abject learning

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Northern Voice Poster FINAL DESIGN, originally uploaded by basco5.

Once again, Northern Voice has met our attendance targets. You can add your name to our waitlist wiki. We also have a small number of openings for the Friday Moose Camp, which this year will be augmented by a series of Internet Bootcamp Sessions for those attendees who would like introductions to various aspects of social media.

Did I mention that our keynote speaker will be WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg? I fear this development may trigger a relapse for the friends of Jim G. over at WordPress Anonymous.

So not only am I struggling to do what Stephen Downes did more than four years ago, now I can’t even do what I did myself two years ago.

It should be a simple problem. Assemble a list of thirty or so student weblogs, allowing them to choose their own platforms, and create a reasonably readable aggregated metablog of all their entries.

Every “feed blender” type application I have tried simply collapses under that number of feeds, and collectively represents a huge time suck over the past few weeks years.

I like the Grazr widgets, but the widget does not track unread entries or provide any sense of which entries are new. Ditto for the promising new Ginger release of Netvibes: promising, but a portal view just doesn’t cut it.

Don’t even start with me on Technorati. It was never reliable, and now I’d rather depend on carrier pigeons or pneumatic tubes. I tried to be a good ELI conference blogger last week, did my Technorati tagging to no effect whatsoever.

Until now, the best simple hack I had come up with was using the results of a tagsearch from Google Blogsearch sorted chronologically, and running the RSS through the ever-reliable Feed2JS. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked OK.

But there are perils with depending on the kindness and stability of third party software. And Google is evidently not immune to that. It seems that Google blogsearch has adjusted its algorithm somehow. In any event, the number of returned entries has decreased in recent weeks, even as the student entries have piled up. Indeed, today there are two fewer entries than yesterday.

So we are making OK progress on assembling a WordPress Multi-User courseblog along the lines of the stuff UMW Blogs does. And D’Arcy is making tantalizing noises of a prototype based on Bill Fitzgerald’s work with Open Academic using Drupal. Maybe Stephen Downes’s impending release of Edu_RSS will do the trick.

But for now my modest optimism is tempered by a long string of disappointments, and hundreds of seemingly wasted hours.

I’m more than little bit shocked to be writing this post, as Michelle Chua is so demonstrably gifted, accomplished, and charming that it’s inconceivable to me that she’d be hitting the job market as a free agent.

But unbelievable as it seems, she is available. I don’t know too many people that are brilliant visual designers, solid coders, ridiculously conscientious, obsessively savvy on web culture, supple and expressive writers, hilarious, and loaded to bear with indie-rocker cred.

Michelle first came to work on a student position for my office about four years ago, and we brought her back for many subsequent projects. She did an outstanding job of everything we asked of her, and usually did much more…

One small but illustrative anecdote. A little over three years ago was my darkest hour at UBC. In the middle of Christmas holidays we had a total server meltdown that incapacitated decapitated our weblog and wiki services, and things were grim. A number of people came through for me then, but Michelle stands out in my mind for her willingness to put off her New Year’s Eve revelry to make a personal visit to the IT server room and to gather information that put the whole debacle into clear perspective. She also got the ball rolling for a process that restored what seemed like irretrievable data.

Most of all, I’m grateful for the time I spent hanging out and talking trash with her, and having her as a partner when a fledgling and seemingly fringe project was just getting off the ground. It would gratify my ego immensely to describe her as a protégé of mine, but when I think it through honestly it might have worked the other way round…

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Caged Gorilla, originally uploaded by bprimrose.

So late last night I’m walking the dog, listening to Radiolab’s show on Zoos… I’ll paraphrase below, but I recommend you listen to the segment I’m describing for yourself:

The clip describes the traditional and frankly shocking state of zoos 30 or 40 years ago. To focus on one example, gorillas were invariably kept in featureless concrete enclosures, devoid of anything to interact with. The effects on the animals were predictable enough, with nothing to do except eat and spread their feces around that’s all they did. Radiolab interviews zookeeper David Hancocks, architect Grant Jones, and gorilla keeper Violet Sunde, who were convinced they could do better. They brought in Dian Fossey as a consultant, who convinced them to try the then-radical approach of attempting to make the gorilla’s space simulate the wild. What I found most striking about this account was the observation that they were only able to try this approach because they were not being supervised. Had an authoritative zookeeper been around, they never would have been allowed to create such a “dangerous” environment, it would be seen as compromising the safety of the animals. My favorite line notes how having all-concrete enclosures was considered the only responsible technique, as it was easy to clean and could be kept sterile.

If you want to draw an analogy to how we as educators create an unnatural, borderline inhumane online environment in the name of safety, I won’t stop you…

Which brings me to my putative point, a most groovy ELI Session entitled “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS? A Digi-Drama About Fear 2.0” delivered by Laura Blankenship, Barbara Ganley, Barbara Sawhill, Leslie Madsen-Brooks, and Martha Burtis. I’ve been struggling with how to frame this session in a blog post, as I doubt I can express my full appreciation without descending into full-blown sycophantic hyperbole.

Thankfully, the presenters have collected their materials in a nifty package, and you can experience their diverse set of short films for yourself. Can I even begin to express how much more compelling these sharable web-friendly materials are than a set of PowerPoint slides? Allow me to add how impressed I was with their creative and conversational approach to the session, generating some very provocative discussion. A subject like “fear” lurks beneath so many of our interactions in this field, and it was clear that people were grateful for the chance to address it directly. I was also privileged to interact with this dynamic and witty crew over meals and relentless Twitter-banter, enriching my stay in San Antonio immeasurably.

Related reading: Gardner Campbell is rendered speechless(!) by a student’s flash of recognition that “our schools are set up all wrong.”

The title of this post is drawn from Ross Johnson’s version of “Theme from a Summer Place”:

I’m special ordering Johnson’s Make It Stop!. You might be interested in reading Johnson (who is a librarian at the University of Memphis!) relate his mostly disastrous experiences working with Alex Chilton and other indie-rock luminaries.

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HAL Beta 0.66, originally uploaded by jurvetson.

I’m back from the ELI Annual Meeting in San Antonio, wading through the emails I’ve been ignoring, looking in on Twitter trying to recapture a little of that unthreaded love thang weave — thankfully it’s been as unstable as normal, so I’ve been forced to move ahead.

I have three, maybe four (we’ll see how brave I am) posts percolating in my head, and I really do want to get them out. The accumulation of sleep deprivation, the inrush of daily employment taskage, reconnecting with family, my own cognitive weakness, I can feel the intensity of my impressions receding. Nothing would make me happier than sitting down calmly, taking a stress pill and thinking things over, and maybe doing justice to the many fabulous contributions people made to my learning this week. But if I’m going to salvage anything out of the experience, I need to let go, get what I can up on the open web, and accept the limitations thereof.

So, some fragmented, non-integrated responses to the session led by Gardner Campbell, Serena Epstein and David Moore entitled “Information Fluency as Curricular Innovation: New Media Studies in General Education.”

* First off, there was a hell of a scheduling dilemma. Because I attended this session, I missed George Siemens discuss Connectivism (I do hope to catch up via the podcast), and also Cole Camplese’s session…

* Gardner’s opening remarks framed the challenges beautifully. How do we reconcile the fact that the web, while being the most powerful technical medium of expression ever created, can be described as fostering a culture whole greatest literary achievement is “LOL”? How does the academic community step up, move towards a mindset in which attention to the means of communication is “baked in” to the curriculum, and not simply “bolted on”? To be truly curricular new media needs to be seen as legitimate inquiry, about “habits of mind,” and not merely a set of useful skills.

* The New Media Reader proved to be an immensely useful core textbook, and can definitely be a useful resource for anyone who cares to integrate these issues meaningfully into higher education. I need to snag myself a copy.

I was simply blown away by the poise and intelligence of the students, and by how differently the two of them approached their final projects (representative of how diverse the methods of new media studies can be).

* David Moore fought valiantly through a flu bug, presented a detailed and impressively grounded overview of the challenges implicit in the structure of discussion forums, and outlined a very promising model for a recommender and referral model that goes deeper than the Slashdot model, one that reminded at least one attendee of eBay.

* Serena Epstein had a much more visceral and artistic approach to the new media domain. She showed a short excerpt of her final project film, and I am a bit sheepish to admit how much I related to the slacker angst the clip depicted.

Later that night, I watched Serena’s whole film, and was moved in a number of respects. First off, it’s just a fine piece of moviemaking. I was especially affected by the sections acted out by Gardner and Shannon Hauser… But the part that just smacked me was the post-film final blooper reel, of all things. Something about what it revealed of what a teacher-student relationship can be… My throat actually tightened up when they walked out of the coffee shop together.

Yes, this culture can foster something a little deeper than LOL.

Technorati tags: ELIAnnual08, Gardner Campbell, literacy, new media…

Henry Jenkins ELI Keynote address is podcasted here.

Jenkins opened with the sensible observation that contrary to media reports, Middlebury College’s much ballyhooed “banning” of Wikipedia was in fact a reasonable first step toward generating a dialogue, and an opportunity to open up the research process, one that can be conducted grounded in reason, not fear.

His subsequent talk proceeded fairly logically from there, and rather than me attempting a comprehensive summary, I’d say your time is better spent reading Jenkin’s own notes on a similar talk given six months ago or Bryan Alexander’s initial response — which he somehow published before the end of the session!

But again, a couple of my own quick takeaways:

* Jenkins made the rather obvious point that new literacies require the old literacies, that we are expanding literacy not displacing it. Obvious, sure, but do I remember to offer that caution when I argue with people about Wikipedia?

* In a succesion of action verbs describing how we deal with the flood of information in new media environments, I thought the best one was “negotiate.” Expect me to run that word into the ground.

* At one point Jenkins bemoaned how “most of us don’t know how to live in a collective intelligence.” To which I thought, most people don’t know how to live, period. That isn’t meant to be a flip as it sounds. We struggle to manage our friendships, our family relationships, our diets, our time, our finances, our engagement with civic institutions… why the hell would our ability to negotiate (HA!) inside complex and shifting cognitive constructs be any different?

My favorite part of the talk was his assertion that Wikipedia represents a challenge to the academic community to reclaim our role as public intellectuals. Bryan twitted the proposition: “What if each American academic spent 5 minutes in 2008 editing Wikipedia?” (My quick reply is that a significant proportion would get hooked, and end up spending a lot more than five minutes.)

Along those lines, I want to point to a very cool Wikipedia project that is part of a class taught by my UBC colleague Jon Beasley-Murray, “with the collective goals …to bring a selection of articles to “Feature Article” status (or as near as possible) by April 10.” Some of the topics are well-known, others don’t have entries at all.

Let’s break this exercise down a bit:

* Students will need to demonstrate all the traditional literacy skills (researching accurate materials, writing lucidly, determining and adopting the appropriate tone, etc…)

* Students will gain new media literacy skills, as they negotiate (HA HA) wording with other users (and anyone who has seriously engaged in a Wikipedia authoring process knows this requires some sophisticated social and diplomatic skills), and also work to make the articles notable enough to others to gain the desired “featured article” status. Students will thus gain an intimate knowledge and understanding of how Wikipedia really works.

* Rather than simply writing a paper that gets graded by a professor or TA and then returned, the outcome is publicly accessible. The activity is authentic, not simulated, and the product is a wildly popular open resource.

* The technology cost to the institution, and the required input from technology support staff at the institution – $0

The wild part is, Jon comes up with a cool idea like this pretty much every semester. Can’t wait to see what he thinks of next…

Technorati tags: ELIAnnual08, span312, literacy

It’s a huge treat to be in San Antonio for this year’s ELI Annual Meeting. The first morning was more than a little overwhelming as I’ve met a succession of some of my favorite people in the field, and a remarkable number of people who I had never met personally but felt like I knew via virtual channels. I’ll try to return to the social dimension in a future post.

Though it was a minor bruise to my ego to have my presentation proposal turned down (and a much greater sadness that my would-be collaborator isn’t here), at this moment I can honestly say I have no regrets at all. For once I won’t be picking at my presentation wiki until the last possible moment, and I’ve resolved to kick it up a notch from my usual pathetic conference blogging performance.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Bryan Alexander speak on at least a dozen occasions, and I’m an avid follower of his work, so on some level I felt like I knew what to expect going into his morning-long workshop on Web 2.0 storytelling. But being in Bryan’s presence is akin to seeing a virtuoso musician perform, and it takes a certain amount of critical effort to maintain my focus on the subject matter, rather than simply marveling at his fluency, erudition and wicked humour. I don’t find myself able to offer much by way of synthesis at this point, but a few capsule observations:

* Based on shows of hands, maybe a quarter of the participants had run a blog, or used Flickr, or heard of Twitter, but everybody had edited a wiki.

* I look forward to diving a bit deeper into Adrian John’s The Nature of the Book, Ted’s Caving Journal, Dreaming Methods, the Improv Encyclopedia, “She’s a flight risk” and Googlization.

* Bryan astutely noted the special affordance of aphorisms in the discourse of Twitter, and I look forward to following Jenny Holzer’s Twits. And I have no idea how the Loose-Fish, Good Captain retelling of Benito Cereno will play out in my feed, but it will be fascinating to find out.

Alan Levine had the funniest line of the day, in the context of a surprisingly durable debate question: “If you don’t have at least a shred of interesting content, then you won’t have community. You’ll have Facebook.”

Along those lines, there was a thoughtful observation concerning the discourse implied by new media, one I nonetheless found a bit troubling. A participant (whose name I missed) noted that higher education has traditionally elevated the value of some voices above some others, cited the imbalanced power dynamic between professors and students as an example, and suggested that new media was having a welcome leveling effect. I’ve made similar arguments in the past, so on a basic level I got and agreed with the sentiment. But as it happened, Bryan had a presentation slide up that mentioned both Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson. It seemed to me that any value system that reduces the contributions of the Pynchons and Gibsons as no more worthy of attention as that of anyone else is to indulge a simple relativism, and that something very valuable is lost in the process. It seems beyond question that at this moment in history the pieces on the game board have been swept up into the air, but also that it is incumbent on us to articulate new values which make sense in the new media reality. I suspect I will be returning to this tension shortly, as it has come up in other forms a few times already here at the conference.

Technorati tags: ELIAnnual08, literacy, digital storytelling

…but a couple of thoughts prompted by reading this post from Gardner Campbell:

I think there’s a strong streak of Aristotelian propositional method in the idea of a data-driven web. Read the Poetics and wonder at Aristotle’s indefatigable defining, analyzing, parsing, specifying. The man never tires, never even hesitates in the face of the enormous task he sets for himself. And even the most breathtaking propositions–his firm assertion about the end [purpose] of life, for example–are just more confident statements in the long march of sureties.

First thought: if you are a geek in academia, or an academic with a geek streak, does it get any better than reading Gardner Campbell?

Second, I am reminded of my single favorite piece of cottage reading, one which has tragically disappeared from my favorite cottage. [An aside and blood-oath to the thief: I will never tire in my quest to hunt you down and bring you to justice.] Will Cuppy’s How to Become Extinct, with illustrations by William Steig, himself author of some of my favorite books to read to my boy, including the wondrous When Everybody Wore a Hat.

I’m dependent on the web for quotes from Cuppy’s devastating chapter on Aristotle and his “observation is optional” approach to science detailed in How to Become Extinct , and they don’t do this wonderful literary takedown justice, but:

* “Aristotle described the Crow as chaste. In some departments of knowledge, Aristotle was too innocent for his own good.”

* “[Footnote:] Aristotle maintains that the neck of the Lion is composed of a single bone. Aristotle knew nothing at all about Lions, a circumstance which did not prevent him from writing a good deal on the subject. …Some people lose all respect for the lion unless he devours them instantly. There is no pleasing some people.”

* “Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.”

* “The Chameleon’s face reminded Aristotle of a Baboon. Aristotle wasn’t much of a looker himself.”

If you see the book in a used bookstore (or care to snag one of the reasonably priced volumes available online, but please wait until I snap up my own copy from Powell’s), you won’t be disappointed — you most certainly will be amused.

This remarkable short film from Peter Fischli and David Weiss, usually translated as The Way Things Go would seem to me a classic example of a work you need to see to get it, the piece really defies description. Though Arthur Danto does pretty well… It’s a real-world application of Rube Goldberg effects, the kind of stuff that makes my son howl with laughter in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure or the Wallace and Gromit films. As you watch the mechanism unfold, it seems ready to fall apart at any moment, the whole process is a marvel of precarious dramatic tension…

A short clip is up on YouTube:

But if you move now, you can see the entire film in wondrous DivX quality. Thanks again to Andy Rush for opening my eyes to this amazing online video format.

Images generated from the code of cyber threats. Not sure they help me to understand viruses any better, but they sure are purty pictures.

Via Infocult.