F2F in the Mediated Classroom

This blog is moving to kathiiberens.com

2011-08-25T12:58:00.000-07:00

Hey friends,

Please visit my new site, kathiiberens.com, to access my blog, syllabi, schedules, assignments and resources for two advanced social media classes I'm teaching this fall, and other goodies.

I'll tantalize you by saying I've just posted there a vid created by some of my students this morning in our class, COMM 499 at USC Annenberg.

The students shot this vid impromptu, after kicking off class today with a discussion of prohibition of devices in the classroom, distraction and attention.

Click here to be taken right to the video. See you at the new site!

Video Overview of COMM 499

2011-08-11T16:39:00.000-07:00

People have emailed me to ask about "F2F in the New Media Classroom," an advanced social media class I'm teaching at USC's Annenberg School of Communication starting 23 August.

So I made this 6 min. video overview. It discusses why

we build and not just consume
students must bring their devices to class and consult them at will
the class meets 65% online and 35% F2F

Those of you who read my post about The Flipped Classroom know that I believe that everything that can be moved OL should be. OL can deliver experiences that are themselves uniquely valuable: some killer guest speakers are slated to Skype in, for example.

What remains in the physical classroom is the unique value of F2F: embodied, thrilling, spiritual, ephemeral. My version of the classroom is face time ++. The students and I will amble outside classroom walls to snap photos on campus to gather assets for our first lesson in visual composition; we'll visit LACMA, view street art, engage with locative digital art in situ, wander. Digital flaneurs. I've had Baudelaire unshakably in my head for months as I've dreamed up this class.

Building the "About": Coding Changes How & What I Teach

2011-07-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about how learning to code changes what I think is important to teach.

Here at the end of my post-doc fellowship at the Mobile Tech Research Initiative, I'm building an "About" page in jQueryMobile for the Columbia Gorge International Film Festival. Finally, I'm seeing what I've learned about code authoring syntax translate into keystrokes. That's a big deal. Groking is one thing. But when it comes to building, it's like I'm seated at the piano bench, trying to find the right finger placements before I can play my song. My fingers had to learn how to do this. Honestly. I can't explain except to say that there's a kinetic quality to the learning to code that was completely beyond my apprehension ten weeks ago. I spent time shoving concepts and tags into my brain. It didn't matter, none of it mattered, until I learned how to type code by, say, opening and closing a tag quickly, then spacing to insert the specific calls. I used to type exactly the sequence. Now I type in syntactic blocks. Without the typing, I wouldn't know anything. It feels hubristic to claim I know anything at all.

The vulnerability of making bonehead mistakes, especially if you're a professor and are hanging out your total ignorance like undergarments drying on the community line, can stop you in your tracks. A few of the Fellows in MTRI do not, will not code. They work their tails off collaborating, editing and generally "getting" code. They are vital to the process. But they are not pushing the keys and sitting alone in front of the screen.

Here's why it's a mistake not to try.

Waaay back in 2002, my pal Norah Ashe McNalley and I got a USC Innovative Teaching grant to start an online student journal, which our founding editors named AngeLingo. (Two years ago, AngeLingo was rebranded "SCribe.") Our first coder, Jason, was charged with building the site over the course of an entire school year. Everything was HTML: CSS hadn't been invented/adopted yet. Jason--one hell of a coder, by the way, who went on to build games for Dreamworks, etc., etc.--procrastinated epically. Norah and I didn't know enough about code (read: we knew zilch) to understand just how far, far behind Jason was in the build. At that cultural moment, before crowdsourcing and Wikipedia, before pervasive broadband and YouTube videos that explain anything you want to know, it was impossible to educate ourselves. Without the intervention of our code-savvy husbands (and without growing a pair: my first lesson in management) AngeLingo would have died. Over the years, AngeLingo has published hundreds of student-authored and -edited academic essays, stories, poems, songs, movies, and the like. Back in 2003, we tripped on how amazing it was to publish without the need for print, paper and $$$$. In 2011, as smartphones make publication a daily, common, WYSIWYG experience, we're in another watershed moment. Faculty need more than a little code literacy (hat tip to Douglas Rushkoff) to give students a learning experience they can't get on their own.

Do faculty need to know how to code? Is it a nice to have, or a gotta have?

At the Modern Languages Association's 2011 Convention (see my post-convention overview here), Stephen Ramsay declared "Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of Digital Humanities and I say ‘yes.’. . . Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things. […] If you are not making anything, you are not … a digital humanist.” See Stephen's summary of his MLA talk here. This comment rippled through the field in the weeks subsequent to the MLA.

(For more on the DH "to code or not to code" debate, see Stephen's thoughtful clarification "On Building," Matt Kirschenbaum's ADE piece "What is the Digital Humanities, and What's it Doing in English Departments?" and Marilee Lindemann, who is "supremely uninterested in determining whether or not I am a Digital Humanist." Of course there are many other resources, to which Matt's piece can lead you.)

Returning to the "About"

My magnificent partner in this summer's appland, Jeannette Altman (cellist, code and Illustrator teacher, perfectionist, goof), has created almost the entire app for the CGIFF. "About" is my foray. Jeannette is gray-eyed Athena, building not one interactive map with the Google Maps API, but *ten*: one for each venue at which the films will show in two weeks. We'll see if we can get it all to sit still in such a light little app. Messing around with her has been one of the highlights of this unbelievably cool summer. (Check out, btw, MTRI's rich resources page, loaded with all kinds of goodies: a little souvenir from our summer trip.) God bless Creative Media and Digital Culture Program Director Dene Grigar for insisting that stuff on the web should be free & shared.

I now know enough about code to appreciate that it's an accomplishment to be playing even one note at a time. I'm really happy to make something tuneful no matter how slowly. An echo of that song "Fill In the Words" sung by Robert Klein in the 1979 musical They're Playing Our Song has been plunking lightly in my ear. He taps a C on a kiddie piano: "You play a C, you get a C. That's simple. That's easy..." (It's a quiet, introspective little number: no YouTube vid to show you. Here are the lyrics.)

As I set my syllabi for the advanced social media classes I'll teach in August at USC and at Washington State University, I am modeling the daily activities on what we've done at MTRI. Building teaches differently than conceptual work. Conceptual work equips students to make sense of the task long after the urgency of a particular build is finished. There's a shelf life for the skills. (One example as an index of how quickly it's moving: the jQuery Mobile code updates frequently: you have to check daily to make sure your header files are current.) Conceptual work allows students to forge the important critical thinking that John Seely Brown and Doug Thomas extol in A New Culture of Learning. It's vital.

But I would say that I'm with Stephen Ramsay on this one. Learning how to build rewires your sense of how things work. As I said, it's in the fingers, this knowledge. There's some kind of recursive loop between the fingers and the brain. Please indulge me this long quotation from Stephen's piece "On Building": I read it in January and loved it then. But now my fingers know it to be true.

As humanists, we are inclined to read maps (to pick one example) as texts, as instruments of cultural desire, as visualizations of imperial ideology, as records of the emergence of national identity, and so forth. [...] But making a map (with a GIS system, say) is an entirely different experience. DH-ers insist – again and again – that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise. It’s the thing I’ve been hearing for as I long as I’ve been in this. People who mark up texts say it, as do those who build software, hack social networks, create visualizations, and pursue the dozens of other forms of haptic engagement that bring DH-ers to the same table. Building is, for us, a new kind of hermeneutic – one that is quite a bit more radical than taking the traditional methods of humanistic inquiry and applying them to digital objects. Media studies, game studies, critical code studies, and various other disciplines have brought wonderful new things to humanistic study, but I will say (at my peril) that none of these represent as radical a shift as the move from reading to making. [Emphasis mine.]

The Flipped Classroom: Exploiting the Best of F2F & Screens

2011-07-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

The Flipped Classroom inverts the typical way teachers and learners engage: lectures are delivered via video podcast; class time is spent in collaborative problem solving.

As you watch this video overview, ask yourself two things: 1) why was the Flipped Classroom was borne of collaboration, not by one teacher alone? 2) How does it exploit the unique properties of F2F learning in the digital era?

Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams are high school chemistry teachers in Woodland Park, Colorado. They create video podcasts of their lectures which students watch outside of class via laptops, mobile devices, tablets or DVDs.

This means that students can access the lectures on-demand. They control the pace of information delivery, which they can't do F2F. Crucial: screens allow MORE student participation in their knowledge acquisition, not less. This is obvious to many of us working in the field, but remember that we are still a tiny subset of educators. High school students in my local school district are FORBIDDEN to bring any screens the classroom: there's still a deep distrust of screens as portals to distraction or cheating, and the false but abiding sense that occasional distraction is inherently a bad thing.

In the Flipped Classroom, students come to class primed to do the applied problem solving, what we typically call the "homework." Instead of struggling in isolation, learners work the problems in small groups. Peer-to-peer engagement in quite natural in this setting. The teacher, as master tutor, wanders around answering questions and sparking further engagement in the problem solving.

Maybe "homework" no longer means that "work you do at home," but "the work" you do IN CLASS that drives the concepts "home."

The takeaways for the superiority of hybrid learning environments are pretty obvious:

Screens are better at conveying lecture-style information
Screens are ubiquitous and permit learners self-paced knowledge acquisition
F2F is better for problem solving (more on this later, when I write about what I've learned, done and observed as a post-doc Fellow at the WSU's Mobile Technology Research Initiative)
The social dimension of learning F2F doesn't suck time away from knowledge acquisition. It doubles the learning. Social in tandem with screen cements learning ways previously unavailable in the pre-digital era.

Silent work in a F2F classroom punishes learners for their natural inclination to share and collaborate. It mistakes the animation of collaboration and its occasional "distractions" as barriers to serious knowledge acquisition, rather than the bursts and rests of how we think/work in real time. Ever get up from your screen to go make a cup of tea? Even looking up from your screen and staring into the far distance for a minute can refresh your attention and enable greater focus and retention.

Thanks to the folks at DML Central for surfacing this today! See this to join the Flipped Classroom social network. Here's a Colorado Springs TV news affiliate describing the Flipped Classroom: useful to be sent to local school district admins in your neighborhood.

Why do you think the Flipped Classroom was borne of collaboration? Drop me a comment and I'll tell you what I think too!

Progress

2011-06-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

Math Geeking Out: an autobiography

2011-06-24T02:23:00.000-07:00

Code Apnea

This summer, I'm learning how to design and code mobile apps. It's freakin awesome.

Awesome in the Kantian sense: standing on a precipice and looking down, gauging the likelihood that gravity will clutch your knees and yank you to a fast fall.

Yesterday I wrote my first computer program. I copied the code as instructed in the iOS SDK. Class was taught by our Xcode native guide Nick Hill. I hit "Build and Run" in Interface Builder. My program popped right up in the iOS simulator. Hello, World! I blinked a little. I went back into the code and turned it yellow. Blue. Cyan. I changed the font size and the x-position.

Then I realized that I'd been holding my breath for the better part of an hour. Code apnea. I sucked in a deep breath.

On the next exercise, I called the instructor over. I'm doing this wrong, I said.

No you're not, he said. I just haven't shown the class how to do that part yet.

Math Grrrrl

It's 1978. I'm 10 and I'm working a couple of years ahead in math. I had been hungry for math earlier in grade school. Now I'm in a dark room next to a mimeograph machine, the purple smeary ink, the wet chemical smell of the paper. I'm doing "new math": pattern recognition. I think I'm stupid because this is supposed to be harder but it's basically kindergarten shapes. It can be done without thinking, without computing.

I put my pencil down, pull out a book and read.

It's 1980, the beginning of 7th grade. The algebra teacher walks up to me in the hallway and asks why I'm not in his class.

Shrug. I don't want to be in it, I say.

Why not?

I want to pass notes with Becky McAllister, I think silently. Becky was the sort of girl, in retrospect, who peaked in junior high. To her credit nobody's hair feathered better and she wore purple mascara.

A couple of months later, the algebra teacher approaches me again. I deflect him again. My parents, who adopted me at birth and are among the kindest people on the planet, were middling-at-best students in school. They are shocked and pleased by my grades, and never ask questions.

I buy a smoky blue mascara.

Where it leaves you. How it comes back.

The little voice that wonders these things.

Learning to code for the first time at age 42, three decades after stopping my ears to all things mathematical, is like the blood returning to fingers so numb they are white stubs. I have this frozen-finger condition, Raynaud's Phenomenon. (Check out the lurid photos in the wikipedia link.) Depending on the severity of the onset, it can take several minutes of warming (in hot water, wrapped around a latte, stuffed in my armpit) before my fingers swell and turn livid, then bright red, and return to normal.

It isn't comfortable getting the blood to flow where it hasn't been.

That's why I'm grateful for the gentle code teachers who never make me feel stupid for asking questions Will Luers, Nick Hill, Nick Schiller, Jeanette Altman, John and Dene, Margarete and Hunter, and especially Michael Sasser, whose canny analogies translate entailed concepts into terms I can grok. Example: the difference between object-related code and procedural code. Procedure is the highway, object-related is the vehicles. Working with mobile apps, I'm thinking a lot about the touch modality. I'm thinking about the design and feel of objects in my hands, like the rounded edges and M&M-like candy coating encasing my white 3GS iPhone. Like the Legos scattered in our loft. I turn them over in my palm. I teach our 6YO procedural logic as we build. I'm alive to the sensory qualities of building.

I am now almost exactly 6 months into learning code. When I started, I knew nothing more than how to modify text to be bold or italic. I know much more now, but am still very slow to execute. I haven't yet made anything really pretty (but the mobile app I began coding today is already head-and-shoulders above a project I worked on 1 month ago).

How lucky I am to live in a cultural moment when near-pervasive access to tools, free instruction, and generous communities of practice make it possible to build beautiful things in HTML5 and CSS3. Wrap it in Phonegap and you're good to go. WYSIWYG programs like Interface Builder and TextWrangler lower barriers to entry.

Coda

My husband and I are in the living room reading when our 10YO night owl pops downstairs. We look up from our devices. The three of us banter. Our daughter declares to my husband, "You are a geek. And you," she says, turning to me, "are a popular wannabe."

"No, dear," my husband intones. "That's what she looks like on the outside. Down deep she is a geek."

My husband urges the girl upstairs.

I insert earbuds, go back to my screen.

["Mascara" image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoliee/]

Experiments in Hybridity: F2F and Mobile Learning

2011-06-15T06:51:00.000-07:00

This fall I'm piloting at the University of Southern California a class that explores the unique properties of face-to-face [f2f] and online [OL] learning environments. 35% of the term I'll meet with students f2f in Los Angeles; 65% of the term we'll meet OL, synchronously during regularly scheduled classes (Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:50) and asynchronously on various social media platforms.

I should add that the f2f sessions extend beyond regular classroom meetings. Students will also go on evening field trips once a month: to the LA Co. Museum of Art, to play with QR-linked locative narrative in LA Flood, to view street art through the VR app Layar. The Annenberg School of Communications, which is generously sponsoring this pilot, will send along a videographer on our excursions to capture [some of the] learning dynamic as we wander peripetatically through the city. This idea was born for me from Baudelaire and the notion of the digital flaneur. Students will drop digital files in the city in real time as we also collect assets we'll build into other digital artifacts for course assignments and collaboration.

Stay tuned to hear about the sister class I'll teach next fall at Washington State University/Vancouver at the Creative Media and Digital Culture program, an advanced social media class that will meet 65% f2f and 35% OL while I'm in L.A.

These experiments in classroom hybridity--f2f, OL, the combination--emanate from my sense that the physical contexts for learning create unique avenues into learning that previously were invisible: f2f was simply the de facto mode of learning "delivery." Now that learning can be more expressly collaborative and mobile, it behooves us to determine their unique affordances so that, among other things, we can thickly describe the c21 mobile classroom to stakeholders (higher ed administrators, students, parents, government officials, business leaders) who influence the shape and funding of classrooms.

As I said recently in a talk at USC's Teaching With Technology Conference, if universities mimic the RIAA and lock down mobile and digital access to learning, they will suffer the similar fate of becoming irrelevant. Joi Ito, co-founder of Creative Commons and entrepreneur, was recently appointed Director of MIT's Media Lab. Ito sits atop this prestigious lab even though he lacks a B.A., let alone the Ph.D. that is ordinarily a prerequisite for such a position.

If increasingly the question is not "where did you get your degree" but "what can you do," then residential universities must integrate digital media into their learning environments or risk becoming antiquated--like cds or "Must-See TV" that required viewers to park in front of their sets at designated times. But that doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath water. F2F remains a crucial modality. It's up to us to figure out exactly how and why.

#Urban Outfitters Twitter FAIL

2011-05-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

Urban Outfitters sat on their hands yesterday while their brand equity hemorrhaged cool. In three hours, UO lost 17,000 followers on Twitter; #urbanoutfitters and #thieves became a trending topic. The tweet that started it all:

Urban Outfitter’s meager response--this one tweet posted a few minutes after Karnes'--was insufficient to staunch the blood that kept spilling all day:

The @amberkarnes tweet became a “Top Tweet,” and was quickly dispatched to another nearly 1.3 MILLION followers. Boing Boing, The Consumerist and Huffington Post picked up the story. Even Miley Cyrus got in on the act and shared with her one-million-plus followers.

Amber Karnes’ full blog post has all kinds of smart things to say about how her Tribe of 1000 followers turned this into an assault on an incredibly powerful brand.

The big story for brand marketers: every second of delayed response to an accusation creates
space for a tsunami of ill will that can wreak havoc with even the most carefully manicured brands.

The indie-cool vibe that Urban Outfitters diligently built by hiring independent designers to craft the in-store brick-and-mortar displays and creating an entire lifestyle from its products--from clothes to furniture to soaps and drawer pulls--is now jeopardized. In less than 24 hours. A slew of “me too” posts on other blogs such as this one about other wronged artists is lending credence to Karnes’ claim that Urban Outfitters is a serial indie art thief.

Whether or not angry tweeters make good on their promise to boycott Urban Outfitters, the brand tsunami wreckage is there for all to see: still flowing in via #urbanoutfitters.

Special thanks to co-author @SixSevenStudios who brought this to my attention yesterday! Check him out on Twitter!

Joi Ito's interview w/Fast Co. Design

2011-05-14T14:30:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from Linda Tischler's Fast Co. Design interview with JOI ITO, the recently-appointed Director of MIT Media Lab.

Read the full interview.

"My whole life has been about connecting things that aren't connected."

Obviously there were a few raised eyebrows when MIT found out that I didn’t have a [bachelor's] degree. The Media Lab people felt like it was a badge of honor because they don’t like to conform. But after I met the administrators and they got that I don’t disrespect academia, it’s just that I have never fit into any of their patterns.

Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, is a friend of mine. We talk a lot about careers. The whole idea that you figure out what you want to be, then plan your course and execute on it doesn’t work anymore. Now, you want to find the things that you’re good at, be able to pivot when you need to, and have the network you need to support that.

Why f2f is crucial in Ito's reinvention of the MIT Media Lab:

Brand is important, but we need to make ourselves less intimidating. And part of that is showing up everywhere. That’s what I did with Creative Commons. And I’d go to Syria and say, “Hey, anybody want to work with us?” Or to Ramallah, and say, “Hey, can we set up a Palestinian network here?” Then I’d go to Israel. Once you start going to places you see that face-to-face is really important.

How Social Media Influenced School Closure Decisions

2011-05-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

On April 25th, my local school board voted to close just one elementary school, Palisades, in Sept. 2011.

This decision surprised the 250 people crowded in the high school library, where board members, seated behind a long table, faced them and publicly voted. It surprised us because in the 90 minutes leading up to the vote, board members laid out the rationale for closing 3 schools and moving 6th graders from elementary school to middle school. Further, the cuts and reconfiguration were strongly endorsed by both of the official parental-input groups, Site Council and the Committee on Reconfiguration.

The Board slowed the process: closure of the other two elementaries and 6th grade reconfiguration is slated to happen Sept. 2012.

You can read my live Tweets here. To increase the size of my Tweets, hit the command key and the +. Or, in your browser's dropdown menu, select View-->Zoom In. The first post is the one at the bottom; read up to experience them in order.

Next-day, traditional media coverage of the vote can be viewed in the Lake Oswego Review and Oregonian.

Twitter informed the community about the meeting's result IRT [in real time]. It changed how we build consensus. District Superintendent Bill Korach customarily builds consensus by convening a lot of face-to-face meetings. He works hard to allow many people to participate in decision making process. I salute him for that! But social media can open the door wider, and it opens on demand.

The LO United site, created and maintained by a small band of local parents amassed facts. Its members, including me, left digital traces of conversations across platforms (most notably Facebook and the comments stream of our local newspaper, the LO Review).

Social media also made clear that our actions as a community were viewable by people who live beyond it.

To get a sense of just how pervasive even a droplet in social media can be, consider this anecdote from USC Annenberg librarian Avril Cunningham, who shared how a Tweet she sent to her 150 followers got retweeted and was seen within 24 hours by up to 5000 people on Twitter. Cunningham presented this case at last week's USC 2011 Teaching With Technology Conference. Avril's is one tiny example of how social media can spread information beyond where we might intend it to go. Our school closure debate, with its many passionate participants, probably sent its social media tendrils out to the tens of thousands. Some people in my Twitter community passed along to their followers URLs to the videos I shot.

Why does social media matter in this example of local politics?

It is still a new thing for us to conceive ourselves as being "always online"; but that's exactly what smartphones enable. Being "always on" doesn't mean being exclusively online, as we are when we're focused on a specific task at our computers. It means we're always aware that we could be online at any moment: snap a photo and post it to Flickr or FB; consult an app to find a restaurant or play a game; Tweet a URL; access a map to figure out where you are or where you want to go; drop a pin so it's faster to find next time. Always on. The gadgets and platforms are so seamlessly integrated that we're no longer aware of being "on," as we were when we had to do everything at a desktop. Our collective mindset is catching up with the actual practice of being Always On. It's changing how we make collective decisions.

Hacking: Apps, School Budgets, Hegemony

2011-04-21T01:48:00.000-07:00

Jason Jones, co-founding editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker, sent me a Tweet today:

Which led me here:

Jason and I met at MLA11 and have chatted intermittently since January about public school education. We both watch what's going down in our local districts (his: New Britain, CT; mine, Lake Oswego, OR) and send nervous tweets about radical cuts to teaching staff (80 in his next year) and impending school closures (proposed 35% of elementary schools in mine).

We've also talked about how far out of sync our districts are with new media curricula. Hence the cool Tweet he sent today: a way to crowdsource said curricula by asking teachers what they need and offering up micro solutions in the form of apps. From this distance and through my perpetually-at-hand, rose-tinted glasses, this seems like a great premise for workable solutions. In public school districts where admins in charge of tech are usually thinking only of equipment replacement, crowdsourcing seems like an efficient workaround to get some curricular innovation dirt cheap and super efficient. From the "Hacking Education" Contest:

Help to shape your school system's budget by revealing what teachers really need. Build the first mobile app for hyper-local education philanthropy. We've got a list of suggestions to help get you thinking.

On the long parchment scroll of stuff I love about the Internet, quotations like that one live near the top.

Jason's suggestion is timely because I just found out I've been named a Fellow at Washington State Vancouver's Mobile Tech Research Initiative.

WSUV is a hub of mobile tech research and storytelling. Dr. Dene Grigar, Assoc. Prof. and Director of WSUV's Creative Media and Digital Culture Program, was just awarded, with Brett Oppegaard, a $50K NEH Start Up Grant for the Fort Vancouver Mobile Project.

It's ironic that at this moment when mobile apps are at the cutting edge of digital academic research and enable the timely fulfillment of hyperlocal public education curricular goals, our schools are being hacked to bits: not binary digits, but little paper snowflakes where whole sheets of paper once unfurled.

In my own district, the School Board will vote next Monday (April 25) on how many elementary schools to shut down and whether or not to move 6th graders from elementary schools to middle schools.

Regular readers of this blog know that the parents of grassroots org LO United surfaced $4-8 million of alternative budget reductions and a substantial body high-test academic research about how 6th graders fare in middle schools compared to elementaries. (Short answer: poorly.) LO United supports closure of one school and keeping 6th graders in elementary school. After studying the issue, I made three videos to promote the LO United positions: "Keep Our Schools Open,""LO Unites: Saving Schools and 6th Graders," and "Fiscal Responsibility."

Here's where the part about hegemony comes in.

I had assumed that community resistance to the LOU positions emanated from doubt about the quality of LOU's work. I made the movies to let LOU experts talk and find an audience. The videos galvanized conversation, but the lion's share of credit falls to the assiduous LOU folks who kept up a steady stream of emails and face-to-face meetings with district admins and the School Board, who have used LOU tools and data to revise their original plans.

What motivates the huge impending change in our school district is not the surface story about budget, but a deeper one about ideology. Hanging around at pick up, volunteering at art lit, co-hosting a mom's margarita fundraiser for the school, I hear again and again: 6th graders are bored in elementary school. They need the specialized curriculum at middle school. I wasn't even tracking it at first.

Then I drove my 4th grade daughter to volleyball practice at the local jr. high and she said, "I can't wait to go here! You get to choose your classes! 6th graders are bored at my school."

That's how hegemony works, right? Invisibly. Not a top-down declaration but murmured here and there. It functions the way gossip does, policing community values. "Everyone" knows it to be true. Perception of this kind is not susceptible to facts because it is boundless like water, always moving, re-routed by a little factual blockage here and there, but finding nevertheless its path to the wide river of common knowledge.

This is a picture of a colonized subject. With a little Geek Dad thrown in for Jason.

In-Progress: Syllabus for Comm 499

2011-03-22T08:53:00.000-07:00

Hi readers,

I welcome comments on this work-in-progress.

F2F In/And the New Media Classroom
Syllabus for COMM 499: Special Topics
Assoc. Prof. Kathi Inman Berens
Fall 2011
Class meets Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:50 in ASC 223

When Socrates and Plato invented the tutorial, face-to-face was the only way in which teachers and students could engage. This remained true for 5000 years. Until now.

Join me in a collaborative research opportunity where we investigate the unique properties of face-to-face [f2f] learning in the age of ubiquitous computing.

Does f2f classroom experience enable learning that can or can’t be replicated online? Are the intimacies we build blogging, on chat, Twitter, FB and Skype the same as or equivalent to those we develop around a seminar table? Does one mode promote learning and retention better than another--or is it wrongheaded even to consider them separately? There’s a smartphone in everyone’s pocket. Is the strictly f2f classroom already a relic of the past?

In this class, we will:
• Meet f2f 35% of the semester, and OL 65% (Additional f2f in evening excursions not included in ratio above.)
• Build digital artifacts
• Evaluate the work those digital artifacts do in the world
• Collaborate f2f and online [OL]
• Analyze the specific qualities of f2f and OL settings

WHAT TO EXPECT
Participative learning. We will use asynchronous forums, blogs, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, Twitter, some geolocative platforms, and a movie making program of your choice.

In short, we’re going to play and make stuff, and we’re going to think through whether f2f augments our learning, efficiency, and pleasure in our engagement with digital media. You aren’t required to know a lot of platforms before this class, but you must be willing to teach yourself things. I usually find videos on YouTube that show me how to do whatever I’m working on. I also buy step-by-step books about particular programs. I’ve heard great things about Lynda.com, where for $25/month it’s all-u-can-eat instructional videos on pretty much any platform or program you’d want to learn. I haven’t subscribed because my needs have been met by googling what I want to learn, watching videos, and spending time playing with it. Budget time for learning platforms if you are not yet digitally active.

I expect we might pull in guest speakers via Skype to our f2f sessions.

We will meet three evenings outside of class, going out into LA and playing with mobile and geolocative experiences. Please review the dates on this syllabus carefully to make sure you can attend the 3 evening excursions; your participation in them is required.

If you are thinking that 65% class time online sounds like you can check out, you’re in the wrong class.

The workload is actually steadier than what you’ll find in most other classes. Think of it like a language class: if you skip a week, you’ll fall behind. You’ll submit work weekly, and you’ll be accountable (via chat or in classroom seats) in every class. The reward: you’ll get immediate feedback on your work, build cool stuff, make some friends with common interests, and think through questions about physical presence and attention that are quite literally at the nexus where humans meet computing. You’ll walk out with some useful digital skills.

ASSIGNMENTS
• A collaboratively-authored blog, co-produced with 2 or 3 classmates, will feature writing, images, links, videos you make, and other objects you decide are thematically relevant. Grading emphasis will be on your ability to gather useful information on your theme and explain it to non-specialists.
• An individually-authored final project: this can be a pecha kutcha presentation (=20 slides, 20 seconds each for a 6:40 oral presentation). It can be a movie. It can be a woices project, or a Street Art project. I’m open to good ideas.
• Comments posted in every class.
• Blog post weekly.
• Robust social bookmarking engaged with at least weekly.
• At least 2 or 3 tweets/week.

EVALUATION of YOUR WORK
Collaborative Blog (weekly entries on a theme): 40%
Social Bookmarking/Midterm: 15%
Essay: Twitter and Infotention: 10%
Oral Presentation: 25%
Class Participation: 10%

READINGS
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (trans. Glaser, 1994)

Guy Bennett & Beatrice Mousli, Seeing Los Angeles: A Different Look at a Different City (2007)

Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation (2000)

danah boyd, “Streams of Content, Limited Attention” (2009) and “Sociality is Learning” (2009)

John Seely Brown & Doug Thomas A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (2011)

Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010)

Henry Jenkins, “How YouTube Became OurTube” (2010) & some posts from Aca/Fan

Steven Johnson, excerpts from Where Good Ideas Come From (2010)

Howard Rheingold, “Attention, and Other 21st Century Social Media Literacies” (2010)

Mobile LACMA

Team blogs authored by students of EMAC 4352 (Prof. Dave Parry, UT Dallas/fall 2010); their theme, privacy and surveillance, is not ours; but these are excellent examples of collaboratively authored students blogs. Note that class for these 4 blogs ended Dec. 2010, but they are still being maintained, which is pretty cool.
Big Brother is Watching Us
Under Surveillance
OutOutsiders
Nonopticon

Mike Wesch’s digital ethnography videos, including the current project Visions of Students Today (2011)

SCHEDULE
Week 1: F2F
Readings: Johnson, Rheingold
Build: your Twitter acct., form teams for blogs; register with Diigo (social bookmarking)
Aug. 23, 25

Week 2: F2F
Readings: EMAC team blogs, Brown& Thomas entire; social bookmarks, Twitter;
Aug. 30
Sept. 1: Evening excursion (6-8 PM)

Week 3: OL
Readings: Boyd, “Attention,” Bolter & Grusin: Theory section; Media ch. 10-14; social bookmarks, Twitter
Team blogs go live 9/8
Sept. 6, 8

Week 4: OL
Social bookmarking: what you’re finding & reading
Readings: class blogs, social bookmarks, Twitter; Bolter & Grusin, Self section; Wesch’s videos
Sept. 13, 15

Week 5: OL
Readings: class blogs, social bookmarks, Twitter; Bennett & Mousli, excerpts
Sept. 20, 22

Week 6: F2F
Readings: class blogs, social bookmarks, Twitter; Jenkins, “YouTube,” Baudrillard, excerpts
Sept. 27
Sept. 28: Evening excursion (6-8PM)
[or: depending on scheduling prefs of co-learners; TBD during first week of classes.]
Sept. 29: Evening excursion (6-8 PM)
Over weekend: upload some digital artifact you made during/after our excursion

Week 7: OL
Readings: class blogs, social bookmarks, Twitter; Boyd, “Sociality”; Oct. 4, 6

Week 8: OL
Readings: Damasio, excerpts
Essay due 10/13: Twitter & Infotention
Oct. 11, 13

Week 9: OL
Readings: class blogs, social bookmarks, Twitter; Rheingold
Oct. 18, 20

Week 10: F2F
In-class workshops; individual conferences w/me
Oct. 25
Oct. 26: Evening excursion (exact time TBD)
[or: depending on scheduling prefs of co-learners; TBD during first week of classes]
Oct. 27: Evening excursion (exact time TBD)
Over weekend: upload some digital artifact you made during/after our excursion

Week 11: OL
Readings: Bennett & Mousli, continued; class blogs, social bookmarks, Twitter
Nov. 1, 3

Week 12: OL
In-class workshops: prep for oral presentations
Nov. 8, 10

Week 13: F2F
class blogs, social bookmarks, Twitter
Oral Presentation of digital artifacts
Nov. 15, 17

Week 14: F2F
class blogs, social bookmarks, Twitter
Oral Presentation of digital artifacts
Nov. 22
Nov. 24: Thanksgiving holiday

Week 15: OL
class blogs, social bookmarks, Twitter
Wind up & rumination on f2f & OL
Nov. 29
Dec. 1: Last Day of Classes

Academic Integrity Policy
The Annenberg School for Communication is committed to upholding the University’s Academic Integrity code as detailed in the SCampus Guide. It is the policy of the School for Communication to report all violations of the code. Any serious violation or pattern of violations of the Academic Integrity Code will result in the student’s expulsion from the Communication major or minor, or from the graduate program.

ADA Compliance Statement
Any student requesting academic accommodations based on a disability is required to register with Disability Services and Programs (DSP) each semester. A letter of verification for approved accommodations can be obtained from DSP. Please be sure the letter is delivered to me as early in the semester as possible. DSP is located in STU 301 and is open 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. The phone number for DSP is (213) 740-0776.

SUCCESS METRIC
Howard Rheingold’s “Expected Learning Outcomes” summarizes what the diligent student will achieve in our course:

“Students apply the tools we use in this course in five interrelated kinds of activity: research, reflection, collaboration, presentation, and networking. In the course of team co-teaching, and collaborative note-taking, students will use one or more of interactive presentation media. Group project teams will use social bookmarking to conduct research, forums to discuss how to organize the project on the basis of this research, blogs to reflect on the personal, social, political significance of the project, and interactive media to augment their presentations.

Students who successfully complete this course will be on the way to mastering the 21st century meta-skill of knowing how to learn to use new social media, to assess a new social medium's potential cognitive, social, and political impact, and to tune or relinquish use of the medium for their own purposes. In addition, students will have practiced mindful self-observation of the ways they use their own attention. Increased facility at inquiry and collaboration are other meta-skills dedicated students should expect to gain.”

I add: students will understand the common and different valences of socializing online and f2f, and bring to their interactions a deep awareness of how those contexts operate singly and in tandem.

I look forward to working with you!

Twitter: @kathiiberens
blog: F2F in the Mediated Classroom
email: inmanber[at]usc[dot]edu; kathiberens[at]gmail[dot]com

Video v. F2F

2011-03-16T04:22:00.000-07:00

As my participation has increased in LO United--a group of parents crowdsourcing solutions to our school district's $6.5M shortfall--I find I'm leaving more and more digital traces of our work. Collectively edited letters, notes and comments on FB, videos to articulate LO United positions to the broader community. I speculate that these digital artifacts have turned up the heat on a local debate that was already moving from simmer to boil.

It's a David-and-Goliath story, this small group of parents pooling their expertise to challenge what had looked until a couple of days ago a fait accompli: closing 35% of our elementary schools and moving 6th graders to middle school, a one-two punch that now seems to have been in the works for months before its official announcement last December. But the smooth thing in David's hand isn't a rock. It's a smartphone.

As of two nights ago, the district is officially considering Scenario A, which closes just one elementary school and leaves intact the 6th graders in elementary school while our district studies the academic literature about moving 6th graders to middle school and otherwise assesses the suitability of that proposed move for our learners. This is a HUGE shift in both tone and process. For months, it had seemed, LOU had been knocking its head against the brick wall: presenting a metric tonnage of alternate budget cuts, academic research, and, most crucially, an interactive data enrollment model designed by LOU dad Jeff Carpenter that allows one to forecast precisely how many seats will be available in a given classroom in a given school in various scenarios of growth (0%-5%).

If there's one thing responsible for the district's willingness to entertain Scenario A, it's Jeff Carpenter's interactive enrollment tool. It demonstrated unequivocally that the proposed six remaining elementary schools would not have sufficient capacity to house our learners, even at a 0% growth rate. (In fact, district enrollment has grown by 8.3% in the last four years.) District officials availed themselves of it, and backed away from the proposed three-schools closure scenario.

Some rights reserved by miss_rogue; via Flickr

As of two nights ago, when the district directed Consolidation Committee members to review the feasibility of closing just one school, it would seem that the LOU message finally resonated with district leadership. They deserve serious kudos for listening. They must be exhausted.

The Lake Oswego community places a strong value on face-to-face meetings, and there have been many and many and many of them. Brown-bag lunches, informational bits at PTA, Consolidation Committee, Site Council, school board meetings, city council meetings, and lots of private meetings. Face time big time.

I wonder if the introduction of video into the social media mix on Feb. 28th might have shifted the perception of the "face": facing our choice because knowing we are being watched, in-your-face, the intimacy of a screen and face time. The first video I made took people by surprise. Volunteering for art lit the next day, several women approached me to discuss it. The principal, who has always been friendly, snubbed me. The video's very existence seemed to excite strong reaction: effusion, revulsion. I'm not sure why, beyond the idea that perhaps I was taking what was construed as a family matter in a small town and quite literally enabling anyone in the world to see and judge it. I've been told this gesture is "negative" and have been advised to "go the parent meeting. Get yourself informed locally." So I did.

I've just returned from a Q-and-A with the principal at the junior high school. On the plus side, the science curriculum would flourish in the lab setting with science-specific teachers. On the minus side, many many elements of implementation have yet to be determined; and 6th graders will certainly lose the formalized leadership opportunities that exist in our elementary schools (Green Team, school store, planning graduation--even the cherished Outdoor School program.) Class sizes and student:teacher ratios vary widely. While I appreciated that principal Dr. Ann Gerson nimbly and honestly responded to questions, it's clear that moving ahead quickly with 6th grade middle school configuration would make for a bumpy ride.

I didn't Tweet the meeting because I've not encountered anybody in LO on Twitter. I took notes on my phone. From what I could tell, that notetaking was the only digital record of the meeting. Which is the problem when a community relies on f2f to transmit major developments: working parents or those otherwise occupied get stranded on the shores of the information stream. This creates little klatches of people who have not just different kinds of information, but even different content. The lack of a consistent digital stream has made it harder to foster consensus. We may not even agree on basic facts because we aren't swimming together in the digital stream.

The vacuum left in FB and YouTube seems to have advantaged LO United. It's created space for David's smartphone to find the soft spot around the temples, not to strike, but to linger there and whisper in people's ears. Videod faces--on demand, declarative, Panoptic in their implication that people were watching--perhaps has leached some energy out of the closed-door meetings.

"Fiscal responsibility" may be a tattered mockery in D.C., but here in our small town it means real dollars and deep accountability. One disappointed Consolidationist at a meeting two nights ago presented the steep cuts to schools and the precipitous 6th grade reconfiguration as "fiscally responsible." I knew we would need faces countermanding this claim, because it's a potent political cliche: "making hard choices." In this case, it seems the hard choice is to question authority: however respectfully and armed to the teeth with facts. Hence.......

A Hyperlocal Internet Public

2011-03-03T07:54:00.000-08:00

As radicalized Egyptians massed in the streets and Mubarak shut off internet for 92% of his citizens, Dave Parry (Asst. Prof. of Emerging Media, UT Dallas) wrote a post called "It's not the Public Internet, It's the Internet Public." Parry observes:

While the government could shut down the hardware of the internet, it could not shut down the social effects of the digital network. In the same way a public is fundamentally changed by the existence of print technology, a public is fundamentally altered by access to the digital network.

I've been thinking through Parry's formulation over the last month, as I watched citizens in my small town (38K people) organize against a proposal to cut 1/3 of our elementary schools and move 6th graders from elementary schools into middle schools.

At first, I was indifferent to reconfiguration. I had long marveled that a community of our size (5667 students K-12) would maintain 9 elementary schools. It seemed luxurious, like loitering beneath a showerhead unmodified for water conservation. Atavistic.

But then my good friend Martha said, come to this meeting. She's actively involved in LO United for Schools, a grassroots dream team. About 400 people have signed their petition; this meeting drew about 200 people, including the mayor, the school district superintendent and local news crews. The LO United team presented three tiers of budget cut ranging from $2.5 million to $11M, each tier preserving the 9 schools. (Easier to do than you might think: even the rosiest projected savings from this utter reconfiguration nets only 1.5 million. The LO United folks put that number around $400K.)

Breakout sessions, brainstorming solutions, willingness to engage skeptics: the rigor and emphasis on transparency impressed me. I realized I was watching a f2f enactment of crowdsourcing, the culmination of hundreds of hours of budget work, mathematical modeling of the schools' physical capacity, social scientific research and lots of community organizing and outreach.

I went away to think. And watch what might come of it.

Two weeks later at a school board meeting, district officials were indifferent to, even tacitly disdainful of, the bound book of solutions presented to them by LO United.

Me? I was disdainful of the book. It seemed a slow way to navigate so much disparate information. Why not a webpage with links?

But even that bound report, it turns out, was too technologically progressive for district officials. For it literalized the unsettling effects new media had rendered on their budgeting process and attendant public relations. It was no longer credible to imply: we're the only experts. We have all the facts, you don't. Back off and let us do our jobs.

Over the ensuing weeks, the district kept mum as LO United churned out more budget ideas, more literature reviews, feedback from realtors about the depressing effect of shuttered schools on home values. It seemed arrogant, this silence. Not one suggestion worthy of consideration? Really? Many resonated with me.

Silence is no longer tenable for the powerful, because the Internet makes information hoarding difficult and costly. Wikileaks shows that even high-test professional hoarders will mess it up anyway.

The folks at LO United hadn't heard the term "crowdsourcing" until I introduced it, but taxonomy is irrelevant. They were crowdsourcing; their entire MO is based on it. Which goes right to Parry's point that "a public is fundamentally altered by access to a digital network" whether or not they are conscious of specific new media practices.

At a Feb. 28 webinar on Information Arts, Liz Losh (Director of the Culture, Art and Technology Program at UCSD's Sixth College) declared that she's "troubled with the ease with which people talk about new media literacy" because it "ignores digital rights and responsibilities." (Those interested in this subject should consult her book Virtualpolitik.)

I'm struck, in this hyperlocal example, by the extent to which social media has drawn a political line in our community: those who exercised their digital rights to insist upon transparency, and those who hewed to paternalism, however well-intentioned it may be. Again, this question of taxonomy isn't relevant to the agents in question, though it is to me: I doubt people in my community would construe the issue in these terms, but as a scholar I'm alive to the political valences of mediation.

But what exactly is crowdsourcing "mediating" in this hyperlocal example? It collapses the space between online and offline. Face-to-face is the grounding element in the circuitry that is crowdsourcing. As information and social applications of information zip through the grids too fast to follow individually, hyperlocal grounds those potentialities, that energy, in a specific place and specific bodies. In this sense even what we saw in Egypt was hyperlocal: the global and networked telescoped down into particular bodies standing on a bridge being sprayed with power hoses in a particular moment. I was suggesting this in my previous post.

Circuitry embodied in microscopic feedback loops of f2f conversation, connecting the wired and those who do little more than check email online: we stand shoulder to shoulder on the school yard watching our kids play. Or nod at each other as we cycle down a path. Or greet the local baker by name as we walk into her shop. This is what I was thinking as I stood there at the playground last week, listening to my friends talk about their online LO United work as our kids loped around the schoolyard, a dog barking in the distance, gray clouds thinning overhead. I thought, so many of these people standing next to me are not going to read a text heavy web page.

So I took out my flip camera and started making this video.

Infotention: Our Bodies, Our Selves, Egypt (xposted on Mind Amplifiers)

2011-02-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

I was struck, during our live session about Infotention in Howard Rheingold's Mind Amplifiers entirely OL class, how much of the discussion was about our bodies: the retention/"software" limits of our brains, the ways exercise awakens our bodies and augments attention, the traces of handwriting and design in calligraphy, the impermanence of ink on paper as a metaphor for human expiration.

Our attention, our bodies, our Selves.

I capitalized "Selves" because I am thinking through the parameters of selfhood as they got redrawn in our entirely virtual community on Friday, and then redrawn again as I think about the moral force of bodies in Tahrir Square.

Now more than ever, I believe the ideal environment for thinking, learning and being human is hybrid.

We are watching the profound power of feedback loops between F2F and OL circulating so quickly that those circuits are literally powering revolution: in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Jordan, in Yemen. Revolution--relatively peaceful agitation for democracy--becomes imitable as we watch it unfold.

Dave Parry (UT Dallas/Emerging Media) sez: "It's not the Public Internet. It's the Internet Public." That is, social media has changed how we perceive being in public, being a citizen, whether or not Mubarek decides to shut off the internet for 92% of Egypt (the remaining 8% being allowed for the highest eschelons of commerce.) Says Parry: "when the government in Egypt chose to shut down the internet, they could shut down the trafficking of information along those channels, but they couldn’t shut down the public that was already created by having already communicated and interacted along those channels."

To Dave Parry's idea I add: The Internet Public is also perforce a physical public, bodies in the square: f2f. The point may be obvious, but it's not trivial, and it's not being theorized alongside the implications for networked culture, new media and its implications for social democracy. What happens when you take Parry's credo (you can shut down the Internet, but not the public that the internet fosters) a step further is that you suddenly have a population that's willing to put its bodies on the line because of what it learned in the networked contexts. And that continues to be willing to do so because the global channels of information are buffering them from the horrendous human rights violations perpetrated against pro-democracy advocate by other brutal dictatorships such as the Orwellian-named SPDC ("State Peace and Development Council") in Burma.

In Egypt, we have the results of highly concentrated Infotention: an informed citizenry putting their bodies at risk to assert their will for democracy. As Howard has noted in his Smart Mobs work (and here I'm mixing in Dave Parry's gloss) it is not inevitable that Internet Publics will operate progressively, or even in their own interest. It can go either way.

That is the power of contingency, of unpredictability. It's ideology on the clock: people wound up by ideas fed by that intense circuitry of F2F/OL and then set loose IRT, most recently in Tahrir Square.

That unpredictability: it flies in the face of Foucauldian over-determinism, the idea that human agency is "always already" contained by a public that's internalized the Panoptic gaze. That fears the prison guard.

Not to minimize the real force Foucault identified: look to Burma (Myanmar) to see the fear unleashed by the SPDC, an unremitting police state, a smug and brutal junta systematically leeching the natural resources from Burma.

My point is that bodies are never fully contained, or inscribed by those in power. It so happens US and other western interests are too keen in the Middle East to abandon the pro-democracy movement there as we have abandoned Burma to China and India.

In Egypt, because of its strategic advantage to the US and its allies, ordinary people will step foot outside their homes and walk to the public square. Informed. And knowing they are being watched by us. And by their neighbors, who have started to agitate for democracy themselves. The Twitter stream for #egypt and #jan25 updates so quickly one cannot really even read the stream: you can only soften the eyes and watch it whirl. You can click, but it's moving so fast that the chances of not actually hitting the thing you clicked on are pretty high. Which seems like more than a metaphor for what's going down. It is the thing going down: that pace, IRT.

What Students Want: Learning Google Can't Provide

2011-01-26T15:26:00.000-08:00

I'm designing two new classes that are headed to curriculum review. If approved, I'll teach them fall 11. I'm a little nervous because mine don't look like the syllabi I read of classes offered this spring in the same unit. Those syllabi are analog. Most of them require papers and maybe an oral presentation. My classes are 75% online, 25% face-to-face: predominately digital, with some experiments in turning off our devices when we're f2f to track how and where we spend our attention. (Yes! Meditation & mindfulness. Namaste, Howard Rheingold.) We're meeting synchronously, during class time, but we're also working asynchronously via various social media platforms. Lots of feedback loops, big and small, whenever and where ever students want them. Then, when collectively we roam out into that great urban lab that is Los Angeles, we're wired, of course, but also physical, proximate to each other: walking, exploring, collecting digital objects we'll assemble later into finished products. Tagging things as we go. Open to serendipity and chance.

As I envision it, we're doing the opposite of what one does in, say, directed search: plunge in, hunt for the treasure, then swim back up again, like the Tahitian kids Rupert Brooke observed diving for oysters. Directed search is the way most of us learn things today. This isn't any less true for students than it is for you and me; it's just that students are too young to have acquired the larger, paradigmatic frameworks on which to hang those facts and examine them from multiple angles. That is potentially worrisome, I grant you. But is Google making us stupid? Of course not.

We're sucking at the firehose of information. We're not yet teaching students how and when it might be appropriate to put the hose down.

During my sabbatical, I've watched for-profit online learning vendors breach the university gates. This has left a bad taste in peoples' mouths about online learning. There's some hand-wringing--appropriately so--about how online learning might suck the life out of university practices as we know it.

Online learning is not inherently bad; in fact, online resources are the best thing to happen to education since the pencil, another remarkable, lightweight tool that made student learning mobile but was pretty much abandoned as a tool for innovation. Why did the pencil get deployed in ways almost identical to the fountain pen? Because people saw it as a cheaper version of the old thing, and didn't look beyond that. Why is online learning perceived to be a poor man's version of f2f? Because people are treating it as a massively scalable (read: cheaper) version of the old thing.

And what is that old thing, exactly? It's not college as you and I experienced it, dear reader. (You and I were in graduate school when cell phones went mainstream, weren't we? Didn't I see you with that ungainly shoe-sized thing pressed to your ear as we loitered outside before the Milton seminar?)

Check out Mike Wesch's first remix (released today) of early submissions to his new project "Voices of Students Today (2011)."

Disconnected. Programmatic. Will this be on the test? If somebody sez in my class they might as well be at home on the couch, I'm not educating them. I have to provide what Google can't: judgment, wisdom, skepticism, compassion. A unifying vision they're at liberty to pull apart, rebuild. Tell me a better story, a truer story. Explain. It's not just the facts, ma'am. Stay on the couch if you like. We can chart new terrain from there. But drop a pin to mark the start, because we're not going to stay on your couch for long.

Stalwarts say students today want to be entertained, coddled, coaxed into learning. If we're approaching students with shoe-sized phones pressed to our ears, pretending things haven't changed, how will we be able to hear them?

MLA11: Hangin' Out & Movie at the End

2011-01-13T13:41:00.000-08:00

At the end of this post, I've added a movie I made here in PDX upon my return from MLA. I rode my bike, thought about DH and what it means at this cultural moment in our universities, sat on a rock in the rain and talked into a camera. Voila! Scroll down if u don't want to be bothered by WORDS.

MLA 11 exceeded my expectations in every way.

Moving chronologically through the happy surprises:

1. Blazing fast, ubiquitous wifi. The first thing I did upon arrival at at the JW Marriott at the L.A. Convention Center was to grab Tweetdeck. The columns allow one to watch hashtag streams (#mla11, plus tags for particular sessions), responses, those one follows, and direct messages. It's a very functional interface. Yummy. And I was never disappointed by the Marriott wifi. Never got booted, was never slow. Which goes to show how few of the 8K MLA attendees were sucking broadband: at Brad's dig conferences, they truck in extra bandwidth and even then, it's a struggle to match demand. But as you'll see, broadband demand may go way up at MLA12 in Seattle. This conf was just too exciting to be missing the digital "backchannel" (not sure it was a "backchannel." Think it pretty much *was* the channel.)

2. Had my first f2f encounter w someone I follow on Twitter. Off to my first panel, I opened up the laptop and started Tweeting. Noticed that Brian Croxall, oh he of Profhacker fame (& Emerging Media Librarian at Emory), was also tweeting. I discreetly examined the room from my mid-room row. Nobody looked quite like that tiny icon I was accustomed to. Then: @kathiiberens The wallpaper in this room is like being trapped inside a Louis Vuitton bag. I laughed. He saw me laugh and located me. @kathiiberens I'm sitting right next to you. I glanced to my right and scanned the room. Nothing. Turned my head to my left and--gasp!--inches away--waved Brian Croxall. F2F? More like elbow2elbow.

3. New Tools Panel; or, The Ghost of MLAs Past It was waaaay too early in my MLA11 experience to gauge how contestatory were the remarks of Marc Bousquet. He was describing an MLA org I recognized all too well: complacent, in denial about market realities, etc., etc. MLA11 Executive Director Rosemary Feal tweeted: "Marc Bousquet looking back, rehashing old history, while the ppl in the room seem to want to look forward"; and "So imp't to stay focused on what we can DO, how we can progress, n not to live in resentment. Bousquet's talk inspires me." Like I said, it was too early in the conf for me to believe her. I didn't even listen to all of Marc's talk (rude, eh?) b/c I felt like I'd heard it, and lived it, all before. Others in the room who hadn't lived through it were alive to the generational differences playing out agonistically on the Tweetstream: "the river runs deep," said Natalie Houston of the old resentments that weren't hers, but were on full display. Remarkably, #newtools didn't get mired in this morass. Urged along by Marilee Lindemann's show-stopping use of humor and political indignation, a strong case was made for unity and action in a time when the humanities are under forthright attack by universities that expect more work (digital plus traditional) for equivalent or less pay. Chris Newfield, whom Lindemann extolled as a hero of political action and careful thought, was the moral center of this panel.

4. Talking w/ the Tweeps I Follow Parked in the back of #newtools on "iPad Alley" sat a few of the (mostly) guys who had taught me a lot about DH before I came to MLA: Dave Parry, John Jones, Matt Gold, Ryan Cordell & Erin Templeton. Met up with all of them. Didn't have to fumble for conversation, b/c I knew what the heck was going on. Inquired after Fun Run meetup space. Chatted abt the panel. And we were off. To Cork Bar, as it turns out:

Here I met Katherine Harris (who loved that wine so much she's hunted it down for a DP this weekend), Stephen Ramsay, George_Online (argh! forgot his last name but can tell u how John Wesley and Methodism figure into his dissertation), Matt Kirschenbaum, Jason B. Jones, and Mark Sample--who on his fantastic blog SampleReality published all the DH panels, thus enticing an outsider like me to haul myself onto a plane. 41 panels, I think it was? It became the de facto guide to the conference for many of us. I kept the paper program for access to the maps.

This was the first afternoon and evening. At Cork, I split a bottle of wine with Dene Grigar, the electronic lit artist, mythologist, and MM program director extraordinaire. We exhorted John Jones and his wife Amy to have a little charcuterie and cheese as Amy told us about teaching music to kids, and preparing to do a doctoral program in astrophysics. Someone showed up, and I wondered if she felt a little bit like a celebrity when I looked her in the eye and said, "You're Amanda French." She was dazed, having conferenced all day with little break for food (an exhilaration I was to experience each subsequent day for the rest of the MLA: too much to see and hear to bother much with eating.) After we'd all hung out in the delicious air, the rectangular fire pit doing its job of making us feel cozied around a hearth, but outside, towered over by the deco downtown LA buildings and wrapped up in the wail of sirens and cars whooshing by, I walked back toward the Marriott alone, chatting with my husband on my Bluetooth. Mark Sample and Matt Gold were ambling the same way, so I signed off and we walked together. Matt lives in NYC. Mark and I took turns telling stories about teaching our kids to walk city blocks without getting run over. (Key: don't stop at the kerb, b/c it's too close to speeding cars. Stop at the edge where the buildings end.)

There's so much more to tell, of course; that's the nature of the new MLA. Pleasure! Who'da thunk it? When I'd told my grad school pals on FB that I was going to MLA for fun, they crinkled their noses as if someone had wafted stinky cheese: "Whhhhyyy? Too much stress!"

Maybe so, maybe so: hard for me to tell, b/c the only job seekers I hung out with were DHers, who generally all had multiple interviews. Nerve wracking always, to interview at MLA; but so much worse if you have only 1 or 2.

I'll end with some reflections about what it all means. Nothing like a bike ride in the rain to extract that from you. Check out the biblio at the end of the vid: blog posts and some panel talks that caught my eyes and ears. Can you name the bands at the head and tail of the vid b4 the music cred rolls?

MLA11: It Gets Better (pt 1)

2011-01-05T07:26:00.001-08:00

For part 2, see the post below.

MLA11: It Gets Better (pt 2)

2011-01-05T07:25:00.001-08:00

Paraphernalian on Why She's Leaving the Academy

2011-01-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

From the trenches. When the wound is fresh, as opposed to the mellow posts I've been writing.

Remember: It Gets Better.

This is directly from Paraphernalian. Click through to the blog. It's a short post . . . . . .

Because the failures of a flawed system are not my personal failures.

Because I am tired of being made to feel like a failure because I have been failed by a flawed system.

Because doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is stupidity.

Because participating in a system that degrades, demeans, and disempowers you is masochism.

Because productivity for productivity’s sake is futility.

Because stupidity, masochism, and futility should not be rewarded.

Because obfuscation, elitism, arrogance, and self-righteousness should not be rewarded.

[Post goes on: check it out].

It Gets Better: a Vid idea for MLA's Narrating Lives

2010-12-28T13:11:00.000-08:00

As I prepare to visit my first MLA since 1996, I'm reflecting on the people I know who stayed in the field, and those who left, and what influenced their decisions to leave or to stay.

I was cheered that my friend Cynthia recognized herself in the previous post as the friend who left UCB to attend rabbinical school: but actually, she's one of two. When it comes to why we leave English, it's as if a tiny vacuum of shame or ambivalence sucks us in. We generally keep quiet about it. I haven't found a community of people sharing firsthand stories about this. Maybe we feel isolated. It's embarrassing to dwell on a "failure."

Media coverage of the issue doesn't break the isolation. See the spate of articles about how humanities Ph.D.s need a Plan B, should conceive of their career path akin to an actor trying to make it in LA or NY, should curtail research because everything smart has already been said, or should just plain not go. All of these, published in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, are better than the stuff you'll find in mainstream presses like The Economist or the NYT.

Those articles, and the dozens you'll find like them, are the context in which the conversation about humanities Ph.D.s is situated. The one read by all your relatives who worry over why the hell you did this degree in the first place. Note, in this excoriating May 24, 2010 New Yorker cover, how iconically the blithe Ph.D. is drawn compared to the lined, worried faces of his parents:

That's the dominant story, but I don't think it's the truest one.

I think that if we were to ask a lot of people why they left and what they're doing now, we'd find a heartening story.

Afterall, there are some significant benefits to leaving. You can choose where you want to live. You may change jobs at your discretion, because the job market is perpetual and more porous--even in this economy--that what goes down at the MLA. You might even earn more money, and/or have other kinds of flexibility that you value (weekends? travel to places other than conference locations? the freedom to live with your life partner instead of hope for the same time zone?)

Does this mirage exist?

It does for me, for my husband, Brad Berens (also a Berkeley English Ph.D., 1999), and for many of our friends. But more broadly than our group?

We won't know until we ask. "We" being us. Being MLA.

The MLA could do something bold and wonderful. It could expressly invite the stories of Ph.Ds and ABDs who chose to leave the profession to its "Narrating Lives" project.

MLA President Sidonie Smith (Prof of English and Women's Studies, UMichigan), has created a YouTube channel and has invited all people--not just MLA members--to post their stories about transformative reading, teaching and mentoring moments. I should think this might also be a place to house stories of the sort I mention.

Smith's project "Narrating Lives" uses new media to gather and distribute stories about why the humanities is vitally important at this cultural moment. It's a wonderful idea, and I hope that many many people post their stories there. I intend to. Whenever I've asked student to write blog posts about transformative reading experiences, it's some of the most powerful writing of the semester. I could see posting one vid about opting out of English, and one about reading, teaching, mentoring or being mentored.

I see this as a kind of "It Gets Better" vid series aimed at helping those who are struggling with their decisions to leave or to stay in the profession. Some of the emotional resonances are similar to the situation of gays deciding whether or not to come out, or figuring out how to cope with being gay in a still largely homophobic society: the fear of how one's community will react to the decision, the shame of wanting something different, the way in which coming out punctures the normative story of success and happiness.

I don't know if others who left the profession would wish to share their stories. But I'm pretty sure those stories would help people currently trying to find a place in the field.

If the "Narrating Lives" project were officially broadened by President Smith to welcome autobiography from those who left the profession, MLA would demonstrate its commitment not just to the humanities, but to the full range of people who have devoted many years of their lives to studying and teaching it.

Another advantage: the mainstream stories peddled about brilliant-but-foolish humanities Ph.D.s would be met with a morally authoritative corrective. The "Narrating Lives" project would trump the petty spectacle of the "cream of the academic crop" (in the words of the Dec. 16 Economist article) "clinging like limpets before eventually falling off" the academic career track.

There's nothing to stop me or anybody else from posting an autobiographical vid about leaving English. The platform is open. (Yay!) But MLA can increase this openness by broadening President Smith's video invitation to include multivalent, autobiographical stories of what it means to find work with a Ph.D. in English.

Exchange with MLA Executive Director Rosemary Feal about Openness

2010-12-21T07:40:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Dr. Feal, for responding to my post about lack of openness and transparency at the MLA11 site.

You are right that $220 for non-member registration is a low conference fee. The fee is even less for MLA members.

But the convention fee is not the point of my post.

Instead, I suggest that both the MLA and MLA non-members might benefit from more openness and clarity about the content of the upcoming convention Jan. 6-9. Access to information, not fees, is at issue here.

I registered as a nonmember with the MLA site, but was not given access to the schedule chronologically, as it appears in PMLA. Instead, I was offered three ways to search: by Participant, Subject, and Meeting Type.

If I happen to know exactly what I'm looking for (e.g., a talk by a particular person), then the search options function.

But if I'm browsing and want to control my own progress through the panel information, I'm out of luck. The user interface is unnecessarily fragmented. For example, I found session #331: "The Open Professoriat: Public Intellectuals and the Social Web" by wading through 261 "Special Sessions." If I hadn't known of its existence from the Digital Humanities sessions posted on Mark Sample's "SampleReality" blog, I doubt I would have found it on the MLA site.

"The Open Professoriat" certainly seems like it ought to be open to the public, but neither the session description nor general information on the MLA site indicate whether non-registered guests might attend. I'm inclined to think "The Open Professoriat" is CLOSED to the public.

Walling off content is a sure way to limit its influence.

On Sat. Jan. 8, David Parry will present "Be Online or Be Irrelevant" (at 606: Methods of Research in New Media). The subhead on Mark Sample's SampleReality blog says: "Own your ideas. Make them free." Cory Doctorow, the fiction writer, Boing Boing co-founder, and net neutrality activist, gives away large chunks of his intellectual capital and has found that free access to his ideas spreads them and, counterintuitively, earns him a tidy living.

What might happen if MLA convention information were published in the open, not behind firewalls?

The MLA might find a population of unaffiliated experts who collectively possess a vast, diverse range of opinion and skill.

It's a little more than 10 years since I filed my dissertation in English with UC Berkeley. In that last decade, I've seen some friends from my cohort (and from similar departments) scatter into fields far from the Ph.D. training we engaged in during the 90s. I haven't done a survey, but I would guess that about 50% of my cohort got jobs in the field (defined broadly to include jobs like mine, an NTT composition position). The other 50% are working in digital media and advertising, selling products in small storefronts, attending rabbinical school, working as college admins, writing commercial books, making commercial videos, staying at home with kids, teaching adjunct, founding independent theaters, directing plays, teaching K-12, and the like.

These are people Ph.D.s and ABDs who may well have interesting things to contribute to the MLA, but who lack the information to even know what's happening in the field, let alone judge whether they'd wish to participate.

The MLA doesn't have to permit everybody to attend its conference. It's a professional organization with specific work in the field to be done. But opening its information--starting with a clearer, more transparent website--could only vitalize the MLA.

"Premiering in L.A.": the "New" MLA 2011 Jan. 6-9

2010-12-20T01:33:00.000-08:00

I walked the red carpet once in L.A., when the movie Practical Magic premiered, in 1998. I don't remember why I was brought there.

[Img: Steves2cents.blogspot.com]

I was writing my dissertation 6 days a week, scuttling from my office only for yoga and the occasional swim. I remember thinking I might see Stockard Channing, or Nicole Kidman, or Sandra Bullock. But they didn't show. The premier was in Century City, a red carpet unfurled over what looked like a law office courtyard. Freestanding Kleig lights blazed. Jennifer Beals, who did not appear in the movie, walked the carpet. Paparazzi shouted her name. Autograph hunters/vendors huddled behind a velvet rope and awaited her scrawl. I walked the carpet, to no one's notice whatsoever. Then I took my seat in the dark alongside everybody else and watched a forgettable movie.

In L.A., not every premier is a grand event.

MLA 2011, this year's annual convention for professors and advanced graduate students in English, comparative literature, romance languages and ancillary fields, is new in one respect: a date change places it well after the Christmas holidays.

But transparency would really make this MLA "new," and transparency and openness are glaringly absent. The MLA has always walled its convention against outsiders. This year's non-member registration fee is $220. Just to search the titles of the 800 convention panels, one must be a paid-up member or guest, which means that intellectually curious non-initiates are shut out of even learning about the event, let alone participating in it. [Exception: anybody on Twitter can follow the tweetstream at #mla11.]

Like a castle under siege, the MLA looks even more cloistered now than it did before new media radically increased our expectation of access to information.

How out of step is the MLA? Check out this Dec. 17 tweet from the well-meaning Rosemary Feal, MLA's Executive Director, who manages the tweetstream:

Are you blogging about what you'll be speaking about at #mla11? Put link here for all to see: http://www.mla.org/conv_listings_mysessions

I clicked delightedly. Finally, to be able to see what people are talking about. But the link redirects to a membership log-in page. As does the page that invites one to "Exchange Collaborative Session Ideas." MLA's notion of "all" is just a tiny fragment of people in the field--registered participants--let alone the broad world.

The happy oasis in this desert of information is Mark Sample's reprint of MLA's digital humanities panels on his blog, SampleReality. Reading those titles, I thought: something cool may well go down in L.A. I am less sanguine about the other 650 MLA panels, which eluded my open search. I got a full list when I accessed the November issue of PMLA via my university's firewalled databases.

I've been toying with the idea of attending MLA for the first time in more than a decade specifically to hear what's going on in digital humanities. I'll follow the Tweetstream whether or not I attend, but of course I'd rather have the full experience--particularly as someone studying how information is conveyed and absorbed in face-to-face settings. Having just returned from LeWeb in Paris, and seeing firsthand the feedback loop created by f2f & Twitter right up on the mainstage, I know how quickly the social media/f2f combo platter can advance and spread the conversation.

As compared to previous MLAs, which I attended in the mid-90s with my husband before I was ABD, the emotional stakes this January would be low. I don't have to worry, for example, whether one tweet might kill my interview prospects--as actually happened at last year's MLA. See the 34 comments following the roguish "MLA 09 Survival Tips" at SampleReality (co-published at the Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker column; scroll down to see specific discussion of the fatal tweet.)

The self-consciousness of job candidates (and those who evaluate them) is both excruciating and merited. You hear horror stories, or just plain silly-slash-tragic ones: the candidate who learned through the grapevine that offering a Kleenex to a sneezing interviewer was perceived as "too forward": the Kleenex drew unwelcome attention to the interviewer's body. Another strategized a jaunty way to toss her winter coat on the bed as she walked into the interview. (After a fruitless two-year search, she left the academy, turned her dissertation into a commercial biography, and won a Pulitzer.)

During my sabbatical year, on leave from teaching advanced composition at the University of Southern California, I've been developing more new media skills and connecting with literary & media critics who attend to the vast landscape of user-generated, DIY content. My progress seems slow, but it's steady enough. I can't conceive of a more exciting time to be making stories, analyzing them, and teaching/collaborating with students.

How ironic that at this moment of unprecedented access to tools and the explosion of genres, the MLA convention is operating largely the way it did when Wimsatt and Beardsley (below) promulgated the "new" criticism in 1946.

[Img: chainsawzombie.blogspot.com]

Is it any wonder that the English professoriate frets over its diminished cultural influence, and runs MLA panels about the "crisis" in its profession? Explicitly, untenured faculty and graduate students are warned to filter all digital traces of their personae, combing them through and through and through for any little nit that an influential someone, somewhere might find objectionable. This extreme caution is at odds with the way most of us behave on social media platforms. Social media has vastly extended my intellectual reach, and is facilitated by the immediate, open, casual tone of exchange.

At a premier, Hollywood can make any product look good. But it's actually word of mouth--crowdsourcing--that determines whether a movie makes money or fails.

Will there be WoM about this "new" MLA?

How could there be, with all the goodies locked away from anybody hungry for a taste?

MLA already has its answer about how vitalize the field, but it doesn't want to know. This "new" "premier" isn't a fresh beginning, but a sequel. MLA's survival depends on openness and transparency. Other disciplines--communications, emerging media, composition, digital literacy, various interdisciplinary hybrids--are spreading themselves across the digital marquee.

At least there are many people in the field trained to recognize an elegy.

Sex & Drugs in Amsterdam

2010-12-13T16:55:00.000-08:00

In America, we believe in "bank error in your favor," as it says on a Monopoly "chance" card. We believe in good luck, in getting away with it. In doing what you want with or without the law on your side.

In Amsterdam one does not.

At a restaurant, I made a small faux pas: a waitress brought me turkey on my salad when I asked for salmon. I pointed out the error. The cook added salmon on top. But I did not set the turkey aside: I ate it. Bank error in my favor.

Later that evening, I realized it must have looked vulgar to eat the turkey I'd pointed out as a mistake. Social decorum here would suggest that if the error meant so much that I requested it to be rectified, then the least I could do is leave the turkey aside. It is crass to have profited from their mistake.

I pieced this together reviewing tiny clues in body language. Social decorum here is subtle, but palpable.

Anybody in America can get drugs whenever they want. Just ask the cops who visit elementary schools to warn children away from drugs. Amsterdam's allure is not about access to drugs, which is what I assumed was the case before I visited.

Amsterdam is about the freedom to consume marijuana and hash, and then hang out. In public. Where lots of people can watch to make sure you're doing as you ought.

You can see a similar principle at work in Amsterdam's attitudes about graffiti. Beautiful graffiti decorates some old buildings in Amsterdam. Graffiti infuses new aesthetic energy into the old buildings, allowing them to reflect the people living in the city right now. That's a really different notion of history than, say, the Parisians'.

Amsterdam calibrates the tension between civil rights and social decorum well, but still, I'm American. I'm surprised when I smell marijuana at the train station, or when I walk by a mostly naked woman seated on a stool in her dark, tidy booth in the Red Light district.

At first I was unsettled to see prostitutes vulnerable in their glass storefronts, illuminated only by the red rectangle of light framing their stalls. I would try to catch their eyes and offer a smile or business-nod, but they almost never looked in my eyes. They didn't want my solidarity. They wanted another client.

Then I realized: these women are probably the safest prostitutes in the world. They are protected. They have a union. I'm a NTT [non-tenure track] professor. I do not have a union. Sometimes I sit in the dark in my little stall, grading papers late into the night, illuminated only by the rectangle of light flowing out of my screen.

Amsterdam is forthright about its pleasures and the social limits on that pleasure.

It doesn't promise that what happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam. It doesn't wink and look away.

Why Amsterdam Is Better Than Vegas

2010-12-13T02:57:00.000-08:00

Wearing a Mink in Paris

2010-12-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Moments before Brad and I were to leave home for Paris--we are attending LeWeb--I was still coatless. I hate to shop. Half-hearted attempts left me with two old light coats layered atop each other, the way people used to layer Izod shirts in the 80s. My Paris style.

I stood in the entry way next to packed suitcase. Brad was loading the car.

"Take my mink!" said my generous mother-in-law, who had flown in to watch the kids while hubby and I went to Paris.

I demurred. "It will get rained on," I said.

"The minks wore it rain or shine," she replied.

"It's so pretty, and so expensive. I'm afraid it would get ruined."

"It's made to be worn!" she exclaimed. "I never wear it."

Brad was starting the car.

I said yes to the coat, and thanks.

Hours later, I found myself in line for passport check at Charles de Gaulle feeling self-conscious. It took a few hours for that to transform into confidence. When it hit, I looked in a darkened window and saw myself costumed for Paris.

I wear the mink on the Metro. To LeWeb. I drape it over the metal door of stalls in bathrooms. I toss it on chairs at bistros. I stroke it. Brad said others on the subway were stroking it, too, but it's so thick I didn't even feel it.

Living in Paris for a week feels like finally getting your childhood wish to sleep overnight in Disneyland. You promenade through sumptuously lit ancien regime monuments, luxuriate in the superabundance of the Louvre, jog past La Tour Eiffel still fizzing straight up into the sky. It's history, this nook of Paris in the 2nd & 9th arrondissements, but with the centuries of contradiction and violence scrubbed clean.

So now, consider this. It's four days into my trip. I no longer notice the mink, or feel like an impostor, or a goddess. I'm at the Nation Metro stop. I have just kissed goodbye my friend Beatrice, whose talk at a local university I have attended. I am alone, but of course not alone: Paris's unwonted snow yesterday shut down the streets and drove every last person underground. The metro car is literally body-to-body. I can feel the shirt buttons of the man behind me pressing into my back. I am trying not to inhale a woman's hair as I breathe.

My stop. Auber. The door on the other side of the car opens. I begin to move forward toward the door. A man crouches down in front of me. He lingers a moment, blocking the door. People begin to curse. "Excuse me, excuse me," I say in English, flustered. I'm pinned, can't move. Hands push me over the crouching man. My body juts over him. My purse stays behind, right hand barely holding on. I hear the doors rumble, as they do before they slide close. I am stuck. Then a wave of exiting passengers surges forward and pushes me out, like a wax plug dislodged by water. I pop up into the air. My right leg wedges down into the gap between the car and the cement platform. I give a cry of surprise and pain. I feel my purse being separated from my hand. I yank with the tips of my fingers. Seated passengers outside the car gape. A runnel opens inside the car. My purse yo-yos from the center of the car toward me. I hoist myself out of the gully. In a second, I'm on my feet, purse in hand. Shrugging for the crowd and escaping into invisibility.

My Parisian souvenir: a 4-inch pink gash above my right knee. Strangely, I really like it. It's unsentimental. An American in Paris wanders outside of her little wedge of FantasyLand. The city grabs you by the mink and holds on.

Talk's Cheap? Columbia's $500 F2F Experiment

2010-11-18T22:49:00.000-08:00

Did the Office of Student Life at Columbia University misfire Monday when it offered a $500 prize to the undergrad who can collect the most secret passwords from fellow students? Will this game achieve their goal of engaging students in nonacademic f2f conversation?

[Image: Ivygate]

Media have jumped all over this story: FoxNY, HuffPo, NYT's CityRoom blog, the Harvard Crimson.

Says Eve Binder, Managing Editor at the Ivy League blog Ivygate, "Instead of having a citywide meltdown, maybe we should be commending Columbia undergrads for assimilating so well into the ethos of New York City. After all, the rulebook does indeed say that you’re not allowed to talk to anyone who smiles, wears colors, or is not from New York."

Sure, but according to an unsigned article at Insider Higher Ed, a dearth of walking-across-campus sociability is not limited to mawkish urbanites at Columbia: "[E]ven rural campuses, including those that pride themselves on a culture of sociability, have had to contend in recent years with the threat posed by mobile devices." The article cites examples of the Speaking Tradition at Washington and Lee in Lexington, VA, and at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, the “Passing Hello” which has been "institutionalized as one of the university’s most cherished traditions."

For some faculty and admins age-35+ whose college years were mobile-phone-free, the sight of undergraduates mashing buttons or sliding fingers over screens as they walk to class suggests a loss. Did they meet their future spouses as they strolled across the campus? Maybe. Did random campus conversations contribute meaningfully to their sense of the college experience? Absolutely. Steven Johnson offers one reason why.

"Liquid networks" generate innovation and creativity. Cities, college campuses (or both, in the case of Columbia) permit random connections among people who are loosely joined together. Innovation is more likely to happen when sparks from outside one's customary orbit blaze new neural pathways to the puzzles your brain is working to solve. That IR major you recognize from a party last night and who you bumped into on the library steps today might remind you of a conversation you'd had at the party, but forgotten--until this random connection reactivated it, and shot it into the forefront of your consciousness.

We can agree that this f2f randomness is potentially meaningful. A good result of proximity.

But do you actually have to be f2f to get that same thrilling brush against difference?

Nope. Twitter has yielded for me more surprising, diverse information than I found bumping into others on the quad. But the conversations I have in the halls with my colleagues are deep, sustained and continuous. The mix of both makes for the most creative thinking.

Why do Columbia's well-meaning admins assume that students' screen socializing is inferior to the exclusively f2f socializing they did when they were in college?

"We are appalled at the absurdity of this game,"declare Columbia undergraduates Tom Miner and Liz Lund in an Op-Ed for the Colubmbia Spectator. "It is certainly a noble goal to get students to better interact with one another, but when you attach a $500 prize to a game whose winner must inherently be a systematic, blunt, and tactless maniac, the purpose becomes lost."

They concede: "The administration is right, though: Columbia students—perhaps more than most college students—have issues socializing."

Wouldn't it be smarter to create f2f experiences that screens can't replicate?

And to involve students in the creation of such experiences?

At the University of Washington, the Seattle Times reports, about 900 people play Humans vs. Zombies Tag, or HvZT. "It's a complex game that sweeps through the UW campus every quarter. 'The best part of it is you meet a ton of people,' says student Malcolm Badewitz-Brown, one of four overseers, or game organizers." HvZT is a trend across universities and around the world.

At the University of Southern California, more than 1,500 students participate annually in the Visions and Voices program, which treats students to a huge range of arts performances and lectures both on- and off-campus. It facilitates guided discussion after each event.

The brouhaha burbling out of Columbia's Social Experiment underscores the technology divide between students and the people in charge of educating them.

Ironically, although some faculty and admins profoundly distrust how students socialize on screens, they rarely bother asking students whether they perceive a lack of sociability. In fact, students just might be up to their ears in social experience. Going to college doesn't mean leaving behind their K-12 network, as it did before social media. When we think about how to create community on campus and in the classroom, we must keep that in mind. Each learner at the seminar table is not just one person, but a web of many people that moves and breathes with that learner everywhere she goes.

Wouldn't $500 be an excellent prize for students who invent a cool new game that promotes f2f on campus? Trust the students to describe their experience and figure out a new way to connect. My guess: the game would be a hybrid, something that would use screens to enable f2f in ways most of us over 20 couldn't imagine. Which is why we haven't.

Do I Have Your Attention? Howard Rheingold's Balloon Experiment

2010-11-10T17:38:00.000-08:00

[src: djsoundwav's YouTube Channel]

Are we afraid to ask students "Do I have your attention" because they'll say, as Zuckerberg does in the clip, "No"?

Of everyone I've been reading lately, Howard Rheingold is the most innovative thinker about attention in the f2f in networked classrooms.

Check out these two tweets (18 minutes ago) about a social experiment he ran in his class today:

2 show capabilities of social networks, my ingenious students placed balloons arnd campus, challenged others 2 ask friends 2 locate them

Students sent SMS, tweets, Facebook updates @ start of class. An hour later, one student had located 11 balloons through her social netowrk

What better to collapse the distances--physical, psychic--between our lives online and our lives on campus than the balloon experiment?

It literalizes the proximal nature of our networks: those folks chasing balloons across campus are both of us and their own selves, following their own desires. Those who get the call to chase balloons can opt to do it or ignore it. But if they see the status update about the balloons and choose not to pursue them, they still have more knowledge than they had before the update: if they see a balloon on campus, they'll *see* it. The social network has given them more knowledge and insight than they would have had without it. And that's just for being part of one: not the reward for opting in.

The social network, in other words, allowed something otherwise invisible or unremarkable to take on significance. To become meaningful.

Today in Howard's experiment, one student's network found 11 balloons. Wouldn't it be fun to figure out why her network found so many? Is her network more playful than most? Blessed with more disposable time? More spontaenous? How are networks inflected by the personalities that gather them, and are there folks studying this? At what point are networks so compendious as to exceed the parameters of personality, turn into a blob of electrons?

Howard's students (and all of us, thanks to his tweet) might think through a couple of ideas manifest in the balloon experiment.

1. In classroom settings, the virtual and the physical (f2f) work most productively in tandem. Neither group (the students in the classroom nor the ones hunting balloons) could find the balloons alone.

2. F2f classes must deliver something that students cannot find themselves online. Bahktin, in Dialogic Imagination calls this "eventness": the infusion of surprise and contingency into the prosaic. Now more than ever, classes need to be "eventful" in order to compel attention. The balloons surprised Howard's students into "seeing" an element of social networking that perhaps they'd taken for granted. That's the job of "eventness": to make visible underlying assumptions of how systems of power operate.

3. Compelling attention in an f2f writing class will necessitate rethinking what counts as a classroom activity, and what gets done in the network or alone in front of a screen. I'm proposing to teach my Advanced Writing class at USC 75% online/ 25% f2f. That ratio is my best guess of how student writers will most productively and eventfully use their time. But that ratio is being met with deep skepticism among decision makers because to acknowledge how much the writing classroom is changed by social media is to heap onto already full plates the challenge of redesign and the thrill of experimentation.

I offer these observations not to those who know social networks to be fundamental to one's self. I offer them to the many people I encounter in higher ed who think of SNs as virtual replications of f2f. If your SN is comprised entirely of people you know f2f, this might be you.

Howard has some f2f exercises for increasing students' awareness of how they spend their attention. This is from his recent EDUCAUSE article, "Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies":

The first thing I do in my class now is ask the students to turn off their cellphones, shut their laptops, and close their eyes.

I tell them that I will let them know when 60 seconds have gone by, and I ask them to just do nothing but notice what happens in their minds, to observe where their attention would go without any external distractions.

Of course, anybody who meditates knows that your mind is pretty much out of control. Your attention can go anywhere: to yesterday, to tomorrow.

After they open their eyes, I ask them to keep their laptops closed, and I add that I will upload my notes for that first lecture so they shouldn't have to worry about taking notes.

But because my intention is to probe, not control, and ultimately to instill in students an experience of some reflection about their media practices, I did not outright ban the use of laptops.

This move at the end is most interesting. It's tempting for teachers to abuse our power and prohibit screens by edict.

But there are several innovators in my department at USC who are already using screens in fantastically exciting ways: Geoff Middlebrook's Blogfolios, Mark Marino's crowdsourced anti-bullying resource, Stephanie Bowers & John Murray's "Writing for the Common Good," docu/writing in the neighborhood course, Matt Manson's tweet stream, Ron Scheer's students' YouTube advocacy vids, and Norah Ashe-McNalley & Nathalie Joseph's student online writing journal, AngeLingo. There may be others flying new stuff: I'm on sabbatical this year, and removed from the day-to-day chez JEF.

I think Howard's fusion of the f2f with the networked is a micrograph of how classrooms will begin to look: shuttling between f2f and screen, lively, kinetic, expansive.

In networked classrooms we're going to be using our bodies more, not less, than we do in the f2f classroom. Rather than passively regard the folks sitting around the seminar table, our bodies will activate new kinds of learning when the networked writing class gathers f2f: as we crowdsource knowledge, extend our selves far beyond the classroom, and jump into the cities that house our universities. Those cities are living texts to explore and annotate. Ulysses.

My wish is that someday soon, we'll all have the chance to hunt after Howard's balloons.

Kaplan U. Investigated by GAO for Predatory Practices; Some Public Univs in CA cost $50K/yr

2010-11-09T23:36:00.000-08:00

Just a short post about predatory practices among for-profit online learning vendors, and the high cost of brick-and-mortar public universities.

The NYT placed a story today in my content aggregator, which means it was one of the 3 top stories it blasted out: "Scrutiny Takes a Toll on For-Profit College Company."

Kaplan higher education revenues eclipse not only the test-prep operations, but all the rest of the Washington Post Company’s operations. And Kaplan’s revenue grew 9 percent during the last quarter to $743.3 million — with higher education revenues more than four times greater than those from test-prep — helping its parent company more than triple its profits.

For-profit education companies will protect the interests of shareholders, not learners. A series of lawsuits pending against Kaplan suggest that it aggressively recruits students who it thinks will be unlikely to finish the program. Even when students complete coursework, Kaplan may withhold access to the last degree requirement (such as a practicum), so students are left in limbo. Non-white single moms are Kaplan's ideal recruit.

NYT's Tamar Lewin explains how Kaplan became enormously profitable: "All these schools get most of their revenue from federal student aid. Kaplan Higher Education, for example, gets 91.5 percent of its revenue from the federal government, through Pell grants, Stafford loans, military and veterans benefits and other aid."

The government pays Kaplan. But only 28% of Kaplan's students repay the government, a rate significantly lower than the 48% of brick-and-mortar repays and 45% University of Phoenix repays.

Kaplan's significantly lower repay rate might reflect its predatory practice of allegedly admitting students that are unlikely to 1) complete the program; or, 2) earn more money as a result of obtaining the Kaplan degree. According to the NYT, most Kaplan students did not see a boost in earning power as a result of their Kaplan degrees, despite Kaplan recruiting promises to the contrary.

It's no wonder that students are scrambling to find affordable alternatives to community colleges and public universities. NPR reported Nov. 1st that:

A year of college at a public university now costs more than $50,000 — if you enroll at the University of Berkeley and don't have in-state status. Berkeley is the first public school to join the 50K club, according to College Board data analyzed by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Still, Berkeley isn't likely to have the distinction to itself for long. Back in the 2008-2009 school year, only three schools in the nation charged more than $50,000. For 2010-2011, there are 100.

With perils at either end of the prestige & costs spectra, I think more students will take matters into their own hands and crowdsource knowledge. Not all learners are motivated enough to do this, and a college degree is still the Golden Ticket to white collar jobs.

That may change if more and more students opt not to incur tremendous debt but can find equivalent knowledge on their own.

In Your Face: the New York Times & Online Learning

2010-11-08T01:28:00.001-08:00

Last week's two NYT articles,"Learning in Dorm, Because Class is Online" and "Live vs. Distance Learning: Measuring the Differences", both by Trip Gabriel, attribute a number of maladies to online course delivery: hyper-crowded classes (1500+!), lack of faculty/student interaction, student malaise and boredom, and learning inequities among Hispanic and non-Hispanic learners exacerbated in online settings.

When a motivated student complains, at the end of "Learning in a Dorm," that online learning is "all the same . . . . No comments. No feedback. And the grades are always late," Mr. Gabriel takes the student's observation at face value. In this the same article we learn that one professor is teaching 1500 students in a blended (online & f2f) intro microeconomics class. What kind of TA support is that teacher getting? Or training in interactive technologies (like Hotseat, a Twitter-and-text app created at Purdue) to augment student participation in large lecture classes? Wittingly or unwittingly, Mr. Gabriel has created dramatic irony: we who are watching this tragedy of learning know more than the players themselves.

Gabriel's narrative choices got traction. The article dug into the ten "most-emailed" NYT articles for three days after initial publication, until the Sunday edition rolled out and the popular columnists swept it away. One imagines parents frantically emailing this article to each other and worrying whether their kids are getting the instruction they deserve, and for which they are richly paying.

The article makes trenches of the lines drawn in the sand: those who see social media as shallow, trivial and ephemeral, a root cause of young people's disengagement from "real" social contexts; and those who see social media as participatory, liberating, and fundamentally enabling of identities. danah boyd is my favorite author writing about teens, social media and identity-formation. Her Oct. 29 address to the 32nd International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners cannily explained teens' attitudes toward privacy even as they pervasively build identities via social networking platforms like texting, Facebook and Twitter. She observes:

People may not like having their privacy violated or being in situations where they're being surveilled, but they will always choose social status and community over privacy. They would rather be vulnerable to more people and deal with institutions than to feel disconnected from their peers and loved ones.

Students are already online all the time. Online instruction, far from alienating them, ought to hit them where they live. If it's not, the fault is not with the online mechanism, but human error: either burdening faculty with new technical requirements they are ill-prepared to meet in addition to their other responsibilities; or cramming classes so full of people that they resemble small cities or raves: full of random possible connections, but not designed to inculcate individual learning and satisfaction.

Readers of this blog know that I advocate f2f learning. I love it. But I want to teach 75% of my class online--all the while mentoring students, continuing to give them the "high touch" insight and access they expect from a f2f setting. I advocate HYBRID writing classes), as do others in the field. See Scott Warnock's post at Online Writing Teacher to learn more about this trend.

Whose interests are being served, I wonder, by the NYT's choice to villify online learning?

The U.S. Department of Education, in its 94-page study "Evidence-based Practices in Online Learning" (September 2010) notes with alarm that there are no sustained, meta-critical studies of online v. f2f learning outcomes dating from 1996-2008. It's a strange elision, this aporia of data. It suggests that we did not *see* f2f as a form of information delivery until online delivery attained sufficient critical mass to be an option for a huge volume of learners.

And sucked such learners away from f2f settings: witness the huge jump in homeschooling among K-12 families, and the rise of the for-profit online learning vendors.

Those developments alone might make the NYT and other ancien regime media institutions board up the brick-and-ivied chateaux against the hoards of collegiate learners rushing online--at a fraction of the cost of residential universities. Online learning, in the NYT and other top-down media outlets, is frequently portrayed as a financial last resort: a bargain-basement knock-off of authentic, holistic learning, which, we are left to conclude, happens face-to-face.

[Shout out, btw, to John Hagel, who coined "ancien regime" to describe old-media film critics' passionate embrace of The Social Network. See his terrific post about SN's "grand narrative" here.]

Mr. Gabriel's most glaring elision in that online learners have unprecedented access to information, academic research and actual university classes. Never before have the vistas for non-privileged learners been so expansive. This seems worth mentioning as we worry over whether freshman will elect to blow off lecture, and maybe never get around to watching the vid stream. Did you know anybody who blew off class and failed to borrow the lecture notes? Online delivery changes how we can participate in class, but it hasn't changed human nature.

Mr. Gabriel's allegorical tale about online learning (sloth! avarice! despair!) might actually be sensitive to the tectonic rumblings of the ground beneath our feet. The big story isn't the one about lazy or disenfranchised learners.

Rather, it's the hint that brick-and-mortar universities are St. George battling the dragon: the valiant human brandishing his sword against a fierce, vast opponent who has no honor (for-profit learning? Onscreen? Bah! Begone, dragon!).

Trick is to watch for the a huge reach and sharp claws.

Villifying online learning delivery won't slay the dragon. Learning how to tame it, integrate it, bring it home to the chateau, will.

Are F2f Classes the Luxury Sedan of the Edu Biz? Go Hybrid!

2010-10-31T08:25:00.000-07:00

USC President Max Nikias believes that undergraduates benefit most from face-to-face learning environments. Faculty working with undergraduates are discouraged from creating courses with distance learning components of their residential classes.

F2F is quickly becoming perceived as a luxury because august public institutions like the University of California are turning to online class delivery to cut costs. Online is seen as a necessity, a poor cousin, not a choice to empower learners.

But as more and more of our lives move online, and crucially, more professional work is being conducted in hybrid environments (that is, online and f2f), what really is the best learning environment for students?

Student writers don’t want face time for its own sake. They want f2f if it delivers something they can’t get online.

Something more compelling than "it feels good."

I am the first one to confess that face time feels great. I volunteer teach classes in my local public school district because I love the learning that happens f2f. Done right, it's a place of serendipity. Even I don't know fully what I'm going to say, or what students will say. And having to wrestle that unpredictability into a set of learning goals for each class session is a puzzle I never tire of solving.

But could it also be that college students prefer f2f classes because they have to work less hard?

Not all students, of course. Some students, across the spectrum of talent and collegiate preparation, will knock themselves out for your class: do the reading, come prepared with comments and questions, jump into debate, hit all the deadlines. Those students power seminars and make them richly meaningful not just for themselves, but for their quiet mice neighbors.

Online, everybody talks. There are no quiet mice. It's easy to see and measure quality of contribution. Students can't take a day off without penalty. There's a digital record of your daily contribution.

Which some students may not like.

And so they may clamor for f2f for reasons not entirely wholesome. Or intellectually sound.

This is not to say that online writing courses are superior to f2f modes, even if, as Prof. Scott Warnock notes, online writing students write 1500-2000 words more per week than their f2f counterparts. Warnock is Director of Freshman Writing at Drexel University and author of Online Writing Teacher and a 2009 book Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. Citing report in the Feb. 10 eCampus News, he notes that "hybrids are hot."

In my own experience, f2f is less rigorous than that same conversation would be if students had already discussed it online first and then come to class ready to hash it out.

My individual experience is consonant with findings from the U.S. Department of Education, which in its "Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning" (Sept. 2010)finds that online learners perform marginally better than students in f2f classrooms. I should note that this report compares online and face-to-face learning environments and outcomes for K-12 learners, not post-secondary.

Time and again in my experience, f2f student discussion is better--deeper, more attentive to nuance and contradiction--if we have already broached it online.

And the benefits are more than intellectual.

The online/f2f combo-platter allows us to be more socially aware and dynamic. Bouncing between the two contexts, we glean information that locates the private writerly self in a body seated somewhere around the seminar table. That guy who wears his cap backward and acts like a goof? He's actually the contrarian pushing against the class's majority opinion. The silent student who sits near teacher has volumes to say online, freed from the terror of public speaking. The one who scowls through much of the class? Turns out she's busy thinking, which is evident in ruminative posts.

Many of us are also using hybrid settings to take students into the cities where our universities are located. The cities are "living texts" for the students to explore and write about. As mobile computing becomes more widely adopted for uses we commonly associate with laptops, such adventures will even more seamlessly integrate with writing programs' curricula.

When f2f looks in the mirror, it sees Socrates and Plato, brick-and-ivy, and students--even if they are seated in a circle and looking into each others' eyes--waiting for the teacher to lead.

When f2f looks into a computer screen, it sees a blinking cursor waiting for fingertips to fling it into Google, into the blogosphere, into social media and crowdsourcing, into hyper-abundance and the aching sense that to find your way, you need guidance from a teacher who's right there with you, using the same tools you use today and will continue to use after graduation, because they are not locked behind proprietary platforms like BlackBoard, or even the marvelous, addictive, and curated databases your library subscription buys you but to which you may not have access when you're no longer a student.

Teachers, f2f and online, have never been more useful and necessary.

If f2f is ready for its close up, it will dance between these contexts, between the body-in-class and the screen.

F2F need not be like the delusional murderess Norma Desmond, who is ready for her return to silent movie glory only after the movies have definitively passed her by.

But that means we're going to have to give her, give f2f, a facelift.

The hybrid can erase those fine lines.

F2F and Dancing with Steven Johnson, Kaleb Nation, and a Journey Tribute Band

2010-10-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

[Sun a couple hours from rising. Breath steaming in the cold, but feet bare anyway. Soundtrack: DJ Wombat's Deep House mix.]

I like to be alone. Social media has made it more fun. I no longer like to read nonfiction without Diigo. I check Twitter several times a day to see what my network has curated for me. I carry social media's perpetual buffet in my pocket. I bike with it pressed to my belly into the cityscapes I love.

And yet, for all this plenitude, 3 serendipitous f2f events last weekend packed the Diigo'd snowflakes I'd been reading into a ball I could toss to someone else.

Like to you, right now.

3 events, 3 days:

Steven Johnson's book tour at the Bagdad Theater three days after the launch of Where Good Ideas Come From delivered presence, aura. Johnson writes prolifically about the history of science and how it shapes innovation today. He is both old school and new: he writes monographs in solitude, just like the Enlightenment intellectuals he admires; but he's also robustly new media, with 1.5 million Twitter followers and a cadre of high-test bloggers who learn from him and spread his ideas.

Sitting at the Bagdad, washing down slippery fries with Hammerhead, I wondered why Johnson (or anyone) bothers with book tours anymore. In the age of viral video, why zoom up and down the coasts selling books one at a time?

Indeed, about half of the material Johnson presented at the Bagdad I'd heard in his September 2010 TED talk. Midway through his perf at the Bagdad, I became conscious of my behavior as a fan: I was nodding at his big reveals & laughing at punchlines I already knew. Why?

I meant to testify: we need to redefine the open web as essential to innovation and growth or risk its becoming, as Scott Rosenberg has suggested, "a brief transitional interlude between more closed informational regimes."

Next AM, I was still thinking "why does Johnson bother with f2f?" I rolled over, scooped up my iPhone, and found that he'd tweeted #ideachat, which led me to this video from Derek Sivers about how to start a movement. Iranian progressives and Burmese monks have used Twitter to start social movements. Why do movements culminate in physical presence, even when it's very dangerous to do so?

Sivers' crucial idea: the leader embraces a "First Follower" as an equal and collaborator. Contagious excitement takes off from there.

I was thinking of Sivers' vid twelve hours later when I decided to dance on the periphery of my row in the Alberta Rose Theater. The 300-seat ART is stadium-style seating, which prescribes passive, butts-in-seat art consumption. Friends, hubby and I were there to see a Journey tribute band, Stone in Love.

I didn't take my shirt off and wiggle around like the guy in the vid above. I stood at the edge of my row, swayed against the wall, and held my microbrew as a kind of shield. Because yeah, I don't really like to stand out. But I like to dance more than I fear judgment.

You know what's coming. 3 women in the row ahead of me got up and danced next to me. Their leader turned her head to gaze at me.

I thought about the First Follower. I smiled, toasted her with my Ninkasi Double Red, and we bobbed our heads in time. Then she returned her attention to her friends.

Skip ahead, skip ahead. A coupla songs later, and 6 people rushed to the front and began dancing with abandon. I darted down. Kevin the lead singer made eye contact with me. He sang to me for a coupla bars. I felt like it was my reward for being the first. Of course I sang along with him. What else to do in junior high but memorize pop songs?

Fully half of the theater was suddenly rocking out down at the front. Pressed together, lights beaming, vocals soaring, double bass thumping. Women I don't know throwing their arms around my shoulders and dancing.

A movement for . . . movement!

Not exactly one of Johnson's Liquid Networks--no grand intellectual ambition here; we did not discover GPS--but I still think there's something intellectually relevant about physical crowds in the era of crowdsourced knowledge. Not sure what exactly. Post a comment if you have a hunch.

Next day, my friend Laura called. She was buried hip deep in grading and could I use her ticket to Wordstock?

Sure I could.

That's where I saw Kaleb Nation. This YA author, seasoned at age 22, is the canniest DIY architect of a new media promo campaign I've seen in a while.

Only some of Steven Johnson's potential audience is NM savvy. Many of his readers rely on book reviews and other top-down media to discover his book.

Not so for Mr. Nation, whose 18K+ Twitter followers upload photos of themselves in Kaleb Nation t-shirts they've bought on his site. KN makes and uploads a vid every day. He showers his fans with Tweets many times a day, at least 12 hours daily: his whereabouts, responses to fans, jokey photos, glib throwaways.

Talk about high-touch! Nation's fans are never far from his electronic caress.

In response, Nationeers dutifully show the love. Example: NPR asked KN to write a book review. When it went live, he Tweeted his Nationeers, asking them to favorite it on the NPR site. Result? Within 5 minutes, KN's article leapt to the number #1 slot on NPR "most popular" beating the next article by like 400%. Shortly thereafter KN's article was promoted to the NPR front page, and . . . .

A star is born. Or at least showing up in the telescope.

KN exemplifies Johnson's idea of the Liquid Network: weak ties bound together by common interest and physical proximity. Except now, the "physical" is virtual: all those photos and vid we upload.

Like the eighteenth-century broadsheeters who cranked out satires and other entertainment overnight and posted them outside coffee houses in the morning, Nation amps up the production schedule: 24/7, always-on. Instead of being inspired by caffeine, that "chat-inspiring liquor" as c18 poet Laetitia Pilkington called it, Nationeers get high uploading, mashing and spreading Kaleb-inspired arcana. They're not consumers of ideas. They're producers. KN is the context, the venue.

He's the juice in the Liquid Network.

What's the takeaway, you might ask?

The smaller the feedback loop, the more contagious your ideas. Nothing makes a feedback loop smaller, more immediate and intimate than f2f.

Why else would Steven Johnson be knocking himself out on the road?

But an electronic constant caress is a close second. Witness KN's killer book tour sked (two! two at once! His own for Bran Hambric: The Specter Key, and another, as chief media officer for The Beautiful Darkness Tour, a book by his friends, #2 on NYT paperback bestseller list.)

F2F. Still what's for breakfast.

Desire and eMotion: The Wilderness Downtown

2010-10-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

View The Wilderness Downtown in Google Chrome or Safari 5.

Almost everyone likes “The Wilderness Downtown,” the interactive film by Chris Milk set to the song “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire. David Pescovitz at Boing Boing declares The Wilderness Downtown “perhaps the best browser-dominating Net art piece I've experienced since Jodi.org's best work more than a decade ago.” Of the 27 comments posted to Pescovitz’s piece, many go like this: “I didn't think I would like this when I saw it a couple days ago. Just some web-tricks. However, the song and the personalization really did it for me. I'm going to send it to my brother and see what he thinks. We have so many memories of the place we grew up.”

The teenage boys to whom I showed it like it. My elementary-school aged daughter likes it. My former boss likes it. My new-media-agile friends like it. I like it.

Is it a bland aesthetic, this burger to which everybody adds their own secret sauce to make delicious? Or is “The Wilderness Downtown” popular because it’s a game-changer, creating the expectation of interactivity: that stories will work harder to meet you, quite literally, where you live.

Yes.

How can both of these things be true?

Metonymy, the rhetorical trope, is the muscle powering Wilderness Downtown’s emotional punch.

Metonymy is the trope of contiguity. Of desire. Metaphor draws relationship from similarity: “Achilles is a lion.” Metonymy draws relationship by approximation: “Madison Avenue scripts what we want.”

“The Wilderness Downtown” is metonymy in motion. Its structure reinforces the nostalgic theme. Up to five windows open and shut in perfect synchronicity with the music. You watch the faceless, hooded proxy of yourself running through your childhood neighborhood as depicted in present-day Google Maps street view. The percussive, moody music pushes you through the experience. Unlike many pieces of eLit, there’s a beginning, middle and end. The unities of color (black, white, gray and orange) and pacing direct the eye, guide you to unify the window-fragments into a satisfying whole. You are instructed to write or doodle a postcard to the self you were when you lived there; this is the only moment where the piece slows down. The creators assume you have a lot to say. “And so I wrote a letter,” intones the Arcade Fire lyric. “I never took my true heart, I never wrote it down.”

Now you can.

At the end of WD you can send your postcard along to strangers if you like, or to the Wilderness Machine, or to the Arcade Fire tour; but of course that defeats the intimacy of the conceit that you are writing to your younger self. It’s a tease, a fake.

Indeed, the interactivity of this “interactive film” is limited to the moment when you enter your address; after that, you’re just watching the movie play out across the literal landscape of your childhood.

“If the measure is the concept, not the interactivity,” observes Mark Marino at Writer Response Theory, “I find the piece to be a nice mashup of html5 effects, maps, and music under a creepy combo of nostalgia and surveillance crows. True, other elit is more interactive--or offers more significant interaction. This is more of the you be the star of the story -- or Dora episode -- genre.”

The first time I saw it a few weeks ago,” notes Dustin Stevenson in response to Marino, “I expected/hoped that the doodle I drew would manifest in the climactic moment of the film. . . . [R]eading this post left me wishing for a more deeply mutable digital object.”

Indeed, WD bets that genuine interactivity takes a back seat to nostalgia. Given the positive reception, it looks like they won the bet. Urged on by the sexy Arcade Fire refrain “aaaaaah, we used to wait,” WD is a steamy broth of conflicting desires: to be the self in the video and yet to escape out of it; to be inside that childhood landscape and also watch it destroyed by crows pummeling the ground and thrusting up into trees that occlude your view. In short, it can be anything to anybody: a perfect marketing machine (recall WD was created in part to show off the HTML5 and new Google Chrome). But is it a perfect aesthetic object? It’s too empty to be truly memorable.

And yet, pretty much everybody I've come across likes it. A lot. The negative comments fall along the lines of: what happened to interoperability? Why can't I run this on Firefox?

Which returns us to the question of why people like The Wilderness Downtown.

Filmmaker Chris Milk: “My real motivation came from my quest for music videos to have the equally soul-touching emotional resonance that straight music does. Honestly, I'm not sure they ever can. Music scores your life. You interact with it. You listen to it in the car. It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl. Music videos are very concrete and rigid. They don't allow for that emotional interaction.”

Unless you customize to each user. Let him plug in his own address, his own memories and desires, and the user can make the meaning. In a way, it’s the dream of every artist and reception theorist: reading is performance, its own art.

But is it art, the infinite regress of me dancing between two mirrors, watching all those arms raise and lower simultaneously? Milk has created a compelling empty screen on which to project our fantasies about our younger selves. Empty but with "boids" flying across it. Duchamp’s fountain has more instrinsic meaning.

Metonymy in motion = eMotion. The secret sauce you’ll buy every time because it tastes like you.

On Informal Learning, Joi Ito, Teenage Boys and Nostalgia

2010-09-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

"The focus on education and accreditation instead of learning is something we need to change."

Joi Ito--entreprenuer, dropout, thought leader--has at least one reason to care about the fate of the university: his sister Mimi is a distinguished cultural anthropologist at USC, a theorist of how teens use new media in the US and Japan. In the video interview I link to above, Joi lays out a powerful case for the rise of the informal learner.

Joi doesn't feel the love for Tufts, the Univ. of Chicago (both of which he left without degree) or other institutions of formal learning that presume the university remains the best way to gather thinkers and distribute research. Joi is not so much an advocate for informal learning as a bright exponent of it. He did it twenty years ago. Today, it's easier for informal learners to operate entirely project-based, acquiring the skills, community and knowledge particular to their goals. The most interesting undergraduate classes I'm following on the Web, for example, are the ones that appropriate DIY skill and zeal. Ironic, eh? That the most "cutting edge" courses at the university emulate the informal learners' MO, urgency and skills?

What does the rise of the informal learner mean for the university beyond "fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night"?

Learners are going to be impatient of requirements they don't see as directly contributive to their knowledge goals, especially when those requirements cost a lot of time and money. Their parents may or may not be similarly impatient. It depends on how vested they are in the university that opened its iron gates to their own knowledge and careers.

What sort of people will continue to value the university's judgments, its intricate system of sorting and filtering the quality of student performance? Will employers always insist on university credentials if informal learners like Jio Ito short circuit the process: the 4-yrs-long process that is an eternity in communities of practice?

I still believe in the university, perhaps out of nostalgia and loyalty to the enormously transformative effect it had on my life.

The university put its stamp on me: BA, MA, Ph.D. Lecturer, Sr. Lecturer, Assoc. Prof: so many degrees like a line of Chinese chops marking ownership and provenance. On me.

Today, as I prepare some bookmarks on Diigo and edit video to collaborate on a service learning project with four teenage boys--all of whom know more about filmmaking than I do, though I am the "teacher"--I doubt these guys will need the university as I did. They might look to the university for a kind of education it is ill-equipped, as yet, to provide.

I hope this is not the case. That the university rises to meet them. Lets them learn at the pace they expect. Listens to what they know. Forgives me my fragments, for I have sinned. Changes quickly before the 4 boys are gone, gone, gone.

Big Brother Tracking Little Sibs 30% More Than Adults

2010-09-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

Following up on how DP's course design plays out IRL.

This just in from the "Regain Control" team: their Tracking Our Children entry analyzes data reported in the WSJ that kids' sites dropped 30% more cookies on kids' sites than in the fifty most popular adult sites.

Tabatha reasons:

[W]e have to ask why companies on the net would use their resources any differently than television advertisers. If an advertiser twenty years ago utilized morning cartoons to sell sugary breakfast cereal, why would an advertiser refrain from using the internet gaming phenomenon to sell products today? Of course, some of the tools installed by the tested sites logged information that did not reveal privacy concerns, like where a user paused in a game. However, other tools tracked the outside sites visited by users, logging trends in their usage.

Tabatha's analysis does more than posts generated by peers on other blogs in emac4325 because she knows she must explain the relevance of the data to us. Her decision to historicize it by looking at Sat AM cartoons as precedent is insightful.

Group Work How-To: David Parry's emac4325

2010-09-19T12:47:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately how to give my students group work experience that, were I a student, wouldn't make me break out in a nervous sweat.
Dave Parry has come up with some rules of engagement that cede to students almost all of the decision-making power, including, unusually, the right to fire team members who aren't pulling their weight.

Parry is Asst. Prof of Emerging Media and Communications in the Arts and Humanities division of UT/Dallas. His blog, Academhack, is a must-read for anyone wishing to think through our path(s) toward a post-print society.

The class is Digital Writing: Privacy, Control and Surveillance on the Internet. It's for undergraduates.

The most original elements of Parry's group-work design are:

Students pick team members based on complementary skills, not popularity or other criteria. Rather than just working with one's friends, or grouping together because of a shared thematic interest, students in DP's class review anonymous mini-resumes written on index cards and choose team members based on complementary skill sets. This sets a serious tone: this is a proto-professional setting; the design of information flow is at least as important as the content itself. (My own primitive blog aside: it's like writing with crayolas. Wordpress on my list of TtoD.)
Each student group crafts its own rules of conduct and expectations. They come to a contractual understanding of how each will contribute throughout the semester. Rules are transparent and decided collectively during the first week of the semester.
Students who fail to contribute can be fired by the rest of the team members. Such individuals will then be responsible for creating a privacy-themed blog all by themselves--a tremendous amount of work. Students who fall behind will either drop the course or suck it up and catch up.
Everyone in group gets same grade. Yeouch! The perennial thorn in the buttocks of every student working group since cavepeople scrawled on walls and one guy sat outside smoking. In professional settings, if your team messes up, it doesn't matter how hard individual members worked. This rule compels students to work out amongst themselves labor allocation and accountability. Social/emotional learning often falls beyond the purview of professors and pretty much NEVER shows up on official assessment rubrics in end-of-semester evaluations. But it still counts, baby. How nice DP is giving students a real-world context in which to hone these skills. And fret, and freak out, and send injudicious FB messages in wee hours, and work around the clock and not shower for three days, then pull through, have an awesome object online for all to see, and feel like maybe you could do this again. Just like in real life.

Judge for yourself how well this design plays out. Links to the students' blogs below. The winner thus far: Regain Control. Nice UI. Course title:
Digital Writing: Privacy, Control, and Surveillance on the Internet

Regain Control
Demet (datamining)
Under Surveillance
OutOutsiders
Geolocation
Fiction (nonopticon)

The "Serious Magic" of Your Face

2010-09-16T17:46:00.000-07:00

TED posted a few days ago Chris Anderson's July 2010 talk "How web video powers global innovation"

I was interested in the portion of Anderson's talk, @11:35, in which he discusses the "serious magic" of non-verbal communication:

There are hundreds of subconscious clues that go to how well you understand, and whether you are inspired. . . . All of this can be conveyed, incredibly, on a few inches on a screen. Reading and writing are relatively recent inventions. F2f communication has been fine-tuned over millions of years of evolution. That's what's made it into the powerful thing it is. Someone speaks; there's resonance in all these receiving brains, and the whole group acts together. This is the connective tissue in the human super-organism in action. It's driven our culture for millenia.

I myself am addicted to the "serious magic" of f2f. In long conversations today with my two best gfs in LA, I certainly craved to see their faces. (Frankly, to hug them: TMI?) In the classroom, I have always relished the ripple of energy around the seminar table, the embodied quality of f2f learning. The stuff we never talk about in academia b/c it's just too embarrassing. The stew of smells in a little brick room as we cluster around a seminar table, the shy glances pinging between students around the room, the huge variations in body posture and openness.

I wonder if f2f burns learning into the brain in ways we aren't conscious of?

Why else would conferences and events remain so popular? Even the most technically agile new media academics expect that f2f "is important for the online network part" of our working lives. Check out Howard Rheingold and Sheryl Grant discussing the pleasures of f2f collaboration and hanging out at the upcoming "Designing for Learning" conference in March 2011.

Business execs feel the same way. A Forbes Insight study, "The Case for Face-to-Face" (2009), notes that although videoconferencing is up by 77%, f2f conferencing remains the strong preference for 85% of the 760 respondents. Why? F2f allows them to "build stronger business relationships" and "read body language" more accurately.

Despite the penetration of new media in higher education, f2f still drives most of what happens in classrooms across the world in thousands of residential universities.

For how much longer? Anderson cites Sysco data that in 2014, 90% of the content on the Internet will be vid. We will all be crowdsourcing anything even remotely visual.

Universities are facing a choice: either embrace video & crowd sourcing, like right now. Or go the way of the RIAA, silo their content, and hope that students and their parents find brick and ivy reeeeaaaaaallly charming. Charming enough to go into debt for when u can crowdsource it--or parts of it--for free. Anderson cites JOVE, a vid sharing system for peer-reviewed science.

I know that many universities are giving away some of their curricula. But the embrace of NM can't be cordoned off into other spaces--the Open University, iTunes U, etc. It ought to refigure the university experience per se.

It would be wise to study what f2f offers learners rather than 1) hew to it because it's what we've always done; or 2) fuhgeddaboutit b/c pretty soon we'll all just skype and crowdsource our learning anyway.

Have you read/written/seen studies about the value (or lack thereof) of f2f?

Drop me a comment and lemme know!

Universal Authorship: can writing programs deal w/loss of control?

2010-09-15T17:37:00.000-07:00

John Jones over at Digital Media and Learning wonders when educators and the institutions that employ them will grok the informal writing that our students do out-of-classroom. Fanfic, FB status updates, Twitter, chats, sms: we've never written more, especially those of us under 18. So why aren't institutions jumping to board down the mountain in this flurry of writing?

Some people find snow storms scary. It's a white out, can't see anything.

Like a blank page.

Like starting over.

Jones notes that routinely we warn students against the indiscretions that social media can make a permanent record of: don't post photos of you in the maid costume chugging everclear, don't break up in status updates, don't announce where you are. Come to think of it, just don't.

Should we who teach the young suggest right there in front of the whole class what is already pretty flipping obvious: that social media is fun? Can open up entirely new ways of finding and engaging like minds? Is a great way to find tasty vittles in the wee hours of the AM? Can make you smarter?

In a cogent comment on John's article, Daria Ng observes:

Educators need to complicate the dichotomy of formal and informal writing, and instead, build up students' writer identities. If students are able to identify themselves as legitimate writers/authors from the beginning and carry these identities with them across multiple styles and modes, then perhaps the idea of expressing themselves through writing will not be something they feel necessary to hide. In order to do this, students will have to engage deeply in the writing process as well as reflective learning, so that they are constantly evaluating themselves as writers and can see all the different mediums through which their voices emerge.

Nice, eh?

I'm especially struck by the portability of identity Ng extols: the idea that learning can travel into the classroom, grow and become something else, and travel out again into the world. Like several times a day. And at the semester's end, too.

Isn't this such a better idea than locking that growth, those new and evolving writer identities, behind CMS like Blackboard where it will moulder away, untouched by another mind that could actually use the ideas contained therein?

Informal learning = lifeblood to writers.

Iraq War Entries in Wikipedia

2010-09-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

Hello Friends,

Two things caught my eye this evening. The first, from the Institute for the Future of the Book, is James Bridle's graphical representation of how many edits to Wikipedia's Iraq War entry have been made in five years: a "total of 12,000 changes and 9,000 pages" from Dec. 04-Nov. 09.

This deft image allows the viewer to gauge instantly the sheer heft of edits, but it also lends itself to deeper analysis, which Bridle does here.

He notes:
"It’s not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot. As is my wont, I made a book to illustrate this. Physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on."

Unlikely Squiggle!

2010-07-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

Unlikely Squiggle is the brainchild/walkabout/callingcard of LT Cooper, former AngeLingo editor and now post-production mac-for-hire, urbane observer, ramen expert.

Here you will find vlogs that will caffeinate you, dress you up at a con, fondle a kitted-up, 15" MacBook Pro and tour an herb garden. You'll learn how to read Kanji in just 3 months and why the microchipped ricemaker is worth the cash. In this video, the first vlog on Squiggle, Leigh counts vanity plates in one N.Virginia parking lot:

Terrific, no?

News bulletin: my son dashes in to tell me he's found a rattlesnake! Actually a garter snake, charcoal gray with a vivid orange stripe down the back and a disposition like a sloth. Around W, mellowness might kill u. This is the time to be an unlikely squiggler.

Greek Goddesses

2010-07-05T00:29:00.001-07:00

Raw Economics

2008-09-09T20:22:00.001-07:00

Brad came home from a business trip tonight--a short one, Deer Valley, UT for 3 days--and so while the kids tackled him and tied him up with robe ties and the three of them slammed each other into rugburn nirvana, I drove out to pick up sushi at the local joint.

This place is a solid place; a local, lowkey Valley place. Sarah Michelle Gellar used to frequent it back in her Buffy days. For years, getting in meant a wait; and though the wait has dwindled in the last couple of years (it's been eclipsed by Sushi Katsu-ya down the street) nevertheless it was always boisterous, a battalion of chefs in black regalia whittling slabs of fish into delicate swaths of color and texture.

Tonight, the battalion stood at attention as I walked in. Really. A long line of them behind the bar looked up expectantly when I whoosed open the door.

Three tables were occupied--a single diner at one and two forlorn couples. The place felt cavernous.

We've heard a lot about gas prices taking a bite out of spending money. It's true. But it's also a symbol, the extra expense that tipped the local sushi joint from informal dinner to luxury.

Perhaps people are driving the extra mile (literally) for prepared cali roll from TJs.

Like so many restaurants coping with skyrocketing costs, this former cash cow is trimming costs where it can. The texture of the tuna rolls was totally different. There must be some kind of filler. Some places have decreased portion size (an honesty I respect--I prefer high quality even if it means I eat less of it). My favorite coffee, Stumptown, has kept its prices steady but decreased the bag size from 1 lb to .75 lb. That's a 25% price increase.

Apparently sales for high-end lipsticks surge during economic downturns. People are looking for a little retail therapy, a little pick-me-up, that you can eek out over many days. Like lipstick and bags of coffee beans.

Sushi by definition doesn't last. It's ephemeral, a play for your eyes, nose, and mouth that asks you to take it right away. There's no tucking sushi into the fridge and making it last.

Which may be why the battalion's sushi knives weren't flashing tonight.

Transformative Reading Experience

2008-09-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

My room was the coldest one in the house, exposed to east winds as the house clung to the lip of a valley in rainy rainy Oregon. It was winter, and it was a couple years before my parents bought the space heater that would warm the room into the high 50s.

So of course I was huddled under blankets, lying beneath the gold light of a lamp that took up most of the bedside table my dad had painted when we moved into the house ten years before.

I had just become friends with Debby, a junior and a year ahead of me, who took me to the biggest bookstore I’d ever seen—Powell’s, downtown. Powell’s takes up an entire city block. Then (as now) it was a haven of used books—the prices discreetly penciled into the upper left hand corner of the first page. It was many years before barcodes and computer searches. You found things alphabetically by section, and by serendipity. In my case I found Scott Fitzgerald because Debby took me there. Her father brought her to Powell’s every birthday and bought her a stack; she’d been reading Fitzgerald for a while now.

Me, it was my first time, and so I chose the first novel, This Side of Paradise.

Back home under the blankets, a whole world opened up to me. Amory Blaine is arrogant and explicitly self-making. He goes to Princeton, invents himself, imagines a type and grows to fit it. Fitzgerald makes it clear that beneath the posing and the slick lines with fast girls beats a heart and a moral conscience, even if Amory doesn’t always heed them. It’s the classic promise attractive men make to girls—if you get to know me better, you’ll see the vulnerability beneath the wicked smile.

It worked on me as it had worked on all of America back in 1920, when this novel became an overnight sensation, ushered in the Jazz Age, and catapulted Fitzgerald and his pretty wife Zelda to a precipitous and demanding fame from which they’d never recover.

Before I read Fitzgerald, I didn’t really think I’d go to college. I didn’t see the point. My mother had never gone, my dad had dropped out. I didn’t see how it could do anything for me.

But when it dawned on me that there were colleges far away from Boring, Oregon (really the name of my town), places where people made themselves up and then launched themselves into the big world, suddenly I got interested.

I stopped reading during math (too late, really, to make much difference—I’d missed years of instruction), but at least I started making grades.

I decided there and then, before I finished This Side of Paradise, that I was going to go “back east” for college. Which I did.

And although I did eventually come west again, for a doctoral program at UC Berkeley and then a teaching job at USC, that collegiate experience “back east” is what made me. It fulfilled a promise Scott Fitzgerald whispered to me beneath the blankets.

Whasa matter with Lady Smatter?

2008-09-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking a lot right now about "pleasure" reading, and what constitutes reading itself. In my classes at USC, my students and I are exploring the reading practices and knowledge acquisition inculcated by old and new media. In this unit, we're attending to the differences between sustained reading of a book or magazine versus gathering information from the various resources available via search engines.

There are lots of people puzzling over these sorts of questions just now. Nicholas Carr's piece, "Is Google Making Us Stupid" cogently frames the concerns shared by many who went to school before the internet was invented (hey--it was invented the year I got married).

[See Carr's terrific sources and notes for his article here.]

Carr and many others fret that online reading entails too much interruption, promotes skimming rather than focus, creates "pancake people" spread wide and thin. His opening paragraphs resonated with me: I, too, find myself skimming even relatively short blog posts that are just 500 words long.

Like this one.

Carr acknowledges that new technology which alters how (or whether) we read always sparks worry, and he quotes deft examples from Socrates' distrust of writing's supplementation for memory all the way through Guttenberg and TV.

One wonders whether this cultural moment--the Googlification of reading--is genuinely revolutionary or just another battle in the centuries-old culture wars.

When it comes to feeling secure in our knowledge, writers and readers have a long history of worrying that they don't know enough, that someone else always knows more, and that the cerebral smackdown is imminent. Any pose of mastery might expose us to mockery as frauds. How much reading is enough? In The Witlings, Franny Burney satirized a type of Bluestocking-literary-salon woman as "Lady Smatter." We've always snickered at people who cram for tests because crammed knowledge rarely survives the blue book. But is this incarnation of cultural anxiety about online reading qualitatively different? Is it just another nervous response to a new technology?

Has Google rendered us a nation, a world, of Lady Smatters?

I think the story's more complex than that.

The Googlification of reading has freed us into a more brutal meritocracy.

Will the smartest kids skim extraordinary amounts of information and read deeply where necessary and/or desired? Will average kids follow their whims and read semi-unconnected bits and bobs? Will the rest read only insofar as it is necessary to send text messages and mash buttons on game consoles?

Tune in as my students and I stretch through this intellectual yoga pose.

Notes from Wish

2007-11-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

At the Farmer's Market this foggy morning, my neighbor Syd told me, I love Halloween. It's all about us, you know, it's all about the grown ups. You don't get Halloween until you're over thirty. I circle it on my calendar, I make a point of being home before sundown. It's about the kids being themselves, before the parents make them say 'thank you' a hundred and forty seven times, so that they don't even know what they're getting. I saw W melting into my window. He wanted the candy. [But Syd did not give candy: she gave peanuts in the shell, itself a truant gesture in this age of allergies, and anaphlatic shock, junior high school kids kising and one of them has eaten a PBJ for lunch and the other one goes into shock and dies. Syd gave peanuts, great handfuls of them, and stickers which W put on immediately and H tucked neatly into her orange felt bag.]

It didn't used to be like that, Syd said. I mean, I hate to sound like that, like the good ol' days, but it wasn't. When I was H's age--what is she?

Six and half.

. . .six and a half, we all would ride our bikes to the grocery store, which is now where the post office is on White Oak. And the thing is, you always knew who was in trouble, because we were all out on the street. Not happening behind closed doors. Now it's kids behind screens in their houses. Halloween is when they get out from behind their screens.

This is what Syd said to me as I fingered shiny pimento peppers in the luminous gray light.

Welcome 340 students

2007-10-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

We're going to be writing, sharing research, and hanging out.

Law firms: Who's Making Partner?

2006-09-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

51% of incoming law students are women. Only 15.4% of them make partner. Why is this the case?
Some answers here:
AngeLingo article about women lawyers