homoLudens

Dawkins and Friends are takin’ the struggle right into the temple with this seasonal activity for the Late Judeo Christian Capitalist High Holy Money Daze:

The Blasphemy Challenge:

“The Blasphemy Challenge” Rewards Participants for Demonstrating Non- Belief on YouTube

Philadelphia — December 14, 2006. The Rational Response Squad has launched a $25,000 campaign to entice young people to publicly renounce any belief in the sky God of Christianity.

Called “The Blasphemy Challenge,” this campaign encourages participants to commit what Christian doctrine calls the only unforgivable sin — blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. (The “Holy Spirit” is an invisible ghost who Christians believe dwells on Earth as God’s representative.) [Via Richard Dawkins.net - MySpace Blog.]

Me? I’m takin’ my most blasphemous self and other to sinful New York. Anyone in Manhattan from Dec. 23 through Dec. 30 who might want to hook up with me and Paul Allison for a blogTech drinkTalk, drop me a note.

Closing out this third year of homoLudens and, truth be told,  the
bloom is off the blog. Which is to say that if I’ve discovered anything
this year about writing online it’s that “online” is NOT the best place
for writing that aims at anything other than pointing. I started the
earliest version of this blog in May, 2000. It took about three months
to figure out how to best use it for researching (finding and gathering
links to information), reading (organizing information by topic in an
ubiquitously accessible online cache), and writing (for an audience of
mostly colleague teachers interested in reading about - what else? -
blogging). A blog made the web personally useful. I started a
second, password-protected blog within two weeks of launching the
first. I needed links to private writing and reading. Blogs multiplied
as different kinds of work - journal, travel updates, photo albums,
houseswapping, BAWP, graduate work, school library,
etc. - demanded them. Radio helped for a bit with management of all
those separate sites, but it didn’t help with managing my own research,
reading and writing. It was clear from the beginning that a blog’s
potential as
writing space was matched by its limitations. It’s even clearer now,
three years later.

Along comes Tinderbox. Doug Miller articulates its value while pointing to other ruminations from James Vornov and Ken Tompkins: “Like the Web, Tinderbox presents a whole new
canvas, a new landscape of thought space. Unlike the Web, which is
primarily public and collaborative, the Tinderbox landscape is
primarily private and maps to my own internal thought processes.”

This
is what I shorthanded as a Tinderbox-facilitated 
“intro-net,” a private writing, reading and research space that was
easily uploaded to, and could download from, the web. In less
than a week using only its basic applications, it’s become my
primary writing space. A little testing of it as a note and
bibliographic organizer shows it’ll be my primary researching
and informational reading tool as well. It’s led to less
blogging and more researching, reading, thinking and writing.

Uh oh, sounds like a resolution. And on that note, the annual New Year’s pointer: “Mr. Flood’s Party.” Here’s to ‘the bird on the wing!’

First kudo to Tinderbox: It is liberating to be OFF the net while still able to link. Internet, intranet - yeah, yeah; but for pre-writing, intronet is the thing: linking within. And I don’t mean within the hive. Not even within the community. Before anything else, linking within the writing, before
the publication. Blogging, schmlogging: its essential power is in
clicking the “post” button. Like shouting in a Quaker meeting:
possible, but oddly disrespectful of the silence, and of the community. Or like bulk mailing, only without
the minimal
filter of real world overhead: draft, copy, mock up, layout,
printing, envelopes,
stuffing, sealing, stamping, mailing., delivery, discard. But what, if
after the early
blog adopters’ first thrill was gone, there was in addition to (or in
place of) the
digital mass mailing, some sort of localized commitment to a community?
How about targeted pre-publication within a chosen circle, within a
blogging response group? (This, btw, might explain the “plateauing” of
lots of early blog adopters: the ‘blah-blah-blog’ effect.) How ‘writng project“-y.

Tinderbox’s “intronet” doesn’t just line things up in files, either. You
can organize both hierarchically and in less tightly top-down
fashion. This is all complemented by (the anticipated) ease of
promotion to public viewing. (Otherwise known as blogging.) Check it out: “Aliases are one of the most
powerful tools in Tinderbox, and one of the most flexible ways for
organizing your notes in ways that a hierarchy doesnít permit. A note
can have many aliases, or none.” A note, then, is a little like a le
Carre character. Or like a thought. This is waaaaaaay better than what I asked Userland for in the
disregarded request for “multiple department designations” in Manila
newsItems.

I think Mark Bernstein offered to do a “how to” Tinderbox session at
edBlogger SF. Why, oh why why why,  didn’t I take him up on it?
Mark, if you come back to SF in late spring or early summer, we’ll put you
and yours up for free, find you workshop participants and a free workspace get you tickets
to ALL the city musuems, lend you a car (or a truck) for the duration, and take you to a
Bernal Heights bar that has Duval on tap. If that doesn’t work, are you
(or anyone else) doing Eastgate trainings anywhere anytime soon?

Terry Elliot is baying on a wiki scent. I should be sniffing out
Tinderbox and I will, I will, as soon as jetlag eases a bit. Meanwhile,
just what hunt are we on?

We’ve got knowledge and experience about teaching writing. (Doing
it in public, urban schools is what interests me professionally. Sure, private schools and home-schooling
count. Teaching writing isn’t the sole preserve of a democratic
commons.) We know less
about how to teach writing while using digital tools. Blog posting
isn’t writing; it’s publishing. Writing happens before the ‘post’ button gets clicked. Good writing is more than news, more
than pointers, but benefits from news and pointers. Good writing is
re-writing. What digital tools especially help us re-write?

Here are some disruptive challenges from Xanadu’s Ted Nelson’s dated (2000) but resonant essay, Where our hypermedia should really go.
It’s old news to many, but new to me in k-12 land. He argues that
“the real problem [for computer development] is how to create
parallel mechanisms for the deep  consideration of alternative
structure.”

• He bluntly dismisses the paradigm (’big idea’) of hierarchical design: “The point is that we have
  fetishized hierarchy as a kind of structure, thinking that this is a real
  structure, which  is preposterous???”
• Then, describing a Japanese colleague’s request for a database tool
  that would help him do complex historical research, he offers a simple example of the problem with hierarchical structure:
  “???the data
  base guy said to him, ‘oh you need to decide in advance what all of
  your fields are going to be.’ That is how it is in the data base world,
  you have to  decide all of that in advance. I guess thatís how
  they
  feel about theirs. For some of us, ideas keep  changing. You have
  to be able to change those fields all the time.” [emphasis added]
• And finally he pushes a BAWP
  mirror up to my face with these thoughts about writing and what writing
  wants from a digital tool: “Similarly, the problem about writing,
  is about re-writing. Especially
  re-writing???. if you are doing a novel, a book of history, an
  encyclopedia,
  the issue is not the fiddly little stuff you can do on a small window
  on
  the screen. The issue is how to massively rearrange, and keep track of
  large pieces of content. Anybody who has done this knows it has
  nothing to do with word processing [or blogging], as presently
  constituted. It
  has to do with being able to find all of the pieces. Being able to
  keep 
  track of where they were in previous documents and rearrange them.”

more…

More for the “Giving mouth” department. Terry Elliot named it in IM the
other night, a Kentucky phrase used to describe hounds’ audibly and
passionately on the scent. It came up in a conversation about
audience and encouragement for writing, with the two of us agreeing to
write more regularly for (at least) each other.

But the first thing I’ve written for him to read feels both too
personal and???, well, uneven if not downright trite. Still, knowing
Terry over the net and f2f now for close to two years, I want to
“publish” the thing for him and for some others, from within my
“personal publishing folder of work,” without making it part of this
cover page of homoLudens.

And thus, the recent installation of Tinderbox, an attempt to
simultaneously leave and stay with a blogging tool as the “cover” of a
digital paper workspace, a space in which organization of writing and
reading (and who knows what else?) is efficient, flexible, and easily
moved to publication. 

Is this a hot trail we’re on, Terry? J. Vornov (who’s using Blosxom, a blogging tool that Bryan Bell has been enthusiastic about for quite a while) writes: “At this point I’m trying to leave something I’ve been dissatisfied with, the reverse linear weblog.” Then there’s Michael Feldman on Dave’s Channel Z. And Doug Miller (He pointed to all of the above. And hey, note the multiple categories for his one post. How he do that?) who sums it up quite nicely:

The first panel at edBlogger resonates, leading to questions and intuitions about
blogging and writing. “Blogging,” for this moment at least, seems one
small piece of managing writing and reading on the web, just one particular and peculiar use of “digital paper.”

From Doug Miller: “To a large extent, Doing Something Different is the public face of Commonplace Book,
where I publish selected material that I want to share with a wider
audience.”

I installed Tinderbox. Now how the hell to I learn to use it?

Hunting for a de-centralized solution to the provision of digital paper. More later.