Week One Progress Report

Launched and in orbit.

As an open participant, I have tried to complete assignments like everyone else. Read the article (a couple of times), posted nugget and concept experience, commented on a few posts. And tweeted here and there. And watched some archived video.

But mostly, I’ve been digging into the odd corners of the Thoughtvectors site, trying to see all it offers and how it works. It’s the corners and edges I like to hang out in. Here are some of my findings.

Blog syndication seems to be working well. It’s an hour refresh cycle, so don’t look for your post to appear on the main page right away. But, there are so many blogs, so many posts, I need some sort of index to remember what I read and where it was. The list of all the blogs helps, unless I don’t remember the name of the blog. [Also, not everyone has put their name on their blog anywhere, so either it is unknown, or I guess.]

The link to find a random post is cool and interesting and of merit, but unfortunately is stuck on the same post. Alan, I think it’s somehow related to the randomization function. I see you have made groups, but each group that I have tried (if it works) goes to the same post (I think within that group) each time.

The Twitter visualization and related functions is cool, but again it isn’t quite real-time. And the linkages for tweets, retreets, mentions don’t show up all the time – might be browser related. Also, at the bottom of the page, the link for showing all tweets vectorized, though it seems to have 39 pages to show, each page selected merely repeats the first page of tweets.

Let’s see, what else? I wanted to use the logo in the upper left corner (Doug Engelbart and “Thought Vectors in Concept Space”) for an image I was working on. Screenshot didn’t work, it grabbed the main part of the body with vectorized blogposts instead. But I was able to use view source and find the actual image used…which is the hard geeky way of doing it, since I could have right-clicked and save picture as.

OK, what have I been learning about people and thought vectors? Looking at several posts this week, I see that some folks are unsure and wondering why we are using all the technological tools. Yet, this is part of the point, I think. The concept space is the augmentation to our communication, and our memory, and our thinking that the Web promotes. We need to develop a fluency and literacy in the use of various tools in this concept space, else our thought vectors fail to make connections. Writing papers, compositions, essays is so twentieth century.

Others (maybe most of us) express some personal details of our lives, our hopes, our plans. This is good! We need to think about our use of the open concept space in relation to what we reveal of ourselves. We also need to think about how we curate and archive our own digital identities. Personally, I have created a mess. I have two google accounts that keep getting mixed up so both have joined the thoughtvectors community. I have started and abandoned several blogs. I should step back and reorganize them, but probably never will.

Scottlo & Alan Levine
photo by Bill Smith CC-BY

Alan & Dr. C
photo by Bill Smith CC-BY

On a personal level, I am enjoying this whole experience along with some friends from previous experiences. In particular, I am grateful to and always learning from Alan Levine (creative use of technology and openness), Gardner Campbell (things to think about), Scottlo (using audio for thinking), Talky Tina (Ninja fun), and several others. And getting to know all the other participants (students all) is a great way to appreciate the variety of people.

Talky Tina
photo by Bill Smith CC-BY