Monthly Archives: October 2010

Greetings from the Delta Quadrant! (Now, take me to your leader.)

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Borg Insignia

Anybody who read Gardner’s latest post and listened to his E-Learn 2010 podcast (you can play it inline at the end of selfsame post, and I encourage you to do so) knows that I’m having some fun here. The above image is the insignia of The Borg, a race of tyrannical cyborgs that terrorizes all the good guys on Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you don’t know them by their insignia–OK, maybe you’re NOT an ubernerd–then surely you’ve seen a Borg or two on the Internet somewhere:

Borg

In his podcast, Gardner discusses the ongoing “Internet Backlash” and some of the folks associated with it, one of whom is Jaron Lanier, author of “You Are Not a Gadget.” At issue in the podcast is, among other things, whether Lanier’s critique of Wikipedia as an expression of the hive mind holds any water. For the record, Lanier is not some garden-variety luddite or even a technophobe. He is, in fact, a computer scientist and a very good writer, to boot. To learn more about his thoughts on the “foolish collectivism” of Wikipedia, have a look at Digital Moaism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. (Between this and Gardner’s podcast, you’ve got an excellent point-counterpoint debate about the concept of the read/write web.)

The spirit of Lanier’s own backlash against Wikipedia is fairly well captured by the very last passage in the essay, which contains the following warning:

The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.

The last sentence there is the key to understanding where Lanier is coming from:

The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.

The tension and often competing interests of the individual versus the collective: That I get. But where I think Gardner gets it right is in pointing out that Lanier’s take on things represents a certain myopia, a “failure of imagination,” as he says, or the inability to see the big picture. Take the concept of “The Collective.” What is “The Collective” anyway? Is it as Lanier would have it (the hive mind) or as Gardner would have it (the artisans of Paris)? The truth is that’s it’s probably both–depending on the context.

That’s just it: Context.  In my view, context counts for much more in this disagreement, perhaps, because never before in history has the idea of “The Collective” existed in such a unique context: The context of many individuals, each at her or his own computer terminal, who just happen to be participating in something collective. In other words, there’s surely more than one flavor of “collectivism,” and the kind we’re talking about here–millions of people editing a shared web space, usually anonymously, and in private–is something very new. As such, I don’t think the same rules apply when Lanier writes:

… the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

History is rife with examples of foolish collectivism gone bad, to be sure; and to be fair, it’s worth mentioning that Lanier cites several examples of ways in which collectivism succeeds in making us smarter. But I think we’re at apples and oranges at this point, so I return to Star Trek for an analogy…

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that The Borgs are subject to the usual personality dynamics that usually manifest themselves when humans (and humanoids) gather in concert to decide something important. The committee: That paragon of the dumb-down where nothing of import really happens. So, let’s say The Borgs are deciding on their next attack strategy in a committee meeting. What happens? The shyest and most quiet Borgs, whose opinions matter presumably not less than the more boisterous Borgs, hold back in usual fashion; and the more bellicose Borgs–some of whom are not particularly trenchant in the ways of attack strategies, let’s say–dominate the conversation, keeping the shy Borgs from having Borg-ese words edgewise. Arguably, this is a recipe for the Borgs getting their butts handed to them by Jean-Luc Picard (and I think Lanier would agree with me here).

While this scenario is a stereotype of the same kind of collectivism that Lanier is imposing on the digital world where, inevitably, the dumbest opinions hold sway, it does illustrate how context is important. In certain contexts–and I speak from my own experience–some people are empowered to be more insightful, more thoughtful, and in general, more interesting and creative when they don’t feel threatened by outside influence or conventional social dynamics. For example, when they’re at their own desks at home or in the office by themselves and have time to think and aren’t worried about folks looking askance at them for voicing strange opinions. This is what digital collectivism affords us: some might call it simply “anonymity,” but if thought of more imaginitively–as Gardner is encouraging us to do–we might also see it as a kind of unfettering of the collective influence. Dare I say, it allows us to have the courage to become more individual?

As for me, I’m a shy Borg and prefer to be left to my own devices behind the protective shield of a keyboard. You might find my writing interesting; but truthfully, if you asked me to speak up in a crowd about something I’m even knowledgeable about, the results will probably be dreadful, but not because what I have to say is less valid than someone who’s more eloquent. Thank goodness for a medium where even the most reticent of us can get our 2-cents in (comfortably). It begs questions: Can this digital collectivism be a bad thing for democracy and the advancement of knowledge? Is it harmful or beneficial to education?

At the same time that Lanier simplifies the notion of what “collectivism” is, so too does he over-simplify the meaning of Wikipedia. No thoughtful and responsible individual, even among futurists and techno-utopians, is going to proclaim Wikipedia as the de facto one-stop shop for knowledge. If thought of more imaginitively, though, one could view Wikipedia as a glorified card catalog or index where one just happens to end up first along the road to higher knowledge. Personally speaking, I use it as a map: Sure, it’s usually the first result on the SERP for any given topic you search for in Google, but so what? That means I have to believe that it’s an authoritative source? Of course not. But it’s not a bad place to start for further reading.

And at the end of the day, even when I take issue with something I read on Wikipedia, I have the freedom to change it. Somehow, that freedom seems more appealing to the individual in me than the Borg.

What we behold becomes us, too

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My favorite part of The Last Lecture, which to me is also the most moving part, is the twist ending: Randy Pausch head-faking all of us into believing that his 76-minute aphoristic speech was intended primarily for the general audience.

Oddly, after yesterday’s seminar–to date, the most poignant for me–I began to feel this same sense of being pleasantly (and movingly) hoodwinked. Something about Bill Viola’s essay and the wonderful commentary provided by my colleagues and presenters Jim Kendrick and Rob Rogers crystallized something in my brain. To their credit, I don’t think I could have teased out as much meaning from Viola without their presentation. Another read of “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” is surely in order. To Gardner’s credit, sequencing the Viola essay after McLuhan was a stroke of genius.

In doing the required readings for NMFS and blogging haphazardly, and in listening to presentations and ideas being brought forth about the many topics we’ve investigated, my assumption has been that the proper focus of this class is the New Media itself. Like the typical student, I’ve progressed through readings and discussions with a lingering refrain in my head that goes, “Ok, so that’s interesting. But what’s the most important thing about this? What do I take away from all this?”

After yesterday’s seminar, something clicked. I had a mind splinter all evening and into this morning. Call it a moment of clarity, if you like, but I think I’m at the precipice of real understanding here. The most startling realization for me is that we have, in fact, been head-faked: This class is NOT about New Media at all. It’s about Us (with a capital ‘u’). It’s about our need for finding meaning in everything that we do and see and hear, and it’s about HOW we go about constructing that meaning for ourselves, cognitively speaking. It’s about the human brain–although, “mind” sounds better to me–and how it devours everything in the pursuit of truth and beauty “steadily and without any resistance.” It’s about how memory and the act of remembering IS like art: Every waking hour, we’re constantly editing, rearranging, and combining our memories all for the sake of telling stories and teasing out meaning from life. And it’s about how we instinctively and incessantly project those cognitive tendencies into the material world in the form of media, all again for the sake of making sense of it all.

But this is a class about New Media, after all. So what’s the point? The point is this: For the first time in human history, we have the most complete and elegant mechanism for extending our minds–THE most important part of ourselves–into the material world. Beholding the Internet with all of its attendant weirdness and beauty is like standing back from your own brain as you would admire it in some glass case in a museum: There we are, perfectly externalized in technological form, warts and all! (Only, you’re not looking at just your brain, but a billion others, too).

Marshall McLuhan writes that “We become what we behold,” but I’d wager the opposite is just as true: That what we behold becomes us. As Viola demonstrates with his water wall technology via video in “Ocean Without A Shore,” the better technology becomes, the more it enables us to convey ideas like the thin wall separating life and death, for example, exactly as that idea might have occured in a dream. That’s to say nothing of the fact that, not only can we now map our minds into our own data spaces; we can also connect to shared data spaces and take advantage of collective intelligence and creativity that exists there.

Again, my mind goes back to McLuhan. I can finally understand why modern computing as a medium (although, to be correct, it should be “media” because computers allow us to call on all media at once) is conceptually more important than all the bits and bytes that make it possible–or more important than all the individual tools and services that we as educators and technologists feel compelled to incorporate into the classroom. As for the message:

” … the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change
of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

The standard response of the technophobe is that computers are making us all into robots. But if like McLuhan we accept the notion that any medium’s message alters the scale of our sense ratios to the extent individual senses are emphasized over others, then the greatest promise of our digital age is that the Internet may in fact help to make us more fully human since it represents our collective brains “externalized in technological form.” It means that learning and creating with New Media means we are doing something more fundamentally innate and human than if we were locked away in our own rooms reading the printed page. And I think this is what everyone from Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay were getting at in their individual essays when they pointed to the power of computing and its ability to more fully replicate our thought patterns and the promise that it could make us smarter by allowing us to collaborate more richly.

Finally, I came away with another notion yesterday that’s harder to verbalize or pin down in a single blog post, but it has something to do with how life is really a lot like art. Every breath represents another opportunity to create, to remember, edit, and rearrange our own stories and ideas in our own data spaces to find meaning. What’s even better is that I can now share my data space with you, just as you can share yours with me.

Viola Gets the Massage

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Bill Viola’s “Condominiums in Dataspace” is very McLuhanesque, and that makes this week’s reading a good transition from our discussion of medium as message. Viola’s description of traditional media as “additive” and linear (sound familiar?) shows his awareness of their effects on our cognition. Several passages in this essay invoke the McLuhan notions that 1). we’re incapable of fully appreciating the media milieu we’re swimming in, and 2). that we often misuse new media for the sake of recreating the old. But rather than “doing today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools,” as McLuhan would have it, Viola’s assertion works in reverse: He argues that we’re doing yesterday’s jobs with the tools of today. In our ignorance of their true meaning and power, Viola says, we fall prey to using new media for old purposes using “the same old linear logic system in a new bottle.”

Viola also channels Ted Nelson in his warnings to those “boring and incompetent teachers” not to bypass “the primary medium, not only of their own fields, but of the entire culture as well.” Again, all this reinforcing this idea of media literacy and awareness a la McLuhan.

Like all the other authors we’ve read for this class, Viola is ahead of the game in recognizing the computer’s potential to express and represent human cognition. Like our minds, “Data space is fluid and temporal,” he writes, and as we move into the digital world, we are actually “moving into idea space here, into the world of thoughts and images as they exist in the brain … .” The upshot is that “With the integration of images and video into the domain of computer logic, we are beginning the task of mapping the conceptual structures of our brain onto the technology.” Wait: A part of ourselves being externalized in technological form? Where have I heard that before? :)

Like Bush, Englebart, and Nelson, Viola seems to embrace the notion that a hypertextual environment is a perfect companion to learning, where the learner is free to start at any point–even free to work from the end back to the beginning to achieve understanding. Or, at least that’s what I thought of when I read this passage: “Our cultural concept of education and knowledge is based upon the idea of building something up from a ground, from zero … It is additive. If we approach this process from the other direction, considering it to be backwards, or subtractive, all sorts of things start to happen.” How that actually looks in practice is another matter, but I’m reminded of the Memex and the Xanadu Project, among other things as I read this.

In Defense of the Seminar

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After Gardner requested that we (re)visit the NMFS discussion forums, I went out this morning to visit the site and saw his thread, “Sharing a concern, and asking for constructive feedback.” Hmmm. Clicked on that and saw a link to Brian Young’s Sept. 30 post questioning the direction, leadership, and purpose of the networked seminar. I pretty much had to tear my own hand away from the keyboard to keep myself from firing off my own rejoinder, but then I saw Brian’s apology to Gardner. OK, fair enough. In Brian’s latest post written yesterday, however, I don’t get the sense that there’s been any real consideration of civility after all, considering this phrase:

This seminar is a mess. The leaders haven’t given the thing much thought, and if they have, they need to think harder. This is not a negative comment …

Com’on guys. Not a ‘negative comment’? If I understand correctly, Brian is frustrated because one of his colleagues decided to quit the seminar because he didn’t like the readings:

Pat is out … He said he’s had enough of the readings. He doesn’t want to waste any more time trying to figure out why what we are reading matters. He did it so eloquently in this comment, I won’t explain it anymore.

Pat’s reason for quitting:

… This stuff is way too heady for someone like me who is a multimedia developer by choice. The readings are about as stimulating as watching grass grow.

Two things: First, my initial instinct is to defend Gardner’s (and Alan’s) leadership and vision and their commitment to doing something innovative and risky–I think I can safely speak for all of my colleagues here at Baylor when I say, “Thank you.” After all, the very idea of this seminar is inherently fraught with all kinds of danger: Getting academics, educators, and technologists in one room to discuss the new media and its role in higher education? Having them blog about their experiences and thoughts, all for the world to see? Putting yourself on the line as a facilitator when so much of the value of this experiment depends on what we, the “faciliated,” put into it? To be sure, we’ve had to wade through some occasionally difficult and dry reading, and I do have to give Brian and his colleagues credit for their honesty. But ultimately, I share Gardner’s thoughts about how we should avoid personal attacks and try to be constructive as we express ourselves online.

This reminds me of a few other things. First, the necessity of teaching our students (and ourselves) how to conduct ourselves online as we establish our digital identities. The “anonymous” nature of the web–or maybe “impersonal” is a better description–can often lead us to write things about others we later regret, so maybe a good rule of thumb is: Never say or write anything online you wouldn’t feel comfortable owning up to publicly, particularly in presence of the person you’re writing about.

Also, to Brian’s point:

What I find most interesting is that many in our group barely go through the readings. The discussions are still great. What do we need them for, other than to sell a few more copies of the New Media Reader? Is this a “typical” seminar? Is this how students feel about seminars?

“Is this how students feel about seminars?” Yeah, sometimes. Students tune out because they don’t want to do the readings, they want things to come easily, and we often hear them say things like, “I for one don’t get it and probably never will” or “What do we need [the readings] for?” or “This stuff is way to heady for someone like me … ” As educators, what are we conditioned to say to that? “Ok, sure. See ya later.” Absolutely not! Our role in higher education is to encourage our students to extend their minds and imaginations, often by requiring them to engage difficult concepts and readings they may not personally like or enjoy. As a result, you’d think we’d have the same expectation of ourselves.

So, I’d like to give credit where credit is due and once again express my appreciation to Gardner and Alan for what has been a wonderful experience in NMFS ’10. It’s a shame not everyone is getting the same enjoyment.

‘…it was the thing rebelling against misuse.’

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As I’m reading Sherry McElhannon’s post on McLuhan, I’m sharing her resentment over the author’s assumption that we’re all “technological idiots” for our innate tendency to fixate on how media are used (even while, like Sherry, I’m not completely sure what all McLuhan’s getting at). But I get the “message” part: The effects of media–how they shape our behavior and relationships to one another–are what really count, not how we use them. Still, not even McLuhan could escape being a technological idiot himself, as is demonstrated in this clip from a 1976 episode of the Today Show, where McLuhan waxed philosophic ad nauseum about how appropriately presidential candidates Carter and Ford used the T.V. medium during the debates:

[youtube ZF8jej3j5vA]

At about 3:20, you can catch McLuhan lamenting the candidates’ poor use of the medium. He says, “I never saw a more atrocious misuse of the T.V. medium. When it broke down, it was the thing rebelling against misuse.” Interestingly, in this entire interview, McLuhan seems to be pointing to the importance of understanding how media are used … and how NOT to use them.

‘Personal Dynamic Media’ leaves me hanging …

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Literally. For those of you wanting to finish “Personal Dynamic Media,” you may get the complete version here: http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf. The online version of this article contains the rest of the conclusion, which speculates about the possible downsides of the Dynabook’s general appeal:

The total range of possible users is so great that any attempt to specifically anticipate their needs in the design of the Dynabook would end in a disastrous feature-laden hodgepodge which would not be really suitable for anyone.

While modern-day OS’s may not be exactly “disatrous,” most of them come pre-bloated with features not everyone will use, and most don’t provide intuitive resources for programming custom tools a la the Dynabook (can’t speak to Linux). Kay and Goldberg’s SmallTalk language, however, was meant to combat this problem–it would provide a means by which bootstrapping users could program their own tools:

… [A] great deal of effort has been put into providing both endless possibilities and easy tool-making through the Smalltalk programming language. … The burden of system design and specification is transferred to the user. This approach will only work if we do a very careful and comprehensive job of providing a general medium of communication which will allow ordinary users to casually and easily describe their desires for a specific tool.

Alas, nothing like SmallTalk exists today. Sure, Macintosh users have Automator, an application that lets users of OSX program AppleScript visually, and I suppose if you were really into punishment you’d immerse yourself in MicroSoft’s Visual Basic programming language, but the sad part is that both of these scripting languages–presumably, the only end-user tools for programming the world’s two most ubiquitous desktop operating systems–are merely meant to program event sequences, not design personal “metamedia.”

Interestingly, more opportunities for bootstrapping seem to exist within the world of mobile devices, where the growing popularity of Android, Google’s open-source OS for mobile phones, is giving would-be developers a ray of hope.

Maybe it’s not Xanadu, but it’s pretty cool …

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Screenshot of Nelson's XanaduSpace.

Those of you wishing to dabble in the hypertextual richness of something like Ted Nelson’s XanaduSpace (minus the spatial aspect), give collaborative annotation a try. I could be wrong, but it seems to come as close to Xanadu as anything I’ve seen. Think social bookmarking a la Delicious on steroids. The best of breed in this category is Diigo, a cloud-based service that lets you manage your account from browser toolbars and bookmarklets to add tags, highlights, and comments on web pages that you find interesting. Every URL that you bookmark, tag, or capture–multimedia may be captured and saved, though I’ve not done this–is saved to your account on Diigo’s web site and can be shared in a social network. I could see where this technology could be really useful if you’re doing research and want to establish those Nelsonian deep links in your work. FYI …

More random thoughts on Nelson, and a confession

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First, the confession: I made a 900 on my SAT and got out of high school without ever taking a whit of trigonometry or calculus because when I was in 8th grade–yes, 8th grade–someone somewhere deemed me hopelessly deficient at Algebra and remanded me to the “pre-algebra” track in 9th grade, which effectively set me back two years from my peers mathematically. I’ve been fighting my own intellectual insecurities ever since.

What sweet irony it would have been if I had become an engineer, scientist, or math professor; but honestly, my strengths (and interests) have always been squarely centered in the humanities and music, and so there is surely a reason math never came easily for me–but that’s not to say that I couldn’t have done better in the formative years. The fact that I didn’t, though, makes me partially sympathetic to Nelson’s attack on the educational system and its emphasis on assessment over true understanding.

In a very real way, I believe that I was another statistic in a system where you either get in line, learn all the rules and tricks, test out early, and move on or get left behind fast. Looking back, I can see that I was as capable at math as many of my peers, I just didn’t learn it in the same way. But rather than provide a means for me to get up to speed and conquer my math demons, my school district simply put me on a trajectory toward falling further and further behind. And yet, for as much as I’d like to blame my algebraic struggles on the crummy math teachers of my past (Nelson would want me too, right?), I just can’t. The knee-jerk reaction to blame the teacher misses a larger point–a point that I think Nelson misses, too, in Computer Lib / Dream Machines.

Everyone in the room yesterday is in Nelson’s crosshairs: After all, we’re all either educators, technologists, or both. Nelson’s diatribe against The System is warranted on one level, but surely the educators are not solely to blame. After all, to implement the change he’s talking about would mean changing the expectations of–not just students AND educators, I think–but parents, also. Parents’ expectations of what education is and should be are obviously formed well before their children darken the door of any college or university.

The reality is that we exist in an education market (ugh) where the expectation is that we will award degrees on the basis of whether one makes the grade, how one navigates the linear path from subject to subject–never mind how much we really learn–and this is exactly what the parents of our students are paying money for. The SAT is supposed to be an indicator of how likely our students will succeed in that system, right?

Seems to me the main challenge to the Nelsonian educational approach is not convincing educators and technologists of its value.

To those of you who teach for a living: Don’t many of you despise having to grade, too, or administer standardized tests? Or test at all? What about the pressure to teach along a certain curricular path, or teach in a certain way, all in service of the almighty A-plus? And to the techies: Any of you really love all those technologies we *have* to support to keep the traditional model going and perpetuate the “four-walled,” paper-driven world? What of creativity and taking risks?

Those of us who really love learning (presumably, those of you who chose higher education as your calling) probably best understand the shortcomings of the assembly-line approach to teaching and learning. Not to say that there’s not value in what we’re doing presently; but the way I see it, our current educational model is one that’s held mostly together by the expectations of those who are paying for it, and all us administrators, faculty, and technologists are simply responding to the pressure to meet those expectations.

This argument may seem like a chicken-egg conundrum: Were these expectations formed because educators committed early on to a rigid, uninspiring approach to learning (i.e., “it’s the way it’s always been”), or have the demands of parents and job markets forced them more in that direction? I suppose both are true. In any case, I’ll wager it’s the educators on the front-lines who see mostly clearly the flaws in our system. I’d venture to say that many of them would find more comfort in a Nelsonian world than many parents and employers with traditional expectations.

More thoughts on Nelson, from the command line to Apple

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Rather than say what has already been said, I will simply quote some of my colleagues who have written far more eloquently about Computer Lib / Dream Machines. Reading from Jim Kendrick’s Of Anti-Westerns and Fish Bowls, I had a similar thought about how Nelson’s rants are uniquely tied to the computing environment of his day:

… Nelson was writing in a different era, one in which the social, professional, and personal roles the computer would play were hardly set. His ideas about how computers can be used pedagogically reflect in many ways the current uses to which machines are put in the classroom …

Unfortunately for such a visionary, Nelson happened to be born in the day when command line interfaces were the norm. But today, it could be argued that much of what Nelson argues for has come to fruition with the advent of elegantly designed user interfaces and Apple Computer Corp., whose ubiquitous products are as sleek as they are customizable, as Cppant reminds us in MIND THE [user-programer] GAP:

The user’s existence in this “prefabricated environments carefully tuned for easy use” is a happy reality that we know today, as is especially imaged (I think) in Apple products. It makes sense that in the 1970s Apple would provide its employees with Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Do we not think of Apple as the ones who brought the computer to the People? And as my brother pointed out to me in his kitchen this morning while he was preparing his famous technicolor velvet cake, Macs are as programmable as the user wants them to be—but software designers have made those features only visible to those who know how to or want to manipulate them. So, while my brother does with his Mac a multitude of things I may not be interested in (including using Open Office technologies, that present day tribute to Engelbart), the option to bootstrap my computer into advancement lies waiting for me should i choose to learn how.

And what, in fact, does Nelson suggest will be the ultimate proof that “real media” has arrived? With astonishing accuracy, he predicts the computing environment of our own time:

I think that when the real media of the future arrive, the smallest child will know it right away (and perhaps first). That, indeed, should and will be the criterion. When you can’t tear a teeny kid away from the computer screen, we’ll have gotten there.

We have, in fact, arrived. But the question still stands: While the capability to augment our collective intellects exists with the present toolset, are we taking full advantage of the tools?