Parallel universes

Queen eats what is in front of her nose.

"Do you write a letter every week?"  Neil looked off to the pasture where Queen ambled up to the water trough.  How could I make this 60 plus year old farmer understand that the photos I'd taken moments ago with my Android were already on my son's tablet in the UK?  


"We usually Skype."  


Neil closed his left eye and scrunched his lips over to the right.  Face-to-face, communication had failed.


"Um, it's like telephoning over the internet, although we could have video, or just type messages back and forth.  Typing's rather nice as we can chat off and on over an entire day as something occurs to us, more like being together than a short international call.  I talk with Ben almost every day."


He breathed out slowly.  "Ah, chatting is nice.  I'd miss our kids if they didn't live down the road, but we only see them about once a week.  Cheryl's got the hang of these computers, but I've never needed them."


Did my eyes widen when Neil came up with the term chat?  


While we talked on, another part of me pondered (bodily hypertexted?) who will read the work my students create online and how will the department grade their efforts.

Anticipating Users

Newborn Lily meeting 97 year old Ruth.

What determines who will use particular media?  


It is not age.  


Already today, I read a blog from my 26 year old niece, exchanged facebook statuses with my 80 year old mother-in-law, and responded to an email from a 4th grader, a phone call from a college senior, and a text from the mother of high school students.

It is not profession. 


My father, an elementary school principal with no background anywhere in the sciences, programmed educational games for his school in the 1970s. 


My son, LU '06, controlled the robot he designed over the internet as it trundled out in the world to get a scone. Geekitude.

Meanwhile, my brother-in-law, who is responsible for voice over the internet having "designed and implemented protocols and software for some of the earliest experiments with packet voice ... [and who] was the primary organizer for the establishment of the worldwide Internet Multicast Backbone (MBONE)" has an empty facebook profile on which his wife lurks to read  family updates.  He was Geek of the Week in July, 1994. 


We can only reach him by phone or stamped mail.


Discussion  of digital natives and digital immigrants followed on the 1999 publication of Tapscott's Growing Up Digital.  Assorted cheerleaders and doomsayers  continue to explore this idea.  

It may not have been that speech or print was linear, but that they had been isolated dialogues.  Online, we are now involved in conversations, conferences, symposia.

Academic adjustments

Punctuation standards, derived from programming protocols, varied from formal written language and percolated through expected usages.  The addition of image, audio, video, links, the hypertextual constructs of varying pathways through the material have changed what is published on line and how.   


Work online is not like an essay or term paper.  


Faculty demand that students use appropriate citation styles for online websites vs. online journals. We can also learn to adjust to online conventions for content.  

• The informality of language.  
• White space.  
• Sentence length.  
• A sense of visual literacy.  
• The conversational attitude used to create connections, community, and meaningful content.

Neil's thoughts converged to the very term we use online.  I need to find the online style standards that correlate Diane Hacker's A Pocket Style Manual.