A Review of Sakai: Free As In Freedom

A couple of weeks ago I bought Chuck’s Sakai: Free As In Freedom (Alpha). When it arrived in the mail, 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 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!

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

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?

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....

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

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

Concentration in the Humanities

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

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

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?

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?