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?

The Heart of Spain

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.

Combating Digital Maximalism

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

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

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.