Take Control of Syncing Data in Leopard

Michael Cohen’s new edition of Take Control of Syncing Data in Leopard is out. You can buy and download the .pdf book from the Take Control site here. These are absolutely the best designed .pdfs of any sort I’ve every seen, and this particular book is a lucid easy to follow step by step guide to controling the way your synchable data moves between your Macs and other devices—including iPhones, iPods, PDAs and cell phones. This is a completely revised edition, from the ground up. You can buy the book for $10.00

You can read all about it here, and download a sample here.

On Homeschooling

Tony Woodlief has written a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, opinion piece about why he and his spouse have chosen to homeschool their children. He writes, in part:

The reason we’ve broken with tradition, or perhaps reverted to a deeper tradition, is not because we oppose sex education, or because we think their egos are too tender for public schools. It’s because we can do a superior job of educating our children. We want to cultivate in them an intellectual breadth and curiosity that public schools no longer offer.

Somewhere there is now an indignant teacher typing an email to instruct me about his profession’s nobility. Perhaps some public schools educate children in multiple languages and musical instruments, have them reading classic literature by age seven, offer intensive studies of math, science, logic, and history, and coach them in public speaking and writing. The thing is, I don’t know where those schools are.

I think were I to have children, I’d want to do much the same thing. Not so much because my own K-12 experience was mostly horrendous, but because of the education I received from my over-educated, intellectually curious book-loving parents. They encouraged me, and provoked me, and fed my brain and mind, while most of the time I was, quite honestly, just parked in a holding pattern by well-meaning but over-worked teachers. (Granted, there were some exceptions: Mr. Muchnick, and Virgina Hall, to name two).

Had I stayed in high school, I would have graduated in 1980. My high school was, and is, one of the better ones in N.H., but I was essentially warehoused. I spent every spare moment in the library, and in the Keene Public Library, the tiny Westmoreland public library, the Brattleboro Public Library . . . not to mention reading pretty much everything else I got my eyes near, and being regularly “fed” books by my older siblings.

But, for a variety of reasons, despite some wonderful teachers, like Mr. Jobin, endlessly patient in French, I was invisible in high school; my guidance counselor told me that I wasn’t college material, and suggested I attend Colby Sawyer for a secretarial degree, where I could meet a nice young doctor from Dartmouth.

It’s much worse now, where “No child left behind” has frequently resulted in a cult of mediocrity.

Go read what Woodlief has to say. He makes a lot of sense.

Beaded Badge Lanyards

My friend Dawn also works in IT. We both have had badges to wear at work, and we both attend conferences, where you also wear badges. Mostly the badges are on fiber-lanyards, and whether you’re at a jeans-and-t-shirt SF con, or IT conference, you look like a dork. And if you’re wearing business wear, a lanyard pretty much destroys your professional look. Dawn, a beader, has come up with a nifty alternative: beaded badge lanyards. Dawn hand-makes and custom designs necklaces using a variety of natural precious and semi-precious stones, glass, crystal, and metal beads. The necklaces can be easily, and quickly transformed into badge lanyards, and then back to a necklace again. You can even purchase (or commission) matching bracelets and earrings. What’s cool is that there are a number of different lanyard-and-badge-holder styles, including one with a retractor for swipe cards. She makes eye-glass chains too.

Do go look at Dawn’s Etsy store, and her Flickr pages. There’s something for every taste, style, and budget, and it’s not too soon for your holiday shopping.

Yog on Online Moderation

James D. Macdonald, SF author and exceedingly experienced online moderator (remember Yog Sysop? That’s him) offers some rules for moderation under the heading:

Here’s what moderators need to know:

• a) Sure, there’s freedom of speech. Anyone who wants it can go start their own blog. On Yog’s board, Yog’s whim is law.
• b) Yog is an ancient ghod of chaos and evil. And he doesn’t like people very much.
• c) Moderation is a subjective art, and the moderator is always right.
• d) The moderator may have minions. They need to have a private area where they keep the buckets of Thorazine and the cold-frosty bottles of cow snot.
• e) The minions speak with the voice of Yog. Yog backs his minions up.
• f) There is always someone awake, and in charge, when Yog isn’t around in person. The minions know who the Duty Yog is.
• g) If someone starts off as a spammer, troll, or flamer, he is a spammer, troll, or flamer forever and is liable to instant deletion/banning with no recourse and no appeal.
• h) If the moderator ever needs inspiration, he can re-read Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and recall that the posters are sinners and he is Ghod.
• i) Rules? In a knife fight? Yog and his minions have standards, but they don’t need to tell the posters, lest some of them attempt to game the system. Attempting to game the system is, all on its own, a deletable offense.
• j) ALL CAPS posts are deleted on sight, unread. Mostly ALL CAPS POSTS are ALL CAPS.
• k) Anyone who doesn’t space after punctuation marks is insane, and can be deleted/banned on sight.
• l) Personal attacks against Yog and his minions are ignored. Personal attacks against anyone else are deletable on sight.

See the original post at Making Light and be sure to read the comments, too.

Blogging as Conversation

Tor, my favorite fantasy/sf publisher, has just gone public with their new Web site, one that has been re-designed with community engagement with content as a core principle. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor, and one of the founding bloggers at Making Light, has a fabulous essay on blogging.

In the blog post Nielsen Hayden opens with this simple but elegant explanation of the core concept behind blogging and community content:

Effective blogging is a combination of good personal writing and smart party hosting. A good blog post can be a sentence long, or three pages long; what matters is that it encourages further conversation.

Go read the rest of his post; it’s one of the best meditations on blogging and digital communication I’ve ever read.

How do we find excellent online teachers?

I’ve copied the following, with permission, from a post on an online forum. The original poster is a professional educator and adminstrator in a graduate program which relies on online instruction. I think the post asks some good questions.

It will come as no surprise to anyone here that the biggest challenge I face is not in finding excellent teachers who know their subject cold. Rather, it’s (you got it) finding people with all of that going for them who can write in the way that you have to in order to give of yourself, show yourself, online.

My big hiring mistakes have all had the same thing in common — they all glide around classrooms like they’ve spent a lifetime in the theater (i.e., they’re great “performers” and know their stuff so cold that they can hold students spellbound for three hours)… but ask them to commit that to paper, and it’s just no go. We’ve always given our own graduate faculty first crack at writing these courses… usually disastrous, because they’re as bad at writing what they do as they are good at doing it!

Asking for writing samples has been a waste of time… it’s just plain not the same genre, and there’s absolutely nothing to be gained from their last article in The Journal of American YouPickIts.

The same thing happens from time to time with the folks who tend the discussions in the class… they don’t know how to show or give themselves to students in their writing… and that’s what it takes when teaching and learning relationships have to happen and develop in print.

How can I “screen” those applicants with credentials and teaching success for their ability to function online, whose persona in print reflects an appreciation for the very specific art of being able to “talk” in black and white like they do in a classroom? Or am I doomed to a lifetime of having to endlessly edit the stuff of people who know something I need them to share, so that it doesn’t put my students into a coma?

What suggestions can we offer about finding applicants who will excel at online instruction?

Hello World . . . Again

Yes, I’ve changed blogging tools.

Again.

I began this blog in January of 2002, using Radio Userland; I eventually moved to MovableType, and now, I’m using WordPress.

I’ve also changed the location; I was over here, at digitalmedievalist.com, but I’m finally realizing I need to distinguish the scholarly me from the geek me, because it’s awfully confusing to would-be employers.

Google No Longer Accepting Termpaper Mill Ads

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Google is no longer accepting AdWords ads from mills:

Academic paper-writing services, or “paper mills,” will no longer be able to buy search terms in the Google AdWords program, and thus their ads will no longer pop up in the “sponsored links” sections of a Google search-results page.

You can read the article here, if you’re a subscriber, anyway. They know they’ll have to hand-check sites, but they do seem to have an idea of what a mill is, and does, and how they work, which means they might even spot the more clever ones.

If I see a Google press release, or a more public article about Google’s policy, I’ll link it here.

Online Communities, Women, and Misogyny

I’ve posted already about the hateful way Kathy Sierra was treated by other bloggers. The reaction has been interesting. Yesterday Chris Locke and Kathy each posted, collaboratively, their takes on the specific incidents, and the larger issue of hate speech and threats in the blogosphere.

The core issues are neatly summarized by Ross Mayfield here:

• Being safe is something most everyone can agree is a right.
• Being anonymous on the web matters.
• Being open on the web matters. Transparency is good.
• Being free with speech is both what makes us great and makes us go too far.

Mayfield provides four assertions that pretty much anyone will agree with. There is, however, a need to juggle possibly conflicting goals—like preserving the right of anonymity, but not when anonymity is used to perpetuate hate speech, as it was in the attacks on Kathy Sierra. There’s potential conflict between speaking frankly, and the necessity of free speech, and not allowing hate speech.

We do have methods of controlling hate speech, methods that aren’t matters of censorship. There are the less than effective technical methods—banning, and moderating and deleting comments; even, disemvowelling the truly idiotic rabid hate-monger, but primarily, online communities need to enforce community standards. As MacAllister Stone puts it:

I think we have to self-police. I think, when someone says something that’s clearly horrible and inflammatory, we stuff ‘em in a box. Embarrass them. Shame them into either adhering to community standards, or exile them by deletion and/or blocking.

With that context extablished, I want to look at two short quotations from Chris Locke and Kathy Sierra regarding online attacks and hate speech specifically directed towards women.

Kathy Sierra asks:

But if we dismiss every cruel, vile, sexually threatening comment as simply the work of an anonymous troll, we will no longer be able to recognize a real threat. Are we willing to stake our mother/sister/daughter’s life on a sexually and physically threatening photo or comment, simply because it appeared on the internet and therefore must be harmless?

Chris Locke observes

Misogyny is real — and vile. Violence against women is wrong. It must not be tolerated. This issue should be explored and discussed, not swept under the rug, not rationalized away.

There’s something else going on here, besides ordinary hate speech and Internet trolls. Kathy Sierra was specifically and carefully targeted. She was attacked for no real reason—but the attacks, and the language and images used in the attacks are overtly sexualized and exceedingly misogynistic.
Like many other women with online presences, Sierra was attacked because she is female. There’s a culture of harassment online, directed towards women in general, over and above the usual ‘net obsessed trolls and nutters. It’s almost impossible to find a woman who blogs or participates in discussion forums who hasn’t been subjected to sexualized attacks and unwelcome sexually explicit comments, innuendos and email.

Bill Humphries linked to these posts from Min Jung Kim an Asian woman blogger, and Gin Mar, a woman and veteran of the Iraq war.
I think Liz Henry, like MacAllister Stone, has the right response:

I’d like to make a call to action. When this kind of shit happens, we’ll call it out and document it in public. Call it in the moment. Call it in front of your coworkers. Call it if it’s major or if it’s minor, it’s all part of the same spectrum of misogynist behavior. How about just saying, once in a while, right in the moment if you can, “That’s not funny,” when it’s really not. Say it crosses your boundaries. Say it’s not acceptable to you. This takes practice, but with time, we can all do it and find strength in numbers.

We need to be very clear that this kind of attack is not accepted, and that the community, and the ‘net as a whole, object to it. At the same time, I also want to acknowledge that there’s a rise in equally sexually-directed attacks against men on the net, and more often than not, overtly sexualized comments from women that very much qualify as hate speech; that’s not cool either, nor should it be acceptable.

In a subsequent post, I want to talk about the particular difficulties faced by women in technology, on and off the net; the underlying misogny in technology by a loud minority is very much part of the reason Kathy Sierra was attacked.

Turnitin Sued

My friend Dawno alerted me to this story about anti-plagiarism service Turnitin.com being sued for copyright violation by four students. Turnitin is a service contracted by universities and schools. Faculty submit student papers for analysis by Turnitin which compares the text to papers stored in an internal database and to text stored on the Web; Turnitin uses an algorithm based-text-string analysis of the sort an experienced teacher engages in when we use our own skills and Google to spot plagiarism. Turnitin looks for strings that match within a few characters, and then provides a “report” that color codes text and and offers statistics and URLs.

I’ve had problem with the concepts behind Turnitin right from the start; I blogged about my concerns regarding violating student’s rights some time ago. Now, students are suing Turnitin for copyright violation because their papers are databased and used for subsequent comparisons without their permission; I suspect we’ll see a privacy violation, particularly in the context of FERPA soon.

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  • Take Control of Syncing Data in Leopard
  • On Homeschooling
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