abject learning

Image by Rob Kruyt

Nearly a decade ago, when we were planning our return to Canada after a couple of years living in Mexico, we had no idea where in our home and native land we might be able to settle. We had a Christmas visit back to British Columbia and Keira took me for my first walk along The Drive in Vancouver, a city that I had never felt comfortable with… I immediately grooved on the mix of cheap ethnic eats, the funky second-hand shops, the wild diversity of people strolling and lounging on the sidewalks. What appealed to me most was a certain down-market sensibility — prices were geared to people living on a budget, a Starbucks sat empty while an adjacent indie coffee shop had a line-up out the door. Grandview Park overflowed with buskers, bongo-banging hippies and black-clad anarchists throwing up funny anti-corporate posters everywhere. It felt like a world unto itself, and that day we resolved that we would live in this neighborhood. We did, and have never regretted the decision.

But in a pattern familiar to so many cities, the very qualities that made this place so dynamic have set forces in motion which endanger its vitality. The rents have gone up, driving out the Italian barbers and replacing them with hip kids clothing boutiques. The eateries, while often excellent, have been cycling steadily upscale. The people who have lived the longest in the neighborhood have been saying for some time that The Drive has lost its soul.

It felt like a kick in the gut when I read yesterday that the venerable magazine and bookstore Magpie was closing its doors. Magpie was one of the businesses that set the tone for The Drive, with a particularly fine selection of art-oriented and rabble-rousing political publications. Its proprietor, Kevin Potvin, was a controversial gadfly who leveraged his shop to launch The Republic of East Vancouver, a scrappy free newspaper with radical views and lots of local coverage.

Potvin largely blames changes in people’s media habits for the closing, and if I am honest I have to admit that with so much wonderful stuff available online I buy fewer magazines than I used to. The other factors in the closing I find more troubling. How is it that a vibrant, well-run and long-standing business is forced to finance with credit cards (especially strange given our current economic crisis brought on by imprudent lending to so many dubious borrowers)? And as Potvin implies, though in macroeconomic terms the city has been “booming,” for working people rising real estate values just mean higher rents and mortgage payments, which when added to skyrocketing food and fuel costs means that the squeeze is on.

Maybe that’s what’s troubling me most. I understand that in bad times, well, times are bad. But the triumphant common wisdom here in Vancouver is that we’ve enjoyed a decade of unprecedented good times, and we are soaring toward a coronation as a truly ‘world class’ city with the 2010 Olympics. The result is a sense of civic schizophrenia, where life gets tougher for those who don’t have a solid stake, where schools are closing, where community centres are cutting their programming, where small businesses can’t hack it… A high-profile and progressive-sounding mega-project destroys a neighborhood, and nobody is held accountable for the false promises that were made when it was being promoted. Cuts to services, but the money flows for every new Olympic cost overrun, for that fancy convention centre intended to impress visiting business people. (As an aside, is there any less pleasant place to gather and learn than every convention centre ever built? Why do people book events in these generic concrete crapboxes?)

We have a lot of friends who work in the community, and the stories they tell us of where things are headed on the street get darker and darker. I got the image above from a new blog by one of those friends, written under the nom de plume Hanna Mitchell. I’m really pleased she has joined the digital conversation. Here’s a sample portrait of this fair city, from the perspective of an artist and activist who has spent many years working with Vancouver’s most desperate people:

…we have created policy after policy that has kept the appearance of our neighborhoods as beautiful places for beautiful people, and anything or anyone that doesn’t fit that criteria gets torn down or comes to the Downtown Eastside. Homeless people aren’t just in the Downtown Eastside, and those walls are breaking, the walls that protect the beautiful and the young, and those who want to stay beautiful and young from the realities of the fragility of the lifestyle created here, a lifestyle that is beyond the means of most people that live here, a lifestyle that has neither style or substance, but is more like smoke and mirrors.

It is the mountains, the ocean, the cherry and magnolia trees, the people i know, and for the last 15 years, one of the greatest buildings in our City that keeps me here, so maybe i just feel duped because i fell for this beautiful place. I fell in love with this beautiful place, and now, not so much. I think she’s ugly on the inside, cold and a bit of a ditz, but still pretty. Not sure where this leaves me, but maybe its like a fight with someone you love, you have to tell them about the things that are bugging you, and hope they can change or that maybe you can live with who they are, or maybe you just leave.

Maybe leave. But I don’t know where else I can go…

One of the benefits of insignificance is that people rarely have reason to take shots at you. So when some fairly sharp criticisms were directed my way over my recent NMC Mashup Symposium mashup I really didn’t know how best to respond… I knew that something that weird would not appeal to everyone, and I had difficulty imagining a response that didn’t just seem defensive.

Then again, I’ve followed the work of both Jeffrey Keefer and Lisa Lane for some time, and when people I like and respect take the time to offer detailed and thoughtful critiques, it almost seems arrogant to ignore them. I also don’t doubt that other people have had similar responses to my stuff. So while I do not have the time to respond in appropriate depth to  the many shortcomings these posts identify, I did want to at least acknowledge them.

First off, mea culpas on a couple of crimes:

* Jeffrey is correct to point out that my abstract didn’t describe the session that I delivered all that accurately. I can only plead for mercy, as that abstract had to be submitted when I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I originally submitted a proposal that was a far more traditional examination of data mashups, but was asked by the NMC to consider something more culturally-oriented… So that abstract was something of a placeholder, and I do regret it if people felt misled.

* Lisa is absolutely right to smack me for not offering a more detailed list of sources anywhere. My only defense is that I did namecheck these people in the audio itself, which I conceptualized as a stand-alone piece. That, and I got lazy. I have updated my post and added the names of the spoken word samples.

Now if I may, I’d like to push back on a few other points. I don’t expect to convince Jeffrey, Lisa, or anyone else to change how they feel about the session, but I’d at least like to make my own motivations clear.

In his post (and previously on Twitter) Jeffrey complains that the session did not provide concrete steps on how to apply lessons learned in his own practice. First off, as I assembled the clips and materials that were most compelling to me, the narrative that emerged was one of mashup artists and sympathetic theorists describing their own histories, philosophies and goals in their own form of expression.  I hope I created a reasonable representation of a culture which has been influential on how we think about discourse in the digital age. If I failed at that, then I failed…

But I would hope there is room for discussion in our field that doesn’t have to boil down to universally applicable step-by-step instructions. Chris Lott, in a post that responded so well to Jeffrey that I felt like I was off the hook, makes this point very well: “there is a whole world of richness of expression and thought that ties into the way I live in and approach the world… and most of that world is in the dark, unseen and hard to quantify.”

I’m also reminded of Alan’s recent post contrasting fishing and fish nuggets: “it means less formal training, less workshops, and more learning by doing. It means using these tools a much as possible in our processes, so they become part of a fabric, not something strange and exotic.”

I have a couple of responses to Lisa’s assertions as  well. First, with regards to the respective natures of pre-literate, literate, and digital discourse, she may be right. But I never have asserted that digital culture simply rolls back the years to pre-literate  traditions. It’s possible that some of the samples in “Confessions” gave that impression, but just because I want to represent the positions of artistic and cultural thinkers does not mean I wholly endorse those views. I might be personally intrigued, even sympathetic to Negativland’s views on copyright, but I would never dream of advocating those positions to a room full of faculty that I hope will embrace an open education vision.

Lisa correctly infers the “Confessions” piece was a bit of theatre designed to provoke. So I am a bit confused why it would be judged by the standards of scholarship. Surely there is room in teaching and learning for storytelling, for sharing, for performance and provocation? Of course, that doesn’t mean she has to like it. And I don’t mean to suggest that good scholarship can’t be imbued with what Gardner Campbell calls “expectation and a sense of occasion.” (Gardner’s recent talk at UBC certainly shows that performance and scholarship are not mutually exclusive.) Maybe Lisa’s vision of the scholastic mashup will be a reality someday.

I should be clear that such strong criticisms to work that I’ve done, while they literally do cause me to lose sleep at night, are a preferable response to apathy. I honestly appreciate that Jeffrey and Lisa put thought into work that I did and that they would post such detailed appraisals.  I got next to no response to my much more deliberate (and carefully cited) mashup complement to last year’s EDUCAUSE Review article. I’ll admit that I was disappointed by the silence… maybe that pushed me to go a little weirder this time, and with more loose ends than some would like.  Personally, I find it more interesting when I am taking a risk with a presentation, and it’s natural that if you try for something ‘out there’ that it will not have universal appeal. I can only hope that there will be room for my own flavours being represented in this field, as I am having a blast working and playing here.

Before I move on, I wanted to note a hit of uncanny synchronicity that just blows my mind.  As I was preparing this post, I came across the following image from the “Confessions” presentation in Second Life in a post by Alan Levine:

And I was absolutely stunned by the resemblance to the awe-inspiring opening shot from my absolute favorite concert film of all time, Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii:

Not intentional, I assure you. Had I grokked it, we would have had banks and banks of amps (preferably stenciled “PINK FLOYD LONDON”) to recreate the set exactly. With coincidences like this, I can take any amount of criticism.

The video is small and grainy, but you can get a sense of the Floyd’s unique performance here:

At the 6:04 mark of this clip you can see the exact moment I went from hating Pink Floyd to thinking of them as one of my favorite bands. The jam that follows is sublime…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLJ_QVfT_wM

I’ve blogged a couple times previously about the Murder, Madness and Mayhem Wikipedia project (MMM) this semester, as it is the most potent cocktail of new media learning and public education that I’ve ever tasted.

As the semester wraps up, I’m thrilled to report that the objective of elevating an entry to “featured article” status has been met. Congratulations to the wiki-wranglers who took a non-existent entry for the novel El Señor Presidente (written by the Nobel Prize-winning Miguel Ángel Asturias), and created a resource so well-researched and presented that is was awarded the designation of Wikipedia’s 2000th Featured Article.

Those of you still wandering lost in the tired epistemic thickets, unable to fairly assess a resource that “anyone can edit”, are encouraged to read not only the entry for El Señor Presidente, but the other recognised MMM articles as well. Believe me, even “good article” status is not something to take lightly. Take a look at the dense layers of citations, and explore the rigorous peer review the work was subjected to via the discussion pages.

Then, please (PLEASE!) let me know if there’s a project that so effectively builds on traditional research and literacy skills, augments them with new media negotiation and interrogation (giving these students intimate knowledge of a resource they were already using), and that results in such high-quality open educational resources (most of which were nonexistent before this course) — articles that will be accessed by literally thousands of readers (in one case hundreds of thousands) and researchers per year.

FYI, the students kept individual blogs as well. And I promise you Jon, we will be able to whip up a proper course blog if you’re willing to give OLT another chance.

I still get forwarded media stories resulting from the hoo-haa when one college department banned citations of Wikipedia (a controversy that Henry Jenkins rightly described as overblown). Will this far more compelling, more inspiring and more illuminating counter-example of the academy making Wikipedia work for its own objectives get anything like the same level of attention?

Don’t even try to argue with me. Boot and Blade is definitely a figure skating blog. I can’t imagine a better place to go if I want to see the worst figure skating falls.

You may have guessed that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of figure skating. And I positively hate the Olympics. I’d be grateful if those of you agitating for a boycott of Beijing’s run of the superspectacle would turn your attention to boycotting Vancouver in 2010 as well.

But I know Julie from organising Northern Voice. She’s gifted and she’s always struck me as a very fine person. And if Julie getting accreditation to that obscenely wasteful monument to fat city jingoism makes her happy, I’ll write an insignificant post on my little blog.

That, and when Barefoot cracks the whip, I make the trip…

I have lost count of the number of people who have asked for the media for Gardner Campbell’s wonderful session at UBC last month, “Computers as Poetry.” I just got the results back from the lab today, and while I need another viewing and some thinking time to be able to respond to it at all properly, I don’t want to let my sluggish mind keep you from this:

This isn’t a light talk. But if you block off the time, settle in and give it attention, you will be rewarded with an experience unlike anything else I can think of in this domain.

I recommend you watch the talk via the show page, the video quality on the bigger screen is pretty good. Commuters might prefer the portable audio version (160kbps MP3, 1hr 09min, 80MB).

If you prefer Vimeo to blip.tv, here you go…

Gardner followed up his formal address with a deceptively freewheeling facilitated discussion that also has the magic. It’s a shame that the audience contribution is inaudible, but Gardner’s performance here gives a sense of his gifts as a teacher. Video here, audio here.

While I cannot do Gardner’s sessions justice before reviewing them, I can say that his performance and presence in Vancouver has only deepened my already profound affection and admiration for him. If nothing else, I now understand why so many of my favorite people in the education technology space have a background in literature. And I feel like he has also given me a set of keys that open up connections between the person I am now, and the person I was more than a decade ago…

Yes, Dr. Glu rocked my world…

I am humbled by how much people seemed to enjoy my mashup unartistry delivered in Second Life yesterday (though that reaction was hardly unanimous). And while I’m a little embarrassed by the heaps of praise offered up by Alan Levine, I’ll link to it anyway since it accurately documents just how much he and Rachel Smith brought to making the experience happen. I just love how the NMC and its community can be counted on to embrace a hearty dose of weirdness.

I have always been somewhat at a loss when it comes to Second Life. And for the first part of the session, listening to the pre-recorded audio, watching my avatar move according to a pre-programmed DJ animation while other avatars sat in that odd impassive Second Life way… well, it was an anxious, bordering on alienating sensation. But as the others began to get up and move, to dance, to throw in silly comments, something like real party energy began to gather. This experience has taught me that there is great potential in this corner of the digital domain to infuse collective experience with a sense of theatre, and opens up possibilities that would be very difficult to attempt in a physical space.

Audio from the session:.

Download: Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist (57.5 Mb MP3, 25:06)

I got hit by some ill-health while preparing this, so when I listen to the file most of what I hear are the things I meant to add, a couple big-time bonehead editing errors… I should also note that while I sampled from dozens of sources, a huge portion of the presentation was drawn from two uber-sources, both of which are vastly superior to what I assembled. If you enjoyed the session, or even if you didn’t, I highly recommend:

* DJ Food’s Raiding the 20th Century, a one hour blast through the history of audio mashups, absolutely stunning in its breadth and depth.

* Marshall McLuhan’s late 1960’s audio version of The Medium is The Massage. I hadn’t listened to this in some time, and was especially struck by the paramount importance of a new education to society’s ability to respond to media’s challenges. And maybe it’s just me, but I was also surprised by how many of McLuhan’s assertions on learning are being echoed by my favorite edubloggers some forty years on.

Update: A few people have asked that I supply additional citations for the sampled clips. While the following list is not comprehensive, I do at least want to link to the spoken word segments that I feature in the piece:

* The first half of the presentation is largely hacked out of the DJ Food piece referenced above. In addition, there is a long segment from The Copywrong Show, an episode from Negativland’s Over the Edge Radio show, originally broadcast in October 91.

* The DJ who says he respects copyright in theory, but not in fact, is Steinski, from the aforementioned DJ Food track.

* There is a segment on the visuality of sound mixing by Jason Forrest (AKA Donna Summer). It is drawn from a 2003 interview with CBC’s Brave New Waves. The interview is no longer online, but is referred to in Forrest’s Wikipedia entry.

In the second half (after my own mic break):

* Jonathan Letham was interviewed on Open Source Radio, February 2, 2007.

* Thomas Pettitt describes the “Gutenberg Parenthesis” and considers the effects on sampling and remixing on judging student work. The talk is here… that link also points to the introduction by David Thorburn, who is also sampled.

* I sampled from David Wiley’s Openness, Localization, and the Future of Learning Objects – which I seem to do every presentation I do…

* And then I finished off with a big whack of the McLuhan material linked above.

A quick note to advertise my eager participation in next week’s NMC online Symposium on Mashups. The NMC knows how to do an online event up right, and my own interest in the topic is well-established. Looking forward to lots of learning and more than a few laughs. If you haven’t registered, I hope you will. Alan Levine has already blogged a bit about the sessions, and speaking for myself I can’t wait to see what Jim Groom and Tom Woodward have cooked up, and I’m certain that Cole Camplese will have heaps of insightful ideas for me to apply here at UBC.

As for what I have planned… at this point it’s shaping up as perhaps the most full-on immersive descent into madness that I have ever dared attempt. I’m not saying that this will be the craziest presentation I’ve ever done… I’m saying it might be the craziest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve dabbled with pretending to be a DJ for sessions in the past, but the special affordances of Second Life open up some new and tantalizing possibilities for wish fulfillment. I’m a total n00b when it comes to SL, but I laid out a set of outlandish requests to Alan and Rachel Smith that would make my virtual dreams come true, and damned if they haven’t already provided me with most of what I requested. The image at the top of this post is a screenshot of today’s run-through… Does the presence of the beat-up school bus and the old television sets offer you any hints for my planned finale?

Analog bliss, originally uploaded by MrGluSniffer.

These were the records I acquired during a vinyl shopping expedition with Gardner Campbell (strike that one off my ‘things to do before I die’ list) when he visited Vancouver… As a result, the picks do tend to reflect our shared tastes. Three of these selections are wonderful gifts from Dr. Glu… Oh, I do loves it when somebody gives the gift of snazzy vinyl.

Total cost for all this: about what you might pay for two, maybe three puny CDs.

If you visit the Flickr photo page, you can use the mouse-over notes feature for more info and music samples.

Central Library Interior #2, originally uploaded by lightgazer.

I’ve been following the Murder, Madness and Mayhem project with keen interest since its inception, but have held off on blogging about the efforts beyond my enthusiastic initial impressions. For one, the progress of the project revealed just how little I knew about the Wikipedia review process and its at-times bewildering attendant culture. In addition, Professor Jon Beasley-Murray (a name that attentive Abject readers will no doubt recognise) had expressed some misgivings to me about publicizing such an inherently experimental approach, one with no roadmap and no guarantees.

Thankfully, Jon has written — with the characteristic speed and eloquence that frequently has me shaking my head in wonder — a detailed reflection and progress report on the Wikipedia website. “Read the whole thing” was never better advice, but to whet your appetite I’ll excerpt some of his observations:

I decided to include wikipedia as a central part of a course I was teaching in the belief that it was only by actively contributing to the encyclopedia that they would learn about its weaknesses, and also its strengths. And also with the idea that they would thereby, and perhaps rather incidentally, improve articles in a field (Latin American literature) in which in my experience wikipedia has been especially weak.

…When setting that assignment, I had not really comprehended how ambitious it was. Wikipedia defines a “feature article” as an article that “exemplifies [its] very best work and features professional standards of writing and presentation.” And its standards are, in fact, impressively high. Indeed, it is a central paradox of wikipedia that its standards are impeccable, even as its actual performance so often lags far behind these standards. To give some indication: fewer than 0.1% of wikipedia’s articles are feature articles.

…I liked the idea that students would be engaging in real world project, with tangible and public, if not necessarily permanent, effects. In the end, an essay or an exam is an instance of busywork: usually written in haste; for one particular reader, the professor; and thereafter discarded.

It is a lamentable fact that, with rare exceptions such as in the Composition classroom, students are seldom motivated to re-read and reflect upon their own work. Indeed, they often scarcely even glance at the comments professors often laboriously write up on their work: understandably given that there is usually by this stage no chance to change things further, they are interested in the grade, and that is it. Students seldom learn about the importance of revision to good writing. And yet on wikipedia, revision is (almost) everything: contributors are called editors precisely because their writing is a near-constant state of revision.

…it was not long before we stumbled across our first, and by far the most fortuitous, piece of good luck. Though nothing came of my messages to the various pre-existing wikipedia projects (most of which, as far as I can see, are moribund or, more likely, simply overwhelmed), it so happened that a small group of experienced wikipedia editors had apparently been kicking around ideas as to how best to increase the number of feature articles on the encyclopedia. They were calling themselves the “FA-Team” and they were looking for a project to work on. They found us, and wrote to me to see if I’d like any help.

…In a sense, then, the FA-Team’s intervention was not exceptional. It was simply a broader and rather more developed instance of this same principle of synergy, of the fact that the more you add to wikipedia, the more your activity resonates and is developed and multiplied by the activities of others. Yes, there are edit wars on wikipedia; but in my experience these do not on the whole revolve around the addition of new content. We had not simply struck lucky; we’d come across one of the basic principles of the wiki’s operation.

The downside of this principle is that where wikipedia is moribund, it stays moribund. Though in theory wikipedia is an endless hive of activity, in practice a glance at the histories of a few pages (all of which are easily available for consultation, at the click of a few more tabs) demonstrates that they are in fact remarkably stable. A bad article remains a bad article for a long, long time. To take a couple of instances from this project of older (and so in fact more important) topics: the entries for Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa have scarcely moved for years, bar a tweak here and a tweak there. Our job was to change this.

…I’m writing this in what is still the throes of the project. One article, perhaps ironically the very one that I started in class (now entitled The President (novel)) has passed its first formal, and I should say remarkably stringent, peer review hurdle and so has been named a “good article.” My students have therefore already created, and created from scratch, one of wikipedia’s best 0.15% content. Moreover, there are no other Latin American literary works among that 0.15%. So they have contributed what is now the very best wikipedia article on any work of Latin American literature. They (we?) can be rightly proud.

…I’d like to think that it is teaching the students research skills and writing skills in what is very much a real world environment. They were set a medium- to long-term goal at the beginning of the semester, and were required to work collaboratively both within their own groups and with strangers in the public domain to plan how to achieve and deliver that goal. And their final product is to be a professional piece of work that will be viewed by many thousands of people, a resource that is in most cases the first port of call for future researchers, whether students like themselves or the any of the many millions from all over the world who visit wikipedia. Most of these articles are, after all, the top hit (or very close to it) in any internet search of the topic.

By comparison, the usual essays and exams that we assign our students really are rather pointless busywork.

[Wow, that’s a lot of text to excerpt. I hope Jon isn’t annoyed with me. Really, there’s heaps more provocative and useful stuff in the original, go read it now!]

As an aside, check out the discussion page on the project’s first “good article”… As an example of real-world traditional and new literacy skills being developed in an authentic environment, as an example of engaged, high-wire pedagogy, does it get any better?

Bonus Wikipedia gossip round: Did Jimmy Wales really have an affair with Rachel Marsden? In the course of trying to “clean up” the entry that details her, um, eventful past relationships, did he not read it? Clearly, history suggests that she might be kind of high maintenance… He’s lucky all that happened was some leaked IM logs and an eBay auction.

Not only is WFMU my cultural touchstone, it’s my source of tech news too.

Off the WFMU Blog is this intriguing reference to Why the Lucky Stiff:

Great swaths of deepest geek Japan know him as a core contributor to the programming language known as Ruby. There are various cultural camps that gather around various programming languages and Ruby, a relatively accessible "scripting" language, has a reputation for bringing the creative types together, the bike mechanics, and the micro-brewers, the in-a-banders, and the creators and solvers of absurd problems.

The mysterious personage known as Why The Lucky Stiff wants to draw creative brains to this party from wider sources. And he’s done so by publishing absolutely unique technical book works like The Poignant Guide To Ruby.

His work is informed by early 90s zine culture. And maybe British drug comedy. (And perhaps syphilis. That’s just my theory.) And lately he’s on a new kick that tops all of his previous manic passing obsessions…

That new kick is Hackety Hack:

Wanna hack like in the movies?

* Code Yourself a Blog in 6 Lines
* Or Your Own IM in About Twice That
* Just Seven Lessons, Totally Conversational
* Let’s Say: 13 and Up

And Hey, Wow, Real Kids are Learning!

One more nugget from the WFMU blog post:

When he realized that he needed a better way to allow users to create user interfaces he decided to basically build his own programming language to suit the task. He’s been working on it forever and now he’s released the guide for free. It’s called Nobody Knows Shoes. And taken as a new confluence of disparate cultures and as a social project for the common good, it’s verifiably genius. Somebody call the MacArthur folks. I’m not even kidding.

I second the nomination.

Lately, when I talk about the colossal self-destructive stupidity of the music industry, I gently suggest that educators might learn from those mistakes. Maybe we shouldn’t put too much faith in our monopoly on accreditation, and accept that if we don’t do our jobs right we might find that others do it better. This is the kind of non-aligned activity I’m thinking of… Why the Lucky Stiff describes himself as “a fledgling freelance professor, one who will die young and make no lasting impression.” But this sort of freelancer might be the harbinger of something very impressive indeed.