Baldur comments on my students' definitions of blogs...
What most of the comments and views have in common is that weblogging seems to be a group process. It is always a part of a community, group topics, a gathering of ideas.
I suspect that this would not have been the common thread if I'd asked them the same question without first having had a discussion with them about the value of blogs as a conversational medium, and the importance of comments and trackbacks in facilitating those conversations.
Speaking of which, Baldur, you really need a comments function on your blog. :-) I got quite dizzy going back and forth between your blog and Dorothea's this morning...the comments and responses were fascinating, but the bouncing back and forth between blogs was disorienting.
In fact, the choice between reciprocal/trackbacked postings and comments is an interesting one. It reminds me a bit of the discussions we're having in my XML class about the choice of attribute vs element in an XML schema...
Personality typing, that is. Jonathon Delacour has been blogging about MBTI and bloggers. He pointed me to the PTypes site...I took their test, but was "unclassifiable" the first time--equal scores on Idealist and Rationalist. (Found that rather gratifying, in some ways.) Second time, I was clearly on the Rationalist side. Mirrors my usual MBTI typing results. I'm off-the-scale E and N, borderline T/F, and pretty solidly J. Keirsey characterizes the ENFJs as teachers, and the ENTJs as field marshals. Both type descriptions fit me, though to varying degrees day to day.
In her discussion of typing, Shelley Powers describes one of the "classic" M-B questions--one that tends to elicit a strong "well, that's obvious" response from takers, regardless of which answer they think is "right":
In the Myer-Briggs test, I felt one of the best examples of this type of question was the one asking which the test taker valued more: justice or mercy. This question, to me, seemed a particularly strong one for determining whether a person is Judging or Perceiving.
I never took a class on personality typing, but I always thought that the justice vs mercy question was more about sensing/intuiting (or maybe thinking/feeling), not judging/perceiving. (The judging/justice similarity is a little misleading, I think.) So, who's been trained in M-B typing, and knows for sure which type aspect this question is a predictor for?
One of the things I've found this kind of typing useful for is understanding the disjoints in communication I sometimes have with my students. The biggest problem seems to come from my "N" tendencies, which conflict with the overwhelmingly "S" tendencies in my students. They want clear grading rubrics, detailed syllabi, lots of structure. I tell them I'll know A work when I see it, and that we'll probably wander from the topics on teh syllabus regularly when it seems appropriate to do so. :-) Now I warn them on the first day, and that seems to help a lot.
In his musings on his PhD work, Baldur said something that made me laugh, since it's been an area of conflict/discussion/debate in our department for some time. Our "multimedia" courses are split into two areas--web development (where I teach) and multimedia development (where I don't). The latter is based solidly on Macromedia Director. My frustrations with that revolve around the problems inherent in basing an academic curriculum on a vendor-specific platform. So when I read Baldur's comment:
Most of my colleages here come from the multimedia industry where you use a single monolithic tool to produce a single monolithic file format which can only be used on the exact platforms you feel like implementing and testing on.
Well...it resonated.
I forwarded it to Andy Phelps, my favorite "multimedia" colleague. He can program circles around most people I know (and know of) in everything from Javascript to Lingo to VRML to Java. He's developing our new and very cool game development curriculum (follow the games edu link on his site for more info), and is always willing to play in a debate about proprietary technologies.
He doesn't have a blog (yet...we're working on that), so I asked him for his permission to repost these comments, which I thought were worth sharing. (Baldur's original comments are in italics...)
Andy Responds: (first, I think it's particularly neat-o)And since my bouts with insanity don't extend into that area, I've been doing a lot of preparatory research work. My idea is to avoid the historical trend in interactive media and hypertext of sticking with proprietry unified approaches.
Ahhh. unfortunately Andy's bouts of lunacy tend in the direction of "I'd like to access that piece of hardware in your machine that draws graphics". There is no standard for doing that. There is OpenGL, but its not very "open" its a spec that is produced by a conglomeration of 4 major video card manufacturers since SGI is in the toilet, and these days any one of them feels obliged to make its own 'extensions' to the spec - which happily seem to void any other hardware but their own. The spec itself is so old as to qualify as a historical landmark of the computing age, having been updated for the last time in 1997. Thus proprietary giants like Microsoft and Sony produce standards like DirectX and Playstation2 (respectively). The proprietary, unified approach is all that exists to effectively combine music, sound, and advanced graphics capabilities using modern hardware and gleaning real-time performance. Yes, there is SMIL, yes there is X3D. SMIL has not gotten a quality foothold because there is not yet a truly capable authoring packages, nor is it capable of accessing hardware accelerated features directly, even for movie display (you need the Quicktime layer or WMP to find the DVD Codec garbage in your machine) - X3D is an absolute dismal failure, still stuck in the era of XML = DTD and completely ignoring the changes to the rendering pipeline that fundamentally altered graphics research in 1999, and again in 2001, namely per vertex and then per pixel hardware accessibility.
Most of my colleages here come from the multimedia industry where you use a single monolithic tool to produce a single monolithic file format which can only be used on the exact platforms you feel like implementing and testing on.
Classic examples are Macromedia's Director, Hypercard, and to a lesser extent Flash. The problem with the .swf format (published by Flash) is that it is not really as open a standard as you'd think. The published specification tends to lag considerably behind what is actually implemented in the Flash Player and Macromedia's authoring tool.
All very true. To view 'Multimedia' in the whole as defined by the large monolithic authoring environment is bordering on certifiable. However, at the same time, there does *not* exists a compelling cross-platform non-proprietary method of delivery. The browser? please. Browsers have *distinct* problems with one rather fundamental aspect of multimedia - the timing loop. Flash / Director / Hypercard / etc do one thing and one thing very well - provide a space to display media / graphics / etc along the axis of time. It is possible to effectively synch media to display at the same time, or on the same rate across a range of machines. SMIL is bordering on capable in this regard, and is the first standard-compliant way of doing so. MPEG4+ was supposedly going to give us this capability, and boy don't we all wish it really had. But it didn't. The 3D support is laughable, using good ol' VRML from 1996. (note that VRML still relies on a nice proprietary plug in none of which are completely standards compliant). The synching is still off in several spots, and authoring is an absolute
nightmare.Javascript timing is downright laughable. In my own tests the setTimeout and such methods seem to be the worst implemented pieces of garbage across the standard set of browsers ever. You can not create a quality timing loop that is capable of driving even quality 2D animation.
Scripting / page display is great for the asynchronous display of information. It can even be 'real-time' in the sense that you want to occasionally push content to the client within a reasonable amount of time. If you study animation you begin to look at it as a very poor medium of display however. Should your website depend on animation? absolutely not. But 'multimedia' - broadly defined - does take into account timing, animation, synchronous display, etc. Unfortunately there is no standard for these things. There is only the proprietary gorilla.
For some reason people feel the need to use the gorilla for things it was not intended - like 'Let's make an interface out of Flash'. That's just not using the brain you were born with. There are lots of tools to build interfaces, that *are* standards compliant, that work everywhere, and with a little effort can look just as good (if not better - see my excursions into Javascript land). Markup and scripting makes great interfaces. Unfortunately it makes piss-poor animation. What gets you into trouble is when people want an 'animated interface' (QUESTION: do you really *need* an animated interface?) because there is not yet a solid way of doing that. There are basic animation principles like 'bounce and stretch' (or 'bounce and squish' depending on your point of view) that are almost impossible to recreate on the web. Sound support is pathetic.
Opposed to this approach you have a way of doing things which is a combination of markup and scripting. This approach has resulted in the only really successful genre of interactive media, namely the web
Now we're going to go an disagree in a rather big and powerful way. There is a history of computer games stretching back to the 1960's that I think disproves this statement - many of which are 'networked' and not on what I would guess you mean by 'the web' - most of these have used the mother of all proprietary gorillas - the custom built C++ playback engine - for several of the reasons above.
I would caution that the web is a great tool, but is not the sum of multimedia. The proprietary crud is important - but not the sum of multimedia. It is interesting that one side is obsessed (finally) with standards, and on the other side there realy is no standard, other than the best-selling toolset. To my great chagrin, none of the stuff you generally see is fully standards compliant, however. Don't be confused by idiot's running around screaming "Multimedia == FlashMX" - anyone who studies anything even tangentially related to media theory knows this isn't true - however the proprietary engine has a long a glorious history for a reason - namely no single entity has ever even attempted a standard in 'multimedia' - only the little subset that trickles into our limited imagination that's confined in a browser.
Caveat: the one exciting standard is a standard to define custom things: XML. Someday, perhaps the line will blur between proprietary and non when everything is (FINALLY) reduced to basic data and separated from display. Display is what everyone is arguing about. Lets argue about data instead for a little while.
Wow. Watching an idea spread through the blogosphere is a very cool thing. Glad this is happening on a day when I'm not stuck in classrooms!
Dave Winer posted his idea about a blogging conference this morning. Shelley Powers chimed in with some great posts about the conference here and here. Anita Rowland commented on Shelley's post, pointing out that there's a lot that can be learned about conference-giving from the SF Fandom "cons".
I contacted Dave about the possibility of some collaboration on this related to the grant proposal that Jill, Alex and I are working on (along with Joi, possibly...), and he's enthusiastic.
And it hasn't even been 24 hours since Dave floated the idea. Blink in blogworld and you miss a lot. :-)
I've been reading Mark Pilgrim's blog for a couple of weeks, mostly because of his great stuff on tech topics I'm interested in.
Stopped by there today, and his post on addiction blew me away.
This is what makes blogs so amazing. That you can be browsing for XML and end up deep inside someone's head. It shakes you up. It makes you remember that it's a big world out there, with scary things and beautiful things and amazing people who write about both.
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