Google Docs in the classroom

I mentioned on Twitter that I use Google Docs in my classroom, and someone asked me to write a short blog post about it. So here it is.

We're blessed at UT because at the CWRL we have several computer-assisted classrooms and the freedom to use these with various types of software. Last year, in the spirit of exploration, I had students write and submit papers using Google Docs, the web-based office suite. Google Docs allowed me to avoid the usual stack of papers as well as the email ping-pong that occurs when students email drafts to me. It also was easy to use -- basically it has the same level of capability as Microsoft Works -- so the learning curve was relatively shallow.

But I was more interested in the collaboration aspects. GDocs allows you to share your document with others, meaning that many collaborators can look at the same document and even edit it at the same time. It automatically allows features that you have to turn on in Word, such as edit tracking and comments. Paired with a project management system such as Basecamp, GDocs was a great way to support the dreaded group project. That's how I used it the first semester.

An added bonus was that I could embed my own comments in the document. That meant that I could review drafts and even insert grading comments directly into the text. (UT does not allow me to post grades on an off-campus server, so the grades are handled through UT's own gradebook application.) So I began to think about using GDocs for all assignments, not just the group project.

Last spring, I decided not to require GDocs. Instead, students turned in papers. It was a nightmare: versions floated around, it was hard to track which version was which, I had to wait until classtime to hand back comments. These are all common and unremarkable issues, but once I knew there was a better way, they seemed intolerable.

So this semester, I required all students to turn in all assignments on GDocs. I simply assign labels to them to differentiate the different classes and assignments (and I have one red label "_TO_GRADE" to track what I haven't touched yet). So far it's working well.

An added bonus is that I was able to lead students through peer reviewing via GDocs. Students inserted comments in each others' papers. When I reviewed the drafts later, I commented on these comments as well. It worked quite well.

I don't believe I've used GDocs to its maximum extent, but it's worked very well so far.

Questions? Drop a comment or drop me a line.

Reading :: Soldiers of Reason

Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire
By Alex Abella

In the Foreword to this book, the author tells how he gained access to RAND. "One of the managers," he tells us dramatically, "confided that he thought agreeing to this book was either the brightest or the dumbest move RAND had ever made" (p.3).

Interestingly, I read the Foreword just days after I mentioned to a RAND contact that I was about to begin the book. His reaction was unenthusiastic; he had not read the book, but seemed to imply that those who had were not impressed. Not great, but not terrible, more of a wash.

That's a pretty good summary -- both of the writing style and the book's content. The book is full of hyperbolic statements and characterizations like this one:

RAND's hawkish views of Soviet intentions, distilled in Leites's works and Nitze's jeremiads, fit the paranoia of the age, the national terror over an impending nuclear conflict, the abhorrence of anything that wasn't true-blue American. Nevertheless, RAND analysts believed that with hard work, dedication, and sacrifice -- and the prescriptions issuing from Santa Monica -- there might still be a future worth living. One of these RAND prescriptions would pull the world from the brink of possible nuclear annihilation, while another would rewrite the basic concepts of social welfare, politics, and government in America and the West. (p.39)

Yet the book itself is just okay. Abella is curious about RAND, but that curiosity leads him to attribute all sorts of things solely or primarily to RAND that seem to have deeper and broader roots. For instance, he attributes RAND's development of rational choice theory with "redefin[ing] the foundations of public policy by assuming that self-interest defines all aspects of human activity" (p.52) and noting that "RAND people were the primary practitioners of realpolitik in America's intellectual world" (p.96), while seemingly unaware of the interplay with Machiavelli and Adam Smith (neither of whom, I hasten to add, was a RAND analyst). For Abella, RAND seems to be the obligatory passage point for these fundamental shifts, but RAND is only one vector for the development of these ideas.

I also began to distrust Abella's characterizations of leading RAND figures from the glory days of the past. Invariably, these figures were portrayed as larger than life, with larger-than-life eccentricities and tragic flaws and blind spots. As often happens with this sort of text, the closer we get to the present day, the blander and more colorless RAND researchers get -- just as the miracle-working patriarchs of the Old Testament make way for the people you see at your local synagogue or church. I began to wonder whether the larger-than-life figures from the old RAND were more the artifact of temporal distance than faithful characterizations, and whether they became larger than life because they were mostly dead, known only through documents and recollections, unable to talk back to Abella's characterizations.

In any case, this book was interesting in spots, but I would seek out corroborating histories if I were to use it as a source.

Reading :: Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
By Peter Kent

When I recently Twittered that I was reading this book, I received two or three replies suggesting that SEO was "snake oil." SEO is certainly vulnerable to this claim: search engines are secretive about their exact algorithms, which seem to change frequently, and much of SEO consists of following good web design practice in any case. But this book makes the case that there is a there there: You really can do some things to boost SEO.

SEO, or search engine optimization, "refers to 'optimizing' Web sites and Web pages to rank well in the search engines" (p.14). The author, Peter Kent, argues that although many companies offer SEO without real expertise or measurable outcomes -- and many web designers will claim to build SEO sites without anything to back up that claim -- SEO is actually achievable.

One basic way to achieve SEO, Kent says, is simply to follow web standards: use validated markup, make sure images have ALT text, make sure the META tag is properly filled with keywords. (Coincidentally, these are the same measures you should take for ensuring web accessibility.) But other ways include registering links with web directories; getting reciprocal links; and examining keywords to see which ones will capture traffic to your site, then weaving them into your text and META tags. The latter was most interesting to me, since it involves actual research and some degree of what might be regarded rhetorical analysis.

In all, this book appears to provide a solid foundation for SEO. It doesn't tell you everything you need to know, I'm sure, but it gives you an idea of what SEO is and how it differs from snake oil.

Assistant Professor position, Emerging Communication Technologies and Digital Media

Are you in rhetoric or a related field? Do you study digital media? Are you an assistant professor or about to receive your Ph.D.? And have you ever dreamed of working at a Research I university in the (self-proclaimed) music capital of the world?

You may be in luck. We're hiring. I'm the chair of the hiring committee.

Don't hesitate to contact me over email if you have questions, and please disseminate widely to your graduate students, friends, etc.

The Department of Rhetoric & Writing (DRW) at The University of Texas at Austin is accepting applications for an assistant professor position in emerging communication technologies and digital media, including video and gaming, and with emphasis on production.

DRW faculty members have the opportunity to teach a wide array of courses designed to contribute to the undergraduate major in Rhetoric and Writing and the graduate concentration in Digital Literacies and Literatures -- all with the support of our nationally renowned Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL), which operates state-of-the-art computer classrooms. As a member of the DRW faculty, the selected candidate will be expected to teach at all levels of our curriculum, to direct dissertations, MA reports, and honors theses, to publish actively, and to offer service to the Department, the College, and the University.

The successful candidate will demonstrate both a scholarly and a pedagogical commitment to the intersections of rhetoric and technology studies and should have completed a PhD in rhetoric and writing or a related field prior to start date.

The DRW boasts a dynamic, collegial, nationally and internationally recognized faculty with interests in the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric, composition theory and pedagogy, technologies of writing, visual rhetoric, empirical research, writing in the disciplines and professions, rhetoric and poetics, and language and literacy studies. Sub-units of the DRW include the Undergraduate Writing Center, the Computer Writing and Research Lab, and the College of Liberal Arts Writing Across the Curriculum Initiative. Teaching load is 2/2; salary is competitive.

Application deadline is October 31, 2008.

Email a letter of application, curriculum vita, dissertation abstract, and statement of teaching philosophy (no longer than one page) to Search Committee Chair Clay Spinuzzi at clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu.

Also submit three letters of recommendation via U.S. Mail to:

Clay Spinuzzi, Search Committee Chair

Department of Rhetoric & Writing
1 University Station B5500
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-0200

Position funding is pending budgetary approval. A background check will be conducted on successful candidate. The University of Texas at Austin is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Google Docs continues to add functionality

Today it added support for tables of contents and dictionaries. These were available in the past through Javascript hacks, but are now officially supported.

Automating location-based mobile tasks

This article on HeyCosmo got me thinking. From the article:

To capitalize on the growing mobile market, a company called HeyCosmo is launching two new location-based service designed for use on both the web and the phone. The first service, HeyCosmo Concierge, wants to help you save time on everyday tasks like making dinner reservations or finding an affordable contractor. The second, HeyCosmo Blaster, is a social event planning tool.

HeyCosmo's software goes about these tasks the wrong way, in my opinion, by essentially pushing people into phone trees:

The easiest example of this would be making dinner reservations. Instead of you calling restaurants one-by-one in order to find an 8:00 PM seating for a party of five, you could use HeyCosmo Concierge to do the dialing for you. With an automated, but customizable, message, its robo-dialer immediately contacts all the restaurants in your area (and this can be narrowed down by cuisine, too) and asks the recipient of the call to press (1) for yes, we can accommodate you, (2) no, we cannot accommodate you, etc. in response to the initial recorded greeting and question. The particular questions and how they are phrased can be specified by you. You can also record your own voice if desired. At the end of the messages, an ad will play, which is how the service makes money.

This is of course the wrong way to solve the problem. People hate phone trees and automated calls. Putting these two together is a terrible idea. It's the opposite of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. It's the Reese's from Hell. I predict that concierges will become adept at hanging up on such calls.

However, something like this could work quite well if HelloCosmo Concierge talked with an automated service on the restaurant's end. Push it from the restaurant's side, peg the pricing structure to the number of connections, and find a way to incentivize customers' use. Unfortunately, restaurants won't have an incentive to help customers comparison-shop.

Thinking about how HelloCosmo tries to automate location-based mobile tasks leads me to thinking about the problem more generally. Currently, the web-based task management system Remember the Milk allows you to associate tasks with locations. For instance, if you want to "remember the milk," you might put "get milk" as a task and associate it with a grocery store location. However, you still have to supply the trigger: you have to check the location to see what tasks are available. That's because your computing device is not currently location-aware.

It will not always be so. More mobile phones have GPS, and are being used increasingly as primary computing devices. Remember the Milk has an iPhone-based application, for instance. The next logical step is for the application to proactively sample your location and push tasks that you could perform at the location. You won't be able to forget the milk if your phone reminds you every time you get within 50 yards of the grocery store, for instance. Or to take another example, you might associate a task with another person ("get that loaned book back from Lauren") and your phone will remind you next time Lauren is in your office.

We're starting to see the beginnings of this sort of leverage going on with the iPhone, although it's slowed by Apple's walled garden approach. I predict an explosion of such capabilities with Android, although I worry that Android will not be fully baked at the time it ships. Either way, I imagine that a year from now, this post will seem quaint.

Copyediting

Here's a fascinating example of how a New York Times article on the Olympics was translated and, er, copyedited for the Beijing Evening News.

Twitter for the Enterprise

Yammer, which launched today at TC50, is being billed as "Twitter for companies."

Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter. If Twitter asks: “What Are You Doing?”, Yammer asks: “What Are You Working On?”

I expect to see a lot more like this.

Twitter dispatching "at" the RNC

Nancy Scola, who wrote yesterday about mobile media coordination of protests at RNC2008, has a follow-up interview with one fellow who acted as a dispatcher. The RNC took place in Minneapolis-St.Paul; the "dispatcher" worked from Tempe and had never been to the Twin Cities. Among the things he did: "appending the hash tag #RNC08 to untagged protest-related tweets so that they would pop-up on the C-SPAN RNC ’08 Convention Hub."

ATTW 2009 call for papers is out

And it looks really interesting.

ATTW 2009 : : Beyond Work? Technical Communication in Professional,
Community, & Social Networks

12th Annual ATTW Conference
March 11th, 2009
San Francisco, CA

Traditionally, teachers and researchers of technical writing have concentrated on writing in workplace settings. And rightly so. But the spread of information technology into all areas of social life means that, increasingly, technical communication practices and genres arise and collide in social spheres other than the workplace. Combine this trend with an increasingly mobile work environment in which people are working from home or from the neighborhood coffee shop rather than an office or shop floor, and an increasingly global workforce that spans multiple time zones, and you have the basis for dramatic shifts in the contexts, practices, genres, and purposes of technical writing. Some may see a threat to our identity, while others may see opportunities for work to have broader cultural and economic relevance.

More at the link.

Mobile technologies enable networked protests at RNC convention

Some notes from the field, courtesy Nancy Scola of TechPresident. Many more possibilities have opened for spontaneous organization since the Seattle WTF protests in 1997 were coordinated by mobile phones.

More Android apps

There's a list of Android apps floating around that reminds me of those thousands of open source projects on SourceForge: niche apps that appeal to geeks, with unpredictable overlaps and mediocre logos and bad names. But then there's this great list of "10 Android Apps We Will Actually Use." They look outstanding, and should really change the way people see phones.

Frolicking on the Internet

Omar Gallaga, a technology writer for the Austin American-Statesman's Austin360.com and avid Twitter user, prints a letter he received from a reader. The letter excoriates him and others for using social networking sites instead of working, lauds Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, and suggests that time spent online is time spent away from volunteering and making the country better.

Gallaga welcomes readers to post their comments online, and promises to "print out the responses and mail them back to her." Want to mount a counterargument?

More on Enkin, the Android killer app

AndroidGuys blogged yesterday about Enkin, an Android application that overlays data on Google Maps and Street View. Today, Wikinomics has a demo. They explain it pretty well:

Using the camera and screen, with labels injected, the Android powered mobile device becomes something of a magical lense [sic] that can be used to provide us with digital information about the world, overlayed on the world itself, as intermediated by the device. So far the Enkin guys have set this up to work with locations that have been tagged in their map view, but imagine the possibilities if it could integrate with all of the Geodata that’s tagged in Google Earth. You could also integrate this with social mobility services, and set your name to public, then strangers on the street could take a look at you through their phone and see your name floating above your head like in a videogame. Businesses could also geotag deals that they are running, and you’d set your Enkin-enabled device in “deal hunter live mode” where you’d see overlays on businesses including distance and deal. The list goes on and the possibilities are great.

No kidding, the possibilities are great. Enkin has the promise of fundamentally changing location-based services. The "magic lens" metaphor is a good one, since theoretically you could select one or more frames to overlay on the world. For instance,

• if you're visiting a city as a tourist, you might select a frame that has pretagged tourist attractions
• if you're there strictly for a conference, you might instead select (or create) a custom frame with only the conference buildings
• if you're more interested in a historical tour, you could load that frame
• if you're working on infrastructure, you could see metadata on streets and bridges, or normally invisible features such as underground cables. Imagine being able to tap into a database of traffic accidents to instantly spot dangerous intersections, or being able to detect cables so that you don't snap them with your backhoe when starting a construction project.

But forget these sideshows, because the real killer app will be when you cross Enkin with a location-based social networking system like, well, Google's Jaiku.

• if you're at a conference, and you want to see where your acquaintances are, you can scan the building and look for concentrations of friends
• if you're coworking, you can find out which coffee shop has your collaborators
• if you're on campus trying to find a colleague's office, you can look through your "magic lens"

Jaiku is currently being migrated to Google App Engine and should relaunch soon. Coincidentally, the first Android phone will probably be presold from T-Mobile in September and delivered in mid-October. I expect the Jaiku relaunch will include the ability to pull data from your Android phone's GPS chip.

Mozilla Ubiquity

Although it's only at release 0.1, Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity promises to be a game-changer, and ensures that Firefox will continue to be my desktop browser for some time. One part Yubnub, one part Quicksilver, Ubiquity allows you to hit a key combination to bring up a command window where you can type abbreviated commands and get instant feedback. Some examples:

• map university of texas at austin (Brings up a Google map)
• youtube cookie monster (Displays video stills search-as-you-type, defaults to Youtube search results)
• g spinuzzi (Brings up Google search results for Spinuzzi)
• word-count (Counts number of words in your selection in the main Firefox window, or counts words that you type after the command on the command line)

The command list is fairly long, but it's also extensible, like Yubnub.

Use dollar coins

The US Mint is piloting a program in Austin to promote using the $1 coin. Great, I like dollar coins. But maybe they should start a campaign to get rid of pennies too?

Mobile phones monitor elections

Smart Mobs points to a CNN report that African observers are using mobile phones to monitor elections at the district level.

Some Android speculation: What if the killer app already exists?

AndroidGuys has some sharp speculation about how Google could leverage its considerable resources and exclusivity to help its mobile platform leapfrog Apple. Yes, it involves StreetView and more, and it threatens to obliterate the standalone GPS industry.

Jaiku upgrades?

Jaiku appears to be upgrading to Google App Engine, doubtless in preparation for the upcoming rollout. They have about seven weeks to be up and rolling by the time the first Android phone gets to consumers.

Good idea, poor execution

Obama's idea to text supporters his VP pick was a good idea, but in execution, it got scooped by the MSM.