Last week I publicly (via Twitter—really what other venue is there?) mentioned that I might be leaving Dropbox. What ensued was a rather lengthy conversation between me and others as to why I would do such a thing. Soon after the conversation started, the folks at @Dropbox noticed and joined the discussion. Why would I think about leaving Dropbox, a service which I often cite as one of the most useful around for educators? One word answer: Privacy. Based on some recent reports, I now have reason to be concerned about the degree to which Dropbox can keep files secure and private. When I expressed these concerns via Twitter the folks at Dropbox responded with some helpful information, and an invitation to write their legal department with any concerns I might have (140 characters being insufficient for adequately addressing the matter. And as I said on Twitter, credit to Dropbox for listening and engaging in a conversation.)

I started to write such an email, and then changed my mind, why not publicly layout my concerns, and let other educators see what the issues are, after all I feel somewhat responsible since I have spent so much time praising Dropbox. Rather than have a private dialogue with Dropbox it would be better to make it public, yes? So here goes.

The Background:

For those that don’t use Dropbox, think of it as an automatically syncing flash drive in the cloud, an excellent way to keep files synced across multiple computers and have them available on whatever device you have in front of you at the time. (Here is the official explanation.) Because of Dropbox I never need to carry assignments, syllabi, or journal articles that I want to read with me, or on a flash drive. These are just stored in the cloud and I can access them anytime the need arises. And this is just the tip of the ridiculously useful iceberg that is Dropbox. If you want more, just look at all the times it is mentioned on Profhacker (or just Google Dropbox uses and see what I mean). Dropbox has become one of the most important services in my media/computing ecosystem. On a scale of one to ten for usefulness and ease of use Dropbox is an 11.

The Problem:

About a month ago I started to see reports that expressed concern over Dropbox security, questions about the encryption being used, and who has access to the files you store on there servers. Basically there are to two sets of concerns. The first is that by design Dropbox is insecure. You can read the whole article, which is mildly technical but amounts to a concern that it would be fairly trivial for a nefarious party to steal one file and thus gain access to all your files without you necessarily knowing. The second is that Dropbox updated their Terms of Service to reflect the fact that they have access to your files if needed. In other words if the government subpoenas Dropbox, Dropbox has the ability to turn over your files in unencrypted form to the officials. (I know what some of you are thinking: Who cares, I am not doing anything illegal? . . . but wait I promise you should.) Both of these issues boil down to the fact that the encryption of your files takes place on the Dropbox servers, not on your own computer. In other words the question is who has the keys to your file(s) and where are those keys stored.

One way to think about this concern is to imagine your files are being stored in a lock box. One way to do it would be to put the files in a lockbox keep the key and send the whole box to Dropbox. In this way Dropbox has no way to unlock the files. But rather than this method what Dropbox employs is a technique whereby you send them your files they place them in a lockbox and give you the key, but have another copy of the key that lets them look in your box anytime they want. Why would they do it the second way instead of the first? Several reasons but I think there are probably two main ones: 1. Ease of use for Dropbox customers. A system where they (the server) handle the encryption rather than one where you manage (the client) has several advantages including a “lighter” Dropbox program on your device since it doesn’t have to handle encryption and the ability to retrieve files for you, even if you forget or lose your password. 2. Dropbox doesn’t want to cross the government.

Dropbox has responded to these concerns with a lengthy FAQ, which I encourage everyone to read. But, honestly the FAQ troubles me, and makes it even more likely that I will seek an alternative cloud service as it leaves many questions unanswered.

My Concerns:

Lets start with the transparency of this issue. What Dropbox is claiming, or appears to be claiming is that this change in the TOS does not reflect a policy shift, but merely an attempt to clarify what has been the policy all along. I’ll take Dropbox at their word on this, but I still have concerns about their wording.

“That said, like all U.S. companies, we must follow U.S. law. That means that the government sometimes requests us (as it does similar companies like Apple, Google, Skype, and Twitter) to turn over user information in response to requests for which the law requires that we comply.”

What Dropbox seems to be implying here is that they are required by US Law to have what is known as a backdoor key (the ability to unlock any file) and give it over to the government when served with a subpoena. But this is not actually the case. If Dropbox has the ability to unlock the files yes they have to give that over if they receive a request. But that doesn’t mean that they have to build a system that would allow them to do this. In other words if they didn’t have the ability to unlock your files the government couldn’t ask for that key, because Dropbox wouldn’t have the ability to unlock said files, they could only give over the encrypted versions of the files to the government, rather than the actual files themselves. This is what is essentially the issue in this article, about the government wanting to be able to WireTap the Internet. My understanding though, and I have asked a few lawyers about this, and their opinion was that the current state of the law does not require companies to serve up plaintext files.

Okay, at this point I hear many of you saying that you want this feature, that you want the government to be able to access the files of “the badies,” and since you have nothing to hide from the government you are not concerned. Let’s table that for a moment, and I’ll explain in a second why this is a dangerous view, but for now, irrespective of this issue there is a more significant one, which affects every user, regardless of whether or not you feel that you have something to hide from the government: A system which by design enables a third party to decrypt your files, is by design not secure. Or, a secret between two people can only be kept if one of them is dead. A system which by design has a backdoor to enable third party access is vulnerable to a security breach. As a way of thinking about this consider the relatively recent case where a Google Employee was accessing user email and chats. Yes, Google is concerned about user privacy, but any system, no matter how good the engineers has holes unless the user is the only one with the keys. So here is the rub, by trusting Dropbox and their current system you are not just trusting Dropbox but a host of employees. Any system designed like this will have a security breach at some point. It might not be a large one, it might not affect many users, but it will happen, you are just rolling the dice, gambling that you are not going to be the one effected (a fair gamble in most cases). Its not just software that you are trusting, but people, and people are usually the weakest link in any system.

Now just as importantly for me is the type of atmosphere this private-government partnership entails. I realize many of you might not agree with this, and I don’t want to turn this into a big discussion here (a discussion I am more than willing to have in other places), but I prefer to play corporate interests against the government, keep those two forces working against each other, rather than siding against the public. One of the particularly damaging developments we have seen in the web over the last 5 years is the ability of governments to control what happens online thru extra-judicial means, collaboration with companies to curtail our privacy. For me at least it isn’t a matter of having something to hide from the government, but rather knowing that I maintain control. Control of my own data, and the data of others who have entrusted it to me seems to be an essential component of dignity.

But What Do I Care?

You don’t have to imagine that the government would want your information to see some problems here. Let’s imagine that through an engineering problem (a problem with the code), an employee problem (see Google case above), or a deliberate hacking attack, Dropbox files suddenly become available. I actually have a good deal of student work, evaluations, letters of recommendation etc. stored there at any given time. Aside from my own paranoia about data and privacy there is a good bit of data that students and others with whom I work are entrusting me to keep private. Lets imagine that your grade roster is stored on Dropbox and that gets compromised. Once that file is unlocked and passed around there would be no getting it back. Leaving aside what kind of FERPA violation this may or may not be, I can imagine many students who might be harmed by this type of info. Have you stored judicial letters (for plagiarism cases) on Dropbox? I can think of a lot of information that I wouldn’t want out there even if it wouldn’t directly harm me.

Now about 80% of the stuff I store on Dropbox has no privacy issue associated with it, things like journal articles or chapters I want to read, or syllabi & assignments, or my running schedule, or stuff that is publicly available elsewhere like my CV. But there is enough there that I am concerned and looking for other options.

I will also note here that given the recent FOIA filings by conservative groups going after professors that being paranoid about data isn’t a bad thing, removing the option from others to share my data (this is why I use my own email more than I use the University provided one).

It’s true I have become somewhat paranoid here, using a VPN when on campus to ensure that the University can’t monitor my internet use, but I don’t think you have to be too paranoid to see this as an issue.

Questions for Dropbox

Having said all of this I think there are probably several things Dropbox could make clear that would help.

1. How many employees have access to user files? Is there a dual control system (do two employees have to sign off on access, or are there are a certain number of employees who can do so on their own)? Are records kept anytime users files are accessed this way, so that the company creates a clear audit trail? Do employees (and or any contractors they deal with) have background checks?

2. Under what conditions do they give the government data? The FAQ suggests that they would fight these requests if they found them to be lacking in merit. Have they done so? Can they make transparent this process? Hard data on this?

3. What is being done to fix the architecture issues? (Here Dropbox runs into a problem as the more it says about its security the more susceptible it is to vulnerabilities, but the less it says the less trustworthy it seems. Security thru obscurity really isn’t a good idea.)

4. Does Dropbox think it is their legal responsiblity, ethical responsiblity, or both to share information with the US government? Would they do so without a warrant? The policy says “request” what constituents a request?

The Other Options

1. As the Dropbox FAQ suggests the first option is to encrypt your file before it syncs with Dropbox. If you encrypt your files before syncing them with Dropbox, using something like TrueCrypt, nobody else will be able to access them. The disadvantage to this is it makes it such that your files are not accessible on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. In other words a not so useful option.

2. Use Dropbox only to store public, or pseudo-public information. Again 80% of what I store on Dropbox I am not concerned about so maybe I just only store that type of stuff on Dropbox.

3. Go back to using a flash drive. (Uhh, no thanks.) This also doesn’t let me use it across other platforms (iPad, phone, etc.)

4. Create a partition on my phone that would store these files. They would always be with me, and I could run something like Samba File sharing and Root Explorer. This would make it more than trivial though to access the files. Really I like cloud features.

5. Switch to a different service. Both SpiderOak and Wuala seem to offer services similar to Dropbox which encrypt the files on the user side. Both of these have applications for all the devices I use (iPad, Linux Computer, Android Phone).

6. Set up my own Dropbox type service on my home computer. Sure this can be done, or I can just run a VNC back to my computer and fetch the files I want, but this is less than optimal. There is also an open source Dropbox being developed, called Sparkleshare.

7. Pogoplug. Pogoplug works by creating your own cloudserver at home.

There is one meta-issue here. As the leader in this type of service, many other applications rely on, and provide support for syncing with Dropbox, for example iAnnotate or GoodReader—usability that would be sacrificed by switching services. And as the easiest and most frequently used, Dropbox is the easy one for me to recommend to faculty members who are less than computer savvy.

Right now I am investigating SpiderOak, Wuala, and PogoPlug. I will let you all know what I discover. My preferred option though would be for Dropbox to address the current issues, cause you know I really do like their service.



Click To Play

The Internet has fundamentally changed not only the means through which we communicate, but also how we communicate and how we think. It has, in turn, altered what others expect from our writing, what employers look for in applicants, and how we conceive of work that used to be private. One need only look at the blog explosion to see how the ability to disseminate our thoughts cheaply and quickly, and to develop a dialogue with others empowered thousands to believe their voice was/is worth sharing.

Teachers cannot ignore this communication shift. A Kindle is more than a paperless book: it changes how we read, how we define reading, and how we perceive intellectual ownership. As society continues down a path toward ever-increasing mobile communication, our conceptions of how we persuade will also change. I think few Rhetoric instructors would argue with the idea that students should be able to not only consume information, something they’ve been doing their entire lives, but also to produce it. But as it stands now, most rhetoric courses focus strictly on writing, and they limit assignments to the classroom environment – practices that devalue other rhetorical mediums, and the purpose of rhetoric itself. It is with this spirit in mind that I designed my special topics Fall 2009 freshman rhetoric course at the University of Texas at Dallas. I wanted to transform the traditional rhetoric class with its standard textbook into a more relevant, new-media oriented course that focused not only on writing and speaking, but one that also looked at rhetoric in film, photography and music.

To that end, I designed the course to include a live WordPress blog on which students could speak to each other and anyone else in the world who cared to listen. A website containing copies of their larger papers coincided with the blog. This made the assignments more communal in nature and reinforced that writing is meant to be shared. In a more traditional classroom environment, students write only for the teacher, an approach that makes assignments seem less relevant to the students and devalues the very idea of rhetoric. Requiring students to blog, contact people outside their classroom, and post writing on the Internet teaches them to engage with the community, gives their writing more significance, and supports rhetoric – a term that, by definition, implies community.

While this public exposure to their work can be intimidating for some students, it forces them to take more accountability for their words while teaching them the power of communication. If they embrace it, students can develop a sense of freedom and power that resides in someone who feels comfortable with both the tools of communication and also the arenas that currently dominate the conversation. Right now, a majority of the conversations are increasingly happening online. Students must know how to navigate these waters. It is a direction more and more university rhetoric departments are going toward, including Ohio State University, which has some excellent examples of class blogs.

A strictly digital approach is not for everyone. I will always prefer a paper book, believe memorizing grammar rules is essential, and don’t think everyone needs a blog. Nonetheless, these are issues students should be aware of. Creating work in a vacuum delegitimizes it. When the goal of your course is to teach students to persuade, and you don’t include what is now the most influential tool for disseminating your argument, you are crippling your students.
Writing and reading online is different than performing those same tasks on paper. We communicate differently on the Internet, and as more and more people read from their phones and portable e-readers, our understanding of communication will change further still. As technology shifts, so does our means of persuasion; if students do not explore this, they will find their skills quickly out of date. Rhetoric is more than just learning a standard structure for an argument. Students should be asking themselves: “How does what we write and what we think change when we know that in ten minutes we can create a blog and broadcast to the world? How does this change how we see and portray ourselves?” These are the deeper rhetorical questions students need to grapple with. It is this focus that will make them stronger readers, writers, and citizens.

The second media-based aspect of the course was centering the writing assignments around a film that the students would produce. My goal was that this would provide continuity between assignments, while reinforcing one of the fundamental ideas underlying this class: rhetoric is found in a variety of media, not just writing. Many rhetoric programs devote time to “visual rhetoric,” but it is often cursory at best and culminates in a short essay examining a film or piece of art. While I do not object to this method, I was always bothered that writing was still given precedent over the image. We tell students that pictures are a viable means of persuasion, and then we as them to write about it. This hardly reinforces the message. So I thought: “Why not have the students work with the mediums they study, including film?”

I “hired” each student for a position in the “company” based on his skills and interests with the idea that this would not only hold their interest, but also be quite germane to their course of study. Everyone had to apply for their job, writing a cover letter and resume, and having a personal interview with me. Students were never entirely on their own, as the positions were part of large groups: pre-production, post-production, marketing, and web design.

Throughout the semester we discussed the various rhetorical aspects that comprise a film – including text, images, music, and sound effects – focusing on how and why creators made the decisions they did. Always, the emphasis was on these crafts as rhetorical devices. The end result was a website and corresponding film, created by the students and comprised of their work throughout the semester. Overall, I have found it a fun, effective approach.

An added benefit of the film was that it captured the students’ interest, as did broadcasting their work on their website, www.rvuentertainment.com. They became so invested in the film that the writing pertaining to it took on new meaning. The first essay required them to identify an issue in their local community and write about it. From these, the students voted on which would be made into a film. The second major writing assignment was a visual essay in which the students each described how they would make the film, supporting their paper with images they found online or took themselves. In addition to these, smaller assignments were given to each student based on his role in the company, including reports, marketing letters, short essays on artists who inspired them, and storyboards. All students were also required to blog weekly. The students really took to the project and, barring the procrastination that is a given for many college freshman, they handled it well. Weekly student-run meetings in class kept everyone on the same page and let me know where things stood. There were also individual meetings in which I worked one-on-one or in small groups to help them with their respective roles.

I admit, I had my doubts. Coming from a traditional writing background, and considering the departments goals, I felt the focus of the class should remain on writing aptitude, and the one constant question rolling around my head all semester was: “Are you doing the students an injustice? Are you taking time away from writing skills to focus on film, sound, and these “alternate” methods of persuasion?” I think my fears were reasonable, but ultimately the class worked out well. Because so many rhetorical devices remain constant across mediums, teaching students how pacing working in screen cuts or music only reinforces how it could be employed in their writing.

Overall, I think the class was a success. It taught the students to work with a variety of mediums and to always consider their work as something to share. It is this final point that the entire course hinged on: community. The blog, the group film – everything the students – did was about engaging the world, establishing a presence, and utilizing the tools that the rest of the world is operating with, rather than limiting them to traditional print-based technology.

Here is an interview about the project with Barbara.

So as most of the readers of this blog know, we launched a new major here at the University of Texas at Dallas: Emerging Media and Communications. (Sorry the website is not as informative as it ought to be, yet. We have been busy getting the program structured and have not had time to work on our public persona, but we will soon.) At any rate, what is exciting about this program to me is that it is built from the ground up. That is, we did not take an old media studies program and add in a digital studies, we started quite literally with a blank slate (okay not slate but computer screen). This has its advantages (and its disadvantages) primarily with course design and major progression. I am sure that we got a lot of things wrong, and will need to change a bunch of things, heck who knows what is going to happen with the media landscape in four years, it could require a whole host of classes we can’t even imagine right now. But, for now I am pretty pleased with what we have worked out: a variety and progression of courses that cover a range of media (audio, video, text), that incorporate both studio creation type classes and theory of media classes.

You can read the official language of the program over at the main site, but before I discuss the specifics of the syllabus and course design I thought I would post some of my personal thoughts on the program, what I see the goal of the program to be. I thought this would be 1) A useful exercise for me to try and concretize what I think the program is about. 2) Useful for students in the program and those thinking about majoring in it (practicing transparency). 3) Useful for others who are thinking about starting a similar program. 4) A way of generating feedback, opening a conversation about what these types of programs ought to do, need to do.

I tend to be a reductionist, not in terms of writing (although I do like twitter) but in terms of thinking about a “core organizing principle” for things. I try to take a “what’s the goal” approach, and that goal better be only a paragraph long. In designing this program, indeed before I even came here to UT-Dallas I think I spent a lot of time mulling over in my head the following quote from Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs:

A new kind of digital divide ten years from now will separate those who know how to use new media to band together from those who don’t.

Now Rheingold wrote this in 2003, so we are over half way to his projected ten year horizon. And so, this is what I lie awake at night thinking about. There is a new type of literacy developing, one between those who will understand the digital network media landscape, and who use it to produce, to organize, to take ownership over their lives, responsiblity for their community, to be critical of it, to engage with it . . . and with those who merely consume it. A divide between those who will be passive consumers at best, victims at worst, and those who will be active participants. There is a lot of nuance in this argument that gets glossed over when I reduce it this way, but I think it is essentially true. We are at “the changeover” a moment when culture is changing, will look completely different than it does now. What that is I have no idea, but I am sure it is going to be profoundly heterogenous to what we have now (think printing press change but on steroids).

And so this crosses with my other goal in education, (as much as I rant about the shortcomings of the University system I do think it can serve a purpose): education, specifically higher education is one of the best ways for an individual to increase their life chances and choices. Sure if you go to Harvard, or Princeton, or one of those other top ten ranked schools, the prestige of your diploma will carry you pretty far, sans having learned anything. But, for other institutions, I think we out to be seriously concerned that both our mode and content of education is going to be, perhaps already is, irrelevant. And that we are educating our students for a world that no longer exists instead of educating them for the world they will inherit. This strikes me as irresponsible.

We have somewhere between 30-50 new majors at the undergrad level (hard to tell because many are not “officially” declared yet) and I have been fielding a lot of questions from faculty here, and at other schools about what this major is. Many of these questions are sincere if skeptical, but many are of the “your just teaching a fad,” “you are seriously going to let students major in “Facebook?” variety. So, my quippy response has been: we are teaching digital literacy—offering no explanation because it doesn’t seem to help. But yes this major is a bit like studying at “Social Media University,” but done right I think that is a good thing. And so, the longer more official justification, taken from my syllabus:

In particular, this class will reflect one of the fundamental principles underlying the strength of the internet: None of us are smarter than all of us. Or, if you prefer a slightly different take: Knowledge is a communal process even if we have been taught to treat it as an individual product. . . .

Given all the above, you might ask yourself: “What’s in it for me?” A fair question, since I am going to ask a great deal of you, probably more than any other class you are taking this semester, not just because of the workload, but because I am requiring you to participate in a whole new style of learning. Let me begin by answering the question this way. . . I think we are approaching a critical cultural juncture, where literacy itself is changing. There will develop, perhaps already has developed, a significant divide between those who know how to use these emerging media, and those who uncritically consume them. My goal for the class is to help you move into that first category: to become active, critical producers in this new media landscape.

So I’ll end there and post again later, on the how’s and why’s of that syllabus, the details and the thought process behind it’s construction.

• First up is an article by Michael Wesch, A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do). The article appears on the Britannica Blog, an institution I do not always associate with progressively thinking about how technology changes knowledge production. Nevertheless Wesch’s piece is worth a read for he navigates the precarious but important middle ground between being a luddite and being techno-utopian, instead claiming that there is nothing new about the notion of playing the “getting by game,” even if the means by which this game is played is different. Ultimately he suggests a rather simple solution: Public Academia.
• Group Table: Group Table is another web application in the list of online collaboration/group organization tools. While there are many out there, most people I know prefer Bassecamp and Backpack, Group Table is focused on specifically serving the student population.
• Open Huddle: When I was searching for free online tools for hosting my virtual grad class, I looked into many (way too many) options. (I just needed chat function, so in the end ended up using a chat program but I digress.) But, Open Huddle was one of the better ones people sent me. Unlike Group Table (above) which is focused on organizing the group, Open Huddle’s purpose is to provide a set of tools for collaborating in real time. Open Huddle has video chat and a drawing board (think virtual white board) as well as allowing messaging and file sharing. My guess is in the future we will see a lot more of these types of sites for robust online learning and collaboration.
• Last but not least, watch Antonio’s presentation on using YouTube as a Classroom Resource.

• lumifi is a online research tool for helping you to search and organize information from the web (sort of like a web based DevonAgent, DevonThink). You can watch the introductory video here.

No, that is not a screen shot of Keynote, it is from an online slide creation tool called 280Slides. The interface though is so similar to Keynote that one might accuse them of just ripping off Keynote, stripping it down and turning it into a web application. Indeed in reading thru the few blog posts it seems that the developers have a Mac bend. Given my preference for Keynote over PowerPoint (“Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely“) one might guess that I like the interface of 280Slides. Like Keynote it is designed more towards a visual presentation and less towards putting text on slides.

280Slides is relatively easy to use, and comes with the advantage of other web applications, i.e. working from any computer, accessing your presentation from any browser, not worrying about file compatibility, etc. And, while I might prefer 280Slides to something like Google Presentation, this still finishes a distant second to SlideRocket (which I reviewed here).

Just finished my semester here at University of Texas at Dallas, which gives me time to return to this neglected blog.

Over a month ago I signed up for a beta-invite for Sliderocket, a what looked to be promising online presentation tool. Think of it as Google Docs for Power Point. To be sure there are several free options for presentation software out there, but none are as feature rich as I would like. And since slides are all about visual presentation I don’t just want something that lets me make bullet points or show slides of text. I want something that looks nice. After playing with Sliderocket for several hours, I can say so far it is the best in its class.

Why would you want one of these? Why use a web based application when a desktop based one works so well? Good question. I don’t see web based applications replacing desktop applications completely but they are useful in ways that desktop versions are often not. For instance, web based applications allow you to collaboratively author a document/work together in real time. Several times over the course of the semester I used Google Docs to work on a document with colleagues, either simultaneously, or back and forth over the course of several days (without having to navigate swapping files, which can get tricky when we are using different applications). Having a good slide creation program will allow me to collaboratively create slide presentations with others, or you can require students to use it, allowing you to easily add comments directly to the slide (again sans the problem of swapping files). Second, while I probably won’t be giving up Keynote anytime soon, a web based application will allow me to edit a presentation easily when I don’t have my computer. I am big on being redundant with presentation information. When I am going somewhere to give a talk I always have the slides available on the net somewhere in case my computer crashes/dies or can’t be hooked to projector etc. . .So, having a backup for editing is also a good idea. And finally, having a free online tool to which you can point students is important. This way students can author presentations/documents without having to buy expensive software (a presentation authored in Sliderocket could easily look better than Power Point-and its free).

Why Sliderocket “rocks:” Unlike a few other free versions out there (including both web based and desktop based) the people who designed Sliderocket understand that slide presentation is a visual/layout “thing”, not a text/word “thing.” All of the essential features are there: images, build in, build out, slide transition (those ones only available in Keynote, can now be used thanks to flash on a PC), embed movies, embed audio, text manipulation, etc. Right now they only offer five templates (but they are the only ones I really want). You can upload presentations for Power Point (not from Keynote though, which isn’t really too much an issue as Keynote exports to Power Point).

But where Sliderocket really shines is in its ability to share. As you create you can share whole presentations, or individual slides, for collaborative editing or viewing. You can even use Sliderocket to host a “meeting,” giving out the web address for others to view the presentation. And again because it is done in flash, you don’t have to make the sacrifices in style necessary to use something like Slideshare (which I currently rely on).

Sliderocket does have a few limits. First, it is still in beta so you will have to sign up and wait in line to give it a try, and it could be a bit buggy (although I had no problems). Second the load times were a bit more than I would like, nothing annoying but just that extra second too long. In fairness this could be a result of the internet connection I am working from, but this is something to keep in mind (more data is being transfered here than via a much simpler web application). Finally, no web application yet is faster than what I can do with a desktop one. This is partly because of speed of connection, load times etc., but also partly because of things like keyboard shortcuts, automation etc. So, while I probably won’t use Sliderocket as my replacement for Keynote, it will be my collaborative tool of choice (just as soon as all my friends get invites).

P.S.: I ended up with some more Evernote Beta invites, let me know if you still want one (leave a comment, or email me).

• One of the difficulties in teaching and researching on the web, is preserving the paths of exploration, not only for one’s own purposes but so that others can traverse the same path. In this regard I have mentioned Diigo before, which allows you to bookmark, highlight, and create slideshows from webpages (a useful solution). But there are other options for sharing web surfing. As Liberal Education Today highlights one can use Trailfire or perhaps more interestingly PMOG which attempts to add a bit of fun to the process, making web surfing a social game.
• Speaking of staying organized. Gathering in Light (the name has something to do with Quakers the subject of the bloggers dissertation) has a well formulated post on using del.icio.us to organize your research, especially when prepping for writing the dissertation.
• Finally The Chronicle covers Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s open sourcing of the manuscript review process. Working with MIT and GrandTextAuto he made his manuscript available free online. Thus opening up the peer review process. I tend to agree with Noah when he says that The Chronicle article tends towards creating a conflict (blog review vs. peer review) when perhaps that wasn’t the point. Anyway both the article and Noah’s reflections on the process are worth a read.