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.

Earlier this year Marc Andreesen was interviewed by TechCrunch on the future of publishing,in particular journalism. Andreesen’s response was, provocatively, “Burn the Boats.” What he was referring to was the moment Cortez, fleeing from Cuba, and landing in Mexico, ordered his troops to “burn the boats,” preventing any possibility of return. The lesson: don’t defend lost ground, at times there is no going back, and making decisions to insure that one does not consider a return is a good move. Andreesen’s point was that old print based media forms are dead, and it does no good to try and re-envision them for the 21st century, rather journalism institutions need to boldly move to future web based models, giving up on their print based biases.

In a similar regard I would like to suggest that academics “Burn Their Boats” or in this case, more specifically “Burn the Books,” making a definitive move to embrace new modes of scholarships enabled by web based communication, rather than attempting to port old models into the new register. Rather than providing the book with a digital facelift for 21st century scholarly communications, academics should move past book based biases which structure scholarly communications and instead imagine and execute born digital scholarly forms, which leverage the evolving digital media landscape.

Let me be clear, I like books, in fact it was my love of books, or more specifically my investment in what books can accomplish that led me to graduate school. My PhD is in English after all. Indeed I collect book, and although I don’t do it much anymore I have at times spent time tracking down and acquiring first editions for some of my favorite works. I am not in fact suggesting that we actually engage in book burning, nothing of the sort, although if I did actually burn some of my books I think it would make moving easier. Instead I am suggesting that we burn our love affair with books, and that out of reverence to the book, we stop treating it as the only or indeed primary means of scholarly communication. Not only are there better ways, but if academia wants to remain (or more skeptically, become) relevant we ought to recognize that the book is no longer the main mode of knowledge transmission.

Faced with the transformation to the digital, the newspaper industry chose to protect a business model, instead of preserving their social function. My fear is that academics are making the same mistake. Now granted this analogy is not perfect, there are contours and shapes, and nuance and details that matters here. They are not a direct equivalence, but I think the underlying logic is the same. It concerns me that academics and intellectuals, with some exceptions, seem to be repeating this mistake, following the digital facelift model, asking how they can continue to do what they do now, but do it in the digital space, rather than asking how what they do has been fundamentally changed in the age of the digital networked archive. Administrators have a tendency to preserve the business function (how can we offer our classes online vs. how does the online reshape the very idea of a class), and academics end up defending the political and ideological function (the importance of books and peer review).

It is probably worth distinguishing here between the materiality of the book, and the ideologies and biases we associate with the book. That is at the most basic level a book is a dead tree processed and bound together in leaves of paper and stained with ink. But, many of the things that we have come to associate with the book are not in fact coterminous with its material structure but rather biases developed over the Gutenberg Parenthesis. I won’t fully develop this idea here but this is what I often call librocentricism, or a book biased way of thinking, where the book stands in for certain prejudices and ideas about knowledge. As a way of thinking about this notice how the word book often stands in for, or comes to mean, the entirety of the matter, as in The Book of Nature, to “throw the book at someone,” or The Book of Love. Again there is a lot more to this idea, and I would no doubt need more than a blog post to develop this, but I think it is easy to recognize, even if the full complexity of the argument would take time, that “book” comes to be an epistemological framework for knowledge, not just a material one.

One quick example of how this works, before I move to some ideas for restructuring scholarship: syllabi. A syllabus is often structured like a book, a beginning, a middle and an end, indeed even with chapters (sections), where the traversal (completion of the weeks or reading of all the pages), promises to deliver the knowledge product.

The idea that knowledge is a product, which can be delivered in an analog vehicle is precisely what I want to call into question. What the network shows us, is that many of our views of information were/are based on librocentric biases. If you printed out all the information on the net, roughly 500 billion GB it would stack from here to Pluto 10 times. While the book treats information as something scarce, the net shows us precisely the opposite, information is anything but scarce. Books tell us that one learns by acquiring information, something which is purchased and traded as a commodity, consumed and mastered, but the net shows us that knowledge is actually about navigating, creating, participating (to be sure some people still trade in knowledge, buying and selling secrets, but this is of a substantially different order than the work we as academics do, especially humanities based academics).

Knowledge is no longer print based, nor governed by the substrate of paper, indeed while in many ways we might continue to harbor librocentric biases, as we move away from structuring knowledge to end up on paper, these framing structures will prove less and less necessary, indeed may actually impede on our ability to participate in knowledge conversations.

I am not saying that we should whole sale give up on books, actually perform a book burning freeing ourselves from all of the pages we have in our respective offices, but rather something slightly different, we should start conceiving of our scholarship as if if will not end up in books, indeed it still might, but begin by asking ourselves what would scholarship look like if were not designed to end up in books.

Here are some ideas, or suggestions for this change over:

• Stop Publishing in Closed Systems: If I can only convince you of one thing, I hope it will be this. If you publish in a journal which charges for access, you are not published, you are private-ed. To publish means to make public, if something is locked down behind a firewall where someone needs a subscription to view it, it is not part of the “common knowledge” base and thus might as well not exist. Academic journals are treating knowledge as if it is a scarce commodity, it is not, don’t let them treat it as such. If someone wants to publish something you wrote, ask them if you can keep the copyright, license under creative commons, and if they say no, don’t give it to them, and find someone who will. Look for journals which publish only online and only for free.
• Self Publish: Publishing and editing are hacks based on the scarcity of paper, no need to carry it over to the new medium. Once publishing was the most efficient way to reach the largest audience, no longer is that the case, so lets get over our publishing fetish. Publishing online allows you to engage a wider audience, both faster and more efficiently than any print based journal. We think of an academics role as presenting polished finished work and ideas, but this need not be the case. We should switch to presenting our ideas in process, showing our work, not just the final product.
• End the .pdf madness: A .pdf document is not a web based document, it is a print based document distributed on the web. One of the principle advantages of the web is the way it connects, operates as a network of connections within an ecosystem of knowledge, one can search, copy, paste, edit, link with ease, none of which is true of a .pdf. The .pdf is just a way of maintaining print based aesthetics and structures on the web. In the same way you wouldn’t think of publishing a book without the appropriate footnotes, don’t publish to the web without the appropriate live links.
• Get Over Peer Review: Peer Review is another hack based on the scarcity of paper. Given the cost of producing knowledge and the fact that academic journals or academic presses could only afford to produce so many pages with each journal, peers are established to vet, and signal that a particular piece is credible and more worthy than the others. This is the filter than publish model. But the net actually works in reverse, publish then filter, involving a wider range of people in the discursive production. Some of the most productive feedback I receive on my work comes not from peers who have a rather narrow sense of what counts and what doesn’t but from a wider range of people, with a diverse perspective. Why do academics argue for small panel anonymous peer review? One thing we know is diversity of perspective enriches discourse. 
• Aspire to Be a Curator: I think we have to give up being authorities, controlling our discourse, seeing ourselves as experts who poses bodies of knowledge over which we have mastery. Instead I think we have to start thinking of what we do as participating in a conversation, and ongoing process of knowledge formation. What if we thought of academics as curators, or janitors, people who keep things up to date, clean, host, point, aggregate knowledge rather than just those who are responsible for producing new stuff. Do we really need another book arguing that throughout the history of literary scholarship the important field of ‘x’ has long been ignored. No. But, we could actually use some really good online resources and aggregators for particular knowledge areas.
• Think Beyond the Book: Think of the book as one form, not the form. Indeed think of things that move beyond the book. What if you are writing didn’t have to be stable, didn’t have to have a final version, what if you could constantly update, change alter, make available your work. There will be no final copy, just the most recent version. While the constantly in beta mode might concern those who aim for perfection, it can also be liberating when you realize that nothing is fixed, taking advantage of the fluid. What happens when we give up on, or at least refuse to be limited by librocentricism? What if a piece didn’t have to be 20 pages for a journal article or 250 for a book, there are economic constraints that place limits on the size of academic writing, how much better can we be when we get rid of these. Or what would an academic argument as an iPhone app look like?

Let me be clear, I am not saying that the book is dead, in one regard it is already dead, in another it continues to haunt us and will never die. And we should be glad for this haunting there are many features of the book from which we benefit. What I am saying though is the centrality of the book is gone, and academia would do well to recognize this, to move into new directions, new grounds, where many already are. We should not continue to constrain our thinking by this librocentricism which no longer structures or limits the way that knowledge is produced, archived, or disseminated.

(P.S. Below is a photo I took at my visit to The Chronicle last week. Apparently these are all the books they received from academic publishers in the last week (that’s right just one week), which nobody wanted. In other words at an academic institution like The Chronicle, not one reader could be found for any of these books. They were giving them away for free. Seriously, we should stop this madness. Won’t somebody please think of the trees?)

(Below is the full video where I elaborate on the points/ideas above.)

Burn the Boats/Books, part 1 from DWRL on Vimeo.

Burn the Boats/Books, part 2 from DWRL on Vimeo.

While all of the posts are connected, and a similar theme runs throughout, each has a slightly different angle. Start with Fluid Learning the first in the series, then check out The Alexandrine Dilemma and Crowdsource Yourself, ending with Inflection Points. Seriously most of what I read on the web I read once, tag it, and thus file it for later reference if I need it (and usually never think about it again), in this series I read each piece at least twice, some three times. They are that good.

• First up is an article by Michael Wesch, A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do). The article appears on the Britannica Blog, an institution I do not always associate with progressively thinking about how technology changes knowledge production. Nevertheless Wesch’s piece is worth a read for he navigates the precarious but important middle ground between being a luddite and being techno-utopian, instead claiming that there is nothing new about the notion of playing the “getting by game,” even if the means by which this game is played is different. Ultimately he suggests a rather simple solution: Public Academia.
• Group Table: Group Table is another web application in the list of online collaboration/group organization tools. While there are many out there, most people I know prefer Bassecamp and Backpack, Group Table is focused on specifically serving the student population.
• Open Huddle: When I was searching for free online tools for hosting my virtual grad class, I looked into many (way too many) options. (I just needed chat function, so in the end ended up using a chat program but I digress.) But, Open Huddle was one of the better ones people sent me. Unlike Group Table (above) which is focused on organizing the group, Open Huddle’s purpose is to provide a set of tools for collaborating in real time. Open Huddle has video chat and a drawing board (think virtual white board) as well as allowing messaging and file sharing. My guess is in the future we will see a lot more of these types of sites for robust online learning and collaboration.
• Last but not least, watch Antonio’s presentation on using YouTube as a Classroom Resource.

Eric Schwitzgebel (a philosopher at U.C. Riverside) and Fiery Cushman (a psychologist at Harvard) have designed a “Moral Sense Test” that asks respondents for their takes on various moral dilemmas. They’re looking to compare the responses of philosophers and non-philosophers, so they’ve asked me to post a link to their test from this blog. They say that people who have taken other versions of this test have found it interesting to ponder the moral dilemmas they ask about. The test should take about 15-20 minutes and can be found at

http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/eric1/test/testN.html