So as most of the readers of this blog know, we launched a new major here at the University of Texas at Dallas: Emerging Media and Communications. (Sorry the website is not as informative as it ought to be, yet. We have been busy getting the program structured and have not had time to work on our public persona, but we will soon.) At any rate, what is exciting about this program to me is that it is built from the ground up. That is, we did not take an old media studies program and add in a digital studies, we started quite literally with a blank slate (okay not slate but computer screen). This has its advantages (and its disadvantages) primarily with course design and major progression. I am sure that we got a lot of things wrong, and will need to change a bunch of things, heck who knows what is going to happen with the media landscape in four years, it could require a whole host of classes we can’t even imagine right now. But, for now I am pretty pleased with what we have worked out: a variety and progression of courses that cover a range of media (audio, video, text), that incorporate both studio creation type classes and theory of media classes.

You can read the official language of the program over at the main site, but before I discuss the specifics of the syllabus and course design I thought I would post some of my personal thoughts on the program, what I see the goal of the program to be. I thought this would be 1) A useful exercise for me to try and concretize what I think the program is about. 2) Useful for students in the program and those thinking about majoring in it (practicing transparency). 3) Useful for others who are thinking about starting a similar program. 4) A way of generating feedback, opening a conversation about what these types of programs ought to do, need to do.

I tend to be a reductionist, not in terms of writing (although I do like twitter) but in terms of thinking about a “core organizing principle” for things. I try to take a “what’s the goal” approach, and that goal better be only a paragraph long. In designing this program, indeed before I even came here to UT-Dallas I think I spent a lot of time mulling over in my head the following quote from Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs:

A new kind of digital divide ten years from now will separate those who know how to use new media to band together from those who don’t.

Now Rheingold wrote this in 2003, so we are over half way to his projected ten year horizon. And so, this is what I lie awake at night thinking about. There is a new type of literacy developing, one between those who will understand the digital network media landscape, and who use it to produce, to organize, to take ownership over their lives, responsiblity for their community, to be critical of it, to engage with it . . . and with those who merely consume it. A divide between those who will be passive consumers at best, victims at worst, and those who will be active participants. There is a lot of nuance in this argument that gets glossed over when I reduce it this way, but I think it is essentially true. We are at “the changeover” a moment when culture is changing, will look completely different than it does now. What that is I have no idea, but I am sure it is going to be profoundly heterogenous to what we have now (think printing press change but on steroids).

And so this crosses with my other goal in education, (as much as I rant about the shortcomings of the University system I do think it can serve a purpose): education, specifically higher education is one of the best ways for an individual to increase their life chances and choices. Sure if you go to Harvard, or Princeton, or one of those other top ten ranked schools, the prestige of your diploma will carry you pretty far, sans having learned anything. But, for other institutions, I think we out to be seriously concerned that both our mode and content of education is going to be, perhaps already is, irrelevant. And that we are educating our students for a world that no longer exists instead of educating them for the world they will inherit. This strikes me as irresponsible.

We have somewhere between 30-50 new majors at the undergrad level (hard to tell because many are not “officially” declared yet) and I have been fielding a lot of questions from faculty here, and at other schools about what this major is. Many of these questions are sincere if skeptical, but many are of the “your just teaching a fad,” “you are seriously going to let students major in “Facebook?” variety. So, my quippy response has been: we are teaching digital literacy—offering no explanation because it doesn’t seem to help. But yes this major is a bit like studying at “Social Media University,” but done right I think that is a good thing. And so, the longer more official justification, taken from my syllabus:

In particular, this class will reflect one of the fundamental principles underlying the strength of the internet: None of us are smarter than all of us. Or, if you prefer a slightly different take: Knowledge is a communal process even if we have been taught to treat it as an individual product. . . .

Given all the above, you might ask yourself: “What’s in it for me?” A fair question, since I am going to ask a great deal of you, probably more than any other class you are taking this semester, not just because of the workload, but because I am requiring you to participate in a whole new style of learning. Let me begin by answering the question this way. . . I think we are approaching a critical cultural juncture, where literacy itself is changing. There will develop, perhaps already has developed, a significant divide between those who know how to use these emerging media, and those who uncritically consume them. My goal for the class is to help you move into that first category: to become active, critical producers in this new media landscape.

So I’ll end there and post again later, on the how’s and why’s of that syllabus, the details and the thought process behind it’s construction.

Seriously is there a reason to not do this? Are you really going to suggest that education is fostered by being secret and clandestine, treating the syllabus as some proprietary, rare commodity available only to a select group of students? Please! Publish your syllabus online, not behind a firewall, not only can your students see what they should expect for the class, but professors and students at other Universities can use the syllabus as a resource.

What about syllabus stealing you ask? Here’s your solution: publish all your syllabi on the web, give them a creative commons license. Now another faculty can use as he/she sees fit, but only if they give you credit . . . problem solved.

The short version: Yale now offers a range of course materials online free to the public. While currently the number of courses is rather limited, the scope of materials for each class is substantial and more thorough than current alternatives. The Yale Online Initiative isn’t perfect, but it is a huge step in the right direction, and an impressive foray into opening up the knowledge production of the University. (The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed cover the story, but the commenters on The Chronicle story sort of miss the point—more on this below.)

The long version: A couple of weeks ago I received an email from a man named Tom Conroy inviting me to participate in an online press conference to announce a new Yale initiative. Although the email did not indicate much, it suggested that it was to announce an initiative in online learning.

As the readers of this blog probably know, one of my substantial concerns (read continuing rants) is about the massive resistance of institutions and educational professors to making their material available to those outside the walls of the institutions. Inevitably when I talk to academics about using blogs one of the first questions I get is “how do I prevent those who are not in my class from seeing the material” (to be fair this is not everyone’s response but it certainly makes up a majority of academics to whom I talk). I have a lot of snarky responses to this question, all of which basically boil down to are you an academic concerned about educating people or are you egoist only out for your own good, who thinks you own the right to knowledge. I am rather fond of pointing out that it seems problematic that the “public academic” is a subset of the larger more prominent term “academic.” Shouldn’t public be the default value? At any rate I agreed to participate in this press conference prepared to be disappointed by yet another attempt to make academic production available to the public, but then I started to read their material and wander around their site, and I was more than pleasantly surprised. After the phone conference I have to admit, Yale gets right, this is one of the more impressive online initiatives I have seen. No, it isn’t perfect, but this is many steps in the right direction and those who crafted this initiative deserve a significant amount of credit.

On the surface Yale’s Initiative seems just like a logical progression from MIT’s Open Course Ware. With MIT’s project they offer course material on something like 1800 course. However, what MIT offers is little more than an enhanced syllabus for each course; a course overview followed by a calendar of readings and a few assignments. So, while MITs material is vast varied and free, its use is rather limited. True I as an academic often consult open course ware when I am designing a syllabus or looking at how various subjects are taught, the use value doesn’t extend much beyond the “here is an outline of how to conduct a course” model.

Yale took this model and improved upon it. Instead of trying to give away all the course outlines they focused on providing all the course material for a few select courses (right now there are only seven courses offered but we were told that there are plans to add 30 more). In addition to syllabi for each class, Yale offers a high definition video of each class session (unedited-offered in a variety of formats), assignments, audio only of each class session, as well as a written transcript of each session. (Here is a screen shot.)

A couple of important points about this. First Yale has taken into account a range of learning styles and opportunities, that is for people who want to read transcripts they are available, if you want to listen on your commute to work but can’t watch the video (use the audio only), if you want to watch the video on your iPod it comes in an iPod friendly format (okay you could also watch it on your Zune, but I sort of assume if you are trying to learn physics you are smart enough to not buy a Zune). In fact they make it easy for you to access all the information, videos transcripts etc. in one large zip file, no need to navigate to all of the files and repeatedly click away. One of the impressive sides of what Yale has done is the user interface, it is not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing with fancy ajax and flash, but it doesn’t need to be, instead the whole site meets web standards (XHTML, CSS, etc.) and is available as an RSS feed. This is important for two reasons: 1. It makes the site accessible to a range of individuals with different abilities—can I tell you how many times I have seen an open access site not even think about these issues. 2. The bandwidth for these sites is going to be relatively low. While for those who access these sites on DSL, cable, or T3 connections this is not a concern, I sense that one of Yale’s visions is to reach a much larger audience. And, in this regard people and institutions with far less computing power than we are used to in American academia should benefit from this material. (Their press release indicates just such a direction, as the courses are going to be available to international education institutions.)

But all of the above is just a well constructed framework, the real importance comes at the bottom of every page, where one finds a creative commons license. Yes, Yale is offering all of this material free of copyright restrictions. In fact Yale has chosen the broadest possible license here, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, which means anyone is free to use the material for non commercial purposes as long as the cite the source and agree to share the derivative work as well. And, herein lies the importance of what Yale has done. Rip, mix, (cite) and burn, Yale Courses. (For a much longer engagement on this topic go watch Lawrence Lessig’s talk.) So, for example if I am teaching a course on astronomy (why I would be teaching a course on astronomy is a different matter, but it was first on the Yale list) I can use any of the material, require students watch videos, portions of videos . . .whatever. After the phone conference last night I kept thinking about all of the uses for this. New teachers can watch some of the best in the field present material and “steal” ideas, small colleges can supplement some of their offerings by using this material, educational institutions with limited resources can use this material as a “textbook” and than have in class discussion, if you are teaching a class in a similar subject area your students can use the content to create something new and creative, remix said lecture, in fact I wonder how long until students start uploading these videos to YouTube, . . . Yale seems to have all of this in mind, as they specifically designed “widgets” (okay I know this word is used to the point of having no meaning but . . .) which allow you to embed their course content in your own site (teaching a class on western philosophy and covering the topic of death, embed Prof. Kagan’s class for students who want extra material). I specifically asked about the technical choices in the conference call, and the technical director indicated they purposely choose file formats and codecs that make this possible.This is education done right, the default value is open, not closed, Yale gains nothing by closing the content of their classes, and looses nothing by making it available, in fact I would argue they gain a great deal. Indeed the only two things that seem “locked down” about these courses are the materials for which they do not own copyright, for example some of the poems in the literature class, and the overall framework (it seems that the underlying code for the websites which support the content are owned by Yale so if UTD wanted to do the same thing they would have to write the enabling code from scratch). It is worth noting that they recruited well known faculty who are gifted lecturers and tenured faculty (individuals who have even less of a reason to be protective of their material), its still a volunteer program, so the exception rather than the rule—it would be nice to see this in the future be reversed.

Now if you read the comments on the Chronicle site, and a few others, some are being critical of Yale, suggesting online education is not comprised of lectures, i.e. the worst way to facilitate an online class is point a camera at yourself while you lecture, that is lecture classes are the least productive for students, especially online. But, Yale is not offering online courses here, rather they are offering material from their courses free to anyone who wants to use them. So, if you are an online educator who is concentrating on building online classes you can use as much or little of the material as you want in order to make a successful class. There is no feedback or direct supervision offered by Yale here, but that’s not the point, rather it is a step in the right direction of setting the default value of the academy to “public.”

Seriously the textbook market is such a racket of copyright/intellectual property nonsense—power to the students. They are doing what any educated shopper would, comparison shop. If the local bookstore is going to charge too much for books, then by them online, or from other students (most bookstores buy back at ridiculously low rates). The part that amazes me is that the book store claims the information students are copying down is their intellectual property. Huh? Seems to me this information belongs to the students and the professors. Maybe professors should just put the ISBN on their syllabus, problem solved. (The Coop apparently prevented a database of this information from becoming available, a database which would have made it easier for students and faculty to order and get books.)

Enter Sean. Sean noticed my comments about syllabus creation software and is working on making such a program. We talked on the phone about what I would want in such a program, and he has since started interviewing other faculty. He has most recently set up a survey which you can take if you have the time. This will help Sean create a program that meets your needs. So, if you want this type of program, go take this survey and make sure Sean gets all the info he needs.

I am not going to get into all of that here, although I do think that I will do a much longer how-to, meta-explanation variety later. But for now I am going to point out one great use for a blog, and show how it is done.

Using a Blog to Get Student to Generate Paper Topics

One of the things I try to get students to do in their writing over the course of a semester is learn to develop their own writing topics. I find most of them have had a high school experience where they have been told exactly what to write, five paragraph format, plug and play. Few students seem able to develop a good paper topic. What I do in my classes (especially lower level undergrad) is start with very specific topics that model for them what a narrow topic should be, and then proceed to have them develop their own. Necessarily though the developing of ones own topic is a discursive process, with a great deal of back and forth and refinement. Here is where a blog can prove to be really useful. (Note: this can be done with discussion boards, or Blackboard tools, but why bother this one is easier and looks better.)

The Assignment

The idea here is to get students to post their topics online and have other students comment on them. The reason this works is that students then get to see all of the other suggestions, in fact can use them to spur their own ideas. I found that what this can actually do is create both diversity and clusters of papers. Students will often start to see how what they are saying connects to what others are developing, while also not getting 25 students to write the exact same topic. The other trick is to get each student to comment thoughtfully on the others post, so they not only have to think about their topic, but think about what makes others a good topic, or a topic that need focusing or revision. Plus then each has their own thoughts as well as the suggestions of at least two others.

Look at the students post below, where the cursor is pointed is the initial post, and the subsequent one is the students comment.

Notice how the respondent picks up on how the initial topic needs to be narrowed and also possible implications. Now certainly this is not an ideal topic yet, but it is improving, the initial responder and respondent have expanded their thinking, this sans teacher comment. If it were me I might go thru and add to comments, or more likely email them directly so as not to dominate the discursive space. It strikes me that this works for so many reasons.

• Student are more and more used to expressing themselves in this type of Web discursive space, this feels more comfortable then saying them aloud in class and subjecting them to face to face scrutiny.
• Sharing their ideas publicly, I think, gets them to polish them a little more than if they were just handing them in to you as the instructor. They want to measure up in the eyes of the other students.
• This requires a back and forth dialogue, talk-respond, rather than the everyone waiting for their turn to say their topic. Contrary to the classroom space the web actually allows you to slow down the time of discourse, which is a bit counter-intuitive given that one of the features of the web is speed, but . . .

The Technical Stuff

This is actually really easy to do, only need two steps

First, you need to install threaded comments to your blog. This is the “key” technical adaptation as it allows students to comment to others comments. You could let everyone have a separate post with comments, but I think it works better to have all the topics in one place so that students seem them as connected part of a discourse. Second, you want students to be able to comment to a comment. Look at the picture above again. The initial post was written, and then the respondent added their comment four days later, but directly below. Usually comments get added in order which they are posted, but “threaded comments” allows you to comment to a comment, not just comment to a post, effectively adding your comment directly to the place it is relevant. So in this example the students posted their papers on “2-24″ (there are 25 other papers also posted), and then over the next four days others log in and decide who they want to comment to.

To install threaded comments for WordPress go here and downlaod the plugin. Open the file it has instructions on how to install, but basically you need to copy the two files into your WordPress account. If you are hosting your own, you can do this. If however you are using wordpress.com or edublogs, you are not allowed to install your own plugins. But, if you email edublogs I am sure they can install it for you, as this seems like an very useful plugin for academics. Login into wordpress and activate the plugin.

Second, set up your topic and post it. Here is the language from the above mentioned post, use as a guideline if you so desire.

To post your paper topic, click on “Comments” below. Then paste or write your paper topic proposal into the form at the bottom of the page. You’ll have to enter your name and an email address to do so. Use your real name so that I can keep track of the assignment, please!
To comment on another student’s proposal (due Wednesday 2/28 before class), click “Comments” below. Then choose the proposal about which you have the most interesting and productive things to say (questions, suggestions, counter-theses are all welcome) and click “Reply to this comment.” Enter your comment. You may enter more than one comment, but please be sure that you respond to an uncommented proposal before responding to a commented one, so that everyone receives feedback.An example containing both parts of the assignment has been provided. Hard copies of revised paper topic proposals are due in class on Friday, 3/2.

Questions? Leave in the comment section, and I’ll try to help out.