And interesting article today in USAToday about a law professor who banned laptops in her classroom. Of course, the students are pissed. And they should be. On the one hand I think it's fine for professors to control the environment in which they teach – within reason of course. That's the job of a professor after all – to pass on knowledge and experience in the best way possible.

On the other hand, professors who do things like ban laptops seem to have a surprisingly thin grasp of the contexts of learning. When students' using laptops makes professors uncomfortable it's probably because it conflicts with their cultural conception of classroom behavior. A student should sit with a pen and paper, maybe a book, and pay attention to the front of the room, just like they did when they were students.

Of course, the contexts of learning, especially in higher education, are quite different now than they were then. Wireless internet in particular has changed the classroom experience. At the iSchool it is commonplace for students to sit in lectures with laptops out, a fact which has been appalling to some folks I've told about it. Often, it's true, there is some distraction from email and the web, especially during those less than scintillating moments in class. But the fact is that laptops and connectivity have led to powerful new modes of learning. Take, for example, Sarita, Sarai, and Steve's ClassChat Project as well as Jen & Matthew's project, both of which explore the implications of the 'the backchannel', an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel that is active during many of the iSchool's courses. They are proving that the backchannel has all sorts of interesting sociocultural functions that are entirely about enhancing comprehension and retention.

This morning's 'Morning Edition' on NPR included a story about the community that has sprung up around a makeshift kitchen outside the Yellow Cab lot in San Francisco. (Janete's Midnight Cabyard Kitchen)

It's a fascinating tale about spontaneous connections, sharing culture, and the unexpected mechanisms of diaspora.

One thing the story doesn't tell us much about: how did it come to be that so many people from a small Brazilian town called Goiânia happen to be cabdrivers in San Francisco?

Feedyes.com lets you scrape pretty much any page, creating RSS feeds for pages that don't publish them. Don't ask me how, I just think it's cool.

(via Purse Lip Square Jaw)

In preparing this week's lecture on surveillance and risk for my science & tech class, I reread Anders Albrechtslund and Lynsey Dubbeld's The Plays and Arts of Surveillance: Studying Surveillance as Entertainment (pdf). Although I still don't think the authors are terribly successful at making their case, it's such a departure from most surveillance studies that I'm really curious to see what the students think.

Surveillance could be considered not just as positively protective, but even as a comical, playful, amusing, enjoyable practice…[I]n this paper we are not concerned with the subverting, critical potential of cultural reflections on surveillance. Rather, our intent is to draw attention to an emerging range of surveillance manifestations the primary purpose of which is to entertain…

[T]here is a growing area of what could be called 'surveillance games' that seems to call for further analysis: games that use data processing technologies to provide or enhance entertainment, thereby appropriating surveillance devices for their own hedonistic purposes. These appropriations suggest that surveillance is not just a steady growing security industry that requires critical debate and extensive academic analysis (important as these are!); surveillance can also serve as a source of enjoyment, pleasure and fun, as is evidenced in the entertainment industry…

[L]ooking at surveillance from the perspective of the fun it can bring could contribute to developing analyses of how surveillance can come up in unexpected places, such as online gaming communities, and increase our sensitivity for identifying surveillance issues in innocentlooking practices such as board games…Further study of popular culture aspects of surveillance can contribute to an understanding of how we use concepts and metaphors derived from fiction in surveillance analyses."

Like Anne, I appreciate that this paper is an alternative to the relentlessly critical approach that defines a lot of academia. By looking at the unexpected ways that sometimes oppressive and challenging technologies are adapted for alternative purposes that they wern't necessarily designed for (and which don't exist in the popular imagination), we can learn a lot.

Recently I saw 'The Aristocrats: 100 Comedians, one very dirty joke' which is a documentary film about the comedy world. Specifically, it's about an old and famous joke which is really not one joke but a model for a joke – it's different every time someone tells it. I think I can safely not give away anything about the movie by describing the joke to you:

A guy walks into an agent's office and says to the agent, 'I've got this great new act you've got to hear about. It's really a killer, it'll bring down the house.'

The agent says, 'So what's the act?'

{insert a description of the most foul scenario you can think of that includes all sorts of sexual acts, horrible scatological stuff, bestiality, incest, basically the most abhorrent stuff you can think of. Each comedian makes this part up on the spot, gives it his/her own flair.}

The agent, flabbergasted, can only say 'Whaddya call that act?' and the guy says, 'The Aristocrats.'

Here's Cartman telling the joke if you want to get a flavor for it (Warning: this is extremely vulgar and disgusting. Like, really, I think you ought to watch it if you want to get the feel of the joke, but it's truly gross. You've been warned.):

The movie consists entirely of 100 different comedians telling the joke, talking about the joke, or talking about other people telling the joke. Apparently this joke is a big part of the construction of this community of comedians.

Somewhere about 30 minutes into the 90 minute movie, about five minutes after I stopped laughing and started wondering how the movie could possibly sustain itself for another hour, I realized something. The Aristocrats doesn't work that well as a comedy, but that's okay, because at heart it's an ethnographic film. I started to look at it differently, and I LOVED it! This joke has so many flavors and so many characters – it's something that 100 different famous comedians could all talk about and share stories about with excitement and passion. The film is a window into a history and a sense of community. Knowing the joke, telling the joke, talking about the joke, and loving it all become parts of the cultural construction of comedy. It's more about comedy and the practice of comedy than it is about the joke – the joke is just the vehicle for the story.

Now I know I said it wasn't that funny, but I almost lost control of myself when Steven Banks (a.k.a Billy the Mime) gave his wordless interpretation of the joke, standing right in the middle of the boardwalk near LA, people walking by behind him. After almost an hour of context about the joke, what it means, and the way it's told, Billy the Mime absolutely tore it up. Dear lord. I wish I could find a video clip, but I can't. I'll keep a lookout.

Mimi Ito of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California (and PI on the Digital Youth project on which I work), is announcing 8 new postdoc positions.

The Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) (www.annenberg.edu) at the University of Southern California invites applications for up to eight postdoctoral positions and one visiting scholar position. These Visiting Research fellows will take part in a major multi-disciplinary research initiative to explore the “The Meaning of the New Networked Age: Innovation, Content, Society, and Policy.” We welcome researchers from various disciplines including anthropology, architecture, the arts, business, communications, computer science, design, economics, engineering, history, international relations, law, library science, neurosciences, political science, rhetoric, and sociology.

Anyone who's done interview transcription themselves knows that it's both necssary and a giant, unimaginable time-suck. When I'm getting towards the end of a 2 hour interview that took place in a loud cafe, I know I'm about to poke my eyes out. So I try to send them out to transcription services whenever possible. It isn't cheap though, so sometimes we're stuck.

Through the Anthrodesign list I learned of a new, free (Shareware) application called transScriber. It's a simple and functional tool for playing back transcription audio while you're typing it into a word processor. I like that it's unencumbered and easy to use – you load the sound file into the app. and it sits in the background while you work in MS Word or whatever. To access the audio controls you just hold down the Alt key and hit an arrow key. Up is start/stop, left and right are for stepping back and forth in 10 second chunks. You can also set bookmarks by hitting the down key, but it looks like there is no way to save them if you quit the program. It supports a wide variety of audio formats, at the moment MP3, MP4, AAC, WAV, AIFF, GSM, and G.711.

So, I like tranScriber, but all things considered, I'd definitely choose Express Scribe (which I blogged about last year) instead. On the one hand, Express Scribe doesn't do bookmarks, and transScriber's Alt-function keys are nice compared to Express Scribe's use of the function keys at the top of the keyboard. I found hitting 'F7' and 'F8' with any speed required a lot of accuracy since my hands have to move from the typing position. Alt – arrow is much easier. On the other hand, Express Scribe is also free, does everything transScriber does, and has a ton of flexibility and features:

• Supports foot pedals
• Lets you customize the playback speed, supports slow playback
• Let's you customize the FWD and REW jump lengths
• Remembers audio position across sessions
• Supports a VERY long list of file formats

Still, you've gotta give transScriber's author Mads Rydahl a huge amount of credit. He built the software from scratch to help out his girlfriend who is a social anthropologists. That's get you points!!!

My buddy Alex, who is an editor at Baltimore magazine, has an interesting post about entitlement and class dynamics in Baltimore.

I spent 7+ years in and around Baltimore, and Alex's perspective reminds me that Baltimore is a city with a deeply rooted identity crisis. In the October 21st, 1973 edition of the New York Times Magazine (that sadly I can't seem to find online), famous Baltimore columnist Russell Baker published a piece titled 'The Biggest Baltimore Loser of All Time.' It's a fascinating read about collective identity and social history in Baltimore. In it he basically argues that Baltimore has developed a massive penchant for underachieving as a result of everything from its position as the banking capital for the Confederacy to the fact that the Baltimore Orioles are the almost-winningist baseball team of all time. In other words, they have gone to the World Series without winning more times than any other team.

It would be interesting to revisit that argument in 2006. Alex, you up for it? Let's get Russell on the line…

I was pretty thrilled to find out recently that my paper, Cultural Assessment for Sustainable Kiosks, was accepted to the 1st International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2006). In it I argue that most assessments of ICT4D projects are too narrowly focused on economic and technical factors, that the concept of sustainability needs to be refigured in terms of grassroots culture instead of business modeling, and that so-called 'rapid' ethnographic methods are a great way to captual cultural factors in an efficient and contextually appropriate way. An earlier version of this paper is available here.

It's very gratifying because I've loved working on ICT4D over the last year, and at the same time I've been sad that I haven't been able to devote more time to it. This gives me motivation to keep going. At the moment it is just a theory paper. This is the beginning of a long road that includes theory, method, and most importantly case-studies of successes and failures in ICT4D projects. The serious analysis of faliures is a glaring hole in the ICT4D community. Why has there been no effort to extract best practices? Considering how many ICT4D projects fail to some degree, it's really amazing…

To keep up the theme of reblogging ancient posts (at least in blog time), here's a fantastic summary, complete with academic references, of what it takes to build a virtual community. It's framed in the context of a business that wants to develop online relationships with communities of customers, but it's particularly relvent in the context of the Mycroft Project, which I previously blogged about.

Mycroft is off to an amazing start, and thus far we've been quietly rolling out a variety of mostly sucky content. However, a real prototype is almost ready, and we are working on our web presence. It's okay for now, since we get next to no traffic. But anyway, as I hope will be clear from the description that Mycroft's success and failure depends to a huge degree on how well we can create a distributed community of contributors.