Have digital tools made your dreams come true?

I found this wonderful video among PBS’s Digital Nation videos. Charlotte Ashurst McDaniel explains how digital tools have changed her life for the better.

I suspect that many of us have stories about how digital tools have changed our lives.

This blog changed my life. In the late 1990s and early in the current century, I was teaching basic HTML and web page creation with Dreamweaver in a community college. I couldn’t find a book I liked. In those years, now familiar concepts such as web standards, symantic HTML, using CSS to create the appearance of a web page, and accessibility were all under heated discussion. I became a believer early on—partly because of my frequent attendance at SXSW Interactive where I sat at the feet of people like Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, and Jeffrey Zeldman while they talked about what they were doing.

Being a believer and trying to teach that way were almost incompatible in those days. The books at the time were still teaching table-based layouts, font-tag appearance controls and other not so wonderful techniques. I decided that I needed to go public with my complaints about the books that were available, and I started this blog. That was in about 2001.

The book reviews I post now are generally fairly positive. The wheel has turned. But for several years after  2001, they were very negative. I began to hear from publishers and writers. I was asked to look at tables of contents, to review chapters, to comment on proposed work. I was asked to write teacher’s editions. I did all those things and soon realized I’d made contacts within the world of computing book publishers.

I used those contacts to find out where to submit a proposal for a book of my own. I had this crazy idea that books should teach HTML and CSS at the same time. When a student learned a tag, they also learned  how to present it with CSS.  I truly did not want to make students learn a whole lot of useless HTML (like font tags) for the first half of a semester and then be told to forget all about it at the end of the semester when CSS was introduced. Learn both at once. I found a publisher–Sybex–who accepted the proposal. Sybex came up with the idea of calling it “Integrated” HTML and CSS.

I wrote the book from a teacher’s perspective. I’m not a computer science person—I’m not a programmer. I pulled together the best ideas for teaching I could and applied it to learning HTML and CSS.

So I had my own book, thanks to my blog. Publishers asked me to do more jobs: tech edit other people’s books. Write a second edition of my own book. Help other writers with their Dreamweaver books. Be the writer for a Dreamweaver book. In my own small way, I put the best web standards based material I can out into the world.

Then, a couple of years ago at SXSW, I met Aarron Walter. He talked about the notion that the Web Standards Project Education Task Force should get some volunteers together to work on a web standards based curriculum. I got involved in that. It seems to me now that this is where I was headed all the time. Because that involvement, that project, that group of people, may make a big difference in web education. The WaSP Edu Task force created a curriculum and called it InterAct. At this time, the first round of courses for the InterAct Curriculum are online. More courses are in development. The core group from InterAct have expanded to include business, education and schools in a  just-forming group at the W3C called The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA). OWEA will bring industry and education together in pilot projects, education projects, outreach projects and in many other ways that will impact the education of web professionals in the future. One of those projects is the Web Education Rocks tours, which bring web standards professional educators to a location near you for training.

My blog changed my life. Dreams I didn’t even know I had are part of my life, part of many lives, part of the future of web education.

How has digital technology changed your life? I know you have a story. Please share it.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Useful links: Teach Naked, eBook format, Trust Agents, Retweet

Teach Naked. What do you think about this idea as a way to teach web design or web development classes? You definitely need a computer lab, but how about the idea for lecture delivery and class discussion?

Sony Plans to Adopt a Common Format for eBooks. This may finally bring the lower priced competition to the Kindle into common use on more campuses where the current standard is the Kindle. Do you see this making a difference?

5 Questions with Chris Brogan. Trust Agents looks like a valuable book for students and users of social media. I probably will never have a chance to actually review it here, so am referring you to this interview.

The Power of the Retweet on Twitter at Webgrrls has a good graphic showing the mathematical effect of a retweet. Appropriate today since Twitter announced revamping the retweet API.

Useful Links: Diagnostic CSS, Zoe Gillenwater interview, and a couple of interesting beta releases

Diagnostic Styling Reloaded from Jens Meiert provides a bookmarklet that uses CSS to highlight accessibility issues on a web page. It points out things like deprecated elements, layout tables, missing alt attributes, style attributes and more.

Peachpit Interview with Zoe M. Gillenwater talks about Zoe’s new book Flexible Web Design and all sorts of web design issues. (Work alert: the podcast plays automatically and there are no controls to pause or change the volume.)

Collecta is a real-time search tool. It’s in beta. It checks news sites, social media streams and “popular” blogs. Take a look and see if you find it useful.

Echo is another beta you may want to check out. Echo is embedded in your site and gives you all sorts of social media features and tracking abilities.

Useful Links: HTML 5, CSS 3, Social Media

A Whole Lotta HTML 5 Love at STC AccessAbility is a very good set of resources.

CSS3 Quick Reference Guide. Nicely organized, by Veign.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later is a truly outstanding presentation by Marta Kagan. Just in case you know anyone who still doesn’t get it. (If f**k terminology turns you against message, don’t go there.)

Useful links: Smub, Twitter on Google, What not to Say on Twitter

Smub is a new bookmarking service you might want to take a look at. It works in your browser, of course, but it also works on mobile devices. Install a bookmarklet and you’re off.

Realtime Twitter Results on Google is a Firefox add-on that will add Twitter results to your Google searches. Puts recent tweets at the top of your search results. Quite nice.

twitterongoogle

Hey, authors, don’t tweet in anger! at Salon Magazine discusses author Alice Hoffman’s Twitter tirade against a critic. In case anyone in your life or classroom needs a reminder that everything you say and do on the Internet can come back to haunt you, here’s a little morality story to that effect. See also Don’t Ask Alice and this on Gawker. (Alice, I want you to know that I love every word in every one of your books. I’ve read quite a few and never revealed a plot twist to a single soul. Oh, yeah, I’m @vdebolt on Twitter.)

Spreading the News

Remember how remarkable it seemed several months ago when a plane sat down in the Hudson River and the first news and photos of the crash came from Twitter? Then the fly ash spill in TVA’s Kingston plant was covered first on Twitter. That was about the time that articles about how the old media just didn’t get digital media started appearing.

An economic meltdown that dumped publishing and media into a period of hard times along with the rest of society came next, bringing a series of new articles and speculation about how media was going to survive and adapt. Newspapers are closing or moving to web only operations, or just struggling along hoping the weather the economic situation.

Media was big news again with the Iran election. Many mainstream media outlets were getting their news from blogs, YouTube, and Twitter. With journalists scarce in Iran, the “organized” media outlets were struggling to get the story by following what they could from the people on the ground who were tweeting and uploading video to YouTube.

Which brings us to the celebrity deaths in the past week, particularly the death of Michael Jackson. TMZ a gossip site with a reputation as trash, broke the story of Jackson’s death. Tweets went out within seconds and the quest for news on the topic was immediate and overwhelming. But nobody wanted to take the word of TMZ. News people wanted to hear from The LA Times or some other big media outlet that they considered “trustworthy.”

That’s a long lead-up to the topic I want to discuss. What are people thinking and saying about the media and the reporting of events regarding Michael Jackson? Here are a few comments.

Pauline from webgrrls reports that she was at the nail salon. In Cyberspace Behavior when Celebrities Die she said,

I was at my local nail salon when the headlines on television caught everyone’s attention: Michael Jackson passed away. As I sat in my massage chair getting a pedicure, I automatically reached for my phone, but unfortunately had no Internet service in that area. I received texts and made a phone call to a friend, while looking up at the television screen to see the news unfold. Other women around me pulled out their phones to call and text the news at a frantic pace. While the shock was palpable in the salon, I started thinking about what was going on in cyberspace.

I first heard the news from Twitter. I told my two grandchildren and they both immediately called their mothers to tell them. As soon as the calls were finished, they started texting friends. But, like Pauline, my thoughts went immediately to how the story was being reported. We had Ryan Seacrest on the radio in the car—oh, the things you must listen to when driving your grandkids—and he was hesitant to confirm TMZ, he quoted CNN’s more tentative reports that it was a coma for several more minutes.

Not to make less of people’s memories of Michael Jackson, but I was interested in the social media aspect of the story from the very first.

TMZ breaks news Michael Jackson is dead; does that also spell the death of traditional media showbiz coverage? from TampaBay.com:

It also raises yet another challenge for traditional news outlets, still scrambling to keep pace with a younger pop culture press moving quicker to break and advance the hottest showbusiness news.

Early in the reporting, people attached caveats to the news. At Written, Inc’s Michael Jackson dead, the comment was,

Ooh, it’s turning into a really bad week for celebrities – if the report from gutter-grabbing celeb “news” site TMZ.com is true.

At BNET, Catherine P. Taylor wrote Michael Jackson’s Death Illustrates How Much Media Has Changed. Her points, which I abbreviate here, are:

1. That, unfortunately, the notion of confirming a story is becoming quaint.
2. That almost everyone wanted in on the story in the name of traffic (I suppose you could include this blog in that … go ahead).
3. That if real-time search has a business model it’s in these huge, spiking news stories, particularly news stories with a heavy commercial angle. While there’s no real commerce to be had in the Iran protests, nor should there be, the sudden interest in a dead celebrity’s entertainment output should mean dollar signs for media.
4. That user-generated content shows the problems with the TMZ age writ-large, when anyone can publish anything, if they feel like it — and distribute it to millions.

Catherine’s points mentioned search. According to Search Engine Journal’s early article called Michael Jackson Dead: Microsoft Bing FAILS in Coverage, Twitter and Facebook Break News, the search engine response to the story was very slow.

In terms of search relevance and breaking news, even with conflicting news amongst various media outlets and social media, Google has not caught up to the rush of Michael Jackson news. Google is showing only ONE headline in its Google News Universal Search Onebox about the rumored passing of Jackson . . .

Yahoo Search News Shortcuts, on the other hand, is right on top of the news. . . .

Is Google Search lagging in breaking news coverage? Indeed it is. Microsoft BING however, has ABSOLUTELY FAILED in their coverage of the passing of Michael

Once the news was finally accepted as real by mainstream media, they went on a reporting frenzy of their own that continues to unfold. Twitter almost crashed from all the comments about Michael Jackson that people wanted to share. Twitter was so full of Jackson tweets that people began complaining that other things were more important. Laura Fitton, aka @Pistashio, commented,

Pistachio But see, Twitter’s about “what do we have in common.” 500 million have just Thriller in common, let alone the rest of his life/career…

We all have pop culture in common, but I think we need to remember that news about Iran’s election was big, too. And when the fly ash story broke it was pre-Oprah, pre-Ashton Kutcher, pre Twitter goes mainstream. Twitter didn’t almost crash over the plane in the Hudson, either. But Twitter has been growing so fast you can’t really compare one event to another one months later in terms of tweets because of increased membership on Twitter.

Big media had defenders for its reluctance to accept the word of TMZ with stories like What the Michael Jackson / TMZ news timing teaches us about credibility at Eat Sleep Publish.

If anything, what this incident proves is that credibility is a very valuable quality. TMZ bet on the accuracy of their story, and they won that bet. Why make the bet? They want to earn a reputation for credibility.

And you know what “old media” has in droves right now? Credibility. Michael Jackson wasn’t, as far as I could tell, widely considered dead until the LA Times independently reported that doctors had pronounced him dead.

It’s not true until I say it’s true. That’s power.

News as a social medium at the San Francisco Chronicle said,

Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at City University of New York and author of the media blog BuzzMachine, said the growing popularity of social-media sites is recasting the job of traditional journalists. He sees them as curating, vetting and giving context to news that bubbles up from teams of reliable amateurs they’ve already recruited.

Curating and vetting. That’s what we saw with the news from Iran. The man in the street tweets something and the journalists curate and vet. Social media feeds the mainstream media. It used to be the other way around. CNN even has a site for citizen journalism called iReport.

In Is Faster Better? Or is it Just Faster? Sarah Perez argues,

You see, I actually watched the CNN coverage and it was good. . . .

It also was a lot more interesting that watching a million “RIP MJ” tweets stream by.

Sarah’s comments relate to the story after it was confirmed by traditional media. Does that mean quality is measured by depth (aka curating and vetting.) Or is it turning into something more immediate? There’s the initial moment when we think, “OMG, Michael Jackson died,” and then there’s the feeding frenzy for details that follows. I think I’m more interested in the “OMG” moment in this article, and not so much in how the week played out after the news was blessed by big media.

An interesting perspective on the overloading of websites relates back to the previous quote from Laura Fitton. In Michael Jackson, Media Convergence and The Decline of the Global Superstar we find:

The mass media’s dependence on new media, especially of this nature, is pointing to a new media convergence that is both liberating and alarming. Do we need this many perspectives to contend with, and how much is verified before stated on air? Immediacy in any breaking event is always a waste of time because details will settle and change, and these social networking platforms are probably the most immediate forms of media there ever were. The crash of these technology-based social networks ostensibly shows an active rather than passive collectivity, meaning rather than experiencing a historical moment together via the exact same channels (limited to a few mass media networks), people wanted to reach out and create their own moment, their own reportage and rapport; however, this crash of systems also points to some intense displays of cultural capital, something a lot of these social networks are built upon.

Waxing Philosophical took a different approach in 3 Unexpected Economic Effects of Michael Jackson’s Death. She talked about money, and her points (which I again abbreviate) are:

1. If Michael Jackson’s death can break the internet, what will we do when there’s a global meltdown for reals?
2. Even a millionaire (billionaire?) needs a budget.
3. Jackson’s debt-ridden estate might just be saved by an unexpected run on iTunes.

In the next news cycle or during the next big story, will mainstream media remain inclined to wait for confirmation from the AP or The New York Times? Or will we begin to accept the word of sources that may be regarded as sleazy some of the time? Is news turning into the world according to Twitter?

See also: Events in Iran.

Cross posted on BlogHer.

Events in Iran

As Events Unfold In Iran, Facebook And Google Translate Quickly Add Persian Versions on Tech Crunch points out the impact that the revolutionary events in Iran have on the way we view social media. On CNET, you can read With Iran crisis, Twitter’s youth is Over. Twitter, a tool that allows users only 140 characters to tell their story, is the leading communication medium for a social upheaval that may change the both Iran and the way we regard user generated content.

Nico Pitney has been live blogging events in Iran for the Huffington Post. He’s compiling all sorts of sources into a running mashup of  what’s going on. Much of it comes from YouTube, some from Twitter and some from news agencies. There’s an ongoing list of tweets using #iranelection as a hashtag on HuffPo. Links to other bloggers writing about Iran at HuffPo are included, too.

The BBC is covering the story in much the same way in Internet brings events in Iran to life. The story is a collection of video, tweets, Facebook links, images, and blog links.

For those who watch trends in communication, traditional journalism, and citizen journalism, the idea that the Internet is changing the way the world tells its story is not new. But the events in Iran are so significant to everyone on the planet,  even people who don’t normally look at trends on the Internet are becoming aware that things have changed significantly. I don’t pretend to understand the implications the unfolding events will have on future communications and future newsgathering, but I can safely say that things will be different from now on.

Addendum: See this excellent post by Ethan Zuckerman: Iran, citizen media and media attention