At work today: one of our periodic, inevitable, spirited conversations about the oft-ridiculed yet oft-cited notion of a “digital native.” We revisited Marc Prensky’s 2001 framing of such (first hit on Google, for all you “digital natives” searching for yourselves) called “Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants” — a piece festooned with dancing italics of another era, and blithely free of proof. The “singularity” is near or already here, brains are changing even as we text, and “the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”
Look! There goes one now! Posted by cole007 on Flickr.
The most typical marketing is “revolutionary” — it were ever thus. Meanwhile the hungry sheep stay hungry. But now that we’re all sober and nostalgic for the good old virtues — close analysis, deep thought, transcendent expression — now that we’re virtuously skeptical about the effects of technology on real learning — I feel like pushing the other way a bit. I would never want to end up in a corner where intellectual worth was measured by detachment from the stunning shifts in communication of our day. That’s too often a stale corner, I think of it as full of Causabons, where ignorance or even fear is sanctified.
Hence, a couple of completely anecdotal observations, ala Prensky, though I’ll lay off on italics.
Even at this late date, some students wash into my classroom with a timorous attitude towards “computers.” Whether or not this is an affectation, a discourse of detachment from technology persists with some amount of vigor, even (or especially?) among “digital natives” at highly selective colleges. And yet the student so loath to do something new with computers in a course setting is tricked out — you can count on it — with a phone of some degree of smartness, an overactive Facebook account, a laptop, a digital music delivery system, and a cherished, variously organized, and promiscuously shared media library juggled between devices.
So perhaps we should set aside the easy binaries — digital native, displaced digital immigrant — and focus more on local competencies (whoops! italics!). The challenge, often, is to apply facility within one kind of digital environment to another — to bring what’s lively and engaging about community discourse in Facebook, say, into a new and different application, as defined by an instructor. Faced with a course blog (say), students are rarely starting from scratch, just as they’re rarely truly innovative users of the environment right out of the gate. They’re somewhere in the middle: endowed with some skills from their ‘other’ life, a life that can seem at once more playful and more serious than what’s going on in the classroom — skills that may or may not pertain to the effort at hand. We can’t assume that this pertinence will be discerned and exercised.
The question of local technical competence and portability thereof is a version of the larger question hovering over the classroom: what is the relationship of what’s learned here to the outside, impervious world? How can we know that classroom skills will really apply out in the field?
The good news for educators, I think, is that “digital natives” come into the room used to figuring out local rules and expectations: ready to be guided in that way. They’ve figured out how to get through so many various environments, and through a certain plasticity and perhaps even detachment (the world is full of strange games) they’ve succeeded. If playing to the “twitch speed” of this generation (a particularly unfortunate Prenskyism) leads education into the shallows, we might better address the adaptability necessarily cultivated by anyone who wants to think with or write to others today.
If “sustainability” is a touchstone du jour, the emphasis of any number of academic courses and programs, my quick claim, backed up by no data whatsoever, is that “adaptability” will be much more important to “digital natives.” When it comes to communication technology hurtling towards who knows where, no skill set is sustainable below a level of purely abstract values — and the effective persistence of such values (critical thought, intellectual honesty) pretty much depends on transference of skills between worlds. “One dead / One powerless to be born,” a burnt out “digital immigrant” might say of these worlds. “O children, what do ye reply?”
By now I’m something of a conference veteran, or, to be more precise, a repeat flâneur at a variety of conferences. Usually I’m presenting at these gatherings, but rarely do I feel like a true member of the community of academics, lawyers, technologists, or administrators that I happen to be among. This could be ascribed to GenX-itis — life in a post-boom interdisciplinary landscape that carries one everywhere and nowhere — or perhaps more simply to a personal gravitation to the margins.
So the first surprise about the recent Open Video Conference was how inclusive it felt, how it swept one up (one used to being a party of one) into a collective vision of the future. This was a healthy conference, due to a very specific rallying point — open video — and a greatly heterogeneous crowd well-nigh forced to bump up against different populations. And so the OVC overstuffed into NYU law classrooms programmers of various types of expertise and roguery, filmmakers with various types of produced work, genial lawyers, political activists, software evangelists, corporate and public media reps, educators, archivists… the “full stack,” as one friend put it, of expertise at pretty much every level of reinventing the way video acts on the web. And a concern rooted in very granular details of code seemed tangibly connected to the way we all will live.
An introduction to OVC
I can’t resist opposing this sense of inclusiveness and vitality to the MLAs I’ve attended, in which extravagant claims for the reinvention of subjectivity or sexuality or post-colonial discourse, say, clash against the most trenchant resistance to actual change. Humanists are nothing if not self-conscious, and the ironies of securing or justifying a tenured career by espousing the critical ‘trouble’ of the moment are oft felt. But MLA sessions addressing the dramatic changes in the way we are actually communicating and transmitting culture — the media revolution happening on our watch — were quirky and underattended (at least before I gave up on them circa 2004), and likely to devolve into older academics warning acolytes not to risk their careers in digital pursuits.
But back to the OVC in 2009. Others will publish some good summaries of sessions and events — I’m starting to see a few now (for example, Scott Macaulay’s blog posts on Filmmaker) — so I’ll keep here to the level of broad and subjective generalizations.
It smelled like teen spirit. Let me hasten to say, I mean that in a positive way, deriving from my experience in a public high school that gathered up a range of different classes, maturities, predilections, abilities, perspectives — drew us all up into something like genuine and still-forming enthusiasm. And so it would be easy for anyone who attended OVC to correlate speakers to various high school stereotypes: the genial hippie, the homecoming queen, the class clown, the truant, the rebel, the exchange students, the dropout, the goths, the a.v. geeks, the musicians, the art students, the nerds, the student government types…. Like high school, the conference made me feel like the future was right around the corner, momentous decisions were just ahead, and sudden and budding capacities were going to change the world. Who wouldn’t want to really feel this again, and at a conference no less?
Ray Blumenthal drawings of OVC speakers
Openness means simplification. It is touching and generous of hard core programming geeks to craft advances that inexorably shift arcane wizardry into the practical and even mundane. Thus on the immediate horizon we’re getting HTML 5 that simply incorporates a video tag, Ogg containers that free video content from restrictive plugins or presentation frames, a Wikipedia that offers easy browser-based video editing. We’re seeing entities like the Internet Archive offering to store and stream personal video without restriction, providing a range of transcoding, taking on what amounts to API service. We’re seeing advances in time-based metadata and accessibility features that make relevant pieces of video easier to find, reference, and recontextualize. We’re getting CC licensing clarifying subsequent use of content. All these efforts to simplify away impediments bolster an active, democratic engagement in heretofore complex and specialized processes, in what until now has been owned and manipulated by the very few.
A preview of new video functionality in Firefox 3.5
Openness can trigger honesty. At OVC I saw how an ethical imperative to be open goes beyond releasing code for the world to see, involves more than offering source content up for unconceptualized future use. I appreciated, through long tail examples like Earth-Touch and BoingBoingTV, that open video offers resistance to over-produced, bogus dramatization, and other commercial attempts to sweeten the pot for paying audiences. Earth-Touch’s HD yet relatively spare videos of actual animals in the field (like these suckling seals), put side by side with Disney’s over-soundtracked, hyper-narrated, dramatically manipulated presentation of (say) thrashing whales, made me feel afresh how corrosive the corn-syrup of ratings bait can be.
Americans must demand more from their broken down public media. Predictably shamed by Canadians actively funding independent video and Norwegians proactively releasing material on peer-to-peer networks, we Yankees (derives from Dutch word for “pirate”, Matt Mason observed) are reduced to handwringing about cultural treasure locked away by rights restrictions, about public broadcasting networks refusing *free* content from desperate filmmakers, by cable fee pittances funding public access tv stations that seem lost in 1982. It takes a Metavid to liberate CSPAN, for crying out loud, from hopeless VHS tape inconsequence. Perhaps PBS, NPR and the like should shift away from membership drives, with their appeals for rather nebulous support, and more to what Alyce Myatt called the “tip jar”: ways of driving direct loyalty to and remuneration for actual programs.
Nev. Senator John Ensign discusses American morality, via Metavid
We haven’t even begun to know what we can do with video. The highlight of the OVC for me was, of course, the education panel, during which CCNMTL released code for VITAL (Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning). During the session, I was struck by how infrastructure, access, and distribution are still dominant topics when people are thinking about educational use of video. These are foundational concerns, but those of us wrestling with how to actually incorporate video meaningfully into curricula — how to make working with video a truly transformative learning experience — have to drive the conversation to the next level: from *access* to *effective use*. Otherwise we can get indifferent and unmotivated broadcasting, subscription services that offer a shopping cart parody of ‘participation’, substitution of awkwardly filmed stagecraft for interpersonal dynamics, false assumptions about expanding the classroom, and a devolvement of educational inquiry into the polarized insufficiencies of passive consumption or blind expression. Video DJs Eclectic Method offered an interesting example of video sampling set to audio beats, and there was no shortage of video artists offering cut-ups and remashes, but much of this active video re-manipulation seems to be paddling around so far in the relatively shallow but fun waters of entertainment and parody.
This stuff is dangerous. For the most part, OVC offered a benign and even symbiotic vision of the future. Yochai Benkler set the tone at the opening keynote, cheering the advancement of participatory culture, the rise of a “5th estate” of engaged citizens able to watch and produce and determine their own world like never before. To many this can help out not only our public culture, but also the wheezing dinosaurs (or Murdoch-monsters?) who are looking for better business models, more compelling content, stronger engagement with audience. Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism (pay what you wish!), spoke engagingly of “virtuous circles,” in which merchants canny enough to pirate piracy get ahead. Radiohead was invoked.
But in a surprise move, the failure of Clay Shirky to make it to the conference opened up spot for a mystery final speaker — and he turned out to be a real pirate, Peter Sunde of the controversial bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. Patched in from Sweden, swigging some mysterious liquid, and professing indifference to incarceration, Sunde signaled no real politics and no limits. He tweaked media corporations by saying they should actually pay him to distribute their products for free, and announced that the Swedish National Theater would be presenting his recent and upcoming trial by authorities. Presumably they’ll be drawing on some lines he’s fed the press in the wake of a guilty sentence (now on appeal) — rather than pay restitution, “I would rather burn everything I owned.” Another Pirate Bay founder as been quoted as saying, “We chose to treat the trial as a theater play and as such it’s been far better than we ever could have believed.” Or, Sunde again: “This has been ‘Season One’ of The Pirate Bay series, and today’s judgment is just the cliffhanger,” he said. “But thanks Hollywood, you taught us that the good guys win in the end.”
An IOU from Peter Sunde
By ending the OVC with a reminder of the heedless hijacking that corporations use as justification for locking down content, conference organizers seemed to undercut the compelling arguments that had been made for refined licensing, better business models, better standards, and more responsive and forward-thinking media development. We ended in a rather adolescent nihilism.
At first I thought this was a mistake, but thinking about it further, I decided that this ending was a final and appropriate flourish to an effective conference. It seems open, after all, to acknowledge that there is actual menace in the air — that this medium is being contested across a legal landscape that could, in its inability to keep up with an increasingly frantic dance, freeze up and lay waste to what now seems like unbounded aspiration. None of us is in control, nobody can predict much beyond a rather ruthless shakeup of the way we communicate — along with the need for us all to somehow survive it, possibly shape it, even learn from it together.
In the perfect world we never seem to live in, migration of scholarship to the web would mean endlessly networked citations. It would mean new metrics for gauging the impact of any given publication, substantiating tenure/promotion and grant proposals with hard evidence. It would give us new tools to map the interplay of research in an interdisciplinary age. Machines would be prosthetic connectors of our truest thoughts.
Citation mapping is a step towards this promise. Academics have been diligently appending to their research footnotes and endnotes of attributions all along; the hooks are there, all we need to do is link them up. Easier said than done, of course, as the Tower of Babylon still smolders. Citation formats and database structures vary; the semantic web is under construction; too often software used to generate citations (MS Office, Endnote, Zotero & the like) is disconnected from the end version of an article, meaning that the article has to be OCR’d and citations re-interpreted. For these and other reasons, as this recent D-Lib article enumerating problems with citation counts points out, “the rates of citation data accuracy and completeness are not precise enough to make fair assessments.”
That’s not stopping efforts to corral citations into paths of discovery, and as usual the science data managers are out in front. Thompson Reuter’s Web of Science, in particular, has been innovating bibliometric analysis and visualization; its Citation Mapping Tool debuted last summer. The tool ‘maps’ articles into generations, allowing you to travel back and forth between cited and citing. Here’s a visualization of how one article cites others:
As this review notes, the tool is far from exhaustive, thanks to database quirks and variation of records across journals. Exporting a citation map is underwhelming at present: you can download it as a flat image, but there is no way to harvest the data into data management. The tool presents some color coding options, so you can sort out ‘types’ of references, but designation of these codes again relies on consistency across fields that cannot be taken for granted.
But perhaps the biggest drawback to this or any version of simple citation mapping is its inability to reflect conceptual relationships. Citations, after all, are made to a variety of sources for a variety of reasons, not all of them equally germane to what an article is about. An article may cite something it’s refuting, or may be cluttered with window-dressing references, or may go out of its way to cite the work of mentors or colleagues more out of a sense of politesse than necessity. Until this variation of citation quality is somehow addressed, along with improved metadata standardization and database interoperation, it seems doubtful that citation mapping can, in the words of the WOS mapping reviewer, “represent, and make access to, the historical progress of human inquiry, including its interdisciplinary aspects.”
***
Time to take another tack? As a recent NYT summary noted, data scientists at Los Alamos have come up with a new mapping of the connections between various disciplines. These connections are charted by tracking logs of click-throughs by researchers moving between journals. The project, detailed in PLoS, is seeking a more accurate way to measure and represent research interconnections than the more traditional citation mapping.
The PLoS report lists advantages of clickstream data: it is immediate information (versus the years that citation data can take to fall into place), it is based on private and actual navigation activity (versus the various motives for citation mentioned above). The report also notes a drawback to relying on clickstreams: “User interactions with scholarly web portals are shaped by many constraints, including citation links, search engine results, and user interface features.” It’s the same infrastructure problem haunting citation mapping.
In any case, the map of click-through connections is quite fun to look at – it’s color-coded by discipline. Humanities sort out to the middle, which is good and proper. Behold what the PLoS authors call a “first-ever glimpse of this terra incognita”:
It’s late January, another semester is gearing up, and yet once more I’m preparing another round of Lit Hum — must be time for Stanley Fish to say something risible about the humanities.
Last year around this time, Fish reveled in the inutility of it all: “To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. ”
In a NY Times blog post published today (“The Last Professor”) he declares, “Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past.”
Universities, you see, are now dominated by a “business model” that has irreversibly devalued the life of the mind:
The best evidence for this is the shrinking number of tenured and tenure-track faculty and the corresponding rise of adjuncts, part-timers more akin to itinerant workers than to embedded professionals. In this latter model , the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs. Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, their credentials and publications (if they have any) are beside the point, for they are just “delivery people.”
And they’re “delivering” to students who could care less about the humanistic tradition; they’re clocking time, really just wanting “information and skills necessary to gain employment,” thankyouverymuch.
The devaluation in Fish’s latest post of students, “itinerant workers,” technology, “delivery people,” even museums — all this is too execrable to merit much debate, though we could generously posit that debate is what Fish wants. (For a more trenchant indictment of university “business models” I suggest Marc Bousquet’s 2002 The ‘Informal Economy’ of the Information University). It’s probably a waste of time to dwell on Fish’s mugging for the NYT, a late-career prance undaunted by flops (his 2007 screed against Starbucks was plausibly recognized by Ron Rosenbaum as the worst op-ed ever).
What pushes Fish’s recent fulmination past annoying and into painful, though, is the post’s conclusion:
People sometimes believe that they were born too late or too early…. I feel that I have timed it just right, for it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess.
Lucky to have had a powerhouse career, and so lucky to be coming to an end of it just as, generally, the “life of the mind” has left the building. If Fish is representative of a mode of academic privilege — not just tenured, but superstar professor/critic/administrator blazing through several universities — then he’s embarrassing more than himself. What is it about his lucky career that makes him so future-indifferent? There’s no elegy, even, just a smug old man farting.
***
Fish’s career continues to be much discussed. I suspect he’ll be remembered less for what he thought than what he did — stocking Duke University’s English department with itinerant (that word again) superstars. As this Lingua Franca post-mortem outlines, outside evaluators of the Fish Duke fiefdom cut through the glitter to find a department “without anything we would be disposed to describe as an undergraduate or a graduate curriculum.” A similar indifference to actual pedagogy runs through Fish’s later comments-catching announcements of the death of the humanities.
When as a tender young grad student I took up Fish’s Is There a Text in this Class I was drawn in — but even then something didn’t seem right. What sticks in my memory after all these years is Fish’s reading of John Milton’s Lycidas, particularly the lines,
He must not float upon his wat’ry bier
Unwept….
(13-14)
Fish wanted to pay attention to reader response — an exciting emphasis for me at the time, New Critical scales falling from my eyes. Could a poem really depend on its relationship with me? Yet Fish’s depiction of the “reader’s experience” came to seem, well, forced. Apparently the “reader” comes to the end of line 13 expecting “perceptual closure”: that poor drowned shepherd Lycidas just can’t be left floating out there in the water; according to Fish, “there is now an expectation that something will be done about this unfortunate situation, and the reader anticipates a call to action, perhaps even a program for the undertaking of a rescue mission.”
Then, Fish would have it, “the reader” goes on to line 14, “Unwept,” and now learns that “nothing will be done,” “the only action taken will be the lamenting of the fact that no action will be efficacious, including the actions of speaking and listening to this lament.”
Say what? Here was enjambment on steroids, certainly not the way I experienced the lines. This “reader” seemed quite idiosyncratic to me — and I experienced the same disappointment I had just experienced when, reading Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, it became quite clear that “you” was not me, but rather just another character in a novel.
What strikes me now is the consistency of Fish’s defeatism: the raised expectations, the dashing of same. If, as Paul Alpers once put it, Fish was “dogmatically relativistic,” the Fishean notion of “interpretive communities” began to seem simply dogmatic. We live in a wilderness of imposed interpretation:
the choice is never between objectivity and interpretation but between an interpretation that is unacknowledged as such and an interpretation that is at least aware of itself. It is this awareness that I am claiming for myself.
Bully for you, Mr. Fish. This fixation on mediation (“critical activity is constitutive of its object”) has somehow now shrunk into an arthritic shrug at university “business models” and the death of humanities. Tenure, that meretricious patronage, is as lost as Lycidas, as dead as Daphnis. Meanwhile the hungry sheep look up and are not fed. Pastures new, anyone?
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.
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 Legoâ„¢ 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 Legoâ„¢ blocks. Whether you’re assembling a bridge or a house or a spaceship, you use the same Legoâ„¢ 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.
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 Legosâ„¢.
Citation mapping is a step towards this promise. Academics have been diligently appending to their research footnotes and endnotes of attributions all along; the hooks are there, all we need to do is link them up. Easier said than done, of course, as the Tower of Babylon still smolders. Citation formats and database structures vary; the semantic web is under construction; too often software used to generate citations (MS Office, Endnote, Zotero & the like) is disconnected from the end version of an article, meaning that the article has to be OCR’d and citations re-interpreted. For these and other reasons, as this 
