Craig Vasey has been hard at work using Drupal to produce an online logic textbook as his project for the Teaching and Learning Technology Fellows here at UMW. Since he has Powerpoint presentations he's used before, we worked a bit on how to incorporate them into the text. Seems, though, that the best bet with them will be to attach them to appropriate chapters for two reasons. First, as Powerpoints developed for class they lose their context and meaning significantly when put in the very different context of the book. Second, though OpenOffice happily converted them to Flash videos, it could only convert slide by slide, which lost some of the effects built in to the Powerpoints.

It did get me thinking, though, about where a slide presentation converted to flash could be useful in an online writing space. One thing that struck me as possibly useful is the way a flash video of a slide show could be used to reorient the temporality of reading. That is, traditional print books correlate progression through time with progression down the page: later in time = farther down the page. Putting a flash video into a page lets that switch around so that progression through time has a new dimension to follow: the sequence of clicks to progress through the slides of the presentation. That strikes me as being useful for thinking about content that has a tight temporal progression such as steps in a process or, more particularly, steps in a proof.

Recently the Teaching and Learning Technology Fellows have gotten off the ground on their various projects. I'm working with Craig Vasey on a project to create a new, online textbook for his Introduction to Logic course. We're using a Drupal installation to make use of the book module, but the rest of the Drupal features are leading us happily into some neat ways to rethink the structure of a book:

One of my favorites came from an idea of his to build students blogs into the book's assignments, so that instead of the end of a section having an "Exercises" section that directs students to do exercises on paper, they would go to a group blog to contribute their responses and solutions. But, with the organic groups in Drupal they could instead submit the work as additional book pages. That way students' work becomes an additional part of the logic book itself, but only visible to others in that group. The textbook, then, becomes something that is slightly different for members of each group. Everyone has that core work that Craig writes, but it is augmented for each student with their own submissions. This nicely, I think, balances the need for a stable textbook with some versatility of removing the monolithic status of a traditional book.

I've been happily coding along on this idea of adding marginalia to blog posts. I'm now two weeks in, and figure that's a good time to stop and take account of what I wanted to do, what I am now doing, and what I hope to do.

Just to have a starting point, I plunged into what might be the opposite of marginalia by adding to the margin things that are author-supplied, rather than the usual reader-supplied. Reader-supplied is still in the plan (as soon as I figure out how to do it!). The effect of the author-supplied direction looks to me, so far, like adding a teaser in the margin to links in the blog. That's partly because I wanted to maintain the usual linking structure for the tools that track and follow links. Working on that premise, I s'pose it was inevitable. The value I see there is in offering a bit more explicit reason for the link to be there in the form of a small string of text from the target page emphasized in the margin note that comes up (which, when all works according to plan, is the full paragraph containing that string). It looks like it is giving some context for the link, which I think has value.

I'm starting to think that differentiating margin notes of different function would be important there, especially in order to not force there to be a link. Basically, a cf. that consists of a quick statement of a thought or idea without the assumption of a web page that corresponds with it would add more texture to authoring--again by being explicit about the connections being made. One way to think about that would, essentially, be that I'd be tagging particular words or phrases in my blog, rather than the entire blog. A more expressive approach would be to give an entire phrase (as I usually do in my margins) without trying to distill it to the brevity of a tag. As a writing exercise, I think that would be a great way to bring some of the background thinking to the surface.

So I'm thinking about this thing that I've put on my lap, and seeing many different directions to go with it

Drupal-centric approach

On one hand, I see a route of learning a lot more about Drupal and integrating margin comments into Drupal's comment structure. At this point, I don't know if that is even possible (but I'm guessing it is somehow). I like that for openning it up to things like co-comments, track-backs, and more.

It's time for a conscious effort to make my blog more lively and frequently-posted-to. It seems like there's a little bit of that going around, and I don't want to end up losing the thoughts going on over the summer. That's meaning number 1 of 're-mediating the blog'

I've been reading "Tools for Thought" by Howard Rheingold lately. It's been great fun for focused intellectual history, and set me into a mood of making many connections. One of the big ones was, happily enough, to a television program that, now that I think about it, had a profound impact on me during my teenage years, "Connections", the documentary series by James Burke on intellectual, technological, and scientific history.

In particular, there is discussion early in "Tools for Thought" about symbolic logic. The really fun part was that I was taking margin-notes, especially using "cf." in the margin to make a note of comparison. "cf." has always struck me as one of the most powerful margin-note tools because it makes a darn good guess at finding a hidden, sneaky, and delightful connection (!) between ideas, but one that needs to be worked out much more than the margin can handle, as Fermat knew only too well!

When I taught first-year composition, I always concentrated a lot on the good reading habits that go along with good writing habits, and making use of the margin to make cf.'s was at the top of the list. It see it as giving students a little free space to make a good guess, play with an insight, and come back to it to tease it out and see if it walks.