The American Journal of Sociology has published a study by Daniel A. Menchik and Xiaoli Tian on the semiotics of email (h/t contexts). According to the abstract:
E‐mail excludes the multiple nonlinguistic cues and gestures that facilitate face‐to‐face communication. How, then, should interaction in a text‐based context be understood? The authors analyze the problems and solutions experienced by a research panel that communicated over e‐mail and face‐to‐face for 18 months, evaluating both kinds of exchanges alongside survey and interview data. Semiotic and linguistic theory is used to expose essential properties associated with the successful communication of meaning in each context. The authors find that e‐mail requires the cultivation of new techniques for specifically conveying the “pragmatic information” that connects the meaning of words to their users. Such information is assigned in e‐mail through the use of what are termed emphatic, referential, and characterizing semiotic tactics. These tactics are also evident in sustained online interactions studied by other researchers. This theoretical vocabulary represents an alternative to the dominant sociological characterization of e‐mail as an inferior substitute for face‐to‐face interaction.
The full article can be reached here. Thoughts?
Everyone seemed a little bit smarter this past Tuesday. Usually ruthless in my assessment of newscaster-types (whose articulate and enunciated speech often seems most directly tied to a desire to assert their own relevance), I was embarrassed to find myself smiling at the MSNBC inauguration-commentators, impressed by their analyses. Suddenly it seemed as if there were more to say, and that a shadow discourse about the history and potential of the United States moved swiftly from private, academic and background locations and into the forefront of public view.
It strikes me that Obama’s take-over marks, among many other things, a movement to un-repress language from the many dusty hideaways (bunkers?) where it’s been stowed for the past eight years. Every utterance by George W. Bush was a reminder that he had not yet formed an independent, adult relationship to language: his speech, rhetoric and policy were marked by painfully primitive and highly polarized conceptions of democracy, freedom, and the very value of human life. The spontaneous production of a single sentence was, for him, a tension-filled act. Obama, on the other hand, appears to thrive in quite the opposite linguistic terrain, one marked by fluency, curiosity, multiplicity, and maturity–not to mention ongoing reading and writing. We can’t yet predict the ramifications of this dramatic shift–I’m not suggesting that a cure for all the nation’s ills is imminent–but at the very least it’s worth pausing to note, and make use of, the expanded space for words.
Elizabeth Alexander had clearly channeled this return to language-as-the-key in her inauguration poem: “any thing can be made, any sentence begun,” she read. “We encounter each other in words.”
I’m happy to note that Blogs@Baruch received a mention in the annual Horizon Report, a document produced by Educause, an international non-profit organization “whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.” Every year the report is read by information and instructional technology professionals at universities and colleges across the world to get a sense of the current state of technology adoption, and future directions. It identifies key trends and critical challenges facing schools as we attempt to keep pace with the technological needs of modern life and as we explore innovative ways to integrate technology into our functions and curricula.
The bulk of the study is focused on describing, analyzing, and sharing prime examples of six “technologies to watch,” which are organized by their “time-to-adoption.” Click the image above to download a copy of the report; it’s interesting reading for techies and non-techies alike. Here’s a summary of the “technologies to watch”:
Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less
- Mobiles: making services and information readily available to students and staff on portable devices such as iPhones and Blackberrys. For an example of what this looks like, see Stanford’s iApps Homepage.
- Cloud Computing: a new way to think about computers, software, and files, which takes advantage of “data farms,” or collections of computers that distribute processing and storage. You no longer need to run productivity software on your hard drive; Google Apps, for instance, supports word processing, presentations, spreadsheet design, and calendars that are accessible, shareable, and functional through a web browser, wherever you are. The vanguard in this development is data intensive cloud computing used by the hard sciences, but this also has implications for students and staff, who, perhaps, need not rely so heavily on Microsoft Office in coming years. (Though not mentioned in the Horizon Report, last September, CUNY’s Online Baccalaureate began a “Virtual Application Streaming Pilot Project,” a local cloud computing experiment).
Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years
- Geo-Everything: mobile phones, cameras, and other handheld devices can now automatically attach “geolocative” information to data they produce, such as photographs and videos. Researchers and teachers are exploring ways to integrate this functionality into their work via annotated maps, visual narratives, and game-based learning. See Community Walk and Paint Map for examples.
- The Personal Web: individuals and groups are exploring the “creation of customized, personal web-based environments to support their social, professional, and learning activities using whatever tools they prefer.” At the Institute, we call this “personal publishing,” and it is the core idea behind Blogs@Baruch, which was mentioned as one of five exemplary “Scholarly Community Blogs” cited in this section. Other examples of “The Personal Web” include Omeka, an open source software developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which allows anyone with access to a server and a MYSQL installation to build and share online collections of artifacts; and SMARTHistory, an “edited online art history resource to augment or replace traditional art history texts.”
Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
- Semantic-Aware Applications: the “semantic web,” according to Wikipedia, “is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.” Some refer to this as Web 3.0, or “using the web as what to write with.” Educause sees the development of “tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract imbedded meaning.” Woah. Few examples of the semantic web in higher education exist. Patrick Murray-John, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, is exploring what opportunities new tools that look treat online materials as data may have for the studying of teaching, learning, and thinking.
- Smart Objects: “a smart object is simply any physical object that includes a unique identifier that can track information about the object.” Think about a package that’s tagged with a bar code that is scanned and allows you to track it; or the library book you have that’s way overdue. Products based on this idea are entering the consumer market, and could be used in archaeology, medicine, and in combination with Geo-Everything approaches. An example being developed by researchers at the University of Florida would continuously monitor patients for a variety of conditions as they went about their normal lives.
We’re pleased to be included in a report of this magnitude, and to see such a wide variety of innovative deployments of technology. These are interesting times!
At BLSCI we are currently conducting research into how the use of Flip Cameras could be used in communication pedagogy.
I was able to interview several experts in the field and the following is a selection of several theories on communication and personal belongings…
We (Hillary and Melis) were new to BPL 5100 during the Fall 2008 semester, and both felt that there was a lot to process once it had ended. After a semester of working with BPL student groups to prepare them for their capstone presentations, we wanted to find a way to use the blog to share our experiences. We came up with the idea of recording a videochat, thinking that it would be an experiment in having a public dialogue that would hopefully invite others to join the post-semester wrap-up.
We chose to focus on the theme of the ‘audience’ because we thought this was an important aspect of how students prepare for their presentations, and because it’s also the topic of the Spring symposium. We discussed the different ideas of the ‘audience’ that we found while rehearsing BPL presentations, as well as different aspects of what audience means for us as Communication Fellows, for our students, professors, and in the business environment.
Video chat is something we had often used for personal purposes but its usefulness for sharing ideas and communicating in the work environment is something we hadn’t fully explored. We’re including a short clip from our chat below, which will give you a glimpse into our conversation. We are looking for your comments and hope that this will help to generate new ideas about the role of the audience in student oral presentations as well as the potential use of video chat in increasing communication.
* Update January 19: A response from Agnieska:
agnieszka_video_comment
Branford Marsalis provocatively lays it down. Thoughts?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rz2jRHA9fo[/youtube]
Via RateYourStudents.
I was surprised when I got home last night to hear on my answering machine a message from Christine, the “Loyalty Team Manager” at Autoland, where my wife and I purchased a car two years ago. Christine wanted to let us know that she and her staff were in a “Yes We Can State of Mind,” and that if we wanted to know more about what that meant then we should call and arrange to come in to talk.
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