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?
From its earliest days, the promise of the Semantic Web has been to bring networked computers closer to the forms and priorities of human inquiry. This promise depends on mark-up language that gives data some structure, and frameworks that bring such structure into recognizable relationships. As a May 2001 Scientific American piece by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues put it, “for the semantic web to function, computers must have access to structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning.”
Automated reasoning! This dream may be coming to life in e-science, with its highly structured and interoperable datasets, but in many other contexts the idea of a Semantic Web sits uneasily with the younger and more popular kid on the block, the Participatory Web. Web 2.0 environments amasses a lot of data and, more importantly, a lot of information about this data generated by humans downright impervious to the need of machines for identifiable and consistent structure. Such tags are generally free-form, non-hierarchical, not expressing relationships in a predictable and consistent way; they dance to “folksonomy” not “taxonomy”; they are blithely untethered to “ontologies,” to any URI-based language standards.
Nevertheless there is intriguing thought out there about the potential interplay of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. The Tagcommons sites lays out Use Cases that envision sharing tags across databases, and sketches out some functional requirements to make that interoperability happen. Tom Gruber, in particular, has argued energetically for “collective intelligence systems” built from syntheses of structured data and social software; his travel-review site RealTravel uses a “snap-to-grid” model to disambiguate and structure user-supplied tags.
And now in Yahoo! Research Berkeley labs, algorithms are starting to take into account aggregate patterns in order to sift out meaning from vast oceans of community-generated tags despite all their unstructured messiness — or, as computer scientists like to say, despite all their “noise.” It’s a matter of inference and cluster analysis. Case in point: the photo-sharing site Flickr’s new experiments in extracting “practical information about the world” from the snapshots and tags poured into it by the great unwashed. The report “How flickr helps us make sense of the world: context and content in community-contributed media collections,” describes a layered process of tag and image analysis–one that can be conducted entirely by machines–that identifies representational tags as well as place and event semantics.
What does all this do for us? For one thing, it can improve a search through piles of community-contributed materials; my search for “Harlem” stands a better chance of coming up with the most representative picture of the neighborhood, or a set of iteratively varied views of the neighborhood, or even a conglomeration of views for a composite view. I could determine the most visited place in the neighborhood, or the scenes of important events. Yahoo!’s researchers are even thinking about automatic tagging of photos, or suggestions for tags, that are generated by visual content abetted by contextual and geographical cues.
Here are a couple of spins of Yahoo! Labs’ TagMaps:
^ TagMap’s World Browser analyzes Flickr tags to locate “Harlem” on a map and offer a set of representative photos (on the right). Harlem seems pushed to the west, and the chicken picture is a little odd, but this machine-generated guess seems viable enough.
^ A search for ‘Paris’ in TagMap’s World Browser whisks us to a city in the middle of France, not Texas, and avoids any pictures of over-photographed heiresses. See: machines have taste too.
Teasing meaning out of cacophony, evaluating ‘where what & when’ through dumb processing of inconsistent human traces: it’s not hard to sense an artificial intelligence awakening here with its own priorities, despite the human decision (conscious or not) to ignore machine-oriented information conventions. What is the ultimate effect of algorithms trained to crunch through the idiosyncratic and identify the representational? Could such aggregate processing of unstructured data fuel a general regression to the mean, as alchemist Jonah Bossewitch muses? As a Trekkie (or is it Trekker?) might say, streaming into yet another convention, resistance is futile.
The fear of human conglomeration coming into sudden sentience is nothing new, of course. I just re-read Frankenstein with a set of fresh young readers, and alarmist correlations of that good old story to a improbably persistent, flexible, and collective-mashed form of AI doubtlessly come too easily to me now. But I do sometimes wonder whether we too will wake up from our most logocentric tagging idylls to sense senseless and unblinking eyes, watching us in the dark and hungry for more.
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.
Clayfox has never been deluged with comments, despite some provocatively insouciant — if not downright ignorant — claims. It’s a quiet place, this blog, offering arcane pondering that trips barely a ripple in the chat-o-sphere. But let’s consider quality as an inverse of quantity. Indeed, I’ve been honored to net responses from a few mindful colleagues, nostalgic friends, quizzical strangers, and producers of a couple of the projects touched on here — reacting to or extending my quick generalizations.
Spam has been kept largely at bay by the popular Wordpress plugin Spam Karma 2. Dr. Dave gets fooled once in a great while — I too was an early sucker for those “I love your blog!” Trojan insincerities — but on the whole, he’s been a valiant defender against relentless bots, and commentary has been a quiet and easily managed thing here.
So why change what ain’t broke? Walking home, listening to a Digital Campus podcast (another fine offering from George Mason’s CHNM, oft-mentioned here), I heard about a little validation program that is such clever good citizenship, I had to install it: reCAPTCHA.
reCAPTCHA’s twist is that it uses actual ‘rejects’ from OCR processing — image patches of text that OCR software isn’t sure what to make of during digitization — and works these mystery patches into the validation process. It is up to you, flesh and blood, to recognize the distorted word and type it back. When you ’solve’ a reCAPTCHA to post a comment, say, you’re also contributing human brainpower to the digitization of a book in the Internet Archive . The reCAPTCHA motto conveys the doubleplay: “Stop Spam. Read Books.”
This is just a picture. For a true reCAPTCHA experience, you’ll have to post a comment.
You might wonder how much effect your little ’solution’ has in the scheme of things. reCAPTCHA claims that 60 million CAPTCHAs are daily solved: that’s a lot of blurry text getting cleared up, a steady current of human recognition. You may also wonder how reCAPTCHA determines that your submitted solution is correct. The key is delivering two words to you to ’solve’ at once: a word for which the answer is known, and a word that can’t be determined by OCR. If you correctly solve the ‘known’ word, reCAPTCHA has more confidence in your solution of the mystery word, and compares your solution to other presumed correct solutions of the word.
So that’s what you’re doing, should you favor Clayfox with a comment going forward: proving your human identity while hastening along the migration from print. Oh, and you’ll be registering — at least here — what you thought.
Virginia Tech’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture recently debuted The April 16 Archive, with some help from the prolific Center for History and New Media at George Mason,
…in order to support ongoing efforts of historians and archivists to preserve the record of this event by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts.
It’s worth keeping an eye on this project as a model of user contributions, clustered around a contemporary and tragic event. How do we use new media to process such things? What does it enable us to capture and collect and learn?
So far the April 16 Archive is fairly bare-bones; it only accepts ‘images,’ ’stories,’ and the vaguely termed ‘other files’. And as of now it’s impossible to search, hard to browse. There is some tagging, but the lumped-up organization makes you wish for some other ways in to the content–perhaps a map interface along the lines of the CHMN’s last tragedy-archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. A simple uploading interface provides a cut-and-paste field for Virgina Tech stories, or an upload field for files (maximum 5 MB). You can choose to just contribute to the archive, or to have your contribution appear on the website (with or without your name). Submitters are told that they retain copyrights to anything they contribute, which broadly bans use for any public purpose without the permission of the April 16 Archive and the original contributor. No CC options here.
The April 16 Archive FAQs take on the question of veracity: How do I know that the content of the April 16 Archive is factual? The answer here:
Every submission to the April 16 Archive–even those that are erroneous, misleading, or dubious–contributes in some way to the historical record. A misleading individual account, for example, could reveal certain personal and emotional aspects of the event that would otherwise be lost in a strict authentication and appraisal process.
Besides, this FAQ rather blithely continues,
…the April 16 Archive harvests metadata from every contributor–including name, email address, location, zip code, gender, age, occupation, date received–and suggests that these metadata be examined in relation to one another, in relation to the content of the submission, and in relation to other authenticated records. Sound research technique is the basis of sound scholarship.
After picking my way around the Archive for a little while, I’m struck by the number of images of Second Life memorials. I just don’t know what to think of such screen grabs. Collective therapy, sure – but an historical record of this tragedy? You tell me.
The web is spinning ever-faster, shards of content are scattering every which way, RSS and podcast feeds radiate in all directions, each new day brings new ways of grabbing & saving & sharing digital bits shorn of context.
It can seem so… centrifugal. Now that web content has slopped out all over the place, churning and reprocessing itself in a puppydog frenzy to deliver customized services, we might take a nostalgic moment to recall when “webmasters” published “pages” that we “surfed.” Somehow, while you were downloading that mp3, emailing your baby pics to all and sundry, setting up your personalized sports news alerts, punching up maps in your car — the very notion of a website became quaint.
To defenders of edifices and books and beautiful places, the 2.0 web world might seem a wilderness of fleeting, fractured signification: a million ephemeral pokes. Of course the web is still designed, even triumphantly, but that architecture is more likely to be in the form of submerged code — design that delivers a teeming, unfixed front end, the on-the-fly, just-in-time, gotta-go whimsies of what I want at the moment.
Two ways of plucking at the web at will — as if it were a lo-fat all-you-can-eat banquet — crossed my path lately. The first, Clipmarks (”Just the best parts of the page”), offers a browser-integrated clipping tool that will grab words, paragraphs, selected images, even video posted on YouTube & its ilk. The Clipmarks demo says it all, and will only detain you for 49 seconds:
Think about when John Kennedy said “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” That line was part of a much longer speech. Imagine if instead of being able to clip that line from the speech, people were forced to listen to the entire speech every time.
Now imagine if that was a web page. What if you were forced to bookmark the entire page, but you really wanted to clip the part that mattered most. How many people would have the time or attention span for the whole thing?
We believe that information is easier and more enjoyable to digest in small portions. Kind of like movie trailers, sushi and cliff notes.
Armed with virtual scissors, web readers are less passive, less hostage to what someone else packaged, less hostage to the ‘writerly,’ as Barthes might suggest from the grave. But is improved appropriation of web content leading to a world of Cliff Notes movie trailers with the shelf life of sushi? Or, more portentously, “obnoxious, mean-spirited dialogue” conducted by anonymous clippers, fueled by uncertainly sourced and possibly stolen material?
Fortunately not every such tool is so blithely delivered into the Whatever Zone. The second grab-it tool coming across the transom recently is more purposeful in emphasis: MediaMatrix, developed at Michigan State University.
In an informative video introducing MediaMaker (a video that, ironically, can’t be easily embedded inline here), we see similarities to Clipmarks: server-side application, browser integration, links-driven. The difference here is that clipped objects load into an editor that encourages annotation, resizing, cropping, notes association, and metadata assignment. Streaming audio and video can be segmented without actually being copied or downloaded — through clever use of just URLs and text parameters. This is sophisticated, task-oriented clipping of media that Clipmarks can only dream about (at 3 a.m., drooling into its Cliffnotes).
With the exception of text, which can be custom-selected, Clipmarks grabs elements in the form that they have been fixed on a webpage (the image, the video, the song as is). MediaMatrix, on the other hand, lets you edit those elements for yourself: it lets you create out of what you collect, even as it encourages responsible tracking and attribution through “metadata skins” that appear during the annotation process.
A clipped sound file is edited on MediaMatrix
MediaMatrix encourages metadata application
But what then happens to your MediaMatrix clip-derived creations? Well, they hang like fruit on an individual’s “tree”…
Clipped and edited assets hang on a MediaMatrix tree
…and await plucking into essay/presentation spaces:
A MediaMatrix workspace, where one prepares presentations or multimedia essays
It’s here, oddly, where MediaMatrix starts to feel outpaced by the bubbleheaded Clipmarks. We’ve had recent occasion to think about centralized versus distributed models of publication; here we have a comparison that exemplifies the dichotomy. MediaMatrix imagines that you will collect and analyze the assets you’ve plucked out of various contexts within a rather gloomy, solitary, pre-formulated workspace. It’s a one-way ride: bits and pieces come out of the web and get imprisoned in “my portal”; if you want to work with them, you have to use MediaMatrix editing tools in a MediaMatrix environment. To publish your work, the best you can do is send out a URL that draws right back to MediaMatrix. What happens in MediaMatrix stays in MediaMatrix.
Clipmarks, in the other hand, cheerfully offers you any number of ways to fling your clipped treasures in any direction. You can save them on their site (and share them with fellow clippers, tossing them up into the communal winds to see what happens — sociability entirely lost on MediaMatrix), or you can push them to your email client, your printer, even your blog (a connection that was fairly easy for me to configure).
Where do you want it? Clipmarks sends your selection any which way.
Clipmarks frankly doesn’t care much about what happens to what you’ve clipped — leaving options for you if you do. Route your purloined selections of web content to the publication platform of your choice, private or public, online or off.
While we’re waiting for perfect digital object recontextualization engine, one that mashes up Clipmarks’s flexible and social publication with MediaMatrix’s editing power, analytic focus, and sense of responsibility, we might think about how to emphasize new wholes out of digital fragmentation. When “the torch has been passed to a new generation,” it will have to know about how to create connections with virtual splinters; “divided there is little we can do.” It is with an exhortative spirit that I clip here the whole Kennedy inauguration address, grabbed in two pieces from YouTube:
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.
It’s a trainwreck, of course, but I can’t look away: Penguin Books and a creative writing program in Leicester have launched “A Million Penguins”: a crowd-sourced wikinovel.
Don’t worry, you know it’s a real wiki because all the usual Wikipedia pieces are in place, including the good old Mediawiki environment & some ethical guidelines evocative of the Neutral Point of View (TM): “Please be respectful of issues of decency and legality on matters of sexually explicit language, and potentially controversial areas such as race, gender and sexuality. Be polite.” Now there’s a recipe for great art!
As you might expect, chapters written so far are as squirming and oblivious of each other as a gaggle of hungry babies. The most entertaining thing about them may be their content-free structure-fetish, somewhat reminiscent of David Foster Wallace. For example, here’s “Chapter 8 1/2,” which currently begins: ‘”Did you know Fellini,” he asked. She couldn’t answer.”‘
“Meanwhile” is a popular word in these environs. Hard-core lurchers are sprouting alternative versions of the novel, providing alternatives to alternation.
The flurry of hypertext novels in the ’90s never amounted to much, it seemed to me, and this 2.0 sequel doesn’t seem likely to renew the genre. “A Million Penguins” does contain one gripping, downright chilling passage, though: the Terms and Conditions. It’s not editable.
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 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.
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.
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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™.
