I’m just throwing out a thought into the wind, here, but I suddenly wondered if any academics out there are using Basecamp as an LMS, or for teaching administration generally.

It struck me that Basecamp already has quite a few features that would be viable as learning and classroom admin tools—particularly things like the ability to assign milestones to individuals on a project. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an RSS feed of all your upcoming assignment due dates? Would it make students more likely to get things done on time?

In terms of multimedia, it’s easy enough to upload files for discussion to the interface. The messages section is very blog-like—you could pose topics for discussion and watch the fireworks unfold. A student could post a draft essay onto the integrated Writeboard and the teacher could annotate it, and then have a versioning history to see what changes each participant has made to the work.

It’s been a while since I taught in the classroom, so I’ve got relatively little direct idea how online systems are supporting teaching. I do have problems with the current LMS tools. In particular, I don’t like the way they tie up learning materials—which are after all created with public funds—behind barely accessible, proprietary, password-protected barriers. Basecamp is a log-in system, too, so it may not be much better in that regard.

For something that began as a throw-away parodic riff on Fritz Leiber’s city of Lankhmar, Ankh-Morpork is now a remarkably richly developed fictional setting. The economic details, the texture of inter-species interaction, and the working of transportation and communication all contribute to a sense that the city could exist. Even old running jokes like the Pork Futures warehouse and the impossibly solid River Ankh (walking across it is no miracle) have a certain heft, given that Pratchett can demonstrate how they have a tangible impact on the lives of the characters.

There’s probably something interesting to be said about the way Pratchett overlays the generic conventions of the police procedural over that of the political thriller, and the tension between notions of idealism and realism that the plots and the characters must constantly negotiate. I’m certainly finding it more palatable than the fashionable, faux looked-too-long-into-the-abyss posturing of reactionary crap like 24, with its endless psuedo-realpolitik justifications for the aestheticisation of torture.

Am I the last person to figure this out; is the Patrician grooming Vimes as an eventual replacement? The little hints that Vimes is beginning to understand Vetinari’s POV are interesting.

Vimes is becoming an increasingly iconic figure in the narratives; going by many of Pratchett’s other novels, that’s not a particularly good sign for his personal health and well-being. Iconic characters tend to have very strange fates in the Discworld. On the other hand, these kinds of characters tend to to have narratives written in their own point of view, and I think Pratchett likes writing Sam Vimes’s voice too much to let that go.

More on this, soon…

I’m not a great Anne Rice fan. But this piece, Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?, is heart-breaking.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.

George W. “Leadership Vacuum” Bush better watch out. Now the vampires are after him, too.

Amazon.com makes it very easy to donate to the American Red Cross’s Hurricane Katrina disaster relief effort. Do it now.

The interesting—though not really surprising—thing about Google Talk, Google’s new instant messaging, is the integration with Gmail. The integration makes it very easy to add people to your chat list by simply populating it with entries from your Gmail address book.

Google really is trying to take over the world. But what’s up with the Windows only clients?

As promised, I’ll briefly set out an example of what I think a bibliographical microformat entry might look like. This example would be taken from a works consulted list:

<div class="biblio mlaStyle">
<p>
<span class="author"><span class="surname">Smith</span>, 
<span class="name">John</span></span>. 
<cite class="book">The Book of Books</cite>. 
<span class="pubLoc">London</span>: <span class="pub">Routledge</span>, 
<span class="pubDate">2005</span>.
</p>
</div>

The code above should produce the following rendering:

There are probably some redundancies there, but I think that’ll cover the main features of the concept.

The entry is wrapped in a div class="biblio mlaStyle". The “biblio” class is to indicate that it’s part of the microformat, and the “mlaStyle” class indicates that it’s in the MLA citation style.

Here, spans are used to associate meaning to words such as the name of the author of the piece—note I haven’t decided here how to handle multiple authors—and the publication details.

The cite element has a class attribute that sets the document type—though perhaps it might be better added to the surrounding div. The system should be flexible enough to accept a bibliographic entry for any kind of work, from books, to journal articles, to DVDs, to television commercials.

I must admit that I hadn’t thought microformats were all that interesting—cool, yes, but not much more than that—when I first heard of them. But this rather interesting and clearly written article at usabletype on the topic gave me pause to think more about what they could do. So I’ve decided to write up a couple of my thoughts on the matter, with a view to suggesting ways they could be used for academic writing on the web.

So what are Microformats?

Well, I commend the article to which I referred above, but I’ll try and give a brief summary.

Microformats are a way to embed the structure of a given text-based or text-oriented data format—such as an electronic calendar (icalendar) or a electronic business card (vcard)—into an xHTML document. In fact, a microformat should not just embed the structure, it should directly map the existing data structures and semantics of the given format onto the the closest existing semantic elements of xHTML.

What’s it all for, then?

One of the key advantages of doing this, from my perspective, is that you can then immediately take advantage of existing web development tools and skillsets to extract the data in these microformats, and then to manipulate and process them.

Here, One commentor noted a practical implementation:

I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve been thinking about making a Greasemonkey script to automagically detect and extract hCard info from pages. I haven?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t really researched it much yet, but I was also wondering if there might be some way to automatically add contacts to my Thunderbird addressbook.

Academic Uses

The first use that came to mind was for bibilographic and citation data. HTML already has several elements that allow writers to mark up citations and quotations. There are at least three that I can think of right away. The first is the <blockquote> element. This element is designed to mark up paragraphs of quoted material. The second is the <q>(uote) element, which is meant to be used to mark up inline (short phrase or sentence-level) quotations, but it is poorly supported by Internet Explorer. The third element is the <cite>, which is generally used to mark up the names of cited works, such as the title of a book, or the name of a film. There doesn’t seem to be a way to easily differentiate between say, book titles, which should be rendered in italics, and journal article titles, which are meant to be enclosed in quote marks.

Despite these limitations, I think that these three elements give us something with which to work. The limitations of <cite> could be worked around thus:

<cite class="journal">Name of Article</cite>

I’ll continue tomorrow with some more thoughts on practical uses of this, and perhaps a more extensive treatment of what I think could form a workable citation microformat.

Update: more here.

Update 2 (17 August, 2005): It looks like there’s already some work going on in developing a citation format. The work seems to be in an inital discovery phase.

A terrifically sophisticated and wide-ranging two-part interview with “fantasy superstar”, China Miéville.

The recent announcement that Apple Computer is moving the Macintosh to Intel processors has stirred the passions of many of the Mac faithful. I’d even admit to some shock and a degree of dismay over this move, not the least because, as a Mac user in a Windows environment, I had to cop a good couple of days of flack from my co-workers over the move. Fair enough though, I suppose. Mac users have long bragged about the technical superiority of the Macintosh’s PPC processor; now we’re getting the same CPU as everyone else, so it’s pay-back time.

At a technological level, this makes a difference to programmers—particularly those who invested in optimising performance on the PPC (G4 and G5) processor—and hardware designers—some of whom may be looking at a dimmer future. But it’s not at the technological level at which the response from Mac fans is operating.

A perusal of the lengthy threads at Arstechnica’s Macintoshian Achaia is revealing. Many Mac users—end users, not developers—are upset. Very upset. And not just because they’re getting scorched by PC users.

John Siracusa, Ars’s Mac specialist, discusses his feelings:

Despite all the interesting possibilities for the future (which I’ll get to in a bit), I’m saddened by this turn of events. Everything that was captivating and exotic about Apple’s CPUs added up to little more than a few brief moments of glory in the market and a handful of trips to the top of the performance heap. But to silicon-loving geeks, it really meant something.

I don’t think it’s just the fans who are turned on by silicon who are upset. One of the things Apple does really well is craft and deliver a message about what its computers stand for, its values, its ideology. One of the core ideological values is that the Mac is a bit more than a computer, more than a cold and inpersonal calculating machine. “I wuv my Mac”, and all that. Mac users like this ideology. They participate in fashioning it, and they work to reinforce it. And they don’t like to see it damaged.

I say this not to psychologise Mac users. I think there’s something interesting at work in the way that middle-class humanists fashion identities through consumption and elaboration of what are almost “anti-consumptionist” ideologies, even when the branding and marketing imperatives behind their initial construction dissipate.

There’s one reason to think the “accidentally leaked” press release introducing G5 Powerbooks might be a fake:

CUPERTINO, California—June 7, 2005—Apple® today announced the upcoming availibility of it’s highly anticipitated PowerBook G5 line of personal computers, featuring low-power G5 cores running up to 2.3 GHz, with 12, 15, and 17 inch high definition widescreen displays, all enclosed in a thin aluminum shell. The super-powerful notebook computer outperforms the leading PC notebooks by up to 35 percent.

(from homepage.mac.com/dzweben/pr/jun/pbg5.html)

Would a professional news release get “its” and “it’s” mixed up?

Daring Fireball directed me to an interesting discussion on Apple’s Mail 2.0 interface design, specifically the new toolbar button icons. What struck me, and what moved me to comment on that post, was the almost total indifference to whether the new design was actually demonstrably better from a usability perspective, rather than an aesthetic one.

I’m a bit of an Apple fan. But many of their interface design decisions seem to be made on the basis of taste rather than research.

In any case, one of the commenters pointed out to me a good weblog on usability, called Apples to Oranges.

I think I’m finally in a happy place with the new weblog design. There are still a few glitches in IE, but nothing radically bad.

The new archives page is now operational, too. It was very easy to implement with the suparchive plugin.

I’ve made the blogroll unified again. The sub-categories were too fiddly to manage manually. Maybe I’ll find a plugin that lets me sort that out. The bloody thing is due for an update anyway.

Via Joe Clark, an excellent critique of HTML 4.0 by Jukka Korpela.

The thing that Jukka's doing, and what few other people are doing, is offering useful ways to make a better mode of writing.

For instance, these notes on emphasis:

Since emphasis is actually a set of rather different things, for which different elements were proposed above, doesn't this apply to deemphasis, too? To some extent, yes. Probably the most usual kinds of deemphasis would be covered by the following new elements:

REM

a remark which does not belong to the main flow of thought, such as a note about the history of a phenomenon

DET

detailed information; typically to be used in textbook-like documents to indicate passages which may (or perhaps should) be skipped on first reading

Edit: Textile's dodgy blockquoting facilities make valid code impossible. Grrrr. Sorry about the hacky nature of the above.