Monday, November 18, 2013

My First Rant! on Higher Ed & Tech Literacy.

Frame 1: Tech/Edu. So if you know me, you know that part of what I do is outreach, professional development, training, support for my faculty colleagues in using tech - everything from social media to ePortfolios to our LMS to open educational resources... you name it. I love working directly with my fellow scholars and teachers, and having a direct impact in supporting what they do. When I can show someone how to embed a video link from the campus library directly into an assignment, or manage office hours with an online calendar, or build an ePortfolio template for their departmental majors, that's good stuff. I can see, with my own eyes, specific cases where using technology helps.

Frame 2: Bigger-Picture. I work at a public liberal arts college, and that means something to me. It means that I take seriously higher education's obligation to help students become something very particular - adult citizens who have the mental habits, and the content background, to be informed and effective agents and decision-makers in any given field they may choose to pursue as adults, whether that be agriculture, business, scientific research, academia, medicine, advertising, or public policy. (I would argue that this last is especially relevant and central to the liberal arts mission historically; but that's a little beside the present point, so ignore it if you like.)

Why pay so much attention to the importance of "technology literacy" for our students? Well, there's a pretty clear prima facie reason: regardless of what field you care to examine, there's an ever-increasing integration of technology within that field, meaning that success in any given pursuit necessarily involves technology skill as part of the necessary preconditions. Publishing? Growing soybeans? Arts management? Surgery? Yeah, you're going to have to know how to use technology effectively - and we're not just talking about using Microsoft Word and email attachments, either. As William Pannapacker paraphrases Frederich Buechner, we need to help our students match their passions to the world's needs.

What are some of the most noteworthy issues current in our society - the sorts of issues we hope our students are prepared to engage effectively?

  • Federal government: The U.S. Congress holds hearings on the status of a broken website
  • Public policy: Edward Snowden initiates international debate on whistleblowing, privacy, surveillance
  • Education: MOOCs, OER, competency-based learning
  • International commerce: Bitcoin, algorithmic-driven stock trading
  • Intellectual property: the Trans-Pacific Partnership's IP terms about DRM

Is it important for our students to have something to say about any of these things? Yes? A meaningful and informed opinion on healthcare.gov? Well then, I suppose that they'd better have the first clue about what makes for a well-designed and functional website, hadn't they? Oh, you want to make a robust case for legislation preventing government surveillance? Do you know the basics of network architecture, or security, or how data packets move from your iPhone to mine?

Frame 3: Is Our Professors Learning? Higher education, as a whole, seems slowly to be acknowledging that this kind of literacy is as properly within its purview as the other, traditional varieties of literacy. (And, in fact, if I were being careful, I'd be talking about multiple literacies here - technology literacy, information literacy, web literacy, data literacy...) And certainly there are pockets of scholarship and research embracing these literacies - just look at the explosive growth of digital humanities generally, or professional organizations and events like HASTAC, THATCamp, and NITLE.

It's great that higher education is professing its recognition of, and commitment to, providing these literacies as a baseline for any given undergraduate student, regardless of major or field, STEM or humanities. And it's great, too, that as time goes on, we're going to see more and more young academics hired into the academy with these technology literacies as a given part of their academic skillsets, and their pedagogical and research experiences. And it's great that higher education is providing support and professional development for faculty who don't bring technological literacy to the table. 

At least, it's great in theory.

Someone named "Greg" commented, in response to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, published November 15, about a tech experience of his:
I didn't pursue it and was not willing to share the fact that I have no concept of what a broken link is, why it is important to me, and why as a faculty member there would be an expectation by anyone that I would know how to fix it. We might as well have been talking about magic beans.
I wish I could say that this shocked me. Unfortunately, it didn't. It was right in line with my own experiences: as I've mentioned elsewhere, at my campus I'm several times more likely to work with a colleague who needs help creating an email attachment than with someone who knows CSS.

Many institutions would reply that they provide something like a Center for Teaching and Learning, some on-campus body to provide faculty with professional development opportunities. I'm not knocking this - I work in my college's Center for Academic Technology! - but let me ask you this:
If we seriously want students who are deeply-versed in technology and information literacies, will they gain that depth of skill, being taught by faculty who sat in an optional 1-hour workshop called "Basics of Social Media in the Classroom"?
My sense is that the typical such Center does a great deal of intro-level development and training. (And, in all honesty, a fair amount of remedial training too.) I find it pretty scary to think of these issues in terms of "literacy" - because if we extend that metaphor, then higher education has a whole lotta barely-literate faculty. And I don't really have a good answer for what to do about that.

As usual, no answers, only questions (with occasional rhetorical flourishes). But I'd love your thoughts.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Twitter vs Zombies 3: #safezones and #zapbites and #brains, Oh My.

Any readers of this blog are already familiar with #TvsZ - I've participated in two iterations
already, and each time I've had a blast and met great people. This weekend, I've been involved in Round 3... and while RL has meant that my participation has been segmented and unpredictable, I have to say that I'm glad to see the enthusiasm and planning that have made this round more than just a repeat of the past two.

Let's start with the rules. This time around, there've been some creative new parameters to the gameplay, giving unexpected advantages to both humans and zombies alike. By encouraging players to expand their media footprint beyond the single medium of Twitter, rules like #zapbite and #safezone lend further credence to the premise that TvsZ is something a bit beyond a fun flash-mob digital experience (though there's no doubt it's that too) - it's about experiencing and learning digital literacies in some of the most engaging ways imaginable. :-)

Hand-in-hand with the ever-developing ruleset, though, is an important parallel strength of the environment: the backchannel G+ community, where communication can happen freely (that is, without in-game consequences) so that the community of players can resolve issues, questions, and disputes as they arise. Anytime smart, passionate people start getting competitive, there's always likely to be the chance of tension - and I think it's been a strength of the game that, instead of falling back on a top-down "referee" model, we've been (imperfectly, but always with good will) doing our best to reach consensus.

One of the constants in the #TvsZ experience has been the fun, creative environment it fosters - giving free rein to a bunch of geeky, creative types to do something fun together! In that spirit, my own contribution this round has been a lighthearted pop zombie love song...

"Eat Somebody" on Soundcloud

Blog posts that count as fortresses against the depradations of the zombie horde; picture posts as weapons with which to stun an advancing member of the undead; and a just plain fun zombie music Popcorn medley. Who says the zombie apocalypse isn't fun?

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Nugae Inutiles

(Apologies to Dr. Merrick.)

Some pleasant things I'm enjoying in the interstices of the busy times...sharing with the world, as is the blogging custom, on the off chance that some one of you may also enjoy them.

1. To Be or Not to Be: That Is The Adventure, by Ryan North. Published by BreadPig, originally a Kickstarter, now available for the general public. A "choosable path" adventure version of Hamlet. You don't have to be Hamlet - you can play as Ophelia if you like, or even King Hamlet. This is truly Awesome Sauce.

2. Persian Letters, by Montesquieu. A delightful melange of social commentary, political satire, and philosophical analysis. I can't believe no one ever made me read this in school.

3. In Treatment, season 2. HBO series set in the office of therapist Paul Weston; each episode is a single session with a patient. Compelling portrayal of the complexities of human relationships.

4. Girl Genius. Webcomic combining multiple tropes well: the mad genius, the steampunk (though the authors
eschew that label as inaccurate, preferring "gaslamp fantasy"), the rollicking adventure. I absolutely advise you to start at the very beginning, else you'll be very confused.

5. Gone Home. Very cool, brand-new video game. Just reviewed in the NY Times on 18 August. Available for Linux, Mac, PC. Absorbing gameplay, and a slew of memories from the '90s. It's games like this (and Braid and [eventually!] Miegakure...) that give the lie to the foolish generalization that video games are all about mindless violence.


Enjoy!

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Take a deep breath: we're about to plunge back in.

It's mid-August, when a young academic's fancy turns to thoughts of ...

THE FALL SEMESTER.

In my day-job capacity in my college's Center for Academic Technology, I've been here all summer, supporting various programs around campus, from new student orientation to summer sessions to the LEAD Academy. But life gets quite a bit busier as my faculty colleagues start heading back to campus (mentally and physically), prepping for the start of the next academic cycle.

For the first time in quite a while, I myself won't be teaching in Fall 2013 (the seminar I was hoping to do didn't look like it would attract enough registration), so there's a fairly large chunk of time and attention I can now divert to my tech-side work with faculty, particularly in effective use of Canvas for online course support. There've been a large number of changes since people logged out of their courses in May, and one of my major goals is to encourage everyone to pay attention to the changes, rather than assuming things are the same as last year.
(By the way, that's a hard habit to break, since our last LMS notoriously didn't "do" updates, except maybe once per year. People are not yet fully used to the idea of dynamic [dare I use the buzzword "nimble"?] SaaS. Updates and fixes every three weeks? Unheard of! Absurd!)
Another work goal I have for myself is to work more closely with our campus's Freel Library. Our Digital Services librarian Pamela has been doing fantastic work developing and promoting resources at Freel, and I want to do my part to help. It helps that our respective resource-sets naturally overlap, and we have, in fact, already done some mutually-supporting development in the past year. "More of that" is the watchword. Watch-phrase. Whatever.

Anyway, I've got some fun projects in the planning stage too. One involves organizing a campus screening of the brand-new documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply; another is a panel discussion about Henrietta Lacks, hooking in to the college's First-Year Experience reading of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; another is, of course, my ongoing work with Dungeons & Discourse.



In closing, a goofy video I made this past weekend for our faculty, and which caused a little spike in my Twitter traffic yesterday...

Friday, August 9, 2013

A New Thing.

I'm going to be testing out a new idea on Twitter - Zella's TechTips, a regular tweet in which I'll mention a piece of software, or a practice, I'd recommend to my colleagues who teach. Sometimes, I have a small nugget or comment to share, and posting it here at the blog seems like a bit of overkill - so we'll see how the cross-platform thing goes!

By the way, I already posted (just a couple of minutes ago!) my first Zella's TechTip - follow me at @gpetruzella if you want to see how this plays out, or the other random things I tweet. (Btw, I forgot to do this on today's inaugural tweet, but henceforth, I'll be using the #zellastechtip hashtag.)

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Augh.

Hmmm... I can just imagine the harrumphing of those who decry the online world - "even writing a blog post is too long-form for today's scholars? O tempora! O mores!"

Yes, I've been too distracted to set myself down and post here for the past two months. I've been doing a fair amount of other things, including micro-blogging (does that count? does anyone actually refer to Twitter that way anymore?) and, you know, actual job-type stuff too.

But in case you are that reader who was actually looking forward to Part 3 of my last posted series... I may yet share my own workflow at some point, but if you're looking for excellent information about, and tools for, managing your own online footprint, may I point you at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)'s Guide to Practical Privacy Tools, a very nice, organized starting-point.

Friday, June 7, 2013

Surveillance, Privacy, and Openness, Part 2.

Well, the hits just keep on coming, don't they?

Yesterday I asked whether the ethical failure of the NSA's actions lies not with the bare fact that they collect (and analyze) information about us which we call 'private', but rather with the imbalance between the level of information they have as contrasted with us - an imbalance of information that translates to an imbalance of power. I proposed that

1. Our aim should be to equalize the power imbalance by equalizing the information imbalance.
2. Equalizing this imbalance could happen in one of two ways:
(a) Government's access to information is reduced, so that they know as little about us as we know about them.
(b) Citizens' access to information is increased, so that we know as much about them as they know about us.
3.  It is unrealistic (and maybe even undesirable for other reasons) to reduce the information available to government and/or other players on the world stage.

The best strategy, then, on my analysis, seemed to flip the usual logic of arguments about privacy - i.e., that we must fight to make the government as ignorant of us as we are of them - proposing, instead, that we should have a "citizens' PRISM", some way of increasing our knowledge rather than restricting theirs.

But this is a ridiculous oversimplification. By its very nature, a government has abilities and resources for analyzing vast quantities of data which are not equally available to any individual citizen. If you handed me full access to Google's servers, I wouldn't have the first clue what to do with it. And even if I did, I don't have the computational resources to perform any robust analytics on the data. A very interesting issue: most of us simply don't realize, or have at best a hazy idea about, the serious difference between having data about an individual and having data about people on a massive scale. If you're a classic science fiction fan, think about Hari Seldon, and his explanation of psychohistory via his two axioms:
  • the population whose behaviour is modeled should be sufficiently large
  • the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses
This presents a huge problem for my initial, naive conclusion: how can there be any serious parity, or equalizing, between the information (data + analysis) available to a government and that available to an individual? That is, how can we ever make 2(b) true?

At least, one might argue, we know that we have mechanisms which work toward 2(a) - reducing what government knows, relative to us. My next post will take a little tour through my own personal application of some of these mechanisms.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Surveillance, Privacy, and Openness.

The story which The Guardian broke late yesterday reveals that the NSA has been collecting metadata in
bulk - that is, about the general public - from Verizon's records. It's hard to know what sort of commentary would suffice in the face of a revelation like this; the scale is breathtaking.

A question occurs to me, though, that takes me in a different direction than the standard conversations that typically arise in the wake of such revelations. What, precisely, is it that's wrong with the NSA surveillance? Is it the fact that they're collecting information which should be private - or is it actually a different issue altogether?

I ask such a question because I'm trying, basically, to figure out whether two beliefs I hold are consistent:

  1. I have a legal (and moral) right to keep information about myself private (i.e., to control the privacy/publicity of my own information).
  2. There are good practical (and moral) reasons to prefer that information, in general, be public and openly accessible.

What's objectionable about the NSA's behavior in this case? What if it's not the bare fact that they have my (and your) telephony metadata, but rather, the fact that they have ours but we don't have theirs? Perhaps, at base, the problem here is the imbalance of access to information, rather than the access itself.

Given that we're not likely to gain a comparable degree of access to the NSA's telephony metadata, it's not prudent to expect a Shangri-La of free and open information access anytime soon. And so in practice, the likeliest path to redressing that imbalance (since raising the level of citizens' access to information is unlikely) is to lower the level of government access to information. This amounts to the same things we're used to hearing - that we must be vigilant about restricting the degree of government access to our information.

However, I think it's critical to make a distinction in the conceptual justification for this action, else we end up fetishizing information privacy for its own sake - and in so doing, misidentifying the locus of the ethical problem. And when we start trying to think about issues of information privacy/openness in other contexts, we risk starting from a false premise, and as a consequence not being able to identify consistent grounds to support our intended results.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Thinking Politically.

"If I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago and done no good to either you or to myself." - Socrates, Plato's Apology 31d-e

And yet.

I'm sure that somebody somewhere is thinking deeply about what it means to be a private citizen in a globally-connected environment. Has the meaning of the term changed since Socrates' day? Of course. In what ways? What degree of privacy is our cultural baseline, when anyone with a Twitter account and a few well-turned phrases can be a Cleon or an Alcibiades or a Cicero, instantly swaying public opinion and even policy? When applying the lever of social media to traditional actions like protests instantly magnifies a thousandfold the import of a private symbolic statement? Is the distinction between 'private citizen' and 'public figure' as clear as once it was? Do one's own private choices carry a more magnified resonance now than they used to? Does this carry an increased moral responsibility to weigh the potential consequences?

A great many conversations in which I participate these days acknowledge a certain subset of starting-points (depending upon the interlocutors' focus and interests) taken from the basket below:

  • American higher education, as a system, is increasingly failing its core purpose: to educate.
  • American higher education is increasingly unjust - inequality of access, adjunctification, debt, etc.
  • Network technologies [already have/can/might/will] radically change something essential about current and future generations - their expectations, their methods of learning, etc.
  • Used wisely, network technologies [already have/can/might/will] vastly improve American higher education.
  • Used wisely, network technologies [already have/can/might/will] prepare students for fully informed and capable citizenship in an increasingly tech-reliant civilization.
  • Done thoughtlessly or naively, introducing network technologies to American higher education is a dangerous entry-point for corporate and/or political interests to increase their influence/control over the system.
  • Introducing network technologies to American higher education is a way for policy activists to appear to be fixing education, while actually setting the parameters for the weakening of the public system, in favor of a privatized vision of education.

As a philosopher, I got to thinking about Socrates' well-known quotation when I realized recently that I am starting to make choices, and take actions, which don't trace a clear path through the issues in these conversations about educational technology and public policy. I'm used to treating conceptual clarity and consistency as realizable goals (huzzah for my training in logic and analytic philosophy generally!); to realize that the very magnitude of complexity of this system precludes such purity of analysis, and necessarily entails conceptual compromise, is a hard thing to accept.

I wonder if I'm simply being lazy - it may be perfectly possible (if difficult) to maintain the complete clarity of one's principles in practice. On the other hand, there may be wisdom in Barney Frank's words, and what I'm experiencing may be the recognition that I'd rather not "luxuriate in the purity of [my] irrelevance" ...

No answers here, just muddy questions.

Friday, May 31, 2013

...Aaannd, We're Back.

The end of a semester is always a bit of a hectic time for me. This is hardly true of me alone; but I sometimes feel as though I'm uniquely bad at managing my time. I tend to drop off the map a bit as tasks and obligations pile up - hence the month hiatus from my dear blog.

There were certainly some noteworthy events happening in RL during this past month...

... not least of which was the annual MCLA TechFest, a day-long mini-conference for faculty to present, and attend presentations, about interesting, relevant, and timely topics in technology. My department (Academic Technology) plans and hosts this event, which is a fairly hefty commitment. We've posted some PowerPoints and other informational resources from the presentations - feel free to check it out. As we round up materials from more of the presenters, we'll add them to what's there.
Dungeons & Discourse, my pet edugaming project, caught the interest of the aptly-named Awesome Foundation, which gave it a micro-grant. I'm planning on developing the game over the summer, with the aim of having a playable standalone level to demo in the fall... who knows where it'll go next?
Oh yeah, my book was published too! Durable Goods, my treatment of the problem of external goods in ancient Greek ethics, is now out there on the open market ... watch out, David Baldacci!

Looking forward to two conference presentations this month - one in Park City, UT, and one in Memphis, TN. Also doing a webinar, sponsored by Inside Higher Ed and Faculty eCommons, on game-based learning. I will be blogging in the near future about this last.

I guess that's all the news that's fit to print right now. I hope all my New England friends find a way to stay cool this weekend!

Monday, April 22, 2013

Recap: THATCamp Games 2013

THATCamp Games:
epic win.
I drafted this post while flying back to Albany NY from Cleveland, where I participated in the second THATCamp Games unconference, hosted by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of the unconference, imagine an event which combines the scholarly rigor of an academic conference, the energy and focus of a trade show, and the gloriously unselfconscious enthusiasm and fun of a sci-fi convention. THATCamps happen all over the country, with different topics and themes, so check out their main site if you want to find out more: chances are good there'll be one in your part of the country, on a topic relevant to your discipline.

I attended last year's (inaugural) THATCamp Games at the University of Maryland University College, and learned an incredible amount about game design in education - just at the time I was about to teach my own Dungeons and Discourse intro philosophy course for the first time. The experience was powerful enough that I knew I'd be back again; and indeed, I planned to attend this year as soon as the dates and location were announced. But the plot thickens: the organizers contacted me and asked me to run a workshop on the first day. How cool: not only was I attending again, but now I had the chance to share some of my own ideas and experiences. My workshop addressed the topic of using an LMS as an edugaming platform, something which has a broad appeal to faculty who work within such software.

The range of sessions ran across three tracks - Course Hacks, Digital Hacks, and Cardboard Hacks - from RPG design for courses to gaming assessment to physically constructing board games to brainstorming opportunities for growing institutional support for edugaming. Our keynote speaker, Prof. Anastasia Salter, presented a fascinating talk on the history and future directions of the field, and I got the chance both to reconnect with colleagues I'd met last year and to meet and collaborate with many new colleagues with similar and/or complementary interests and projects.

One of the first cryptic clues.
Lest this start sounding like a generic panegyric to a humdrum conference, however, let me remind you that the theme was Games ... and we surely did practice what we preach. There was a great deal of time, space, and opportunity built into the event - quite intentionally! - so that we could run a rousing 3-hour session of Battlestar Galactica, or a quick half-hour of Pandemic. And overlaying the entire event was a mysterious ARG-style meta-game, with an ancient threat, a mysterious Order, and cryptic clues scattered across multiple media, from videos to flyers to tweets to exhibits in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

I've said it before, and it bears repeating: deep engagement and motivation are exactly the things we always say we want in our classes - and these are exactly the things we can approach effectively by understanding and applying game design principles to what we do. I can't wait to start planning for my next course using what I've learned from my colleagues at this year's THATCamp Games!

Monday, April 1, 2013

Pesce d'aprile!

...Okay, so the title is really only there because of today's date, rather than any relevance to the content of this post. :-)

Game-based learning (#GBL) is the idea that we can (a) identify and articulate the elements which make a game successful, compelling, and fun, and (b) apply those elements in our practice of teaching and learning.


What this is not: Oregon Trail or Number Munchers. Now, I loved playing those two games, but in all honesty, they were simply fun games which happened to involve some of  the same content as math and history classes. They weren't designed to teach - and I certainly didn't learn from them! Neither of these games would have been in any way appropriate as the basis for a curriculum.


It's all about structuring content to maximize engagement and motivation - and primarily intrinsic motivation (though careful use of extrinsic motivation has a place too!). We have no problem acknowledging that we want to achieve these goals when we teach. But it's a leap for a lot of us to realize that using gameful practices is a realistic and authentic means to do so.


I recommend two three books for any colleague who's interested in getting a general introduction to the topic of GBL:



  • Gee, J. P. (2003). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-6538-7
  • McGonigal, Jane (2011). Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the WorldISBN 978-1-5942-0285-8
  • Prensky, Mark (2001). Digital Game-Based Learning. ISBN: 978-1-5577-8863-4

Of course, so much of the ongoing and contemporary scholarship on this topic is happening in primarily electronic media. For my colleagues who are a bit more comfortable with, and open to, taking seriously research conducted outside the forest of dead trees, try some of these:



Have fun!

Monday, March 25, 2013

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.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

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.

Friday, March 15, 2013

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.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

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!

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

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?

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

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...)



Sunday, March 10, 2013

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 MiĆ©ville'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...

Saturday, March 9, 2013

...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.

:-)

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

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)

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'.

Monday, March 4, 2013

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.