dude, that’s so punk rock
May 31st, 2008 § 1 Comment
So my Facebook friends, and my other friends, and the people in the cubicles next to me, and, well, anyone who has ever heard me speak knows that I’m not a big fan of the Blackboard learning management system. Despite having some good interactions over email with Karen Gage and the group of people responsible for the “2.0″ side of Blackboard development, my actual experiences with Blackboard have been confusing, frustrating, clunky and … more frequent than I would like to remember.
So this post yesterday at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus made me smile when I scanned the headline and saved it to my del.icio.us account – I’m not just a disgruntled librarian who lacks the patience to make Blackboard sing. I’m totally punk rock. This morning, however, I realized I needed to go back and read more than the headline – this edupunk idea is apparently a whole thing that resonates with a bunch of people.
This post says “Enter EDUPUNK” and future posts will continue to develop the idea and what it means. I’ll admit I loved this post because it details how the idea developed out of connections made between frustration with something Blackboard was doing, reading a really great novel and an awesome bar conversation — a process I can totally relate to. I loved this statement:
The insanely irresponsible advertising for BlackBoard 8 suggests that Academic Suite release 8.0 will “enhance critical thinking skills” and “improve classroom performance.” What LMS can do this? What Web 2.0 tool can do this? This is total bullshit, how can they make such an irresponsible claim? These things are not done by technology, but rather people thinking and working together.
OMG yes. But more than that – the connections drawn go on to talk about the implications of the specific, corporate environment Blackboard creates and is created by — “And this move by BlackBoard to commodify the labor of others is exactly the problem with the idea that educational technology “is about the technology.”
On his other blog, term-coiner Jim Groom provides an image of himself as the edupunk poster boy. There’s a little badge on the bavatuesdays blog now – leading here — edupunk.org (nothing there yet but an anthem)
Leslie Madsen Brooks at BlogHer provides a much better rundown of the conversation that’s been going on on the blogs.
Generally speaking, when I’ve talked about my problems with Blackboard I have focused on the closed nature of the LMS and how I think that closed off, password-protected, walled garden e-learning environment doesn’t work. Of course on one level I’m talking about the way that Blackboard just doesn’t work very well and there’s no way to go in and fix it. It’s a closed shop and a closed shop that doesn’t seem all that interested in creating something that works well.
But the real problem with the passwords and the walled gardens isn’t really about how it affects me as a teacher. I usually end up talking about how those things affect students as learners. I think that learning how to learn on the web and learn from other people on the web, is an essential part of what it means to be able to learn at all today. And that means learning how to learn in public. It means learning how to find the learning communities that will help you get where you need to go, and learning how to participate in those learning communities — contributing to the shared knowledge as well as consuming it. My del.icio.us network is hands-down one of the most important learning networks I have and it has been for a long time. And a big part of why it is so important is the way that it pushes things I wouldn’t otherwise find across my path. In that community, I make connections between things that I would never have made otherwise.
When Blackboard introduced it’s del.icio.us clone Scholar, Karen Gage provided me with a password so that I could check it out. Even though my interactions with her were really positive, my reactions to the product were not. The big advantage over del.icio,us seemed to be the ability to tag items by course name/number. I needed the special password in the first place because the only way to use it in my own BB environment was for our Blackboard administrator to do a system-wide implementation. And at that time, you could bring your bookmarks into Scholar, but you couldn’t export them out.
Scholar to me became the perfect metaphor of the BB LMS — sort everything into courses, don’t even consider that the best learning comes sometimes from drawing connections between learning experiences, don’t consider customization or user control of their own environment and once you leave school – you won’t need that knowledge base you developed while you were there anymore. Yeah, I know that Scholar might have improved in the year since I checked it out. But at the end of the day, I don’t think that matters.
Even if Scholar worked perfectly and even if it did some awesome things that del.icio.us could never do — I don’t think I would think it a substitute because of the walled garden thing. Our students don’t need to learn how to learn from a pre-selected, safe group of peers. They need to learn how to function on the wild, wide open web. They should be learning that in college. E-learning is something they will be doing for the rest of their lives. They should be learning how to do that in college. Closed off LMS’s don’t give them that experience, and they never will.
Alex Reid takes a rhetorical look at the term, and decides that it might be a case of trying too hard. And I think he might be right. I like his concise articulation of the question –
Still, I think there’s an interesting question here about how pedagogues position themselves in relation to institutionally-approved technologies and in the marketplace and commons of the larger techno-mediascape.
But I’ll also admit to liking the edupunk term. My friend Matt Cibula wrote this essay way back in the nascent days of the participatory web when we were very young but already nostalgic. Matt was a year ahead of me at Canby High School and while we never talked about the Clash while we were in Canby, this essay explains why they were important to some of us who were there better than I ever could. I honestly never expected to have a reason to link to it here – so bonus!
ARGH – Joss Whedon-related ARG – & me with no time
May 29th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
On Monday, a new thread appeared on the unfiction forums pointing out a trailhead for a new game that seems to be linked to the Fox series Dollhouse. Given the percentage of librarians who are big damn fans of Joss Whedon + my obvious fascination with Alternate Reality Games the odds were very good that I would find this very fascinating – but …. I will have no time to catch up on it until after next week.
So quick – if you fall into the above categories and are not presenting in a week:
Rabbit hole – one of the characters on Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse sends an email to this person (described as a “prominent Whedon fan” on unfiction. Not a librarian, but yes, an Oregonian). The email leads, though not directly, to this website — http://www.adelledewitt.com/
That site is then referenced at an official Fox blog, suggesting this isn’t a fan-created site, but an “official” ARG.
(Note, the login information for the adelledewitt site is provided in the comments to the Fox blog post. Not typical ARG practice, but there it is. And it is interesting how even on the unfiction forum there are clearly some ARG newbies being pulled in by the Joss connection)
Trailhead thread at the unfiction forums — 7 pages and 93 posts as of this moment. They really start to get into the unfolding narrative on page 2.
Game thread at the official Dollhouse forums
Game thread at the Dollverse forums – a fan-created Dollhouse portal
All about the intersection of scholarship and peer review around here
May 28th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
all the time. That’s because Kate and I are deep in preparation for our Loex of the West talk and it’s hard to think about anything else. A few things that have come out of my work in the last few days.
This video at Kairos – This is Scholarship –
This video cuts across a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about lately – the connections between new scholarly forms and traditional reward systems based on peer review.
The context for the video work done (and released in 2006) by the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion
Some related reading – Kathleen Fitzpatrick at The Valve, argues that the conversation about the future of scholarship can’t end with journals, but must be extended to a conversation about books in her essay – On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review and Tenure Requirements.
At Inside Higher Ed, Catherine Stimson provides a dean’s perspective on the MLA report – significant because the MLA task force left the specifics of how their recommendations should be implemented up to individual institutions.
And Alex Reid’s post today talking about last week’s Computers in Writing conference – Experimentation and Expertise in Web-based Scholarship looks at some of these questions through the lens of the digital journal Kairos, which published the video that started this off.
how the experts do it – and does JSTOR make a difference
May 21st, 2008 § Leave a Comment
This presentation from last week’s JSTOR Annual Publishers Meeting, examining how digital access to information has affected scholars’ research patterns, is very interesting. Meredith Quinn presented some research from Ithaka that looks at some of those disciplinary differences in research practice that I think most of us intuitively feel are there.
What a difference a discipline makes: How scholars use resources across the academy
A few points I pulled out on first scan – which are worth thinking about as we find ways to teach new scholars and undergraduates how to navigate these types of resources –
- There’s a difference in how scholars in different disciplines approach the process of exploratory search – historians tend to search broadly, hoping not to miss anything and to make unexpected connections. Life scientists, on the other hand, look to narrow their inquiry to limit the amount of information they have to sift through. Both sets of scholars want to be comprehensive – but they approach that task (and probably define that goal, though the presentation notes don’t go there) differently. As a former historian, I definitely fall into the broad exploration category – which might be affecting how I communicate with those in other disciplines.
- Across the disciplines, scholars are more likely to use Google than Google Scholar to find material in the journal literature. Given that this slide immediately follows one on “targeted” (we’d call it “known-item”) searching — I’m wondering if that’s not connected. If I’m looking for the full-text of a specific journal article I’ll use Google instead of Scholar — why wouldn’t I? This may also suggest that Google is used more as a retrieval tool than as a scholarly search environment — which is something to think about when we think about how to teach our students to find expert information after they leave the university, with its database subscriptions.
- The availability of online resources and online search tools has made interdisciplinary research easier and more important. But scholars struggle, just like the rest of us, evaluating information outside of their area(s) of expertise. And many of them rely on colleagues — so how do we realistically expect students to do this work without a network of experts to turn to.
Notes from the freeculture front
May 20th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
From this — The Future of Online Music: Why Closed Platforms Will Fail –
Alternatively, the disappearance of an open platform could spell the end of DRM technology altogether, at least for digital music. Since I believe strongly that the market in the end must and will be based on interoperable digital formats, if DRM is used to erect barriers to that goal, then there is no question it will be swept aside, and the industry may end up with what many have believed was the obvious choice from the beginning: open MP3 files.
Either way, Napster has the tools in place to adapt to whichever way the environment evolves and will remain committed to the common-sense goal of helping to shape a music industry that actually benefits consumers over the long-term.
To this — Napster goes DRM-free as iTunes war steps up –
Napster has bowed to the inevitable and stripped away the DRM from its entire catalogue of tracks, meaning music purchased through the service is Mac, iPod and iPhone compatible for the first time. The service is offering six million tracks, free of usage limitations, in high-quality 256kbps MP3 format.
(For an interesting exercise – check out the difference in tone between the Macworld (US) story and this one – the US one reads much more as a “Napster vs. Apple” tale. Or maybe that’s just me.
Both stories point out that the significant thing here is that Napster has apparently convinced all of the major labels to take part, including Sony-BMG, something Apple has been unable to do.
Napster’s subscription service continues, with a slightly higher price tag. The DRM-free option does not apply to the subscription service, only to songs purchased individually.
And shifting gears – from the MIT chapter of Students for Free Culture (freeculture.org) comes a fairly awesome research project – Youtomb.
From the project –
…YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.
And a little further down – they say that they became interested in the issue after YouTube announced that the takedown process would be automated. The students wondered if this would lead to collateral damage and take-downs of videos that should fall under fair use or that should not have received any scrutiny at all.
You can’t watch the videos anymore – and the site makes it pretty clear that this is an informational/research project only that’s trying to see what kinds of videos are being challenged and to see if there are any patterns to be found. So it’s kind of interesting to look at the comments on the TechCrunch story about it where it’s being discussed more like it’s just another startup.
Holy publishing model shift, Batman!
May 16th, 2008 § 1 Comment
So I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at different models for scholarly publishing preparing for this presentation, and what always happens happened – the themes start showing up everywhere. I went to visit the Top Shelf comic site the other day and found this — anticipation-building countdown. Intriguing!
Investigation led to this story at Publisher’s Weekly. Top Shelf 2.0 is a new site devoted to webcomics – editor Leigh Walton and Top Shelf founder Brett Warnock hope to capture and keep readers’ attention by publishing new webcomics regularly and often — every weekday something new will be posted. It may be an installment in a larger serialized work, or a quick one-shot.
The countdown counted down and now there’s webcomics to look at. I haven’t been through them all (they launched the site with a small collection of comics – varying in style, theme, and intended audience) but there’s some cool-looking stuff there.
Here’s a tiny glimpse – that does no justice to the real thing – of the splash page wrapping up the first installment of Kagan McLeod’s Infinite Kung Fu:
To Publisher’s Weekly, Walton talked about the benefits of the web platform as a publisher. Some of the themes echo what we’ve heard in the scholarly world – the digital world means we don’t have to worry about space limitations, we can take more risks about what we publish and how much we publish — we don’t need the same return on our publishing investment because we haven’t invested as much, or at least we haven’t invested the same. But he also talks about some things more specific to the comics world:
“The most obvious difference [with webcomics] is color—something that we’re still using very sparingly in our print publications, but on the web is completely unlimited,” added Walton. “What excites me the most about working with young artists—those, like me, born after 1980—is that we’ve grown up with computers, and that affects the comics that we make. Whereas it would have been unthinkable for an “alternative comic artist” of Chester Brown’s generation to work in color (for economic reasons), for a lot of these new folks, it’s unthinkable to do it any other way.”
I love the color palette in Jed McGowan’s evocative Western-themed comic, Cookie Duster. Go – read!
So this is still a site focused on the consumption of information with no room for reader-generated content, remixing or conversation. But I think calling this Top Shelf 2.0 is fair enough — the creators retain control over their work, and the site feels like a step away from web publishing where we just apply the metaphors and practices of the print world and put them on the web. It’ll be interesting to see if more steps in that direction are forthcoming.
good interface + bad metadata =
May 13th, 2008 § 2 Comments
well, not really bad metadata. More like the wrong metadata.
Dipity lets you build interactive timelines. You can pull in all kinds of information sources — video, text, images — and display them in a nice, linear timeline. The interface is easy to navigate. Each item in the timeline can be viewed within the timeline, and each item has a handy “next event” button to make navigation easier.
Sample Dipity timeline about the Beatles
Anyway, I have some ideas for how to use this interface and if I ever get time to try them, I’ll post about it more. But that’s the thing – putting this stuff together does take time. If you choose the browse timelines option on the dipity site – there are a LOT of timelines with no events, with 2 events, with 4 events. I’d imagine a fair number of them will never be finished.
So the other day I noticed this – Time Tube – a mashup that puts the Dipity timeline interface together with YouTube. Same cool interface, but you just have to keyword search a topic and your timeline will be populated with YouTube videos a few minutes later. It’s created a fair amount of buzz over the last couple of days, most of it positive because it’s fun to use and some of the timelines are pretty interesting.
But – the timelines are based on the date the video was uploaded. If all you want is a nice browsing interface this is okay – as another way to display the results of a YouTube keyword search. But as a way of visualizing information, if what you want is to add some kind of meaning or context to the videos, it’s only useful for a very narrow set of topics.
Compare this “Beatles” timeline to the one above -
It doesn’t look too bad, but there’s no real meaning there. Not even a spike when Across the Universe was released.
TimeTube lets you pick a longer timespan – here’s fifty years. This really shows the limitations.
Everything clustered in the middle because YouTube didn’t exist until a short time ago. The fact that they let you open out your range to 20, 50, 100 years suggests that the upload date might not always be the way these things are generated? Or maybe it’s just a holdover from the original Dipity interface. The timelines created are dynamic and there’s no way to save them. There’s no account to create so you can’t find timeline buddies either.
Where this is useful now is for topics, like “olympic torch protests” where people upload their videos right away after an event happens. Or to track the zeitgeist when something emerges out of nowhere to become the next big thing. Or as a fun browsable interface for a YouTube keyword search.
When comments collide
May 12th, 2008 § 2 Comments
at least in my head. My head is tired, though, from speaking at this and at this. So I may not be making any sense.
Last week before I got sucked into preparing stuff I had a brief exchange about peer review with John Daly on the K4D blog and he said something that resonated but I wasn’t able to take time to think about it until now –
Perhaps more importantly, peer review works when it works because experts have learned ways to evaluate information — the clarity of hypotheses, the appropriateness of the sample, the quality of the instruments used, etc. We can all use these same criteria to evaluate information. We don’t usually because we only need information that is “good enough” and it is not worth while to spend more time and effort getting information of higher quality that one needs.
I wonder to what extent this line, “we can all use these same criteria to evaluate information” holds true for undergraduate students. I mean, we all can if we know how – but do they know how? When do we learn what those methods are? I don’t think that many of us in libraries are teaching that – and I’m wondering how much that is being taught throughout the curriculum, particularly at the gen-ed or core-curriculum level?
And I’m even wondering to what extent people really immersed in a discipline would even agree that there are general evaluation skills that we can all learn? Does the way academia is structured, and the way it supports intellectual specialization work against this idea to a certain extent?
(and when I say “I’m wondering” I mean I’m really wondering – not just passive aggressively suggesting an answer. It’s been so long since I was immersed in a curriculum myself that I don’t really know)
Daly continues on to say that “I have been impressed by the failure of my students in the past to see that they can transfer their information literacy from one field to another. Teaching scientific experts to use their skills to evaluate foreign policy information is an example of something that seems easy but is really quite difficult.”
And this echoes something that Barbara Fister said on my Why I am a Librarian post several months ago –
The issue of expertise is fascinating. In some ways, faculty in the disciplines defer tremendously to expertise, even to the point of saying “I can’t comment on that issue, because it’s not my field.” Well …. we didn’t get training in most of what the world’s about, but we did get training in how to read and analyze and respond. Sometimes we have to figure it out even if it’s not familiar.
That’s one of the devil-may-care things you get to do as a librarian, figure it out. And help other people learn how to think for themselves.
That’s been my experience too – that the more expert one becomes in one field or sub-field the more one feels inexpert in others. The thing is, even when experts in one field defer to experts in another, they’re not doing so entirely blindly. And the other thing is — it’s really important that lifelong learners, that informed citizens, figure this stuff out. In today’s world we do need to be able to evaluate like experts, even if we aren’t going to be generating any original scholarship or research ourselves.
Maybe this is one way to get at the “how to teach peer review” question — it would take a lot longer than I usually have to talk about this issue, but it could get at the question of “why peer review” as well as the question of “have the peer reviewers done their job.” Normally, this is what I do when asked to help students find peer reviewed articles – I explain what the process of peer review looks like and talk about some cues the students can look for to identify whether or not an article has gone through that process.
This really isn’t very different than the checklist approach I criticized a few posts ago, but it does focus on the students’ actual need, which is to use a source that has been peer reviewed. I’ve seen a lot of those assignment sheets and they’re not usually required to identify a good scholarly source so much as they’re required to identify a scholarly source.
Given a couple of sources without the names, institutional affiliations, journal names, etc — I wonder how well they’d do coming up with a list of metrics or questions or methods that one could use to evaluate the quality of that information? Would they think to question which research method the scholar used, or would they think to question whether or not the conclusions matched the results? Would they think of following up the sources in the lit review? I might be a Pollyanna, but I think at least some of them would. And even if they didn’t – I think I’d have a much better sense of how to approach the why peer-review question with other students if I saw some approach that question in this way.
maybe fun isn’t quite enough
May 7th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
So back in this post, I explained why one reason that I don’t like EBSCO’s new visual search is that they didn’t preserve the fun factor of the old interface. And I stand by that. So I was intrigued when I saw this in my feeds yesterday.
This is Spectra, part of msnbc’s Newsware suite of tools, applications, games and widgets. From the site:
Spectra merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience. With comprehensive live news coverage, striking design, complete customization, dynamic browsing, human body interaction and many other unique features, Spectra brings A Fuller Spectrum of News to life in our most immersive extension yet.
A wee bit hyperbolic? Yes, maybe. But it looked swirly and fun, so I thought I’d check it out. I showed it to a class of students this morning (advanced rhetoric and composition) and I definitely got some interest in the fun swirly interface. What do I mean by “swirly?”
Well, you choose from a variety of news channels – by subject (sports, science, etc.) or by format (videos, blogs, etc.) and items from those channels fly up into this swirly looking thing – kind of a tornado of news:
After you watch it swirl around for a while, you can start looking at the articles. They display like this:
You can save articles you like to a newsreader as you pick them out of the swirl. You can also search your swirl, and then all of the articles that don’t have your search term will drop out, which looks kind of cool, and which is kind of useful. And you can re-order the items in your swirl so that they’re grouped by subject, or displayed in date-time order.
What’s not as useful – you can’t click on an item as it swirls by and skip to that item. I don’t know, this seems like a deal-breaker for me. I kept wanting to do it even after I knew that I couldn’t and intuitively, I think I can’t be the only person who might want to do that.
Also not as useful, under the option “Change View,” Spectra will apparently tap into your webcam and see what color you are, or what color you’re wearing, or what color your walls are or something and then feed you news that goes with those colors. Seriously. It took me like an hour to figure out that part was supposed to be doing because I just kept saying, “no, that can’t be what they mean by that.”
And finally not as useful is the fact that the only news is msnbc news. While not surprising, this is disappointing and probably makes this a tool I won’t come back to again.
The Newsware package includes games (some integrate with Facebook) that I didn’t play. It also includes widgets, screensavers, feeds and more. All in all, I think there is a lot of good work going on here – but I don’t really think they’re there yet.
Back to Spectra, the headline reader, and fun. It’s a little fun to watch, and when I demonstrated it the students were interested. But I don’t think it’s interactive enough or that it gives the user enough control to really be fun to use. And fun to use is what’s really important, at least to me. I’m excited about the potential of dynamic information visualization because I think it fits into the whole idea of research as part of a learning process, based on exploration and discovery. Just watching doesn’t get you to that point.
After the demonstration, when students had the option to use any of the tools I’d demonstrated, I did notice that none of them picked Spectra. I may not have been as clear on what kind of tool it was or how they might use it as I could have been. But I also think that it might be a situation of what’s fun to watch in a demonstration isn’t fun in the hands-on if all it really lets you do is watch.
More on why “peer review” isn’t code for “awesome”
May 2nd, 2008 § 4 Comments
There’s an interesting conversation going on at Historiann’s blog about peer review. It’s especially interesting to librarians I think as a peek behind the curtain of academic publishing – at least a glimpse of what it’s like in certain disciplines.
I have always wondered how closely my experiences writing in the peer-reviewed library science literature match the reality of publishing in other disciplines – and I’ve assumed that they don’t match that well. It’s a little heartening to see some of my frustrations echoed here – especially where she says “Journals also seem to have no shared rules or system of peer review.” The amount and type of peer review I’ve gotten for my articles has varied pretty dramatically, and the extent to which I have been able to see and incorporate the reviewers’ thoughts has varied as well.
This is my favorite part – even though most of the post is about why this is an idealistic picture of a process that doesn’t look like this very often:
What’s not to like, with a fair and humane group of supportive senior scholars freely sharing their wisdom with their (usually junior) colleagues? Furthermore, having one’s work reviewed by supportive senior scholars is a really great way of making new friends and influencing influential people. I’ve had that experience a few times–and I’m truly grateful to the people who lent their time and expertise to make me a better historian.
I like this because I think it’s easy to forget this reason for the peer review process. At this point, with a huge structure of scholarly publishing, employment and reputation that both supports and relies upon our faith in the peer review process as a guarantor of quality – I think it’s easy to forget the “peer” part of peer review. And I also think that remembering it can help us as we figure out how to talk about peer review in a time where the landscape of scholarly communication is changing.
Right after I read this, I read the Tenured Radical’s lovely post remembering Charles Tilly, who died on April 29th. The whole piece is a wonderful tribute. This segment particularly struck me after reading Historiann’s description of ideal peer review as “a fair and humane group of supportive senior scholars freely sharing their wisdom with their (usually junior) colleagues?”
I didn’t know that at that moment in time you got Chuck and Louise as a package, and that once you fell into their orbit you never really left. You became part of this network of astonishing people with capacious intellects who came in and out of town, moving through offices that were a hive of activity, research and ideas. Looking at something I had written one day, Chuck said, “Theda Skocpol is coming through next week — let’s have her take a look at it and pick her brain.” Chuck ran a proseminar on the state which was my principle intellectual context during my final years in graduate school: one fall, in the first meeting, I walked in and sitting around the table were E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Bridget Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm.
What’s not to like, indeed?
