thoughts on creative writing, MFA programs, and the social beat

I recently participated in a local event called Ignite Bloomington, where my co-presenter, Christian Briggs, and I performed a poem we called "the social beat."

The design of the background images, the development of the poem, and the planning of the performance were all completed collaboratively; this was by far the most collaborative creative project I've ever been involved in. I say that as a graduate of an MFA program who spent three years doing almost nothing but creative work. I say that as someone who intentionally moved away from what I'm coming to see as the antiquated approach to writing that pervades creative writing programs around the country.

I write more now, and more creatively, and with more enthusiasm, than I ever did during my days as a 'poet.' In part, this is because the primary type of writing I do these days is far more public and persistent, and more closely linked to issues that matter deeply to me, than was the writing I did as a creative writing major. But the writing I do nowadays is also more aligned with my ethos: These days, I embrace openness, collaboration, and collective knowledge-building; and producing, circulating, and building upon others' ideas online meets these interests nicely. In fact, this "writing publicly for a networked public" thing meets my needs like gangbusters.

Creative writing, at least in the MFA-program sense of the term, never did meet my needs or interests. It felt too far out of my control. We more or less buy the idea of the "muse"--call it flow if you want, call it the zone, call it whatever you want, but what it means is that we embrace this strange idea that the greatest works emerge when you can set your conscious mind a little bit to the side and let your unconscious break through to the surface. It had to happen in silence. It had to happen alone. And you couldn't control it. You could only control the circumstances that make it more likely to happen.

Sure, fine. We need people to make those great brilliant works by betting on the muse. But that way of thinking about writing is just not for me--it never has been. I'm more into the "how do you get to Carnegie Hall" approach to writing, which is why blogging, and the attendant potential readership, appeals so much to me.

And when it comes to creative writing, I'm kinda into this "collaboration" thing. Coordinating the partnership is tricky and time-consuming, but if you find the right partner you end up standing on each other's shoulders, finishing with something better than any one of you could have written on their own. One thing I know for sure is that the work that came out of my collaboration with Christian is better, stronger, more powerful than anything I could have come up with on my own. I'm proud of this work, maybe prouder than I was of any poem I wrote on my own, and I'm proud to include the poem and a video of our performance of it below.








the social beat
{implosion::explosion}
Jenna McWilliams & Christian Briggs

let’s walk it backwards:
when a girl
in a field
face shielded from the sun
looks out at you and smiles
you think something has begun
but that’s not a smile
it’s a grimace it’s a sneer
you’ve got that camera around your face and a 21st century leer

but it’s a circle, a cycle, a snake that eats its tail
explosion, says mcluhan, split the instrument from the wail
and now we’re walking that split backwards to where the hammer meets the nail
to where the language meets its speaker and the face removes its veil

is this a flat world?
a kind world?
a world framed as a game?
what’s the win state?
who’s losing?
should we send it all up in flames?
and with every change we fight for does it all just stay the same?

explosion:
in 1984 papert blew up the school or said computers would
{they didn’t
or if they did, they hid it}
it’s a long revolution
a slow evolution
characterized by dilution and diffusion
and confusion
sometimes, but joy too, and profusion, collusion and elocution
and hope, and motion, and implosion
of space and time and multiple uses
we lifted our tech and it calmly spoke through us.

implosion: the same plane with the same name moves us and rushes us and smooshes us together
that long walkway is us walking away from the everyday pulleys and gears of our years
we climb onto the tech we climb into the sky
we can collaborate now we can elaborate now we can fly

it’s gonna crash
the school becomes a skull
its planks and its floorboards and its chalkboards and its front doors flash past us like shrapnel
as we dash past with laptops
the floor’s falling in and we have them building backdrops and stage props in woodshop.

they’re gonna fall
explode in on themselves, the freight and the chaos
beams buckling, roof knuckling under the weight
as crowds spill like kindling into the street
meeting each other again flinting and squinting again in the sun {ignite}

it’s all going under
it’s all yellow light slanting sideways across shining faces
it’s thunder
it’s traces of ozone it’s acres of blight
as we push back the night as it grinds to a crawl as the old ladies watch and wonder
they’re gonna go under

but the story’s not finished
they’re gonna defend
they’ll never give in. they learned how to stand in an age of their father’s machine.
they’re clean.
so they defend. and they default. and they defer
to the icon and its policies and its politics and its poetry
we automate the manual. now our hands are clean on the path to hell

cue eye roll.
we know how to build, we can do it again. so we build.
and we machinate. and we slap down machines to palliate the children
we fill them as if they were containers.
it’s heinous.
it took two days for those green machines to fill up with guess what? porn.

we’ve had millennia now of dissemination, maybe it’s time to change the story
to disovulation: one perfect idea at a time, sent out into the world
then we’ll let you guys fight over who gets to claim it.
or blame it.
millennia now of the Churchills the Hitlers the Gateses the Jobses the Spitfires and Messerschmittses and Habermas and Hobbeses

like a girl
in a field
face shielded from the sun
is still inside the lines
where something has begun

it’s the circle, the cycle, the snake has caught its tail
the explosion’s moving backward though the timid first will fail

the tots will test it, resisting with a poke, a prod, a post
the slightest and the smallest seem the most benign of rabble
filling up the tubes with what will mostly seem a babble
to defenders of the past

now they’re teens
on the street
the lines are giving way
babble turned to business
as the structures start to sway
but still defenders are within this
scene, clutching for the days….
that will no longer be..

you see…

the teens have grown and jumped the lines
we’re not walled in and not walled out
nor confined by any doubt
instead we clamber for the time
when all that’s in will all be out
a coalescing of the minds
whose synaptastics speed the time

technology will take its place
a toy a tool connecting us
aiding a collective us
crushing in both time and space
freeing up the play in us

we are those girls
in our fields
faces turned toward every one
collectively reflecting on the
thing that has begun
or is it ending as it rends us?
the scream igniting as it mends us?
unbends us and upends us:
a lick of flame, a bonfire, night brought shrieking to the sun
a slow sermon whispered softly:
there is much that must be done.

help me collect information on Twitter lurkers

I've gotten interested lately in the role of lurkers within the Twitter social network. I recently posted this tweet:

Though I wasn't specifically soliciting feedback on this issue, I received lots of responses from Twitter users who wanted to talk about how and why they user Twitter. These are, keep in mind, people who self-identify as lurkers--yet they responded to me through Twitter.

Clearly, this is something people want to talk about.

So I'm interested in finding out more.

I've created a short survey, intended to gather some basic information about the use of Twitter by people who consider themselves lurkers or light users of Twitter, and I'd also be thrilled to hear any thoughts you have on the phenomenon of lurking in Twitter or other online social networks, either through the survey or in comments to this post. I'll post the results of the survey to this blog. The survey is available here.

Thanks!

SparkCBC takes on the issue of computational literacy

As I've explained in previous blog posts, I'm a fan of incorporating computational literacy education into the formal classroom--across curricula and content areas. So I was thrilled to see Spark Radio will be tackling the issue of computational literacy in an upcoming broadcast. Spark co-producer Dan Misener explains, using the user-friendly iPad as an example:

(T)he iPad (and its little brothers, the iPhone and iPod touch) abstract much of the computer away. Apple watcher and former Spark guest John Gruber says it’s a bit like the automatic transmission in a car:

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

And from the standpoint of the vast majority of computer users, this abstraction can be a good thing. It makes computing simpler, easier, friendlier. Why should I need to understand what’s going on under the hood of my computer if all I want to do is send email to my friends?...

But I wonder, is the same attitude towards computers dangerous? Does oversimplifying technology –removing necessary complexity — have a downside? By making technology simple, easy, and convenient, do we risk a generation of people who can’t tell the difference between this blog post and the Facebook login page?

As I ponder this, I’m a bit torn. The technology populist in me wants to say, “Of course, make computers easy! What’s wrong with making computers as simple and friendly as possible?”

But another (geekier, snobbier) part of me wants to say, “Yes, computers are hard, and that can be a good thing. I don’t want to use technology designed for the lowest common denominator.”

The question this Spark show hopes to tackle is this:

If I don’t understand how to use my computer, whose fault is it? Is it my fault for not wanting to read manuals or spend time learning a new technology? Or is it the fault of the designers and engineers who build the technology we use?

You can weigh in on the discussion at the Spark blog, then listen in live or or download the podcast of the show; information on broadcast times and podcast download is available here.

Here's my take on this issue, which I've also posted as a comment on the Spark blog:

This is a thorny issue, because easier interfaces help to drop the barriers to participation, but on the other hand this shift means we give up some degree of empowerment to make decisions about which sorts of interfaces, and by extension which sorts of technologies, work best for our specific needs. Indeed, the crafting and marketing of products like the iPad is deeply, deeply political, and the embedded politics that lead to the tools we use is not readily evident to those without a degree of computational literacy. And enormous swaths of the computer-using public are lacking in this area.

On the other hand, computational literacy is very much like other forms of literacy: reading, writing, mathematical literacy, and so on. We don't blame the math-illiterate learner who has never been exposed to mathematics education, or whose math education was lacking in significant ways. This is the exact case with computational literacy education: It's nearly nonexistent in formal classrooms, and has become the nearly exclusive domain of those with the luxury of access to computational technologies outside of school. In some ways, then, perhaps we get the technologies we deserve.

a model for designing the ELA classroom in support of "literacy science"

You guys, I think I have a model to show you.

This makes me extremely happy, because as I've explained (more than once), I've struggled mightily with the very concept of modeling. I've also struggled with representation. The purpose of designing this model is to show my take on the role of new technologies in educational environments. But articulating a theory, even a working theory, about the role of technologies has been such an insurmountable challenge for me--which technologies? for which students? and for what purpose?


But the elements for building this rudimentary model have been around me for some time. It just took time and reflection for me to be able to put the elements together.

(image description: this is a pen-and-ink drawing of a classroom. In the center of the room, the class is seated, facing each other, around a square of tables; on the table in front of them are combinations of books, notebooks, and electronic equipment. Around the edges of the room are, clockwise from the upper lefthand corner: an easel labeled "representational literacy;" a table with extra pens and extra notebooks; a chalkboard with a variety of marks on it, labeled "design thinking"; book shelves; a workbench labeled "computational literacy"; open space lining most of one wall; a laptop labeled "new media literacy"; a safe filled with bundles of cash; and a laptop cart. Below the picture is the phrase, "If you can't build it, then you don't understand it.")

Inspiration for this model
Design of the periphery: Multiple intelligences schools. A few years ago, I read the 25-anniversary edition of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. Throughout the book, Gardner describes a variety of approaches to integrating his theory of multiple intelligences into learning environments, and one description--of the Key Learning Community in Indianapolis--has stuck with me. In this school, students work in "pods" that represent each type of intelligence outlined by Gardner; a founding principle of this school, he explains, "is the conviction that each child should have his or her multiple intelligences stimulated each day. Thus, every student at the school participates regularly in the activities of computing, music, and bodily-kinesthetics, in addition to mastering theme-centered curricula that embody standard literacies and subject matter."

You don't have to agree with this approach to appreciate its effort at offering a range of avenues for learning to happen. From time to time I think about those multiple intelligences schools and wonder what aspects might be applied to my current area of focus, the English / Language Arts classroom. Clearly, more avenues toward literacy is better than fewer avenues; and since we know that traditional literacy practices taught through traditional means are insufficient preparation for the types of literacy practices people are called upon to demonstrate in real life, we might think of "pods" for different groupings or categories of literacy learning.

Design of the center and periphery: A real life ELA classroom. I've had the unBELIEVABLE good luck to sit in on Becky Rupert's ELA classroom at Aurora Alternative High School here in Bloomington, IN. Much of the design of this model is based on how she has arranged her class. To begin with, the main focus of the room is a square of tables where students meet at the beginning of each class. My model does not identify the teacher's location; that's because in Becky's classroom, she sits at the table right alongside her students. She does this on purpose, and it works in service of developing a learning community.

Becky's classroom is absolutely stuffed with books--you have to move books in order to get to other books. A new addition this year is a laptop cart, which sits against the far wall of the room.


Inclusion of design thinking: my work with SociaLens. For the last several months, I've been working with a new organization called SociaLens. The purpose of this organization is to consult with businesses and offer strategies for integrating new types of communications tools and ways of thinking into their organizational plans, with a particular eye toward social media technologies. Two key categories that we think make for highly adaptive, potentially highly successful organizations are new media literacies and design thinking.

Until I started working with SociaLens, I had not thought to consider the connection between these categories. I also hadn't thought about what educational researchers can learn from corporate innovators and vice versa. But what has been seen cannot now be unseen. I've come to see design thinking as an essential element of literacy learning, and especially if you believe (as I do) that computational flexibility (which I'll describe briefly below) is key to preparation for success in a new media age.


Inclusion of new media literacy, representational literacy, design thinking, & computational literacy "pods": Some stuff I've read. I've been immersed in new media literacy research for a good chunk of years, and I drank that kool-aid long ago. If you believe in the value of teaching new media literacy practices in schools, then computational literacy kind of comes with the territory. These categories of literacy are similar in lots of respects: Both are better described as a set of proficiencies and attitudes--what Lankshear and Knobel call a combination of "technical stuff" and "ethos stuff"--than as concrete, teachable skills. Both require a kind of openness--a flexibility--to meet the quickly changing demands with emerging technologies. But new media literacies are the required skills to engage in collaborative knowledge-building or collective meaning-making or problem-solving activities, while computational literacy is, in my mind, linked to a kind of "hacker's mentality." It's the act of simultaneously making use of and resisting the affordances of any technology; of knowing when and how to say "no" if a technology doesn't meet your purposes; and of finding (or developing) a new technology that better meets your needs and interests.

Design thinking, as I mention above, comes out of my work with SociaLens and the (admittedly very surface-level) reading I've done about this approach to problem-solving. This type of thinking has also made an appearance in the recent work I've been reading about research in science and math instruction. Many researchers whose work focuses on supporting an inquiry-based focus in science instruction, in particular, emphasize the value of embracing the epistemological basis of science-as-inquiry. As William Sandoval and Brian Reiser explain in their 2004 piece, "Explanation-Driven Inquiry: Integrating Conceptual and Epistemic Scaffolds for Scientific Inquiry," the epistemic elements of this approach include

knowledge of the kinds of questions that can be answered through inquiry, the kinds of methods that are accepted within disciplines for generating data, and standards for what count as legitimate interpretations of data, including explanations, models, and theories. Placing these epistemic aspects of scientific practice in the foreground of inquiry may help students to understand and better conduct inquiry, as well as provide a context to overtly examine the epistemological commitments underlying it.

Wilensky & Reisman, in their work with computer-based modeling, argue in support of what they call "the engineer's dictum": "If you can't build it, then you don't understand it." They work with a modeling language called NetLogo, which is a loose descendant of Seymour Papert's Logo program. The program requires students to solve problems by developing models of real-world processes like population fluctuation within predator-prey (wolf-sheep) communities and the phenomenon of fireflies synchronizing their flashes. The authors make a strong case that model-based thinking--or what we might also call "design thinking"--is key to students' ability to engage in deep learning about a specific phenomenon and about scientific inquiry more broadly.

I included a pod for "representational literacy" in this model because of my own recent experience grappling with model-building. The ability to design, critique, and modify representational models is a set of skills with relevance across content areas, and we don't typically think of it as extremely valuable in the literacy classroom. But it should be news to nobody that "literacy" is becoming an increasingly visual category of proficiencies, and that representational literacy is quickly becoming even more tightly bound up with traditional literacies than it ever was before.

What I haven't yet noted is that these categories of literacy practices make up what we might call "literacy science." I mean this term to hold the same place in the literacy classroom as "mathematician" or "scientist" or "historian" or "musician" hold in their respective classroom-based environments. As a culture, we haven't spent enough time yet thinking about the purpose we hope the new literacy classroom to serve. Science class is supposed, ideally, to get students thinking like scientists; in math class you (ideally) learn to think like a mathematician; in history class you think like a historian; but in general English class has been designed as a sort of catch-all, a place where students can learn the basic reading and writing skills that enable them to think like historians, mathematicians, and so on.

What if we shifted the focus of the ELA classroom to more explicitly broach the notion of "literacy science": A way of being in the (literate) world characterized by an ethos, a set of skills, and a set of norms and behaviors? What would it mean to turn the ELA classroom into a place where we support the growth of literacy scientists?


Inclusion of open space: a nod to the future work of literacy science. Howard Gardner's list of multiple intelligences has grown over the years, and my model is designed to accommodate new categories of literacy practices. Filling up the entire classroom does nobody any good, especially since we know--we absolutely know--that new valued practices are emerging along with the breakneck speed of emergent technologies.

I should mention, too, that my model includes a safe filled with bundles of cash. This is a nod not only to the future work of literacy science but also to the current conditions of the typical public school. On top of the training required, every one of the pods in my model costs money, and it's money that schools simply don't have.

So that's it: That's my current model for the role of technologies in the literacy classroom. I would love to know your thoughts. Comments, questions, and suggestions are most welcome and will be read with great joy, thoughtfulness, and enthusiasm.


References: In case you're interested in reading the work I identified above, here are the citations.

Wilensky, U. & Reisman, K. (2006). Thinking like a Wolf, a Sheep or a Firefly: Learning Biology through Constructing and Testing Computational Theories -- an Embodied Modeling Approach. Cognition & Instruction, 24(2), pp. 171-209. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/papers/wolfsheep.pdf.

Sandoval, W., A., & Reiser, B.J. (2004). Explanation-driven inquiry: Integrating conceptual and epistemic scaffolds for scientific inquiry. Science Education, 88:3, 345-372.

technologies as sleeping policemen: or, how I learned to stop worrying and...

Nicholas Burbules and Thomas Callister worry for us. Or, at least, they were worried, over 10 years ago when they offered up their take on new technologies in a paper called The Risky Promises and Promising Risks of New Information Technologies for Education. Among their concerns: that too many people adopt a "computer as panacea approach" to new technologies. This is uniquely problematic in education, they argue, where

(r)ather than acknowledge the inherent difficulty and imperfectability of the teaching-learning endeavor, rather than accept a sloppy pluralism that admits that different approaches work in different situations—and that no approach works perfectly all the time—educational theorists and policy makers seize upon one fashion after another and then try to find new arguments, or new mandates, that will promote widespread acceptance and conformity under the latest revolution.

As problematic as the "computer as panacea" approach is, it pales in comparison to the relativistic "computer as neutral tool" approach, the one that has people saying that any technology can be used for good or for evil. Burbules and Callister explain that:

this technocratic dream simply errs in the opposite direction from the first. Where the panacea perspective places too much faith in the technology itself, the tool perspective places too much faith in people's abilities to exercise foresight and restraint in how new technologies are put to use; it ignores the possibilities of unintended consequences or the ways in which technologies bring with them inherent limits to how and for what purposes they can be used. A computer is not just an electronic typewriter; the World Wide Web is not just an on-line encyclopedia. Any tool changes the user, especially, in this instance, in the way in which tools shape the conception of the purposes to which they can be put. As the old joke goes, if you give a kid a hammer they'll see everything as needing hammering.

They prefer a middle approach, which assumes that a simple cost-benefit analysis fails to account for the possibility that benefits and costs are highly dependent on perspective. They offer as proof the history of antibiotics, which through widespread use greatly decreased humanity's likelihood of dying from bacterial infection but in the process led to the emergence of drug-resistant forms of bacteria. ("That is a very bad thing," they write.)

Though it's fairly simplistic to compare new information technologies to antibiotics, I'll go with the analogy for now, mainly because I agree with the authors' effort to problematize attitudes toward new technologies. It's perhaps more accurate to consider the social effects of antibiotics: they have led to a general increase in life expectancy, but in the process have enabled imperialistic societies (cf. the United States) to effectively colonize cultures, communities, and countries worldwide. In the same way, new technologies offer unprecedented access to information, communities, and tools for mobilization, but they simultaneously support new forms of colonization, both across and regardless of national borders.

Which brings me to the metaphor of technologies as sleeping policemen.

The sleeping policeman: In America, we call it a "speedbump." It looks like this:

The speedbump's intended effect is to get drivers to slow the hell down, and it's commonly used in neighborhoods and suburban areas with lots of kids. And it does get people to slow the hell down, primarily because they have no choice. There are also tons of unintended effects: Parents feel more comfortable letting their kids play outside. And, as this post points out, kids playing outside tend to get to know each other better. They--and, by extension, their parents--connect with other neighborhood residents, and everybody feels more connected: "Parents come to know the nearby children. And, inevitably, they come to know those childrens’ parents. They begin trading favors like driving children around. They become neighborly."

There are potential negative effects, too. Using sleeping policemen to slow drivers down changes driving practices in unintended ways. When a driver hits the last speedbump, she hits the gas and jets on down the road. This might increase the risk of an accident just beyond the range of the speedbumps. Drivers may choose to avoid areas with speedbumps, thereby increasing traffic through other areas--even, potentially, nearby neighborhoods whose streets lack speedbumps. And when a driver is not forced to monitor her own driving practices, the decision to simply drive more slowly in neighborhoods is taken away from her, thereby increasing the possibility that she will not adopt slower driving as a general practice.

Still, I think we can all agree that the benefits outweigh the costs. Nobody sees the speedbump as a panacea, and I don't imagine many people see the speedbump as a neutral technology.

So why do we worry so much more about the emergence and increasing ubiquity of new media technologies than we do about sleeping policemen or antibiotics?

One reason is that it's easier to see new media technologies as actors that shape our practices than it is to see how speed bumps and antibiotics have shaped us.

Actors: Any person or tool that exerts force upon any other person or tool, thereby shaping its use or practice. In Actor-Network Theory, everything is a potential actor, everything a potential actant.

Speed bumps act upon cars, drivers, kids, parents, neighborhood dynamics. Antibiotics have acted upon people, policies, government spending, and attitudes. We live longer now. We therefore reshape our lives, our goals, and our relationships to others. It's all very chaotic and complicated, because our reshaped attitudes in turn act upon our use of antibiotics. Everything mediates everything.

Because new media technologies have emerged and been adopted so quickly, their role in reshaping thought and action--and even, it's becoming clear, physiology--is clear, even if the outline of how this reshaping is shaking out remains quite fuzzy. New technologies as sleeping policemen: They shape not only how we drive, but how we think about driving. We move them, we reshape them, we add more or take a few away, we develop cars with better suspension...and it goes on down the rabbit hole.

smacking down Jaron Lanier & 'World Wide Mush'

Normally, I wouldn't take on such a revered, well credentialed authority as Jaron Lanier,* but his recent Wall Street Journal piece on why the movement toward collectivism, collaboration, and openness is doomed to failure leaves him cruising for a bruising.

"Most people know me as the 'father of Virtual Reality technology'," Lanier announces. (This boast is repeated in his presumably self-crafted or at least author-approved bio at the bottom of the article.) He was also, however,

part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future. Our dream came true, in part. It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. On the other hand, we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity. I am appalled that our old fantasies have become so entrenched that it's hard to get anyone to remember that there are alternatives to a framework that isn't working. 

 The "mistake" of making participation in online communities free and unpaid is only the first half of Lanier's frustration. He also hates what he calls the "collectivist" nature of online communities:

Here's one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn't want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.

Lanier's first mistake is treating Wikipedia culture--or, as Stephen Colbert puts it, Wikiality--as a stand-in for all forms of collective problem-solving. Lanier of all people should know that the often anonymous, often trivial and often problematic Wikipedia model is only one approach to collaboration, and one that works--and often works very well--for fairly low-stakes and longer-term goals. You don't cite Wikipedia in a White House briefing on Islam in Nigeria, for example, but you do cite Wikipedia in proving to your brother-in-law that Breakfast at Tiffany's was released just at the very beginning of the 1960's, just like you said it was. (Did you get that, Dean? 1961.)

Lanier also finds Google Wave problematic because he sees it as another iteration of wikiality; it "encourages you to blur personal boundaries by editing what someone else has said in a conversation with you, and you can watch each other as you type so nobody gets a private moment to consider a thought before posting.

"And if you listen to music online," he continues, "there's a good chance your listening will be guided by statistical analysis of Internet crowd preferences."

Ultimately, I suppose, and in true Wikipedia form, we all get the reality we expect to perceive. Lanier, in his mistrust of collective action, zeroes in on specific communities and specific features of specific resources that he believes prove that collectivism is a terrible, dehumanizing mistake. Along the way, he ignores the vast variety of successful projects of collective action, including:

• This year's DARPA challenge winners, based out of Sandy Pentland's Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT, who successfully crowdsourced the search and retrieval of 100 red balloons hidden across America in a flabbergasting 8 hours and 52 minutes (researcher Riley Crane points out that while the balloons themselves were an arbitrary target, the process by which the balloons were retrieved might be applicable to more significant social problems);
• The recent Netflix Prize, which crowdsourced the development of a more accurate system for identifying Netflix members' potential interests based on previous titles viewed;
• And, oh yeah, the entire open source software movement, starring Linux, WordPress, Mozilla Firefox, Ubuntu, and a host of lesser characters playing supporting roles.

And those are just the easily identified successes of collective action. It's more challenging, but equally important, to identify and champion local or concentrated examples of collective action. When people learned of a proposed bill in Uganda that would legalize execution of homosexuals, they spread the word. Bad press for any country, even worse when prominent Americans appear to be involved behind the scenes. Video of Rachel Maddow brutally smacking down "ex-gay" evangelist Richard Cohen, suspected to have worked in support of the law, was viewed nearly 60,000 times on YouTube. While the bill is moving forward through Uganda's Parliament, the international outcry makes it more likely that a.) the law, if passed, will go largely unenforced; b.) international relations with Uganda, with governments or NGOs, will be strained; c.) any other country interested in passing a similar law will think twice about garnering such negative press; and d.) prominent anti-gay American politicians and evangelicals will think twice about joining up with a similar cause.

Over on Twitter, Dean Shareski announced he had been charged hundreds of dollars by his cellphone carrier when his daughter began texting new friends without adding them to the company's My5 plan. As he explains in a recent post, Twitter saved him $764.13: His tweets about the issue were retweeted by followers, and the company noticed and erased the extra charges.

Small and large, the possibility for collective action is empowering people to resist injustice, call for change in politics in attitudes, develop new tools to improve human lives. You don't get innovation? You can't foster creativity? I say bollocks to that.

Now for the second part of Lanier's argument, that the model of unpaid contribution has led to a general decline in quality and social and technological progress. He writes:

The "open" paradigm rests on the assumption that the way to get ahead is to give away your brain's work—your music, writing, computer code and so on—and earn kudos instead of money. You are then supposedly compensated because your occasional dollop of online recognition will help you get some kind of less cerebral work that can earn money. For instance, maybe you can sell custom branded T-shirts.

We're well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.

Yeah, sure, the economics of creativity are shifting--but what Lanier sees as a kind of serfication of the creative class (what? really? really? really?) others see as an equitable redistribution of socially valuable goods. John Brockman reminds us of the words of McLuhan himself:

McLuhan had pointed out that by inventing electric technology, we had externalized our central nervous systems; that is, our minds. (John) Cage went further to say that we now had to presume that 'there's only one mind, the one we all share.' Cage pointed out that we had to go beyond private and personal mind-sets and understand how radically things had changed. Mind had become socialized. 'We can't change our minds without changing the world,' he said. Mind as a man-made extension became our environment, which he characterized as 'the collective consciousness,' which we could tap into by creating 'a global utilities network.'

If you believe we are all part of one social mind, the world's mind (and remember that we get the reality we expect to perceive),  then it follows that the segmenting off of important ideas, the claiming ownership over ideas, the holding them separate from the rest of the social mind is the worst kind of sin: It is relentless and causeless self-abnegation, a sin against oneself.

It's true that some of the contributors to some of the projects I list here were paid for their participation; but they were paid for their time, and not for their ideas.  The rewards for joining in a collaborative effort are not, despite Lanier's assertion to the otherwise, reduced to either praise or money; the rewards are in contributing to a socially meaningful activity, in being a productive part of something larger than oneself.  Indeed, Lanier's very argument that "millions of people are ready to contribute" but that they are ready to do so even though their contributions are "unpaid, and often anonymous" shows that kudos or money are not the only motivators in collaborative spaces.

I'm an intermittent contributor to Wikipedia, and I do it without the expectation of money or kudos; I do it knowing nobody knows or cares about my contributions, except that what I add makes something neat a tiny bit better than it was before. There's value in that, to me and to the hordes of people who are perfectly comfortable contributing to collaborative projects anonymously and for free. Some things we do for money, after all, and some we do for love.






*jk jk jk I have absolutely no problem taking on such a revered, well credentialed authority as Jaron Lanier.

on Cory Doctorow on how to say stupid things about social media

"There are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to social media," says writer Cory Doctorow in his fantastic Guardian piece, "How to say stupid things about social media." Social media environments, he continues,

are Skinner boxes designed to condition us to undervalue our privacy and to disclose personal information. They have opaque governance structures. They are walled gardens that violate the innovative spirit of the internet. But to deride them for being social, experimental and personal is to sound like a total fool.

Yet plenty of perfectly smart people who should know better say exactly the foolish kinds of things Doctorow rightly decries in his post. Mainly, lately, the stupid things have been leveled at Twitter: It's trivial. It's banal. It's too voyeuristic, or it's a weak imitation of real relationships, or--and this is the one that really gets me--I try to use it in smart, deliberate, consequential ways, even though lots of my followers don't.

Partially, people who take stances like the above fail to see that the majority of the communication on sites like Twitter falls into the category of what Doctorow calls "social grooming." He writes:

The meaning of the messages isn't "u look h4wt dude" or "wat up wiv you dawg?" That's merely the form. The meaning is: "I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well."

Doctorow compares the "banality" of conversations on Twitter and Facebook to the conversations we have with coworkers. We ask a coworker if she had a good weekend, he writes, not because we care about how her weekend went but because we care about developing bonds with the people around us.

Yes, though that's only part of the answer. In choosing to communicate via Twitter, I'm not only saying "I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well," but I am also publicly announcing: "I am thinking of him, I care about her, I hope he is well." These announcements are interspersed with my Twitter interactions with
people who are not close friends or even necessarily acquaintances--people I care about only in the most abstract sense. I follow just under 350 people, after all, and am followed by around the same number--a far higher number than I am equipped to develop deep relationships with. And lots of people follow and are followed by far greater numbers than I.

The creaming together of the personal and the professional, the public and the private, means that 'trivial' social interactions in online social networks, however much they seem to replicate those that pepper our physical interactions, actually represent a new social animal whose form we have yet to fully sketch. We're all kind of blindly feeling our way around the elephant here. We who embrace social media technologies can scoff at the person who says an elephant is like a water spout after feeling only its trunk, or the person who has felt a little more and argues it's like a moving pillar topped off by a shithole, but we would do well to remember that in this parable, everyone who tries to describe the elephant, no matter how much of it he has touched, can only describe it by comparing it to objects he has previously encountered. Twitter is similar to a lot of things, but in the end it's its own elephant, identical to nothing else we've seen before.

This is why, as Doctorow points out, people rely on personal experience and therefore read Twitter and similar networks as trivial and banal instead of deeply socially meaningful. But it's also why we need to take care to treat the social meaning as different from that which emerges through other types of (digital or physical) social interactions.

on lurkers, geeks, and pasty white men

I'm reading a fascinating new piece by Kate Crawford called "Following you: disciplines of listening in social media." Crawford, an Associate Professor in the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, suggests that we rethink our discourse around lurkers and less active participants in online affinity spaces; actually, she suggests we get away from that term "lurking," since "this term has hampered our understanding of online spaces, and...the concept of listening offers more open and critically productive ground."

Crawford points to a glorification of "voice" as the highest form of online participation. She is gently critical of "this privileging of voice, and particularly voice-as-democratic-participation," which dominates research and writing about online activity. She explains:

In Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn's Democracy and New Media, the authors argue that the Internet 'is politically important because it expands the range of voices that can be heard in a national debate, ensuring that no one voice can speak with unquestioned authority.' This 'speaking truth to power' model is a prominent feature of much media and cultural studies analysis, but it has limited the recognition of the variety and reach of the practices of listening online. Listening has not been given sufficient consideration as a significant practice of intimacy, connection, obligation and participation online; instead, it has often been considered as contributing little value to online communities, if not acting as an active drain on their growth.

By my lights, Crawford is both right and a little bit wrong. There is a strange trend among new media researchers to privilege those who speak loudest and carry the biggest sticks; we often hold up "geeking out," as Mimi Ito and her colleagues describe it in their recent book on youth and new media, as the gold standard of online participation. But geeking out is characterized by single-minded obsession, deep immersion into a hobby or pastime, often at the expense of other pursuits. The archetypal "geek" is often the pasty white man toiling in the dead of night in front of some terminal or circuit board or technology. In a recent post on animals' use of tools, HASTAC co-founded Cathy Davidson remarks on the recent discovery that certain types of octopus use coconut shells as tools. The post is called "Only Humans Use Tools (O, and Octopi Too)," and Davidson explains that the title is intentionally ironic:

Many, many animals--maybe even all of them, in fact--use tools if only humans could "see" that they do. We see tools very anthrocentrically in the same way that we hear animal "language." Unless the animals translate it for us, we don't believe it exists.

I think the same is true when it comes to talking about "geeking out." Because pasty white men have traditionally dominated geek culture, at least in America, their practices became the standard by which we measure all geeks. If it doesn't look like a geek, walk like a geek, or quack like a geek, then we argue that it's not a geek--unless geeks who don't fit the geek stereotype translate for us, we don't believe they exist either.

In this sense, Crawford's effort to re-position the lurker as a listener whose participation in online spaces is essential to the success of those spaces is both important and useful. (And by the way, this paper identifies three categories of listening: background listening, delegated listening, and reciprocal listening; and the work she does to discuss these categories offers nice strategies for reframing different approaches to listening.) But on the other hand...if you spend your entire life listening and never 'speaking truth to power,' then what's the point of listening at all?

The work of making cultural meaning, after all, depends on collaboration. It depends on the power of speech, the power of communication, and the willingness to take a stand when it matters. It may be perfectly legitimate to be a Twitter user who listens in but never tweets, but the hope is that this sort of Twitter user will feel empowered to speak up in another space somewhere else. Henry Jenkins says this about participatory culture:

Not all members must contribute, but all must feel free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

Lurking--or, if you prefer, listening--is certainly a legitimate form of participation. But if a person never moves beyond listening and begins to 'speak' (and keep in mind that 'speaking' may take a variety of forms in this strange and wacky era we call The New Media Age), then that person isn't engaging fully with the affordances of the technologies she is engaged with. Often, of course, the geeks--the ones that we readily recognize, and readily cede the floor to--drown out the voices of other types of participants. This is a problem we need to set about solving. But the solution is not to argue that listening is valid in the same ways and to the same power as is making your ideas heard.

Crawford's piece, along with others she references in her article, helps us to rethink how we describe listeners as participants in online spaces. The next step, in my opinion, is to find a way to empower them to speak when they feel they have something to say. Alongside this goal is the deep imperative to find ways of recognizing speech acts and other forms of communication that don't fit the archetypes and stereotypes that too often direct our thinking about these sorts of issues.

response from Mark Bauerlein: on The Dumbest Generation

I recently received an email communication from Mark Bauerlein in response to my recent critique of his book, the Dumbest Generation.

I asked, and Bauerlein gave me permission, to post his response to my blog. Here it is, in its entirety:

Astonishing, Jenna, that you quote Liz Losh, who actually takes one disgruntled student's comments on RateMyProfessors as evidence from which to generalize about my teaching.

If you have found any factual or logical errors in Dumbest Generation, I'll be happy to concede them. After all, we want every harsh judgment in the book to be proven wrong.

Mark

let's all agree to pretend it's not ironic that we ask experts to weigh in on the changing nature of expertise

An astounding phenomenon of participatory culture is this: If you toss yourself around in it enough, and you bang hard enough on everything you think might be a door, and you try to do your very best to toss yourself around and bang on doors in articulate, responsible, and interesting ways, sometimes you get lucky and someone opens the door to figure out what all the ruckus is about.

I got lucky this week, when CBC Radio called to interview me about new media literacy. The resulting interview, posted to the CBC program Spark, was my chance to try to say something reasonably articulate and unembarrassing about strategies for navigating the new credibility issues that emerge out of a cultural moment in which, as National Writing Project Co-Director Elyse Eidman-Aadahl put it in a recent panel on digital writing, we have the technologies and the potential to foster universal authorship in tandem with universal literacy.

The interview, with Spark host Nora Young, has been posted in full online (here and here). A shorter version will air on CBC Radio soon. Try not to pay attention to the eye-crossing, jaw-dropping irony of the argument I make that the very nature of expertise and credibility have changed, all the while acting as if I were an expert on the issue of expertise.

Another interesting feature of participatory culture is that there are still plenty of opportunities for people to act as the Sage on the Stage, despite the fact that the wisdom they impart often comes through deep collaboration and interaction with many people. In this case, the ideas I brought to this interview came through conversation with my buddies Rafi Santo, Katie Clinton, Michelle Honeyford and Becky Rupert. It's strange to me sometimes that the person who makes the most noise so often ends up being the one who gets handed the bullhorn and an audience to address.

By the way, the example I give of the stakes in finding out the year Mickey Mantle was born came directly from Rafi Santo. I stole it and he deserves all the credit.

I worry that the internet will kill everything I love.

I am, I feel, often a couple of steps behind mass culture.

Actually, this appears to be true only about a subgroup of TV shows that we might label THE MOST AWESOME TV SHOWS EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

Among the TV shows I got around to watching after they'd finished their first time around: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly / Serenity, Jericho, Battlestar Galactica. And now: Dr. Who. I'm only five episodes in to the first season and I'm head over heels. (the special effects! the character development! the joy with which Rose and the Doctor thrust themselves toward adventure! those radiant, radiant smiles!)

But enough about me. Let's talk about Hulu.

More specifically, let's talk about the cheap and free media-streaming services that offer a kind of on-demand programming experience--movies, TV shows, digital shorts--to anyone with a computer and a moderately reliable internet connection. Hulu, a joint venture funded by NBC and Fox, is the second most popular video viewing site on the web. (YouTube was tops, but then again it's hard to beat the king.) It's not hard to figure out why. Hulu features a deep vault of new shows and older classics, and it offers links to streams of shows not hosted on Hulu. (Because it's affiliated with its parent networks, the Hulu-hosted offerings stick mainly to those owned by NBC, Fox and Hulu-affiliated networks.)

I still watch a few shows on TV so I can have that old-time "community of fans, in this together" experience (SAMCRO FTW), and I subscribe to Netflix, through which I receive about 2 DVDs a month and watch up to a dozen shows and movies online. But the rest--the rest comes for free, mainly through Hulu and other franchise-sponsored media sites.

Which is why I was so sad to hear that Hulu is considering a switch to a paid format for at least some of its content, at least according to News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey (News Corp. is a part-owner of Hulu).

blogging as a pedagogical tool: some initial ideas and a request

I'm hoping to crowdsource some brainstorming about the pedagogical potential of blogging on learning. Lately, in my work with Dan Hickey's 21st Century Assessment Project, I've been thinking tons about how integrating blogging in the formal English / Language Arts classroom might build a rich new media environment for ELA students. I've started a provisional list below but am hoping that others (most importantly for me, people who have worked with blogs in their classrooms) can offer ideas for additions to this list.

First of all, it's worth noting that my approach to the value of blogging for teaching and learning in Language Arts is deeply informed by the work of a number of teacher-researchers from several fields. Most notable among these are Paul Allison, whose chapter "Be a Blogger: Social Networking in the Classroom" (in Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom, by Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson, and Charles Moran) offers a glimpse into the day-to-day workings of a blogging-focused ELA curriculum; and Sam Rose and Howard Rheingold, who have devised (and made publicly available) an enormous set of resources for teaching in and through new media platforms.

My approach is also informed by my personal experience as a blogger--really, to be fair, as someone who is willing to squeeze out nearly anything in order to make time for posting. By even my most generous estimate, I spend far too much of my time blogging--unless you account for the formative value of blogging for someone like me. I am convinced that the intellectual and identity work required for me to maintain this space has led directly to my growing prowess as a researcher, reader, and writer. You cannot convince me otherwise; so do not even bother trying.

My experiences and the reading I've done about the value of blogging for learning informs everything that comes next.

Characteristics of blogging that support new media literacy

Reaching a wide(r) reader base
It's important to note that blogs differ in purpose from many seemingly similar writing platforms. It's obvious to most that a blog is different from a personal journal, in that while many of us may hope to have our journals read by a larger public some day, blogs are actually intended to support wider readership. The majority of blogs are public (meaning anybody can view them) and taggable, and they come up as legitimate sites in web searches.

Blogs also differ from forums, chat rooms, instant message programs, and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Of all of these spaces, blogs are generally the most polished, the most text-based, and the most supportive of extended engagement with a single idea.

Shifting from intended audience to intended public
This idea is ripped from Howard Rheingold, who (tapping into some Habermas) writes that

[m]oving from a private to a public voice can help students turn their self-expression into a form of public participation. Public voice is learnable, a matter of consciously engaging with an active public rather than broadcasting to a passive audience.

The move here is away from the "please read what I wrote" approach to "please act on the ideas I've written down here." The regular practice required for building and maintaining a blog's readership helps to crystallize this shift and helps writers to see there is a broad, if constantly shifting, group of people whose interests align with the broad, if constantly shifting, ideas of a blog. Though the intended public is largely invisible (we have generally only met a fraction of our blog's readers), consistent practice in finding, drawing in, and engaging this target public makes them less transparent.

Blogs as (genuine) conversations
When I taught college composition lo these many years ago, I always tried to argue to my students that all writing is a conversation--that when we write, we take up ideas that were presented by other writers before us and try to present something new that might be of interest to people who care about the kinds of things we write about.

The argument always felt hollow to me. After all, college students are typically only eavesdroppers. Only a handful of people will ever read what they've written, and often the students don't really care all that much about the assigned writing topics anyway. Add to that the artificial motivator of the ever-elusive 'A' and you have a recipe for calamity.

But blogs--now blogs are authentic communication spaces. They really are. Anybody can get almost anybody to read a blogpost and, if the post is engaging enough, to comment on the post for all eternity to see. This very fact ups the ante some: Getting the spelling of someone's name suddenly matters an awful lot. Making a concise, well supported argument has real, potential consequences: A strong enough argument gets people to sit up and notice. A strong enough argument gets people to act.

A move toward increasingly public spheres of participation
An increasingly participatory culture calls for participation that's ethical, reasoned, and publicly accessible. After all, the widespread takeup of the spirit of participatory culture requires that we all act in ways that keep the barriers to participation low, the potential for contribution high, and the mentorship possibilities readily available to most or all participants. This can only happen to the extent that all or most of us are willing to operate, to express and circulate our ideas and creative works, in public online and offline spaces. Since so much discourse will increasingly happen in public spaces, it only makes sense that we use the ELA domain to prepare students for engagement in those public spaces.


Blogs as spaces for fostering both traditional and new media literacies
For language arts teachers, blogging presents a fairly obvious avenue for preparing learners for engagement in public spheres of communication, since blogs align nicely with the traditional purposes of the ELA classroom. As a group of readers engage in deep analysis of their own and others' blogs, they have to think about issues like tone, style, genre, punctuation, word choice, and organization.

The extra toy prize is that students also get to learn about the characteristics of online writing, including what danah boyd identifies as the four properties of online communication (persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability) and three dynamics (invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private). As my colleague Michelle Honeyford put it, "they hit all the standards and get to learn about online participation for free."


Confronting the ethics challenge
Nobody's arguing that we should sign every sixth grader up with a Blogger account. That would just be silly. Media scholar Henry Jenkins is fond of saying that the role of educators and parents is not to look over kids' shoulders but to watch their backs, and scaffolding learners toward participation in increasingly public spheres allows us to do just that. Lots of teachers (including the famously brilliant Becky Rupert at Bloomington's Aurora Alternative High School) start their students out by having them post to a private space (she uses Ning) but having them analyze writing from more public spaces. This way, they have a kind of new media sandbox to try out and engage with the norms of online communication before actually being held to the higher ethical standard, with deeper potential repercussions (both positive and negative).


That's all I have for now, though I would love to hear from you on the list above. What have I missed? What am I ignoring? What struggles are linked to bringing blogs into the classroom, and what challenges have you encountered if you've tried to do so?

I hope for this to be a multipart post that will include thoughts on the following categories:

• Affordances of blogging as a new media writing technology
• Challenges to integrating blogs into the ELA classroom
• Resources (including lesson plans, other writing on this topic, etc.)
• Assessment guidelines for working with blogs

If you have thoughts on any of the above, I'd love to hear from you. If you have any trouble posting comments (I don't know why, but some of you have) please email me at jennamcjenna(at)gmail(dot)com.

'blogging is not serious writing': Oh, re-he-he-he-heallllly?

file under: you can't be serious.

Blogging, writes Jose Quesada over at the Academic Productivity blog, is not serious writing. Quesada references Jaron Lanier's essay,"Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism," in which Lanier argues that

writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it's easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday's moves in a conversation.

Far from challenging either the notion that "writing meant to last" is not "just reactive" or that blogposts are somehow just reactive and not meant to last, Quesada agrees with Lanier's stance and adds that

[a]ll academics are painfully aware that writing well takes time, and some know that writing well is not a prerequisite for having a successful blog.

So, basically, it doesn’t pay off to painfully slowly distill ideas for a blog post. In a sense, consuming blog posts –let alone microblogging 140-character blurbs- warrants you a so-so level of refinement.... Playing to the crowd –what bloggers must do, according to Lanier- does not require incredibly solid thinking; it’s a completely different skill.

Truly, I've had enough of this outdated stance with respect to blogs. It's worth pointing out that Lanier's essay dates back to 2006--eons ago, from the perspective of the social revolution. Here in 2009, blogs have come into their own as spaces for serious engagement with serious ideas. (Author update 9/27/09, 11:18 PM: Not to press too hard on this issue, but Lanier's essay is so outdated that it refers to Wikipedia as "the Wikipedia"--not once, not twice, but twenty-one times. Just imagine the alternate universe where we talk about looking up information on the Wikipedia--akin to tweeting on the Twitter or posting a new status update on the Facebook. That would make for a very different the America, that's for sure.)

Academics have embraced the platform in a variety of ways. Media scholar Henry Jenkins uses his blog for presentation and exchange of serious ideas. Over at the Tiger Beatdown, Sady Doyle takes on the outrages of a deeply sexist society with a playful tone (she explains her blog is about "ladybusiness") that only heightens her deeply effective expression of rage. HASTAC co-founder and Duke University professor Cathy Davidson uses her blog to work through key issues (social media, literacy practices, academia) in an informal, inviting, colloquial tone. Though I've only offered three examples, academics are in fact embracing the weblog in their own interesting ways by the dozens--by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands.

Quesada argues that "blogging will do nothing in an academic CV." I couldn't disagree more. While it may be true that blogposts don't yet count as "serious" academic discourse on par with publication in peer reviewed journals, not having a blog is increasingly a glaring omission, especially for academics who are or should be focused on the role of social media within their discipline (which is to say just about every academic).

Career advancement issues aside, Quesada seems to be arguing that producing thoughtful, intellectually challenging blogposts is not a productive enterprise for academics--that if they choose to blog, they should use it to reach a popular audience instead of using it to present deeper intellectual work. "What I think could work," he writes,

is a hybrid between a focused paper (that nobody would read other than a close circle of scientists) and a blog post that ‘plays to the masses’ and tries hard to capture attention at the cost of rigor and polish.

(Shut up! the blogger in me wants to holler. At the cost of rigor and polish? Do you even read any academic blogs? *cough* *sputter* ::regains composure::)

One of the most significant obstacles to intellectual progress is the difficulty of getting interesting but new or untested ideas circulated among other thinkers--academics and non-academics alike. This is especially true for young academics (like me!) who have an awful lot to say but neither the credentials nor the years of research to back up their ideas. My work in maintaining a blog--and using it to present ideas that I think are both rigorous and fairly well polished--allows me to not only offer up my thoughts for examination by thinkers whose opinions matter to me, but also to refine, build on, or dismiss ideas based on input from others. (I got Ted Castronova to comment on my blog!) Further, when other academics whose work I admire keep a blog, I have the opportunity to weigh in on and perhaps contribute to their ideas. (I get to comment on Henry Jenkins' blog!)

In short, academic blogs drop the barriers to participation in productive, valuable and meaningful ways--and the more seriously academics take this platform, the more likely it is that blogs will increase in significance (and, incidentally, upping the odds that blogging will come to mean something on an academic CV).

We would do well to remember that academic productivity is about much more than finding ways to get your work done efficiently. It's also about being a productive member of a larger community of thinkers and researchers, all of whom benefit from the wider circulation of more ideas, from more people, in more participatory ways.

update on the decline of print media

Over the last few months, I've largely kept my "print-media-isn't-viable" soapbox stowed out of public view. A new post by Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy got me lugging it back out.

Kennedy, a long-time subscriber to the Boston Globe (which he calls--and I agree with him--"the most important news organization in Greater Boston"), has decided to cancel his Monday through Saturday subscription. He writes:

Why did we do this? It’s been inevitable since early this summer, when the Globe made a couple of important changes in its distribution model. First, it unveiled GlobeReader, an electronic paper that’s a faster and easier read than the Web edition. Second, it raised the price of its print edition.

Seven-day home delivery of the Globe now costs $46.56 a month in Media Nation. With advertising in what may be a permanent decline, readers are going to have to pick up more of the cost, so I certainly don’t fault the Globe for charging more. But our family is not immune from economic pressures. For us, it makes sense to go with paper on Sundays and use GlobeReader the rest of the week.

Kennedy, like all of us who consider a thriving, free press to be the backbone of a thriving, free society, explains that he has struggled with his family's changing relationship to his local newspaper. He justifies the change with his subscription to the Globe Reader (it costs $14.95 a month it comes with subscription to the Globe--thanks for the correction, Dan) and explains that he would not have canceled his subscription if the only alternative were reading the news online, because

[l]ike virtually all newspapers, the Globe is struggling with its decision some dozen year ago to offer its content online for free. At one time, newspaper executives assumed that advertising revenues would eventually justify that decision. It didn’t happen — it may never happen — and the way out of that morass is unclear. We were not about to contribute to that pain.

Though Kennedy makes no judgment here about the net value of making news content available for free online, there are those who do, who have, and who will. I am one of those people. I believe that the decision to make news content available for free online is perhaps the single most crucial factor leading to the social revolution.

Imagine an alternate scenario: back in the 1990s, at the very beginning of the internet age, news executives decide to charge--and even a micropayment will do, for this scenario--for access to online content. Communication, creation, and circulation of individual ideas and creative works are still cheap or free, as they are today, but accessing the news will cost you. In this scenario, the power of the hyperlink gets diluted to practically zero, at least for those who choose not to pay for their news. Blogging loses its widespread appeal. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, if they even come into being, get relegated to the realm of the banal: tweets about what I had for breakfast, status updates spreading my results on a series of meaningless quizzes, achievements in Mafia Wars and Scrabulous.

It's tough to imagine this alternate universe because putting a price, even a tiny one, on access to content seems nearly unthinkable to us now. Indeed, perhaps the most significant fallout from media executives' decision not to charge for content is the general public stance exemplified by Jon Stewart's comment to Walter Isaacson, a journalist and policy guy who believes newspapers should start charging for access to online content: "Sir," Stewart said in disbelief, "the internet is free."

Since the advent of mass literacy, has there ever been a time when so many people believed so strongly that information should be free and accessible to all?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
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a new political model: "just in time" civic engagement

Over at Empathetics: Integral Life, my pal Rafi Santo just published a post about his experience voting in his city's Democratic primary election.

He explains that despite his commitment to civic participation--which, for him, includes casting a ballot in primary elections--he has struggled to keep up with electoral news. He writes:

While I’m motivated to vote in these elections, realize that my vote will make a real difference in deciding who gets into office, and understand that these politicians have probably the most impact on the issues immediate to my city ranging from education and real estate development to local environmental laws and criminal justice, I just can’t seem to get motivated enough to actually follow these races.

His solution: Whip out his laptop, plug in to his polling station's free Wi-Fi, and search for details on the candidates before casting a vote. In doing this, Rafi writes, he engaged in "just in time" learning, which he contrasts against

“just in case” learning, where the learner learns something on the chance that they might need to know it at a later point, but the situation in which they might apply it is certainly not present, and may never be. For a great example of just in case learning, think back to a good bit of your high school experience. I swear I have never used trigonometry.

Given the historically low voter turnout in primary elections, Rafi argues that it's not that people are too busy or don't care but that "they don’t want to waste their time with something they know nothing about." He suggests we leverage our capacity for supporting "just in time" learning by offering research terminals at polling stations so people can gather the information they need, when they need it.

I find this to be one of the most sound and cost- and time-effective ideas I've heard for fostering greater participation in the electoral process. Though clearly significant issues of equity and fraud could emerge (would certain sites be blocked? could hackers crash the system? what if some polling places lost their internet connections? would activists use the terminals to spread electoral results or other [mis]information?), the payout is potentially enormous. After all, more democracy is generally better than less democracy, and dealing with the fallout is therefore worth the investment.

Not only is Rafi's idea an important one to consider, but it also pushes us to rethink our definition of "civic engagement." Voting, after all, is not exactly the tippy-top of the civic engagement mountain--though we do like to believe it is, since it's fairly easy to measure and stands in nicely for everything that civic engagement means to our culture. But it's not the casting of the ballot that matters, but the symbolic drive behind the vote. Culturally, we carry in our head this icon of the Engaged Voting Citizen who stands up when the times call for it; who stands up in earnest and urgency to make herself heard on the matters at hand.

The days of the Engaged Voting Citizen, if those days truly ever existed, are long past. When it comes to voting for POTUS, it's almost a no-brainer for most of us, and the results are generally decided long before Election Day by pro-am journalists and media outlets whose reportage dictate not only what choices we will have, but upon what criteria we will make our decision. They fill our space up with information, just in case, and we try our best to remember as much as possible in case the time comes to act upon it.

Compare that to what we might call "just in time" civic engagement: It often emerges organically, from inside of an online or offline community that forms or unites around a perceived injustice, problem, or challenge. One example: The thousands of people who united to save the TV show Jericho for one more season were, for all intents and purposes, as engaged as the most energized campaign organizers. They didn't need to be heckled or cajoled into participating; they understood the need and, just in time, gathered and circulated the necessary information on how to react effectively and efficiently.

In Here Comes Everybody, technology guru Clay Shirky considers why so much collective action focuses largely on "relatively short-term and negative goals." He points to political protests in the Philippines, flash mobs, and protests against corporate policies as examplars of this, then writes:

Despite the number of stories about collective action, though, they have one thing in common: they all rely on "stop energy," on an attempt to get some other organization or group to capitulate to the demands of the collected group.... Everywhere we look, social media makes creativity not just possible but desirable enough that these examples and millions of others are all out there, with more added every day. Everywhere, that is, except collective action.

Perhaps collective action is more focused on protesting than creating because collective action is simply harder than sharing or collaborating.

Perhaps Shirky's right; but then again, I'd be hard pressed to think of a powerful example of civic engagement, either online or offline, that didn't emerge out of a need for "stop energy." I suppose voting is our best example of "go energy" engagement, coming around as it does like clockwork; but when do we get the largest voter turnout? When it's time to kick someone out, of course.

It's time to move past the lamentation that young people don't vote; they're used to models of civic engagement that feel more powerful, more effective, and more directly relevant to their everyday interests and desires. If we want (and I agree that we do) to get young people engaged in local and national politics, then we need to find ways to leverage this new ad hoc, "just in time" model for a range of civic needs, both large and small. Bringing in research stations and offering (hack-proof) online voting are two interesting strategies for doing this; and as we continue to rethink what we mean by the terms "civic engagement," "community" and "participation" we need to continue to develop and shift our long-established notions of what it means to be a good citizen in an increasingly participatory culture.

weighing in on the natives / immigrants metaphor

Just FYI, "digital" isn't actually a language, no matter how badly Marc Prensky wants it to be.

Prensky's notion of "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" has gained cultural traction because it gives us a way to talk about the generational differences in approaches to technology. We get it when he writes that

[a]s Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today's older folk were "socialized" differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

My mom prints emails that interest her and trusts the information delivered in print form to her front door, but not the information delivered digitally to her computer screen; the kids I work with don't really bother with email and gather digital data like it's Super Mario Brothers coins. Ha! we say. Digital immigrants! Digital natives!

Fine. Except "digital" is not a language.

"Digital" is a way of conveying information. "Digital" is a cultural tool for delivering language, not the language itself.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems with the natives / immigrants metaphor. More troublesome is the question of who gets to decide which of us are the natives and which are the immigrants. We need to consider how this metaphor--taken up so widely in our cultural conversations--continues to reify a divide in participation based on gender, class, and ethnicity.

Even those who subscribe to the Prensky metaphor have to concede that not all young people can be considered "natives" by his definition, and not all old people can be considered "immigrants." When we make the sweeping proclamation that kids these days are digital natives, what we're really doing is identifying the type of kid whose practices and ways of being in the world have gone mainstream.

Had we but world enough, and time, this cultural approach, Prensky, were no crime. But what we actually have is a desperate divide: (largely middle and upper class, largely white) kids with excess time and access to resources and support for developing a technological fluency; and (largely lower class, often nonwhite) kids without the resources or support to develop the kinds of social competencies that will enable them to join the larger cultural conversation.

The digital natives / digital immigrants metaphor is yet another tool that gets used, intentionally or unintentionally, to support our culture's dominant Discourse, dominated as it is by the same members of the privileged classes who have historically monopolized cultural conversations.

One of the most thrilling aspects of the social revolution is its potential to overthrow gender, class, and ethnic divides. So far, we haven't come anywhere near realizing even a fraction of this potential, and sweeping terms like Prensky's--steeped as they are in a long history smacking of hegemony--make the revolutionary potential of new media technologies increasingly difficult to realize.



Related posts by other writers:
Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants--A New Way To Look At Ourselves and Our Kids
Marc Prensky: Overcoming Educators' Digital Immigrant Accents: A Rebuttal
Henry Jenkins: Reconsidering digital immigrants...
John Palfrey: Born Digital
danah boyd:some thoughts on technophilia
Timothy VanSlyke: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants:Some Thoughts from the Generation Gap