Blogging the WIDE Conference (Day Two)

8:00-8:30 am//Opening Remarks: David Gift is Vice Provost for Libraries, Computing and Technology, Michigan State University; Co-Director Jim Porter

8:30-10:00 am//Panel One, “Knowledge Economy/Work”

Clay Spinuzzi, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cheryl Geisler, Bill Hart-Davidson

10:30-12:00 am//Panel Two, “Community/Culture/Identity”

Huatong Sun, Ellen Cushman, Samantha Blackmon, Jeff Grabill, Ann Bishop

1:00-2:30 pm//Panel Three, “Public Policy and Digital Economics”

John Austin, Stuart Selber, John Logie, Danielle DeVoss, Jim Porter, David Gift

2:30-3:00 pm//Closing Remarks: Co-Directors Jeff Grabill and Bill Hart-Davidson

As before, my scattered notes are below the fold!

Morning Sessions

Jim Porter
MSU

(What does writing practice have to do with the economy? - Jim)

In a digital economy,
knowledge work=digital writing/communication

David Gift
Vice Provost for Libraries, Computers and Technology
MSU

The usual opening remarks, but he is presenting on public policy and digital economics later today.

Panel One: Knowledge Economy/Work
Clay Spinuzzi, Johndan Johnson-Eilolla, Cheryl Geisler, Chip Steinfield, Bill Hart-Davidson

Clay "Weaving and Splicing Networks"

Marx and Dialectical Materialism
Engels and Dialectic. Marx's work became the theory of everything in Engels' hands. (Dialectics of Nature)

Organic and Heterogeneous work organization

splicing is not connected but rhizomatic

Actiivty theory
polycontextuality

Johndan "Models for Text Ecology" or "What Would It Mean if Hypertext Actually Worked" or "Welcome to RFIDsand Spimes Postmodernism Wins

Spimes: Bruce Sterling (Shaping Things) **
object as artifact (created by hand, locally, no robust internetwork). Datacloud is the evolution of the artifact to the product. (Delicious Library)

Gizmos have a lot of potential, but their not yet at a stage that they are fully integrated into our lives.

Spimes are objects that generate data automatically from before their inception to after their death. (like UPC codes and RFIDs).

What do texts as spimes allow?
1. extensive feedback on texts are being used
2. enacting a constant ongoing usability test of texts

And what else?
1. spiders, bots, etc on the web "auto googling
2. the book is reading you (Ben Vershbow at if:book)**
3. readers may want to opt out of contributing

Cheryl "Time, Technology, and Text"

Talking about gizmos. PDA announces the owner as someone who is busy and without much time.

Texts as technology for creating virtual experiences

TIme: time in the home and time at work

The problematics of PDA usages (PDA time is for short term work)

Charles "Supporting Collaboration in Distributed Teams"

Today, Knowledge work is often:
group work
complex
multidisciplinary
distributed
(People are working in virtual teams)

Virtual teams have problems:
Information distribution
Does everyone have the same information?
Awareness
presence
attention
activities
context
Social Cohesion

Collaborative Tools Can Help
Shared workspaces
Activity Awareness
Availability awareness
Social awareness

Issues to resolve
1. balance between passive and active collection and delivery of presence and activity information
2. customization of awareness features
(and 1 or 2 more that I didn't note)

New Tools, New Forms of Virtual Collaboration
the rise of the wiki
mobile collaboration

Bill Hart-Davidson "Groups Being Groups: Knowledge Work in Social Collectives"

Zuboff (In the Age of the Smart Machine)

-the knowledge that underlies "action-centered skill" is increasingly encoded in networked systems where it was previously ephemeral or oral in nature

-this "textulaiztion" of work frees workers from constraints of action-centered work, and also frees them to act on their work...

New Tools
WIDE (Grassroots: A map creation tool for communities)**
Going Beta Soon

New Priorities
Move away from individual and towards the social group as primary locus

Move away from an emphasis on rhetoric as enacted in discursive "moves made by individuals

move away from views of texts as snapshots of past actions or indicators

move away fromt he study of rhetorics as wondows on more or less fixed social orders and toward rhetrs as dynamc collections of discursive resources available to memebers of a communit in a given social-historical moment.

Panel Two: "Community/Culture/Identity

Presenters: Huatong Sun, Ellen Cushman, Samantha Blackmon, Ann Bishop

Huatong "Think Globally of Local Writing Practices"

Think Globally Act Locally: But we seem to be acting locally without thinking globally at all.

Text messaging as a formal genre?
Not a genre of formal discourse?

Beijing mayor sent a message to all of the local cell phone numbers in Beijing on the eve of the spring festival. There were so many that they started 2 days before the message.
-TM introduced in China in 2001
-Chinese journalists will sometimes conduct interviews via TM

Blogging as grassroots writing practice?
-Celebrity blogging (10 million hits in 3 months for one actress)

Instant messaging
ICQ (first IM)
AIM (most popular here)
QQ (most popular in China)
There are QQ groups that allow mass messaging.

Social network websites
Like facebook, etc now
-My Friends (in China) back in 2000 similar to facebook. Earlier there because of the culture of group communication.

The diffusion of local writing practices to other locales. We need to be aware that modern digital writing practices are now participating in global discourses. Developing a global vision.

Ellen Cushman "Toward a Praxis of New Media: Sustainability and Capacity Building in an MSU Cherokee Nation Collaborative"

Started in 2004. She is an outlander citizen of the nation. This was helpful in getting an in with the Cherokee Nation and working with them to work and do research.

locus of designing. looking at the literacy event.

Share-learn-share model of technology development

Civic and community commitment.

Ann Bishop "Community Inquiry and Informatics for Youth"

A part of the research of a collective

Community Inquiry assumes that everyone has valuable information to share. (Turn of the century pragmatists)

Jane Addams (Hull House) Pragmatist "Public Activities and Investigations" Working with community inquiry and the community in general (a women's club) to find out why the death rate of the area was so high.

Working with youth in Chicago. community based study of learning, digital writing, and social activism.

PR Cultural Center (30 years old) self actualization and critical thought

The community is the curriculum

Where do digital texts come into this.
Tools should be designed to meet the real needs of real people.

Student informal research group done with the students, Ann, and the community

Community Inquiry Labs (iLabs) Free suite of software developed by the research group and the students involved in the project. **

Connection to share-learn-share and my notion of representation in the production of the technology.

www.cii.uiuc.edu Community Informatics Initiative

Q& A Thoughts

Globalization and the notion of technology. How is technology based in the US going to be received by the rest of the world in the future? Is it going to be different in the future after the current presidential regime? How these things are going to be rhetorically constructed or reconstructed. Thinking back to the way that N. Korea is using The Diary of Anne Frank.
Secondary repositories and resistance
How do we figure out how people are resisting?

Text is an incidental step on the road to action- Jim

Looking at the discourses that sustain or don't sustain the artifact rather than focuses specifically on the artifact - Stuart

Social Collaborative Filtering Applications?? (Amazon algorithm) Allows you to look at what other folks might be looking at in addition to the things that they have seen.

 

Afternoon Sessions

Panel Three: "Public Policy and Digital Economics" John Austin, Stuart Seler, John Logie, Danielle DeVoss, Jim Porter, and David Gift

John Austin "Defining a Great Lakes Economic Agenda: A Project of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program

What Matters for Economic Growth today

Region is developer of new technologies and ideas

Stuart Selber "Beyond Napster: Public Policies and Digital Economics"

Penn State Napster Agreement
Music tethered to a maximum of 3 machines.

Pressure from Congress and the RIAA, sanctioned access to music and educating students about copyright law.

There was something like 80 firewalls that went up with the Napster agreement. These blocked access with most P2P networks including legal ones.

Like at Purdue it is limited to Windows 2000 and XP even though all students are paying for it in their IT fees (including Mac and Unix users who can access it).

John Logie "Copyright in Increasingly Digital Academic Contexts: What it Takes"

From Writing to Digital Composing

Looking at the Teach Act and what it does to our pre-Teach Act pedagogical practices.

Danielle DeVoss and Jim Porter "Rethinking Plagiarism in the Digital Age: Remixing as a Means for Economic Development?"

Allowable Plagiarism (set of have you ever questions that ask specifically about academic websites <syllabi, powerpoint slides, etc.>)

to recombine to produce a new of modified audio, recombining existing media elements

to engage in collaborative, rhizomatic composing exemplified by spaces like flickr and wikipedia

Information arrives, gets remixed with other information, and then the new package....Lev Manovich

Conclusions: What do Plagiarism and remix have to do with economic development and the digital economy?
-remix is necessary in the digital age
-remix is necessary for innovation
-remix is necessary for economic development
we must this find an ethical middle ground that fosters digital writing practices essential for fostering creative work and building communities, cultures, and coalitions

Q&A Discussion
With what gets lost in digital duplication it becomes more and more necessary to continue to fund traditional library resources.