A Hyperlocal Internet Public

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.

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

[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

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.

The "Serious Magic" of Your Face

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!