On Technologically-Mediated Communication & Productivity

Team Leaders' Technology Choice in Virtual Teams

This was an interesting study by Anu Sivunen and Maarit Valo that explored the pros and cons of various technologies available for use with virtual teams. This in-depth, ethnographic exploration of Finnish virtual team leaders examined their choices of communications technologies in daily work, breaking their decision down into four factors, two of them person-related and two task-related. The person-related factors were accessibility or ease of member access through a particular medium, and social distance between members. The two task-related factors were idea sharing or ease of members ability to share ideas, and informing or team leaders ability to share and document information based on the nature of the task (58).

In essence, the study looked to determine what influences communication technology choice to optimally facilitate and support communication between virtual team members. In short, it found landlines, voicemail, and email the most popular conferencing medium and videoconferencing, shared databases, and IM less often used. As an example, the study found videoconferencing not that prevalent because the ability to see the other party rarely adds value to communication in the majority of working contexts while email was popular due to its ubiquity and ease of use.

The study looked at the principle determinants of team leader choice (61) which were based upon:

1. Rational technology, or which technology is chosen that will suit the task best? 

2. Social influence, or which technology is impacted by co-workers' preference? 

3. Adaptive structuration, or which technology choice is a product of the particular culture using it?

Study conclusions found that accessibility was important due to increased mobility of members and whether they had access to the particular medium and were reachable through it. Findings (65) concluded that the characteristics of the situation determined media choice and most important were distance between members, time pressure of the project, and as stated earlier, accessibility of the technology to members. Ultimately, it comes down to the nature of the task at hand, characteristics of the technology, and the team members' ability to access and use it. This study does a good job of proving this.

Mediated Immediacy:

A language of affiliation in a technological age

In this study by Patrick B. O'Sullivan, Stephan K. Hunt, and Lance R. Lippert, the authors remark that accompanying the diffusion of social technology in teaching, important problems in student reactions, notably low student involvement and motivation, and increased isolation have occurred. Despite the promise of new communication technologies to improve teaching and learning, progress in developing well-informed, appropriate, and effective applications of technology has been slow and inconsistent, the authors contend (485).

An ongoing problem with computer mediated communication (CMC) is the lack of non-verbal signals that typically accompany traditional classroom learning environments and that if these important social cues are lost, often times, emotional connectedness seems to be lost as well. The result? In most cases, ineffective or non-existent learning.

Mediated immediacy refers to communicative behaviors that reduce the physical or psychological distance between individuals and foster affiliation between them. The authors state (469) that immediacy can be encouraged through an "approach and avoidance" construct - that people approach things they like and avoid things they don't - as a way to better understand the communicative practices that convey affiliation and foster relationships with communication technologies that can achieve a positive outcome.

The authors point out (470) that research has demonstrated students learn most from teachers who are warm, friendly, immediate, approachable, and fostering of close, professionally appropriate personal relationships. Use of immediacy is an important element of this. Mediated immediacy, according to the authors, are communicative cues that can help shape perceptions of psychological closeness and help promote appropriate educational intimacy with students to reduce anxiety and uncertainty and improve attitudes towards the instructor and course. 

In this vein, important mediated immediacy cues were found to be those that promoted instructor approachability and his/her regard for students. The study found that these cues can be both linguistic and presentational. Linguistic cues incorporated into written course content can include informality, self-disclosure, politeness and a friendly, conversational tone to the voice of the content. This bodes well for their integration into text-based technologies such as email, chat rooms, and web pages, assuming of course, that students are appropriately engaged with the content. Presentational cues are more graphical in nature and can include the use of color, the instructor's photo, and a sense of informality in material design, notably, but not limited to web sites.

Study results generally supported the hypothesis that incorporating multiple immediacy cues produced both lower uncertainty and increased motivation towards the instructor and course by study participants. Further, the study determined that using more cues didn't produce significantly lower levels of anxiety, although this relationship was in the predicted direction.

This is an interesting study. As a college instructor in the process of repurposing my course to be delivered as more of a blended hybrid, it provides me with some good implications for incorporating appropriate mediated immediacy cues in writing and designing CMC course materials with sensitivity towards student anxiety and related decreased motivation. One point that will always be a challenge is determining with a good degree of accuracy, those who have issues and those that don't. Often times, this isn't readily apparent with students until unfortunately, much time and educational opportunity has passed.

On Work & Play in a User-Generated World

Going Mobile: Cell Phones in Context

At the beginning of this chapter, author Naomi Baron mentions her 1998 train ride on a Quiet Car in Britain where talking on your mobile phone was prohibited. And this was more than a decade ago. I watched a show on the German Autobahn and nobody talks on mobile phones or texts or eats while driving. Germans take driving very seriously, just as the Britons take train courtesy seriously. 

Sometimes I feel the Europeans are much more advanced than us in this regard. Maybe it's because mobile phones came into being much sooner in Europe than here in the US. But I think it's something more. I'm generalizing, but I think Americans seem to care less if their actions are discourteous or annoying to others around them than those of other cultures. My wife and I stopped going to movies because of cell phones and talkers in theaters. But I digress.

The author mentions (132) she's yet to hear of any Americans using their mobiles for beeping (providing a single ring and hanging up to save money) as a thrift measure. She doesn't know the Aveni's. My daughter gives me a single ring on her cell phone to let me know she's on her way home to save on minutes. That's been the rule for years, still in place even though our service has dropped from .25/minute down to a dime. It's the principle of it. And it's kept her conscious to save money where possible.

The author remarks about the Silence on the Chikatetsu (subway) in Japan. I was in Japan for 3 weeks in the early 90's and can attest to this. It is a social transgression to be loud or distracting when riding on mass transit in Japan. Generally, courtesy (and get along-ness) is paramount in Japan for 2 reasons: First, because it's improper to stand out among the crowd and second, because it's so densely populated that without cooperation among citizens, Japanese society wouldn't be able to function. My most used word phrase in Japan was, "non ban sen" meaning which tracks do I go to? By the time I'd show my ticket and typically get a response from the gatekeeper, 15 people had lined up behind me and not once did anyone say hurry up. As Baron remarks, (133), "crowds keep moving - but in silence."

I was in Japan before the prevalence of mobile phones but I remember the young girls with their Hello Kitty pagers looking just like we do today with our phones. Indeed, as Kenichi Ishii remarks in Implications of Mobility, Japanese youth culture in the mid-1990s embraced a unique form of communication called berutomo (pager friends) especially among schoolgirls (349). Pager friends did not know each other’s names and had never met; however, they knew the pager numbers of their correspondents. They exchanged short messages such as ‘‘hello’’ and ‘‘good night’’ on their pagers almost everyday and sometimes even talked to each other about their personal problems via pagers (Ishii, 2004). I thought this was fascinating but unique to Japan and I'd never see something like that here. Hah.

In America, just as in Japan, these devices are, as Baron states, truly keitai, (something you carry with you) a "snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device and mundane presence in everyday life" (134). This is a perfect definition for cell phones, particularly for young girls. It's way more than communications when my daughter has to have her phone next to her when she's sleeping and has to bring it to the dinner table. I took her phone for a day because of bad grades. Pulling off fingernails would've been less painful. Grades are better now.

The People We Become: 

The Cost of Always Being On

I love humorist Dave Barry's remark, "... I prefer email because it's such an effective way of getting information to somebody without running the risk of becoming involved in human conversation" (220). I think this just about sums this chapter up. But I do think it's hard to say whether the internet decreases the strength of of our close social relationships. I think only if we let it.

You gonna pick up if I call?

Maybe we should evaluate technology like the Amish bishops do: Does it bring us together or draw us apart? Rheingold (223) interviewed an Amish man about getting a telephone. The man said, "What would that lead to? We don't want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It's not just how you use the technology. We're also concerned about the kind of person you become when you use it."

So what kind of people do we become by using the technology? When I think that we don't seem to care if how we communicate in public is discourteous or annoying to others and some have stopped going to movies because of it, I'm apt to wonder about this just as Baron has. For what it's worth, since I untethered from a mobile phone after my previous job 6 years ago, I think I listen better and appreciate more of the ambience around me now, including people. Maybe that's what the Amish are talking about. Although I don't expect others to ever untether, every once and a while, I bet many might enjoy it.

The Death of Social Schizophrenia

As a baby boomer, I never really thought about how I've spent my life in a schizophrenic world but I guess I have: teacher, student, dad, husband, son, brother, boss, subordinate and many more - each with a different role and somewhat different persona. Yea, I guess if through social media every person of significance in my life could see me in every other role I have to play, I'd likely appear to be a very different person to them. 


But I think Qualman in this chapter is implying I'm not being genuine playing all these roles when he says, "People are best off being comfortable in their own skin and not pretending to be anything that they aren't" (120). And that social media is some sort of remedy to this: by living with more transparency through the network, I'll be somehow better off by only having to be one person or personality or essence. Hmm. Frankly, I believe I'm more well-rounded having to live with the challenges of all these different roles and succeed within them.

On Agency, Authority and Trust

Privacy, Trust, and Disclosure Online

Most of the research cited in this article by Carina B. Paine Schofield and Adam N. Joinson goes back a number of years, showing that the issue of online privacy has and remains a very big deal. It seems that we need to continue to divulge more and more about ourselves to have access to what we want to find and purchase online. No doubt that if data miners really wanted to compile a file on any of us, they'd likely be able to do so. 

Indeed, just as the authors remark about actual (objective) privacy and perceived (subjective) privacy, (p. 15) although they coexist, there's often a mismatch between the two. We think we have a lot of control when we limit what we divulge in an online store, but we really don't know who or what is compiling our "footprint" or click path (which divulges a ton about us) to get there or anywhere else we go online and whether this information gets released to a 3rd party unbeknownst to us. I don't even want to know what Google knows about me. I've always found it curious that we trust our credit card numbers to high schoolers at convenience stores but get all fired up about the same card number online, as if people are somehow less nefarious if we see them in person.

Regarding building trust online, the authors allude to techniques (p. 21) that are important in building trust, including linguistic cues. This reminds me of the importance of establishing ethos from Dr. Anheier's course. I'll go the authors one more and say what's personally important in web site trust-building to me is a FAQ section and even better is a Forums section where real folks have posted their opinions about the site's products and service. I think predictability and dependability are the most important components to trusting a web merchant. The longer I use the merchant and receive the same results, the more I tend to trust it.

I had to buy some cold medicine the other day at Walgreens. It used to be on the shelves, now it's over the counter at the pharmacy. Apparently it has an active ingredient in it can be used to make methamphetamine. To purchase it, I had to provide my drivers license. The clerk inputted everything on it into a monitoring database. I asked her why she did this. She said it was a federal law that she must do this and she also needed it to monitor my purchasing behavior to limit how often I can purchase it. She assured me that my information would go no further than Walgreens. I don't believe her.

A Social Skill Account of Problematic Internet Use

Author Scott E. Caplan refers to what are now fairly old studies in his article. The model proposed and tested here predicted that individuals who lack self-presentational skills are especially likely to prefer online social interaction over face-to-face communication. Further, this model predicted that a preference for online social interaction fosters compulsive Internet use, which results in negative outcomes. I don't think there's any surprise to these results, knowing what we now have come to know over the last decade about those that spend too much time on the Internet.

I'm surprised that the researchers, Morahan-Martin and Schumacher (2000) and Young (1998) could identify problematic Internet users, (those with psychosocial problems like anxiety, loneliness, and depression) well enough through their survey techniques to confidently make this correlation. I'd think these types of subjects might not be so objective about themselves and also, that psychosocial problems seem to me to be so nebulous. But apparently they were able to.

These studies make me think about the msnbc show, To Catch a Predator with Dateline NBC correspondent Chris Hansen. It's obvious from the show that sexual predators using chat rooms to lure children come in all shapes and sizes - those with psychosocial issues and those without. This is what makes these study correlations so intriguing to me. 

Young's study observed that whereas nondependent Internet users spent most of their time online using email and the web, dependent users spent most of their time online using synchronous interpersonal communication applications like chat rooms and interactive multiplayer games. I know some big-time gamers. One's a nephew and another's a tenant. I'd profile both of them as lacking social skills in this way, so considering my survey of two, I think there's merit to this.

I agree with the authors. I'm surprised as well that Internet researchers have not devoted more attention to this subject. 

On Social Media Adoption & Uses

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, 
and Scholarship

This is a great piece. I really like the remark by Wellman (1988) summing up the rise and proliferation of social networking sites: "The world is composed of networks, not groups" in reference to the way SNS's are networked publics that support sociability. Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellisong put together a great primer on social networking sites; a very succinct historical timeline of their evolution. I've only heard snippets about some of these SNS's as many of them got their 15 minutes of fame over the last number of years so I appreciate a narrative on how they all evolved, how some died, and why.

Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield in their 2007 study explored the relationship between profile elements and the number of Facebook friends, finding that profile fields that reduce transaction costs and are harder to falsify are most likely to be associated with larger number of friendship links. Can anybody explain to me what they mean by a transaction cost in this context?

The authors confirm a point I've noticed and thought about with my daughter on Facebook and why I don't really worry too much about her activity there. They reference this same study that suggests that most SNS's primarily support pre-existing social relations and maintain existing offline relationships (like classmates at school) as opposed to browsing for complete strangers. I think this is very true.

My daughter is so selective about her friends in the physical world, I'm hard pressed to imagine her getting close to someone she'll likely never meet. Connections with any faraway "friends" are all based on a commonality of interest such as Manga graphic novels and certain rock bands. Outside of their common interest, their relationships go no further. 

As the authors state, while most SNS's support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks, others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. My big sister was recently diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma cancer in her throat and will soon start radiation and chemo therapy. She doesn't know anyone who's gone through this before. Because of this class, I thought of looking into blogs for her. What a blog site I found at Blogforacure.com. Here is a community of folks with many different cancer types. A quick search and I found 11 people going through treatment for this very type of cancer, each with their own blog. My sister was happy I found this site. I hope it helps her through what's sure to be a trying, worrisome, often lonely experience to come. We'll see.

Using LinkedIn to Get Work

This was a great article by Rich Maggiani and Ed Marshall. It inspired and motivated me to get my LinkedIn profile in order. Before I read this article earlier in the semester, I had 3 contacts and didn't really care much about my profile. I now have about 30 with 3 recommendations and links to professional organizations (including the SE Wisconsin STC) and am getting regular correspondence from all of them. My network is growing. People are connecting with me that I haven't had contact with in years. I know there's folks out there with contacts in the hundreds, but I'm mighty impressed with the ones I have. I'm even linked with Drs. Pignetti and Watts now! That's big.

I was in a waiting room a few weeks ago and found a great article from the April 12 edition of Fortune magazine that takes the points from our article to another level, making an even more compelling case for the importance of being on LinkedIn. In How LinkedIn Will Fire up Your Career, author Jessi Hempel points out that,"If you're serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn." She provides pointers on practically every LinkedIn site feature with great tips on how to maximize their benefit. Being a novice to the site, these are great points. Consider reviewing this.

In a similar vein, Jack Molisani in his essay Is Social Media for You? brings up some great points about developing our online brand (p. 12). He remarks, "I'm a firm believer that if you are a professional in your field, you should have an 'internet footprint' that gives evidence of what you have done." He did a search for a colleague and couldn't find anything about her, pretty much implying her loss of stature in his eyes. Being proactive towards ourselves as brands is key. He remarks, "Just as you should build your professional networks before you need them, you should take time to build your internet footprint before you need it." Once I really liked how my LinkedIn profile looked, I had a real good feeling about how I would look to others coming to it. I feel a sense of confidence now - always a good thing with the job market.


I'm certainly not implying that LinkedIn alone will guarantee me ever getting a better job that I have now. But before I receive an inquiry from a potential employer, I'm pretty sure they'll come looking at my profile before they consider contacting me and I want it to look good and current. How can it hurt? I produced a program at MATC last year called Opening Doors with China, connecting our school with a college in Shanghai for a live cultural exchange. This was the first ever simulcast with another college from a different country in either school's history. A major technical accomplishment and very educational for all the students and faculty. I have the same link above on LinkedIn. How else could I get this out for potential employers to see?

On Technology, Society and Change

Technological Visions and the Rhetoric of the New
The Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technologies

I'm still waiting for this. . .

This was an excellent reading. Many of the issues brought up in this chapter are ones that I've struggled with about technology for quite some time. In Technological Visions, the authors, Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas first discuss the concept of binary thinking, a concept of polarization that implies (I think correctly) that we basically choose one of two ways of looking at technology: it's either going to save the world for future generations or ultimately destroy the world as we know it. There doesn't seem to be much grey area in between and certainly no consensus about it. My struggle is that as I witness tech advances, my longing for the past with less of it increases. Why is that?

Related to this, what seems to be funny about technology is that its benefits are never as good as prognosticators predict and never as bad as doomsday prophets would have us believe. I think technology will always fall somewhere in between, but we just can't seem to accept this. I think the authors are spot on stating, "Technological change continues at a rapid pace but the visions that define it remain caught in a repeating cycle of overly simplistic binary frameworks" (p. 2). I don't think we have a choice in this or by now, we would've changed our way of thinking. It's just how we're wired and besides, anything more complicated is too hard to comprehend.

Just like electricity was embraced as a transformative force that promised freedom, democracy, and enlightenment, I think it's just human nature that we seem to be stuck in this endless cycle of hope and disappointment with technology since it cannot possibly fulfill such expectations. Do you think this kitchen of the future is coming to us anytime soon? I love the authors remark (p. 3) that society's capacity to project concerns and desires on technology operates as a primary form of social denial; the belief that a new technology can solve existing social problems reveals a refusal to fully confront the deeper causes of those problems and the complexity of human interaction. What a gem.

We humans continue to hope that the "next big thing" will save us from ourselves, only to be disappointed again and again. But we seem to need this. We need these visions and the metaphors because they give us hope. I think this is where the concept of an afterlife comes in. Somewhere, someday, we'll be transcended to a place where we won't be constantly let down, our expectations crushed.

But, darn it, utopia always seems to be just out of reach. It's no wonder that technology is so closely tied with metaphors of transportation and mobility. They imply this transcendence, that we can be somehow lifted out of our worlds and be taken to a new spiritual height, to get to where we need to be - wherever that is - and get whatever it is that we think we need. In my favorite dreams (yep, even better than those kinds of dreams) I can fly like a bird. Oh, what a feeling. If technology could help me have those more often, it'd be all I need with tech.

I was unfamiliar with the concept of ahistorical visions until this reading. Ahistoric visions (those that transcend actual history) of technologies are directly related to the fact that in popular imagination, technology is often synonymous with the future (p. 6). This creates serious problems in predicting the future - and why we seem to get it wrong so often. An example that comes to mind was the paperless office, the office of the future, its first prediction made in Business Week in 1975. In the future, we wouldn't need a single sheet of paper, not even a Post-it. All handled electronically. Let me jot a note to look into that.

Walt Disney became a very wealthy man feeding us a future where everything was going to be perfect. 

A perfect tomorrow coming

I remember as a kid just loving Disneyland's Tomorrowland. Its theme: A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, Just a Dream Away. Particularly enchanting was General Electric's Carousel of Progress with the family being transported in four sequences through time (even the dog!) It was such a buzz I could rotate around that theater all day long, imagination ablaze in anticipation of a world surely to come, and soon. What happened to that future? The Carousel has since been moved to Yesterland.

I love John Perry Barlow's remark (p. 12) on The Future of Prediction. He says, "It is the rhetoric of predicting the future that brings it into being, that we create the future we believe we deserve." Barlow seems to imply that the future can be invented by setting into motion a vision of what it should and will be. What an optimist. If we just embrace this certain rhetoric of new technology, we can use it to to shape the future. I hope he's right, or wait, do I?

Convergence Culture:

Worshiping at the "Altar of Convergence"

Here might be that technological afterlife notion from above put into practice.

The New Orleans Media Experience in 2003 (p. 6) was a festival showcasing game releases, and a venue for commercial and music video concerts, theater performances, and panel discussions. As author Henry Jenkins wonders in Convergence Culture, was "worshiping at the altar of convergence" to a New Testament God threatening destruction unless attendees followed His rules? Here's that dystopian concept again. He, like the attendees had come to New Orleans hoping to glimpse tomorrow before it was too late. Stuck between the 1990's dot.com bust of moving too quickly and the dangers of moving too slowly (the recording industry's file-sharing dilemma, for example) all were there to get it just right this time with investments, predictions, and business models. Although the show pressed everyone into the future, roadblocks to convergence were apparent - it's harder than it sounds and people have to work together. Has it happened since the author's remarks of 2006?

On the hardware side, the iPhone and iPad seem to be getting it closer. While the old vision of convergence was that one central device does everything, I think the downside to this it that the device's original functional intention seems to get lost. As Jenkins states, it's impossible to find a phone for just phone calls anymore while saleskids smirk like my daughter does when I tell her I'm considering a Jitterbug phone because I can't see the keys on today's cell phones without my reading glasses. Try as we might to have a fully integrated system, if and when one part breaks down and needs repair, we're left with nothing, like an HP All-in-One printer on the fritz.

Hello. . . again.

I think the author gets it right when he remarks (p. 24), "Don't expect the uncertainties surrounding convergence to be resolved anytime soon." With our converged TV, internet, cell phone, and land line, a power outage from a storm this past summer put us out of commission - brought on by and now at the mercy of Mother Nature. I dropped my Uverse remote last week. A few buttons were pushed while it bounced off the corner of the coffee table. TV gone and wouldn't come back. Call AT&T. Perfect convergence ultimately is reserved for the afterlife, where all media is compatible and in the unlikely event of a problem, a technician picks up the line without going through a cumbersome phone tree to get him.

On the content side, true to Jenkin's word, media producers will need to renegotiate their relationships with their consumers. In the meantime, knowledge about important social issues still gets delivered to us in convergent ways. Time magazine's cover story last week was on Alzheimer's disease. This special report is a collaboration with Maria Shriver, whose study, The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Takes on Alzheimer's, produced with the Alzheimer's Association, investigates the disease's epidemic. (Her father, politician and activist Sargent Shriver, was diagnosed with the disease in 2003.) Shriver first discussed the report's findings on ABC's This Week on Oct. 16th. The full report will be available as an e-book from Simon & Schulster and details are posted on the als.org website. Although not delivered through a singular device, heightening Alzheimer's awareness through a magazine story, a TV show, an e-book, and the web, I think this is convergence culture at work. Not every pressing social issue receives this breadth of coverage from so many media outlets simultaneously, but this example does show we can move in this direction. 

On Technological Literacy

Becoming Literate in the Information Age 
Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology

Those were the days

This is a fascinating study by Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Being 8 years older than Melissa, I'm in between her and her father. I'm a lot like one of the study participants, Dean Woodbeck (48 at the time of the study), dealing with mainframes, Fortran programming language, and punch cards. In my early 20's, I was discouraged with computers not just because of their complexity, but with the method of learning. I wrote routines to punch cards, handed them in and had to come back the next day to see if my program worked. Then debug and repeat. It was the same with writing Basic programming. To me, it may as well have been Chinese.

I believe that part of what we're experiencing in this prolonged recession has a lot to do with technological literacy - or the lack of it. Many of the jobs that have been lost are gone forever. Many of them were positions requiring little technological literacy and this unemployed workforce hasn't the skill-set for this new world - a world that today bears little resemblance to 1978.

Retraining for re-entry

Our culture is indeed undergoing a profound transition from that of a superpower with manufacturing might towards a post-modern world of global commerce and "rhizomatically organized digital information exchanges." The value placed on younger workers possessing these skills (and receiving jobs utilizing them) will be seen more and more in coming years. It doesn't bode well for older workers either unprepared or unwilling to "change their stripes" and go back to school for retraining and re-entry into a profoundly different workplace that values completely different skills. There are many back to school at MATC but this is only a fraction of those that should be. IT professionals seem to always have their pick of jobs, recession or not. Technological literacy has a lot to do with this.

I'm a little surprised that the researchers are still finding gender to play a part in technological literacy and am willing to bet that since this 2004 study, it's a lot less today. Use of computers, the internet and social networking tend to, in my opinion and with first-hand experience as a father, level the playing field between males and females. As with Brittany (p. 668), remarking that being a girl seldom hampers her pursuit of digital literacy, I'm convinced my daughter feels the same. She has more than 300 Facebook friends and it's fairly balanced between gender.

This reminds me of a recent article by Hanna Rosin I read in the July/August edition of The Atlantic titled, The End of Men. By almost every professional measure, women are outperforming men and are being placed into positions traditionally held my men, including those at the highest organizational levels. If there are gender-based barriers to technological literacy, they are few and getting fewer. 

The internet has really become a gateway to the literacies of technology as the authors allude to (p. 670). If computers in the home weren't connected to a network and were simply stand-alone workstations for homework, games, and say, home finance like Quickbooks, we wouldn't have the opportunity for email and collaboration and community that comes from social networking. Although Melissa and Brittany learned a lot on their own, principally via their own individual initiative, it's through networking that technological literacy flourishes and indeed has exploded. Kids emulate other kids and nobody wants to be out of the loop. In this case, social networking is much like conventional social groups at school where being "in" is being someone.

Multimodal learning...  we're getting there.

In drawing a comparison to last week's readings, we continue with these readings to cover inadequacies of schools to address and promote teaching paradigms that offer students alternatively a "visually rich and multimodal" (p. 671) way of learning and being taught. Like Charles, most of the analytical thinking often prized in schools is done out of school. But schools would have to have truly individualized instruction to address / encourage every student's individual interests and aptitudes. I don't know how this can be done. Yes, the print-based and alphabetic literacies taught have much to do with how the teachers were taught, but I'm not going to get into it again in lots of detail that students still must know the traditional basics of these literacies. Maybe in 25 years, this will change, but not right now, despite what kids might be doing in their spare time.

Indeed, these are fascinating first-hand personal accounts which tell us much about how technological literacy can be shaped, but as the authors contend (p. 676), they cannot be considered indicative or representative of any larger population. The inequities of access to technology by race has parallels to the same inequities with other things. Mortgages, living in particular neighborhoods, and job advancement come to mind. Computers, as ubiquitous as they are today, in some segments of society, still denote privilege and power. And computer literacy certainly gives those in the know power. As with Brittany, I see a difference with my students. Many come from lower class families with a lack of access to computers. Having been on a computer since age 4, my teenage daughter is further ahead in many ways.

There's a Brave New World coming. Anybody can see it. But it's coming more gradually and more in fits and starts than scholars sometimes might have patience for. As a college writing instructor, it's a challenge to think of teaching in visually rich, multimodal ways when many students are entering college with woefully inadequate grammatical skills and ability to structure thoughts to a sheet of paper. This lands right at my door and I have to get these kids ready to enter a workforce where employers still and will for quite some time, value traditional literacy along with technological.

The Zen of Homemade Tomato Sauce

"I got lots of seconds if you really want 'em, and for cheap!" the farmer's wife says. I take another bagful. Bruised, imperfect, unsightly to some, but not me. Their inner flesh holds summer in its folds and time to capture it has come. I lug at least three dozen to the car.

My wife doesn't relish the job of par-boiling to get the skins off and removing the snot and seeds. A good hour or more of dissecting. Aches the back. Trashes the sink and stovetop. But she knows what's in store at afternoon's end simmering and mellowing that tender meat of summer's flavors. 

There's no crayon for the hue in these pots. An earthy perfume wafts through the home. Onion and garlic. Peppers and wine. And the last of those herbs saying, "I'm done, get me in there." 

Man, wife, plants, everyone doing their part. A task, yes, and so fulfilling. When making sauce, I always feel my father's spirit: "Stir it or you don't eat!" he'd bark. Love and family and the cycles of life. Right now, such anticipated delight makes the whole world feel complete.

This time two kinds - mega basil and zesty pepper. 

Oh, I'll have trouble choosing tonight.

And when family and friends taste their requisite batch,

the essence of summer captured will go its appropriate way.