digital digs

Web 2.0 and related applications in teaching

Now following on the prior post in a more practical vein. Here's a list of web 2.0 things I have used and/or will be using, with brief annotation.

So here are things I have used.

• Typepad for personal and course blogs
• Blogger for free personal student blogs
• PBwiki and Wikispaces for course wikis
• Delicious for sharing links with classes
• iTunesU for sharing secure media
• YouTube and Google Video for more open sharing of video
• Second Life for real-time group activities and exploration

Here's what I'm planning on adopting this year

• Ning to build community between courses
• Microblogging--not sure which app yet. Probably twitter.
• Seesmic--this will depend on the availability of web cams for students, though you can buy one for $30.

Spaces on the sidelines

• Facebook: I added the Courses app. I have friended students in the past. I will converse with students there if they initiate it. However I don't want to invade their space here.
• Flickr: I just haven't done much with sharing photos in my courses.
• Slideshare: this seems like a good option, so it's on my mind.
• Skype: thinking about this for office hours as an option. I usually use IM.

microblog compositions

Following up on my earlier post on microblogging, I saw a thread on the TechRhet listserv regarding this subject: essentially how might one use Twitter in the writing classroom?

The general consensus in the thread was that there was a potential to teach concision in the 140 character limitation of the tweet. There was also extensive comparison to the haiku. Well, a tweet may sound like its a haiku on the classic subject matter of nature or spring, but that's about as far as it goes.

Writing a short message is not the same as writing a concise message or a haiku (btw, I would not characterize haikus as concise; there's a different aesthetic @ work there).

Fortunately our students don't need to be taught how to write short messages. They probably write more than their instructors. Obviously the 140 character limit reflects the important connection between microblogging and SMS. And as we know the point of texting is not to be concise! In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. In microblogging we say anything and everything b/c it's quick, easy, and free.

A couple other observations...

disqus and seesmic

So I am trying an experiment right now making use of these two applications. It should now be possible for y'all to leave video comments on this blog. Now I don't know if you want to, but I thought it might be cool. If it works I'll probably try to integrate this into my online course in the fall.

What Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Rene Descartes, Socrates, Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen, and I all have in common

Yes, apparently we are all "engineer" personality types. Finally I had a semi-legitimate reason to put the Olsen twins on my blog. Now I'll really see some web traffic! BTW, it seems that fictional characters can also be personality types and that I am joined by an android (Data from Star Trek) and a cyborg (Seven of Nine, from Star Trek: Voyager). [side note: Brent Spiner, the actor who played data, is also an engineer. Talk about typecasting, huh?]

And about that introverted thing (said the blogger): it's not that I'm shy. It's just that I can't think of a good reason to talk to you ;)

One more on suburbia: Walk Score 18.

Found this amusing Google mash-up following CogDog's tweets, Walk Score. It searches for business, schools, libraries, etc within walking distance of any address and then hands a score on a scale from 1-100.

My score? 18, which equals Driving Only. Well, you can actually walk to the Wal-Mart superstore from here, which has a McD's and a hair salon, so where else exactly do you need to go anyway? Of course it makes little sense to walk there ... cause how are you going to lug back a six-month supply of toilet paper, an industrial-size bottle of dishwasher detergent, 10 cubic feet of decorative mulch, and the latest DVD release?

Helpfully there is a Border's "nearby" (six miles) and you only have to cross two interstates and a giant mall parking lot to get there.

A Second Education

Yes, I know. There's been a lot of hype about Second Life. I am skeptical as well. I know there are some folks who never metaverse they didn't like (cue rim shot). I find myself in a situation much like I did (and still somewhat do) with podcasting and video. That is, what does it mean for me? How does it relate to the teaching of professional writing and/or my own research in new media (mobile) convergent media networked rhetoric and composition?

The answer to the latter may seem fairly obvious, or at least easier to justify than the former. But to answer you need to decide whether you think SL is the "next big thing" or a "fad" or "an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment." Or maybe you don't. Maybe you can just study it and see what happens. That's the position I'm taking. It's also the position I'm taking in regard to my teaching.

There seems to be a sense, one that I encounter on discussions lists, that we need to make judgments in advance of study. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, youtube, second life: it's all just hype (or not); it's just amateurish drivel (or not); it's corporate consumerism (or not) and so on. Perhaps some day we might ask such questions about the "academic discourse" we commonly teach in writing courses: how valuable is that stuff? to whom? At least we'd have some experience and knowledge on which to found our judgment (as if it were even conceivable in our discipline that we could reach the conclusion that such writing shouldn't be taught).

But I digress.

One thing I have realized in working with iTunes U is that I have discovered answers to many questions about the value of audio and video to my work. I regularly find worthwhile media on the web to share with my class. I realize now that I would not want to teach a solely text-based online course. I've also realized that in many instances I can discover existing media content that makes more sense to use than creating my own. Just as I don't write my own textbooks, there's not a whole lot of sense to creating my own media, except in some specific instances. Those specific instances are mostly cases where I am responding directly to student concerns or course issues rather than speaking generally about a concept or course topic.

I'm sure, in the future, I will create some of my own media to share with others and use in my class, but I don't foresee a future where the course media are primarily created by me.

I'm guessing a similar thing will be true in SL. Yes, I can have virtual office hours and meet with students. Yes I suppose I could give a virtual lecture and then discuss the matter with the audience (the discussion being the valuable part and the reason you'd do it in SL). Yes, my students could meet and collaborate there. And yes, SL offers one way of presenting a media installation of student work (btw, the cool thing about doing it this way rather than the standard web page portfolio is that you hold an opening and everyone comes and looks at stuff and discusses it).

But the thing I'm thinking is really of value is the opportunity the SL might offer for my students to work, in public, with others: on projects for SL, on projects for the web, and/or on other projects for the real world. It's also another place where students can encounter knowledge. For example, let's say I want to discuss Henry Jenkin's theories of convergent media. We can read Jenkins' book or other essays. We can read his blog. We can listen to an audio podcast or watch a video. But we can also maybe go and see him speak in Second Life.

Anyway, I'm guessing I'll be finding out what works and what doesn't.

virtually working or working virtually

I just finished reading Play Money, Julian Dibbell's account of his time spent doing Real Money Trading in Ultima Online. It's a quick read and interesting text that combines his personal experiences and thoughts are combined with a good discussion of a variety of intellectual foundations: economics, ludology, computer science, and so on. I'm looking forward to discussing the text in my Writing in Cyberspace course.

I've never been a big proponent of virtual reality. I suppose if you want to be an elven mage or a starship captain, then VR is the place to be. Now, don't get me wrong: there were certainly times in my life when I would have loved to have spent time doing such things... and did, just in the ol' role-playing game sense (yes, I was one of those kinds of geeks.). I played Ultima in the 80s, long before it went online and became an economic force larger than that of some nations. I remember when VRML came out, and I even have spent some time teaching in an (albeit two-dimensional) VR classroom at Georgia Tech in the late nineties.

The thing I could never figure out is... why? Obviously I could understand the motivation of networked communication, but I never saw the advantage of undertaking that communication between 2-D or 3-D avatars with talk balloons or what have you. Of course that was also in the days of dial-up.

Nowadays there are plenty of motivations, most of them with $ signs attached. There's the RMT economy associated with online gaming and the business opportunities of Second Life. However much of it is tied to the importance of play and sociality in work and commerce. That is, I can go to eBay or Amazon and shop, but perhaps I would rather wander a virtual mall with friends? Maybe. I can work and communicate with colleagues and students by a variety of means but perhaps meeting in Second Life reintroduces the occassion (place and time) and play of learning or collaboration that is absent from other online learning contexts.

Dibbell does a good job of lightly covering the issues of work and play from the Puritain work ethic through to the Situationists. I know some (Marxists) resent that idea that anyone might have fun while they are working and imagine any such experience purely as an example of being duped by ideology. I'm not going there today (I spent a lifetime there one year in grad school.). That said, I think the balance of work and play, the tension between them, is familiar to pedagogy and writing.

It's certainly familiar for my work. Let's see if this sounds familiar. Exert labor in physically repetitive task (e.g. typing). Produce strictly virtual product (e.g., copyrighted media, intellectual property) that has almost no conventional marketplace value (i.e., you're not going to profit from selling it in a store) but has potentially significant value in a reputation economy (i.e., your discipline) that might lead indirectly to money for you (e.g., tenure, promotion, etc.). Obviously the parallels to an RMT trader are rough, but I think one can see the similarities.

LIke a gamer, I can conceive of my job (the job of any academic) as never-ending. One can spend endless hours tinkering with courses, researching, writing, proposing, etc. Why am I writing this on a Sunday morning? Is it for profit? (I wish.) Is it for reputation? Maybe, but only if I'm feeling especially delusional this morning. Is it for play? for fun? I suppose there are worse perversions to admit to than saying that I enjoy doing this "work." Of course you say it can't really be work unless one is getting paid for it. And no one is paying me to do this. No one at my college cares whether I do this or not. Well the sad fact is that no one really pays me to do research either. I mean now that I am tenured there is virtually no finanical incentive to continue publishing. The raises I may get from publishing are pretty negligible. I could make a lot more money if I just shelved research altogether and put that writing time into freelance or RMT like Dibbell for that matter or any number of other potentially profitable activities.

I guess that's where professional ethics comes into the conversation, and ethics certainly belongs in a conversation about the intersections between work and play. I suppose I could say that I am obligated to do research, but I can tell you right now that little work of value will come out of such obligation. Thinking about ethics as obligation leads quickly to a politics of resentment.

No... this has to be about play, about the deconstruction of the play-work binary if you like. I know this turns the Marxist's stomach, but maybe it shouldn't, as in a way it's a logic extension of Marx. Industrial, bourgeois capitalism begins in the market and the factory but then it expands into every aspect of life. Perhaps the play-work binary was a historical-ideoogical reflection of the incompletion of modernization. Play denoted activities that lay outside of capitalist exchange. They were, by definition, useless, even though they might be meaningful in other social ways. Now there are no other social ways. Now all activities are capitalist activities (even while holding other meanings as well). As a result, now we can go back and look at traditional work activities and see the potential for understanding them as play as well. Once one sets aside the demand for Taylorist efficiency, one can recognize a long history of play interspersed with work.

Anyway, I know I said I wasn't going to go there, but, well, it was fun (I know, sick, huh?)

Online learning and the academic union

Michael Feldstein has an interesting post about the Common Cartridge practice recommended at Educause. Basically the idea of the Common Cartridge is to develop a standards-based learning management system practice. That is, let's say you're a professor who moves from one job to another, or more pointedly, you're an adjunct who teaches at three different institutions in the same semester. Wouldn't it make sense if you could move the course you developed at one institution to another? After all, it is supposed to be your intellectual property, right?

Feldstein suggests, and I agree, that unions should get involved in protecting their members' intellectual property and help them make it more portable by encouraging institutions to work with learning management systems that support standards-based online learning.

Furthermore, this practice is also in the interest of the institutions if they do not wish to find themselves beholden to a particular vendor. It should be clear by now that walled gardens are not the way to go. This doesn't mean that you have to go open source, but it's a step toward recognizing that the future of higher education lies in collaboration.

While they're at it, unions might have a thing to say about Blackboard as well. From my perspective, it seems that Blackboard threatens the integrity of higher education, engages in business practices that run counter to academic ethics, and perhaps even undermine academic freedom.

Video and the teacher continued

Inside HigherEd has picked up on the YouTube story I mentioned earlier with students videoing teachers and publishing them on the web.

A couple of interesting points to pick up on, mostly from the comments that follow the article. The article notes

Among the issues being raised [on my Blog and Yellow Dog] are whether this form of expression — however upsetting to faculty members — is an example of students acting on their feelings and expressing themselves, something composition instructors in particular tend to encourage.

Hmm... well, OK, though that doesn't quite come out the way I meant it. That would tend to suggest that composition instructors are somehow encouraging this type of behavior. I don't think that's the case. What I meant, anyway, is that in teaching writing and literacy (which is more than just the responsibility of composition, btw), we tell our students that communication is power, the ability to put forward an argument and share it with others is at the heart of intellectual life and democratic society. So here are students doing just that, putting forward an argument.

Now, we may not like the argument they are making. We may also respond to their argument by questioning its ethos. In short, we think they could make a better argument. However, how do we respond to the following questions:

• Should students be able to question the practices and content of the courses they take?
• Should they be able to engage in this questioning in a public forum?
• Should they be able to offer video evidence in support of their argument?

These are all troubling questions, though I think most teachers would say "yes" to the first. The second was never really an issue until now. I remember student protests as an undergrad at Rutgers. I remember protesting the English department's decision not to tenure Amiri Baraka, but that was as public as you could get: a local, student protest. Now local issues can be globalized (think locally, act globally), and the university is no longer the sequestered space it once was. Activity in the classroom can be captured on a cell phone videocam and published on the web before the class ends.

Certainly part of the student response is ideologically-motivated, mostly conservative students and their perception of "liberal bias." But much of the talk on Inside Higher Ed and elsewhere is about representations of teacher outbursts or student boredom and other attempts to represent teachers as foolish: to disempower teachers in one way or another. And even the best teacher can be made to look foolish if captured at the right/wrong moment and edited.

There is a question as to whether such secretive videotaping is criminal and/or a violation of intellectual property. This is also discussed among the commenters on Inside Higher Ed. Of course we've long allowed students to tape our lectures. Now we have iTunes University to update that practice. Any student in a course will be able to download a course cast, edit the sound file, and post the result. I suppose we are saying this last step is a violation, the making public of teaching.

I think it comes down to this. If a student posts a video of his/her teacher as a "good teacher," that teacher is unlikely to complain, even though the act must be as much a crime or copyright infringement as it would be if it were a "bad teacher" video. As it turns out, there are plenty of videos that come up on searchs for "good teacher," at least as many as "bad teacher." What we are opposed to is the way we are represented (not the act of representation itself). As I suggested in my earlier post, perhaps we might see this student practice, in turn, as an expression of their own opposition to the way they are interpolated as students.

It is objectionable to be made a student, to be the subject of pedagogic scrutiny, to be made a captive audience, and so on. Students are always subject to our heroic pedagogic narratives. Here they claim a different narrative, a different representation. It is perhaps no more fair or accurate than our own versions. Certainly it can be disheartening as teachers to see these representations.

The challenge, I think, is not to find ways to shut down this practice, to tighten the panopticon. Instead the challenge is to enter into this discursive space, to address it with students, to confront the institutional relationships that produce this condition.

the video and the teacher

Jeff and Spencer both write about this phenomena of students posting videos of their teachers/professors on YouTube. Here's one example titled "screaming teacher." I'll go as far as to provide a link but I don't want to reproduce it here. As much as I find this scene unfortunate, anyone can have a bad moment; this guy's bad moment happens to be on YouTube.  The point is though that we have all been students in scenes like this (I would imagine), and I know at least I have had teachers where such scenes and other similar behaviors were not uncommon. If you look at the comments for the video, they say things like "this is why I hate teachers," and "I don't care how much they get paid, this is why I don't respect teachers."

Now to be fair, there are some videos that represent teachers positively or at least in a benign fashion. Even still, it's an uncomfortable feeling thinking that your actions as a teacher might be serreptitiously recorded and made public. True, most people don't want to be secretly recorded under any circumstance, but there are some special considerations to understanding the videoing of teachers. This YouTube practice, along with those or ratemyteacher or ratemyprofessor and MySpace or Facebook pages dedicated to the dislike/hatred of a teacher, does not represent a change in the way that students feel about teachers, but rather a change in the available means of expression.

I can't imagine many people want to be high school students. Not only does one face the personal psychological and physiological crises of adolescence, but also the social trials of negotiating peer communities. And that's without school. School adds this massive institutional force, where nearly one's every move is surveilled and judged (by peers or by teachers or staff). Even though teachers may think of themselves as caring or sympathetic, they regularly act of out of their institutional identity to control or discipline. Playing out this role is likely unavoidable, even if one didn't believe it was his/her job to do so. The social do-gooder grates as much as the touchy-feely teacher or the tyrranical teacher or the burned out teacher. It's not so much what kind of teacher one is as the fact that one is a teacher at all, forcing others to occupy the role of students. No matter how one defines oneself as a teacher, students will inevitably push their teachers to call upon their institutional authority, and it is at that point that the students believe they see their teachers "true colors," regardless of how those teachers see themselves.

Now here's the interesting twist. As teachers, particularly in English, we encourage our students to write, to express themselves. We often discuss how effective writing can have power in a community. Well.... here you go. We got what we asked for. Now the students turn the panopticon back on their teachers somewhat. I'm sure there have been students over the past decade in my classes who have been sitting there thinking "this guy is boring" or "he's an idiot" or "I hate this teacher!" Why not? I've had those thoughts as a student. Now they have a way to express those thoughts, besides talking to their roommates.

I don't think there's much teachers can do about it. Perhaps the YouTube phenomena will pass lke a fad, but I really doubt it, even if YouTube itself doesn't last. Perhaps teachers will be more reflective about their behavior, but I doubt it, and I don't know that that's really the problem anyway. Even the entertaining teacher can be cast as a fool in a video (in fact, that's a common trope on YouTube). I suppose you can heighten the panopticon to try to catch these secrete video recorders. I'm sure that's the response you'll get if this really increases. No cell phones or at least no cell phones with camera/video function in the classroom.

Yes, that will surely make things better...

The bottom line, I guess, is this. Yes, there is some bad teaching out there. Yes, this videoing practice and related online attacks on teachers can be unfair and unethical. The institutional relationship between students and teachers ensures that we will continue to see this dynamic play out. Even if the relationship in the classroom were entirely voluntary, there would still be some of this conflict (though it would be diminished, I believe).