Thinking Digital
Digital Community Pages
This page is for Stockton community members to post their comments, reflections, ruminations on all things digital. If you want to become a contributer, just send me an email at RosnerL@stockton.edu.
This page is for Stockton community members to post their comments, reflections, ruminations on all things digital. If you want to become a contributer, just send me an email at RosnerL@stockton.edu.
June 14th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Starting around 2000, students enrolled in Introduction to Literary Research at Stockton were asked to study selected texts, annotate them, and then place them on the web. The main “resesearch” feature of these projects was annotation — difficult words or phrases were supposed to be explicated in helpful ways. Overlib javascripts were used, and when a cursor was run over affected words, annotations appeared.
Our original server was not a powerhouse and our original blogging software, manila, was infrequently updated. Together they were no match for the growing demands of the web, and in 2006 server and software suffered badly from relentless spam attacks. The time spent manually removing spam from the “comments” section of hundreds of blogs was lengthy (and I thank primarily Ken Tompkins and Bob Heinrich for completing that thankless task). After that, we invested in a new server and new blogging software (WPMU).
The new blogging software, however, did not allow us to invoke the OverLib javascripts that make our projects’ annotations work. Thus a dilemma arose. We could not keep the old server running and open to the web (it was closed to all but the on-campus Stockton College community). In the summer of 2009 I took the time to migrate the projects from the old server to a new one. I used Firefox to save each project page, and it did a great job of saving pages with associated folders containing necessary javascripts, images, etc. Still, I had to edit the code for each page and rework links that pointed to the old server. It was a tedious process, but I hope worthwhile. You can see the projects here.
This is a fairly simple example of the need for file migration. If we care to save early examples of electronic technology, or even classroom projects that aren’t particularly old, migration of files to newer formats is absolutely crucial. In some cases the updating of file formats can be automated (in Photoshop, for instance, macros can be fashioned that repetitively reformat all files stored in a particular folder). But at other times the process can be time consuming and an easy thing to overlook. Think of those eight tracks floating around your house — perhaps cassette tapes and albums are better examples. All of these formats, none of which is particularly old, are becoming increasingly difficult to play. The same dating is happening electronic files on and off the web right now.
It may be good for the economy that many of us use iTunes to repurchase music that we already own (sometimes in several formats, I have many Dylan tunes on album, cd, and now iTunes), but such redundancy is expensive when we consider educational resources on the web. File migration is a matter that educators, not just the folk in tech support, needs to consider.
Tom Kinsella