In general I think it can be a productive activity to encourage students to take a step back from relying on social media. I say this not because I think social media is a bad, or even harmful technology, but rather because I think that changing behavior can lead students to certain realizations about whatever it is they are studying. Showing students is usually a better pedagogical method then telling them. I won’t go into all the reasons in detail here, if you want you can check out the longer article I wrote for Flowtv.org on the student saturated media environment, but in short I would say that what seems strange and unfamiliar to us, is normal to most of our students. That is there is nothing particularly strange or unusual to them about Facebook, texting, Twitter, YouTube etc. As an educator one particularly effective tactic, I think, is to take the familiar and make it look strange. Or as Siva Vaidhyanathan explained on Twitter recently, students are like fish swimming in an ocean of media, my job is to get them to notice the water.

So it might seem like I would support Eric Darr, the provost of Harrisburg, and his plan to cut off social media for a week. Except I don’t. Actually I think it is a bad idea (maybe with good intentions, but a bad idea nonetheless). Let me explain.

In short I think this sort of experiment needs to be done carefully at a local level not globally with a broad brush. As Eric Stoller characterized the decision, having the Provost decide the matter for the whole University seems a bit “heavy handed” (Note: the “heavy handed” quote which is attributed to me in the Chronicle article originates with Eric, although I agree with it.) In this instance it becomes an abstracted authority telling his subordinates, what is and is not healthy, or at the least creating an experiment where the participants have no say in the matter. Whether or not it is Eric’s intent the message easily becomes “students cannot live without social media, they should try it for a week.” And again whether or not this is the Provost’s intent, it ends up coming off like a “kid’s these days” situation. Try substituting another “batch” of technology to see how problematic this becomes. For a substantial portion of the faculty, dissertations were written on a typewriter maybe we should ban all computers for a week and make graduate students work on typewriters, or we used to communicate in handwritten letters, for a week all communication must be handwritten, or people used to walk everywhere before there were cars, maybe we should have students practice a car free week.

This is not to suggest that anyone of the above couldn’t be a productive project, but I think they would only be productive given the right context. If you were studying urban planning it might be useful to have students not use cars for a week, or if you were studying linguistics and machine technology maybe only letter writing would be appropriate, but without a context I think the experiment is bound to fail, probably creating more frustration and anger than anything else.

In essence Harrisburg (or Eric, it’s difficult to tell) has grouped together a wide range of technologies and banned them all, without really recognizing their difference, and recognizing the differences between these technologies is one of the crucial things we should be teaching. On the first level who decides what is “social media” and what is not, is foursquare blocked? what about last.fm? World of Warcraft? or discussion boards? or heck even blogs with comments? I am not sure that I could decide what is and what is not social media and I am supposed to be an expert in it, how is a school going to decide? Second on the practical level it is near impossible to block all social media sites. Even if you could create a working definition of social media it would be impossible to create an exhaustive list of sites, there are simply too many to count.

Furthermore, how does one even go about enforcing this? A University wide ban is not likely to stop students from using social media, rather what it is likely to do is teach students how to set-up proxies and route around the IP blocking the University is planning on doing (not that this wouldn’t in and of itself be a good thing for students to learn. I wonder how many Tor downloads will happen that week?) Or students will likely just go off campus to access the net, making the ban an inconvenience but not an experience in giving up social media. What is more is that it is likely to disproportionately effect students over faculty and disproportionately  effect some students more than others. Faculty members who go home at night, or students who live off campus will be less affected. And what is worse is there is likely to be a class divide here as students who can afford to work at places like coffee shops will access the net there, or students who can afford Smart Phones will just rely on those devices for social networking.

There is one other concern here worth noting, one that I tried to raise in The Chronicle article but which unfortunately came across probably too soft. I think we should start by recognizing that social media isn’t an online form of communication, rather social media is how students communicate. In other words Eric isn’t asking students to give up communicating online, he is asking them to give up a large portion of the way in which they communicate. Imagine if the experiment was to have no one on campus talk to each other? There are actually fairly serious concerns here that shouldn’t be treaded over lightly. For many students their social media networks of friends are crucial to their daily lives, whether as the primary means by which they stay in touch with people or at the most significant level as a medium by which they connect with their support groups. Asking students to give up social media is not just a technical ask, it is a social and psychological one as well, one which I think those who don’t use it as a primary means of communicating probably underestimate.

But it is all to easy to critique without offering a solution. So, here is my solution, how I go about asking students to go on a social media fast.

1. I do it within a specific class context, making it an assignment. Since I teach social media, media is both the object and means of study, any ask I make is within the context of the class. In the same way asking students to give up cars for an urban planning class would make sense, asking students to give up a particular social media site within the context of class makes sense. This also presents the opportunity to discuss and process the experience.
2. Create buy in. Just telling students to live without social media seems to authoritarian, explaining to them, again within the context of the class is a far more effective way to handle the situation. If students are bought in to the assignment then they are more likely to do it. An assignment like this cannot possibly be monitored, so you need students to want to willfully do it. Do all my students follow through? No, but a majority do. (Incidentally the person who commented on The Chronicle that I would leave it up to a class vote, sort of missed this point. You can demand a lot of things from students, the one thing you can’t demand is that they learn. Their mindset going into any assignment will greatly determine what they get out of it.)
3. Make the assignment after, or during studying the object. This again creates context. After discussing Facebook and the way students use it, asking them to give it up for a week will make more sense.
4. Pick specific social media, not all social media. When I assign students to give up Facebook for a week they are still free to use email, discussion boards, even Twitter. By being specific you get students to pay attention to the specifics of each site rather than treating them all as equal, which they are clearly not. I might have students give up search engines for a day next semester.
5. Have a specific timeline and a reason for the duration. Make it a challenge.
6. Recognize that students will be differently affected by this assignment, especially if you are asking them to give up their support networks.
7. Join them. I never ask students to give up something that I am not also willing to give up.
8. Have them write about it, during and after. I want them to process the experience, they learn more this way and learn more from each other this way.

P.S. You should also read Eric Stoller’s take on this from a student life perspective.

I want to explicate some of the issues I raised in the last post, address some of the comments, walk back my position on at least one point (yes you are all right the word “bad” was not a fair characterization), and dig in on a few others.To keep these posts stylistically similar let me again start with two observations.

1. One of the essays I most enjoy teaching in my media studies classes is Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. When teaching this essay I often begin the class by saying Benjamin understood why Ebert was wrong. That is Ebert, rather famously claimed that while video games might demonstrate a high level of craft, they will never rise to the level of art. Of course what Benjamin argued in The Work of Art, at the time in relation to photography, was that the question should not be “Is Photography Art?” but rather the more important question: “What does having photography do to our concept of art?” (By extension the question of video games should be what does having video games do to our concept of art.)
This is similar to how I think about the concept of digital humanities. I think we should not be asking, can the humanities be digital, or how does the digital allow or not allow us to do humanities, but rather, what does having the digital do to our idea of the humanities (and by extension what it means to be human). Anything short of this strikes me as less than interesting, but more importantly a missed opportunity.

2. Okay, I can tell I am really going to get in trouble for this one but . . .

The following is not originally my observation, I wish I could take credit for it as I generally agree and think it is really astute, but it’s not mine. (But I will let the original source remain anonymous as it was an “off the record conversation,” but if said person wants to claim it, I will note credit here.)
Generally speaking (painting really broad but accurate brush strokes here) Digital Historians, and Digital Literary Scholars have had significantly different approaches to incorporating “the digital” into their respective scholarship. Digital Historians have leveraged the digital to expand and engage a wider public in the work of history. As examples of this think of Omeka, or leveraging social media to engage in crowd sourced projects. That is, Digital Historians have often begun by asking “how does the digital allow us to reach a larger/public audience?” Now this could be because many of the folks working in Digital History come from a public history background . . . But in the case of literary studies the “digital” projects have not, as much, changed the scope of the audience. So that if you look at digital literary projects they often look remarkably similar to projects in the pre-digital era, just ones which have been put on steroids and run thru a computational process. Seems to me that the Digital Historian model is a better one.

Okay so onto the post. . .

I can’t help but notice that most of the talk, or at least critique, in the comments centers around the last paragraph, largely ignoring the analysis which led me to that paragraph. (To be fair I sort of invite this, saving my central and controversial claims for that section, but still . . .) That is, the early part of the post has as its supposition that “Universities are still valuing the wrong stuff,” and by Universities I mostly arguing about humanities scholars, but that’s only because the context was the MLA. When I look at what type of digital scholarship in the humanities is being recognized and valued by the institutions within which we operate it seems that that scholarship is mostly conservative, does little to question, upset, or threaten the dominant paradigms. And, that what I see to be as truly important work has yet to receive recognition. The fact that someone like Brian can be without a job and largely a “real nobody” while he is such a significant “virtual somebody” is just one example of this.

In his comment on the original post Tim Lepczyk suggests that a large part of the problem here is in defining what I, or anyone, means by the digital humanities, or humanities 2.0. I think this is spot on, and this is probably one of the most slippery parts of my argument, one I haven’t entirely worked out. As he points out there has been a certain amount of baggage from prior text analysis that is ported over in the upgrade to digital humanities. I definitely see humanities scholars as collaborating with computer scholars, IT folks, and people from a range of places within the academy and outside the academy. (Indeed one of my favorite presentations at the MLA addressed one particularly thorny aspect of this issue, @nowviskie’stake on intellectual property and labor in the age of collaboration.) But I think if what the digital does is just take the old disciplines and make them digital, leaving disciplinarity and the silo structure of the University in tact, it will have failed. I want to see the digital transform not just the content or practice of the disciplines, but the very idea of disciplinarity.

But, it is not entirely true as Brian Breman argues that I am advocating a “this changes everything,” approach to the digital humanities. In fact my major fear, the thing that keeps me up at night, is the idea that “this changes nothing.” Indeed that was the impetuous for the original post, despite the digital, nothing changes. It seems to me that the digital affords us (both as academics and as a wider members of a society) to do something really different, to re-organize many of the founding assumptions we have about how to organize knowledge, how to organize people, and even the nature of what it means to be human. But, I see us not necessarily taking advantage of this opportunity. In fact I see this as a fading opportunity, as our culture makes the “change over” from one intellectual substructure (dead tree) to another (digital network) it seems that we are porting over a host of prejudices about knowledge production and dissemination that are worth rethinking. (As just one example of this I think about intellectual property and knowledge ownership.) So, I would love if “this changes everything,” but unfortunately I think (as my original post claimed) that this has changed little, especially within the walls of academia. This is not to suggest that there are not some significant revolutions/projects taking place both within and outside of academia, but that a lot of what is being done/counting as digital scholarship does little to question the founding principles of academic knowledge production, especially within the field of “literary studies” (principles which we can at this moment, perhaps, but for a very short time re-negotiate).

On the most radical I’ll raise the question this way: The rate at which some of the digital scholarship has been so smoothly/effortlessly incorporated into the walls of the academia should perhaps give us pause to question whether or not it actually signals any change at all. Again to paint broad brushstrokes, but ones which I think are relatively accurate, scholarship tends to fall into two categories: 1. That which does little to call into question the walls of the ivory tower, or what is worse strengthens those walls, a digital humanism which would build an ivory tower of bricks and mortar and supercomputers crunching large amounts of textual data producing more and more textual analysis that seems even more and more removed from the public which the academy says it serves re-inscribing and re-enforcing a very conservative form of humanities scholarship. 2. A digital humanism which takes down those walls and claims a new space for scholarship and public intellectualism. Now while these two positions are not as mutually exclusive as I am painting them here I am more than willing to sacrifice the first for the sake of the later.

In the longest comment on the last post, @mkirschenbaum, suggests that when we think about the internet we need to think not about the Derrida of The Postcard or Of Grammatology, but rather the Derrida of Given Time. This is perhaps the most succinct phrasing I have heard of the problem. We spend too much time thinking about the structure of the link or data and not enough time thinking about the social relations and ethical questions opened up by this space.

And in this regard I agree with in part @sramsay’s comment that “new tools can facilitate a new type of public intellectualism.” The printing press was not just a faster version of the scriptorium, it was the “gadgets of the early modern period and the networks of communication in which they flourished” that changed the intellectual and wider cultural landscape. The printing press was not a mere tool by any means. But, it was precisely at the level beyond the printing press as gadget that I want to look, and to which I think we need to focus our efforts. On one level the printing press was just a gadget and the real, the important change, came at the level of the social negotiation about how that gadget would be deployed. Authorship, intellectual property, authority, piracy, etc. were all social/legal/cultural negotiations that occurred and were not decided at the level of the gadget, even if the gadget did speed up the rate of connectivity. If academic scholarship, just to take one example, says “what can I author now on the web,” without first calling into question the notion of “authorship” and recognizing the degree to which it might be heterogenous to the way knowledge can be organized on the web we will have missed a golden opportunity.

I think I should have been perhaps clearer, or not so glib in my paraphrasing of the question from my panel. I think to say that it was a “bad” question was wrong. What I should have said was that I think to answer the question straight up is not the most productive way to look at the problem. Instead by answering the question backwards, saying what if we thought about the “digital” as not merely an adjective (gadget to be applied to the humanities) but something much more, what does having the digital do to our conception of the humanities, seems to me the place we should place our focus.

And so this is where I am really going to dig in. @tanyaclement, correctly so, calls my analysis out, saying that like the MLA I am perhaps focusing too much on social media, “Clearly, there has been a lot of focus on “Digital Humanities” this year because of the rise of twitter and, as such, DH has now been associated with social media almost exclusively. This is unfortunate.” Where I am going to disagree with this is at the level of “unfortunate.” I think this is a fortunate thing (if only it were the case). The more digital humanities associates itself with social media the better off it will be. Not because social media is the only way to do digital scholarship, but because I think social media is the only way to do scholarship period. Yes it is true that there are hosts of scholars having scholarly discussions who are not on Twitter, but you know what, they better be, or they risk being made irrelevant. No this doesn’t mean that every scholar has to have a Twitter account, but it probably wouldn’t hurt, but it does mean that every scholar better be having their discussions in public on the web in these digital spaces for all to participate in.

I realize that this stance displays a certain amount of irreverence to the very people on whose shoulders which I stand in order to make this argument, but on the same time it displays a hyper-fidelity to their work, thinking about how it can be carried into this new digital substructure, used to shape this (perhaps) new way or organizing knowledge.

Yesterday this argument took a different sort of turn when Ian Bogost published The Turtlenecked Hairshirt: Fetid and Fragrant Futures for the Humanities. In part Bogost was weighing in on the question of Digital Humanities and its arrival, non-arrival, but was actually, it seems to me, making a much broader critique. Regardless, as he observes in the comments on the post, much of the discussion centers around a conflict between digital humanities and new media. Along these lines Matt asked if this is not just a debate over semantics, and perhaps less generously, a territorial pissing match. Throwing around the term “digital humanities” as an empty signifier, backlash against the digital humanities.

Let me be clear, I have no desire to engage in an academic territorialization argument. Honestly I couldn’t care less, having left an English department I am quite happy to not have to engage in those discussions. My position was a much larger one, addressing the question of whether or not “digital humanities” has arrived, and in a connected manner what this means for the future of the humanities. It appeared to me that much of the discussion at MLA was about the arrival of the “digital humanities” and in a related theme the extent to which this can serve as a “cure” (as Ian puts it) for what ails the humanities.

So let me put it a different way, maybe the digital humanities has arrived, maybe it is becoming central and important in the way that humanities scholars do their work, but the digital humanities that has arrived (the slow work that @tanyaclement mentions) is the kind of arrival that changes nothing, a non-event. The only type of digital humanities that is allowed to arrive it the type that leaves the work of humanities scholars unchanged. Seriously, don’t tell me your project on using computers to “tag up Milton” is the new bold cutting edge future of humanities, or if it is the future of the humanities it is a future in which the humanities becomes increasingly irrelevant and faculty continue to complain at boorish parties how society marginalizes them, all the while reveling in said marginalization, wearing it as a badge of honor which purportedly proves their superiority on all matters cultural.

As Ian observes, “It’s not “the digital” that marks the future of the humanities, it’s what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas.” That is what I was after in my original post, the idea that the digital that I am hoping for, hoping will challenge and change scholarship hasn’t arrived yet, for all the self congratulation about the rise of the digital, little if anything has changed. Humanists are still largely irrelevant in the broader culture discussions, and it seems to me purposely chose to remain so.(Actually I am not certain the degree to which this is really about “literary” humanists, as it seems this issue plays out differently in history. But that might just be the perspective of an outsider.)

And this is the brilliance of Brian’s paper (content not withstanding) he made his material more relevant than all the other papers that weren’t published, he engaged the outside (even if it was a paper that was a lot of inside baseball on the workings of the academy) because he opened his analysis and thinking to a wider audience (and as @amandafrench and @bitchphd remark did it with a real-time spin that enhanced at both the level of content and delivery). Again The real influence should be measured by how many people read his paper, who didn’t attend the MLA. Or maybe, the real influence of his paper should be measured by how many non-academics read his paper. Scholars need to be online or be irrelevant, because our future depends upon it, but more importantly the future of how knowledge production dissemination takes place in the broader culture will be determined by it.

An innocent enough of a gesture one could assume. What I took Sybil’s point to be, was that Britannica is not a good scholarly source, and that the library should be encouraging other/more appropriate research practices (like, you know using scholarly sources, and judging credibility and bias). But what also struck me about this was the odd moment when librarians are encouraging students to use the encyclopedia as a source. And, perhaps I read too much into this, but I think the librarians gesture comes as a correction to Wikipedia, i.e. the subtext here is “Don’t use Wikipedia use Britannica.” This might be my bias, or my way of reading things, so fair enough I didn’t respond to Sybil’s tweet. But, apparently Britannica has a Twitter account, and the person who manages the account noticed Sybil’s tweet and decided to respond:

Shocked to see that Britannica was on Twitter I couldn’t resist and posted the following:

Well needless to say it was all downhill (or shits and giggles depending on your perspective) from there. I won’t recount the blow, by blow, mainly cause it gets really long, and the person who Tweets from @Britannica obviously feels passionate about defending Britannica, and at one point posted nine straight tweets defending the appropriateness of Britannica as a scholarly source.

A few notes might be worth making at this point: 1. I am not speaking for @SybilV here, these are my opinions, and I have a sense that my tone if not also my stance is more radical/ contentious than hers. 2. I have no idea if the account @Britannica is an official Britannica Twitter account. I looked at the Britannica page and couldn’t find it listed. So, the account might just be a Britannica fan, or an employee who unofficially Tweets from that account. I don’t know, but I think we can take the arguments that @Britannica makes as indicative of those who champion this encyclopedia and its format.

It seems to me that with all the tweets sent back and forth, with others in the Twitterverse adding to the discussion, the central issue was “What is the appropriate use/role for Britannica in relation to society and specifically academia?”

So here’s the thing: 1. It has none. 2. This is because of Wikipedia.

Don’t get me wrong I am not disparaging Britannica, not really. It had a role, and generally speaking it served it well, but:

Yes, Britannica is a pretty good secondary source. It has a lot of advantages as a secondary source. Articles are fairly thorough, contain citations, and are more or less accurate, but as a secondary source it doesn’t even come close to the value of something like Wikipedia. Thirty years ago, heck even ten years ago, Britannica was arguably the best secondary source around. If you wanted to get a quick overview of a specific subject Britannica was a good place to start, a good portal to gaining deep knowledge about a subject.

In a world of dead-tree based knowledge the central authority, hierarchically controlled way of organizing, was a good thing. When you only have so many pages, you can’t reprint frequently, and distribution is expensive, these are good decisions. But in a digital networked information structure these are not.

What you want from a secondary source is a good introduction to a concept, that is mostly reliable, up-to-date, entries for as many topics as possible, connections to where to go to learn more, and easy and ubiquitous (as possible) access. A secondary source is not an in depth analysis which upon reading one is suddenly an expert on said entry or topic, it’s not designed to be. It is just a good overview. No secondary source is going to be completely accurate, or engage in the level of detail and nuance which we want from students, or that is required to fully “know” about a subject.

This is why the Wikipedia banning by schools and professors has always struck me as a particularly stupid policy. The issue is not that Wikipedia is or is not reliable and thus should be banned in academic environments, rather the issue is that Wikipedia is a secondary source and thus should not be treated as a primary one. But, this also holds true for Britannica. Any syllabus which contains language about banning Wikipedia misses this point. Ban secondary sources from student work, not Wikipedia in particular as this confuses the issue. This doesn’t mean that students shouldn’t use secondary sources, indeed they should they are great ways to begin to learn about a subject. It just means they should not cite secondary sources, they should always look for primary ones, and that they should never take Wikipedia or Britannica as the final word on a subject. I don’t recall a single syllabus from my college days (pre-Wikipedia) that said “do not use Britannica as a source for your papers, doing so will result in failing the assignment.” Seriously, professors explained to us what reference books were for, and how to correctly use them.

Several semesters ago I wrote a piece defending Wikipedia and arguing that it was irresponsible to not teach students about how to use Wikipedia. I won’t rehash those arguments here, but I will reference one objection made in the comments of this article, which I often hear when I talk about Wikipedia:

MY guess is that the author wouldn’t want his doctor to base his latest surgery on a Wikipedia article.

Of course not, don’t be stupid, I wouldn’t want my doctor to be educated by Wikipedia, but I wouldn’t want my doctor to be educated by Britannica either. The role of Wikipedia isn’t to train heart surgeons how to perform a bypass, nor is it the role of Britannica, that is not the function of these objects. To hold Wikipedia to this standard is more than a bit ridiculous. Wikipedia doesn’t strive to be an object that teaches doctors how to operate (although it seems that Britannica might be trying to claim this ground).

We could argue about the accuracy of Wikipedia, although studies show that it is as accurate as Britannica, or about the policy that “any one can edit,” at least with Wikipedia I can view the editing history, or we could argue about the problems on Wikipedia, of which there are many (bland prose, serious debates between inclusionists and deletionist, its Western-English bias, an increasing bureaucratic control structure, among others). But what really isn’t arguable at this point is that as a broad overview of knowledge, a good place to start an inquiry, Wikipedia is a killer app.

When it comes to functioning as a secondary source, a reference guide, Wikipedia has substantial advantages over any prior encyclopedia model. In the same way that Britannica’s model of “get experts in a field to write specific articles” was a vast improvement over the prior model “get the smartest person to write the whole encyclopedia,” Wikipedia is a substantial improvement over Britannica. (Sorry folks at Britannica, this is just the way it is. P.S. While you are at it you might want to sell your stock in 8-tracks, newspapers, and scriptoriums.) The breadth of knowledge, its ability to be linked to other knowledge, its cost (free), its up-to-dateness, and its preservation of editorial discussions (it records not only the article but the discussion which produced said article) makes it far more useful. And that doesn’t even begin to address things like how much easier Wikipedia is to use for mash-ups and data extraction, repurposing the information for other reference works.

To illustrate this point I make the following challenge:
I hereby challenge any employee of Britannica to a game of trivial pursuit. You can consult Britannica Online for any question, and I can consult Wikipedia. Want to take bets on who will win? (I’ll even let you have all 15 print editions as well). We could also play “Who Want’s to Be a Millionaire?” of “Jeopardy” if you want.

So, this is the bind that Britannica is caught in. It can market itself as a secondary source: we are a great reference tool. But if it does this, someone can easily point out that Wikipedia is a better secondary source, and free (in other words libraries can spend dwindling resources on other primary materials). Or, it can claim to be a great primary source, a role it simply can’t fulfill. It simply doesn’t have a place anymore, there are better services doing what it did.

Now seriously, can we end this debate already. Instead lets talk to students about how appropriately to use secondary sources, how to understand how encyclopedias function, how all encyclopedias are biased, all knowledge is discursive, and focus on teaching students how to judge credibility and accuracy instead of outsourcing it to people at Britannica.

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.

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).

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).

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.)

(Okay quick time out here, I am about to do something pretty “stupid,” that is I am about to critique a major news organization, and while I certainly have problems with the way this played out, I do like making appearances in the press, not only does it help fullfil my vision of being a “public intellectual”—something I am not, but wish to be—but it perhaps more importantly feeds my ego. Yes, I did email the link from the article to my mom because I knew it would make her day . . .So critiquing said news organization is probably not a good way to get asked to be an “expert” again. And, I should also make clear that the reporter, Lisa France, was completely professional, personable, and polite through our whole conversation, this story is more about the forces that produced the process rather than her individual execution of the process.)

Lisa indicated that she was writing a story about the new website, was up against a deadline, and was looking for opinions from “experts.” She asked if I had had a chance to look at the site, to which I responded yes but only briefly, in fact I had just pulled it up. From this she proceeded to ask me a few questions about it, and what I thought. Not having had much time to look at the details of the site I responded with the broadest of characterizations . . .but here is where the story gets a bit confusing. In my comments I was comparing the new Whitehouse.gov site to Obama’s mybarackobama.com, and change.gov. Making the rather basic but important point that Obama had effectively leveraged social media to organize people, creating a digital network that produced the rather difficult to acheive effect of getting people to use online tools to produce change in the physical world. At some point in these comments I said a more complex series of terms, something like “digital networked organization tools” or even the more basic “social media.” There was some confusion about my terminology at this point and so I said something to the effect of “generally referred to as Web 2.0.” Now this conversation happened over a relatively short period of time, not more than two minutes. At this point, Lisa asked me to compare the two sites. Here I am willing to extend the benefit of the doubt and say she said compare the old whitehouse.gov site with the new one, but regardless because I had been talking about Obama’s prior use of websites I began to answer the question in terms of comparing the three iterations of Obama’s web presence (barackobama.com, change.gov, whitehouse.gov). From here the conversation continued perhaps another minute or so, with me talking about one set of comparisons and the reporter hearing me making another set. It is in this context that I said transitional, arguing that change.gov was perhaps a transitional site preparing people for what ought to become a more dynamic version of a government web presence, change.gov as the alpha version, whitehouse.gov as the beta, leading to something hopefully more dynamic in the future. Hence the confuisng nature of that quote. My context was totally separate from her’s. Now misscommunication happens (actually I am found of arguing that misscommunication is a structural necessity of communication as my students will tell you), but it is the particular nature of this conversation that lead to this rather stark communication issue, one that I think is illustrative of the problem(s) in journalism. Let me explain . . .

At the end of the conversation I asked Lisa how she got my name/decided to contact me. Her response was Twitter. Evidently she had used some combination of Twitter and Google to search for academics who could be an “expert” on the matter. (At some point she said “Thank God for Twitter,” which I took to mean “Twitter is a great way to find a source.”) If you look at the CNN article the fourth bullet point, next to the headline, says “Expert: New site is more dynamic than the official Bush White House site.” Through the course of the conversation I realized that she was merely calling in order to be able to write that line. A couple of interesting observations here. First the nature of the conversation didn’t particularly lend itself to me being an “expert” the entire conversation happening very quickly, and only covering the surface. I realize this is the nature of journalism, on TV you only get 30 seconds to make your point, but one this would clearly not have to be a limit placed on print journalism. More importantly I admitted early on that I had only looked at the site for a few moments, and thus didn’t really have much to say yet, but she was up against a deadline (more on this below) and thus just really needed the line “expert says” to legitimate the piece. Second, there are many others out there who are more qualified than me to comment on this both outside of academia and inside (I follow many people on Twitter who work outside of academia who would have much to add to this converation), my work is not particularly focused on the rhetoric of government websites, or digital politics, sure I have taught an undergraduate course in this, but I am by no means an expert (seriously if you want an expert you should consult Liz Losh at virtualpolitik). Heck my Ph.D. is an English one, not a Politics or a History one; I haven’t even spent that many hours looking at the history of federal government websites. If I worked in an English department and my title was Assistant Professor of English I doubt if I would even have been called. So there is this rather bizarree tension here where I am being asked to comment on something as an expert (because the institution authorizes me as such) but the object of said comment is meant to at the very least subvert said heirarchical instituional authority and expertise. Seriously how different could have this article been (and by different I mean better) if CNN reporters could quote the “Twitter stream” as “experts” I am sure that the stream of Twitter comments about the site were far more informative than my surface comments.

In the end it was pretty clear to me that she was writing for an article that had to be published within the next couple of hours, indeed it was on CNN within a few hours, and that the idea was just to have an article that was “signed” by an expert. In fact I got the distinct impression that I was not the first person she called (true or not I don’t know) and that she was just calling people hoping to find an expert (and by expert I mean someone with a title and three letters after their name) who would serve as the “stamp” on the article rather than developing it. Seriously though, go back and read the article, really it only says two things, one Obama has changed the whitehouse.gov site and it is better than the previous ones because experts say it is. Contrast this approach with this article at the NY Times, or Dave Winer’s post after the matter, or perhaps most importantly techPresident (which the article sites but does not link to????), these sites rather than break the news take the longer approach and are relfecting on the news. CNN gets caught here trying to break the news (but four hours after the inauguration this is already old news, but also being too fast to supply any meaningful analysis). How much better would this article be if they broke the news with one/two paragraphs within half an hour of the annoucement, and let people comment on the post, and then filtered the best comments to the top, or if they had taken the “long approach” and contacted somebody like Dave Winer or virutalpolitik to write the article. As a related note I think this points to the future of journalism, playing for the short long term, not trying to break the news, but helping to develop a conversation around stories and provide background and context (for a good example of this see The Daily Beast).
I thought about this because yesterday I was talking to a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Ed who is doing a story on something that is in my area of expertise. The reporter spent far more time with me on the phone and as a result I am sure he will write a much better story (even if he doesn’t use any of the material I gave him), because at the end he asked the most important question anyone in any field can ask: “Who else should I be talking to?” In other words how else can we expand this conversation rather than how can I quickly close this off to produce a fixed/final work. (Granted The Chronicle piece will become a fixed article, but that is because it spent a lot more time in conversation.)

The other lesson here for academics is that network capital matters, if you want to get noticed build an online profile, give your stuff away for free and you will get noticed . . .but I have been saying that for a while, so I’ll end here.

• NetNewsWire: Clearly I have an RSS addiction. This is the way I track what is going on in the field, in academia, and the world at large. While there are several RSS reader options, I prefer NetNewsWire. The ability to sync across multiple computers, plus read while offline, and save clippings (which also sync) are crucial for my work flow. I would like the ability to share items (i.e. GoogleReader) but the other features make NNW my choice.
• Twittelator: Again no secret but I use twitter for a range of academic and personal functions. There are many iPhone twitter apps, but this is my favorite (I actually purchased the pro version). Others I know use Twitterific, or Tweetsville, but the copy and past feature for retweeting got me hooked on this one early, and just haven’t found a reason to change.
• TextGuru: I tried several “mini-word processor” apps for the iPhone and this one ended up winning the prize. Not that I intend to compose a chapter or article on the iPhone or anything, but having a way to type or edit a document does come in handy. This one handles a wide range of formats, and most importantly allows input in landscape mode, which makes typing a whole heck of a lot easier. You can also transfer files wirelessly between your computer and the iPhone.
• Snatch: Simple and exactly what I wanted. When the iPhone apps first came out I was disappointed to learn that Remote only worked for iTunes and FrontRow (stupid). Seriously, all I wanted was a replacement for that stupid IR remote that meant I had to stand behind my computer when presenting. Snatch allows you to use the iPhone as remote control for the mouse/trackpad, or just a clicker. I also gave StageHand a shot, and it has the added feature of providing your presenting notes to you on the iPhone, but really all I wanted was a clicker.
• Wikiamo: Of course I want access to Wikipedia anywhere. Again, I tried out several applications, and while I wish Wikiamo had collapsable sections like iPedia+, it is simply much faster, and remembers past searches.
• OmniFocus: Expensive, but syncs with OmniFocus on my computer and provides location aware contexts. GTD FTW.
• Evernote: I haven’t fully leveraged the power of this app yet, but I still use it to record, take quick pictures, and generally preserve things in the short term that I might want to access later.
• WordPress: Again not like I am going to be doing any long blogging from the iPhone, but since I use blogs to organize/run my classes, this app lets me update them from anywhere.
• SnapTell: This is one of those “magic” how does that possibly work apps. Take a picture of a book (DVDs and Video Games also work), the application accesses the internet, looks-up said book and tells you where it is for sale on the internet. Seriously, from just a picture it can “read” the title and look it up. I use this less for online shopping and more to take pictures of books I want to order later, check out from the library etc. Forget having to write down or type the title, just snap the picture.

What did I miss? Leave it in the comments.

Enter Edmodo, Twitter for educators. Edmodo is a private microblogging service. I generally think one of the values of twitter is its public nature, being able to connect to people beyond your usual milieu. That having been said I can see the use in having a private channel particularly for public K-12 education where “internet-fear” constricts the use of public platforms.