academhack

I have been thinking a lot lately about Howard Rheingold’s “Attention 101” and “Attention 102” videos, this is somewhat inspired by his recent reposting and discussion as he begins class, but also because I am also beginning a new semester. I think regardless of what discipline or subject matter we teach, we could do with more productive conversation about “student attention” in the classroom and Rheingold’s videos are a good place to start.
I struggle with how much technology to allow in the classroom.

Don’t get be wrong, I have little to no sympathy for educators who decry the current tech generation and their addiction to technology, and wistful longings for a return to a pre-technological learning space. After all, there is no such thing as a technology free classroom, pencils, paper, books and chalkboards, heck even tables, desks and chairs, are technologies. But I struggle with the technology in the classroom question because in a hypermediated multitasking world, I see it as part of my job as an instructor concerned with digital literacy to help students learn not only how to multi-task but also when not to multi-task, that is direct singular focused attention at a project or task. (As a brief tangent, but slightly related everyone who teaches writing should have their students read Cory Doctorow’s post on writing in the age of distraction).

Let’s be clear I think wireless access in a classroom is at this point a necessity, any space which purports to be about the sharing and construction of knowledge that does not have access to the internet seems to me to be a severely crippled space (yes I am looking at you MLA conference planners). But I also realize that introducing wireless access to the classroom brings with it a host of possible distractions for the students, and that I see it in part at least as my responsibility to address in the classroom (even if it is simply for me to mention that these distractions exist). I know that with computers in the classroom that some students will be surfing the web, updating their facebook status, studying for another class, playing WoW, playing solitaire (seriously folks can’t you find a more engaging simple game?), or, the ubiquitous nightmare example, looking at porn.

I also realize that for many of my students having access to the internet enhances their ability to discourse about the matter at hand. Many of my students take notes on their laptops, using programs that help them take notes in what is for them a much more productive way than paper and pen, some even have their notes posted live as the class progresses either to a wiki or a blog (the equivalent of live-blogging the class). What is more during a discussion students often use the internet as a giant reference book to query for information or check the facts about an assertion I have made (I often say in class, “I’m not sure look it up on Wikipedia” which sure enough usually within seconds a student has the request page . . .) or to offer an example. Indeed this is the very type of literacy I want my students to develop, how to use the internet to enhance and contribute to your creative and critical endeavors. This is why the reaction of many professors, to demand that students shut-off the computers, or ban cell-phones and laptops strikes me as entirely the wrong response. Indeed realistically little could be done to “demand” the attention of students. Sans digital distractions students still have minds that wander or get tired (this happens to professional academics as well, how many of us honestly pay attention through three 20 minute papers at academic conferences?), they think about what their plans are for the weekend or other matters that seem more pressing than whatever we are currently discussing. And sans some Orwellian mind control device there would be no way to monitor students attention. What strikes me as different about this moment though is that the tool of inquiry (the computer) is also the tool of distraction (and in many of my classes is also the object of inquiry.)

Part of me is of the mind that if students are focusing their attention elsewhere so be it, what do I care, who does it hurt. Except for the extreme cases (looking at porn) the students are only “hurting themselves,” (it is not really distracting to others) and will most likely reap the consequences later when they have to beg to borrow someone else’s notes, work harder on the assignment, or just plain receive a lower grade (as in all of my classes participation is a component of the final grade). Call this the business model approach, in the business world if you don’t pay attention in meetings (generally speaking) your work will suffer, and you will most likely endure consequences or at the very least not reap the rewards of labor (i.e. promotion). But, I don’t view my classroom as a business space, and I certainly don’t view my role as an educator to be to train students to be better workers so this model has little purchase with me.

Part of me also thinks that a large part of the responsibility lies with instructors. Lets be honest many instructors are just down right boring, like the ones who read from lecture notes or worse use PowerPoint presentations riddled with text and bullet points. If I can’t entice my students to pay attention, convince them that what I have to say really matters, maybe they should just tune-me out. After all, this is what I do. If I am listening to a lecture, or a presentation, or reading another scholars work and it bores me, if I am unconvinced that it matters I just tune it out, stop paying attention, or put the article aside.

But there is another issue here, and that is what it means to be a member of a community, to participate in a creative and critical discussion. And this is one of the things that I see as my role as an educator: to teach students how to participate in an academic community, to both model this behavior and illicit it from them. Honestly it is downright disrespectful to not pay attention during class, to ignore the instructor and more damagingly to ignore ones peers, in effect saying I know better than everyone else here and have nothing to learn from anyone (even if what they “know better” is a “false” assumption that the matters being discussed are not worth paying attention to). Honestly I spend a great deal of time preparing for class, and most of my students invest substantial time prior to class as well, to simply blow off all of that effort seems ill-informed. (And I should say here that this is more than just the problem of the commons, or the 80/20 rule, although this also factors in).

So this is my conundrum, how to teach students to participate in a learning community without demanding that they do. Which brings me back to Howard’s prompt. I really like what he does in the second video, demonstrating for students what the classroom looks like from his perspective, (and to be sure one of the problems here is how the classrooms are designed, but that is a matter for a much different and longer post, Foucault never did write that book about educational institutions). But, and here is where I want to progress more slowly or question Howard’s framing of the question. He says that it is about “paying attention” and “looking at the person who is talking.” I take it he primarily means not looking at the screen, or looking at cell phones, i.e. demonstrating that one is paying attention by looking at that to which you are paying attention. For the most part I would agree, but on several occasions when this has come up, part of me is resistant to this reduction of the problem.

Why? Because eye-contact ain’t all it is cracked up to be. In the first case the notion of eye-contact is culturally specific. There are entire cultures where eye contact specifically with someone who is speaking is considered aggressive, and as someone (sorry I forgot whom) pointed out on twitter the other day, eye contact not only privileges a certain Western cultural form of discourse but also one predicated on a pre-defined “normal” social behavior (some autistic youth pay rapt attention without, indeed on the condition that they not make eye contact). In a former life I was a camp director and one of the smarter people I ever meant observed that saying “look at me when I talk to you,” is one of the worst mistakes that adults make. Why? Because if you say that, then what is the student/child thinking? “I must look, make sure I look, don’t break eye contact . . .” In fact thinking a host of things that have nothing to do with paying attention to the content of what you are saying. Eye-contact in this regard is just another way of demanding attention, reproducing an old hierarchy that privileges certain modes of interaction, and structures, “all eyes face forward.”

Okay at this point I should be fair to Howard and admit that he is using “eye-contact” as a stand-in for being fully present, paying attention, and that I don’t think his musings are not sensitive to difference. Again this is where things get complicated, for what I am interested in teaching students is how they can each in their own way pay attention, become deep critical learners, who can be fully present in the academic community at hand, but how can I measure this? Is it even possible to measure this? Especially when all our measurements are so steeped in cultural, social, and historic biases (what’s with always privileging vision?). Do we even know what it means to pay attention when we move into these hypermediated spaces? Or are me just asking them to pay attention in old ways, reproduce old behaviors that might not only be outmoded, but not entirely useful for everyone? For one of the things that I love about these digital spaces is the ways in which they enable a host of learners to participate enable, participation from people once excluded. But, if we measure participation by old standards I think we continue to loose what is most promising about these digital spaces. (And if it isn’t clear already, I am not really talking here about eye-contact . . . it’s only just a stand in for the large issue.)

For those who follow my account on twitter you already no doubt know that between Christmas and New Year’s Eve I was in San Francisco at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association. Those who read this blog also know that I am critical of organizations and institutions (yes almost all of them), especially in higher education as they are oft slow to change and seem to fight for the position of “most irrelevant.” Having said that I should also admit that this was by far the most productive and enjoyable of the three MLA conferences I have attended. (This despite catching the MLA cold which several people seemed to have.) And in the MLA’s defense there were some, at least in my mind, really positive changes, that signal at least a willingness to embrace the literacies of the 21st century (much to the dismay of the Mark Bauerlein’s of the profession.) Rosemary Feal (MLA’s Executive Director), blogged the convention, prior to the meeting the MLA attempted to crowdsource fund graduate students, the MLA offered a feature on the website prior to the convention which allowed you to print out an individual program and calendar from the panels you select (okay you couldn’t export the selections to g-cal or share with others, but this was a good start) and perhaps most important (for me at least) there was an increase in the number of panels related to “digital stuff” which brought with it a rise in the number of faculty attending who were interested in matters of the digital.

(For those who are interested, you can read more about the panel I was on about Microblogging over at the HATAC blog.)

Several others have already blogged their MLA experiences, including Alex Reid (who has at least three posts), and Cathy Davidson (who has posts about the Twitter panel, and two separate posts about the Digital Media and Learning Panel). For more general impressions of the MLA from digital scholars you should check out fellow Microblogging panelist Matt Gold’s excellent post about The Rise of the Digital MLA and Chuck Tyron’s reflections on the MLA as he works on a syllabus.

What I wanted to do was add my voice to this series of reflections and musings, perhaps in a series of posts, explaining why I thought the MLA was so productive this year (for me at least) and suggest a few ways this can be even more the case. So, I am going to start with something that might be counter-intutive, and seemingly unrelated to the “digital” but which upon consideration was huge in my experience. The Jobmarket or more precisely the lack there of for me. (Later I’ll talk about some of the panels, or individual meetings I had, but for now . . .)

This was the first year I have attended MLA when I was not interviewing, or serving on an interview committee. Aside from the huge time suckage that interviewing can be, it was also a huge mental relief. If you are interviewing (either side doing the interview, or being interviewed) the process is incredibly mentally demanding and thus really intrudes on your ability to do other things at the conference. This would be fine if the conference was only for interviewing, but its not. So, here is my suggestion:

Schools should stop interviewing at the MLA

Okay I know what you all (or many of you) are thinking, that I must be crazy, and you want a job so people should interview more at the MLA, but just stick with me a moment on this as I explain.

The tradition of interviewing at the MLA (and here I hypothesize I have no real knowledge of this) grows out of a pre-digital world model, when the easiest and most efficient way for schools to interview a large enough pool was to assemble them all in one place, but this is no longer the case. Digital tools can compensate, and provide a better option. Consider for a moment what is the carbon foot print of the MLA, having 8,000+ people travel from all over the US to meet, how many people could we cut from that list if interviewing was not taking place?

What’s the alternative? Simple, video interview. The technology is now good enough, and cheap enough (easily less then the price of one plane ticket for one faculty member of one of the interview committees at any school). I already know of several schools that have gone this route. Now I know what you are thinking, video interview that can’t be as good as in person. Seriously? If you think that having someone sit on a bed in a hotel room and answer questions for half an hour as they try to sneak a peek at their watch making sure they have enough time to sprint half way across down town (or in SF up a hill) to their next interview, gives you an accurate view of the candidate you are kidding yourself.

Consider the advantages:
• How much money would your institution save? If you saved your department the cost of 3 people traveling to another city (flight, hotel, meals) for three days what would you save? Maybe you could even convince your chair to allow you to bring an extra candidate to the on-campus interview? (Which is a far better measure of someone’s fit.)
• How much money would graduate students save? The job market is a ridiculously expensive endeavor, especially if you are a grad student with already paltry income, and have to travel to MLA for two-three interviews, or what is worse make reservations and plans to attend MLA to not get any interviews. Ridiculous.
• Quality Interviews: How much better could the interviews (on both sides) be if you were not cramming them into a tight schedule. If they are done remotely you could do three a day over several days, rather than four or five a day.
• Eliminate the hotel room problem. Seriously folks what kind of profession asks people to interview in a hotel room while sitting on a bed? Want to see something surreal? Go to a MLA hotel, take the elevator up to the rooms, stand in the hallway and watch as ten or fifteen people line up in the hallway and knock on doors at precisely 10:00. Weird!
• Eliminate graduate student stress. I think the whole two to three days to make or break your career/life, is a little much. The jobmarket is already brutal enough (like being audited by the IRS someone once told me) but pulling all these people on the market together and putting them in a couple of hotels just adds to the insanity.
• This makes for a better timeline. You can do the interviews in early December, and notify candidates about campus invites before the holidays.
• But most important this would free up the conference to be about the exchange of academic ideas. Yes sans job market the MLA might be smaller, but people would actually have time to go to panels, talk, converse and meet with each other, without the pressure of interviewing, or worrying about whether or not someone from one of the schools you are interviewing at is at a particular session . . . In short eliminate the interviewing (which is just not efficient), and make the MLA about the ideas.

The cycle goes something like this: textbook companies make a lot of money selling books to college students, used bookstores cut in on profits by buying and selling these books to students, textbook companies raise prices to recoup profits and publish new editions every year attempting to muscle out the used book market. But, then enter the internet . . . where alas information yearns to be free (yet is often frequently held in chains). Earlier this year The Chronicle reported on Textboook Torrents a site which sought to liberate information from the textbook industry and supply it free (illegally) to students, to which the publishers responded by issuing legal notices to get the site taken down.

Never fear poor students . . .the internet has responded and now you can Rent-a-Textbook. This seems to me to be a better option than torrenting, not only because it is legal but because you get the physical copy. (I’ll admit the user interface on a book is pretty good, preferable in many cases. When was the last time your book ran out of batteries?) I am sure the cat and mouse game of textbook publishers and exploits will continue for quite some time, but ultimately this information is going to follow the music model and get really cheap (think iTunes). Let’s just hope the textbook industry learns faster than the RIAA. (Okay, probably won’t happen but here’s hoping.)

(thanks to @dancohen for tweeting about this)

DevonTechnologies has just released the beta version of DevonThink 2.0. And yes, this is likely the best thing I will get for the Holidays. Whether this says more about me and my geeky/scholarly loves, or about the people who will give me gifts I leave to you. (Actually my brother and I instituted a ban on gifts to anyone who was alive for the Ronald Reagan Presidency, instead we give stuff to charities . . . but I digress). At any rate, I am wonderfully excited about this release, for as much as I use Devon the interface was somewhat lacking and it needed to catch-up with the current informational trends (tagging). I am happy to say that the interface has much improved (it supports coverflow). Devon also says that the search functions have been improved. But, what interests me most about the new features is the side drawer which allows for easily adding information to multiple and separate databases.

If you are not reading Mark Pesce’s blog The Human Network you really should start. But more importantly if you are in education you should carve out some time to read a recent series of posts he has published which all focus on education. Actually I suspect that these are the published versions of a series of talks he gave at a recent Australian educational conference. At any rate I find Pesce to be one of the more provocative thinkers on the internet and matters of cultural transformation. I am not sure I always agree with what he suggests, but this is also one of the reasons I find him worth reading.

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.

I received an email yesterday, as I am sure many of you did, from the MLA (actually the email was from Rosemary Feal but I digress) requesting help funding graduate students. What interests me about this email is the direct appeal to “grassroots” funding rather than trying to find big donors. I realize that I am fairly anti-institutional (institutions of all kinds) and have been critical of the MLA in the past for not moving into the digital sphere fast enough but this seems a step in the right direction.

Attending MLA, not to mention being on the job market can be an expensive endeavor, forcing poor underfunded graduate students to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars when all is said and done. While I think much could be done to reduce the cost (hello electronic submission, and don’t ask for a transcript unless you really need it), this is a short term fix. As it stands, according to the email there were two hundred applicants who the MLA was not able to fund with a $300 travel grant to attend the conference. The solution is simple, microfund, if 6,000 tenure track faculty each gave $10 all of the grad students who applied could receive the grant. (A grant which for most would not even cover airfare I might add.) So, please consider clicking this link and helping out some poor job seeking grad student. Do it for the grad student you used to be, or do it just to demonstrate the power of the digital. (And maybe next time they will have a link that doesn’t require you to sign in to give.)

Update: A representative of the MLA commented below, and I was wrong. Non-members can contribute click the link below the login.

Sometimes you write a post thinking it is no big deal, just a reference to something, and all of a sudden gets more interest than you would think. So it went with the prior post about Boston College no longer offering campus email accounts to students.
In my mind I thought this was a no-brainer. So much a no-brainer I really didn’t spend much time explaining why I thought it was a good idea. Well commenters, and emailers, disagreed so I thought I would explain a bit more.

Campuses got in the business of offering email prior to hotmail and gmail, when many students arrived at campus without having an email account. In fact my first email account in 1993 was a uchicago account. Given that moment in the development of the internet it only made sense for campuses, regardless of infrastructure cost to offer accounts to all of their students. The only way that they could be assured that students had email accounts was to provide them. This in turn produced a low cost way for campuses to communicate with their student body. And for the most part students used these accounts as their primary accounts. Indeed I recall when students used to scramble to figure out how to keep their email accounts after leaving college, because it was their primary or only account.

Fast forward to now, most, in not all of our students come to campus with an existing email account, one which they have used for several years already, one attached to their “online identity” (okay I really don’t believe in the idea of online vs. offline identity, hence the scare quotes, but you get my point). So having a campus email address is now a burden, one more piece of information for them to monitor, which they generally only begrudgingly do, because the only communication they get via this account if official campus stuff. (In fact the younger generations don’t use email nearly as much, instead relying on text messaging, but I digress.)

Allowing students to register their accounts they use as their official accounts greatly increases the chance of reaching them, and doesn’t create a “garbage account” that they will only be so happy to get rid of when they leave the institution.

But what about the students that don’t already have an account?

Good question, but wouldn’t it be better to teach those students how to get a free account, one they can continue to use later in life after they have left the institution. I for one believe in empowering students.

What about just having an official account which they can forward?

Fine by me. But why bother? If you are just going to create an account which they then forward to another account why bother with the time an effort of managing such a system. Instead, free up the server space, save money, and have the IT folks teach people digital literacy skills. Perhaps each address would be just a forward service that students are required to point somewhere else. This would work, but seems like an extra step. Just require students to register an email account, like any online registration does, done.

What about Privacy?

This is a red-herring. There is no privacy and the university supplying “safe” email accounts just teaches students bad habits. Instead teach them how to maximize security on their own. Honestly I have more problems with the official institutional email addresses I am forced to have then I ever do with the ones I manage myself.

But having a .edu address is useful.

Only because other people/institutions treat .edu with a special import, one which is probably starting to fade. At any rate said institutions would deal when suddenly large numbers of students don’t have .edu addresses.

But as Faculty I like my account.

Faculty seems a bit more reasonable to me, the relationship is longer term and as a representative of said institution you might want to officially sign your email as relating to the university. I personally find it a pain, but it seems a reasonable investment for a school to provide official addresses for employees. But please for the love of all that is holy, let me forward it out of that account.

But student emails might get stuck in spam filters.

Again an important intelligence for students to learn,: how to craft an email that will not, and which free services are best. Again my own spam filters do a much better job of accurately filtering than do the ones the university sets up.

It’s a liability issue, institutions have to have official channels they can be sure students receive.

Again you are far more likely to reach the student on the email account they do read rather than the one you want them to read. If you want a guarantee send a courier and have them sign for it, otherwise no guarantee, campus email or not. This is again where providing students email produces a false sense of security.

What about security?

You really think students read those security updates? Besides they are far more likely to read them if they go to the account they check regularly rather than the one they only check occasionally. Important principle of communication: If you want someone to hear you state it on a channel they usually listen to. Wouldn’t hurt to make them interesting/fun to read. I have seen a few like this, and students are far more likely to read if they aren’t official campus speak. And for real emergencies email is not fast enough try text messaging.

But I like my harvard.edu address.

Seriously? Okay if you want to carry your college address around with you like that 20 year old college sweatshirt trying to brag and relive the glory days of your college years, trading on the prestige of an institution rather than your own reputation feel free, but Universities should just start charging for this. Consider it premium service.

Are institutions going to start providing all students with a cell phone and number since they text each other to communicate? Obviously not. Managing student email accounts is just spending bad money.

So, I got this email the other day. You know the type, one from a not all together legitimate website, saying “Hey Link to My Post” your readers might want the information. The post purported to be a list of the top 50 iPhone applications for educators. The only problem is that some of the things listed were not iPhone apps, a few were just mobile websites, and at least one listed doesn’t even exist. Nevertheless I did pick up one useful bit of information, World Cat has a mobile optimized website. If you want to read the original post you can access it here, or you can read my list below (inspired by said email).

• 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.

Boston College takes the important step of not providing incoming freshmen with email addresses. I have argued this before, but, I simply don’t understand why campuses spend so much money trying to maintain and provide students with email addresses. There are so many free services out there, ones which students who are coming into the university are already comfortable with using. Now I know someone is going to mention privacy in the comments here, so let me preempt that comment. Privacy here is a red herring, rather than provide students with a false sense of privacy related to an email account they don’t use we should teach them how to responsibly use the one they will.

It may not be this company but sooner or later something like this is going to happen legally.