I.T. in the University

Google's Doodles and the Waning of Serendipity

2012-01-02T16:38:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser, whois the current president of moveon.org. In keeping with the interests of that organization, Pariser’s book is anattempt (at least tacitly) to expand the communitarian and civic capacities ofthe Web. But he makes his way there byarguing that the Web is confining rather than expanding our cognitive horizons. Instead of introducing us to a broader and morevaried set of people, the Web is increasingly taking us to points of view that arecongruent rather than divergent with our own. With personalized search and personalized social networking, the 'netintroduces us to places and people we already like and that we’re alreadyinterested in. As searching and matchingalgorithms improve, we’re increasingly exposed to material that is alreadyrelevant to our lives. This, of course,is good up to a point: we like relevance. The downside is that we’re challenged less and less to consider or visitperspectives that differ from our own.

These trends have been in the works for many years now –Cass Sunstein famously identified them as far back as 2002 in the bookRepublic.com. But, as Pariser argues,what makes them more worrisome in 2012 is that they’ve become moreinsidious. In the past we narrowed ourhorizons through conscious acts: we went to nytimes.com instead of foxnews.com(or vice versa) by choice and more or less deliberately. But as the Web has become personalized, thesechoices are increasingly made for us behind the scenes in ways that we’re onlyvaguely aware of. When I visitAmazon.com and shop for The Audacity of Hope, Amazon also suggests I buy BillClinton’s memoir, but not say, Bill O’Reilly’s Pinheads andPatriots. And when I visit Facebook, myfriends, more often than not, seem to share similar points of view. Pariser doesn’t reference Marx, but the filteris the modern generator of false consciousness. In the past we did our own Web filtering. But now our filters are selected behind the scenes. In the brave new world of the personalizedWeb our false consciousness is created for us.

In Pariser’s closing chapter, he offers up a number of thingsthat individuals, corporations and governments can do to allay the moreinsidious effects of filtering. Hesuggests that as individuals we occasionally erase our tracks so that siteshave a more difficult time personalizing their content. (To paraphrase Pariser: “If we don’t erase our [Web] history we are condemned to repeat it"). For corporations, he suggests that theirpersonalization algorithms be made more transparent and that a littleserendipity be introduced into searches so we’re occasionally exposed tosomething beyond our current interests and desires. And for governments he suggests a strongerrole in overseeing and regulating personalization.

There are problems with Pariser’s suggested solutions andEvgeny Morozov, in his own review of Pariser, brings a very important one tolight. In expanding our civic andcommunitarian and serendipitous encounters, it would be nice if Googleoccasionally popped up a link to “What is happening in Darfur?” when we type“Lady Gaga” into Google. But who exactly is supposed to decide what these serendipitous experiences are tobe? We may want to allay some of thecognitive deficiencies that the current 'net breeds. But the danger in doing so is that we replaceone bias with another. In looking a littlefurther into this I visited the thousands of doodles (e.g. custom banners) thatGoogle has generated in the past couple of years. Not surprisingly I didn’t see much therethat’s over-the-top civic or political. But maybe that sin of omission is better than the alternative: I prefer “don't be evil” (their current motto) to “dogood but risk partisanship and bias in the attempt.”

Pariser may not provide convincing fixes, but his descriptionof the problem makes the book a worthy read. One would think that as the information stream accelerates we’d becomeincreasingly subject to distractions and to new ways of seeing the world. In fact, Clay Shirky touches on this point in“It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure:” the filters which themass media industry imposed on late 20^th century media consumers have beencorroded by the advent of the Web. But thetrends that Shirky makes light of may bereversing. Our cognitive horizons may be contracting rather than expanding in the age of personalization. And our attention blindness may be increasingrather than decreasing as the filter bubble grows. In bringing those concerns to light,Pariser’s has done good work.

The Two Cultures

2011-12-09T17:04:00.001-07:00

This blog is sort of an informal companion to a colloquium we hold here at Weber which is also called "I.T. in the University." Recently we had the privilege of reading Science Fiction and Computing: Essays on Interlinked Domains which was edited by Eric Swedin and David Ferro who are colleagues of mine here at Weber. The below is a guest post by them.

Most students of the history of science and the history of technology will remember “the two cultures” from their education. The phrase comes from the English molecular physicist and novelist C. P. Snow who described in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) that a gulf of understanding existed between scientists and literary intellectuals. The people within these two cultures understood their own cultures, but scientists often did not appreciate the humanities, and humanities-oriented intellectuals did not understand science. Snow advocated education to overcome the ignorance on both sides.

The two cultures is a living reality even today and that the divide still exists is obvious on many college campuses. Professors tend to dialogue only with professors in closely related disciplines and students often find themselves drawn either to science, technology, and engineering, or to the arts and humanities. They learn different languages and different values about what is important. A good example is the arts and humanities student who dreads taking a science class because they just see mountains of memorization and a way of thinking that bewilders them. They think of a math class as an act of cruelty. Of course, a science or technology student who is sent off to take their general education class in literature looks at a pile of novels that they have to read for class as nothing less than torture. They find the novels boring and the discussions to be vague and full of opinions unsupported by any sort of methodical thought.

This divide is most unfortunate and people on both sides need to make the effort to learn about information from the other side of the divide, even if is material that does not interest them. The authors of this guest blog entry have straddled this divide through doctorates from the arts and humanities side of the divide and considerable experience in teaching both computer technology courses and history courses. One of the areas that drew our interest was science fiction. It is often thought that people on the science and technology side of the divide have no appreciation of literature, but that it not true. They just have their own literature.

We will not go down the rabbit hole of defining exactly what science fiction is, because there is no common agreement on an exact definition. Much of the best science fiction is based on an understanding of science and technology and readers who do not have that background come away frustrated and bewildered from reading science fiction. They cannot fill in the blank spots to evoke a sense of wonder that is often found in science fiction. An appreciation of science fiction can build bridges between the two cultures as one side learns to appreciate humanities beyond just science fiction and the other side learns enough about science and technology to appreciate science fiction as genuine literature.

As computer experts, one in a Computer Science program and the other in an Information Systems program, we often noticed how many people in our fields that we knew liked science fiction. This was particularly true of the students and professors in our field who were the top performers. We wondered if we could document a connection between computing and science fiction. This led to some articles and then to a volume of interdisciplinary essays that we edited, Science Fiction and Computing: Essays on Interlinked Domains (McFarland, 2011). We found strong linkages.

Science fiction has often provided terms, concepts, and a milieu of technological enthusiasm for pioneers in the computer field. Science fiction also provided ways for computer innovators to talk about where they thought computers were going. More research needs to be done on the linkages between science fiction and computers, a wonderful opportunity for different academic disciplines to talk to each other, and we hope our book helps that conversation along. We also hope that our book will encourage academics, educators, and other people to think about how we can bridge the two divides in our intellectual culture. We need academics and students who are grounded in science and technology to appreciate the contributions made by the arts and humanities, and for the reverse to be true.

"From Behind The Safety of the Internet's Vast Perspex Shield"

2011-11-27T21:46:00.001-07:00

On the Music For Deck Chairs blog, the author (who wishes to remain anonymous) makes some interesting observations on the recent pepper spraying of UC Davis student demonstrators by a UC Davis police officer. The subsequent footage of the chancellor making her way past a gauntlet of silent students is also very moving. In spite of these images, Music For Deck Chairs cautions us not to be too judgmental "from behind the safety of the internet’s vast perspex shield" (I love that phrase). For sure, none of us want to model our behavior after that of Officer Pike, but some of us in IT are also guilty at times of colluding with hierarchical thinking. It's still unclear whether the UC Davis protests and the Occupy movement will have the impact that the Tea Party has. But I don't want these things to go by completely unnoticed on this blog -- especially since there is still a tangential connection to IT and the university. I've reposted my comment to Music For Deck Chairs below:

To segue from your last paragraph I’m reminded of David Noble who probably would have seen resonances between the actions of officer John Pike and initiatives of elearning administrators (I draw the connection only because your blog is dwelling on both). Here is what he says in Digital Diploma Mills:

“Once faculty and courses go online, administrators gain much greater direct control over faculty performance and course content than ever before and the potential for administrative scrutiny, supervision, regimentation, discipline and even censorship increase dramatically. At the same time, the use of the technology entails an inevitable extension of working time and an intensification of work as faculty struggle at all hours of the day and night to stay on top of the technology and respond, via chat rooms, virtual office hours, and e-mail, to both students and administrators to whom they have now become instantly and continuously accessible. The technology also allows for much more careful administrative monitoring of faculty availability, activities, and responsiveness.”

This isn’t to say that all forms of “collusion with hierarchical thinking” should be conflated. But as I think you are saying, we better check carefully to see whether our own houses aren’t made of glass before shaming other people too stridently.

I wonder too, whether that process of shaming will lead to positive social change or something else besides. Sometimes the shaming of egregious repression of social protest has resulted in positive social change ( for example, Bull Connor’s actions in Birmingham were ultimately a P.R. victory for the civil rights movement). But the irony of the UC Davis protests is that the students were there because they were objecting to a tuition hike. Those hikes, while due to many things, have at least a tenuous connection to the Berkeley protests of the late 60’s. Those earlier protests were stirring but they also alienated some Californians who weren’t interested in romanticizing the academy as a virtuous fifth estate. That alienation played a role in the election of Reagan and the defunding of California higher education. So yeah, we need to take inspiration from the Mario Savios of the world, and all those who are bold enough to choose the risks of civil disobedience over the cowardice of little-Eichmanns. But we need to do this in a way that keeps the university in the good graces of the taxpayer and the constituencies who are a little less strident in their condemnation of people whose jobs require the strict following of orders. What then is the best way forward?

Digital Humanities in the University

2011-11-21T09:58:00.001-07:00

I've been regretting that my blog has such a pedestrian title, especially when I compare it to some of the other blogs I've been browsing like CogDogBlog or BavaTuesdays. Unlike those mysterious titles, mine has little irony. It doesn't prompt the reader to keep asking what it means. And the phrase "I.T." can sound uninteresting. The first vision that may come to mind is a bunch of mainframes and Cobol programmers wasting away in non-descript tan cubicles. That stereotype, as it's witheringly pictured in the movie Office Space, or as I lived it while doing Y2K patching in the late 90s at Ashland Oil Company, is certainly a part of what I.T. is. And I suspect those faculty I'm friends with who don't quite know what I do at work, think these images sum it up.

Fortunately, the culture of IT, in the university at least, isn't usually as corporate as that vision. We have our share of practitioners who wear suits, and who wax excitedly about books like Who Moved My Cheese, or Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. But the reality is that IT in the University is a lot more than all of that.

On this blog, for example, I've been trying to highlight the digital humanities which are very much a part of I.T. in the university. A nice synopsis of what this IT initiative is can be found in a recent Chronicle article by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. But the fast and short story is that the digital humanities are two things. First, humanities scholars are increasingly using digital tools in their teaching and research. Second, the frameworks and approaches that humanities scholars use offer incredibly insightful perspectives for making sense of what I.T. is, where it should go, and it's role in forwarding the missions of the university.

To forward those activities some universities have established digital humanities centers (a flagship one for example is George Mason's Center for History and New Media). But even on campuses which don't have formal centers, it's easy to uncover how much they can serve (and be served) by university I.T. I'll leave a comprehensive survey of these service roles for a later blog post. But for now I want to list three digital humanities concerns that I came across last week while on my own campus. They aren't necessarily the most powerful examples or most salient digital humanities initiatives on campus (I'm leaving out for example the whole range of activities that our media scholars do in English and Communications -- including but not limited to Michael Wutz's research on emerging 19th century media and Sheree Josephson's research on computer-human interaction). But I draw attention to them simply to illustrate that digital humanities concerns are a pervasive and topical presence on campus even outside of the areas where one would ordinarily expect to find them. (If you don't care about what's happening on my local campus you might skip the italicized stuff below):

1) On Tuesday I was working with some students who were about to read Henkin's fine history of the postal service in 19th century America. To spark their curiosity I mentioned that many of the concerns that we have about emerging media now are echoed in 19th century Americans' reactions to changes in postal services. For example, when the postcard first came out in the middle of the 19th century, Americans expressed worries not unlike those worries we now have about the abbreviated messaging that happens in texting and twittering. We then dwelt on challenges of salutation (which were as much an issue in the postcard as they are in email), which in turn morphed into a discussion of the manner in which proliferating media are eroding traditional institutions of authority (the recent audience disturbance during Weber State's performance of Beethoven's 9th was mentioned as an example). After class, a couple of students noted that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have some classes on netiquette. A digital humanities center could do this and more, Rather than merely teach polite practices for the online world, it could lead us to examine how issues of authority, familiarity, cordiality, and social relations more generally take on new forms in the digital age.

2) On Thursday I met with two Weber State professors who recently published an anthology titled Science Fiction and Computing. (I hope to post a transcription of that conversation here in a few weeks). Like many anthologies, it covers a lot of ground. But one thread that was particularly noteworthy was the insight that science fiction plays an important role in helping readers to sort through the moral challenges that past and present technologies have (and are) presenting us with. While science fiction is sometimes seen as a form of techno-porn or technophilia, it actually also plays an important role in developing and evolving our understanding of IT. It goes without saying that this too is a topical example of the digital humanities at work within our university.

3) My spouse, who recently published Homesickness: An American History, spent five years doing archival research to determine that the once popular sentiment of homesickness has given way to nostalgia. Instead of indulging homesickness, the modern American economy celebrates nostalgia. While the book is painstakingly researched, she was surprised when a reader used modern data analytics to corroborate her empirical research. Using Google's Ngram viewer of the American library, the reader determined that indeed the use of homesickness has declined while the use of nostalgia has increased:

Of course there's a lot more to my wife's argument than is conveyed by a simple graph. Analytics in and of itself isn't going to generate (or displace) the meaning and significance that is uncovered through archival work. But as a complement to traditional humanities scholarship, these digital techniques certainly have a lot to offer.

These three anecdotes are not necessarily the most obvious examples of the way I.T. and the humanities intersect in our university life. But their topicality suggests how omnipresent the digital humanities are in university affairs. We need digital humanities more now than ever to make humanities teaching and research stronger. But in turn we also need the digital humanities to make sense of I.T. and it's growing presence in university life. We may not all have the resources to found digital humanities centers. But there is certainly an argument to be made for creating umbrella organizations to host conversations that address the ongoing concerns that the humanities, I.T., and the larger university share.

The Progress Paradox: Students Now and Students Then

2011-11-03T15:29:00.001-06:00

Weber State University hosts a number of book groups that I’ve been attending and/or leading this semester. For example this fall we’re reading everything from Science Fiction and Computing to The Fall of the Faculty, to Hamlet's Blackberry. This past week some students and I discussed Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox which grapples with the predicament illustrated in the following Andy Singer cartoon:

Easterbrook argues that evidence of progress is fairly incontrovertible. Americans may sometimes feel nostalgic but few of us would be willing to jump into a time machine and live permanently in a world without modern health care, transportation, plumbing, heating, cooling, and the bounty made possible by the green revolution in farming. Yet, in spite of the fact that we are favored compared to our ancestors, we “do not feel favored.” Easterbrook then asks “what does this tell us about ourselves?”

Easterbrook seems to be writing a Whiggish history that legitimates complacency and a blindness toward existing injustices. But he’s really not. He acknowledges that there is still too much inequality, and that the developing world still has yet to reap the full boons of progress. But because he sees the glass as half full and is grateful for what he has, he argues that we should use and share those resources to help others. That doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to escape the tragedy of the human condition or the fact that we’re hedonically adaptive: we can make a better future for our descendents, but those descendents will continue to complain.

The Progress Paradox isn’t without its weaknesses especially in light of the current crises we’re facing in education, potential climate collapse, a growing disparity in wealth between rich and poor, and continued resource scarcity. Easterbrook may be right that history is progressive over the long term. But the direction of history seems less clear when we look at the recent past. To paraphrase Thomas Friedman, the world isn’t really quite as flat as we sometimes present it. In spite of all this, I think the students still thought that it was a good inquiry into the nature of technological change, the tragedy of the human condition, and the possibility that an optimistic demeanor can give foundation to an enlightened and progressive politics.

Given Easterbrook's optimistic disposition, I asked the students whether they shared it in light of the Occupy Wallstreet Movement and the financial pressures they are facing as college fees increase and jobs become scarcer. To my surprise, the six students in my discussion group did not want to dwell on that critique. Our current crisis did not on the surface seem to dampen their sanguine outlook. I expected them to be more like me. As an undergrad I spent many semesters reading and writing about the politics of nihilism and existentialism. I don't know, maybe it was more in vogue in the 80's. Or maybe students now just don't have the leisure to go down such paths. Either way Easterbrook provides an important reminder for at least one generation in the academy: constructive change may come as easily from people who feel optimistic about the course of history as from people who take a darker view.

Happy Halloween

2011-10-31T18:44:00.000-06:00

I went to a Halloween costume party Saturday night. The theme was "Come as your favorite religious figure." Maybe we don't have enough diversity in our university community because (without any coordination) two of us showed up as Steve Jobs.

I'm on the left and my friend Dave is on the right.

Occupy Park City: Reflections on #opened11

2011-10-28T17:05:00.000-06:00

It’s the day after the Open Education conference in Park City. What can I say in a brief blog post to mark that event? I want to thank Brian Jacobs of Akademos for attending the conference and being one of its sponsors. We met while suffering through the trials of studying political theory in grad school. While neither of us has become a practicing political theorist, we’ve been disciplined (for better or for worse) by our common education. Over the years I’ve attended a lot of open-oriented conferences and been exposed to a lot of insightful perspectives. But while that diversity has been good it was gratifying to be there with someone who was familiar with the same disciplinary frameworks I use for making sense of what a social movement like open education is all about.

That isn’t to say that I’ve got it all figured out beyond noting that the open ed movement gathers together a set of people and beliefs and practices that belie easy generalization. This was epitomized on Wednesday when Jim Groome began his presentation by popping out of a tent he’d pitched on stage as a way of drawing connections between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the open education initiative. Jim gave an inspiring account of his teaching which is bold and experimental and seems to engage his students and prompt them to develop new media literacy. But however important that message was, it was overshadowed by the stylistic contrasts between himself and the other featured speaker who was Josh Jarrett, Deputy Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Where Jim presented in an untucked t-shirt, Josh showed up in a blazer. Where Jim flashed slides of Wonder Woman, Josh spoke in sobering terms of budget challenges, demographic changes and educational completion rates. When the presentations ended David Wiley, thanked both speakers and asked the audience to reflect on the contrasts and on how these different archetypes complement and (perhaps sometimes) antagonize one another.

A presenter immediately after those keynotes asked the audience who they most identified with, and the answers varied. Some said Jim, some said Josh, and milquetoasts like me said both (even though I was wearing a blazer). All of this is to say that, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, open education isn’t a phenomenon that is simple to define, and is replete with marked contrasts. Its constituents identify with the underprivileged but the conference was hosted in a rarified and expensive locale. Its constituents are attracted to archetypes of rebellion but the movement’s locus is in one of the more conservative states in the union. It challenges traditional ways of disciplining the faculties but is led in part by a resurging discipline of instructional design. Its advocates celebrate openness and democratization and sharing and the disruption of traditional academic practices. But they promote different degrees of openness, and democratization and disruption. It’s been interesting to see how this coalition has come together and whether it stays together going forward.

Are Machine's Making Us Stupid?

2011-10-22T10:38:00.000-06:00

Here's the poster that my colleague made for our NEH funded spring course (since it's a new class we need to do a little advertising around campus to make sure students know about it ):

Following the pop culture reference, and the fact that we anticipate some interesting cross-generational conversations in the class, what would the appropriate iconography be if the poster had depicted an x-ray of Bart's brain, rather than Homer's?

Openness Talk

2011-10-12T11:36:00.000-06:00

If you happen to be going to Educause 2011 in Philadelphia come by the following talk to find out what Chuck Severance has to say about openness and his book Sakai: Free as in Freedom (Alpha). We'll be taking questions from the audience but feel free to e-mail before-hand with any questions you think are particularly worth fielding.

On the Internet Nobody Should Be a Dog: A Review of Cathy Davidson's Now You See It

2011-10-08T14:05:00.000-06:00

In the 45 second Ape In the Midst selective attentiontest (you can take it yourself above) participants are asked to focus closely on a video showingpeople passing basketballs back and forth. After the video finishes they are asked to report how many passes weremade. But more importantly, participantsare also asked whether they saw the gorilla. Many viewers actually miss seeing it.

In her new book NowYou See It, Cathy Davidson uses the exercise to suggest that in focusingclosely on one thing we become blind to other significant events in oursurroundings and that this “attention blindness” is a problem we sorely need toredress in the 21^st century. For Davidson, the efficiency imperatives of the industrial age drove acult of single-tasking that is epitomized in the assembly line and FrederickWinslow Taylor’s efforts to focus workers' labors on a set of narrow tasks soas to increase productivity in the work place. Davidson goes on to argue that inculcating an ethic of mono-tasking nolonger prepares our students for work in the 21^st century wherescreens increasingly demand attention to multiple inputs.

Davidson never mentions Marx (or even cites him in theindex) but her argument recalls a Marxist analysis: ideology (or the learning and beliefs and the educationalinstitutions that lend support to that learning and beliefs) help legitimateparticular relations of production. Butas those relations of production change, so eventually must the ideology. In this respect Davidson’s book is a truewake-up call: as academics (who are inpart stewards and conservators of past knowledge) we might be inclined tohallow traditional methods of learning. But in so far as we buy into a marxist framework, Davidson is telling usthat we better evolve if we don’t want to become apparatchiks to an old andfading way of doing things.

In many ways, I’m persuaded by Davidson’s argument. Having gone through eight years ofincreasingly narrow and specialized study in grad school, I exited with a degreein political theory that was no longer marketable. I’m a walking example of the opportunitycosts and attention blindness that accrue when one focuses for too long and toohard on one subject. And I know thatthere are plenty of other PhDs in archaic disciplines who can appreciateviscerally what Davidson means when she calls into question the legitimacy andvirtues of mono-tasking.

Graduate students and professors sometimes legitimately feelthat the demands of their profession encourage over-specialization. And along with that, many of us feel a need tointroduce more interdisciplinary courses into the undergraduate curriculum sostudents can see the connections between different areas of knowledge. (Isuspect that this is in part what impelled Davidson to move from being anEnglish professor to being a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies.) And therelativists among us understand the need to introduce students to Nietzsche’sperspectivism and the virtues in seeing the world from multiple coigns ofvantage. More topically, following the2011 Ig Noble award that was given to John Perry for celebrating structuredprocrastination, we know that being distracted by things of lesser importancecan sometimes lead to accomplishments of consequence.

At the same time, however, we also know, that the production filters thrown up by 20^thcentury mass media have been killed by the internet. We're doing less information filtering than before. As a result it’s more incumbent on us thanever to resurrect those filters in our capacity as consumers (c.f Clay Shirky in his keynote "It's Not Information Overload It's Filter Failure") The cult of specialization and ofmono-tasking and of filtering may have, as Davidson argues, some historicallyspecific origins. But some of thoseconcerns transcend timeand place. After all, filtering, andconfining our focus to a few activities, is what gives us the capacity to buildgreat things and write (as Davidson has done) interesting books. It’s the difference between us and Fido: wedon’t bark at every passing stimulus. The now famous New Yorker cartoon that was captioned “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” can be rewritten as a caution not to buy Davidsonwhole sale: “On the internet nobodyshould be a dog.” Fido for sure will bark at the gorilla. But he won’t be able to countthe basketballs!

.................

2011-10-07T08:56:00.000-06:00

Two Minute Lightning Round of Concentration in the Humanities

2011-09-18T21:44:00.000-06:00

At the upcoming Digital Humanities Start Up Project Director's Meeting we've been asked to present our projects in two minutes or less. Here's one of my rehearsal attempts to do so. (It's definitely a communicative literacy I still need to hone):

Program Or Be Programmed: Code Monkey Responds

2011-09-07T00:39:00.000-06:00

First check out this music video titled "CodeMonkey:"

Fun huh? But why is this relevant to a review ofDouglas Rushkoff's Program Or Be Programmed? I'll get to thatin a second. But first some general background:

In Program or Be Programmed Rushkoff argues that technology has biases that encouragecertain behaviors. He describes those biases (for him thereare ten main ones). And then, to makesure we don’t become unwitting victims of those biases, he prescribes guidelines that will allow us to steer clear of thosebiases worst potential social effects. For example, in Chapter One (which is titled “Always On”) he observesthat computer networks follow their own time. And because that time doesn’t usually jibe with human time it ofteninterrupts and intrudes on our thought processes. To remedy that bias we should take care tomoderate our connections to digital devices and “refuse to be always on.” [p.37] The subsequent nine chapters followthe same approach albeit for ten other biases.

I’ll refrain from judging the middle chapters mostly becausethe tenth, which has the same title as the book, was at once the mostinteresting and at the same time the most incomplete. Rushkoff, in an appeal to history, arguesthat in an age of print it was those who could read and write who shaped theworld. Similarly, in an age of code, itis those who program who are defining human experience. So in Rushkoff’s view, coding is rapidlybecoming a new literacy – and those who don’t have it will rapidly become thesubjects of those who do. Here's Rushkoff's two minute video promotion of the book:

As a programmer myself I’m flattered by the power he’sconferred on my profession. I’ll confessthat in an essay I wrote a while back called Code and Composition, I fell preyto similarly exaggerated senses about the power which programmers supposedlywield. And as an instructor oftechnology studies I’m half-tempted, following Rushkoff’s warnings to have mystudents take a crack at learning Scratch, SIMPLE or LOGOS. Certainly we shouldn’t discount the powerthat code is having over our lives. Butwe shouldn’t be too quick to assume that just because programmers are the oneswho are writing the code that they are doing so independently without having toanswer to institutions with even more influence. In most software shops they have toexecute a vision that’s been handed to them by designers and productmanagers and shareholders.

In short, coders may be implicated inthe digital refashioning of the world. And their lives may not be as desiccated or lacking in creativity as theportrait that is offered up in Code Monkey. And it’s probably a good idea to expose students to what coding is justso they can get a more hands-on feel for the way code is determining the worldwe’re living in. But programmers arenearly as subject to being programmed as those who don’t. Code Monkey – I think – would agree.

A Review of Sakai: Free As In Freedom

2011-08-28T17:07:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago I bought Chuck’s Sakai: Free As In Freedom (Alpha). When it arrived in the mail from Amazon, I thought, “great, another $20 shelled out on a book that was exciting to buy but that I won’t actually read with all the other distractions in my life.” How wrong I was. Chuck’s book is actually a page-turner – at least for those of us who’ve tried to tag along for the Sakai ride. There have already been two positive reviews of the book by Alan Berg and Jim Farmer. Like them, I took no small pleasure in reading it not least because Chuck reveals a lot of things that I was only vaguely aware of (having never sat on the Sakai board) or that I might have been familiar with but that I’ve forgotten over the course of the years.

Not all of Chuck’s recollections can be summed up in this review but one especially worth highlighting (and which you can get the gist of by reading the closing chapters) is that Chuck and the board differed on issues of governance. Anyone whose dipped more than their pinky toe into open source initiatives knows, following Eric Raymond, that there are cathedral style (e.g. hierarchichal) software organizations and bazaar style (e.g. organic self-organizing) ones, and that open source (with many notable exceptions including the up and coming Instructure) generally gravitates toward the bazaar. But while many of us came to Sakai (and open source) because we longed for more inclusive, less top-down software communities, this doesn’t mean we’re partial to moving away from the cathedral and into the bazaar in equal degree. These same differences existed on the board and Chuck sums up the division as follows:

My opinion was that the purpose of the Foundation was to have a light touch and focus on nurturing the individual and organizational members of the community. The Foundation was to be the cheerleader, the communicator, throw good parties several times per year….and generally give folks a rallying point to find each other… the Foundation was never to take the responsibility for the direction of the product, nor should the Foundation hire core developers, nor should the developers report to the Foundation staff to receive their assignments.

The opposing view held by the majority of the board members was that the Foundation and Foundation staff were a form of command and control with the top of the authority hierarchy as the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors. The…stakeholders were concerned that letting individuals….make their own priority decisions….would be too risky for the adopting schools…..Central control and guidance was needed to insure that the product would move forward according to a well-defined and well-understood roadmap and do so on an agreed-to schedule.

Given my own school's tepid reception to the Sakai product (I still remember one Weber student who summed up his experience in version 2.4x with the withering description “everything is scattered from hell to breakfast”), we were receptive, on pragmatic grounds, to a little more command and control planning. And yet, at the same time, Chuck’s vision appealed to my own deeply seated political and pedagogical beliefs. Especially as Chuck justifies them near the end of his diary:

The reason that I prefer a bazaar-style organizational structure for Sakai was that software for teaching and learning is something that everyone understands and has feelings about. There is not one set of designated experts who can define and design teaching and learning software and hand that design to some developers and have them “code it up” as if programming was an advanced form of typing….good ideas can literally come from any part of the world and an idea can come as easily from a student as from a professional instructional designer. So I felt that it would be wrong to let design and priority decisions rest in the hands of a select few.

Given the competing virtues that are inherent in authoritarian and more anarchic governance structures, it was true, as Chuck also observed, that there wasn’t a “universally correct” organizational strategy that Sakai could have followed. But for better or worse, Chuck’s vision differed from most of the board’s and in his view it played an important role in his decision to relinquish the executive directorship to Michael Korcuska at the Amsterdam conference in the summer of 2007.

Chuck’s sympathies with a more loosely organized development model can also be found in other places in his narrative. For example, while he eventually learns to appreciate Carol Dippel and her QA efforts, he’s initially skeptical. And while he credits Mike Elledge’s use of Microsoft Project to systematize Sakai’s development efforts he readily admits his own aversion to using it. The portrait is rounded out when Chuck recounts buying a couple of suits for bettering his Sakai advocacy: apparently his credit card company flagged the purchase as suspicious. By whatever stereotypes of consumer behavior credit card companies use to build portraits of their users they seemed to have pegged him more as a Birkenstock than Wingtip kind of guy.

I’ve only talked with Chuck once very briefly while riding up an elevator at the Movenpick hotel at the Amsterdam conference. But I don’t get the sense, even after noting the above predilections, that he’s a simple Richard Stallman caricature who is out to “stick it to the man.” For example, in contrast to some of the rest of us, his misgivings of Blackboard were not that deep-seated. He describes the patent suit as a defensive action that any corporation out to protect share-holder value would have been interested in pursuing (p. 176) And in spite of the suit he continued to seek productive partnerships between Sakai and the Blackboard corporation. Like Brad and Joseph he knew how to appeal to freaks like me who sometimes have difficulty acknowledging that our 401-k’s make us complicit too in the heartlessness of capitalism. But he did it in a way without alienating potential partnerships with commercial interests outside academe.

As the Soviet’s used to say (and as historians often still profess), “the future may be certain but the past is always contested territory.” Which is another way of saying that if Chuck has offered up an intriguing story, I hope it doesn’t end up being the authoritative history of Sakai. The sub-title, after all, is a “retrospective diary” rather than a history, which would suggest that many other stories are worth telling. For example, Chuck glosses over the divisions that arose between those of us who saw Sakai primarily as an LMS and as a commodity whose core design could largely be derived from prior art and those who proclaimed the LMS as dead and Sakai as a larger platform and community for innovating new online teaching technologies. The CLE versus LMS story is, I expect, only one of many other stories worth telling. Perhaps, as Jim Farmer has suggested, we need to publish a compilation? In the meantime Chuck’s book is a great (Alpha) history.

Homesick on Campus? iPhone Home!

2011-08-23T21:10:00.000-06:00

This is a guest post from my wife, Susan Matt, whose book, Homesickness: An American History, comes out in September from Oxford University Press. The last chapter, titled "Of Helicopter Parents, Facebook, and Walmart: Homesickness in Contemporary America," deals with college students and mobility among other things.

Mobile devices have profoundly transformed campus life. One of their significant effects has been a change in the way that students relate to those off campus. A recent study of University of Michigan and Middlebury students found they were in touch with their parents by phone, email, and text message an average of 13 times each week. Add to that Facebook and other social media sites, and students today can be sitting in their college dorms rooms, and still chatting online with their high school classmates, parents, and siblings, no matter how far apart they are scattered. The idea of going away to college is not quite what it was. As a New York Times columnist reported, with “unlimited cell phone minutes, e-mail, text messages and Blackberries,” college life today is far different from “the days of calling home once a week—collect—from the pay phone in the dormitory hallway.”

What does this unprecedented level of contact with home actually mean? Some suggest that it is the perfect antidote to homesickness, the old bugbear of freshman year. Now, rather than pining for mom, dad, and old friends, students can point a mouse and be in touch.

Others, however, worry that the endless text messaging, the Facebook, the tweeting, and cell phone conversations, are inhibiting the emotional development of students. According to this view, college used to be a developmental stage on the path to independence, a point when young people learned to separate themselves from home, and overcame homesickness. Psychologist Peter Crabb, for instance, suggests that the spread of cell phones and other communications technology among college populations ultimately “promotes immaturity and dependence.” He argues that the rising generation is not learning proper lessons of emotional control, observing that students call home for comfort. “The call makes them feel better. But they are not learning to control their emotional states, which is part of becoming an adult.”

Is too much communication a bad thing? Should we worry? Will we end up with a cohort of immature adults who are unable to be independent?

It seems to me that we only need worry if we hold sacred the idea of the rugged and isolated individual. Modern psychology suggests that the footloose person, who can be mobile, who can cut ties and not look back, is the norm of human behavior, but this is only true in the contemporary United States. Our ideas about how connected young people should be to their parents—emotionally or technologically—are historically contingent. In more communitarian societies, the ceaseless emphasis on individualism is largely absent, the lessons about breaking home ties less visible. If students and their parents want to stay in touch, and indeed, if students want to stay in touch with their classmates, their past, their homes, why should we complain? Aren’t such efforts a reflection of their commitments to other value systems besides lonely individualism? We celebrate mobility and moving on as distinctly American traits; yet we shouldn’t overlook or discount Americans’ ongoing efforts to sustain connections and community across great distances.

Canvas Discussions; Chuck and Martin and the 80/20 Rule

2011-08-04T13:36:00.000-06:00

Earlier this week, Instructure hosted their first international conference. I expected mostly Utah people but there were attendees from all over the U.S. including one person from a school in Toronto. In keeping with Postman's first rule of technological change I don't want to be an evangelist for any LMS but I will say that the conference did a good job of disarming me. The conference, in many ways reminded me of early Sakai conferences in Baltimore and Vancouver. There was real energy in the air and I left with a sense of belonging to a close knit community of users who are listening to each other. Whether Canvas can sustain this as it grows will be interesting. Josh Coates (Instructure's head honcho) alluded to this in a question and answer session when someone in the audience asked him, "What is your primary strategic focus in the next three years?" Josh responded that a year ago there were only seven employees in Instructure, that today there are 45 and that next year, at present rates of growth, there will be upwards of 140 (not to mention how many more schools there are likely to be using the product). Given those numbers Josh asked "How do you grow?" Hopefully, from our perspective, in a way where we still feel like we're still playing a role in determining our own technological destiny.

To that concern of controlling destiny, during the closing BBQ, I had a chance to talk with Brian Whitmer who cofounded the company with Devlin Daley during (or perhaps directly after) a grad stint at BYU. For the most part I've really liked teaching in Canvas but I did ask him whether there were any plans to supplement the way they've chosen to set up discussion boards with other more traditional approaches. Instructure chooses an option that Moodle calls "Display replies flat, with oldest first" whereas I prefer "Display replies in threaded form" or "Display replies in nested form." (The links, by the way, take you to a Moodle hosted discussion where participants are discussing the relative merits of Moodle versus Canvas.) We didn't talk long enough for me to understand completely what Brian has found problematic in the nested and threaded forms, but I think he thinks that students often won't drill down as much as instructors would like them to -- which would mean that the potential advantages of nested and threaded approaches might not really pay out in practice. To keep this post short, I won't weigh the respective merits of these approaches except to speculate that there are enough users who like the traditional approach that it may merit including it as an option, even if Brian wants to keep the flat approach as the default.

Certainly, this is the strategy Moodle has chosen. Since there is a division among users, rather than choosing just one, Moodle provides users with choice. Interestingly, there's a short video of Dr. Chuck (former Executive Director of Sakai) interviewing Martin precisely about this challenge. Here is the transcription:

Dr. Chuck (aka Charles Severance): Is there ever been a situation where the community has mildly revolted where you thought X and a whole bunch of people thought Y and they sort of ran away with it? Or have you been in front of it the whole time?

Martin Dougiamas: It's been pretty good....occasionally when something's been put in there as a pedagogical feature....what usually happens with this sort of stuff is we talk about it we decide there's two camps and so we create an option and people can make a choice but the default value for that choice is always mine. I always try to make Moodle out of the box behave like the way I want it to behave.

And if you want to see the speech in full check out the actual video at minute 2:30

As I recall from our conversation, Brian mentioned the 80/20 rule but when I pressed him on it, he wouldn't say definitively that 80 percent of users prefer the "Display replies flat, with newest last." This isn't to say that the Instructure guys haven't already given all of this a lot of thought (in a story that is rapidly becoming mythic Brian and Devlin toured the country in a car without air-conditioning gathering user requirements at a ton of schools before actually coding anything). So it's possible I'm wedded to an anachronistic outdated approach that isn't worth including because of the clutter it would cause. And in fact, Brian, does have a point. I may miss Moodle's approach but it's certainly not enough of a frustration that I'll stop using Canvas because of it. Still, I'm writing it here so it matters at least a little to me. What do other people think? With respect to this little microcosm of Canvas are there any refinements that could be made to discussions? If so what are they?

Dear Uncle Ezra: Where's My Privacy?

2011-07-25T17:03:00.000-06:00

I just returned from Ithaca, New York after attending the Institute for Computer Policy and the Law which is hosted every summer on the Cornell University campus. This summer, the Institute focused on the issue of privacy on college campuses and what educators need to do in order to protect it. Although discussions about privacy have never been out of vogue, they are particularly topical these days because social media are giving us unprecedented opportunities to reveal who we are online. And while these outlets are a boon for self-expression, they can, when wielded inappropriately, seriously, and sometimes permanently, damage reputations. Ten months ago on Sept 28^th, Rutger’s freshmen Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate surreptitiously streamed a live video feed of Tyler having sex with another male in their dorm room. The Tyler Clementi case serves as a reminder that student privacy is increasingly challenging to protect in an era of social networking and ubiquitous surveillance. If it wasn’t the event which inspired ICPL’s focus on privacy, it certainly could have been.

How should we as college administrators or college professors deal with this problem? We are after all in the business of building student’s reputations. But how best to help them in this age of hyper-connectivity?

FERPA, of course, offers some guidance (and attorneys at ICPL went over this at length). As university employees we need to be mindful of our student’s privacy as we’re carrying out our jobs. But beyond FERPA, I left ICPL with the strong impression that we also need to be engaging with our students so that they too take up the conversation. ICPL held one of these conversations in a panel discussion that was reported last week in Inside Higher Education. You can read the full account there but for me the biggest lesson I learned was that students actually value privacy. Although there has been some talk that students don’t care about it (a sentiment that would jibe with Mark Zuckerberg’s pronouncement that privacy is dead) at least one student on the panel seemed to suggest that this is a misconception. Students may treat their own privacy (and that of others) fairly casually in their initial forays into social networks. But it doesn’t take more than one bad experience posting too much of oneself online to inculcate more moderated sharing. So we can all sigh a bit of relief: it doesn’t look like the next generation is inclined (at least not en masse) to duplicate the foibles of Anthony Weiner. Like the rest of us, they too are learning the art of discretion.

The ICPL conversation mostly emphasized the dimensions of privacy that are defined when we make choices about how much of ourselves to share online. When we produce content and share it with others we are of course redefining what of our lives is private and what is public in fundamental ways. But beyond this production oriented definition I wonder whether privacy awareness could also be enriched by broadening the definition of privacy to include the experience of seclusion and solitude and the particular psychological and intellectual spaces that are created when we moderate not only our production but our consumption of digital resources. Privacy, after all, isn’t just about what we choose to share of ourselves online, but how much of our time we choose to spend in the company of others and how much time we choose to spend alone. These are the types of questions that William Powers takes up in Hamlet’s Blackberry and William Deresiewicz in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece titled “The End of Solitude.” On my campus we’re promoting these latter conversations about privacy as well in a project titled “Concentration in the Humanities” in which we ask students to alternatively work in private and communal spaces and consider which ones catalyze better writing. When the definition of privacy is broadened this way we can (potentially) engage students not only by appealing to their long term interest in reputation but their more immediate interest in being better writers.

As one speaker mentioned on the last day of the conference the mission of the university suffers when students and instructors have to worry about excessive surveillance. When we’re surveiled overmuch, students and professors feel constrained, and our interest in contributing to the marketplace of ideas diminishes. This is an important point. But it’s also worth noting that the mission also suffers when our students and professors are so connected that they can’t differentiate between their own thoughts and those of the digital hive. Discussions about privacy, are, ultimately, also discussions about identity and the extent to which we subscribe to individualistic or communitarian senses of the self. These senses of the self, in turn, give definition to competing visions of what a university education is for (Is it there to cater to the desires and ambitions of private wants and ambitions? Or is it there to cater to the broader needs of the community?) Privacy thus framed can then address the immediate pragmatic need to guard student’s reputations while at the same time broaching more fundamental problems about the nature of the self, what it means to be an educated person, and the missions of the university.

If the theme of this year’s ICPL talk was inspired by the Tyler Clementi case, it was especially fitting that the conference ended with a presentation on Cornell’s “Dear Uncle Ezra” which, in Ann Lander’s or Dear Abby mode, dispenses therapeutic advise online to students who write in with their questions. When it was deployed in 1986 one of the early questions and answers was from someone contemplating jumping off one of Cornell’s infamous bridges. Here’s the letter (and answer) quoted in full:

Dear Uncle Ezra:

WHERE IS THE BRIDGE THAT EVERYONE JUMPS OFF OF I AM CONSIDERING IT MYSELF.

Dear Considering,

Most people, at one time or another, consider suicide as an answer to their problems. As Ann Landers says, suicide doesn't solve problems, i t only passes them on from you to the survivors -- family, friends,loved ones, and other people who care about you.

Suicide is usually an attempt to deal with a crisis. The Chinese character for "crisis" translates into "dangerous opportunity." Suicide is a permanent solution, and eliminates other options. So if you're hurting so much that you are willing to pass the pain on to those who care, perhaps you could use this dangerous opportunity to try some other options first.

Ithaca and Cornell have a number of services specifically to help people in crisis. Call Suicide Prevention any time at 272-1616, go to Psychological Services in Gannett Health Center (255-5208), talk with a chaplain in CURW (118 Annabel Taylor Hall, 255-4214), talk with a friend, and use this opportunity to change your life for the better.

Problems have solutions. Your life has value. Please give it a chance.

Uncle Ezra

Clementi, who wasn’t at Cornell, didn’t get a chance to write directly to Ezra. And even if he had, it’s sheer speculation to say that Ezra would have turned the course of events with any more success than the help that was offered to Clementi at Rutgers. But that speculation isn’t my purpose here. I post the Ezra letter to show that the identity of the self in college can be a very fragile thing, whether we’re talking about the college experience in 1986 or 2010, and that we, as educators and administrators, can help to nurture that self by helping students to think through their sense of selves as private, isolated (and sometimes lonely) individuals and their selves as shaped and defined by a larger community of (as Ezra puts it) “family, friends, loved ones , and other people who care about you.” This isn’t to say that the conversation will yield simple answers about privacy. After all, it appears that in one sense Clementi didn’t have enough privacy. And yet, in another sense he might have been saved had he been less private about his suffering. Talks on privacy framed this way can, hopefully, deepen the conversation and bring our students into closer touch with the abiding questions that should be central in university life.

You Say You Want a Revolution....

2011-07-11T10:58:00.000-06:00

I'm finishing my 11th week teaching in the Canvas system. As an instructor who has taught extensively in Blackboard, Moodle and Sakai here are my current impressions of the product and the larger community:

Just when you had given up all hope that Utah’s hotbed of digital innovation would produce an LMS of your liking, along comes Instructure’s Canvas a system that promises to rock the industry off of it’s clay feet. Plenty of people have already reported about Instructure’s eminently usable interface and my own experience teaching a course in it over this summer semester is something I want to talk about a bit later.

But first a bit about Utah as that hotbed of LMS innovation – it’s actually true. After all, we’re the progenitor of Novell and Wordperfect as well as plenty of more recent startups. So if you suffer from some sort of reverse provincialism – thinking that really cool LMS innovations are only going to come from the coasts, or from Silicon Valley or from cities or universities with a reputation for a more cosmopolitan orientation, the Instructure product will lift that veil quickly. Use it as I have for only a few days and I guarantee that it will knock your teaching socks off.

This has not been easy for me to admit, because for years now I’ve been using and promoting Sakai and Moodle. I’ve been doing so because of their open, global communities and the promise that involvement with those communities would benefit my own university’s commitment to global outreach. Back in the summer of 2008, when Instructure made it’s earliest pitches to me at TTIX it seemed implausible that a more locally situated organization, with a much smaller body of developers who were all concentrated in one area could compete with that value proposition.

And yet on a functional level, it’s clearly competing. As Michael Feldstein has noted, Canvas has streamlined the number of clicks it takes to work in the gradebook – that bane of almost all LMSs. But I don’t need to repeat those accolades here. What I find most impressive about Canvas are two things: A design that looks spare but (like a very good waiter) presents functionality when and where you need it. And a design that draws students toward the activities they need to do in a course even when you might be a little forgetful. In this regard, Canvas is sort of like an executive secretary on speed. Once you’ve constructed and scheduled your assignments, Canvas will present prompts and course views that will keep even the spacier students on track and informed about what needs to be done, the consequences of not doing it, as well as the larger learning outcomes that are associated with each activity in the course. Do you get tired (or sometimes forget) to remind students of upcoming assignments or ones that might be past due? If you do Canvas will remind students for you. And if you sometimes wonder whether students understand or take into account the relative weight of different activities, Canvas presents easily accessible gradebook views that drive this message home. And for students who actually work prospectively, Canvas automatically generates a calendar with the course’s activities so that they can think about the course’s various commitments in the context of their other lives. Finally, for students who aren’t just grade grubbers or scheduling fanatics, but who are actually thinking intellectually about the course, Canvas allows them to view a list of learning outcomes and to grasp how those learning outcomes are aligned with the various activities in the course.

While there is plenty to gush about in Canvas (and if you want to participate in the gushing subscribe to the listserv by sending an email to : sympa@lists.usu.edu?subject=sub%20canvas or come to Instructure's upcoming August conference in cool Snowbird, Utah) this isn’t to say that I don’t have a few reservations about moving to Canvas . I’ve worked for a long time with Sakai and Moodle and have developed many collegial relationships in those communities. And right now I’m participating in an NEH grant that came my way in part because of the social and professional relationships that I’ve developed with those organizations.

So while there are plenty of nice things to celebrate in the Canvas product, this hardly means that we should all of a sudden forget these other associations or gloss over all of the contributions that these other communities have made, and are continuing to make to the development and refinement of the LMS.

It is in this context that I lament Instructure’s use of the iconography of war and insurrection to suggest what is going on in the LMS landscape or the relationship between the various players. It’s best instantiated by their release a couple months ago of the following video which is a takeoff of Apple’s 1984:

To some extent this is forgivable; Canvas really is the upstart David to Blackboard’s entrenched Goliath. And it would be nice to see a bit of Blackboard’s near monopolistic hold on the market eroded (or in the parlance of the day, “disrupted”) by Canvas innovation. It’s after-all what Steve Jobs was trying to do 30 years ago when 1984 was released and I don’t know anyone who seriously begrudges that marketing campaign. But one thing that distinguishes the Canvas-Blackboard narrative from the Apple-PC scene is that there are also a number of strong open source players in the LMS market including Sakai and Moodle. These organizations, in terms of their governance structures and their disposition to transparency and openness are at least as revolutionary as Instructure is. Moreover, while Instructure presents itself as something entirely new, one would have to put on some serious blinders not to see the many aspects of the product which are derivative of prior art. A good example of this is their modules tool which is an obvious copy of Moodle’s. The product, despite the marketing campaign and the gush, has not emerged ex nihilo nor is it something entirely new. More accurately, it’s a refinement of prior art in a field that many claim has largely been commoditized.

I suspect, as Canvas gains market share (which as early adopters of their product I and my institution seriously want) the adversarial nature of their marketing can be toned down and the intellectual debt which all of these LMS initiatives owe to each other can be more openly acknowledged. After all, it’s universities to whom these organizations ultimately cater and it’s from their feedback that these organizations learn in which way to innovate. And in so far as universities espouse the ideal of openness, proper attribution and spirited collaboration one would think that our LMS partners would ultimately align behind those values as well. Here’s hoping they will.

Free as in Freedom

2011-06-14T08:28:00.000-06:00

Chuck Severance's book Sakai: Free As In Freedom is now in bookstores!

Concentration in the Humanities

2011-05-25T10:28:00.000-06:00

Our NEH application was awarded. It's titled "Concentration in the Humanities." I've posted on some of the concerns that the project intends to address in Combating Digital Maximalism But here is the grant proposal's abstract:

Concentration in the Humanities is a three-part project that helps Humanities students deal with digital distractions. The grant will: 1) fund the development of an interdisciplinary course that explores our increasing connections with others and how these in turn affect the experience of solitude; 2) fund the development of software enhancements to an existing assessment engine which students in the course will use, and 3) fund the creation of a “distraction lab” that will enable students to explore how concentration encourages better reading and writing. Students in the course will write their assignments in the “distraction lab” where instructors can calibrate the amount of connectivity students can have with the outside world. The Concentration in the Humanities Project will serve as a pilot. Weber State’s Composition Program (which one of the grant participants directs) will integrate the pilot’s best practices into its curriculum. Concentration in the Humanities will also catalyze campus conversations about the problem of distraction in the digital age and the importance of learning how to focus when attempting to read or write.

Statement of Innovation

The project will transform Weber State’s testing centers and enhance testing software to give instructors more granular control over the amount of connectivity students have when completing assignments. The course will put a problem often treated as uniquely modern in historical context. While the specter of the "data deluge" is real, few scholars have investigated its historic antecedents. By using the past to inform the present we will examine whether modern challenges to concentration are unique. By using cutting edge software, we hope to find new solutions to enduring dilemmas.

Statement of Humanities Significance

The capacity to concentrate is fundamental to reading and writing, yet distractions often impede concentration. Distraction is often framed as a quintessentially modern problem, the result of an increasingly busy, connected world. Yet distraction is not particular to the digital age; worries about it have been recorded since the inception of the written word. Looking at past approaches to the problem of concentration and applying modern methods, we will help students learn to be focused writers in a world where distractions are rife.

Lions, Polar Bears and the Coming Battle: Benkler and Wu Revisited

2011-04-03T19:16:00.000-06:00

Having now completed Tim Wu's The Master Switch, I've been trying to think of weaknesses or ambiguities in his narrative that might stop me from buying the story wholesale. Boiled down, Wu argues that the history of information systems in America is a cyclical one where industries move from open organization to closed and back to open:

History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel—from open to closed system....History also shows that whatever has been closed too long is ripe for ingenuity's assault: in time a closed industry can be opened anew....This oscillation of information industries between open and closed is so typical a phenomenon that I have given it a name:"the cycle" [p. 6 Wu]

While the majority of Wu's book is devoted to history, his intent is ultimately presentist. He's interested in using history to clarify whether the current openness of the Internet is subject to the same cyclical vacillations that have occurred in past evolutions of information networks. In Wu's view the cycle is still at work in the present day. In spite of the fact that an open architecture and philosophy is embedded in the Internet, Wu doesn't think that we've transcended history. This time is no different: we're still subject to the cycle. And what makes matters worse is that the cycle this time around is more consequential than it's ever been before. These arguments shouldn’t be unfamiliar to people who have read Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks and his argument that we’ve come to a crossroads where we can choose to protect the virtues of a shared electrical commons or allow the big media conglomerates to divvy it into private spaces. But Benkler’s argument is buried in a massive tome that isn’t an easy read. Wu, in contrast, makes the story quite compelling:

At the beginning of the 2010s, as a chasm opened between Google and its allies like Amazon, eBay, and nonprofits like Wikipedia on the one side and Apple, AT&T, and the entertainment conglomerates on the other, it was obvious that what loomed was just the latest iteration of the perennial ideological struggle into which every information industry is eventually swept. It is the old conflict between the concepts of the open system and the closed, between the forces of centralized order and those of dispersed variety. The antagonists assume new forms, the generals change, but essentially the same battles are fought over and over again. It is the very essence of the Cycle, which even a technology as radical and powerful as the Internet seems able at most to moderate but not to abolish.

….While it may sound fanciful, the contest in question is more like one of polar bears battling lions for domination of the world. Each animal, insuperably dominant in its natural element—the polar bear on ice and snow, the lion on the open plains—will undertake a land grab where it has no natural business being. The only practicable strategy will be a campaign of climate change, the polar seeking to cover as much of the world with snow as they can, while the lion tries to coax a savannah from the edges of a tundra. Sounds absurd, but for these mighty predators, it’s simply the law of nature.[p. 289-290]

No doubt Wu is a good story teller, and if making references to bears and lions seems like a stretched metaphor it’s still a compelling way to describe the crisis. But like many stories I wonder whether the portrait is a little too starkly drawn. Are we really in a zero sum game? Or is there room for both lions and polar bears?

According to Randal Picker’s blog (just a quick note that I think it’s not him speaking so much as a law student whose seminar reflections he’s posting) there's room for both:

While Professor Wu’s criticisms of Apple’s closed hardware designs are accurate, in my opinion Apple’s tight walls predominantly surround just their hardware product and are not aimed at preventing the open interconnection that has allowed for Google and the internet to thrive. In this sense…. the habitats are not so mutually exclusive that they must now exist at loggerheads competing for their future corporate existence. In my opinion, Apple’s business model is not primarily focused on its ability to strike deals with the old conglomerates and monopolists, but instead on moving their proprietary hardware and protecting the brand that allows for the inflated prices at which they sell it. [http://picker.typepad.com/picker_seminar/2011/02/revisiting-polar-bears-and-lions.html ]

Duly noted. Still, one of the comments notes, it's not strictly a question of infrastructure bandwidth so much as the limited attention span of surfers. If we all gravitate toward the polish and sparkle of content on a tethered device like the iPad we’re moving a step away from the ragged freedom of a wide open world-wide-web. To boot, we may be moving a little closer to abdicating the university’s responsibility in arbitrating culture and letting Steve Jobs and his media partners become --as Wu calls them-- our new "cultural surrogates." This isn’t to say that one can’t buy and use an iPad in the university (I own more than my share of Apple devices). But it’s good to know that our consumer choices aren’t completely without consequence or symbolism.

Using OER and OSS to Protect Taxpayer Entitlements

2011-02-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog post titled "Openness, Socialism and Capitalism" David Wiley argues that one of the reasons OER should be promoted is that it forwards the interests of the taxpayer through the protection of contracts and property rights. Summarized, Wiley argues that taxpayers should be entitled to the intellectual property that is produced and funded by taxpayer dollars. By licensing this property as OER, that entitlement is protected. However, conversely, if the intellectual property is privatized that entitlement is jeopardized. (Wiley doesn’t say so directly but this is essentially a Nozickian view of justice where goods are distributed on the basis of existing titles and contracts rather than on the basis of something else like utilitarianism or egalitarianism.)

Since by vocation I’m more of a technologist than an an academic I’m always interested in how the ideals and arguments of OER apply to OSS. While OER is not the same as OSS, it’s worth noting that with regard to this particular issue OSS licenses also serve the taxpayer’s interest. When universities (and university technologists) acquire software – especially big ERP systems or LMSs – they don’t just use the software, they often also help to make the software better by reporting bugs, writing ancillary documentation, suggesting design improvements, and doing local quality assurance testing. When the software is OSS, those taxpayer funded labors get embedded in property that is publicly owned. However, when the software is something other than OSS there’s a weaker guarantee that the value produced by that labor will remain in the public domain.

Since college and university technologists labor behind the scenes it’s not always transparent where they labor, how all that taxpayer money is being spent, or where all the value that is produced by that labor ends up. But a good portion of it, instead of being handed directly back to the taxpayer, is leveraged most directly by the software companies whose bugs we uncover and whose user communities we foster.

As charitable institutions universities shouldn’t be too grudging in how the value which they add to the world is distributed. The university's intellectual property should be there for anyone to take whether those people are taxpayers or private corporations trying to advance the latest innovations. But OSS and OER ensure that everyone has an opportunity to benefit and that the intellectual property funded through taxpayer funded labor remains a taxpayer entitlement.

Disciplining the faculties: should learning always be fun?

2011-02-20T17:22:00.000-07:00

I recently posted the following on Educause's Games and Learning Listserv:

I just finished “This Game Sucks”: How to Improve the Gamification of
Education” in the most recent edition of Educause Review. Not a
sucky article (and as a side note I think the author – Smith Robbins
-- also hosts this listserv). I was especially interested in the
following passage:

“Of course, many in higher education think of games as frivolous and will say that the job of faculty and administrators is to deliver a quality education, not an entertaining experience. To me, a quality education and an entertaining experience are one and the same. True intellectual challenge is exhilarating. Lifelong learners become so because they find learning fun.”

Given the space limitations in an Educause column it’s understandable that the idea of education as entertainment versus education as something else couldn’t be elaborated on. But perhaps it’s worth exploring at greater length here?

There are merits to both sides. For learning to be sustainable we do need to show students that it has intrinsic rewards. However, I’m not sure that something that’s rewarding necessarily has to be fun. Or, even if it has to be fun whether it needs to be made fun in the short term. By way of an example I’m pretty sure that most of us learned something of value when we wrote dissertations and undergraduate theses. But very few of us would probably describe those experiences as fun. (Or at least not fun in the same way Black Ops is fun).

On the one hand, in differentiating between something that is rewarding and something that is fun, I’m partial to a pedagogical ideal that stresses that successful learning also entails teaching
students about discipline and about delayed gratification. To be sure we want to stress that just as we can expect good games to incorporate experiences of flow and fiero (as Jane McGonigal argues) we should attempt to introduce those same experiences into learning as well. But that doesn’t mean that students should expect those experiences all the time or perhaps even most of the time. And since it won’t be there all of the time in class or in work in the larger world, we need to teach students the disciplinary outlooks that can help them get through the duller less rewarding moments that inevitably arise.

On the other hand, in stressing a vision of education that takes it’s ideals from the disciplining of faculties (rather than simply from fun), I finally had a look back at Lawrence Veysey’s classic text, The Emergence of the University, in which he traces the origins of these more ascetic ideals of education in his opening chapter titled “Discipline and Piety.” Unfortunately, at least in that classic chapter I couldn’t find a particularly good defense of the idea of discipline. Even Princeton’s McCosh (President of that school in the late 19th century), who Veysey sees as one of discipline’s defenders seems to hazard feelings that Smith-Robbins could use in the promotion of gaming:

“Some have gone so far as to say, that [it does not]…..matter whether the knowledge….acquired, say the writing of Latin verses, be of any use in the future life or no; no matter how dull and crabbed the work, how harsh the grindstone on which the mind is ground, provided thereby the faculties are sharpened for use…..Do you not see the terrible risk of wearying and disgusting the mind, when it is making its first and most hopeful efforts, and giving it ever after, by the laws of mental association, a distaste for severe studies? True, the exercise of the mind, like that of the body, is its own reward; but both are most apt to be undertaken when there is some otherwise pleasant or profitable object in view…..” p.25, Veysey

So a defense of Smith Robbin’s positions can even be summoned from visions of education promulgated over 150 years ago.

But that being said, there is more to be explored here. Is education really about fun? Or is it about other sorts of rewards as well? And if elements of discipline and gratification also need to be incorporated into education, is gaming really the best (or most important model) from which to fashion educational reform? Finally are there other American intellectual traditions to draw on (apart from the Discipline and Piety educators) in defending (or calling into question) the virtues of learning as gaming?

Coming of Age in Call of Duty: Black Ops

2011-01-09T17:39:00.000-07:00

Ok, it’s an awkward title but I use it as an allusion to Tom Boellstorff’s book Coming of Age in Second Life which in turn is a play on Margaret Mead’s much more famous ethnography. In a short blog post of course I’m not going to do real ethnography but like Boellstorff I do wonder whether the tools of cultural analysis can be used to redeem (because they certainly can’t edify) my recent delinquent immersion into the much acclaimed video game Call of Duty: Black Ops. When I was describing my interest in doing an ethnographic analysis of the game to a colleague of mine he snickered which is a sensible reaction. After all, why even try to redeem a game that falls squarely in the genre of a first person shooter where the main activity is killing (virtually) other people?

Why not just embrace pretend warfare’s pleasures on face value? And isn’t this total folly in light of the recent assassination attempt of Rep. Gifford in Arizona? Shouldn’t we be moving away from symbolic violence?

There are those considerations, of course. And I won’t discount the desire for entertainment as a primary motivator for shelling out $300 on a Sony Playstation and another $45 on the actual game and a good portion of my waking life since I brought it home on Christmas Eve. If I’ve learned about all sorts arcane weaponry like a Claymore mine and a China Lake I might like to say that I’m doing it to become “more deeply acquainted with the artifacts that make up and populate Call of Duty’s culture.” But admittedly there are more base -- and less intellectual --motivations at work here.

So my colleague’s snickers are legitimate.

Still, serious studies of gaming culture and virtual worlds are increasingly common. Boellstorff isn’t alone and you are more than likely to have a colleague or two who treats the enterprise with gravitas. Here at Weber State for example my colleague Greg Anderson in the Computer Science department recently finished a dissertation titled “The Impact of Video Games on Team Cohesion” at Indiana State University. As Boellstorff reminds us, when we venture into virtual worlds we’re often plagued with the notion that we’re engaging in escapism. But that doesn’t mean that the experience can’t bleed back into our real life in positive and constructive ways if we allow ourselves to reflect on the experience. Here’s a rudimentary beginning. Think of the following as merely as a first day's set of field notes. If my spouse doesn’t grab the Playstation away from my cold dead hands, perhaps something more substantive will follow later:

First, despite what anyone tells you, gaming, at least for an initiate like me, is a real learning experience. The learning might not be about texts, or numbers, but it is deeply and engagingly a kinesthetic education in how to use one’s hands to operate the Playstation’s controller. The first time I picked up this tool I couldn’t do anything with it. But gradually, over the course of a few days of playing it begins to feel like an extension of one’s self. Following Matthew Crawford in Shopcraft as Soulcraft, maybe this intense use of one’s hands deserves more consideration than we’ve given it up until now. Here is Crawford quoting Mike Rose in The Mind at Work:

‘…..our testaments to physical work are so focused on the values such work exhibits rather than in the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission….It is as though in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links the hand and the brain.”

To be sure, there are problems with extending the analogy between craftwork and gaming too far. One works with actual material things in the real world whereas the other works with things in virtual worlds. And craftsmanship, is about making things whereas the traditional first person shooter is primarily (although not exclusively) about destroying things. But the intense use of one’s hands (and one’s eyes) is still there.

Second, when I finished the campaign (one of four distinct games in the Black Ops software) the credits which scrolled up the screen lasted much longer than they do at the end of a movie. And what was even more notable was how large their pool of quality assurance testers was. (Testers are people who go through the software attempting to uncover and document bugs so that the programmers can then fix them). In spite of this, the game still had its share of bugs in it which impelled me as a gamer to patiently and laboriously discover work-arounds. Unless I engaged in this discovery process I couldn’t proceed with the game. While there’s much more to quality assurance testing than just this, it’s an important part of the process. As such the game is socializing at least some section of the gaming public to procedures they will come across in the work force.

Third, Black Ops isn’t just developed by programmers. In the credits you’ll see a whole slew of citations to art directors, character artists, effects artists and environmental artists (to name just a few of the positions) that suggest that aesthetics isn’t just a passing concern to the studio which produced it.

In fact, unless you’ve got an antiquated Arnoldian high brow sensibility, you’d be hard pressed not to call this art and very engrossing and engaging art at that. So if there are manual and intellectual and work cultures embedded in Black Ops there are also artistic and aesthetic cultures to be found as well.

None of the above is to say that the symbolic violence which is produced and consumed in gaming culture isn’t something that we should be worried about. But this violence is embedded in a whole slew of other cultural practices and sensibilities which make gaming's simple dismissal unrealistic. Which might be another way of saying that gaming ethonography is good; we can learn a little more about who we are and who we want to be by promoting it.

The Heart of Spain

2010-12-30T14:59:00.001-07:00

As a Christmas present my dad just sent me a copy of Donald Harris's The Heart of Spain. My dad wrote the preamble. Harris is the founder of Tienda.com and it's not surprising that the book is a vision of Spain as seen through it's culinary traditions. Food, of course, is a elemental (alimental?) venue through which to understand culture. I tried to do a bit of the same in my own blog post "Tourism and Tequila Worms" which recounts (unfortunately a little pedantically) a tequila experience I had in Tepic about a year ago.

Tourism and Tequila Worms: Expanding an Exchange Program in Tepic, Mexico

2010-12-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

This past January I went to Mexico for a week. During the first few days I helped expand an exchange between Weber State University -- which is next to Utah’s Great Salt Lake -- and the University Autonoma de Nayarit (UAN) in Tepic, which is an hour inland from the Pacific coast. A three-hour plane flight separates these two universities but they are linked by a common ecology; millions of birds fly between the Great Salt Lake and Nayarit's warm Pacific wet-lands every year. To preserve this flight corridor, Weber State, UAN and several other organizations have been sponsoring yearly bird festivals, bird education programs, and academic exchanges.

The business side of things met with considerable success. Weber State and UAN agreed on a number of joint projects that we hope to carry through in the next eighteen months. While the planning was carried out in board-rooms and administrative offices, there was also, during the latter half of the visit, some time for visiting the beach, wandering the market, eating out, and going on bird-watching tours through crocodile infested mangrove swamps. So if our primary purpose was business, we also spent some time being tourists.

At first gloss, these activities seem dissonant. After all, the hard work of formalizing agreements in offices is precisely the type of activity that tourists try to escape. And if the contrasts between activities that feel like work and activities that feel like play registered on a gut level, it was also confirmed by a book I was reading in my spare time titled Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters (edited by Dina Berger and Andrew Wood). While the book finds many redeeming features in tourism, the closing essay included part of a polemic against tourism that Jamaica Kinkaid wrote in A Small Place:

[the tourist is] an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that….never [realizing] that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness. p.371

Kinkaid’s polemic is wrenching and her point is reinforced by the fact that while over 15 million American tourists visit Mexico each year, far fewer Mexicans come to the U.S. as tourists. Moreover, while tourists are interested in seeing an authentic Mexican culture, a lot of what they actually encounter are constructed experiences that offer a view of Mexico far different from how Mexicans actually live.

The book made me wonder about our mix of activities and identities. In the capacity of academics we were there with an express purpose -- to forge stronger intellectual links with UAN by creating a collaborative community of academics who could research and teach together. If, however, we were turning into neo-colonialists when we replaced our suits with tourist garb then maybe our vocational and recreational selves were working at cross purposes. If in one scenario we were trying to meet our Mexican hosts as equals and as peers, in the next scenario, in the role of tourists we were re-awakening invidious relationships that might distance us from our Mexican hosts.

But if one can’t fully cleanse tourism of its unequal power dynamics, and the possibility that tourists are not really seeing the real Mexico when they visit, Dina Berger explains that U.S.-Mexican tourism has also served as a form of informal diplomacy:

Tourists, through pleasure travel, learned what made Mexico tick and learned to appreciate cultural difference and likeness….. those who enacted it seemingly played some role in forwarding foreign policy agendas, whether aware of it or not….tourism can and has acted as a medium for improving Mexican-U.S. relations. After all, through the act of travel, members of different nations came face-to-face with one another in a potentially meaningful exchange. And like more formal programs of public diplomacy, a certain image of national identity was portrayed by both host and guest. p.111-114

For me, tourism played this diplomatic role in two distinct ways. First, it served to break down culinary barriers, and second, it helped to assuage fears that had been instilled in me through the media.

In the afternoon after our first round of meetings, UAN representatives took us to a restaurant called “El Marlin.” There we were served a specialty called sarandeado which was a local fish marinated in soy sauce, lime and chiles, smoked over a wood fire and served with fresh onions, tomatoes and cucumbers. During dinner we were plied with rounds of bottled beer which I drank even though I can never recall drinking with fellow administrators in Utah, where our campus is dry. I was warmly warned, that at the end of the dinner we’d be having a shot of tequila and that I might be asked to eat the tequila worm.

I never actually was asked to swallow the worm but in acquiescing to the food and drink and to the challenge of eating the tequila worm I was engaging in what Jeffrey Pilcher, in “Jose Cuervo and the Gentrified Worm,” described as a common touristic experience with multivalent meanings:

The dinner table provides an arena for building community through two distinct processes, the physical act of sharing sustenance with insiders and the symbolic boundaries that exclude the food of outsiders as inedible….Through food and drink, tourists from the United States have consumed their Mexican neighbors: alternately dominating, transforming, excluding and embracing them…p.221

Pilcher notes that the tequila worm is itself an invented tradition, put in place as a marketing gimmick by distillers in the 1940s. By eating the fabled tequila “gusano” I wasn’t about to eat something that originated authentically from Mexican folk culture. But in volunteering to eat it I was still trying to engage in informal diplomacy. My rationales for being careful about what I ate and drank in Mexico were pragmatic; I didn’t want to get sick, and as an emissary I needed to consider whether I had to abide by the puritanical drinking norms of my own culture. But on an alimental level, to resist food and drink was to create an organic barrier between my own culture and a foreign one. By sharing in a common repast, I was showing my willingness to cross a primordial boundary.

I hope that by participating in manufactured culinary tradition I helped to break down some informal barriers. But if it didn’t, I do know that tourism helped me to cross other barriers that I’d buttressed through fear. These fears included anxieties about getting kidnapped, having to pay exorbitant sums of money to corrupt policemen for minor traffic violations, and the fabled “turista.” A few months ago the New York Times identified Mexico as having the most kidnappings of any country, with over 7000 a year. And last spring Arizona state universities issued travel advisories discouraging students from visiting Mexico, because of the escalating drug-related violence. Although I had blithely traveled through Mexico in the late 80’s after college, these reports gave me serious pause. With over a million American expatriates living in Mexico it’s self-evident that these fears are overblown. The fact that they are exaggerated is made even more apparent in books like Gringos In Paradise and On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel, both of which provide soothing accounts of North Americans leading happy and uneventful expatriate lives in Mexico. But if books can assuage worries, a far better way was simply to hop on a plane and visit Mexico in person. As a tourist many of my experiences may have been banal; I successfully drove for a week without having to pay an onerous bribe, I ate fresh vegetables and fruit shakes without incident, and (big surprise) I made it back to the states without getting kidnapped. While these may seem shallow, they served to take away my fears. As such they are an important first step to take before moving toward more genuine exchanges.

In the closing passages of The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman exhorts that in a post 9/11 world we need to make sure to fathom the dangers that lie around us. At the same time, to live fruitfully in a flat world we also need to become masters of our fear:

It is always hard to know when we have crossed the line between justified safety measures and letting our imaginations get the best of us and thereby paralyzing ourselves with precautions….We all don’t need to become so gripped by imagining the worst in everyone around us that we shrink into ourselves…..We have to be the masters of our imaginations, not the prisoners…..Do whatever it takes, but get out the door. p.614-615

Books can help in putting one’s worst worries to rest. But it’s the actual act of getting out the door that really puts the most corrosive fears to rest. This isn’t to say that dangers don’t exist; indeed our Mexican hosts spent an entire evening dwelling on the growing violence in Mexico. But again, while the dangers of travel are real, it’s important not to over-estimate them; otherwise our ability to cross boundaries and to make connections with other cultures is seriously constrained.

As academics who’ve been steeped in the culture of political correctness and Kinkaid-like polemics, it’s easy to lose sight of the many if sometimes banal benefits that tourism offers. We think that if we can exchange ideas and collaborate on an intellectual endeavor that the rest of a friendship and an exchange will naturally fall into place. What we forget is that while academic collaboration can take us a long way, tourism can function as a useful complement. It isn’t likely to provide as much perspective into another culture as the experience of living in situ for a long period of time as an exchange student or faculty member. But it will take us a lot further than the compatriot who has simply stayed at home. Tourists, more-so than other travelers, fall victim to constructed forms of culture. After all, I’m pretty sure that in an average week average Mexicans are not having to ponder whether they’ll need to eat a tequila worm. But an encounter with constructed culture is better than no encounter at all.

Combating Digital Maximalism

2010-08-14T17:24:00.000-06:00

I just finished William Powers’ Hamlet’s Blackberry which is a great rumination on the costs we accrue as we become increasingly interconnected and what we can do to loosen it’s insidious grip on our lives. Powers (like Neil Postman in his third idea of technological change) thinks that an identifiable philosophy lies at the heart of technology and that in the digital era it's called "Digital Maximalism" and can be summarized by a maxim and two corollaries:

It’s good to be connected, and it’s bad to be disconnected.
First corollary: The more you connect, the better off you are.
Second corollary: The more you disconnect, the worse off you are. [p.35]

Like most people who value contemplation, Powers takes issue with this philosophy and devotes a good deal of the book examining how we can get off the grid and spend a little more time with our inner selves. He’s by no means the first to have written on this theme (think Carr’s well received The Shallows or my own small contributions in “iPhones Each Day Keep the Instructor O.k”), but I especially appreciate his attempt to look at a few famous men from Western history (including Socrates, Seneca, Gutenberg and Shakespeare) and examine what they’ve done to shirk the distractions of the crowd and get down to deeper and more focused thinking. If you need a fresh and interesting take on the canon, and you worry whether our intellectual capacities are diminishing as a result of recent inventions than this book is for you.

Addendum: Powers suggests that we need to build options into our current digital technologies that will allow us to adjust how much connectivity we want. Most of our devices attempt to realize the maxim and corollaries enumerated above. But when people choose the relatively less connected Kindle over the iPad they are often leveraging the kind of option Powers wants to see more of. People (like myself) who turned on Gmail lab’s “Email Addict” feature (which made Gmail unavailable for 15 minutes) were after the same thing too. It’s a shame that the feature was retired which (incidentally) is somewhat at odds with Google’s very own Eric Schmidt who as CEO once advised:

Turn off your computer. You’re actually going to have to turn off your phone and discover all that is human around us. Nothing beats holding the hand of your grandchild as he walks his first steps. (quoted from p.76 of Hamlet’s Blackberry).

Consuming Post-Socialist Nostalgia in Budapest

2010-07-31T16:23:00.000-06:00

Ok this post isn't strictly about I.T. in the university but as Andrew Sullivan writes in "Why I Blog" a successful blog doesn't necessarily need to have the focus or formality or authority of essay writing. It's free to be a little more eclectic and experimental. So I'm trying a bit of that in this post.

I recently came back from a bike trip from Passau in eastern Germany to Budapest in Hungary. While in Hungary I went and visited Memento Park where I happened across an old Trabant. My pose in the above picture is intended to be ironic. My thoughts while standing there were of classmates who had proudly posed in our high school year book in front of their own (or perhaps their dad's) prized vehicles. I've attached one of these images although I count many more like it in my yearbook. I'm not sure exactly what underlies the irony; certainly I'm trying to signal that I wasn't the type to pose this way (although my own year book picture was equally if not more ridiculous). But I'm hoping that something more is evoked as well. In an essay my Dad shared with me (titled "Go Trabi Go!") Daphne Berdahl argues that going about in a Trabi in post 1989 Europe could symbolize your own poverty and lack of ability to afford something nicer but that later it took on a more nostalgic and ironic character. As Berdahl argues:

"The revitalized Trabi is....symptomatic of what I have called "ostalgie for the present", that is practices that both contest and affirm the new order of a market economy by expressing politicized identities in terms of product choices and mass merchandising....consumers of Ostalgie and drivers of Trabis may escape the dominant order without leaving it."

I was only semi-conscious of this "ironic awareness" when I posed hurriedly in front of the camera. But perhaps similar motivations were at work. It's too bad the Trabi wasn't around when I graduated from high school; maybe then I too could have a graduation picture that I'd be less embarrassed about.

iPhones Each Day Keep the Instructor OK; Mobility and Place in American Academic Life

2010-06-28T10:42:00.000-06:00

My essay on iPhones and American mobility was just made available on academiccommons.org. At a recent executive briefing that I attended at Apple's campus in San Jose attendees were promoting the growth in mobile learning. There's a lot to be said for learning-on-the-move and the 2010 Horizon Report brings the trend to light. But some types of learning are still facilitated by more place-bound activities. I explore these tensions in the essay.

Kamenetz and Crawford: Mashing Up Class

2010-05-31T16:03:00.000-06:00

In America, where the ideology of anti-intellectualism runs deep, it’s not hard to find people who call into question the value of education. If you are interested in the tradition, pick up Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, or if you are yourself an anti-intellectual simply recall the continued popularity of the quip: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” (often attributed to Mark Twain). In DIY U, Anya Kamenetz, adds a chapter to the history, not because she espouses anti-intellectualism (she’s a Yale graduate and both her parents are academics) but because she argues, quite persuasively, that a college education is so expensive nowadays that it’s no longer the guaranteed gateway to the middle-class that it once was.

To remedy the problem, Kamenetz wants students to take greater advantage of the open educational resources which people like David Wiley, Jim Groom, Stephen Downes and the OCW initiatives have long espoused. However, while there certainly is an imperative for us to redress the economic burdens that we’re piling on students, there’s been some interesting conversations on David Wiley, Michael Feldstein and Dean Dad’s blogs on whether today’s students are sufficiently intellectually privileged to take advantage of these new open modalities and what needs to be done so that they can take advantage of them. The challenge isn’t just to push content out onto the Web but to provide students with the guidance and intellectual catalysts in a virtual format that are afforded by the residential college and Yale’s fabled master’s teas of which Kamenetz may have occasionally partaken. So in spite of their celebration of eduPunk, and their desire to “destabilize traditional hierarchies in higher education” neither Wiley, Feldstein, nor Kamenetz see the traditional university withering away. Its relative advantages vis-à-vis other ways of getting educated may be eroding, but it still enjoys some absolute advantages.

Although herself a product of the Ivies, Kamenetz isn’t interested in discussing elite education (presumably she thinks it knows how to take care of itself). Still, it’s worth pointing out that some of the destabilizing tendencies that are at work in the community college and at overpriced second tier institutions are also manifest in more prestigious settings. Take for example Mathew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft which came out last year. Heralded as the new Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Crawford’s book is about his experience as a recently minted University of Chicago political science Ph.D. who becomes disenchanted with academic learning and turns to motorcycle repair as a palliative. For a while after getting his Ph.D., Crawford tries to live the life of a knowledge worker but he’s unhappy not only with having to sit in a cubicle but with the relative returns on his educational investment vis-à-vis the blue-collar worker:

" . . .parents don’t want their children to become plumbers. Yet that plumber under the sink might be charging somebody eighty dollars an hour. This fact ought, at least, to induce an experience of cognitive dissonance in the parent who regards his child as smart and want him to become a knowledge worker. If he accepts the basic premise of a knowledge economy that someone being paid a lot of money must know something, he may begin to wonder what is really going on under the sink." (page 20)

Maybe I too am focused overly much on the Ivies but I see it as a supporting exhibit to Kamenetz’ concerns. In DIY U Kamenetz wonders why as a journalist she was making so much less than her follow Yale grads who had gone to work as hedge fund managers. (p. 32) While Crawford directs his envy toward a different vocation (and by many measures a different social class) the laments are similar; even elite education no longer seems to offer clear remunerative guarantees.

The resonance doesn’t end there, however, as Crawford then goes on to suggest how best to redress these social worries:

"So what advice should one give a young person? If you have a natural bent for scholarship; if you are attracted to the most difficult books out of an urgent need, and can spare four years to devote yourself to them, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. But if this is not the case; if the thought of four more years sitting in a classroom makes your skin crawl, the good news is that you don’t have to go through the motions and jump thorough the hoops for the sake of making a decent living. Even if you do go to college, learn a trade in the summers. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid as an independent tradesmen than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems or low-level “creative.” To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable." (p. 53)

One should be careful, of course, not to press the Crawford-Kamenetz conflation too far. Crawford is a Jeffersonian Republican who is celebrating the modern yeoman. He’s interested in the lives and liberties of the working class but his emphasis is on independence freedom and work that is truly redemptive. Kamenetz, in contrast, despite her Yale pedigree, seems genuinely interested in social justice and expanding the middle class (p. xiii). Still, that doesn’t dampen the resonance too much. While Kamenetz ventured beyond Yale’s cloisters for internships at the Village Voice, Crawford took up Plutarch with one hand and a wrench with his other. Both are educational contrarians who seek to imbue a little more of a mash-up into the traditional curricular track. Like Twain before them, Kamenetz and Crawford have noticed a chasm between (their) schooling and education. And they are both seeking to help others close this chasm as a way of helping the next generation into careers that are both redemptive and remunerative.

Ivy, Industry and The Incredible Shrinking CIO

2010-05-18T15:09:00.000-06:00

Among the many great observations in “The Incredible Shrinking CIO” was Grochow’s remark that information technology has been democratized. This comment resonates strongly with Nicholas Carr’s argument in IT Doesn’t Matter. Educause articles have been written contesting Carr’s relevance in the academy. But even if Carr doesn’t describe what’s actually happening on the ground, the argument is compelling in the abstract: when information technology has been commoditized internal innovations yield less competitive advantages. And when innovations in I.T. have less R.O.I, there’s less incentive to place the CIO on the cabinet level if his/her role has become operational rather than strategic. In effect the role of the CIO shrinks as information technology becomes a technology one buys off-the-shelf rather than a system that one produces in house.

What is also striking is that The Incredible Shrinking CIO came out roughly around the same time as Greg Smith's post "Is Higher Education Losing Its Influence Over the Tech Industry?" and the Chronicle's highlighting of it. It’s possible that there isn’t any direct connection between the waning influence of the CIO and the waning influence of academe on information technology vendors. But the parallel is nonetheless striking.

Regardless of whether these conversations are directly related, or whether the authority of academe and the CIO is actually waning vis-à-vis the authority of the tech industry, information technology continues to play an important role in shaping cognition, and learning, and the flow of information. And since these are central concerns to the university, CIOs and other academic technologists who are committed to reflecting deeply on the relationship between technology and the academic mission need to continue to be involved. These concerns impel at least some of us to open source learning management systems like Sakai and Moodle. We perceive those movements as direct attempts to regain some of the control that we've ceded to vendors in the LMS marketplace. But in spite of this movement to open source, we shouldn't be too quick to imagine unbridgeable divides between what academics do and what vendors want. After all, as James Ptaszynski reminds us in his comment on the Chronicle article, there are many people who migrate between these different cultures and want to have a common conversation. Let’s have it!

iPad To the Rescue

2010-05-07T09:39:00.000-06:00

Just when I'd given up hope in further innovations in the auto industry Chuck Severance comes to the rescue ;) :

Technology, Feelings and American History

2010-02-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

Last week, in Slate Magazine, Vaughn Bell wrote an article titled “Don't Touch That Dial!” Vaughn reminds his readers that anxieties about the effects of emerging technology on cognition are not particular to our own age. Indeed, we’ve been worrying about how new communication technologies affect thinking for a very long time. Even Plato worried about how writing was bad for thinking in the Phaedrus. I cover similar ground in the below post. But my post is at once narrower and broader than Vaughn’s. It’s narrower in that I focus on just a few forms of communication in American history. It’s broader in that I’m grappling not only with feelings of anxiety but other feelings as well. As the humanities strive to find their place in the 21st century academics need to invest time understanding how the fit between our feelings and our technologies have evolved through time. For historians of the emotions this is fertile disciplinary ground!

-----

"We realized a long time ago that what you make people feel is just as important as what you make....." -- BMW Television Advertisement

In reading the past through the concerns of the present, I’m guilty of presentisim, which among historians, at least, is a taboo. Still, even if committing this methodological sin can skew an understanding of the past, it can lend insight into the present. I was especially struck by this after reading David Henkin’s The Postal Age; the Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. Henkin argues that the rise of the postal service allowed feelings of intimacy to be shared across greater distances than they had been prior to the the democratization of letter-writing. While a postal network was already in place by the Jacksonian period, it was primarily used as a means for distributing newspapers; personal correspondence was a secondary concern, and the cost of sending a letter was too high for the service to be used widely for this latter purpose. When rates dropped precipitously in the 1840s the exchange of letters rose dramatically, and in the wake of this, American’s in disparate places began to feel interconnected as never before. Henkin’s text is littered with personal accounts that document this feeling. For example, William Ellery Chaning observed that the postal office

“binds the whole country in a chain of sympathies….It perpetuates friendships between those who are never to meet again…..It binds the family in the new settlement and the half-cleared forest to the cultivated spot from which it emigrated.” Pages 50-51

Do Channing’s comments seem familiar? Today we have similar accounts of how Facebook and Twitter are expanding (or at least reworking) intimacy. For example, in the New York Times article “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” Clive Thompson claims that these new media are expanding so-called “ambient awareness;” the feeling of being near someone through the stream of Facebook posts and tweets found online.

Ben Haley, a 39-year-old documentation specialist for a software firm who lives in Seattle, told me that when he first heard about Twitter last year from an early-adopter friend who used it, his first reaction was that it seemed silly. But a few of his friends decided to give it a try, and they urged him to sign up, too… Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes..Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. “It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.”

It’s not hard to come across other articles like Thompson’s. There are plenty of articles that document how new personal communication technologies are shaping feelings and how feelings, in turn, are reshaping these technologies. But Henkin’s history reminds that this reshaping has been going on for a long time. And wrapped up with this history is a complimentary concern about the proper etiquette and protocols to use when communicating through mediated means.

Since the advent of email, texting and twitter we’ve confronted all sorts of authoring challenges that resonate with longstanding epistolary challenges one finds earlier in letter and postcard writing: Should I begin my email with “Hi David,” “David,” or “Dear David?” How crafted and refined do my emails, texts, and tweets need to be? Since these technologies truncate my prose, should I be forgiven if I don’t craft my language as much as I might have in another medium? And just this month, with the advent of Buzz, people are lobbying Google to refine it so as to more closely mimic boundaries that we’ve established between our public and more private selves.

There is no question that we traffic in these questions today. But what is equally, if not more remarkable is that we confronted similar questions a hundred and fifty years ago. For example, Henkin narrates how Americans were not initially in the habit of checking for mail daily. In fact, days or weeks might pass between when a letter arrived at a post office and when it might be picked up by an addressee. As personal correspondence grew in popularity, and as correspondents began to expect quicker delivery and turnaround, the imperative to visit the mailbox or the postoffice more often also became more pressing.

This gradual immersion in a network comes as little surprise to those of us who’ve become more and more absorbed (or at least distracted) by growing streams of email, texts and tweets. But what is equally notable is that our own contemporary worries about how tweets and texts were corrupting writing are in some ways anticipated by the introduction of the postcard:

There was from the start something elegant, not to mention convenient, about cards that bore their own one-cent postage….since postcards supplied a built-in excuse for being brief, they further lowered the threshold for mail exchange (the postcard, as one recent celebrant puts it, “justifies, from the outside, by means of the borders, the indigence of the discourse”). Before 1845 a correspondent assumed a heavy burden in deciding to send a letter. Over the next few decades that burden had lightened, but the cultural construction of the personal letter as a gesture of intimate connection tended to maintain some of the earlier pressures…..if the postcard further democratized the exchange of interpersonal greetings, it fit uneasily into familiar constructions of epistolary intimacy. By emptying the personal letter of its enclosures, the tendency of the postcard was toward the reduction of correspondence to formal gestures. More obviously, postcards exposed themselves to public view….Page 174

Today we fret about whether digital technologies are deepening or shallowing out our relationships with others. But our worries are not completely new ones; they were anticipated by 19th century Americans witnessing the rise of the postal service. Although it’s not a new complaint much of the present discourse about information technology (and especially information technology within the university) suffers from historical amnesia; we often don’t go further back than twenty years in attempting to trace the ever evolving fit between our feelings, our technologies and our protocols or etiquettes. But as Henkin reminds us the connection between our technological present and our technological past is very much continuous:

Despite all the changes that separate us from the postal culture of the mid-nineteenth century, our pervasive expectations of complete contact, of boundless accessibility, actually link us back the cultural moment when ordinary American’s first experienced the mail in similar terms. The world we now inhabit belongs to the extended history of that moment. Page 175

It is perhaps too much to hope for, but as we fashion technology strategies for our university’s future let’s remember that our struggles to find a felicitous fit between our feelings and our technology precede the advent of the digital age.

The Mission Behind the Margin

2010-02-12T00:26:00.000-07:00

In a recent post on the Educause Openess Discussion List Brad Wheeler counseled that while open-source may indeed be a social movement, the current cohort of adopters are likely to be alienated if it's referred to as such:

I believe arguments for the efficacy of open approaches to aid in research and education are best made in the language of economics, utility, goals, etc. There is no doubt that those who labor to make open projects and services are part of the Innovators/Early Adopters work as a movement. Yet, across the chasm, the language of ‘movements’ and ‘causes’ that may motivate some Innovators/Early Adopters may actually undermine interest by those who seek solutions for the same problems but listen for arguments of economics and outcome. They are sometimes quite turned off as they do not wish to join a movement or be dependent in the long-term on one. [To see this quote in context visit the Educause ListServ archives at: http://listserv.educause.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind1002&L=OPENNESS&T=0&F=&S=&P=2999 ]

Pragmatically speaking I'm convinced by this. I make the strongest appeals to campus constituencies when I draw attention to the features in an open-source product, when I suggest that it will mitigate vendor-lockin, that we won't be forced to upgrade (or retire) a system because of a merger or acquisition, and that supporting open source helps to combat the monopolization of the LMS marketplace. I’m less sure of my appeal when I bring up references to Richard Stallman’s free software movement or the Edupunks movement.

It is hard to deny the traction of Wheeler’s argument; a lot of CIOs (or at least the CIO conversations I witness on the Educause Listserv) are distinctly uninterested in questions about open-source as a movement or whether the ideologies of these movements are more or less in alignment with university missions. Instead, most CIOs weigh the benefits of open source by reference to more pragmatic criteria. The mindset was captured years ago in a Chronicle article titled “Open Source is the Answer Now What is the Question?” by University of Chicago’s CIO Gregory Jackson. In it Jackson inveighs against so called religious thinking and proposes that we analyze open source through a calculus of costs and benefits:

the meanings of open source are diverse. Not surprisingly, so are the arguments in favor of it. Some of them seem almost religious: for example, that software should be free, meaning that software is merely the representation of ideas and methods, and that ideas and methods should never be commercial property. Other arguments maintain that certain software companies are evil, and that to support open source is to combat evil…Open source can be the right answer when colleges and universities base their decisions on careful, complete analysis of relative costs and benefits, avoid unnecessary heterogeneity, specify integration requirements carefully, and avoid "religious" arguments…..My advice is simple: Treat open source like any other procurement possibility, paying careful attention to the functions it is to serve, how it needs to be integrated with other programs, and its costs. Avoid simplistic notions of good and evil. http://chronicle.com/article/Open-Source-Is-the-Answer-Now/2139/

Since Jackson’s and Wheeler’s views are representative of those of many other CIOs, we need to attend to these points of view as we’re performing open-source advocacy.

Still, even if these are good pragmatic strategies, choices between open-source solutions and proprietary solutions should be informed by understanding the larger social movements that support and lend significance to free software and free culture. And part of understanding these movements depends on articulating the values, ideologies and belief systems that give impetus to these initiatives.

While one might wish to avoid “simplistic notions of good and evil,” it’s hardly the case that there aren’t important value questions to consider when universities need to choose between open and closed partnerships. Nor should universities avoid using the language of ethics or values to understand what open source is. Indeed, value questions are the soul of the university. Without frank talk about ethics and missions and values we’d be failing to carry forth one of the most important ways that universities have made sense of the world.

The Alexandria Complex

2010-01-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

At the American Historical Association meetings which I'm currently attending I dropped in on a panel discussing whether Google is good for history. Participants at the session identified many problems which Google has yet to redress adequately: the fact that Google’s landing pages don’t disabuse users of what one panelist called “the Alexandria complex” (the hubris to believe that all of the world’s knowledge might be contained in one place), that Google doesn’t clearly identify the limitations and biases that are inherent in online search, and that absent these warnings, Google may breed a level of epistemological trust in users that erodes the healthy skepticism upon which good scholarship depends. By and large I think Brandon Bader, the Googe rep, handled these criticisms gracefully especially in his willingness to acknowledge that he was a little “embarrassed” by the current interface in Google Books. Google might not be as transparent as librarians and academics would like it to be but it’s still playing an important role in democratizing access to knowledge. And while a Google search refracts and bends this knowledge, when used as a complement to other research techniques it’s good for history.

Still Not Dead

2010-01-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

The most recent Sakai Executive Brief is out, this time highlighting the formation of a Sakai Product Council chaired by Clay Fenlason, a longstanding contributor to Sakai and perhaps it’s most erudite spokesman. True to form, Clay gave a very engaging keynote at last September’s Australian Sakai Conference which closely follows his article titled "Back to basics: the web, academic values, and Sakai" article. It's opening lines are:

“One could be forgiven for confusing virtual learning environment
(VLE) debates with those of theology….a growing number of voices has
taken up a Nietzschean cry, declaring the VLE dead. What now? What
will take its place, and on what grounds? …..Technologists who labour
in this area are in a period of soul-searching. The forms of VLE we've
known, however useful they have been, now plainly represent an
intermediate stage that will soon be superseded. The world has moved
on, and the form of the VLE must shift with it. Call this shift a
"death" if you like, but we're still left with the business of working
out its consequences.”

Clay is politic in not taking explicit sides in the Not Dead Yet versus the Social Media is Killing the LMS Star debate. But is it hubris to even tacitly suggest that the VLE is dead and that Sakai is poised to move beyond it?

On the one hand, it’s definitely not true. Sakai has many things to be proud of, not least of which is its efforts to re-imagine how the VLE as a CLE can better service the mission(s) of the university. And more so than any other VLE initiative, Sakai is making great efforts to leverage the wisdom of crowds.

On the other hand, Sakai still is playing catch-up in the VLE marketplace. Our own campus pilot and those of campus instructors at other universities have confirmed that there’s still some clunkiness in using Sakai if one tries to use it as a VLE. If in Moodle one can lay out a course in much the same way as one constructs a syllabus, in Sakai this is a much more difficult
proposition. In Lisa Lane’s illuminating essay “Insidious pedagogy:
How course management systems impact teaching” she levels much the same critique against Blackboard:

"The construction of the course syllabus is a familiar beginning point
for most instructors, yet few CMSs consider this. It would be natural
and useful for novice instructors to see a blank schedule into which
they could create each week’s or unit’s activities, rather than a
selection of pre–set buttons or links. Most professors think in terms
of the semester, and how their pedagogical goals can be achieved
within the context of time, rather than space. Some think in terms of
topics they want to cover. Blackboard/WebCT’s default organization
accepts neither of these approaches in its initial interface. It
forces the instructor to think in terms of content types instead,
breaking the natural structure of the semester, or of a list of
topics. Again, we know that the setup can be customized with relative
ease, by going to the Control Panel and selecting Manage Course Menu,
then using Modify buttons. You could change all the course menu
buttons into “Week 1”, “Week 2”, or organize by topic instead of
content type. But few professors try that, or they assume that they
can’t do it. Blackboard can be highly intimidating to learn, and may
“seriously hinder” choices the faculty member makes while using the
tool [4]. Faculty are led by the interface of a CMS not only because
they do not immediately see an alternative, but because the familiar
signposts (the Syllabus button) imply a single way of completing the
task (upload a document). Only the Moodle system provides a default
setup that looks like a calendar-style syllabus...."

Having taught for multiple semesters over many years in all of these systems, I can say that many of the same challenges that Lane experiences with Blackboard can also be found in Sakai.

When the next major release of Sakai is ready for adoption the course-authoring deficits mentioned above should be resolved. And there are already plenty of positive reviews of Sakai. But the play on Nietzsche’s jeremiad does obscure a very painful deficit that exists between Sakai and the conventional art in the VLE. Until it’s bridged, my bet is that my own school will continue to regard these other VLEs as very much alive.

Angels and Demons

2009-05-07T11:14:00.000-06:00

I don't know of anyone who predicted the recent Blackboard-Angel initiative to merge. But it shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us. Even after the WebCT/Blackboard merger and the Blackboard patent suits we've continued to see universities make LMS acquisition decisions using rubrics that give little weight to our shared interest in enlarging the intellectual commons, fostering innovation, and discouraging LMS monopoly. Blackboard's initiatives are of a piece with what in the The Wealth of Networks Benkler and others have called the second enclosure movement. It's tempting to demonize Blackboard. But to the extent we ignore the potential enclosure of the commons when making LMS decisions we become, in some ways, "BlAngel's" willing victims.

AcademiX 2009

2009-04-29T15:46:00.000-06:00

Last week I attended Apple's Academix 2009 conference at the University of Utah. There were some interesting presentations including ones by Paul Hammond, Richard Miller, Adam Gazzaley and David Wiley. I review some of what they talked about in Apple’s AcademiX 2009--the Closing and Opening Of University Minds

Frankenstein Talk

2009-02-26T11:58:00.001-07:00

The adjacent poster advertises a recent panel discussion where we talked about university I.T. through the lens of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelley encourages us to revisit our faith in technology, science and progress. In the context of the university are the new technologies we are deploying on campus promoting the university's mission? What should we be doing to make sure this happens? How do we avoid becoming Victor Frankenstein? We have created all these wonderful inventions. But have these inventions become our master's?

LMS Futures at Weber State

2009-02-08T00:42:00.000-07:00

Putting profit ahead of wonder; patents, university missions and LMS decision-making

2008-09-07T13:01:00.000-06:00

In the article When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder” (New York Times September 7, 2008 ), Janet Rae-Dupree reports that in the wake of the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act (also known as the University Small Business Patent Procedures Act), universities have ramped up their tech-transfer offices and focused on patenting more of the intellectual knowledge that is produced through university research. According to the act,

“It is the policy and objective of the Congress to use the patent system to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research or development” and “to promote collaboration between commercial concerns and nonprofit organizations, including universities.”

While the act was meant “to infuse the American marketplace with the fruits of academic innovation,” critics claim that it has “distorted the fundamental mission of universities.” Instead of openly sharing their research and making their findings open to others who might want to expand on it, universities “increasingly keep new finding under wraps” through the pursuit of patents and patent litigation. From the perspective of critics, the patenting of scientific technique and technologies “puts it out of the reach” of other universities who might otherwise have been able to engage in further research (in the case of a scientific finding) or create further innovations that build on a former invention (in the case of a technological innovation).

While Rae-Dupree is suggesting that the missions of the university are being distorted by the university’s pursuit of patents it’s worth pointing out that this may not be the only initiative that is jeopardizing the university mission and the enlightenment ideal of expanding the public store of knowledge. If universities are truly interested in contributing to the marketplace of ideas, we may not only be interested in revisiting patent activities within the university (although a balanced revisit must also look more closely at the positive contributions our technology transfer offices are making), we may also be interested in making sure that universities collaborate and partner with organizations outside the university that are committed to the vision of expanding rather than contracting the intellectual commons.

For example, for many years, universities have been weighing the relative merits of different learning management systems ( the huge and often very expensive software systems that allow schools to teach classes online). But while universities choose these systems on the basis of a myriad of criteria, many don’t give weight to whether the LMS is eroding the same intellectual commons (and open sharing of scientific technique and technology) that the critics of the Bayh-Dole Act are trying to preserve. In order to promote better LMS decision-making we should make this consideration more apparent. On the one hand, open source LMS solutions like Moodle and Sakai are very much intent on preserving this commons and it’s written into the licensing of the software. On the other hand, LMS companies like Blackboard are engaging in patent suits which are perceived by many in higher education to jeopardize open and collaborative technology sharing among universities.

Of course, whether or not an LMS organization is helping to expand or contract the intellectual commons can’t be the most important criteria guiding what LMS organization a university chooses to partner with. The more fundamental
concerns driving LMS choices need to be driven by the capacity of the technology to deliver quality instruction online. But that doesn’t mean that these issues can completely eclipse the question of the intellectual commons. Good LMS decision-making depends on weighing and considering the fundamental missions of the university including it’s abiding commitment to sharing and disseminating research findings and technological innovations. If particular LMS choices erode this commitment while other ones forward it, these considerations should be factored into university strategic planning in the same way that Rae-Dupree says that critics are reconsidering the way that universities should pursue the intents underlying the Bayh-Dole act.

Frankenstein In The University

2008-05-28T12:17:00.000-06:00

My essay Frankenstein in the University was just published in Campus Technology. I'm also making available an unabridged version which explains at greater length why narratives of technological determinism often mask the larger social and commercial forces that drive IT change in the university. In the essay I use the literature of technological determinism as a device for thinking about the amount of influence that IT plays in determining university affairs. But much more could be said on the subject. For example, in the recently published Toolbox or Trap? Course Management Systems and Pedagogy Lisa Lane explores at greater length the way our CMSs constrict our pedagogical practices. And in a much older article titled "Aligning IT Strategy to Open Source, Partnering, and Web Services" Brad Wheeler grapples with open source options that may help universities to better control their IT destiny. For a quick introduction to the subject of technological determinism from the standpoint of political theory see Langdon Winner's piece Do Artifacts Have Politics?. For a topical article surveying technological determinism from the standpoint of a professional historian see Jill Lapore's recent piece in The New Yorker titled Our Own Devices; Does Technology Drive History?.

Will Campus Computing Move Into the Cloud?

2008-02-01T17:36:00.000-07:00

A century and a half ago when manufacturers needed power for their machinery, they generated their own. To run lathes, saws, and other power tools manufacturers set up their own waterwheels, steam engines, or in the early years of electrification, their own generators. While independently produced power grew through most of the nineteenth century, with the spread of a reliable and ubiquitous electric grid in the early twentieth century business relinquished this activity to utility companies. Rather than generating their own power, manufacturers plugged into the electric grid and paid utility companies to provide power for them.

According to Nicholas Carr in The Big Switch (Norton, 2008), a similar change is happening today in the development of so-called “cloud” computing. For the past thirty years companies and individual users have used their own software and hardware to process information. There were no alternatives because the communication networks that allow one computer to talk to other computers were not fast enough to facilitate computing at a distance. But with growing bandwidths, and more ubiquitous grids, hosting services in “the cloud” in remote locations far removed from end users has become a viable option. For example, instead of buying and running my own copy of Microsoft Word I can author and store my documents in Google Docs and rely on Google’s server farms scattered all over the world to take care of this for me. Likewise, business users who used to have to buy locally hosted customer relationship management software (CRM) can browse their way to companies like Salesforce and use their vastly discounted CRM services over the Web.

In Carr’s view, Google Docs and Salesforce are only the beginning of a big switch. Much more is to come and it will transform the way we manage information technology as radically as electrification transformed the production and consumption of power. When everyone is hosting their own hardware and duplicating infrastructure that another company has just down the road inefficiencies result. While vendors are happy to sell the same hardware to multiple customers, cloud computing promises to redress this duplication. With cloud computing, these inefficiencies are so radically diminished that the economic imperatives to switch are hard to resist– even if the transformation has not happened everywhere yet.

Carr is an engaging scholar but in spite of this he is forwarding a premise that is bound to raise eyebrows. Is the big switch really happening? Will local I.T. infrastructures disappear? Will everything move into the cloud? Carr is careful to say that if the switch is happening, cloud computing will take many years to mature and that it faces many challenges. As more and more customers are served by centrally hosted services, cloud providers will have to figure out how to centralize and consolidate services while catering to the diverse needs that make up a large customer base. Cloud computing providers will also have to address security concerns which tend to be more acute when company data is moved off site. But if these seem like significant challenges, they pale in comparison to the task of convincing companies to retire and repurpose all of the local infrastructure into which they’ve poured so much money. Will CIOs really repurpose or write off all these investments? And on a more human level will they be able to convince their employees to leave aside technologies that they’ve spent years becoming familiar with?

Carr thinks that the imperatives of the market will drive a great many technologies into the cloud in spite of these challenges. But if Carr helps illuminate some aspects of technology strategy, managers will still be faced with the hard task of figuring out how big the switch is, how quickly they’ll need to respond to it, and what they’ll do with local I.T. once the switch is made.

And if universities are a little less subject to market vicissitudes, if the switch really is occurring, these questions will also face those of us in academe. Here at Weber State I see evidence of it already taking place. For example, we’ve poured millions (yes millions) of dollars into a locally hosted learning management system. But the Utah Educational Network has built their own state-wide system and is offering to provide these services to us at discount. And companies like eCollege are providing large scale fully hosted solutions that are a viable substitute to our locally hosted solution as well. Will we move toward this learning management system solution? Or will we continue to host locally? And what will happen to all the I.T. jobs on campus if we do move learning management into the cloud?

I’'ll make the following prognostications based on Carr's work.

First, even if we take advantage of the cloud’s efficiencies and migrate, there will still be a place for local I.T: we will still want to keep local help desks and provide faculty and students with the training which will allow them to leverage cloud computing to its best pedagogical advantage. (cf. Patrick Masson on the Educause CIO listserv)

Second, information technicians will continue to work in the university – they’ll just be repurposed to other projects which currently sit on the back burner.

Third, in spite of all the efficiencies of cloud computing, it’s possible that we won’t choose to move our Learning Management System (LMS) into the clouds after all. An LMS is a technology that is servicing a core mission of the university (e.g. teaching and learning). If we want to maintain full control of this mission and the way technology shapes this mission, we are likely to want to customize our LMS in ways that can't be met by the cookie-cutter options available in the cloud.

Fourth, I won’t unequivocally embrace the idea that the big switch is here. But having now read Carr (rather than 'of Carr') I’m impressed, if nothing else, by his erudition. In an early passage, Carr takes Lewis Mumford to task for asserting that we can control technology if we can summon the courage to do so. In response to this sentiment Carr replies that Mumford was “mistaken”:

“….the technological imperative that has shaped the Western world is not arbitrary, nor is our surrender to it discretionary. The fostering of invention and the embrace of the new technologies that result are not ‘duties’ that we have somehow chosen to accept. They’re the consequences of economic forces that lie largely beyond our control.”

The big switch may or may not have been thrown. But if it has, in the long run, we’re unlikely to be able to resist it’s economic imperatives. Technology may not ultimately control the university. But in the long run, sadly, market forces do.

Automatic Professor Machine

2008-01-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

Langdon Winner, author of Autonomous Technology, and The Whale and the Reactor has, for some years now, been looking at technology through the lens of political theory. Like Leo Marx et al in Do Machines Drive History? Winner is interested in representations of technology that appear out of control and how much human agency people retain in an era of high technology. His Automatic Professor Machine and his picture of The Glow-Ball University's Distant [sic] Education campus are interesting parodies that play on many faculty's anxieties about online learning.

Public Relations // Case histories

2007-12-04T08:38:00.000-07:00

Jame's Surowiecki has always provided interesting lenses into American business and his 2005 New Yorker Article "In Case of Emergency" may help illuminate the way Blackboard manages p.r. issues when CLE deployments that use the BB software experience failures. Of course, when universities are trying to make strategic CLE choices, they need access not only to p.r. material but to a repository of case histories that document failures and successes. Without ready access to these case studies, it’s challenging to make the kind of deliberative and informed decisions that lead to defensible CLE acquisitions. Are these repositories being developed anywhere or does the CLE community suffer from shared historical amnesia? What repositories are universities currently using and are they adequate?

Blackboard catastrophic system crash in Utah

2007-11-27T16:45:00.000-07:00

In a recent Chronicle article outlining the Utah Network Blackboard crash, my former colleague Scott Allen said that the cause of the crash "was not caused by a defect in the Blackboard product but most likely by a problem with a computer network port." While I'm sure that Scott's analysis is technically true (he's a super-competent admin) it's important to contextualize this. The ultimate worth of a system is contingent on the systems it depends upon; when we disaggregate Blackboard from these other systems, or from Blackboard's historical track record in the state of Utah, we're engaging in a form of abstraction that ultimately inhibits our ability to assess the product.

The more grievous problem is that Utah schools have experienced multiple catastrophic failures with Blackboard in the past. Given this history it’s perplexing that UEN has elected to partner with Blackboard anyway. One way UEN can redress this liability is by making sure that it is carefully evaluating alternative learning management solutions. There are a lot of other systems out there that are, in many ways, better aligned with the mission and spirit of higher education. Let's hope UEN continues to evaluate these other options as it moves forward.

Managing Innovation

2007-08-12T15:51:00.000-06:00

In a recent post on the CIO listserv (http://www.educause.edu/SEARCH/606 ) there’s been some discussion on how much to centralize or decentralize the management of IT in the university. As one respondent said:

"polarizing the choices of management approaches to A (centralization) OR B (decentralization) is bound to get you down the wrong path......The interesting challenge for us is whether or not we can now create compelling services centrally whose service attributes, performance, and even governance look and feel local......This challenge changes the discussion to one about where and when and how can we can centralize..."

In Katz's edited book Dancing With the Devil there's an essay (“Developing and Using Technology as a Strategic Asset”) that elaborates on this challenge. The basic argument is that campus information technologies (like most other technologies) go through a life cycle. In the early incubation stages, when they are just being conceived and developed they probably shouldn't be hosted or 'centralized.' But as the technology becomes more reliable, as it becomes a service that everyone uses and depends upon, as it becomes effectively 'commoditized' it becomes a technology that should be centrally hosted and managed. The essay in many ways substantiates the above post to the listserv: it's not a question of whether to centralize or decentralize, it's a question of "where and when" to centralize.

One thing that is interesting about this management strategy is that it provides a caveat to Carr's IT Doesn't Matter. Carr is often conceived as someone who thinks of IT as something that has become commoditized, and that because IT has been commoditized it should be treated strictly as a utility. Katz' position offers some qualifications to this vision of IT; to be sure there may be types of information technology that need to be centralized within the university. But that doesn't mean that everything should be centralized or that the university shouldn't continue to provide incubation spaces where innovation can continue to occur.