Listing entries tagged with Education

iTunes U: more read/write than you'd think   02.22.2006, 8:02 AM

In Ben’s recent post, he noted that Larry Lessig worries about the trend toward a read-only internet, the harbinger of which is iTunes. Apple's latest (academic) venture is iTunes U, a project begun at Duke and piloted by seven universities -- Stanford, it appears, has been most active. Since they are looking for a large scale roll out of iTunes U for 2006-07, and since we have many podcasting faculty here at USC, a group of us met with Apple reps yesterday.

Initially I was very skeptical about Apple's further insinuation into the academy and yet, what iTunes U offers is a repository for instructors to store podcasts, with several components similar to courseware such as Blackboard. Apple stores the content on its servers but the university retains ownership. The service is fairly customizable—you can store audio, video with audio, slides with audio (aka enhanced podcasts) and text (but only in pdf). Then you populate the class via university course rosters, which are password protected.

There are also open access levels on which the university (or, say, the alumni association) can add podcasts of vodcasts of events. And it is free. At least for now -- the rep got a little cagey when asked about how long this would be the case.

The point is to allow students to capture lectures and such on their iPods (or MP3 players) for the purposes of study and review. The rationale is that students are already extremely familiar with the technology so there is less of a learning curve (well, at least privileged students such as those at my institution are familiar).

What seems particularly interesting is that students can then either speed up the talk of the lecture without changing pitch (and lord knows there are some whose speaking I would love to accelerate) or, say, in the case of an ESL student, slow it down for better comprehension. Finally, there is space for students to upload their own work —- podcasting has been assigned to some of our students already.

Part of me is concerned at further academic incorporation, but a lot more parts of me are thinking this is not only a chance to help less tech savvy profs employ the technology (the ease of collecting and distributing assets is germane here) while also really pushing the envelope in terms of copyright, educational use, fair use, etc. Apple wants to only use materials that are in the public domain or creative commons initially, but undoubtedly some of the more muddy digital use issues will arise and it would be nice to have academics involved in the process.

Posted by virginia kuhn at 08:02 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education , Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , apple , copyright , elearning , fair_use , ipod , itunes , itunes_u , podcast , read/write_web , stanford , university

what I heard at MIT   01.26.2006, 9:47 AM

Over the next few days I'll be sifting through notes, links, and assorted epiphanies crumpled up in my pocket from two packed, and at times profound, days at the Economics of Open Content symposium, hosted in Cambridge, MA by Intelligent Television and MIT Open CourseWare. For now, here are some initial impressions -- things I heard, both spoken in the room and ricocheting inside my head during and since. An oral history of the conference? Not exactly. More an attempt to jog the memory. Hopefully, though, something coherent will come across. I'll pick up some of these threads in greater detail over the next few days. I should add that this post owes a substantial debt in form to Eliot Weinberger's "What I Heard in Iraq" series (here and here).

Naturally, I heard a lot about "open content."

I heard that there are two kinds of "open." Open as in open access -- to knowledge, archives, medical information etc. (like Public Library of Science or Project Gutenberg). And open as in open process -- work that is out in the open, open to input, even open-ended (like Linux, Wikipedia or our experiment with MItch Stephens, Without Gods).

I heard that "content" is actually a demeaning term, treating works of authorship as filler for slots -- a commodity as opposed to a public good.

I heard that open content is not necessarily the same as free content. Both can be part of a business model, but the defining difference is control -- open content is often still controlled content.

I heard that for "open" to win real user investment that will feedback innovation and even result in profit, it has to be really open, not sort of open. Otherwise "open" will always be a burden.

I heard that if you build the open-access resources and demonstrate their value, the money will come later.

I heard that content should be given away for free and that the money is to be made talking about the content.

I heard that reputation and an audience are the most valuable currency anyway.

I heard that the academy's core mission -- education, research and public service -- makes it a moral imperative to have all scholarly knowledge fully accessible to the public.

I heard that if knowledge is not made widely available and usable then its status as knowledge is in question.

I heard that libraries may become the digital publishing centers of tomorrow through simple, open-access platforms, overhauling the print journal system and redefining how scholarship is disseminated throughout the world.

And I heard a lot about copyright...

I heard that probably about 50% of the production budget of an average documentary film goes toward rights clearances.

I heard that many of those clearances are for "underlying" rights to third-party materials appearing in the background or reproduced within reproduced footage. I heard that these are often things like incidental images, video or sound; or corporate logos or facades of buildings that happen to be caught on film.

I heard that there is basically no "fair use" space carved out for visual and aural media.

I heard that this all but paralyzes our ability as a culture to fully examine ourselves in terms of the media that surround us.

I heard that the various alternative copyright movements are not necessarily all pulling in the same direction.

I heard that there is an "inter-operability" problem between alternative licensing schemes -- that, for instance, Wikipedia's GNU Free Documentation License is not inter-operable with any Creative Commons licenses.

I heard that since the mass market content industries have such tremendous influence on policy, that a significant extension of existing copyright laws (in the United States, at least) is likely in the near future.

I heard one person go so far as to call this a "totalitarian" intellectual property regime -- a police state for content.

I heard that one possible benefit of this extension would be a general improvement of internet content distribution, and possibly greater freedom for creators to independently sell their work since they would have greater control over the flow of digital copies and be less reliant on infrastructure that today only big companies can provide.

I heard that another possible benefit of such control would be price discrimination -- i.e. a graduated pricing scale for content varying according to the means of individual consumers, which could result in fairer prices. Basically, a graduated cultural consumption tax imposed by media conglomerates

I heard, however, that such a system would be possible only through a substantial invasion of users' privacy: tracking users' consumption patterns in other markets (right down to their local grocery store), pinpointing of users' geographical location and analysis of their socioeconomic status.

I heard that this degree of control could be achieved only through persistent surveillance of the flow of content through codes and controls embedded in files, software and hardware.

I heard that such a wholesale compromise on privacy is all but inevitable -- is in fact already happening.

I heard that in an "information economy," user data is a major asset of companies -- an asset that, like financial or physical property assets, can be liquidated, traded or sold to other companies in the event of bankruptcy, merger or acquisition.

I heard that within such an over-extended (and personally intrusive) copyright system, there would still exist the possibility of less restrictive alternatives -- e.g. a peer-to-peer content cooperative where, for a single low fee, one can exchange and consume content without restriction; money is then distributed to content creators in proportion to the demand for and use of their content.

I heard that such an alternative could theoretically be implemented on the state level, with every citizen paying a single low tax (less than $10 per year) giving them unfettered access to all published media, and easily maintaining the profit margins of media industries.

I heard that, while such a scheme is highly unlikely to be implemented in the United States, a similar proposal is in early stages of debate in the French parliament.

And I heard a lot about peer-to-peer...

I heard that p2p is not just a way to exchange files or information, it is a paradigm shift that is totally changing the way societies communicate, trade, and build.

I heard that between 1840 and 1850 the first newspapers appeared in America that could be said to have mass circulation. I heard that as a result -- in the space of that single decade -- the cost of starting a print daily rose approximately %250.

I heard that modern democracies have basically always existed within a mass media system, a system that goes hand in hand with a centralized, mass-market capital structure.

I heard that we are now moving into a radically decentralized capital structure based on social modes of production in a peer-to-peer information commons, in what is essentially a new chapter for democratic societies.

I heard that the public sphere will never be the same again.

I heard that emerging practices of "remix culture" are in an apprentice stage focused on popular entertainment, but will soon begin manifesting in higher stakes arenas (as suggested by politically charged works like "The French Democracy" or this latest Black Lantern video about the Stanley Williams execution in California).

I heard that in a networked information commons the potential for political critique, free inquiry, and citizen action will be greatly increased.

I heard that whether we will live up to our potential is far from clear.

I heard that there is a battle over pipes, the outcome of which could have huge consequences for the health and wealth of p2p.

I heard that since the telecomm monopolies have such tremendous influence on policy, a radical deregulation of physical network infrastructure is likely in the near future.

I heard that this will entrench those monopolies, shifting the balance of the internet to consumption rather than production.

I heard this is because pre-p2p business models see one-way distribution with maximum control over individual copies, downloads and streams as the most profitable way to move content.

I heard also that policing works most effectively through top-down control over broadband.

I heard that the Chinese can attest to this.

I heard that what we need is an open spectrum commons, where connections to the network are as distributed, decentralized, and collaboratively load-sharing as the network itself.

I heard that there is nothing sacred about a business model -- that it is totally dependent on capital structures, which are constantly changing throughout history.

I heard that history is shifting in a big way.

I heard it is shifting to p2p.

I heard this is the most powerful mechanism for distributing material and intellectual wealth the world has ever seen.

I heard, however, that old business models will be radically clung to, as though they are sacred.

I heard that this will be painful.

Posted by ben vershbow at 09:47 AM | Comments (5)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education , Network_Freedom , Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , Remix , academia , academy , broadband , conferences_and_excursions , copyleft , copyright , creative_commons , cyberlaw , democracy , economics , economics_of_open_content , film , freedom , internet , media , monopoly , music , network , open_content , open_spectrum , p2p , politics , publishing , scholarship , technology , wikipedia

the economics of open content   01.23.2006, 9:31 AM

For the next two days, Ray and I are attending what hopes to be a fascinating conference in Cambridge, MA -- The Economics of Open Content -- co-hosted by Intelligent Television and MIT Open CourseWare.

This project is a systematic study of why and how it makes sense for commercial companies and noncommercial institutions active in culture, education, and media to make certain materials widely available for free—and also how free services are morphing into commercial companies while retaining their peer-to-peer quality.

They've assembled an excellent cross-section of people from the emerging open access movement, business, law, the academy, the tech sector and from virtually every media industry to address one of the most important (and counter-intuitive) questions of our age: how do you make money by giving things away for free?

Rather than continue, in an age of information abundance, to embrace economic models predicated on information scarcity, we need to look ahead to new models for sustainability and creative production. I look forward to hearing from some of the visionaries gathered in this room.

More to come...

Posted by ben vershbow at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education , Libraries, Search and the Web , academia , conferences_and_excursions , copyleft , copyright , free_software , gift_economy , library , open_access , open_content , publishing , scholarship

the future of academic publishing, peer review, and tenure requirements   01.06.2006, 12:54 PM

There's a brilliant guest post today on the Valve by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, english and media studies professor/blogger, presenting "a sketch of the electronic publishing scheme of the future." Fitzpatrick, who recently launched ElectraPress, "a collaborative, open-access scholarly project intended to facilitate the reimagining of academic discourse in digital environments," argues convincingly why the embrace of digital forms and web-based methods of discourse is necessary to save scholarly publishing and bring the academy into the contemporary world.

In part, this would involve re-assessing our fetishization of the scholarly monograph as "the gold standard for scholarly production" and the principal ticket of entry for tenure. There is also the matter of re-thinking how scholarly texts are assessed and discussed, both prior to and following publication. Blogs, wikis and other emerging social software point to a potential future where scholarship evolves in a matrix of vigorous collaboration -- where peer review is not just a gate-keeping mechanism, but a transparent, unfolding process toward excellence.

There is also the question of academic culture, print snobbism and other entrenched attitudes. The post ends with an impassioned plea to the older generations of scholars, who, since tenured, can advocate change without the risk of being dashed on the rocks, as many younger professors fear.

...until the biases held by many senior faculty about the relative value of electronic and print publication are changed—but moreover, until our institutions come to understand peer-review as part of an ongoing conversation among scholars rather than a convenient means of determining “value” without all that inconvenient reading and discussion—the processes of evaluation for tenure and promotion are doomed to become a monster that eats its young, trapped in an early twentieth century model of scholarly production that simply no longer works.

I'll stop my summary there since this is something that absolutely merits a careful read. Take a look and join in the discussion.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , academia , e-publishing , monograph , peer_review , publishing , scholarship , university

tipping point?   12.08.2005, 7:36 AM

An article by Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger C. Schonfeld in this morning's Inside Higher Ed claims that over the past year, libraries have accelerated the transition towards purchasing only electronic journals, leaving many publishers of print journals scrambling to make the transition to an online format:

Faced with resource constraints, librarians have been required to make hard choices, electing not to purchase the print version but only to license electronic access to many journals — a step more easily made in light of growing faculty acceptance of the electronic format. Consequently, especially in the sciences, but increasingly even in the humanities, library demand for print has begun to fall. As demand for print journals continues to decline and economies of scale of print collections are lost, there is likely to be a tipping point at which continued collecting of print no longer makes sense and libraries begin to rely only upon journals that are available electronically.

According to Fenton and Schonfeld, this imminent "tipping point" will be a good thing for larger publishing houses which have already begun to embrace an electronic-only format, but smaller nonprofit publishers might "suffer dramatically" if they don't have the means to convert to an electronic format in time. If they fail, and no one is positioned to help them, "the alternative may be the replacement of many of these journals with blogs, repositories, or other less formal distribution models."

Fenton and Schonfeld's point that electronic distribution might substantially change the format of some smaller journals echoes other expressions of concern about the rise of "informal" academic journals and repositories, mainly voiced by scientists who worry about the decline of peer review. Most notably, the Royal Society of London issued a statement on Nov. 24 warning that peer-reviewed scientific journals were threatened by the rise of "open access journals, archives and repositories."

According to the Royal Society, the main problem in the sciences is that government and nonprofit funding organizations are pressing researchers to publish in open-access journals, in order to "stop commercial publishers from making profits from the publication of research that has been funded from the public purse." While this is a noble principle, the Society argued, it undermines the foundations of peer review and compels scientists to publish in formats that might be unsustainable:

The worst-case scenario is that funders could force a rapid change in practice, which encourages the introduction of new journals, archives and repositories that cannot be sustained in the long term, but which simultaneously forces the closure of existing peer-reviewed journals that have a long-track record for gradually evolving in response to the needs of the research community over the past 340 years. That would be disastrous for the research community.

There's more than a whiff of resistance to change in the Royal Society's citing of 340 years of precedent; more to the point however, their position statement downplays the depth of the fundamental opposition between the open access movement in science and traditional journals. As Roger Chartier notes in a recent issue of Critical Inquiry, "Two different logics are at issue here: the logic of free communication, which is associated with the ideal of the Enlightenment that upheld at the sharing of knowledge, and the logic of publishing based on the notion of author's rights and commercial gain."

As we've discussed previously on if:book. the fate of peer review in electronic age is an open question: as long as peer review is tied to the logic of publishing, its fate will be determined at least as much by the still evolving market for electronic distribution as by the needs of the various research communities which have traditionally valued it as a method of assessment.

Posted by lisa lynch at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , Libraries, Search and the Web , library , peer_review , publishing , royal_society_of_london

gaming and the academy   11.28.2005, 10:36 AM

So, what happens when you put together a drama professor and a computer science one?

You get an entertainment technology program. In an article, in the NY Times, Seth Schiesel talks about the blossoming of academic programs devoted entirely to the study and development of video games, offering courses that range from basic game programming to contemporary culture studies.

Since first appearing about three decades ago, video games are well on their way to becoming the dominant medium of the 21st century. They are played across the world by people of all ages, from all walks of life. And in a time where everything is measured by the bottom line, they have in fact surpassed the movie industry in sales. The academy, therefore, no matter how conservative, cannot continue to ignore this phenomenon for long. So from The New School (which includes Parsons) to Carnegie Mellon, prestigious colleges and universities are beginning to offer programs in interactive media. In the last five years the number of universities offering game-related programs has gone from a mere handful to more than 100. This can hardly be described as widescale penetration of higher education, but the trend is unmistakable.

The video game industry has a stake in advancing these programs since they stand to benefit from a pool of smart, sophisticated young developers ready upon graduation to work on commercial games. Bing Gordon, CEO of Electronic Arts says that there is an over-production of cinema studies professionals but that the game industry still lacks the abundant in-flow of talent that the film industry enjoys. Considering the state of public education in this country, it seems that video game programs will continue flourishing only with the help of private funds.

The academy offers the possibility for multidisciplinary study to enrich students' technical and academic backgrounds, and to produce well-rounded talents for the professional world. In his article, Schiesel quotes Bing Gordon:

To create a video game project you need the art department and the computer science department and the design department and the literature or film department all contributing team members. And then there needs to be a leadership or faculty that can evaluate the work from the individual contributors but also evaluate the whole project.

These collaborations are possible now, in part, because technology has become an integral part of art production in the 21st century. It's no longer just for geeks. The contributions of new media artists are too prominent and sophisticated to be ignored. Therefore it seems quite natural that, for instance, an art department might collaborate with faculty in computer science.

Posted by sol gaitan at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , Games , academia , academy , digital , gaming , new_media_arts , video_games

blogging and the true spirit of peer review   11.17.2005, 3:27 PM

Slate goes to college this week with a series of articles on higher education in America, among them a good piece by Robert S. Boynton that makes the case for academic blogging:

"...academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture.

...might blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve?"

The idea of blogging as a kind of service or outreach is just beginning (maybe) to gain traction. But what about blogging as scholarship? Most professor-bloggers I've spoken with consider blogging an invaluable tool for working through ideas, for facilitating exchange within and across disciplines. But it's all decidedly casual. And that's part of what makes it such fun. But to gain acceptance in the academy, there have to be standards. There have to be barriers to entry. Traditionally, that's what peer review has been for. Can there be some sort of peer review system for blogs?

Boynton has a few ideas about how something like this could work (we're also wrestling with these questions on our back porch blog, Sidebar, with the eventual aim of making some sort of formal proposal). Whatever the technicalities, the approach should be to establish a middle path, something like peer review, but not a literal transposition. Some way to gauge and recognize the intellectual rigor of academic blogs without compromising their refreshing immediacy and individuality -- without crashing the party as it were.

There's already a sort of peer review going on among blog carnivals, the periodicals of the blogosphere. Carnivals are rotating showcases of exemplary blog writing in specific disciplines -- history, philosophy, science, education, and many, many more, some quite eccentric. Like blogs, carnivals suffer from an unfortunate coinage. But even with a snootier name -- blog symposiums maybe -- you would never in a million years confuse them with an official-looking peer review journal. Yet the carnivals practice peer review in its most essential form: the gathering of one's fellows (in this case academics and non-scholar enthusiasts alike) to collectively evaluate (ok, perhaps "savor" is more appropriate) a range of intellectual labors in a given area. Boynton:

In the end, peer review is just that: review by one's peers. Any particular system should be judged by its efficiency and efficacy, and not by the perceived prestige of the publication in which the work appears.

If anything, blog-influenced practices like these might reclaim for intellectuals the true spirit of peer review, which, as Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters has argued, has been all but outsourced to prestigious university presses and journals. Experimenting with open-source methods of judgment—whether of straight scholarship or academic blogs—might actually revitalize academic writing.

It's unfortunate that the accepted avenues of academic publishing -- peer-reviewed journals and monographs -- purchase prestige and job security usually at the expense of readership. It suggests an institutional bias in the academy against public intellectualism and in favor of kind of monastic seclusion (no doubt part of the legacy of this last great medieval institution). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the language of academic writing: opaque, convoluted, studded with jargon, its remoteness from ordinary human speech the surest sign of the author's membership in the academic elite.

This crisis of clarity is paired with a crisis of opportunity, as severe financial pressures on university presses are reducing the number of options for professors to get published in the approved ways. What's needed is an alternative outlet alongside traditional scholarly publishing, something between a casual, off-the-cuff web diary and a polished academic journal. Carnivals probably aren't the solution, but something descended from them might well be.

It will be to the benefit of society if blogging can be claimed, sharpened and leveraged as a recognized scholarly practice, a way to merge the academy with the traffic of the real world. The university shouldn't keep its talents locked up within a faltering publishing system that narrows rather than expands their scope. That's not to say professors shouldn't keep writing papers, books and monographs, shouldn't continue to deepen the well of knowledge. On the contrary, blogging should be viewed only as a complement to research and teaching, not a replacement. But as such, it has the potential to breathe new life into the scholarly enterprise as a whole, just as Boynton describes.

Things move quickly -- too quickly -- in the media-saturated society. To remain vital, the academy needs to stick its neck out into the current, with the confidence that it won't be swept away. What's theory, after all, without practice? It's always been publish or perish inside the academy, but these days on the outside, it's more about self-publish. A small but growing group of academics have grasped this and are now in the process of inventing the future of their profession.

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:27 PM | Comments (3)
tags: Education , academic , academy , authority , blogging , blogs , higher_ed , higher_education , peer_review , publishing , scholar , teaching , tenure , university

hundred dollar laptops may make good table lamps   11.17.2005, 8:08 AM

"Demo or die." That was the creed of the MIT Media Lab in the glory days -- days of ferment that produced important, foundational work in interactive media. Well, yesterday at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, where Nicholas Negroponte and Kofi Annan were unveiling the prototype of the 100 dollar laptop, the demo died. Or rather, the demo just didn't happen.

As it turns out, Negroponte wasn't able to get past the screen lock on the slick lime-green device, so the mob of assembled journalists and technofiles had to accept the 100 dollar gospel on faith, making do with touching anecdotes about destitute families huddled in wonder around their child's new laptop, the brightest source of light in their tiny hovel. All told, an inauspicious beginning for the One Laptop Per Child intitiative, which aims to put millions of cheap, robust, free-software-chugging computers into the hands of the world's poorest children.

Sorry to be so snide, but we were watching the live webcast from Tunis yesterday... it's hard not to laugh at the leaders of the free world bumbling over this day-glo gadget, this glorified Trapper Keeper cum jack-in-the-box (Annan ended up breaking the hand crank), with barely a word devoted to what educational content will actually go inside, or to how teachers plan to construct lessons around these new toys. In the end, it's going to come down to them. Good teachers, who know computers, may be able to put the laptops to good use. But somehow I'm getting visions of stacks of unused or busted laptops, cast aside like so many neon bricks.

A sunnier future for the 100 dollar laptop? A commercial company obtains the rights and starts selling them in the West for $250 a pop. They're a huge hit. Everyone just has to have one to satisfy their poor inner child.

Posted by ben vershbow at 08:08 AM | Comments (3)
tags: 100_dollar_laptop , Education , Negroponte , UN , boondoggle , elearning , free_software , kofi_annan , laptop , nicholas_negroponte , open_source

blog meeting in la-la land   11.15.2005, 5:36 PM

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published a positive piece on blogging in academia, a first person account by Rebecca Goetz, one of the first academic bloggers, of how blogging can actually enhance scholarly life, foster trans-disciplinary communication, and connect the academy to the public sphere.

The timing of Goetz's article is auspicious, as the institute is currently grappling with these very issues, gearing up for a grant proposal to do something big. Last week, about to dash out the door for the airport, I mentioned this project we're cooking up to encourage, promote and organize academic blogging with the aim of raising its status as a scholarly activity. Well, last Friday in Los Angeles we assembled a cadre of over a dozen blog-oriented professors, grad students, and journalism profs, along with a radical blogger-librarian, a grassroots media producer, and a sociologist, for a day of stimulating discussion about what can happen when you put blogs in the hands of people who really know something about something.

We're still sifting through notes and thoughts from the meeting, and for anyone who's interested we've devoted an entire blog to continuing the discussion. I guess you could say we've formed a little community dedicated to answering the big questions -- chiefly, how the blogging medium might serve as a bridge between the world of scholarly knowledge and the world at large -- and to helping us form the proposal for a project -- a website? a network? a new sort of blog? -- that will address some of these questions.

John Mohr, the afore-mentioned sociologist, described it as a matter of "marshaling and re-deploying intellectual capital," which I think brilliantly and succinctly captures the possibilities of blogs both for making the academy more transparent and for helping it reach the general public, shining the light of knowledge, as it were, on the complexity of human affairs. The power of blogs is that they exist in a space all their own, not entirely within the academy and not (at least not yet) within the economic and editorial structures of mass media. Because of this, bloggers are able to maintain what McKenzie Wark calls "a slight angle of difference" from both sides. We here at the institute, from our not-quite-inside-not-quite-outside-the-academy vantage, are interested in simultaneously protecting that angle and boosting its stature.

Back in May, I saw Wark speak at a conference on new media education at CUNY called "Share, Share Widely." He talked about how the academy should position itself in the media-saturated society and how it can employ new media tools (like blogging) to penetrate, and even redefine, the public sphere. I was mulling this over leading up to the meeting and it seems even more dead-on now:

"This tension between dialogue and discourse might not be unrelated to that between education and knowledge. Certainly what the new media technologies offer is a way of constructing new possibilities for the dialogic, ones which escape the boundaries of discipline, even of the university itself. New media is not interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. It is antidisciplinary -- although one might be careful where and to whom we break this news. Its acid with which to eat away at the ossified structure of discourse -- with the aim of constructing a new structure of discourse. One that might bring closer together the university with its outside. Not to erase the precious interiority of the university, but to make it porous. To actually apply all that ‘theory’ we learned to our own institutions."

"Imagine a political refugee, fleeing one country for another, jotting down his thoughts on the run, sharing them with his friends. I’m talking about Marx, writing the 1844 manuscripts. I think critical theory was always connected to new media practices. I think it was always about rethinking the discourse in which dialogue is possible. I think it was always knowledge escaping from the institutions of education. Think of Gramsci editing New Order, negotiating between metropolitan and subaltern languages. Think of Benjamin’s One Way Street, a pamphlet with bold typographic experiments. Or Brecht’s experiments in cinema. Or Debord’s last -- amazing -- TV program. Broadcast only once so you had to set your vcr. Or the Frankfurt School and Birmingham Schools, which broke down the intellectual division of labor. Or the autonomous studio Meilville built for Godard."

"We need to do a ‘history of the present’ as Foucault would say, and recover the institutional aspect of knowledge as an object of critique. But of more than critique as well. Let’s not just talk about the ‘public sphere’. Let’s build some! We have the tools. We know wiki and blogging and podcasting. Let’s build new relations between theory and practice. No more theory without practice -- but no more practice without theory either. Let’s work at slight angle of difference from the institution. Not against it -- that won’t get you tenure -- but not capitulating to it either. That won’t make any difference or be interesting to anybody."

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:36 PM | Comments (1)
tags: Education , academia , academy , blogger , blogging , blogs , marx , scholarship , university

the creeping (digital) death of fair use   11.02.2005, 1:13 PM

Meant to post about this last week but it got lost in the shuffle... In case anyone missed it, Tarleton Gillespie of Cornell has published a good piece in Inside Higher Ed about how sneaky settings in course management software are effectively eating away at fair use rights in the academy. Public debate tends to focus on the music and movie industries and the ever more fiendish anti-piracy restrictions they build into their products (the latest being the horrendous "analog hole"). But a similar thing is going on in education and it is decidely under-discussed.

Gillespie draws our attention to the "Copyright Permissions Building Block," a new add-on for the Blackboard course management platform that automatically obtains copyright clearances for any materials a teacher puts into the system. It's billed as a time-saver, a friendly chauffeur to guide you through the confounding back alleys of copyright.

But is it necessary? Gillespie, for one, is concerned that this streamlining mechanism encourages permission-seeking that isn't really required, that teachers should just invoke fair use. To be sure, a good many instructors never bother with permissions anyway, but if they stop to think about it, they probably feel that they are doing something wrong. Blackboard, by sneakily making permissions-seeking the default, plays to this misplaced guilt, lulling teachers away from awareness of their essential rights. It's a disturbing trend, since a right not sufficiently excercised is likely to wither away.

Fair use is what oxygenates the bloodstream of education, allowing ideas to be ideas, not commodities. Universities, and their primary fair use organs, libraries, shouldn't be subjected to the same extortionist policies of the mainstream copyright regime, which, like some corrupt local construction authority, requires dozens of permits to set up a simple grocery store. Fair use was written explicitly into law in 1976 to guarantee protection. But the market tends to find a way, and code is its latest, and most insidious, weapon.

Amazingly, few academics are speaking out. John Holbo, writing on The Valve, wonders:

Why aren’t academics - in the humanities in particular - more exercised by recent developments in copyright law? Specifically, why aren’t they outraged by the prospect of indefinite copyright extension?...

...It seems to me odd, not because overextended copyright is the most pressing issue in 2005 but because it seems like a social/cultural/political/economic issue that recommends itself as well suited to be taken up by academics - starting with the fact that it is right here on their professional doorstep...

Most obviously on the doorstep is Google, currently mired in legal unpleasantness for its book-scanning ambitions and the controversial interpretation of fair use that undergirds them. Why aren't the universities making a clearer statement about this? In defense? In concern? Soon, when search engines move in earnest into video and sound, the shit will really hit the fan. The academy should be preparing for this, staking out ground for the healthy development of multimedia scholarship and literature that necessitates quotation from other "texts" such as film, television and music, and for which these searchable archives will be an essential resource.

Fair use seems to be shrinking at just the moment it should be expanding, yet few are speaking out.

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:13 PM | Comments (4)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , DRM , Education , academy , blackboard , copyright , fair_use , google , google_print

a better wikipedia will require a better conversation   10.28.2005, 1:04 PM

There's an interesting discussion going on right now under Kim's Wikibooks post about how an open source model might be made to work for the creation of authoritative knowledge -- textbooks, encyclopedias etc. A couple of weeks ago there was some dicussion here about an article that, among other things, took some rather cheap shots at Wikipedia, quoting (very selectively) a couple of shoddy passages. Clearly, the wide-open model of Wikipedia presents some problems, but considering the advantages it presents (at least in potential) -- never out of date, interconnected, universally accessible, bringing in voices from the margins -- critics are wrong to dismiss it out of hand. Holding up specific passages for critique is like shooting fish in a barrel. Even Wikipedia's directors admit that most of the content right now is of middling quality, some of it downright awful. It doesn't then follow to say that the whole project is bunk. That's a bit like expelling an entire kindergarten for poor spelling. Wikipedia is at an early stage of development. Things take time.

Instead we should be talking about possible directions in which it might go, and how it might be improved. Dan for one, is concerned about the market (excerpted from comments):

What I worry about...is that we're tearing down the old hierarchies and leaving a vacuum in their wake.... The problem with this sort of vacuum, I think, is that capitalism tends to swoop in, simply because there are more resources on that side....

...I'm not entirely sure if the world of knowledge functions analogously, but Wikipedia does presume the same sort of tabula rasa. The world's not flat: it tilts precariously if you've got the cash. There's something in the back of my mind that suspects that Wikipedia's not protected against this – it's kind of in the state right now that the Web as a whole was in 1995 before the corporate world had discovered it. If Wikipedia follows the model of the web, capitalism will be sweeping in shortly.

Unless... the experts swoop in first. Wikipedia is part of a foundation, so it's not exactly just bobbing in the open seas waiting to be swept away. If enough academics and librarians started knocking on the door saying, hey, we'd like to participate, then perhaps Wikipedia (and Wikibooks) would kick up to the next level. Inevitably, these newcomers would insist on setting up some new vetting mechanisms and a few useful hierarchies that would help ensure quality. What would these be? That's exactly the kind of thing we should be discussing.

The Guardian ran a nice piece earlier this week in which they asked several "experts" to evaluate a Wikipedia article on their particular subject. They all more or less agreed that, while what's up there is not insubstantial, there's still a long way to go. The biggest challenge then, it seems to me, is to get these sorts of folks to give Wikipedia more than just a passing glance. To actually get them involved.

For this to really work, however, another group needs to get involved: the users. That might sound strange, since millions of people write, edit and use Wikipedia, but I would venture that most are not willing to rely on it as a bedrock source. No doubt, it's incredibly useful to get a basic sense of a subject. Bloggers (including this one) link to it all the time -- it's like the conversational equivalent of a reference work. And for certain subjects, like computer technology and pop culture, it's actually pretty solid. But that hits on the problem right there. Wikipedia, even at its best, has not gained the confidence of the general reader. And though the Wikimaniacs would be loathe to admit it, this probably has something to do with its core philosophy.

Karen G. Schneider, a librarian who has done a lot of thinking about these questions, puts it nicely:

Wikipedia has a tagline on its main page: "the free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit." That's an intriguing revelation. What are the selling points of Wikipedia? It's free (free is good, whether you mean no-cost or freely-accessible). That's an idea librarians can connect with; in this country alone we've spent over a century connecting people with ideas.

However, the rest of the tagline demonstrates a problem with Wikipedia. Marketing this tool as a resource "anyone can edit" is a pitch oriented at its creators and maintainers, not the broader world of users. It's the opposite of Ranganathan's First Law, "books are for use." Ranganathan wasn't writing in the abstract; he was referring to a tendency in some people to fetishize the information source itself and lose sight that ultimately, information does not exist to please and amuse its creators or curators; as a common good, information can only be assessed in context of the needs of its users.

I think we are all in need of a good Wikipedia, since in the long run it might be all we've got. And I'm in now way opposed to its spirit of openness and transparency (I think the preservation of version histories is a fascinating element and one which should be explored further -- perhaps the encyclopedia of the future can encompass multiple versions of the "the truth"). But that exhilarating throwing open of the doors should be tempered with caution and with an embrace of the parts of the old system that work. Not everything need be thrown away in our rush to explore the new. Some people know more than other people. Some editors have better judgement than others. There is such a thing as a good kind of gatekeeping.

If these two impulses could be brought into constructive dialogue then we might get somewhere. This is exactly the kind of conversation the Wikimedia Foundation should be trying to foster.

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:04 PM | Comments (8)
tags: Education , Libraries, Search and the Web , Online , authority , encyclopedia , library , open_source , web , wiki , wikibooks , wikimedia , wikipedia

can there be great textbooks without great authors?   10.27.2005, 8:08 AM

Jimmy Wales believes that the Wikibooks project will do for the textbook what Wikipedia did for the encyclopedia; replacing costly printed books with free online content developed by a community of contributors. But will it? Or, more accurately, should it? The open source volunteer format works for encyclopedia entries, which don't require deep knowledge of a particular subject. But the sustained examination and comprehensive vision required to understand and contextualize a particular subject area is out of reach for most wiki contributors. The communal voice of the open source textbook is also problematic, especially for humanities texts, as it lacks the power of an inspired authoritative narrator. This is not to say that I think open source textbooks are doomed to failure. In fact, I agree with Jimmy Wales that open source textbooks represent an exciting, liberating and inevitable change. But there are some real concerns that we need to address in order to help this format reach its full potential. Including: how to create a coherent narrative out of a chorus of anonymous voices, how to prevent plagiarism, and how to ensure superior scholarship.

To illustrate these points, I'm going to pick on a Wikibook called: Art History. This book won the distinction of "collaboration of the month" for October, which suggests that, within the purview of wikibooks, it represents a superior effort. Because space is limited, I'm only going to examine two passages from Chapter One, comparing the wikibook to similar sections in a traditional art history textbook. Below is the opening paragraph, framing the section on Paleolithic Art and cave paintings, which begins the larger story of art history.

Art has been part of human culture for millenia. Our ancient ancestors left behind paintings and sculptures of delicate beauty and expressive strength. The earliest finds date from the Middle Paleolithic period (between 200,000 and 40,000 years ago), although the origins of Art might be older still, lost to the impermanence of materials.

Compare that to the introduction given by Gardner's Art Through the Ages (seventh edition):

What Genesis is to the biblical account of the fall and redemption of man, early cave art is to the history of his intelligence, imagination, and creative power. In the caves of southern France and of northern Spain, discovered only about a century ago and still being explored, we may witness the birth of that characteristically human capability that has made man master of his environment—the making of images and symbols. By this original and tremendous feat of abstraction upper Paleolithic men were able to fix the world of their experience, rendering the continuous processes of life in discrete and unmoving shapes that had identity and meaning as the living animals that were their prey.

In that remote time during the last advance and retreat of the great glaciers man made the critical breakthrough and became wholly human. Our intellectual and imaginative processes function through the recognition and construction of images and symbols; we see and understand the world pretty much as we were taught to by the representations of it familiar to our time and place. The immense achievement of Stone Age man, the invention of representation, cannot be exaggerated.

As you can see the wiki book introduction seems rather anemic and uninspired when compared to Gardner's. The Gardner's introduction also sets up a narrative arc placing art of this era in the context of an overarching story of human civilization.

I chose Gardner's Art Through the Ages because it is the classic "Intro to Art History" textbook (75 years old, in its eleventh edition). I bought my copy in high school and still have it. That book, along with my brilliant art history teacher Gretchen Whitman, gave me a lifelong passion for visual art and a deep understanding of its significance in the larger story of western civilization. My tattered but beloved Gardner's volume still serves me well, some 20 odd years later. Perhaps it is the beauty of the writing, or the solidity of the authorial voice, or the engaging manner in which the "story" of art is told.

Let's compare another passage; this one describes pictorial techniques employed by stone age painters. First the wikibook:

Another feature of the Lascaux paintings deserves attention. The bulls there show a convention of representing horns that has been called twisted perspective, because the viewer sees the heads in profile but the horns from the front. Thus, the painter's approach is not strictly or consistently optical. Rather, the approach is descriptive of the fact that cattle have two horns. Two horns are part of the concept "bull." In strict optical-perspective profile, only one horn would be visible, but to paint the animal in that way would, as it were, amount to an incomplete definition of it.

And now Gardner's:

The pictures of cattle at Lascaux and elsewhere show a convention of representation of horns that has been called twisted perspective, since we see the heads in profile but the horns from a different angle. Thus, the approach of the artist is not strictly or consistently optical—that is, organized from a fixed-viewpoint perspective. Rather, the approach is descriptive of the fact that cattle have two horns. Two horns would be part of the concepts "cow" or "bull." In a strict optical-perspective profile only one horn would be visible, but to paint the animal in such a way would, as it were, amount to an incomplete definition of it.

This brings up another very serious problem with open-source textbooks--plagiarism. If the first page of the wikibook-of-the month blatantly rips-off one of the most popular art history books in print and nobody notices, how will Wikibooks be able to police the other 11,000 plus textbooks it intends to sponsor? What will the consequences be if poorly written, plagairized, open-source textbooks become the runaway hit that Wikibooks predicts?

Posted by Kim White at 08:08 AM | Comments (17)
tags: Education , authority , e-learning , ebook , jimmy_wales , open_source , textbook , wiki , wikibooks , wikipedia

everything bad continued -- the author strikes back   10.26.2005, 10:39 AM

Folks, enjoying the discussion here. I had a couple of responses to several points that have been raised.

1. The title. I think some of you are taking it a little too seriously -- it's meant to be funny, not a strict statement of my thesis. Calling it hyperbolic or misleading is like criticizing Neil Postman for calling his book "Amusing Ourselves To Death" when no one actually *died* from watching too much television in the early eighties.

2. IQ. As I say in the book, we don't really know if the increased complexity of the culture is partially behind the Flynn Effect, though I suspect it is (and Flynn, for what it's worth, suspects it is as well.) But I'm not just interested in IQ as a measure of the increased intelligence of the gaming/net generation. I focused on that because it was the one area where there was actually some good data, in the sense that we definitely know that IQ scores are rising. But I suspect that there are many other -- potentially more important -- ways in which we're getting smarter as well, most of which we don't test for. Probably the most important is what we sometimes call system thinking: analyzing a complex system with multiple interacting variables changing over time. IQ scores don't track this skill at all, but it's precisely the sort of thing you get extremely good at if you play a lot of SimCity-like games. It is not a trivial form of intelligence at all -- it's precisely the *lack* of skill at this kind of thinking that makes it hard for people to intuitively understand things like ecosystems or complex social problems.

3. The focus of the book itself. People seem to have a hard time accepting the fact that I really do think the content/values discussion about pop culture has its merits. I just chose to write a book that would focus on another angle, since it was an angle that was chronically ignored in the discussion of pop culture (or chronically misunderstood.) Everything Bad is not a unified field theory of pop culture; it's an attempt to look at one specific facet of the culture from a fresh perspective. If Bob (and others) end up responding by saying that the culture is both making us smarter on a cognitive level, but less wise on a social/historical level (because of the materialism, etc) that's a perfectly reasonable position to take, one that doesn't contradict anything I'm saying in the book. I happen to think that -- despite that limited perspective -- the Sleeper Curve hypothesis was worthy of a book because 1) increased cognitive complexity is hardly a trivial development, and 2) everyone seemed to think that the exact opposite was happening, that the culture was dumbing us all down. In a way, I wrote the book to encourage people to spend their time worrying about real problems -- instead of holding congressional hearings to decide if videogames were damaging the youth of American, maybe they could focus on, you know, poverty or global warming or untangling the Iraq mess.

As far as the materialistic values question goes, I think it's worth pointing out that the most significant challenge to the capitalist/private property model to come along in generations has emerged precisely out of the gaming/geek community: open source software, gift economy sharing, wikipedia, peer-to-peer file sharing, etc. If you're looking for evidence of people using their minds to imagine alternatives to the dominant economic structures of their time, you'll find far more experiments in this direction coming out of today's pop culture than you would have in the pop culture of the late seventies or eighties. Thanks to their immersion this networked culture, the "kids today" are much more likely to embrace collective projects that operate outside the traditional channels of commercial ownership. They're also much more likely to think of themselves as producers of media, sharing things for the love of it, than the passive TV generation that Postman chronicled. There's still plenty of mindless materialism out there, of course, but I think the trend is a positive one.

Steven

Posted by steven johnson at 10:39 AM | Comments (2)
tags: Education , childhood , cognition , culture , everything_bad_is_good_for_you? , gaming , iq , neil_postman , video_games

some thoughts on katamari damacy:
everything bad is good for you, part 3.5   10.24.2005, 8:02 AM

Responding to Bob's "games provide much more than a cognitive workout"...

Growing up in the 80s, video games were much less sophisticated and probably less effective as a matrix for training consumption. TV performed that role. I remember watching on Nickelodeon competitions between children in a toy store in which each contestant had 60, or 120 seconds to fill a shopping cart with as many toys as they possibly could. The winner -- whoever had managed to grab the most -- got to keep the contents of their cart. The physical challenge of the game was obvious. You could even argue that it presented a cognitive challenge insofar as you had to strategize the most effective pattern through the aisles, balancing the desirability of toys with their geometric propensity to fly off the shelves quickly. But did that excuse the game ethically?

I've played a bit of Katamari lately and have enjoyed it. It's a world charged with static electricity, everything sticks. Each object has been lovingly rendered in its peculiarity and stubbornness. If your katamari picks up something long and narrow, say, a #2 pencil, and attaches to it in such a way that it sticks out far from the clump, it will impede your movement. Each time the pencil hits the ground, you have to kind of pole vault the entire ball. It's not hard to see how the game trains visual puzzle-solving skills, sensitivity to shape, spatial relationships (at least virtual ones), etc.

That being said, I agree with Bob and Rylish that there is an internal economy at work here that teaches children to be consumers. A deep acquisition anxiety runs through the game, bringing to mind another Japanese pop phenom: Pokémon. Pokémon (called "Pocket Monsters" in Japan) always struck me as particularly insidious, far more predatory than anything I grew up with, because its whole narrative universe is based on consumption. "Collect 'em all" is not just the marketing slogan for spinoff products, but the very essence of the game itself. The advertising is totally integrated with the story. Here's Wikipedia (not a bad source for things like this) on how it works:

"The Pokémon games are role-playing games with a strategy element which allow players to catch, collect, and train pets with various abilities, and battle them against each other to build their strength and evolve them into more powerful Pokémon. Pokémon battles are based on the non-lethal Eastern sport of fighting insects, but the Pokémon never bleed or die, only faint. The game's catchphrase used to be "Gotta catch 'em all!", although now it is no longer officially used."

Similarly, the Katamari backstory involves the lord of the universe getting drunk one night and shattering the solar system. Each level of the game is the reassembly of a star or planet. If you succeed, a heavenly body is restored to the firmament.

After an hour playing Katamari, having traversed a number of wildly imaginative landscapes (and having absorbed a soundtrack that can only be described as Japanese chipmunks on nitrous) I re-enter the actual world in a mildly fevered state. The cardinal rule in the game is that to succeed I must devour as much as possible. No time is afforded to savor the strange, psychedelic topography, to examine the wonderful array of objects (everything from thumbtacks to blue whales) scattered about in my path. Each stage is a terrain that must be gobbled up, emptied. A throbbing orb of light in the upper left corner of the screen, set within concentric rings representing target diameters, measures my progress toward the goal: a katamari "n" meters in size. The clock in the upper right corner pressures me to keep rolling.

Video games today may not be as blatant as the consumerist spectacle of the Nickelodeon game, and they may provide richly textured worlds posing greater problem-solving challenges than any electronic media that has preceded them. But it seems to me that many of them do not differ ideologically from that shopping cart contest.

Posted by ben vershbow at 08:02 AM | Comments (4)
tags: Education , Games , capitalism , children , cognitive , everything_bad_is_good_for_you? , japan , katamari , katamari_damacy , nickelodeon , pokemon , steven_johnson , video_games

chicago law faculty starts blogging   10.12.2005, 1:07 PM

Law professors at the University of Chicago have launched an experimental faculty blog to connect with students, the legal community, and the world at large. They've chosen a good moment to jump into the public sphere, when the Supreme Court is in flux. I wouldn't be surprised if this spurred similar developments at other universities.

The University of Chicago School of Law has always been a place about ideas. We love talking about them, writing about them, and refining them through open, often lively conversation. This blog is just a natural extension of that tradition. Our hope is to use the blog as a forum in which to exchange nascent ideas with each other and also a wider audience, and to hear feedback about which ideas are compelling and which could use some re-tooling.

Though a growing number of scholars have embraced blogging, the academy as a whole has been loathe to take treat it as anything more than a dalliance. But a few more high profile moves like the one in Chicago and university boards may start clamoring to jump in. Perhaps then there can begin a serious discussion about legitimizing blogging as a form of scholarly production, and even as a kind of peer review. It's not that all academics should be expected (or should want) to become high-profile public intellectuals. Fundamentally, academic blogging should be considered as an extension of "office hours," a way to extend the dialogue with students and other faculty.

But there's a definite benefit for the public when authoritative voices start blogging about what they know best. It's refreshing to read sober, deeply informed reflections on the Miers nomination and surrounding questions of judicial philosophy written by people who know what they're talking about. It helps us to parse the news and to tune out some of the more worthless punditry that goes on, both in mainstream media and in the blogosphere. Less noise, more signal.

Of course, experts can get noisy too. I was thrilled when Paul Krugman began writing his column for the NY Times -- here was someone with a deep grasp of economics and a talent for explaining it in a political context. But as Krugman's audience has grown, so has his propensity to blow off partisan steam. To me at least, his value as a public intellect has waned.

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , academia , academic , academy , blog , blogger , blogging , blogs , chicago , culture , faculty , intellectual , judicial , law , legal , miers , pedagogy , politics , publishing , schools , supreme_court , university

the blog carnival   10.11.2005, 7:18 AM

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a good piece last week by Henry Farrell -- "The Blogosphere As A Carnival of Ideas" -- looking at the small but growing minority of scholars who have become bloggers. Farrell is a poli sci professor at George Washington, and a contributor to the popular group blog Crooked Timber. He argues from experience how blogs have invigorated scholarly exchange within and across fields, allowing for a more relaxed discourse, free of the jargon and stuffy manner of journals. In some cases, blogs have enabled previously obscure academics to break beyond the ivory tower to connect with a large general readership hungry for their insight and expertise.

What Farrell neglects to mention -- which is surprising given the title of the piece -- is the phenomenon of the "blog carnival," an interesting subculture of the web that has been adopted in certain academic, or semi-academic, circles. A blog carnival is like a roving journal, a rotating showcase of interesting writing from around the blogosphere within a particular discipline. Individual bloggers volunteer to host a carnival on their personal blog, acting as chief editor for that edition. It falls to them to collect noteworthy items, and to sort through suggestions from the community, many of which are direct submissions from authors. On the appointed date (carnivals generally keep to a regular schedule) the carnival gets published and the community is treated to a richly annotated feast of new writing in the field.

Granted, not all participating bloggers are academics. Some are students, some simply enthusiasts. Anyone with a serious interest in the given area is usually welcome. Among the more active blog carnivals are Tangled Bank, a science carnival currently in its 38th edition, the Philosophers' Carnival, whose 20th edition was just posted this past Sunday, and the History Carnival, currently in its 17th edition.

Here's a small taste from the most recent offering at History Carnival, hosted by The Apocalyptic Historian:

New Deal liberalism has been on the minds of politicians lately. Hiram Hover posts about the recent talk of New Deal analogies from politicians in deciding how to help the victims of Katrina in “Responding to Katrina: Is History Any Guide?” Caleb McDaniel at Mode for Caleb draws a startling historical parallel between the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Phildelphia and New Orleans after Katrina in 2005.

In a comparison of another of Bush’s crises in the making, Jim MacDonald revisits the history of the Sepoy Rebellion with comments on the current situation in Iraq. Meanwhile Sepoy contributes to a recent attempt to compile the views Westerners have about Islam at Chapati Mystery.

How many times have humans believed the world was coming to an end? Natalie Bennett reviews a recent work on the Anabaptist takeover of Münster in 1534, when the belief in the impending apocalypse sent that city into chaos.

Most carnivals have a central site that indexes links to past editions and provides a schedule of upcoming ones, but the posts themselves exist on the various blogs that comprise the community. Hence the "carnival" -- a traveling festival of ideas, a party that moves from house to house. Participating blogs generally display a badge on their sidebar signaling their affiliation with a particular collective.

Though carnivals keep to a strict schedule, but there is no mandated format or style. Host bloggers can organize the material however they choose, putting their own personal spin or filter on the current round -- just as long as they stick to the overall topic. The latest issue of Carnivalesque, a monthly circuit on medieval and early modern history, shows how far some hosts will go -- styled as a full magazine, the October issue is complete with a mock cover, a letter from the editor, and links organized by section.

The concept of the carnival seems to have originated in 2002 with "The Carnival of the Vanities," which for a while served as a venue for bloggers to promote their best writing -- a way of fighting the swift sinking of words in a sea of rapidly updating blogs. It's not surprising that the idea was then taken up by academic types, since the carnival model, in its essence, rather jives with the main warranting mechanism of all scholarly publication: peer review. It's a looser, less formal peer review to be sure, but still operates according to the ethos of the self-evaluating collective.

It's worth paying attention to how these carnivals work because they provide at least part of the answer to a larger concern about the web: how to maintain quality and authority in a flood of amateur self-publishing. In the cycle of the carnival, blogging becomes a kind of open application process where your best work is dangled in the path of roving editors. You might say all bloggers are roving editors, but these ones represent an authoritative collective, one with a self-sustaining focus.

So the idea of the carnival, refined and sharpened by academics and lifelong learners, might in fact have broader application for electronic publishing. It happily incorporates the de-centralized nature of the web, thriving through collaborative labor, and yet it retains the primacy of individual voices and editorial sensibilities. Again, you might point out that its formula is far from unique, that this is in fact the procedure of just about any blog: find interesting stuff on the web and link to it with a few original comments. But the carnival focuses this practice into a regular, more durable form, providing an authoritative context that can be counted on week after week, even year after year. Sounds sort of like a magazine doesn't it? But its offices are constantly in flux, its editorial chair a rotating one. I'm interested to see how it evolves. If blogs in cyberspace are like the single-cell organism in the primordial porridge, might the carnival be a form of multi-cell life?

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:18 AM | Comments (7)
tags: Education , academia , academic , academy , aggregation , blog , blog_carnival , blogging , blogs , carnival , early_modern , history , journal , medieval , peer_review , philosophy , publishing , reading , science , university , writing

this laptop costs $100   09.28.2005, 1:03 PM

MIT has released some new images of its $100 laptop prototype, of which it hopes to have 5 to 15 million test units within the year. The laptops are much more durable than your average commercial machine, can be used as writing tablets or rotated 90 degrees as ebooks, and run on Linux - 100% free software. The idea is for the machines to provide a platform for an open source education movement throughout the South - a major hack of the current global order.

I love the hand cranks on the side, a backup charging option for remote or poorly provided areas where there is little or no electricity.

("The $100 laptop moves closer to reality" in CNET)

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:03 PM | Comments (6)
tags: $100laptop , Education , MIT , Negroponte , The Ideal Device? , africa , asia , classroom , computer , gadget , google , justice , laptop , linux , notebook , opensource , poor , poverty , redhat , revolution , south , southamerica , tablet , technology

podcast: discussing neil postman's "building a bridge to the 18th century"   09.27.2005, 5:32 PM

(Annotated audio recordings of this discussion appear further down.)

On the dedication page of "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century," Neil Postman quotes the poet Randall Jarrell:

Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

Though often failing to provide satisfying answers, Postman asks the kind of first-order questions one hears all too infrequently at a time when technology's impact on our social, political and intellectual lives grows ever more profound. Postman has been accused of deep reactionism toward technology, and indeed, his hostility toward computers and telecommunications betrays an elitism that discredits some of his larger, and quite compelling observations.

In spite of this, Postman's diagnosis is persuasive: that the idea of technological progress bequeathed by the Enlightenment has detached from reason and become a runaway train, that we are unquestioningly embracing new technologies that unleash massive change on our family and communal life, our democracy, and our capacity to think critically. We have stopped asking the single most important question that should be applied to all new technological innovations: does this technology solve a problem? If so, then at what cost? To whose benefit? And at whose expense?

Postman portrays the contemporary West as a culture without a narrative, littered with the shards of broken ideologies - depressed, unmotivated, and therefore uncritical of the new technologies that are foisted upon it by a rapacious capitalist system. The culprit, as he sees it, is postmodernism, which he lambasts (rather simplistically) as a corrosive intellectual trend, picking at the corpse of the Enlightenment, and instilling torpor and malaise at all levels of culture through its distrust of language and dogged refusal to accept one truth over another. This kind of thinking, Postman argues, is seductive, but it starves humans of their inspiration and sense of purpose.

To be saved, he goes on, and to build a better future, we would do well to look back to the philosophes of 18th century Europe, who, in the face of surging industrialization, defined a new idea of universal rational humanism - one that allowed for various interpretations within its fold, was rigorously suspicious of religious or any other kind of dogma, and yet gave the world a sense of moral uplift and progress. Postman does not suggest that we copy the 18th century, but rather give it careful study in order to draw inspiration for a new positive narrative, and for a reinvigoration of our critical outlook. This, Postman insists, offers us the best chance of surviving our future.

Postman's note of alarm, if at times shrill, is nonetheless a refreshing antidote to the techno-optimism that pervades contemporary culture. And his recognition of our "crisis in narrative" - a formulation borrowed from Vaclav Havel - is dead on.

September 19: Bob, Dan, Kim, and Ben discuss Postman's book at our new Brooklyn office (special prize if you pick out the sound of the ice cream truck passing by).

1. Bob's preface - thoughts about how we do business at the institute (1:56) (download)

2. Ben's first impressions - childhood under threat... Dan's first impressions into discussion - a Clinton-era book, sets up a rather straw man caricature with the postmodernists, but society's need for a narrative is compelling - why the Christian right has done so well... Postman seems to be assuming that progress is a law, that there is a directed narrative to history - problems with how he treats evolution. (6:43) (download)

3. Bob: Postman is much better at identifying problems than at coming up with solutions. Which is what makes him compelling. His stance is courageous. People assume with technology that just because something can be done it should be done. This is a tremendous problem - an affliction. If you could go back in time and be the inventor of the automobile, would you do it? People get angry at the responsibility this question imputes to them. How can we put these big questions at the center of our work? (13:34) (download)

4. Another big question... "An electronic community is only a simulation of a real community"? Flickr, Friendster, Howard Dean campaign? What is the vehicle for talking about this? What format is best for engaging these questions? Looking for new forms that illuminate or activate the questions. (15:43) (download)

5. Where/who are the public intellectuals today? [The ice cream truck passes by.] Strange bifurcation of the intellectual elite - many of the best-educated people most able to deal with abstraction make their living producing popular media that controls society. (10:07) (download)

6. Is capitalism the problem? Postman's bias: written language will never be surpassed in its power to deal with abstract thought and cultivation of ideas. But we are arguably past the primacy of print. What is our attitude toward this? (9:39) (download)

7. What opportunities for reflection do different media afford? Films on DVD can be read and reread like a book - the viewer controls, rather than being controlled - a possibility for reflection not available in broadcast. What is the proper venue for discussing this? Capitalism is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. How do we create, if not a mass agitation, then at least a mass discussion? Tie it to the larger pressing problems of the world and how they will be better addressed by certain forms of discourse and reflection. Averting ecological catastrophe as one possible narrative - an inspiring motivator that will get people moving. How do find our way back into history? (10:09) (download)

8. What should we read next as counterpoint/antidote to Postman? The Matrix - are we headed that way? (12:33) (download)

9. How do we organize new kinds of debates about technology and society? Other issues to be addressed - class, race and gender inequality. (11:26) (download)

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:32 PM | Comments (5)
tags: 18thcentury , Education , Thought Experiments , america , audio , benjaminfranklin , book , books , culture , debate , democracy , diderot , download , enlightenment , hume , jefferson , lit , literature , locke , matrix , neilpostman , philosophy , podcast , postman , progress , reading , reason , rousseau , science , technology , thomaspaine , voltaire

ways of seeing, ways of writing - a conversation   09.23.2005, 6:19 PM

The following discussion about a proposed exercise for a high school or college class began in an email exchange yesterday with Bob, Virginia Kuhn and Karl Stolley (Virginia and Karl are both teachers of rhetoric and composition and great intellectual partners of the institute). We thought it was getting interesting so we decided to slap it up here on the blog as a thought experiment. Please join in the discussion in the comment stream.

Bob Stein wrote:

karl and virginia:

this is an idea for an exercise for a high school or college class. i'm wondering if you think it would be interesting/valuable for both students and for those of us interested in understanding the relation of different media types.

*Ways of Seeing, Ways of Writing*

class is divided into four sections. one given pad and pencil. one given digital still camera. one given audio recorder. one given video camera*

the class is asked to "write" about a place (local historical site, downtown street corner, mall, supermarket, cemetary, etc. etc. )

or asked to "write" a response to a question, e.g. "was the response of the federal govt. to the rescue of New Orleans residents affected by the fact that the people needing rescue were mostly poor and black."

each group "writes" their description of the place or answer to the question using the particular media assigned to their group.

the class reviews all responses, then each group is asked to make a synthesis piece using media captured by all groups.

*if resources aren't a problem, it would be great if each of the groups with electronic capture devices has more than one.

Karl Stolley replies:

Hmmm...this assignment does offer interesting possibilities. But I guess I'd be interested in the rationale behind splitting the media-producing and -capturing activities between groups. On the one hand, from a teacherly point of view, it's quite convenient. But viewed from the analogy of a cooking class, it would be like giving each group a set of ingredients plus a kitchen appliance, and then asking each group to take some of the results and make a dish out of it. I know that's riddled with all kinds of logical holes, but I have to try and interrogate this somehow.

The thing that bothers me most about the assignment is that there is a serious disconnect between the artful choices required to both capture/produce AND compose/orchestrate, as though those activities can be discreet and separate (that disconnect is what tends to make a lot of multimedia assignments feel like the old Surrealist "exquisite corpse" drawing game; if that's the rhetorical goal, then fine--but that's limited to a particular kind of stance towards orchestration).

Instead, wouldn't it be better to give students the question, and then consider which kind of media would be most effective to capture based on the rhetorical situation they've been confronted with, have the groups delegate that task amongst themselves? Beginning with the distribution of media before the question is putting the media/genre cart before the rhetorical horse, I think.

Bob replies:

karl,

thank you for your very thoughtful reply. before make specific comments, perhaps i should explain the origin of the idea.

ashton (girlfriend) and i try to spend as much time at her godmother's place in sardinia as possible. one of the big draws is an island, actually a big hunk o' dolomite - two miles long and 1500 feet high- that dominates the view from the shoreline. because tavolara's rockface is mostly white and gray it changes color all day with the sun. (a few photos from recent vist here.) i literally can sit and watch it for hours. it's been a dream to bring a group of artists to capture its beauty. this year i was thinking that it might be interesting to bring a writer (think someone like john mcphee), a painter, a photographer, a video artist or filmmaker, and an experimental interactive artist like mike naimark or josh portway and let them all have a go at it. my guess is that each would be inspired and the results while quite different would all get at some aspect of the beauty.

at the same time i was thinking about capturing tavolara in various media, i was thinking a lot about the increasingly nettlesome text vs. image (especially moving image) debate. i'm pretty sure the solution is not to give up words in favor of images, but rather begin to appreciate the value of all media and work toward new forms of _expression which call on different media types at different points or which merge them in useful new ways. i was also thinking about how the insitute might start to play a more active role.

thus the idea of coming up with a series of exercises that might be used in college and high school which helped students begin to understand the relative value and utility of different media types and also begin to experiment with how to use them together.

Specific comments:

Hmmm...this assignment does offer interesting possibilities. But I guess I'd be interested in the rationale behind splitting the media-producing and -capturing activities between groups. On the one hand, from a teacherly point of view, it's quite convenient. But viewed from the analogy of a cooking class, it would be like giving each group a set of ingredients plus a kitchen appliance, and then asking each group to take some of the results and make a dish out of it. I know that's riddled with all kinds of logical holes, but I have to try and interrogate this somehow.

i think a better kitchen analogy would be giving everyone the same ingredients (in the sense that tavolara or a question is the same ingredient) but ask one group to use a grill, one group to use a pan on a stove, one group to use only a cuisinart etc. but anyway, the pedagogical reason to get the students to use one media type is so that they can appreciate its properties on its own.

The thing that bothers me most about the assignment is that there is a serious disconnect between the artful choices required to both capture/produce AND compose/orchestrate, as though those activities can be discreet and separate (that disconnect is what tends to make a lot of multimedia assignments feel like the old Surrealist "exquisite corpse" drawing game; if that's the rhetorical goal, then fine--but that's limited to a particular kind of stance towards orchestration).

my instincts are that one of the problems with "multimedia" is that few of us really understand the components, that is we don't really know what the different types can do on their own. i guess i don't think we are so far advanced that we can conceive of a new media type which is multimedia. e.g. i don't think people intuitively grasp how impt. sound is to a movie until it's pointed out and they have an oppty to focus on it.

Instead, wouldn't it be better to give students the question, and then consider which kind of media would be most effective to capture based on the rhetorical situation they've been confronted with, have the groups delegate that task amongst themselves? Beginning with the distribution of media before the question is putting the media/genre cart before the rhetorical horse, I think.

i'm not wedded to my schema, but it still seems like there would be some fantastic discussions in the classroom as students look at the different results and debate the advantages and disadvantages. it seems that experience would be helpful when they later start to create full multimedia projects.

and then of course there is the issue of interactivity which complicates everything exponentially.

b.

The conversation continues in the comment stream.

Posted by ben vershbow at 06:19 PM | Comments (10)
tags: Education , Thought Experiments , classroom , composition , digital , documentary , experiment , film , filmmaking , multimedia , music , photo , reading , rhetoric , school , student , writing

introducing next\text   09.16.2005, 8:02 PM

The dawn of personal computing and the web has changed the way we learn, yet the tools of instruction have been sluggish to evolve. Nowhere is this more clear than with the printed textbook.

So the institute has launched next\text, a project that seeks to accelerate the textbook's evolution, onward from its current incarnation, the authoritative brick, toward something more fluid, more complete, and more alive - more fitting with this networked age.

Our aim is to encourage - through identifying existing experiments and facilitating new ones - the development of born-digital learning materials that will enhance, expand, and ultimately replace the printed textbook. To begin, we've set up a curated site showcasing the most significant digital learning experiments currently in the field. Our hunch is that by bringing these projects (and eventually, their creators) together in a single place, along with publishers and funders willing to take a risk, a concrete vision of the digital textbook for the near future might emerge. And actually happen.

So check out the site, comment, and by all means recommend other projects you think belong there. What's up now is a seed group - things that have gotten our wheels turning so far - to be grown and expanded by the collective intelligence of the community.

Posted by ben vershbow at 08:02 PM | Comments (1)
tags: Education , book , books , classroom , digital , ebook , elearning , pedagogy , publishing , school , student , textbook , university

reed elsevier and the arms trade   09.12.2005, 1:19 PM

They say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. And so I'm pointing to this upsetting story about educational publishing giant Reed Elsevier's complicity in international violence through a subsidiary (Spearhead Exhibitions) that runs one of the world's largest arms fairs. There are the beginnings of a movement for academics and others to demand that R.E. drop this sordid business.

(via Crooked Timber)

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)
tags: DSEi , Education , arms , classroom , elsevier , learning , lexisnexis , publishing , reedelsevier , spearhead , spearheadexhibitions , textbook , war , weapons

continuous computing: backchannels as impromptu textbooks   08.23.2005, 9:51 AM

"Continuous computing is an emergent phenomenon--a complex pattern of social behaviors that arises from the use of a variety of simpler digital tools. It advances in unexpected directions as people find innovative ways to put these commercial and open-source technologies to use in their social lives."

The above quote is from Social Machines, an article by Wade Roush, recently published in Technology Review. According to Roush, wireless devices have created a "virtual information field" that allows us to "both pull information about virtually anything from anywhere, at any time, and push their own ideas and personalities back onto the Internet -- without ever having to sit down at a desktop computer." This phenomenon of constant connectivity is changing the way we learn and the way we participate in classroom environments.

In classrooms and lecture halls with open access to wireless networks, students can use cellphones, laptop computers, and other wireless devices to silently converse (via text or instant messaging systems) with one another or to surf the net during class. This secondary layer of classroom communication is known as the backchannel. Some instructors recognize the inevitability of the backchannel and are experimenting with how to organize these activities in a productive manner.

The key characteristic of the back channel is that it allows students to participate in the "push/pull" of constant connectivity that Roush speaks of. Students can "pull" supplementary information from the web and "push" their interpretation of the facts or their ideas and queries about the ongoing lecture into the backchannel social space. The University of Southern California's Interactive Media Division has experimented with multimedia back, front, and side channels. Here is a brief description of the Backchannel options for USC IMD Speakers outlined by Justin Hall.

We have three primary areas of backchannel work. Speakers, participants, feel free to review these various scenarios and let us know what you think. We have fourteen screens up on the walls of the lab, so these various functions typically share visual space with a speaker's own supporting visual materials.

Backchannel During a speaker's presentation, students with laptops will chat about the topics at hand. Typically, we post the thread of comments on two-to-three of the fourteen screens.

Frontchannel We can provide a special area just for questions for the speaker. Then, during the talk, if someone has a clarification they'd like, or a question they want to ask, the speaker can see that question pop up on a small monitor at the front of the room. The speaker can answer it when they feel ready!

Sideshow We have several students who are trained expert Google Jockeys. If a speaker would like to have their own presentation supplemented by a stream of images, statistics, background articles, as they talk, they should let us know and we will arrange for students to run the sideshow presentation on their research.

These various areas represent experiments in collaborative multimedia-internet enhanced learning. We welcome your suggestions! And if you feel that these might be too distracting, we're happy to reign in some of our participation during the presentation. The intent is to involve students in the lecture and to allow people to use the tools at their disposal to engage a speaker's research in real time.

A variety of responses to the backchannel were expressed in a January 2005 online discussion entitled "is the backchannel working." Some students found it "useful (for keeping track of the points, for cross reference, and for fact checking), immersive, stimulating and engaging;" while others found it, "distracting, unnecessary, detrimental, irrelevant, pointless, alienating," and even "rude" as evidenced in this exchange:

What ever happened to giving your full attention to the guest speaker? Since when is carrying on a side conversation an acceptable thing to do? What happened to our manners?

I wish I had saved the logs from last semester. But I recall several presentations where the speaker stopped and asked the group what was going on with that back channel that is so funny. I wonder how the professors who presented last semester feel about this.

Posted by: Shelby at January 31, 2005 07:38 PM

I believe that we are ALL here (professors included) because we were the really smart kids that stared at clouds, wrote stories, drew, and made up games during class. That's how I feel when my peers are obviously multi-tasking during class or during a presentation. I don't think it's rude to multi-task.

I do think it's rude to type up really dumb jokes or ASCII pictures on the backchannel that are unrelated to the presentation. However, I think it's really awesome that our professors and our presenters are open to our experiments in multi-tasking and over-stimulation. Especially in the age of the internet, the next gen behind us are going to be so savvy at carrying on multiple conversations and multiple lines of thought simultaneously, I think it's good to experiment with this instead of putting "miss manners" restrictions on the class.

Posted by: kellee at February 2, 2005 03:37 PM

Although this form of collaborative learning is still in the experimental stage, it seems to have a great deal of potential. Well-run backchannels could serve as improptu, collaborative textbooks. Students and so-called "Google Jockeys" could gather, present, and discuss the supplementary information as the instructor lectures. This process would be inspired by the instructor, but not directed by the instructor.

Posted by Kim White at 09:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: Education

the open source curriculum: MIT's opencourseware   08.16.2005, 12:20 PM

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia dreams of a free curriculum - open, high quality course materials built by a grassroots movement of volunteers (much like the one that is building the web's largest encyclopedia). But Wales is not alone in his dreaming. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also wants to spread the wealth - but not through a groundswell.

OpenCourseWare is all about the heights. OCW publishes syllabi, course calendars, readings, exams and other study materials from over 1,100 MIT classes - "a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world." Sounds good. And it is pretty good, but it's important to know one crucial fact: at this stage, many, if not most, course readings are only listed for reference. Anything in the public domain is available for download (or is linked to a free resource like Project Gutenberg), but most of the courseware is not, in effect, open.

OpenCourseWare is most powerful as an idea, the same idea trumpeted by Wales, though they are pushing from opposite sides. MIT dispenses manna from the ivory tower while Wiki Books rallies instructors from middle and lower-tier American universites and developing countries. Both movements are in their infancy - largely untested.

There is some evidence that the OCW model is beginning to spread. Tufts University has launched its own OpenCourseWare project, as has The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and several universities in Japan (see OCW Japan portal). But to say that MIT has more institutional heft than the Wikimedia Foundation would be a serious understatement. It's relatively easy for them to launch a project like this, with the MIT stamp, and to quickly generate a favorable buzz. But in the end, how valuable will OCW be if you can't get your hands on the bulk of the materials? As more content becomes freely available through public-spirited ventures like Wiki Books and Creative Commons, as well as a myriad of independent online textbooks, OCW might need to populate its courses with such materials in order to stay relevant and useful.

But will an elite institution like MIT be willing in the end to incorporate texts and materials forged in the far-flung suburbs of the academy? MIT syllabi are stocked with quality scholarship - expensive, well-bred stuff. It's difficult to imagine Wiki Books taking a seat among such high class company. And so it's equally difficult to tell, for an institution like MIT, whether OCW is a sign of healthy adaptation or inevitable erosion. Questions like these point to the profound changes that will rock the modern university as the web levels and obsolesces the old hierarchies - as profound as the upheavals in Europe around the dawn of moveable type.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education

we teach success.   08.15.2005, 4:55 PM

That's the motto of The Donald's latest business venture, Trump University. Yes, you heard me right, Donald Trump has started an online University, complete with lectures, seminars, blogs, chat kiosks, esteemed faculty, and of course, distinguished Chairman of the University, Trump himself.

Like the University of Pheonix, Trump has built his online learning initiative on a firm business model. The mission of this so-called university is "success," in a trade-school kind of way. The ambition is to teach skills and "trade-secrets" that are designed to turn a quick profit in the marketplace. The site is replete with self-help euphemisms like: "what's the altitude of your attitude," "bloom where you are planted," and "your mind can build castles, just make sure the foundations are in place first."

Self-help schlock notwithstanding, I was tempted by some of the offerings. For a mere twenty-nine dollars, I could get a "Career Assessment Profile." A 76-question online test that measures key dimensions of my personality and can predict job performance. According to the site, the test can "tap into your hidden abilities and find the job that best matches your personality." Twenty-nine dollars seemed like a small price to pay to tap my hidden potential. What if low-paying scholarly work really isn't my thing? Maybe the assessment will reveal that I'm better suited to wheeling and dealing at the top of the corporate ladder. The only thing that stopped me from signing on was the memory of a similar test I took in high school which revealed that my true calling is police work (a noble profession, but, if you knew me, you would roll your eyes at the thought of kim white, the enforcer).

I also had to restrain myself from using the institute credit card to sign up for Trump's intriguing "Women-Centric Studies program"


Trump University is developing a new "women-centric" curriculum, starting with Prof. Karen Kahn Wilson's live course, Success Strategies for Women. This four-session course, scheduled for September and October, will be delivered over the Web. It will focus on the distinct strengths that women bring to the workplace and how they're related to findings in the latest research on female neurology. It has always been "common knowledge" that men and women think and behave differently--in the workplace and elsewhere--but these differences can now be explained through hard science.

Could it be? Is the business community finally realizing the unique contributions women have to offer? Are courses like this designed to change the business environment so that cognitive skills native to the female become highly respected and sought after? Or does Trump University offer this course because they know that this is what I wish for, and what I might pay for?

From the "Trump University Winner Wear" collection

Posted by Kim White at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education

academic commons   08.15.2005, 4:28 PM

I'm excited to announce Academic Commons, a new online journal-cum-workshop space devoted to "investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education." The August issue brings together an impressive array of articles - including essays by Richard Lanham and hypertext fiction writer Michael Joyce - and profiles several noteworthy projects.

Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. We want this site to advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources.

Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Academic Commons provides groups and forums for catalyzing and developing collaborative projects, and is linked to LOLA, a learning object repository hosted at Wesleyan. Educators can come here to find incisive critical thinking on the meaningful use of technology in schools, and also can obtain concrete resources and contacts for use in their teaching. From the looks of the inaugural issue, it seems Academic Commons is set to become an important player.

Posted by ben vershbow at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education

electronic textbook program gets real (slightly)   08.15.2005, 1:18 PM

So, the pilot e-textbook program (see post) on trial this fall at Princeton, the University of Utah and nearly a dozen other universities, is modifying inititial plans to make digital textbooks expire after five months, extending terms to at least a year, and, in some cases, scrapping the limit altogether. Congratulations to publishers for bravely pushing their program to the bare minimum.

See "Publishers loosen rules on e-textbooks" in CNET.

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education

the open source curriculum: wikimania   08.15.2005, 12:20 PM

A little over a week ago, at the first international Wikimedia conference (Wikimania) in Frankfurt, Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales presented a free culture manifesto comprising ten problems, or, "ten things that will be free" over the course of the next generation. Invoking the famous "23 problems" presented by mathematician David Hilbert to the world mathematics community in Paris in 1900, Wales laid out the ten forms of information that he believes have a solid chance of actually becoming free, provided that his burgeoning Wikimedia empire, and other similar ventures, continue to gain influence.

The list:

1. free the encyclopedia
2. free the dictionary
3. free the curriculum
4. free the music
5. free the art
6. free the file formats
7. free the maps
8. free the product identifiers (e.g. ISBN etc.)
9. free the TV listings
10. free the communities (e.g. web forums, wiki hosting sites etc.)

Recently a guest writer on the Lessig blog, Wales had the opportunity to expand on some of the ten items. I found the "free the curriculum" entry particularly suggestive, especially considering recent feeble efforts from textbook publishers to adopt an electronic model (see "tired of feeling so used, textbook publishers go digital"). Wales predicts that "a complete curriculum in English and a number of major languages will exist by 2040, and translation to minor languages will likely follow soon after."

In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.

Wales dreams that Wiki Books - a clearinghouse of free, open content textbook modules - will lay the groundwork for this new era of openness. There's not a whole lot there yet, certainly nothing to match the 22 million articles that in half a decade have filled the pages of Wikipedia. But let's wait and see.

I would guess that it won't be Americans or Europeans who will make the first big move into open source curricula. The West may be a great source of ideas, but it is also a stronghold for the entrenched interests of publishers and software companies. In so-called developing nations, there is much less to lose and probably much more to gain from experimenting with something like Wiki Books. Take a look: someone has even "wiki-fied" the entire National Curriculum of South Africa as a skeleton for the kind of public domain curriculum Wales has forecast. Right now, free software is spreading rapidly through the developing world, especially in educational initiatives. Freeing the curriculum would be a logical next step. If or when these changes take root, we'll find ourselves living in a very different world.

Over the next few days, I'll be discussing some other open curriculum initiatives. Stay tuned.

new post now up: MIT's OpenCourseWare

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:20 PM | Comments (1)
tags: Education

electronic reference works contribute to innovation   08.11.2005, 9:07 AM

Electronic reference works are exploiting the unique capabilities of the digital medium and educators are incorporating these innovations into curriculum material. The atlas, for example, has its internet counterpart in: MapQuest, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and others. These electronic data sets are being used as material for student projects like Jimmy Palmer's gCensus, which is constructed from Google Maps and data extracted from the 2000 United States Census. Of the project, Palmer says:

I recently completed my Masters of Science in Computer Science at The University of Mississippi. One of the classes I took during my last semester was a course concerned with processing large quantities of data. Specifically, the course focused on scientific data collected in such fields as fluid dynamics, physics, and weather. The class was small, about a dozen people, and this allowed the class to be somewhat informal in nature. We read two or three published research papers per week and discussed the papers in round table discussions during class meetings.

One of the assignments we were given was open-ended. The assignment was to "do something interesting with a large data set". I looked around at possible datasets and came across the census data. At approximately ten gigabytes, I thought it qualified as a large data. At the same time, spring 2005, Google had just released its map technology. I thought the two were a perfect match and gCensus is the result.

As we consider the ways in which textbooks are evolving in the digital medium, we must also look at how electronic reference material is created, archived, and accessed. Changes in the use and nature of reference works may engender changes in teaching methods and tools.

Posted by Kim White at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Education

tired of feeling so used, textbook publishers go digital   08.10.2005, 3:42 PM

CNET News reports that ten schools, including Princeton, the University of Oregon, and the University of Utah, are to participate this fall in a trial program in which college bookstores will offer digital editions of high-demand titles at a 33% mark-down from print prices. In exchange for these enormous savings, students get to download one, intensely straight-jacketed .pdf file - a book that is readable on only one machine, cannot be printed out in full, and will expire after 150 days.

Some of America's biggest textbook publishers, including McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, John Wiley & Sons, and Thomson Learning are offering digital titles in the program through wholesaler MBS Textbook Exchange. Their aim? To tempt cash-strapped students away from used textbooks, the bane of the textbook industry. All in all, it's a cynical move that implicitly acknowledges the absurdly inflated price of print textbooks, yet offers only token relief, trying to pass off self-destructing, digital facsimiles as a reasonable substitute for a perfectly durable, slightly dinged used book.

What the textbook publishers ought to be doing is cultivating a more creative vision of the digital textbook, and getting over their terror of online distribution, which they can only see as an intellectual property disaster. Textbook publishers should take a look around and see that there are ways to make good business online. Charge for the service, not the copy - explore syndicated content that students can subscribe to at reasonable rates. Develop new kinds of multimedia titles that can truly take advantage of the online environment. Stop spending millions on digital rights management, stop worrying about your precious copies getting stolen.

On the web, everything is a copy, and it's pointless trying to police this reality. What's meaningful is access, what's meaningful is staying up to date. Develop a good service, with consistently updated, valuable content, and students and professors will buy in. If the textbook industry does not wake up and adapt, they could find themselves in the ash heap. More on that to come.

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:42 PM | Comments (1)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education

n.y. times examines "the digital student"   08.03.2005, 10:48 AM

With August comes the ritual back-to-school mania, and fittingly, there's a large special section in today's Times on the "digital student." At a glance, it seems to focus heavily on gadgets - a sort of fashion spread for the accessorized student - but there are also articles looking at social software in the classroom and new pedagogical methods. Could be interesting.

Posted by ben vershbow at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Education

e-slates in kenya   08.01.2005, 5:00 PM

A pilot program in Kenya gives 54 fifth grade students pocket PCs in lieu of textbooks (BBC story). Known in the school as "e-slates," the handheld computers run on open source software and contain digitized print textbooks, but could eventually support multiple media materials. The whole classroom is connected through a wireless network, which allows texts to be updated seamelessly, and may ultimately enable homework assignments to be passed between teacher and pupil without a single sheet of paper. But that will depend on a reliable network connection and a steady supply of electricity, neither of which are a given.

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: Education

the paperless high school   07.21.2005, 7:37 AM

According to a recent article in the Arizona Daily Star, Empire High School in Vail, Arizona will soon become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school. The laptops will entirely replace paper textbooks. Traditional lesson plans will be built around online articles and electronic reference material. Adminstrators are betting that this flexible teacher-driven curriculum will inspire both students and teachers.

Calvin Baker, superintendent of Vail Unified School District, said the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.

Educators also believe the initiative will improve learning, engage tech-saavy students, and better prepare them for future careers.

Posted by Kim White at 07:37 AM | Comments (2)
tags: Education

The 2005 Computers and Writing Conference   06.22.2005, 12:36 PM

Stanford University hosted the 2005 Computers and Writing conference this past weekend. Each session was rife with "future of the book" food for thought. This is an informal summary, with apologies to all the fabulous presentations that I don't mention (sorry, being only one person, I could not attend them all). Some of the major themes (which dovetail nicely with issues we are exploring at the institute) included: Open Source, new interpretations of literacy and "writing," the changing role of the teacher/student, performance, multimodality, and networked community. It is important to note that these themes often blur together in a complicated interdependence. This thematic interplay was evident in the pre-conference workshops which included instruction in open source tools and applications like Drupal that allow for multimodality and the creation of communal authoring environments. Workshops in "Reading Images" and "Using Video to Teach Writing" addressed multiple modalities and new concepts of writing.

I was excited to see that the Computers and Writing community understands the potential of, and imperative for, Open Source. It's practical advantages (free and customizable) and it's philosophical advantages (community-based and built for sharing rather than for selling) make it ideally suited to the goals of the educational community. Open Source came up over and over during the presentations and was featured in the first town hall session "Open Source Opens Thinking." The session challenged the Computers and Writing community "to consider a position statement of collective principles and goals in relation to Open Source." Such a statement would be useful and productive; I'm hoping it will materialize.

The changing role of the teacher and student was evident in several presentations: most notably, the pilot program at Penn State (see my earlier post) in which students publish their "papers" on a wiki. The wiki format allows for intensive peer-review and encourages a culture of responsibility.

There was a lot of speculation about how writing will evolve and how other modalities might be incorporated into our notion of literacy. Andrea Lunsford's keynote speech addressed this issue, calling for a return to oral and embodied "performative literacies." She referred to Tara Shankar's MIT dissertation "Speaking on the Record," which confronts the way we privilege writing above other modalitites for knowledge and education. She says: "Reading and writing have become the predominant way of acquiring and expressing intellect in Western culture. Somewhere along the way, the ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power, creating a graphocentric myopia concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge. One of the effects of graphocentrism is a conflation of concepts proper to knowledge in general with concepts specific to written expression."

Shankar calls for new practices that embrace oral communication. She introduces a new word: "to provide a counterpart to writing in a spoken modality: speak + write = sprite. Spriting in its general form is the activity of speaking "on the record" that yields a technologically supported representation of oral speech with essential properties of writing such as permanence of record, possibilities of editing, indexing, and scanning, but without the difficult transition to a deeply different form of representation such as writing itself."

The need for a multimodal approach to writing was addressed in the second Town Hall meeting "Composition Beyond Words." Virginia Kuhn opened by calling for a reconsideration of "writing," and the goals of visual literacy. Bradley Dilger reminded us that literacy goes beyond "the letter;" we need multiple interfaces for the same data because not everyone looks at data the same way. Madeleine Sorapure pointed out that writing with computers is determined by underlying code structures which are, themselves, a form of writing. She quoted Loss Pequeno Glazier, "Code is the writing within the writing that makes the work happen." Gail Hawisher, talked about the 10 year process of incorporating multiple modalities into the first-composition courses at the University of Illinois. Cynthia Selfe addressed this struggle, saying: "colleges are not comfortable with multiple modalities." She advises the C&W community to "think about how to give professional development/support to resistant colleges in ways that are sustainable over time." Stuart Moulthrop also offered some cautionary words of advice. In addition to faculty and administration, Moultrop says students are resistant to multimodality. Code, for example, is fatally hard to teach non-programmers or visually oriented people. "There is a political problem," Moulthrop says, "we are living through a backlash moment. People are very angry about how fast the future has come down on them."

Some participants delivered "papers" that attempted to demonstrate these new multimodal imperatives. Most notably, Todd Taylor's presentation, "The End of Composition," which asked, "Can a paper be a film?" Todd argues "yes" with a cinematic montage of sampled and remixed clips along with original footage, which was enthusiastically received by the audience (alt. review in Machina Memorialis blog.) Morgan Gresham's Town Hall presentation was a student-produced video and a question to the audience; is this just a remake of a bad commercial, or is it a "paper"? Christine Alfano's presentation experimented with a hypertext, "Choose Your Own Adventure," style that allowed the audience to determine the trajectory of the talk. Once the selection was made, she dropped the other two papers/options to the floor. The choice, unfortunately for me, eliminated the material that I most wanted to hear about (Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl). Additionally, "virtual" presentations were delivered during an online companion conference called: Computers and Writing Online 2005 When Content Is No Longer King: Social Networking, Community, and Collaboration This interactive online conference served, "as an acknowledgment of the value of social networks in creating discourse of and about scholarly work." CWOnline 2005 made both the submission and presentation process open to public review via the Kairosnews weblog. Despite some flaws, I thought these experimental presentations pushed at the boundaries of academic discourse in a useful way. They reminded us how far we have to go and how difficult the project of putting ideas into practice really is.

Finally, the conference highlighted ways in which computers are being used to cultivate community across cultures and institutions; and between students, teachers, and scholars. Sharing Cultures, a joint project of Columbia College Chicago and Nelson Mandela University Metropolitan University, in South Africa "creates two interconnected, on-line writing and learning communities…the project purposely includes students who traditionally have not had access to, or have been actively marginalized from, both digital and international experiences." Virginia Kuhn approached computers and community at the local level, with a service learning class called, "Multicultural America," which asked students to write an ebook documenting local history. The finished work is part of an ongoing display at a Milwaukee community center. This project inspired an interesting reversal; community members who worked with students on the project are now (thanks to a generous grant) coming to the University of Milwaukee for supplemental study. Within the academy there are also exciting opportunities for computer-based community-building. In her Town Hall presentation, Gail Hawisher said that literacy on campus is, "usually taken care of by first year composition." If we are to incorporate visual literacy into our definition of literacy then, "Perhaps we should be looking to art and design for literacy instead of just the English dept." This is an incredibly smart idea because, short of requiring composition teachers to have degrees in art, film, AND writing, collaborative efforts with other departments seem to be the best way to ensure a deep and rigorous understanding of the material. I had an interesting conversation with Stuart Moulthrop about this. We imagined a massively-multi-player game environment that would allow scholars from around world to collaborate on curriculum across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Wouldn't it be great, we thought, if someone who wanted to teach an odd combination like, film/biology/physics, could put a course scenario into the game where it would be played out by biologists, film scholars, and physicists. In other words a kind of life-time learning environment for the experts, a laboratory for the exchange of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and place to weave together different strands of human insight in order to create a more complete "picture" of the universe.

Posted by Kim White at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , The Performing Book , conferences_and_excursions , the_networked_book

Networked Pedagogies: Opensourcing the Writing Classroom   06.18.2005, 4:45 PM

Penn State has initiated a pilot program of 10 wiki-based composition classes. Richard Doyle, Jeff Pruchnic, and Trey Conner, instructors in the pilot-program discussed their experiences this morning at the Computers & Writing Conference in Stanford. They found that students produce better work in a peer-reviewed environment. Grammar and mechanics are contextualized and there is greater motivation to create error-free work. Students read each other's work, which forces them to consider their arguments carefully in order to avoid repeating someone else's point.

They also found that the self-governing ecology of the networked wiki format creates a fruitful environment for discussion and debate. The wiki places control over the direction and duration of the discussion into the student's hands. Richard Doyle also pointed out that there has not been a single editing war in the years that he has been teaching the course. He attributes the lack of unproductive "flame wars" to the amount of work his students have. Each student produces about 100 pages of material and must read, comment on, and GRADE their fellow students' work. This is a learner-centered environment where, as Richard Doyle puts it, "the teacher acts as coach or zen master, making periodic interventions." Doyle also points out that in these wiki-based courses, "students are learning how to interact in an information dense environment responsibly. They are being trained to deal with the fluid environments they are going to find themselves in."

Posted by Kim White at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: Education , conferences_and_excursions

"an invaluable resource that they had an extremely limited role in creating"   06.09.2005, 2:11 PM

Good piece today in Wired on the transformation of scientific journals. There's a general feeling that commercial publishers like Reed Elsevier enjoy unreasonable control over an evolving body of research that should be freely available to the public. With exorbitant subscription fees, affordable only for large institutions, most journals are effectively inaccessible, and the authors retain few or no reproduction rights. Recently, however, free article databases have sprung up on the web - The Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMed Central, and NIH's PubMed - some of which, like PLoS, have begun publishing their own journals. It's a welcome change, considering how much labor and treasure is poured into scientific publications (from funders, private and public, and from the scientists themselves), and yet how little is gotten in return. Shifting to a non-profit model, as PLoS has done, preserves much of the financial architecture that supports the production of journals, but totally revolutionizes the distribution.

PLoS journals are free and allow authors to retain their copyrights, as long as they allow their work to be freely shared and distributed (with full credit given, naturally). They also require that authors pay $1,500 from their grants, or directly from their sponsors or institutions, to have their work published. These groups pay the bulk of the $10 billion that goes to scientific and medical publishers each year, and what do they get in return? Limited access to the research they funded, and no right to reuse the information.

"It's ridiculous to give publishers complete control of an invaluable resource that they had an extremely limited role in creating," Eisen said (Eisen teaches genetics and is a founder of PLoS).

But what is in many ways the tougher question is how to shift the architecture of prestige - peer review - to these new kinds of journals.

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:11 PM | Comments (1)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education , Libraries, Search and the Web

building frontier networks   06.06.2005, 2:17 PM

The $100 laptop project - the MIT-led initiative to distribute cheap, network-enabled computers to schools throughout the developing world - is moving ahead, but it's far from clear whether it will succeed. Today Wired discusses some of the daunting physical challenges of deploying technology in places where there isn't even electricity, let alone a wireless broadband network. As far as energy is concerned, the MIT team is trying to make the computers as self-sustaining as possible, experimenting with hand cranks (like a wind-up watch) and "parasitic power," where the user's typing constantly charges the battery. Then there is the problem of networks. The vision driving the project is one of delivering the resources of the web to communities that are cut off from libraries and the general flow of information. But extending the gossamer strands of the web requires robust architecture. Dumping cheap laptops in village schools won't achieve much if you can't connect the dots.

Wired mentions geekcorps, a group that coordinates skilled technology volunteers around the world "to teach communities how use innovative and affordable information and communication technologies to solve development problems." One of their trademark innovations is the "BottleNet" - a method for setting up improvised Wi-Fi relay networks with "do-it-yourself antennas," first employed in geekcorp's Mali project:

The do-it-yourself (DIY) antenna designs were based on information gathered from numerous sources, including standard ham radio operator reference manuals, books on building wireless community networks, numerous DIY wireless sites on the Internet, and from the past experiences of GCM volunteers with wireless antennas. Changes to the designs were made to incorporate materials that are easily available in Mali (plastic water bottles, used valve stems from motorbikes, window screen mesh, television and low cost coaxial cables, etc.) to minimize the technical skills needed to build an antenna and to reduce costs.

Something about these ad hoc creations, patched together with junk - the scraps of western industry - speaks eloquently of the fragility of our grand networked enterprise.

images: (left) kids with Panasonic Toughbooks at the Nicholas and Elaine Negroponte School in Cambodia (from Wired); (right) BottleNet antenna in Mali

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: Education

student papers with a purpose   05.16.2005, 8:26 PM

One of the most exciting presentations at the recent Share, Share Widely conference was Natalie Jeremijenko's student-authored wiki "How Stuff is Made". According to the website FAQ page, HSIM is a visual encyclopedia documenting the manufacturing processes, labor conditions and environmental accounts of contemporary products. It is collaboratively produced, independent, academic, wiki-based publication. Encyclopedia entries are summative photo essays created by engineering, design and art students guided by faculty who ensure high standards of evidence.

In her conference abstract, "Changing Structures of Participation In New Media Education," Dr. Jeremijenko claims that the HSIM project provides ...evidence that the way we structure participation changes what information is produced, who produces it, and how it circulates. Additionally, the work provides material to question what these changes may mean for learning.

Posted by Kim White at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education

could this be a textbook?   05.12.2005, 3:37 PM

Aural learning. Podcasting your reading assignment. New powers for students to time-shift materials and work. Load up chapter five on your iPod and take it to go.

Dyslexia's defeat?

Publishers must be noticing all the earbuds in students' ears.. how can they make some noise in that space?

But how do you take notes, make annotations on audio? How do you evaluate learning? Could this be anything more than a supplement?

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education

sharing teachers, connecting classrooms   05.11.2005, 10:56 AM

An initiative in Maine is using technology to provide advanced placement programming to high school students in rural areas. The Maine Distance Learning Project "identifies Maine teachers and schools that are interested in offering Advanced Placement programming to be delivered over distance to students in Maine via the state-wide ATM network during the 2005/2006 school year."

According to a recent article in Newsweek, Reaching Rural Students, support was provided by the University of Maine. The University set up "a network of cameras in AP classes like Brendan Murphy’s calculus and statistics class. These classes were broadcast to five other schools across the state. 90 other schools have a set up like Carrabec’s. Each site’s classroom has a three-foot television screen split into quadrants, and two cameras in each room."

Posted by Kim White at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Education

what's in a game?   04.27.2005, 2:34 PM

Steven Johnson's much-discussed book excerpt in the NY Times Magazine challenges the conventional wisdom that television rots the brain, arguing that TV today offers an incredibly rigorous cognitive workout. Multi-threaded narrative, a form first developed on television in soap operas, first found its way into more "serious" programming in the early 80s with Hill Street Blues, and has matured all the way up to the Sopranos, the West Wing and 24. Junk too, Johnson argues, has become more sophisticated. Reality shows like Survivor or the Apprentice explore well-worn territory like sex, money and ambition within a more complex, and at times intentionally confusing matrix, and raise the society of the spectacle to new heights. Much of this, it can be argued, is also influenced by video games, and a large part of Johnson's book is apparently devoted to this.

On his blog, he brings attention to the question of gaming, and delivers a very funny satire on what would happen if it were actually books that were the new invention that had parents and educators in a frenzy, encroaching on the centuries-old civilization of the video game.

"Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices."

It goes on...

Also worth reading is a nice post on Cognitive Daily about the uses of video games in education. And this piece - "Much Fun, For Credit" - from the Sunday Times about the recently instated "Game Arts & Sciences" program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: Education , Games

abandon all hope, ye who enter here   04.16.2005, 1:23 PM

Silly-sounding business jargon and corporate pep talk abounded at the eBooks in Education Conference at McGraw-Hill in New York. The kind of stuff that makes the eyes and mind glaze over. "Fluidity of work flow." "Content creation." "Course-centric versus learner-centric." The "three-legged stool," of digital publishing... Books are "learning objects." A teacher is just a "sage on the stage," as though teaching were an antiquated idea. Youth is a marketing problem to be solved, the latest batch of young professionals in the making, rolling along the conveyor belt. Tim Magner, a stuffed shirt from our dear own Department of Ed., talked about priming kids for the new global economy (he also took the opportunity to mention that we're doing the same for Iraq). But nothing about the issues at the heart of education. Nothing about a civil society, an educated citizenry, etc. About nurturing critical faculties in an age of information blitz. About advancing the light against darkness. I don't doubt the good intentions of many of the speakers and attendees (though I do doubt some) but to someone outside the industry, the conference was plainly nothing more than a congregation of hucksters and homogenizers. Only the accessibility folks (the ones concerned with opening up digital media to people with disabilities), and one soft-spoken tech development manager from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, seemed to exhibit any kind of public spiritedness, or a belief that technology should be made to serve human beings and not companies.

Then there were the numbing waves of PowerPoint, PowerPoint, PowerPoint! Nothing more perfectly exemplifies the muddled thinking, ignorance of design, and all-around mediocrity of the so-called "ebook industry." Each presenter - with the exception of George Kerscher of the Daisy Consortium (who is blind) - supplemented their talk with the obligatory PowerPoint presentation, which, after a while, becomes a kind of torture. The slides flip one after the other after the other, the bullet points rattle like hail. Incomprehensible charts and graphs slouch across backgrounds of pastel or mock-marble. There's a lot of teal. A lot of magenta. The slick veneer of the corporate board room washes over you like microwaved cheese, but the occasional tell-tale typo betrays the obvious haste and lack of consideration with which the things are made. In most cases the presenter abdicates entirely and plays human accompaniment to the PowerPoint show, lamely reading aloud as the panels slide past, sort of like the airline stewardess doing her bit with the oxygen mask while the safety film plays behind. After sitting through a few of these, your brain feels like it's been flattened out with a rolling pin. I kept thinking of Hart Crane's lines:

"The mind has shown itself at times
Too much the baked and labeled dough
Divided by accepted multitudes."

I also thought of Edward Tufte's wonderful monograph, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" (encapsulated here), a shrewd critique of sandblasted thinking in Microsoft-era America. It's a little frightening to hear adults talk about the future of education in the scrubbed, frictionless language of the corporate slideshow. If they are teaching by example, then it is a sorry example indeed.

From Tufte:
"Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something."

I couldn't resist including the cover illustration of Tufte's piece. which gloriously sends up the totalitarianism of PowerPoint..

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:23 PM | Comments (2)
tags: Education , conferences_and_excursions

the dinosaurs are myopic: publishing industry clueless about the future of textbooks   04.15.2005, 3:37 PM

I spent yesterday in the McGraw-Hill building listening to the textbook publishing industry's ideas about the future of the book. It was grim. The abysmal lack of creativity and insight, the singular focus on "revenue models," and the utter disregard for the needs of students and teachers, made for a dull, and sometimes disturbing, day.

The ebook offerings ranged from plain old PDFs, to web-based books, to jury-rigged versions of Microsoft office. The only panel that offered a forward-looking vision of the future and interesting ebook software to go with it was the accessibility panel, moderated by George Kerscher—Secretary General, Daisy consortium—who is blind. This panel included a demo of Dolphin Audio Publishing’s EasePublisher a tool that facilitates the creation of multimedia content that unites text, audio and images. Dolphin and Elsevier were the only companies that addressed multimedia and its role in the future book. While McGraw-Hill is offering PDF textbooks because they are, “the easiest, fastest, cheapest solution.” Dolphin is thinking about how to enrich the learning experience for everyone. They found that when students with no disabilities used their multimedia books, they learned more. Apparently the combination of text (reading), audio (hearing the text read by a human), and image (photos, videos or illustrations that illuminate the material) enhances learning. Designing electronic textbooks that exploit this opportunity seems like a no-brainer. Teachers I’ve spoken to and my own experience with students in the classroom suggests that multi-media ignites student enthusiasm. Making PDF textbooks is like driving a Jaguar in first gear. But after 10 years of experience in the field, McGraw-Hill’s Ginny Moffet believes that: “students only care about the grade,” and “the biggest challenge to the [electronic textbook] industry is the high cost of content creation.” Hmmm, what about making a high quality product that everyone wants to buy, isn’t that the problem they should be trying to solve? It’s clear that the job of making an interesting electronic textbook is not being taken up by any of the old giants. Our prediction (and our hope) is that the future of the electronic textbook will not be directed by corporations, but by small start-ups, or non-profit consortiums of schools and academics. Efforts like the non-profit, Virtual High School, are an interesting beginning.

Posted by Kim White at 03:37 PM | Comments (2)
tags: Education , conferences_and_excursions

6th avenue agriculture   04.15.2005, 10:15 AM

Even before the head of the University of Nebraska library began bemoaning how the pictures had fallen out of their collection of vintage agronomy ebooks, the Open eBook Forum conference on ebooks in education felt a great deal like a convention of cattlemen gathered to discuss the latest advances in treating animal ailments and increasing their milkfat percentages. The cattle, of course, are the hapless students, handily divided into K-12 & college lots. The publishing industry, with the help of the software industry, is doing their best to milk them for all they can.

The major image that came to my mind, however, was genetically modified corn. Genetically modified corn is theoretically a good thing: you get a bigger harvest of better corn. But! for the good of the masses - so it doesn't get loose in the wild - Monsanto's made their GM corn sterile. What this means for their bottom line: the farmers have to buy new seeds every single year. In short, what should be a renewable resource has become corporate property. And this strategy, more or less, is what the people at the Open Ebook Forum were most delighted about having hit upon. They're selling coursepacks to college kids which expire at the end of the term, ebooks to libraries which only one user can check out at once, and more software to parents so their kids can do their schoolwork. Hopefully, this technology will let you, the efficient new school administrator, get those pesky teachers out of your payroll. Then: profit!

The future of the book looked incredibly bleak from the McGraw-Hill auditorium. One bright spot of enthusiasm: a few groups of people (including Geoff Freed from the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media and John Worsfeld from Dolphin Computer Access) working on making media more accessible to people with disabilities. Not coincidentally, they were the only people there not primarily concerned with making money off the students.

Posted by dan visel at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , conferences_and_excursions

ebooks in education   04.14.2005, 8:10 AM

if:book will be spending the day at the Open eBook Forum's eBooks in Education Conference at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York.

In the spirit of the conference, here's an AP article from last week that gives a good overview of Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop project for developing countries.

"Details are still being worked out, but here's the MIT team's current recipe: Put the laptop on a software diet; use the freely distributed Linux operating system; design a battery capable of being recharged with a hand crank; and use newly developed 'electronic ink' or a novel rear-projected image display with a 12-inch screen. Then, give it Wi-Fi access, and add USB ports to hook up peripheral devices. Most importantly, take profits, sales costs and marketing expenses out of the picture."

Posted by ben vershbow at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , The Ideal Device? , conferences_and_excursions

the kids are good to go: media literacy and the next generation   04.08.2005, 1:30 PM

What would happen if you gave a computer to a group of under-educated kids who had never seen one before? Answer: they would figure out how to use it, all by themselves. Immediately. This is the surprising result of what has come to be known as "the hole in the wall experiment," conducted by computer scientist, Dr. Sugata Mitra. Dr. Mitra put a computer with internet access in a hole in the wall outside his New Dehli office. According to an article in FRONTLINE/World, "He wanted to see who, if anyone, might use it. To his delight, curious children were immediately attracted to the strange new machine." All of these children lived in the surrounding slum and had never seen a computer before. However, "Within minutes, children figured out how to point and click. By the end of the day they were browsing. "Given access and opportunity," observes O'Connor, "the children quickly taught themselves the rudiments of computer literacy."

The children even developed their own names and associations for the computer icons "They don't call a cursor a cursor, they call it a sui, which is Hindi for needle. And they don't call the hourglass symbol the hourglass because they've never seen an hourglass before. They call it the damru, which is Shiva's drum, and it does look a bit like that."

But the slums of New Dehli are not unique, priviledged kids are also enthusiastic about computers. According to a recent report called “Born to Be Wired”. teens and young adults spend more time using interactive technology than they do watching television. This could mean that are ready for a more interactive and self-guided experience in the classroom. Wise use of media in the curriculum should find ways to exploit this new hunger and allow kids to participate in ways we couldn’t imagine in the past. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, is calling this "The Participation Age,” a new paradigm for collaborative content creation that seems destined to influence our top-down educational system. The question of how to teach media literacy to kids who seem to grasp these principles intuitively and instantaneously, seems answerable only with a paradigm shift in educational models. Perhaps educators should become more like guides or support persons, providing educational resources and mentor-like advice, empowering kids to engage in self-motivated learning experiences.

Posted by Kim White at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education

weaving textbooks into the web   04.07.2005, 10:38 AM

Mark Crane put forth an interesting possibility for digital textbooks in TechRhet Daily Digest Volume 2: Issue 74: "I've been thinking about ways to swap "playlists" of favorite online readings as a sort of virtual textbook, and it occured to me that social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and wurldbook might be a way to start to do this. For example, if you collected a series of links related to technical writing, you could publish that "playlist" to a service like del.icio.us and tag the readings as "tech comm" or "tech comm reader" or something for other people to use via a single url, perhaps."

Mark’s idea is very exciting because it suggests a direction the future textbook might take as it learns to incorporate the vast and ever-expanding body of scholarship available on the web. An ephemeral “links” list could also be attached to a more durable body of content, like an ebook. The electronic textbook could offer these “playlists” as a dynamic index which would be continuously updated by the user community.

Posted by Kim White at 10:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: Education

windowless classrooms?   03.29.2005, 6:45 PM

There's a nice piece in today's NY Times about how Brazil is rejecting Microsoft and striking out its own path across the so-called "digital divide." The secret? Open source software.

"Looking to save millions of dollars in royalties and licensing fees, Mr. da Silva [President] has instructed government ministries and state-run companies to gradually switch from costly operating systems made by Microsoft and others to free operating systems, like Linux. On Mr. da Silva's watch, Brazil has also become the first country to require any company or research institute that receives government financing to develop software to license it as open-source, meaning the underlying software code must be free to all."

Posted by ben vershbow at 06:45 PM | Comments (2)
tags: Education

adopting a new model for textbooks   03.23.2005, 8:12 AM

Anyone interested in the future of textbooks should take a look at Jay Mathews' "Class Struggle" column "Why Don't We Fix Our Textbooks?" in yesterday's Washington Post. Why are most K-12 textbooks in America so mediocre? It's in large part due to the adoption process used in 21 states, including the biggies Texas, Florida and California, in which textbooks are selected by statewide committee rather than by teachers themselves. The ones that make it through are like processed cheese, politically censored by pressure groups, and written in dumbed-down language in "chop shops" at the "el-hi publishing cartel" - Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Reed Elsevier, and Houghton Mifflin. Even states and schools that are not directly subject to these policies are affected, since the dominant textbooks on the market are the ones produced in the mediocrity mills of the adoption committees.

Mathews points to an excellent report by David Whitman called "The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption", published by The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which gives a good overview of the situation. It's fascinating to learn that adoption committees first appeared during Reconstruction when Southern States pressed for the right to publish their own version of the Civil War. Today, it's political correctness and economy of scale that guide textbook selection, with cranky pressure groups forever chipping away at perceived infelicities, and publishers looking for formulaic bestsellers appealing to the broadest possible audience. Meanwhile, high-quality alternatives from smaller presses struggle to survive.

Peppered throughout the article are bits of a conversation between Mathews and Diane Ravitch, author of the introduction to the "Mad, Mad World" report, and of "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn":

"I asked Ravitch a couple of days ago if there has been any progress lately. She said California, Florida and Texas have all considered bills that would weaken the adoption process, but so far there has been little change. She said she thinks the best hope is that the Internet and electronic publishing will eventually render obsolete the textbook giants and their adoption panel co-conspirators."

There is reason to hope that digital technologies might usher in a textbook renaissance, boosting quality and diversity while dramatically reducing cost (see Textbook Ripoff report), and ultimately redefining education in the digital era. And if the open source model is embraced, then textbook adoption might actually evolve into an interesting process of peer review and creative collaboration. But there is equal reason to fear that the el-hi publishing cartel will cut innovators off at the pass and dominate the e-textbook market through DRM and extortionist content-update schemes.

Dave Munger summed it up well in a conversation we had last month about laptops as textbooks:

"In my dream scenario, the big publishers will embrace open source. They will become service companies, doing contract work to customize texts for particular markets.

"I imagine what will really happen is that publishers will fight this tooth and nail, like Microsoft is doing with Linux. It will be an all-or-nothing battle, with one side winning and the other losing."

Posted by ben vershbow at 08:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: Education

game theory   02.11.2005, 11:49 AM

I wasn't surprised by two adverse reactions to the blog entry "The Book is Doomed"; scary news for a lot of people. Think about the jargon embedded in those pieces that deal with e-books, or the cryptic messages that pop-up on the screen when the uninitiated tries to access an actual e-book… In order to read a paper book one doesn't need to know proofreader's marks or bookbinding jargon. So, a paper book is friendly. At this point, that seems to be the approach almost anyone takes to the idea of a different kind of book. Even audio books have their detractors, those who say that listening to a book isn't the same as reading a book.

A couple of news in last week's Times made me think of issues not yet addressed by the Institute's site. One is the prevalence of videogames in the lives of children and the fact that the "future of the book" really belongs to those children. For me, finding hot and dusty Internet cafes in the oases of the Tlakamakan desert was, in a way, unexpected. Finding those places full of school-age children playing videogames was a revelation. In "Is Instructional Video Game an Oxymoron?" Matt Richtel talks about nonprofit organizations adopting the game format to advance their agenda. "For the current generation, the Net is the medium, and the message includes 'Become a Unicef World Hero,' as conveyed by a game on the unicefgames.org site. He also mentions a shooting gallery game from the American Cancer Society that "lets players flip virtual rubber bands at passing cigarettes in the Smokeout Café," or the Greenpeace site, where "players can intercept harpoons fired from a Japanese whaling ship - or, by getting three 'activists' aboard the ship, force its crew to surrender." The Bureau of Engraving and Printing lets youngsters color and design currency while learning to spot counterfeits.

"Through online games, we're teaching a whole generation to authenticate their currency," said Dawn Haley, a spokeswoman. "It was one easy way to get children involved. Gaming is huge these days."

What they are doing is updating the old didactic tradition of using games to teach, they are teaching in the digital age. That brings me to my second thought, is the future of the book the domain of brainy sophisticates or is it a democratic move? In "New Economy; At Davos, the Johnny Appleseed of the Digital Era Shares his Ambition to Propagate a $100 Laptop in Developing Countries," they mention that Nicholas Negroponte in partnership with Joseph Jacobson, a physicist at M.I.T., wants to persuade the education ministries of countries like China to use laptops to replace textbooks (see also Laptops for the Masses on this blog). At Davos, Negroponte said that he found initial backing for his laptop plan from Advanced Micro Devices and that he was in discussions with Google, Motorola, the News Corporation and Samsung for support. "You can just give laptops to kids," he said referring to an experiment in Cambodia. "In Cambodia, the first English word out of their mouths is 'Google.'" In my opinion that is/should be the future of the book.

(photograph: girls at the Elaine and Nicholas Negroponte School in Cambodia)

Posted by sol gaitan at 11:49 AM | Comments (2)
tags: Education , Games

laptops for the masses   02.10.2005, 4:16 PM

MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte is developing a line of laptop computers that will sell for less than $100 a piece. The textbook of the future?....

>>BBC article

Posted by ben vershbow at 04:16 PM | Comments (3)
tags: Education , The Ideal Device?

Children and Books: Forming a World-View   12.14.2004, 9:44 PM

When I think about the part books played (and still play) in forming my world-view, I have to think about them as tethered to a set of circumstances. It is impossible to say, for example, whether it was Gardner’s Art Through the Ages that awakened my passion for visual art, or my teacher Gretchen Whitman, who introduced the book to me and led me through it.

The book is part of a matrix that is difficult to parse. How is one’s world-view formed? Certainly books are a part of the process, but maybe they function more as “tools” then as “beings.” Insofar as they are extensions of the people or circumstances that drove us to them. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that very few of these lists are the same.

It’s interesting that nobody confesses that children’s books formed their world-view. I was profoundly influenced by the books I read when I was a child. The Little House on the Prairie series, and the Wizard of Oz still resonate with me. Dorothy and Laura Ingalls were pioneers—girl scouts, who were always prepared and never complained. They were independent, pragmatic survivors. I'm not saying this is the best collection of virtues one could strive for, but, nevertheless I recognize them in myself and think they were engendered, to some extent, by those books. Also, I must mention the fantastic strangeness of Dr. Seuss (who prepared me for surrealism), Maurice Sendack, Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson.

Children’s books are there at the beginning, digging into our consciousness. The fact that children must, initially, be read to, illuminates something about how the book functions for humans. My son is 14 months old and he loves books. That is because his grandmother sat down with him when he was six months old and patiently read to him. She is a kindergarten teacher, so she is skilled at reading to children. She can do funny voices and such. My son doesn’t know how to read, he barely has a notion of what story is, but his grandmother taught him that when you open a book and turn its pages, something magical happens—characters, voices, colors—I think this has given him a vague sense of how meaning is constructed. My son understands books as objects printed with symbols that can be translated and brought to life by a skilled reader. He likes to sit and turn the pages of his books and study the images. He has a relationship with books, but he wouldn’t have that if someone hadn’t taught him. My point is, even after you learn to read, the book is still part of a complex system of relationships. It is almost a matter of chance, in some ways, which books are introduced to you and opened to you by someone.

I think people who are resistant to electronic books worry that this intimacy will be lost in a non-paper format. But clearly, it’s not the object itself, it’s the meaning brought to it by and through people. The medium won’t really change that.

Posted by Kim White at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , Thought Experiments , books , childhood , children , literacy , reading

Lawrence Lessig on "writing"   12.11.2004, 6:17 PM

Closing the USC conference "Scholarship in the Digital Age," Lessig spoke on "free culture" and the current legal/cultural crisis that in the next few years will define the constraints on creative production for decades to come. Due to obsessive fixation by a handful of powerful media industries on the issue of piracy, the massive potential of networked digital culture that has briefly flowered in the past decade could be destroyed by draconian laws and code controls embedded in new technologies. In Lessig's words: "never in our past have fewer exercised more legal control."

Lessig elegantly picked up one of the conference's many threads, multimedia literacy, referring to the bundle of new forms of cultural and scholarly production – remixing, reusing, networking peer-to-peer, working across multiple media – as simply "writing." This is an important step to take in thinking about these new modes of production, and is actually a matter of considerable urgency, considering the legal changes currently underway. The ultimate question to ask is (and this is how Lessig concluded his talk): are we producing a legal culture in which writing is not allowed?

Posted by ben vershbow at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education , Remix , USC , conference , copyleft , copyright , free_culture , free_thought , intellectual_property , lessig , p2p , writing

more from USC conference: useful dichotomies for reconsidering scholarship in the digital era   12.11.2004, 11:48 AM

from Tara McPherson:

- content/context
- practice/theory (practice as research in action)
- process/product (embrace productive failure)
- open/closed (what does versioning mean?)
- dialogue/argument (new ways of marshaling evidence; what does it mean when argument shifts into dialogue?)
- pedagogy/scholarship/service (tenure system is archaic; most non-traditional modes of scholarly inquiry are considered nothing more than community service)
- many/single (how do we rethink collaboration?)
- tools/theories (blurring that boundary)

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Gender and Critical Studies; Chair, Division of Critical Studies, School of Cinema-Television, USC; and editor of the forthcoming Vectors, an electronic peer-reviewed journal.

Posted by ben vershbow at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , USC , academia , collaboration , conference , conferences_and_excursions , pedagogy , scholarship , theory_vs_practice , university , versioning

An Exchange With Alan Kay   12.08.2004, 5:39 PM

Hi Bob –

I've been asked questions like this several times in the past, and have never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. I estimate that I've read between 15,000 and 20,000 books, with about 1/10th of these being really worthwhile, and perhaps another 1/10th or more really useful as "how not to think about it" that serve as a large field of comparative and contrasting ideas. I think a central answer to your question from me is that I would simply not have my world view if it weren't for books, and not just a few books but the wealth of multiple perspectives that the printing press made possible and encouraged.

The most important events in my life were learning how to read fluently before school age, and having read many books by the time I got to the constricting dogmas of school learning. This allowed me to resist and to gradually build my own mind, again largely through reading. I believe this is also an important answer to much of the good that has happened in the last 400 years. It's hard to pick 3 books that changed the world, but there is no doubt in my mind that the combination of new kinds of argumentation and many more points of view from thousands of books broke apart a lot of the rigidity of thought that has characterized most of human existence. Sorry, best I can do ...

P.S. If you had to pick one for the 17th century, it would be Newton's Principia Mathematica. I came upon this in my late 20s or early 30s and it would be my pick for the number one "amazing book" ever written. However, my course and POV were already set by the time I actually got around to buying and reading it.

Cheers, Alan

to which Bob replied:

So . . . do you think books are playing the same role today as they did 40-50 years ago when we were growing up? My instinct is no . . . but even if i'm right, i'm not sure if it is because times are different or because the media landscape has changed so dramatically.

to which Alan replied:

No [in answer to “do you think books are playing the same role today ... ] and I think that much of the new technology in the 20th and 21st centuries has been used to automate old oral forms (telephone, radio, movies, TV, voice mail, etc.) and this has taken quite a bit of day to day reading and writing out of most peoples' lives. We are wired for oral discourse and most are happy to stay there. The larger scheme of things was greatly aided by having writing be the only long distance replicable technology around for a long time -- and given that only 1% in Europe in 1400 could read, it really took the printing press to spread the hard to learn and literally mind-changing technology around sufficiently.

Also, McLuhan and Postman were pretty much right: that TV, especially, is a media form that delivers a 24 hour wall to wall environment that seems total, but lacks many important message carrying (and carrier) properties that the "written symbolic" media has. So, it's not that TV actually tells people how to think, but, as an environment, it is what people try to learn to be fluent in and adapt to, and this makes it difficult for most people to formulate non-TV kinds of thoughts (many of which have been critical to the development of the last 400 years). And TV is much easier to "learn". In simple: if you don't read and think for fun, you won't be fluent enough to read and think for purpose. This is why, when asked, I advise parents to treat TV and other similar media (including computer) like a cabinet of loaded guns or liquor. Locking it up is good, but not having in the house is probably better. But, since they are avid TV watchers and non-readers themselves, this advice has no effect. I think things are getting worse in part because TV is progressively making many more bad ideas seem normal.

Cheers, Alan

...and again, later on...

Hi Bob --Your questions got me thinking about certain books over the years. I stand by my earlier claim that it was the totality of many many books that did the job on me. But, still, there were a few, especially some very early ones that got me thinking one way and not another. For example, the first adult book I read all the way through -- maybe at age 4 – was my father's copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I originally read it because I had gotten interested in the ancient Greeks (he was quite interested). But the last part of the book contained Norse myths and these were in some cases similar to the Greek ones. This got me to realize that these were just stories and needed more than claims to back them up. This helped tremendously in resisting the Bible during later attempts to force this on me. Another early book was a long one, also my Dad's, Breasted's Ancient Times, maybe read at age 6 or 7. Again, I originally started reading it because I though ancient (and "lost") civilizations were cool (and loved the different architectures, etc.). But, I started to realize that human beings are driven to similar forms under similar conditions, etc. This led me to Anthropology later on.

A Life Magazine on the Holocaust (published in 1945, but I saw in 1947 at age 7)completely horrified me, and made me afraid of adults to this day (and rightly so).This was likely one of the earliest insights and shocks that motivated my later long standing interests in helping children to think better than most adults do today. Willi Ley's Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel around age 8 had a big effect. One memory from this book was the strange idea that you couldn't just aim a rocket at the planet you wanted to go to, but had to create an orbit for the rocket that would cause it and the planet to meet many months in the future. I can't quite explain why this had such a big effect on me. Science fiction, especially of Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, etc., had a huge effect, and got me to read many deeper books, like Korzybski's Science and Sanity. To have a conversation with a professor who didn't like grad students but did like McLuhan, I spent the better part of the summer of 67 really understanding Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. This was one of the biggest most useful shocks I got from a book. Marvin Minsky's Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines had a great effect on getting me to think more mathematically about computing (maybe 1968), and this led to McCarthy's meta definition of LISP in the LISP 1.5 Manual (a book of sorts), which was the key to really inventing objects "right". And so forth ...

Cheers, Alan

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Education , Thought Experiments , alan_kay , book , books , free_thought , reading