With some notable exceptions, the willingness of English Departments to seriously engage with current communication technology has advanced “one funeral at a time,” to quote one voice in the wilderness. Denial, nostalgia, tenure pressure: all part of the tweedy sluggishness. Meantime the hungry sheep look up and are not fed.

But I’ve found a video that stirs hope — at least for the Rutgers English Department. In it Richard Miller, its chair, posits that training students to express themselves in the communication channels they actually inhabit should be a core concern of English Departments.

Because we live in a read-write world, it is essential that the English Department provide training to our students about how to live in this world. This is a world which has radically defined what authority means, what expertise means, and how you define labor.

Exactly, and how refreshing to hear an authoritative voice engaging with a Board of Governors in this clear, simple, true way.

Miller’s video pitch defensively emphasizes the traditional publication prowess of Rutgers faculty, and it announces the advent of Web 2.0 as if to Rip Van Winkel. But then the video warms up to its convictions–or at least mine….

When professors of English start thinking like this, can Spring be far behind?

It’s taken long enough, but Clayfox has shaken off summer dreams to engage with a little edu-distopia, 2007-style.

Michael L. Wesch, the Kansas State University anthropology prof who brought the YouTube-fueled world a much-referenced little primer on Web 2.0 some time back, has had his students produce a new video, this one a decidedly grim picture of the college classroom grandly titled A Vision of Students Today. The jaunty electronica is back (CC-friendly Tryad), but this time it’s frosting a world of disjunction and guilt.

Behold sallow college students flashing sign after sign of disengagement with an scene of education that may as well be some boring corner of the moon — blandly self-absorbed, at any rate, in creaky rhythms and technologies and communication patterns dating from 1840-something, tagged as Death-in-Life by Marshall McLuhan forty years back already & still death-in-living.

They’re ignored and distracted, these laptop-toting prisoners of the Havisham lecture hall; they’re indebted, claustrophobic, self-loathing, and lazy. Their lives are being drained away by Facebook twittering, while off in the lectern distance some dork scratches at a chalkboard and impervious-anyway book spines sit uncracked. And oh, the fluorescence, the fluorescence…

Tragic, no? I’m struck by the ways our young victims express and don’t express themselves in this YouTube cri de coeur. It’s a Vision of Students Today that’s clearly filtered through Alienation, Adolescent 101; one suspects that Catcher in the Rye is a rare one of the eight books these kids have managed to find time to read (or not…). Did you glimpse that Google Doc, that hub, presumably, for planning the video? “200 students made 367 edits to this document.” Collective expression in action! And… action!

And yet we hear no voices. Instead, here’s the tour of a sterile wilderness of signs–some scrawled on furniture, several displayed by kids fixing the camera with a a look of bale. Sometimes a sign is two-sided; it says one thing, then their holder flips it over to counter or complicate. One turn of the screw. But that’s as deep as it gets: the flipped succession of surface statements.

I’m sure these students recognized themselves as doing something provocative, challenging norms, goading the world to rethink the process of college education . It’s a start, but just a start, a register of sad: using collaborative communication to hunker down in oversized sweatshirts behind a slogans that say, with variation: We don’t get you (flip over) you don’t get us.

Let’s hope that the next YouTube sensation from Wesch — who clearly knows how to make ‘em — shows students in a more active mode, trusting themselves with a subject beyond disfunction.

A little while ago, the semi-ubiquitous learning management system Blackboard announced it was going 2.0 – in its own proprietary fashion. Lumped under the name BeyondInitiative are a series of properties that are designed to connect users worldwide, across education segments and disciplines, and thus leverage the wisdom of the community for teaching and learning.

The first of these properties launched as Scholar.com. It’s built into the basic Blackboard LMS package, and allows for tagging and RSS feed subscription. Course tags are automatically generated for students enrolled in a given course.

But, of course, this worldwide tagging, subscribing, collecting takes place within the world of the Blackboard Learning System(TM):

HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN COLLECTIONS? To create your own bookmark collections, you need a Blackboard Scholar(TM) account. Only users of the Blackboard Learning System(TM) (including former WebCT Vista and CE products) can create an account, and you do so through your Blackboard course or by clicking the Scholar tab within Blackboard if your institution has it enabled.

As an IT manager at a school not hooked into Blackboard World complains, “it seems social in the way that lunch table with the cheerleaders was back in high school - I didn’t get to join that clique either.” Then again, what if your social world were limited to cheerleaders — or any one type of population, however spirited & fascinating?

Even if you’re happy discovering and sharing resources within the horizon of this LMS, what happens to your collections when you’re no longer a Blackboard customer – that is, connected to your participating institution? Limit social software to affiliates of Blackboard institutions, and you may get nothing but a big dying outdoor plant starved for light.

***

Christian Dalsgaard’s Social software: E-learning beyond learning management systems represents a wholly opposite approach, one that argues in an earnest, Danish way for ditching the LMS altogether in favor of an open world of social software. Committed whole-hog to a social constructivist view of learning, Dalsgaard argues that

Students’ self-governed and problem-solving activities are considered the focal point of a learning process. This conception of a learning process means that it is not possible to structure or pre-determine the students’ activities in a learning process – the activities must develop on the basis of the student’s own problem-solving.

This means, in practice, passing out a lot of personal tools to students that they can use to build social networks on their own. Gone are standalone silos, built course by course, delivering assignments and swallowing submissions; taking their place is a frenzy of networking:

1. networks between people working collaboratively
2. networks between people sharing a context, and
3. networks between people sharing a field of interest

As a student swimming in such open networks, I set up my social bookmarking tool, or blog, or wiki, or RSS reader, to subscribe and affiliate, depending on the courses I’m taking, the groups I’m working with, the field I’m tracking. It seems such a Scandinavian claim, somehow:

It is important to stress that the argument for using separate tools instead of an integrated system is a pedagogical argument. The argument is that the learning activities of students cannot be structured or pre-determined. Choice of a variety of tools will better support the required flexibility of open-ended activities than any one integrated system.

The Small Pieces Loosely Joined approach certainly has its appeal. And yet in the debate between centralized and decentralized learning, there are plenty of reasons to sit on that proverbial fence and wonder. Some various questions occurring to me as I ponder the wisdom of leaping into the self-organized learning camp:

• Do students really want to erode class walls? Is that inviting distraction and incoherence into their lives? I mean, imagine using some kind of university-supplied dashboard to subscribe to 45 different feeds, push blog entries into several different contexts, manage 3 group projects, and maintain a personal profile that will get you into all the right parties. I know it’s fashionable to maintain that this NetGen lives effortlessly and shamelessly online — but might even NetGeners approach classrooms as a place of concentration and respite? Do we owe them a break from constant identity-defining affiliation? And by insisting on a sink-or 2.0 environment, do we alienate those whose background for one reason or another hasn’t led them into active participation in online networks ?
• If learning is an affiliations and subscription-based, individualized, pull-push business, how do we track or promote a community of use around a certain resource? Let’s say we are building a learning object repository of some kind — one designed to push its riches out into distributed arenas, where they will then be transformed and discussed by independently affiliated groups. Without some sophisticated tracking back, discourse around those objects — indeed, the whole sense of their use — will get scattered to the winds. Put it this way: does social affiliation come at the cost of object- or subject-based discovery? Will the next person to look at that object have any idea of the ways it’s been contextualized somewhere out there, by groups unaffiliated to him?
• Is it best, sometimes, to enter a learning resource through a front door like anyone else, wide-open to what may be found? Dalsgaard speaks approvingly of the creation of individual profiles that would then shape your searches, “narrow down” what you stumble upon. But such channeled searching may encourage premature hardening of the arteries: college is precisely the time to play with your “profile” in ways you can’t predict. It would be a shame if your immature preferences limited your horizon. And how attentive would a ‘distributive’ university be about proffering effective advice about preference settings?
• Is it right to dump the messy dilemmas of open access and permissions creations into students’ laps? Just because faculty does an abysmal job, on the whole, of raising awareness and defining good academic practice in this area — it seems unfair, somehow, to make students make all the decisions for themselves, at the age of 18, about what stays private and what circulates. Of course, this is a free country — sort of — and kids make MySpace/Facebook/whatever decisions along these lines on their own. But academic work is another matter: rightly or wrongly, among students there is a deeper sense of revelation, often, about serious work than about drunken pictures. Academic work is often graded on an individual basis, and that only complicates the decisions about what gets published to whom. Those evaluating instructors, seems to me, have a responsibility to weigh in–and perhaps even enforce a standard.

If I were Sophie making a choice, I’d of course toss Blackboard & its ersatz social software away, and take my chances in a distributed world. But let’s hope for third ways, options that promote student-directed learning and university-cultivated resources all at once.

In our last episode, we beat up a bit on the notion of “learning object repositories” (LORs), wondering whether the well-meaning assemblage of modular bits and pieces of educational materials was actually a frustration of coherent teaching. Educational practices, after all, are still grounded in settings and customs that predate the digital on-demand world. We speak of courses, of curricula, of graduation; we cling on to learning as an unfolding, progressive narrative. And progressive narratives seem to be exactly what free-floating clusters of learning objects lack.

Haunted as I am by S.T. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and that ghostly character’s pseudo-progressive travails, I can’t help thinking of decontextualized learning objects as similar to the unearthly sounds that rise out of the mouths of his dead crew and swirl unfixedly about:

Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mix’d, now one by one.

Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
I heard the skylark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seem’d to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning!

And now ’twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel’s song,
That makes the Heavens be mute.

It ceased…

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is heuristic to the core; it teaches us to teach through many spectacularly negative examples. Disconnection from community, the poem suggests, leads to a horror-mirror world of isolation: a world teeming with elements snapped off from the teleology of cause & effect. The Mariner butchers the bird, obeying some unexplained private impulse, and dooms himself to a world where wind is heard but not felt, or felt but not heard — and the same goes for companionship, morality, religion, expiation. Very dissatisfying. Those free-floating supernatural sounds — all that “sweet jargoning” — are momentarily marvelous, even Heavens-eclipsing — and yet they’re unreliable and of dubious value, to say the least. They don’t advance the plot; they just cease.

The Mariner’s original sin: ignoring community (which was, after all, so strongly fostered by that unlucky albatross). It’s a pretty trenchant sin; even after any amount of penance, he seems doomed to repeat it. He poaches the Wedding Guest, blocking this unwilling auditor from entering a communal wedding celebration (the poor Guest protests, to no effect, “The guests are met, the feast is set: / May’st hear the merry din….’”), and forcing the Guest, instead, to listen to a hard-luck story having little to do with its auditor, superficial appearances notwithstanding (”That moment that his face I see, / I know the man who must hear me…”).

And what in mute Heaven’s name does any of this have to do with learning object repositories? It seems that we’re learning the Mariner’s lesson all over again. The most thoughtful study that I’ve read about the uptake and implementation of LORs is the recent study “Community Dimensions of Learning Object Repositories,” funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The gist of this report is evident directly from its title: however energetically you go about building a constellation of durable, interoperable, reusable, and sharable chunks of teaching & learning materials, it won’t mean a thing unless you tailor it to the cultural norms and expectations of a user community. As the report observes in its rather British way, “pedadogical, social, and organisational factors have not been at the forefront in LOR development to date.”

A community shares goals, interests, practices; it draws on commonly available tools; it shares understanding of processes and concepts. The JISC study lines up and sets marching some hard questions bound to make any repository-builder squirm: What is the purpose of the LOR — ie, how does it serve its community? Who are key stakeholders in that community? In what broader context does that community operate? A LOR project that starts by grappling with such large questions stands a better chance of being organized by pedagogical goals and activities, rather than all the content it can cram into its great maw just because — like the Mariner knocking an albatross down out of the sky — it can.

Treating teachers as one big community is in many ways an absurdity, of course — we operate within a dizzying array of conditions and expectations, and with a variety of allegiance to vastly different sponsoring institutions. Nevertheless, it is at least a good step to consider how a LOR addresses whatever generalizations you may wish to venture about teachers as a community. This borders on a truism, but then again how many LORs truly meet an actual teacher half way? The JISC report hazards a few claims about teachers and the way they behave:

• They have a very problematic relationship with metadata. Descriptive metadata can fail them when they’re hunting in the dark for objects. When submitting an object to an LOR, they’re not trained & often not helped in the fine art of quality metadata appendage. More on this issue here, btw
• They often prefer to create their own learning objects, rather than patch someone else’s in. On the scale of teacherly chores — grading, planning, meeting, exhorting, reviewing — creation of new materials for one’s class is actually on the fun side, one of the best ways to stand out and inspire, to make your class into a unique event. Even if you’re not so handy with making new things, by dipping into the well of pre-made pieces you risk “loss of educational narrative,” as the JISC report puts it (and how many teachers got into the business because of their assemblage skills anyway?). Educational narrative may be more important to individual-obsessed humanists than object-oriented scientists, the report notes in passing.
• Teachers like incentives just like anyone else, and an LOR would do well to supply some. They could be in the form of recognition or perhaps an even more tangible reward for contribution, or proof that use of material from the LOR will make a teacher more effective. If the LOR is keyed to the goals of the institution that pays said teacher, that’s a fine reason to use it.
• Despite all impediments, teachers, bless ‘em, are a persistently open-minded lot, at least according to the JISC report: “In general the interviewees have a positive attitude to reuse, and most have stated that they are willing to keep trying to reuse material, despite the difficulties they have faced.” This is a suggestion that LORs have some time to wake up to the willing worlds around them in all their glorious particularity.

And let’s close, on that brighter note, by nodding towards LORs that do seem engaged with the communities that use them, on some level at least.

The granddaddy of LORs, LC’s American Memory Project, set an early standard by layering its gigantic offerings with a “Learning Page… especially for teachers” : a collection of “teacher created, classroom tested lesson plans… [to] jumpstart your use of primary sources,” a rundown of curricular themes, various strategies to promote critical thinking, and professional development materials.

The National Science Digital Library corrals its resources for various imagined players: K12 Teachers, Librarians, NSDL Community Members (you know who you are), University Faculty, and First Time Users. Each of these groups has customized “pathways” through the library, as well as a fistful of fairly active blogs grouped by audience category.

Finally, the December issue of D-Lib describes a geoscience LOR named “Teach the Earth” built by the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College; the article is encouragingly titled, “Digital Library as Network and Community Center: A Successful Model for Contribution and Use.”. The authors state, flat out:

A successful educational digital library is as much a social process as a technical problem. It requires creation of a culture that fosters contribution to and use of the library. We have addressed creation of this culture by working with NSF-funded projects focused on the professional development of geoscience faculty as teachers. Each of these projects partnered with SERC to create its project website. They seek two primary services in this partnership: 1) tools, resources and experts that assist them in creating high quality project websites and 2) placement of their resources in a network that enhances dissemination and use of their work. We created a win-win situation that yields rapid production of content for the library and facilitates use, by allowing our partners the flexibility to meet their own project goals while contributing to the overarching digital library.

Let’s see: professional development, support of individual projects with an eye towards incorporation, maintenance of a consistent level of quality, enhancement of dissemination and recognition of work — sounds like a happy LOR to me, one that engages its users, rather than stunning them.

The SERC authors claim that a full 25% of all geoscience faculty in the US (the audience it bothered to target) now use Teach the Earth: now that’s uptake!

The pendulum has certainly swung far away from the early days of digital learning happytalk, which was all objects all the time. In them dotgone days, “strategic futurists” such as Wayne Hodgins proclaimed that “the ability to learn and apply the right stuff faster is the only sustainable competitive advantage there is for any of us” — and the way to win was to call up that stuff, those digital learning objects, pronto. The “learnativity revolution” would be powered by gobs and gobs of “terrific resources” marked up by Learning Objects Metadata, dressed up for discovery. Powering all this (remember when ‘powering’ was a verb?): the Lego (TM) metaphor, as touched on by a 2002 D-Lib article called “Metadata Principles and Practicalities” –

In a modular metadata world, data elements from different schemas as well as vocabularies and other building blocks can be combined in a syntactically and semantically interoperable way. Thus, application designers should be able to benefit from significant re-usability as they gather existing modules of metadata and ’snap’ them together much as individual Lego™ blocks can be assembled into larger structures.

Though futurist Hodgins (a co-author of the D-Lib piece) is avowedly “wandering and pondering as he scours the world for trends and technologies most of us will not see for the next 18 months to 10 years,” an anxious world is still waiting for the followup to “Into the Future: A Vision Paper” (2000), in which “the rules of Newtonian physics have been superseded by those of Learnativity, where the gravitational pull of creating new knowledge determines and shapes the actions of everything within.” The process, as described in this Vision, is at once entropic and plastic:

Breaking knowledge down into information objects, the smallest useful chunks of information, frees it to be used again. Think of this as creating and assembling Lego™ blocks. Whether you’re assembling a bridge or a house or a spaceship, you use the same Lego™ to form a “learning object.”

The notion that newly created digital objects can upend physics may seem to belong to the discard pile next to sock puppets and Netscape 4.0. And yet the Legoland learning world haunts us still. We have a deeper sense of how hard it is to transform (let alone revolutionize) education with modular resources, but the web brims with learning object repositories that are palpably yearning to be engaged by actual teachers.

Every once in a while, a teacher even urges their use to colleagues, such as this 2006 endorsement by a Professor of Geomorphology writing in Ariadne:

Reusable educational objects (REO) or reusable learning objects (I prefer the wider term) are becoming an area of interest in education, especially in Higher Education. This stems from the ideas of reusability from ‘mass’ e-learning in the USA and from there developed the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) as well as some resources such as MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching). This tends to have full resources such as a slide set or a Web page. Lecturers should try this as there may well be all sorts of useful material available within the archive, often free.

There is a lot of faith packed up here — in a preferred definition of a ‘learning object’ (a definition that tends to crumble when you push on it), in the value of reuse and mass broadcast, in the existence of “all sorts of useful material” to be unearthed within an archive (for free!). All the more reason to wonder and ponder the extent of actual use of learning object repositories. Are current offerings honoring the enthusiasm of our good professor of Geomorphology? If not, is there something fundamentally flawed in the idea of freely recontextualizable learning objects?

I recently took a quick sip of MERLOT (”a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education”), the learning object resource singled out by the good prof, and found it to be… rather flat. Though it offers ‘peer review’ filters and advanced searching, MERLOT failed me when I came into it with a specific agenda: to find a peer-reviewed resource that would supplement teaching of William Wordsworth’s poetry. No results found. Was that too specialized? Then how about something about landscape in art or literature? How about anything at all involving the keyword ‘landscape’? Finally, one peer-reviewed result found: oddly enough, an FTP tutorial (author unknown, section 508 non-compliant).

When I approached MERLOT without an agenda — that is, in ‘browse’ mode — I was again underwhelmed. Looking to see how available resources might be engaged, I picked through assignments posted on the site, and found one rather expansively called The British Empire. The gist of this assignment: go to an outside website, read sections of it, and write a 5-7 page essay. This outside website itself warns: “This site is not a rigourous academic site! I’m sure there are plenty of mistakes and oversights on my part; for which I apologise in advance! My interest in the subject is purely that of a personal journey of discovery….”

After a few disappointments like this, the sun was setting on my hope that MERLOT had much to offer me. To be sure, like our Geomorphology prof, the site has nothing but the best intentions. Its solicitation of assignments and personal collections offers some way into the “15818 materials” (as of this writing) somewhat chaotically gathered. In other words, there’s effort to bring the wisdom of learning communities to bear on these bits and pieces– to encourage peer review, share insight, suggest deployment. ‘Gold level’ users of the site (rated by submitted materials, comments, assignments, and collections) would surely attest to MERLOT’s value.

But the effort seems limited by the objects model embraced by past futurists. “Materials” are gathered, and activity is to follow: the activity of wrestling them into actual curricula in a meaningful way. Put it this way: I would have to be a fairly passive teacher if I were satisfied with the results and suggestions I unearthed on MERLOT. I would have to be willing to suspend the gravitational pull of my own course — sacrifice context, really — on order to incorporate an object impervious to what came before in my class and what would follow: a second-handedly endorsed learning resource with priorities and emphases that may be disconnected — even inimical — to my own.

***

At the heart the idea of “learning objects,” then, is believe in modularity, as if teaching were so much recombination. If you’re in a really dark mood, you might consider the model of replaceable parts as emblematic of the “Information University” vividly deplored by Marc Bousquet a few years ago. In the nightmare Information University, labor is made up of so many interchangeable parts, available on-demand and easily replaced:

Constrained to manifest itself as data, labor appears when needed on the management desktop–fully trained, ‘ready to go out of the box,’ and so forth–and after appearing upon administrative command, labor in this form should ideally instantly disappear.

Who would consent to work this way? Replacements for the tenured class, of course, that market-immune anachronism that is vanishing like so many glaciers:

Dispensing with the skilled professoriate is accompanied by the installation of a vast cadre of differently-skilled workers–graduate students, part-time faculty, technology specialists, writing consultants, and so forth.

Just the sort of workers lacking the training and time and perspective, I would suggest, to assemble a coherent and effective pegagogy out of a massive pile of Legos™.

I was on the verge of crafting a blog entry expressing fears and reservations about Second Life when it occurred to me that skepticism has gotten too much play here of late. I’m really not so grumpy. To try to prove that, I’ll slap down here a few paragraphs from a mini-manifesto I’ve been working on lately. It’s lumpy and unfinished — but it’s hopeful.

***

The digitization of learning objects does not, in itself, foster study of them. Even the richest digital library teaches little if it is not selectively engaged by pedagogical context and activity. Conversely, a learning environment that fails to incorporate available resources best suited to its purposes courts hermeticism and limitation. We should be committed to activating digital collections — exploring mutually beneficial relationships between collections and learning environments — through the integration of digitized material with new modes of study and dissemination.

The best digital learning tools may well draw on discrete digital collections in different ways — often within the same environment. This is no surprise: just as no one pedagogical application could exhaust the possibilities of a robust digital library, it is often the case that no one collection satisfies the evolving or multiple purposes of a sophisticated learning environment.

At a university, such tools should be conceptualized in consultation with faculty, consultations that focus on teaching methods and goals. Identification of relevant collections to draw upon (at an institution’s library and from the wider world) is an important follow-up to this impetus, akin to identification of the software that will run the project. Just as some innovative projects now run on proprietary as well as open source software, and may mix a number of microapps into one environment, so should we draw on a range of collections that best engage the purpose of a given project.

Existing digital collections, more often than not, consist of material restricted for certain uses or limited to certain audiences, in compliance with licensing and codification. Projects that engage diverse existing collections are likely to require special permissions and/or an access architecture of no little complexity (material variously available to various populations): negotiating this variety can be difficult, but it nevertheless ensures that pedagogical goals, and not the restrictions of any one collection, shape a learning environment.

In addition to existing digital collections, heretofore unpublished or uncollected assets may vastly improve and distinguish learning environments. This ‘dark’ material may be created and owned by individual faculty members, or held in reserve by public or private enterprises; its use may be open to negotiation, which takes no small amount of time and effort. In some cases, onerous restrictions or the simple lack of relevant material may drive the crafters of educational environments into active production of new assets for a given project: videotaping new interviews, recording new performances, capturing new creations. This active creation also requires a lot of resources, but the advantage here is that content can be produced with permissions and licensing optimal for a learning environment.

The heterogeneous provenance of collections means that any producer of digital learning tools has an active interest in understanding and promoting standards of interoperability. We also have a stake in open access movements: a collections landscape less hedged by restriction is a landscape that will offer a fuller array of elements for the tools we build. Whenever possible, our projects should be made open for access and use beyond any conceptualized engagement; this maximizes the often extensive investment of an organization in any given project, and inspires the holders of potentially useful collections to match our lead.

Finally, the fungible quality of digital material means that it is often transformed through incorporation into a learning environment. As it is used, it changes– through recontextualization, annotation, or other user modifications. A project that begins by drawing on discreet collections may thus become a unique collection itself, reflective of assignment-related engagements of a given community. Instructors may shape materials in a certain way, or supplement it over the course of a term. Student work may be archived in the project and in turn made available for future iterations of the project or outside use of it. Evidence of active study may thus consist of transformation of material in the environment; it could also be fresh material generated or uploaded by students. Many of the most interesting educational environments will in this way prove to be ‘two-way’ collection areans, necessitating thoughtful policies about ‘outputs’ as well as ‘inputs.’

***

For an exemplification of some of these points, I invite you to take a little tour of the Havel at Columbia site. Here is a digital melange of:

• Columbia University Libraries holdings (special collections, institutional archive, media holdings)
• Donated commercial material (documentary film selections, CNN news archives)
• Donated privately owned material
• Material purchased for the project (CORBIS & Getty images, video archives)
• Material created for the project (video interviews conducted with Lou Reed, George Soros, et. al.)
• Campus events videotaped during Havel’s residency
• User ‘notebooks’ used to assemble and annotate assets into multimedia essays and demonstrations

Unavoidably, some of this material is restricted to students and instructors at Columbia. But whenever possible, we’ve opened things up for universal access, and encouraged those participating in this project to do the same.

The next step, I can almost hear you thinking, would be to release the collection of publicly accessible material on this site under a CC license. We’ll get there, I’m sure of it. See? Hopeful!

If you agree that Wikipedia presents more thorns than roses to academic experts, you have good company: one of Wikipedia’s two founders.

The split between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger has a certain Old Testament character: Wales (the Web 2.0 brother) reigns over the miraculous worldwide flourishing of the anonymously and communally edited encyclopedia that nobody predicted, while Sanger wanders in the web wilderness, in stubborn pursuit of distinctly pre-2.0 constructs of expertise.

Nupedia, Sanger’s original attempt to build an expert-authored online encyclopedia (and the predecessor of Wikipedia) crashed and burned. Now Sanger’s back with a similar idea: a “progressive fork” off of Wikipedia called Citizendium. His vision of harnessing “educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly” into rival encyclopedia generation awaits you here.

In Sanger’s new scenario, regular Joes and Janes would be welcome to pitch into Citizendium as long as they deferred to ‘editors’: subject-area specialists who “meet certain benchmark requirements–the same straight-up credentials that the offline world relies on.” These expert editors would claim the right to patrol topics by flashing credentials. If several editors with the right credentials claimed a topic, well, “the more the merrier”: disputes among them would be settled “by discipline-oriented editorial workgroups” that would be “staffed only by editors.”

Wikipedian anonymity is quite obviously out of the question here. If the world of Wikipedia is mythically flat — built by faceless if not selfless peers — Citizendium is stunningly hierarchical, as if brandishing one’s identity could settle most any question of authority. One can easily imagine, though, a “straight-up credentials” demolition derby: institutions impugned, publications trashed, countries belittled, research areas broadswiped. If the offline world relies on credentials, it also relies on heterogeneity, microclimates, and quite local constructs of authority.

Citizendium would begin by mirroring Wikipedia, and, presumably, refine this populist chaff into premium wheat. Expertise standing on the shoulders of undifferentiated pygmies, as it were. And since Citizendium content would be freely available under the GNU Free Documentation License, Wikipedia could in theory suck the refined content back into itself, without directly compromising on its disdain for egghead experts.

The reigning smackdown of Citizendium is Clay Shirky’s blog post last month entitled Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise — a precise attack that drew a defensive response from Sanger. I generally agree with Shirky, who sees disaster looming in Sanger’s dream of a self-certifying expertocracy shorn of institutional context. Shirky’s concluding dismissal, however, gives me pause:

Sanger is an incrementalist, and assumes that the current institutional framework for credentialling experts and giving them authority can largely be preserved in a process that is open and communally supported. The problem with incrementalism is that the very costs of being an institution, with the significant overhead of process, creates a U curve — it’s good to be a functioning hierarchy, and its good to be a functioning community with a core group, but most of the hybrids are less fit than either of the end points.

Such categorization is ominous for any of us skating the half-pipe of that ‘U’: those of us, that is, applying social software to learning environments. Ours is a hierarchical world, we want to build communally supported processes: are we doomed to hybrid mush? Admittedly, even the most starry-eyed 2.0 prophets have trouble describing how communal software is to work its magic, once it’s scooped out of the vast flickring seas and let loose within the tiny microclimate of a classroom. Yochai Benkler, for example, says much about networked production of educational texts, but little about peer production within a class (in, for example, his article Common Wisdom:. Peer Production of Educational Materials).

If social software depends on scale — the happy fact of human diversity that guarantees that someone, somewhere, is bound to perform a necessary function — then what happens when your field is winnowed down to, say, eight bright-eyed students with the same major? If your software is thoughtlessly cribbed from a quite different environment, one that depends on scale or interconnection that is foreign or even inimical to a classroom, you’re courting failure. Shirky’s notion of situated software — “small, purpose-built apps” — is well worth bearing in mind in this respect.

Whatever the tool it’s using, customized or off-the-rack, a classroom exists in a microclimate that consists not just of a gaggle of students, however skilled and productively interactive — it also contains a super-entity, an authority akin to Sanger’s editor: the credentialed teacher (and plenty of other shadowy figures behind her — but we won’t go into that here). Whatever is peer-produced in such an environment will be some fairly complicated blend of authoritative fiat and collaborative discovery. It will be as forced as it is fortuitous — a provenance quite different from Wikipedia, but perhaps a bit like Citizendium. However quixotic Sanger’s dream of expertise within a collaborative framework may seem, and however displaced onto a grudge match with Wikipedia it may be, it is worth tracking from the curvy heart of the U.

Yo, can I borrow your notes?

Harkening back to the salad days of college, I seem to remember a free-floating faith in the power of someone else’s notes to fill in cracks of attendance & attention. I doubt that much significant learning took place in power-cramming sessions entirely reliant on someone else’s diligently indented transcription of wisdom. But I’m struck now, thinking back, by the instinct to herd together in such situations.

A study tool named stu.dicio.us has recently made its debut, promising del.icio.us-like value through aggregation of communal effort. Now maybe some stranger from West Virginia Tech will save you from the consequences of having slept through Chemistry. Or maybe that concept your prof seems so fond of has been dropped in another class somewhere, in a context just different enough to fuel your next paper. Or maybe you can meet that hottie on the far side of the lecture hall because you’ve done a search limited to your school and this class and lo & behold here you both are, believing in the power of networking your notes.

Sharing notes is not cheating, insists stu.dicio.us. Everyone should have every advantage possible in increasing individual knowledge. The site rather mysteriously claims to be created for students, by students, and is rather predictably in beta.

There are bugs, and slender participation makes any 2.0 service like this awkward at first, but give it time. After a little tour, I think that stu.dicio.us is actually more useful for its lightweight organizational tools. There’s a sortable todo function – handy even if you aren’t interested in checking peers’ todos. The basic Textile formatting for notes encourages precision (see this testimony), and auto-save is built in. You can use simple brackets for auto-links to Wikipedia, Google, or Google scholar. You can upload files and access them whenever you want –as long as the service remains online. For those times when you can’t get online, stu.dicio.us offers an offline mode.

Here are a couple of screenshots. First, my fake schedule, with grades, notes, files, todos, and (sadly) no friends. This would be useful, I’d say, especially if it were within a course management environment:

… and someone’s notes, which i found by doing a search for history and columbia:

Enlightening? I doubt it – but misery does love company – and if you’re casting around randomly for any mention of history in anyone’s notes, chances are that you’re feeling a bit miserable.

You’ve wrangled that paper to a plausible conclusion — a bit of sleep is just around the corner — but hold on, not so fast, you’re Sisyphus after all. Citation formatting is a special curse, the inane labor at the end of hard work that holds all your effort hostage. Never does it seem less true that it’s the thought that counts.

The best portrait of this frustration that I know is Louis Menand’s New Yorker article from three years back, “The End Matter; The Nightmare of Citation.” (And no, I won’t properly cite it.) Menand mobilizes here a full sense of the tyranny that must be endured in the construction of endnotes —

Every error is an error of substance, a betrayal of ignorance and inexperience, the academic equivalent of the double dribble. That the decorums of citation are the arbitrary residue of ancient pedantries whose raisons d’etre are long past reconstructing does not reduce the penalties for nonconformity.

Surely technology should free us from such tiresome finish-line ambushes. And yet, as Menand observes,

The notion that the personal computer has eliminated the bone-crushing inefficiency of the typewriter, and turned composing The End Matter into a drive in the word-processing park, belongs to the myth that all work on a computer is “fun”-one of the Digital Age’s cruellest jokes.

Microsoft Word, as Menand observes, is too often a baffling mess when it comes to foot/endnote generation, plaguing you with random formatting and automatically generated annoyances. Too many options: the exhauster citer just wants to be faultless and to be done.

EndNote — which is a plug-in in my version of MS Word — might seem to be a lifesaver. Indeed, many of us have been happy to sit through earnest training in this and similar tools, entranced by the promise of metadata pulled down from a network, stored in a local database, and spit back out, effortlessly, into formatted endnotes. Oh, you wanted APA 5th, not Turabian? Hold on just a sec - (click, click) - here you go! Choose a style, any style: here are 1012 to choose from!

And yet, in my personal experience, EndNote endnotes are chock full of flaws. I’m not here to assign blame — maybe it was an incomplete OPAC record, maybe the library filter was off, maybe EndNote dropped a field — at the end of the day (rather, the night), citations are liable to look like nothing in that overstuffed, unloved red style manual (which is all but impervious, anyway, to the need to cite digital sources). Back to fixing, fretting, fudging. Only EndNote is liable to overwrite your corrections: surprise!

And yet the dream of escaping such frustrations through technology won’t die — and shouldn’t. It seems only fair that our Babylonian predicaments be ameliorated, at least somewhat, by computers–our vast interconnected ever-churning never-complaining prostheses.

George Mason’s Center for History & New Media (a seemingly ever-inventive group) has had a promising tool chugging down the pike for some time that offers a new glimmer of hope. It manages citations and other research information in a web environment. When first I heard about it , they were calling this tool Firefox Scholar – now it’s been rebranded to Zotero: a term loosely based on the Albanian word for acquiring/mastering. Whatever – let’s trust that this promising project will prove to be less obscure than such an etymology.

From what I can tell from the description of Zotero, bennies include:

• Ability to capture & store PDFs, files, images, links, web pages in a browser platform.
• A range of organization options, including folders & tagging & ’smart’ collections.
• iTunes-like interface.
• Spotlight-like search-as-you-type.

…and, most relevant here:

• Ability to sniff out a citation on a web page & capture it to your library
• Citation export.

Zotero works with Firefox to sense when you are visiting a page with full bibliographic data (like an OPAC) and offers a little book icon; click it, and citation material comes flying into your computer.

Since suddenly there’s a profusion of browser-based store-organize-share tools (SOS?) for scholars, Zotero will be all the more valuable if it can be jiggered to play with academic social software like Connotea or the aforeglimpsed CiteULike – and, while we’re dreaming, if it can feed stored items into networked repositories. Since it’s free and open source, one can imagine any kind of evolution for this “next generation research tool.”

Will researching and citing on the web actually get a little easier? We’ll see – Zotero is in private beta now, but should be in public beta by the end of the month.

Reading Roy Rosenzweig’s thoughtful appraisal of Wikipedia in the current Journal of American History (“Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”), I was particularly struck by this passage:

If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible. And if every member of the Organization of American Historians devoted just one day to improving the entries in her or his areas of expertise, it would not only significantly raise the quality of Wikipedia, it would also enhance popular historical literacy.

Let’s step back and marvel at another indication of the power and sudden inexorability of Wikipedia — can you imagine a distinguished historian feeling that he owed it to the world to improve the Encyclopedia Britannica, and urging colleagues to do their part too? For no credit and no money?

If historians and other academic experts should really be raising the quality of Wikipedia, this begs the question of who their exertions would be for. An initial answer, I suspect, would be: not for each other, and not for their students. As Rosenzweig writes (in a peer-reviewed journal, of course, and not an encyclopedia),

Most readers of this journal have not relied heavily on encyclopedias since junior high school days. And most readers of this journal do not want their students to rely heavily on encyclopedias — digital or print, free or subscription, professionally written or amateur and collaborative — for research papers.

And so an obligation to Wikipedia seems outwardly directed, keyed to a general public’s understanding (that Cleaveresque ‘family’ using a family encyclopedia). This raises further questions. Are we seeing a technologically-enabled resurgence of the public intellectual? If so, what would it mean to take on this role in a communally edited space impervious to individual identity and, as Rosenzweig notes, suspicious of expertise?

Since an edifying or even identifiable relationship with Wikipedia users seems impossible, let’s posit that obligation to it is not primarily to a public, but really to a field of knowledge as it is represented in public. In other words, if the Wikipedia page on the American Revolution is becoming the de facto online summation of this event, and if historians don’t weigh in, their knowledge fails to apply where it’s most needed.

But I wonder about how good academics generally are at writing encyclopedia articles. In many cases, it’s not at all the kind of work they do when researching or teaching — it’s not what their intellectual life is about. In general encyclopedias have settled into tended repositories of knowledge, not the active sites of inquiry that universities strive to be.

As Rosenzweig says, “Wikipedia (like encyclopedias in general) summarizes and reports the conventional and accepted wisdom on a topic but does not break new ground.” To get a sense of the progressive quiescence of encyclopedias, you could look at Wikipedia’s entry on Diderot’s Encyclopédie:

The Encyclopédie played an important role in the intellectual ferment leading to the French Revolution. “No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century. It sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion,” wrote the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.

This reliance on a hundred year old hedged claim in another encyclopedia about the political impact of a 200+-year-old encyclopedia may seem abundantly timid, but it exists — at least today — in an Wikipedia article whose neutrality is nonetheless flagged as disputed. Wikipedia strives to resolve dispute, to traffic in the indisputable — while a university that lived by that principle would be a zombie campus, at best.

Whether or not you believe in the power of online collectivism, and whether or not you think that Wikipedia represents that collectivism, you have to hand it to it (them?): Wikipedia knows what it is and what it is not. It couldn’t be more explicit about its limitations: it accepts no original research, no original ideas. And it does not pretend to satisfy research; its founder, Jimbo Wales, reportedly offers this advice to students: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

So, again, why might thoughtful and original academics pay particular attention to an environment that is in many ways alien to them — and even entertain notions of obligation to it? I have a few guesses, all of them broad, none of them substantiated:

Academic publishing is sluggish — Is there any write-up about Wikipedia that does not refer to its vast coverage, its low barrier of entry, and what Rosenzweig calls its “open-source mode of production and distribution”? Academics yearn to see their work actually get distributed in the world, and they are caught in increasingly sluggish and narrow channels of communication. Wikipedia actually publishes effort, instantly and in retrievable form, to an audience that can respond to it.

No doubt about it, academic publishing constricts the discourse it should support, but the invigoration of it in a digital environment will probably be quite different from the structure and dynamics of a wildly popular collaborative encyclopedia. Wikipedia may have the most to teach us through its stubborn emphasis of what it is not: are we listening? This is a world in which, as the entry on ‘expert’ tells us (today, at least), “an intellectual elite may or may not be correct about a particular issue in their field of expertise.” The “may or may not” ambivalence about expertise, the faith in correctness at all cost… not exactly the environment for nuance, originality, or intellectual leadership.

The academic star system is stifling — This is a corollary to the above point, because recognized stars get into print more often, or at least can lean on the rusty gears of publication. And stars are stars — let’s face it — they energize events, they get the grants, they make things happen. But I suspect many academics — even stars — are titillated by Wikipedia’s oft-noted indifference to expertise. By depersonalizing and flattening and opening the field of contribution, Wikipedia seductively suggests that truth will prevail on its own — no lollygagging on laurels here.

Whatever we think of laurels, it is indisputable that peer-review, the basic engine of academic appraisal, depends on identification and reputation. Escaping the burdens of apprenticeship, labor-validation, review, and professional development may seem liberating, but a specified affiliation and whatever responsibility (or lack thereof) that implies are enabling conditions of academic discourse. A university can’t function without overt hierarchies–campus rituals are almost entirely organized around the individual’s passage through sanctified levels. Anonymity may prove surprisingly difficult for those whose sense of work is so deeply rooted in acknowledged position.

Neutrality is only fair — Wikipedia’s sternly enforced Neutral Point of View policy seems to offer respite from a world riddled with clashing theoretical frameworks. Humanists and scientists alike may feel that it’s exhausting to interpret morning noon and night — all the while moving practically through the world, negotiating its incoherencies. Wikipedia’s banishment of originality lightens the burden of this reconciliation; it sings the siren song of the incontestably evident.

The ban on spin attempts to keep things calm and cordial, but to what end? Wikipedia’s NPOV might seem related to the disinterested analysis beloved of academicians, but, as Rosenzweig points out, Wikipedian neutrality leads to a great deal of waffling and prim skirting of controversy. When it comes to the pursuit of knowledge, a polite series of self-cancelling on-the-other-hands proves a poor substitute for interpretive power and conviction. Poor and censorious. For a surprising little totalitarian chill, I recommend Wikipedia’s page about NPOV disputes : “there is a strong inductive argument that, if a page is in an NPOV dispute, it very probably is not neutral.”

Facts are simple, fact are good — A corollary, again, to the above point. Wikipedia leads us into a world of passive construction, where things have been proven, have been shown, have been accepted. Once all that messy agency is wiped out, we are left with qualified data in its proper place. Enjoy a small chuckle that the “Fact” entry in Wikipedia is today double-flagged as containing “disputed factual accuracy” and “original or unverified claims” . The fact remains that in Wikipedia, things are either proven or not, accepted or not, controversial or not — it’s an organized and binary landscape.

The pursuit of just the facts ma’m orients Wikipedia towards what’s been commonly agreed, but it can also lull thought to sleep. As a historian, Rosenzweig knows very well that “good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose.” Let’s go back to that “Fact” entry in Wikipedia and partake of its droning tautology: “A fact that was once a fact and hence becomes disproven may once again become a fact if the factual evidence supporting its validity become increasingly factual in light of new and, ultimately, factual evidence.” ‘Nuff said.

Data is (are) cool — Though Rosenzweig gives props to the factual accuracy of Wikipedia — finding it to clock in somewhere in-between the Encyclopedia Britannica and the prohibitively expensive American National Biography Online — you can sense in his article a purer enthusiasm for Wikipedia as object. Its open content can be exported for research — “downloaded, manipulated, and ‘data mined’… Wikipedia can therefore be used for other purposes.” One of these purposes might start to feel like research: measuring activity in a somewhat transparent online environment. As faddish tracking of Wikipedia contrails suggests, passage through it becomes an enticing reflection of its users — you can trace patterns and behaviors to your heart’s content.

But what is all this data telling you? Who do Wikipedia’s users represent? How much should we take Wikipedia’s ground rules as exemplary? Tautology looms: we’re studying Wikipedia to learn how Wikipedia works. Take a research paper like “Ambiguity and conflict in the Wikipedian knowledge production system” — here’s how its it resolves: “Wikipedia is a fascinating topic of study and requires careful examination of its underlying social and cultural processes…. One of the most urgent items on the research agenda is to describe and explain the concrete processes by which knowledge and truth is produced and adjudicated.” What’s behind this compulsion — the requirement of examination, the urgency of such a research agenda? Could it be mirroring of Wikipedia’s own faith in neutral truth-production?

Again this feeling of compulsion attending Wikipedia. Maybe you feel it too. If so, it’s probably too late to suggest that another wiki, another platform, another construct might better deliver your truth.