Comment on Process of Podcasting

These comments are based on students using the Open Source application Audacity to record their project essay. Having made the recording, they export it as MP3 and upload into a Wiki in the Moodle course. I assemble the files and create the podcast and make it available in this blog.

There are three main sets of issues here:

1. Technical (headset, sound input levels)
2. Environment (quiet, time required)
3. Integrate into course (listen to podcasts, do assignments with them, personalise the process)

Comments on the process of podcasting in a public Lab

1. Attention to Technical Issues
   • Use noise cancelling microphones
   • Glitches with USB headsets and Audacity. In the program the microphone volume control mutes microphone. Problems with adjusting sound levels — levels are changeable on the headset, in XP, and in Audacity. It might be worth trying out the recording process on the Mac to see whether it’s more tractable.
   • Jack inputs may be better than USB but entail grovelling around back of computer.
   • Plenty of disc space needed. Some students ran out of disc space and the recording screwed up. The only solution was to set the Audcaity temp folder to C: and rerecord.
   • Options for editing on personal computer having recorded the original in a Lab. This is not straightforward — can set Audacity temp folder to network drive but then you run the risk of running out of space, plus you need to save the .au file to the network drive. One possible workaround might be to use a high capacity thumb drive (but the host PC will need USB 2).
   • One student had problems with the number of tracks she ended up with (every STOP & Start recording generates a new track) and Audacity crashed whenevery she tried to play the recording.
   • Generating the MP3 export can take some time so this is a job for a reasonably powerful machine.
2. Environment issues:
   • quiet environment for reading aloud and recording may not always be attainable in public lab situation. Finding a Lab where all students can record and not be interrupted is difficult.
   • A single class period (50 mins) is the minimum required — with no technical hitches. If there are glitches then longer time will be needed. I have used 2 Lab classes to complete a single recording.
   • At the least the initial recording needs to be in class time to smooth over the glitches with sound input & levels.
   • recording and environment issues may be ameliorated if students record using a digital recorder in their own time and then play back into Audacity and use that to edit.
3. Integrate into course:
   • Have students listen to podcasts with relevant subject material. An assignment could be listening and make notes.
   • Possibly listen to prof podcast and make notes from this.
   • Podcasting integrates well with blogging.
   • Teacher makes class podcast with all student’s recordings and
   • Each student uploads recording into their own blog to make personal podcast

Social Software : class blogs & podcasts

Social Software : What the students think. Podcast:

Babbs with Secondary Social Software, Curious Lives

Play recording here:

Brenton reading 'Spinning the Ultimate Social Network'

Play recording here:

Eric pondering 'So You Think You Use The Internet For Good'

Play recording here:

Kerry ruminating over 'A Flight of Dragons: Otherkin Online'

Play recording here:

Nathan niggling with 'Faceless Gamers'

Play recording here:

Sascha struggling with 'Worlds of Warcraft: The Social Ramifications and Communities Surrounding Massively Multiplayer RPGs'

Play recording here:

Tessa wrestling with 'Anti-Social Networking: The Commodity of "friend"ship'

Tyler dictating 'Metagame...Those Who Know, Will Own'

Play recording here:

Noah musing over 'Rescuing with Marriage or Trafficking Women?'

Play recording here:

Nhlanhla talking to his crystal ball: 'Web 2.0 - The Future is here!'

Play recording here:

Basil wonders where 'Tagging and Folksonomy' will lead

Play recording here:

Google Print - Pros & Cons

John Battelle’s Searchblog: The AAP/Google Lawsuit: Much More At Stake

Get the class to blog about this and the Salon article.

blogging and democracy

Wired News: Clark Campaign to Debut Big Blog was commented upon by The Register in One blogger is worth ten votes – Harvard man

Wired author, Chris Ubrich, writing about the Wesley Clark campaign for Demoratic Party nomination in 2003 writes:

“Writer and Linux Journal senior editor Doc Searls said he was impressed with the number of ways the Clark Community Network gave users to participate.
“In a networked democracy, participation is key. You need an active constituency, not just a crowd of supporters waving banners,” he said.
Winer said he was encouraged that campaigns were starting to recognize the value of blogs to the democratic process.
“A voter with a weblog is ten times more powerful than a voter without a weblog, because there’s more to voting than just going in and flipping a lever,” he said. “

Andrew Orlowski’s sarcastic commentary has a thought provoking punch line:

“Beneath the headline “Clark Campaign to Debut Big Blog” - a democratic daisycutter of weblog, we imagine - Winer is cited, thus:

“A voter with a weblog is ten times more powerful than a voter without a weblog, because there’s more voting than just going in and flipping a lever.”

Too true, Dave, too true - but at the end of the day, it’s the guy who has gotten the most real levers flipped who wins. That’s what matters: the acquisition and exercise of real power. Somehow we can’t escape the wicked thought that what Dave is really trying to say, is that people who use his weblog software are more powerful - because they’re using his weblog software. And that, in a nutshell, is how weblog software vendors measure ‘success’. We can coin a phrase for this: “Emergent Democracy” - which translates to “how many times people use my software”. For this seems to be the only defining characteristic of this particular version of democracy.

So Orlowski tries to burst the bubble of blogboosting hubris with the hot needle of political reality.

This is a characteristic of the giddy kind of people who define themselves through computer-mediated relationships [my italics]. They get terribly excited about people just like themselves using the same software, when all that bounces back from these dead phosphorous LCD screens is something that approximates their own reflection, and isolation. Bits and bytes are useful - but they’re not where real power is exercised. And fantasies are popular here - “blog shares” mirrored Wall Street, in a harmless way, and “Emergent Democracy” mirrors real power in an equally harmless way too.

And, of course, in hindsight this self delusion had its denouement in the Howard Dean campaign which fell flat on its face due, in no small part, to incestuous self deception of the Dean blogging community (see Exiting Deanspace by Clay Shirkey).

Comparison of Reference.com with wikipedia.org

I followed a link from another site to this defintion: Reference.com/Encyclopedia/Millet (Ottoman Empire)

Just out of interest I looked at the wikipedia entry for Millet [Ottoman Empire] . It used exactly the same words, with a bit of extra padding.

eg Reference.com :

Millet (Ottoman Empire)
Millet (stress on the e) is an Ottoman Turkish term for a legally protected religious minority. It comes from the Arabic word milla for confessional community. The Arabic term is a very general one.

Wikipedia:

Millet (stress on the e) is an Ottoman Turkish term for a legally protected religious minority. It comes from the Arabic word milla for confessional community. The Arabic term is a very general one, the Jewish neighbourhoods in Morocco and Tunisia were named mellah.

Isn’t this something called ‘copyright violation’? Where are the RIAA when you need them??

blogs in the future

Forbes magazine

“Let me make a prediction. Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news, and has created a whole new group of major companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies. At this point, the industry will then undergo its first shakeout, with the loss of perhaps several million blogs — though the overall industry will continue to grow at a steady pace.

And, at about that moment, Forbes will announce that the blogosphere is the Next Big Thing for investors.”

— Mike Malone, a former editor at large for Forbes ASAP magazine, has the last word on Forbes’ alarmist broadside against bloggers.

Sony pulls anti-piracy software

From Slashdot

Sony Pulls Controversial Anti-Piracy Software

“An anonymous reader writes “Bowing to public outrage, Sony BMG has temporarily halted the use of its controversial anti-piracy software in all of its music CDs, the company said in a statement today . The move comes just a day after a top Bush administration official chided Sony and the entertainment industry for going too far: according to this story over at Washingtonpost.com Stewart Baker, the Department of Homeland Security’s policy czar warned would-be DRM makers: ‘It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.’ The Post has the full text and video of his commentary.” “

Comments from Slashdot:

” An interesting read at: http://www.changethis.com/4.drm [changethis.com] :

“DRM punishes honest people!” … “Without DRM, people will steal and artists won’t get paid!” … Usage of Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been hotly debated since a college student threatened to put an entire industry out of business with a little application he built in his spare time, Napster. In this transcript of a speech he gave at Microsoft’s campus, Cory explains why DRM doesn’t work, why DRM is bad for society, bad for business, bad for artists, and a bad move for Microsoft.

Using Sony and Apple as examples of companies that are using DRM to punish consumers, he suggests Microsoft use the opportunity to once again champion users’ rights. To follow our current path, Cory argues, is to stifle innovation and contradict the purpose of American copyright law: to promote the useful arts and sciences.”

I always find it very remarkable that the content industry treats the people who pay for their products — in other industries also known as customers — as criminals. People don’t buy cd’s because they want to screw the people who made them and make a zillion copies. Those people buy the damn things because they do not want to wast their time on copying!

And I also don’t think the way customers are treated is in the interest of the artists, in whose name this whole mess is being created. Take a look at an excellent article by Janis Ian, a respectable musician:

http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.h tml [janisian.com]

“They told me downloads were “destroying sales”, “ruining the music industry”, and “costing you money”.

Costing me money? I don’t pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my wallet…and check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing’s missing.”

For what it’s worth: this is a women who made more then 25 albums and wrote some very well known songs for other artists. One of her most known songs is “At seventeen”, which can be downloaded for free, just like some other songs of here:

[individualidade.com.br]
[janisian.com] “

Stewart Baker, the Department of Homeland Security’s policy czar warned would-be DRM makers: ‘It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.’

How about: “it’s not your computer. You do not have the right to install software components on someone’s computer that spy on them, without their permission. That is computer trespassing and wiretapping. The FBI is currently investigating; in the meantime, here is a court order to remove any CDs with this software from shelves immediately, and we expect you to fully assist consumers with identifying whether a machine has the software installed, and the removal process.”

What Baker is doing is trumpeting the Homeland Security line (“Won’t someone PLEASE think of the Homeland Security?!”), and distracting us from the more important issue-that a corporation installed trojan programs that spy on people, and probably broke an number of laws doing so.

It’s not like we should be surprised. Does nobody remember this from five years ago? Emphasis mine.

“The [music] industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams. It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what. Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [ISP]. We will firewall it at your PC. These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake.” —Steve Heckler, Sony senior VP, 2000

The rise and demise of the Wikipedia project

The rise and demise of the Wikipedia project

In The Faith-Based Encyclopedia Robert McHenry describes how, way back in the Cambrian era of Internet existence (ie 10 years ago) “a cluster of enthusiasts coalesced in an online discussion group devoted to the creation of an encyclopedia on the Internet, an Interpedia, as they called it.” This was described as :

“the Interpedia will be a reference source for people who have connectivity to the internet. It will encompass, at the least, articles submitted by individuals, and articles gleaned from non-copyrighted material. It will have mechanisms for submission, browsing, and authentication of articles. It is, currently, a completely volunteer project with no source of funding except for the contributions of the volunteers and their respective institutions. It also has no governing structure except for a group of people who have volunteered to do specific tasks or who have made major contributions to the discussion…. Everyone is encouraged to make a contribution, small or large.”

Does this sound familiar? He describes how there were extensive discussions on every aspect of this new venture and “Every so often there were rhapsodic explanations of why the Interpedia, as a noncommercial and collaborative project, was ipso facto superior to all existing encyclopedias, all of which were published for [ shudder ] profit and all of which had their origin in [ shudder ] print.” ‘Interpedia’ as such was stillborn — partly because “the volunteer nonleaders of the ungoverned, unstructured project truly did not know where or how to begin”. But out of the ashes a phoenix called Wikipedia arose and casting aside ligatures (correct spelling should be Wikipaeida) and other conventional norms it swept aside all other pretenders to the throne of default online information resource. A year ago the online self-styled encylopedia reached it’s millionth article which engendered some media coverage which was overall positive but also some hard hitting critiques. It is these that we’ll examine with a view to assessing the worth of the wikipedia philosophy.

Larry Sanger, writing an op-ed piece in kuro5hin.org entitled Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism confessed to having co-founded Wikipedia and went on to lament it’s current problems. These were, in his opinion:

“First problem: lack of public perception of credibility, particularly in areas of detail.”
“Second problem: the dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers”
“The root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise.”

Quality Issues

These major issues surfaced many times in other commentary. The Register reported that überpedian Jimmy Wales admits to serious quality problems . Andrew Orlowski writes:

“Traditionally, Wikipedia supporters have responded to criticism in one of several ways. The commonest is: If you don’t like an entry, you can fix it yourself. Which is rather like going to a restaurant for a date, being served terrible food, and then being told by the waiter where to find the kitchen. But you didn’t come out to cook a meal - you could have done that at home! No matter, roll up your sleeves.

As a second line of defense, Wikipedians point to flaws in the existing dead tree encyclopedias, as if the handful of errors in Britannica cancels out the many errors, hopeless apologies for entries, and tortured prose, of Wikipedia itself.

Thirdly, and here you can see that the defense is beginning to run out of steam, one’s attention is drawn to process issues: such as the speed with which errors are fixed, or the fact that looking up a Wikipedia is faster than using an alternative. This line of argument is even weaker than the first: it’s like going to a restaurant for a date - and being pelted with rotten food, thrown at you at high velocity by the waiters.”

A panel of experts were assembled by the Guardian Unlimited and asked to review entries for their particular fields. The average of these seven experts’ grades was 55%. And in Big idea - the wisdom of crowds hot off the internet press in Oct 24th we get:

“Last week do-it-yourself online encyclopaedia Wikipedia came face to face with its own Ratner moment. The Ratner moment is so named after the gaffe perpetrated by Gerald Ratner back in 1991, when the British entrepreneur made the mistake of admitting that some of the merchandise being sold in his high street stores was “total crap”.

Wikipedia’s own Ratner moment arrived when co-founder Jimmy Wales posted a message admitting that two entries - those for Bill Gates and Jane Fonda - were “a horrific embarrassment” and “nearly unreadable crap.”“

To address these issues the Wikipedia contributors are invited to join Project Galatea to make “large-scale, sweeping stylistic improvements to articles”. An admirable intent but one fatally flawed from the beginning. For not only are contributors told that “there is no need to be an expert on the article you are working on” and indeed “(in fact, there are some advantages to being completely ignorant of the subject to start with)” but the ‘editors’ (a term carefully avoided in this project) or Project Galatea ‘members’ are highly encouraged to work with the articles regular contributors, ie the very people that wrote the mess you’re trying to clean up. Moreover, the seeds of failure are already sown in the first section of this project where you, yes you, are encouraged to delude yourself into thinking that you’re a ‘sculptor’; after all, anyone in this wikiworld can be an expert.

Robert McHenry draws attention to this in The Education of Gesture and is inclined to “see this as a particular instance of a more general phenomenon, the replacement of the adult by the adolescent as the paradigm citizen”.

There is a nieve faith in the wiki community that the editing policy can take poorly written and inaccurate first drafts and somehow have them ‘evolve into polished, presentable masterpieces through the process of collaborative editing.’ and this process ‘allows Wikipedia to approach the truth asymptotically’ ( The Faith-Based Encyclopedia ). The truth is more the converse; Nicholas Carr refers to the ‘collective mediocrity’ of the wikiverse and proposes the “Law of the Wiki: Output quality declines as the number of contributors increases. ( The law of the wiki )

This brings us to Larry Sanger’s second problem:

I’m a Troll, foll-de-roll

According to Wikipedia a ‘troll’ in the internet sense is someone “who posts inflammatory messages on the internet, … to disrupt the discussion or to upset its participants.” While regular contributors to Wikipedia might have an enhanced resilience to being trolled most people outside the cabal are repelled by the poisonous social or political atmosphere . Indeed Larry Sanger complains that such people are accorded too much respect and that this destructive behaviour is endemic in unmoderated Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists.

The Wikipedia community acknowledge these problems ( Why Wikipedia is not so great ) especially with regard to the ‘Neutral Point Of View’ or NPOV which has given rise to an official policy on Neutral point of view (editable by anyone of course) , guidelines for disputed statements and handy dandy NPOV dispute banners to decorate disputed pages with. However, it still remains acutely vulnerable to the actions of organised pressure groups such as the Great Wiki Raid of 05 where ‘Futurists from around the world conduct a 24 hour “knowledge assault” on Wikipedia.org for the purpose of demonstrating how knowledge is created in a digital world.’ This vandalism has been labelled ‘“astroturfing” - the creation of what is intended to look like grass-roots movements, but is studiously fake’ and is tellingly revealed by graphic images displayed at The art of vandalism on Wiki

Finally, in an article with tongue firmly in cheek Larry Groznic writing for The Onion takes issue with the Wikipedia entry for ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic

wikipedia quotes

Collection of quotes about wikipedia:

From O’Reilly Network: What Is Web 2.0

“But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter”

“Another way to look at it is that the successful companies all give up something expensive but considered critical to get something valuable for free that was once expensive. For example, Wikipedia gives up central editorial control in return for speed and breadth.”

In kuro5hin.org Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism :

“First problem: lack of public perception of credibility, particularly in areas of detail.”
“Second problem: the dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers”
“The root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise.”

In Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems by UK online rag, The Register Andrew Orlowski writes:

“Traditionally, Wikipedia supporters have responded to criticism in one of several ways. The commonest is: If you don’t like an entry, you can fix it yourself. Which is rather like going to a restaurant for a date, being served terrible food, and then being told by the waiter where to find the kitchen. But you didn’t come out to cook a meal - you could have done that at home! No matter, roll up your sleeves.

As a second line of defense, Wikipedians point to flaws in the existing dead tree encyclopedias, as if the handful of errors in Britannica cancels out the many errors, hopeless apologies for entries, and tortured prose, of Wikipedia itself.

Thirdly, and here you can see that the defense is beginning to run out of steam, one’s attention is drawn to process issues: such as the speed with which errors are fixed, or the fact that looking up a Wikipedia is faster than using an alternative. This line of argument is even weaker than the first: it’s like going to a restaurant for a date - and being pelted with rotten food, thrown at you at high velocity by the waiters.”