My apartment is covered in dry erase boards. I like to use them. Here are some examples:
This tendency has led to me using them for my slide presentations. I've had two in the hopper that I presented at the Michigan Library Association's Tech Escape workshop in May. As is always the case with my presos, be forewarned that they contain a lot of salty language:
If you have any dry erase board art requests, please leave them in the comments and I will try my best.
Chris Coyier posted a nice, working solution to a real problem over at CSS-Tricks. Basically, CSS lets you style your website to look and work well on mobile devices by over-writing the styles of your full-size website. There are performance drawbacks to this approach, but for the most part it's the best-of-all-possible-worlds solution.
One thorny problem, though, is over-riding the style of certain elements that use the width of the screen liberally by default. One such element is the venerable data table.
Coyier's solution is great in that each table cell is labeled. However, doing this requires either writing CSS manually for every data table on the site (which is near-impossible for large sites) or having the same thing done with scripting on either the server or client side:
I propose a generalized solution that requires no scripting whatsoever. The drawback of this method, though, is that the cells are not individually labeled. The example is also more compact, but this aspect can be tweaked by marrying the two methods:
@media screen and (max-width:720px){
table{display:block;}
td,thead th{border-color:#444;border-style:solid;border-width:0 2px 0 0;display:inline;float:left;}
td:last-child,th:last-child{border-right:0 none;}
thead th{background:transparent;font-size:1.1em;}
tr{display:block;float:left;clear:left;padding:6px 0;width:100%;}
thead tr{border-bottom:4px solid #444;margin:0 0 .3em 0;padding:0 0 .2em 0;}
tbody tr:nth-child(even){background:#ddd;}
td:nth-child(5n+1),th:nth-child(5n+1){background:#FFD8D8;}
td:nth-child(5n+2),th:nth-child(5n+2){background:#FFE8D8;}
td:nth-child(5n+3),th:nth-child(5n+3){background:#FFF8D8;}
td:nth-child(5n+4),th:nth-child(5n+4){background:#D8FFD8;}
td:nth-child(5n+5),th:nth-child(5n+5){background:#D8D8FF;}
}
Open the working demo and resize your window to under 720 pixels wide to see the effect. I call this approach the "Rainbow Tables" method 
Thanks to Chris Coyier for posting a thoughtful working solution, and thereby motivating me to post about my approach after sitting on it (in production no less!) for almost a year.
For 2011, my New Year's resolution was three words: exploration, patience, transparency. It's been a goal of mine to assess the documents in my Google Docs, share as appropriate, and disseminate the information once available.
It's with that goal in mind that I'm releasing these 65+ documents. This release makes up only a fraction of the electronic documents that could tentatively be shared, but it's a start. There's some good stuff in there; also, some pretty useless stuff.
I look forward to continuing this exercise as the year goes on.
At the end of May I quoted Voltaire in my first transliteracy-related post: "Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another." It's been a long process, but I feel I've defined a language model of transliteracy to a satisfactory extent. So before I demolish IL in the Information Literacy vs. transliteracy debate, I figured it would be fun to offer a practical example of the language model.
One thing came to mind when thinking of examples: Brian Hulsey's Everyday Transliteracy video. It's known as the "blueberry smoothie" video to many; it shows how someone might communicate the same message (a blueberry smoothie recipe) using different websites and other forms of communication, and all in a concise, friendly manner.
Let's look at the examples through a linguistic lens.
Most examples involve some form of written language. In many cases, though, communication via a particular website or other form requires subtle changes of dialect or language variant.
In many ways, the language used in email is most like that of a written letter from perhaps a century ago. If a writer wished to ignore clear, concise business style, he or she could write an email of flowery prose or any other style you might otherwise encounter in written language. To me, the written language of an email is something of a baseline for comparison to other language usage.
Linguistically, twitter is an interesting variant. Where you might devote a whole paragraph in an email for a stand-alone idea, the standard on twitter is for one tweet (at 140 characters or fewer) to do the same. As such, someone familiar with the letter/email baseline might develop a workflow for converting their verbose ideas to tweet-appropriate length:
There's more to it, such as @replies, but the above workflow is the gist. It's interesting, anecdotally at least, that tweets and text messages diverge somewhat in linguistic usage, despite their similarity in imposed length restrictions. Whereas it's common to use instant message-type lingo (lol, brb, stfu, etc.) in an SMS message, it's at least somewhat less common on twitter. It's also more accepted to go over the character limit in text messaging, while quite impractical on twitter.
Facebook doesn't formally impose stringent length limits like twitter. A savvy facebook user, however, knows that a long status update will get cut off at a certain length; and the cut off text is only viewable after clicking a "read more" link. This leads to a subtly different usage than twitter. Facebook users are more likely to use full words in full sentences.
The combination of "read more" links and quoting the first three or so words of comments on profile pages means that effective facebook users avoid "burying the lead." Such users communicate in pithy, concise posts, with their thesis statement within the first few words.
Facebook users may sometimes forgo leading personal pronouns since their name is displayed before their status. This is a less-likely occurrence on twitter, where users are represented by short usernames rather than their actual names.
Blogs are similar to emails from a written language perspective. There are nuances, of course, but it's long-form writing with the optional addition of hypertext elements, just like rich email.
Talking on the phone obviously isn't written language. However, I think it's a great basic example of transliteracy. Brian, in the video, reads the necessary amount of orange juice aloud off the screen. This is him reading (decoding) written language and speaking (writing, encoding) the same message into oral language. This is a basic transliteracy that many of us possess that we often take for granted.
Similar to long-form written language. For a message longer than originally intended, someone writing a post-it message might employ chat lingo and abbreviations, or might start writing smaller near the end of the message.
URLs are a written language construct all their own. I learned what URLs looked like, how they worked, and the intricacies of their syntax and semantics from using them, rather than by any formal instruction. However, an internet user can gain a lot from being instructed in URLs.
For instance, Brian was 100% correct to shorten the URL for the recipe before posting it to twitter, as that's common practice. On the other hand, he didn't show how he used the full URL for the resource in facebook. It's knowing usage rules like these that make URLs an important language literacy.
Written language is a special subset of visual language. Hypertext is where, on the web, written language and what we usually consider visual language intersect. Hypertext elements have default styles per user agent stylesheets in the browser, making them visual elements. They are also semantically-defined markup elements per their SGML syntax. So bold text or italic text or a link or a heading appear different from text not wrapped with any markup; the elements' semantics precede their appearance.
A web user who doesn't know how to identify the common appearance and function of hypertext elements would be at a great disadvantage. Often the appearance of form elements, for instance, are derived from similar UI elements from the base operating system's toolkit. However, sites will often style or re-implement elements like buttons, so the essence of button-like symbols is a useful and transferable visual language skill.
Note that in the video, Gmail, twitter, facebook, and WordPress all have similar, but at least somewhat-different, representations of buttons, text fields, text areas, rich text boxes, etc. I think it's in the subtleties of hypertext visual language that it's most practical to use the language model instead of the platforms/tools/media model.
Each site uses layout conventions involving columns, proportion, color, contrast, and other precepts of visual language. How they are similar and different is a teachable thing for those we might instruct. Knowing basic visual language of websites is a transferable skill.
Besides site layout, another interesting form of visual language are symbols, often used as icons. The Noun Project is a cool resource for exploring this aspect of visual language.
I've written a lot about a little, and have still managed to leave out a lot! The literacies at play when doing seemingly-simple things are often complex and varied.
What I wanted to demonstrate more than anything else is that the language model allows us to talk about all the same transliteracy things, but in a way that actually gets to the core literacies.
I think these language literacies allow us to work from a common set of terminology. They let us proceed quicker to developing more-universal and more useful curricula for instruction.
A point to ponder: Brian's video, many (myself included) contend, is a wonderful example of transliteracy. It does not, however, focus in any way on the critical abilities normally associated with Information Literacy.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my former classmate Lane Wilkinson for the discussion about transliteracy we shared via email. More importantly for you, dear reader, is that Lane writes a blog called Sense and Reference with some of the best and most thought-provoking posts in the library world.
If you've followed the series of posts about transliteracy on this blog, perhaps you'd agree that I've approached the topic somewhat backwards:
In this post I'd like to illustrate that the issues with the definition are causing problems: namely inconsistent communication among transliteracy researchers.
In his post, On defining transliteracy, Lane asserts that since transliteracy is a young term, it may not be appropriate now (or ever) to define transliteracy intensionally. I would absolutely agree with this notion if transliteracy were defined extensionally.
In the literature, the PART working definition is not only the current definition of record, but the basis for a functioning intensional unit. If we acknowledge that transliteracy is trans- plus literacy without making the necessary pre-assumptions of my previous posts, people still naturally use the word to mean "An ability to [do something] across [something]."
The first blank, "the ability to [do something]" is much less contentious among transliteracy writers. The PART definition fills the blank with "read, write, and interact" while my suggestion instead goes for "encode and decode information." I think in both instances the intent is largely the same:
My review of the literature confirms the agreement on these conditions of the first blank, despite the difference in wording I suggest.
A review of the literature (which you're free to contribute to) shows us what transliterate entities are purportedly doing something across:
The agreement isn't total, but the clear majority of those discussing transliteracy have latched onto 'medium' as the unit that transliterate people are literate across. As such, the "precise necessary and sufficient conditions for being an instance of transliteracy" are asserted overwhelmingly by writers in the field to be met by being able to read, write, and interact across media.
But medium is used inconsistently with regard to scope, and often outside of the usage of any other field. As such, the condition-facilitating uncertainty that would otherwise be attached to an extensional 'transliteracy' is instead confusing the word 'medium'.
For instance, is facebook a medium? What about twitter? Is there a single "facebook literacy" or "twitteracy"? Is medium intended as it is in the field of Communications? Of Art? In a McLuhan sense of the word?
There is no agreement in the literature.
The word 'medium' is being used as a placeholder for an ill-defined unit of literacy. This placeholder isn't serving anyone because of the stark variation in usage.
I've made a case for language to be the unit instead, clarified what language means, and showed that it can function across all contemporary literacies. What else is necessary to get the discussion away from medium and toward language?