Alex Reidâ€s post

Good? Bad?

My advisor one day related the story of a local news crew that came to interview him in his office. This would have been in the mid-1990s. The first question the reporter asked him was: “The Internet: Good? Or Bad?”

Technologies have politics, but the obvious answer to that obvious question is “Yes.” Just as when people ask about computers and learning, the answer is that technology can be a force for oppressive, ordered, adaptive multiple-choice “Computer Aided Teaching,” or it can be used to provide a platform for autonomous, participatory, authentic interaction. If there is a tendency, it is one that is largely reflective of existing structures of power. But that doesn’t mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. On the whole, I think computers provide more opportunities for learning than threats to it, but I’ll be the first to admit that outcome was neither predestined nor obvious. It still isn’t.

Are there dangers inherent to the very idea of badges? I think there are. I’ve written a bit about them in a recent article on the genealogy of badges. But just as I can find Herb Schillerâ€s work on the role of computer technology in cultural hegemony compelling, but still entertain its emancipatory possibilities, I can acknowledge that badges have a long and unfortunate past, and still recognize in them a potential tool for disrupting the currently dominant patterns of assessment in institutionalized settings, and building bridges between informal and formal learning environments.

Ultimately, what is so confusing to me is that I agree wholeheartedly with many of the critics of badges, and reach different conclusions. To look at how some badges have been used in the past and not be concerned about the ways they might be applied in the future would require a healthy amount of selective perception. I have no doubt that badges, badly applied, are dangerous. But so are table saws and genetic engineering. The question is whether they can also be used to positive ends.

Over the last year, I’ve used badges to such positive ends. My own experience suggests that they can be an effective way of improving and structuring peer learning communities and forms of authentic assessment. I know others have had similar successes. So, I will wholeheartedly agree with many of the critics: badges can be poorly employed. Indeed, I suspect they will be poorly employed. But the same can be said of just about any technology. The real question is if there is also some promise that they could represent an effective tool for opening up learning, and providing the leverage needed to create new forms of assessment.

Gold Stars

One of the main critiques of badges suggests that they represent extrinsic forms of motivation to the natural exclusion of intrinsic motivation. Mitch Resnick makes the case here:

I worry that students will focus on accumulating badges rather than making connections with the ideas and material associated with the badges – the same way that students too often focus on grades in a class rather than the material in the class, or the points in an educational game rather than the ideas in the game.

I worry about the same thing. I will note in passing that at worst, he is describing a situation that does no harm: replacing a scalar (A-F letter grades) with a system of extrinsic motivation that is more multidimensional. But the problem remains: if badges are being used chiefly as a way of motivating students, this is probably not going to end well.

And I will note that many educators I’ve met are excited about badges precisely because they see them as ways of motivating students. I think that if you had to limit the influences of using badges to three areas, they would be motivation, assessment, and credentialing. The first of these if often seen as the most important, and not just by the “bad” badgers, but by many who are actively a part of the community promoting learning badges.

(As an aside, I think there are important applications of badges beyond these “big three.” I think they can be used, for example, as a way for a community to collaboratively structure and restructure their view of how different forms of local knowledge are related and I think they can provide a neophyte a map of this knowledge, and an expert a way of tracing their learning autobiography over time. I suspect there are other implications as well.)

Perhaps my biggest frustration is the ways in which badges are automatically tied to gamification. I think there are ways that games can be used for learning, and I know that a lot of the discussion around badges comes from their use in computer games, but for a number of reasons I think the tie is unfortunate; not least, badges in games are often seen primarily as a way of motivating players to do something they would otherwise not do.

Badges and Assessment

The other way in which I worry about computer gaming badges as a model is the way they are awarded. I think that both learning informatics and “stealth assessment,” have their place, but if misapplied they can be very dangerous. My own application of badges puts formative assessment by actual humans (especially peers) at the core. Over time I have come to believe that the essential skill of the expert is an ability to assess. If someone can effectively determine whether something is “good”–a good fit, a good solution, aesthetically pleasing, interesting, etc.–she can then apply that to her own work. Only through this critical view can learning take place.

For me, badges provide a framework for engaging effectively in assessment within a learning community. This seems also to be true for Barry Joseph, who suggests some good and bad examples of badge use here. Can this kind of re-imagination of assessment happen outside of a “badge” construct? Certainly. But badges provide a way of structuring assessment that provides scaffolding without significant constraints. This is particularly true when the community is involved in the continual creation and revision of the badges and what they represent.

Boundary Objects

Badges provide the opportunity to represent knowledge and power within a learning community. Any such representation comes with a dash of danger. The physical structuring of communities: who gets to talk to whom and when, where people sit and stand, gaze–all these things are dangerous. But providing markers of knowledge is not inherently a bad thing, and particularly as learning communities move online and lose some of the social and cultural context, finding those who know something can be difficult.

This becomes even more difficult as people move from one learning community to another. Georg Simmel described the intersection of such social circles as the quintessential property of modern society. You choose your circles, and you have markers of standing that might travel with you to a certain degree. We know what these are: and the college degree is one of the most significant.

I went to graduate school with students who finished their undergraduate degrees at Evergreen State College, and have been on admissions committees that considered Evergreen transcripts in making admissions decisions. Evergreen provides narrative assessments of student work, and while I wholeheartedly stand by the practice–as a great divergence if not a model–it makes understanding a learning experience difficult for those outside the community. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a table of contents? A visual guide though a learning portfolio and narrative evaluation? A way of representing abilities and learning to those unfamiliar with the community in which occurred?

I came to badges because I was interested in alternative ways of indicating learning. I think that open resources and communities of learning are vitally important, but I know that universities will cling to the diploma as a source of tuition dollars and social capital. Badges represent one way of nibbling at the commodity of the college diploma.

Badges, if done badly, just become another commodity: a replacement of authentic learning with an powerful image. To me, badges when done well are nothing more than a pointer. In an era when storing and transmitting vast amounts of content is simple, there is no technical need for badges as a replacement. But as a way of structuring and organizing a personal narrative, and relating knowledge learned in one place to the ideas found in another, badges represent a bridge and a pointer.

This is one reason I strongly endorsed the inclusion of an “evidence” url in the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure schema. Of course, the OBI is not the only way of representing badges, nor does it intend to represent only learning badges–there is a danger here of confusing the medium and the message. Nonetheless, it does make for an easier exchange and presentation of badges, and importantly, a way of quickly finding the work that under-girds a personal learning history.

All the Cool Kids Are Doing It

Henry Jenkins provides one of the most compelling cases against badges I’ve seen, though it’s less a case against badges and more a case against the potential of a badgecopalypse, in which a single sort of badging system becomes ubiquitous and totalizing. Even if such a badge system followed more of the “good” patterns on Barry Joseph’s list than the “bad,” it would nonetheless create a space in which participation was largely expected and required.

Some of this comes of the groups that came together around the badge competition. If it were, like several years ago, something that a few people were experimenting with on the periphery, I suspect we would see little conversation. But when foundations and technologists, the Department of Education and NASA, all get behind a new way of doing something, I think it is appropriate to be concerned that it might obliterate other interesting approaches. I share Jenkins’ worry that interesting approaches might easily be cast aside by the DML Competition (though I will readily concede that may be because I was a loser“unfunded winner” in the competition) and hope that the projects that move forward do so with open, experimental eyes, allowing their various communities to help iteratively guide the application of badges to their own ends. I worry that by winnowing 500 applications to 30, we may have already begun to centralize what “counts” in approaches to badges. But perhaps the skeptical posts I’ve linked to here provide evidence of the contrary: that the competition has encouraged a healthy public dialog around alternative assessment, and badges represent a kind of “conversation piece.”

Ultimately, it is important that critical voices of approaches to badges remain at the core of the discussion. My greatest concern is that the perception that there are badge evangelists and skeptics is in fact true. I certainly think of myself as both, and I hope that others feel the same way.

Overall, it was an outstanding conference, and I wanted to mark why both in terms of the content (which should find legs in other places) and the structure (which is finding its way slowly into other conferences).

Why I Conference

I think for most people, the main thing that holds them back from going to conferences is that they are expensive: in terms of registration costs, travel costs, and–probably most importantly–in terms of time and logistics. This is certainly the case for me. Also, like many others, I am introverted–while I like people in theory, actually being around them, especially if they are not people I already know pretty well, is uncomfortable. And on top of all of that, I have a soon-to-be-two-year-old who doesn’t want me to leave, and it’s very difficult because I would rather stay with him as well.

With all that, why go to conferences at all? There are a few reasons, but personally I judge the success of a conference by two main criteria. The first is whether I learn new things or get new ideas from being there. Now, I have yet to have gone to a conference where I didn’t learn at least something (even if it was only “I don’t ever want to go to this conference again”), but there needs to be a particular saturation of ideas in order to make it worthwhile. And secondly, if there is a tangible collaboration or opportunity to work together either at the conference or coming out of the conference, and if these have a good chance of coming to fruition, I consider the conference a success. Most conferences are designed explicitly to meet the first criterion, and implicitly to meet the second.

By those two goalposts alone, Drumbeat was one of the best conferences I’ve been to, and I would go again in a minute. It managed to neatly strike the balance between drawing together likeminded people (including, to echo Rafi Santo’s comment, people who may not have previously known they were likeminded) and put together some diversity of thought and background. There was certainly some feeling of “drinking the Koolaid”–Mozilla represents as much a movement as it does a topical area, and there are some sometimes unspoken, and often shouted, underlying ideals in play. These ideals are ones I share, but it is always difficult to walk the line between coordinated movement and groupthink.

There were also those at this conference who come from the Open Ed world, where “Ed” is still pretty operative. They think seriously about the way materials are shared and how they can be improved, but are often not so radical when it comes to the alteration or avoidance of educational institutions. And I think some of those present from the technical community think about learning in a very particular and practical way. They may recognize that there are more than purely technical skills in play when it comes to designing and building software (and hardware and movements) but some have not thought about what this means outside of a fairly limited range of training opportunities, or at least see learning through the lens of what they have experienced as learning.

In all, there seemed to me to be just the right amount of common ground and uncommon territory. At times, I felt like there was some preaching to the choir, or a bit of redundancy, but this was surprisingly rare, and that allowed people to come more quickly to some of the deeper questions and problems that needed to be addressed.

What Worked and Didn’t

As someone in the midst of planning a conference, I think it’s worth briefly noting what things worked at Drumbeat and what things did not.

First, what did not: I think there were two technical details that the organizers would agree that just went wrong. The first was the lightweight WiFi infrastructure. Yes, I recognize that not having internet is not the end of the world, but for a conference like this, it is really important to be bathed in the glow of high-speed access. I also know personally how hard it is to plan for 400 people who are not just briefly checking their mail, but constantly tweeting, uploading photos, and trying to slip by streams of media in some cases. Most providers look at the number of attendees and make certain assumptions about usage that are just way off. But I am kicking myself for spending the hours after I arrived sleeping off the jetlag rather than heading out to Orange to pick up a PAYG SIM for the iPad.

Acoustics, especially on the first night, but throughout, were terrible. If you weren’t trying to make sense of discussions as they were amplified by cavernous, ancient rooms, you were outside fighting against the scratch-and-roll of the skateboarders or the real tweets of the birds. I feel particularly bad for those for whom English was not their first language, at a largely English-language conference. That said, there are tradeoffs to be made, and it was likely worth the hassle for such a great venue.

I recognize and appreciate the openness to chaos, but it would have been great, especially as the second day trailed on, if there could have been a bit more discipline with the schedule. Given the calls to end the repressive factory nature of schools, calling for bells or chimes is probably misplaced, but I did miss the gentle cowbell we had at the IR conference this year reminding us that the next session was getting started. So, Drumbeat: more cowbell!

Finally, as the conference wore on, it started to feel like we were missing some people here. In particular, the Prof. Hacker crowd would have been a welcome middle ground between some of the more academic people, some of those working in informal learning, and some of the techies. There are people out there who live and breathe this stuff and who weren’t at the conference. I suspect it’s because it didn’t quite make their radar–or because Barcelona was a long haul–and that’s a shame.

There was too much right to list here. This was not, strictly speaking, a BarCamp–they front loaded with more scaffolding than is normally the case–something I think was necessary given the size (number of people) and scope (breadth of participation). As I noted above, I think there were opportunities for even more scaffolding, but I was really glad to be freed from the stand-and-deliver. There were a few plenary sessions, but these were universally excellent and short–two attributes that likely run together. Most of the sessions were organized around structured conversation, something missing from most academic conference, where it swings pretty wildly between presentation (sometimes fine, but often boring and unproductive) and unstructured conversation (often excellent but sometimes without clear goals or outcomes). I think Drumbeat did a nice job of zeroing in on semi-structured conversations with a dedication to making outcomes and building tangible and intangible products.

Facilitating this requires a bit of self-reflection, a bit of a reminder of why we are putting up with small bumps along the way, and quite a bit of “follow me.” And so it is important to note just how important the dedicated organizers were to making it work as well as it did. The sessions were exciting because those leading them were excited about what they were doing–and knew what they wanted out of it. And it only functioned smoothly because of a really dedicated group of volunteers.

Fantastic conference food and drink, as you would expect in Barcelona. And it’s hard to beat the setting, both in terms the structures we met in and being able to walk in the city. And if anyone does a conference in El Raval again, I think they should designate a tiger team of bag snatchers with a prize for the most competent, or invite local pickpockets to run a session on what we can learn about theft as social engineering.

No Respect for Authority

It seemed to me that there was a great charge of revolution in the room at a number of moments, with the traditional school and university structures firmly in the crosshairs. Two of the plenary speakers were proud dropouts of traditional educational institutions, and there was a general feeling that we can do it better ourselves. As Cathy Davidson noted in one of the early talks, we needed to find the “joy in insurgency.”

And you will find no one more responsive to that general feeling than I am. But I think it is worth tempering. After all, I am a high school dropout with a Ph.D.–a condition that probably reflects my intermediate position on the issue fairly well. Are schools and universities broken? Of course they are, always have been, and always will be. IE is broken too. The solution, however, was not to throw the browser out with the bathwater, it was to make a better browser. (Oh, and BTW, Firefox is broken; there is nothing fundamentally wrong with brokenness, as long as you are also always in the process of fixing, and the ability to fix is not impeded.)

I think that a hard stance against the university is strategically the wrong way to go. As Mitchell Baker noted in her brief introduction, one of the successes of openness is that it kills with kindness. I thnk that in the case of free and open software, that means adoption by commercial software producers, and for open learning, it means universities and schools that embrace open learning as obvious rather than a radical concept. This is not total war; the objective for me is a quiet but unstoppable change that leads to the crumbling of structures that do not adapt, not their explosion.

There is too much good in universities to throw them out, and although there is a certain strategic value in both rhetoric and actions that challenge its existence, at least in current form, as leverage in making substantial changes, I still think there is so much that the university model represents that is good that the most valuable approach in one that is probably more familiar to those in Barcelona, opening up the institutions that are traditional, authoritative, and highly structured, so that we may walk off with their resources, ideas, people, and capital. Since only the last of these is really alienable, we are not robbing, but liberating.

Just Do It

One of the reasons I like this group more than most is the willingness to, to borrow from the esteemed Tim Gunn, make it work. As academics, we are extraordinarily good at talking, and not always as good at actually doing. This is a problem worth building our way put of, and the people at Drumbeat are essentially learning bricoleurs, willing to disassemble, take the parts that work, and repurpose them. This is necessarily a process of experimentation, and of research through practice. I’m going to drop this 30-minute presentation right in the middle of the blog post because it embodies this spirit better than I can.

This presentation, by Aza Raskin, includes a nice overview of what participatory design means (not just what it is) and was quickly put on my “must watch” list for our starting students. (If the mention of jQuery freaks you out, feel free to abandon half-way through!) I think most of the people in the room were thinking about prototyping socio-technical systems in the form of web software, but it is equally true of design in other contexts. The push to prototype your way through a project–both as a way of creating and as a way of getting people “co-excited” about an idea–is important.

I think the one-day prototype needs to find its way into our learning environments far more often.

Turn up the base

A lot of the direction here was toward learning for us by us, and that is fine. But it is worth noting that those at the conference did not represent all learners. I think one of the more inspiring plenary talks was by Anna Debenham. (Assuming I get the chance to edit it down, I’ll post that talk shortly.) There were a few other young people at the conference, but it would have been great to see more. Of course, youth are not the only target, and they may not even be as much of a special case as they are often considered. Some have suggested we need to stop treating adult education like education for kids–I think we also need to stop treating learning environments for kids like education for kids.

The other problem is that we may be designing for users that do not yet exist. Of course, this is always the case to a certain extent–users are a moving target–but particularly when it comes to learning, our ultimate aim is to change the users, even when they are ourselves. So, it’s important to get an early view from potential users, but is also difficult. When we are successful, our systems help to co-create new kinds of users.

Given that difficulty, it is especially important to do two things. First, we need to create resources that assume very little about the end user, and make it as simple as possible for them to customize the tools and materials that we create. The second is that they need to know about those tools as soon as they have a bit of resilience and polish–advertising matters. Firefox was important as a piece of software, but putting it into people’s hands was another project, at least equally as important.

Moving Forward

We covered a lot of ground in this meeting, and although I have not been involved in its planning it is clear that a lot of people spent a lot of time on both the projects presented and on organizing the conference itself. It takes a great deal of scaffolding to provide a conference that is this open to tinkering. There were, throughout the conference, calls to make sure that this was not a one-off or end-point, but rather a starting point. Despite efforts to encapsulate one unifying starting point, what I saw was a broad spectrum of starting points. As I continue thinking about the conference, I’m going to be focusing on one aspect that really got me excited about moving forward: badges. I am sure that others found their own pet projects, and I hope that in many cases these were different than the projects they had going in.

Research in the field of Digital Media and Learning (DML) tends to focus on youth participants, occur in dynamic, mediated environments, and often consists of researchers working in different locations and sharing their observations. All of these factors can complicate the process of seeking and receiving approval from local IRBs, leading to a substantial amount of effort by researchers and unnecessary delay in doing good research. Particularly vexing is the difficulty in sharing data among researchers at different universities, a vital prerequisite to collaborative social science. In the hope of improving this process for everyone involved–the researchers, members of the IRBs, the participants in the research, and the public at large–the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub supported the first of a pair of one-day workshops intended to discuss potential solutions. A number of groups have been looking at how IRBs are working and how they might work better, and we were lucky to be able to bring to Irvine a group of people with significant experience working with the IRB process in various contexts, including Tom Boellstorff, Alex Halavais, Heather Horst, Montana Miller, Dan Perkel, Ivor Pritchard, Jason Schultz, Laura Stark, and Michael Zimmer. Each of the participants shared their research and other materials with the group beforehand, as did others who were unable to join us.

We found that while there might be some fairly intractable issues, as there are for any established institution, some of the difficulties that IRBs and investigators encountered were a result of reinventing the wheel locally, and a general lack of transparency in the process of approving human subjects research. The elements required to make good decisions on planned research tend to be obscure and unevenly distributed across IRBs. From shared vocabularies between IRBs and investigators, to knowledge of social computing contexts, to a clear understanding of the regulations and empirical evidence of risk, many of the elements that delay the approval of protocols and frustrate researchers and IRBs could be addressed if the information necessary was more widely accessible and easily discoverable.

Rather than encouraging the creation of national or other centralized IRBs, more awareness and transparency would allow local solutions to be shared widely. Essentially, this is a problem of networked learning: how is it that investigators, IRB members, and administrators can come quickly to terms with the best practices in DML research? Not surprisingly, we think digital media in some form can be helpful in that process of learning.

The devil is in the details. First, it’s important to identify what should be shared, how to share that information in a way that is most helpful, and how to get from where we are now to that point. Much of this information sharing already takes place today informally, with colleagues contacting one another for advice on protocols, technologies, and the like. Our hope is to create a resource that opens this sharing up a bit more, highlights a core set of ideas held commonly in the disciplines that make up DML, and makes the IRB process quicker and more effective.

As a group we would love to hear your suggestions on how best to improve the IRB process, or questions you might have in the.

NB: This post originally appeared on DMLcentral. Please make any comments there.

Digital Media and Learning as a Post-Academic Field

DML, as with many new fields, finds itself in the interstices of traditional academic practices. It draws clearly from a range of disciplines old and new: sociology, anthropology, education, communication, computer science, psychology, and many others. As such, it brings together theories and methods that must be reinterpreted. Likewise, it brings together practices and makes space for new kinds of practices. Those most likely to engage in research involving learning with new media technologies are often working at the margins of existing institutional structures, and bring that experience to their research practices.

Our panel will discuss the role of post-academics–those who work both in institutions of higher learning and in their penumbra–in the development of the field of digital media and society. To what degree does studying these technologies and their role in learning require us to engage with them in our own research and teaching, and what does this practical engagement affect our ability to influence scholarly discourse within institutions? Speakers will engage questions of open scholarly communication, collaborative research, and the participation of our subjects, our students, our colleagues, corporations, and publics in practices that have traditionally been considered privileged and segregated.

The Communications Manager will work closely with the Research Hub management, staff, and affiliated researchers to develop and manage an integrated public presence, publicity and outreach infrastructure for the initiative. This will involve: 1) developing a PR strategy and public identity for the initiative as a whole, 2) acting as the editor and curator of the public online presence of the initiative (which includes a web site and an email newsletter), 3) managing contacts and communication for key research partners , constituencies, and press, 4) crafting and managing publicity, including helping to craft press releases, to the general public, 5) helping to coordinate partnerships with other research institutions, and 6) working with the overall DML Research Hub team to plan, coordinate, and organize various meetings, notably, the annual grantees meeting and conference. This position will report to the Director of the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).

Salary: $57,600 – $85,800
Work Schedule: 8-5, M-F
Contract Position.
Final candidate subject to background check.
Please attach your resume.

For more information, go to the UC Irvine jobs page, and click on “contracts.”

Now, I am naturally lazy–a trait I am trying to more actively cultivate, but I gather he had figured that because I haven’t been blogging or tweeting or doing any of those other sorts of continual status updates I must be slacking. As usual, my blogging (including micro-blogging) is inversely proportionate to how busy I am, not the other way around. There is a small caveat: sometimes it is an indicator that I am procrastinating, and therefore should be busy. On very rare occasions, when the stars align, it is actually linked to progress on a project, but generally speaking, silence on this front should never be taken as indication that I am actually relaxing a little.

On the other hand, the number of hours I have each week to work on projects is somewhat limited by being the daytime parent (with some help) of Jasper. This remains my priority, and though it sometimes means sacrificing things I would like to do, there is never going to be another time to hang out with my six-month-old, so he wins. As it is, I wish I could spend even more time with him.

In what seems to be a perennial sort of post, here are some of the projects I’m working on right now, besides raising the future benevolent dictator of our solar system:

• Writing Course at Quinnipiac University. I’ve been dragged–somewhat against my will :)–into teaching the “writing for interactive” course this summer. Actually, the content of the course isn’t what puts me off: it’s that (a) it is in the summer, and I would like to reserve summers for research and projects and (b) it’s 5 weeks long. It is hard enough to teach a course in 15 and have students not feel overwhelmed. When you compress that into 5 weeks–and it’s the same number of credits, so I think we should hit the material at the same depth–it is just impossible. So, dealing with that tension, particularly in a writing course, is going to be difficult. I also need to revise my fall seminars. I’m organizing one of my courses around reading and annotating Little Brother, as well as heavily revising my intro (ICM 501) course. (I have also felt a recent disruption in the force in the ICM program, which will probably require even more cycles being put toward re-keeling it.)
• Digital Media & Learning Hub. I haven’t been talking publicly in any organized way about this, but some of you know that I have been working with the DML Hub, a group constituted to improve collaboration among researchers funded by the MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. I’m working with a team to create a DML Collaboratory site for researchers, as well as an external site that will seek to gather the current state of the art in one place. I’m also in the early stages of working with a group to establish some norms of sharing data, particularly qualitative data. I’ll actually be blogging a bit about this latter project in the coming week, and probably tweeting a little about the Collaboratory and that process.
• Twittering and Protesting. Happy to have the opportunity to work with Maria Garrido again, this time on a project that tracks the ways in which Twitter is being used to both build identity and coordinate action. This is one of two papers that I’ve promised for the AoIR meeting next year. Will be blogging a bit as it develops. This is also one of two Twitter-related research pieces I’m working on, both at early stages.
• Association of Internet Researchers. In the short term, setting up a registration site, but I am desperately hoping that I can get the Exec behind using this in the long term as well. It would make my life so much easier, and everyone else’s as well! Still doesn’t solve the paper submission and refereeing system issues, but I really hope we are able to move to a different system for that next year. Looking forward to talking to next year’s organizers about how to make that work out a bit better.

A lot of other things are right on the cusp of needing to be done, but I’m trying to keep my head clear of them for the moment. It really doesn’t seem that bad when it’s spelled out as above. Of course, tthere are the other pending things: three book projects, whipping some old research together into publishable form, a grant proposal sometime later this year, various talks, digitizing my library, etc. But I’m trying to keep those things out fo mind, wherever possible.