One of my apartment mates sent me a link to a piece by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled “Architekt entdeckt unberührte DDR-Wohnung” (Architect discovers untouched apartment from GDR times). In it the author reports how an architect discovers an untouched apartment in Leipzig 9 years plus some months after the fall of the Wall. It is fascinating to read what he and his crew discovered because they basically stepped back in time into an era that is so different from ours today.
However, the most crucial questions for me are not answered in this article which only scratches on the surface:
How can it be that nobody had discovered this apartment earlier? Somebody must have wanted rent for it.
What happened with the stuff in the apartment? Did it get shipped of to a museum?
Was the last inhabitant contacted to uncover why he left so quickly? Maybe he wanted some of the photos that were found.
Sarah Perez’ post over at ReadWriteWeb entitled “Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live?” resonates with me. I don’t like to view everything through a camera lens and thus do not record everything that I see. Seeing fathers film every move of their families on vacation from the moment they wake up until they go to bed always puzzles me and I never want to do that.
If I want to record something, it is done with a still camera to capture that very moment. That is more like a cue for later to recall the event. If I looked at a video, I would not have to think so much myself but have everything played out before my eyes.
When I am behind a video camera lens, which happens primarily only when I record public lectures that are organized by our study programs at the university, I realize that I see the events differently. I cannot not look at the display to follow the lecturer or the participants. Of course, then my field of vision is limited and my attention is not so much focused on what is actually said, but thoughts of “is this shot positioned nicely”, “count till 4 until you pan again”, “don’t zoom in too jaggedly”, “oops, I should have started to move earlier”, “should I switch the light settings now or wait until later”, “will there be a good moment for switching camera tapes”, “great; I’m in the right position to tape the presentation” etc. shoot through my head. Thus, I miss a great many discussion points and can only console myself with the fact that I can watch the recording later on.
Using a still camera is easier for me. I can take it out fast and put it away as quickly. With a video camera, I feel I have to stay “on” longer to capture the conversation / what happens. My still camera gives me more freedom in deciding when, what, and for how long to record something. I carry a camera with me at all times (you gotta love these tiny digital cameras), but I do not take it out to snap away at everything. Sarah Perez put it nicely:
The fine line between what’s worth documenting and what’s not is a hard one to define. We immediately assume that the most important, the biggest, the most incredible moments are those that should be recorded. But it’s these very moments that are best to experience live, with our full focus.
And I surely did not record some of the best moments in my life, but these are the moments that do not require a visual or audiovisual cue to recall.
Making decisions is not always easy, especially when you need to decide between the good and the bad, but sympathize with the in-between because you can see the advantages and they seem to outweigh the disadvantages when the product / service is used as intended. I’m not making sense? Well, hopefully it becomes clearer in the next few lines.
I ran across userfly on the ReadWriteWeb blog. It is a new online service which allows you to record a screencast of anybody who comes to your website. That way you can study the user’s behavior while s/he is on your site. This in itself is awesome. You do not need fancy and expensive equipment anymore to do basic usability testing, but you can do it on the fly. However, as you can see in the screencast, every keystroke you make is recorded and played back. Does that ring a bell?
Although I would hate to see anybody misuse this one line of code which is all that it takes to set up userfly on a website, the potential is there. When each keystroke is recorded, it is very easy to spy out passwords. However, there is a solution to that: Use a password manager or copy and paste your password in a browser’s text field. Then only the keystroke “v” will show up, but not the entire password.
Tumbarumba‘s problem, to which Waxy.org linked, lies somewhere else. With the Firefox plug-in Tumbarumba you can replace text on a random web page you are viewing with text from a number of short stories. That adds a bit of fun and may be very good for an April Fool’s Day joke or for a session on web credibility. However, it poses a problem because
you don’t know on which page the replaced text appears
you may not detect the replacement when you only skim the text.
For example, when you take a screenshot of a page, save or print it before reading it in it’s entirety, you may not realize that text was replaced. If you then use that text as reference and quote it with the incorrect text, then that is a problem. Maybe you stumble upon the replaced text because the inserted one is way out of context, but maybe some passages will actually fit. How will you recognize the switched text then?
Tumbarumba was created as “a frolic of intrusions—a conceptual artwork“. Your mind is challenged. However, will you change your on-screen reading habit and read everything carefully?
Thanks to my Twitter network, I learn about interesting, funny, stunning, awesome, academic things to do, to read, to view, to reflect upon, and to wonder about.
Last night, I saw @zotero‘s latest post on a new plugin that would allow Zotero users to export library collections to the web. As I am a happy Zotero user as it facilitates the process of taking bibliographic notes, I needed to check this plug-in out with which one can upload connections to the internet.
Zotz allos users to publish collections from their Zotero library to Citeline of MIT. After a collection is uploaded to Citeline, one can change the appearance, title and what others would be allowed to see. The thus created page can be downloaded as an html file to be used on an intranet for example. Furthermore, the references can be saved as files to be imported in bibliographic manager software for further use.
That is a great start to share a (part of a) Zotero library with others. I assume that the development on Citeline will continue. There is a lot of potential because right now it is rather static beyond the basic editing options and thus there is space to grow:
The link to the exhibit (Citeline’s word for what Zotero calls collection) can be shared through an URL and the exhibit can be downloaded for use somewhere else. However, there is no way for me to tell Citeline whether I would like to keep the URL private or public.
You can only delete an entire library, but not individual entries.
You cannot add items to an already existing exhibit.
People with whom you share your Citeline exhibit cannot make comments.
Special characters are a slight problem. They got messed up during the upload.
You cannot update an entry on Citeline. This is not good esp. in light of the previous point. You would have to correct the letter to its English equivalent in Zotero and upload the entire collection again but to a new exhibit and re-do all the fine-tuning on Citeline.
You cannot search across of exhibits of one person.
Other “social networking” features could be helpful, e.g. adding people to your network to keep track of their exhibits. Saving exhibits of other people, being alerted when they created a new exhibit.
Despite this list of it-would-be-great-to-have-that features, and I can think of some more easily, I already like this plug-in because it allows me to share references with others in an easy way and let them know about some of my favorite funny YouTube videos.
At the beginning of October I read Michele Martin’s blog post “The Social Media Game – Remixed and Some Comments” in which she shares her material and experience of playing that game at a conference. As I had just started teaching an optional module in our bachelor on “(Peer) Tutoring for the Learning with New Media”, I wanted to play it with my students if time permitted.
Yesterday, during our last of the five 3-hour sessions, I had planned 30 minutes for the game as we had already looked at some of the tools mentioned in the game and thus skipped the introductory remarks for the tools.
The scenarios provided by Michele Martin did not fit my target audience too well and thus I thought up some which I want to share here. Due to time constraints, we shortened the game and only used two scenarios. Although I think that I was more excited about the game than my students, they did a good job at discussing the various options and coming up with a good tool set.
I post the scenarios in English and German as I had written them in German originally and did not want to discard them.
