For those who share an interest in the blending of technology and culture, you should consider joining a new google group I’ve started: Robocult. On Finding America I’ve explored how robots are portrayed and understood in culture, and begun to formulate basic ideas about the basic relationship between man and machine through this archetype. This group expands upon that and seemed like a better idea than starting yet another blog.

As my first contribution to the group, I posted on the discussion board about what may have been the first robot dog in Paris, 1929. Please join up, and invite others who may be interested.

Attention cultural historians, museum curators, and robot enthusiasts. On Saturday, the San Jose Museum of Art opened an incredible exhibition on robots that continues through October 19th. This compliments some previous observations I’ve expressed about the robot icon in American culture. Here’s the blurb from their website:

Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon examines the development of robot iconography in fine art over the past 50 years. In 1920, the term robot was coined from a Czech word robota, which means tedious labor. Since then, the image and the idea of a robot have evolved remarkably from an awkward, mechanical creature to a sophisticated android with artificial intelligence and the potential for human-like consciousness. As robotic technology catches up with the wild imagination of science fiction novels, movies, and animation, dreams and fears anticipated in these stories may also become reality. Artists included in the exhibition have responded to the technological innovation with optimism, pessimism, and humor, presenting work that ultimately explores our ambivalent attitudes towards robots.

And an introduction from JoAnne Northrup, Senior Curator:

What do the game Battleship, carnival clowns, patriotic country music, and gender in the Oregon Trail computer game have in common? They all were represented at the session I spoke at in Rochester, NY for the MAASA/GLASA conference on play at Strong Museum. This eclectic group of presenters approached play in many different ways – something I’ve come to expect from American Studies. While there I got the scoop on a new quarterly publication from Strong whose first issue comes out this summer:

The American Journal of Play will feature articles on such disciplines as child development, education, psychology, anthropology, history, communications, and museology and is aimed at a general audience of educators, psychologists, play therapists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, museum professionals, and others interested in children and the importance of play.

Last Fall I teamed up with Student Pugwash USA to create a Facebook survey evaluating the positions of 18-25 year olds on science policy and politics, and the results are in! The full report is available for download – and while its content falls outside the scope of this blog, I think it’s another great example in addition to my Oregon Trail Survey of how we can target niche groups and wider demographics on the social web. The survey was designed to inform the creation of a 2008 Science and Technology Policy Guide about the candidates.

Despite my optimism of the survey, its self-selecting nature makes it in no way a representative sample of all youth 18-25. One of the most striking numbers was that 96% of respondents said they were planning on voting in the 2008 election. I would consider most of the respondents hardcore political junkies or environmentalists, which is still OK. Overall I’d suggest this approach for collecting oral histories, or other information from the most active members of an online community.

In October 2006, I conducted an online survey about the Oregon Trail computer game by using the beta Facebook API to authenticate users and target OT enthusiast groups. Tonight I’ve published raw results. In only 8 days the survey had 500+ participants representing 44 states and 4 countries. While my original intent was to evaluate my methodology and eventually reconduct the survey, I realized that a) others can use this data, so I should share it b) it’d be beneficial for me to revisit this in anticipation of an upcoming presentation c) I’ve had some terrific blog dialog recently and I’d like to see that continue.

One thing to keep in mind while viewing the results is that the survey was entirely an experiment; I wasn’t entirely convinced that outside of my group of friends I’d attract much attention. I was pleasantly wrong. Most of the questions required short-answer responses, and the lack of quantitative data collected makes the sheer number of responses unmanageable in many ways. Along the lines of oral histories, many of the responses shed light into how students played the game in the classroom, and how they remember parts of the game. I’ve had luck navigating the responses by using keywords, although without being able to bundle similar responses it’s difficult measure the number of occurrences. Still, patterns in the results can be discerned. Here are the questions I asked:

Year of Birth:
Gender:
State:
Game Version:
Where did you play the game?
How often did you play the game?
Was the game taught with a lesson on the trail, or did you just play the game?
What was your favorite part of the game?
What was your least favorite part of the game?
How were Indian characters portrayed in the game?
How were female characters portrayed in the game?
How were male characters portrayed in the game?
What did the West look like in the game? Do you think this was accurate?
Do you think the game accurately portrayed the Oregon Trail? Why/Why Not?
Any additional comments or memories of the game:

The object of the survey was to have respondents recount representation within the game, judge whether or not they think this memory of the game is accurate, as well as give insight into how the game was used within an educational setting. Understanding historical representation in the classroom, and measuring the effectiveness of the game to present that knowledge was of key interest.

Beyond the educational goals of the game, many of the survey responses discussed elements of the game that I glossed over in my research, but resonated with students. One of these was the ability to name characters in the game. Here are some interesting quotes related to that:

I liked the excitement of it. It felt like an adventure, plus you could always name your crush as your husband in your party!

I would use my friends names as members of my wagon train

Being able to name people… And then letting the ones I didn’t like die, or rub salt in their wounds, etc. Morbid, I know, but I think most kids will agree that was the best part of the game.

the first time I played, the people I played with named all our characters after the X-men because they were popular at the time, because of the cartoon.

Also fun to name your characters stupid things. My personal favorites were names like “Nobody” or “Somebody” or “Everybody,” so that the game would be like “Somebody has cholera” and you’d be like ‘but who?’ and “Nobody has died” and you’re like ‘Whew, that’s a relief.’

The last response was the best IMHO.

Those who have read my blog for a while know about my ongoing interest in robots, particularly the development of the robot archetype in popular American Culture in the early twentieth century. By and large I’ve sought to understand these depictions of robots within the cultures that produced them. Whether that was the image of the ‘savage robot’ explored in an earlier post about a 1937 Lil’ Abner comic strip, or an earlier attempt to create a brief pre-Asimov robot timeline, the relationship between humans and machine is fascinating. In several weeks I’ll have a call for participants in my newest exploration of the robot archetype, but more on that later.

Elektro was a robot presented by Westinghouse at the 1939 World’s Fair that helped bring the robot into public consciousness, as well as present an idea of what the ‘future’ of robotics would be. Seven feet tall, this steel humanoid robot walked by voice command, talked, moved its head/arms and even smoked cigarettes. Elektro’s voice used a 78-rpm record player, saying lines including ‘If you use me well, I can be your slave’ — similar to the Lil’ Abner comic. Not only was Elektro made in the image of man, his ability to smoke distinguishes his activities closer to humans than a machine. This fascinating diagram shows the moving components of Elektro, including his bellows.

The submission deadline for The Humanities and Technology (bar)Camp is Midnight, Saturday the 15th; you have less than 4 days to submit your proposal!  If you’re free the weekend after Memorial Day, send us an application to join a top-notch crew of digital humanists give a range of presentations “from full-blown papers (not many of those, we hope) to software demos to training sessions to debates to discussions of research findings to half-baked rants.”  More information is on THATCamp’s website and on twitter.

The Omeka team should be encouraged. At three weeks since we released the public beta, we’re had over 500 downloads and had a flurry of interest at conferences including WebWise & code4lib. We’re in a good position to continue building an active developer community that augments Omeka’s core. Here are three exciting examples:

1) Omeka forum user Kerim recently posted on the forums about his idea to use the iPaper document viewer for displaying pdf and doc files in a slick flash-based interface. After experiencing some problems, he asked for help and Omeka crack programmer Jim Safley went to work on a soon-to-be-released iPaper plugin. I know there has been some buzz about iPaper recently, so it’s great to see this feature being added to Omeka’s growing plugin directory.

2) One of the hardest parts of getting an open source project off the ground is helping support early adopters, and despite the high level of traffic the forums have been receiving we’ve been able to keep up-to-date with most questions, thanks to the hard work of the Omeka team and the community itself! This is one of the most-promising signs of the project, that users unaffiliated with CHNM are going out of their way to help others with their installations. Special thanks to MrDys and Syma!

3) Wally Grotophorst at the GMU library has been exploring ways of harvesting data from their MARS (Dspace) repository and pulling that metadata into Omeka. According to Wally, “once an Omeka database of items was built using the DSpace metadata, non-technical staff could log into Omeka and build exhibits.” And Wally isn’t the only one interested in this; others I met at code4lib made strong cases for Omeka’s use in very similar situations. With some terrific ideas for how this could be done, this is the start of a conversation that will mature in the future.

As our community of Omekans continues to grow you can enter these ongoing conversations by posting on the forums. We’ve created categories for different topics, including plugins and a space to discuss data migration. I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in migrating data to Omeka to post their ideas and works-in-progress there. For updates on what’s going on with Omeka, I’ll continue to post here on my blog, as well as the official Omeka blog. If you’re on twitter, you can follow Omeka or myself.

Following up a blog post by Tom Scheinfeldt on using Twitter as an outreach tool, I recently came across a service under development called Edmodo. Billing itself as “Twitter for teachers and students,” Edmodo is in alpha testing as a social educational portal, including a classroom-calendaring feature. Based upon the screen capture of the service, I don’t see how this is significantly different than Twitter. In fact, the Twitter API could be used to build a service like this. So while this is nothing groundbreaking, it caused me to reflect on some of the significant changes in social networking of the past year, and how those changes are trickling into online educational tools.

In my judgment the largest shift we’ve seen is that of a ‘friends activity feed.’ In the case of Facebook, I can be notified when my friends modify their profiles, add other friends, or perform any activity (as long as they haven’t disallowed the display of these messages). And while that information was available before, its display is now one of the core features of Facebook itself. Your ‘news feed’ shows the activities of your friends upon logging in. Since then, Myspace has followed suit with a similar feature. These features encourage users to be active on the site in order to gain the attention of others, or be seemingly overlooked among your other collection of virtual friends.

The other change that has been developing is the idea of providing your ‘status.’ In some ways, I see this as an outgrowth of the AOL Instant Messenger away message. Depending on the person, away messages can be informative, have song lyrics, or be an ambiguous word. So has become the nature of the social networking ‘status.’ The free-form nature of it allows anyone to express what they’re feeling or doing at the moment. Twitter’s sole purpose is to express these statuses, while many other social networks offer it as a feature of a larger and further complex social network.

The merging of these two ideas offers interesting pedagogical possibilities for educators who can think outside the box. What are ways that providing a ‘status,’ or sharing text-messages in a public space engages students? What is the benefit of students seeing the activity of their peers in real-time? How can these tools build a greater sense of community and cooperative learning between students?

The nature of social networks often demands a high level of participation in order for them to be worthwhile to participants – seeing the activity stream of your classmates is only helpful if you check it once, or several times a day. So while the tool can facilitate rapid dialogue between classmates, its usefulness is based upon the students in the class and their decision to be constantly hooked-in, or to not be. Its worth mentioning that other web tools for learning – wikis, blogging, forums, and listservs facilitate the public distribution of analytical work, while Twitter and microblogging services are better-suited for shorter messages in greater frequency. Although I’ve seen microblogging in the classroom, I wonder if its asking too much from students.

Not necessarily looking to displace other tools as ways of classroom communication but rather augment them, Twitter and Edmodo offer interesting possibilities. How can these tools for sharing basic knowledge and engaging in public discourse be integrated into pre-existing tools and computer-based strategies for teaching? The next step in my judgment is integration into courseware management tools like Blackboard, and even ScholarPress CourseWare.

There’s a small typo in this year’s Code4Lib schedule – Omeka is the digital archive and exhibit-building software developed by the Center for History and New Media, not Omedka as the program states.  Hopefully anyone at the conference who Googles “omedka” will find this, and visit our official website, http://omeka.org