Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

I think a fellow at Georgetown Law is making the current stink, but let me say why I agree with his proposition that we outlaw laptops in college classrooms.

If you're listening to lecture, your mind wanders. But what does it wander to? Tired enough, wandering might include the awe inspiring doodle, it might include looking out of the window, and it might include taking a gander at those around you. But at the proverbial end of the day, those things don't really compete too strongly with your instructor. At the end of the day, your mind often wanders right back to where it should be, on content from an expert you simply can't get anywhere else.

No matter how romanticized the belief, I believe we still pay to go to college to listen to experts, and experts producing research in fields that relate directly to our stated profession or life goals. You don't pay to watch Facebook. More to the point, you're not paying to watch a talentless schmuck trained (franchised?) to wade through Powerpoints provided by textbook publishers. Class is not meant to be a battle for your attention. Your ability to lend your attention to whatever the professor has to offer should, at this point, be a moot point.

Are there horrible professors whose classes kill you by sucking hours of your life away giving you nothing in return? Yes. Do your research before taking a class. Might all students zone out at some point? Absolutely, they do. The answer is not to provide more attractive options for those wandering minds. Is it useful to put notes into digital format? Heck yes. But you can accomplish that with a Macintosh Portable from 1989.

(Honestly, the single most useful item for a college instructor would be the ability to limit students' network access. You could easily serve a class website without giving students full Internet access, and turn back on the phat pipe when you needed them to perform research in-class. The wide-open WiFi found in universities today is ill-conceived.)

What concerns me is the war of attention. If students can use laptops, then the answer, often, is to use technology like those the students consume to win back their attention. Fight facebook with facebook, you know? How can we make class interesting and informative? Make it as or more interesting than what's available via WiFi! Show YouTube in class not because it fits, but because it's YouTube! That's a wrong-headed idea.

As more technology enters the classroom expressly to keep "this next generation" glued to their topics, colleges increasingly become mules for the corporations pushing tech. As more technology enters the classroom, more non-tenured, publisher and industry trained faculty find jobs teaching "service learning" courses that are more vocational than research based. Sure they pad the university's bottom line, but they don't share research because they're (relatively to tenure track professors) not really doing research!

The emphasis should not be on how to introduce more consumption into the classroom, but how to push on-site training back onto the site. This limits the scope of universities considerably, but such a change in stated orientation would also free universities back up to cleanly pursue what they, ostensibly, were supposed to be pursuing all along.

When did education become less about sharing and performing research and more about vocation and consumption? More importantly, and beyond simply following the money, why was the compromise to introduce tech for tech's sake made in the first place? Who said that laptops with WiFi in classrooms would necessarily be a boon? What were the course-specific reasons for that system? The US has a capacity fetish (see the FCC representative on the NewsHour this week arguing that more spectrum needs to go to wireless broadband simply on the basis of the US not losing the lead in wireless, as if that alone could argue for such a massive communal give-away), and it's about time the motivations behind implementations of this fetish were properly interrogated and deconstructed.

(Sorry, kinda lapsed into pseudo-acad speak there at the end.)

Labels: acad, hats of money

Michael Wesch's youtube post is interesting in that it tries to make key distinctions between the use of traditional manuscript against the use of hypertext, but it's misleading in a number of ways I find particularly troubling. Let's be blog-a-rific and not compose these in any meaningful, synthesized way, and just list 'em out in the order they pop from the fingers.

1.) The fade from the white page of pencil to hypertext can be interpreted in one of two ways. The first is that there is a continuum between paper-manuscript and digital cultures, and the second is that there's a stark break. You watch as the actor moves from saying that digital text is different because it moves or can be changed in some strange way, but the editing continues until linking/hyperlinking/hypertext is settled on as the key distinction. Unfortunately what we just saw in the paper-manuscript suggestion was already doing a great job saying that this is not the case. There is no Web 1.0 or 2.0. Each set of technologies, whether keyboard, text editor and browser or pencil, paper, and printed page have their own means of remediating the dynamic functions depicted in that video. Read Heather Jackson's Marginalia and then tell me manuscript culture didn't have the same functionality as digital text. Both are compositional forms where the method of composition is the same as the method of publication, both typically allow avenues for easy coauthorship by readers/consumers/audiences, etc.

The differences seem obvious enough, and they are useful ones. Digital media (with enough infrastructure -- server/proc speed & RAM, software, bandwidth) can quickly scale to allow for "flash mobs'" worth of interest, for example, whereas books with particularly impressive marginalia are much harder to share with millions at once. Yet these are differences, not strengths deserving 1980's style synthesized background music promising intellectual liberation. One allowed for the flourishing of the Tuesday Club, and the other allowed for Matt Drudge. The real difference between the two is the ability to move from a controlled, known audience to a potentially anonymous one, which I often rant about when people try to argue that privacy has been lost online. It's not so much that any of this is privacy but the expectation of anonymity... what are the ramifications for culture whose cities include the potential to walk down the street arguing personal matters with your spouse knowing that the comments aren't likely to be heard by anyone which you know personally? It would seem digital communication is only now catching up with the changes in the gross urban populations that have increasingly become the rule. Certainly the community of the shared gossip fence has died (and the gossip has likely gone digital without it).

Which moves us from unearned break number one (as it becomes clear Wesch would rather argue a paradigm shift (meaning a quantum leap) between the abilities of paper-manuscript and digital text rather than something that does the same work differently) to unearned break number two -- the video's implication that HTML and XML are such totally different animals -- he trivially makes the case that you can't consider the format without the human behind it (a concept key for understanding any digital standard, like HTML, XML, and their SGML brethren), but the impression for the uninitiated is a dangerously misleading one, which I guess I'll talk about later. In brief. to say that HTML caused a static Web 1.0 and that XML allows for a dynamic Web 2.0 where form completely separates from content is horrendously oversimplistic. Makes for a groovy video, but does not, as presented, invite needed inquiry. (And as if Web 2.0 as currently conceived is an improvement...) It also tends to overlook that html was initially conceived as a means of providing markup whose display would be regulated by the way the browser's user set the preferences. I should find an older browser, but for now you can see a few vestiges in Netscape Communicator 4.77, which I had handy.

EDIT: Here's a picture from Netscape 2.02. The operative option is highlighted (and it's in v4 as well) -- "Always use mine."

-- I'd also add that one of the biggest changes from my undergrad days to today is the rigid policing of access to academic journals. Fifteen years ago, anyone could walk off of the street into their state university and have, within reason, the same journal access that their university professors had. Now, access to online journals are very carefully tracked, thanks to the power of databases and digital delivery/publication systems, and online-only subscriptions mean that access can be stolen away at any moment, shoved back into an exclusive virtual rare book room.

Labels: acad, web 2.0 shiite, youtube

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Laptops in college not good I think a fellow at Georgetown Law is making the current stink, but let me say why I agree with his proposition that we outlaw laptops in college classrooms. If you're listening to lecture, your mind wanders. But what does it wander to? Tired enough, wandering might include the awe inspiring doodle, it might include looking out of the window, and it might include taking a gander at those around you. But at the proverbial end of the day, those things don't really compete too strongly with your instructor. At the end of the day, your mind often wanders right back to where it should be, on content from an expert you simply can't get anywhere else. No matter how romanticized the belief, I believe we still pay to go to college to listen to experts, and experts producing research in fields that relate directly to our stated profession or life goals. You don't pay to watch Facebook. More to the point, you're not paying to watch a talentless schmuck trained (franchised?) to wade through Powerpoints provided by textbook publishers. Class is not meant to be a battle for your attention. Your ability to lend your attention to whatever the professor has to offer should, at this point, be a moot point. Are there horrible professors whose classes kill you by sucking hours of your life away giving you nothing in return? Yes. Do your research before taking a class. Might all students zone out at some point? Absolutely, they do. The answer is not to provide more attractive options for those wandering minds. Is it useful to put notes into digital format? Heck yes. But you can accomplish that with a Macintosh Portable from 1989. (Honestly, the single most useful item for a college instructor would be the ability to limit students' network access. You could easily serve a class website without giving students full Internet access, and turn back on the phat pipe when you needed them to perform research in-class. The wide-open WiFi found in universities today is ill-conceived.) What concerns me is the war of attention. If students can use laptops, then the answer, often, is to use technology like those the students consume to win back their attention. Fight facebook with facebook, you know? How can we make class interesting and informative? Make it as or more interesting than what's available via WiFi! Show YouTube in class not because it fits, but because it's YouTube! That's a wrong-headed idea. As more technology enters the classroom expressly to keep "this next generation" glued to their topics, colleges increasingly become mules for the corporations pushing tech. As more technology enters the classroom, more non-tenured, publisher and industry trained faculty find jobs teaching "service learning" courses that are more vocational than research based. Sure they pad the university's bottom line, but they don't share research because they're (relatively to tenure track professors) not really doing research! The emphasis should not be on how to introduce more consumption into the classroom, but how to push on-site training back onto the site. This limits the scope of universities considerably, but such a change in stated orientation would also free universities back up to cleanly pursue what they, ostensibly, were supposed to be pursuing all along. When did education become less about sharing and performing research and more about vocation and consumption? More importantly, and beyond simply following the money, why was the compromise to introduce tech for tech's sake made in the first place? Who said that laptops with WiFi in classrooms would necessarily be a boon? What were the course-specific reasons for that system? The US has a capacity fetish (see the FCC representative on the NewsHour this week arguing that more spectrum needs to go to wireless broadband simply on the basis of the US not losing the lead in wireless, as if that alone could argue for such a massive communal give-away), and it's about time the motivations behind implementations of this fetish were properly interrogated and deconstructed. (Sorry, kinda lapsed into pseudo-acad speak there at the end.) Labels: acad, hats of money posted by ruffin at 3/17/2010 01:38:00 PM

Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Food for Thought: Study Finds Public Discontent With Colleges - NYTimes.com Study Finds Public Discontent With Colleges - NYTimes.com: Most Americans believe that colleges today operate like businesses, concerned more with their bottom line than with the educational experience of students, according to a new study. And the proportion of people who hold that view has increased to 60 percent, from 52 percent in 2007. Why would folks think this? Hrm. Because the belief is on the money? The knee-jerk reaction is that a college acting like a business is a wrongheaded move. To the degree that this mentality produces a college is simply vocational, I'd agree that the move is ill-conceived. To the degree that engineering colleges are business-like, these being fields which are trying to produce citizens whose research is specifically blending scholarship into business, well, the lines aren't quite so clearly cut. One place where acting like a business is despicable is in the humanities. Nothing concerns me more than the way humanities departments are scrambling for cash via corporate sponsorship and/or partnership. I've heard very well-respected scholars argue that we are entering an age of the digital humanities, where our now increasingly technology-driven fields benefit from adopting the business-friendly model from engineering and hard sciences. Without their money, how can we perform the broad-based, collaborative research the new influences in our fields require? These rationalizations lose the stereotypical tweed jacketed and elbow padded professor who is in the academy precisely because it provides them safe haven from -- no, simply an alternative to -- those parts of our nation driven directly through corporate capitalism or any other institutional mindset. The academy is supposed to be, well, perhaps "supposed to be" is too strong. The academy was once an institution that was largely separate from the state, the church, and industry. It chose to live in a privileged position from which intelligent citizens would give up their earning power to better society in specific, critical ways. The protection from chasing dollars is precisely what made the college powerful. That's why people set up endowments for goodness sake. Colleges are meant to be money losing propositions. We, as a society, passively or no, long ago said that such commentary was worth the "loss". Do we blame the land grant college, the Moo U's, for compromising this romanticized goal of cultural critique for critique's sake? Do we blame the rise of collegiate sports and the way the common alumnus/a is just or more likely to give to the football booster program as their old department? Have universities and colleges simply worn too many hats under the same roofs, and this cultural osmosis was too difficult to resist? I don't know. I just know, from taking a look inside, that faculty bends over backwards to figure out clever ways to make the humanities a money-making enterprise through service courses and science-like research. I've seen too many take jobs in the academy not because they understand the world and wish to make it better through personal sacrifice, but take the jobs only because they offer to them the most lucrative career and cultural respect that their abilities can support. I've seen the new academy take the critical lens of scholarship from its once protected position, and eviscerate its traditional ability to critique power and offer needed alternatives. Without the least feeling of being melodramatic, I feel comfortable saying that the nation, even the world, is worse off for the compromise. Labels: acad, hats of money posted by ruffin at 2/17/2010 07:59:00 AM

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Washington Post Reporters Now Writing Specifically for Computer Readers This from Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post's Ombudsman, titled "Why you're seeing more copy-editing errors in The Post": Why the increased errors [in the Washington Post]? Clearly, reduced staffing plays some role. A decade ago, at its peak, The Post's newsroom had more than 900 FTES (full-time equivalent employees)... Today, the now-integrated print and online staffs total about 650 FTEs... The answer may be less about staffing levels and more about the changing duties of copy editors. Gone are the days when they primarily detected errors and smoothed prose for the next day's newspaper. Now they must also operate in an online environment where "search-engine optimization" is a key goal. That requires new skills and time-consuming additional duties. Separate online headlines must be written in a way that attracts attention on the Web. ... Some relief may be coming for beleaguered copy editors. This week, The Post will begin search-engine optimization training for the entire newsroom. Front-end help from reporters and other staff should ease the burden on copy editors. [emboldened emphasis mine] I don't know about you, but I'm not happy to hear that journalists are writing for the computers to the exclusion of their human readers. I realize there has always been a pressure on writing to the technology. I've done a review of newspapers from the 18th century, and realize the way that length was constrained by the sheets you could afford to print and sell, or how headline lengths are influenced by column and font size, and how inserting pictures are exceptionally difficult. I've seen papers run out of a font and start printing in, eg, italics to finish up a page to save time. I know that content is influenced by technology directly. Still, what the Washington Post is doing marks a significant change for the press. Now, people are writing content for, say, Google News rather than to point out the most newsworthy events of the day. Like a gamer figuring out the secrets of the algorithm for Mike Tyson's Punch Out ("When he makes the noise, dodge right, and then upppercut"), newspaper reporters, the front line folk, are being asked to learn, anticipate, and integrate the algorithms of the news search engines ("When we're talking about someone in the movies, try to tie Angelina Jolie in there somehow" or "Make sure 'failed Obamacare' is in the title of three of today's stories somehow"). I've noticed the WaPo's declining editorial attention. To redefine what "editing" meanings is to take the lazy fellow's way out. What's happening isn't that you're doing a more complicated job. It's that you're no longer doing your old job. We're more worried about hits than grammar. And what bothers me the most is the degree to which an American institution is pushing onto the front ranks of the free press the onus for making our news match whatever Google's programmers feel is newsworthy. In the briefest terms, then, I'm exceptionally disappointed that Google's programmers have become the editors of the Washington Post. Labels: acad, business, cheating, control, digital, ethics, evil, Google, market, politics, pseudo-academic posted by ruffin at 2/16/2010 09:50:00 AM

Monday, August 25, 2008
I'm an old fogey. University should keep its own email. From UNC's student newspaper: Google has created a new program specifically designed for college students. The education edition of Google Apps includes e-mail service in addition to applications like Google Calendar and Google Talk, an instant messaging service. ... Unlike a campus e-mail service, Google Apps comes at no charge. Arizona State University, which switched to Google Apps two years ago, paid $400,000 a year to maintain their old system, Keltner said. Well, why Google is interested in providing the service for the university makes perfect sense -- most will likely use Google's own web application to interface with email, and that means lots of ad revenue. And I suppose as long as you can use POP3 or IMAP to view your Google-hosted mail, I shouldn't complain. Still, what are the chances that Google stands to net more than $400k a year from your students? That is, could the university not invest in making its own, ad supported online interface and come out ahead in the long run? I would prefer that capitalism kept its sorry grubby hands away from academia, even if the university made the cash -- as if a capitalistic state institution of higher learning were still an option. Labels: acad, business, email, ethics, gmail, Google, market posted by ruffin at 8/25/2008 02:03:00 PM

Thursday, August 21, 2008
Quick Wesch Critique Michael Wesch's youtube post is interesting in that it tries to make key distinctions between the use of traditional manuscript against the use of hypertext, but it's misleading in a number of ways I find particularly troubling. Let's be blog-a-rific and not compose these in any meaningful, synthesized way, and just list 'em out in the order they pop from the fingers. 1.) The fade from the white page of pencil to hypertext can be interpreted in one of two ways. The first is that there is a continuum between paper-manuscript and digital cultures, and the second is that there's a stark break. You watch as the actor moves from saying that digital text is different because it moves or can be changed in some strange way, but the editing continues until linking/hyperlinking/hypertext is settled on as the key distinction. Unfortunately what we just saw in the paper-manuscript suggestion was already doing a great job saying that this is not the case. There is no Web 1.0 or 2.0. Each set of technologies, whether keyboard, text editor and browser or pencil, paper, and printed page have their own means of remediating the dynamic functions depicted in that video. Read Heather Jackson's Marginalia and then tell me manuscript culture didn't have the same functionality as digital text. Both are compositional forms where the method of composition is the same as the method of publication, both typically allow avenues for easy coauthorship by readers/consumers/audiences, etc. The differences seem obvious enough, and they are useful ones. Digital media (with enough infrastructure -- server/proc speed & RAM, software, bandwidth) can quickly scale to allow for "flash mobs'" worth of interest, for example, whereas books with particularly impressive marginalia are much harder to share with millions at once. Yet these are differences, not strengths deserving 1980's style synthesized background music promising intellectual liberation. One allowed for the flourishing of the Tuesday Club, and the other allowed for Matt Drudge. The real difference between the two is the ability to move from a controlled, known audience to a potentially anonymous one, which I often rant about when people try to argue that privacy has been lost online. It's not so much that any of this is privacy but the expectation of anonymity... what are the ramifications for culture whose cities include the potential to walk down the street arguing personal matters with your spouse knowing that the comments aren't likely to be heard by anyone which you know personally? It would seem digital communication is only now catching up with the changes in the gross urban populations that have increasingly become the rule. Certainly the community of the shared gossip fence has died (and the gossip has likely gone digital without it). Which moves us from unearned break number one (as it becomes clear Wesch would rather argue a paradigm shift (meaning a quantum leap) between the abilities of paper-manuscript and digital text rather than something that does the same work differently) to unearned break number two -- the video's implication that HTML and XML are such totally different animals -- he trivially makes the case that you can't consider the format without the human behind it (a concept key for understanding any digital standard, like HTML, XML, and their SGML brethren), but the impression for the uninitiated is a dangerously misleading one, which I guess I'll talk about later. In brief. to say that HTML caused a static Web 1.0 and that XML allows for a dynamic Web 2.0 where form completely separates from content is horrendously oversimplistic. Makes for a groovy video, but does not, as presented, invite needed inquiry. (And as if Web 2.0 as currently conceived is an improvement...) It also tends to overlook that html was initially conceived as a means of providing markup whose display would be regulated by the way the browser's user set the preferences. I should find an older browser, but for now you can see a few vestiges in Netscape Communicator 4.77, which I had handy. EDIT: Here's a picture from Netscape 2.02. The operative option is highlighted (and it's in v4 as well) -- "Always use mine." -- I'd also add that one of the biggest changes from my undergrad days to today is the rigid policing of access to academic journals. Fifteen years ago, anyone could walk off of the street into their state university and have, within reason, the same journal access that their university professors had. Now, access to online journals are very carefully tracked, thanks to the power of databases and digital delivery/publication systems, and online-only subscriptions mean that access can be stolen away at any moment, shoved back into an exclusive virtual rare book room. Labels: acad, web 2.0 shiite, youtube posted by ruffin at 8/21/2008 12:03:00 AM

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