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In the latest episode of the MediaMixED Podcast, with Laura back on board, Josh opened the floor by describing the change taking place in his division as it moves now into an open office plan, with stand-up desks and no walls. How do open designs impact the way we work, and when and how do we still carve out some privacy?

In books, Laura is on to Arthur Phillips’ latest, The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel, Josh is back in non-fiction territory with David Weinberger’s To Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room, and Anthony is still on George R. R. Martin.

In television it’s The Boss, Justified, Lilyhammer, American Horror Story, Touch, and the still enjoyable Firefly.

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Josh and I were back at the table for another MediaMixED podcast. This time around, we opened with a discussion of “collision spaces,” which I mentioned in my previous blog entry, “Brighter Together.” We also touch on Apple’s iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and rich media publishing. We were both lucky enough to hear from Cathy Davidson, author of Now You See It, when she spoke on campus and we spend several minutes talking about some of the issues she raises.

In our media picks, we suggest Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Sons of Anarchy, Boardwalk Empire, and Hell on Wheels. There is also a brief mention of the Japanese drama The Queen’s Classroom (女王の教室) from 2005.

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"LED light bulb" by Karl Baron. Used under a CC-BY-2.0 license. Click for link to original.

I will agree with Cain that many fine ideas come from individuals working alone, but so do outlandish, hare-brained ideas that can never fly. Steve Wozniak is a brilliant man whom I respect greatly, but there is every possibility that, without the charisma of Steve Jobs and, ultimately, the efforts of everyone who brought Apple computers to the marketplace (yes, I know the longer version of the story, with Steve and Steve building their earliest shipments in the garage), Wozniak’s work would have remained exclusively in the hands of homebrew enthusiasts the world over. After all, not everyone is a genius, (and not everyone has the charisma of Steve Jobs), but not all the ideas from the smartest minds are good ones. In fact, many bright, successful people will tell you of their failures along the way.

More importantly, though, great ideas are also born of “happy collisions” and can be nourished to reality among groups. A librarian friend of mine has just penned an article on “Collision Spaces” and the benefits of serendipitous meetings and chance encounters, lost when architectural design favors more private offices and fewer group spaces. While I count myself lucky to have a private space in which to work, I do spend a lot of time in meetings, both formal and informal (do not underestimate the benefits of an impromptu hallway gathering!). The “group” represented by the attendees of those meetings, however, knows far more together than I know as an individual. Most people would not call me an introvert, though, so I am not afraid to voice my opinions and ideas in those meetings, and welcome the feedback from others to tell me why I’m wrong, why I may be insufficiently informed, or why my thoughts are valued. The groups that I have the pleasure of working with, for the most part, help me to improve and give shape to my ideas so that they have a better chance of succeeding when they are realized.

I do not disagree that more and more time during the workday is spent in meetings, and not all of it is productive. Nor do I disagree that many of us need time away, in the nooks and crannies or in our own offices, to be more productive. I think that’s true for introverts and extroverts alike.

For me, though, Cain’s attempt to brand “Groupthink” as some new form of socialistic threat to our communities is just misguided. It is not about conformity in classroom pods, it is about the exchange of ideas in those pods, the sharing of knowledge, the strong helping the weak, and about learning how to work with others. For better or worse, these are skills that the modern worker, and the modern society, needs. While it is not a given, we CAN be brighter together.

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Our good friend Laura joined Josh and me around the table for our second podcast, recorded just before the holiday break at the end of 2011.

In this episode we discuss some of our holiday traditions before moving on to our regular stew of TV, books and videos. In particular, we talk about our “TV worth watching” and the changing nature of television consumption; then dive in to our reasons and motivations behind why we read what we read. Recently, that has been Reamde, Ready Player One, The Marriage Plot, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Do e-books simply NOT offer a better experience to the physical tome? Laura and Josh hit some of the pros and cons of this debate.

In games, Skyrim seems to be the game of the year, but what’s available for the family-friendly Wii console that just doesn’t suck?

As always, your feedback is appreciated.

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Adapted from "Cut Cables" by Nick J Webb. Used under a CC-BY-2.0 license. Click for link to original.

“Cord Cutting Easier Said Than Done” by Jose Castillo.

There is also frustration directed at the multiple options we have for viewing and the total lack of integration between boxes and subscriptions. If we are going to cut the cord, it appears as though we will have to shave it off piece by piece.

I share a lot of Castillo’s frustrations (remotes and cables included). Last summer I intended to cut the cord at home, only to bail when two other issues arose. The first was Comcast’s decision to offer a new suite of alternative programming packages (the MyTV Choice bundles) in my area, which allowed me to scale back the number of channels in my cable lineup and save some money along with it. It’s not quite a la cart yet, but certainly a step in the right direction. The “Get Started Plus” bundle comes close to an 80/20 solution. The second was that I then turned around and used the cost savings to buy monthly access to JapanTV, an overpriced, single-channel offering of news and entertainment programming from Japan. This has long been a request from my wife and the opportunity finally presented itself.

So, we still have been unable to cut the cord. Much is available freely online and through other services, such as Netflix and Hulu, but content and timeliness matter. Netflix’s “contemporary” streaming offerings still feel anemic, many DVDs are delayed a month, and Hulu is delaying many new shows by a week at the request of studios and networks. While there is an abundant supply of people willing to post recordings on YouTube and a plethora of similar international services, one usually needs to watch quickly before the content owners file their takedown notices. I purposely avoid the torrent market these days, leaving few alternatives to watch content when and where I want it, unless I keep the cable connected and take advantage of the OnDemand service that that provides.

Still, that leaves me waiting until 2012 to watch HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones, when the DVD set will be released and I can borrow it from my library.

The cord is still tough to cut.

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This first episode is a bit long, as we cover our thoughts on the Kindle Fire, HTML5 Video, and our current TV viewing, book reading, game playing, and movie watching lists.

As always, your feedback is appreciated.

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I don’t know how long it will take its competitors to offer an alternative, but I’ve been on the fence, looking at the Kindle Fire, the B&N Nook, and the new Kobo Vox. This news may have pushed me off the fence. Amazon already has me in their music, video and shopping ecosystem, so going all in with ebooks seems to be a no-brainer at this point.

Still, I need to look into the details a bit more. I wonder what this means, if anything, for libraries, both public and school-based?

Photo "Broken Glass at Work-6" by Eric Schmuttenmaer, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. Click image for original

A colleague shared a link to a recent Nicolas Carr blog posting entitled, “Utopia is creepy.” In his posting, Carr is critical of the increasing number of futuristic videos created by tech companies.

The productions are intended to present us with visions of technological Edens, but they end up doing the exact opposite: portraying a future world that feels cold, mechanical, and repellent.

Nicholas Carr has been stirring the pot for a number of years now, perhaps most famously on the topic, “Does IT Matter,” and more recently with his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, on how the Internet is rewiring (rotting?) our brains.

In his blog posting, I think Carr makes some valid points about these videos, but futurists have been imagining utopias and dystopias for centuries, and by the nature of the endgame, they must be as sterile and perfect, or as harsh and hellish as can be. Describing our modern world of medical advances, wireless communication, miniaturization, etc. to people 100 or 200 hundred years ago, the future would have seemed as far-fetched, magical or blasphemous (depending on your POV) as some of the videos are today. We can only envision the future through the lens of our present understanding of the world, which is why I think these visions tread into the uncanny valley (familiar yet foreign).

Carr may be repelled by the packaging of these visions, but I view the packaging in the same way I view most TV shows that feature perfect people living fantasy lives–as fantasies. However, I DO like to imagine the various applications of technology that I see in these videos. For me, my criticism or cynicism is not about the packaging, but about the degree to which commercial/government interests, or even valid security/privacy concerns, will prevent these visions from becoming a reality.

What do you think? Are the videos cold or sterile? Too minimalistic? Too fantastic?

———

I blogged about Corning’s video a couple of months ago.

Microsoft has a series of these videos, including the first one below that Carr references:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYCez_DoHpo

Here’s a vision of screens, with some elements that we see other places, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_eVzxDXB0

Some notes:

The opening keynote by Seth Godin was well-done from a presentation point of view. As a professional speaker, Godin was clearly “off book” and knew his material well. His slides were interesting visually and his message was one that I believe many in the audience were pleased to hear. I must agree with my colleague, Josh Kim, however, who faults Godin for not doing a bit more homework to connect the message more closely to the educationally-oriented audience. One could easily imagine Godin giving the same presentation at any number of other conferences with little effort beyond some drag-and-drop changes. During the Q&A session, an audience member asked Godin for his solution to the educational challenges our nation faces. While acknowledging that the issue is more complex than anything that he could suggest, his response was that we should send our children to public school during the school day, to participate in and support the community, and home-school our children the rest of the day, using every opportunity parents have to encourage their intellectual development. While a good answer, I think it lacked the inspirational insight many may have hoped for following the main presentation.

The Vendor Floor was big and nicely laid out. I appreciated the wide walking corridors. My memory of past events was more cramped. The only place where space was at a premium was in the area that was designated for poster sessions. New this year was Startup Alley, a place for up-and-coming ventures to pitch their wares. The company that caught my eye was Kno, a web and mobile app for e-textbooks. Kno offers over 100,000 textbook titles and supports PDFs as well. On an iPad, Kno then adds a number of tools for annotation, note taking, for 3D modeling of chemical structures. The texts can be purchased or rented. The notes can be read within the context of the page or can be read as a companion notebook format, with direct links back to the source page. Plus, the notes live in the Cloud so that they are accessible between devices, too.

Other notes from the floor:

• I enjoyed Google’s booth setup, which combined an “indoor” product area along with an “outdoor” fireside chat area for their demo workshops, complete with forest imagery and outdoor carpet. They gave away Chrome-based notebook computers at each workshop.
• The MoodleRooms exhibit was quite large, a testament to how many schools have chosen to move away from commercial LMS vendors.
• I was pleasantly surprised by Epson’s interactive short throw projectors, with both wall and table mounts. The latter allows for interactive tabletop collaboration without the investment in something like Microsoft’s Surface computer.
• iPads were everywhere throughout the Conference, in attendees hands and as top prizes in vendor raffle drawings.

In addition to corporate products on the show floor, it was nice to see other projects continuing to be developed at colleges and universities. BiblioBouts is an online game developed at the University of Michigan to help students learn the process of finding high quality information using library databases and other reference information. At the end of the game, students will have a high quality bibliography or list of research sources they can use for to complete the course assignment, as well as research skills they can continue to use throughout their college coursework.

Purdue returned to demo their Hotseat product, a backchannel aggregator to assist students with question and answer in a large classroom setting. It joins a bevy of tools on their Studio Projects page, which includes Jetpack (for interactive learning), Doubletake (for video assignments), Mixable (making academics social) and Signals (an early intervention tool).

UCLA showed off and demonstrated their MWF (mobile web framework), a Javascript and CSS framework designed to make developing for mobile devices as easy as possible. Their guiding principles behind the framework are:

• Device Agnostic – The framework is compatible with any web-capable mobile device.
• Platform Independent – The framework can be used by applications written in any language and on any environment.
• Easy to Use – Developers write one set of semantic markup and the framework handles the rest.
• Easy to Deploy – The framework is lightweight and simple to deploy and maintain.

The platform is already in use on five UC campuses and three more are in development. There is an active community around the framework and they have hosted annual conferences and workshops. The demo was amazingly easy to follow and looked very easy to implement.

Spencer Striker began developing GameZombieTV as part of his Master’s thesis at Indiana University in Bloomington. The video-game-oriented media site serves as the basis for the Media Arts & Game Development degree program curriculum covering Video Production, Web Design and Programming, and New Media Marketing now being offered at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.

Other highlights included a presentation by Lynda Weinman, of Lynda.com, who spoke on “The changing role of educators in the digital age,” and constituent group meetings for attendees interested in Games and Learning and Digital Signage. You can find out more on the Constituent Group page of the Educause web site.