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.

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 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.

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.

• 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.

• lumifi is a online research tool for helping you to search and organize information from the web (sort of like a web based DevonAgent, DevonThink). You can watch the introductory video here.

I realize I am a Devon Think groupie, but the news that a new version is in the work for this year has me anxiously awaiting the release. In my opinion it is the best, “brain in a box” software out there. My largest complaint with Devon is the interface (it is rather dated an un-Mac like), but never fear reworking the UI is one of the upgrades.