Clio Wired provides glipmses of digital domains I haven’t considered before. With the trip underway, I figured a postcard would be in order.
This week’s readings and the consequences of my choice to do the digital readings online have led me to some “meta-cognatizing” on how I think and act interacting with the wired world. Searching, spidering, and hypertexting are now second nature, and worth an assessment:
- I matched my searching skills against CNMH’s tools: score was 1-1. Syllabus finder was hands down winner, but H-bot was an H-bomb. I struggled for 15 minutes to talk it into trying to find a way to pull up monthly casualty figures in Vietnam. I felt pretty good about my search techniques when I found what I wanted on the second click.
- “Spidering” has become second nature, and Turkel’s hyperlinks in the Methodology for the Infinite Archive were better than his article. Although I liked learning more, was this additive to the main point or a distraction? I think distraction, amplified by my next problem:
- The magic genie of my computer screen & search engine does more than history readings, driving me to endless distraction. The ideas the are sparked by doing the course readings lead to endless excursions of things I’ve wanted to check, but haven’t done so yet…..for example, when I saw the Latin in the metasearch engine screnshot, I remembered I wanted to check a quotation I’d heard attributed to Heracles sometime last week.
So, I agree with Turkel, we need to learn a set of new digital skills. I’ll add one more: we have to learn a new level of mental discipline when thinking and working in front of our windows into the wired world.
Bill
PS: I can’t wait to tell all my friends back home that we creating 5 exabytes of information this year!!!
I enjoyed Staley because he reinforced a line of thought I ise in teaching. I use visualizations often to teach military history at the National War College. Sometimes these visualizations are the result of white board work in seminar. Other times, they are the result of sketching out ideas on paper to link course themes. I’ve uploaded two visualizations I use. The first is my representation of Sun Tzu’s “way of war” as described in Art of War.
sun-tzu-way-of-war.ppt
The second is a depiction of human reactions to battle: the physical conditions, the emotions that result, the consequences, and antidotes.
use-of-force.ppt
The slides that follow show a commander’s role in calibrating violence. The ball is his unit. The tilt of the bar and the obstacles represent the commander and interplay of the environment.
Bill
The US Air Force Academy is generally regarded as a prestigiuos institution of higher learning and a national resource through it’s mission of preparing young men and women to lead our air and space forces.
What the outsider doesn’t hear about is the highly spirited and unique culture that has grown within the cadet body over the last 50 years. USAFA alumni have created a folklore wiki to capture our culture and heritage. To add to the recording of our culture, I digitized, cropped, and resampled some 35mm slides depicting a notorious jet flyby that led to disciplinary action against the lead pilot, (because he broke all the rules on flybys) but earned him undying admiration among the cadet wind due to the breathtaking flying!
http://www.usafatoday.com/wiki/index.php/Low_Level_A-10_Flyby
It was a steep learning curve on how to embed graphics on this wiki, because there were no instructions. Once I found how to upload a file, I examined the code of other pictures and used a trial and error until I got them looking right
I examined the source code behind my organization’s website, for what I thought would be a simple set of code. Our
home page doesn’t change, and has a few pretty simple links. I was amazed to find 11 pages of code. I didn’t find the banner image until page 7! It was intimidating to try to decipher, I was almost ready to throw in the towel a few times, but worked through the “ and “
I found an undue amount of effort went into building columns, rows, and designating colors. This suggested to me that the designers didn’t use much CSS if any. There is a reference to CSS (I used the “edit/find” function to locate it), but I didn’t know how to figure out what was afffected by the CSS. It also made it clear to me that there aren’t quick and simple changes to such an extensive and complex code in even simple sites. I went to
Zen
Garden to remind me of what is possible in simplicity/keeping the content and style separate. I hope that there are easier ways to do this, or else the inspiration I got from “collecting history online” will founder on friction inherent to implementing the vision.
Since we’re “wired” for this course, I did the readings online instead of printing them out. Wow, it was hard work! Reading the Digital History Introduction chapter took focus and effort far beyond reading a chapter in a physical book.
Here are a few problems I ran into:
- Note taking in the margins: I wrestle with authors by amplifying and taking exception with notes in the margins. I cut and pasted the intro chapter and inserted comments…it took a lot longer than my scribblings. When I tried this with the other chapters, I couldn’t copy/paste them because they were broken into many “pages.” Separated by a “next à link. It made me wonder if there’s a way to mark up a document online.
- Pacing: I don’t know how long a document is if I have to keep following different links to “next à” This leaves me feeling uneasy, can my time available equal my time needed?
- Attention span: I think we’ve become accustomed to 3-5 sentence web-bytes when surfing the web. An online text book like Digital History isn’t configured to align with web habits. Maybe one way might be to cut it back to a thin outline with links to depth and examples? If not, I’m ready to go buy the book!!
- Distractions: If I’m reading a document in a browser, an idea might pop into my head on any random subject. Since I’m sitting at a computer, I’m usually now off chasing it down on Google.
So, I’m going to try to stick with a paperless semester. It remains to be seen if I can
retrain my mind and retool my learning habits to make it work
