digital digs

iPhone University?

As reported on AppleInsider and elsewhere, Apple has launched a new program, much like the existing iTunes U with pilots at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and Abilene Christian University (yes, I know, cue the one of these things is not like the others music). One of the primary differences of the iPhone and iPod Touch is the wifi capacity to share files directly. I'm sure there are a variety of technical/security issues that might be associated with this process, but I want to point to two other issues.

spreading iTunes U

We've had iTunes U at Cortland for three semesters now, and its use has grown slowly. There are a number of local reasons for that.

1. The primary interest in iTunes U at Cortland has been from faculty like myself who are interested in having their students produce audio or video podcasts and share those podcasts with their classmates. Perhaps, in the long term, such compositions will become more regular features of academic work, alongside the essay, the blue book exam, and the in-class PowerPoint student presentation. Right now though, this is a fairly small demographic of faculty who have the interest and expertise to incorporate student podcasting, as well as a curriculum in which the time devoted to such practices makes sense.
2. On the other hand, there has been little or no interest from faculty for doing what has become the conventional application of iTunes U: coursecasting. Cortland's faculty, I believe, are fairly typical in their level of technological proficiency. That is to say I believe most of them could learn to podcast if they chose, but very few know how right now. So there's a question of the time involved in learning and then implementing this practice.
3. Finally, there are ongoing concerns about the effect of podcasting on education. If I coursecast my lectures, will students stop coming to class? Do coursecasts improve student performance? Or do they prevent students from learning other important skills?

These are all valid issues. More generally I believe they point toward the way that convergent media networks are reshaping education. And that we need to think on that level as we approach these concerns.

what an online learning system requires

I was reading Michael Feldstein's brief postmortem on his experiences with the SUNY Learning Network and why SLN ultimately decided to move to Angel. As I understand, in a non-technical way, the LMOS project Feldstein and his colleagues were pursuing, the idea was a modular, standards-based approach to online learning. This strikes me as the right direction ultimately, even if the project failed to get off the ground at SLN for various institutional/political/material reasons.

Why?

Well, not to be overly systematic about these matters, but it strikes me that a university curriculum could be mapped across several dimensions in relation to technology in which you could look at each faculty member in terms of

• rate of adoption of new technologies
• integration of discipline-specific applications
• quantitative-qualitative methods of evaluation
• degree of student interaction
• degree of online use (i.e. the amount of data and entries for a course)
• degree of media-intensity (e.g. text-only to video and so on)

I'm sure one could come up with other measures. But for example, one psych professor I know makes extensive use of discipline-specific applications and quantitative methods. However, he's not making heavy use of media or new techs (outside of discipline-specific stuff). He would and is an important client for our online learning system to serve. And really our system, Web CT/Blackboard, is designed to serve him better than it is to serve me.

learning from teaching online

I've been teaching Writing in Cyberspace and Academic Writing online this semester and using iTunes U. Using iTunes U has obviously got me thinking about video and audio I can create for my courses, as well as media my students can produce and share. The obvious first impluse is as a teacher is that you're going to record lectures or maybe get more ambitious and put together video with some better production values. Those things are OK, I guess. And I can put in the extra time to make a video with decent productions values. But if I do that, I'm going to want to use it more than once. Then I'll suddenly find myself in a world of canned content that I've been avoiding as an FTF teacher my whole career. If I were going to pursue that, I guess the best thing I might do then is create a library of media that I can share with my students.

Well, perhaps you can guess where I'm going with this. I've created some specific screencasts for my students to help them with some technical how-to's and maybe I'll create some lecture-like videos yet. But I can draw just as easily on existing material. I know, no great revelation there.

However, it does have me thinking about how one thing leads to another. In part it makes me think about the potential value of public pedagogy, a professional-technical writing channel on YouTube. Sure there'd be a fair amount of worthless stuff as there always is on YouTube. Yet there's also great stuff, as you know.

But more importantly this experience has offered up a palpable feeling of how these things proliferate. I remember when I first learned many years ago that students who have computers at home use computer labs more than students who don't have labs. Now that just seems obvious.

Well, this is obvious too: iTunes U can be a gateway drug. Start thinking about how you can draw networked media into a course and you'll uncover many avenues for doing this.

mobility matters

Is it any surprise that education struggles to adapt to the implications of mobile networks? After all, we work in an environment where many of our colleagues complain if desks are moved out of their "proper" alignment in rows. Just as moving desks into a big circle or rearranging them in small groups creates different communicational dynamics, different netowrks. Ok, it's a very loose analogy, but it's at least a point of reference from the context of everyday teaching.

Mobility matters.

So what's my point? iTunes U and podcasting have a range of uses unto themselves. And as is often pointed out, you don't need an iPod to use them. The result though of this logic is that we don't require students to purchase iPods (though many have them) and that faculty don't need them either. I realize the logistical and budgetary issues here, especially in a developing situation like this one where the technologies are in such a state of flux. However, I want to make an argument for the importance of mobility in this context.

Mobility is about more than convenience. It's more than listening to lectures on the treadmill or bus. It's also about time- and space-shifting pedagogy for your convenience. Can you imagine any potential value in your own courses to being able to offer instruction at a particular time and place outside of the classroom? For example:

• a tour of a particular place
• instructions/reminders for a process (e.g. guidelines for a lab experiment)
• technical support
• gloss on a reading (e.g. read chapter two and then listen to this)

It's not about doing the same old, same old but on foot. It's about imaging whole new practices, like these examples of just-in-time teaching.

Of course that's still just thinking about one-to-many communications. It's analogous to keeping the chairs in rows. Like shifting chairs in the classroom, iTunes U is really about shifting communicational dynamics. Take this potential for just-in-time communication and multiply it by the group-forming networks of Reed's law. Now it's not only the teacher who offers these communications, it's the extensive potential network of students with their overlapping interests and demands.

Right now we're just on the cusp of this. The near future will undoubtedly offer us mobile media devices with wireless download ability and playing from the network when the connection speeds make this reasonable. Sure, right now you need to anticipate your needs and download media to your iPod before you head out. But even in this context, the ability to draw on a network of students and faculty offers many possibilities.

Stepping into podcasting and iTunes U without a mobile component will certainly allow you to do a lot of new and interesting things, but it's mobility that offers the greater challenge to our pedagogical imaginations.

ANT's marching

I've been thinking about Actor-Network Theory in relation to both my teaching and research surrounding iTunes University (iTunes U being a recognizable starting point for the larger subjects of networked media pedagogy and new media rhetoric). In my Writing in Cyberspace class, we've been focusing so far on mobile technologies (via Rheingold's Smart Mobs, which for being for being 5 years old remains amazingly current). While I don't have plans to discuss ANT directly in the course, there's clearly a lot to draw from it.

My overly generalized, outsider understanding of ANT goes something like this. Though there is a very strident protest that ANT is separate from postmodern/poststructural theory, particularly Derrida and Foucault, ANT also begins, as Latour says, as a negative theory, as a critique of sociology. In my view it begins with the deconstruction of several key binaries: nature/culture, scientific/social, and material/symbolic. Now I will admit to making "motivated" readings of Derrida and to not putting a whole lot of value on the literary studies deconstruction industry in the U.S. of the 80s onward. However, these strike me as central elements of Derrida's project. Similarly there have been some bizarre readings of Foucault's notion of power as this omnipresent, mystical force, as Latour notes. Finally, I can't help but read ANT in the context of Deleuze and Guattari, but I'm not going there today.

Anyway, I've encountered multiple responses to iTunes U that might be well-understood as coming out of recognizable constructions of the relationship between society, technoscience, and individuals.

1. socio-ideological determinism: iTunes U functions as what Latour terms an intermediary for the dominant ideological force (i.e. transnational capitalism or whatever you want to name it... the "social"). That is, iTunes U (again as a synecdoche for networked media) serves as a means to control in some fashion the critical/oppositional potential of the university. This would include for example that iTunes U serves as a mechanism that threatens faculty positions (eliminating the need for professors to repeat their lectures year after year), encourage certain consumer practices (buying iPods, using the iTMS), and perparing students to be networked workers. I won't refute these are potential effects. Nor would I disagree that some might see these as desirable effects and pursue them while others see them as nightmares. The more limited point of ANT would simply suggest that it is an error to imagine that these technologies are simply intermediaries transmitting agency/causes that come from elsewhere (a spectral social or ideology for example).
2. technoscientific determinism: I might also term this "pessimistic humanism." It is the belief that technology and/or scientific facts determine outcomes. I know that humanisits often believe that scientists view the world this way. And some likely do. What happens here is that people believe that technology is costing us our humanity, that technology and science threaten humanity. In terms of iTunes U, the common argument, often rehearsed by my students and others, is that when you are tuned into your iPod, you are tuned out of the world around you. The technology itself, and again this spectral "will to technology," determines outcomes. I would not refute that these technologies are redefining humanness and human relationships, just as the plow or the codex or the automobile did in the past. Nor would I refute that some technologies affect us more powerfully than others. However, it is another matter all together to imagine that technologies or scientific facts determine what will happen, as if they were not in themselves products of some larger context.
3. good old-fashioned humanism: the flipside of #2 and the idea that human free will determine what happens. "Guns don't kill people, etc." If you don't like iTunes U, then don't use it. Don't like the iPod? Don't buy one! ANT doesn't even need to go here b/c this position has already been displaced in sociology by the power of "the social." However, I have to go here because this is where many of my students, and others with whom I interact, live.  Typically what happens in academia is that we move students backward through these positions: from 3 to 2 to 1. I have free will. No my free will is threatened by technology. No, it's not technology but the spectral force of ideology and/or the social that shapes "reality."

So that would make ANT position zero? I guess, whatever. In any case, my students are producing podcasts as I write this. We've been using iTunes U somewhat (in fact I should be producing some material right now instead of writing this), but we'll begin in earnest with these productions. I really want to look into all the various "actors" that get involved in these productions. Clearly you can spin out across the culture to Apple and their engineers and so on and so forth, but I guess you have to choose to narrow your focus somehow if for no other reason that at some point you have to declare your research complete and say it's time to write that article. 

So what I'm saying is that I'm going to focus on the more proximate actors in these productions, obviously starting with the students and the technologies available to them, the support they receive, various institutional practices at the College, and then move on from there. The result is that I hope I can uncover some sense of how students actually use iTunes U and podcasting and from that move toward some positive assertions about what I might do next to build on it. That's my research agenda.

On the teaching side, I'm hoping to move students away from some of these positions above. In doing so I don't want to abandon the concerns or criticism they raise but rather do away with the built-in explanations that accompany those concerns. That's what this is about.

promise of podcasting

On Thursday I'll be presenting with my colleagues, Chuck and Paul, about our experience with iTunes University last semester. It's part of the opening college meeting for this semester. We have 15 minutes, so it will be brief (thankfully). I'm taking the last leg of the presentation, and I'll be talking about how what we've done might translate for others and also about the direction for iTunes and networked media.

So here are the major points I want to get across.

1. The faculty should get the sense that iTunes U is easy to use (which it is) and that producing audio, video, screencasts and/or enhanced podcasts is something they and their students can accomplish in technical terms. True, professional grade media is still difficult and expensive to produce, but YouTube and everyday podcasts demonstrate that college faculty and students should be able to produce usable media. In the end it's not any more difficult than learning Web CT.
2. The real challenge lies in determining what the content of such media might be and how it will function in the classroom. The answer to the challenge will differ from discipline to discipline, and it will change as technologies continue to develop. However in general terms one can consider material conditions of the network and the media. Network-wise you have the obvious one-to-many (coursecast) and many-to-one (students turn in media project); then you have many-to-many. You've got some idea of how this might work from course blogs or web ct discussions and so on. Then you have to consider how audio and/or video media offer you something different from text. Again this will be something discipline specific but I can offer a few general examples of many-to-many communication that would work in a number of disciplines:
   --online presentations: have students do enhanced podcasts rather than give powerpoint in class. The obvious advantage is that you don't take up in-class time with presentations. Students are also left with a product that they can include in a portfolio.
   --record group discussions: have students meet in small groups and discuss a series of questions about a reading. This could serve in lieu of small group work in class or provide some starting points for further class discussion.
   --personal podcast: this might work especially well for interns or student teachers. They could offer reflections of their practice and/or possibly video recordings of classroom practice (iTunes U is secure). Either might offer a more intimate understanding of what is going on during such experiences than a more formalized report. These might then be shared among students interning or student teaching during a given semester; it's nice to know you aren't alone sometimes.
   --making student work public: a video of students at work or a student podcast would likely capture an audience that would not choose to read student texts offered online, an audience like members of the campus community or prospective students.
3. Finally though we need to talk about why we need to do this. Clearly as faculty we each need to determine how a technology like iTunes U might function in our teaching. We need to consider how or if iTunes U will help us reach our curricular objectives. That said, we must also recognize that our students will enter a workplace where an increasing number of companies have already made this same determination and have decided that social media will be an important part of the way they do business. In a recent study of the 500 fastest growing private companies, two-thirds noted that social media were very or somewhat important to their business. We already know from the 120 million MySpace users and 12 million American bloggers and 70 million videos watched daily on YouTube that social media constitute a sizable cultural space. In short, as individual faculty or programs we might choose not to integrate networked media into our curriculum--and we may very well have viable intellectual reasons for doing so--but those choices are not without consequence, particularly when they are made in the context of a society that professional and culturally is expanding rapidly into these areas.

In the end, I hope that my audience can leave with the sense that networked media like iTunes U presents significant challenges, but the challenges are not technological, they are disciplinary and pedagogical. In the other words, the challenges exist precisely in the spaces where they have been best trained. Furthermore I hope that they recognize that while they may choose individually to not rise to this challenge, in doing so they only put that burden on the rest of us b/c this is not a challenge that we can choose to ignore as an institution.

Anyway, that's the gist of it. We'll see how it goes.

iPhone, iTunes University, and Higher Education

No doubt you've already seen all the news surrounding the announcement of Apple's iPhone.
As is to be expected, there are varying opinions over what impact iPhone will have, as well as its relative merits as piece of new technology. I'm thinking particularly about implications in education, especially for iTunes U.

Clearly the immediate impact of iPhone is small. After all, it's hard to imagine a singificant portion of students or faculty will have an iPhone in the next year. However, iPhone does give us a glimpse into a new era of networked media. Educause's 2006 Horizon report idenitified developing cell phones as a technology that would break into education in 2008-09. iPhone provides us with some sense of how that might work. Whether or not iPhone itself proves to be the next iPod is not the point. iPhone does give us a sense of how it might be possible to have a workable desktop on a phone. If you can have fully functional web access, then it is not hard to imagine fully-functional web-based appplications. While you might not be editing web-based Photoshop documents on your cell phone, it's not hard to imagine blogging, for example, from a phone (though the tiny keyboard might be the one thing gets me to write shorter posts). It's not hard to imagine creating audio files, editing them with a web-based audio editor, and uploading and/or downloading suche files from iTunes U or any other such site.

So now I'll be harping on a recognizable theme. Let's go back 5-6 years to 2001. iPod's didn't exist. Blogging was around but few people did it. Wikipedia had just begun. So, let's imagine that  the kind of technology we're talking about takes five years to become as widly adopted as iPods, blogs, and wikipedia (twice as long as the Horizon report predicts). That would seem to suggest that over the next five years successful colleges will be ones that have moved to a fully mobile, networked curriculum and pedagogy.

I wonder what that would mean? I don't think it means the end of FTF pedagogy, though I do think it will mean a shift in the role and practice of FTF teaching. I do think it means that colleges and faculty will both need to be more responsive to the broader changing informational environment. That is, we will be less sequestered than we have been. We will need to offer information within the formats, networks, communication practices, and workflow (or playflow?) in which our students operate. Doing so will allow us to build upon their existing literacies and engagement with media.

Really you could almost think about it through the following analogy. The traditional model of the university is based on proprietary information: you can only get the information we have if you come to us, adopt our formats, and meet our requirements. It's questionable whether or not this walled garden approach to education will work into the future.

iTunes U at SUNY Cortland

Chris Widdall and I recently did a webinar for the SUNY Training Center on iTunes U at SUNY Cortland. There were a number of questions about the basic functioning of iTunes U. I've also gotten some questions about this from other folks on our campus.

As such I've created this brief screencast demonstrating how iTunes U works. The video is 640X480, which allows you to see the iTunes application fairly well, but it does mean it won't fit here on this page. As such you can follow the link to watch the clip.

screencast rhetoric

Going back eight years I was part of a pilot program in writing in electronic environments at Georgia Tech. Basically we working trying to figure out how to teach hypertextual, web-based writing in first-year composition. The primary obstacle, as I recall, was the shift from linear argumentation to a non-linear mode of presentation. Clearly it's an issue that we are still working through as we try to imagine the e-book or whatever.

Now as I look at it though, it makes sense to me to begin with recognizing that we rarely read print books in a linear fashion, especially nonfiction ones (though who hasn't skipped to the end of a novel). Hypertext need not preclude linearity but simply offers alternate means to experience the text.

Anyway, I've been thinking more about audio and video this semester. Bringing iTunes University into the curriculum and working in a learning community with video production and digital imaging courses has necessitated this. This has brought a new set of rhetorical challenges. In a sense, we are all so familiar with television that we have a fairly stable sense of genre that we are beginning with. That doesn't mean I think we're trying to create Discovery channel or PBS programming or CNN, but that sense of video documentary is certainly there in the students' minds as they try to imagine their own productions.

However, it does have me thinking about the regular intellectual work of the classroom in the context of video, particularly the English/writing classroom, and to me it is analogous in some respects to the challenges hypertext presented.

For example, let's say I'm teaching a general education intro to lit course. I often teach Frankenstein in this context. I've read many 3-5 page essays on Frankenstein that employ some mode of literary critique--Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, something. Today, I could imagine students producing a website on Frankenstein: a course wiki, a blog covering the reading experience, a linkroll of Frankenstein-related websites, and so on. The intellectual work of such a website is quite different from the "single-authored" essay; it's a network of texts and other media.

To think of video production in the classroom, for me it is necessary to see it through this intermediate step of networked communication. I shudder to imagine a video of a student reading her paper (yikes!), just as I try to avoid the student presentation/read powerpoint slides to the class experience.

The video/screencast must be understood in the context of a network of communications-not as the interpretation of Frankenstein, to continue my example, put as an element in an ongoing interpretive community. The power of video, in my albeit newbie view, is that it necessarily pulls us into the context of the visible world around us. If we contend that reading and interpreting literature continues to have value in our lives, then should we not be able to capture that value with a camcorder?

Obviously you are not going to duplicate the knowledge gained through writing an essay by producing a video. If you want students to learn what they learn through essay writing, then it makes sense to write an essay. The task here is to imagine a different type of knowledge production enabled through a different mode of media composition.