academhack

I have finally returned from my end of month traveling and am getting back to work on my current project (more on that later). But for now I wanted to join an ongoing conversation, about what was one of the most productive academic conferences I have been to: THATCamp. First, let me say mad props should be given to David Lester and Jeremy Boggs the two who organized it, as well as praise to the Center for New Media and History for hosting it.

I have been thinking a great deal since last weekend (when this conference was) about what made it so different from other academic gatherings. Many of the participants agreed with this sentiment, and many are talking about organizing others with a similar organizational structure. So, I thought it might be useful to offer some reflections as a way to improve THATCamp in the future, and more importantly as a way to encourage other conferences to adopt some of its features.

First a brief introduction for those not familiar with THATCamp or gatherings of its ilk. (For those who are familiar you might want to skip this paragraph as it is sure to bore you, and I am bound to get something wrong which might just confuse the matter.) My guess, although I don’t this for certain is that THATCamp takes its inspiration from BarCamp and FooCamp. The idea behind this type of conference (conference is perhaps the wrong word, indeed organizers often refer to it as an unconference, gathering is probably closer, although that is not very descriptive either). The idea is that rather than have a rigidly designed program at the start, with panels which feature speakers who dominate the break out sessions, participants themselves decide the breakout sessions, with each session being structured as a conversation rather than a presentation. Think of it as a wikiconference. For those who haven’t been to one I realize you might be thinking this sounds chaotic, unorganized, and less than productive. You would be right about only one of those: chaos (but it is a really productive sort of managed chaos).

Let me start by re-itterating something I started with, that this conference was by my evaluation tremendously successful. Indeed, if I was only able to attend one conference/gathering next year, I would probably chose THATCamp. Usually I am very resistant to conferences, I think they are far less productive than our profession makes them out to be, but THATCamp was the antithesis of the typical intellectual masturbation of most conferences. Why? Because you actually learn something, and collaborate on knowledge production. Rather than go to a panel and listen to somebody read a paper for 20 minutes telling you how smart they are, only to suffer through a question and answer period where nearly every person asks a question that is meant more to demonstrate how smart they are (the typical I don’t have a question but a comment where the questioner talks for five minutes) rather than generate conversation. THATCamp works precisely against this logic. If I want to read someone’s long form argument I am better off reading the 20 pages or so on my own time, rather than paying for a plane flight, a hotel for several nights, and having them read it to me in a hotel conference room with bad acoustics. I have for some time thought that the importance, or the real academic purchase of conferences is what happens after the panel (aside from networking which also happens after the panels) most of the better conversations have been had outside of the sessions where dialogue can happen. THATCamp makes those conversations the center of what happens rather than the supplement. Every hour and fifteen minute session is a conversation rather than a series of structured monologues.

Perhaps obviously the thing that made the conference so worthwhile was the people. This is probably a bit of a chicken and egg issue though, as the format of the conference probably attracted good people just as much as the participants made the conference good. There were a number of people whose work I had always respected from a far, or only ever knew through online communication so the conference afforded an opportunity to meet these people in physical space. But aside from the people what made the conference so successful?

Ideas not conclusions: Most conferences seem to be structured around individuals presenting conclusions of their research, or their final statements. Read a 20 minute paper, defend your thesis. THATCamp was markedly different, instead each session was more about generating ideas, testing out thoughts, and sharing perspectives. Thus individual egos were mostly put on hold in favor of trying things out, testing thoughts. Its really hard to overstate the importance of this, or even to fully capture what happened in each session, but by removing the “defend your thesis” from being the center of the conversation, the discussions turned out to be far more productive.

Organized Chaos: When I describe the format of this conference to some more traditional academics, they look at me weird, and usually ask “how could this possibly work?” “Don’t you need a program and strict organization ahead of time?” The answer is really no. Leveraging internet technologies and being comfortable with a flexible schedule allows for a bottom up organization where the participants determine what is important, rather than organizers deciding ahead of time what works for the participants. It probably helps that those who attended were familiar with the ethos of Web 2.0 where this kind of organization works. Simply put the conferences organizers designed a good “platform” and let the participants work and rework the “content.”

Keeping it Brief: Honestly I don’t need to hear you speak for 20 minutes. Lots of people with short ideas can be more productive than a few with really long ones. One of the more fascinating parts of the weekend was “dork shorts” where presenters had three minutes to demo a project they were working on. The organizers kept people to this schedule (think gong show but rather than a gong you were ushered off by keyboard cat if you went over time). So, by the end of lunch I had seen maybe 15-20 projects. Some useful for me, some not, but the ones I was more interested in, I got to follow up on.

Twitter: Seriously, I know some people here think I make too much of twitter, but it really added to the conference experience. Unlike many conferences without internet connections THATCamp had wifi throughout the weekend. (A couple of times it buckled under the strain of 100 overly connected academics, their netbooks, computers, and iPhones, but this only happened briefly.) This meant that participants could leverage the internet to enhance the session experience. Not the least of this was using twitter. So, those who were not at THATCamp could follow along, you could follow concurrent sessions, but perhaps most importantly it served as a sort of live organic note taking process, in addition to being a backchannel. You can see the archive here. Tech savvy participants also took advantage of the network to produce a wiki of the event. The twitter activity and collaborative note taking is definitely something other conferences can learn from.

Doing it on the Cheap: The conference was free. That’s right free. They asked for donations of $25 per participant, but no one charged at registration. Rather than host it at some big swanky hotel it was held at George Mason, thus cheaper. Breakfast on two days and lunch was included. I think I heard that the conference cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $3500 to host. My guess they made most of that back in donations. (Note: If you haven’t donated you should do so now.)

Diversity and Similarity: THATCamp was a good mix of people of diverse backgrounds within the humanities, but with similar interests. This meant that there was a mix of people with coding and technical background and a people more like myself, some technical knowledge but by no means an expert. This really helped in the sessions. My sense from some of the post THATCamp discussion was that some of the coders wanted more “hacking” (or coding time) and a little less discussion, so perhaps the panels were weighted a little in favor of conversation and less in production, but I think future conferences could easily change the percentage here. The key though is the mix of technical abilities and disciplinary approaches. Many academics talk about being interdisciplinary, few ever are. There was also a pretty good spread of students, staff, and faculty. In fact one usually had little idea who was who—and that was a good thing. My conference experience has often been that the conference reproduces the hierarchy of the institution, with faculty dominating conversations and ignoring the voices of the non-tenure track. No such thing here at THATCamp, I met undergrads, librarians, coders, and faculty alike. No one cared.

Size Matters: This is probably the unfortunate part of THATCamp: they capped the enrollment, turned people away. This had the positive effect of keeping the conference small, but the negative effect of limiting participation. I think the small feel really added to the sense of it being a friendly conference rather than an academic performance, and adding to the number of participants I think would really change this dynamic. I am not sure one could have more than 150 participants without seriously changing the dynamics. The up side is that the participants made it part of their participation to communicate to those not at THATCamp what was going on. I think in future iterations it might be nice to capture the video (or at least the audio) and turn it into a podcast. But more importantly nothing prevents there from being a lot more of these, several a year in fact, perhaps in different parts of the country, and with slightly different foci.

Here’s hopping that this serves as the model for more conferences like this. Maybe even outside of the digital humanities (but I won’t hold my breath for that one).

This week I am hosting the Teaching Carnival.

This weeks Teaching Carnival theme: The Future of Education.

Alex Halavis suggests that the future of education lies outside the walls of the university. After all, what are students paying for? an administrative function that they can perform themselves? Personally I am not that keen on ad supported textbooks or holding class in Panera, but I do think professors can start delivering their services sans the wall of the institution. Alex Reid also chimes in on the future of education, suggesting that we adopt the freemium model.

Mills Kelly opines about innovation in distance learning and more importantly about ways to foster that innovation. And, if you still need more convincing that Learning Management Systems (Blackboard etc.) are a bad idea check out Matt Gold’s, Against Learning Management Systems.

On the practical side of going edupunk Teaching for the Future covers how to turn compujunk to educational use (hint start with Ubuntu).

Over at The Future of Higher Ed Jim Moulton gives evidence from his recent trip to India that technology penetration is not yet what we assume it to be and reminds us that “there is no digital solution to a fundamentally human challenge.”

But perhaps we yearn to much for online distance learning, Howard Rheingold defends the importance of physical presence.

Generally I agree with @chutry, that there should be a ban on using the phrase “a spectre is haunting . . .” (completely overdone). So when you read or watch Mark Pesce’s keynote on education and digital citizenship you will just have to pretend the first sentence is not there, cause otherwise this is a good piece.

The best practical pedagogy post I saw this past week comes from Mark Sample and his American Postmodernism class using the network to create an annotated bibliography (results here).

This week saw the 50th Anniversary of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which was not only an excuse to issue a 50th anniversary edition, but also a good reason to debunk the usefulness of this text, Open Education also piles on. (I am always a fan of going after sacred cows).

If you are thinking about mobile uses in the classroom, check out The Salt-Box’s thought experiment on possible uses (again the pay off is in the comments).

And now that Oprah is on Twitter, even if she types in all caps, what teaching carnival would be complete without referencing a few twitter articles. Wired Campus covers a Professor at Penn State who uses twitter during class. (In fairness though I think I saw this a year ago, when @briancroxall was doing this (although it wasn’t in The Chronicle. (As always you should make sure that you read the comments on the aforementioned twitter article, even if for just the pure amusement factor.)

@mkgold recently used twitter to demonstrate to his class the power of the network. The result is not only a good demonstration of knowledge building, but a rather robust list of online education tools and how various professors use them.

Pardon my snark, but I have become accustomed to Blackboard and WebCT innovating after the curve, and providing vastly inferior products with pathetic user interfaces. Perhaps though someone at Blackboard is paying attention as they are developing a Blackboard interface for the iPhone. I do however reserve the right to make fun of them when it doesn’t work. Ohh wait, I won’t be using it because I refuse to store knowledge which should be public behind a firewall . . .

No secret to the readers of this site that I am a bit of an evangelist for Creative Commons. And those who follow the work of danah boyd know that she filed her dissertation under a creative commons license. Despite the fact that the CC license is easy to use, some institutions have been weary to accept this in lieu of copyright. For those who haven’t filed a dissertation recently, the organization under which you file, ProQuest encourages you to copyright your submission, for which they charge a fee of $65. So, licensing under creative commons would seem to be a better option (especially since you can restrict use to non-commericial).

The hurdle for CC though is often on the Universities side, whether or not the graduate school will allow it. When I filed my dissertation at the University at Albany (in July of 2007), I sort of discretely included a creative commons page, and hoped that no one would notice, hoping to avoid any “official” policy discussions, as I was running up against a deadline and did not have time to make a principled stand. (Side story: I filled the dissertation as movers were packing up our house, and actually had a second set of front matter printed out and ready to swap out in case the CC license didn’t fly with the graduate office.) No one noticed, and thus my dissertation was submitted with a CC license. But, I happen to know someone this semester at Albany who just filled a dissertation. Initially the graduate school rejected the submission for something like “unknown foreign characters” on the title page. I assume they were referring to the CC license images. But after some discussion, the graduate office sent the following in an email:

Good news indeed. Give it up for the University at Albany! (Formerly known as SUNY Albany but that’s a different story all together.) Here’s hoping more schools follow suit.

One of the things I consistently tell grad students is that they need to start developing an online profile now, their future, and the future of the profession depends on this. While already established faculty (read ones with secure full time jobs) can afford to ignore the developing intellectual landscape the coming generation of scholars will have no such privilege. This is a softer version of two other related points: that what you do in college matters far less than developing a digital portfolio, and that in the future you can be online or be irrelevant (quick, before you send me hate mail on the second one it is not an evaluative claim merely a descriptive one).

A couple of recent news items and conversations and developments brought this into focus and got me thinking about this problem, so bear with me for this longer than usual blog post as I explain how this all ties together, but first here are the pieces:

• Facebook changes their terms of service, and then changes them back.
• Tom Scheinfeldt writes about “Scholar Branding”
• Interfolio launches a new service aimed at academics who want to have a public online profile.
• In this past week I have had at least four conversations with junior faculty members in the humanities who would like to build a website/develop a digital presence for various reasons.

One of the things the digital era affords us as scholars is the ability to both deliver to a wider audience, and develop a reputation independent of institutional structures. That is, not only can you blog about developments in your field, and blog about how those developments might be of interest to a wider audience, and audience outside of your immediate classroom and colleagues, but perhaps more importantly one can develop a profile and voice that is more important than the specific institution with which you are associated. Think about this as rather than being a professor from Omega university who writes about Legal Institutions in Meerkat Communities, you can be a professor who writes about Meerkats and the Law and who is associated with Omega university. This is not really anything earthshaking, but rather a general trend that the internet creates, administrative and sorting functions are pushed down to the local level. This is happening in all sorts of fields and education will certainly follow.

In this landscape managing your online “portfolio” will become increasingly important. Tom Scheinfeldt was making a similar point in his recent post, “Brand Name Scholar,” albeit while referring mostly to institutions. But I think this holds for scholars as well. If you publish a book, write an article, make an appearance, apply for a job, you can be sure that a large portion of your audience will google you (or employ another search engine of their choosing). It is to your advantage to be able to be seen and findable in this type of information structure. As a way of demonstrating this google any random name, heck even try your own name, and see what comes up. In many instances the top hit for any particular name is a linkedin account or a facebook account. I think most academics would want people viewing their own faculty profile before a link to a page in which their name appears on a list of conference speakers or worse perhaps, a place where someone is questioning your academic credentials or argument. Its to your adverting to control the discourse.

Now linkedin in part serves this function for professionals, making it easy to find someone’s professional portfolio and set of related contacts, but it doesn’t quite work for academics, as it doesn’t allow the flexibility as much to constantly update and link to courses one is teaching along with links or perhaps the full documents from recent publications and presentations. Now universities in part can fill in the gap for their faculty by having faculty pages, but this means that your “reputation” and content are tied to a specific institution, buried deep within a series of faculty and department pages which you may or may not have the ability to update easily, and which you certainly would not have the ability to change the look of, and perhaps most importantly you could not take with you if you left the institution. Simply put you want a place that you control, that you can take with you independent of any institution, that demonstrates to the world what type of scholar you are, and what you do.

These can serve a range of functions, from presenting a simple CV and list of courses taught, to linking to research, hosting a discussion for a recently released book, to an ongoing conversation about current events . . .The point is you want a space you control.

Now one solution to this would be for someone to build/host a “facebook for academics” one particularly tailored to the interests of those working in academia. I think this is the tack academia.edu is perhaps taking over the long term by creating a large database of faculty and faculty profiles, but as of now it doesn’t really allow one the sort of robust functionality you might want.

Enter Interfolio. Let me start by saying I recommend Interfolio (not this current product but its prior set of services: dossier management). I used them during my job search and had nothing but a good experience with them. The few times (2) I had to contact customer service they were wonderfully responsive. My only complaint is that they are pricey, especially for poor graduate students, but I don’t get the sense that they are artificially inflating prices, just that I wish there was a cheaper way to handle this (perhaps if more Universities could receive documents electronically . . .). So, it seems like a natural transition for Interfolio to develop a platform for academics to manage their online portfolio, again a sort of facebook for academics, to serve as a central hub to which scholars can point people interested in their work. It appears from this mock-upthat they have developed a platform that will cater to all of the interests/needs of most academics.

I am of two minds about this. Part of me thinks that many academics need this, especially the less digitally savvy ones, ones for whom setting up their own webpage and/or set of pages would be a daunting task, even if using something like iWeb. And when I talk to academics who are not well versed in things digital, but who want to have their own online portfolio this seems to be one of the larger barriers. So, I definitely see Interfolio filling a gap. But on the other hand I think it is better to develop your own profile, your own set of pages and develop the digital literacy to control your own data. Why? Because of Facebook. If Facebook has taught us one thing it is that the services that provide us with places to store and share information about ourselves, develop an uncomfortable amount of power, and that when these sites decide to change TOS or use your data in ways in which you are uncomfortable with, there is often little you can do. I think in this regard the internet has two futures (similar argument here to Zittrain) one which people set up their own websites and places to share information, and one in which this information is increasingly centralized, and the end user has less and less control over said information presentation and dissemination. Me I prefer the former, sure the learning curve is tougher for that route, but I think the payoff is larger. So I will be curious to see how this develops whether faculty will develop a digital literacy to present themselves to the world controlling their own information, or increasingly farm this out to third party services, where an academia.edu or a facebook for academics replaces the University, rather than individual academics controlling their own voice and presentation.

Update: After I wrote this post I talked/emailed with some folks at Interfolio who saw this post. The Interfolio model is to let the users control/own all of their data, in other words you don’t give up the rights to your stuff, and you don’t have to worry about them selling your data (the other side of this is that the service will be subscription based). So, kudos to interfolio for doing this right.

To be honest I was only half serious when I started this rant on Twitter yesterday. You see my Thursday’s are really long, my first class starts at 10:00am and my last class ends at 10:00pm, so I try to keep myself entertained and mentally active. Twitter I discovered is a perfect tool for this. So, given a confluence of events, conversations I have had with faculty and grad students and spurred on by a few tweets by @briancroxall I decided it would be a good time to poke at one of the “sacred cows” of academia: tenure. Now I should admit that one of the things that I appreciate about Twitter is that it can serve as a mechanism for provoking discussion, sort of throwing out provocative statements, over stating the case and seeing what happens (the 140 characters doesn’t lead to deep discussion and debate, but it can provoke). So, while I was serious about my position against tenure I was being overly quippy and reductive about the issue, hence this blog post which will attempt a more nuanced approach, I am on balance anti-tenure. And as I said on Twitter yesterday, It is important to have someone running around saying the emperor has no clothes, even when in fact said emperor is fully clothed (and in this case I think, to carry this metaphor too far, the emperor is at the very least stripped down to his undies).

But I want to be clear, despite my overstated Twitter rhetoric I think on the whole tenure is an outmoded bankrupt system which needs to end. Tenure ain’t what it never was. To be sure at least recently tenure has come under fire, especially from forces external to academic institutions, so my proposal to end tenure, as some observed was neither radical nor new. But on the whole most of these calls have come from a neo-liberal ideology, a sense that faculty members should be subject to the same market forces that most labor is, “produce now, be productive now, or be fired,” a precarious and damaging economic model which does not protect workers. And as @afamiglietti repeatedly pointed out yesterday one of the serious problems with doing away with tenure is that it would turn all academic workers into a large pool of “adjunct labor” at the mercy of administrators who eager to cut cost would bid out classes to the cheapest teachers they could find. I think most of us can agree that we don’t want “academic share-cropping.” I am not eager to introduce more market forces to academia. I agree with many others (see for example Bill Readings) that the corporitization of the institution has seriously harmed academia, and I have no desire to increase said corporitization. This is indeed the danger in eliminating tenure. Furthermore despite @cscan’s claim (he was joking of course) that I am a neocon because I think doing away with tenure will save the University, I am not a neocon. I don’t think academia’s problem is crazy tenured professors producing irrelevant and socially meaningless leftist ideology and that the University would be better off without them. (In fact I wouldn’t even rank tenure in the top five ways to reform higher ed., might not even make the top ten.) Indeed precisely the opposite, tenure is a problem because it is a conservative/conserving force which results in the suppression of intellectually creative and provocative thought. That is, tenures claim to promote academic freedom is actually a lie, it does precisely the opposite.<

One other point that is worth raising here before I launch my assault on tenure: my own position. If we are going to seriously address these issues I think we would do well to admit our own positions within the University structure, for we are discussing power relations and it would be irresponsible for me to discuss said power relations without first admitting to my position within this structure (as many of my Twitter critics pointed out). So, I have a tenure-track job. (I am one of the lucky few.) But, I am not tenured. I do not have any particular angst about this process though, that is I am not particularly nervous about meeting those requirements, this might change in a few years, but for now my position against tenure is not self-serving. Indeed my position against tenure is arguing against my own personal selfish interests. Would I accept tenure if offered? Yes, but hopefully I would then use said power to change the rules, for as I will argue below one of the problems with tenure is that it disproportionally collects power in a few who then use it to reproduce the same. We need people with tenure who will vote to eliminate it. (I am also for what it is worth willing to admit that this is perhaps a self-serving rationalization for my future choices . . .)

Issues

It seems to me that there are two central issues with tenure:

• 1. It collects power in a minority of the stake holders in an institution, which results in an unequal distribution of not only power to affect change, but also all of the things that go with this.
• 2. Tenure actually fosters conservative scholarship not diversity (i.e. that is, it does exactly the opposite of what is intended).

I’ll take these one at a time. First the issue of power relations. No need for me to fully rehash here, it should be fairly obvious to anyone in the institution that this is true. Tenure faculty are paid better, teach fewer classes, frequently are the only ones with voting power, receive better research budgets, have the better offices . . . What shocks me about this distribution though is that the very people who have made a career of analyzing power relations in society (humanities professors) are often the last to recognize what is a fairly obvious inequity. Sure they will suggest that their department should offer more tenure track positions theoretically sharing their power, but ultimately my experience is that most tenure track faculty believe that they have earned the right to tenure, that their tenured position is a result of a meritocracy. I think we should be honest that the system is not a meritocracy but rather a rather standard system of power reproducing and conserving itself, where the few maintain their power by demanding that others participate and achieve within the system that benefits them, rather than questioning the system as a whole. This creates a system, which as several people pointed out yesterday on Twitter, whereby large groups of people are afraid to voice their opinions, speak up, or otherwise question the institution for fear of not being allowed into the “elite,” club. And what is more this “elite club” of Tenure-Track jobs, or tenured faculty creates a false hope, the sense for all the masses of disenfranchised intellectuals that if they just work hard enough, play by the rules and do as they are told, then they to will be admitted to the “in-group.” To be sure some are admitted into the group, but larger numbers are denied access. The tenure-track job serves as the false hope and promise which disciplines “the masses.” Like American Idol it offers the false hope that if you are good enough you might rise to the top, allowing a few to succeed in order to continue the myth that our society is a meritocracy. (And if you think my comparison to reality television is a bit unwarranted, sit in on tenure discussions, ones where “collegiality” is raised as an issue, producing a Survivor-esque atmosphere where people are voted off the island just cause some don’t like them.)

Finally as I think most of us recognize, again to paint a broad picture and not to single out any institutions or faculty in particular, the tenure system places an unequal distribution of work within tenured or tenure track faculty. Assistant Professors yet to get tenure are pressured to say yes to everything, while full professors have the option to decline, to pick and choose, displacing the workload onto the junior faculty. Again this is not true of all full professors, but I think it is true of more than we would like to admit. As a simple test just clock the number of hours a junior faculty member is on campus, versus the number of hours senior faculty are on campus . . .And I think we all know a few cases of the full professor teaching a 1-1 who refuses to work with grad students, and who also has a side job, as say a real-estate agent, making twice the amount of the junior faculty member teaching a 3-3, and six times the amount of the adjunct faculty teaching a 5-5. And before all the full professor faculty members out there leave a comment saying “but I earned that pay, and teaching load” I refer you to all of the CEOs of large companies who say the same thing about their pay and bonuses. . .okay they don’t say that about “teaching load,” but you get the point.

But as far as I am concerned the second issue is the really damaging one, that is tenure actually does the reverse of what it purports. The justification for tenure (and ultimately I am with @@foundhistory on this, that the intellectual freedom argument is sort of a fig leaf, a thin justification for other motives), the only justification as I see it, is academic freedom, that we want to protect faculty from politically/ideological motivated hirings and firings, for perhaps the worst thing that can happen to an academic institution is homogeneity of thought (and I would defend this position independent of political position, as much as I find him annoying and ultimately intellectually shallow I would not want to be at an institution which would not hire David Horowitz solely because of his conservative thinking . . .there are limits to how far I would take this . . .but more on this later). So, despite all the above shortcomings tenure would be defensible if it was the best way to produce diversity of thought. But alas, it does not. In fact and here is the crucial point, tenure doesn’t enable academic freedom, there is no such thing as academic freedom, what tenure does is farm the decision of academic freedom out to other bodies. A majority of institutions make tenure decisions based on publishing record, in other words forces outside the institution which are making market decisions based on what can be profitably sold as an intellectual commodity (usually in book form) are deciding what academics can and cannot say. If you have a standard rather typical academic argument which fits within the narrative of what is acceptable as scholarship you can get published, ideas which do not deviate too far from the norm are acceptable, but truly radical thinking is not. In other words to get tenure you have to produce the same, be conservative make your work fit within the current intellectual frameworks. Only that which can be assimilated within the system is tolerated, that which questions the entirety of the intellectual discourse, that which is truly radical and new, does not count. As I said on Twitter, Tenure is a fundamentally conservative and conserving institution. You think Karl Marx would have ever got tenure by writing Capital?

So indeed, when academics are young and should be producing exciting thought provoking material they are engaged in producing the most conservative of scholarship, that which will be recognized by a body of older “peers” invested in preserving their own ways of thinking, and filtered through a range of market informed forces, literally will this idea sell—the infamous tenure book. Now you might protest that once you have tenure you can publish, produce whatever you want. But seriously folks how often does this happen. It strikes me that these cases are few and far between that more often than not when academics get tenure they continue to produce the same type of scholarship which got them tenure in the first place. I am sure Foucault would have something to say about discipline and disciplining . . .

To be sure there are other issues with Tenure, not the least of which is the job market but I think the two above crystalize my opposition.

Okay that’s enough for now, later I will continue this post and argue for some possible solutions, and more radically perhaps, purpose that the age of digital information renders tenure useless, and provides us with better options. (Teaser: the digital makes transparency possible, which is the very antithesis of the opaque tenure system. . .)

For those who are not on twitter and following the recent meme about changing TOS, you should start by reading this post and the subsequent follow-up.

To be fair to Facebook part of the momentum here is a general sense of angst about who owns what when it is stored in “the cloud” or on “social networking sites.” But, Facebook also has changed their language to reflect a pretty (in my opinion) ridiculous policy. So while Facebook has become the lightning rod here, they did bring it on themselves. To get a clear picture of different TOS read Amanda French’s rundown of different TOS (seriously go read it, its important).

I have had several conversations recently that take one of two shapes: 1. Why do you have over a 1,000 followers but only follow 200? or 2. How do you decide who to follow? These questions seem related, if not coterminous, and go to the heart of what I find valuable about twitter, and how and why I use it, so I thought it might be useful for others to spell out exactly how I go about “managing” who I follow.

Those I follow break down into roughly the following groups:

1. People at University at Texas at Dallas. I follow pretty much any student (grad or undergrad) I have had in class who regularly uses Twitter. As I said in my original post on Twitter I think the most valuable thing about the medium is its ability to build community amongst individuals who are geographically dispersed. I know a lot more about my students, there concerns about the program, what they are planning on doing, art openings one of them might have etc. Plus this often yields feedback on the readings or their coursework in general. There are also a few other faculty members who I follow, but it really is mainly a student medium which makes it high in the signal to noise ratio for connecting with students and contextualizing the educational process.

2. People in Dallas. I follow quite a few people in the Dallas area: this keeps me updated on things going on in my area, weather, news, events, general goings on. Plus connects me to a group of people when I want thoughts and opinions about things to do in Dallas (say for example recommendations on the best Pad Thai . . .)

3. Twitter “Power Users.” There is a handful of the top 200 twitters I follow. I don’t follow a ton of these people, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 20. These include people like @jayrosen_nyu @newmediajim @anamariecox and a small selection of journalists (although mostly citizen journalists over professional folk). I tried following people like @maddow for a while but I found that for the most part I like people who tweet their opinions and the minutiae of their lives, not just announce what is going to be on their show. I don’t follow many “tech pundits” honestly I find most of their conversations boring and repetitive. The key exceptions here are Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly), Howard Rheingold (@hrheingold who also fits in the category below), and Dave Winer (@davewiner). In fact Dave Winer is one of the people I most value. He mixes the personal with the professional, the ranting opinions with short quips, the humor with the sincere. I don’t always agree with him, but this is what makes it interesting. In fact I think “I learned” how to use Twitter by following him, and mimicking what he did. (He’s the one who gave me the idea to change my Twitter name to Dave Hussein Parry during the election nonsense.) I don’t follow any “celebrities.” I did follow a few for a while, but honestly there was no pay off for me. (I do follow cobracommander though.)

4. Academics who are in my field. There are probably 30-40 academics in my field (what I will call “Digital Literacy” or “Media Studies” who I follow). This is not only because they tend to talk about things which interest me, tweeting about what they are currently working on, but also because it helps me stay in touch with these people, some of whom I know better than others. The nature of academia is that there are not often many people in your immediate geographic area who study what you study (because you are supposed to be “the person” who covers the field at your school why would they hire a second), so Twitter helps fill this gap. Also in this group are a collection of instructional technologists as part of what interests me is the pedagogy of technology.

5. A wide swath of people. Yeah, I know this group doesn’t make any coherent sense. But, one of the ways I use Twitter is to get a “snapshot” a quick look at what people are thinking about, what I have started to call the “collective conscious” or “swarm consciousness.” So this is the group that takes the most tweaking and I would be hard pressed to tell you how I decide who fits in this group. Often I will follow someone, take them for a “test-drive” and if they provide tweets and perspectives not in my stream I follow them. I have high school students I follow, undergrads in college (who are not media majors or even in Texas) a few politicians (mainly conservative ones as I like to know what they are thinking). I have added people who were tweeting about part of the world to which I had never been, or who lived in part of the US from which I did not already have someone.

I don’t follow many organizations, that is I find it more valuable to follow people rather than news organizations, or groups who are using Twitter to update people. There are a few exceptions, but mainly the value in Twitter for me comes from individual voice.

I tend to add people in, and “listen” to them a while and then decide whether or not to stay tuned in. The key for me is not adding in so many people that I cannot follow the thread of what they are tweeting about. When I am “listening” to Twitter, I pretty much try to read or at least glance at everything that comes through. If a particular user is dominating the stream I tend to unfollow (as often happens when they live tweet an event—in most cases I refollow after the event). I found if I follow to many people I find it hard to differentiate between people, and part of the value for me is connecting the individual tweets to the stream of tweets that someone has been authoring. If I followed many more people I would get overwhelmed, not able to follow what is going on. So for me it is less a matter of numbers of followers, and more a matter of managing number of tweets I get per hour when I am paying attention to Twitter.

Yes I do recognize this is fundamentally an unequal power relation, that is, many more people are “listening” to me than I am “listening to,” but in my defense I offer that this also can help the network. Hubs are an important part of any network and the asymmetrical nature of Twitter is one of its principle features.

I have blocked very few people. Pretty much I only block spam tweeters, and people using twitter as a marketing tool. I tend to think that the power of twitter comes from it being an open network, so I keep my updates unprotected, related to this I tend not to follow people with protected updates (again with some exceptions).

Steven Johnson, who I started reading because of his book Everything Bad is Good For You (a well thought out defense of digital games) has a post on boingboing documenting his novel writing process (he has a new book out). Although he says he has used various writing tools for his different books, his “one constant?” DevonThink. His account of the writing process is short, but still worth a read as I always enjoy learning about the tools and processes other writers use (something we tend to treat as a “magic black box” rather than as an important step in the process).

(A story of Twitter, academia, and old journalism trying to be new but failing.)

Okay first read this article on CNN about the new whitehouse.gov website, okay you can actually just skim the article and skip to the last three paragraphs. Yes, that’s me being quoted in that article, and yes you are correct that quote makes no sense. What the bleep was I talking about? Perhaps like many stories in the world of journalsim this is partly a story of being misquoted, but there is actually more to it than this. The way the reporter found me, and the context surrounding said quote, while perhaps not a unique story, is certainly illustrative of several trends and problems with old journalism, and perhaps more germanae to this audience, it is a telling story about the future of media and the importance of social networks.

On Tuesday (inauguration day) I was teaching until 11:15 (12:15 ET) and so missed the first part of Obama’s speech, but as class let out and I moved to the lobby of the Arts and Humanities building where they were showing the speech I quickly read through my Twitter feed, glancing over what the most prominent topics of conversation were. Not surprisingly one of the most “tweeted” about items was the introduction of a new whitehouse.gov website. So, following the speech I returned to my office and pulled up the new new site. I really had not looked at it much, perhaps two minutes total when my office phone rang. Now this is a particularly unusual occurence as most everybody I converse with contacts me through email. In fact most of the time when I get a phone call it is somebody else in the building or on campus looking to see if I am in my office as they were planning on stopping by. But when I answered a woman introduced herself as Lisa France a reporter from CNN.com. (In fact she spoke so quickly that following the conversation I did not remember her name, as I totally missed it the first time around, in fact I wasn’t even sure that I heard the CNN.com part of her introduction correct.) What I do recall from her introduction was her sense of relief at having actually reached a person, something in the realm of “thank God I reached someone.” (Not her words just my interpretation of them.)

Read the rest of this entry »