Back to the future: Two-speed Internet

The New York Times reports that the F.C.C., which I am starting to think is run by Clay Davis, Evan Burrell, and William Rawls of The Wire, wants to let big bucks rule the internet even more than is currently the practice.

Content providers can pay for fast speeds.

And all those web sites for universities, digital projects put up with grant funds and a lot of sweat equity, and other knowledge-content sites that are there because someone believed in them? They can wait--or, rather, you can sit there and watch them load with 14.4-baud dial-up modem-like speed.  Remember those speeds?

It'll probably be like hotel wifi.  You know when you're in the conference hotel and you use the basic-level wifi? Sometimes the basic costs $9.95 to 15.95 a day, but it's still nothing to brag about.

You sit and wait for sites to load, until they time out.

Sometimes you watch a site that loads as if a content curtain is being slowly lowered, like some kind of information strip-tease, before a pop-up emerges on the screen and kills what little information you've been able to gather.

You watch the signal drop and reconnect.

You hope that the one button of wifi that the indicator is showing you will allow the email you're trying to send will get through.

Surprise! The wifi drops and times out before that happens. 

From the article:

The F.C.C. proposal claims to protect competition by requiring that any deal between a broadband company and a content provider be “commercially reasonable.”

But then the F.C.C. thinks that a Comcast   cable and internet provider monopoly is "commercially reasonable," so I'm not holding my breath. The U.S. already has slower internet than, say, Latvia because it's "too expensive" for the big companies to upgrade, or so they tell us.

I hope the F. C.C. comes to its senses.

For the research junkies among you: index cards

At The Junto: A Research Blog on Early American History, there is a post that is pure delight for everyone who loves to read about the research process. (Come on, I can't be the only one!)

Once I got to an archive, I created a new Word document for each collection I looked at. As I read, I transcribed the quotes I thought would be useful for me, making sure to note in bold when a volume changed over to the next volume. As I transcribed, if I came across a quote that immediately gave me something to say, I’d make a note to myself using all caps so that I could spot it easily when skimming a document. I should say that sometimes these notes were useful, and sometimes they were completely useless; at various points during the write-up stage I found myself vehemently crossing out my capitalized notes.

The author, raherrmann, then used to put these word documents into 3 x 5" formats and print them onto index cards, though how this happens exactly--does Avery make sheets of index cards? do you stack them up like photo paper?--isn't specified.

The end result is a stack of index cards that you can shuffle around, with page numbers to help you put the whole thing back together. Doesn't this sound orderly?

I've tried with index cards a few times just to see if it will help my writing process, but I am too impatient to type everything out in this way, although like raherrmann, I take copious notes and transcribe a lot at archives. I always go back to the tried and true.

To wit:

• books bristling with translucent colored tags or post-its piled high around me
• a nest of printed Word documents in front of me
• a yellow pad with "Don't forget to write this!" and a lot of handwritten things on it
•  more Word documents open on the computer.  

Each book has a special place, too, depending on how soon it's being used: side bookcase, bookcase above the desk, space ahead of me on the desk between keyboard and monitor, space to the left of me on the desk. It looks as though I've built myself a book fort and have drawn up the ladder behind me.

Evernote would be smarter, probably, but I can't get the hang of it. If it's in a file, even if it's an Evernote file, it's invisible to me. It doesn't help that I've never gotten it to read handwriting, as it's supposed to do, and that sometimes the things I think I've captured on the web are blank.  I know I'm doing something wrong, but it takes too much time to figure out.

Scrivener has helped immensely with making the whole manuscript in chapters visible at once, but if I put research in the research folders, I still forget about it. The research journal has helped, too, since I can search for terms and see what I thought about something.  750words.com lets you download all your daily writing as a text file, so that's searchable, too.

But wouldn't it be great to have all those thoughts in index cards ready to be put together?

What's your research/writing process?

Steve Jobs

I heard about Steve Jobs's death on all academics' primary information source, NPR, as I was driving home, and, like everyone else was saddened by it. (See the tribute at Roxie's World.)

This won't be news to any of you, of course, but he did fundamentally change the way we communicate with each other. I'm thinking not just of the consumer electronics Apple pioneered under his watch but also of the difference he made in teaching. Back in the olden days, teaching with computers meant standing in a computer lab and teaching rows of students sitting at dumb terminals as they stared at a blinking amber cursor on a monochrome screen and tried to figure out what Function and Control keys were. Today, we teach students whom only draconian measures can separate from their iPhones and computers for the length of a literature class. I'm thinking of all the things we used to have to teach students about technology (FTP! Floppy disks! C:\ prompt! Save your file!) that are now either obsolete thanks to Steve Jobs or handled in an elegant, intuitive way.

As his Stanford commencement speech shows, he was an idealist as well as a perfectionist, and he was passionate about his work and encouraged others to be so as well. I never knew the man, of course, except through his products and the press coverage that erupted every time he walked out his front door, but he will be missed.

[See also the posts by Historiann and Tenured Radical, both of whom make good and less rose-colored points than I do. Oh, and let us not forget The Onion, via Dr. Koshary.]

Green computing: everything old is new again?

From Inside Higher Ed: is Rockhurst College's move to "green computing" the wave of the future?

The new computers, which are about the size of VHS tapes, are literally stripped of their guts. They have no need for hard drives or memory, because the servers will store everything instead. That means less material is needed to produce the units, one of many factors that Rockhurst touts as “earth friendly.”

(I wish they'd show a picture of the monitors, too, since the VHS-size computer by itself doesn't give enough detail.)

Hmm. I think that just maybe we've been down this road before (can you say VAX, boys and girls?), and yet I really like the philosophy behind this. A loose and very impressionistic history of computing on campus would go something like this:

• 1970s: Big mainframes and scheduled times to use them. Computer users easily identifiable by the rubber-banded stacks of punchcards and green-and-white printout pages they carry.
• 1980s: Computer classrooms that non-CS people get to use. Big mainframe systems and "dumb terminals" with monochrome monitors that glow amber or green. Rudimentary e-mail clients. Later in the decade, rooms of stand-alone computers. Wastebaskets are overflowing with long, ticker-tape-like ribbons of paper torn from the sides of printer paper. Students must save their files to a central server.
• 1990s: Networked computer classrooms. Students could talk to each other and, after 1995 or so, could connect to this newfangled thing called the World Wide Web. Monitors sometimes hidden below the desk with a glass screen inset into the desk to view them. Later in the decade, classrooms with laptops or laptops wheeled in on a cart, thus making the fixed desk-monitor-chair positioning of the traditional computer classroom optional.
• 2000s: Laptops everywhere, the better to check Facebook and Wikipedia in class. More multimedia authoring and technology, which still makes the computer classroom viable for a lot of places. Individuals can carry their files with them. Later in the decade: students must save their files to a central server?

Here are some questions/observations:

• Back in the 1980s, students had to print things in a computer lab because printers were too large and expensive. As printers got cheaper, they'd hook up their computer to a printer in their dorm room. Now, however, since computers have become so mobile (very small laptops, using iPhones, etc.), are students going back to printing to central locations because it's easier than messing with an individual printer? I know there are still some of the latter, because at the end of the semester I get handed blue/pink/washed-out black papers as the student sheepishly explains "My printer is just about out of ink." But is the individual printer becoming a thing of the past?
• For that matter, is the computer classroom/lab getting phased out in favor of something else? Is this happening on your campus?
• The photo accompanying the article shows a flash drive attached to the thin client. I'm assuming that this means they can access their files on the server from their laptops, if they have them, as well as saving them to the flash drive, but are we going toward saving it all to a central server or online? Are flash drives (in student perceptions, anyway), the 5.25" floppy disk of the future?
• And a philosophical question: does saving one's classwork to the central server while maintaining other devices (iPod, etc.) for things that are important to one's life serve to create a distinction between work that somehow belongs to "them" (the university), since it's kept in "their" space, and work that belongs to "me," since it's kept in "my" space?