BTW if you follow me on Twitter you know that I’m in the final push of formatting the dissertation according to grad school standards. As soon as I’m done I plan to compose thoughts longer than 140-characters and update this blog with details about my defense experience, feedback I received, and ideas for future projects.
Does anyone know when Google Maps updates its street views?
It’s becoming common practice for those impacted by disaster to use Google Maps to either organize efforts or search for views of homes/neighborhoods, but I was surprised when tinkering around with Street View to see my now razed home still showing up.
Some background:
As I blogged in September 2005, the site Scipionus.com allowed me to type in my address and find this information:
My parents chose to move permanently to Mississippi instead of rebuild and when I went home over Christmas they saw the house had finally been demolished. Here’s a pic of my brother who visited NOLA in January:
While I’m all about the Internet providing more accurate and authentic information than traditional media, I have to say that, especially during this time of finalizing the dissertation, it was comforting to see my home still there…
NOLA’s future is bright and I couldn’t be happier! Just wish I didn’t have to wait til JazzFest to get down there to celebrate…
Speaking of which, other than Twitter, which I can scroll through pretty quickly, I plan to be offline a lot for the next few weeks. There are dissertation deadlines to meet and with only about 20 pages left to write up, I’m not stopping now!
My favorite way to start a semester in Advanced Rhetoric:
In addition to readings from our three course texts: Rhetoric and Human Consciousness, Rhetoric and Style, and Rhetoric Online, the semester will bring in PDFs of readings like Tania Smith’s “What Connection Does Rhetorical Theory Have to Technical and Professional Communication?”
I also plan to show Thank You For Smoking, The Invention of Lying, Shattered Glass, and, if there’s time, SuperSize Me.
So much to cover and so many arguments to analyze, but I think my upper-level undergraduates can handle it!
It also helps that I’ve got 85-minute class periods.
I’ve been in serious dissertation writing mode this new year which means I’ve hardly tweeted, watched little TV other than that on DVD and returned very few emails. Sorry about that, but that’s what consumes my life when the semester begins. Well, not the TV part.
Anyway, since I am in this dissertation state of mind that means I’ve been in a Tampa/USF mood too, checking in with the graduate program assistant [Lee is amazing!] and talking to current grad students and former faculty. I even checked my USF email account to make sure my final tuition payment went through and was surprised to see a blog comment notification. For months I’ve been trying to log in to my blog.usf.edu space with no success. That’s part of the reason I even started this new space and bought my domain name. Just last week I even checked the main blog.usf.edu site and saw nothing. I figured they took all of them down to save on server space. I don’t think there were many active bloggers using the service. After seeing that blog comment email though, I tried one more time and saw my Doctor Daisy blog as a newly revamped WordPress site! I no longer have my fleur de lis theme over there, which you can see in the web.archive.org version, but that’s OK.
Taking this discovery a step further, I decided to explore the export/import tools since both of my blogs are Word Press. Short story short, it literally took 3 clicks and now this space has ALL 475 of my USF blog posts.
I’m not into Season 6 of SYTYCD as much as I was Season 5, but while trying to find video of ballroom boy Ryan’s solo from this past week I came across this appearance by the Top 10 on Ellen.
My beloved Boys have launched a new i-phone friendly version of their website, which includes a neat interactive media player where you can remix tracks, watch videos, etc. Love, etc, that is…
And another attempt at NaBloPoMo down the tubes. Oh well! I still plan to post as often as possible, now that I feel that my weeks are more manageable, even with the stacks of grading.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m very much into Twitter and have a growing list of bookmarks on diigo, which are also copied to delicious, and then shared with my 4Cs Emerging Social Software SIG members.
Enjoy, and I look forward to updating my own “Teaching with Twitter” page at the end of this semester since I’ve revised the instructions I give students and now assign some readings from The Twitter Book to assist new users. I also incorporate more live-tweeting into my class discussions, calling on students who post in addition to replying to Q&A.
While I was at AoIR everyone was all a buzz about Google Wave. I too suddenly wasn’t complete until I received an invite, but then when I got one, I didn’t know what to do with it. I noticed several of my Twitter followers saying the same, “It will be a good tool but there aren’t enough people on yet.”
Thankfully, I was added to a Digital Humanities wave, and there I could see things in action. The most important thing I learned there, via Lifehacker, was the “with: public” command, where I could see all of the waves out there and decide which ones I might want to join.
Doing that “with: public” search actually led me back to the gracious soul who sent me the invite in the first place, Matthew Kaskavitch, a student at UW-Stout who I’ve never met, but who is an active Twitter user and social media in higher ed proponent. (Yes, that “one professor in the English department used Twitter in the classroom to communicate with her students” is me. I’ve actually gone on to incorporate some of those suggestions too and now more actively ask students to tweet on readings at the beginning of class then call on them to elaborate during large group discussions).
An interesting Wave that Matt’s started is the “University of Wisconsin Wavers,” which is allowing folks from any of the campuses across the state to communicate and collaborate in ways never before. Of course, things are still in the early stages, but I think it’s a great start to a dialogue amongst tech savvy folks and much more fun (to me at least) than listserv messages.
Still, even with all of this, I don’t see myself becoming an active Wave user until I get some invites to share with colleagues. Where those at, Google???
Given the cool stuff I’ve been working on and tweeting about but too lazy to blog, I’m going to try this 30 posts in 30 days challenge again. So far, it doesn’t look like there’s a theme to adhere to either.
I always feel better after I’ve clicked “publish” so here goes!
I’m just back from my first Association of Internet Researchersconference and have to say it was the best conference I’ve attended in a long time. Small enough to not get overwhelmed, and with the half hour breaks in between sessions and the #ir10 Twitter channel, it was quite easy to meet with people I’d only interacted with or read online.
Otherwise stated, it was an excellent place for me to “get my geek on.”
All of the panels I attended included a nice mix of qualitative and quantitative research and the whole time I was reminded of my 2007 Summer Doctoral Programme experience. Lots of supportive feedback and exciting international projects.
What I noticed most was many folks working on multiple projects at once, and the detail with which they spoke actually inspired me to save a planned part of my dissertation for a separate project. I think it’s pretty clear that I have enough to speak on blogs and the NOLA blogosphere rather than try to bring in Flickr, Twitter and audio/video embedding. This way I can go into more detail about how my bloggers differ in terms of rebuilding experience and perhaps even map out how they represent so many neighborhoods across the city.
I’ll write again soon, as I really want to make sure I update this space more often, but til then, let me know what you think of my slides:
