Go Rogue.

It's been awhile since I posted something in the "classical scholarship" area here, so I figure it's due. Not for lack of content, mind you - it has continually astonished me to realize how active the community of classical scholars is when it comes to digital humanities. I've already mentioned the upcoming Digital Classics Association conference; folks like the Stoa Consortium, the Digital Classicist, EpiDoc, and the good ol' Perseus Project are just a sampling.

Within the Twitterverse, I really like @rogueclassicist, who pushes out a daily sampling of neat stories, from linguistic stuff to archaeological stories to gingerbread Herodotoi.

My Current Enthusiasms...

Some arbitrarily-chosen items which are currently making me happy.


Item the First: CNET brings us the story of an amateur video game editor who rewrites The Legend of Zelda so that Zelda herself is the hero(ine), and rescues Link!

Item the Second: Inverted World, by Christopher Priest. Published in 1974, it's a really engrossing, but relatively unknown, classic of sci fi. Read a review.

Item the Third: LTI apps. For someone who's serious about curation and presentation of a wide range of online content, having a platform which uses LTI is frackin' amazing. Digital hunting-and-gathering has its time and place - but so does well-structured and -presented coherent content.

Item the Fourth: Miegakure, a video game, long in development, but SO worth the wait: a puzzle-platformer in 4 (spatial) dimensions. Any site with a shout-out to Edwin A. Abbott is all right in my book.

Liberal Arts, Humanities and Technology

This post comes from an email dialogue I've had recently with a colleague at another institution. She dropped me a line earlier this semester, after we'd met at a conference, to ask my perspective on the role of the digital humanities ("DH" in the edtech jargon), specifically as someone who works and teaches at a small public liberal arts college - in her words, "the traditional and best bastion of humanities".

It's an important question - one that I think is going to inform a great deal of what we do in edu, higher and otherwise, more and more with each passing year. There are so many interrelated issues and considerations around the umbrella term "digital humanities," it's hard to know where to begin - my apologies if I'm a bit scattered! Hopefully there'll be at least a few nuggets you'll find useful to ponder, or to foster critical discussion.

My colleague asked: "in a word - what's your opinion? Yea or nay, and why?" My answer in a word: yea. I'm someone who sees DH as an opportunity to expand the relevance of the humanities and liberal arts - its values, the habits of mind it cultivates - into an important (and growing) aspect of the contemporary human experience.

Think of how long, and in how many different contexts, we've seen tension between the "pure" practice of the liberal arts and the "public intellectual" model. There's a sense in which the current dialogue over DH is another iteration of that longstanding back-and-forth: how far should we reach out into our students' world of what's happening now, and how much should we insist that they step out of that context and realize the ahistorical, noncontextual values the academy has traditionally endorsed? The liberal arts have a centuries-long tradition, and have stood the test of time. If we change what we do based on technology - especially given the amazingly rapid development of technology - do we risk becoming merely reactive, perpetually playing catch-up to an ever-changing set of technical skills?

Perhaps as importantly, there's a fair concern over the industry-driven nature of technology: even in something as seemingly innocuous as word-processing, the choice of our tech tools bears broad ethical consequences, committing us as individual researchers and teachers, and as institutions, to supporting particular companies/industries. ...Unless we're fortunate enough to be at an institution which has committed to #opensource / #oer resources: but, at least at present, this is a rather tiny (if growing) sliver of the pie!

In another (but related) sense, the humanities' concern over adopting tech is often about self-preservation: the more we admit that tech use is a crucial skill for students to succeed in their lives, the more we admit that it's a viable competitor for the skills we teach! Many see this challenge, and are not sure how to respond: should we "admit defeat", and shift what we do to a model of career training? If not, what's left? stridently and shrilly maintain the value of our traditional liberal arts skills as a counterpoint to those "merely technical" skills - and hope that we can keep attracting students on an "us-vs-them" rhetorical model?

I consider it a misguided tactic to respond to the challenge of technology, and the value of technological skills, by setting up the liberal arts and humanities as a competing "track" or set of skills or aims. If we're serious when we say that the liberal arts represent a way of thinking which is broadly applicable to human lives, regardless of particular role, or career, we have a certain responsibility to support that claim, yes? We perhaps ought to be ready to show our students, and our societies, that being a humanist is fully compatible, and seamlessly integratable [horrible neologism], with being a technologist. And, we ought equally to be ready to show that technologists benefit in authentic ways from the humanities: it's already clear that we humanists are deriving measurable benefits from technology!

In the particular context of the small liberal arts college, one thing that springs to mind is an important footnote to the prevailing public conversation: we are not all using technology to "scale" - no MOOCs here! Our local interactions with technology are very much about improving and streamlining and enhancing the direct, personal connections between faculty and students which have always been at the heart of the small liberal arts college model. While there are certainly very real pressures (especially on larger universities) to use edtech as an expansion tool (with all the issues of justice that entails: labor issues, access issues...), we're focusing on translating the valuable pieces of our small-scale educational practice into methods that use technology as supportive, rather than intrusive.

From the point of view of humanities scholarship and research (which, granted, is not a hugely significant piece of what we do at my institution), DH is fascinatingly rich, not only for the sorts of new research methods it makes available to traditional projects, but for the new areas of research it opens up to traditional methods. I'm going to be at the Digital Classics Association conference in April, where colleagues will be presenting on issues of stylometric text analysis, mapping antiquity, linguistic annotation, citation, and intertextuality - traditional humanistic research interests, but now capable of incredibly robust analysis, visualization, and interpretation, on the basis of powerful aggregation and comparison of data which would have taken lifetimes of individual, manual scholarly effort. On the other hand, there are fascinating sociological, psychological, ethical, anthropological areas of inquiry around our use of, and relations with, our evolving technology, which are ripe for (and already giving rise to) serious scholarly work.

Faculty at every institution of education need to be having this conversation. Because if we don't, we cede the field: we tacitly abdicate our claim of relevance to a whole swath of human life in the 21st century. And that, if anything, is exactly the opposite of what I, at least, believe to be true.

Faculty Protip: Aggregate for Sanity!

Let's face it: it's annoying to have to manage many different systems! Log in to First Class to check email; then to Banner to input grades; to Digication to check on your students' ePortfolio projects; then Canvas to build course content; then your own personal calendar (Google Calendar, or iCal, or whatever); then your social media and favorite blogs or news sites ... it never ends!

This proliferation is exactly why it's important to aggregate whenever you can - avoiding overload is a crucial key to using tech effectively. Here are some aggregations I use, and you can too!

1. Merge your communications. When you send an Announcement or message through Canvas, did you know that a copy automatically goes to First Class too? Nice. Easy.
2. Merge your calendars. The magic of RSS makes it easy to put your course calendars right into your personal calendar - why check two different places? It's as easy as copy/pasting a link: here's the guide.
3. Merge your info streams. If you have a bunch of favorite sites and/or blogs you like to check for daily news, imagine a world in which you could simply access a single site with the newest information from all of them at once. For personal use, try an app like Feedly; if you're using sites for your courses, you can add the feeds from news sites and blogs directly into your Canvas Announcements area - and your students will automatically get the latest news!

Pew Research on Teens, Tech

I've been having a great time munching the numbers in the report, released by the Pew Research Center this morning, entitled "Teens and Technology 2013" (*.pdf).

I've shared the document, as well as a few key highlights, with the faculty at my institution, in hopes of sparking some serious conversation about it. I see too many who are still thinking of current technology as just another iteration of the projector - a fad that'll ultimately fade, leaving the same, good old pedagogical frameworks and expectations. I disagree: as near as I can tell, there are serious issues of justice at stake in the adoption of technology in our classes - here's one example:


• Approximately 1 of every 4 teens uses on the internet mostly on a smartphone/tablet.
• Of these, girls are more likely than boys to be "cell-mostly" internet users.
• Among older teen girls who are smartphone owners, 55% say they use the internet mostly from their phone.

If I make a conscious choice to refuse to incorporate (or at least accommodate) mobile technology when it's available, am I affecting my students' access? Dial it back a few years, and a few iterations: what if I refused to accept emails from students, or insisted that essays be hand-written only? Harmless idiosyncrasy, or something else?

PLAYDATE13 - Boston!

Kinda brings me back to 1979 and "Pop Muzik"... :-D

Portland, Chicago, and Boston are all hosting their own PLAYDATE events. In case you're wondering, yes, it's an acronym: People Learning & Asking "Y": Digital Age Technology Exploration. Jenny Magiera has a great post about the origins of this idea - here's her summary of what the event's about:

This conference will be geared towards those who just want to explore - or play with - apps, websites, programs or tools that they've always wanted to dig into more deeply, but never had the time or support to do so. Modeled after an unconference or an EdCamp, the sessions will be participant-driven and hands on. Most importantly - there will be no sit and get. Period. No Presenters. Period. All of the content will be learner driven, exploration based and hands on. Just like the model of education we hope for our students. At the end there will be a share out of learning and take aways "The Play Off" - and digital content and notes will be disseminated to all.

 And so, I'll be in Boston this Saturday, learning with inspired and exploring colleagues from around the state, trying out a range of tech tools designed around classroom use. In the spirit of the unconference and open educational resources, we've already been crowdsourcing a resources list - bookmark it, and add to it! If, like me, you're involved in providing any sort of training or professional development, or if you're just looking for great starting-points to explore new things, what better place to start than a list specifically curated by your colleagues?

(And you can bet that some of what I pick up at #PLAYDATE13 will be making its way into TechFest2013 this May at MCLA...)

Dungeons & Discourse, SXSWedu-style

Thursday morning, it was all about Dungeons & Discourse, baby.

Yes, it was the final day of a conference. Yes, we were opposite a MOOC "cage match". Yes, our session was at 9 a.m.

Even so, we rocked, if I may be so bold as to say it. Emily, Justin, and I had been spreading word of our projects and our session at every conceivable opportunity over the previous days, and interest was high (especially after the double-endorsement from the SXSWedu Advisory Board a week ahead of the conference!). Edugaming was one of the key themes weaving through this year's event, and we were ready to feed the hunger: after many, many sessions talking abstractions about games in education, people were ready to hear about three projects that are actual - actually reaching students, actually breaking out of factory-model education, and actually collaborating in an altruistic, non-competitive way.

If you're interested in seeing and hearing how it went, here are some links for ya:

Let me tell you about the Dread Sophist...

• The official SXSWedu podcast of our session (I start talking at 22:00 about Dungeons & Discourse, but you should listen to the whole thing, of course - Project LAPIS/BIOME and Tres Columnae are kindred spirits, and amazing projects.)
• The Prezi I was using during my talk (you're just going to have to figure out the timing for yourself, I'm afraid :-)
• The public demo of Dungeons & Discourse in the Canvas LMS (it's not fully functional, of course; but it'll probably whet your appetite.)

Day 3, SXSWedu

9a session: Mind the Gap: Games, Impact, Potential, Reality

One of the conference's Distinguished Speakers, Alan Gershenfeld is a former chairman of Games for Change, an organization focused on digital games for social, humanitarian and educational impact. He's also the president of a for-profit, which was relevant to his topic: what's involved in moving beyond simply having a great edugame idea - the pragmatic steps involved in making it happen.

Gershenfeld spent a fair amount of time at a high level of generality - something I appreciated, having little to no background in the business world. I found interesting his take on the "double-bottom-line" business model: while expressing strong commitment to the notion of a sustainable, mission-aligned business model, Gershenfeld nevertheless sounded a cautionary (to my ear, slightly pessimistic) note:  at best, maintaining a company's commitment to social responsibility is a continual rebalancing act, adjusting to the tensions with the profit-seeking inclination.

Anyway, he presented several substantive pieces of advice for an aspiring edugame creator. Stakeholder alignment. Team building. Articulation of outcomes. Identifying a target audience well, with both demographic and psychographic analysis. Identifying the context of the game experience, including platform alignment. I know, I know: summarized like this, these look like the very picture of content-free entrepreneurial buzzwords. I promise, the talk was actually significantly interesting.

10:30a session: How Immersion in Virtual Worlds and Mobile Devices Engage College Students in the Real World

The River City interface.

Finally, a session about an actual game! Chris Dede of the Harvard Graduate School of Education walked a packed room through the EcoMUVE and EcoMOBILE projects. Phase 1: build an immersive virtual environment ("River City") to recreate a RL pond ecosystem, and build a middle-school ecology curriculum within that virtual space. Think Second Life, except that the environment is designed to be educational, rather than repurposed as such.

Phase 2, however, takes the curriculum out of virtual reality (which is really hard to build and maintain), and instead ventures into augmented reality (AR) as the curriculum platform. The virtual world of Phase 1 is a kind of springboard toward this phase, which (a) avoids the technical demands of a fully-virtual space and (b) gets kids out into the physical world (which is, after all, a lot better than accumulating hours of screen time manipulating a virtual pond and virtual trees, yes?). Dede is doing serious, well-informed work. He gets the real function of gamespace in relation to education - he's not a breathless cheerleader for gaming for its own sake. And, since I've already planned to incorporate some AR in this semester's version of my Dungeons & Discourse philosophy class, I'm really psyched at his announcement that his project is going to be releasing templates for AR curricula.

1:45p session: Gameplay as Assessment, Assessment as Empowerment

This was a 15-minute mini-session: but seriously, it was utterly jam-packed with awesomeness. My colleague and co-presenter Emily Lewis of the Pericles Group was sitting in the same row, and we just kept exchanging expressions of astonishment throughout the presentation. Dylan Arena graduated from Stanford and is co-founder of a media/tech company developing an iPad-centric curriculum. He didn't do any plugging, though: the talk was straight-up statistics and psychology. So you claim that your game has educational value? Then you'd damn well better have a rigorous and well-designed way of measuring that purported value. And it had best be valid and reliable - that is, measuring the appropriate construct (and not some other one, like the IQ test or SAT) and doing so consistently over time and over a given population. In Arena's words, "calling it a math game doesn't make it so..."

+1 for turning me on to DragonBox.

3p session: Investing in Education Innovation

I'm really not sure what to say about this session, other than that it was the epitome of "edu-preneurism" - that buzzword-filled and, at least to me, incomprehensible shadow realm which is the ever-present flipside of where I live in the education world. There are plenty of people out there who will tell you how awful and venal and antithetical to true learning these investor-types are - I don't feel the need to ride that particular pony. I went to the session hoping to see for myself whether there was anything noble and principled in the investment side. Honestly, I'm not yet sure how to judge what I heard: my initial takeaway is that educational investors are simply investors. For better, for worse: it's just a whole different way of looking at the world, and one that's supremely alien to me. Educators with great ideas do somehow reach out into this world and make things happen - still, it all kinda reminds me of China Miéville's Embassytown...

Whew! Day 3 was jam-packed. I'll post something about Thursday, Day 4, for the sake of completion. The only things left to talk about are my own session and the final keynote by Bill Gates...

...Where's my SXSWedu Recap?

...I hear your plaintive cries.

A few issues have taken my time and attention immediately since my arrival back home from SXSWedu (not least of which was some weather/travel positively Saturnalian in scope).

I do intend to keep my promise to wrap up my SXSWedu coverage this weekend - it's just going to be tomorrow.

:-)

Day 2, SXSWedu

9a session: EduBrawl!: Mobile, Flipped, Games

Full disclosure: I attended this session B.C. (before coffee). A panel of K12 educators sharing a range of reactions to the current troika of hot edtech ideas. (Yes, I know. They're not new, in any meaningful sense; they're just hot in the mainstream.) The bulk of the attention went to devices in the classroom: school districts struggling with BYOD, classroom teachers facing expectations to use tablets/apps without any training, finding and curating high-quality media resources. Interestingly, represented on the panel was the anti-tech p.o.v.: a teacher from a school which eschews technology in the classroom. At a conference where the enthymemetic assumption is pro-edtech, was including this fellow an attempt to keep a healthy caution in the too-often celebratory edtech conversation - or a fig leaf?

The flipped class model came in a close second, with the panel fielding questions about methodology and implementation. As someone in higher ed, it was really important for me to see where a lot of the K12 community are on these issues: I saw a great deal of enthusiasm for the possibilities; just as much pragmatic/grudging concern over administrative constraints; and a fair amount of fear and trembling over the fact that many teachers simply never get the support they need to learn how to use tech - let alone use it effectively as a tool to teach!

2p session: An InBloom Day in the Life: Data Flow

Ah, analytics. InBloom, one of the major sponsors of this year's SXSWedu, has developed a framework designed to extract data from across multiple institutional systems/databases, in order to generate useful analytics easily - rather than the tedious, often manual, data crunching that is the hidden but necessary task when dealing with SIS, LMS, etc. In high relief here: the capitalist tendencies toward maximization (and, of course, monetization) of individuals' data - I stayed for an hour, and no one mentioned, let alone addressed, issues of privacy or individuals' control of their own data. Maybe they did eventually - but I left early, largely because I wanted to get to...

3p session: MOOCs: Hype or Hope?

Alas, MOOCs being the flavor of the week, the room was SRO by the time I got there, and event staff were strictly managing ingress/egress. I was ultimately not able to get in to this one. So, instead, I dropped in on...

3p session: Not Another Zombie Idea: Customizable, Open Digital Content Transforming Learning

Single-speaker session highlighting the fact that many school systems' assumptions about the value of "big publisher" content rest on myths. When it comes right down to it, OER (open educational resources, for the non-jargoned among us) is already a high-quality source on par with traditional texts - and of course, is far and away superior to traditional sources in multiple other respects:

• cost (of course: a perennial concern for public schools)
• customizability (no copyright concerns - imagine!)
• cross-platform access (no proprietary file formats, thank you very much)

3:45p session: Common Core: A Call for Innovation

Two speakers, one focus. At a time when 22 states have introduced measures which give schools flexibility to spend dollars on print textbooks or on tech media resources; and when even assessment is moving into an online format; the time seems perfectly ripe for being smart about the change. How? Rather than dropping the same tired methods into the shiny new chassis of tech, consider the ramifications if, for example, a school district were to use CC BY materials and texts (from a source like CK-12, f'rinstance), and tweak them however necessary to make them perfectly fitted to the district and aligned with the standards. Textbook costs plummet; students immediately have access to materials in a plethora of media/platforms, including text; the district has 100% control over exactly how the texts/resources look, and what they contain.

Anyway, taking a break now; I'll be heading back to the conference for a 5:30p meet-up session on the topic of ePortfolios. After that...who knows? Yet another awesome vegan eatery? That's what I'm thinkin'.

Day 1, SXSWedu

Here follow some random musings on what I've seen today.

1:30p session: Advances in Open Textbook Publishing Technology

An idea whose time has come. Awhile ago, actually. Although, to be fair, the staying power of "proprietarism" in education is perversely strong: you'd think that educators, if anyone, would be early adopters of technologies and practices which are fundamentally aligned with the free sharing of knowledge. The panelists here are pursuing several OSS projects around the development of ebook publishing platforms with friendly GUIs, based on HTML5 for native cross-platform presentation of media. The coolest stuff imaginable. As per usual, tech outstrips our readiness to deploy it. Key question: how long will it take until a faculty member in a "publish-or-perish" institution will be able to self-publish a CC BY text on archive.org ... and have it count toward her tenure file?

3:00p session: Got Game? Learning Through Play. Seriously.

The more I see of the administrative side of education, the more I'm amazed every time I see people who are - somehow! - able to resist, to any degree, the pressures of commodification. It's particularly acute in re: edtech, which is right about now fresh enough to be exciting, yet mature enough to exploit at scale. The fact that "gamification" has acquired a slimy connotative patina among edtech folk is a case in point. But to get off my soapbox... The panelists here represent companies trying to make a living, accommodate administrators' requirements, and preserve the basic equivalence of learning and playing. All at once. And I have no frakking clue how they do it. But I hope, very deeply, that enough people keep trying.

Today's cool Dungeons & Discourse tidbit: after a session, I met, purely at random, a fellow who complimented me on my shirt. What shirt? Why, the Dresden Codak t-shirt pictured here. And of course, dresdencodak.com is the wonderful webcomic site whose author created, and has graciously permitted me to use, the Dungeons & Discourse idea. (In case you haven't already, go support his awesome Kickstarter, "Tomorrow Girl".)

After posting this, I intend to get a bit of fresh air, and take a leisurely walk to find some tasty vegan food. Later this evening, the first SXSWedu social event!

5 minutes...

...until the official start of the welcoming session of the 2013 SXSWedu conference! I've got myself a 7th-row seat, and am psyched to get going: some fascinating sessions on tap for this afternoon. More later...

"Keep Austin Weird"

...is apparently the unofficial slogan of the city. I like it. :-)

Flew in yesterday, and spent a bit of time relaxing from travel, getting settled in my digs, and finding some amazing culinary options. Food trucks are a relatively recently mainstreamed food option in the US - reasonably well-established now in many major urban areas, but not really so much in my part of the world. So it's with delight that I'm realizing how many there are to sample here over the next few days - and how many offer tasty vegetarian and vegan fare. In fact, last night I visited a 100% all-vegan food truck called Conscious Cravings. If you're ever in Austin, get their blackened tofu wrap. Yum.

Happy March!

Amidst all the excitement about my imminent participation in the SXSWedu conference in Austin, I think it's important not to let fall by the wayside another very cool upcoming event:

Word, Space, Time: Digital Perspectives on the Classical World 
It's an interdisciplinary conference organized by the Digital Classics Association at the State University of New York at Buffalo, taking place 5-6 April.

It'll be particularly fun for me to return to my old Buffalo haunts, and reconnect with some friends and mentors from my grad school days in the Classics and Philosophy departments, as well as former students who are currently at UB!