What is Elmwoodstrip.com
Elmwoodstrip.com is a Buffalo, NY based community dataspace that brings local residents together and

allows them to "click-publish" textual data, imagery and sound. (E:strip) was developed in response to the the negative effects experienced by our local community due to the globalization of communication via the intenet and inclimant weather keeps buffalonians at home 6-7 months out of the year. The intentionally simple interface allows users with little or no web design knowledge to publish their thoughts and artwork. Elmwoodstrip.com runs off an open source MySQL database with a PHP/HTML frontend.

Who is part of this online community?
Currently there are about 45 people on the site with several journals that have recently been started and not yet publicized.

I expect to announce it publically this coming month with the distribution of flyers, banners, tee-shirts and advertisements in local venues. It will also be advertised on Plasma screens at locations around buffalo?

I would like to eventually take the heart of the network and move it to a local community intranet with wireless, cell phone, and kiosk assessibility in an effort to move it even further away from the web.

What do people talk about on the site?
People talk about anything from their experiences on the streets of Buffalo to their private lives, to issues of local and national interest. We do not have any specific guidlines for what people talk about on the site. The only restrictions are that you cannot post porn or hate speech.

Sample Topics
gender*
kerry
environment
animal*
cancer
pano*
politic*
jesus*
beer*

Future Plans
Local Political Debate - I would like to create a system for reporting on local political and environmental issues. This system would be used to allow people with littl ebackground on these topics to easily see what each candidate/law was about and whom it affected.

Customer based Restaurant and Venue Revue - I would like to incorporate more features for rating and describing local venues, restaurants, policians, and music without resorting to advertisments.

Sound Database - I would like to write for a grant for a hundred or so voice recorders that could be lent out in a library system. The results would be electronically compiled into a database where people could search by date and location to hear what elmwood sounded during a specific timespace.

Electronic Newspaper - I would liek to develop a electronic newspaper that automatically sleects relevant information from journals each week to compile an electronic newspaper which can be read via cellphones, on the site, or via email subscription. This will be especially important once there are many users and you cannot search each journal everyday.

A 3D chat room - in anime/film noir style based on the elmwood community. I have not decided on the exact method yet, but people will be able to access the 3D chat as an avatar or simply from a textual interface through some other hardware.

Cell phones - More cell phone functions to allow people without computers to use the site.

Basic Spell Check - This is deifnately going to be in a future update as soon as I get a chance.

Funding
(E:strip) is currently funded by the paul, matthew , and terry foundation for the electronc betterment of buffalo neighborhoods foundation of north america. What we need to take this to the next level? About $5000 in investment captial to buy advertising, a faster server connection at our house, and to start developing the beginnnings of the wireless system, and a real Flash Communication Server License.

How does it work
(E:strip) works off a MySQL database with a PHP frontend. When the user types a journal it is sent to the database server fo
r storage. The
re
a

re no static pages. When you view the journals, the PHP code sends a message to the MySQL database to get the information requested, either by username, search, date, etc.

The Flash (e:chat) is based on the Macromedia Flash communictaion server. The (e:radio) is based on the Shoutcast server system. Both run off of our home server, the future home of the entire site once we have enough money for a faster, higher bandwidth connection.

The two posts below this are in response to this situation I am having in tempreal. I just wanted to post them here for historical reference, so that I can rememeber what it was like after I erase the tempreal journal at the end of the semester.

This is being posted here to remind me how much I hated this experience at UB.

---

The course was designed to see what students could do in a 3D virtual community with no governmental or leadership structures in place. People had also been asking for a way to interract with their models and this course was developed in response.

We hoped to see how students would personally, socially and artistically develop in 3D space if given the tools and left on their own. This does not mean abandoned. Jesse and I were 100% available to meet, online or offline, with any student who needed help modeling, scripting, and writing. As a matter of fact, I often posted it to my journal, asking if people wanted to learn more about how I was making the scripts I wrote and was available for a huge portion of the semester almost 24/7 via IM.

I think that you are beginning to attack me on a personal level and I do not appreciate that. I take great personal offense to many of the comments on your latest journal entry.

When I said that it was healthy to discuss the matter publically, I was hoping you were talking about more constructive criticism in terms of how we could get other students involved. Most importantly, I was hoping other students would have input of their own. I hope you can re-read your journal and ask yourself what is really necessary to explain your position. Especially comment such as:


Your Comment"Should the members of the class lose respect for you or your abilities by bearing witness to this discussion, both they and you will have been harmed by it. "
Response - I am not being paid, this is really voluntary. The credit I am getting for this course is mostly for the database and cataloging method that runs the tempreal site. I am not sure what it is for Jesse as the last I knew the school has no money to fund the course. What exactly are you suggesting here?

Your Comment"What disturbs me though is that you want me not only to come up with the ideas but also to impliment them."
Response - That was defined in the syllabus.

Your CommentPlease don't take this as an insult (that is absolutely not my intent) but if you truly feel that providing the inspiration to empower people is not your job, why are you a teacher? That is what teaching is. It's not about increasing people's knowledge of things. It's about bettering their knowledge of themselves and helping them become more complete individuals.
Response - I never said that providing the inspiration to empower people was not my job. You are putting words in my mouth, and doing a poor job of assuming you understoodd what I meant.

I have now taught 11 classes in the last three years, excluding the TAing I did before that. During that time I have been a very inspirational and influencial teacher to my students many of whom have come back to personally thank me. My students this semester at Canisius are also inspired by my teaching, I can tell this because I see the way they act in the classroom and the massive improvements in their coursework work and attitude from the first day to this week. I can also tell because they email me all the time, stop by for office hours, eat lunch with me, and generally spent time outside of class in the lab when I am around - always willing and eager to learn and work with me. Besides the fact that I have had nearly perfect student reviews during my stay at Canisius.

Honestly, I feel in this particular course the students have been super unavailable and either very incapable of or unwilling to complete the course work. I cannot teach people that are completely absent and are uninterested in particpating in a course. You also cannot force people to learn.

I don't think you understand how much J
esse and I have tried to contact some of thes
e
pe

ople. We wrote them emails, we called their homes, we left messages on their cell phones, we sent them IM's, we sent them inworld messages. It is impossible to be inspirational to someone who is completly absent. How can you reach out to a student that is never there? I can honestly say that the time I spent trying to get them organized and figure out what to do about it took away from your learning experience. I appologize for that. We spent more time trying to figure out what to do about the absent people than what to do with the 2 present ones. At the same time the course was really about developing your own world.

At this extremely late point in the semester, many of the students have still not handed in the assignments. We have talked about implementing a final project to give people one last chance. Do you guys have any feelings about this?

This is a personal note to myself so that when I look back in time, I remember that I love teaching but that I hate teaching at UB and would rather have my finger nails repeatedly extracted on re-growth than ever try it again.

I was really excited about teaching the 3D virtual communities course that I wrote about last year after visiting the Second Life crew at Siggraph. Unfortunately, Canisius could not host it because of technical difficulties with getting the mac version of the software before the beginning of the semester. That is where the idea should have died as fate demanded.

The goal of the course was to develop a virtual community within a 3D web environment. The environment itself was already created. The students, as per the syllabus, simply needed to get togther, create a social network, government, and infractsructure for their online community and document the development.

I am now convinced that moving it to UB was really the wrong direction to go in. Instead of canceling I decided to work with Jesse. Roy allowed me to get supervised teaching credit and I put several hundred hours into designing and particpating in the course. Yes, several hundred hours for a job that I was paying to have. What nonsense.

For me the undergraduate UB students seem to be really unmotivated. I am not saying this from this single experience, I am saying this after I have participated in classes with them and now I have tried teaching one. I think the average stuednts motivation level there is just much lower than the average level at the school's I attended, or at least, in the programs at the schools I attended.

The students in the course seem to have a serious lack of self-motivation, a factor which I think often defines a student's ability to learn and develop both intellectually and professionally. It's really hard for me to understand as I am extremely motivated from within and always have been. None of this, "some leader inspired me" bullshit that my student gave me this wek. I think that one can be genuinely inspired by ones self. Ask anyone that knows me.

In the case of this class, I just didn't want to direct/control the specifics. I tried to leave the option up to the students. Big mistake I guess. I think people signed up for the online course looking for a freebie. As defined in the syllabus, it was a writing intensive course and most people never handed in any of the papers.

Tempreal (the course name) failed miserably. Almost no papers were handed in, most students did not participate in the communities. Both Jesse and I called their houses, their cellphones, sent them emails, posted notifications to the course web site, etc all to no avail. At this point I am uninterested in putting more effort into the course until I see some production and homework coming in.

During the first part of the semester I tried so hard to get students going. At first many of them complained of technial problems and the inability to get online. I found it hard to belive that students would sign up for an online class with the descritption that ours had and then not be able to get online.

Some students did not arrive in the course environment until weeks after the semester started, despite notifications, etc.

I cannot believe how ill prepared these students will be in the business world if they carry such a work ethic over. I mean they will simply never make it.

God help me to never teach at a massive public school again.

I am once again staying up late to get some renders done but instead of getting the renders done I have managed to wipe out my boot partition to my linux drive. Great. This whole project has really sucked. I am a big fan of not working with untested products.

Well stickboy, I also find late in the night/early in the morning to be the best time to get work done. For me it is the only time iwthout distractions. However, I do hear what you are saying about wanting to hold onto another day that is slipping by. I feel that too.

I also went to go see goodbye Lenin last night. It was a really facinating and yet funny/touching movie.

See terry's journal [inlink]userName=terry,blogID=181[/inlink] for more info about the movie or visit here to see the trailer.



What I questioned most during the movie was WWTD? What Would Trebor Do? I thought I remembered him telling me he was a wall guard. Maybe I am wrong but if so - wow. In any case it would explain his obsession with social justice and protecting the rights of the oppressed and protesters, etc nowaday?

If that is the case I wonder if he does it out of a bad conscience?

I read your journal

I seriously got a lot of work done during the second half of this week. I ignored the site, my friends, eating, etc and was able to make some progress. I still feel empty a bit, which means that it was not the work load that was bothering me. I guess it was the weather, the situation, my lack of direction, reading suck-ass student papers, etc.

Tonight I will celebrate life at Lilho's soire. I am surprised more people haven't contacted us for directions. I guess we posted it too late.

Josephine got me a license to test Virtools, I am sure I already love it. Check out this great chat application. DSomeday, the elmwood site will have something very similar.