Interrobang

[June 15, 2009]
If you're not seeing it, you're not paying attention (to the right channels).

Over the past few days a storm of political unrest has been brewing in Iran, backlash questioning the legitimacy of the outcome of the Iranian election. Another controversy has been emerging online.

Upset about CNN's lack of immediate coverage of the election protest in Iran, many twitter users are calling the 24-hour cable network out for a major fail (for more: 1, 2, 3). #CNNFail emerged by an implied community of twitterers who've been covering the story both on the ground from within Iran and from the comfort of their computer chairs around the world. While this brings questions of influence and discord between mainstream and social media, (a major topic in my dissertation) something else struck me about what's been going on the last few days.

The real-time-web is an emerging topic in the online world today, a phenomenon whose potentiality and staying power are a Big (yes, with a capital B) "?". Right now you can choose your info source about the unrest: Mainstream media or Social media. And, no, not the social media we've known the last few years but a new stage of social media: the real time web (a topic so new at 11am PST this morning I couldn't find Wikipedia page on it... so I decided to start one).

There are, of course posts on the twitterverse on the topic. But twitter provides a narrow, text-based 1-medium knowledge-stream. There are also videos emerging on YouTube, blog posts, photos actively updated by protesters in the streets of Iran on Twitpic, etc, etc. There is a wealth of rich, multimedia news unlike anything we've ever before seen covering a live event of this historical magnitude. But how do we make sense of all this info as it races by us? Real time web search engines are currently offering the best ways for tracking this amalgamation of info streaming in, the likes of which traditional news cannot compete with.

To understand this mess of data, real time web engines pool from various sources such as micro-blogs, photos, blogs, etc., delivering a multimedia mosaic of what's important right now.

Some insightful examples are:

• Twazzup (by far the best from what I can find)
• Scoopler
  
• SocialMention
• OneRiot (webstream)
• Oneriot (videostream)
  

[May 25, 2009]
Happy Memorial Day! Tomorrow I leave for a 1-week get away vacation with Kelin! I will be meeting her in England where we will be staying for a day and then off to Malta. It should be fantastic and I could very much use the break. I will have many photos and will be sure to post some when I return. Here's just a quick summary of what's been going on the last few weeks as the semester ended and summer has begun to get rolling.

Com 420
I re-organized a good deal of my new communication technology class. I felt like something needed to change and after thinking on it awhile I was struck with an idea late one night when trying to sleep. I got up, wrote it down and the next day began pursuing it. The quick of it is that I am going to have my students use various new media tools to track a technology related to their field of study over the course of the semester. Social media is evolving and there is more and more talk about: "how can we understand this behemoth of user activity and interaction online."

I want my students to immerse themselves in the real-time web, learning and using new media literacies that will allow them to gain first-hand experience with an array of new media platforms but will also teach them valuable and marketable new media skills (such as research using new media tools). I'm having them use diigo.com (a social bookmarking platform) and twitter.com, for example. With this new project students will also get active in these spaces and will become part of the conversation about their topic. Students will work in groups and there will be 3 presentations of the state of their research that reflect how the conversation around the technology they are studying (e.g., new developments, issues, incidents, etc) is developing and changing.

I am re-energized about this project after doing an assessment of the multimedia project I used to have my students do and deciding for a number of reasons that I was unsatisfied with how it was going. It has been great to have this much flexibility and freedom to design this class and I feel like I've learned from a number of valuable experiences that could only come with being able to develop your syllabus and your assignments as I have. So, having re-tooled the class in a number of ways, including the trending project I mentioned above, I'm excited to be going into summer session here in a few weeks and trying some new things.

New Media Research
Two project I worked on got accepted for presentation at AEJMC this August. One is about new media use and predictors of political participation and the other examined the interrelationship between bullying and user-generated content. Both projects are great pieces I feel and I am very proud of both. They are perhaps two of the best research papers I've done. If you are going to be at AEJ, I hope you'll come and check it out. I will post more when I get my hands on the final schedule on here and of course on my ePortfolio.

Garden
There is bad news on the garden front. The other morning I woke up to find all our pepper plants, our peas, our lettuce and some of our basils had been stolen by birds from off my front porch. There were little holes in the pots and I found a few feathers and 1 of the plants in the grass on the ground floor. I was pretty angry and sadenned about it because this is only our second year learning to grow food and it hurts to have that kind of a set back. It is a bit late, but I am trying to replant some pea seeds and went to the co-op and bought some replacement pepper plants that were a lot further along than were ours. The good thing is that these plants are organic and should make decent substitutes. The other good thing is that our garlic, some of our basils and some of our coriander were inside and so they are still going strong! I suppose I was naive to not realize that birds come and rob you of your plants. But it is a learning experience. And in that respect, gardening is like grad school.

Well, there is really much more I could talk about. But I have to get moving. There is still much to be done before I leave tomorrow from Spokane. Wish me a good trip. It will be good to get away for a little while and re-charge my batteries! See you when I return with a tan!
photo: WikiCommons

[May 12, 2009]
We expect our colleges and universities to be beacons for innovation and progress. We should expect our campuses to be leaders in green innovation. I came across a great article the other day about the most "green" (a vague term, I know) college campuses. The article was unfortunately written in 2008. I'd like to see an update given how fast things are progressing in recent months. Still, there is some interesting info here. I'm pretty disappointing WSU isn't a nationwide leader in the campus greenolution. While we certainly can't compete with some of these schools, at least not yet, I do think there are some great things that go on here at WSU. For example, we have a culture of depending on public transportation and walking in this town. Recent efforts by WSU to go paperless in all internal communication are another example (although, admittedly driven by $ concerns rather than Earth concerns.. the impact is still the same). We also have a crop-share program here at WSU.

In terms of my own gardening with Kelin, we have had some good growth. Our beans are growing rapidly and our garlic seems happy. Our pepper plants are slow going but making their progress. It has been difficult weather for plants of late, with overcast skies and blustery wind. I hope you've started a garden and are having good luck! I've come to realize that growing garlic has got to be one of the easier things to grow and encourage you to give it a try if you are not quite confident in the greenness of your thumb. What do you think? Anything else very easy? Any updates on your end!?

[May 1, 2009]
And so it has come and gone! I took my written exams. Lost sleep and hair. Then, I took my oral exams this past Wednesday and it went great! I have passed and am officially ABD, or All But Dissertation. Which means, I have the hardest part ahead of me: writing the beast!

But with my great accomplishment comes what appear to be subtle changes. There is still a mountain to climb and so I have not yet felt a great relief. Perhaps it has not hit me yet that I'm officially a doctoral candidate, and no longer a doctoral student or that I've closed the book on the first 3 years of work towards a Ph.D. I suppose I've been busy these last few days. And so the changes must be subtle such as: I updated my email signature to "Doctoral Candidate," (above. The old photos below) and changed the graphics around on my ePortfolio and made a few updates. For now, I am enjoying these subtle changes and that feeling of accomplishment is beginning to emerge with time to reflect over the past 3 years. And with that, I'm looking forward to summer and beginning to solidify my dissertation topic. Thanks for everyone who has wished me good luck or congratulated me, either on here, facebook or twitter! I really appreciate it. More to come soon!

Lastly, Kelin and I have just about all our plants planted for the season. We still need to get our potatoes set up. We've had some bad weather the past week, and even some snow. We were tricked into thinking Spring had arrived to Pullman. I'll write about our gardening ventures soon and hope to have some photos. I am glad to see that others are growing Victory Gardens :) Enough about me, how are things coming along in your parts of the world?

Happy Earth Day! In honor of the 1 day of the year which we give a nod to our good friend for all the credit it deserves, I've got a few things to say. The fact is, grad students should be home gardeners. We are high-stress people, often couped up people sitting at our desks writing, studying and grading. We need to eat healthy on a budget and little distractions are always welcome.

Gardening
My hope is that this year you will start growing your own food! There is no time better to start than Earth Day. With even the Obama's starting their own garden, it is clear that Victory Gardens are making a comeback. While we were fighting Fascism in WW2, today we are fighting climate change (not to mention the recession).

Last year Kelin and I tried to grow food for the first time in our lives. Her mother is a gardener and once I was throwing the lacrosse ball with a friend and accidently missed the passed... it ended up in a neighbor's garden. That's about the extent of our experience. Our efforts last year were unsuccessful. We tried to grow various pepper plants and although we got the plants to grow, by the time the peppers started to come in it was too late in the season and we lost them. This year we are trying our hand again, and are going for a bit more variety. We got our hands on a cool little book titled "Don't Throw it, Grow it!". And, with some internet research and re-thinking our practices, we are hoping to have better luck this year. The major challenge is that we are moving this summer and so we can't start a garden in her yard. So, right now we are doing windownsil gardening. We are taking a sustainability approach, and are re-using waste from products.

We've used an old egg carton as a seed starter (right)

We're also keeping our milk cartons to grow garlic and other plants in (top). We also plan to grow some herbs, potatoes, corriander, and almonds (if we can get these almost plants to start growing!). We are a bit late in the season, I know... but spring comes late to the Inland Northwest. Wish us a better growing season than last year. So far, the garlic is taking off which is a good sign and some of the green onions we planted last fall are coming up! I hope you'll try and grow something this season - for better health, to reduce your impact on the enviroment, to save a few dollars, or just for simple stress relief. Even if you are living in an apartment like us, you can grow your own food! A few resources you might find helpful are:

• Instructable's Home Gardening Page
• DIY Network In-door gardening page

[April 20, 2009]
It has been quite a while since my last post. I took the written portion of my preliminary exams and it was certainly a challenge. Hours typing in front of a screen in a room with no windows isn't quite my idea of fun! The plan seems to be that I will take my oral exams a week from Wednesday. I'll let you know how it goes. If all goes well, I'm ABD which stands for All But Dissertation.

Kelin defended her thesis and it went very well. She graduates in about a month so things should start winding down soon with the start of summer just over the horizon. We've both decided we could use a break to recharge our batteries and are taking a trip to Malta this summer. If you're not familiar with Malta, it is a small island in the Mediterranean sea. Cool, huh!? I know. We'll be there just over a week and I intend to return with a nice suntan and full batteries to begin working on my dissertation and plan for teaching this summer.

One of my goals with this blog is to address what I see to be a lack of cohesion among the grad student population on the internet. With this in mind, I've created Gradsphere - a widget from tweetizen.com that focuses on popular hashtags grad students use. I hope you'll find it useful for finding other grad student twitterers and trending popular topics in the grad school community. I encourage you to check it out: in the below blog post, or by clicking the 'Gradshere: Follow Grad School Twitter Trends' link in the tab at the top of the page.

Please tweet the link: http://interrobangblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/gradsphere-grad-school-twitter-trends.html

Any thoughts or comments?? Is there a popular hashtag I missed?!

Photo by: that kat chick

The Gradsphere
Follows Twitter trends using common grad student related hashtags (#). Every time you use a hashtag that the Gradsphere follows, it will be tracked on this page. You can also post directly into the Gradsphere by typing your post below with appropriate hashtag.
If you have hashtags you'd like to see added to the Gradshere, please let me know.