Notebook of Sand

• Recent Publications
• Recent Projects
• Conferences & Speaking
"Comparing Spatial Hypertext Collections"
  ACM Hypertext '09
"Archiving and Sharing Your Tinderbox"
  Tinderbox Weekend London '09
"The Electronic Nature of Future Literatures"
  Literary Studies Now, Apr '09
"The World University Project"
  St. John's Col. Cambridge, Feb '09
"Ethical Explanations,"
  The New Knowledge Forge, Jun '08
Lecture, Cambridge University
  Tragedy in E-Lit, Nov '07
Hypertext '07: Tragedy in E-Lit
Host for Tinderbox Cambridge '07
Keynote: Dickinson State Uni Conf
Upper Midwest NCHC'07: Speaker
eNarrative 6: Creative Nonfiction
HT'05: "Philadelphia Fullerine"
  Nelson award winning paper
NCHC '05:
 Nurturing Independent Scholarship
Riddick Practicum:
  Building Meeting Good Will
NCHC '04:
  Philadelphia Fullerine
  Lecture on American Studies
WWW@10: Nonfiction on the Web
NCHC '03: Parliamentary Procedure
ELL '03 -- Gawain Superstar
• (a)Musing (ad)Dictions:

Ideas. Tools. Art. Build --not buy. What works, what doesn't. Enjoy new media and software aesthetics at Tekka.

Theodore Gray (The Magic Black Box)

Faith, Life, Art, Academics. Sermons from my family away from home: Eden Chapel!

My other home: The Cambridge Union Society (in 2007, I designed our [Fresher's Guide])

The Economist daily news analysis

Global Higher Ed blog

• Hypertext/Writing

Writing the Living Web

Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems, hypertext expert Mark Bernstein. (Electronic) Literature, cooking, art, etc.

Fabulous game reviews at playthisthing.

• Stats

Chapter I: Born. Lived. Died.

There is a Chapter II.

Locale: Lancaster County Pa, USA

Lineage: Guatemala

Religion: My faith is the primary focus of my life, influencing each part of me. I have been forgiven, cleansed, and empowered by Jesus Christ. Without him, I am a very thoughtful, competent idiot. With him, I am all I need to be, all I could ever hope for. I oppose institutional religious stagnation, but getting together with others is a good idea. God is real. Jesus Christ is his Son, and the Bible is true. Faith is not human effort. It's human choice. I try to be the most listening, understanding, and generous person I can.

Interests: Anything I can learn. Training and experience in new media, computer science, anglophone literature, education, parliamentary debate, democratic procedure, sculpture, and trumpet performance. Next: applied & computational linguistics, probably.

Education: Private school K-3. Home educated 4-12. Graduated Summa Cum Laude from Elizabethtown College in Jan 2006. As the 2006 Davies-Jackson Scholar, I studied English at St. John's College, Cambridge University from 2006 - 2008.

Memberships: Eden Baptist, Cambridge Union Society, ACM, AIP, GPA.

Alum of the Elizabethtown College Honors Program, sponsored by the Hershey Company.

Jessica Rubart Gives Suggestions For Tinderbox Collaboration
Sunday, 26 Jul 2009 :-:

Following on my series of posts about collaboration and Tinderbox (especially the one about patterns for teams to follow), Jessica Rubart sent me this truly staggeringly-fabulous set of suggestions.

Jessica is an experienced team manager, and a researcher on the use of Tinderbox-like spatial hypertext for team-based activities. Her latest project (brilliant) is an app which uses spatial hypertext to plan Scrum Meetings (more about scrum).

  • Meeting structure:
    • Describing an agenda (notes in a column)
    • Adding references to documents (e.g. URLs)
  • Team structure:
    • Persons and groups, e.g. through a composite note
    • Organizations and persons, e.g. through additional composite notes and aliases
    • Persons and roles
  • Process structure:
    • Task notes as composite notes containing relevant document references
    • Workflows, i.e. task notes, process links, and maybe links to team structure
  • Group forming (E-Learning):
    • Group areas for joining
    • Group recommendations through agents based on profiles of persons in the model
  • Project plan:
    • Priority lists through spatial arrangement (E.g. Task lists for persons with dependency links to other tasks)
    • Date attributes for tasks
    • Status adornments for tasks, e.g. within a person composite note
    • Scrum-like task boards using adornments for setting tasks states (a state could be an attribute) and an agent for generating a sprint burn down chart from a current task board (this is good -- Nathan)
  • Goals
  • Recent changes:
    • In addition to a description of changes it might be useful to include a status of the tinderbox file or an area, saying e.g. that a review of person or role xy is required.
  • Landing areas:
    • Adornments for groups of people who get the notes by e-mail, which one drops there
    • Adornments as a kind of todo-lists for users work items can be dropped there; after a user has completed the work on an item, he/she can drop it on the todo-list of the following user.
  • Cooperative access:
    • Use version control and visual diff :-) (by this, Jessica is referring to my ongoing work on comparing changes in Tinderbox files)
    • Further development could think about splitting a tinderbox file into several parts that could be put into a version control system separately. Then, those different parts can be locked by different people at the same time so that simultaneous work on different parts of the shared model is possible. Alternatively, one could use different files for each part. But then linking between those might be constrained.
    • Use application sharing for synchronous access, e.g. through WebEx (Nathan: This is a great idea)
  • Brainstorming/Mind Mapping:
    • Use application sharing for synchronous sessions
  • Mashups:
    • Composing notes from different files or different areas of one file
    • Providing a merged view of notes and resources on the web that somehow are related to the notes
  • Overview:
    • Guided tour (this can be done with Tinderbox Demo/Tutorial format)
    • Reading advice (see above)