Metamedia

Chris Lott's "From Plato to Perl: the Problem of Sociality and the 'Idea' " Presentation

Here are some resources from Chris Lott's visionary concluding keynote presentation this morning at the 2009 Teaching w/ Technology Idea Exchange. This is an inspiring and thought provoking address, at a distinctly different level of thinking than the usual educational technology ideas.

The concluding ten minutes are especially important as Chris touches on of the most fundamentally important parts of teaching and learning that we rarely talk out loud about: love.

Presentation Links

• Chris's blog post with links to script and slides
• Link to the ustream.tv stream or play below:

:

Liz Coleman's call to reinvent liberal arts education

I have been a liberal arts generalist all my life, even during my professional moments of technical expertise. The reason I am not a full-time academic is because my beliefs in the role of the liberal arts generalist and the basic interconnectedness and interdisciplinary nature of those studies were not welcomed nor supported during my graduate school years by my mentors in an elite Ivy League university, where my interest in teaching and crossing disciplines was seen as quaint at best, and a professional liability at worst. Which, it turned out, it was, for my future in that profession, though not for me as a person.

The generation of Trilling and Barzun were my exemplars, and I even had the good fortune to know one of the finest men of that tradition, Ainslee Embree. But such a tradition was of no avail to aid me as I realized my only option for acceptance in the academy was to abandon such ideas for the minutiae of over-specialization and research. Instead, I choose the alternate path of technology, at least professionally.

So, for me, Liz Coleman's words of critique are powerful thoughts I recognize as my own, long abandoned, which raise pangs of regret for what might have been, but was impossible twenty five years ago in my life and situation.

In particular, the death of the voice of the learned generalist has been silenced in the public sphere, abandoned to an academy of the specialized who speak only with each other, with no one to speak to or for the public - a void, as Coleman notes, happily and opportunistically filled by ignorant theocratic ideologues.

I hope her words may be heeded so that others in the next generation will have options I did not.

Random Incompleteness: This Is Not a Collection

Collections of physical objects, such as in libraries, galleries, and museums, have the property of "random incompleteness."

Random Incompleteness arises from the fact that collections are put together as a result of a series of historical accidents.

An item's provenance is usually an odd confluence of the eccentricities of the collector and the buying opportunities on a pubic or private market: the death or indigence the artist, heir, family, or any string of post hoc collectors; the conquest of a city by an opposing army; legal entanglements; or more or less outright theft.

As a result, the distinct physical objects - the works of an artist, group, period, movement or style - will be physically scattered, and any one collection will not only be physically incomplete, in that it does not have all such works, but this incompleteness skews the context and perceptions of the original works.

It represents a bygone world in which accurate knowledge of, and physical travel to, the places in which these works originated was difficult, expensive, and impossible for all but the wealthiest and most adventurous -- that world before 'Eighty Days Around the World,' before the arising of Abundant InfoWorld.

From the Teaching Perspective

To a teacher trying to teach, this random incompleteness means that being forced to use any particular collection hobbles, always to some degree, their ability to select items for educating.

There will be random gaps in items needed that will have to be filled from some other source. A teacher may need other angles of a picture, a close up or detail, other works by the artist, or related artists, or works from the same town, country, period, or even different cultures altogether.

Where will that source be?

Anywhere or anyone. Any teacher, any student, any tourist. Any book, any colleague's slide.

To the teacher, what matters is that it is driven by pedagogical need, not the exigences of the collection process.

No collection of physical objects could hope to have this level of completeness, not even collections of collections.

When faculty complain about the expensive online software products built around collections, they say things like, "It doesn't have the other version, the right angle, the different lighting, the related items I need, the proper context."

And it never will.

But their answer is unfortunately to attempt with limited, yet expensive, resources to build a competing private collection of their own; to fly around the world on sabbatical and take the pictures they want (at least to the extent allowed to) and then keep them to themselves. To build yet another collection suffering from Random Incompleteness.

Individual faculty have their own collections, departments have their own collections, school libraries have their own collections, consortiums have their own collections -- and all do and will suffer from Random Incompleteness.

They are doing today's job with yesterday's concepts.

Building The Ultimate Collection

Indeed the only way to overcome this inherent property of Random Incompleteness is to create the collections of all collections that are and then engage every interested person to fill in the gaps: a universally shared, crowd-sourced collection. (Sound familiar?)

But this is entirely doable in the digital world -- if the "owners" of those objects start to realize that the images of the thing are not the thing -- if they start to understand the principles of information at work in Abundant InfoWorld are not those based on the hoarding of a physical object.

What we need is not more sets of independent, limited item and limited access collections of reproductions of items in collections, but total open access to the ultimate complete digital collection from which we can choose anything according to teaching and learning needs.

Linktributions

• http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/lacmas-magritte-exhi.html
• http://www.23hq.com/magnus_wurzer/photo/952468
• http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/high/Lauren-cards.htm
  

Captain Cook, Blogger

Captain Cook was a blogger.

So were the scientists and other Gentlemen in his crew, even some of the mates. They didn't have the word blogger yet, but they were writing something part log, part journal, part essay. And what they blogged was the raw material for published books: very influential books.

I just finished the wonderful biography by Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook.

One of the major themes of Thomas' view of Cook is his growth and transformation as a person and a writer during each of the three voyages, especially the first two. Cook is transformed by his personal experiences of managing first contacts with other cultures, and it is reflected in his journals.

He starts as a prosaic logger of voyage realia, but develops into a reflectic, aware writer, using his journals to help him come to some understanding of the novelties of cross cultural contact.

Of course, there are differences between the late 18th century journal and a modern blog: privacy, for one.

But the differences are not as much as we think.

It was evident that all the journal writers on Cook's voyages talked to each other and interacted with each other about the issues in their journals. They write drafts, then change them later in light of such conversations.

And when back in England, the journals are collected together, read and scrutinized by committees, and then edited into books -- some telling the officially sanctioned stories that the Admirality wanted to promulgate, and some not.

As the raw material of popular books, these journals became enormously influential in creating the perceptions that fueled empire:  New Zealand was understood to have an already complex indigenous civilization and so was bargained with by formal treaty, hence Waitangi Day; while the "savages" on the eastern coast of Australia did not (and to some, still do not), hence the treatyless Invasion of Australia.

Did we mention the myth of Tahiti as a tropical sexual paradise?

But most of all, the journals of Cook show us the complexities of real life, of a real person dealing with unprecedented experiences the best he could, belying the superficial symbols of Cook as either The Bringer of Civilization or The Corruptor of Paradise.

In the future, will the blogs of today become primary source material for historians?

Yes, if they can be found....

Necessary But Not Sufficient: Wikiphobia and Middlebury

Last night's podcast of the Great Wikipedia Debate  featured among others Don Wyatt, chair of the History department at Middlebury.

The most interesting facet of the discussion was its structure: after each of the main speakers stated their positions on the issue, it was evident that everyone was in a agreement with the Middlebury decision and its appropriateness.

So, after five minutes, it seemed there was nothing to discuss.

But the discussion did go on and was fascinating at times as the main issue was danced about, surrounded, avoided, touched on, glanced at, but never quite grappled with: the Middlebury decision is a tactical disengagement from a much larger strategic issue.

As I analyzed in my previous post on this topic, traditional sources of knowledge validation used today in Academia are print based and privilege its particular notion of authorship over content, while Wikipedia is based on an interactive digital medium that privileges content over authorship, and though written is not a print based medium.

So it will be clear from that point of view that the Middlebury decision is Necessary but Not Sufficient:

• Necessary as a restatement of the traditional modes of knowledge authentication appropriate to its environment,
• but Not Sufficient because it does not bring us any closer to solving the problem of knowledge authentication in this new medium.

Perhaps the traditional Liberal Arts College is not the place to look for this, if it believes it that its mission is only to train students for dealing with one type of knowledge medium, but not another; if it believes that faculty should stick only to the traditional methods of publishing and contributing knowledge to society. 

But students of today will receive more and more of their information from non-print sources. They will have to deal with it somehow.

Is it not the job of the liberal arts education to educate them to do so? If not liberal arts colleges, then who will ?

The future is going digital. Middlebury can put up its hands and say ''It's not my job," if it wants to, but if it and other institutions like it do so, then the same thing will happen that happened when television became popular and signaled a shift from print based popular sources.

It is not a coincidence that the precipitous decline and fall of the American intellectual from the public sphere in the last half of the twentieth century happened when intellectuals responded to Televisuality with those same words: "It's not our job."

The ghost of Lionell Trilling lingers on and is both more important, and more irrelevant, than ever before:

• more important because more students will be ever less prepared for critically handling a world of overwhelming and overwhelmingly expanding information, and they desperately need just those skills available in the liberal arts tradition to deal with it;

• more irrelevant if they aren't actually taught to apply those skills to the new digital world and learn to develop new skills needed to fully handle future knowledge media.

And thus, I see the Middlebury disengagement may be necessary, but it is certainly not sufficient.

Wikiphobia

I suppose it's time to label "Wikiphobia" as an official subgenre of "Fear of the Internet," the notional disease based on an emotional obsession with the Big Fixation in Western culture that there is only "One Right Way."

Six Impossible Things

The tamasha surrounding the Middlebury History Department's decision not to allow students to cite Wikipedia as a source has crested, perhaps, but the issue will not go away, today nor a year from now, nor as long as there are digital compilations of sources.

When the story first broke, people asked for my response, since I build and manage wikis for a liberal arts college, and teach students and faculty to use them. My answer was simple:

What would you do if it was analog instead of digital?  Should students in Liberal Arts Colleges be citing the Encyclopedia Britannica in their papers?

The answer is no, but that's not news. In fact the wording of the Department's resolution makes this perfectly clear:

"2) Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation, even though it may lead one to a citable source."

Fine. I learned that trope of scholarship my freshman year, long before online anything: look up the basics in a general text, follow the bibliography to more specific citations, cite the specific ones and do NOT cite the general ones. That's a part of the scholarship game of bibliography and it is a useful skill. Where would the world of Classics be without Pauly-Wissowa ? And let's not forget that the encyclopedia business is a training ground. Like many a grad student before me, I learned part of being a scholar by writing basic articles for one of the many prestigious discipline-specific encyclopedias.

So, what makes this episode "wikiphobia" ? 

Let's do a thought experiment:

If the Middlebury History Department had passed a resolution that students could no longer cite the Encyclopedia Britannica or Microsoft Encarta, would that have made the national nightly news ? 

No. It probably wouldn't have even gotten a notice in the campus newspaper.

And that tells us wikiphobia is in the air.

Hunting the Snark

Let's take a look at the language of the resolution passed by the department. There is a preamble followed by TWO resolutions. You've seen the second one already; here's the first, which is much more interesting:

"1) Students are responsible for the accuracy of information they provide, and they cannot point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors."

The first clause in this sentence is a platitude, while the second moves us closer to the heart of the issue: what is the level of reliability of ANY cited source ?

For instance, consider the following thought experiment restatements of this:

Learning Spaces Didn't

A word or two about Learning Spaces from the great-grandfather of Constructivist pedagogy:

"At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student's room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence in the fourth story.

I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish.  Those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. 

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants.

Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. 

The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme -- a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection -- to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. 

I think that it would be better than this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. [...] 

Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges.  The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.  The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end ..."

    -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

The Ethics of Class Blogging

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has written an incisive post on why and how to balance the issue of student privacy while using class blogs that are open to the world. Her extensive work on the Pomona machine blog is a very successful example of how to implement this in a thoughtful way.

But even more important, to me, at least, is her connection of this way of working, to the entire tradition of scholarship:

"But we also discuss the value of doing this kind of intellectual work in public, of writing for an audience that is larger than just ourselves, of genuinely engaging with a broader field of folks working on the same issues.  And everytime something like this happens—a student posts a question about Scott Rettberg’s “Kind of Blue,” for instance, and Scott Rettberg himself pops by to respond—it absolutely electrifies the class, conveying in ways that no amount of talk from me will that they really are engaged in a conversation among scholars."

Perhaps the thing I love most about the machine project is that she is experimenting in public along with her students, and allowing the world to comment. This is a courageous step for a teacher: first to position herself not as the fount of all knowledge, but as a guide, a fellow explorer; and secondly, to allow the world to view (a portion) of the way the process is working, without knowing the outcome in advance.

How many of us could do that with a classroom? Not many, but extending the LAC classroom into another written realm allows this to happen.

The Burger King Complex

A recent article about the use of Moodle in Spanish universities highlghts a problem of the basic provincialism in many American liberal arts colleges (LACs), a special type of provincialism that leads to what I call The Burger King Complex.

If I tell you that Moodle is widely used in Spain and the UK, has 40,000 students on line at the University of New Zealand, started in Australia, and has contributors from all over the world ?

You say, what is XYZ top tier college doing? Or even what does that other college-across-town-that-we- think-we-are-so-much-better-than have?

For years in the corporate world, product FUD reigned. The old saying used to be ”No one ever got fired for choosing IBM” — just change it to Microsoft and you are up to date. In the world of the LMS, it’s Blackboard.

Now the FUD is about Opensource, because the challenge is real.

Of course, I can also tell you that UCLA  has choosen Moodle. That’s good. Word on the street is Minnesota will soon follow. So, elite state schools are moving to it. Among LAC aspire-tos, both Reed and Carlton are implementing it. Now you feel safe? Yes, you do.

I call that the Burger King Complex, after the well known phenomenon in which if Burger King wants to figure out where to put a store, they simple wait for McDonalds to build a new store. Then Burger King puts one in across the street. Then Wendy’s and Taco Bell fall in line.

They do this because it works, of course: let the industry leaders do the heavy lifting, spending the money on research and planning. Just watch them and follow along.

It is safe, of course, but best of all it provides a built-in identity and strategy. It is much safer -- safer to Boards, safer to Parents, safer to those with the money -- to stay as you are.In fact, it is so successful that it may take some one like Robert Townsend to come along to shake things up. But educational executives like that don't last long, because educational executive don't do much executing anymore.

It means you will always be second best. You will always be behind, always derivative, always second tier: you will always be the Burger King. 

And that may be good enough.

After all, no one ever got fired for having their main strategy be how not to get fired, did they ?