That was easy.
I'm resisting my impulse to comment, because I think the video speaks for itself.
Okay, okay, just one comment, from my friend Ryan, who writes: "These a-holes need a Care Bear Stare, STAT."
Here's a video rebuttal of the National Organization for Marriage ad, by GoodAsYou.com:
For additional rebuttals, visit the Human Rights Campaign's EndTheLies site at http://www.hrc.org/endthelies/.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Reading with mouse in hand
I was recently notified that I'm not appropriately sensitive to how difficult the act of writing is for some people. This notification came as my friend and colleague Katie Clinton was finishing up co-authorship of a paper with two of our colleagues for an upcoming conference. I was in the process of complaining that my normal flood of email to the three of them was garnering little response.
"Why is everybody ignoring me?" I whined.
"For some people," she explained patiently, "being in writing mode takes all of their energy, and they don't have the headspace to think about other things. It's hard for you to get it because it comes so easy to you."
Fine, yes, Katie's right: Writing comes easily to me. But it's more that--writing comes easily to a lot of people, but that doesn't mean they spend literally all of their free time posting to their blog (unlike some people I know). In fact, there are entire groups of people--I include myself in this group--for whom "writing" is inseparable from the everyday activity of making meaning of the world. This is a break from traditional notions of writing as separate, as requiring a separate focus, a separate head-space. Something else--something extra and much more complex--is going on here.
I'd like to introduce the concept of "reading with mouse in hand," a notion developed by my colleague and friend Katie Clinton. It emerged through a collision of the work we've done for Project New Media Literacies on curriculum for high school ELA classrooms and our thinking about Spreadable Educational Practices (here and here) in collaboration with my sensei Dan Hickey and my mentor and partner in crime Michelle Honeyford. This work has been heavily influenced by media scholar Henry Jenkins and tech guru Clay Shirky, and we've recently been circulating the video below of Shirky talking about the revolution in and via social media (originally posted at WarrenEllis.com). It's 15 minutes long and worth every penny:
Today's youth, as Shirky explains, understand that a product that ships without a mouse ships broken. They exist in a world where writing is one practice among a host of generative activities that are inseparable from media consumption.
This is not, in some important ways, fundamentally different from the act of "reading with a pencil in hand," a common practice among professional writers and voracious readers. The difference, though, is in what happens to the generative activity linked to reading: In the video example below (featuring Wyn Kelley, Melville Scholar and Senior Lecturer in Literature at MIT, and edited by Debora Lui, an alumnus of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program), annotation and ornamentation are introduced as a means of filtering information, possibly for future publication or, at the least, generative work. These activities adhere to a traditional "filter, then publish" format of information transmission.
In contrast, reading with mouse in hand adheres more closely to the "publish, then filter" approach defined by Shirky. In a "publish, then filter" world, everything goes live, most of it open for public consumption and appraisal, and it's now our job as readers of all of that generative work to sift through it and figure out what matters to us or to our interests and work.
A few months back, I attended a talk by literacy theorist Deb Brandt, who made a compelling argument that we're in a second stage of mass literacy. In the first stage, she argued, reading literacy was key--and it was during this stage that the assumption of reading literacy as a basic human right was established. This second stage, according to Brandt, is characterized by writing as a more common practice than reading.
"[People are] reading to write," she explained, "and they're learning to write by writing to people who write."
Not only that, Brandt argued, but what we write is increasingly available for co-opting by corporate interests. "Your language is for hire," she said, "and that's...weird."
I suppose so. On the other hand, instead of "weird," we might say "complex in ways we hadn't anticipated." As physicist Philip Anderson says, "more is different."
As a blogger, I write more now than I ever have, even when I was a graduate student in a creative writing program. These days, I'm up to thousands of words a week just on my blog, and that's in addition to the writing I do for my day job, in emails, internal and public documents, and reports to colleagues and collaborators. What's more, I always read with my mouse in hand, which is to say that I read with an audience--a public--in mind. As what Howard Rheingold calls an "intelligent filter," I am conscious of my role as a sifter of information, a synthesizer of news items, a writer for an audience, however limited.
What happens when "writing comes easily to me" and "I always got good grades on my papers" become "I know how to act on what I consume" and "My blog gets hundreds (or thousands) of visitors a week (or day)"?
We can--and should--start thinking about ways to address the concern Brandt and others have raised that education institutions have not figured out how to accommodate the shift toward a generative literacy. Shirky writes that "the future belongs to those who take the present for granted." It's a nice sound bite, and as such, perhaps somewhat more sweeping than it is strictly true. But the deeper truth that Shirky points to--that a revolution is underway, and that no amount of nostalgia can turn back the tide of social change--is a deep, important truth that once accepted will change, dramatically and forever, the terms and frame of the conversation.
"Why is everybody ignoring me?" I whined.
"For some people," she explained patiently, "being in writing mode takes all of their energy, and they don't have the headspace to think about other things. It's hard for you to get it because it comes so easy to you."
Fine, yes, Katie's right: Writing comes easily to me. But it's more that--writing comes easily to a lot of people, but that doesn't mean they spend literally all of their free time posting to their blog (unlike some people I know). In fact, there are entire groups of people--I include myself in this group--for whom "writing" is inseparable from the everyday activity of making meaning of the world. This is a break from traditional notions of writing as separate, as requiring a separate focus, a separate head-space. Something else--something extra and much more complex--is going on here.
I'd like to introduce the concept of "reading with mouse in hand," a notion developed by my colleague and friend Katie Clinton. It emerged through a collision of the work we've done for Project New Media Literacies on curriculum for high school ELA classrooms and our thinking about Spreadable Educational Practices (here and here) in collaboration with my sensei Dan Hickey and my mentor and partner in crime Michelle Honeyford. This work has been heavily influenced by media scholar Henry Jenkins and tech guru Clay Shirky, and we've recently been circulating the video below of Shirky talking about the revolution in and via social media (originally posted at WarrenEllis.com). It's 15 minutes long and worth every penny:
Today's youth, as Shirky explains, understand that a product that ships without a mouse ships broken. They exist in a world where writing is one practice among a host of generative activities that are inseparable from media consumption.
This is not, in some important ways, fundamentally different from the act of "reading with a pencil in hand," a common practice among professional writers and voracious readers. The difference, though, is in what happens to the generative activity linked to reading: In the video example below (featuring Wyn Kelley, Melville Scholar and Senior Lecturer in Literature at MIT, and edited by Debora Lui, an alumnus of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program), annotation and ornamentation are introduced as a means of filtering information, possibly for future publication or, at the least, generative work. These activities adhere to a traditional "filter, then publish" format of information transmission.
In contrast, reading with mouse in hand adheres more closely to the "publish, then filter" approach defined by Shirky. In a "publish, then filter" world, everything goes live, most of it open for public consumption and appraisal, and it's now our job as readers of all of that generative work to sift through it and figure out what matters to us or to our interests and work.
A few months back, I attended a talk by literacy theorist Deb Brandt, who made a compelling argument that we're in a second stage of mass literacy. In the first stage, she argued, reading literacy was key--and it was during this stage that the assumption of reading literacy as a basic human right was established. This second stage, according to Brandt, is characterized by writing as a more common practice than reading.
"[People are] reading to write," she explained, "and they're learning to write by writing to people who write."
Not only that, Brandt argued, but what we write is increasingly available for co-opting by corporate interests. "Your language is for hire," she said, "and that's...weird."
I suppose so. On the other hand, instead of "weird," we might say "complex in ways we hadn't anticipated." As physicist Philip Anderson says, "more is different."
As a blogger, I write more now than I ever have, even when I was a graduate student in a creative writing program. These days, I'm up to thousands of words a week just on my blog, and that's in addition to the writing I do for my day job, in emails, internal and public documents, and reports to colleagues and collaborators. What's more, I always read with my mouse in hand, which is to say that I read with an audience--a public--in mind. As what Howard Rheingold calls an "intelligent filter," I am conscious of my role as a sifter of information, a synthesizer of news items, a writer for an audience, however limited.
What happens when "writing comes easily to me" and "I always got good grades on my papers" become "I know how to act on what I consume" and "My blog gets hundreds (or thousands) of visitors a week (or day)"?
We can--and should--start thinking about ways to address the concern Brandt and others have raised that education institutions have not figured out how to accommodate the shift toward a generative literacy. Shirky writes that "the future belongs to those who take the present for granted." It's a nice sound bite, and as such, perhaps somewhat more sweeping than it is strictly true. But the deeper truth that Shirky points to--that a revolution is underway, and that no amount of nostalgia can turn back the tide of social change--is a deep, important truth that once accepted will change, dramatically and forever, the terms and frame of the conversation.
Monday, April 6, 2009
the sleeping alone review of books: Opening Up Education
Good book on the open education movement: Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (2008, Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, eds.). You can purchase the book through the MIT Press, though an electronic version is available for download under a Creative Commons license here.
What makes this book so useful is that it offers up a framework, from inside of the world of open education, for analyzing--and, if I may be so bold, at times criticizing--the early fruits of its own movement.
Below, I summarize and review one chapter from the book, followed by a critique of MIT's OpenCourseWare, one of the flagship projects of the Hewlett Foundation's Open Educational Resource Initiative; if you want, you can skip the review and jump down to the meaty stuff down near the bottom.
The Review
The book is divided into three sections: Technology, content, and knowledge. As the authors explain, this division is intended "largely as a convenient and easily understood framework. Naturally, the three categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, their natural interrelationships become evident from the very beginning."
I want to skip ahead to the very last chapter of the book, "What's Next for Open Knowledge?" by Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings. The authors point out that the vision of open education--"dramatically expanded educational access, more widely effective teaching models and materials, and ongoing, systematic improvement in teaching and learning as educators generate and share new pedagogical knowledge and know-how"--is more than just a vision. In fact, many educational institutions have embraced and joined in on a shift toward open educational resources (OER's), and have assisted in the building of what Huber and Hutchings label, borrowing from their own earlier work, "teaching commons: an emergent conceptual space for exchange and community among faculty, students, administrators, and all others committed to learning as an essential activity of life in contemporary democratic society."
How, then, the authors ask, do we continue to expand and preserve the ethos of open education and the teaching commons? "It is well and good," they write, "to make as many educational resources as possible accessible to as many teachers and learners as possible. But, to borrow a line from the movie Field of Dreams, if we build it, will they come?"
Promise, Tool, Bargain
Shirky's answer is simple: "Promise, tool, bargain." These three elements, properly aligned, he argues, will lead to success of a group relying on a social tool; improperly fused, they lead to failure. (For an example of how this does or does not work, take a look at my blogpost on the promise, tool, and bargain of Facebook here.)
Given that there are really only three things to worry about, then, why do so many new groups or movements fail? Two reasons, according to Shirky:
The application of promise, tool, and bargain of open education: Promise
Though Huber and Hutchings use different language, choosing to focus their efforts on two distinct categories--"Knowledge that Matters" and "Inviting and Maintaining Openness"--they are essentially considering the categories Shirky identifies. (Know that aligning Huber and Hutchings with Shirky is a somewhat arbitrary move; I might just as well have said that Shirky essentially considers the categories identified by Huber and Hutchings.) The promise, Shirky writes, is the "why"--why a person would want to join a group or use a tool. For Huber and Hutchins, the "why" is more aptly described as "knowledge that matters"; in considering this point, they explore the promise of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), a program that
To Huber and Hutchings, "knowledge that matters" is collaboration and sharing of scholarship and research around contributing to the improvement of teaching and learning both within individual classrooms and on a larger scale. This knowledge is built and shared around situated approach to teaching, a presumption that context matters. "In short," the authors write, the momentum that the scholarship of teaching and learning has established over the past decade clearly points to the value of pedagogical knowledgte that is deeply contextual and closely tied ot the particulars of classroom settings.
We might say, then, that the promise of joining a program like CASTL--the "why"--is that it offers teachers the opportunity to draw on a bunch of lesson plans, assessment strategies, and so on to the immediate benefit of their own teaching practices, and at the same time offers a feedback loop whereby teachers can share classroom successes with other teachers. They give back to the community of educators and in so doing have an opportunity to influence teaching beyond their local environment.
Tool: the "how"
Often, the authors write, the "how" is ensured in development of tools that allow for "close-to-the-classrom knowledge" to be captured in ways that will travel to other settings." The authors offer the exampe of the KEEP Toolkit, which they argue provides a useful model that combines user-friendly features with readable and usable templates.
The bargain: What we expect from one another 
The bargain, Shirky writes, is where things get tricky, "in part because it is the least explicit aspect and in part because it is the one the users have the biggest hand in creating, which means it can't be completely determined in advance." The bargain is the--ideally shared--agreement between users about community expectations.
For Huber and Hutchings, the bargain of open educational resources is, put simply, openness. Openness, in this case, means both access and the spirit of collaboration and community. As they explain,
First, they write, it's essential to allow the commons to remain open for teachers across disciplines who want to contribute to collaborative knowledge-building, even if they contribute only infrequently. This, however, gives rise to a second concern: Questions about who can (and can't) contribute. "Open education," they write, "does not necessarily mean 'free.'"
Additionally, the bargain in education is not simply between users and makers of educational content; increasingly, teachers and learners are being held accountable by outside stakeholders. (Most significantly, we see this in the phenomenon of testing the souls right out of our young learners.) Huber and Hutchings express concern
Case Study: MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW)
Promise, tool, bargain. It's a difficult combination to get right, even when you have financial backing, institutional support, and a critical mass of contributors, as MIT's OpenCourseWare project proves. Let me be clear: OCW is a success, at least in most important senses of the word. But in its efforts to succeed, it has had to sacrifice some of the most important tenets of the open education movement.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'll once again make clear that I am employed at MIT, though I am not affiliated with the Hewlett Foundation, the group that funds the OCW project, and not in any way connected to OpenCourseWare.
The project is awesomely ambitious. As the OCW site explains,
And that's the modest explanation. In a February 2007 report on Open Educational Resource projects funded by the Hewlett Foundation, Atkins, Brown, and Hammond exclaim:
Fantastic premise, right? And MIT, backed by Hewlett, is putting its money where its mouth is, investing resources into the continued and ongoing development of OCW. The result is a fabulous early stab at an open education resource, one that really does offer high-quality content to the general public--absolutely free.
It turns out, though, that while OpenCourseWare is strong on promise ("You can access course content from some of the greatest minds of this generation!") and bargain ("...and it's all free!"), it's still a little light on tool ("...but genius is not included."). As I mentioned in a previous post, I read voraciously and omnivorously in my capacity as the primary blogger for sleeping alone and starting out early. One place I never, look, though, is on paid-content news sources like the Wall Street Journal. Another place I never look is OpenCourseWare. Why? It kinda...well, first, the download process is confusing, and once you successfully figure it out, you're rewarded with a file folder that looks a lot like this:
Assuming you eventually manage to extract the relevant content, all you really get is a pile of .pdfs, a syllabus, and some course notes. The brilliance, the spark, the certain something that makes a class a mind-blowing experience...that's not available for download.
And, of course, there's the cost involved: Approximately $25,000 per uploaded course, according to the Hewlett report. Add it up: 1,800 courses means $45 million. (Just FYI, that's enough to cover four years of public college for more than 6,800 students, according to stats from the College Board.)
OpenCourseWare is an admirable, but so far unsustainable, model for opening up education--especially since OCW seems to prohibit free appropriation and remixing of course materials. As the site explains under the FAQ category of intellectual property,
These are meaty issues for Hewlett, OCW, and the open education movement to keep working on. As goes OpenCourseWare, after all, so goes the movement.
What makes this book so useful is that it offers up a framework, from inside of the world of open education, for analyzing--and, if I may be so bold, at times criticizing--the early fruits of its own movement.
Below, I summarize and review one chapter from the book, followed by a critique of MIT's OpenCourseWare, one of the flagship projects of the Hewlett Foundation's Open Educational Resource Initiative; if you want, you can skip the review and jump down to the meaty stuff down near the bottom.
The book is divided into three sections: Technology, content, and knowledge. As the authors explain, this division is intended "largely as a convenient and easily understood framework. Naturally, the three categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, their natural interrelationships become evident from the very beginning."I want to skip ahead to the very last chapter of the book, "What's Next for Open Knowledge?" by Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings. The authors point out that the vision of open education--"dramatically expanded educational access, more widely effective teaching models and materials, and ongoing, systematic improvement in teaching and learning as educators generate and share new pedagogical knowledge and know-how"--is more than just a vision. In fact, many educational institutions have embraced and joined in on a shift toward open educational resources (OER's), and have assisted in the building of what Huber and Hutchings label, borrowing from their own earlier work, "teaching commons: an emergent conceptual space for exchange and community among faculty, students, administrators, and all others committed to learning as an essential activity of life in contemporary democratic society."
How, then, the authors ask, do we continue to expand and preserve the ethos of open education and the teaching commons? "It is well and good," they write, "to make as many educational resources as possible accessible to as many teachers and learners as possible. But, to borrow a line from the movie Field of Dreams, if we build it, will they come?"
Promise, Tool, Bargain
Shirky's answer is simple: "Promise, tool, bargain." These three elements, properly aligned, he argues, will lead to success of a group relying on a social tool; improperly fused, they lead to failure. (For an example of how this does or does not work, take a look at my blogpost on the promise, tool, and bargain of Facebook here.) Given that there are really only three things to worry about, then, why do so many new groups or movements fail? Two reasons, according to Shirky:
First, because getting each of these elements right is actually quite challenging, while getting all of them right is essential. Second, as with groups themselves, the complexity comes not just from the elements but from their interactions.
The application of promise, tool, and bargain of open education: Promise
Though Huber and Hutchings use different language, choosing to focus their efforts on two distinct categories--"Knowledge that Matters" and "Inviting and Maintaining Openness"--they are essentially considering the categories Shirky identifies. (Know that aligning Huber and Hutchings with Shirky is a somewhat arbitrary move; I might just as well have said that Shirky essentially considers the categories identified by Huber and Hutchings.) The promise, Shirky writes, is the "why"--why a person would want to join a group or use a tool. For Huber and Hutchins, the "why" is more aptly described as "knowledge that matters"; in considering this point, they explore the promise of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), a program that
seeks to support the development of a scholarship of teaching and learning that: fosters significant, long-lasting learning for all students; enhances the practice and profession of teaching, and; brings to faculty members' work as teachers the recognition and reward afforded to other forms of scholarly work.
To Huber and Hutchings, "knowledge that matters" is collaboration and sharing of scholarship and research around contributing to the improvement of teaching and learning both within individual classrooms and on a larger scale. This knowledge is built and shared around situated approach to teaching, a presumption that context matters. "In short," the authors write, the momentum that the scholarship of teaching and learning has established over the past decade clearly points to the value of pedagogical knowledgte that is deeply contextual and closely tied ot the particulars of classroom settings.
We might say, then, that the promise of joining a program like CASTL--the "why"--is that it offers teachers the opportunity to draw on a bunch of lesson plans, assessment strategies, and so on to the immediate benefit of their own teaching practices, and at the same time offers a feedback loop whereby teachers can share classroom successes with other teachers. They give back to the community of educators and in so doing have an opportunity to influence teaching beyond their local environment.
Tool: the "how"
Where traditional views of educational reform tend to assume a small number of approaches that can be "scaled up" and widely adopted, open knowledge (and, more broadly, open education) offers a different path to improvement, eschewing the "fat head" for the "long tail" (to use Chris Anderson's now well-traveled metaphor) in which many approaches find smaller groups of adopters and champions.
Often, the authors write, the "how" is ensured in development of tools that allow for "close-to-the-classrom knowledge" to be captured in ways that will travel to other settings." The authors offer the exampe of the KEEP Toolkit, which they argue provides a useful model that combines user-friendly features with readable and usable templates.
The bargain, Shirky writes, is where things get tricky, "in part because it is the least explicit aspect and in part because it is the one the users have the biggest hand in creating, which means it can't be completely determined in advance." The bargain is the--ideally shared--agreement between users about community expectations.For Huber and Hutchings, the bargain of open educational resources is, put simply, openness. Openness, in this case, means both access and the spirit of collaboration and community. As they explain,
The "stuff" of open knowledge for teaching and learning is on the rise, happily, both in supply and in the variety of materials and representations of teaching and learning.... But having good stuff is not enough. Those committed to this work must also push for policies and practices to ensure that what is open stays open in the fullest, most vital way. This means maintaining access, certainly, but it also means creating a culture in which people want that access, both as contributors to and users of knowledge in the teaching commons.
First, they write, it's essential to allow the commons to remain open for teachers across disciplines who want to contribute to collaborative knowledge-building, even if they contribute only infrequently. This, however, gives rise to a second concern: Questions about who can (and can't) contribute. "Open education," they write, "does not necessarily mean 'free.'"
Additionally, the bargain in education is not simply between users and makers of educational content; increasingly, teachers and learners are being held accountable by outside stakeholders. (Most significantly, we see this in the phenomenon of testing the souls right out of our young learners.) Huber and Hutchings express concern
about how to maintain a space for educational experimentation and exchange in a period that seems headed for increasingly bottom-line forms of accountability, with its concomitant calls for institutions to make evidence of student learning outcomes available to the public.... At one level, the value of evidence is something that any responsible educator would share. Faculty care about their students, and they want to know that the resources they find in the teaching commons will serve those students well. The danger comes when high stakes constrict people's ability or willingness to explore new pedagogical ideas.
Promise, tool, bargain. It's a difficult combination to get right, even when you have financial backing, institutional support, and a critical mass of contributors, as MIT's OpenCourseWare project proves. Let me be clear: OCW is a success, at least in most important senses of the word. But in its efforts to succeed, it has had to sacrifice some of the most important tenets of the open education movement. In the interest of full disclosure, I'll once again make clear that I am employed at MIT, though I am not affiliated with the Hewlett Foundation, the group that funds the OCW project, and not in any way connected to OpenCourseWare.
The project is awesomely ambitious. As the OCW site explains,
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines.
And that's the modest explanation. In a February 2007 report on Open Educational Resource projects funded by the Hewlett Foundation, Atkins, Brown, and Hammond exclaim:
This world-changing project emerged from MIT faculty and administrators who asked themselves the following question: "How is the Internet going to be used in education and what is our university going to do about it?"
The answer from the MIT faculty was this: "Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.”
Fantastic premise, right? And MIT, backed by Hewlett, is putting its money where its mouth is, investing resources into the continued and ongoing development of OCW. The result is a fabulous early stab at an open education resource, one that really does offer high-quality content to the general public--absolutely free.
It turns out, though, that while OpenCourseWare is strong on promise ("You can access course content from some of the greatest minds of this generation!") and bargain ("...and it's all free!"), it's still a little light on tool ("...but genius is not included."). As I mentioned in a previous post, I read voraciously and omnivorously in my capacity as the primary blogger for sleeping alone and starting out early. One place I never, look, though, is on paid-content news sources like the Wall Street Journal. Another place I never look is OpenCourseWare. Why? It kinda...well, first, the download process is confusing, and once you successfully figure it out, you're rewarded with a file folder that looks a lot like this:
Assuming you eventually manage to extract the relevant content, all you really get is a pile of .pdfs, a syllabus, and some course notes. The brilliance, the spark, the certain something that makes a class a mind-blowing experience...that's not available for download.
And, of course, there's the cost involved: Approximately $25,000 per uploaded course, according to the Hewlett report. Add it up: 1,800 courses means $45 million. (Just FYI, that's enough to cover four years of public college for more than 6,800 students, according to stats from the College Board.)
OpenCourseWare is an admirable, but so far unsustainable, model for opening up education--especially since OCW seems to prohibit free appropriation and remixing of course materials. As the site explains under the FAQ category of intellectual property,
The intellectual property policies created for MIT OpenCourseWare are clear and consistent with other policies for scholarly materials used in education. Faculty retain ownership of most materials prepared for MIT OpenCourseWare, following the MIT policy on textbook authorship. MIT retains ownership only when significant use has been made of the Institute's resources. If student course work is placed on the MIT OpenCourseWare site, then copyright in the work remains with the student.
These are meaty issues for Hewlett, OCW, and the open education movement to keep working on. As goes OpenCourseWare, after all, so goes the movement.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
How to kill newspapers
The Boston Globe is in trouble--and not just because its owner is threatening to shut it down. It's in trouble because the best minds in journalism can't get their blinders off long enough to get on board with innovative business models that can support a participatory model of journalism.
The New York Times Co., which purchased the paper in 1993 for what the Associated Press calls "a record $1.1 billion," is now threatening to shutter the paper unless its union accepts $20 million in concessions.Right on schedule, economists and media analysts are offering up their ridiculous resolutions to this impending crisis. Management consultant Peter Cohan, for example, suggests this wacky solution: Scrap dead-tree printing, move the paper to an online-only news source, and charge readers to view the content.
Cohan writes that if the Globe goes to an online-only format, it will lose a significant revenue source in paid print advertising; as a result,
in order to make up the lost revenue The Boston Globe will need to charge users for access to its online content as the Wall Street Journal does. This might not be as difficult as it would first appear. If it stopped producing a dead-tree version, The Boston Globe could roll the unfulfilled portion of its print subscriptions into online ones. Then it would face the challenge of getting others to pay for a previously-free online subscription.
This argument calls to mind Jon Stewart's recent interview with Walter Isaacson, who argued, first in a Time Magazine article and then on the Daily Show, that the way to save newspapers is to charge readers to access online content. Stewart's response to this argument was a deadpan look of utter disbelief, followed by this:
"This is ridiculous--I can't believe we're talking about this. Sir, the internet is free."
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Walter Isaacson | ||||
| ||||
As the primary blogger for sleeping alone and starting out early, I spend a lot of time trolling the internet looking for interesting news items to write about. I poke around a lot, following links wherever they take me. But do you want to know where I never look? News sources like the Wall Street Journal that require paid subscriptions for accessing content. Why would I, when I can a.) find coverage of most of the most interesting stories for free at other news sources; or b.) find links to free online reprints of the WSJ stories that matter to me?
The problem with newspapers is not, contrary to the opinions of journalists and critics, that people are dumb or the Internet is destroying real reporting or that kids today just don't care about good journalism. The problem is that the people who are running print news can't shake antiquated approaches to journalism. In the Christian Science Monitor, for example, former Globe senior editor and current CS Monitor editor John Yemma calls Boston without the Boston Globe "unthinkable"--privileging, I assume, the traditionally territorial nature of beat journalism.
Yemma and others think of a city's newspaper as an institution in line with sports teams and local celebrities--an integral element, in other words, of that city's character. Sports teams and newspapers have traditionally served an important purpose: Uniting a city when it has become too big for social ties alone to do that work. When people feel like they belong to something larger than themselves, after all, they're more likely to care, to pitch in, to align with the larger cultural work of the city and its residents.
But increasingly, citizenship is less about geography than it is about affinity. I may live in Boston, but the crew I run with largely depends on the context. Members of my Friday afternoon book group all live in the Boston area. As a blogger, my network is much more widely distributed. Bloggers I follow live as close as Cambridge, MA, and as far away as New York, Michigan, Indiana (Indiana, Indiana, Indiana, Indiana), the UK, and Peru. At my day job, I also happen to be a part of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, a globally distributed network of educators and researchers.
Traditional newsmen and women understand, I think, that in a participatory culture people affiliate with networks outside of their geography. What they don't seem to understand, though, is that these identities aren't like hats that we put on and take off at will. We all position ourselves somewhere inside of a constantly fluctuating network of interests, affinities, and causes. Print media, to the extent that it has been willing and able to accommodate this shift, has successfully adjusted to this change--but so far, adjusting is the best it has been able to do. Newshounds remember the good old days when the newspaper was the fastest, most cutting edge information source; chasing after emerging trends that have come out of online innovations has been a difficult change. People like Cohan, Yemma, and Isaacson remember with great fondness the time when journalism felt an awful lot like tap dancing to a medley of greatest hits while seated in front of a single camera trained on their every movement. One camera, two chairs, three television stations: The days of single-digit anything are long, long gone.
Friday, April 3, 2009
The future of journalism: We Report, We Decide
In a recent post I argued that blogging is better than newspaper journalism. As a former newspaper reporter, I explained that
unlike the experience of being a newspaper reporter, my experience of blogging is one of jumping in to a conversation. The goal of print journalism is to break the story. In general, the goal of blogging is to comment on the breaking news. When I speak here on sleeping alone, I'm generally picking up on an idea or news item presented in an online paper or another blog; ideally, my ideas will get picked up by another blogger, and so on, and so on.
My former editor, Philip Allmen, posted the following comment:
You make some good points. But I bet that most people haven't put as much thought into the differences between reporters and bloggers. The two, I think need each other to thrive, but most don't realize that.
Phil is right and he's wrong. To support his point, I turned to a recent article in The Nation by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney. The article argues that the crisis of newspapers is not a brand-new phenomenon; in fact, it began in the 1970's, "when corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers took off." By the 1980's, journalists and editors were "quitting the field in disgust at the contempt corporate management displayed toward journalism."Here's the result of a decades-long watering-down of journalism:
The news media blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion, spoon-feeding us lies masquerading as fact-checked verities. They missed the past decade of corporate scandals. They cheered on the housing bubble and genuflected before the financial sector (and Gilded Age levels of wealth and inequality) as it blasted debt and speculation far beyond what the real economy could sustain. Today they do almost no investigation into where the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and Treasury are going but spare not a moment to update us on the "Octomom." They trade in trivia and reduce everything to spin, even matters of life and death.
Obviously, the decline in journalistic rigor has wide-reaching implications. What kind of journalistic environment are we in, after all, when Jon Stewart is the only one who can take on cotton-candy financial reporting like that of Jim Cramer? Stewart tossed Cramer over his knee and gave him a good public spanking. We loved / hated to watch it, and it was a long time coming.
On the other hand (and Nichols and McChesney make this point as well), hard-hitting journalism still exists, though more often it comes at us in books, documentaries (Bowling for Columbine or Sicko, for example) or localized beat reporting in magazines or online news sites. Sometimes it's delivered to us under the guise of a satirical comedy news show. Sometimes it's delivered to us via two of this type of show in a row. Monday through Thursday, Comedy Central, 11 p.m. to midnight.
The problem--and the implications of this creep into every area of contemporary life--is that this kind of journalism is increasingly rare and, as more people choose to become their own media outlets via blogs or first-person reporting sites like, say, Orato, this rarity trickles into the everyday news that we all access. And here's where Phil's argument comes in, supported by Nichols and McChesney:
The Internet and blogosphere, too, depend in large part on "old media" to do original journalism. Web links still refer readers mostly to stories that first appeared in print. Even in more optimistic scenarios, no one has a business model to sustain digital journalism beyond a small number of self-supporting services. The attempts of newspapers to shift their operations online have been commercial failures, as they trade old media dollars for new media pennies. We are enthusiastic about Wikipedia and the potential for collaborative efforts on the web; they can help democratize our media and politics. But they do not replace skilled journalists on the ground covering the events of the day and doing investigative reporting. Indeed, the Internet cannot achieve its revolutionary potential as a citizens' forum without such journalism.
But here's how this argument gets complicated: Some of the best journalism out there is of a kind that folks like Nichols and McChesney would likely not recognize as journalism as it has traditionally been defined. Immediately after the London Transport bombings in 2005, some of the first reports about the event came from citizens who were in the tunnels. They took photos with cellphones and uploaded them to photo-sharing sites like Flickr (you can view them at Flickr's London Bomb Blast Community here.) This is
one extreme example, but it's of a kind that's increasingly common--and increasingly important, in a world where governments and corporations are increasingly adept at duping, getting into bed with, or hanging out to dry traditional and mainstream journalism outlets. Citizen journalism, via blogs, cellphone pictures, text messaging, and smart mobs have led to rapid and radical cultural change. Governments have been overthrown. Protests have been organized under the noses of watchful dictators. And inaccurate or outright wrong news reports have been corrected by people with firsthand knowledge of current events and the resources to share their knowledge. Does this kind of journalism rely on the existence and reporting work of traditional media outlets? Well, yes--at least in the sense that traditional journalism laid the groundwork for a reporting culture. But in a very real sense, information--newsworthy, important information--is increasingly being delivered to the people who can act on it without regard to, and sometimes in spite of, Big Newspaper.
If we think of journalism as a profession, one in which the onus of rigorous reportage is on the elite reporters in the most widely respected media outlets, one for which standards and a code of ethics exist and can and must be learned only through apprenticeship, then yes, journalism is in the midst of a worrisome decline. But if we think of journalism as, to appropriate the language of Clay Shirky, a temporary behavior rather than a professional identity, then we can see how journalism is thriving. Instead of a few thousand reporters stationed strategically around the world, we now have people stationed literally everywhere people are living, any one of whom might have access to and, if we do this cultural revolution thing right, the capacity for blowing the top off of the next big story.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
The stunted revolution: Why I was wrong, revisited
Early on in the lifespan of this blog, I argued that the recession might be good for higher education. Clearly, I was wrong, and I admitted as much here.Now comes more proof that I was right to say I was wrong.
According to this New York Times article, acceptance rates are down this year among Ivy League universities because application numbers have increased. Applications at schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia are up by between 2 and more than 20 percent. Top public schools, including UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia, have also reported gains.
Don't worry, though--this trend is not universal, not even common enough to draw conclusions from. As the article points out, about half of the almost 350 colleges that accept the Common Application (a shared online application form) received more applications this year; just under half received fewer.Fine, fine. No conclusions drawn. But add to this the increased emphasis on accepting applicants who are able to pay full tuition, and we have a social justice issue on our hands.
Clay Shirky writes that "it's not a revolution if nobody loses." It's also not a revolution if everybody loses. So who wins here, other than the wealthy who will continue to exercise their right to do whatever it takes to continue to rule?
Online universities, apparently. Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey points out that enrollment in online offerings from Kaplan, the University of Phoenix, and their ilk, is up, way up. Many will bemoan this trend, Carey writes. They will argue
that the best traditional college courses are superior to any online offering, and they're often right. There is no substitute for a live teacher and student, meeting minds. But remember, that's far from the experience of the lower-division undergraduate sitting in the back row of a lecture hall. All she's getting is a live version of what iTunes University offers free, minus the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward at a time and place of her choosing.
She's also increasingly paying through the nose for the privilege. Few things are more certain in this uncertain world than tuition increasing faster than inflation, personal income, or any other measure one could name. People will pay more for better service, but only so much more. And with the economy in a free fall, more families have less money to pay. The number of low-cost online institutions and no-cost alternatives on the other side of the accreditation wall is growing. The longer the relentless drumbeat of higher tuition goes on, the greater their appeal.
Readers of sleeping alone may remember that I'm no fan of online universities. But I'm also no fan of the
skyrocketing cost of higher education. I've been lucky in this respect: a scholarship covered my undergraduate costs, and I'll be fully supported as a doctoral student at Indiana University. In the middle, though...in the middle...I racked up more than $40,000 in debt earning an MFA in creative writing. (Expect a future post to elaborate upon the foolishness, self-indulgence and / or well-considered practicality of the MFA in the first decade of the 21st Century.)Though I don't regret my MFA--it positioned me beautifully for the work I'm doing now and my future work as a doctoral student--I'll be stuck paying that debt down for decades. Indeed, that debt, coupled with a growing need for health insurance and a stable income, led me away two years ago from work I loved passionately: teaching as an adjunct instructor at a trio of Boston-area colleges. I may not regret the career shift, but I know others who made the same decision as I did, for the same reasons, and regret it deeply. These former instructors are now deeply mired in corporate work, in health care professions, in many other non-education fields.
And this is what makes a recession so agonizingly painful for higher education: Not only is access to education further stratified by socioeconomic status, but the quality of the education itself, especially at community colleges and less prestigious public universities, is compromised by the tough decisions intended to streamline and economize in hard times.
We want simple answers to solve these terrible, terrifying trends; but there are no simple answers. New resources, new technologies, enable unprecedented access to the knowledge distributed across vast networks of people and tools; but our culture continues to rely on an outdated credentialing system wherein what matters most is not what you know or what you can do but what degrees you hold and where you got them from. It's not a revolution if nobody loses. What do we call it if everybody does?
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Montana is on board
On March 31, sleeping alone and starting out early hit a milestone: It has officially received visitors from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Montana was the last to jump on board, with a visitor from Bozeman apparently completely accidentally landing on my blog for just under one second before having his or her mind blown so completely that his or her Internet Explorer program most likely shut down unexpectedly.
I do spend a decent amount of time publicizing my blog. Most commonly, this involves reading blogs of like-minded bloggers, commenting on their writing, and asking them to visit my site. I also hound my friends and family, basically browbeating them into reading what I write. Why do I bother? Why do I care?
The simplest answer I can provide here is a quote from Clay Shirky: "Everyone is a media outlet."
In my early 20's, I spent a solid two years as a newspaper reporter, moving between three different local weekly papers. (Just to give you a sense of how long ago this was, only one of the three papers had a companion website, but the only material included on this site was a set of phone numbers to reach various staff members. This, by the way, was less than ten years ago.)
My stories were about zoning board decisions, school board meetings, and sporting events. Even if I had been skilled enough to make them interesting, I still wouldn't have captured many readers. In fact, I imagine I had fewer readers as a print reporter than I do as a blogger. This was so even though the material I wrote as a reporter was intended to link directly to the interests of its readers. This was so even though we actually delivered the news to our readers, instead of needing to draw readers to the news. One difference between newspapers and blogs, of course, is the distance between the presenting of news and the consumption of it. In the newspaper business, the division of labor is pretty clear: A small handful of crack reporters uncover and present the material; the rest of the populace consumes it. If they want to join in on the conversation, they need (and are encouraged) to write a letter to the editor for possible publication in a future edition.
It's relatively burdensome to write a letter to the editor, all things considered, and this was even more true back when I was a reporter than it is now. Let's say you read an article that sparks something in you, such that you think: I have something to say about this. Then you have to turn on your computer or open your laptop and type the
damned thing out. It needs to be short and succinct, well written, well organized and lacking any noticeable errors. Then you have to print it out (assuming your printer works and has enough ink left in its cartridge), put it in an envelope, find a stamp, and drop the letter in the mailbox. If the editor finds the letter interesting enough to print, you may see it printed up to two weeks later. Granted, this level of difficulty isn't on par with, say, building the world's largest toothpick mosaic, but still.Compare this to the types of comments I received to my most heavily visited post to date, "Gearing up for Operation Feel Your Boobies." The founder of Feel Your Boobies, Leigh Hurst, posted a link to my post on the group's Facebook page, at which point the pro-boobies contingent began to weigh in. A few sample comments:
"Would you feel better if the name was Touch Your Titties?"
"I have boobies and I feel them at least once a month! Thank you Leigh!"
"I have to say I didn't think of a sexual connotation at all when I read this name. And I'm not post-feminist; I'm 52 and grew up in the Germaine Greer/Betty Friedan era. The purpose of the group is to get women to think about breast exams. We've heard "do a monthly breast self-exam" for so long we don't think about it anymore. This cute name catches our attention enough to remind us that we haven't done one. I do think the author is reaching for a topic here; Victoria's Secret window displays? Objectifying, fetishizing. Feel Your Boobies? Cute, harmless, purposeful."
What seems to engage people about reading and commenting on blogs is that they can, if they want to, write a thoughtful, well structured and well supported argument. If they don't want to do that, they can sling a one-liner up and have the gratification of seeing it instantly broadcast to other readers.
And now we're back to why I care about expanding my readership base: Because unlike the experience of being a newspaper reporter, my experience of blogging is one of jumping in to a conversation. The goal of print journalism is to break the story. In general, the goal of blogging is to comment on the breaking news. When I speak here on sleeping alone, I'm generally picking up on an idea or news item presented in an online paper or another blog; ideally, my ideas will get picked up by another blogger, and so on, and so on.
News passes to me and through me; as it does, I try to shade it in with a thoughtful comment or two and I do my best to pass it on. Blogging at its best is the exact opposite of that game "Telephone": Each person whispering the story to someone else clarifies, expands upon, and contributes to the story being told.
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