Video Overview of COMM 499

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.

The Flipped Classroom: Exploiting the Best of F2F & Screens

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

Experiments in Hybridity: F2F and Mobile Learning

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.

In-Progress: Syllabus for Comm 499

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

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.......

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

 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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

In Your Face: the New York Times & Online Learning

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.

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!