Keeping Up With The Technology

I like to think of myself as a relatively technically savy individual. There's a lot that I cant do, but I have a better than pedestrian knowledge about most things.

One of the save things about staying within one's institutional walls is that wha you have the ability to do in terms of your electronic shingle is limited by what the institution will support. If they won't do blogs or wikis with your personal space, than you don't have to worry about them.

But when you venture beyond your own institutional walls, then it becomes a different story. I have no idea if my domain provider allows me to create a blog or wiki - I'd prefer at this stage to use a blog system created by someone else so that I don't have to worry about maintaining it.

I mention these things because today my domain sent me this:

.Mobi Landrush Registration Opens Today!
Many premium names are still
available. Hurry up, reserve yours today.

Within the next three years 1.3 billion users will use their phones to access
the Internet. .MOBI will be the standard by which these people browse the web
from their mobile device.

It is the first top-level domain dedicated to delivering the Internet to
mobile devices and is designed to guide mobile users to made-for-mobile Internet
content and services that can be accessed with confidence.

What is landrush registration?

Landrush is a two-week period of time prior to General Registration in which
individuals or organizations may register .mobi domains at an earlier date (with
a slightly premium price).

Why register a .MOBI Domain?

• Be accessible to your customers anywhere, anytime
• Mobile devices outnumber personal computers by four to one
• Register great names long snapped-up in other TLD extensions

Prebook your .MOBI Domain

Doteasy is now offering landrush and general registrations starting from
September 26, 2006.

.MOBI Registration - Registration Period - Price per year -
Requirements
Landrush (Sept 26 - October 10, 2006) - US$35/year - 2-Year
minimum
General (October 11, 2006 - Indefinitely) - US$12.50/year - 2-Year
minimum

Sign up now for .MOBI
domain today!

So now I sit here, before my morning cup of coffee or tea or anything to really wake me up, trying to figure out what .MOBI is and whether or no it is something that I need to know about. If I were still inside the protective walls of my institution I would have woken up the morning and remained ignorant to .MOBI's existance. But instead, I have to at least gain a pedestrian knowledge of what this thing is.

Tags: AECT 2006, AECT, graduate student, graduate students, graduate school, higher education, education

One Of The Last Institutional Vestages... E-mail

Okay, so it appears that The Rest Of The World Gets In The Way again (although it is the same post referenced the last time). Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to get caught up on transcribing my dissertation interviews and reviewing my observational videos, so I haven't had time to work on my shingle. That changed tonight.

While it has been a while since I moved to my own domain (and if you missed the story, I recounted it again in the first entry of this blog - see Starting This Journey), I have continued to use my institutional e-mail instead of the mkb@michaelbarbour.com that I could have created. I continued to use my mkb@uga.edu e-mail address because I felt that the institutional label lent some credibility to my work as an academic. While still hold that view, I have become more and more concerned with some of the big brother features that are common with institutional e-mail accounts.

In the past, I always used a non-affliated e-mail account. I had (and still have) an e-mail account with the National Captial Freenet (http://www.ncf.ca) and I would always use that account on business cards and in correspondence, on websites, etc. - instead of whatever ISP that I had or whatever school account (secondary school or university) that I could have used.

However, over the past few hours I have really been thinking about this, and really this is the last institutional tie I have when it comes to my online presence. So I bit the bullet and switched. A colleague of mine set me an invitation for a GMail account not long after GMail got set-up. I responded at the time and created the account. Through a series of odd circumstances tonight, I decided to recall/remember (with the assistance of Google) my username and password for that account and see if I could mask my institutional identity within GMail.

Well, this was a message that I sent from my GMail account to my UGA account:

From: MICHAEL K. BARBOUR
Mailed-By: gmail.com
To: mkb@uga.edu
Date: Sep 19, 2006 9:25 PM
Subject: Test

Notice the from field. When I click reply, in the "To:" field appears mkb@uga.edu - as I was able to create that as the default "Reply to:" option. So for all exterior purposes, it appears as if I am using an institutional account. Granted, all of my in-coming mail still goes to the UGA server before begin forwarded to my GMail account, none of my outgoing mail can be seen from there.

Basically, I get to keep the credibility that comes wth the institutional label (and I'm sure that there are people who disagree with me on this point), but I get to by-pass actually having to use the institutional system.

Hopefully the continued re-design of my non-institutional homepage will go as smoothly as the transition to GMail did this evening, although I doubt it - as I had my colleague show me how to manipulate my image in Fireworks only to forget two nights ago when I went to do it again.

But that will have to wait for the next entry - in any regard, I am still planning and on target to release my new homepage before I travel to AECT.

Tags: AECT 2006, AECT, graduate student, graduate students, graduate school, higher education, education

How Much Do You Include?

Okay, so it has been a while since I have been on track (even if And Then The Rest Of The World Gets In The Way) . But I have e-mailed my colleague to set up a time to get my header image finalized for my homepage and I think I have decided upon the outline and content based on what I discussed previously (see Style).

One thing that I am still struggling with is what to do with my publications and presentations. In the beginning, when I was using the National Captial Freenet (http://www.ncf.ca) to host my homepage, I used to link digital copies of all of my publications and even all of the PPT files from my various presentations on my homepage. When I migrated to the UGA server, I did the same thing. But when I migrated to my michaelbarbour.com homepage I didn't. At the time I think it was the work that would have been involved in uploading and linking all of those items in again, but a part of me had other concerns.

I know that there are certain copyright issues that I haven't been concerned with in the past. And regardless if I support open source or not, if a journal owns the copyright to my article what kind of example am I setting for my students as a future member of the academy by ignoring these issues.

There is also the issue that Vegreville raising in his entry entitled Losing control of the manuscript. In this post, he makea case for why he doesn't or isn't posting manuscripts anymore. From his entry, I get the sense that he is referring to manuscripts that are in progress or have been submitted but not accepted, as much as he is talking about publications. But he does raise some interesting points.

So, where does that leave me? Ignore copyright issues in my own little protest for open source and open content by posting digital copies all of my publications and presentations? Or simply provide the list with an encouragement to e-mail me for copies?

There is a middle ground, which would be to post some and not others, but how would you judge which ones to post? There is also the issue of whether or not to post conference presentation PPT slides, I mean a lot of us graduate students have a lot of conference presentations because we need to present to get funding from the university to go, and we need to go to get our names out there and meet others to help us find employment upon graduation.

Some things to think about and hopefully get feedback on. What should be included in my professional shingle that I am designing for the main, or at least immediate purpose of helping me find employment?

Tags: AECT 2006, AECT, graduate student, graduate students, graduate school, higher education, education