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Slightly expurgated, occasionally bowdlerized
Nov. 18th, 2009
03:07 pm - When the audience gets ugly
I think teachers might want to know about the recent Higher Ed Web conference in which the audience turned on the presenter - without ever saying a word.
Backchannel chatter on Twitter heckled the presenter but no one in the room said or did anything to indicate that the presentation was dated and insultingly uninformed about the topic - which apparently it was (as well as poorly graphically designed).
Some news outlets are touting it as yet another example of riotous online types failing to respect the niceties of society (or at the very least gutting people the second they have the temerity to open their mouths), but there's also been one analysis to show that actually, the speaker had demonstrated for a quarter of an hour how poor his presentation was before the audience started to tweet that.
Isn't this what teachers are often afraid of? That their students will be commenting on the quality of their tie - or worse, their critical theory - while the teacher goes on and on, oblivious to the conversation that's actually happening?
And isn't it funny that it would actually be very easy to tune into that conversation, since it's all happening in public view?
Some people are sad that the days are over when a speaker could be listened to simply by virtue of his promotion to the position of speaker, and that the audience would meekly submit to the experience. (Did that ever even happen, outside of a classroom? Parliamentary history from around the world seems to indicate that immediate arguments, fisticuffs, even weaponry sometimes takes a part in otherwise civilized and formal discourse.) Personally, I can't be all that sad. I like my students to pay attention and in turn I pay attention to them. That's about the best I can hope for.
I like the ideas for using Twitter to keep the speaker apprised of what the audience is thinking (and conversely to remind the audience that they are "speaking" out loud and that the speaker will see it.) I tried something like that with a large group of faculty this summer and it worked well for me - not sure how well it worked for them, but it was definitely a work in progress.
Oct. 26th, 2009
05:30 pm
This very cool animation demonstrates how a curveball is really just a visual effect. Neat!
Sep. 24th, 2009
12:26 pm - Am I the only one seeing this?
In the Arts & Letters Daily right now, one article bemoans the death of English literature as a study, while in another an English professor reports on the bursting interest - and handwringing - over technology and the communication revolution.
I don't actually think that it will serve society, or our students, if English departments subside into the quiet dignity of departments of the classics. I agree that the field of English has dealt poorly with the explosion of canon and the rise of cultural interests, and anyone who has ever attended a faculty meeting must surely agree that turf-protection has largely trumped any cohesive understanding of the field.
But I must be missing something somewhere. It isn't just everyone in English, or everyone in the humanities, or even everyone in academia who's struggling to understand what the communication revolution means. It's everyone. Full stop. I mean, there are certainly farmers in Thailand who don't really care right now... but IBM for sure cares, because it intends to provide those farmers in Thailand with whatever communication technology they DO decide they want, when they want it. And if they don't ever want it, they're going to be living in quite a different world from everyone else. Following up on Genevieve Bell's papers and presentations from her anthropological study group within IBM, it's clear that communication technology either has or will touch everyone in the world, even if it's only to be consciously rejected. It's just too omnipresent.
And English departments don't have enough work to do?
They can't conjure up any common reasons why their field is still central to liberal arts?
Really?
No one is stepping forward to offer a cogent redefinition of the field that some of these authors are hearing, because the ones that have been offered are ones they don't want to hear. They don't want to hear a redefinition of English departments that doesn't contain - or isn't limited to - words they already understand, like James Joyce, Auden, or synecdoche.
But the fact of the matter is that I hope to goodness most English departments do not subside quietly into the dignity of the classics. (And I support the teaching and learning of the classics, as my old Latin teacher Mrs. Wood could attest.) I hope they start figuring out how to study the messy explosion of English that is happening all around them. It could very much use some putting in order.
Sep. 14th, 2009
06:03 pm - Cranky.
OK, look, let me just start by pointing out that I'm kind of cranky today anyway.
And let me be clear that it isn't distance learning that makes me cranky. It's the way people talk about distance learning that makes me cranky.
Laurie Fendrich's blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education pointed me at Zephyr Teachout's Washington Post/Slate essay about how higher education is going to be changed by distance education in the way that newspapers have already been changed... by distance education? Uh, no... by the Web? No... What was it... I just had it now... Oh yes, by the disintegration of their revenue model.
Let's be clear about what's killing newspapers. It's the disintegration of their revenue model due to competition from cheaper online sources... as well as the disintegration of their audience. There are probably many reasons for the disintegration of their audience. If they had been able to tackle those reasons (if that's even possible), way back when "Craigslist" was written on the wall, they might be in a salvagable state. Or, more likely, there was nothing they could do about the disintegration of their audience, because in effect their audience was happy to sink to the lowest common denominator and stay there (I'm not looking at you, Craigslist.) It is both the fact that audiences no longer apparently wish to read authoritative compilations of the day's news AND the fact that they no longer apparently wish to pay to read them that are causing newspapers' downfalls.
I think both Laurie and Zephyr are right that our public - perhaps our government too - certainly our businesses perceive college as a place where employees are trained. That's a massive failure on the part of higher education to retain our audience. We have done, are doing, and no doubt will continue to do for some time a very poor job of explaining to students what "education" - as opposed to job training - is actually for.
I think Zephyr's dead right in some of her/his observations and dead wrong in some associated predictions. While the New York Times might survive (MIGHT), it certainly is not unaffected by the disintegration of the newspaper industry. Similarly, elite institutions might well survive largely intact from the sort of sea change in higher education that Zephyr's essay describes; however, what will be gone is the idea of social mobility that attaches to those elite institutions.
If I were a very smart high school student today, challenged with the sorts of problems funding my college education today that I faced in the eighties, would I bother to try for an elite school and its associated possible financial aid? I did it in the eighties because "everyone" did. There was a tacit assumption that these schools (especially the ones with need-blind policies like my alma mater Bryn Mawr) wanted to educate the best students regardless of those students' socio-economic status. I paid the same amount to attend Bryn Mawr that I would have paid to attend a state school - no doubt comparable to what students would pay now to take their degree à la carte, whether it's through transferring to multiple campuses as is now common, or taking some or all of my credits online, as is also now common.
What I wouldn't have gotten is the social mobility that attached to my Bryn Mawr education. Would today's-me have gone to graduate school? Be self-supporting? Be Dr. Me instead of Ms. Me working at the bookstore (also slated for eventual destruction) at the mall outside of town? Probably not.
Would students today make that effort, knowing even less than I did about the value of liberal arts education not just to themselves and their careers, but to their communities and their country and the world? Why? If their parents don't convey those values to them, where would they get them? Is pop culture convincing them that universities are places where education makes it possible for them to build lives they've never even dreamed of? Solve world problems? Springboard into new futures? Are we convincing our students of that?
Personally I think it's silly to predict that massive amounts of distance learning will make us all into Metropolites. (Yes, Laurie, I've seen the movie - I've even taught it.) It's a massive leap to say that uses of social technology necessarily lead to technocratic socialism! It's a red herring, a distraction from the main issue. It's not just the revenue model that's in danger in higher education, it's the potential audience. In the same way that the public doesn't, apparently, perceive the value of a professionally edited and produced newspaper, I suspect that the public doesn't perceive the value of a great education. Ironically, education is probably to blame in both cases.
I once received some items from my grandmother that had been packed in a box for over a hundred years. The newspapers wrapped around those items were far more amazing than the items themselves (I cannot now even remember what was in the box). The country newspaper from northern West Virginia carried page-two information about politics in Mexico and Eastern Europe. I realize I'm making a leap in my assumptions about the past as large as the previous writers' assumptions about the future, but it seemed to me looking at those brown pages that the readers of that paper were interested in the news. Enough that their purchases funded that paper.
Our biggest problem isn't that our students want to be online (come on!), it's that they aren't particularly interested in becoming educated. They want job certification, not education. If we can't solve that problem, then absolutely, the few elite schools will survive, along with a lot of institutions that provide job certification. And if that happens (along with all the other economic and political problems that will cause - because an uneducated citizenry is an uncreative citizenry as well as, historically, a group of unwise voters) - if that happens, what will be lost that will be most difficult to replace is the idea of education as a meritocracy, that it can provide a path anywhere in the world, even to the Presidency, for a smart kid willing to work. That won't just be a loss to politics and industry, it will be a loss to the arts as well - it will be a loss to every field in which there has ever been a contribution made by someone who didn't have automatic entrée into truly good education.
But then, that's just the opinion of someone who knows how to put accents into my own blog.
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cranky04:42 pm - THAT's formative feedback.
This has to be my favorite quote of the day (perhaps week), from Douglas Reeves' "Remaking the Grade" in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
"The Class of 2013 grew up playing video games and received feedback that was immediate, specific, and brutal—they won or else died at the end of each game. For them, the purpose of feedback is not to calculate an average or score a final exam, but to inform them about how they can improve on their next attempt to rule the universe.
Imagine a class in any other subject, from science to classics, conducted in the same way. The students wail, "Does it count?" and the professor responds, "I'm just giving you feedback to improve your performance—try to do better next time." I have never heard students thank their Nintendo machine for its insightful feedback, but I have observed many of them respond more attentively to those machines than to their professors."
Sep. 4th, 2009
12:48 pm - Data warehousing... in a non-painful way.
The question for this year is shaping up to be data mining. We're gathering a lot of data that we need to use (or would like to use) for program assessment as well as student success and retention. We're going to need to start gathering it and reporting on it in a reasonable way.
When I see another school being the bellwether on a topic that is so current and so fraught, I rejoice. Because when someone else has done something really difficult, complicated, and hard, that means the next step is to do 80%-95% of the same thing in a simpler, cheaper, faster way. Usually the bellwethers go on to forge the trail and those of us in the next wave do something that's a little more sustainable, a little quicker to deploy, a little more standardized... and therefore reproducible.
So many of the web services available now are built on SQL that getting data out of them is trivial. But it won't be the data we need in the format in which we'll need it. Those export projects are going to be the first step; building a repository in a sane, reasonable way is going to be the second. (Does everyone cringe when they hear "data warehouse" or is that just me?) And I'm very encouraged by what I'm hearing about improved ability to get data out of Blackboard. In that case I'll just be pleased to get data out of it at all. It's not a question of being surprised by how gracefully the bear dances, but of being (pleasantly) surprised by the fact that the bear can in fact dance.
H1N1 prep isn't overshadowing everything, at least not at my school. I wonder if my colleagues at other schools are seeing this coming up as the next big thing?
Aug. 28th, 2009
04:16 pm
I agree so vehemently with Tim Clydesdale's "Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology", featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, that it seems a shame to disagree with any of it.
Tim's absolutely right about who our students are, and I suspect he's also right that the type of instruction he's proposing would greatly improve the public's respect for academia as well. (I also think, though, that education and research are coming a bit more into fashion; I suspect that some members of the public will be influenced by President Obama's obvious respect for research and the processes of science, just as some members of the public were probably influenced by President Bush's lack of same.)
I have to add, though, that I've brought up this idea of the public good before and been informed by the people who follow public opinion surveys that the public no longer believes that education is a public good. I suspect, though I don't have confirmation for this, that the public no longer believes in public good, period. The debates we are currently having over health care, for instance, simply could not take place in a society that adopted as its beginning axiom the idea that there is such a thing as the public good, followed by the idea that a democratically elected government should serve to secure as much of that public good as possible for all citizens.
I don't know exactly when the idea of education as a public good disappeared. I know the GIs who attended college in droves after World War II certainly benefited from the idea of education as a public good. There are substantial GI benefits in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act that passed in this previous Congress. Someone out there still believes in something like education as a public good - but most people, apparently, don't.
I think the most valuable outcome of adopting Tim Clydesdale's approach to teaching would be students who had a way into knowledge, who saw the path their teachers had walked and realized that they too could walk that path. That's the way to raise more engineers and scientists, or even thoughtful dancers and writers. Students need to see that the field raises real, unsolved problems, and they have to get excited about the possibility of solving those problems, if they are to become involved in research and contribute new knowledge.
Many of us fear showing students that aspect of ourselves - how we found our way into the knowledge we have now - because we fear for its authenticity. One of my most esteemed faculty mentors once said to me, "Every semester I fear that the students will find out that I am a fraud." He was smiling at the time but it wasn't much of a joke. Good teachers know how much they don't know, and they often are painfully aware of the narrowness of their own specialties. And when you're one of only a few dozen people in the world who even follow that particular research topic, how validated can you be in your knowledge?
Tim Clydesdale's epistemology calls for braver faculty willing to show their vulnerabilities, and that's not going to be easy to do.
But at the same time, the second most valuable outcome of adopting such a teaching strategy would be reversing the trend away from viewing education as a public good. Personally, I think education is vital to democracy, and that's why it's a public good; not because it certifies any particular worker to take any particular job. I kinda want the rest of my country to share that view, at least a little. Higher education has a lot of work to do to change that perception, and we've abandoned it as a task that we must do for a very long time. We're going to have to sweat to catch up. But he's absolutely right that the calls for accountability will not go away. And personally I would like to have more public support for higher education - financial support, but also the sort of support where the public has faith in its universities and professors and the work that they do.
Jul. 30th, 2009
02:00 pm
Last week Mark Bauerlein published in the Chronicle Review a call for reassigning the attention of scholars in the humanities to teaching rather than producing criques-as-performances that no one wants or needs to read (Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research).
Several of the commenters on the site have already gestured toward what I would say about his article. There's way too much publication about Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, and Hamlet. (Let me say that I adore Wallace Stevens.) In the years since 1985 when all that performative criticism has exploded, so has publication and distribution of literature in englishes around the world, as well as movies, television, radio, drama, and the whole universe of electronic media/texts. There are also still medieval manuscripts that have yet to be translated and made available to scholars. And in between the very old and the very new there are plenty of authors - and texts - worth explicating, with or without performance.
I agree that tenure review portfolios should be trim and excellent. I also agree that attention should be showered on the teaching enterprise, which always receives short shrift at other people's schools but is always paramount at "ours" no matter who the "we" is.
But he must realize that his argument is a straw man. There's been overpublishing on the biggest English literature topics, so the humanities needs to spend more time on students? Please. If anything, students in the humanities deserve to know how Wallace Stevens or James Joyce or Hamlet inform the world around them. The political right made that a task related to "cultural heritage" and made it suspect to the left, so the left dropped it. Nonetheless the legacy of those authors belongs to every reader of English and we are currently giving it too scant attention. At the same time there is plenty of basic research to be done in English and in the humanities in general regarding what is usually overlooked material, because if the new scholars don't cluster around the old material, the old scholars overlook them. Graduate students who are foolish enough to forge out into uncharted territory are guaranteeing themselves NO job interviews in departments where the preponderance of the faculty are still only interested in discussing Joyce. Unable to judge between good truly investigative, groundbreaking scholarship and poor dissertations on whatever books or movies the researcher liked in high school, existing faculties fail to support the exploration of truly new territories in their fields.
Full sour grapes disclosure: I do think I know whereof I speak. The last postcolonial studies conference I attended was "Inside the Whale" in Northampton in July 2003. I gave rather a good talk, I thought, about Peter Carey... which went over like a lead balloon. The conference participants were all friendly, encouraging people, so my only conclusion was that I was an idiot. Perhaps it showed on my face, because later on in the conference, a very senior researcher I respected tremendously was nice enough to make small talk with me while walking from one building from another, and he was also nice enough to say "I just don't think they know the work."
I was stunned. Peter Carey is a popular author not just in his native Australia but in America too; movies have been made of his work (good movies) and his work is incredibly rich literature rewarding academic study as well. The book I was analyzing, his first book of short stories, was (I believe at the time) the bestselling book the University of Queensland Press had ever published. I expect a certain amount of provincialism in America regarding other countries' literatures in english, but in Britain? I was shocked.
And discouraged. And while I am satisfied enough with it, I obviously have not had the sort of academic career that a young graduate student would want to emulate.
I'm not arguing with Mark Bauerlein on teaching; I'm sure we in the humanities could do it better. But that isn't the most direct correlation with overpublishing in our field. The most directly related problem is that in the humanities we are very poor at mapping out new territory with good scholarship.
Jul. 20th, 2009
02:27 pm
For everyone but for Boot Campers especially:
This video of José Bowen talking about technology and teaching is right on. (The associated Chronicle article is here.) I think few faculty are ready to hear this but I agree with his take. Computers in the classrooms are a red herring - though Dean Bowen's position sort of presupposes students will have laptops and can bring them to work together in a wireless environment if you want them to. (I think we should be able to presuppose that, don't you? But one can't unless one's school has a requirement that makes sure that students who don't have laptops - usually for financial reasons - can get one.) But using the technology OUTSIDE of class to regain the time you have to interact INSIDE the classroom - I'm right there with you on that one, José!
Jul. 7th, 2009
May. 14th, 2009
02:17 pm
A blog in the Wall Street Journal suggests that people are starting to think "monopoly" when they think "Google".
If Google were indeed a monopoly in the web search business, who exactly does that hurt? Other startup companies that want to be in that business? Google may be competition-proof but I don't think of that as a very malignant type of monopoly.
Meanwhile Blackboard Inc. has bought Angel Inc., its only commercial competitor in the learning management system space. Some folks may be congratulating themselves for adopting Moodle or Sakai, both open-source LMSs, instead of a commercial solution.
But open-source LMSs take resources to implement and to develop, resources that are devoted by the institutions of higher learning who adopt them.
Institutions of higher learning who believe their business is higher learning and not software development might reasonably want a choice of commercial LMSs to buy instead of build. Now they have no choices except the one company with the least innovative, most expensive product. I did not work with Prometheus, the first LMS that Blackboard Inc. bought and killed, but I was very familiar with WebCT and have become familiar with Angel, and while they both used very different back-end technology, the merits of which nerds like me can debate endlessly, both were vastly better experiences for the teacher (possibly even for the teacher and the learner) than Blackboard.
The rising cost of higher education has become a serious issue in this country. Cuts in state and federal funding have contributed to those rising costs, as have utility bills and a host of other expensive issues. But software vendors like Blackboard also contribute to those costs, constantly raising prices and cutting services and holding hostage colleges and universities who just want to be able to teach using technology in appropriate ways. An LMS at a university is like a car in the country: you gotta have one or you can't get from here to there. You can drive it responsibly or you can crash it into a tree but you can't not have one.
If the Obama administration seriously wants to cap higher education costs, I wish they would take a closer look at this merger. The SEC might have ruled that the sale does not violate anti-trust laws, but they are incorrect. There is now no competition in commercial LMSs, and it's an area where competition is sorely needed.
May. 6th, 2009
02:21 pm - Speaking of MarketFail...
I know many people are dissatisfied with the resolution of AmazonFail, pointing to at least one documented case where Amazon failed to reimburse a self-publisher of e-books when those books contained LGBT themes, while books that did not were handled just fine.
Whether or not Amazon is a company Out to Get the Gays (and I hope that it is not), it's not the only example of the difficulty of operating an online merchant that crosses state and national and cultural lines.
Right now there's a bottle of perfume on eBay that I'd like to bid on. When I click the item - which still appears just fine on searches - I get this message:
"Dear User:
Unfortunately, access to this particular listing or item has been blocked due to a Paris commercial court decision that bans trade of certain authentic perfumes and cosmetic products on eBay because of French selective distribution laws. eBay is appealing this ruling but is nevertheless required to enforce it. We are blocking your viewing in an effort to comply with this court decision. Regrettably, in some cases, we may prevent users from accessing items that are not within the scope of the decision because of limitations on existing technology.
Thank You.
Hit the return button to return to the previous page."
Before eBay, I would not have had the option of buying a partially used bottle of perfume, French or not. Now I have that option -but a Paris commercial court is blocking me.
I can buy that same perfume, unused and new, from several distributors in the U.S. But because this is not a recognized reseller, I am not allowed to buy this partial bottle from an eBay seller.
National and international restrictions, almost always prompted by corporate concerns, about what can and can't be sold, are the limitations to Chris Anderson's theory of the Long Tail. The technology exists for a potentially infinitely large market, especially for media products - but the corporations make it impossible to really exploit that market for what it's worth.
If the market were truly based on competition, and if products could be considered no longer the property of the corporations once they were first sold, there should be no restrictions on things such as selling a partial bottle of perfume on the web.
But because intellectual property comes with strings - license considerations, controlled appellations, brand identities and so on - corporations try to protect their holdings by blocking such secondary sales wherever they can.
At the same time corporations like exclusive distribution rights. So Disney will distribute their movies via iTunes, just as Luckyscent will distribute Montale perfumes and Beauty.com won't. And what looks like a very open, democratic system of distribution simply isn't, and is maintained that way. If a niche perfumer, an independent filmmaker, or a new author wanted to self-distribute via the web, how would new customers ever locate their product? Viral marketing can work for them, but unless their product is a breakaway hit and therefore picked up by one of the larger distributor networks, they will always remain smaller than the smallest of the products distributed by the larger corporations.
These latest rounds of "fails" - aren't they really just the latest generation of netizens realizing that the web looks open but isn't?
Apr. 13th, 2009
11:32 am - AmazonFail and questions of social networking
My blogosphere indeed alerted me to AmazonFail yesterday, and my partner wanted to know if I would include it in my class.
I think I will, because it's interesting in a number of ways:
1) for the speed of the negative response and the size of it and the fact that it can be noted in venues as respectable (and not normally immediate) as Publishers' Weekly.
2) for the attribution to the speed of the response to the Twitterverse more than blogs. Possibly because they are sexier, though I doubt that news traveled faster via Twitter than by blogs. Interesting if anyone could measure that.
3) for the poor quality of Amazon's response, obviously, but also for the fact that I doubt any other response is possible. Mega-corporations are neither good at nor quick at damage control when a public relations problem occurs. Neither are medium- or small-sized corporations. It is inherently difficult to design a business process that can differentiate between many small unrelated issues and one large one. I would be interested to know what sort of escalation process this went through yesterday and today. I would also be interested in finding a better one; God knows we could use that in our organization too. There must be work processes out there designed to differentiate these; I need to do some research on that.
4) but most importantly, for the fact that social networking tools have been abused. Whether they were abused by the company or by do-badders, like any other form of voting, social networking tools (like the rankings) require trust and collaboration from users. We've already studied this in the class and my students immediately settled on the idea that such social systems are Good and Reliable. Really? We've already talked about the fact that such systems rely on unpaid labor. (Is it really a good thing that Wikipedia, for instance, relies on the unpaid labor of all its contributors? If it is, what about Don Tapscott's claims that such work can revolutionize industry? How much unpaid labor in the pool is OK before it becomes a problem that a significant amount of the labor is never paid for, and that the companies profit from it directly? If this is the kind of work available to be done in the future, how will people live if they don't get paid from doing that kind of work? What sorts of work are they going to be paid for in the 21st-century economy?)
This is a flip side of that same coin. What if the labor contributed is not in good faith? Users may blame Amazon for adding a system that allows users to flag "adult" content. Personally, for me that's only about a 25% on the "stupid shit-o-meter". I can see the value to a company of being able to say "If our customers want to object to listings, we give them a tool to do so, and if enough of them do so, we don't strip the listing but we do remove some key features like sales ranks that might allow some people to stumble across the title rather than find it directly by searching for it." However, the real problem seems to me the concerted effort someone made to remove these titles from the system by abusing it. If that's really the tool and that's really how it works - and of course I could be proven wrong on that, but that seems to be what Amazon is claiming at this time and though we are cynical it is generally even worse policy for a company to flat-out lie than to be caught being stupid - then the problem is that someone exploited the tool for their own political ends. The tool was vulnerable to concerted political movement, when it may have been intended only to register the individual personal preferences of a random user, no more concerted than the average Google search or Flickr tag.
And that's primarily why I do believe that it was a troll attack, whether it was by some right-wing organization or by semi-pro trollz for lulz. It doesn't actually remove any GLBT content from Amazon, nor does it really affect most searches. It DOES cause a massive PR headache for Amazon and probably long-term losses (though perhaps negligible) in sales. It gets Amazon negative publicity, and no matter what they tell you to get you to appear on reality shows, it is NOT true that any coverage is good coverage. And unless Amazon has some massive company problem bigger than I can see with a five-minute reading of their January SEC filing, they have no reason to want negative publicity nor do they seem to have anything going on that requires the censorship which would be outweighed by the negative publicity. (Someone else who's better at this than me want to skim this baby?) I can't see any legal proceeding listed that would cause them to try to bow to anyone's insistence that they remove material from their listings. (I am curious about the bump in operating expenditures and related debt in 2008 - that must feel unwise to them now in the slumping economy - I suspect many people have cut back on Amazon spending this year. But they appear to have paid off a large lump of back taxes in 2007 and be in relatively good financial shape, though growth has slowed.)
Traditionally speaking, causing headaches for people is what trolling is all about. Changing their basic business model for yuks is simply not what large corporations do. Amazon's basic business model depends on The Long Tail - customers being able to find even tiny niche products that they want aided by sophisticated search engines and social information aggregation. They've done dumb stuff before (anyone else remember the "Hey, I get different prices based on what machine I'm using!" stupidity of, oh, about 2000?) but on the whole Amazon is larger now and with largeness comes, not less stupidity, but more immobility. I very much doubt that there was a business plan inside Amazon that said "Hey, let's remove GLBT content, but let's remove it over Easter weekend when, uh, all the GLBT/friendly folks will be, uh, eating chocolate eggs! So they won't notice! Yeah!" That doesn't sound plausible to me. It DOES sound plausible to me that Amazon, operating internationally and with a lot of concerns about decency laws and various censorship laws, might quietly debut a tool to allow social information to include information about "adultness" just as they do about popularity. Obviously this isn't a campaign against sex in general, or Amazon's excellent vibrator and lube selections would also be gone. I very much doubt that it is a campaign against GLBT content either. I suspect it is a troll abusing that tool, an attack to which Amazon let itself be vulnerable by debuting the tool too quietly and by not having a communication plan in place if the tool were to be abused. If Amazon is to be blamed for anything, it might be that they should be blamed for not realizing that social networking can be abused and that not all the negative outcomes of such abuse could be smoothed over with the automated/mass emails they obviously kept on tap for complaints about the uses of the system. After that, we can blame them for investigating ways of quietly censoring works that don't meet with the approval of some or many people. But I'm not a person who believes that absolutely nothing should be censored, so I'm not the person for that campaign.
However, that's just my take and it's just my take on a Monday morning. Let's see how this develops.
Mar. 22nd, 2009
12:37 pm
NY Times interviews Anne Mulcahy of Xerox.
"We talk a lot about execution and the importance of it. But I actually think it’s a lot more about followership — that your employees are volunteers and they can choose to wait things out if they don’t believe. And that can be very damaging in a big company. So it is absolutely this essence of creating followership that becomes the most important thing that you can do as a leader."
Mar. 16th, 2009
12:47 pm - Thinking the Unthinkable
A wonderful colleague passed on to me today Clay Shirky's blog post "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" (online at Mr. Shirky's own blog at www.shirky.com).
I hate jumping on the bandwagon only to find out that the bandwagon has not only left, it has taken everyone to the party and the party's been had and in fact the bandwagon is coming back the other way loaded with drunks and empties.
I have a feeling, though, that this party's just really getting started. We can't help but notice the ongoing collapse of the news industry in general (this is about newspapers but I would argue, especially based on some of Ted Koppel's address to the AAMC in November, that it's really all of news we're talking about), and since the United States is a democracy and a democracy depends on access to fair and honest information this is an issue of burning concern for all Americans at the very least.
[I really do have a feeling too that more Americans would be up in arms about the collapse of the news industry if we had HAD fair and honest reporting over the last eight, nine (ten, twelve - pick your number) years in this country. But that's beside the point now. Or maybe just beside the point for this particular blog post.]
I've been worried about this topic a long time. So much so that I'm now teaching a class that as far as I know is unique in combining textual analysis with market analysis. Not to toot my own horn. I'm teaching Myth 2.0: Global Storytelling and its Sales precisely because I think my students in global studies need to have some tools for thinking about not just global media, but global media markets.
The short form is: the only increasing parts of the economy (certainly America's but possibly the world, to extend Robert Reich's book in a way he wouldn't necessarily authorize) are those based on symbolic analysis, to use his terms, or creative information/entertainment production, to use mine. In a digital world, the old economic models for creative production break down immediately. (They are also immediately global in scope - but not usually in content, which is an interesting conundrum/opportunity.) So what stocks do you buy - Washington Post or Google? Do you have reasons? And how does that affect the economy, right down to the individual worker, right down to the individual voter? Right now and for the last twenty years markets have trumped governments or any other sort of organization. Corporation goals have trumped democracy's goals. For how long will that be true? And how do you fight it, if you want to fight it, given the strength of markets? My students have to decide that for their own generation, maybe for mine.
I take issue with one of the points from the Shirky article. If you had asked me in 1996 about Craigslist I would have said "Well there goes newspapers." To me, even with my rudimentary understanding of the revenue model that made newspapers possible, it was sad but obvious; to an editor it was unthinkable. A net-savvy newspaperman might have said differently; not a real online geek. I have some of the same concerns about education, quite frankly. Everyone in higher ed assumes the current model will persist because of its benefits; pretty much no one I've ever talked to or read outside higher ed assumes the same thing.
That aside, I think there are two key texts everyone interested in these catastrophic moments of change should read right now. Maybe three. Certainly the top two are Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, which is the first book I've seen explaining how markets really work in an online environment. No one used to a traditional editing or publishing model will like it; nonetheless I think it's accurate. The other is Don Tapscott's Wikinomics. I'm more suspicious of this book. But it's important because it's a key explanation of how the top 1% of moneymakers are thinking now (and I would include publishers in that category.) If they're not thinking that way, they're trying to figure out how to think that way. Wikinomics is a great model for generating value for everyone except the worker. Even my students totally bought into it; they think it's self-explanatory, revolutionary, the way things are going to go. When I asked them how, if they were to work in a wikinomics world, they were going to pay their bills? They looked worried. There are no good answers yet, but at least these are some of the interesting questions.
The other text I might recommend is David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. It gets a bit abstruse (if I'm using that word right; I'm unable to choose between abstract and obtuse - anyway, it's highly theoretical but I think it explains the theories with excellent examples). I think it's critical to anyone who doesn't already live in an online way to understand why information (and that includes news) in a digital environment is fundamentally different from information in an analog one.
I recommend books because at heart I'm a teacher. It's what I do. I would be very interested in any type of discussion that might help us formulate the experiments called for. I have no interest in and no time for hand-wringing and sign-waving about how this is bad. Of course it's bad, at least for democracy and for our economy and probably everyone else's. It's still going to happen. And there are key issues about censorship and about the flow of information and about rights in a digital market, even a long tail market, even a wikinomics market, that are only starting to be raised in the mainstream though I know scholars have been working on it for a while. Have you seen the NYT article about China's grass-mud horse? China's online censorship is one of the scariest examples of current fascism extant, and I doubt many people are paying attention; but they should. We are joined to China at the hip. Moreover if the New York Times didn't bring out this article, who would? If the news industry really collapses, who will?
Yes, others. I know. I read Wikinomics, I read The Long Tail. But how will we find it and how will we know what to look for? Those books, again, explain market forces, not democratic forces. How will the best new news gain credibility? Reliability? How will it make it to the head of the market and become profitable?
Anyone else have any books/texts they can recommend for me?
Feb. 19th, 2009
04:15 pm - Sita Sings, People Listen
Apparently "Sita Sings the Blues" is going to be shown on PBS on March 7. It will be available at least at the New York PBS station's website, WNET, and I'm not sure what's going to be happening with it after that, but there seems to be some movement toward other types of distribution? I'm very excited to see this movie get broader distribution!
Jan. 20th, 2009
10:04 pm - Happy Inauguration Day, everyone!
This is Frank.
Frank was my taxi driver in San Antonio the day after the presidential election of 2008. I did not really enjoy San Antonio (though I did enjoy the conference), and I definitely did not enjoy spending Election Day away from my family and watching all the returns with my beloved and later with my brother via phone calls. I was leery of whether or not the denizens of Texas would be as excited about the previous night's results as I was.
Taxi drivers often want to chitchat and for some reason I attract this behavior. I am always treated to stories of their girlfriends, their previous jobs, their previous residences, and the tattoo parlors they run on the side. I didn't know if this guy would want to chat and I very much feared that if he said anything negative about Obama, anything at all, I was going to commit the sort of offense that might end up with me arrested instead of on my plane safely out of Texas.
Frank, the taxi driver, initiated the conversation.
"It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"
I agreed that it was.
"A great day. A great day."
I agreed that it was.
"There's really only one question left to answer."
Paralyzed by worry about what he might say next, I made only a noncommittal noise indicating that he could continue.
He looked in the rear view mirror. "What the hell was going on with that dress?"
I loved Frank.
We discussed for a minute the disastrous dress, because I couldn't figure out what the hell HAD gone on with that dress - I felt, and still feel, that the dress Michelle Obama wore on the night of the election was startlingly bad, and I am surprised still, because she's usually so fantastic in her fashion choices - and I was glad to find, for a moment, a kindred soul who felt my pain and my puzzlement and asked the big questions that were plaguing me as well.
I took this picture before I went into the airport. I promised him I was going to put it on my blog. Everything looked a little better as I entered the little airport. I was still eager to get the hell out of Texas but I was feeling a lot better about San Antonio, my fellow Americans, and the world in general.
I hope you get famous from me posting your picture in my blog, Frank. That day was the beginning of the change from the old world to the new one. I hope you had as hopeful an Inauguration Day as I had.
It's the first day of a new America, and I for one am very, very glad.
I never thought we'd get here either, Frank, yet here we are.
Jan. 14th, 2009
10:55 am - Odd thing on the road this morning.
Two white Ford Freestars bearing "Office of Customs and Border Control" logos on the sides had their emergency (roof) lights running while they escorted between them a black van with ratty paint. The van was full of narrow, tall boxes, taped up with tape in different colors, full to the roof. All three of them had DHS license plates (the last Freestar had DHS 26686) in addition to some plate I didn't recognize that started with PA and was green lettering on a black background, a smaller plate in addition to the DHS plates. I couldn't tell if the white plain truck in front of them was part of the caravan, but it too had the smaller black PA plate, but its white plate didn't start DHS, it started GB2.
It didn't feel good, seeing them on the road. Why would DHS have a "ratty" black van? (There were no dents or scrapes on it, just areas where it looked like the paint had come off or been covered with primer.) And why escort it with lights? And if they're border control, what border are they going to? If it's Canada, I don't know why they would detour through Long Island. (They were heading north on Peninsula Boulevard between 10:30 and 10:40 this morning.) It didn't seem like it could be that urgent, since the passenger in the front Freestar was reading what looked like a tabloid newspaper. But then why the lights?
The Department of Homeland Security makes me paranoid (indeed, that is their job), but this just didn't feel good, especially six days before inauguration.
Jan. 5th, 2009
02:04 pm - Hope.
I forgot to post after my last semi-apocalyptic essay:
When I returned I went to a workshop our math department had set up to learn about SmartBoards. Nothing fancy, nothing difficult; they wanted to know and we wanted to teach them.
It was SO much fun and so heartening. These people really want to know. These people were bursting with ideas on different things to do in their classes, and they immediately slotted in the things we could tell them about how SmartBoards behave and started plotting new uses.
I forgot that this is always what's out there. It's too easy for technology people to get down on the faculty and vice versa. But when the partnership works it's so lovely. We are lucky here; our faculty really care about teaching and they care about their students. Whenever we can help them find something new and useful to help them in their teaching, it's a good day.
There will be this work to do for a long time.
Nov. 3rd, 2008
06:52 pm - The economy meltdown and instructional technology
Ted Koppel and Darrell G. Kirch, M.D, AAMC '08
Ted Koppel would get along great with my partner. Both are very interesting and educational on the topic of why the world is going to the dogs fast.
The keynote panel at the annual meeting of the American Association of Medical Colleges offered a lot of food for thought, including an overview of the possibilities of genomic medicine that I almost followed and found quite interesting. Darrell G. Kirch, M.D, the current president of the AAMC, gave a lucid and pointed address essentially asking his colleagues to ask themselves some hard questions.
Ted Koppel followed up in much the same vein but on a larger scale. There is no big pot of money coming down the pike anytime soon to solve anyone's problems, much less the problems of our health care system or educating our students to take their places within it.
It was an eye-opening set of talks because I came straight to AAMC from EDUCAUSE '08, the national academic IT conference. At EDUCAUSE my colleagues were preparing for belt-tightening and trying to be optimistic about the "challenges". But I didn't hear anyone offering any potential massive change. And only massive change is going to help IT lower the costs of higher education in the coming years instead of helping to raise it.
I'm not talking about doing what can't be done. The HEA reauthorization adds some 70 new programs and 110 new reporting requirements, all of which are, as I understand it, unfunded. The strategy of passing laws for education without funding them can't go on forever.
However, in an environment where costs for higher education have gone up so much - and anxiety about those costs has gone up even more - it seems clear to me that revolutionary change, not incremental change, is what's going to allow innovative colleges and universities to take the leap to the next generation of learning tools AND save money at the same time. Juxtaposing this with the presentation Gardner Campbell and James Groom gave about UWM's blog educational publishing system, and it seemed even more on target to me. Maybe it's my own personal history or perception, but it seems to me we've invested too much in LMSs that practically prohibit student interaction, and don't reserve resources for these faster-moving "nimble" experiments in true web 2.0 learning tools.
( I'll put the rest of this behind a tag for those who have already had enough... )
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