfjd443sx72jerjd1pp325r.png" alt="Grandmother with child on iPad" title="Grandmother with child using iPad" class="image-right" height="200" width="302">Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books. This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones. They freely acknowledge their digital double standard, saying they want their children to be surrounded by print books, to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals.</blockquote> <p>So the New York Times reports in an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/business/for-their-children-many-e-book-readers-insist-on-paper.html">article today on resistance to ebooks for young children</a>. It's an interesting challenge for ebook developers, particularly since children's ebooks have been the standard-bearers for the interactive and graphical possibilities of tablet-native titles. In part because storybooks are shorter than adult titles, they've demonstrated far more creativity than the initial generation of adult ebooks, featuring everything from simulated pop-ups to reading aloud to touch-triggered animations.</p> <p>But it's a great example of how an app's greatest strength will typically also be its greatest liability. Precisely because children's ebooks have been so successful in blurring the line between book and app, and between narrative and game, they can lose the perceived purity of the reading experience. Our emphasis on reading as the cornerstone of education and learning means that parents resist anything that appears to distract from or dilute that reading experience -- particularly if it feels like that new paradigm of evil, Video Games.</p> <p>We owe it to our kids to rethink this idea that books and readings are not only distinct from, but antithetical to, gaming. Gaming is the environment in which our kids will spend a good portion of their school years, and which may also define much of their adult work lives as software developers become more successful at integrating game mechanics into other on- and offline activities.  We can best serve our kids if we not only embrace gaming as part of literacy, but also find ways to integrate it with the traditional literacy of reading.</p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/do-ebooks-help-or-hurt-childrens-literacy#comments children ebook gaming literacy Epublishing Mon, 21 Nov 2021 23:34:44 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31543 at http://www.simcentre.ca Self-publishing: 5 issues for authors to consider, from Amazon’s Jon Fine and Prof. Tim Laquintano http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/self-publishing-5-issues-authors-consider-amazon%E2%80%99s-jon-fine-and-prof-tim-laquintano <p></p><p>At the <a href="http://mergingmedia.ca/agenda/conference">Merging Media conference today</a>, we heard from Jon Fine, Amazon’s Director of Author & Publisher Relations. Jon’s talk reminded me of the terrific <a href=""/career-work/internet-researchers-tackle-the-future-of-reading-publishing-at-aoir">presentation I heard at AOIR</a> from <a href="http://sites.lafayette.edu/laquintt">Tim Laquintano</a>, a writing professor at Lafayette College who spoke about the evolution of self-publishing. Drawing on their talks, as well as on a paper by Tim, I have identified 5 key issues that authors need to consider if they are interested in self-publishing:</p> <ol> <li><strong>Income potential. </strong>Tim Laquintano’s history of self-publishing included the remarkable tale of Carlo Flumiani, who ran a robust and highly profitable vanity publishing scam before being convicted of fraud in 1941. Stories like this may contribute to some authors’ hesitation about self-publishing, fearing that it’s a route to embarrassment or financial ruin. As both Laquintano and Fine have made clear, self-publishing today is frequently more profitable for authors than publishing with a traditional house, since they can sell digitally or through print-on-demand, and earn a significantly higher portion of total sales. Fine made a point of noting that many Amazon authors earn six-figure incomes from their self-published titles, and a few have even hit the million-dollar mark.</li> <li><strong>Discovery.</strong> If you’re only selling your book to people who <em>know</em> they are looking for it, you’re missing a lot of your potential market, so it’s important to have a strategy for reaching people who would be interested in your title if they knew it was out there. Jon Fine points out that traditional book discovery has placed a lot of emphasis on “hand selling” (when a bookseller places a recommended title in your hands, based on your expressed interests) and cover appeal. In the world of digital book selling, your book’s cover matters less than the metadata you use to describe your title. Using the right keywords is the online equivalent of the book jacket: it’s what makes your title turn up in searches that are based on topics or areas of interest rather than only for readers looking for your specific book.</li> <li><strong>Platform. </strong>Time was that if you published a book with a traditional publishing house, they did the work of building a platform (i.e. a reputation) for you. These days, traditional publishers are primarily interested in working with authors who have a pre-established platform, and authors who go the indie publishing route will likewise need to build (or build upon) their own platform. Tim Laquintano notes that online communities can provide a great mechanism for writers to generate publicity, provided that authors don’t treat these communities as ad platforms, and instead become meaningful contributors to the community conversation.</li> <li><strong>Legitimacy.</strong> One of the major themes in Laquintano’s talk was the shift from “vanity publishing” (with its connotation of being far less credible than mainstream commercial or academic presses) to “indie publishing”, in which self-published authors have a newfound legitimacy. But where does that legitimacy come from, if the author hasn’t run the gauntlet of agents, editors or peer reviewers who have read the work and found it worthy of publication? Fine emphasized the importance of authors building out and curating their Amazon.com pages (both the pages for their individual titles, and their overall author page) since this will usually be the top Google result for a search on a book title. Filling out your author bio, upcoming appearances and the editorial reviews of your title all help to underscore the legitimacy of your self-published work.</li> <li><strong>Authorship.</strong> Both Laquintano and Fine focused on the benefits of epublishing for authors. The process of exploring epublishing at Emily Carr has led me to think a lot about the other players at the table: not only writers but also designers, developers and media creators. If you want to go beyond print-on-demand books or PDF-like ebooks, and instead create enhanced ebooks that take wider advantage of mobile, social and touchscreen technologies, a traditional writer working alone will not be up to the job.The ebook experiments we are doing at the SIM Centre are aimed in part at evolving a new model of authorship in which writers, designers and developers collaborate on both form and content so that we can create ebooks that realize the potential of tablet-based devices for storytelling and knowledge-sharing. The business models that make indie publishing appealing to writers aren’t as well-suited to these new forms of authorship: the costs of developing enhanced ebooks (which are often highly complex software projects) demand new models of financing and of distributing both the risks and rewards of authorship.</li> </ol> <p>You can read more about Jon’s work in this <a href="http://publishingperspectives.com/2010/05/amazons-jon-fine-on-self-publishing-plans-to-publish-in-translation-and-more/">interview in Publishing Perspectives</a>, and find out more about Tim’s work in his paper on <a href="http://wcx.sagepub.com/content/27/4/469.abstract">Sustained authorship: Digital Writing, Self-Publishing, and the Ebook</a>.</p> <div id="flaresmith" class="feedflare"><script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/alexandrasamuel?i=http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/career-work/self-publishing-5-issues-for-authors-to-consider-from-amazons-jon-fine-and-prof-tim-laquintano" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script></div><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=23UiA500d2c:Ia_k0X2EHkU:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=23UiA500d2c:Ia_k0X2EHkU:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=23UiA500d2c:Ia_k0X2EHkU:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=23UiA500d2c:Ia_k0X2EHkU:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=23UiA500d2c:Ia_k0X2EHkU:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/23UiA500d2c" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/self-publishing-5-issues-authors-consider-amazon%E2%80%99s-jon-fine-and-prof-tim-laquintano#comments amazon authorship career ebooks epublishing fine laquintano Fri, 28 Oct 2021 23:14:36 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31518 at http://www.simcentre.ca An overview of ebook design possibilities http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/overview-ebook-design-possibilities <div class="field field-type-filefield field-field-re-blog-post-image"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> <img class="imagefield imagefield-field_re_blog_post_image" width="619" height="335" alt="" src="http://www.simcentre.ca/sites/simcentre.ca/files/blog/images/SophieHalbert_%20Helen%20Lu_KarstonSmith.png?1319045081" /> </div> </div> </div> <p>This fall, Design professor Jonathan Aitken is teaching a 4th year communications design class on <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/programs/courses/DESN/412/F001">Next-generation Ebook Design</a>. In this class, students will work with content teams to develop design prototypes for 5 different ebook titles. But before digging in, Jonathan asked them to orient themselves to the possibilities for ebook design by exploring the way current ebooks and apps tackle five different kinds of challenges:</p> <blockquote> <ol> <li>Usability, translation and contextual help</li> <li>User-generated content and annotatation</li> <li>Social and dynamic content</li> <li>Web and device integration</li> <li>Interactivity, location and game mechanics  </li> </ol> </blockquote> <p>Students came back with intriguing examples of innovative approaches to each area, as well as their own sketches of possible functionality or design approaches. In this series we'll share highlights from their work, as well as links to the micro sites that each team created. Explore one area in-depth, or review all five to get your own crash course in the most exciting possibilities for ebook design.</p> <p> </p> <p><em>Image from multi-device interaction<br />Sophie Halbert + Helen Lu + Karston Smith </em></p> <p><em><br /></em></p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/overview-ebook-design-possibilities#comments Epublishing Wed, 19 Oct 2021 17:25:56 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31508 at http://www.simcentre.ca Internet researchers tackle the future of reading & publishing at AOIR http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/internet-researchers-tackle-future-reading-publishing-aoir <p></p><p>True confession: I treat conference panels as competitive events. Whenever I’m participating in a multi-speaker panel my secret goal is to “win” the panel. This doesn’t mean I try to take down my fellow panellists: it’s not like wrestling or ice hockey, where you’ve got to crush your opponent in order to take home the gold. It’s more like rowing or cycling or maybe figure skating, where the goal is simply to turn in the best performance.*</p> <p>Today I did <em>not</em> win my panel, because I had the privilege of being part of a totally kick-ass conversation at AOIR with 3 <a href="https://www.conftool.net/aoir-ir12/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=78&presentations=show&abstracts=show">smart people doing very cool work on reading and publishing in the digital world</a>, fluidly woven together by Janet Salmons. More amazing still, our work all intersected (not something you can take for granted) in ways that were incredibly constructive for my research, and I hope for others’ as well.</p> <p>So who were these crazy digital rock stars, and what did I learn from them?</p> <ul> <li>Peter Boot talked about how online communities enable new kinds of conversations about books, which go beyond reviewing to content creation and identity construction, and made me think about how that kind of identity work could happen within an ebook if it offered a community to its readers</li> <li>Kathleen Fitzpatrick talked about how we can get over the conventional model of peer review, already, and start editing in ways that actually enrich scholarship — and made me think that is a universe in which I could get pretty excited about academic publishing</li> <li>Tim Laquintano talked about the stigmatization of “vanity publishing” and how it’s giving way to “indie publishing”, and saved me about $5,000 in future psychotherapy by convincing me to just get over this obsession with being published by an Official Imprint</li> </ul> <p>My own talk shared some of the ebook research we’ve been up to at Emily Carr, where I’ve been part a team of designers and researchers including Jonathan Aitken, Celeste Martin and Ron Burnett. In particular, I talked about our interest in creating social ebooks — ebooks that support not only collaborative annotation and highlighting but fuller social experiences in which readers converse and even contribute to book content. To think about how an ebook might deepen reader engagement, I’ve been drawing on the reader-to-leader framework of Preece & Shneiderman, which has been used to study many different kinds of online communities:</p> <p><img class="aligncenter" title="Reader to leader framework" src="https://img.skitch.com/20111014-jmfbnm3fm5mbp1d7qiu97yaw4w.png" alt="Reader to leader framework shows 4 levels of participation" width="560" height="443" /></p> <p> </p> <p>If we think ebooks can act as some form of community, then perhaps the reader-to-leader framework can apply to ebooks. Based on the work we’ve done so far, here’s how different ebook features might map onto this framework — along with a minor adjustment to the framework that makes it a little more useful in this context.</p> <p><img class="aligncenter" title="eReader to Leader Framework" src="https://img.skitch.com/20111014-tf8epaw989r32tnbpxg31ydbbg.png" alt="eReader to Leader adds a "user" layer above "reader"" width="496" height="500" /></p> <p> </p> <p>It’s going to take me at least a few days to digest the ways in which these talks fit together. When I have something semi-coherent to say, I’ll follow the spirit of the panel and share it digitally, as fodder for further conversation.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p>* Yes, I am using a sports metaphor — a move that is guaranteed to cost you crucial points in any panel performance <em>I</em> might be judging. And yes, <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/ericbuchegger/status/124607355445981184">I said “ice hockey”</a>.</p> <div id="flaresmith" class="feedflare"><script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/alexandrasamuel?i=http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/career-work/internet-researchers-tackle-the-future-of-reading-publishing-at-aoir" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script></div><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=HQFmDG_IKJU:aRfofYNI7nk:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=HQFmDG_IKJU:aRfofYNI7nk:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=HQFmDG_IKJU:aRfofYNI7nk:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=HQFmDG_IKJU:aRfofYNI7nk:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=HQFmDG_IKJU:aRfofYNI7nk:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/HQFmDG_IKJU" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/internet-researchers-tackle-future-reading-publishing-aoir#comments #IR12 AOIR career ebooks publishing reading research Fri, 14 Oct 2021 05:28:53 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31501 at http://www.simcentre.ca 10 myths about ethnography, from Tom Boellstorff http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/10-myths-about-ethnography-tom-boellstorff <p>There was a lot to love about anthropologist Tom Boellstorff's dynamic, thought-provoking <a href="https://www.conftool.net/aoir-ir12/index.php?page=browseSessions&print=head&form_session=89&presentations=show&abstracts=show" rel="nofollow">keynote to the Association of Internet Researchers</a>. But I figured that my design colleagues, many of whom use ethnographic research as part of their design work, would be particularly interested in his list of myths about ethnography. Here's <a href="http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/TenureReview/10-EthnographyAndVirtualWorldsCh5-DRAFT.pdf" rel="nofollow">all 10, from a draft text</a> online:</p> <ol> <li>Ethnography is unscientific</li> <li>Ethnography is less valid than quantitative research</li> <li>Ethnography is simply anecdotal</li> <li>Ethnography is undermined by subjectivity</li> <li> Ethnography is merely intuitive </li> <li>Ethnography is writing about your personal experience </li> <li>Ethnographers contaminate fieldsites by their very presence </li> <li> Ethnography is the same as grounded theory </li> <li>Ethnography is the same as ethnomethodology <li>Ethnography will become obsolete</li> </ol> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/10-myths-about-ethnography-tom-boellstorff#comments ethnography Design Research Wed, 12 Oct 2021 23:05:23 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31500 at http://www.simcentre.ca Social e-books as online communities, for AOIR 2011 http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/social-e-books-online-communities-aoir-2011 <p></p><p>Tomorrow I’m off to the conference of the <a href="http://ir12.aoir.org/">Association of Internet Researchers</a>, an event I’ve always wanted to attend and this time actually get to present to! I’m part of a session on <a href="https://www.conftool.net/aoir-ir12/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=78">Books and Publishing</a>, where I will be talking about the e-book research I am now undertaking at Emily Carr in collaboration with Jonathan Aitken, Ron Burnett, Celeste Martin and other colleagues.</p> <p>Our research has morphed a little in the many months since I submitted my session proposal, so here’s a slightly updated version of what I’ll be discussing in this talk.</p> <p><strong>Would you friend a novel? Social e-books as online communities</strong></p> <p>Social e-books are now emerging as a new form of participatory culture. The iPad and other tablet devices have ushered in a new generation of books that blur the line between text and performance, book and app, e-publishing and online community. These e-books that are now appearing on tablet devices differ from their modestly enhanced predecessors by incorporating not only text, image and video but also features like collaborative annotation, game mechanics, interactive animation and socially generated content. This paper argues for the incorporation of social e-books into the study of online community and participatory culture, introducing a model for analyzing social e-books as online communities. It provides a preliminary test of that model through the case of a social e-book now under development.</p> <p>To date, the literature on electronic books has largely fallen in the fields of information science, publishing and education addressing topics like reader perceptions of electronic books (often by analyzing library usage) (Hurst et al. 2009); examining implications for the book industry; or the assessing impact of electronic textbooks on student learning (Chau 2008) and reading habits (Simon 2001). This emphasis on the fundamental experience of reading made sense as long as PDFs and black-and-white virtual ink readers like the first Kindle represented the technical frontier of e-books of mainstream readers.</p> <p>The advent of the iPad created a critical mass of consumers who now have access to a tablet with the technical capability to support much richer forms of media interactivity. In the ten months since the arrival of the iPad, social e-books have begun to enter the mainstream discourse on electronic book publishing, although rudimentary speculation on its potential features goes back at least as far as 2002 (Henke 2002). Social and interactive iPad titles, mostly aimed at children, have dovetailed with the predictions of industry observers who anticipated e-books that support sharing reading notes (Johnston 2010); the exchange of voice annotations, book lending and socially-based reading time estimates (Rose 2010); and “crowdsourced wikis linked within the book” (Wolf 2010).</p> <p>By reviewing a selection of leading-edge social e-books that represent the range of functionality now being incorporated into electronic publications, this paper creates a taxonomy of these emergent features. These include the e-book’s incorporation of video (as per a wide range of Vook titles); interactive animation (for example in Alice in Wonderland and The Heart and the Bottle); animated illustration (The Pedlar Lady); game mechanics (Dusk World); social sharing of book highlights (Copia, and the latest Kindle update) and user-generated content (on the recently announced SocialBooks platform).</p> <p>The e-publishing literature is not well-equipped to predict, analyze and elicit user engagement with books that include these kinds of participatory features. In contrast, research into online community and participatory culture provides a rich source of inspiration and insight for e-book creators; the field may also be enriched by incorporating the study of newly social e-books. This follows the path of other emergent forms of online community that have been successively recognized and incorporated as appropriate subjects of inquiry, such as photo-sharing communities (Nov, Naaman, and Ye 2009), social networks (Boyd and Ellison 2008), YouTube (Rotman and J. Preece 2010) and mobile/SMS-based communities) list-making systems (Krüpl 2010), and Wikipedia (Gleave et al. 2009)</p> <p>To assess the value of online community research in analyzing social e-books, the paper draws on the reader-to-leader framework (J Preece and B Shneiderman 2009), a relatively recent contribution that has already informed research and experiments as diverse as an online community to address climate change (Malone et al. 2009), an investigation of distributed participation in scientific research (Nov, Anderson, and Arazy 2010), and an analysis of geocaching communities (Clough 2010). This framework articulates the user’s experience of deepening social participation in terms of successive levels: “reading, contributing, collaborating, and leading.” (J Preece and B Shneiderman 2009) By mapping the taxonomy of social e-book features onto the levels in the reader-to-leader framework, the paper establishes both the utility of this framework for analyzing reader participation in existing social e-books, and suggests some of the framework’s limitations.</p> <p>It then demonstrates how the framework has been used in planning a specific e-book project by demonstrating how it has been applied to the e-book projects now underway at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. The relevance and gaps of the reader-to-leader framework in structuring the design choices for this project will inform the paper’s conclusion, which identifies the implications for the research agenda in the fields of online community and online participation as well as e-publishing.</p> <div id="flaresmith" class="feedflare"><script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/alexandrasamuel?i=http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/world/social-e-books-as-online-communities-for-aoir-2011" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script></div><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=NrSMV8LIIIk:wf_WoIyJhcE:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=NrSMV8LIIIk:wf_WoIyJhcE:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=NrSMV8LIIIk:wf_WoIyJhcE:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=NrSMV8LIIIk:wf_WoIyJhcE:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=NrSMV8LIIIk:wf_WoIyJhcE:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/NrSMV8LIIIk" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/social-e-books-online-communities-aoir-2011#comments community ebooks reader-to-leader research Tue, 11 Oct 2021 16:02:24 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31497 at http://www.simcentre.ca The post-reading generation talks about the future of books http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/post-reading-generation-talks-about-future-books <p></p><p><a href="http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/post-reading-generation-talks-about-future-books"><em>This post originally appeared on SIMCentre.ca.</em></a></p> <p>Today I got to be a (<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/awsamuel/status/113757779054968832">tweeting</a>) fly on the wall in Jonathan Aitken’s <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/programs/courses/DESN/412/F001">ebook design class</a>. Somewhat to my amusement, Jonathan began by explaining how old people like us used to read in linear way, where you flip through pages in order. The explanation seemed less amusingly superfluous once a quick show of hands revealed that the vast majority of students had read fewer than 10 books in the past year. (OK, I’m not doing that much better myself, but I have kids — useful not only for their steady supply of amusing Facebook anecdotes, but as an iron-clad excuse for not reading more.)</p> <p>Once we got into discussion mode, what was really interesting was how reverently these not-very-book-consuming young people talk about the role and value of books. Some representative comments:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>There’s still value in actually completing something, and focusing, and we’re losing that.</li> <li>It feels disrespectful to just read part of an article. It’s like me tuning out half your lecture.</li> <li>A book is meant as an escape.</li> <li>There are a lot of studies that show that hyperlinks break your concentration — a hyperlink is an implied decision we can’t stop thinking about.</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>And on socially enhanced ebooks in particular:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>I would rather read for myself before getting othe people’s comments.</li> <li>It makes it less intimate, and more social.</li> <li>I want to read a book by myself. The thing about social networks is you get so distracted by tweets by stuff — if you are tweeting back you can’t really focus.</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>On the other hand, some students noted the value of a less linear or immersive approach to reading:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>If you are reading a book for entertaining yourself you want to submerge yourself, but if you are reading a book for another purpose sometimes you just want to get to the point.</li> <li>It can be useful to read in fragments; sometimes you just need to read a specific thing.</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>After spending so much of the past year reading books and articles that fret over how computers, the Internet and social networking are slowly chewing up and digesting the brains of our young, it was interesting to hear so many iPhone-toting students making a passionate case for the value of immersive reading. Then again, i’m not sure that Emily Carr students are all that representative of Kids These Days: do the kids in your office <a href="http://www.twylah.com/awsamuel/topics/graffiti">draw this nicely on the walls</a>?</p> <div id="flaresmith" class="feedflare"><script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/alexandrasamuel?i=http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/sim/the-post-reading-generation-talks-about-the-future-of-books" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script></div><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=NlvVUrV6vbg:nDjakKt4Teo:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=NlvVUrV6vbg:nDjakKt4Teo:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=NlvVUrV6vbg:nDjakKt4Teo:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=NlvVUrV6vbg:nDjakKt4Teo:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=NlvVUrV6vbg:nDjakKt4Teo:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/NlvVUrV6vbg" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/post-reading-generation-talks-about-future-books#comments ebooks ECUAD SIM students Wed, 14 Sep 2021 06:35:21 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31459 at http://www.simcentre.ca The post-reading generation talks about the future of books http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/post-reading-generation-talks-about-future-books <p>Today I got to be a (<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/awsamuel/status/113757779054968832">tweeting</a>) fly on the wall in Jonathan Aitken's <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/programs/courses/DESN/412/F001">ebook design class</a>. Somewhat to my amusement, Jonathan began by explaining how old people like us used to read in linear way, where you flip through pages in order. The explanation seemed less amusingly superfluous once a quick show of hands revealed that the vast majority of students had read fewer than 10 books in the past year. (OK, I'm not doing that much better myself, but I have kids -- useful not only for their steady supply of amusing Facebook anecdotes, but as an iron-clad excuse for not reading more.)</p> <p>Once we got into discussion mode, what was really interesting was how reverently these not-very-book-consuming young people talk about the role and value of books. Some representative comments:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>There's still value in actually completing something, and focusing, and we're losing that.</li> <li>It feels disrespectful to just read part of an article. It's like me tuning out half your lecture.</li> <li>A book is meant as an escape.</li> <li>There are a lot of studies that show that hyperlinks break your concentration -- a hyperlink is an implied decision we can't stop thinking about.</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>And on socially enhanced ebooks in particular:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>I would rather read for myself before getting othe people's comments.</li> <li>It makes it less intimate, and more social.</li> <li>I want to read a book by myself. The thing about social networks is you get so distracted by tweets by stuff -- if you are tweeting back you can't really focus.</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>On the other hand, some students noted the value of a less linear or immersive approach to reading:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>If you are reading a book for entertaining yourself you want to submerge yourself, but if you are reading a book for another purpose sometimes you just want to get to the point.</li> <li>It can be useful to read in fragments; sometimes you just need to read a specific thing.</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>After spending so much of the past year reading books and articles that fret over how computers, the Internet and social networking are slowly chewing up and digesting the brains of our young, it was interesting to hear so many iPhone-toting students making a passionate case for the value of immersive reading. Then again, i'm not sure that Emily Carr students are all that representative of Kids These Days: do the kids in your office <a href="http://www.twylah.com/awsamuel/topics/graffiti">draw this nicely on the walls</a>?</p><div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-related-projects"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> <a href="/projects/art-ebook">The Art of the eBook</a> </div> </div> </div> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/post-reading-generation-talks-about-future-books#comments brains class ebooks Epublishing Wed, 14 Sep 2021 06:21:27 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31446 at http://www.simcentre.ca Back to school at the juncture of art & social science http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/back-school-juncture-art-social-science <p> </p> <p>Walking through the front doors of Emily Carr today after a few days in political science land was a reawakening to the extraordinary.The gallery by the front doors was bursting with fresh pieces, including something that requires you to put on headphones and look at a painting of birds. The young man coming down the stairs as I went up was wearing a NSFSS* <a href="/lifestyle/creating-a-visitors-guide-to-your-home-tech-setup">jaunty cap</a>. The bathrooms had a new crop of inspiring graffiti.</p> <p>It’s a different scene from the one that I and my fellow political scientists were trained for, as I remembered during my ritual re-immersion last week at the <a href="/career-work/10-ways-to-tell-the-difference-between-apsa-and-swswi">American Political Science Association meetings</a>. It was absolutely lovely to see so many old friends and colleagues, and to discover new ones. My grad school classmates have mostly made it through the gauntlet of tenure, and (in not-unrelated news) their first books were laid out on the tables of presses like Oxford, Cambridge and Princeton University. My colleagues in the Information Technology and Politics section, which hosted all the panels I attended (surprise!), offered up insights on topics like online extremism and political twittering, many of which provoked me to think about my own writing and research in new ways.</p> <p>There were plenty of aspects of APSA that I wanted to wrap up and bring back to my colleagues at Emily Carr: the norm of participating in a global research community as an integral and rewarding part of academic life.  The breadth of academic publishing opportunities, still more available in social science than in art research. The widespread tradition of co-authoring with students, and providing the students with the professional opportunity of presenting the results of that work.</p> <p>But I couldn’t help wondering what a burst of art school energy could do for APSA, and for social science more broadly.Setting aside the sartorial benefits of cross-pollination (which I hesitate to do), and the likely impact on PowerPoint style (easy on the fonts, cowboy!), I am most intrigued by the idea of unsettling a field that one APSA blogger excorciated for its innate conservatism. That conservatism is not so much a political position (like many academic fields, political science skews left) as a temperamental one. As I noted last week, this is a conference in which people still focus on publishing books and talking at you on panels. They take notes on paper, and nobody seemed to be having a panic attack at the lack of wifi. The Internet revolution has arrived, and given way to the social media revolution, and political science has remained largely unchanged except for the appearance of a few booths hawking e-textbooks and software tools for data analysis. And that conservatism makes sense, in a way, because we’re talking about a field based on the idea that research is a cumulative and incremental process in which each researcher builds on those who have gone before.</p> <p>After almost two years of working out of an art university there are still huge gaps in my understanding of how people learn, teach and work in a field that is so different from my own. What I observe, however, points to a pedagogical and research culture that is miles away from that poll sci conservatism. As one colleague said while discussing the idea of giving students a highly structured assignment, “if an art student doesn’t rebel against that structure by the time they get to their 3rd year, we’re not doing on job.”</p> <p>How can a field and culture that cultivates rebellion engage with one in which conservatism is the deeply embedded norm? I don’t have an answer, but I have a hunch that it’s an important question.  Every day I spend at Emily Carr, I see a willingness to challenge, a fearless capacity to experiment, and most of all, a passionate commitment to the political and social ideals that first inspired entry into the field. These are qualities that conventional academia frequently kerbs, or channels into structures so narrow that we extinguish the spark of excitement from which they sprang.</p> <p>As well as being the first day of school here at Emily Carr, today is also the very first day of school for my youngest child (aka <a href="http://twitter.com/lilpnut">Lil Pnut</a>) who is starting kindergarten. When I think about what I want school to be for him, I do indeed think about his potential induction into the human project of knowledge creation, and into the culture of discipline required for sustained intellectual work. But I also think about how to nourish his joy in learning, his ability to see beyond the problem presented to him, and even his terrifying, powerful ability to refuse the rules that don’t make sense. And I feel grateful to be spending my days in a place that reminds me how to do it.</p> <p>*Not Safe For Social Science.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/PDNzJY-PmV0" alt="" width="1" height="1"></p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/back-school-juncture-art-social-science#comments apsa career education Emily Carr political science Tue, 06 Sep 2021 19:43:25 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31434 at http://www.simcentre.ca Work at Play CEO David Gratton on the new Google+ http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/work-play-ceo-david-gratton-new-google <div class="field field-type-text field-field-summary"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> <p>Work at Play CEO David Gratton looks at what Google+ offers to today's Twitter or Facebook users.</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>Wondering how Google+ is going to change the social web? Check out these thoughts from David Gratton, CEO of SIM partner <a href="http://workatplay.com" rel="nofollow">Work at Play</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>Given that our attention is limited and many people have time to monitor only a couple of social networks during the day, I think Google+ represents a significant threat to Twitter, while Facebook is likely to feel little impact with the present offering.</p></blockquote> <p>David's assessment is based on the response he got when he sent out almost 500 Google+ invites. As he writes on the Work at Play blog, he got two different kinds of feedback, depending on the social media patterns of the people he emailed:</p> <blockquote><p>Those not on Twitter, but on Facebook - "I don't get it", "Why is this supposed to be better than Facebook?", "This is a waste of time". Their general emotional response was some level of either skepticism or outright dismissal.<br><br /> Those who use Twitter regularly - "It's interesting, I need to play with it more", "This is great!". Many made no comment at all but were "in like Flynn" based on the volume of posts and comments they were making. Their general emotional response was somewhere between curiosity and excitement.</p></blockquote> <p>Have <em>you</em> tried Google+? How does it map onto your experience using Facebook or Twitter? Let us know here, or leave your comment on <a href="http://www.workatplay.com/think/google-initial-response-represents-serious-challenge-twitter" rel="nofollow">David's blog post</a> on the Work at Play site.</p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/work-play-ceo-david-gratton-new-google#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2021 23:53:25 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31415 at http://www.simcentre.ca 10 ways academics can use Twitter http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/10-ways-academics-can-use-twitter <p></p> <p>M.H. Beals has a terrific overview of <a href="http://thesocraticdilemma.blogspot.com/2011/05/workshop-review-social-media-for.html">Social Media for Researchers and Academics</a>, based on a one-way workshop held at the Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services in Edinburgh. Her post provides a great roadmap of the different ways academics can use social media, ranging from delicious to Wikipedia, along with pointers to resources that can help them get started.</p> <p>Her post includes a delightful list of ideas for how academics can use Twitter:</p> <blockquote><ol> <li>asking for reading suggestions or reviews “Any recent articles on….”</li> <li>advertising a speaking engagement “In London? Come hear my paper on…..”</li> <li>searching for specialists “Looking for assistance with….”</li> <li>finding a peer reviewers “Almost ready to submit. Anyone fancy a read of…”</li> <li>locating the right room at a conference “#AHA2011 Where is Foner’s panel being held?”</li> <li>advertising an event, call for papers, or publication</li> <li>facilitating an online discussion group in large lectures</li> </ol> </blockquote> <p>…but let me add three more to bring us to a round 10:</p> <li>organizing a backchannel conversation during a paper or panel presentation at an academic conference by using a hashtag for that session</li> <li>finding colleagues who tweet about a certain topic by using Listorious or a Twitter keyword search (rather than posting a general request for help)</li> <li>identifying potential research subjects by noticing who tweets about a specific topic (for example, finding people with diabetes, single moms, finance managers, etc.)</li> <p>For more great ideas about how to use social media as a research tool, <a href="http://thesocraticdilemma.blogspot.com/2011/05/workshop-review-social-media-for.html">read the full post</a>.</p> <div id="flaresmith" class="feedflare"><script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/alexandrasamuel?i=http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/20110525/10-ways-academics-can-use-twitter" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script></div> <div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=iRh7cLV5TLg:oSC0XIuwnb8:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=iRh7cLV5TLg:oSC0XIuwnb8:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=iRh7cLV5TLg:oSC0XIuwnb8:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?i=iRh7cLV5TLg:oSC0XIuwnb8:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?a=iRh7cLV5TLg:oSC0XIuwnb8:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/alexandrasamuel?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/alexandrasamuel/~4/iRh7cLV5TLg" height="1" width="1"/> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/anonymous/10-ways-academics-can-use-twitter#comments academia career research twitter Thu, 26 May 2021 06:18:09 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31385 at http://www.simcentre.ca Welcome to the new SIMCentre.ca http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/welcome-new-simcentreca <div class="field field-type-text field-field-summary"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item odd"> <p>This week the SIM Centre site launched with its new design. You can look forward to more news about our research now that we have a beautiful new online home!</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>This week we're proud to introduce the new SIMCentre.ca. This site is the newly beautiful home for blog posts, project news and event announcements about the wide range of activities happening at the Social + Interactive Media Centre. We hope you'll visit regularly (and <a href="/blog/414/rss" rel="nofollow">subscribe to our feed</a>) so that you can stay up-to-date with the latest digital research and innovations at Emily Carr and beyond.</p> <p>The new site reflects a lot of work by a lot of different people at Emily Carr and beyond. In particular I'd like to give a huge shout-out to:</p> <blockquote><ul> <li><a href="http://raisedeyebrow.com" rel="nofollow">Raised Eyebrow</a>, the Vancouver-based web design company that built the site in Drupal. Thanks especially to Magnus & Lauren for many months of help!</li> <li>Myron Campbell, the rockstar MAA student who designed our funkadelic new look</li> <li>David Aitken, a freshly minded Emily Carr grad who did a lot of the production work to help implement the new site design</li> <li>Cari Bird, who designed our new ECUAD-tastic logo</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>But most of all I want to give a huge thank you to Sandra Dametto, the Project Manager at SIM & the S3D Centre. Now that we've got an online home you'll be able to hear more about Sandra and the rest of the team at SIM, but let me say that Sandra a one-woman case study in the importance of awesome project management. You can have a fantastic design and development team (and we did!) but unless you have someone pulling all the pieces together it can just never quite happen. Sandra really jumped in and made things happen, both at the big picture level (so, how many sites do we need, exactly?) and then right down to the painful details (what is that comma doing there?) I'm thrilled that we have our very own living example of Sandra's capacity to make complex projects come to fruition...a talent that will continue to benefit so many other projects at SIM.</p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/welcome-new-simcentreca#comments Social Media Thu, 19 May 2021 05:00:54 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31379 at http://www.simcentre.ca Wanted: Javascript + HTML5 guru/mentor for Emily Carr/Mozilla collaboration http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/wanted-javascript-html5-gurumentor-emily-carrmozilla-collaboration <p>One of the SIM Centre's research areas is in the development of innovative, highly interactive ebooks. We are currently developing an experimental prototype for a research project with Mozilla, and we need a developer or development company who can work with our team for 4-8 weeks in May/June. This developer will work with our faculty team to mentor 4 students who are currently learning HTML5, and to do the javascript development (plus additional HTML5) for our ebook's advanced features.</p> <p>The ideal person or team will offer us:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>strong HTML5 experience with a portfolio of HTML5 sites and/or applications</li> <li>experience developing for tablet and/or mobile devices</li> <li>strong javascript skills with examples you can share</li> <li>an active interest in teaching or mentoring, demonstrated through past experience in teaching, mentoring, training or management roles</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>If you or your company is available to work with us on this exciting project on a small short-term contract, we would love to hear from you. This is an ongoing research area so there may be additional opportunities for longer-term collaboration.</p> <p>Please send an e-mail to awsamuel[at]ecuad[dot]ca with:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>a short summary of your skills  interest in this project</li> <li>a résumé and/or a link to your online portfolio or client list</li> </ul> </blockquote> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/wanted-javascript-html5-gurumentor-emily-carrmozilla-collaboration#comments Tue, 26 Apr 2022 23:52:31 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31357 at http://www.simcentre.ca Planning the SIM Centre web site: technical requirements http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/planning-sim-centre-web-site-technical-requirements <p>We're now well into the job of overhauling our site. As we chug along, I thought it might be useful for folks to see how I documented our requirements for the site. This is a fairly sketchy set of requirements -- I'd recommend a much more detailed set of requirements for most purposes, but since this is a simple site and since I (the client) know a fair bit about Drupal, we didn't need a detailed set of requirements in order to lay out the expectations for the site. The wireframes that I previously posted actually offer a much more detailed picture of the prospective site, but a table like this is a nice place to start. Apologies for the crazy-looking table but I was starting from a Microsoft Word document and didn't want to spend too much time on cleanup! You'll find this much easier to read by <a href="http://simcentre.ca/sites/simcentre.ca/files/2010-07-26.SIMsite_requirements.doc" rel="nofollow">downloading the Word file here</a>.</p> <p><strong>Approach:</strong> We need a simple web site with the flexibility to grow and expand over time; we expect the SIM Centre site may be a way of trying out new features that could later be incorporated into the Drupal install for ecuad.ca. While we are setting up an independent site in order to have admin access, flexibility and a few additional features that are not available on the ecuad.ca site, the goal (at least in the first instance) is to have a site that feels as integrated/seamless as possible with the ecuad.ca: in a best-case scenario the user wouldn’t realize they were on a different site, except by looking at the address bar and seeing a different URL.</p> <p><strong>Platform and hosting</strong>: A Drupal site has already been provisioned by CanTrust hosting and setup with the basic modules, nav structure and content. It’s at simcentre.ca</p> <p><strong>Taxonomy: </strong>We will need a combination of free tags and a few structured taxonomies:</p> <p>a. free tagging<br />b. thematic categories (correspond to major thematic areas, e.g. 3D, soft materials, social media)<br />c. projects (should integrate with node relationships)</p> <p>In addition I would like to use node relationships to relate projects, industry partners and faculty.  See for example the relationship between clients (http://www.socialsignal.com/clients) and projects on the Social Signal site (http://www.socialsignal.com/cases).</p> <p>Roles and permissions: We need to include three user roles:</p> <ol> <li>Admin: full access</li> <li>SIM team:  this would allow a few internal people to add content.</li> <li>ECUAD: (hoping for pass-through authentication from ecuad.ca though have yet to get confirmation that this is possible. Would provide access to internal pages (grant application info) which we will otherwise need to make generally visible.</li> </ol> <p>For the rest document, which you'll find much easier to read <a href="http://simcentre.ca/sites/simcentre.ca/files/2010-07-26.SIMsite_requirements.doc" rel="nofollow">download the Word file here</a>.</p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/planning-sim-centre-web-site-technical-requirements#comments Sun, 13 Mar 2022 00:31:20 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31211 at http://www.simcentre.ca An open design process for SIMCentre.ca http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/open-design-process-simcentreca <p>Shh...don't tell anyone, but we're redesigning our website.</p> <p>That's the standard attitude towards website redesign, at least since the (merciful!) death of those horrible "under construction" signs you used to find all over the web. It's kind of the way people are about disclosing plans for plastic surgery or corporate reorganization: nobody wants to admit an overhaul is needed until it's all done and you can put a happy face on the results.</p> <p>We've decided to break with tradition and put the redesign out in the open. After all, it's no secret that the Social + Interactive Media Centre website looks pretty rough. We pulled it together in about 3 days, borrowing heavily from a pre-existing website profile and using a default theme. It got the job done but it certainly hasn't reflected the creative and design talent or innovative tech thinking that we find at Emily Carr and among our partners.</p> <p>For the past few months we've been working on something better...hopefully a lot better. And since we are here to share Emily Carr's creative and design capacity with the community, we want to invite you along for the ride.</p> <p>We've started by rolling back our current site to the most basic design we could imagine: the virtual equivalent of a blank slate. And we've figured out what we want our new site to do, functionally: the content and features it needs to offer.</p> <p>What comes next is the fun part. We're now working on making it look cool, behave in an interesting way, and most of all, engage the folks who the SIM Centre is here to serve: Vancouver's business, creative and tech communities.</p> <p>Embedded in this blog post is a wireframe (functional mockup) that maps out the ingredients you'll find in our upcoming site, which will be built by <a href="http://raisedeyebrow.com">Raised Eyebrow</a>. These wireframes were created by Myron Campbell, an Emily Carr graduate student who was recently named <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/about/news/94482">interactive designer of the year at the Canadian New Media Awards</a>. Myron based his wireframes on the work and input of our broader website team; I'll introduce the rest of the team in my next post.</p> <p>As we take these wireframes from a functional description to a living website, we are inviting you along with us. We'll share our internal design notes, sketches and glitches. We'll argue in public and if you're lucky you'll also catch our moments of inspiration. We'll do our best to model a constructive collaboration, and we'll be eager to hear your thoughts and experiences on what makes for a great web development process.</p> <p>And we would love your inspiration, too. Tell us what we're getting right, what we're getting wrong and where we can do better; we are even setting up a voting feature that will let you vote other people's comments up or down. And please do tweet, blog, Facebook and gossip about our design process to encourage your colleagues and friends to share their feedback, too.</p> <p><a style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; display: block; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Initial wireframes for SIMCentre.ca on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/47489621/Initial-wireframes-for-SIMCentre-ca">Initial wireframes for SIMCentre.ca</a> <object id="doc_80851096295925" style="outline: none;" width="100%" height="600" name="doc_80851096295925" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /> <param name="wmode" value="opaque" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=47489621&access_key=key-2oie5luwjoq92w9jbcfh&page=1&viewMode=list" /> <embed id="doc_80851096295925" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%" height="600" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=47489621&access_key=key-2oie5luwjoq92w9jbcfh&page=1&viewMode=list" name="doc_80851096295925" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#ffffff"></embed> </object> </p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/open-design-process-simcentreca#comments Sat, 22 Jan 2022 01:25:40 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31145 at http://www.simcentre.ca Crowdsourcing 101 with partner Work at Play http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/crowdsourcing-101-partner-work-play <p>SIM Centre partner <a href="/work-play" rel="nofollow">Work at Play</a> shared a <a href="http://www.workatplay.com/think/spotlight-crowdsourcing" rel="nofollow">great post summing up the best practices in crowdsourcing</a>. </p> <blockquote><p>The broad range of web-based tools that enable commenting, contributing and collaborating all helped pave the way for the crowdsourcing model. From the relatively straightforward acts of writing/editing Wikipedia and translating Facebook, through to setting briefs for scientists around the world, crowdsourcing seems to be able to offer a solution to just about any problem. </p></blockquote> <p>A couple of key principles to bear in mind:</p> <blockquote><ul> <li>Start small: Try a crowdsourcing experiment within your company first, to see if it fits with your organization’s culture. </li> <li>Manage expectations: The 90:9:1 rule will likely apply - 90% consume, 9% comment, 1% contribute.</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p><a href="http://www.workatplay.com/think/spotlight-crowdsourcing" rel="nofollow">Read the whole post on the Work at Play blog</a>.</p> <blockquote><p></p></blockquote> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/crowdsourcing-101-partner-work-play#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2021 20:40:14 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31135 at http://www.simcentre.ca Show + Tech: what I did on my summer vacation http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/show-tech-what-i-did-my-summer-vacation <p>Stinky socks. Talking dogs. Dancing jelly beans.</p> <p>We got to see all of the above — and more! — at the SIM Centre‘s inaugural <a href="http://simcentre.ca/events/show-tech-what-i-did-my-summer-vacation" rel="nofollow">show + tech</a>. Show + Tech is a chance for members of Vancouver’s business, art and technology communities to connect with the faculty, students and staff at Emily Carr, and to discover one another’s projects and passions.  Tonight's gathering included digital artists, web developers, curious onlookers and Emily Carr President Ron Burnett.</p> <p>We heard about 6 different projects, all on the theme of “what I did on my summer vacation”. Each presenter shared a single image, slide or video clip that illustrated their latest creative or professional project, and gave us a quick 5-minute rundown of what the project was about before taking a few questions. Then it was on to the next!</p> <p>E-mail us to let us know if you want to attend the next show + tech, or if you have a project you’d like to present. We’d love to hear about the creative digital endeavors outside of Emily Carr as well as within the university.</p> <p>Here are the projects we heard about tonight:</p> <p><strong>Diana Burgoyne: Flap</strong></p> <p>Feet don’t smell as bad as you think. That was one of the insights we took from <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/~dburg/main.htm" rel="nofollow">Diana Burgoyne</a>‘s presentation of <a href="http://www.aut.ac.nz/news/aut-news/2010/august/smelly-socks-tell-story-of-cultural-identity" rel="nofollow">Flap</a>, an installation that she created in partnership with New Zealand artist Raewyn Turner. These two artists believe that exploring our sensory associations is another way to understand our cultural identity, and developed a collaboration to give that notion visceral form. The project collected 25 pairs of socks from Canadians — Diana asked a variety of family and friends to wear socks until they were intolerably stinky — and placed them in jars in gallery that also contained 25 pairs of socks from New Zealanders. Each jar was rigged so that gallery visitors had to lean in perilously close to trigger a jar opening…whereupon they’d get a whiff. The big surprise, Diana told us, is that people dove in for a bigger sniff than they were obligated to take…and that the stinky socks were mostly not that stinky.</p> <p><strong>Lauren Bacon: datadotgc</strong></p> <p>The geek-tastic<a href="http://www.datadotgc.ca/" rel="nofollow">datadotgc</a> is a project for anyone who hates to wait. Here in Canada, we’ve been waiting for the government to introduce an open data strategy like the United States’ <a class="zem_slink" title="Data.gov" rel="homepage" href="http://www.data.gov/" rel="nofollow">data.gov</a> or the UK’s <a class="zem_slink" title="data.gov.uk" rel="homepage" href="http://data.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">data.gov.uk</a>. Lauren Bacon of <a href="http://raisedeyebrow.ca/" rel="nofollow">Raised Eyebrow web studio</a>showed us what happens when people stop waiting and take matters into their own hands: this summer, Lauren and her collaborators worked with a team of Microsoft developers to create a working beta that can take data like <a href="http://www.datadotgc.ca/dataset/location_of_historic_buildings_in_edmonton" rel="nofollow">a list of Edmonton’s historical buildings</a>, and turn it into a sortable, mappable resource.</p> <p><strong>Leslie Bishko: Body Buddies</strong></p> <p>What’s missing from a 3-person Skype conference? Once you get past two participants, you can’t do video, so you lose the entire repertoire of non-verbal communication.<a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/people/profile/14460" rel="nofollow">Leslie Bishko</a> and her collaborators have tested an alternative in Body Buddies, a system of avatars that supplements a Skype call with gestures and body language. No more communicating with disembodied voices: Body Buddies lets you incorporate meaningful social signals into your voice-only communications.</p> <p><strong>Sean Arden: Best Before</strong></p> <p>If you’re the only person using your computer right now, you are way under capacity: <a href="http://www.atomized.ca/" rel="nofollow">Sean Arden</a> and his collaborators were able to support 64 gamers on a single dual-core computer. Throw a few of those computers together, and they were able to get 200 gamers simultaneously playing their parts as little jelly beans in a giant, movie theatre-sized video game. Their show, <a href="http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project_4397.html" rel="nofollow">Best Before</a>, launched at the Cultch in Vancouver before touring worldwide.</p> <p><strong>Maria Lantin: Breath I/O</strong></p> <p>We don’t consume media: we breathe it in…and out.</p> </p> <p> That’s the insight behind <a href="http://blogs.eciad.ca/breathio/" rel="nofollow">Breath I/O</a>, a collaborative art project presented by one of its creators, IDS Director Maria Lantin. Breath I/O is a virtual reality sculpture that projects video imagery onto a stereoscopic 3D model of living, breathing lungs, accompanied by breath sounds and the whispered inner dialogue (“I like it. I like it. I don’t like it. Like me!”) that narrates our subjective experience of social media and life online. Maria showed us the latest iteration, which she worked on during her Oboro residency this summer, and which she displayed with a snazzy laser projector that can project onto curved surfaces…like the 3D fabric lungs currently being created for the project by Emily Carr grad student Katherine Soucie.</p> <p><strong>Julie Andreyev: Remote monitoring</strong></p> <p>If your dog barks when there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? That question is not exactly what drove <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/people/profile/14527" rel="nofollow">Julie Andreyev</a>‘s summer explorations, but she’s in a good position to offer an answer. Julie’s exploration of animal consciousness in <a href="http://glistenhive.ca/" rel="nofollow">*glisten HIVE</a> has evolved into an investigation of the latest generation of options for remote monitoring while you’re away from home, from <a href="http://www.senstic.com/iphone/aircam/aircam.aspx" rel="nofollow">webcams that stream to our iPhone</a> to<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mattel-T7005-Puppy-Tweets-Blue/dp/B0037W6TX0" rel="nofollow">a dog tag that gets your puppy tweeting</a>.</p> <p><strong>Rachel Kroft & Shelagh McLellan: A digital resource directory for Emily Carr</strong></p> <p>One of the standout projects at last year’s grad show was Lisa Fraser’s <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/people/work/36698" rel="nofollow">BearHug</a>, a pressure vest for autistic kids who find calm in a tight embrace. Lisa’s project faced a common challenge here at Emily Carr, where student and faculty projects often require an eclectic, unusual and highly specialized set of resources and services. But when students succeed in tracking down the shop with that programmable embroidery machine, or the guy who knows how to do a certain kind of welding, that information may leave the school with them. By creating a digital resource collection that integrates with the university web site, <a href="https://www.ecuad.ca/people/profile/27321" rel="nofollow">Rachel</a> and <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/people/profile/20424" rel="nofollow">Shelagh</a> hope to build a directory of suppliers and expertise that can help students, faculty and other members of the artistic community.</p> <p>Of course, no show + tell would be complete without juice + cookies, so once our minds were blown we had a chance to kick back, meet each other and start finding potential intersections. We hope you’ll join us at our next show + tech for even more stories and inspiration from the place where art and tech collide.</p> <p> </p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/show-tech-what-i-did-my-summer-vacation#comments Fri, 01 Oct 2021 06:24:24 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31124 at http://www.simcentre.ca The pajama test: An open letter to my Facebook “friends” http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/pajama-test-open-letter-my-facebook-%E2%80%9Cfriends%E2%80%9D <p>You may have noticed that you’re hearing from me less, and when you do, it’s mostly about my husband or my shoes or how I feel when someone eats the last brownie. Maybe you’re happy that your news feed isn’t full of my Twitter updates anymore (I got rid of my Twitter-to-Facebook hookup) or maybe you’re unhappy that I never write on your wall. Maybe you’re wondering why I didn’t accept your friend request, or maybe you’re wondering why you’re not in my friend list when you used to be.</p> <p>Here’s the truth: we’re not actually friends. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you, or think you’re smart, or want to work with you. I’ve turned down friend requests from some of my favourite colleagues, and from people I respect a lot. In fact I would love to hear from you on Twitter (I’m @awsamuel), and if you’re missing all those great social media links and tidbits, you’ll still find them on my Twitter feed.</p> <p>But Facebook isn’t Twitter. And for most of the past two years — the time in which I’ve been really active on Twitter — that’s felt like a bad thing. Twitter is more open, more flexible, and more useful as a source of professional learning and conversation. I can tweet something and store it to delicious at the same time, I can use Skitch to capture a screenshot and share it instantly on Twitter; I can even use Twitter to log my hours in Harvest, our time tracking system.</p> <p>In fact, I use Twitter so much that it now feels like the most awesome, raging party you’ve ever been to: a packed room full of fascinating colleagues and friends where conversation is flying along a mile a minute. I love parties like that, and I’m not above saying they can also be very useful professionally: I’ve begun more than one great collaboration over a few beers.</p> <p>And yet a giant rager is not my favorite place to spend time with friends. At the end of the day (or night) I want to go somewhere quiet and unwind, take off my party shoes and have a postgame chat with one of my closest pals. Hell, I want get into my jammies and settle in for a good long juicy talk.</p> <p>I’m now focusing my Facebook time on the friends who pass the pajama test: is this someone I know well enough to chat with once I’m in my jammies? These are the people who actually do care about what I’m eating for breakfast (something I hate reading about on Twitter); these are the people I love so much that yes, I do want to hear about the funny thing their cat just did.</p> <p>This is the point where you pop over to my Facebook page and wonder how the hell I could feel comfortable enough to wear my PJs in front of 718 people (my current number of friends). The truth is, I don’t. And that’s exactly why I’ve changed the way I use Facebook by:</p> <p> Creating a WTF list on Facebook for the people who friend me, but who I can’t place…but know I know somehow<br /> Ignoring friend requests from anyone who is totally new and unfamiliar, especially after I discovered that my habit of accepting random friend requests was filling my news feed with updates from some pretty undesirable “friends”</p> <ul> <li>Getting disciplined about clicking “hide” whenever I see news in my feed from someone I don’t really really really care about, and hiding that person from my news feed</li> <li>Refusing all group invitations on Facebook</li> <li>Killing the Twitter-to-Facebook import that used to cross-post all my status updates</li> <li>Setting my Facebook privacy settings so my posts are only visible to people on my Friends list, and not to my networks or friends-of-friends</li> <li>Setting up a “Kid Sharing Friends” list on Facebook for the even smaller number of people who I feel comfortable sharing kid photos with, and limiting the visibility of my Facebook photos to that list</li> <li>Killing the Twitter-to-Facebook import that used to cross-post all my status updates</li> <li>Gradually paring back my Facebook list to the people who pass my pajama test.</li> </ul> </p> <p>All of these practices make me a lot less visible on Facebook. And I’ll admit, that’s a little scary for a social media junkie like me: it feels like so much of social media is about waving your arms as wildly as possible and shouting “look at me! look at me!!”</p> <p>But I’ve decided that Facebook is the one part of the social media empire where I’m going to stop waving. Because as much as Facebook’s “walled garden” approach (which makes Facebook relatively invisible outside the garden walls) is what drove me towards focusing on Twitter, the walled garden has its charms, too.</p> <p>There are times when it’s nice to settle into a shady corner and talk about stuff that has nothing to do with work (bearing in mind that someone can still peek over the walls and tell the world exactly what you’re saying). There are times when I want to pay attention to the people I know from school, instead of the people I know from work. There are times when it’s I just want to catch up with my BFF — even if there are lots of other people, like you, who I also really enjoy!</p> <p>And yes, there are times when I just want to put on my PJs.</p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/pajama-test-open-letter-my-facebook-%E2%80%9Cfriends%E2%80%9D#comments Wed, 09 Jun 2021 07:00:00 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31353 at http://www.simcentre.ca Social networks say good-bye to difficult but crucial interactions http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/social-networks-say-good-bye-difficult-crucial-interactions <p>Todd Essig has a thoughtful post about how social networks have affected the process of saying good-bye in our culture. Now that the hospital where he works is closing, he anticipated more than the usual end-of-school-year good-byes. Instead, he’s seen less: as one of his residents observed, “there has been more ’see you on Facebook!’ and ‘I’ll follow you on <a class="pt-basics-link" style="color: #236fb5; text-decoration: none;" title="Psychology Today looks at Social Networking" href="/basics/social-networking">Twitter</a>‘” than actual goodbyes.</p> <p>While social networks promise to help us keep in touch, that same promise may deprive us of a meaningful good-bye, Essig writes:</p> <blockquote> <p>The fact that social networks are transforming the often messy difficult process of good-bye is no surprise. But I’m not so sure this is such a good thing. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not: not because there’s anything wrong with staying in touch with old friends and former colleagues online—actually, that can be pretty great—but because processes of saying good-bye can be so psychologically rich and valuable it would be a real <a class="pt-basics-link" style="color: #236fb5; text-decoration: none;" title="Psychology Today looks at Embarrassment" href="/basics/embarrassment">shame</a> to lose the experience just because we now have a technologically-mediated easy way out.</p> </blockquote> <p>So what makes a good-bye so important? Read Essig’s <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/over-simulated/201006/4-reasons-good-bye-keep-social-networking-becoming-social-notworking">4 reasons for good-bye: Keep ’social networking’ from becoming ’social notworking’ in Psychology Today</a>.</p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/social-networks-say-good-bye-difficult-crucial-interactions#comments Tue, 08 Jun 2021 17:44:34 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31354 at http://www.simcentre.ca Making time for creative expression online http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/making-time-creative-expression-online <blockquote> <p>Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.</p> <p>[T]he bad news: You have to make time to do this.</p> <p>This means you have to grasp that your manic forms of connectivity—cell phone, email, text, Twitter—steal most chances of lasting connection or amazement.</p> </blockquote> <p>So Anne Lamott writes in a wonderful piece for Sunset Magazine, <a href="http://www.sunset.com/travel/anne-lamott-how-to-find-time-00418000067331/">Time lost and found</a>. (Thanks to <a href="http://twitter.com/Bbravo/statuses/11832242369">Britt Bravo for pointing me to it</a>!) It’s no accident that her article initially points to all the online activities that steal our time — though she eventually gets around to acknowledging lots of other time sinks. But the go-go, non-stop web is the distraction that so many of us notice (and resent) the most, if only because it’s the newest and fastest-growing source of interruption in our lives.  And our unease with the interruption reflects the fact that what we’re interrupting, so often, are those pursuits that are most likely to make us truly happy: The time to connect with friends. The opportunity for self-expression. Simple quiet.</p> <p>But our time online doesn’t have to pull us away from what really matters. The irony of Lamott’s piece is that the very joy she urges her readers to make time for — the pursuit of creative self-expression — is one that the web makes vastly more accessible. Yes, the satisfactions of writing (among other forms of expression) are available even if you never get published — as Lamott points out in her excellent book, <a class="zem_slink" title="Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life" rel="amazon" href="http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp/0385480016%3FSubscriptionId%3D0G81C5DAZ03ZR9WH9X82%26tag%3Dzemanta-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0385480016">Bird by Bird</a>. But for a lot of us mere mortals, the possibility that someone <em>could</em> read your words (or see your photographs, or listen to your music) is a useful motivation, a source of sustenance during those moments when we wonder exactly why we’ve skipped the gym five days in a row in order to write.</p> <p>The same online tools that can distract us from self-expression also serve as a gateway to the possibility that yes, someone will see what you’ve taken the time to create. Whether you’re a published author or a first-time writer, you can write a blog that gives you an audience not in six months (when that magazine finally hits the stands) but today. You can post your photos to <a class="zem_slink" title="Flickr" rel="homepage" href="http://www.flickr.com">Flickr</a> and add them to a collctively-curated collection of related images. You can record your song in Garage Band and share it on <a href="http://www.jamendo.com/en/">Jamendo</a>. You can make your brilliant movie and distribute it on <a class="zem_slink" title="YouTube" rel="homepage" href="http://www.youtube.com/">YouTube</a> or <a class="zem_slink" title="Vimeo" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>. In fact, it’s hard to think of a form of creative expression that can’t be somehow produced and shared online.</p> <p>And the web offers more than a distribution channel: it can be a powerful source of inspiration and support, as I described in my recent post on <a href="/20100118/9-ways-social-media-can-support-your-creativity">9 ways social media can support your creativity</a>. You can maintain an always-accessible inspiration file with a tool like <a class="zem_slink" title="Evernote" rel="homepage" href="http://www.evernote.com/">Evernote</a>, which lets you access your notes via computer, web or smartphone. If you can’t find another local artist to critique your work — or the time to get together — you can get support, feedback and encouragement online. You can ferret out the facts for your historical novel using YouTube and Wikipedia, or find  the right palette for your next painting at <a href="http://www.colourlovers.com/">ColourLovers</a>.</p> <p>But the web’s creative riches and possibilities remain elusive as long as you relate to it in the manner that Lamott describes: as the always-on, non-negotiable distraction that demands your attention and dictates how you spend your time. If you want to take her advice to “fight tooth and nail” for the time to pursue your creative expression, you’ll need to turn the web into an ally rather than an enemy in that fight. That means thinking about your top priorities before you sit down at the keyboard (or pick up that iPhone) and directing your online minutes towards the sites, activities and relationships that help you pursue what matters.</p> <p>What matters most, as Lamott points out, are those creative outlets that make us feel truly alive. Before you click another link, join another network or send another text message, I highly recommend reading her <a href="http://www.sunset.com/travel/anne-lamott-how-to-find-time-00418000067331/">excellent article</a>. It will reinforce your resolve to make the most of your time — online and off.</p> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution"> <script src="http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </span></div> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/making-time-creative-expression-online#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2022 16:37:39 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 31359 at http://www.simcentre.ca How to think like a social media artist http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/how-think-social-media-artist <p>If you want to sharpen or deepen your use of social media, try going to art school.</p> <p>That’s the big takeaway from my first months here at <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca" rel="nofollow">Emily Carr University of Art + Design</a>. I can’t say I’m “going to” art school — my role heading up the new <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/research/sim" rel="nofollow">Social + Interactive Media Centre</a> has so far kept me out of the classroom, though I’m dying to audit everything from the <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/programs/courses/AHIS/210" rel="nofollow">course on art since 1945</a> to the <a href="http://www.ecuad.ca/programs/courses/CEID/222/S001" rel="nofollow">Continuing Studies class in Arduino</a>.</p> <p><a href="http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/iStock_000002881668XSmall.jpg" rel="nofollow"></a>But I’m nonetheless enjoying an eye-opening immersion in the work and world of the practicing artists who make up Emily Carr’s faculty and student body. Through their exhibits, presentations and conversations I’m discovering a new way of thinking about my own creative expression through social media.</p> <p>Of course, it feels presumptuous to even draw the analogy. But in many ways the experience of an individual participant in a social media site is analogous to the role of an artist, particularly if your definition of art isn’t contingent on its aesthetic value or tangible social impact. Blogging is much like memoir or criticism; photo sharing online is not unlike exhibiting in a real-world gallery; YouTube contributors are amateur (or not-so-amateur) filmmakers, and podcasts are often more like spoken word performance than like journalism.</p> <p>It is journalists, however, to whom social media creators are most frequently compared. “Citizen journalism” is a very real and powerful phenomenon, and has shifted some of the power to narrate our contemporary experience out of the hands of established institutions and into the hands of individuals and small groups. But to hold social media creators to the paradigm of conventional journalism is to obscure much the impact of their creation, which is significant not just in how it speaks to the world but in how it transforms the creator herself.</p> <p>The transformative power of social media is better understood by looking at creators not as journalists, but as artists. And it’s not such a tremendous leap to do so. After all, much of contemporary art transcends the traditional idea of art as painting or sculpture: conceptual art and installation art are now included in the exhibits of museums all over the world. There’s also a long and strong tradition of art that comments on political or social issues, so the content of social media should be no obstacle to considering it as a form of art. Finally, we should look at social media in the context of the thriving digital art movement, in which everything from video games to virtual sit-ins has been presented in exhibition. By all of these standards, the contributions of social media participants look a lot like art.</p> <p>Artists</p> <p>Social media creatives</p> <p>Express themselves in text, performance, photos or film</p> <p>Express themselves in blogs, photo sharing and video sharing</p> <p>Collaborate on ambitious projects and performance pieces</p> <p>Coordinate online by combining related works</p> <p>Engage with political and social issues through their art works and activism</p> <p>Undertake online activism through creative expression in blogs, photos and video</p> <p>Embrace new technologies to create new forms of art</p> <p>Create and use technologies as a form of creative expression</p> <p>Incorporate traditional crafts into works of art</p> <p>Foster and market crafts online</p> <p>You don’t have to identify as an artist to use social media to explore and celebrate your creativity, and turn that creativity into an engine for personal growth. In fact, getting away from the artist label – from what we think about as Art – can help make creative expression less daunting, more approachable, and more rewarding. What matters is to find the path, platform and tools that will help you connect creativity to the world and to yourself.</p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/how-think-social-media-artist#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2022 20:58:41 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 30931 at http://www.simcentre.ca A novel approach to life online http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/novel-approach-life-online <p>For the first time in a year, I’ve lost myself in a book. It’s Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060852577?ie=UTF8&tag=socisign07-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060852577" rel="nofollow">The Lacuna</a>– a marvellous historical novel that centers on a Mexican-American who becomes cook and secretary to Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky. I’ve disappeared into the world of mid-century revolutionaries and artists, surfacing into my own life with that lingering distraction that comes from having half of my head, and even more of my heart, ensnared in a fictional world.</p> <p>And yet I never feel more myself, more in balance, and just plain happier than when I’m reading a novel. That’s why I was so distressed by the recent realization that it had been months since I lost myself in a book. How many months? I wondered aloud, during a conversation with a dear friend. I counted backwards to….the arrival of my Kindle last May.</p> <p>“I guess I haven’t been reading since I got my Kindle,” I heard myself say. “I guess that at the end of the work day, it just feels like one more damn screen.”</p> <p>“That’s because it is one more damn screen,” she pointed out.</p> <p>At the time of our conversation I was mid-way through <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416594981?ie=UTF8&tag=socisign07-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1416594981" rel="nofollow">A Short History of Women</a>. It was the third novel in a row that I had expected to love, but as I paged through my <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015T963C?ie=UTF8&tag=socisign07-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0015T963C" rel="nofollow">Kindle</a>, found just OK. That very day, I headed to a real bookstore — you know, the tree-killing kind — and bought the very same novel in hardback. It had taken me weeks to plow through the first few pages, but once I switched to paper I was pulled right in.</p> <p>My next experiment ran in the opposite direction: at an airport bookstore, I picked up a copy of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006147410X?ie=UTF8&tag=socisign07-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=006147410X" rel="nofollow">Anathem</a>, which was loaded on my Kindle but still unread. After a couple of days of reading, I was halfway through the paperback, so I switched over to the Kindle. My reading ground to a halt. I picked up the paperback again, and forced myself to try switching back to the Kindle a few more times….but no luck. The sad truth was that despite being a major gadget freak, the Kindle just didn’t work for me.</p> <p>Since abandoning my Kindle I’ve read a couple of other books, but nothing that has really won my heart. Finally, with <em>The Lacuna</em>, I’ve rediscovered myself as a reader: the kind of reader who lets dishes and e-mails pile up while I read just a few more pages. And yet a reader geeky enough that the most resonant analogy for my readerly state comes from a Star Trek episode: the episode in which Captain Picard gets zapped by some kind of alien satellite, and lives an entire parallel lifetime over the course of an hour-long brain-probe. That’s what a good book is like: a chance to live a complete parallel life, unconstrained by the place or moment in which your physical self happens to reside.</p> <p>And that’s what a fulfilling online life can be, too: the chance to live a life and a half, to squish a second parallel existence into the seams of our day-to-day physical lives, projecting another version of yourself into a world that you experience only through the force of your imagination. Like the world you slip into through a novel, that virtual life can feel emotionally real and intellectually compelling; you can feel invested in its characters and relationships, and find it painful to tear away.</p> <p>That’s online life at its best. But too often it feels novel-like only in the difficulty of separation: like a good book, I can’t put my computer down. Unlike a good book, however, I don’t necessarily feel quenched by checking in on Facebook, or Twitter, or foursquare, or whatever happens to be my compulsion of the week. It’s only as fulfilling as a beach read: diverting without being nourishing, eventful without being insightful.</p> <p>As I try to tune into the quality of my online interactions, and to differentiate between those that are replenishing versus those that are merely amusing (or far worse, compulsive) the standard of a good novel is a helpful gut check. Novels have been my soul food since I was eight years old, so the feeling I get from a good read is as familiar and certain as a pang of hunger or the adrenalin rush from a run.</p> <p>My best online experiences have that same soulful quality: the sense that the parallel world I’ve entered through an online exchange has somehow enlarged the space of my life, or the recognition that something I’ve read or seen online has changed how I look at the world, perhaps narrowly, but permanently. Recognizing that online content and online interactions can be as profound as a novel is what keeps me coming back; remembering that a novel remains my single best emotional yardstick for life online is what reminds me that sometimes, I just need to unplug.</p> http://www.simcentre.ca/blog/alexandra-samuel/novel-approach-life-online#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2022 05:26:38 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 30932 at http://www.simcentre.ca The beauty of baffling http://www.simcentre.ca/ideas/alexandra-samuel/beauty-baffling <blockquote><p><a href="http://twitter.com/awsamuel/status/9266529943" rel="nofollow">It’s the nature of Twitter that you baffle half the people who follow you & are baffled by half the folks you follow.</a></p> </blockquote> <p>I wrote this tonight in response to an old friend who was teasing me about finding half my tweets baffling. It’s a comment I get a lot, often from Facebook friends who are subjected to all the tweets that I cross-post to Facebook. And in most cases, it’s because I’m often tweeting about relatively technical things that don’t make sense to folks who aren’t web developers, or at least, very heavy social media users.</p> <p>I know how they feel. About half the stuff I read in my Twitter feed baffles me just as much as I (apparently) baffle others. And that’s a good thing.</p> <p>Here’s why: while it can be uncomfortable to be baffled (an experience that is not entirely unrelated to feeling stupid, as I often do online) it’s a sign that you’re stretching. If you understand 100% of what you read in your Twitter feed, you’re either following the world’s most effective 140-character communicators, or you’re following people who only talk about stuff that is entirely within your comfort zone.</p> <p>Where’s the fun in that? The whole joy of Twitter (or at least a good chunk of it) is discovering the undiscovered, or (as Donald Rumsfeld put it) the unknown unknowns. Click the cryptic link, read the web page that includes only 7 words you recognize, and next time you come across a post on the subject (whether it’s working with AJAX or resurfacing floors) you’ll recognize 8 words.</p> <p>And if you’re the baffler rather than the bafflee, that’s also good news. It’s a sign that you’re not just preaching to the choir. You’re still saying the occasional thing that makes sense to people outside your lab, your field, your spiritual community. There’s enough variety in your tweets to both baffle and engage; to interest your fellow specialists while still appealing to your old friends. And hopefully what’s engaging some of your followers is what’s baffling to others, and vice versa: you’re helping all of them stretch their muscles, their knowledge, their ability to decrypt obscure and labored acronyms in a desperate attempt to stay within 140 characters.</p> <p>Whether you know exactly what I’m talking about here, or you’re still feeling baffled, that’s ok. Either way, I’ll aim to get you next time.</p> http://www.simcentre.ca/ideas/alexandra-samuel/beauty-baffling#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2022 04:58:11 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 30935 at http://www.simcentre.ca 9 ways social media can support your creativity http://www.simcentre.ca/ideas/alexandra-samuel/9-ways-social-media-can-support-your-creativity <p>Some new mothers worry about when they’ll get to sleep through the night; I worried about when I’d get to write a novel. I’d always figured that I’d write a book some day, but now that I had a kid, would some day ever come?</p> <p>For me, the answer lay online. Not in an online writing group: I felt far too protective of my writing to consider sharing it with people I’d never met. But I was brave enough to reach out to other local writers by using the web to connect.  I found a couple of other writer friends who liked the idea of starting a creative writing group for people like us: people who earned a living as professional writers or communicators, but wanted an outlet for personal writing. I created a simple web site that explained the purpose of the group, with an application form for would-be members. Once we had found our fellow writers, we used a Yahoo Group to run an e-mail list that let us schedule meetings, circulate drafts and store files.</p> <p>Whether your creativity takes the form of a solitary activity like writing or painting, or is intrinsically collaborative (like theater or filmmaking) the web can help you connect to the people, resources and ideas that foster your creativity. Creativity often demands social connection: for peer support, for feedback, for knowledge, for collaborators.</p> <p>The social web offers a lot of ways to capture, hone and feed your creativity:</p> <ol> <li> <em>Find your medium. </em>YouTube not withstanding, the web is still a text dominant medium. Blogging makes it easy for writers to find a creative outlet online; photographers have Flickr, and filmmakers have YouTube. But there are lots of creative projects that don’t fit inside these boxes, so you’ll need to get even more creative in finding your online voice. Take pictures of your canvases; shoot a video of someone interacting with your installation piece; film your play, tape your song, make your own music video.</li> <li> <em>Engage another hemisphere. </em>I rely on my netbook for writing – but I rely on my iPhone to spark my creativity. Not by serving up poetry or inspirational stories: by turning off the very parts of my brain that are key to my writing. When I hit a wall, I pull out my iPhone and plug into a game of Flight Control: an utterly uncreative, dangerously addictive game that involves landing planes on a tiny landing strip. A few minutes of Flight Control is so absolutely absorbing that it lets my creative neurons recharge until they’re ready to fire up again.</li> <li> <em>Collaborate.</em> My first adult forays into fiction writing happened spontaneously online. An online chat with a pal turned into an extended riff on a “what if” scenario, and within an hour we’d written our way into a story. Over the following weeks it grew into a manuscript, albeit one that we never published or even edited. But even in raw form, that collaborative writing process reconnected me with my writer self. I was far braver as part of a team than I was able to be solo; by collaborating online, I rediscovered the joy of writing and recommitted to writing on my own.</li> <li><em>Keep an inspiration file.</em>“Things that aren’t even cats”. It’s a line from a Malcolm In the Middle episode that has become our internal label for “none of the above”. I’m not sure why we find it so compelling, but somewhere in that phrase lies the kernel of a story about organizing ideas online. And when the inspiration for that story hits, I’ll be ready, because I am religious about maintaining a list of story ideas in <a class="zem_slink" title="Evernote" rel="homepage" href="http://www.evernote.com/" rel="nofollow">Evernote</a>, an application that keeps my notes synced between my mac, my netbook and my iphone. Wherever I am, I’m always ready to jot down an idea or retrieve one.</li> <li> <em>Talk it out. </em>Sometimes the mere act of writing something down strips it of its passion – or feels like too big an obstacle. Text recognition services and software can help you brainstorm out loud, whether by writing full documents by voice, or just using a mobile service like Jott to make calls that will get transcribed and set back to you as notes.</li> <li><em>Relocate. </em>When I want to do an intensive bit of writing, I have to get out of the house and out of the office. But I don’t need a quiet garret: I do best in a cafe with lots of light, and interesting people who aren’t too creeped out when I stare blankly into the middle distance that they happen to be sitting in. I’ve made it easy to dive into a day of cafe writing by buying a tiny, lightweight computer just for writing days; it’s always packed into a tiny backpack that’s ready to go with the essentials for a day of writing. (The essentials: computer, mouse, headset, advil, hand cream, nicorettes). And I use a couple of programs that ensure my writing machine can access any relevant notes on my primary computer: Evernote, which is my master notebook, and <a class="zem_slink" title="Dropbox" rel="homepage" href="http://www.dropbox.com" rel="nofollow">Dropbox</a>, which lets me keep a folder full of files synchronized across computers.</li> <li><em>Find material.</em> Artists are the world’s most incorrigible thieves. As anyone with a writer friend can tell you, everything is subject to appropriation: that quip you made at a party, the video of your first birthday party, the story of your most painful breakup. The social web liberates you from stealing from your friends’ lives, and opens the door on a world full of images, characters and experiences that are yours to borrow and embroider. Stay within the bounds of intellectual property law (i.e. no stealing someone else’s words, images or stories) and you can find all the real life material you need online.</li> <li> <em>Remove distractions. </em>The same computer I use for my creative projects also contains an endless series of distraction. My hard drive is never more organized than the day before a major writing process: I can procrastinate for hours by consolidating folders, renaming files and optimizing my software setup. To limit my techie procrastinations, I use a separate computer on writing days, and keep it as light as possible: I’ve deliberately minimized the number of software tools installed on my writing machine, and I use a low-powered computer that makes it hard for me to run distracting programs or do much geeking out. I also keep a separate, distraction-free account on my primary computer: if I want to write, I switch to my alternate login, which denies me access to the chat programs, email and files that would pull me out of writing brain and into work or geek brain.</li> <li><em>Expand your horizons. </em>I’ve always been comfortable with words, and assumed that in some previous life I accepted the deal that my ability to write would come with an inability to draw a straight line with a ruler. My family is full of visual artists, but drawing stick figures appears to be the outside limit of my artistic capacity. Happily, I’ve discovered that online design doesn’t require the kind of eye-hand coordination that has always defied me: I’ve created photo collages, illustrative graphics and entire web page designs, and had a heck of a good time doing it. You may have a preferred medium, but trying out other forms of creative expression online – whether it’s making a movie, recording a song, or writing a poem – can help you discover other kinds of creativity in ways that fuel your primary creative commitments.</li> </ol> <p>Are you an artist/geek — or a geek/artist? Or maybe even a techno-skeptic who has nonetheless found ways of harnessing technology to your creative self-expression? I’d love to hear about the  practices, tools and work habits that have helped you turn the social web into a tool for supporting your creativity.</p> <p><em> </em></p> <p><em> </em></p> <p><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" title="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" href="http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/aca68836-429f-4c62-9977-8422e8bddbc0/" rel="nofollow"></a></p> http://www.simcentre.ca/ideas/alexandra-samuel/9-ways-social-media-can-support-your-creativity#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2022 20:08:56 +0000 Alexandra Samuel 30937 at http://www.simcentre.ca