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What "Teaching Computers" Can Tell Us about Teaching Digital Culture
July 18, 2013 - 1:15pm![Teaching Digital Culture](http://dmlcentral.net/sites/dmlcentral/files/blog_images/johnjones.37.600.jpg?1374167117 "What "Teaching Computers" Can Tell Us about Teaching Digital Culture Blog Image")
In a recent piece at Locus, Cory Doctorow argues:
Computers are the children of the human race’s mind, and as they become intimately involved in new aspects of our lives, we keep stumbling into semantic minefields, where commonly understood terms turn out to have no single, well-agreed-upon meaning across all parts of society.
As an example, Doctorow gives the "real names" policies of social network sites like Facebook and Google+. Where it may seem simple for a person to use his or her legal name on a website, Doctorow uses the example of his family, immigrants from Belarus, to complicate this assumption, describing the convoluted processes by which they acquired transliterated names and nicknames when they moved to Canada. Here he describes his grandfather's name:
My dad’s father was born Avram, which was anglicized as "Abraham" (naturally enough), but his first employer called him "Bill," because that was a more "Canadian" name. It stuck, and his Canadian citizenship papers read "Abraham William Doctorow," though no one ever called him "William."
The complexity of a name—what I am called depends on where I am and who I am with, and those realities may not be reflected on official documents—can elude computers in ways that are unlikely to stump or confuse a human.
The title of Doctorow's essay is "Teaching Computers Shows Us How Little We Understand About Ourselves," and while I think he identifies a real problem in computer culture—he describes it as the "ambiguity that is inherent in our human lives…rub[bing] up against our computerized need for rigid categories"—my takeaway from his article was slightly different than his.
Doctorow uses this example to suggest that we don't know enough about ourselves to code these relationships properly into computers. I think, however, that it shows the limitations of a certain way of thinking, a way of thinking that wants to apply rigid, rule-based codes to all situations. This is how computers "think," and they can be quite inflexible because of it. As Doctorow puts it, "With a human bureaucrat, there was always the possibility of wheedling an exception; machines don’t wheedle."
While wheedle has some negative connotations, what Doctorow is describing is basic persuasion, the chance to convince another to see beyond rigid categories in a particular situation, and computers do not perform well at tasks like that.
Real name policies don't show us what we don't know about ourselves, but rather expose limitations of digital culture and our adaptation to it. Near the end of the piece, Doctorow warns against "encoding errors about the true shape of family in software," implying that if we could only get the software right—if Facebook had the right form for his grandfather, for example—this would solve the problem with real name policies. But, while the correct software might be possible to achieve, the real issue with computers will remain: computers can't wheedle (at least for the foreseeable future), and wheedling is an important part of who we are and how we interact with each other.
I am an advocate of teaching programming and other forms of digital culture. But Doctorow underscores the (current) limitations of these systems, and performs the correct response. He is able to convey the complexity of real name policies by carefully explaining the issues involved and the limitations of technical systems. That is, his essay emphasizes the importance of teaching writing and communication skills as part of digital media instruction.
This is not writing as simple grammatical correctness (a rule-based, machine view of language), but as the vast array of persuasive possibilities presented by language that are relevant not only to texts, but to podcasts and videos and other artifacts of digital communication. Certain technologies can constrain the range of such persuasive communication, but it will never become unimportant, and pointing out the limitations of our technical systems only serves to underscore this point.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
The Trouble with Testing
July 15, 2013 - 9:10pm
It’s obviously summer because my news alerts are no longer steadily reporting concerns about education, our children’s future, the problems with teachers, etc. Perhaps now, then, is the perfect time to address the issue of testing and its troubles, while a little distance might provide perspective. So, why do we test? What do we hope the tests will achieve?
Last summer, Thomas Friedman suggested that parents and teachers view classroom performance as CEOs do economic performance to keep us competitive and to overcome our “education challenge.” In this light, testing helps us know where we stand in relation to other countries. Presumably, this knowledge will improve local performance because teachers can target areas of weakness.
Yet, learning research consistently shows that an emphasis on test scores does not necessarily lead to gains in academic performance. Perhaps learning, with its long-term gains and diffuse experiences does not lend itself well to an economic model. Instead of focusing on test scores at the elementary and secondary levels, why not take a longer-term view? Why public education? What are our true goals for teaching and learning? When pressed, most politicians will state that the long-term goals of education are to develop a citizenry that maximizes contributions to society and economy; yet, our standard test measures typically seem unrelated to the higher-order qualities that lead to such engaged citizens. It seems that to move toward a goal of an educated, engaged citizenry, we should consider the skills, aptitudes, and experiences of those among us who do positively contribute to society, who embody the values we seek to instill, and measure our school systems in terms of these long-term outputs.
Current testing mostly focuses on short-term achievement without considering long-term goals. For example, after our early 20s, most of us don’t remember quadratic equations, regardless of how well we tested in our teens; but perhaps the lesson wasn’t the equation itself, but the process of understanding or not understanding it. Learning is about more than its parts, it is about perseverance, to pursue a thing regardless of its obstacles, to adapt ideas and frameworks in light of new challenges and uncertainty. Yet these lessons aren’t adequately measured in national or international tests, not because of lack of interest but because of their intangibility. How many high school students who many considered ‘least likely to succeed’ did anyway? When we limit our measures of potential to fragmented subject knowledge, we risk missing what truly contributes to fostering the citizenry to which we aspire.
Ticking boxes and demonstrating an understanding of concepts in isolation, skills measured by PISA and ETS, do not prepare students well for demands of university learning or future careers. Established predictors of academic success—patience, perseverance, and adaptability—are not measured by these exams. Another consistent predictor of academic and professional success, delayed gratification—discovered in the now infamous marshmallow study that tested children’s ability to forego short-term gratification in favor of long-term gain—cannot be measured by the PISA tests.
Also not reported through PISA is the ability to crossover between subjects and concepts, to see the applications of and relationships between ideas beyond a single instance. The ability to imagine, to be creative, to adapt ideas regardless of challenges or obstacles are predictors of innovation. In these skills, we could argue that many graduates of the U.S. school system have far surpassed their counterparts. For some reason, despite our ‘average’ scores, the U.S. continues to be a major contributor to technologies that change the world: the Internet, Facebook, Google, the iPhone, to name but a few examples, not to mention innovative contributions in the areas of entertainment, health, and science. So perhaps testing well isn’t the only measure of success.
In looking at examples from Finland and South Korea, we want to take the learning gains a la carte, apart from the social systems that may foster them. We desire learning gains in mathematics, for example, but not a nationalized health system. Often absent from discussions of testing and improvements to education is the parents' role in their children’s academic performance and future career choice (Friedman provides an excellent overview of research in 2011). How do parents in these high performing countries support their children’s learning? Consistently in the U.S., parent’s education level is shown to be a predictor of academic success, yet corporate models of increased testing and academic competitiveness ignore the role of the parents. There is a gap in expectation: we expect teachers to improve, school systems to improve, indeed even children to improve, but we do not consider what kinds of support parents might need in order to cultivate adequate learning environments for their children outside of the classroom. We do not expect parents to play a stronger role in prioritizing education, and further, do not offer an infrastructure to aid parents in supporting their children’s learning experiences.
Friedman accurately states there is a mismatch in worldviews. The aggressive rhetoric of ‘education challenge’ seems unhelpful though, and I recommend instead focusing on the questions David Graeber posed, why are there no flying cars? If an entire nation of schoolchildren scored perfectly on the standardized tests now, what would our society be like in 15-25 years? Would we enjoy more social equality, enlightened distribution of resources, flying cars? As a nation, we need to be more clear about what it is we’re aiming at, and the best place to start is to look around at the people who already embody these qualities and consider how our school system and larger society fostered their development.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Both Sides of the Screen: Museums Seeking Balance in a Digital Age
July 11, 2013 - 1:30pm
Museums, like many public sites of informal learning, are struggling to understand the roles digital media can play within their walls. In short, are they an obstacle to engagement or a new path to knowledge? I recently saw both ideas reflected in popular media and the experience left me hoping for a third path between the two extremes.
There’s a New Yorker cartoon, published this past March, that shows a mother and child in a museum, the child pointing a device towards a painting. "It's an audio guide, sweetheart," the mother explains, "not a remote." The cartoonist is poking fun at the perceived expectations of today’s youth to use digital tools not just to augment but to interact or participate with the world around them. Depending on your perspective, the tools are either preventing the child from appreciating the museum or enhancing ways of learning the museum is failing to address (Incidentally, my 7-year-old son thought the cartoon was hilarious, as he interpreted it as actually being about the man in the background who "thought the guide was a phone”).
There’s an AT&T ad (right) that shows a woman walking through a museum yet fully connected to her Facebook community as everything around her is transformed into reflections of her digital life. A statue transforms into a girlfriend with her new haircut. “Us girls are going dancing tonight,” an older male guard says to her, mimicking a recent text message. “You in?” The ad, supporting this deep integration, of course wants us all to say, “Yes!” (it is a phone ad after all). But when I showed the ad to my father, who turns 82 this month, and asked him what it was about, he laughed with embarrassment and said he couldn't make heads nor tails of it. To me the ad, on one hand, suggests digital media can create a personalized visit by filtering a museum experience from a hyper-personal angle. On the other hand, it also suggests digital media prevents people from experiencing a direct, unmediated connection with museum content.
The dichotomy between the two, however – the wired versus the unplugged, my son versus my father – is a false one. We all struggle to balance our attention between two sides of the screen. And finding that balance is something museums are currently struggling to achieve. Museums are “caught between contradictory demands for connectivity and contemplation,” says the the recent Future of Museums’ TrendsWatch 2013. The annual report identifies six significant trends in museums. Alongside chapters with names like “3-D Printing” and “When Stuff Talks Back” is “Disconnecting to Reconnect.” As an organization, the Center for the Future of Museums is as “wired” as they come, but even they can’t ignore the Musée d’Orsay banning all photography and what they described as a “backlash against digital immersion and in favor of quiet contemplation and face-to-face contact.”
One way to balance our attention, explored in a follow-up blog entry called “Museo-mindfulness,” is learning to focus our attention in a mindful way. “Perhaps it is time for museums to...become a cultural force for mindfulness, providing refuge in the melee rather than contributing to it.” A museum in Los Angeles offers mindfulness meditation sessions that begin in the classroom and lead into the galleries, and at least two other California museums are following suit. But digital media need not fall at one end of a mindfulness spectrum with connectedness at the other end. The best guide I’ve read to navigating the digital age – Howard Rheingold’s essential Net Smart: How to Thrive Online – tackles the topic head on in the first chapter. “Mindfulness is what connects your attention to skills of digital participation, collaboration,” and the other skills required to “thrive online,” Rheingold argues. And in the section, “Mindfulness in an Always On World,” he writes, “Mindfulness is the most important practice for anyone who is trying to swim through the infostream instead of being swept away by it.”
Rheingold’s third way is neither to romanticize digital affordances nor run in fear from their dark side. Rather, he recognizes that whether faced with either extreme, we, and not the tools, are in charge. The more museums can empower their visitors to control their attention, to be in charge of how the digital mediates their experience, the more museums can contribute towards helping us all find the balance we seek.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Teaching and Learning with Minecraft: Liam O’Donnell
July 8, 2013 - 3:15pm
Playing with blocks certainly predates constructionist theories of learning by playing with “tangible manipulatives,” but the culturally universal practice is probably as old as human social learning. What is new is the ability to use simulated blocks to teach comparative religion by enabling students to construct navigable models of famous houses of worship. Or explore biology by assembling giant DNA molecules, or manifest millions of blocks by performing the proper calculations and applying appropriate logical operations. Manipulatives aren’t containers of knowledge, but can be used as “objects to think with,” as Seymour Papert noted more than thirty years ago – inexpensive, abundant, available, safe components that even a young child can control, adjust, build with, and above all, experiment and hypothesize with. Just as blocks have no inherent curricular power other than experience in making big things by stacking smaller things in the right order, the ability of computer-controlled pixels to convey important knowledge depends entirely on what (and how) they are used. That’s where teachers come in…and why some are beginning to use an inexpensive online game to teach everything from philosophy to biology: Minecraft.
If you didn’t know what it is about, you might – as I did – conflate the popular “sandbox” game “Minecraft” with the popular online adventure game, “World of Warcraft.” Within the last year, however, my radar started picking up signals from educators who were introducing Minecraft to their students. I’m taking a MOOC on programming in the Python language, and when the instructor (Professor Joe Warren from Rice University) said, “If there is one game I could recommend that could get you into the frame of mind of computer programming, it’s Minecraft,” my antennae started quivering. Following my usual learning method of nosing around, stumbling into and over things, then inquiring into those stumbled-upon phenomena that awakened my curiosity, a quick search led to Minecraft’s website, where I learned that Minecraft is about building stuff – a “sandbox” in which the object of the game is up to each player. Yes, you can raise protective structures and create armor to protect against the monster hordes. You can also build a city, a factory, a molecule, a temple, a playground. Players dig up dirt, stone, and wood, combine these basic materials to make swords and microscopes and build castles, rollercoasters, spaceships, Parthenons, planets.
Players can fight monsters, but nothing in the environment compels any one kind of play. Those who don’t want to be warriors can be architects, engineers, navigators, scientists, playwrites, community-builders. Creating an elaborate environment is only the beginning – then you need to attract others to come socialize in your world. Like a physical sandbox, a Minecraft server can (but doesn’t have to be) a social environment as well as a laboratory for individual exploration.
Some of the first signals I detected came from my friends at Ryerson University’s Edgelab. Edgelab researcher Melanie McBride is enthusiastic about Minecraft’s potential to empower autonomous learning where students seek out teachers, texts, and peers to solve the mathematical problems necessary to turn a blueprint into a three dimensional object, to perform the historical research necessary to make a simulation of a Mayan temple or Greek theater look authentic. She also warned me that with autonomy (i.e., the students are free to choose how to act and are not following explicit instructions) and a social arena, the same problems that can arise in any youth environment are possible – bullying, cliques, “griefing” (deliberate destruction and/or mockery of the work of others).
“Because Minecraft allows folks to have their own servers (like having one's own blog or Ning perhaps) there is the sense of entitlement to an audience,” McBride told me. “The attitude is ‘If I make it, others will play.’ This of course is not always or even often the case. The very ingenious or already socially savvy are able to amass a following without the knowledge or social skills or literacies or time or energy to make a community work. So you have a lot of kids moving from server to server until they find one that is ‘popular’...unfortunately, in a kid-run server culture, popular doesn't mean inclusive. And many of these servers harbor trolls and bullies. So when the kids come to a well-governed server it's a shock. People are nice and the grown ups don't allow them to bully. It's a safe space – though it's not always a ‘popular’ space.” In other words, not only does Minecraft work best when teachers set boundaries, model behavior, pose challenges, answer questions – and let the students work out the rest – it can also go south in the absence of explicitly stated behavioral norms and expectations.
Melanie introduced me to Liam O’Donnell, a Toronto educator who has been initiating other teachers as well as students into the educational potential of Minecraft. He hosts Gamingedus, a wiki for Minecraft-using educators and a Multi-school Server for four different Toronto area schools, educators, and students. In our brief video interview, O’Donnell and I talk about “messy learning” and more. (In the next part of this series, I will talk with an elementary school teacher in Southern California whose students have built elaborate models of famous places of worship for the world’s major religions).
Teaching and Learning with Minecraft: Liam O'Donnell from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
'Reclaim Open Learning' Innovation Contest
July 5, 2013 - 1:45pm
Mark your calendars for Aug. 1! We are looking for proposals that rethink open learning in new ways.
The participation of elite research universities in initiatives offering Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has generated considerable discussion within higher education, as well as mainstream and educational media, about the next generation of open learning initiatives. The New York Times declared that 2012 was “the year of the MOOC,” and The Chronicle of Higher Education announced that it was “the year of the mega-class.” Alternatives for the free delivery of course content have proliferated in the years since MIT announced that it would offer free online course materials in 2001 and the launch of iTunes U in 2007. Open courseware companies such as edX, Coursera, and Udacity provide video coursecasts, interactive quizzes, and peer grading activities. With hundreds of thousands of students from around the world eager to take advantage of seemingly lowered barriers to access, the promises to provide social justice, as well as information and first-rate teachers, through course portals have become more ambitious and perhaps harder to fulfill.
Yet, as these initiatives have proliferated, there seems to be relatively little variety in strategies to recruit and retain students or in the basic design of the educational software interface, and the assumption that bigger is better remains largely untested. Unfortunately, the promise of educational equity offered by many in the open access courseware movement might differ radically from the lived experience delivered to remote users. Very high attrition rates characterize the enrollment patterns of courses that prioritize the dimension of massiveness, as Audrey Watters has pointed out, and participant-observers such as Cathy Davidson of HASTAC have noted problems with the talking head format, the lack of reciprocity in peer-to-peer learning activities, and the absence of critical thinking required in multiple-choice quizzes (Davidson, who has now experienced creating MOOC content herself, suggests more learning happens with mash-ups than with MOOCs). Although MOOCs might be encouraging faculty to reflect more on their own teaching and may provide some interesting multimedia alternatives to textbooks, the designers of these course platforms don’t seem to recognize the revolution in informal learning that has been fundamentally changing pedagogy as peer facilitation takes off. For those who have been struggling to keep up, Steven Krause has posted a useful list of links here.
Records from online forums hosted by such courses show students expressing their frustration at being starved of the personal attention needed to develop truly participatory learner-centered communities of practice, and there has also been remarkably little empirical research on the student experience in MOOC education.
The Reclaim Open Learning initiative is seeking people interested in postsecondary education to develop a true community of pedagogues and researchers interested in exploring what openness could mean. Although institutional stakeholders include the MIT Media Lab and the MacArthur Foundation-supported Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, this initiative welcomes those whose work might not necessarily have received the media coverage MOOCs have garnered. This group recognizes the fact that the open learning movement actually has a very rich history that is less tied to Silicon Valley profit models, a history that includes the work of adventurous pioneers, such as David Wiley, from whom we can learn. It also encourages teachers to draw on resources from connected learning, such as their webcasts, and archive of videos and other materials.
Please check out the Innovation Contest that offers a $2000 incentive to either teachers or students interested in transforming higher education. Reclaim Open Learning has already sponsored a hackathon at the MIT Media Lab and is planning an open learning summit at UC Irvine in late September, which should be an exciting public symposium for exchanging ideas.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Edu.txt: Mediating Education
July 1, 2013 - 5:10pm
Digital media are increasingly shaping how we produce, transmit and receive knowledge, but do we often pause to think about the techniques which now mediate how we think and know about education and learning?
In the field of digital media and learning, the use of the web, digital devices and social media for communicating what we know about learning and education has become entirely normalized. We blog on education, we Tweet learning, we wiki about assessment, we Skype MOOCs, and so on. The stock of knowledge about digital media and learning has escaped from the analogue form of the printed book, the course text, the curriculum guide, the conference proceedings, and so on, and migrated in to new digital states.
Although physical texts, papers and books are certainly still with us, we are increasingly accessing knowledge about educational matters through digital materials and social media too. Here we might encounter infographics, wikis, visualizations, audio and video materials, reader comments on blogs, tweets and retweets, conference backchannels, as well as hybrid mashups, remixes and multimedia recombinations, and so forth. What are their effects on how educational issues, problems and concerns are produced, transmitted, received and comprehended? And why is this significant?
We Make Txts
It’s significant because, as many bibliographers and literary scholars know, the physical or material form of a text has an effect on its meaning. Even a seemingly straightforward medium like the printed book is in fact not just a technical container of a single author’s ideas but a complex social and collaborative object of production, transmission and reception. This puts texts in their necessary sociological contexts.
An appreciation of the social life of texts is has been described as the “textual condition”—the fact that “we make texts” as much as “we read texts.” This kind of research is alert to the “bibliographic codes” of texts—the various textual, typographic, visual and material techniques they deploy—and seeks to explain how these material properties ultimately transform the meanings of the linguistic codes (the words) they contain. It also examines the radial “paratextual” factors that surround and shape the physical production of a text—such as the work of publishers, editors, typographers, designers, distributors and so on—and their effect on its transmission, reception and meaning. It takes account of the social, political and economic motivations of producing, editing and publishing texts, and of how the technical, physical and material aspects of a text can affect its interpretation.
With digital media the interactions between the material properties and the interpretive possibilities of texts become more densely interwoven. Drawing on ideas about the textual condition, the digital humanities scholar Mathew Kirschenbaum has usefully developed ideas about “the .txtual condition” of digital texts. In order to interrogate the .txtual condition, he argues, researchers need to think about texts as “networks of transmedia properties,” as “massive assemblages of data,” as “hybrid artefacts” tracking across analogue and digital states, and as the result of complex social, legal, political and economic negotiations. The .txtual condition is defined by the interweaving of issues of sociality, hybridity, and transmedia reticulations. The emphasis is not just on the bibliographic codes of texts, but the computational codes that define programmed environments.
This approach to the “digital forensics” of textual analysis takes into account such things as the hardware, software, devices, storage media, operating systems, file systems, networks, repositories, a variety of digital artifacts such as audio, video, photos, tweets, and the computational processes, programmes, codes and algorithms required to make those texts. So it takes seriously things like word processing applications and the way they influence how we write. It also considers the human participants in text production, transmission and reception, and associated issues of privacy, security, ethics, access, control, as well as identity and anonymity. It also takes up aspects of a software studies approach to the political, cultural and conceptual formation of software and a close analysis of its layers of computer code, algorithmic logic, programming languages, visualization, and ordering.
Turning attention back to education and learning, then, if we want to interrogate education today then we need to examine its .txtual condition, and all the computational codes and bibliographic codes that affect the meanings of its linguistic codes.
Making Education Tweetable
Let’s consider something as mainstream as Twitter and its role as a digital form in the emerging .txtual condition of education. Twitter is a very good example of why we need to view digital texts as networks of transmedia forms and their codes and to untangle how those codes intervene in the recording, transmission and consumption of educational meanings.
A simple critical argument might be that social media like Twitter are “dumbing down” complex educational issues to sound bites. But that oversimplifies matters. Instead, making education tweetable involves a complex transformation of all kinds of information, data and knowledge into forms which are amenable to being translated and distributed as 140 character messages. If education is to be tweeted, then how does the computationally coded form of the tweet affect it?
In order to squeeze through that tightly mediated form, pretty much the first prerequisite for making educational matters tweetable, then, is that they can be hyperlinked and hashtagged. That is, they must have a digital presence. We can see this of course in the massive digitalization of even government educational policy texts. In order to be visible in the networks of social media, texts have to be digital in the first place. You could almost say, for example, that if an educational policy or a piece of educational research does not have a digital presence then it does not really exist. So, in order to make anything in education tweetable, it has to have a digital life, a hashtag and a bit.ly link that can be shared in the highly restricted textual environment of Twitter.
But some digital texts are more amenable to being tweeted than others. The texts that can generate sufficient interest to circulate in the networks of retweets, scoops, likes and so on are those that can employ attention-grabbing techniques. There is a growing online industry for generating short, catchy, “tweetable” phrases and info-nuggets that are optimized for potential retweeting.
Additionally, we now see attention-grabbing infographics, visualizations, concept maps, diagrams and other graphical imagery playing a significant part in the communication of education. Visualization technologies and techniques make it possible to translate a domain as complex as learning theory itself into a visual representation. These forms transform complex matters, information and data into simplified visual arrays and representations. As Bruno Latour has argued, visualisations act as material techniques of thought. They can be moved around, copied, reshuffled, recombined, superimposed and reproduced in other places. The power of a visualisation, graphic, image, or diagram, is to stabilize ideas, problems, concepts, explanations and arguments in one place so as to influence the way people think about it. Visualizations can freeze and condense into one image and location an extensive network of conceptual content and thus make it amenable to tweeting.
The attractiveness of these kinds of digital forms might also play a part in shaping the kinds of educational knowledge which can be communicated. Emerging technologies such as learning analytics are generating enthusiasm and attention at least in part because of the emphasis given to visualization. Though the underlying tracker technologies and data mining procedures are undoubtedly complex, learning analytics can generate simplified visualizations of data in a way that makes the technical aspects of learning processes seemingly visible and intelligible. It is also possible to turn learning analytics into an infographic for use as a practical resource. In that sense, translating education into something like a visualization, concept map or an infographic can fundamentally affect the meanings and interpretations of educational issues that are possible.
Less spectacularly, it is also clear that certain kinds of textual formats are more likely to be moved around and shared than others. Educational research which is restricted in specialist journals to institutional subscribers is much less likely to become tweetable than open access pamphlets from think tanks, social enterprises, nonprofits and other intermediaries whose businesses depend on reaching out to wider publics. Such organizations have to make educational matters seem buzzy, creative, and capable of making a difference. They often deploy a variety of material and digital forms which are intended to change the way people think about the future of education. These can include, for example, glossy online brochures, accessible websites, dedicated blogs, Facebook profiles, and other social media spaces, as well as the more mundane but no less important form of the plain English report. Plenty of examples of these kinds of techniques can be found among organizations involved in promoting the future of the curriculum. These organizations and the techniques they use to grab attention have potential to generate substantial societal impact. Content published in academic journals, with their specialist language and linguistic codes and their tightly controlled bibliographic codes, is perhaps less likely to be tweeted, retweeted and reproduced in other places.
A final issue to consider is how well we are using digital and social media to archive our knowledge about education and learning. Might educational knowledge become obsolete with the obsolescence of the media which contains or communicates it? Could certain aspects of educational knowledge bitrot away? While Twitter may certainly be the platform of choice for now, its use in even a few years may be dramatically reduced. In a decade, Twitter could be technologically dead. The result is that a large part of the archive of our present may only be available to those with access to the specialist equipment and techniques required to probe obsolescent technologies.
The Codes of Education
These are just a few starter thoughts for considering the particularities of the textual, material and digital forms in which education is interwoven—this is education as “edu.txt.” Twitter is just a convenient example—you could ask the same questions about the roles of Powerpoint and Slideshare in the circuits of educational knowledge. Often, we treat the texts through which educational matters are discussed as straightforward documentary reconstructions or representations of an underlying reality. But we need to look at it differently. These material and digital forms play their part in making education what it is today. Education as we know it is actually being produced as edu.txt through a cascade of encounters with bibliographic, linguistic and computational codes.
The main issue here is about how we might approach the textuality of education in all its analogue and digital forms. This means acknowledging within the field of education what bibliographers and literary scholars have identified as the social and material aspects of the textual condition, what software studies scholars have begun to identify to as the social life of software and its computationally coded constructions, and what digital humanities researchers now see as the .txtual condition of digital materials.
Exploring the .txtual condition of education would mean taking a close critical interest in the material and virtual form of, for example, policy texts, curriculum guides, and school websites, and particularly in the social media tools and resources now commonly used to share and distribute information and knowledge about education. Paying close attention to the bibliographic codes, linguistic codes and computer codes which shape the distribution, reception and meanings of educational matters should be essential given the extent to which we now find education scattered kaleidoscopically as edu.txt across a variety of analogue and digital forms. These forms matter because they affect how we know and think about what education and learning mean, and how they might make it amenable to being thought anew.
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Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Social Media, Citizen Media, Online Tools Are Shaping Brazil’s Protests and Politics
June 28, 2013 - 4:05pm
What started earlier this month as a protest against the cost of public transportation has spread like wildfire across Brazil. One estimate said protests have taken place in 430 cities. The range of issues has grown too, including education reform, high taxes, healthcare and public corruption. I’m not sure there has ever been so much discussion about the country by so many people using social media – and it has created some instability for the government.
To begin to understand the story that is unfolding, two colleagues, Fabio Malini from the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo and Marco Bastos from London School of Economics and Political Science, and I started to monitor and collect online data about the protests and begin to conduct an analysis. It’s raw and events are still unfolding but I want to share some of the data in this post.
On June 17 and 18, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Brazil, especially in cities where games of the Confederation Cup were being held.
While the vast majority were peaceful protesters, there were clashes with police, and several people were beaten and arrested without a clear cause. Stories of people being attacked by police spread via social media and traditional media. The stories about police violence inflamed people all the more. Several hashtags emerged. Memes about the prohibition of "vinegar" (vinegar inhibits the effects of tear gas and the police started arresting anyone who was carrying vinegar) began trending. Fabio Malini explained part of this "battle of vinegar" in this post.
From the beginning, social media has played a key role. People have used Twitter to narrate the protests and to share how best to take precautions for personal safety. I plotted two graphs with the hashtag #protestoRJ used by Rio de Janeiro protesters during the June 18 event. The first graph (below) is from the beginning of the demonstration and the second one, more dense, shows activity at the height of the protest. They show how much people were Tweeting about the protest, taking pictures, creating videos, and spreading them online.
As the number of protesters expanded and the volume of online activity grew, the focus of people’s demands shifted from anger about public transportation to more general complaints – for example "more health,” "more education," and "stop corruption.” At the same time, several competing groups started countering the protests with their own issues. Mainstream media started criticizing the loss of focus.
In response to the many competing demands, several groups used social media to organize (and focus) the citizens’ demands. “Anonymous Brazil” created a video that quickly went viral, proposing five points for the protests to focus on. Facebook groups popped up, articulating proposals and priorities. New words and calls to action started to appear in social media, such as "impeachment” and "get Dilma out (the president).” For some, the president became the focal point and many people started criticizing her government and her party's politics.
As the protests escalated, so did the violence. On June 20, while more than one million people were in the streets in several cities in Brazil, protesters in Brasilia (the country’s capital) broke into the Itamaraty Palace and set fire to the building (The Itamaraty is the headquarters of the Ministry of External Relations in Brazil). Other cities also saw a night of violence and rioting. Even though most of the violence was carried out by small groups, it had a strong impact on media coverage.
On June 21, president Dilma Rousseff made her first official remarks on TV and radio to talk about the people’s demands. She was short on details and mostly emphasized how open she was to meeting with the leaders of the protests. The president also condemned the violence and riots. While the president addressed the nation, several people started using the hashtag "#tamojuntoDilma" (we are with you, Dilma) and it started trending quickly on Twitter. On Facebook, several posts had the result of changing the focus of people’s anger from the president to Brazil’s congress. Quickly, online criticism of the president lost intensity. (Below is a graph I plotted from 18,000 tweets that used the tag #tamojuntodilma during her address. You can see, in the middle, the efforts of a small group of Tweeters who published and retweet messages supporting the president).
Here is another graph of some 5,000 tweets collected at the same time, with the tag #CalaABocaDilma – “shut up, Dilma” – which shows a less connected group and a more diluted focus and effectiveness:
Ever since, the intensity of the protests has eroded. Marco Toledo Bastos, a Brazilian researcher from London University who also has been working with me and Fabio Malini monitoring the protests, has data on his blog about some of the most used hashtags on Twitter and how the volume of traffic dropped sharply after the pro-Dilma messaging efforts.
With protests still taking place in the streets, both violent and peaceful, Dilma again addressed the nation on June 24. During this pronouncement, she proposed five "pacts" to address a portion of the protesters’ demands with the Congress, the state governors and major cities’ mayors: 1) a pledge to spend $50 million to improve public transportation; 2) a pact for a better education system; she endorsed the idea that 100% of the country’s oil royalties could go towards education; 3) a proposal to improve health care by contracting with Cuban doctors (itself a point of controversy); 4) More fiscal responsibility and inflation control; and 5) a proposal for a referendum on political reform (a change in the Brazilian Constitution). Details of how these pacts were to be implemented were not given.
Despite many skeptics, her announcement seems to have had an impact on protesters. Public assemblies started forming to make practical proposals to the government. Many of these assemblies have taken place in the same places where protests are also still happening.
There are indications Brazil’s Congress has been influenced by the events of the week. In recent days, votes on two significant issues indicate that the protesters seem to have been heard. The first vote was about a constitutional amendment that would have resulted in limiting the ability to investigate prosecutors and police for wrongdoing. Its rejection was one of the calls to action in the Anonymous Brazil video, and it was one of the consistent themes in social media and at protests. While this was previously an issue that closely divided the Congress, this time it was strongly rejected by 430 votes against, only nine in favor, and 2 abstentions. The second vote involved the use of oil royalties. While the government had previously not allocated the funds to things like education and health, that’s what the Congress voted to do this time – designating 75 percent of the royalties for education and 25 percent for health services. During the proceedings, many politicians acknowledged "the voice of the streets.”
Banner image credit: Afonso Henrique Menezes Fernandes https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=485431608200711&set=pb.100002016291762.-2207520000.1372445997.&type=3&theater
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Big Data, People's Lives, and the Importance of Openness
June 24, 2013 - 8:35pm
Openness has become the buzzword for everything in India right now. From the new kids on the block riding the wave of Digital Humanities investing in infrastructure of open knowledge initiatives to the rhetoric of people-centered open government data projects that are architected to create 'empowered citizens', there is an inherent belief that Opening up things will make everything good. I am not an Open-data party pooper. In fact, I firmly believe that opening up data – through hardware, through software, through intellectual property regimes on content – and enabling access to information and data is one of the most basic needs of the information age. I also advocate for strong policies that curb corporate and government control and monopolies over data and information. Along with my colleagues at the Centre for Internet and Society, and the many networks we work with, I have thought of myself as an open data advocate and have worked towards examining openness not only at the level of content, but also openness in infrastructure and conditions of access, distribution and storage. More than ever, it is necessary to build systems of Open Data that not only have distributed, collective and ethical ownership but also ensure the fair use and integration of information in our everyday life – especially given the sinister age of relentless remembering, as lives get incessantly archived through ubiquitous and pervasive technologies of portable computing.
Having said that, there is a strange thing happening around Openness right now. Openness seems to have been separated from the fact that it is a response to things being gated and closed. Openness, as it is being deployed right now, in e-government initiatives or rapid digitization processes in university libraries, seems to suggest that Openness is merely about making things in the physical format available in the digital medium. Hence, for example, the National Mission for Education through Information and Communication Technologies, India’s largest flagship government initiative to build learning conditions of the future, is investing almost all of its budget on digitizing historical and local language material in digitally intelligible and legible records that can be easily distributed. While the effort at building the infrastructure and preserving this material is absolutely worth supporting, making it the be-all and end-all of Open data initiatives is symptomatic of what I call the ‘politics of the benign’. We need to realize that Openness is not merely about making already available content in physical formats in the digital domain. Openness is about battles with Intellectual Property Regimes, which charge an extraordinary amount of money for high-value knowledge to anybody who wants to access it. In other words, openness is not about digitizing our grandparents’ pictures; it is about claiming access to knowledge and information hidden behind paywalls and gateways that is often produced using public resources.
As you can imagine, the perpetuation of this politics of benign fits many agendas; there are numerous stakeholders and actors who seek to neuter the radical nature of demands made by the Openness movements while retaining the vocabulary of political change. And that is why, if you look at the ways in which openness debates have changed, they get immediately deflected to questions around infrastructure, access, last-mile, etc. – which are all presented to us as the infrastructure of being political and being open. In the last few years, especially with Digital Humanities emerging as the playground where politics is not allowed, I find too many instances where the Humanities and Social Sciences questions get morphed into similar sounding questions that pretend to be the same but dislocate the political content and intention from the engagement.
One of the ways this works really well is by a separation of data from the lived reality of people. Data is seen as something that is out there – something that is about the real rather than the real. It is seen as an abstraction, which, when it further enters the circuits of pretty visualizations and graphic representations, becomes so entrenched in questions of reading and coding that it often becomes a surrogate for the larger realities that it is supposed to intervene in. So, for example, in India, the concerns around agriculture infrastructure and conditions of the farmers have easily been replaced by agriculture informatics – leading to a strange paradox where the states with the highest community informatics infrastructure also have the highest incidences of farmer suicides. I am not suggesting there is a cause-and-effect relationship here. However, it is a telling story that the community informatics infrastructure which was supposed to change the bleak realities of agriculture and farming in India has definitely not changed the nature of the reality it set out to solve.
Or in a similar vein, the ways in which the landscape of education is changing in the country, because of the emergence of the digital as the new organizing principle and in some instances, the raison de etre for building education infrastructure also needs to be examined. So, for instance, India has seen a rapid improvement of the Gross Enrollment Ratio in education that measures the annual intake and successful completion of education programs by students in the country. The GER shows that with remote education processes, the attempts at building distributed learning environments and the building of digital infrastructure has led to more students in different parts of the country getting enrolled in formal education systems. There is a celebration that more children are entering schools and colleges and are also in a state of socio-economic mobility. There is a clear causal relationship established in producing digital infrastructure and greater access to education and learning resources for an emerging information society like India.
However, this particular mode of looking at education, through the lens of access and inclusion, is no longer able to reflect on the core concerns that education institutions in the country were historically supposed to address. If the primary function of education was to address the questions of inequity, uneven modernity, disparate wealth distribution, and widespread socio-cultural conservatism, these are no longer questions that are featured in the Data-Technology driven education programs. These problems, which have been at the center of education debates in the country – leading to widespread affirmative action and violent resistance to it – have now been reformulated around quantifiable parameters of intake, credits, employability, affordability, accessibility, merit, etc. So there is silence about the nature of the students who enter education. There is an implicit push for the disinvestment of the state from education resources in favor of privatization. We remain enamored by the numbers joining the system, without worrying about the categories of discrimination – caste, gender, sexuality, language, location – that have affected the quality, intention and function of education. These issues have become moot points, to be replaced by visualizations and data sets that remain opaque in looking at the negotiations of identity politics and the need to embed education processes in lived realities of the students who enter formal education.
These problems are not new. And the intention of this articulation is not to deny the power of digital technologies or the opportunities they produce. Instead, it is a call to say that we need to stop thinking of data – an abstraction, an artifact, a manual product – as a natural state of being. We need to remind ourselves that engagement with data is not a sterile engagement, rendered beautiful through visualizations and infographics that can make reality intelligible. It is perhaps time to realize that Data has replaced People as the central concern of being human, social and political. Time to start re-introducing People back into debates around Data, and acknowledging that Data Informatics is People Informatics and data wars have a direct effect on the ways in which people live. And Die.
Banner image credit: sugree http://www.flickr.com/photos/73462957
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Be Quiet and Don’t Move So You Can Be Heard
June 20, 2013 - 3:00pm
Last Saturday, one day after I left Istanbul following an intense week of interviews with more than 100 Gezi Park protest participants, Turkish police forcefully cleared out the park, which had been occupied by protesters for the last three weeks trying to halt the construction of a replica Ottoman Barracks and a shopping mall in Taksim Square's only park. It was a sad, violent end to a joyful, eventful occupation that had a Woodstock meets Paris Commune vibe, where drum circles got interrupted by tear gas volleys, and diverse groups ranging from soccer fans to anti-capitalist Muslims to LGBT organizations had co-existed in a colorful environment.
Just a few days before, it had seemed that it all might have ended in peace. Representatives of the protesters had met with Prime Minister Erdogan last Thursday night and presented their demands, which were focused on preserving the park and punishing officials responsible for the police actions that had killed four protesters and injured more than 7,000. The premier had signaled some agreement, though not all, to their demands.
On Friday, the protesters started to meet in small groups, which culminated in a large group discussion and a decision by two thirds of the groups that constituted the “Taksim Solidarity” platform, the committee that had coordinated the occupation of the Park, to consolidate the occupation into a single “observer” tent. Significantly, the government had promised to obey an existing court order halting the construction of an Ottoman military barracks replica where the park stood and promised to let the city of Istanbul decide the fate of the Park by a referendum.
The protesters I spoke to weren’t thrilled by these developments but felt like they had made their point. “Obeying court orders as a concession tells you how bad things are,” one protester told me. That the fate of a Park in one Istanbul neighborhood had become a personalized battle between the Prime Minister and the protesters spoke to the heart of the problem—something that should at most be a local issue had become a symbol of a government trying to legislate too much and micro-manage processes that many had felt should be about local choices and freedoms.
I had started telling people that I thought that this was it—that Gezi Park protesters would declare victory and go home, and the government would also declare victory by having ended the occupation. However, just a few hours after “Taksim Solidarity” announced that many would be packing up their tents, premier Erdogan gave a very harsh speech at a rally in Ankara, where he accused the protesters of many inflammatory actions, including “drinking in mosques.” This claim, repeated by Erdogan on multiple occasions, had been refuted by the Imam of the mosque, which actually had become a make-shift clinic for people injured by tear gas and rubber bullets. There was ample video showing wounded, bleeding people being frantically treated on the floor of the mosque by doctors who had respectfully taken off their shoes inside the mosque.
In that speech and in his subsequent rally in Istanbul, Erdogan continued, at times, to refer to the protesters as terrorists and vandals and used strong, polarizing language. Befuddled by the Prime Minister’s apparent choice to re-escalate the tensions, I watched protesters get angry about yet another dismissal of their concerns and more put-downs (He had initially called them capulcu–a rough combination of looters and riffraff, and that term became the unifying identity of the diverse universe of protesters. We're all capulcu, many said, and started referring to themselves as the riff-raff).
As these developments unfolded, I tweeted that since the beginning of the protests about 19 days ago, I was afraid that tensions, which seemed on the verge of resolution, were about to escalate.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t wrong.
Mere hours after Erdogan’s Istanbul Rally speech, the police moved into the park in an enormous show of force. Journalists were not allowed in for the most part, but video shows police using massive amounts of tear gas, tearing down tents, and people fleeing in fear, many of them to the nearby luxury hotel Divan. A night of intense clashes followed.
Harrowing footage from inside the five-star hotel shows tear gas (or CS gas) being thrown inside confined spaces in the hotel and people choking and crying. In fact, the hotel was gassed for most of the night. Parliamentarians who showed up to resolve the crisis seemed unable to persuade police to stand down or to stop using tear gas.
These clashes in multiple neighborhoods continued for maybe 24 hours. People marched from Kadıköy–on the Asian side–to the Bosphorus bridge, where they clashed with police barricading the bridge, managed to get past, and continued to march over to the European side to go to Taksim. Thousands of people from the primarily Alevite Gazi neighborhood blocked the main TEM highway. Tear gas seemed to be everywhere. It's hard to describe how unprecedented such intense clashes are for Turkey, at least since the 1980 coup era.
The protests continued until last Sunday evening, when mobs, reportedly sometimes armed with sticks and knives, started showing up in the streets, shouting pro-Erdogan, anti-protester slogans. Scared of where things were headed, some protesters started a “#evedon” hashtag—a call to go home, so as not to start a round of civil violence that may steer the country towards an even worse situation. Police repression and fear of escalating violence, it seemed, left the largely non-violent protesters with few avenues.
As large numbers of police closed off Taksim, some ferry trips across the strait were canceled by the Governor. And, as many streets near Taksim became engulfed in the familiar fog of gas which burns the eyes and sears the lungs, the protests seemed at a roadblock. Even the water in the water cannons was laced with pepper spray, causing first degree burns in some protesters.
The largely peaceful occupation of the park had ended and the street actions had been met with police or mobs whose responses threatened to trigger a descent into uncontrolled violence. The movement that had begun with the Gezi Park occupation to be at a standstill.
That is, until, one man decided to stand still. 
Around 6pm Sunday, in Istanbul, a man in his early thirties, wearing a white shirt and carrying a backpack with some water and food in it, started standing still in Taksim Square, facing the old, abandoned Ataturk Opera House (AKM) that the government had shut down about five years ago with the promise of a restoration that had never taken place. Many had seen the closing of AKM as yet another step by the government to choke “unapproved” arts—opera, ballet, music and such. During the Gezi protests, the AKM had become covered with a multitude of banners. Mid-way through the protests, the government had taken all of them down in a show of force and instead put up two large flags and one Ataturk banner (the initial Ataturk banner was replaced by an even bigger Ataturk banner).
This lone man, dubbed “the standing man” or “duran adam” online, stood there staring at AKM, where the colorful mosaic of the protest banners had been replaced by two large, somber Turkish flags and an Ataturk banner. Not much happened at first. The police questioned him at some point and let him stand as it didn’t seem like he was doing anything...but standing.
He continued to stand, very still, not talking, not moving, just standing.
Soon, people on my Twitter timeline started discussing this man. A hashtag “#standingman or #duranadam” emerged.
Did you notice this guy standing still, staring at the flag, people asked? What’s he about? Who is he? Anyone know what’s up? People circulated photos and pondered.
After the third hour, it became clear that this was a protest. Kicked out of Gezi park, stifled by a controlled media that had aired penguin documentaries during the country’s biggest clashes in Istanbul since 1980, and disappointed by an ineffective opposition party–people around Turkey started to talk about the lone, quiet, mysterious standing man. (The incompetence of the main opposition party, the CHP, provided a key agreement point between the protesters and the premier when, at some point during the process, Erdogan declared that the CHP was so incompetent that it was hurting Turkey’s democracy–many protesters I talked with agreed wholeheartedly. They laughed when Erdogan blamed the protests on the CHP—if CHP could organize this, they chuckled, maybe we wouldn’t have to be out in the streets).
Within three hours of the start of the standing man’s lone, unannounced, quiet protest, around 9pm Sunday in Turkey, #duranadam had surged to the top of Twitter in Turkey, replacing the other ever-present global social media force (#turkeybeliebersmissyoujustin) as the top trending topic. But it also became a top trending topic globally since Turkey has massive social media participation and a large population (half the population is online and both protesters and AKP supporters tend to be heavy social media users).
I watched as one woman and two more men joined the standing man in his vigil. A fifth person came a few minutes later and, after taking a picture of the four and tweeting it, joined them. A woman in Ankara said she would go to the spot where Erdem Sarısuluk had been shot and killed by police during the protests and stand there. People in other neighborhoods starting “standing”—others took pictures and posted them online. Soon, there were hundreds “standing” quietly in Taksim. Three people went to the spot where Armenian journalist Hrant Dink had been murdered in 2007 and stood there, quietly. Others went and stood quietly at the site of the Madımak hotel in Sivas, where, in 1993, a religious mob massacred 37 artists and intellectuals, mostly Alevites, by setting fire to the hotel.
Through it all, there was little to no TV coverage. A cartoonist photoshopped a “standing penguin” into the middle of Taksim Square, an ongoing joke that has come to symbolize media censorship in Turkey. I started getting pictures from around the world. Someone ‘stood’ in NYC, wearing the same white shirt, jeans and a backpack positioned in the same angle. Someone stood in Las Vegas. International media started covering the standing man as Turkish media, reluctantly as always, started joining in. Someone started a live feed from Taksim from their phone. Soon, more than a 10,000 people were watching the live feed and Turkish social media became dominated by this discussion.
AKP supporters, too, were watching this online. Many dismissed it as a joke. Some saw something more sinister. Turkey’s finance minister retweeted a pro-government journalist who declared “standing” was “item number 137 in [the] CIA manual for non-violence.” “Don’t you get it?” he asked, provocatively.
Meanwhile, "standing man" became a meme, as jokes, art and captions flew online just as many more people started taking to the streets and standing. At some point, enough was enough and the Turkish police moved in and started detaining some of the standers, though it was completely unclear what their crime was.
As the police moved in, the original standing man stopped his own protest, slipping away without being detained; he said later, he did not want to endanger others. The police took away some of the detainees via a police bus and ordered the rest to scatter. The police formed a human barricade around Taksim Square, which, as many others noted, required them “to stand still” in the same manner as the original protesters.
The next day, the ministry of Interior was asked if “standing” was illegal—the question itself shows the absurdity of the situation. No, he declared, as long as it’s peaceful; however, sporadic reports of people being arrested for “standing” continued to trickle in. It seems that the government and the police were unclear about how to handle the throngs of people who were doing nothing but silently standing. “Standings” quickly multiplied. Lawyers went to Caglayan court, where dozens of lawyers had been beaten and arrested a few days ago and started “standing.” “Standings” multiplied to many other cities. International media took notice and stories about standing appeared on BBC, in The Guardian and in many other news outlets in other countries.
What started, unannounced, with a single person, had become a phenomenon thanks to a fed up public and the power of social media. 
Meanwhile, the police completely shut down Gezi Park in Taksim to civilians and started planting flowers in the now deserted park. Unable to get into the park, the Gezi platform announced a call “to stand” in parks throughout Istanbul Monday evening.
In many ways, #duranadam represents much of what’s been going on in Turkey during the tumultuous last three weeks. Stifled by an increasingly authoritarian government, shut out of the mass media public sphere, unrepresented by spectacularly incompetent opposition parties, people in Turkey who are increasingly worried about the country’s direction and their own lives are trying to find ways to express their discontent and to draw a line in the sand. Lacking representation in the censored media sphere, they are turning to social media to organize, to coordinate, and to create their own narrative structures.
I’ve described this as a “listen to us” uprising—it’s not aimed at toppling the elected government (people I interviewed rarely expressed such a wish and even those who wish the prime minister would resign quickly add that it probably isn’t realistic to expect this). The most common demands I heard during my interviews were a call for the government to back off legislating lifestyle choices; to stop demolishing neighborhoods and parks to construct shopping malls and new, shiny, soulless buildings that enrich contractors at the expense of people who live in the area; to stop using massive police force to quash even the most non-violent protest; and last, but not least, to have a mass media that at least pretends to report the news more often and serve as a watchdog over the growing power of a government.
Gezi Park became a symbol of much of that discontent, rising especially from the younger, pluralistic, more creative generation who most deeply feels stifled and blocked. They have tried to be heard through humor, through song, through protest and through a three week occupation of a park. They keep being met with harsh rhetoric, tear gas, and walls of police. In desperation, they have started to be as quiet, and as still as they can be, in hopes that they can finally be heard.
Banner image credit: http://dersimnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/duran-adam-460x260.jpg
Second image credit: http://www.aktifhaber.com/foto-galeri/taksim-meydaninda-duran-adam-7923-1g.jpg
Graphic credit: Kaan Eryilmaz http://dribbble.com/shots/1119852-Duranadam
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Privacy, the NSA and Web Literacies
June 17, 2013 - 1:15pm
I work for Mozilla. We were one of 86 civil liberties groups that signed an open letter demanding swift access from Congress in the light of recent revelations around NSA surveillance. The website StopWatching.Us has seen a surge in people signing up to find out what they can do to campaign for a more visible, transparent and accountable government.
I'm a UK citizen. This does not make me exempt from this story. In fact, it makes it even more relevant for 'foreign nationals'. The NSA has admitted to routinely surveilling those outside US borders – in other words, people like me. And, of course, as I'm not a citizen of the US, I don't get a vote in elections that may be able to do something about the situation. It's an extremely disempowering feeling.
I am a citizen of the Web. I work as part of a distributed team spanning several timezones and cultures. We use many different tools in our everyday lives – some free, some paid-for. The ones that are 'free', of course, are paid for by someone. That 'someone' is usually comprised of advertisers, paying for the data generated by the 'raw materials' (a.k.a. us, the users of the service providers).
I work on Web Literacy. We can and should lobby Congress to do something about the NSA revelations. But what can we do on a daily basis? It's unrealistic to expect all Web users to be cryptography experts. Our aim should be to improve the average level of knowledge, skills and understanding relating to the Web. That's why I'm leading work for Mozilla with valuable community input to create a new, open learning standard for Web Literacy.
I have hope. It often takes a crisis to galvanise people into action. I doubt I've been the only one who has re-evaluated the services that I use in the last couple of weeks. But this isn't just a user issue, this is a design issue; it's a rallying point. We should all build privacy controls (such as Do Not Track) as well as cryptography into future products and services.
You can help. You can talk to people who are confused about what the NSA revelations mean for them. You can teach them. You can improve your own knowledge of why privacy is important even if you have nothing to hide. You can lobby the US government. You can write to your local representative. You can help us build a Web Literacy Standard. You have power. We have even more together.
Some resources:
Read The Mozilla Manifesto
Find out more about Terms of Service agreements and how they affect you
Use Me and My Shadow to find out more about privacy on the Web
Track the trackers using Collusion
Improve your knowledge using the EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense site
Banner image credit: Steve Rhodes http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/9054778166/in/set-72157634145260907/lightbox/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Wanted: A New Generation of Problem Solvers
June 16, 2013 - 12:40pm
It has been more than a decade since Marc Prensky popularized the term “digital natives” to describe young people’s inherent connection with digital technologies, and while students may be able to successfully navigate these technologies to accomplish everyday tasks, researchers such as Ugochi Acholonu are exploring the extent to which this theory holds true when it comes to a student’s ability to innovate using technology. 
Acholonu tested this theory by asking a group of community college students, ages 18-20 who had grown up in technology inclusive environments, to complete a set of problems on paper. The young people were able to answer the questions in this context, but when it came time to do the same experiment in a real world setting, many of the students failed to solve the task again. According to Acholonu, there was a significant drop in performance when students had to adapt, manipulate, and repurpose technology to support their own problem solving and learning objectives. Acholonu noted that the students who were successful at solving the task were those who deeply explored their environment by touching and inspecting the technology in front of them. Students need practice dealing with ambiguity, Acholonu said, and specifically, in using technology in situations that are ambiguous.
In the video below, Acholonu talks about the need to develop exploratory programs, where students are forced out of their daily learning routines and inspired to think about solving complex problems in atypical ways. Acholonu, a postdoctoral researcher at DePaul University who received her PhD in Learning Sciences and Technology Design at Stanford University, presented her findings at the 2012 DML Summer Research Associate Institute. Below are some of the highlights, but Acholonu’s experiment as a whole stresses how crucial innovative and critical thinking skills have become in helping young people meet the demands of the 21st century.
It was really shocking. People could answer it on paper. People were creative enough and they had the knowledge, but something in the environment was blocking the activation of that knowledge.
Our environment is a great feedback mechanism. If I throw something through the window, OK, that’s going to break the window. The people who didn't solve the task didn't touch anything outside the pencil and the paper. They were doing something that they knew would work, but they didn't explore other alternatives.
Students need practice dealing with ambiguity and dealing with transforming technology and systems of technology into a way of supporting their needs and goals.
My goal is to look at the pedagogy around teaching people to be explorers, beyond just creativity, but in the sense of being smart innovators. You can innovate and innovate and not get anywhere, so what does it mean to do smart innovation, and how do you capitalize on ambiguity in ways that are both small and big?
Ugochi Acholonu - DML Summer Institute 2012 from DML Research Hub on Vimeo
Production credit: Marc Bacarro
Banner image credit: colemama
http://www.flickr.com/photos/colemama/3363947220/in/set-72157614642189413
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Enacting Social Change in a Digital Age: An International Case Study
June 15, 2013 - 12:20pm
In recent years, international development organizations have started incorporating digital media programming in an effort to merge storytelling and popular media into civic engagement and to bring young people together across national and cultural differences. In 2009, AMIGOS de las Americas partnered with a major development agency to carry out youth media and youth arts programs in Nicaragua. As the program’s director, Chelsey Hauge, a doctoral candidate in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, spent three years studying young people’s relationships with media production, community development, and civic engagement. She was especially interested in the ways young people become invested in political movement and in how using media in civic engagement education shapes youths’ experiences as local and global citizens.
During her time with the program, Hauge discovered that young people’s personal experiences were often leveraged as storytelling devices to bring about social change or to spark civic engagement in their communities. Hauge presented her findings at the 2012 DML Summer Research Associates Institute.
In the video below, Hauge describes how the young people immersed in the programs used media production as a means to deeply explore meaning and representation. Hauge noted that gender emerged as a popular topic among the youth. Development agencies are heavily focused on improving girls’ access to resources, and many youth in the program produced videos about girls and gender, reflecting the interest in shifting gender culture in their communities. While there has been much progress in closing these gender gaps, she warns that the excitement over the progress being made around girls can obscure the power dynamics between youth and communities and development and media organizations. Hauge also considers the ideology of cosmopolitanism as a way of dealing with some of these major issues surrounding difference and marginalization that are impacting people around the world.
Below are a few noteworthy excerpts, but during the entire video, Hauge closely examines the scaffolding that is needed in literacy based programs in order for young people to develop a rich set of higher-order skills that enable them to be critical of the media that frame their everyday lives.
I am really interested in how those youth negotiate meaning, how they are going to tell stories, what stories they tell, what comes out of the relationships where youth are speaking different languages and come from different backgrounds, and how they negotiate and use that to effect change and progress in the world.
I am really passionate about media and media production. I think it’s really important for young people to have media skills, especially right now when so many of the publics that they can participate in are online or are mediated in some way.
There’s a big call for that among educational scholars, and it seems that the organizational parallel or the practice parallel to that is these organizations that are doing these programs that bring young people together across difference.
Chelsey Hauge - DML Summer Institute 2012 from DML Research Hub on Vimeo
Production credit: Marc Bacarro
Banner image credit: Courtesy of Chelsey Hauge
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
The Role of Social Media, Citizen Media in Latest Anti-Government Unrest in Brazil
June 14, 2013 - 1:20pm
Like Turkey, Brazil is seeing a wave of anti-government protests it hasn’t seen in years. Thousands of residents in several cities, including Brazil’s two biggest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, are now organizing protests.
Protests started in Sao Paolo after the government had authorized (another) increase in bus fares in the city. Through social media, the movement "Passe Livre" (Free Pass) formed online and quickly drew more than 50,000 supporters. Most of the protesters are university students, although officials said “anarchists” looking for a fight were also taking part.
Mainstream media are portraying the protests in an interesting light. Major newspapers, as well as television and radio, are describing the protests as limited to certain places and organized by "vandals" that are "destroying the city.” In Sao Paulo, state governor Geraldo Alckmin told the BBC, "What we are seeing is a political movement – small, but very violent.”
Yesterday, the conflicts escalated. The scenes in the streets were war-like. The protesters were violently repressed by the police. Several videos and pictures displaying police truculence against unarmed people appeared online. Several blogs, Tumblrs and stories appeared on social networking sites. The accounts on social media contrast sharply with mainstream media and official versions. On social media, many individuals express concern about the overall state of democracy. 
Here are some links to:
- Firsthand accounts of people who were arrested and beaten by the police.
- More stories of people beaten during the protests.
- Videos of police shooting (rubber bullets) against unarmed protesters.
- Stories of people who say they were simply walking home when they were cornered and attacked by police.
Journalists were also beaten and arrested. One journalist, Piero Locatelli, wrote that he was arrested because he was carrying vinegar (which attenuates the effects of tear gas, which has been used against the protesters).
At the same time, mainstream media outlets are continuing with their pro-government, pro-police discourse.
However, the combination of the escalation of violence by police and citizen accounts circulating in social media has generated public support for the protesters. More people are talking about the movement and more protests are scheduled to happen this weekend in cities across the country. A new hashtag (#SP13j) emerged yesterday to compare the protests happening in Brazil with others around the world (the Arab Spring, for example, with #Jan25).
A powerful, emblematic moment occurred yesterday.
During a popular television show, "Brasil Urgente" (Urgent Brazil), anchorman and host Jose Luiz Datena proposed a poll for the audience to vote on the protests. The television show had consistently characterized the protesters as violent and the police as just doing their jobs. The poll was simple: "Do you agree with the protests, with the troublemakers?" The answer was a resounding "Yes." Immediately, Datena changed his discourse live on television. He said "The people are discontented. Between police and bandits, I prefer the police. Between the people and the police, I prefer the people."
Meanwhile, the government in Sao Paulo is defending the bus rate increase, saying it will not submit to the protesters.
You can expect more indignation to spread on blogs, Tumblrs and social networks. There will be more demonstrations too. A CNN account can be found here.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
MOOCs, Hype, and the Precarious State of Higher Ed: Futurist Bryan Alexander
June 10, 2013 - 12:40pm
Does it continue to make sense to go to college when the sticker price of a college education is soaring, the amount of debt college students are taking on – even for the non-elite universities and what were formerly affordable public universities – is severely constraining their choices post-graduation, and job prospects for new graduates are dismal? A year ago, I talked with Anya Kamenetz, who delved into these issues in her book, DIY U. Since then, the ballyhooed arrival of free MOOCs into this frightening intersection of economic, intellectual, and social forces has ignited debate about the future of universities. The Reedie in me asks: What is the place of liberal arts ideals in an atmosphere like this?
Liberal arts education is not just about the transfer of cultural knowledge; the liberal arts are often said to be about learning how to learn and how to participate in public discourse vital to the growth of knowledge and health of democracies. Certainly, our civilization depends on those who know the nerves of the face and understand how Ohm’s law applies to microcircuits. It also depends on the existence of a broad and informed discourse about topics that don’t have exact answers, in which the answers are not as important as is widespread, rational and civil discussion and argument about them – about what it means to be a citizen, a democracy, a human.
Transfer of knowledge is not going away and neither is the need for institutions that perform that task. Possibly, and especially for fields such as mathematics or computer programming in which there are exactly correct or incorrect answers, brick and mortar schooling might be in some part supplanted by machine learning in the cloud – whether publicly provided or provided for profit. Can online communication and machine learning also supplant the small seminar that digs into philosophy and literature, semiotics and ethics, politics and civil society? “What is the role of the human teacher in an era of machine learning?” is a perfectly liberal arts question to ask.
At the moment, MOOCs are still in the early part of the hype cycle and discourse is dominated by Manichaean fears of robots replacing professors or venture capitalists taking over higher education. (Although the discourse is not without thoughtful pieces about the pedagogy of MOOCs or forecasts that attempt to see beyond the hyperbole). When it comes to speaking about the nuances, the many shades of meaning between the extreme positions, and especially about the role of liberal arts at a time when digital media and learning offer such great promises – and to some, great threats – I knew where to turn. Bryan Alexander, who I previously interviewed about emerging learning technologies for this blog, is the senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. The ensuing video conversation is longer than usual – around 24 minutes – but if you want to get past the more superficial debates about MOOCs and take a more finely-tuned glimpse at possible futures, you will find it worth your time. This interview will be followed in my next blog post by a conversation with a passionate (and in online learning circles, legendary) practitioner who is bringing the ideas Alexander is laying out for us to life in a residential college and, simultaneously, a global online learning community.
MOOCs, Hype, and the Precarious State of Higher Ed: Researcher, Educator, and Futurist Bryan Alexander from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.
Banner image credit: mathplourde http://www.flickr.com/photos/mathplourde/8620174342
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
'Making' and Education Reform: Learning to Ride the Wave
June 6, 2013 - 1:55pm
At this moment in time, on both sides of the Atlantic, digital making and the maker movement is enjoying its time in the sun. A combination of policy concerns, technological developments, learning theories, social opportunities and articulate enthusiasts have come together and, although the maker movement is a bit of a minority sport, it seems to have broken through into the mainstream. In the UK, for example, there is a terrific program of support offering a range of activities from maker-faires to hacking events to coding clubs working with apps and mash-ups and the new pliable, wearable, fungible, programmable switches, boxes, add-ons and computers coming together under the banner 'Make Things Do Stuff'.
I want to try to flesh out why making and the maker movement seems to have gained so much traction in the reform arena because it helps us to understand what combination of factors are needed to make an impact in the contested and conflicted world of education, but also to compare the contemporary making moment with older and other making movements – especially around media production – to disentangle why some curriculum innovations seem to gain approval and some don't.
There are a number of reasons why digital making has taken off. The most obvious might seem to be the new wave of technological innovations. Raspberry Pi, lily pads, Arduino are all cheap accessible, simple to use and mass produced. Previously high-end technologies like 3-D printing are coming down in price all the time and connectors, Wi-Fi and RIFD chips all seem to have reached a tipping point so that they are available and almost intuitive to use. Yet these technologies (and combinations thereof) are only the tip of an iceberg as making as a movement works along a continuum from simple-to-use and off-the-shelf technologies to serious innovation in manufacturing. There is a broader context at work here suggesting that important economic growth is going to be stimulated by possibilities opened up by the maker movement. Here, writers like Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow have suggested that there is a move afoot from small-scale tinkering to open up new products and new markets – a particularly important argument given the seemingly intractable problems faced by the declining economies of the West.
One of the key issues here is that forms of collective social activity, often through virtual communities, now open up the prospect of making goods and entering marketplaces with a much lower barrier to entry, thus offering opportunities to those with initiative and entrepreneurial drive rather than simply those with access to large amounts of capital. In the UK we have been looking backwards nostalgically (perhaps not for the first time) at the home computing movement in the early 1980s stimulated by the BBC and its patronage of an accessible early computer, the BBC Micro. The workforce who learnt on that technology were at the forefront of the then highly successful UK games industry and a desire to recreate that energy and entrepreneurialism now lies behind current policy initiatives espoused by conservative and left alike, especially unifying around the desire to teach coding.
Yet, I suggest none of these synergies would have had quite the purchase that they have had in education communities all over the world if making didn't build on the accepted and embedded principles of Constructivism developed in the main by key actors working at MIT in the 1980s.
Learning by making is an accepted principle amongst teachers and educators of all sorts of persuasions. Whilst it is true that the maker movement can give young people a different kind of access to communities and resources and allow them to work with peers or directly to market, thus (possibly) shaking down the traditional through routes from school to college to work, and whilst it is true that there may well be metaphorical gold in plastic, none of this would have had any effect on educationalists if they weren't already predisposed to view the act of making and its associated disciplines as central to the processes of effective learning. In other words, the fact that policymakers have jumped on the making bandwagon and acted in such a way that many teachers have felt it was now legitimate to place making activities at the heart of the curriculum. Equally, making with young people often describes a particular set of processes, of learning to hypothesise, to experiment, to manipulate, to reflect and assess and then to repeat – learning from one iteration to the next. In an educational context that prizes standardised high-stakes testing finding policymakers who were prepared to espouse messier and open-ended classroom activities also seemed a form of validation. Official recognition of making allows many teachers to come out of their constructivist closets – just like in England over the previous decade the banner of creativity mobilised a generation of silenced teachers and principals.
However, making as an educational project is not just about process or product but carries within it a key principle of critical reflection. As the blurb for the English digital making initiative claims, making: inspire[s] young people to be creators, not just consumers of digital technologies. Setting aside for one moment any empirical claim of whether this is true and how we would know if it was, the desire to empower youth to take control and to learn an independent stance in relationship to their everyday use of digital technologies also infuses maker ideology; and this ideal is shared (or so they claim) by politicians and business leaders alike. A key feature of learning by making and especially of digital making is that by making explicit how things work it enables all of us to understand how the apparent transparency of technology mediates and constructs reality; and it places users and readers in a different kind of relationship to the product or text.
The same dynamic – enabling a critical stance, and above all, a change in role from consumer to producer – has been part of earlier iterations of the shift to a digital world. It was present in early claims about how early computers enabled forms of modelling and simulation; it was present in the move to digital production showing how image manipulation and non-linear editing work their 'magic'; it was present in the desire to offer courses in making websites 10 years ago; and above all it has been part and parcel of the debate around digital literacy where it is suggested that we need to understand the ‘code’ in every sense of the term behind digital artefacts and participation in digital culture. It is not so much an original argument as a persistent one.
In many ways, I am suggesting that the making movement and making culture has been more successful in taking on this dynamic, this critical stance, this movement between reader and writer, than any of these previous iterations. Given that it is never going to be easy to advocate being critical, I wonder why this aspect of making has been so amenable in public debate. Is it because, as I have already suggested, making brings together so many different constituencies – economic growth, cheap technology, progressive pedagogy and a constructivist curriculum – that this potentially challenging principle gets through the door?
Earlier and continuing kinds of digital making in the form of film, video and other forms of participation and expression by youth are almost always more marginalised and problematic. For those of us who share these critical aspirations it may be that the maker movement can teach us more than just how to make clothes that light up, new kinds of speakers or curious plastic objects. Maybe change needs longer traditions like those provided by the maker movement, and maybe we all need to find ways to build constituencies across previously distinct stakeholders in order to promote the conditions for serious change? Is Making the new form of digital literacy in all but name?
Banner image credit: the_exploratorium http://www.flickr.com/photos/exploratorium/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Networked Politics from Tahrir to Taksim: Is there a Social Media-fueled Protest Style?
June 3, 2013 - 3:46pm
Protesters from one of the world’s richest countries, one of the world’s oldest autocracies, and one of the world’s rising developing countries walk into ... a public space, use Twitter extensively, and capture global attention to their movement and their hashtag.
From "#Occupy Wall Street" in the United States to the #M15 movement in Spain, from Tahrir Square and #Jan 25 in Egypt, to Taksim Square and #occupygezi in Turkey, there have been a variety of social movements that, while coming from strikingly different backgrounds and contexts, also share structural and stylistic elements. In this post, I’d like to offer some preliminary analyses of this emergent type of what I’m calling “networked movements.”
To be clear, I am not attempting to analyze every aspect of these movements – no movement or revolution is simple or reducible to a single cause – nor is it identical to any other. Nor do I claim that this is an exhaustive or final list of their characteristics. However, we now have enough examples to try to make sense of common elements to these seemingly disparate social-media fueled movements.
There are also other interesting political commonalities to these movements, including their use of durable presence in public space as a form of protest, anti-authoritarianism as a uniting ideology, an “anti-political” stance among participants, the participation and key role played by “lumpen” elements such as soccer fans, the importance of anger towards cronyism, police repression as a spark and uniting theme, to name a few. Hence, this post is an attempt to take a bite out of a complex topic with a special focus on social-media and organizational styles of networked movements:
1- Lack of organized, institutional leadership. None of these movements has identifiable institutional leadership, either in institutional form or as spokespersons.This is quite a striking change from the traditional, common (though not exclusive) form of movements of the 20th century.
This is not to say that these movements are flat or lack prominent persons or a hierarchy of influence or attention. There are structures, hierarchy, informal leadership and other elements of leadership in all these movements. However, there is no NAACP or trade-union or political party that has control over, or the ability to speak for, them and there is no formalized mechanism of representation – or decision making.
This, of course, creates advantages and disadvantages in terms of long-term politics. Since these movements have no recognized representation, they cannot be co-opted or negotiated away behind closed doors. (In his book, Revolution 2.0 Wael Ghonim recounts how Mubarak’s top officials tried to negotiate an end to the demonstrations with him. He could only chuckle as he had no such power).
However, in the same vein, since these movements have no recognized representation, it is difficult for them to develop a coherent and delimited set of policies, demands or make any significant gains that go beyond providing a strong refusal to a particular event, leader or framing. This leads to my next point.
2- Organized around a “no” not a “go.” Existing social media structures allow for easier collective action around shared grievances to *stop* or *oppose* something (downfall of Mubarak, stopping a government’s overreach, etc) rather than strategic action geared towards obtaining and sustaining political power. This is probably why these movements don’t make as much long-term impact as their size and power would suggest. (They do have impacts, of course, but often not proportional to their size).
Not only has the world not moved towards more “participatory democracy” as opposed to “representative democracy,” the current trend globally has been otherwise. Even mere representative democracy has been eroding as moneyed interests have expanded their power over more and more areas of politics and the public sphere. Hence, we see an outburst of “participatory refusal,” which does not necessarily expand into either addressing or opposing failing parts of representative democracy. Instead, these demonstrations seem to be unable to break out of a “no.”
It is also easier to use social media to communicate a message or an image of refusal or dissent rather than convey complicated arguments. The closest example to a mass participatory online environment that tries to negotiate complex outcomes is Wikipedia. While wildly successful in some ways, research also shows Wikipedia to be run by relatively small numbers of highly-influential people who are spectacularly good mostly at providing a certain, narrow outcome (eg., a summary of existing sources on a topic, the depth and quality of which varies, depending in part on the amount of conflict over the topic).
There needs to be a lot more “practical” research into what and how online platforms could contribute to positive civic outcomes through participation, negotiation, and solution generation, especially for complex problems. By research, I mean creation, trial, error and study rather than merely examining existing forms – as these are clearly not enough.
3- A feeling of lack of institutional outlet. In all these cases, there has been a failure of both oppositional politics as well as mainstream media. Protesters repeatedly state they have felt a lack of outlets to express their dissent. In the case of Egypt, this was because elections were rigged and politics banned.
In Turkey, the media has cowered and opposition parties are spectacularly incompetent. During the height of the most recent protests, CNN Turkey alternated between showing documentaries on penguins, and then a cooking show. At a particularly low moment, CNN Turkey was showing a documentary about a popular Turkish volunteer search and rescue team, AKUT, while AKUT members were out in the streets providing medical aid to protesters and AKUT founder Nasuk Masruhi lay in a hospital after both his legs were broken by police.
The failure of media and institutional outlet carries over to a country like the United States as well. In the Occupy movement in the US, there also was a widespread feeling among #occupy participants that the government and the media were at the hands of the moneyed interests and the corrupt. For example, look at this chart about mentions of the word “inequality” in major US media before and after Occupy:
At the time, the grave effects of the economic crisis could be seen in historically high unemployment and underemployment. Yet, most US media were covering economics mainly from the point of view of a very small minority of people who were concerned with inflation and levels of public debt and taxation on the rich – all of which are more of a concern to wealthy and to bondholders rather than to the struggling middle and working classes.
The feeling of lack of institutional outlet also, crucially, includes political parties. In Turkey, Spain and the United States (representative democracies), opposition parties and parliaments have been seen as incompetent, corrupt or uninterested in issues that concerned broad swaths of the public. This failure and sense of non-representation, of course, varies according to context but is nonetheless shared in all these movements.
4- Non-activist participation. Most previous big demonstrations before #occupygezi in Turkey were attended by experienced protesters. In contrast, the 2013 protests in Turkey are being attended by large numbers of people who have probably never been in a protest before. It has included participation from residents in their homes (banging pots and pans, turning lights on and off) on a scale that is unprecedented in Turkey in the post 1980 coup era. Tahrir protests 2011, Tunisia December 2010, Gezi 2013 drew large numbers of non-activists. My own study of Tahrir participants (a non-random sample) similarly found a great many who had never attended a protest before.
Occupy, too, attracted a mix of seasoned activists as well as many participants who seemed drawn to the action partly because it was seen as “more than politics.”
5- External Attention. Social media allows for bypassing domestic choke-points of censorship and reach for global attention. This was crucial in the Arab Spring (and we know many people tweeting about it were outside the region which, in my view, makes Twitter more powerful in its effects, not less).
In fact, just as in the Arab Spring, there have been moments in Turkey where international coverage of the protests was better than the domestic counterparts. Here’s CNN International showing Turkey protests while CNN Turkey shows a cooking show:
In all these cases, social media sources provided more comprehensive and more timely coverage of the events. Of course, the lack of institutional media reporting inside the country also had insidious effects in that it was difficult to keep in check unfounded and inflammatory rumors that ricocheted around online social networks.
6- Social Media as Structuring the Narrative. In all these protests, we see that social media allows a crowd-sourced, participatory, but also often social-media savvy, activist-led structuring of the meta-narrative, as well as the shaping of the collective grievances. Stories we tell about politics are incredibly important in shaping that very politics, and social media has opened a new, complicated path in which meta-narratives about political actions emerge and coalesce.
Many of the “network analyses” based on social network analyses methods have missed this crucial aspect of the narrative shaping power of social media as it cannot be seen merely by scraping a billion tweets and making a colorful “spaghetti” map of the network. What has emerged is that Twitter, Facebook and online social networks are the new mass, participatory, open, but also UNFLAT spaces of uneven influence where narratives conflict, coalesce and then are rebroadcast and recirculated by mass media.
In short, Twitter is the new spin room for the 21st century. 
7- Breaking of Pluralistic Ignorance and altering of Collective Action dynamics. Revolutions, political upheavals, and large movements are quite hard to predict, but once they happen, they seem inevitable. Then there is a lot of hand-wringing on why they weren’t predicted before by analysts and observers. (A classic case is the 1979 Iranian revolution which everyone should have seen coming but nobody did).
This is not because all analysts and political observers are idiots but because of a particular characteristic of large-scale social upheaval, especially in repressive environments. Many such events break through when “pluralistic ignorance” – ie, the idea that you are the only one, or one of few, with a particular view – is broken. This can happen via a public mass action which can be a street demonstration or a Facebook page proclaiming “we are all Khaled Saeed."
In other words, many people keep their true preferences private, or speak only with a few trusted people, thinking either that they are a minority or that if they speak up, they will be one of only a few and thus meet with massive repression. Once this dam breaks, however, the dissent explodes. Thus, it’s easy to predict that there is a lot of pressure on this dam; however, it is hard to predict when and where it will break.
The key conceptual issue here is not digital versus non-digital but visibility, accessibility and signaling power. Street demonstrations, in that regard, are a form of social media in that they are powerful to the degree that they allow citizens to signal a plurality to their fellow citizens, and to help break pluralist ignorance. Overall, social media are altering mechanisms of collective action in societies and we have just begun to understand this fundamental shift.
8- Not Easily Steerable Towards Complex, Strategic Political Action. The combination of the above factors makes social-media fueled protests very powerful and consequential in some dimensions and somewhat ephemeral and weak in others.
While social-media fueled collective action lacks the affordances of politics and the institutional capital that political parties and NGOs can provide, they can be very good at drawing red lines and organizing and gathering attention to a loud “NO!” (ie., Mubarak, SOPA/PIPA, Gezi Parki demolition). However, such movements seem usually unable to translate their power into a next step which directly impacts policy, law or regulation through elections or parliament.
This partly stems from the lack of representative power within the movement. During Occupy, for example, the protests were almost shut down at one point not because of police, or Zuccotti Park’s owners’ actions but because the protesters were unable to contain a few people among them who wanted to continue drumming around the clock. The neighborhood almost evicted them themselves – the crisis was averted at the last minute. Lack of representational power has meant that movements have little capacity to direct their own participants towards any tactical steps or strategic steps.
Whether there will emerge new platforms and ways of organizing enabled by online media remains to be seen; however, as of now, this is where this nascent phenomenon stands.
Banner image credit: http://24.media.tumblr.com/ca6ea44759c716a645b91530cda1d2a1/tumblr_mntyf7ldWN1ste7qoo1_1280.jpg
Credit for Chart, "Before/After Occupy": Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/20/1038431/-The-Victory-of-the-Occupy-Movement
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Poorly Educated and Poorly Connected: The Hidden Realities of Innovation Hubs
May 30, 2013 - 2:00pm
When President Barack Obama decided to kick off his “Middle Class Jobs and Opportunity Tours” in Austin it highlighted once again the city’s reputation as a growth sector in the nation’s creative and high tech economy. Over the last few years the arrival of Apple, Google, Facebook and others has diversified Austin’s creative economy which has long provided a home for Dell, IBM, and Applied Materials Inc. According to the White House, the President’s visit was to observe, listen, and explore how the innovation and industry in Austin might serve as a model for other cities around the country.
In his book, The New Geography of Jobs, economist Enrico Moretti characterizes Austin as an innovation hub. What is an innovation hub? These are cities that have a highly-educated labor force, high levels of human capital, and a strong innovation sector. A highly educated region attracts more highly educated workers leading to a rise in incomes, upward mobility, and quality of life. Moretti argues that our cities are divided not simply by race or class but also by geography and, more precisely, the making of well educated and poorly educated regions. This trend is symptomatic of what Moretti calls the “Great Divergence,” a situation in which the innovation hubs (think Silicon Valley) are rapidly pulling away from cities that were once industrial or manufacturing hubs (think Detroit).
The Hidden Realities of Innovation Hubs
There is, however, an underside to the rise of innovation hubs. Importantly, the vast majority of U.S. workers will never be employed in the high skill, high income jobs that are driving our creative and knowledge economy. According to Monretti, about ten percent of all of the jobs in the U.S. belong to the innovation sector. He adds that even during its peak the manufacturing sector in the U.S. never employed more than thirty percent of the U.S. labor force. And while innovation hubs are economic growth engines it is what Monretti calls the “multiplier effect” that makes them particularly interesting. For every high tech job that is created in an innovation hub another five service-oriented jobs are added. These jobs may range from skilled occupations (lawyers, teachers) to unskilled occupations (hairdressers, waiters).
Austin is an interesting case study of the complexities of the “Great Divergence.” The growth in Austin’s creative class has given rise to a service sector that finds itself on the edges of the innovation and opportunities that are driving Austin’s creative economy. New U.S. Census data reveals that the Austin metropolitan was the fourth fastest growing between 2011-2012. But far more people in Austin will be employed in service-oriented jobs rather than the creative industry jobs that generate substantial attention and a visit from the President of the United States.
During our year-long research at Texas City High School (TCHS) it was clear that many of the teachers and administrators were aware of Austin’s economic growth. TCHS and its families sit literally and figuratively on the edge of Austin’s thriving creative economy. Like a number of metropolitan areas around the U.S. there has been a big re-shift in where Austin families with school-age children live. A surging number of Austin families with school age children are making their way to the city’s fringe and suburbs. And those suburbs are undergoing a change. In their book, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube of the Brookings Institute argue that between 2000-2011 poverty in America’s suburbs grew by 64% compared to 29% in cities. During this period the rate of poverty in Austin’s suburbs grew more than any other city in the U.S. with the exception of Atlanta.
Like many suburban and urban fringe communities around the country the school district that serves TCHS students and their families lacks the infrastructure, capital, and, to this point, vision to grapple with a growing population of kids who are tightly clustered in low-education, low-income communities. These social, economic, and geographical shifts establish a critical context for the research that we have been doing on digital media, learning, and future pathways for the young students we met at TCHS.
The Digital Edge: Poorly Educated & Poorly Connected
The core tension in our work pivots around this question: to what extent can young people located in the social, financial, geographical, and educational margins find opportunity for social and economic mobility? Moreover, what is the role of digital media and learning in this context?
Over the last two years TCHS has made a concerted effort to begin offering classes—game development, technology applications, and digital arts—that aspire to ready students for a rapidly evolving global and knowledge economy. It was not unusual to hear the technology teachers mention Austin’s role in the innovation economy in hopes of convincing students to show more drive and interest in school. All around the United States under-resourced schools like TCHS are confronting what will be one of our defining educational dilemmas: to what extent should the investment in a digital media curriculum develop a vocational and/or academic track? What kinds of skills and dispositions does each track develop? And how will those skills translate in future economies? Currently, the classes at TCHS lean more toward the vocational and not the educational. This particular approach emphasizes gaining skills to get a job today rather than gaining skills to attend college or prepare for the jobs of tomorrow.
Even as TCHS strives to equip its classrooms with 21st tools and its students with 21st skills the challenge it faces in preparing students for the opportunities that are emerging in today’s knowledge economy are formidable. The students at TCHS are cut off, literally and figuratively, from the social networks, information channels, and institutions that provide access to the creative industries forming in their own back yard. A decisive majority of the Hispanic and African American students at TCHS are not college bound. Consequently, the opportunities to expand their social networks and pathways for economic and social mobility are not that great.
As much as anything else communities like TCHS suffer from a severe lack of social capital and social connectivity. Combine all of this with low educational attainment and these students might as well be living in Dehli or Detroit. In other words, though they live in one of the nation’s leading innovation hubs most of the students also reside in a separate, disconnected, and unequal world. This is the hidden reality of innovation hubs.
Connecting poor students to rich social networks, institutional agents, and opportunity is one of the great challenges we face in closing America’s digital, learning, and economic divides.
Banner image credit: rutlo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rutlo/3791854340/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Are MOOCs An Extension of Academic Publishing into Teaching?
May 28, 2013 - 10:05am
Over the past few months, there has been a growing backlash against MOOCs. If you aren't familiar with the term, massive open online courses — college courses that (for now) are free and will enroll anyone, generally without any restrictions on the size of a course — have been around in various forms for some time, but the term has gained wider exposure with the very public introduction of the for-profit MOOC startups Udacity and Coursera. These companies have advocated the ability of MOOCs to provide access to education to anyone with an Internet connection. As Coursera puts it:
Coursera is an education company that partners with the top universities and organizations in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. Our technology enables our partners to teach millions of students rather than hundreds. We envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education that has so far been available to a select few. We aim to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.
In theory, this sounds great. Yet a growing number of educators and critics have begun expressing concerns about MOOCs. Cathy Davidson has argued that MOOCs simply reaffirm "sage-on-the-stage" teaching practices and "are not about interactive new peer-learning pedagogies." Some of this criticism has focused particularly on the connection of MOOCs to for-profit companies whose business models remain subjects of speculation. Media theorist Richard Grusin has posted a list of these concerns (for a more in-depth view of the economic implications of MOOCs, see this long post by Bob Meister), many of which revolve around the potential for MOOC companies like Coursera and Udacity to make their money as other social media companies do: by capitalizing on user data.
4.MOOCs are driven by the desire of Silicon Valley entrepeneurs to capitalize on the data generated by college students.
— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013
6.MOOCs use the economic model of 21st century social media to build a massive user base for commercial purposes
— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013
I am also concerned about the role of money in MOOCs (so are others: in response to the launch of for-profits like Udacity and Coursera, a consortium of universities led by MIT created edX, a not-for-profit MOOC platform). Specifically, I'm concerned that their business model will replicate that of the academic publishing industry.
While there has been a growing number of open access journals in academic fields and encouraging trends in open publication, academic publishing traditionally works in this way: a researcher is paid by a (frequently public) university to create research. The researcher then publishes this research as an article in a academic journal, some of which charge the researcher for this privilege, a bill which some universities help to pay. If that journal is published by a for-profit publisher, the article — bundled together with others — is then sold back to the university library for the university community to access. To recap: the university pays a researcher to produce research, then, after that research is given away to a for-profit publisher for free, buys that research back from the publisher. This seems like a silly practice for universities to subsidize, but it is good business for the publishers, who make profits in the range of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.
My concern with for-profit MOOCs is that they will adopt a similar plan. Universities will pay their teachers to develop and teach courses — sometimes paying them extra to turn those courses into MOOCs — and that labor will be given freely, or at a reduced cost, to MOOC for-profits who will, in turn, sell it back to the university or sell it directly to college students.
I think there will be a role for MOOCs (or something like) in higher education. However, I don't want that role to be what Grusin called the "neoliberalization of higher education," defined in part by creating public resources — like teaching at public universities — and handing them to private companies to monetize. However, I fear that if, as Jeff Rice argues, we do not offer alternatives to MOOCs (as Cathy Davidson has) this may be what we get.
Update, 5/30/2013: My employer, West Virginia University—along with nine other universities or university systems—just announced a partnership with Coursera to develop MOOCs and offer them to students.
According to the press release, WVU will initially offer Coursera courses for free and without credit. However, the Chronicle of Higher Educations has published more details about the contracts involved, which it reports are "pretty much identical." Here is the relevant bit about what Coursera will be charging universities.
In a typical case, the company would charge the university a flat fee of $3,000 for "course development." After that, Coursera would charge a per-student fee that would decrease as more students registered for the course. The first 500 students would cost the university $25 per student; the next 500 would cost $15 per student; the university would pay the company $8 for each student beyond that.
Apparently, these deals are structured to incentivize universities to make these courses more "massive": as the university adds more students, its cost will go down, but tuition charges to those students will stay the same.
It also appears that this structure largely mirrors the one I have described above: universities will pay their employees to create courses, give those courses to Coursera, and then Coursera will, in turn, charge the university for the privilege of allowing it to offer those courses—for which the university has shouldered the costs—to their students. The only difference from academic publishing seems to be that the university keeps some of the revenue, in this case the extra tuition money it charges students.
Banner image credit: detail from http://chronicle.com/article/The-Major-Players-in-the-MOOC/138817/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Toward A Networked Approach to Improving Education
May 24, 2013 - 6:35pm
Which comes first, coordination or collaboration? It’s a classic chicken or egg debate that surfaces among network organizers and one that Peter Wardrip, a Ph.D. student in the Learning Sciences and Policy program at the University of Pittsburgh, has been exploring for the past three years. In today’s interconnected world, there seems to be a network to support just about any interest or profession. If you’re a writing teacher or an edtech leader, your options include the National Writing Project or the Consortium for School Networking. Young people from metropolitan areas such as Chicago, New York, and Pittsburgh can expand their learning experiences by joining the Digital Youth Network or the Hive Learning Networks. But what do the inner workings of these networks look like, and what design mechanisms are put in place that best encourage collaboration across all fronts?
Wardrip examines how these networked organizations spread and support innovations. Currently, he is involved in a study that seeks to better understand how networks get started and how they form. Two years prior to this work, Wardrip was part of the research team of Quantway, a network improvement community that addresses the alarming drop out rates of community college students in developmental math. Quantway, which comprises eight community colleges across three states, aims to improve mathematical outcomes for all students by constructing engaging learning experiences that support the development of quantitative literacies. The key to this, Wardrip says, is the network structure of Quantway.
In the video below, Wardrip discusses several fundamental components of the networked organization including the community’s decision to develop a new curriculum that shifts the focus of development math from algebraic concepts to those of quantitative reasoning. Wardrip presented his work at the DML Summer Research Associates Institute in 2012. Below are just a few highlights, but throughout the entire video, Wardrip discusses the role coordination plays in collaborative work and the effects both have on the implementation of effective network improvement communities.
For collaboration to happen or to advocate for collaboration and have it implemented, there have to be structures put in place in order for people to be able to collaborate. I do a lot of research in high schools, and they often don’t support collaboration very well.
There’s no incentive for collaborating. There’s no reward for collaborating. In a school sense…the mindset of the administration, the leadership, as well as the teachers, has to shift in order to promote collaboration.
A common challenge of distributed work is being aware of what everyone on your team is doing. You have to figure out the ways to build group awareness – whether it’s through technologies, through frequent face-to-face opportunities, or phone calls.
Learning from many different places, testing out curriculum in multiple places…and adapting to the contextual factors that are important to each classroom can broaden the educational opportunities for students in a diverse array of places in the country.
Peter Wardrip - DML Summer Institute 2012 from DML Research Hub on Vimeo
Production credit: Marc Bacarro
Banner image credit: jeremywilburn http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremywilburn/5431133156/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Thoughts on Pew’s Latest Report on Teens: Notable Findings on Race and Privacy
May 22, 2013 - 8:20pm
Yesterday, Pew Internet and American Life Project (in collaboration with Berkman) unveiled a brilliant report about “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy.” As a researcher who’s been in the trenches on these topics for a long time now, none of their finding surprised me but it still gives me absolute delight when our data is so beautifully in synch. I want to quickly discuss two important issues this report raises.
Race is a factor in explaining differences in teen social media use.
Pew provides important measures on shifts in social media, including the continued saturation of Facebook, the decline of MySpace, and the rise of other social media sites (e.g., Twitter, Instagram). When they drill down on race, they find notable differences in adoption. For example, they highlight data that is the source of “black Twitter” narratives: 39% of African-American teens use Twitter compared to 23% of white teens.
Most of the report is dedicated to the increase in teen sharing, but once again, we start to see some race differences. For example, 95% of white social media-using teens share their “real name” on at least one service while 77% of African-American teens do. And while 39% of African-American teens on social media say that they post fake information, only 21% of white teens say they do this.
Teens’ practices on social media also differ by race. For example, on Facebook, 48% of African-American teens befriend celebrities, athletes, or musicians while 25% of white teen users do.
While media and policy discussions of teens tend to narrate them as an homogenous group, there are serious and significant differences in practices and attitudes among teens. Race is not the only factor, but it is a factor. And Pew’s data on the differences across race highlight this.
Of course, race isn’t actually what’s driving what we see as race differences. The world in which teens live is segregated and shaped by race. Teens are more likely to interact with people of the same race and their norms, practices, and values are shaped by the people around them. So what we’re actually seeing is a manifestation of network effects. And the differences in the Pew report point to black youth’s increased interest in being a part of public life, their heightened distrust of those who hold power over them, and their notable appreciation for pop culture. These differences are by no means new, but what we’re seeing is that social media is reflecting back at us cultural differences shaped by race that are pervasive across America.
Teens are sharing a lot of content, but they’re also quite savvy.
Pew’s report shows an increase in teens’ willingness to share all sorts of demographic, contact, and location data. This is precisely the data that makes privacy advocates anxious. At the same time, their data show that teens are well-aware of privacy settings and have changed the defaults even if they don’t choose to manage the accessibility of each content piece they share. They’re also deleting friends (74%), deleting previous posts (59%), blocking people (58%), deleting comments (53%), detagging themselves (45%), and providing fake info (26%).
My favorite finding of Pew’s is that 58% of teens cloak their messages either through inside jokes or other obscure references, with more older teens (62%) engaging in this practice than younger teens (46%). This is the practice that I’ve seen significantly rise since I first started doing work on teens’ engagement with social media. It’s the source of what Alice Marwick and I describe as “social steganography” in our paper on teen privacy practices.
While adults are often anxious about shared data that might be used by government agencies, advertisers, or evil older men, teens are much more attentive to those who hold immediate power over them – parents, teachers, college admissions officers, army recruiters, etc. To adults, services like Facebook that may seem “private” because you can use privacy tools, but they don’t feel that way to youth who feel like their privacy is invaded on a daily basis. (This, btw, is part of why teens feel like Twitter is more intimate than Facebook. And why you see data like Pew’s that show that teens on Facebook have, on average 300 friends while, on Twitter, they have 79 friends.) Most teens aren’t worried about strangers; they’re worried about getting in trouble.
Over the last few years, I’ve watched as teens have given up on controlling access to content. It’s too hard, too frustrating, and technology simply can’t fix the power issues. Instead, what they’ve been doing is focusing on controlling access to meaning. A comment might look like it means one thing, when in fact it means something quite different. By cloaking their accessible content, teens reclaim power over those who they know who are surveilling them. This practice is still only really emerging en masse, so I was delighted that Pew could put numbers to it. I should note that, as Instagram grows, I’m seeing more and more of this. A picture of a donut may not be about a donut. While adults worry about how teens’ demographic data might be used, teens are becoming much more savvy at finding ways to encode their content and achieve privacy in public.
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Anyhow, I have much more to say about Pew’s awesome report, but I wanted to provide a few thoughts and invite y’all to read it. If there is data that you’re curious about or would love me to analyze more explicitly, leave a comment or drop me a note. I’m happy to dive in more deeply on their findings.
Banner image credit: paride de carlo http://www.flickr.com/photos/paride81/4515486809/#
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff