Mobility Shifts

There are only a few more days before the call for Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning Summit closes. Like the previous conference organized by Trebor Scholz on digital labor, The Internet as Playground and Factory, pre-conference discussion is already an important part of the critical discourse around the event, and the mailing list for the Institute for Distributed Creativity is already abuzz with introductions from keynoters like Cathy Davidson of HASTAC.

Matt Gold and I are co-chairing the "Digital Fluencies" track at the conference, and we're interested in expanding the meaning of what digital learning means on a very fundamental level to get away from the charity-case after-school computer lab paradigm and the romance with the digital native and to look seriously at forms of learning that involve mobile devices, political engagement, and much more ambiguous narratives.

What are new pedagogic approaches for learning with mobile platforms? What are the limitations of the “digital literacies” paradigm and its first world/third world assumptions?

How do we promulgate digital fluency as an understanding of the particular features of global information flows in which data, attention, capital, and reputation might move both to and from individual actors and communities?

How can mobile media platforms be used for more than the one-way delivery of content? What are new pedagogical approaches for real-time mobile learning that make full use of the potential of mobile phones, iPods, laptops, PDAs, smart phones, Tablet PCs, and netbooks in formal and informal contexts? How can global participants use mobile media to create rich social contexts around important learning tasks? How can such platforms be leveraged to teach digital rights and the value of collaboration across cultures?

How can we dispel the myth of the digital native?

How can mobile networks reshape our experiences of space and place through interactive architecture, locative art, geo-caching games, and real-time object recognition? What opportunities for networked teaching and learning might we find in such media-rich, responsive environments?

Check out the call for participation here. The deadline is July 1.

(Sixth College is one of the partners of the project and plans to sponsor faculty and TAs from the Culture, Art, and Technology program to attend the event.)

Away Game

The HASTAC 2010 conference, like previous conferences from the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory emphasized new modes of digital learning, online collaboration, and scholarship in the age of big data. This year the plan was to hold a "virtual conference" featuring discussion carried on through Google Wave. The schedule indicates that there were a number of Virtualpolitik colleagues on the roster, including Craig Dietrich, Vanessa Vobis, and Nicole Starosielski from the 2009 NEH-Vectors Summer Institute on Broadening the Digital Humanities.

In the main message about "The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," David Theo Goldberg of the UC Humanities Research Institute and Cathy Davidson of HASTAC explore when "virtual means collaborative" and draw attention to their own historical context in which "the White House asked the public: what does 21st century learning mean to you?"

In explaining why they "frame the conversation in terms of thinking not of learning," they argue that "thinking is the largest category." As Cathy Davidson notes, "education" and "learning" may be related categories, but "thinking" is central to the humanistic enterprise. David Theo Goldberg observes that "technical components" of "reading, writing, and 'rithmatic don't always prioritize "other modes of encouraging" thinking, which might include "modes of judgment" or "modes of reflection." They explained that their mission comprised more than "technical or technicist things," because their collaborative work reshaping educational institutions was about "capacities not simply technical skills."

They also introduced the issue of "modes of attention. Davidson talked about the famed "gorilla suit" study and Goldberg noted how the rise of PDAs could have consequences for the neuropsychology of attention that represent "opening and closing" of opportunities that involves rethinking of simple "expanding vs. trading" models.

Davidson said they were "both skeptical about 'digital natives'" and the assumption that young people were naturally more facile with technology, as noble savages who did not need any instruction. But she did note that when working with a class on the concept of "digital literacies," she observed a "look of terror" when they were asked to contemplate a "world without the Internet" and a "lack of digital sources," which she believed reflected on their "thinking about thinking." For Goldberg, what is critical is the "notion and nature of literacy itself" and the "self-reflexivity" and "ability to use capacities" that the term implies.

As a pragmatist, Davidson also discussed the importance of "assessment" in understanding the "ecology of knowledge systems," which might be "associative," "iterative," and "process-oriented," in ways not imagined by the No Child Left Behind legislation mandating standardized testing but misses the fact that what is "in the outcome itself" can't be so easily captured.

Goldberg also explored the "notion of contribution" in telling about how he had asked graduate students to produce collaborative products in a seminar and engage in syllabus building collectively, much as they would be expected to participate in "teamwork throughout life." For him the "radically individualized" idea of standardization is proved false by lived experiences in "collaboration and laboring together," even if the "common end" may not always be clearly defined from the beginning.

At one point Davidson even suggested that Mozilla might be putting forward the "philosophy of our time."

Then Goldberg explained how "institutions" could serve "as mobilizing networks," so that "institutional walls" were understood as "reforming" even as they are "crumbling." and the classroom becomes about "engagements between the virtual and the material" world.

Goldberg did acknowledge, however, that there could be conflict about this mixing of frames of reference, as was the case in the controversy about the presence of laptops in the classroom, which had even become an issue at the DML. In defense of laptops, Davidson described how "somebody needs to Google jockey this" in certain live classroom interchanges to highlight how "diverse the answers are" when the "affordances in the classroom" are fully explored. Goldberg argued for awareness of the "temporality and closing off" involved in such pedagogical moments, and cited how Eszter Hargittai controls students' laptops from podium. (In my own use of smart classrooms, I like having all students' laptop screens projected, although I have no direct control over their displays.)

There Is No "T" in Natives

At the recent Digital Media and Learning Conference closing keynote speaker Sonia Livingstone argued in her talk that the rhetoric of the "digital native" encouraged misguided policy making that cast children both as innocent victims and as magically computationally savvy next generation saviors.

Ezster Hargittai seems to have reached a similar conclusion in "Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the 'Net Generation,'" which examines how dynamics of class and education play out in patterns of Internet use and the role of parental modeling.

Hargittai's abstract for the published results of her study reads as follows:

People who have grown up with digital media are often assumed to be universally savvy with information and communication technologies. Such assumptions are rarely grounded in empirical evidence, however. This article draws on unique data with information about a diverse group of young adults’ Internet uses and skills to suggest that even when controlling for Internet access and experiences, people differ in their online abilities and activities. Additionally, findings suggest that Internet know-how is not randomly distributed among the population, rather, higher levels of parental education, being a male, and being white or Asian American are associated with higher levels of Web-use skill. These user characteristics are also related to the extent to which young adults engage in diverse types of online activities. Moreover, skill itself is positively associated with types of uses. Overall, these findings suggest that even when controlling for basic Internet access, among a group of young adults, socioeconomic status is an important predictor of how people are incorporating the Web into their everyday lives with those from more privileged backgrounds using it in more informed ways for a larger number of activities.

From the Ivory Tower to the Control Tower

There is a word-for-word transcription of Sonia Livingstone's comments here, as she delivered the closing keynote for the Digital Media and Learning Conference, so perhaps it isn't necessary to do a long blog entry, although the talk was provocative and aimed at dispelling myths about "digital natives" in ways that often spoke to my own research about the rhetoric of the "digital generation" for my next book, Early Adopters. Livingstone may not be a familiar name in the United States, but she has an international reputation as "neither a celebrator not a fearmonger," who is also known for "immersion in policy discussions, American cultural studies

As a rhetorician, I must admit that there was one aspect of her talk, "Youthful Participation: What have we learned, what shall we ask next?," which hit a wrong note with me: her use of the "R-word," so that "rhetoric" always indicated deception, emptiness, or manipulation and never had any positive value for pedagogical or civic development.

In trying to understand "different constituencies" and "how the young sustain" certain media practices, Livingstone is known for "interviewing youth in their bedrooms while they are online." She acknowledged that "media are more privatized" but they intersect "with social activities and spheres of life." She explained the large themes in her research by pointing to the work of Friedrich Krotz: 1) globalization 2) individualization 3) commodification, and 4) medialization. The last term she described as the "logic of media systems and media forms (as combination and dependence)," and her work was clearly also influenced by lifeworld theory, since she discussed "instrumental and market values," as well as "surveillance in the lifeworld." She noted also that her talk would have three parts: 1) empirical: what's going on?, 2) explanatory: how shall we explain it?, and 3) ideological: how should we react to it?

She opened by asking "What claims are being made about digital media? Does the evidence support the claims being made, and are we examining evidence that doesn’t fit?" She wondered aloud also about if there were "sufficient independent evaluations of new initiatives," such as the ones that the hosting body, the MacArthur Foundation, was known for funding.

She described a thirteen-year-old trying to find German website on food and drink in vain. "It can involve the family, and it can fail," she lamented. She also depicted the parents of an eight-year-old "information junkie" who marveled at her fast clicking that doesn’t reveal struggle. As Livingstone summed it up, "she is not the digital native" that her parents assume her to be. "If we overestimate younger people’s skills, we can underestimate their need for support," since "children are struggling and have doubts."

She shared her observations about social networking attitudes when she asked teens a simple question about "how to change their privacy settings" and recorded their befuddled answers. She insisted that "hyperbole brings questions the wrong way round," particularly when young people using technology are talked about as a "new species." For her, central to inquiry should be "not what can the digital offer to learning and participation" but rather among all the factors shaping young people's experiences, what does the digital contribute, particularly when "not all the factors are within our expertise" and it is difficult to "escape the charge of technological determinism."

She told the story of how Megan, who was eight when her observations began but is now twelve, demonstrated her facility with the story-writing option on AOL. But Livingstone discovered that a far more mundane program, Microsoft Works, was allowing this student to produce a story she was in the middle of writing that was "creative," "dramatic," and had a "fantastic vocabulary." She also reminded the digerati present that the girl also lived in a "bedroom full of books." She also described eighteen-year-old marry who found "school council more meaningful than use of Internet" to explain how "school, information, and civic" spheres" might be "three things that don’t come together."

She also spoke about the "constraining of children’s lives" that took place now that "children were getting older younger and yet staying younger" and thus "held longer in a state between dependence and autonomy," much like the one described in the book Hackers and Painters. By seeing "childhood as last place for enchantment," she warned that adult society perpetuated a "construction of childhood" as endangered and fragile in which "we may inadvertently fuel surveillance" with "digital native rhetoric." She told about Anisah, 15, who lived in a housing estate that was troubled with parents with high expectations. Although she was never to download music, she did enjoy chatting with friends late. As computational media offered a route for temporary escape, the girl still had to face a mother who wanted "to empower and yet to control" by shutting off "opportunities and escape from offline constraints." In this situation "risks lurked and yet were not spoken about." For Livingstone, they were too "tied together" to be verbalized.

As she moved out of her summary of fiedwork experiences, Livingstone offered a few generalizations:

1) Children don’t draw the line where adults do. What they call meeting up with friends, we call meeting up with strangers. They might remix forms; we worry about copyright. There are fused activities.

2) Design of digital resources confuses and brings risks and opportunities into collision. For example searching for "teens" without the safe search filter on Google is quite something. We cannot draw these neat lines in online digital worlds.

3) Learning involves risk-taking as young people try "to expand experience and expertise." Children have to push against adult-imposed boundaries.

4) With participatory genres there will always be some "playing with fire" as young people "explore what adults have forbidden" and "take calculated risks to show off to others" in "trying to work out for themselves what adults consider strange and dangerous." In Livingstone's opinion, "this is not so very new." It may "look like young people are creating, participating, but it may be playing with fire." Those adult goals are being attained, but let's examine closely the adult structures next to or imposed upon young people.

Then she displayed a diagram with "State," "School," "Parents," and "Commerce" mapped out that she described as "not an elegant piece of art." At this point, she quipped that she might "need a younger person" to create a more dazzling computer graphic. Such diagrams could reinforce the "need to focus on structure as well as agency," as she reviewed a number of dyads and connections: "create" (state and school), "subvert" (state and parents), "network" (school and commerce), and "explore" (parent/com). She made the analogy to earlier sites of illicit discovery like a "bike shed" or "World War II bomb sites." She talked further about the relationship between "political economy and popular opinion" and the disengagement (or collaboration) of critical theorists and semioticians.

She then reiterated a number of points that she described as "repeated findings": children engaged in online participation are generally the already engaged; they are not the newly motivated. Backgrounds of the children shape their digital use more than the digital technology affordance itself. The design of digital resources confuses and brings fused behaviors. Learning involves risk-taking, and children must push against boundaries, which involves intimacy, privacy, vulnerability. These were capped off with the inevitability of "playing with fire" when it could be "fun teasing the suspicious man in the chatroom" or trying out chat roulette where "you might be able to go and meet a rapist," much as earlier generation might have dared themselves to sleep in a park or street. She described how some of her informants even disrupted an adult Yahoo chat room for police and fire officers by pretending to be blind orphans in a home with abusive caregivers.

As she closed, she warned against the "unholy alliance" between "network society optimists and popular opinions" in which fan activities, profits, autonomous learners, and state interests might be served by "digital native rhetoric."

Of course, as some one who hands out awards for bad official websites, I was most charmed by her mockery of a government website supposedly designed for children: Epal.tv. Producers claimed it is "about participation in the broadest sense," because services for young people "need to engage with young people in a participatory way." However, Livingstone derided the site by complaining that "such vague expectations regarding engagement contrast with the considerable planning of project funding and design." "When pressed, they could not state what kind of participation they aimed for," she chuckled. Teenagers, not surprisingly, resisted this approach and found the site "boring." Despite well-meaning statements, young people "need to know about a lot more these days to make the right choices" rathen than be talked down to by adults or appealed to as if "youth" could be treated "as single thing." (This has also been called the "creepy treehouse" problem.)

She also encouraged critical thinking about publicly funded use of technology in education. She described observing an after-school computer club in which there was a math game and how she couldn't help intervening by reading the instructions, because "neither the game nor the teacher gave instructions." In this numerical simulation "one mistake, and the boat crashes." She said that there were many instances of "the supposed fun of digital media," although she did tell about a stopped school in Denmark where all participants devoted themselves to a digital animation project successfully. But she asked that if "radical transformation" is desired, are teachers, parents, and governments ready?

She cited the excellent work of my UC Irvine colleague Mark Warschauer at this point to ask "in whose interest" such projects are undertaken, when there are "unequal power relationships that exist in society." Technology may actually "reinforce existing interests of power" in such situations, rather than overturn them.

She said that host Henry Jenkins understood that there was also a sense that our use of digital media might only foster consumerism, edutainment, standardization, and individualization, so that collective interests might be overlooked in the promotion of self more than community. We must "counter that rhetoric," she said, as the "R-word" appeared yet again. Among "transnational elites," there were "new forms of illiteracy as well as literacy," she claimed.

In particular, she attacked how the once critical field of media literacy, personified by Patricia Aufderheide and legitimated by a national report on media literacy that emphasized critical thinking:

Media literacy may be defined as the ability to access, experience, evaluate, and produce media products. Media are seen to represent actual events, but those representations are subjective and incomplete. Journalists and news producers select which stories to publish, what aspects to emphasize, and what language to use. Media literacy is necessary for media consumers to sift through the variety of presentations, including films, newspapers, Web sites, and video screens to arrive at meaning.

Eventually these kinds of statements were watered down by those with more socially conservative agendas. Ofcom (2004) reduced it to "the ability to operate the technology to find what you are looking for, to understand that material, to have definition of media literacy" when "put simply." AVMS (2007) paternalistically announced that "media literacy refers to skills, knowledge and understanding that allow consumers to use media effectively and safely." (Note the language of use and consumption not production and creation.) The Minister of State for Culture, Media, and Sport (2004) reminded one of Foucault's concept of "governmentality" with its summary definition emphasizing "personal responsibility for what they watch and listen to." By emphasizing what Ulrich Beck has called "the individualization of risk," the possibilities of citizen collective action in the digital realm are delineated extremely narrowly, according to Livingstone.

In cataloging "financial literacy, health literacy" and other literacies in which "media literacy has parallels with other skills," she reminded the audience of how Robert McChesney’s critique of "literacy" emphasizes how it "distracts from questions of power."

Livingstone expressed her concern about how "critical and state priorities are aligned for now" and the need for an "explanatory form of critique" with a "wider gaze that encompasses the structures" be they "political or ideological," as academic discourses move "from the ivory tower to the control tower."

Her call to action urged that participants "must be tougher on ourselves" and must "stop being so nice to each other." "Are we cheerleaders for change?" she asked plaintively.

Jenkins served as her respondent and repeated his self-characterization as a "critical utopianist" engaged with the question of "what kind of world do we want to live in" and "blockages and obstacles" that represent "what do we have to overcome." As remedy he emphasized that the event had brought "theorists and practitioners into the same space," even if it was impossible to represent "all voices in US much less the world" or to analyze "deeply cultural problems."

Like Livingstone, there was a lot of the R-word with Jenkins, who talked about "dismissing that rhetoric" and the "digital revolution rhetoric" in his closing remarks. As he closed the conference, he again referenced his mentor John Fiske, author of Media Matters, by quoting his line that "in early modern Europe everyone had a larynx, but not everyone could speak."

One of the most retweeted lines from the session actually came from danah boyd who said that the group needed to add "playing w/ fire" to the standard trio of "hanging out, messing around, and geeking out" as core youth practices.

Here is the formal copy of her paper.

Literacy not Litter

New media journalist Clive Thompson interviewed fellow rhetorician and friend of Virtualpolitik Andrea Lunsford in "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy." In the article in Wired Lunsford describes her longitudinal research project on college student writing that incorporates the writing that students are doing outside of class. I tend to have trouble with the literacy paradigm, because I think that it directs attention away from the issues of digital rights, even though advocates for digital literacy like Lunsford and Henry Jenkins are some of the most visible and vocal proponents of copyright reform, net neutrality, and anti-censorship awareness. But the Lunsford/Thompson argument about the importance of audience in the digital literacy landscape is presented concisely and well. Given the number of people seeking funding for audience-less "creepy treehouses" or "walled gardens" in the name of literacy, this article makes an important point.

Au Revoir

Humanities & Technology: Voices of Digital Scholarship from UCI HumaniTech® on Vimeo.

Yesterday was an event commemorating the ten-year anniversary of Humanitech that included a panel with James Herbert, Ramesh Jain, Alan Liu, Julia Lupton, and J. Hillis Miller who debated the status of the humanities in the "posthuman" age and the future of Gramsci's "organic intellectual."

Over the course of a decade, distinguished Humantech speakers have addressed major issues about the future of the humanities in the digital age: the late age of print, blogging as critical discourse, the rhetoric of computer games and virtual worlds, open access publishing, the future of writing, and the role of design as a discipline. Rockers David Byrne and Thomas Dolby have also been honored guests.

This timeline shows some of the program's notable scholarly events, which have also been documented through a series of podcasts. Humanitech has also been on the forefront of digital activism by balancing the need for copyright guidelines in a litigious era with the need for fair use of digital materials in academic contexts.

Humanities & Technology: the Past Ten Years from UCI HumaniTech® on Vimeo.

Sadly, the program is a victim of budget cuts, and Barbara Cohen, Director of Humanitech, is now retiring. Here's my personal thank you.

The CIA Library

I've never really thought much about the CIA library until I discovered that they had ordered my book, which actually details a number of CIA-related digital snafus. (Click image to enlarge.)

It's an interesting question to think about the other books that might be stored in their collection and about the kinds of reading practices that might be supported and sustained in the library's physical space. Scholars like Giles Bergel who are thinking about how online reading practices may be related to how publications once circulated in pubs and coffeehouses are now looking closely at the actual collections that such public spaces kept on the shelves.

A Great Time to be a Graduate Student

It's difficult for me to look back too fondly on graduate school. Certainly I don't miss eating meals composed largely of the following ingredients: potatoes, lentils, beans, and rice (pick two). Or wax nostalgic about being a patient at the university health center where I often had to make small talk with my own students while holding containers with my own bodily fluids when waiting for lab work to be done. Or wish that I could travel back in time to spend months writing something that only one other person on the planet would ever read . . . unwillingly, of course.

But now, thanks to the Internet, graduate students have access to many more tools for teaching, research, publishing, collaboration, and networking than I or anyone of my generation did as PhD candidates.

Today I took part in The Future of (Mediated) Scholarship for USC graduate students interested in taking advantage of multimedia technologies in an afternoon organized by Holly Willis, who pointed out readings by Cathy Davidson, John Seely Brown, and Henry Jenkins in their informational packets and USC's role in developing and promoting Sophie as a platform for online rich media publishing, which is currently being rewritten in Java. (Sophie creator Bob Stein was also in the audience.) Willis also pointed out that too often university programs functioned as separate silos, a problem that the Institute for Multimedia Literacy was trying to address.

In the first presentation Susan Metros, USC’s Associate Vice Provost for Technology Enhanced Learning and Deputy Chief Information Officer, presented findings from the 2009 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium, which also evolved as developed parts of the document through a collectively written wiki. (One of the committee members is Clifford Lynch, who will be on a panel about open access that I am moderating next week, and open access proved to be one of the themes of the day.)

The Horizon report lists technologies most likely to transform education in the coming five years. Metros began by reviewing software for cloud computing applications and information representation. She noted that her father's collection of World War II photos could be shared with others through tagging on Google's mapping functions. She also championed the evolution of the "personal web" that was still a few years away, despite the fact that such programs have raised privacy concerns for some educators. To demonstrate the potential of the semantic web and smart objects for curricular design and instructional applications, she did live demos with programs like Retrievr and Semapedia (the latter with BeeTagg, her iPhone, and a data sticker on her podium to show how the physical space of the campus could offer more possibilities for learning with the help of ubiquitous computing devices. She also admitted that these technologies could be imperfect: not everything she showed worked, and she pointed out that educational applications currently available for the iPhone generally offered little more than digital flash cards for the user.

Next up, Kathleen Fitzpatrick represented both the Department of English and Media Studies at Pomona College and the consortium for reforming publishing and information dissemination in the digital age, MediaCommons. Fitzpatrick offered an overview of the current state of scholarly publishing and presented research for her new book project titled Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy. Fitzpatrick discussed work being done at the Institute for the Future of the Book and enthused about how sections of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's dissertation on Expressive Processing were vetted by readers of the blog Grand Text Auto using Comment Press software. How Diigo and Comment press did in a "head to head" match-up as social annotation tools for scholars was discussed during the course of the day. Given the audience, Fitzpatrick didn't include the rather dispiriting assessment of Internet scholarly remixing by Chris Kelty of his own book Two Bits or problems with computer servers that have taken important texts, such as McKenzie Wark's GAM3R 7H30RY and two projects by Siva Vaidhyanathan offline as a result of technical problems. It was probably rhetorically appropriate, since Fitzgerald was already giving a lot of bad news about traditional print publishing from academic presses and the threats to those organizations' survival to those assembled.

In Graduate Research 2.0, Mark Marino showed a dizzying array of social bookmarking technologies that could be deployed for scholarly research. Marino argued that sometimes it seemed that "Web 2.0" had become a term like "postmodernism," which had been emptied of its meaning during a period of overuse in the academy. He directed the graduate students in attendance to tips for How to See the Field at a Glance from Digital History Hacks and Dave Parry's advice at academhack for how to turn just about anything into an RSS feed, so that your research can actually come to you rather than you search for it. (Also check out Parry's top ten list of overlooked tools for academics.)

Unfortunately, Marino didn't have time to make it to covering Zotero, the free and open source godsend for those doing otherwise tedious bibliographic citations in academic writing, which I have been not so quietly promoting with librarians and instructional technologists on our own campus, or CiteULike, a tool for managing scholarly references. But he took time that is all to rarely given in these kinds of presentations to pay attention to the back end and explain how content-management systems worked, define terms like "RSS" correctly, and walk students through setting up files for readers and aggregators step-by-step.

As the day came to an end, I showed a number of examples for how to use web design, blogging, wiki creation, online video production, teleconferencing, and space in virtual worlds for teaching and learning that can have a synergistic rather than substitutive relationship to the live face-to-face classroom experience. Here’s the link to the materials from my talk. Like many who teach with technology, I am keenly aware that pedagogy doesn't always mix well with Web 2.0 particularly when it comes to questions of privacy, the public sphere, and the ownership of the creative commons. In that spirit I opened my talk with three essential questions:

1) Is the aim of using computational media and distributed networks intended to establish authority or encourage participation?

2) Does one go indie or institutional? Should scholars depend on university domains? How much does one use existing course management tools?

3) Does one use proprietary commercial software or free and open-source products?

In trying to suggest the many ways one could answer these questions, I argued that there are certainly legitimate pedagogical debates to be had, since convenience, ease of access, and the professional ethos of the instructor are not trivial concerns for teachers, even for pedagogues committed to the principle of openness in the academy.

Update: For more writer-friendly software gizmos, read "DIY: How to write a book" for how cut and paste beats writer's block any time.

I Told You, I Am Doing Digital Inclusion

François Bar gave a talk today at UC Irvine about a recently launched five-year study funded by the Gates Foundation on Investigating the Impact of Public Access to Information & Communication Technology. It's a team that also includes a number of faculty members at the University of Washington, including Beth Kolko, who establishes her globalization credentials with a faculty page that opens with a Google map of her talks and projects around the world.

A Bar explained, many of the deliberative processes involved in designing the methodology of the study have encouraged stakeholders to question the basic definitions of terms like "public," "access," and "information technologies." Members of these transnational multilingual teams have apparently been successful at getting funders to put aside their pre-existing first-world biases that privilege personal computing and assume that public access in places like cybercafés and telecentres is necessarily 1) inferior and 2) temporary. (For more about grassroots telecentre communities, Bar recommends checking out telecentre.org.)

Although the initial aims of the IPAI assessment were to look at how computer centers in libraries might foster economic and educational development, the group has noted that there are many ways that the "impact" of computational technologies with distributed networks can be measured in areas that encompass civic engagement, the preservation of language and culture, the development of democracy and transparent government, and even child care and that qualitative as well as quantitative research methods need to be applied.

They also are examining many sites of heterogeneous use that include -- in the case of Bangladesh -- mobile technologies that are maintained by female repair people and local solutions such as floating libraries that go from village to village. In that country many computer centers segregate women and men in the temporal and physical space with special hours for women or machines of a designated color signifying gender on a particular side of the room. In this case, claimed Bar, restricting access actually fosters it, since many women in Bangladesh would not use such technologies at all without prohibitions on socially forbidden contacts with men in place.

After hearing about the national mania for Mister and Miss Facebook contests in Chile from Pablo Manriquez, it was interesting to hear about the success of what might be called a more promiscuous attitude about social computing in the Zeitgeist of the country. While the puritannical United States expends money and human resources policing the computers at libraries and schools with minders and screening software that often forbids access to YouTube, games, social network sites, and anything perceived as excessively "adult" or subversive, it seems that Chilean public libraries have realized the counterproductive effects of gateway technologies and laws and restrictions on youth access to the Internet and entertainment applications.

The research group's ipai wiki documents their experiences thus far in three countries: Bangladesh, Chile, and Lithuania. Images like the photograph above were taken at sessions for "information ecology mapping" in which local people explained how they might get information about important subjects like family health or agriculture. Interviewers are also studying the role of "infomediaries" who may input data into the machines for those without direct access or sufficient technical or alphabetical literacy. According to Bar, the project may also take researchers to Brazil, Botswana, Egypt, and the Philippines, as the scope expands.

As Bar notes, "rules matter." In the case of the Brazilian government, for a long time official federal telecenters barred access to the popular social network site Orkut, because these online activities were seen as mere leisure, at odds with their politically approved ideologies of labor and production. However, according to Bar, Brazil also offers many kinds of public access with many types of rules that include community centers funded by Italian labor unions and free and open source sites promoted by Gilberto Gil. During the question-and-answer session, Bar reminded those present that specific forms of sponsorship can also produce more guarded responses from informants who are fearful of seeming to work against the aims of philanthropic funders by telling researchers that they are taking part in online practices that aren't being promoted by a given public access site. For example, Bar said one young person playing an online game was particularly reluctant to explain what he was doing to a member of the study team. Finally, he used what he thought would be a verbal formulation that would legitimate his game play: "I'm doing digital inclusion."

Locking the Barn Door

"At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool" notes how research for school reports has moved beyond Wikipedia into YouTube. Ironically this takes place at a time in which many schools that serve K-12 block the popular video-sharing site on their computer networks. Thus, ironically, a teacher could not show this video about transnational hip hop done for my teenager's Japanese class, even though it was done as a class assignment.

Dumbest and Dumber

The words "attention deficit disorder" or "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" or their equivalents do not appear in the index of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), yet it is clearly an attempt to label the young with a sweeping pathology of cognitive dysfunction, even though Virtualpolitik pal Siva Vaidhyanathan has contested the very idea that such generational stereotypes can ever apply at all.

The irony of the very negative appraisal of The Dumbest Generation that I am about to offer is that there are a number of arguments about media culture with which I have to agree heartily. Yes, 1) not everything is a "literacy," 2) philanthropic institutions shouldn't be so in love with the digital practices of the young, and 3) Henry Jenkins doesn't always acknowledge the tensions between consumerism and civic life when it comes to participatory online culture. And personally I tend to resist the control that television and other channels for consumerism and popular culture have over child-rearing and family life, as this video and its sequel shows.

But as this Newsweek review notes, Bauerlein's complaints about the ignorance of the young are hardly novel in the literary record. Defending established culture against the ignorance of youth is a rhetorical trope that goes back to antiquity. Furthermore, not to be picky, but for a book that complains about poor vocabulary skills among digital readers and writers, I couldn't help but notice that on page sixteen he seems to misuse the word "querulous" in place of what sounds like he intended to be a synonym for "inquisitive." (If Bauerlein wants to locate every malapropism in my book, I suppose that's fair retribution, but I don't claim to be such a staunch defender of rigorously correct prose.)

Besides, how can you hate people under thirty with this much dripping bile and still work as a competent and professional faculty member? How would it be possible to teach your classes with this much misanthropy aimed at people of your students' ages? With this much contempt taking place in inner monologues that are so well-rehearsed, how can you not communicate it to the student seeking help on the other side of your desk? Well, based on his ratemyprofessor standings, it looks like he's an easier instructor than I am, ironically. So much for defending high standards of achievement for students.

I'm not sure that colleagues who are librarians would necessarily want to follow Bauerlein's recommendations either, given the disdain he shows for providing popular services, such as DVD check-out and computer access in public and university libraries. He would almost certainly find the design of my local library, which incorporates a café, objectionable. And yet, when I'm enjoying a coffee and a breakfast burrito with the copy of Harper's that I've grabbed off the rack inside, I can't help but notice that everyone around me in the crowded courtyard of the library has an open book, and so I feel like a relative illiterate in comparison.

Toward the end of the book, Bauerlein makes an argument about culture wars that praises the public intellectual, and yet his anti-Internet rhetoric seems problematic given what Daniel Drezner has said about the importance of the blogging professor in his recent essay "Public Intellectual 2.0" and many of the current conversations going on about new publishing practices in the academy, including this one about Open Access in the Humanities that I'll be moderating. (Come see! These panels tend to be very lively discussions.)

In her work on the paradoxes of institutional initiatives, Deborah H. Holdstein has argued that too much public rhetoric about educational systems ricochets between lamentations and Cassandra cries of "crisis" and giddy declarations about the wonders of an institution's or program's unmitigated "excellence." This book clearly belongs in the "crisis" camp, and it merely mocks those in the "excellence" camp -- sometimes justifiably -- without considering how to negotiate any common ground. In contrast, for a book that acknowledges the social and pedagogical risks of digital culture along with its benefits, check out Networked Publics from MIT Press.

Granted, there is a growing fissure between the informal online practices of Internet cultures of information and the academic conventions governing print cultures of knowledge in universities. I've said it on many occasions (like here and here). But why be a prohibitionist and a puritan, eager to forbid people's everyday digital practices? Politics shows us that this kind of fundamentalism can succeed, but what is the cost to the free exchange of ideas? In his section on "culture warriors," he seems to grant the importance of dissensus in universities, but he himself seems unwilling to acknowledge counterarguments, even from empirical researchers who make well reasoned cases for adopting the kinds of inquiry-based or problem-based learning paradigms that Bauerlein lampoons.

In the Obama era, his complaints about the lack of youth interest in the political process also makes the book seem dated, and the possibility that this apathy might have more to do with the workings of the electoral college and hanging chads in the 2000 election than with the availability of the Internet is never seriously explored.

Sure, there are many ways that Facebook and MySpace spread the mindless banality of high school into the broader culture. Anyone who's gotten a friend request from a former school tormentor knows that the pointless popularity contests of adolescence can continue in such social network sites, even if the tables might seem turned in adulthood. Mimi Ito admits as much in the recent report completed for the MacArthur Foundation with the colloquial title Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Ito describes two kinds of youthful Internet users: 1) those who use social computing technologies to facilitate high school affinity practices such as gossip and status-checking and 2) those who seek out more advanced forms of expertise in specialized knowledge communities. Bauerlein totally dismisses the latter group in his attack on the former, but -- speaking as the parent of a teenager who has used the Internet to learn about film noir, contemporary French drama, traditional printmaking, and the ethnomusicology of the blues -- I don't think the existence of this demographic should be completely discounted without any critical reflection.

This "geeking out" is also very important in the essay (later a book) "Hackers and Painters" in which Paul Graham claims that the problem with high school is not the cultural power of the young but rather their impotence. Graham argues that without the apprenticeship systems of old teenagers are locked out of meaningful participation in adult culture, and those who try to earn membership among the grown-ups by showing off their intellectual gifts or trying to be productive individuals are tormented as nerds.

Bauerlein talks about how Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Stuart Mill, and Walt Whitman were liberated by books, but strangely Bauerlein does not seem to realize that for some liberation from the cruelties of bias and the mental poverty of lowest-common-denominator culture came from access to the computer not to the printed page. Speaking autobiographically, this was true for those of us in middle school computer labs who were not conventionally attractive or graceful in face-to-face interactions or who struggled with poor handwriting and organization. When I read novels from the past about accomplished heroines with beautiful penmanship, dexterity with the needle, and competence at piano playing, I am often grateful that I live in the digital age where I am not an unmarriageable failure living as an outcast in penury.

Certainly danah boyd has written about the importance of the Internet for gay teenagers in the poisonously homophobic atmosphere of high school in which the ultra-masculine jock and the ultra-feminine homecoming queen and/or cheerleader rule as the royalty on campus. The possibility that the Internet could facilitate potentialities for genuine -- as opposed to fatuous -- "resistance identities" in Manuel Castells' terms to teen conformity and consumerism is never seriously entertained in Bauerlein's book.

Which brings me to the subtle heterosexism of Bauerlein's text that actually contains a line about how "father fights the traffic" while "mother must prepare dinner." In my household, I'm the one driving from UC Irvine to Santa Monica while my husband does wonders in the kitchen. Geez! How can someone assume this Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle still persists among a dual-income readership?

Finally, I have to say something about all the cheap shots that Bauerlein takes that are aimed at the brain-stultifying din of crappy pop music that no one is defending, and precisely the kind of music that teens are rejecting through Internet radio and other online alternatives to what he not very carefully considers to be the ubiquitous pap of "Tupac and Britney."

So I'd close my diatribe against Bauerlein by referring readers to this DJ Earworm mash-up of Billboard's top twenty-five chart-topping pop hits that was created first for a very non Ozzie and Harriet gay audience of San Francisco clubgoers to mark the end of 2008 with the dizzying spectacle of racial and sexual stereotypes, romantic melodrama, consumerism, instant gratification, and commodity fetishism emptied of its destructive social directives and turned into a clever musical soup that is danceable and evocative of guilty nostalgias and heterogeneous pleasures that Bauerlein would have us condemn.

Mark of Zotero

The blog at the Wired Campus for the Chronicle of Higher Education describes a copyright infringement suit of interest to information literacy educators in "Maker of EndNote Citation Software Sues George Mason U." The article explains that the maker of the proprietary software package Endnote, which is used by many academics to create and organize bibliographic citations, has sued the Center for History and New Media, which has been known for its ground-breaking work in multimedia teaching, open courseware, and the creation of online archives of documents and images. EndNote accuses the group of violating its intellectual property rights by reverse engineering their pricey corporate product and then releasing Zotero, a free open-source tool for the Firefox browser, which claims to be "leveraging the long tail of scholarship" by offering a single application to collect, manage, and cite research sources. Personally, as a longtime EndNote user, I love the ease of Zotero and have even converted my colleague Julia Lupton to its cause. Now, as part of an effort to ward off inappropriate citation practices and plagiarism, we are emphasizing Zotero as part of the larger information literacy curriculum of the Humanities Core Course.

The rhetoric of the actual legal complaint emphasizes the language of its own license agreement, which George Mason seems to have consented to and even renewed. It's also interesting to note how they refer to "information and belief" about Zotero's supposedly nefarious practices several times without citing any specific sources themselves.

Update: The Madisonian blog provides more analysis of the case here. Peter Murray of OhioLINK, the Ohio Information and Library Network, also points readers to more resources and references about the case at the Disruptive Library Technology Jester.

Future Chalk

Mimi Ito has launched The Futures of Learning Blog, which looks beyond her own well-known empirical research on digital learning among young people to report on work being done in the current transnational critical milieu by other scholars considering how ubiquitous communication, gaming, file-sharing, and public writing for the web are reshaping both what can be considered the pedagogical environment and the larger context in which teaching and learning takes place. "Empirical" is obviously an important word for defining the kind of research that the blog will cover, but otherwise it plans to presents a wide variety of subject matter relevant to how digital social media facilitate peer-t0-peer learning and amateur cultural production.

I’ll be among a really great international group of researchers, who will be taking a few months to do reading on research and practice in the area of new media and learning, and also to visit different institutions and projects in the US and elsewhere that are innovating in this space. Along the way, we will be using this blog as a way to share some of what we are learning, and to solicit feedback on our work in progress. We will be posting book and article reviews and reports from our visits to various sites and conferences.

In the past I've complained about how Internet research is often disproportionately focused on the activities of the young, and my Sivacracy colleague Siva Vaidhyanathan has expressed his own skepticism about the very existence of a distinct "digital generation" separate from their analog elders. But I've always admired Ito's work for its willingness to explore counterintuitive possibilities and its hesitance to jump to one-dimensionally celebratory conclusions. For example, some of her work about the ideologies of educational videogames undermines easy equations of technology with more sophisticated learning techniques. So I'm delighted that she has joined the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine on my own campus.

One particularly noteworthy aspect of this blog project is its emphasis on its multilingual team of researchers. As Geert Lovink has noted in the case of German critics of new media, too often relevant work is not disseminated, because it is not translated into English. For example, the blog already includes work by researchers who are publishing in Korean and presses based in Asia rather than the United States.

Back-to-School Night

The instructional technology movement that has become an integral part of staffing and building design on many college campuses has also taken on a much more prominent role in K-12 education. This evening I attended the parents' back-to-school night at Lincoln Middle School, and I was struck by how many teachers were using corporal presentation technologies, particularly digital slideware. Only the music teacher spoke to parents without an electronic aid. English, history, math, and science teachers all had PowerPoint presentations prepared for the rooms of expectant parents. The art teacher used overheads, but they were created with a digital printer, and the physical education teacher showed parents a tour of his HTML website. (From this same PE teacher I learned that YouTube had been blocked by the school's computer administrators and that this often created problems in showing particular game plays, dance steps, or modes of physical activity imported to the U.S. from other countries.)

Many teachers were actively involved in online video production with student participation: two math teachers were busy creating "Mathcasts" starring Tuesday afterschool students, and the PE teacher offered to upload videos of his charges performing to a password-protected site, where only parents could view only their particular children engaged in the fitness curriculum. Many others also showcased tablet PCs purchased by class gifts or by grant monies. I thought that a science teacher's use of her document camera was particularly notable: she not only used it to show experiments to the class that would otherwise be difficult to see -- such as a seed growing in a plastic cup -- but she also thought to use the document camera as a way to display the appearance of model student work, particularly in the area of scientific illustration in which explanatory clarity might be far more important than artistic polish.

Having been a veteran of many parents' nights, however, I was struck by the fact that far fewer parents asked questions of the teachers than I had seen in previous years and how much the technology reinforced the one-to-many character of the exchanges that did take place. Parents were far more likely in this situation, it seemed, to behave as passive spectators rather than active participants.

I also wondered about the ways that these technologies decrease the physical proximities of teachers to their pupils when students never have a reason to gather around the instructor's desk to see something small and singular and about how the optics of wonder can be reshaped by even a laudatory use of a document camera. Yes, by keeping students seated, these technologies reduce disruption, but they also relegate students to an audience at some remove from the pedagogical show.

School Supplies

I've posted this year's online video introduction to my digital rhetoric class this Fall on YouTube.

The Children's Hour

A recent article in the New York Times, "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?," depicts a family portrait in which love of books and onscreen reading divides up along generational lines. In some ways this story just re-emphasizes what Siva Vaidhyanathan has called the "myth of the 'digital generation,'" by depicting the befuddlement of traditionalist parents at the behavior of tech-savvy teens. Although the article pays lipservice to the larger issues of "the future of reading," the article spends more time on what I have called the "ambulance chasing" of ideologue Dana Gioia than it gives to a broader survey of literacy specialists. As a parent and an educator, I'm certainly a fan of "sustained silent reading" of print texts, but I don't think generational trend-spotting or rhetoric about the death of reading does much to build a culture of literacy. And much of the article reads like lazy reporting with little insight to bring to the web-surfing habits that are so superficially observed that the reporter does little more than sprinkle the columns with names of URLs.

Street Cred

The UC Santa Barbara Social Computing Workshop convened today for a wide ranging discussion about technologies that "can be defined as the deployment of network communication systems for the purpose of allowing communities of people to interact within particular domains of knowledge for one or more goals." Led by digital pioneer Alan Liu, who launched the Voice of the Shuttle, the sessions of the day were intended to get beyond merely defending traditional academic gate-keeping and aspired to more creative brainstorming activities that looked toward the future as well as back to the past.

Credibility was perhaps the most obvious theme for many of the attendees. Several of the suggested readings designed to foster discussion related to UCSB's MacArthur-funded project about Credibility Online, which is headed up by Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanigan, who contributed a lot to the discussion. During sessions, Metzger talked about how we "manage mulitple bounded identities," the problems with umbrella terms like "credibility" and "social computing," and the importance of being able to "visualize disagreement."

Pre-workshop suggested readings had included "The Hidden Order of Wikipedia," "Digital Media and Youth: Unparalleled Opportunity and Unprecedented Responsibility," "The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority," and a range of other articles and links. My only criticism of these reference points might be that too often they emphasized receptive rather than productive literacy. From my own anecdotal experiences I might suggest that assessing credibility and content-creation are often related activities and that initiatives for information literacy and distributed digital media production should not be separated in ways that they often are. In connection with this concern, Kathy Im of the MacArthur Foundation pointed me to the work of the University of Michigan's Soo Rieh, who is testing the hypothesis that forms of Internet participation and judgment may be related.

The other big agenda item involved constructive criticism of the campus's IGERT Proposal for a Social Computing Research Training program. Many attendees at the conference cautioned that this kind of interdisciplinary research program can fall prey to excessive rationalism and formalism, especially if the orientation of the inquiry focuses exclusively on online behaviors that are obviously purposive. For example, some called for inclusion of emotional considerations, meme-sharing, and the formation of collective identities on the principle that "expressive" practices should not be relegated to "entertainment." They also urged incorporation of the study of virtual worlds, ubiquitous computing, and games in the proposal, since social computing is already much more than use of the World Wide Web. Audience members also noted the disiciplinary absences of philosophy and ethnography in the current draft of the project.

(More photos of the social computing group being social are here.)

Computers for Smarties

Speaking of "books that make you dumb," I've recently looked at two books about digital rhetoric that make reference to the "For Dummies" trade paperbacks. One is literally a "For Dummies" book, Second Life for Dummies, written by Virtualpolitik pals Sarah Robbins and Mark Bell. Robbins is known for her work teaching communication skills in virtual worlds, and as a result the book has a strong rhetorical orientation with chapter titles like "Jumping into the Conversation: Express Yourself" and "Creating Your Second Life Persona." It also contains material about teaching and learning in Second Life, although they downplay their professional work as researchers in the text. I see Robbins and Bell on the conference circuit, and the last time we caught up on their globe-trotting promotional efforts, Bell was giving a presentation to the Kinsey Institute about sexual practices in SL. (He was debating how much to say about the experience of being cruised by a giant animated taco.) Robbins has been emphasizing the tricky boundary shifting that can challenge any pedagogy with a slogan from her talks, "Don't come to class naked."

Although it has been out since 2001, Laura Gurak's Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness also acknowledges the "For Dummies" genre. As Gurak writes, "Unlike many of the 'how-to' books and 'dummies' guides' on the market, this book is not a technical listing of what to do and not to do." Unfortunately, a lot of the book seems dated now, which I know is a hazard faced by any new media title. It's messages about gender, "techno-rage," and hoaxes could also be said to play into many of the implicit assumptions key to the current reactionary political mood that focuses on cybersafety rather than building public information infrastructures. There's also a kind of normative moralism that runs through the book, even though I've made arguments in favor of dissimulation, exhibitionism, and transgression in Internet environments. The issue really is "cyberliteracies" not "cyberliteracy," I would argue. Finally, even though Gurak is an expert on the clipper chip debate and the role of technical constraints in online communication, the book is relatively light on the forms of procedural rhetoric being written about right now by Ian Bogost and others.

Show Offs and Showdowns

Lovink's chapter on "Updating Tactical Media" in Zero Comments raises a number of interesting issues in thinking about balancing activism with engagement with policy-making and the role of the public intellectual assumed by many of my colleagues both inside and outside academia. Lovink quotes Paul Garrin's warning that "Tactical Media is not only something that Media Activists engage in. It's advertising, corporate psychological warfare of Perception Management."

As someone who well remembers Act Up, I'm not sure that Lovink is right to date the phenomenon to 1992, although his catalogue of "ways to connect, relay, disconnect -- and again reconnect -- a veritable stampede of pirate radio waves, video art, animations, hoaxes, wi-fi networks, music jam sessions, Xerox cultures, performances, grassroots robotics, cinema screenings, street graffitti, and (don't forget) computer code" accurately describes how tactical media attempt to engage public audiences by mixing branding with political subversion and high art with low. Despite the critique of blogging with which Lovink opens Zero Comments, he also argues that "blogs are an essential vehicle" for "sticky ideas."

One could argue that the recent public showdown between friends, colleagues, and fellow copyleft advocates Kembrew McLeod and Siva Vaidhyanathan over a robot-costume/Bill-Clinton-heckling incident also represented a kind of showdown between Tactical Media Activism and Critical Information Studies. There are certainly those who use tactical media who have a place in the academy and even members of The Yes Men are known to keep campus office hours and go to department meetings. But there is certainly tension between those who embrace the spirit of what Lovink calls "protestivals" and those who focus on public testimony wearing suits to try to convince policy makers by using formal channels for official political deliberation.

Finally, I tend to side with Lovink when he says that at least theory needs to be part of the globalization debate as well, but -- since I studied with Derrida and Lyotard in graduate school -- I may not seem like the most neutral party on that question to readers of this blog.

(Speaking of Tactical Media Activism, I will be giving a talk about hacktivism at this year's Popular Culture Association in San Francisco.)

The Wiki Witch of the West

The name "Virgil" is climbing up the rankings for reasons unrelated to the work of the Latin poet, since Virgil Griffith created WikiScanner, a program that identifies the source of otherwise anonymous Wikipedia edits by using information about computer IP addresses. Wired points out in the title of a recent article that those monkeying with their public reputations on the giant online encyclopedia include Diebold and the CIA. And the New York Times piece about revealing "corporate fingerprints" adds beverage giants Anheuser-Bush and Pepsi to the list.

As Ian Bogost observes in "Tactical Iraqi's Wikipedia Spin," I've personally been involved in a weird case of self-interested Wikipedia revisionism that seemed to involve boosters of a military-funded videogame. Once the WikiScanner page search is back up and running again from its current overloaded condition, I look forward to finding out who deleted the paragraph that I wrote that described why the game was controversial among developers of so-called "serious games" for education, training, and rehabilitation. I suppose I can feel vindicated now that my paragraph has been recently restored by another anonymous editor who noted "the original was sourced, the replacement unsourced and POV."

(I don't know how many more Wikipedia stories I can run here, since I'm running out of puns.)