Update:
If you sign up for this and have links for Digital Citizen, please use the “for:digitalcitizen” tag. Thanks!
This is a different sort of fluency milestone because its not really related to the Snyder book. I’m going to talk about social bookmarking and discuss a way for everyone to participate in Digital Citizen- without having to worry about speaking out loud or writing massive essays.
Social Bookmarking is like picking “favorites” or bookmarks for your web browser- Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.. But instead of having the bookmarks just sit in your browser, the bookmarks are stored on a website. Through “tags” you place on the bookmark, the bookmark is shared with the rest of the internet. You can send it to your friends, you can subscribe to feeds that feature tags you are interested in or you can just use it to keep track of the things you like.
The social bookmarking tool I’m going to talk about here is del.icio.us. There are of course others- Digg or Furl.
Here is an example of a group of tagged bookmarks. In this case, I’ve tagged them “digitalcitizen” so i can refer to them when i’m writing.
You can also look around at the popular tags through what is called a “Tag Cloud“- just for a hint of what’s popular among those of us who are forced to sit at computers all day. Its almost entirely tech related, for now. This is a great way of just happening upon interesting sites.
So say you find a story you want everyone in the class to find out about. Using the Browser Buttons or Firefox Extension, you can tag the site and give a brief summary of what you’ve found. If you tag it “digitalcitizen”, it will immediately show up here, and as a feed you can subscribe to.
You can also use the tag “for:username” to send a bookmark to a friend. Say I found an article about Wikipedia that I wanted to send to Piotr, and he had a user account on del.icio.us, I could simply tag it as “for:prokonsul” (assuming that was his username) and it would show up in his del.icio.us inbox. You can also send tags directly to me for digital citizen by tagging them “for:spacemountain”, which is my user account on del.icio.us.
I’ll be including the digitalcitizen tag feed on the Digital Citizen site so everyone can see it in action. Give it a try! It sounds a lot more confusing than it really is.
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Some friends of mine made this documentary about podcasting and the changes it could potentially bring. If you’ve been wondering what the fuss is about, check it out:
Watch it here.
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While Digg spam (IE Kevin Rose is a fucking tool) is highly annoying, users shouldn’t worry about it. No one is digging it and it will never make it to the front page. This is what Digg is all about! They’ll be filtered out over time because no one is digging them. So just ignore it! Problem solved!
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Click HERE to vote for Digital Citizen at Podcast Alley. You need to give them an email address and click through a link they send you but that’s it! Help publicize Digital Citizen!
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My friend Andy posted an insightful response to the Wikipedia interview with Piotr, and I put it up as a post on the Digital Citizen Page. If you have some time, check it out and feel free to add to the conversation!
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This week’s This Week In Tech Podcast features a discussion by a blind podcast who railed against authentication systems that use image verification (aka Captchas)- such as the one some of us use to verify comments on Blogger. It seems that they are major problem for blind people because they don’t conform to the reader software many people use to browse the web. He mentioned that some web sites allow you to turn on an aural equivalent of the captcha, while others allow you to contact them for authentication, though he said response was spotty at best. He also said that while google pledged to improve their Captcha system for people with disabilities, they as yet have done nothing.
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Although I doubt most of us will need to know how to convert bits to bytes and ascii to bits and bin to hex or whatever on the day-to-day, its kind of neat just to understand why its there, because suddenly you see its use in a lot of things- especially if you’re online. Have you ever tried to find a color for a web page? Hex. Wondered just what the numbers in your IP address represents? 32 bits encoded as base-256. If you’ve ever had to mess around with a router at home, you have heard of your MAC Address, 48-bits represented in hex.
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So I played with the new xbox today at EB, the controller is HORRIBLE! They even did something I’d been wishing for- moved the black and white buttons to the shoulder. HOWEVER, they somehow managed to make it feel awful. The playstation controller has two shoulder buttons on either side of the controller, which are easily manipulated by the middle and ring fingers. The trigger design is really meant for the index finger, which means you either have to use the middle for the trigger and the index for the shoulder, or switch between the buttons with the single index. Suddenly the black and white buttons below the colored “jewels” seems pretty nice, not to mention the “<<” and start buttons have now been relocated as well, on either side of the “X” in the middle, which now launches xbox live. When you’re launching a new console based on one your audience is just getting adapted to, whose backwards compatibility is being touted as a major feature, you’d think they’d try to normalize the controller configuration a bit.
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I am not a good programmer. I have taken many programming courses and done well enough, but outside of coursework I have an extremely hard time programming anything beyond simple scripts and modifying other people’s code. I understand the concepts but I think because I neglect any practice of it I have a very hard time with it every time I try to pick it back up. With that said, debugging is even harder.
There is a programming technique that a few years ago was the toast of IT- XP, also known as eXtreme Programming. Though I am obviously not fluent in XP myself, one facet of XP that became quite popular and seems in retrospect beyond obvious is the practice of “team” programming, where two coders sit down and work on the program together. Having a second brain on hand to help brainstorm your way through problems certainly doesn’t apply only to programming, but its use in programming is really kind of revolutionary. If you’ve ever stared at code for hours on end, only to have a friend point out you missed a semicolon somewhere, you know how useful this can be. One person codes, the other watches, offers thoughts, thinks about what they’re seeing. A big problem in debugging as I see it is that you are simply too close to the code to see the errors. Another being that people can’t read more than a few lines of code and truly understand what its doing, so error checking by another person later on is as much a matter of trial-and-error, as it is for you, if not more so. Even with good comments!
In a lot of ways, conversation is the same way. I’m often startled by the things I find myself thinking when I converse with people, simply because the act of conversation has caused me to think and react in ways I wouldn’t have had I not entered the discussion.
Of course, it may not work for everyone, but I’ve found it quite useful. Peace.
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