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.

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.

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.

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.

...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!

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!

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 World. ISBN 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:

• The Principles Behind Game-Based Learning
• KQED blog: 10 Surprising Truths About Video Games and Learning
• TED Talk: Tom Chatfield on 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain
• MIT's Education Arcade
• NYU Game Center

Have fun!