After my first full summer home with the kids, it's back to teaching next week. Classroom teaching starts Tuesday at 9, hardly a grueling start of the work week by many standards. The churn of the start of classes has been well underway for a while now, in that there are always details to resolve, but I've gotten better at adding to the checklists with each successive semester.
Some semesters begin with weather disruptions. Last Spring started in a snowstorm. This semester is starting with Hurricane Irene. Finals for the Fall 2012 semester fall during the Apocalypse. The important thing is to plan ahead and have contingency plans when things don't work out as expected.
It has been a privilege to share so much time with the kids despite ongoing life events, and there is no knowing what the future will hold. But just as today's sun and tranquility may be replaced by gale-force winds and driving rain on Sunday, the slow pace of summertime will be quickly replaced by the whirlwind start of the semester next week. I hope my future students of next week have a safe weekend ahead and that the effects of the storm are at a minimum over the weekend. Also thankful to be 300 feet above sea level here in the relative tranquility of my hometown Upstate this weekend..
Friday, August 26, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Transitions and transfers
This step in the journey could be compared to the transfer from one train to the next. When you find yourself headed in the wrong direction, disembarking, only to wait for a transfer headed in the right direction. And during this period, there is time to contemplate the odd pattern of gum stains on the concrete, only to remind oneself that there is in fact no pattern that exists but only to the whims of the observer.
In the midst of these ongoing transitions between one set of circumstances to another, it's amazing to think of the number of roles we play in life. What are the labels we call ourselves, and how those change. And how many of these labels can we really change or want to change at the same time? Every step is a shift, a move from one set of labels that make up an identity to another. It's not a smooth platform, but a pile of rocks we must scramble onto as we wait for our transfer.
But with time, the sheer impossibility faced in changing direction and waiting, seems overwhelming at first. There is no map, no timetable, but just dead reckoning and stories for guidance. Whether there is in fact a ride to take you closer to home, or whether to attempt the treacherous walk, there must be someone to help you along the way, whether someone who follows you on the journey, or those along the way who lend a helping hand as you pass by. A waiting place for the weary traveler is just that, a pause and a chance to reorient before the journey resumes.
In the midst of these ongoing transitions between one set of circumstances to another, it's amazing to think of the number of roles we play in life. What are the labels we call ourselves, and how those change. And how many of these labels can we really change or want to change at the same time? Every step is a shift, a move from one set of labels that make up an identity to another. It's not a smooth platform, but a pile of rocks we must scramble onto as we wait for our transfer.
But with time, the sheer impossibility faced in changing direction and waiting, seems overwhelming at first. There is no map, no timetable, but just dead reckoning and stories for guidance. Whether there is in fact a ride to take you closer to home, or whether to attempt the treacherous walk, there must be someone to help you along the way, whether someone who follows you on the journey, or those along the way who lend a helping hand as you pass by. A waiting place for the weary traveler is just that, a pause and a chance to reorient before the journey resumes.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
People and Ideas
Going through my dissertation and research personal wikis last night reminded me a bit about how dated the paradigm of the wiki has become. Though ongoing life changes makes bursts of productivity extremely few and far between these days, it's crucial to take a step back and ask questions at times. Wiki was a great tool for what it does, but the authoring tools are fairly old school by Internet standards- WYSIWIG or HTML textarea, it's a square box you type into. If you want to connect your current page to another page, which was the entire point of wiki in the first place, you have to remember the exact name of the page you want to connect to, key it in precisely, and surround it with arbitrary markup your particular flavor of wiki supports.
This was a workable solution when programmers thought in terms of CamelCase variable names, and the tool of choice was the Regular Expression-centric language of Perl. It stopped being 1995 a long time ago, and among other things, we have 700 million Facebook users that are well-versed with concepts of groups, people, and "liking" "pages".
So let's steal ideas from Social Media's tools for connecting people, FB and Twitter and the like, and use their ideas for ways to connect ideas, data, and documents. Documents are static, ideas and people are not. At first glance, throwing a Facebook interface on a content management system is tempting, but not quite right. You can't change your friends, but you can revise "idea pages". Suppose you have two pages and can generate a view of mutually-linked pages. Or view a sub-graph of a few related pages and explore their connections.
Links in the Social Media world are undifferentiated. Many have ways to classify users into lists or categories, but it remains unclear how these are used outside of retrieval. Can you apply rules based on membership in a list? What happens to members of multiple lists? When working with managing documents and ideas, this will be a starting point, not the afterthought that Social Media has made it.
----
For no special reason, I'm finding AJAX irritating lately. Or maybe I've just run into a slew of poorly implemented versions. Either way, it's broke so please fix it. And no, don't start posting glowing comments about JSON. The problem of inventing exotic data structures was already solved by markup, so I never saw the point of recreating a problem to solve a solution.
This was a workable solution when programmers thought in terms of CamelCase variable names, and the tool of choice was the Regular Expression-centric language of Perl. It stopped being 1995 a long time ago, and among other things, we have 700 million Facebook users that are well-versed with concepts of groups, people, and "liking" "pages".
So let's steal ideas from Social Media's tools for connecting people, FB and Twitter and the like, and use their ideas for ways to connect ideas, data, and documents. Documents are static, ideas and people are not. At first glance, throwing a Facebook interface on a content management system is tempting, but not quite right. You can't change your friends, but you can revise "idea pages". Suppose you have two pages and can generate a view of mutually-linked pages. Or view a sub-graph of a few related pages and explore their connections.
Links in the Social Media world are undifferentiated. Many have ways to classify users into lists or categories, but it remains unclear how these are used outside of retrieval. Can you apply rules based on membership in a list? What happens to members of multiple lists? When working with managing documents and ideas, this will be a starting point, not the afterthought that Social Media has made it.
----
For no special reason, I'm finding AJAX irritating lately. Or maybe I've just run into a slew of poorly implemented versions. Either way, it's broke so please fix it. And no, don't start posting glowing comments about JSON. The problem of inventing exotic data structures was already solved by markup, so I never saw the point of recreating a problem to solve a solution.
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