The Connected Professor

A test picture

admin — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:24:02 +0000

Rogue Computing

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:55:50 +0000

In the earliest days of the Internet, there were no Internet Service Providers other than colleges, universities, and government entities. I remember thinking at that time (around 1990) that as long as I remained a professor,at home I would have a fairly reliable dial-up connection to the Internet through Occidental College and my oxy.edu e-mail address.

Nowadays, of course, most professors pay for broadband Internet connections at home, and many have an e-mail account in addition to their “work” account. I’ve moved further in that direction. I own a domain (traiger.net) and host much of my courseware on it. I have a Microsoft Exchange e-mail address that is hosted off-site, and I have all of my college e-mail forwarded to that address. Anyone can write to me at my college address, but the actual correspondence takes place off-site.

Why do this? Let’s begin with courseware. Several years ago I discovered moodle, the now very popular open-source content management system. At the time, Occidental College used Blackboard, which I detested, and didn’t use. Oxy didn’t run moodle, and so I simply installed it on traiger.net. It was not hard, and it gave me this great tool and total control over it. Today Oxy is just catching up. Next year it will switch to moodle, which is great. Will I move to allowing Oxy to host my moodle content? Probably not. I would have to give up a lot of control.

I also run this blog on traiger.net, as you can easily tell. It seems obvious that one would not want to blog on one’s institutional server unless one restricted blogging to college business. Again, setting up a blog like this one is not hard, and the flexibility and customizability are well worth the slight effort it takes to manage the software.

Taking e-mail off-campus may ultimately be the most important move. In California, a federal appeals court just ruled that employers may not read employees e-mail without a court order if that e-mail is stored on a non-corporate server. Take a look at the e-mail policy for Occidental College, and you’ll see that Oxy makes it clear that they own your Oxy e-mail, and they retain the right to read it. By forwarding all my mail off-site, I retain privacy rights for my e-mail correspondence that I wouldn’t otherwise have. I also do not use College resources for non-college business. Anyone who is using their institutional e-mail account for non-institutional business is giving up the privacy of their correspondence, and also is making inappropriate use of an institutional resource.

Better Gmail

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:55:05 +0000

I find myself using gmail more and more. When I invite someone to view one of my Picasa photo albums, for example, the invitation is sent as a gmail message, of course, and so replies to the invitation come to my gmail account. But I’ve never been a fan of web-based e-mail clients, since they don’t have the all the features of a native client like Outlook or Thunderbird. But this is changing! Gmail gets better almost every day, and there are a couple of must-have Firefox extensions that make it even better:

Customizegoogle does just that – it enables you to get search results from other search engines when you do a google search, for example. But here’s the best thing: It removes all the advertisements from gmail and other google sites! It also offers you the option of changing your connection to gmail to a secure (https:) connection, which I recommend doing.

Better Gmail 2 is an astonishing plug-in for gmail that I just discovered from this Webmonkey post. Install this puppy and then choose the “redesigned” skin from tools|better gmail 2 menu in Firefox. Astonishing! [Update on Better Gmail and the "redesigned" skin: Once installed, gmail makes calls to the author's website - this may be a security concern. I'm withholding my recommendation pending more info. The skin is awesome, but not worth compromising security.]

Xobni

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:54:11 +0000

Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. It appears as a sidebar window in Outlook, and it can be opened or hidden. Xobni indexes your e-mail, enabling quick searches of all your correspondence. So far this doesn’t distinguish it from Google Desktop, which also has an Outlook plug-in component for searching e-mail. Where Xobni shines – and, in my view, is controversial, is in providing you with information about the people and institutions with which you’re in e-mail correspondence. Xobni ranks your correspondents based on the frequency of your exchanges with them. You may be surprised to see who your frequent correspondents are. Xobni also tries to extract phone numbers from e-mail messages, presenting them in a way that makes them both prominent and computer dial-able. But here’s the controversial feature: Xobni shows you the e-mail social network of your correspondents. That is, for each of your correspondents, it presents a list of your correspondent’s contacts! I really don’t know where that information comes from – I guess it comes from data in your e-mail, including people cc:-ed in messages to you. But it feels a bit creepy, and it’s definitely information that you would not have otherwise had easy access to. Xobni takes some deeply buried data and brings it front and center. For some of my contacts, hundreds, even thousands of contacts are listed in e-mail network list. In addition to this social network information, Xobni provides you with lists of conversations you’ve had with a particular correspondent, as well as a list of files you’ve exchanged. Both are handy, and not controversial.

Xobni, like Google Desktop, uses a fair bit of memory and resources, and currently it is only available with Outlook. It also appears to be incompatible with Google Desktop, which will rule it out for many users. This is an application which I can’t figure out whether I love or hate.

The Connected Meta-Professor

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:52:46 +0000

This is a recommendation: If you’re interested in the issues and topics raised in this blog, then you should check out the work of Bryan Alexander. Bryan works for NITLE (see the prominent link the blog header above) and he writes about digital technology with tremendous energy and insight. Also see Liberal Education Today, to which Bryan is a regular contributor. It sounds mundane, but it isn’t.

History of Hypertext

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:49:06 +0000

“The Web Time Forgot” in today’s NY Times describes the work on hyperlinking and searching documents in the early 20th century – ancient history for things digital. The article highlights the work of Paul Otlet, and makes the case for the importance of the hyperlink. The article links to other background material and primary sources. See Boyd Rayward’s 1975 biography of Otlet, available in pdf format.

Before actual computers, before actual networks, and certainly before the web, Otlet understood that texts can be linked together by embedding an address of a related document in another. The physical instantiation of reaching one text from another is not the conceptual breakthrough. It’s the simply the idea of embedding instructions for accessing one text in another.

Ask Philosophers

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:47:49 +0000

AskPhilosophers.org is a place to ask a philosopher a philosophical question. The panelists are professional philosophers who volunteer to field questions in all areas of philosophy. Highly recommended! (Full disclosure: I’m a fairly recent addition to the panel.)