Kindle Screen Fail: A permanent cloud of E-ink

A dark cloud has settled over my Kindle landscape. Unlike the Kindle Cloud, a service that  allows me to access and read my books from the Web using different devices, this one is permanent, and remains “printed” on my Kindle screen even after the device is turned off.

The Kindle is one of the many E-book readers that uses E-ink technology to create a simulation of a printed page. Unlike laptops and tablets, they display text and images using reflected light, rather than emitted light. Tiny, electrically charged white particles float in black dye between two plates. A change in the magnetic charge in a matrix of electrodes on the plates creates the illusion of printed paper (if attracted to the surface, the white particles reflect light like paper; if repelled to the back, the black dye absorbs light like ink). The cloud on my Kindle is like the repressed memory of an earlier technology that has been erased through the act of simulation.

The ghost image is a fragment of one of the Kindle screen savers – an Albrecht Dürer engraving (1519) depicting Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg. This is what must have been displayed when the pixels in the upper quarter of the screen suddenly suffered some kind of machine dementia, or stroke, and died. The colour of their small square tombstones, in one of sixteen shades of gray, is their silent epitaph. The resulting text, although just a fragment of some larger narrative, is confidently inscribed in Roman capitals that are familiar to us from Trajan’s Column (and the posters for too many Hollywood films).  The monumental letters, first chiseled in stone, then etched on printing plates, printed, and digitized, are now memorialized on my Kindle screen.

As Arthur C. Clarke says, “[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The technology that makes E-books (and other digital displays) possible is pretty impressive. However, like other magic tricks that we’ve seen many, many times before, this one, too, has become expected, predictable, and ordinary. The real magic is not the technology, but its invisibility. All technologies become invisible through repeated use - until they fail. Then, we are reminded of the magic, the seeming impossibility of how it works, and the fact that it can stop working. The distortion of a cellphone call, a frozen video frame, and the crackle of a radio transmission are all wake-up calls.

When technology fails, the penny drops – like the light fixture that falls from the “sky”  in The Truman Show. In the same way, the existence of social structures, organizational systems and other abstract tools that we (or others) have devised to enable us to deal with the complexities of social life is brought into high relief when they break down (or work against us). So, we should welcome limited technological failures when they occur, because they remind us of the many ways that we have extended ourselves, and they provide us with an opportunity to reflect on the artificial nature of the world that we have made and inhabit.

I suppose I could have my Kindle repaired or replaced (assuming I can find the printed receipt), but I might just leave that cloud hanging there – as a reminder, and a warning.

(Video uploaded to YouTube by knowitvideos on Jan 23, 2012)

Not only is UDACITY.com open for registrations from students, the company is looking for employees, too. If you act quickly, you can get in on the ground floor of a firm that offers a “competitive salary, benefits, and Series A stock options“. Series A stock options?

Sebastian Thrun has rightfully earned attention and accolades for his impressive accomplishments, educational insights, innovative mindset, and infectious passion. However, the main problem is not the outdated practice of university academics lecturing to small groups of privileged, fee-paying students in campus classrooms (although this is certainly worth critiquing). The foundational problem is that we have developed a way of organizing and rewarding the work that we do (including teaching and learning) that is inefficient, wasteful, and inevitably leads to goal displacement and unintended (usually negative) consequences. We won’t solve the economic crisis by building another private bank, and we won’t solve the education crisis by launching another dot com startup. Rather than pinning our hopes for tranformational change on heroes and their companies, however ethical and well-intentioned they might be, we should work together to develop models and approaches that are based on fundamentally different philosophies and goals. One way we can do this is by participating in open, distributed, inclusive networks of collaborators who understand the power  of collective effort and who recognize the problems associated with the private ownership and control of ideas and organizations. Through this process, we might be able to transform, not just education, but our practices, our structured relationships, and ourselves.

Video: “What’s a MOOC?” Written and Narrated by Dave Cormier, video by Neal Gillis, CC-BY 2010

Why participate in a MOOC if you are not working towards a qualification and don’t need the credit? Well, you might be an educator investigating innovative approaches to learning, an administrator who wants to transform institutional structures, or a lifelong learner who is simply interested in the subject and who wishes to engage in conversations with other interested people. You can sample material and sessions that suit your particular interest and schedule, or you can immerse yourself by attending all the sessions, absorbing the resources, following discussions on Twitter, and writing, reading, and commenting on blog posts. You decide on the level of engagement that suits you. Since MOOCs are conducted entirely online, you are visible to the extent that you take part in the live sessions and post material (usually through a blog or Twitter feed). By adding a tag (a shortened version of the course name, e.g.: “#CCK12″) to published material, relevant comments and resources can be easily found, collected, and distributed in list form to course participants. The facilitators arrange for guest speakers and provide useful resources, but the connections that the MOOC model facilitates (connecting learners and resources, learners and facilitators, and learners and other learners) opens up channels and conversations that can take you to places that you never thought you would go, and the journey doesn’t need to stop when the course is over.

I’ve participated to varying degrees in a few MOOCs over the past year, and, for me, they have been well worth the time and effort. I’ve learned that what you gain from these courses is directly proportional to what you contribute. It’s a bit like a face-to-face conversation – if you say little or nothing, you are less likely to feel present or engaged, and what you hear is less likely to seem relavent or interesting.

If you think you might be interested, I suggest that you simply register for one and give it a try. The facilitators (and more experienced participants) are patient and helpful. You will find that your presence, and your contributions, will be appreciated. As well as the “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2012″ MOOC, there are others that may interest you. Here are a few that I’ve discovered:

Learning and Knowledge Analytics (I believe this course is also starting this week).

#Change11: Education, Learning, and Technology (currently in week 17, this course finishes in May 2012).

#DS106: Digital Storytelling (started earlier this month – the related radio show is worth a listen).

#EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education (finished at end of 2011, but will likely be run again in 2012). This course may not be “Massive”, but it is certainly “Open”.

#CMC11: Creativity and Multicultural Communication (finished at the end of 2011, likely to continue in some form; smaller “class” than the other Open courses I took part in).

I had plans to finish several draft posts about my experience in these MOOCs, but I had trouble pulling myself out of conversations that were taking part in other blogs and in various other nooks and crannies online where people met. Hopefully, I’ll do better with #CCK12.

According to their promotional website, the film is “[s]et in a futuristic, dystopian society where everyone is forced to be equal, the short follows one man as he attempts to go beyond the heavily enforced restrictions of such a world”. Citizens of this near-future society are constrained by the “2014 Uniformity Act, section #A7″, which states, in part, that

“…attempting, in any manner, to educate one’s self or others in any concepts not outlined in s.A2 (‘Equality of Individuals and Accepted Levels of Ability’) is prohibited…”

Clearly, these students didn’t wanted to be limited by what they could learn through formal education alone. As the TV1 reporter noted: ”the boys decide that school was getting in the way”. So, working at home, they set about teaching themselves what they needed to know in order to achieve what they wanted to do. As the director, Juan Robertson (17) said, ”I’m creating things, I’m doing what I enjoy, and I’m learning a lot”. Fortunately, they had the support of their parents and progressive teachers, who accommodated the students so that they could combine formal and informal education. Their abilities were recognized, and they were not limited by normal expectations and “accepted levels of ability”. The film is an amazing accomplishment. Oh, and their high school results were excellent, too.

Ex-Greek PM George Papandreou on Democracy Now! 9 Dec.

We all remember the response from the mainstream media, the financial sector, and most European political leaders when, in early November, then Prime Minister, George Papandreou, called for a referendum to ask his people if were prepared to accept the European Union’s bailout plan, and the severe austerity measures that it contained. This recent plan follows a similar deal in 2010, when Athens agreed to years of austerity measures in exchange for a $146 billion bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. There was no referendum then (the last referendum in Greece was in 1974), and the decision sparked many protests and riots. Against this backdrop of earlier cuts and mounting domestic pressure, it is understandable that Papandreou wanted to give the Greek people an opportunity to have their say. After all, consulting the electorate before committing to further domestic spending cuts would seem to be a sensible and expected part of the decision making process in a democracy. However, leaders in the rest of the world were focussed on the health of financial markets, not on the health of the democratic process, and they saw the referendum as a high stakes gamble. Not surprisingly, the markets were rattled, political pressure on Athens was intense, and Papandreou cancelled his plan for a referendum. Others, not the Greek citizens, would decide how the country would respond to its worsening financial crisis.

On 9 November 2011, Lucas Papademos was appointed as Prime Minister of Greece, replacing Papandreou. Papademos is a US-educated economist and former vice-president of the European Central Bank. He has never been elected to any public office. As the Guardian reported on 10 November, Papademos explained: ”I am not a politician but I have dedicated the biggest part of my career to economic policy in Europe  and Greece”. The Guardian interviewed a spokesperson from one political party, who commented that  Papademos expressed the ”logic of banks and markets”.

“The new government and the new prime minister are being called to impose a political policy that does not have democratic legitimisation,” said Alexis Tsipras, who heads the leftwing Syriza group, adding that Papademos “is someone who has not been elected or judged by the Greek people”.

“This development amounts to a merciless distortion of popular sovereignty,” he said. “The choice of Mr Papademos is a guarantee that the same policies that have destroyed us will be continued with greater force and consequence.”

On December 9, Papandreou was attending the U.N. climate change summit in Durban, South Africa, and Democracy Now! has been on location to cover the event all week. Amy Goodman got an exclusive interview with the former Prime Minister of Greece. She began by asking Papandreou to “talk about the status of democracy now in Greece, the cradle of democracy”. He responded:

Well, I believe that we have a democratic challenge around the world right now, because we have a globalizing economy, but our institutions are national. Our democratic institutions are national. And that means that there is a lot of power being concentrated in the global economy, in the hands of a few—it could be in money, it could be in media, it could be in technology—which is not under any democratic oversight, whether we call them rating agencies or whether we call them the CDSs, the credit default swaps, or whether we call them the tax havens. This allows for a lot of power to be concentrated, which is beyond our citizens’ reach.

A policeman casually pepper sprays students protesting peacefully at the University of California, Davis, November 18, 2011 (click to see YouTube video)

Citizen journalists photograph, video, and stream police actions at the University of California, Davis, November 18, 2011 (click to see YouTube video)

Note: For updates on this story, follow Lee Fang (@lhfang) on Twitter, and check his blog regularly.

On 18 November, 2011, Nathan Brown, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California at Davis, wrote an “Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi“, for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

The police actions that prompted this letter, and many other expressions of outrage, were well documented by the staff, students, and others, who gathered in the university quad that day to peacefully protest against tuition increases and the police brutality that took place earlier in the week.

The information accompanying the YouTube video, from which the stills above were taken, explains that, during the peaceful protest by the Occupy Movement,

police came in to tear down tents and proceeded to arrest students who stood in their way. Once students peacefully demanded the release of the arrested, a police officer unnecessarily pepper sprays the students to open a path for the rest of the officers.

The name and contact details of the officer who sprayed the students is also provided.

A search for “occupy cal” on Youtube shows 377 videos that have been uploaded over the past week. Many of these have already been viewed by thousands of people, with the most popular clip attracting 14,457 views and 396 “Likes” within 24 hours. There are more than 5,300 archived Ustream “occupy” videos, which were streamed live to anyone who wanted to follow the play-by-play. Of these, 95 videos relate to “Occupy Cal,” 21 of which were streamed and archived within the past few days. The fact that all of this work has been done by citizen journalists shows that, as well as occupying significant physical spaces, the protesters and their supporters are creating and occupying new communication spaces online. Like the flow of capital between institutions and nation states, the protesters’ message moves easily and quickly, crossing national borders and bridging cartesian space and cyberspace. However, unlike capital, the Occupy message is multiplied and amplified as it spreads. And all of this without needing to attract the attention of traditional media outlets. In addition to chanting “We are the 99 percent!”, they could also claim, “We are the media!”.

Update (Nov. 22): The Atlantic Wire reports (12:39 PM ET, Nov. 21) that: “Although UC Davis has decided to put its police chief and two pepper-spraying officiers on leave, the school’s chancellor says she’s not going to budge — despite silent and not-so-silent calls for her resignation”.

The video, “UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car”, which is embedded in a short story on the npr site , was shot by Lee Fang, and has been viewed on YouTube nearly 630,000 times, attracting over 2,000 comments so far. His discussion of the silent protest is interesting. Equally interesting is the way that his video of this event has travelled through various media outlets, and the discussions that it has seeded in these different sites. Lee Fang explains why he calls his blog “The Second Alarm“:

I named this blog The Second Alarm after a Revolutionary War newsletter that led to the Boston Tea Party. Called “The Alarm,” the pamphlet warned colonists that the British and the East India Trading Company would ruin America by sucking the wealth from its citizens and ruling over us in the pursuit of profit. I think a similar dynamic exists today, but instead of the East India Trading Company, lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and multinational banks like J.P. Morgan Chase pose an existential threat to America’s democracy, and to our greatness as a nation.

Pepper-spray images are now moving through the media like an aerosol, dropping seeds that spawn new stories that then circulate in their own information ecologies. “Casually Peper Spray Everything Cop” images have spread far and wide. They have already become so popular that the Mashable social media site has issued a “New Meme Alert“. The news and images travel via email lists (like Stephen Downes’ “OLDaily“), and through Twitter (check out the increasingly-used “#pepperspray” hash-tag). Sites like the “Pepper Spray Chronicles,” which is devoted to this increasingly used chemical weapon and image of this now-famous (or infamous) police officer, are now popping up like weeds after a heavy rain.

Although events at UC Davis are not as dramatic as what is currently unfolding in Syria and elsewhere, there are similarities in the actors, the dynamics, and the flow of information in each of these sites. The feedback loop (and sub-loops) created by the event, reports about the event in the media (online, offline, and the loop between them) is both entertaining and instructive. It is a fractal dance with hula hoops. These loops (and hoops) are developing, and reconfiguring, more and more quickly as the distance (geographically and temporally) between the event and media reports about the event, collapses. The half-life of the loops and hoops is also getting shorter. Soon, event and media will comprise a single experience, and it will be impossible to separate the event from the reports and documentations about the event. The medium not only carries and comprises the message, it has merged with, and now contains, the event itself. The medium is the experience.

"Popeye Spinach" by Lancefisher (CC-BY-SA)

“Last night I deleted my Facebook account.” So begins a message that Dave Winer published on his blog on Thursday, 10 November, 2011. I left a comment in response to his post, which I have pasted below. Facebook protests have mounted since recent changes to their “Privacy” policy. For many, like Dave Winer, this was the tipping point. We all know that, online as well as offline, “public” doesn’t always mean ”public”, and “private” does not always mean “private”. Sometimes, “private” means “privatized” and “public” means “publicized”. However, we are often prepared to accept the slippage, the fib, or the outright lie in exchange for ease of use, convenience, or some other short-term benefit. We convince ourselves that it a fair deal; a necessary trade-off. We pull the wool over our own eyes. For many, the weight and opacity has become too suffocating to bear, and they have chosen to come out into the open and say so. In cyberspace and in physical space, they have been proclaiming, to quote Popeye, “That’s all I can stands ’cause I can’t stands no more!”.

Greetings, Dave

It is becoming increasingly difficulty to distinguish between “public” and “private” spaces and conversations online. This is especially the case when we enter a privately-owned and managed site (after agreeing to terms and conditions that we haven’t read) that contains areas and activities that are labelled as “public”, but are not really public — at least not according to the accepted definition of the term. Upon reflection, we may discover that we have not only traded away some basic rights, we have also agreed to a new, much more limited idea of what “public” means. It is like buying into a gated community (without first reading the fine print on the purchase contract) and then discovering that hard-won rights that we assumed could never be taken away from us (like privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly), are gone. Without thinking, we have traded them away for a chance to hang out in a convenient, safe, and controlled environment that provides us with entertainment, a few “free” services, and a chance to communicate with old friends and make new acquaintances. We can be forgiven, at least at first, for not noticing the significant loss of public space and civic rights, because the images, like the words, are cleverly deceptive. But we willingly enter into this “shared hallucination”, and, once there, we choose to forget what we have left behind. The result is a process of erasure through simulation, and a self-inflected amnesia. It’s public life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Mark McGuire

"Online Communities 2" CC-BY-NC

I received the following email this morning. I thought it was worth passing on as is. I’ll post related comments and links soon. Read the comments to get an idea of who is behind this project.

Subject: Invitation to the Social Swarm

Dear fellow people from the Internet.

We know that social network services changed the way  we handle information and relationships.

But we also know that social network services create certain problems that come with storing  large amounts of personal information.

We are concerned about our privacy on those services. The centralized nature of current social networks forces users to trust third parties that are not trustworthy.

We do not have to surrender to technology as it is.

We have to shape technology in a way that is suited  to human nature.

This is why the goal should be to create a network that enables all of its users to communicate freely.

They must be able to use it in the way they want to, without being hindered by restrictions like censorship or the risk of losing control of their own content.

It is not about creating an alternative to existing social network services – it is about creating something even better.

There are different approaches to bringing this about, and they all have different up- and downsides. You are working on them. We are working on them.

So we ask you to join forces, with us and with each other, to create what we all are hoping for, what is driving us and what we need: A free and secure means of communication for everybody and everything.

To achieve this, we think the social network must satisfy these requirements:

1. Free software.

2. Good usability.

3. Decentralization.

4. End-to-end encryption.

5. Mandatory privacy: no plaintext data stored on servers.

6. Scalability.

7. Innovation over standards.

8. Better than what we currently have.

We would love to see you on our mailinglist:

https://mail.foebud.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/socialswarm-dev

To have a closer look at the project, go to our wiki:

http://socialswarm.net

Best wishes,

the folks of Social Swarm

Twitter search results for #connectedpd

On Friday night (4 November), I followed a link to the Website for Connected PD,  an “experiment in “Community-sourced” teacher professional development”. The Events page had an announcement for a session on ”Teacher Professional Development and Participatory Learning”, with guest, Howard Rheingold. The date for the session was Friday, November 4, 9 am PDT / 12pm EDT. Although that meant 5:00AM on Saturday morning in Dunedin, New Zealand, I made a mental note of the time. As it happened, I woke up at 4:50AM. I had my alarm clock (which, conveniently, doubles as an iPhone) beside me, so I sat up, launched the Twitter app and searched for “#connectedpd”. The session soon started, and I did my best to keep up. Contributing and following Website links is difficult on a phone, so I limited myself to simply typing comments, knowing that I could check the links that others posted later. The session lasted for one hour. You can see the moset recent “Connected Personal Development” conversations by searching for “#connectedpd” on ” Twitter. Because Twitter messages are soon lost in the (not easily accessible) archive of historic messages, I captured the posts of the discussion with Howard Rheingold for my own records. You can click on the link below to download the PDF file.

PDF file: Results for #connectedpd (with Howard Reingold Nov. 5 2011)

This event was an interesting, and useful, experience. As in face-to-face situations, one person can easily dominate a conversation in a small group setting, and I was embarrassed to discover how many of the tweets were mine. I spent a lot of my time typing, so I was not paying as much attention as I should have to who else was “speaking”. I read what I could as the messages streamed by, but there was no easy, quick way to “scan the room” and see how many others were present and might want to speak. However, this is no excuse, and I have posted a “note to self” to be more aware of others in conversations like this, and to hold back from “taking the floor” too often, or for too long.

My second observation was that the conversation was, indeed, useful, productive, and efficient – at least from my perspective (it may have been less satisfactory for those who had to see my avatar popping up all the time). A small group can use Twitter productively to have a discussion in the field (my phone worked fine for this) on a topic of shared interest. No one needs to “take the minutes” because a complete and faithful record can be easily called up (without waiting) using the same tool that is used to support the meeting. The ability to include shortened urls in a message, and to follow a link the moment you receive it, if you wish, enhances the usefulness of Twitter in this context considerably. Exchanging urls is a common practice for those who use Twitter for “work” – especially educators. In fact, many users are followed by others because they are good at selecting and sharing links to information and sites that are “on topic” and immediately useful. I will monitor the Connected PD website for future events like this.

The nature of the space that was created by this conversation is very interesting.  The situation is a bit like a gathering of people in a community hall who have assembled for an open, public discussion on a topic of interest to the community. The differences, however, are significant.

First, you are invisible to others (you are outside the room) until your initial utterance exposes you. The tradeoff for speaking (participating in more than a passive way) is that you must remove your cloak of invisibility (just say the magic word – #connectedpd” and you appear!). Furthermore, this room is lined with two-way mirrors – anyone outside the room can see in, but those inside cannot look out and see who is looking in. There are multiple ways to take part, and it is impossible to know exactly who has “attended”.

Second, not only does everything you say to the group become part of the public record, but anyone (participant or not) can easily obtain their own copy of that public record. The surveillance cameras are auto archiving, and anyone can pick up a free copy of the tape if they want one. Sure, Twitter is designed as an immediate, transient form of communication, but that does not mean that a record does not exist, or that it is stored in only one archive. Indeed, you might discover that a tweet that you released long ago, thinking that it has disappeared into a distant cloud of half-remembered conversations, turns up, years later, caged and on display in a public blog post for everyone to examine closely. Although this is not likely to be a problem for the individuals who took part in the discussion that I am reporting on here, it may be an issue for those who use Twitter for both public and private conversations, without thinking carefully enough about the increasingly permanent and public nature of small group conversations online.

Before writing this post, I had a look at the Connected PD website, the hippocampus.org Website, and Rheingold U. There is much in these sites to comment on, but I will leave further discussion for future posts.