Intro Interactive (1): first steps

By alex | Published: 5/21/2010

Next fall, I’m teaching the introductory seminar and a course called “Communication, media, and society.” I’ve taught both before. At the graduation someone mentioned that it’s not like, in our field, we can just stay with a course and reteach it. That’s true to a certain extent, but one of the things I hope to impart to students is that changes in our media environment, while rapid and profound, reveal deeper, more important long-term trends. Nonetheless, I think it’s time to “reform” the two fall courses.

In the past, the intro course has been something of a survey, providing students with a glimpse of what comes later in the program, and it’s been largely bereft of hard-core tech. There isn’t enough room in our curriculum for a table of contents, though. Instead, I am going to cover what I think is most important for someone to know if they are going to be producers of content in the current media environment. I plan for it to stand alone in that regard. If they leave the program after taking this one course, I hope they leave with enough to be reasonably successful in the media field. High expectations, indeed.

In the past, I’ve started with the ancient Greeks, moved quickly to WWII, and then through urbanization and mass media in the twentieth century. I think it’s really important that students get the historical grounding in this stuff. They need to know that people were talking about the memex and augmented thought way before the “web 2.0” popularity. But they seem to complain at the outset that they didn’t come to grad school to learn history. (I hope some change their mind after thinking through things, but many are so turned off they may not.)

Instead, I’m going to start with the things I think are most important, and move back, forward, and out from there. It will come as no surprise that I still think the idea and practices of blogging are at the center of understanding social media. So, in the first week, I’m going have them set up a WordPress blog and Twitter account and identify an area they want to make a significant, field-wide impact on. I expect them to become micro-experts in that area by the end of the semester. And much of the semester will be dedicated to understanding how it is that they can produce good, engaging content, provide an excellent experience to the community that follows them, and gain attention in a noisy world.

So the central organizing question will be: How do I create a great blog–with a substantial return on the time I invest in it–within a short period of time? (Painfully short in the case of the 7-week online version of the course.)

Naturally, this turns a lot of my readings on their ear. It’s going to be hard to shave down some of the readings. For example, I probably ditch “As We May Think” in favor of “Don’t Make Me Think.” (An older version of the course is here.) A lot of the pieces, though, remain the same.

I will divide the work into:

1. First There Was the Blogosphere
2. Social Networks and Social Networking
3. Into the Twitterverse
4. New Structures of Knowledge
5. Mining the Flow
6. Designing an Experience
7. User-Centered
8. Getting Attention
9. Commercialization and Marketing
10. Onto the Holodeck
11. Locative Media
12. Physical Computing
13. User-Created
14. Hacking Citizenship

This topical organization makes touching on the vital pieces a little more difficult, but for my own organization purposes, as I flesh this out, I look at each unit and ask about why it matters to social media more broadly, in addition to:

A. History & Future

Who already thought about this stuff? I’m a big fan of the idea that there is nothing new under the sun, and most of the changes we see today have very deep roots. How do the sorts of activities we are seeing here reflect earlier forms of mediated communication? What changes and what remains the same? Who

B. Social, Policy, & Ethics

There was a bit of discussion of determinism and the relationship of technological change to social change in the earlier version of the course, and that will remain here. I’ll try to address mitigating some of the harm these technologies can bring, as well as identifying and enhancing their potential benefits. I’ll touch on issues of privacy, of piracy, of access to knowledge, of differences in ability, of freedom of speech, and of the relationship of media to democratic participation in government.

C. Design Process

I want to make sure students understand the concept of design patterns, of user-centered design and user testing. I want to imbue them with an appreciation for open standards. They should have a rough idea of what happens in large organizations when something needs to be developed, and what sorts of specializations exist. They should be able to identify some key designs or designers that influence their thinking. They should be able to understand some of the basics of information architecture and user experience. I want them to start looking at the world from a design engineer’s perspective: identifying problems other people don’t see and starting to think about how to fix them.

D. Strategic Sensitivity

I want them to be thinking in terms of ROI, even if that investment is in time or attention. Really, this is about maintaining a good environmental scan and being aware of threats and opportunities. How do you know what you are doing is the best way to do it? We’ll talk a little about business intelligence, analytics, and setting goals and metrics. This includes both at the organizational level and things like personal time management and lifehacking.

E. Tools

There’s a bunch of technical stuff that I’m including this time around that I haven’t in the past. A lot of this is baseline stuff, and many (hopefully most) students will come in already knowing it. But I want them, for example, to be able to understand what a web server is, how FTP works, how to set up a database, what HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, and web programming languages are and what they do, be able to prep images for their blogs, and use them appropriately, embed media, use basic HTML tags, semicodes, RFID, GPS, and the like. I want them to be WordPress masters and have a basic exposure to Drupal and CMSes in general. In other words, even if they can’t do everything on the web, they should know in basic terms what can be done and what technologies are used. (And yes, they lays the groundwork for a new version of the basic web dev course–ICM505–that will start from WordPress and Drupal and go on to CSS, HTML, jQuery, and enough PHP to support templating.

Obviously, these themes are far from discrete.

The next step for me is to cross the five themes with the weekly topics and come up with clear objectives for each unit, and then look for readings, listenings, watchings, and doings that will lead to meeting those objectives.

More to come…

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Jerky Merging

By alex | Published: 5/13/2010

I‘m done with school for the year, and so, also with my exciting four-hour commute up to Connecticut. Especially after the thaw, that already painful commute got further complicated with lane closures as they tried to repair the damage of Father Winter.

When a lane closes, the remaining lanes move slower. It’s that simple. People follow the instruction to merge (to the left or to the right) well in advance of the last possible point of merging, and as a result, the lane that is about to disappear always moves faster. And as a driver, you are faced with the ethical decision of when to move over. How many cars can you pass and still feel good about moving over? Or should you move over at the earliest possible moment, and sit in traffic as others race past?

It’s a classic ethical decision. I was, initially, of the “early mover over” camp, but then I realized that was dumb. Yes, taking advantage by cutting in on people who are in a queue is rude, but this is not a formal rule of the road, it is simply a warning: slow down and prepare to merge. Some people see that as “merge immediately,” some as “merge when required by the cones,” and most somewhere in between. I thought it was a good idea for the flow of traffic to start to move over, thus reducing the speed drop of forced merges. But there will always be “late mergers” and as a result, it’s stupid to leave all that asphalt unused. Seriously: why on earth do we think that increasing the total length of the lane restriction is a good thing?

Not surprisingly, this has been relatively well-studied, with much of the literature focussed on the type of merge to set up. In relatively sparse conditions, a nice long merge is a good idea. With more congestion, a late merge is smarter (again, since it uses up more of the road). The major problem here seems to be aggravated drivers at the merge point. Since I’ve crossed over from “early merger” to “late merger,” I’ve encountered these drivers. Pissed at having waited their turn while I zoomed up in an empty lane, they refuse to allow me to merge. Usually, the next person (or, ironically, the person ahead of them) waves me in. I understand their frustration–I used to be there, though I never would have aggressively tried to close the space so someone couldn’t merge.

Those who refuse to make space for a merge are the real problem, not the people who are zooming past in the soon-to-be-closed lane. By slamming on the accelerator and brake to make sure there are only inches between their car and the one in front, they set up the preconditions for fender-benders that then lead to extreme delays for everyone. The question now is how–short of leafleting the lane as I pass–is how to educate early-mergers to see the light and use the road?

Update: Thanks to Chutry’s comment below, I dug into Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt’s blog. He links to an article in the Oregonian that talks about the anger some people have over late merging (or should we call it “checkpoint merging,” as suggested in the comments over there).

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8 hours of TV?

By alex | Published: 5/11/2010


We talked quite a bit about TV when Jasper was about to be born. We talked about getting rid of it entirely. We watch what I consider to be a lot of television, though it is perhaps not as much as in some households. It was a lot less before we got a PVR; like many Americans, the number of hours we watch is up. I would say we probably watch somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 hours a week. We’ll usually watch a show during dinner, and maybe the Daily Show as a chaser. That’s a lot of time, and yes, we could replace that with scintillating conversation, but–well, for all the reasons lots of people don’t, we don’t.

But back to Jasper. He’s been exposed to exactly the same amount of TV we have, and until recently, to the same shows. During his first year of life, he generally was uninterested in what appeared on the screen, with the exception of dancing. Now, he will watch our shows for a little bit if something interesting is going on. And, for the first time, we’ve been watching kids shows: Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer.

I know perhaps better than most that exposure to TV has lots of negative outcomes. I more recently ran into a study that looked at TV viewing at 29 months and 53 months, and found that it made the kids fat, innumerate, and picked on by fourth grade. Yes, there are more influential factors, like mother’s education (naturally, Dad’s education doesn’t matter in the aggregate because Dad’s at work?), but I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming at this point: TV is bad for kids.

Only… It sure doesn’t seem that way. Sesame street is way better than I remember it being. Elmo is cloying and annoying as ever, but his name is easy to say. And Dora, while not ideal, does appeal to my love of puzzles and maps. I can see the thinking that goes into these programs, not just by the creators, but by Jasper when he watches. Yes, he gets the thousand-mile stare sometimes, but he also knows a little bit more about backpacks and maps now.

And this is further confused by his addiction to a particular form of television. Our TV, of course, is just a computer, and so he generally wants us to play his music. This is usually accompanied by the visualizations of whatever music player we are using. He doesn’t actually ask for TV, but he certainly asks for his music. (He’s goes to a Music Together class each week, and there is an associated CD.) The natural tendency is to think of TV as bad and a desire to listen to music good, but I’m not at all sure that’s the case. And it’s not like he’s asking for particularly good music.

In the end, I’ve decided it’s stupid to worry about it. He’ll continue to watch TV, even at this young age, limited to about 3 hours each week, and watched with heavy involvement by us. Yes, this is in violation of the AAP recommendations, but since when did we follow the rules?

Posted in Research, Teaching | 3 Comments

Networked Teaching

By alex | Published: 5/6/2010

Abstract for my “Internet Research 11.0” paper, to be presented this coming October…

Networked Teaching: Institutional Changes to Support Personal Learning Networks

Much of the educational literature of late has made a marked shift to the perspective of the individual learner at the center of a network of learning resources in the form of other people, environments, and information artifacts. These provide affordances for learning, shaping a highly individualized environment that corresponds, in many cases, only imperfectly to the structures of educational institutions that the individual may engage. With the attention on the learner, and on informal learning, the words “education” and “teacher” seem somehow archaic. Yet schools, including institutions of higher education, have always supported learning networks to some degree. We are rapidly encountering a crisis in higher education: structures that were established (and ossified) over the last two centuries to formalize and standardize knowledge seem ill-suited to the needs of today’s citizens.

Faculty in universities who attempt to support what have come to be called “personal learning networks” often find their institutions to be challenges rather than partners in attempts to better serve the broader learning environment. Part of the reason for this is that, despite digital media and learning research that has examined networked learning in situ, particularly over the last several years, there is not yet a consensus regarding the appropriate role of the teacher in a learning network. Particularly in schools during the years of compulsory education, and especially in the United States over the last few years, there has been a renewed effort to assess students along the “fundamental” skills of reading, writing, and mathematics, leaving more comprehensive understanding and areas like art and music unassessed and generally ignored. Higher education has provided more opportunities for experimentation, but has also been influenced by new efforts at standardization of process and assessment. Without strong evidence of the mechanisms of informal learning and their benefits, working against such policies is difficult.

On the other hand, many of these policies exist largely as a result of inertia and tradition. Conservative views as to what a good education consists of are rarely evidence-based, but are privileged by policy-makers because they represent familiar “common knowledge.” This paper presents the current state of understanding regarding personal learning networks, and suggests ways in which university policy makes it difficult for university faculty to actively engage in such networks. The suggestion is not that universities should necessarily retool their curricula to engage networked learning environments, but rather that small changes in policy, and particularly changes in the ways in which teaching is assessed for junior scholars and for departments, will provide greater room for experimentation with new forms of learning. The evolution of open source within the traditional software industry provides some indication of ways in which openness can be allowed without radical shifts in values or practices. Efforts at opening up the education process, beginning with open educational resources and open access to research, have already gained a foothold in many institutions. By building on these successes and creating incentives for teacher-scholars to engage in broader learning networks, it is possible to provide for new spaces for teaching experimentation.

The paper concludes by suggesting some concrete measures that can be taken by faculty and by students to encourage policy frameworks that provide for networked research and teaching. Equally important is bringing together these experiments with the means to assess their effectiveness and communicate this with broader publics. The best teachers have always engaged in experiments within their own teaching, often without the consent or notice of the institutions in which they teach. There is a danger–as we have seen with the charter school movement in K-12 institutions in the US–that working models will not find their way back into the mainstream of educational practices, and that failed models will not be shared widely enough to avoid reinventing a broken wheel. By creating spaces for engaging personal learning networks within universities, and by creating the infrastructure for sharing this active experimentation in teaching and learning, we can ensure the relevance of the institutions of higher education to the new learning society.

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