...on the road to the Royal Library at Ninevah

Music of the Spheres

I love music.  I wanted to be a musician.  I started  my professional life as a musician.  I played drums.  I went to college on a scholarship to study music.  But the Hippy years, and Viet Nam years got in the way, and I wound up doing the public service sector.  But I still loooooove music.

In recent years, I have watched the net to see how it would embrace music.  And though there are many examples of copying music, making videos, and some indie efforts to actually franchise music via the net, there has been little to make music the collaborative element it rightfully needs to be.  Bandwidth and lagtime have prevented group creativity in music.  I beleive it will yet occur, but we have to find a more equitable e footprint on the bandwidth stage, and find a better way of moving music P2P.  But....

Information and the CIC

The business is a simple one.  Hiro gets information.  It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document.  It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.

He uploads it to the CIC database - The Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore.  Most people are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means.  And even the word "library" is getting hazy.  It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones.  Then they began to include videotapes, records and magazines.  Then all the information got converted into machine-readable forms, which is to say, ones and zeros.  And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency.  Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway, So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering. 

Millions of othe CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same  time.  CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it. Hiro gets paid.

From Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, 1992

Ok, so I am reading a book from 1992, to get a better grasp of Web 2.0.  Ok, so it's a science fiction written more than 15 years ago, about some future world....or in the case of Snow Crash, some future Meta-verse.

Functional Literacy in Action

Functional literacy often presents more of a challenge than a problem to me. But this week, it has been the real world that has kept me from responding to your post or writing in my blog....I have been baby sitting my 19th month old grandson. Love him though I do, he thinks that keyboarding is a collaborative experience...if I put my hands on the keys, then his belong there too.

I know that is not much of an excuse, but hey, it wasn't my fault.

However, it does not mean that I am not reading what is written nor thinking about it. In fact, I think this week has given us some remarkable insight into functional literacy. In short, if functional literacy has to do with understanding and utilizing the technology, then the events unfolding (and here) in Myanmar this week have a lot to say about functional literacy in that part of the world. The government there allegedly shuts down internet service only to find that protestor/hackers have found other ways to access the net. Functional literacy in action.

A different approach to video media

Andrew Keen seems to think that internet technology and the Web 2.0 may spell doom for the current art venues. I think I agree to an extent, but only to the extent that instead of seeing the end of medias, we instead, are witnessing new market models and new technology applied to older art farms. He particularly rails at YouTube and other social network video gatherings. He envisions a public sitting at home in front of a tiny screen without contact with other humans, addictively watching poor quality video subject matter. In turn, this might hurt our current market model of movie theaters. Today, I spent some time looking over a place that perhaps Mr. Keen just doesn't yet know about. Its a place that shows videos that can be submitted by anyone, and if selected can be shown to large crowd. The revenues raised come from sources that have more to do with face2face socialization than online.

Trying to grasp meaning in multiliteracy.

Well, I have to start somewhere, so here are a few random thoughts about Multiliteracy. * First and foremost, multiliteracy is not static. It is a flowing thing. I cannot say, THIS is multiliteracy, but I can say, this is an example of what multiliteracy is about. As a flowing element, it means that I can insert my knowledge gathering device into this flow at any point and gather a certain amount of information, and upon withdrawal, I will know that I have learned much, I will also feel that I left behind much I need to know. I think it partially explains why this particular class draws me back year after year. I think it also explains why Vance feels compelled to host this course year after year.

...on the road to the Royal Library at Ninevah

...on the road to the Royal Library at Ninevah. Wait, I thought this blog was about multiliteracies? Well, it is. So what is the connection? The Royal Library of Ninevah not only existed but until it's destruction in 606 BC, it was intellectual "center of the universe" of that time.  It was the host to thousands of volumes of the earliest form of  "books". Those clay cuneiform remnants and that library have since evolved into websites, blogs, vlogs, and other technological representations of things literary and the internet (and soon the the Web 2.0). From my perspective the Library of Assurbanipol at Ninevah was one of the first instances of multiliteracies that we know of. That library sits at the nexus of oral history and print. The Library marks a turning point of technology. It is for that reason that I have chosen it's reference as the name of this blog. The "...on the road to the Royal Library at Ninevah" blog is the result of an assignment from a class, "Multiliteracies" taught by Vance Stephens, first in 2004 and again in 2005 (when I took it). I have little doubt that my efforts to create this blog will rival the great Library of Assurbanipol, but in my own small way, I hope it adds evidence to the idea that technology and literacy "haves" or "are about to" turn another corner. Not a library in the strictest sense, I hope to create a receptacle for information like the clay tubes that held the earliest writing in Ninevah. I don't wish to recreate the Wiki, but I am certainly going to use it as a reference. So join me in this travel...on the road to the Royal Library at Ninevah.

...Webheads descend on Dallas...

  Chris and Linda Originally uploaded by elderbob.

...visiting Webheads from Arizona...

It's always great to get a chance to have a synchronous live chat with another Webhead. In this case, I had a chance to visit with two. Chris Jones and her associate Linda, had just delivered a great Webhead performance to a conference in Dallas. Since I live close by, I called them up and we had a chance to break bread together. It was a great visit and I feel like I have deepened my friendship with both of them.

powered by Audioblog.com

..becoming the scribe, instead of a scribbler..."

...it's been a few days since I last posted.  If I was a traditional learner, I would be concerned that I was falling behind.  But as I sat here tonight berating myself for not staying focused on task, I began to wonder where the time had gone.  I surveyed all the tasks that I had worked on in the days since my last post, and it struck me that I had been very busy with other projects.  I suppose, that in the traditional view, my instructors my label me as a less than desirable student.  In the new view, I was just connecting.  I was busy engaging my circle of associates...people of like mind...my mentors...my co-collaborators.  I was BEING multiliterate.  Or even better, I was BECOMING multiliterate.  Travelin' Vance understans this.  He doesn't chide people for not reading the text, he simply asks the question, "Have you read the text?".  In fact, he goes even further to state, that it is not necessary to read the text.  He doesn't lessen the value of the text, he simply admits that there are other ways to BECOME multiliterate. 

So while I was sitting here, with my laptop strapped to my knees....cleaning out feeds I had already viewed in my aggregator, I came across a post that struck me as very appealing.  This very activity is somehow involved in becoming multiliterate...finding an ability to scan the forrest before selecting the tree you wish to cut down.  I had scanned dozens of feeds, but for some reason, I picked this one to explore.  Intuitive, yep...in fact, had I opened the post an found that it was not something I needed to read, i would have closed it and deleted it.  But this paragraph of information caught my eye. 

Sharing Information

  DSC03947 
  Originally uploaded by kaptan.

• Readings: Integrating Contemporary Literacy into the Classroom, by David Warlick.
• The Psychology of Information, Or Why We Don't Share Stuff, by Dave Pollard.
• Knowledge Sharing with Distributed Networking Tools
• Web 2.0 for Designers, by McManus and Porter
• Digital Lifestyle Aggregation, by Marc Canter

Rights of the Writers...

   

Photo by Salimfadhley

The scribes at Ashurbanipal were often tasked with writing the biographies of the oral storytellers of the time.  In our age, their writings would be copyrighted.  Unfortunately for the scribes, their names do not appear on the clay tablets. 

In our time, the producers of the content are the right holders.  The moment the stylus is set to the clay, the ownership is ascertained...well, at least it is supposed to work that way...or is it?