shawn rider dot com

UB DMS Course Index

At the beginning of the Fall 2007 Semester, I received some plaintive emails from a grad student at UB (SUNY Buffalo) who wanted to look at my notes for the courses I taught (which he was preparing to teach). My course websites were well known within the Department of Media Study, and outside the department, too. I always tried to make the sites as complete and useful as possible, keeping in mind that they were meant to supplement the in-class environment (as opposed to being designed as online courses, these are merely course websites — big difference).

At the time, I had just suffered a hard drive crash and forced move to another machine and I could not find the files anywhere. My primary backup had been destroyed (reminder to everyone to practice good backup habits). I felt terrible that I couldn’t help out a fellow DMS student, and also that I had lost four years worth of planned, accumulated teaching materials.

However, in going through all of my various hard drives from old machines, I came across a complete archive of my course sites. What luck! I was able to do some minor modifications to make the internal navigation work, but otherwise they are the same as the last day that I was at UB. I invite you to browse the courses, relive fond memories of The Shawn Rider Show (Thank you very much, I’m here all week!), or use them to help yourself or your students. 

Please note: I am not trying to maintain these courses per se. They are presented here for archival purposes. So there may be broken external links or irrelevant information. As technology and techniques change, I’m sure many of the production techniques presented in these courses will become irrelevant. Nonetheless, I hope you’ll agree that there is still a value in this content, and the price is right! 

UB DMS Course Index

The Phone

The Phone is a sequence of interactive vignettes. It reminds me a few other things that are very similar, such as 99 Rooms and Not Pr0n. All of these things will suck you in for an hour, and I like them because they occupy a territory between artful decoration, interactive game/puzzle, and narrative. One one hand, all three of the mentioned works are collections of mostly disconnected vignettes. They are not overtly narrative, which is why I use the term vignettes to describe the individual elements of these interactive objects. In a way, they operate very much like a painting — they draw the viewer in to look, and look closely. They reward scrutiny. The interaction is very low-impact, generally involving a poking, prodding, or tracing rather than simulated actions and movements. It would be really interesting to have a frame on the wall that could display different beautiful riddles for you to figure out, using your finger to interact. I think there will be a future for those kinds of decorative/engaging pieces.

I stumbled upon (not using StumbleUpon, just the regular way) a thing called Swicki. What is a Swicki you ask? Good question. Turns out a Swicki is a particular kind of search engine which returns results based on a preference profile it generates from user-feedback. And the Swicki site allows users to create their own search engines, which can be customized to return tailored results on any topic or agenda.

There are a lot of these already, probably too many to be useful. Some have cool names and topics, like Systemic Unlearning Meme, which is a Swicki dedicated to learning contemporary web design. If it returned better results… This is an example of a Swicki-in-training, as most of these Swicki engines are. A search for PHP on the Systemic Unlearning Meme Swicki yields a list of results that places PHP.net (the main hub for PHP information online) in 6th place, while Google puts PHP.net at the top of its search results (which are, albeit, preceeded by some ads and book search plugs). But I suggested a promotion for PHP.net, and PHP is a popular keyword for the Swicki, so hopefullly others have found more useful content at PHP.net than 43Things.com (which ranks second in the list of results).

On the other hand, the #1 All Hip Hop Swicki manages a bit better. On a search for Sovereign, the top results are all from major Hip Hop information outlets, and result number two mentions Lady Sovereign, my hoped-for reference. I suggested to the moderator to axe the results for Sovereign Financial and Sovereign Restaurant, so once again, I have something to come back and check on. Let’s see how this thing learns…

Along these same lines, I recently discovered Ning, through a link from BoingBoing to the CC Hits site, which lists Creative Commons-licensed music releases. The CC Hits site is very well-done and definitely on my watch list. I hope CC music isn’t all dominated by electro-remixes by kids with Acid…

Ning, however, is even more interesting. Like the Swicki site, Ning allows users to create their own user-driven websites. These are “web 2.0″ in the most conventional sense of the term (although that doesn’t make them necessarily unattractive or less useful). The CC Hits is really a standout from the browsing that I’ve done so far, integrating a media player and featuring a complete redesign of the site. Most Ning sites allow users to approve and/or disapprove postings in a Digg or Videobomb fashion. With CC Hits, this user-based evaluation should be very useful in wading through the many tracks available. Some of the other sites are, well, less obviously useful.

Ning allows users to either clone the Ning site they come across or create a brand new site based on a template. There are many different templates available, from photo and video sharing sites to social networking sites for clubs, dating sites, or even social networking sites for any member of the animal kingdom. Users can create their own Craigslist style “marketplace” site, for trading goods or services, as well as traditional blogs and discussion groups. Even more advanced sites based on or integrated with Google maps can be created.

These are two services that allow users with little to no knowledge of web design to create sophisticated websites. In a way, they are the ultimate epitome of how O’Reilly envisions Web 2.0: These sites not only allow and leverage user-interaction, they are literally skeletons for users to build their own applications that allow and leverage user-interaction to create valuable content. There is some level of meta-removal here that is pure poetry. And from a web design point of view, Ning and Swicki are examples of the beautifully modular web application design. Not only can one rework the visual, procedural and data components of the site individually and at-will, but one can completely spawn new sites and applications using a common codebase.

I’m excited to keep watch on these projects and see what develops…