Flavors of Discourse Analysis Questions One Might See in "Misty Mountain Hop"

Discursive Psychology: "Why don't you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see..."

Progressive Discourse: "And baby, baby, baby, do you like it?"

Now Spreading the Prezi Love

I have never considered myself a PowerPoint hater...I use it at conferences, I'd like to think I can make a pretty dynamic PPT, and putting them on Slideshare for others has proven popular, at least I have a decent hit count. I work at a university where I get MSOffice for free, and while I have largely moved to Google Apps, I remain relatively content with PowerPoint, and haven't had much desire to move from it.

So what on earth would come along to make me tell you that I WILL NEVER MAKE ANOTHER POWERPOINT AGAIN?



Can I just say how much I LOVE Prezi? It's like having a table onto which you can dump the contents of your brain (and your document folders), arrange and rearrange your content, and then add a path to which you are not beholden to stick...jump (or let others jump) around as you/your audience please/s.

And again, 100MB of free space to create...the price is right! AND...once I have perfected my Prezi, I can download a self-contained Flashapp presentation that plays nice with any computer I use....or link out to it...or embed it wherever I like embedding things....

I like this one so much, I'm likely to upgrade this one to take advantage of the offline creator for use in our faculty development center.

Please share with me your Prezi stories...I can't be the only one out here who is smitten with this app!

Hey, you in the Ivory Tower: the Technology Gap is Real!

Do you really still think Prensky has been debunked?

Think again:

Use by Students and Faculty Members of Various Technologies in Conjunction With Education

Tool	Students	Faculty Members
Laptops	84%	69%
Course management systems	77%	60%
Social networking	52%	14%
Open source applications	31%	12%
iPod / MP3 player	31%	8%
Wikis	28%	11%

Hope and Hype is Always Better Than Hate

Remind me never to apply for a position at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. With a cyberstructure researcher who hates cloud computing and a CIO who hates Twitter, can you imagine how well RTB would fare there?

My favorite observation from the site (made me think of something Dr. Counts would say...which then made me cry):

...academics remain enormously hidebound about social utilities. I routinely hear academics who have never laid eyes on Twitter or Facebook dismiss them with would-be clever put downs based on sheer ignorance. Such people sound like nothing so much as medieval scribes grousing about the advent of movable type.

Spreading the Dropbox Love

Thanks to J. for turning me onto Dropbox, the 2nd free app this week that has radically transformed how I work (more on that later). My files are now always in sync on my PC and Mac (even on my iPod Touch!), sharing folders with friends is easier, I have my critical documents backed up OFFSITE, and since Dropbox has a 30 day undo history, it's even RTB-proof! It has saved me from stressful situations on several occasions this week...and I've only had it for a week!

And did I mention that it's free? 2GB of storage...free! (Actually, 2.25 GB if you use the links in this post!)

And since I know that the NMAP loves the CommonCraft "In Plain English" YouTube Series, I thought she'd appreciate that they were commissioned to craft the Dropbox promotional video:



Save yourselves. Get Dropbox. Friends don't let friends use flash drives.....(can you believe we're "past" flash drives already?)

Questions about Sneijder & te Molder (2009)

"Normalizing ideological food choice and eating practices. Identity work in online discussions on veganism" Appetite 52 (2009) 621–630. 
(I'm looking at p. 623)

"In the first fragment, participant Anne, who categorizes herself as a novice by the activity of introducing herself..."

Perhaps I'm the only one who finds this observation problematic, but it seems to me that Anne could very well have been lurking on the forum for a year or more for all anyone knows. Not sure the activity of introduction categorizes one as a novice the way Sneijder & te Molder want you to think. Seems to me like there was other data in Anne's transcript that would have made a stronger case for her being a novice (as a vegan or as a member of the online community) than the fact that this was an introduction.


"The analysis was performed on the Dutch materials. It informed the translation to the extent that it was designed to capture the social actions found by the researchers in the data. In line with discursive psychological practice to ensure as much transparency on data and analysis as possible, the original Dutch postings are also made available to the readers."

I think this was well done...and makes my argument that "in line with discursive psychological practice to ensure as much transparency on data and analysis as possible", original video and audio recordings should also be made available to the readers in other research projects....

A free APA 6R after all.....

Thanks to the American Psychological Association for FINALLY listening to their PR people and doing the right thing (which you should have done, oh, say....WEEKS ago!).