The goal of the upgrade was to get BuddyPress up and running, which will create additional avenues for social publishing and networking around academic interests across the College. The upgrade included two new WordPress child themes, one that uses bp-default (for the home site and all BuddyPress functionality) and one that uses TwentyTen (a new default theme).

if ( is_user_logged_in() )

Since we’re rolling BuddyPress into a system that’s been active for almost two years already, and which has more than four thousand users, I was hesitant to just automatically give everybody public profiles or to make the member list publicly visible. The following simple argument came in very handy in these cases:

<?php if ( is_user_logged_in() ) : ?>
<?php else : ?>
<?php endif; ?>			

I snaked this code through functions in a number of places:

• in header of the BP child theme to hide the Members list (by excluding the page id for the Members page in the “else” statement)
• in sidebar.php file of my child theme, to give logged-in users relevant quick links
• in members/index.php of my child theme, to hide the Members directory
• in members/single/home.php to hide individual Profile pages

I also hide the BP admin bar for logged out users (which is an option built into BP)… So if you’re a visitor to the site, BuddyPress won’t be visible to you.

Logged out:

Logged in:

This is the way we’re going to keep it for now, and I think such a structure reflects our sense of BuddyPress primarily as a tool for the community to get to know itself a little better. Rumor has it that some more granular privacy control will be coming down the pike in future versions of BuddyPress, and we’ll revisit this issue as appropriate.

bp-custom.php etc.

Every BuddyPress install should have a bp-custom.php file located in wp-content/plugins/ which houses customizations. I used this file to change the order of the tabs on Profile pages, and to insert additional menus on the BuddyPress admin bar.

One of the great challenges I’ve had is the fact that one of my good buddies and partners in pizza-eating crime has become one of the top BuddyPress/WordPress developers around, and Boone’s on my IM rolls. I’m often faced with the dilemma of taking an hour to figure something out, or bothering him and getting some code in about 3 minutes. He helped me with code for the tab order:

function change_profile_tab_order() {
	global $bp;

	$bp->bp_nav['profile']['position'] = 10;
	$bp->bp_nav['activity']['position'] = 20;
	$bp->bp_nav['blogs']['position'] = 30;
	$bp->bp_nav['friends']['position'] = 40;
	$bp->bp_nav['messages']['position'] = 50;
	$bp->bp_nav['groups']['position'] = 60;
	$bp->bp_nav['settings']['position'] = 70;
}

add_action( 'bp_setup_nav', 'change_profile_tab_order', 999 );

The additional menus in the admin bar, I figured out with help from the Codex:

function my_help_link(){
  ?>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/explanation-of-buddypress/">HELP!</a>

 <ul class="wp-admin-bar">
<li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/guide-to-buddypress/">Guide to Buddypress</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/for-blog-authors/">Support for Students</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/for-blog-administrators/">Support for Faculty</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/contact/">Contact</a></li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  <?php
}
add_action( 'bp_adminbar_menus', 'my_help_link', 14 );

function quick_links(){
  ?>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/explanation-of-buddypress/">Quick Links</a>

 <ul class="wp-admin-bar">
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/about-blogsbaruch/terms-of-service/">Terms of Service</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/blsci">BLSCI</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/bctc">BCTC</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/">Baruch College</a></li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  <?php
}

And, with Boone’s help, I made a change to my wp-config.php file so that Profile (rather than the Activity Stream) became the default component loaded when you visited a member’s page. (I located this line of code just beneath the “/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */” comment, as it didn’t work when I put it at the end of the wp-config.php file).

 /** Sets BP Nav to load Profile first */
define( 'BP_DEFAULT_COMPONENT', 'profile' );

These changes are intended to prioritize Profiles. We want our users to share information about themselves and to use Boone’s Custom Profile Filters to connect with others at the College with similar interests. While the CUNY Academic Commons, for which that plugin was written, hopes to connect CUNYs across campuses, we want do this on a more local scale. When all of our incoming students get their Blogs@Baruch accounts next week, they will be asked to fill out their profiles and to begin exploring.

New Default Theme

I also used the upgrade opportunity to create a new default theme for sites created on Blogs@Baruch, a child of TwentyTen which features some Baruch College and CUNY branding/linking and altered css. Aided by this tutorial, I swapped out the built-in header images that ship with TwentyTen for images taken from Baruch College’s library of photographs. Here’s the code for that, placed into the theme’s functions.php file:

define( 'HEADER_IMAGE', get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory') .'/images/headers/baruchcollege.jpg' );

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'blogsatbaruch_setup' );
function blogsatbaruch_setup(){

/* Add additional default headers: All Photos are from Baruch College Visual Standards Library: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/visualstandards/photos.htm */

	$blogsatbaruch_dir =	get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory');
	register_default_headers( array (
		'Baruch' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/baruchcollege.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/baruchcollege-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Baruch College', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Elevators' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/elevators.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/elevators-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Elevators', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Reading' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/reading.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/reading-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Reading', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Streetsign' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/streetsign.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/streetsign-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Street Sign', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Turnstiles' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/turnstiles.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/turnstiles-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Turnstiles', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'VC View' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/vcview.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/vcview-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'View from VC', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Windows' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/windows.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/windows-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Windows', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),

	));
}

function remove_twenty_ten_headers(){
	unregister_default_headers( array(
		'berries',
		'cherryblossom',
		'concave',
		'fern',
		'forestfloor',
		'inkwell',
		'path' ,
		'sunset')
	);
}

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'remove_twenty_ten_headers', 11 );

And here’s what it looks like:

This new theme is sharper than what previously loaded, and TwentyTen is customizable enough that I think a lot of our users will just keep it as their primary theme.

Bye Bye Userthemes

Finally, I’ve done away Userthemes on Blogs@Baruch. The last two WP upgrades have required hacks to keep the plugin only half-working (I’ve never been able to turn off Userthemes on blogs… once you go Userthemes you’ll never go back!). It’s such an important part of what we do on the system that I wanted to cease relying on such an unstable plugin. Instead, with Tom Harbison’s help, we copied all of our custom themes into the theme library and renamed their folders to the site id for which they were intended. We didn’t activate these themes site wide, but rather went one by one through the blogs, editing the template, stylesheet, and theme settings for each. Not the perfect solution, but it feels more stable than relying on Userthemes.

Those are the hacks that I remember. I’m sure there are a few that I missed.

If you’d like to take a look at the child themes, here they are: Blogs at Baruch BP (child of bp-default) and Blogs at Baruch (child of TwentyTen).

photo credit: Ian Sane™

Jim Groom and Brian Lamb recently asked me and some of my fellow CUNYs to reflect on how we’ve “designed or conceptualized” the publishing platforms we oversee, with a focus on the role of networked collaboration in public higher education. The question is a big one, and it spurred me to think about the roots of my work as an educational technologist, an #alt-ac that emerged for me rather incidentally out of the work I was doing while training to become a historian at the CUNY Graduate Center, and which has led to Blogs@Baruch.

See, a myth is out there that one day the Reverend Jim Groom wandered into the University of Mary Washington from the wilds and revolutionized open source university-based personal publishing when he launched UMWBlogs in 2007. But this is only part of the story. Jim cut his teeth as an educational technologist in the same accidental way I did; we were both graduate students preparing for traditional academic careers. Our paths converged in 2004 when we met as Instructional Technology Fellows at the CUNY Honors College (which is now the Macaulay Honors College). I had already worked for four years at the New Media Lab, with the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, building Virtual New York City, and had taught history at Baruch. My work with ASHP taught me much about collaboration and the power and necessity of networks when doing new kinds of intellectual work in a discipline, and my teaching at Baruch had introduced me to the challenges and rewards of teaching at a public institution with an incredibly diverse and unique student body. Even before doing work as an instructional technologist, then, I had learned the catalytic value of connective networks and the pedagogical rewards of working in a “non-traditional” classroom setting.

As ITFs (a group of graduate students who are now overseen by the great Joseph Ugoretz, who unfortunately came on-board after Jim and I had moved on) our job was to work with faculty members who were teaching in the College’s core curriculum to make smart use of the laptops every student was given by integrating technology into pedagogy and cross-campus events. As Fellows, we met every couple of weeks to discuss our work and share ideas, and while many Fellows saw these meetings as a burdensome distraction from their much more important doctoral work, I always saw in them an opportunity to think collaboratively through methods and pedagogies that were in circulation but were not very present throughout much of CUNY. Those exchanges with Jim, Zach Davis, Jeff Drouin, Wendy Williams, Emily Pugh and others were very much the foundation of the work I’m now doing. They helped shape my sense that teaching with technology was about exploring and embracing new possibilities rather than reinforcing existing structures. They showed me that there was as much to learn from breaking down and reflecting upon the processes by which we produce knowledge as there was in using technology to engage deeply with content. They sharpened my understanding of experiential learning, and got me to focus more on nurturing sustained engagement than meeting the heavy coverage that’s always expected of teachers of history. They also taught me that doing this kind of work while in constant conversation with others is really the only way to do it, for if you’re doing it right you should be raising more questions than you’re answering. Many spaces in higher education — especially those that revolve around making sense and use of new technologies — would benefit from increased dialogue, reflection, and collaboration. Being part of a network that exists within and beyond our home institutions foregrounds those qualities in our work.

I remember the specific ITF meeting in Spring 2005 where Jim shared a maps project he had done on WordPress with a class at Hunter College, and excitedly riffed on the pedagogical possibilities of self-publishing on the open web. It wasn’t until that Summer when I started to play with WordPress on my own that I saw what had gotten him so excited. I’ve mused before that the edtech revolution started not in the classroom, but in the baby blogosphere. In February 2005, Zach Davis and his wife launched a blog (using Movable Type, if I recall correctly) about their young daughter; in March 2005, Jim and Mikhail Gershovich launched blogs to document the lives of their young sons; I followed suit a couple of months later with my own baby blog. I can’t speak for the other blogfathers, but in my case blogging about my child served multiple purposes: it was a needed distraction from my dissertation research that also pleased far-away grandparents; it spurred me to explore presenting a wide range of media online; and it lulled me into my first tentative steps towards real hacking. I knew HTML and CSS and had built sites using Dreamweaver and Fireworks and Flash, but I was no hacker and was never much interested in code. But by blogging and making movies and art about my child I came to see more clearly the power of the lowered barriers to self-publishing provided by a software like WordPress. And that I was doing this in concert with other like-minded academic geek dads made me feel as though my efforts were part of some larger trajectory.

By Fall 2005, I was ready to roll WordPress into my support for courses. I had worked for two years with a faculty member, Roz Bernstein, whose pedagogy was proto-edupunk in that she always required her students, after studying a particular art form, to produce work of their own in that form. We had previously done a project where students crafted PowerPoint presentations inspired by the movie Capturing the Friedmans about their own families, and the students had come up with some fantastic creative work (work that I still use today to challenge arguments that there’s no such thing as a good PowerPoint). So when her students were studying collage, they were tasked with making collages of their own and to write about their creations. We scanned the collages and shared them along with the notes via a WordPress blog. This process opened up second and third layers of dialogue, as students commented on each others’ work asynchronously and then reflected upon the process in classroom discussions (including a memorable discussion of what was gained and loss by the process of digitization). I’ve often said that Baruch students are among the most interesting college students in the world, and none of them realize this. Their stories are so rich and varied that assignments which urge them to mine their pasts to find the raw materials with which to create and reflect are invariably rewarding. Maker assignments done here that encourage students to bring what they already know to what they’re learning are successful time and time again.

After a few additional projects at the Honors College I joined the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute in 2006 as a CUNY Writing Fellow. Mikhail, the Director of the Institute (who I had first learned of through his baby blog), wanted to bolster support for “computer-mediated instruction,” and had talked me into leaving the Honors College. The opportunity to see what could be accomplished with these tools in a non-honors setting appealed to me, as did the opportunity to get experience with WAC/WID theory. Finally, I was interested in seeing if we could expand support for open-source applications at the College. Mikhail gave me the freedom to develop some faculty development initiatives around teaching with blogs, and we ultimately supported 10-12 different course blogs per semester (on single installations of WordPress) between Fall 2006 and Spring 2008. We worked with English, Law, Sociology, Anthropology, and Journalism course, and we did everything from small, project-based assignments, to research paper scaffolding, to collaborative research using a wiki, to creating a news blog of student reporting about New York. And I started blogging about my work at Cac.ophony.org.

Those two years of work as a Writing Fellow, while I was finishing my dissertation, really drove home the extent to which we were working on something that was new to our campus and University, something that was needed because it connected the intellectual/academic work that students were doing in school with the digital literacy that they were developing only outside of the curriculum, and which they would need wherever their careers took them. I continued to stay in touch with Jim and learned from the way he distilled his network through a political and pedagogical prism to which I was sympathetic, a perspective which had in-part been forged by professional experiences at CUNY supporting teaching, learning, and scholarship with technology. I followed with great interest as his experimentation led to UMWBlogs, and discussed with Mikhail the opportunity to systematize and scale up what we had been doing up until then only on a piecemeal basis.

Blogs@Baruch evolved out of these discussions, and has very much depended upon the interplay between a broader network of teachers, learners and scholars out on the interwebs and the unique community we continue to engage with at Baruch College. A significant part of my job is to mediate this interplay, to bring ideas and inspiration mined from my expanding network and to try find a place for them within the curriculum at Baruch, and to then to share back my reflections on the results. We’re getting ready to roll BuddyPress out on Blogs@Baruch this Fall. Our goal in doing so is to congeal a platform that already has more than 4000 users into an academic publishing network. We hope doing this will make more explicit the fundamental fact that what’s happening on small corners of our system is connected both to other developments around this school and around CUNY, and also to a broader community within higher education of people finding their footing on the open web, and using that footing to launch themselves forward. Baruch students and faculty have much to learn from these connections, and also much to give.

photo credit: waferboard

I’m preparing to roll BuddyPress out on Blogs@Baruch later this month, and I’ve grown a little concerned about the implications of doing so. I thought I’d write up some of my concerns and see if the Internets has anything wise to say about them.

Our goal in using BuddyPress is to try to draw out and congeal an academic publishing network out of the various work that’s being done across the system. We hope to give students a platform to track their work over their careers at the College, to make connections with students with similar interests, and to cultivate a profile in a space they’re somewhat familiar with that we can support and that they can build as they desire. But I’m anxious about a few things.

First, we already have more than four thousand users on Blogs@Baruch, and the vast majority of those accounts were created for course-based blogging. I’m uneasy about turning on profile pages for users who never used the system for that purpose, without their knowledge. My current plan is to send an email out to all users when we turn on BP with instructions about granular control of profile pages. But, as far as I know, that control can only be so granular: with BuddyPress Profile Privacy you can set privacy on a field-by-field basis, but you can’t lock a whole profile page down. I’m hoping Jeff Sayre’s Privacy Component, which apparently is nearing a second beta, can help solve this problem. We’ll be registering incoming first year students for Freshman Seminar and instructing them on how to use the system beginning in August, and we’ll keep Profile pages set to “open” for new users from that point forward (we’ll be updating our woeful Terms of Service as well).  I think it might make sense though to lock-down already existing accounts and outreach to those users with details about BuddyPress’s purpose and instructions on how to manage their profile privacy. I’m uncertain about this, though, both the ethics and how I’d manage this technically.

Second, I’d like for the primary engine of Blogs@Baruch to continue to be course-based blogging. BuddyPress, however, elevates the social networking function to equivalence with the blogging functionality of a WP-MS installation. We’re not building ePortfolios like our friends at Macaulay and don’t have the resources to closely support the development of profiles on a system as big as ours. And I certainly want to avoid the creepy treehouse factor, which is an issue with incoming Freshman.  I just want students to use BuddyPress@Baruch to connect with each other around interests and academic work. So there are a few spots where I’d like to make some choices or changes that could nurture that understanding; for instance, I don’t think I’ll have a link to the members directory from the front page (but have it publicly accessible via internal links); I’ll hide the BuddyPress admin bar for logged out users; and, I’d like to hack BuddyPress so that upon log in, instead of landing at the front page of the home blog, users land at the Dashboard for their primary blog. Any other ideas?

Third, I have to revisit our registration process. In most classes, we use DDImportUsers to bulk register new users. Our most technologically capable faculty members can handle the intimidating two-step of a “self-registration” and the addition of Andre Malan’s “Add User to Blog” widget. Now, with BuddyPress functionality turned on, registration can become more complicated and require more information, which is fine for self-registering users but potentially problematic for those who are bulk-added. The bulk process also only creates new accounts, which I’ve been struggling with for some time; existing users need to be added to new sites individually, and to do so you need both a username and an email address (if I had my druthers, the DDImportUsers plugin would be able to check a list of newusernames|newemailaddress against the user_email field in the wp_users table and if a email address exists, add the user with that address to the individual site… and then to go on to register all the new users).

As the system grows, this is becoming a bigger problem since every semester a higher percentage of Baruch students have accounts on the system and find their way into new classes that use it. In an older version of WPMu you were able to add users to individual blogs simply with an email address, which was preferable because the cross-referencing is a pain. But that pain is balanced on the other side by the agita that would be caused if nervous first-time blogfessors are made to manage a multi-step registration process. In the past, I’ve taken the pain on in exchange for the benefit of drawing more users onto the system, and it’s been a good trade. I’m not sure yet how BuddyPress fits into this equation and how it will impact my overarching goal of easing the registration process, but wanted to get the issue out there. In the long term we’re looking at LDAP integration, but we’re not there yet. One solution is BP Group Blogs; but that creates additional steps in the registration process and we still want to make things as sleek and streamlined as possible.

These are my concerns for now, and I’m sure there’ll be more to come… any feedback, questions, and exchanges from out there in the wild are welcome and greatly appreciated.

My little girl finished kindergarten today.

Here she was on her first day:

And here she is today:

The difference in her face is striking to me; it’s like a year of school has swapped out her babyness and replaced it with, I don’t know… wisdom? Knowing? I mean, yes, she’s like 15% older than when we took the first picture… but she looks like she’s aged.

I have a mixture of emotions about her experience and her school and the place we’ve chosen to call home. And she can be incredibly difficult for her mother and myself to deal with to such an extent that I quiver when I think about what awaits us in her teenage years. But I’m unequivocally proud of what a good, eager and curious learner she is, and more than anything in my life I love watching that take shape. The other day she said to her mom, “isn’t it kind of sad when you finish a book?”  I can’t think of another phrase I’d more wish my six year-old to say.

But he’s got two obnoxious beefs that run through his work that I’d like to highlight: he hates New York and he has disdain for people who watch television. Of course these statements are overdrawn, but only because Simon overdrew them first himself. Here’s a clip from a talk he gave a couple of years ago at Eugene Lang College at the New School:

There is no city more vain about its position in popular culture, more indifferent to other realities, more self-absorbed than New York City…. You guys think you know urban America, you don’t know shit anymore.

Granted this is a rant and certain allowances must be made for imprecise language, but it’s still surprising to see someone who has done some of the most humanistic work in contemporary culture speak of a city as though it itself has the uniquely human qualities of vanity, indifference, and self-absorption, and then to proceed to correlate the development of these qualities with the extent of crime and suffering currently in the city. If he were to argue that New Yorkers were exceedingly provincial, I’d agree with him. If he were to argue that the national media is New York-centric, and that this is because of all the money that flows through Manhattan, and that this reality informs stories that do and do not get funded and told, he’d get no argument from me. But that’s not what he’s arguing in the clip above, or in this excerpt from an interview he did with Alan Sepinwall comparing New Yorkers’ reaction in the aftermath of 9/11 to the perspective of New Orleanians after Katrina:

Although who isn’t self-absorbed when their town has a near-death experience? Were New Yorkers not talking about 9/11 for years afterwards? Was it not a subject of intense discussion and self-awareness? Did New Yorkers not sound to outsiders self-absorbed and preachy when they spoke of 9/11? The sense of entitlement that New Yorkers feel and that they’re not willing to grant to someone else who’s had a life-changing experience is really remarkable. But that’s the nature of empathy: it only goes so far.

Simon starts this bit off sympathetic to those whose city has been through trauma, but can’t help himself from throwing a dig in against “New Yorkers” and their “sense of entitlement.” Fact is, the vast majority of New Yorkers I know who were here on 9/11 wanted immediately to find ways to both remember what happened on that day and get on with the normalcy of their lives. Thought it’s an unscientific claim, I’d bet that as much of all that “never forget” stuff came from outside the city as from the city’s citizens; New York has no singular claim on 9/11 fetishism. Simon seems to be arguing that New York’s location at the center of American economic and cultural power not only crowd out other stories but also delegitimize to a certain extent the stories and voices that do come out of the city. This perspective flattens and ignores the extent to which human and social conflict propels this city forward just like it does any other city, and it does absolutely nothing to help bring stories from other locales to light (perhaps besides fuel Simon’s considerable intellectual fire).

Simon’s beef about New York in Treme flows in-part from his sense that New Orleans didn’t get the national love that New York did after Katrina, and this argument filters into the perspectives of Creighton “Fuck You You Fucking Fucks” Bernettte and Davis “This Can’t Happen in New York” McAlary as well as the intense parochialism exhibited by many of the characters on the show. It also leads to groan-inducing expository lines like the one delivered by Annie’s friend in Episode 9 of Treme when Annie leaves Sonny, her boyfriend and musical partner: “Fucking is fucking, but music? That’s personal.” In New Orleans, such a perspective is to be celebrated because the music, food and culture are wonderful and bohemian and largely uncapitalized, the city’s people have been shat upon for generations by government and corporations, and not many people outside the city “get it.” In New Orleans, other rules prevail. In New York, if you’re a New Orleans-bred trumpeter like Delmond Lambreaux, you seem like a turkey paralyzed by an Oedipal complex if you explore music beyond that which is at your roots.

Simon is even more disdainful of television watchers than he is of New Yorkers. He begins his interview with Alan Sepinwall, who has been among the best chroniclers of both The Wire and Treme, by insulting him. Sepinwall asked Simon what he was hoping to accomplish with the flashback scene that occurs in the season finale of Treme, and Simon snaps “it’s kind of self-evident, isn’t it?” before defending the choice from a critique that the interviewer doesn’t level. Simon adds:

So it’s kind of frustrating, for people trying to blog the show each week like yourself, people trying to comment on it or to anticipate the storyline, to debate the filmmaker’s choices. But it’s a no-win situation. We wouldn’t want to have people not discussing the show, but at the same time, you can’t take the discussion seriously until everyone gets to the end. At the end, people can reflect on what they’ve seen, and whether it added up…. I’ve come to realize that the only commentary I can take seriously are people who react to what’s on screen and how that reflects on the reality they know. That’s the only biofeedback that matters to me.. All the feedback of, “I wish the show would be this, I wish the show would be more of this, I wish this character had less to do, I wish this character had more to do,” that’s of no use. It’s of no use because we’ve already finished production, but on a more philosophical level, it’s of no use. Choices have been made based on the last half hour of film. Every season of ‘The Wire’ built to the last half hour, to the endings. This is my seventh time of having the initial reaction to our storylines be, “I don’t understand where they’re going. Why do they have this? This doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t like this character.” If you go back and watch the first episode of any season of “The Wire,” or the first episode of “Treme” or “Generation Kill,” knowing the ending, the choices will be entirely reasonable as a first chapter of something that is novelistic. If you experience it only as something that’s an episodic entity unto itself, I can’t answer that, because I don’t really think about that. I’m not irate about it, I just can’t take it seriously.

So, this is effectively a rant against the consideration as episodes of blocks of television that are constructed and presented as unique entities once a week, with beginning and ending credits, and an assertion that you really can’t say much of value about the arc of a season or a series or a character until you first see all that the “filmmakers” have to say. That’s just idiotic, and flies directly in the face of Simon’s own claims that the art he produces will not allow fundamental human truths to be distorted by the restrictions of form.

Simon acknowledges in the interview that there is space for criticism and discussion of his work, yet he repeatedly detours any question Sepinwall asks about arc and plot and characters and choices that might lead to some reflection and introspection about human nature into rants about how most viewers and critics are brainwashed by tv so deeply that we don’t really know how to watch a show like this:

I don’t mind if a character is selfish or insecure. I just don’t need all my characters to be winning. And in the same way that people often miscalculate or fail to acknowledge the equivocation between high-stakes and plot itself, I think people generally mistake their dislike of a character as poor acting.

Simon has, over the years, become ever more certain that he knows The Truth and that there’s a pretty good chance that you and I do not. Much like Creighton Bernette, who we see once in the classroom and learn immediately that he is a pretty crappy teacher, Simon is much more interested in polemic than in dialogue. His polemics are smart, interesting, entertaining and often right-on. But they’re also becoming gradually more obnoxious in how they proclaim Simon’s single perspective and urinate upon all others. This approach informed some of the fifth season of The Wire, which centered around a fairly simplistic and nostalgic rant about the demise of newspapers. And it’s present periodically in Treme, a show I love, but one whose perspective is represented by a title that doesn’t sport an accent mark even though it’s sometimes spelled with one.  If you don’t know how to pronounce Treme and aren’t sufficiently motivated to get it right, what you think doesn’t really matter.

photo credit: Eustaquio Santimano

Right up there with the complaints about the vuvuzelas at the 2010 World Cup has been tsuris about the Adidas “Jabulani” ball, which was made specifically for this event. Every four years goalies complain about the new World Cup match balls, which have consistently been made to fly faster and to swerve more severely. Glen Levy quotes Cote D’Ivoire coach Sven-Goran Erikkson as saying FIFA should heed the concerns of keepers and field players, yet Levy ultimately concludes that the concern is nothing: the low scoring is due to playing at altitude and to overly-defensive strategies.

I’m not so sure. The ball seems to be affecting offensive play more significantly than defensive play. From the opening match the ball looked to me as though it was coming upon players more quickly than they expected, and that passes were outpacing recipients more than what I’m used to seeing in the football I watch. Goalies were concerned that shots taken from distance would dip and dive and move about unpredictably; but few shots from outside the box even seem to be finding the target.

I decided to crunch some numbers to see if there was any data to support what I thought I was seeing with my eyes. I’m no Nate Silver, though I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. I compared selected ball control stats from the first sixteen games of this year’s Cup with those from the sixteen matches in 2009′s Confederation’s Cup.

The results were pretty striking:

Total Passes Completed
2009: 73.7%
2010: 70.5%

Short Passes Completed
2009: 74.8%
2010: 73.6%

Medium Passes Completed
2009: 77.7%
2010: 77.4%

Long Passes Completed
2009: 61%
2010: 47.6%

Crosses Completed
2009: 34.3%
2010: 18.8%

Corners Completed
2009: 62.5%
2010: 40.6%

And, I also looked at shooting and scoring in 2009 and 2010.

Shots on Target
2009: 40.7%
2010: 34.2%

Shots Wide
2009: 42.2%
2010: 47.2%

Goals
2009: 43
2010: 27

In every one of these categories, control of the ball has been more fleeting in 2010 than 2009. Specifically, you can see that long passes, crosses, and corners have been the most severely impacted plays, sporting the largest differentials from last year to this.

All 32 of the games considered were played in South Africa, so the altitude question is neutralized. I supposed that strategic differences between a 32 team tournament and an 8 team tournament could have some impact on these numbers, as might the pressure of playing in the World Cup. I’m nowhere near equipped to integrate these allowances into my analysis. Now, everyone plays with the same ball, so I don’t think there are any questions about whether or not this situation is “fair.” But what’s above certainly combines with what I’ve witnessed with my own eyes to lead me to conclude that the Jabulani is having a negative impact on the ability of field players to control the ball.

But one of the most annoying things about playing Eaton Rapids was that their fans always brought these goddamn cowbells to the games, and would bang them throughout the match. I hated those cowbells, which came to mind this weekend amidst the furor against the vuvezelas that have blared and bleated throughout the first few days of the World Cup.  They’ve caused such an uproar that World Cup organizers were considering banning them from matches.

photo credit: markhillary

Any soccer fan who watched the Confederation’s Cup last year or who has watched South American soccer in the past 30 years will already be familiar with this noise, and discussions about whether or not they should be banned from the Cup have been going on for a year. My feelings? Get over it. I’d much rather the Black Eyed Peas and, especially, Bono and R. Kelly be banned from the Cup; the vuvuzelas are less annoying, and at least they have character and impart a local feeling to the goings on.  Who knows, maybe they even give African and South American squads that are used to hearing them an advantage, which I’m all for given that this is the first World Cup in Africa. That they give idiotic American cretins another thing to whine about also seems an argument in their favor, doesn’t it?

If it annoys you, turn your sound down, go to a bar, or simply watch more matches. I’ve acclimated myself to them already, much more so than I ever did those goddamn Eaton Rapids cowbells.

Jason Gay offers an even heartier defense of the vuvezela here.

* Yes, I realize that “vuvezela” is not Spanish, but the alliteration was too alluring.

** PS.

But not when it comes to soccer.

The confluence of my own past with the sport, America’s historic mediocrity on the pitch, and my religious conviction that sport fandom not only justifies but in fact requires a certain level of irrationality make me pull deeply for the Yanks.

We’re in our sixth straight World Cup after missing them for 40 years. Here’s a brief review of the past five performances.

1990

The US qualified for the 1990 World Cup on this goal by Paul Caligiuri at Trinidad & Tobago:

They showed up in Italy with the youngest squad in the tournament, consisting almost entirely of recent college players. They lost all three games: 5-1 to Czechoslovakia, 1-0 to Italy, and 2-1 to Austria. The achievement of this tournament was merely reaching it, though the US did show well against Italy, and would have tied the game had Walter Zenga not stopped a Peter Vermes blast with his rear end.

1994

The US qualified as hosts of the 1994 World Cup, and I was lucky enough to see them play Switzerland in their opening match, which they tied 1-1 thanks to this goal by Eric Wynalda:

In the second game, the US faced Colombia, who were fashionable picks that year to make a deep run behind Carlos Valderrama and Faustino Asprilla. The US shocked Los Cafeteros, behind this fateful own goal by Andrés Escobar (which led to his murder two weeks later):

And then this beauty of a game winner by Earnie Stewart:

The US slipped into the second round after losing their third match to Romania, and was rewarded with a match against mighty Brazil on July 4. Despite the fact that Brazil played the second half with ten men after Leonardo fractured Tab Ramos’ skull with this nasty elbow –

– the US couldn’t overcome Bebeto’s second half tally and the Brazilian ball control, and fell to the eventual champions.

Getting out of the first round was unquestionable progress.

1998

Any progress made in 1994 was returned in 1998 when the US stunk up France worse than the most aged blue cheese. The team entered the tournament in total disarray, and suffered resounding defeats to Germany, Iran, and Yugoslovia. It’s recently come out that John Harkes, who then national team coach Steve Sampson had recently named “Captain for Life,” had been stripped of his captaincy and dismissed from the team for (allegedly) sleeping with a teammate’s wife. This no doubt contributed to the Yanks’ miserable performance on the field, and one can only hope that the similar controversy that recently emerged from within the English side has a deadening effect on the British legs. The effort against Germany was especially troubling, as the usually plucky Americans caved to the physical assertiveness of their opponents.

2002

The 2002 World Cup was the high point of American soccer. After the dismal performance of 1998, few expected the US to get out of a group that featured the host country, the Korea Republic, a tough team from Poland, and Portugal, who had Luís Figo, the reigning FIFA World Player of the Year, and a was a team chosen by many to break through to the late stages. The US faced Portugal in their opening game (which I watched at 7 am ET), and came out confident and aggressive and with nothing to lose. They scored three goals in the first half (one was an own goal), and held on in the second for a shocking 3-2 victory.

After tying Korea (on this Clint Mathis goal):

and then losing to Poland, the US emerged from its group to face arch rival Mexico in the Round of 16: the biggest match the country has ever played. This one was a 4:30 am ET start time, and the US dominated and forced the Mexicans to completely unravel at the end of the game (Rafael Marquez’s hit on Cobi Jones was just as dirty as the Leonardo elbow to Tab Ramos in 1994).

The reward for beating Mexico was a matchup with Germany in the quarterfinals, the same German team that had pushed around the Americans four years earlier. Claudio Reyna, who at that point had enjoyed more success as a professional in Europe than any other American player (and who carried the nickname “Captain America”), had been especially abused by strongman Jens Jeremies in 1998. But on this day he was the best player on the field, and the US got the better of play through most of the game. The refs missed a blatant German handball on the goaline, and the US couldn’t ultimately punch home a goal.

This was a remarkable showing, and indicated to the world that American soccer was indeed capable of a world class performance. The run in 2002 set a new standard for the US side.

2006

The 2006 World Cup greeted the Americans with high expectations, but an extremely difficult draw: Czech Republic, Italy, and the top African side, Ghana. The US came out flat in their first match, falling to the Czech Republic 3-0, before showing brilliantly and confidently against Italy in a physical 1-1 tie in which two Americans (against one Italian) were ejected. Again, the US benefited from an own goal, the only score the Italians would concede on their march to the final. Needing a victory in their final group match against Ghana to advance, the US fell to Ghana 2-1, victims of the Ghanian’s speed and a horrid penalty call in the first half injury time.

That the US failure to advance from this difficult group was seen as a disappointment showed how far American soccer had evolved since 1990. You want to enter your third match of the group stage with a shot to advance, and the US has done that the past two World Cups– although they’ve lost both games!

2010

As the US preps for Saturday’s match with England, expectations are extremely high. Given the US’s experience — including a victory over a full-strength Spanish side and a near upset of Brazil at last year’s Confederation’s Cup — there’s simply no excuse for them to fail to advance from a group that includes England, Slovenia, and Algeria. If history is any indication, however, the US could struggle with this group. They haven’t beaten England since 1950, and always have a tough time with big Eastern European sides (see losses to the Czechs, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia). Slovenia is less experienced and talented than each of those sides, and the US is much more poised than in the past, so they should pull out a victory or at least earn a tie. They’ll be in good shape if they go into the final group match against Algeria with 3 points, and they’d be in great shape if they can get a draw against England in the first game and a win over Slovenia. The US has historically played one great match, one mediocre one, and a stinker in the group stages. Where those efforts are located will make all the difference in the world this year.

The US team has significant questions on the pitch. In previous years, central defense has been a strength, showcasing American toughness, size and poise with Eddie Pope and Oguchi Onyewu. Gooch is just returning from a knee injury, and hasn’t played 90 minutes in nearly 8 months. The other two center backs are the tough-but-slow Jay DeMerit (who tends to play too far off the ball in the defensive third) and the untested Clarence Goodson (who’s good in the air but not nearly as physical as what this position calls for). This could spell trouble for a side that likes to play compact defensively and spring counter attacks. Wing defenders (Carlos Bocanegra, Jonathan Spector, and Steve Cherundolo) are solid but again, slow. Head coach Bob Bradley loves Jonathan Bornstein, who has speed but lacks the size and toughness to compete at this level. We may see him as a situational substitute.

The strength of the current US team is in its midfield, and there’s more talent than can fit on the pitch. Michael Bradley, Clint Dempsey, and Landon Donovan are sure to be in the starting eleven. Bradley generally plays a 4-4-2 lineup, and though he’s tried to play Dempsey up front with Jozy Altidore, he’s indicated he’d like to play two true forwards (it’s looking that the second will be Edson Buddle, who comes in to the tournament in great goal scoring form). So, the big question is, who will be the fourth midfielder? Ricardo Clark has gotten most of the time there in tune up matches, but hasn’t particularly impressed; I’d prefer to see Maurice Edu, who tackles just as hard as Clark but is more solid with the ball (and also has a nose for the goal). The other midfielders — Stuart Holden, José Francisco Torres, and DaMarcus Beasley are capable substitutes, and can each go a full 90 if needed. I hope we don’t see Benny Feilhaber in a game; although he’s got the ability to possess the ball, he consistently disappears from matches and is a horrid defender. Up front, expect to see Herculez Gomez as a late game substitute if the US needs a goal, and Robbie Findley if the US feels it needs to exploit a speed advantage. Tim Howard will man the goal, and will both make the spectacular save and do his best to keep the rag-tag back line organized.

The World Cup is one day away, and we’re two days from what promises to be an epic US match against England. Let’s get the party started!

But If you can’t attend the tournament, NYC must be the next best place to be. Thousands of folks are out in their kits, draped with flags, and every other conversation you overhear on the street seems to be about the Cup.  The event unites the focus of the world, and that effect’s on full display in New York. It gives those with ties to other countries permission to flamboyantly celebrate those connections, and for other New Yorkers to join or mock them.  Soccer bars (like Nevada Smith’s or these national rooting spots) are packed with fans throughout the day watching games played halfway around the world, and those fans are usually banging on drums, singing and screaming at each other, and downing pints (whether they have to go back to work or not). Whole blocks shut down in Little Italy, Koreatown, and Little Brazil on those countries’ match days, and fans watch from the street on gigantic displays amidst a carnival.

The best thing about New York City is the opportunity it gives us to sample the world. That’s never more true than during the World Cup.

photo credit: jenschapter3

Peter Crouch is a tool. More evidence:

Holmes needs to bounce The Robot up from out his repertoire. He’s embarrassing himself and his girlfriend, and pissing Don Cornelius off.

One of the few things of value to come out of England over the past decade is Ricky Gervais, and even he ragged on this goof:

Now, if I was at all confident in the ability of the US central defense to actually beat this guy to a ball played in the air, I’d get really mean. Or maybe I’m just saving that for Terry, who might be shagging Crouch’s fiance.

Spain will breeze through it’s group (Chile, Switzerland, and Honduras), and could be matched up with Cote D’Ivore (though it looks as though Drogba is out with a broken arm) or face fellow Iberians Portugal in the second round, before likely facing Italy in the quarterfinals.

Here’s the best tribute video I could find… it’s also a bit bizarre.

Here’s snippets of their victory over Brazil in the 1974 semi-finals:

The Netherlands won the European Championship in 1988 behind Gullit, van Basten and Rijkaard, but haven’t moved beyond the semi-finals in a major tournament since. I think they’ve got a shot this year, as they blazed through qualifying behind the tremendous form of Wesley Sneijder and Arjen Robben, who pair with the explosive Robin van Persie and the tough-as-nails Dirk Kuyt in the attack, with Mark van Bommel holding and banging away in the middle of the field (and Nigel de Jong attempting to break people’s legs behind him).  They’ve also got a ridiculous amount of attacking talent beyond those four but, like Argentina, are somewhat suspect at the back.

If everything goes to form, they’re likely to face Brazil in the quarterfinals.  What a match that could be. Here’s a look at some of their stars… remember, a lot of these guys will be on the bench:

Frame grab from Fox Sports of Armando Galarraga’s near perfect game.

For me, last night’s near-perfect game by Armando Galarraga and the Detroit Tigers is as memorable for the events in its aftermath as it is for the blown call on Cleveland’s 27th out, which kept the game from the record books. The weight of history hovers over no sport so much as baseball, where the past is enshrined in statistics that upon a single glance might tell you the story of a moment, a game, a season, a career, an era. That weight is at the heart of baseball’s struggle to deal with steroids, which have totally distorted our knowledge and memory of a whole generation of achievement in the sport.

The reactions of both the Tigers and Jim Joyce give us occasion to reflect upon the way we connect records to meaning. For all intents and purposes the Tigers viewed Galarraga’s performance as perfect. Some joked that it was the first 28 out perfect game, and the pitcher received the customary “beer shower” bestowed upon hurlers who accomplish this miraculous feat. Though the Tigers gave it fiercely to Joyce on the field, without exception those who were interviewed later in the clubhouse treated the umpire and the moment with an astonishing level of class. Manager Jim Leyland spoke about what a great umpire Joyce is, about how Joyce was going to feel worse about this than anyone, and, crucially, about how the humanity and error that are at the center of the game are what makes it so great. Austin Jackson, whose Willie Mays-ish over-the-shoulder-catch secured the first out of the ninth for the Tigers, also talked of mistakes as being part of the game, and about how hard it is to be am ump. Third baseman Brandon Inge raved about how proud he was of Galarraga’s poise and performance.

Joyce, upon seeing the replay, immediately copped “I just cost that kid a perfect game,” and went to the Tigers clubhouse to apologize, tears in his eyes. Galarraga gave Joyce a hug, then told reporters that “he feel worse than I do.” He added “nobody’s perfect” with a smile. He then noted that he would save the tape to show his son. Joyce will be haunted by this moment the rest of his career, much more so than Galarraga.

The class shown by Galarraga and his teammates revealed their deep satisfaction with the content of the performance, which reminds us of what records sometimes miss. They knew this was a perfect game, and what frustration they showed was due to the fact that they immediately understood that history would not reflect what they knew to their very cores to be true. The “incident” is already enveloped in larger debates about whether to institute instant replay in the game. There’s debate about whether the Commissioner’s office should give Galarraga the perfect game anyway and Michigan’s Governor, never one to miss an opportunity, has already arrogantly done so!

But the Tigers, at least as they reacted last night, don’t seem like they’re too interested in all this. They know what they did, and whether or not they’re included in the record books won’t change that knowledge, which this Tiger fan hopes makes them pick things up a notch in their battle for the Central with the Twins. They know there’s a hundred and twenty more games to play, a hundred and twenty more opportunities to strive for perfection, and ten thousand times that many mistakes to avoid.

Though this Maradona goal was ludicrous:

These were amazing:

I warmed to Argentinian football in 2006, when they played with an unbelievable team flair. This gem from the first round is an example:

And I’ve become a huge Leo Messi fan:

Argentina will be very interesting to watch in South Africa, as they have perhaps the most attacking talent of any side.  They have significant questions in the middle of the field (will they be able to get Leo the ball in dangerous places?) and at the back.  With Maradona at their helm, they may perhaps lack some emotional stability and discipline.

Argentina should advance out of a tough but not spectacular group that includes Nigeria, South Korea, and Greece, and I think they’ll make it to the quarterfinals where they’ll likely face England, setting the stage for another installment in a classic rivalry.

Via.

I was a pup at the time, and my memories of MSU’s run to the 1979 National Championship over Larry Bird and Indiana State are fuzzy at best. I remember everyone was happy, and to this day I don’t recall a time before I was conscious of Magic. In 1980 I was somewhat conscious of Larry Bird, too. When he became a Celtic, though, I remember being confused that there had been a black guy who wore number 33 in green and white and whose poster was on my bedroom wall who dominated on the court, and then the following year there was a white guy who wore number 33 in green and white and dominated on the court.

Magic was a major a presence in 1980s Lansing, from the “Magic Johnson Donuts” at local bakery chain Quality Dairy (gold frosting with a purple “32″ drawn on top), to the softball team he played for in the summer that would draw hundreds of spectators, to the constant reporting on the trajectory of his career. If you didn’t know him personally, you knew someone who did, and I met him multiple times as a kid. He visited my elementary school on a couple of occasions, and in fourth grade I won a competition for a full scholarship to the local basketball camp he ran with his agent, Charles Tucker. I attended the camp two consecutive years, spending a week each year in the presence of Magic and other stars of the 1980s NBA: Isaiah Thomas, Dominique Wilkins, Spud Webb, Tiny Archibald, Mark Aguirre, Herb Williams, Jay and Sam Vincent. Roy Tarpley and William Bedford, two talented big men who would soon snort themselves out of the NBA, served as counselors (I remember Bedford being especially nice). I remember two specific encounters with Magic: one, a left-handed lay up drill done without a ball, so you would concentrate on your form. Magic stood under the basket and if you did it wrong, he made you do 20 push-ups. I was absolutely terrified, but somehow managed to fluidly lift off my right foot and pass the test (though I could never make a left-handed lay up in a game). The second was my second year, when I made the All-Star team for my age group. I hit a 15 foot jumper in the All-Star game and Magic, who was reffing the game along with Herb Williams, gave me a high five as I ran back down the court.

It’s from within this context that I approached the Lakers-Celtics rivalry, which reached its rabid apex in the 1980s. (To learn more about the rivalry between Magic and Bird, see the terrific documentary “Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals”). Everyone I knew rooted for the Lakers, mostly because they loved Magic. But there was a broader national breakdown along racial and social lines, crudely constructed as follows: If you were black or liberal or hip, you rooted for the showtime Lakers, and delighted in Magic’s daring passes to Worthy and Scott, and Kareem’s skyhook. But if you were working-class white, or conservative, or lame, you rooted for the Celtics, and celebrated Bird’s grit, McHale’s low post moves and wet hairy armpits, the Chief’s stoic gaze, and whatever the hell Danny Ainge did. Of course, regional allegiance played a large role in who you rooted for, but the sense that the breakdown was as described above did much to invigorate the rivalry by embedding it within the broader political narratives of Reagan’s America. Both teams represented elements of that transitional decade: the Lakers were glitz and excess, and the Celtics were a resurgent conservativism and traditionalism. If nothing else, the rivalry revealed the resilience of the racialized lens through which much of the American public saw sport (and thus life). Yet at the heart of it all was a deep truth: these were two fundamentally brilliant basketball teams, with styles fully realized and stars in constant search of another challenge to conquer.

I pulled for the Lakers through their championship years until they met my Detroit Pistons in the Finals in 1988, when I maturely said to Magic: you’ve won enough. It’s the D’s turn. My Magic love persisted, though, so much so that November 7, 1991 is just as seared into my memory as January 28, 1986. But as Magic’s career ended awkwardly over several years, I lost interest in the Lakers.

The NBA has changed significantly since the 1980s, when Magic and Bird rescued the league from its image as a refuge for drug-addled social miscreants, and handed to Michael Jordan and David Stern a “product” primed for global expansion and resonance, and set to churn out megarich icons. The game has changed, too, from an era when big stars regularly threw down in pursuit of a win to a league where accruing too many physical fouls well get you suspended. Fact is, college basketball is a much more physical game than the NBA, which is part of the reason that it’s more watchable.

It’s also part of the reason that we don’t have rivalries like what we had with the Lakers and Celtics in the 1980s. Too many players and coaches are mercenaries, playing for their next contract. These guys are professionals, to be sure, and most care deeply about winning (no one can tell me Kobe Bryant wants to win any less than Magic or Bird). The skill level and physical ability is amazing, and the game is played at as high a level as ever. But, the context has clearly changed; the game is too clean, too corporate, too image conscious, and exceedingly concerned with being family friendly. As a result, the politics that infused Lakers-Celtics in the 1980s are absent from the contemporary game and hard to imagine ever being so prominent again. Rivalries now only gain intensity from tight contests in the immediate past.

I’ll watch the upcoming Finals, but it won’t be must-see tv in my house. I’m sure these guys’ll play great basketball, and the networks will roll out references to the “Memorial Day Massacre” and the “Baby Hook” in an attempt to infuse these games with the weight of history. Personally, though, I don’t really care who wins, and unless something unexpected and remarkable happens, I’ll probably forget this year’s Finals as quickly as I forgot the 2008 Finals. The fact that I can barely bring myself to hate the Celtics anymore probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve aged and mellowed and have better priorities more widely dispersed. But it also has something to do with the game, which is at least as responsible for my connection to it as I am.

photo credit: jectre

Of course, we’re far from the only ones considering these questions, and we’re certainly not the only ones who’ve borrowed the terminology of revolution to cheekily make our case. Matt Gold has already done a fantastic job creating a hit-and-run guide to guerrilla pedagogy that delineates the tools, philosophy, and connective processes requisite at its core. Gardner Campbell has argued for a trajectory in liberal education towards the development of media fluency and in favor of a shift from both “signature pedagogies” to “pedagogies of signature” and from general education to generalizable education. Gardner has also spoken passionately about the role of movements around the integration of digital tools into the work of higher education in destabilizing the institutions at our center. Joss Winn and Mike Neary have written of “The Student as Producer,” connecting pedagogies that place the student squarely in the role of knowledge-maker within broader efforts to combat the corporatization of higher education and to reimagine a university that for once might be fully committed to the development of humanistic thinkers. Jeff McClurken has argued smartly that digital literacy is something that should be developed within the disciplines and shown how, though I’d guess he’d agree that such an approach does not preclude a broader college-wide addressing of these questions. And besides being actively involved in building the tools from the ground up, Boone Gorges has brilliantly theorized the structural similarities between the types of communication and personalized connections that happen within social media and the specific goals of a college’s general education program.

There are others, many others, who’ve been doing this type of work and thinking, and their models and theories are very much the fuel that propels us along our path.

Che Groom

photo credit: 5tein

Blogs@Baruch has evolved along three broad publishing contours in its first two years, and each can be seen as a step towards developing a foundation upon which those in power at the College might do some tough thinking about how the general education could be reimagined. This said, I have no idea whether or not they might do this, or even when the gen ed was last revisited. But if they call, we’ll be ready to contribute what we’re learning.

Non-Course Publishing
We’ve become the go-to shop for folks at the College who want to get stuff online. Student publications, online magazines, faculty development sites, exhibits, extra-curricular project journals, document reviews using CommentPress, grant competitions and committee sites… we host them all.

Members of our community now recognize that they no longer need HTML skills to be able to publish to the web or CSS skills to control how what they publish looks. On the flip side, each of the individuals and groups involved in these projects has been forced to confront questions of audience, tone, purpose, tools, design, and connectedness. This has spurred conversations that otherwise might have been offloaded to a contracted web group, or might not have happened at all. The Schwartz Institute, through our nurturing of these conversations, has joined the staff of the Newman Library at the center of thinking on campus about the role of digital tools in the varied work of the college. This broad “culture of self-publishing” is raising the overall digital literacy of staff, faculty, and administrators at the College by creating and sustaining unavoidable engagement with the implications of doing professional and intellectual work on the open web. This engagement has been more incidental than systematic, but it’s been ongoing and persistent, and more and more people are taking part.

Course-based Publishing
Our most exciting work is taking place inside of courses. We’ve supported more than a hundred course sections over the last two years, and they are inspiring faculty members towards more experimental and experiential pedagogy. We’ve featured much of this work at Cac.ophony.org. Some courses are using Blogs@Baruch as little more than an open CMS, taking advantage of a flexible aesthetic to create a more intimate relationship between students and their engagement with course materials online. Others have used the system to explode students’ prevailing understandings of audience by creating and capturing collaborative writing through the integration of wikis, scaffolding research papers in public groups, or bringing in the voices of outside authorities. Many have used the power of writing for classmates’ consumption (and beyond) to raise the stakes of an assignment. Some have staged engagement with a difficult text through a dialogic close reading that evolves into performed knowledge about the themes of the work. Many have taken advantage of lowered barriers of entry to the production of multi-media work to create opportunities for students to engage with course themes and texts through video and other media, and then to write about how the process impacts their understanding of the genres studied in the course. Most have embraced the connectedness of the web to integrate additional resources into their teaching and expose students to a range of critical research methods.

These courses have done three types of work. First, they’ve produced models that are replicable within this college and beyond, and fueled a buzz and interest in teaching with digital tools that hadn’t been very present on campus until recently. Second, they’re helping us develop a local “community of practice” committed to dialogue around the implications of digital pedagogy, which has filtered into the faculty development initiatives already afoot at the Schwartz Institute. And, third and most importantly, these courses have worked to instill in students a critical sense of how to exist intellectually and professionally on the Web by spurring dozens of small conversations about online ethics, linking, sharing, identity, performance, knowledge building, collaboration, mashing, hacking, looking, listening, and learning. These conversations have not been systematized, but they’re most definitely happening.

Social Publishing
The third contour in which we’ve been working is social publishing. This is an infant compared to the two toddlers described above, and is based primarily in our work supporting Freshman Seminar, which draws all incoming students into conversations on Blogs@Baruch. I’ll spare you the details of how the project has evolved, which you can read up on by following this tag on Cac.ophony.org. We hope that our pending integration of BuddyPress will both challenge some of the alienation that happens on a purely commuter campus, and enable what Matt Gold has called “serendipitous connections” around shared interests that otherwise might not happen. Matt and George Otte’s framing and stewardship of the CUNY Academic Commons is very much our model for structuring and naming such a possibility. This coming Fall our first year students will be writing creative blog posts that integrate freely-available digital tools to examine their own processes of identity formation. In doing so, they will be sharing and connecting their experiences to others at the school and beyond, and also reflecting upon the choices they make and tools they use. This is non-credit bearing work, but we hope that it will provide for our students a critical base from which to use the web to engage and learn that they will carry through their four years at the College.

All of the above work intersects only incidentally with the formal general education curriculum at the College. And, yet, I think we can safely say that what we’ve built with Blogs@Baruch has impacted the generalizable education that our students are getting. What’s needed, however, is more systematization, more points of reflection and articulation, more staging towards digital and media fluency, and more buy-in across the curriculum. As guerrillas, we’ve made and built our critique while modeling an alternative approach to supporting educational technology that saves the College money and raises its profile. If we are indeed in the midst of the revolution that will remake higher education, then we stand with our colleagues at the vanguard, arguing that universities must embrace the core values of the open web, and work them systematically into curricula.

Over the past five years, Ghana’s Essien has become one of my favorite players, despite playing for a club team — Chelsea — who I don’t particularly care for. Nicknamed “The Bison” for his exceptional speed and strength, he’s the prototypical defensive midfielder (or “holding midfielder”). Essien is beautiful to watch because he’s always involved in the action, and glides across the field from goal box to goal box, exploding towards the ball when it’s available. The defensive midfielder is tasked with breaking up the other team’s attack and linking the ball between the defense and the offense. This player must be tough, possess great stamina, and be able to anticipate and take the right angle on the ball. Since the defensive midfielder plays just behind the attack, he/she should be able to shoot the ball on goal with power from range, and should also be able to win balls at every level of the field. In short, the defensive midfielder has to do everything that’s required of a soccer player, and do it well. Michael Bradley and Ricardo Clark share that position for the United States, and they’re both solid and sometimes better than that. Bradley is a great tackler and able distributor, and Clark is a fantastic athlete who covers a lot of ground.

Without Essien, Ghana is going to have a tough time advancing from a difficult group that includes Germany, Australia, and Serbia, but I still think and hope they will (they have another fantastic player in Stephen Appia). Going in, I thought that Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire were the two African sides with the best chances to advance deep into the tournament. But Didier Drogba’s Les Elephants have the toughest draw of all, facing Portugal and Brazil in the opening round (and North Korea, which should be interesting).

Here’s a video of Essien’s brilliance, which I’ll be sad not to see in South Africa. Warning: the soundtrack is hideous, so turn it off and put on some Nas or Bach or Tribe Called Quest (“Brother brother brother, Essien you’re like no other.”)

Sorry, Michael.

- “The Monster,” written precisely as above by a kindergartner I know

My oldest child is completing her first year of public school.  While I was mostly pleased with her experience, there are certain components of it that, projecting forward, make me uneasy. Primary among them is the administrative impulse within public education to categorize children. Her classmates have all been divided into groups, and the groups will be evenly distributed across the various first grade classes next year. Boys and girls are each a group. Special needs children are a group, as are the “troublemakers.” Then there are the average kids, the “brights,” and the few who have horrifyingly been deemed “gifted and talented.” They’ll all be spread across 10 or so classes, with the “gifted and talenteds” collected in one lucky classroom that gets a visit from an outside teacher once a week. Once you’ve entered into the “gifted and talented” group, thanks to your performance on a secret test and assessment formula, you stay there for the duration of elementary school, like some sandbox mafia to which other children are occasionally extended an invitation. There’s also a special arts program, which pulls students out to work on projects with a district art teacher, who handpicked the kids, herself, based on her interactions with them this year.

I understand the need to assess students, to identify those who need extra help and to ensure that all are challenged. I understand that in order to distribute students across classes and distribute resources effectively within a system, divisions and choices must be made. But what I am seeing first-hand, which should come as no surprise to anyone who pays attention to public education, is a system that creates giant cracks connected by shoddy netting. Forward, forward, forward the students are marched, their teachers sympathetic drill sergeants who can get them a little help and extra attention within certain confines, but not really much more than that. My state, like many others, doubles down by incentivizing a system that reifies taxonomies that I’ve been shocked out of my naivete to find start immediately. I have these misgivings even though we live in a very good school district and even though our daughter has done very well.

I’m familiar with but not expert in theories of elementary education, and there is much I don’t know. What I do know is that I wish we could send our child to a school where she was marched on the path projected forward by the thinking in the story above, not by a system that sorted her by its expectations of what she should be able to do when. There’s a creativity and focus in “The Monster” which I fear will only be tapped and harnessed incidentally given the current trajectory of public schooling, whether she’s in a “gifted and talented” program or not. I want her to get help at school nurturing that ability, mining it and turning it into the base from which she can develop the literacy required to be a well-rounded adult. But the hegemony of quantitative assessment and the taxonomies that it leaves in its wake make me worry that such creativity will be given space to flourish less regularly than it should.

Approaches like what I want exist, to be sure, but we can’t afford to have our kids attend the nearest Montessori, and home schooling isn’t practical given our situation (and sense of what we’re capable of doing). We also care deeply about public education, and would rather contribute to its richness and successes through the unique perspectives we know our children will bring than to remove ourselves from it all together.

Ultimately, we’ll plan to supplement and support our children’s pursuit of their passions, and while we’re confident they’ll come out the other side whole, talented, adjusted young adults, we’re also increasingly resigned to the fact that no matter where we are it will take a certain amount of navigation, and that we’ll see things along they way that don’t sit well with us. In fact, that’s already begun.

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photo credit: minowa*naitoh

The ad is pretty remarkable, cramming in knowing riffs on the personalities and national implications of the performances of many of the players listed above. Cannavaro’s celebrated glitz, Rooney’s mercurial personality (and England’s tabloid obsession with him and his teammates), Howard’s slyness, the Brazilians’ joyful dancing on and off the ball, Ronaldo’s statuesque physique and persona: it’s all in there. So is the “one worldness” that the Cup quadrennially creates as people around the world tune in to the same series of events and experience them together even as they’re filtered through local perspectives.

Unsurprisingly, though, Nike elevates the role of the individual over the team. Italy, Brazil, and France won the last three Cups because of how they functioned as units, not only because of the play of Pirlo, Ronaldo, or Zidane. Yet, making and marketing icons has been key to Nike’s business model since it brought Michael Jordan into the fold, and it was so eager to release this thing that it included one towering figure, Ronaldinho, who didn’t even make the cut for his national team!

Gestures towards the way that futbol embodies a nation’s character, culture, and personality are in the ad, though they’re backgrounded to the celebration of the individual. One of the joys of watching this tournament will be observing and celebrating and theorizing the relationship between individual brilliance and the collaborative coherence of a team. Watch for how the Germans defend, the Brazilian’s creatively move the ball to space, the Italians work as a tight unit, the Americans scrap, the Dutch fly up the field, the French mix styles, and the Portuguese play dramatically. Individual brilliance will rightly be celebrated, as it will be on full and glorious display in South Africa next month. But the best teams will move forward, and their work will be just as beautiful.

First question: where am I going?

There’s a big difference between going to a conference at, say, University of Minnesota, and going to one at University of Miami. The respective climates of these destinations impacts how you should prepare. If you’re going to be in Miami, you’ll likely need linen pants, a bathing suit, and to start doing sit-ups at least six weeks ahead of time. If you’re going to Minnesota, you’ll probably need to bring extra sweaters, more books, and either anti-depressants or Advil for the specific type of Midwestern hangover caused by drinking cheap beer.

Second question: who else is going to attend?

There’s also a big difference between going to a militantly casual hippie love fest in Fairfax or Vancouver and going to a professional meeting of staid veterans in your discipline at a big conference center. When attending the former taking a shower, ironing your clothes, or even preparing intellectually in any significant way will just make you look like a square. When attending the latter, you’ll need to dress as close to the way that the old white men who hold named professorships in your field at the Best Colleges dress (even if you’re a young brown woman. Actually, probably especially if you’re a young brown woman).

Third question: what’s my role at this event?

If you’re going to present your work at the conference, it’s worth thinking about how your dress accompanies or contradicts the thesis of your presentation. If you’re making an argument embracing the chaos and revolutionary potential of the open web, jeans, a ripped tee-shirt, and a baseball hat are probably the best outfit (though, avoid wearing a Yankee hat, since that particular organization is seen by many as the embodiment of corporate hegemony). If you’re making an argument about the role of flora in Emily Dickinson’s pre-Civil War years, then perhaps consider wearing a suit with a bright colored tie or — if you’re a woman or transgendered male — a long floral-print skirt and a subdued blouse.

If you’re not presenting, it’s worth thinking about how your dress accompanies or contradicts your goal in attending the conference. If you’re there to attract the attention of senior scholars in your field, get a haircut and dress boldly so that they notice you in the hotel bar and remember that earlier you were sitting eagerly in the front row as they read their paper out loud for forty-five minutes. If you’re there to try to hook up with another attendee, any other attendee, then you might bring leather pants to change into for evening events. If you’re tenured, your department is picking up your registration fees, and you really just want to hear a few interesting conversations and eat free finger food, then the only reason not to wear sweat pants is that you’ll be remembered at the following year’s conference as the person who wore sweat pants in 2010. If that doesn’t matter to you: go for it!

Fourth question: I’m flying. Should I check my bag, or carry it on?

If you’re used to traveling with children, this is an opportunity to travel light, and your packing skills are probably evolved enough so that you can fit all your things into a carry-on. But be aware: this will place certain limitations on what you can and cannot pack. If you’re bringing a suit, you’ll probably need a garment bag, though those are kind of expensive, break easily, and hold fewer items than other types of luggage. If you’re using traditional carry-on luggage, consider choosing a single color scheme for your outfits for the weekend, which will limit the number of items you have to take. For instance, if you’re wearing a black outfit one day, but a brown one the next, you’d probably need to bring two pairs of shoes and two belts (that is if you are the kind of academic who cares about things like “matching”). Avoid such situations at all costs!

It would also help to think about the various places you might find yourself while on the trip. Might you lounge by the pool? Will you have considerable downtime in your hotel, when you might write, grade papers, or do yoga? Do participants in your discipline favor medieval theme restaurants or strip clubs? Each of these endeavors will require a change of clothes you should anticipate. If you’re a runner, and you can’t possibly function unless you get your miles in, factor this into your overall planning, but think long and hard about whether or not your running shoes might also work for the more casual moments on your trip. Bringing a third pair of shoes which occupy the great distance between formal footwear and dedicated exercise footwear can really put a crimp in your packing efficiency.

Thinking about these questions really helps me get through conference season with minimal packing agita. Even still, sometimes you just can’t prepare for the unexpected: a torrential downpour, the spilled glass of wine or marinara, or the ripped pant leg. But as long as you keep a happy outlook, and keep in mind that this conference experience is only one element of what will determine your success as an academic, you’ll be just fine!

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H/t to Tom Woodward for first satirizing The Chronicle.

photo credit: bgblogging

Brentin Mock writes on TheAtlantic.com:

Monáe has given pop music its first Toni Morrison moment, where fantasy, funk, and the ancestors come together for an experience that evolves one’s soul. It’s been attempted before: Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, I think, but that failed because it lacked the courage to carry its struggle to the finish, too often interrupted by gooey songs (“Escapade”) that reminded us she’s still a mere mortal who believes girls just wanna have fun, just like you. Listening to Monáe, I felt a chromatic charge, like Aunty Entity laughing while pointing a crossbow at my heart in the middle of Thunderdome. Yet I still recognized it as blues and funk—a smothered funk, though perhaps at times too thick, too inaccessible, but not so much I didn’t want to shake my ass. It was like the first time I read Beloved, or better Song of Solomon—I didn’t quite know what to make of it, but I knew I felt 100 feet taller after reading it.

You can get a sense of her style (as well as her moves) in this video for the first single off the album, “Tightrope,” a funky dance number that quotes Ingmar Bergman and features Outkast’s Big Boi in all his aesthetic glory.

Listen to the whole album here. Buy it here. Below is a playlist of a few tracks that immediately jumped out at me.

ENVISION : Step into the sensory box from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.

h/t Greg Zinman (Greg, if you read this, give me a single preferred place to link to… you’re mad distributed yo!)

For the second straight year, we’re awarding the Blogfessor of the Year Award to Zoe Sheehan Saldana, of Baruch’s Fine and Performing Arts Department. The award comes with priority support from the Schwartz Institute on all online publishing endeavors. Of course, Zoe already has that because she’s so awesome.

Zoe developed three sites on Blogs@Baruch this academic year.  Last Fall, she did a Do-it-Yourself Publishing site that used FeedWordPress to syndicate nineteen individual journals where students documented making their own books from scratch (some digital, some not).

This Spring, she used a site in her Basic Graphic Communication course… here’s a description of her course and how she used her course blog from her “About” page:

…this course

This course introduces the graphic design process and methodology. Conceptual and creative thinking is stressed and understood through problem-solving assignments based on research, readings, and classroom demonstrations. The student is introduced to graphic design principles and exposed to historical and contemporary models and current standards of advertising and design. The Macintosh computer is included as the primary graphic design environment. This class is a prerequisite for all advanced Graphic Communication courses. Complete course guide available here, as a PDF file.

…this blog

This blog is a venue for presenting, exploring, and discussing work, ideas, and topics pertaining to the course.

And, finally, together we developed a site for the Focus on Photography Exhibit which served initially as a processing space for members of the Baruch community to submit photos that they wished to be considered for a physical exhibit (which opened last week at the Mishkin Gallery).  The site’s since evolved into an online companion displaying close to 200 images submitted by Baruch students, faculty, and staff.  The submissions process used the TDO Mini Forms plugin to collect information from applicants, allow them to upload their images, and then it published those images to password protected pages where the exhibit judges could asses them. After decisions had been made about which images were accepted for the physical exhibit and which were not, Zoe hacked the Monotone WordPress theme (ideal for photo blogging) to create the online exhibit, which will live beyond the one at Miskhin. The amazing photographic ability of Baruch folks is a topic for another post, but I encourage you to take your time and click through the exhibit to see the fantastic images these folks have captured.

What’s so great about Zoe, beyond her gracious personality and charm, is that she’s exactly what an educational technologist like me needs to get better at what I do: someone who asks questions that I don’t know the answers to, patiently awaits the answer, and works to arrive at a consensus around what can be done with the tools, time, and resources available.  She’s a great collaborator and a creative teacher.  And, as she showed in talks she gave at last year’s CUNY WordCampEd and this year at the Baruch Teaching and Technology Conference, she has a strong grasp of the pedagogical, political, and philosophical impulse behind what we’re trying to do with educational technology at the Schwartz Institute.  As her course blogs and her own art show, she’s an O.E.: Original Edupunk, and both Baruch and the Schwartz Institute are lucky to have her around.

image credit: lumax art

This exchange came to mind when I was listening to Elvis Mitchell’s interview with one of my favorite actors, Michael Caine, which included the following snippet:

caine

(You’ve gotta base everything on truth and reality. Even comedy has gotta be real.  You know,  you’ve gotta be a real fat man, and the people gotta know the banana skin’s there, and you’ve gotta fall over properly.)

Besides being a fantastic turn of phrase elegantly spun, there’s a fundamental truth here not only about comedy and acting but also about many types of communicative endeavors, including blogging. My nemesis Jim Groom wrote a bang-up post today about the concept of personal branding and the inflated role it seems to have in the work of those at the intersection of technology and education.  My hero CogDog chimed in with a dismissal of the phrase for elevating “the attention itself as the goal.” CogDog notes that there is something there though, something that comes in the “wake” of the ship that’s good work built up and out the right way over time.  Call it intellectual capital, call it a reputation, call it a professional persona, whatever.  Calling it a “brand” though suggests it’s the end in and of itself.  Whatever it is should be organic, earned, and reciprocated, not cultivated, nurtured, and proclaimed. D’Arcy Norman’s reaction to someone noting he had “built his brand” was right-on.

This is on my mind because I’m just starting off trying to do this stuff at a regular clip and I want to try to stay focused on the reasons that I think I’m doing it.  I’m writing because I like to write to engage with my ideas and other folks’ and I haven’t been doing enough of that on my own terms recently. I’m writing because I have a couple of bigger projects that I want to get to and I feel I need to write regularly to prepare.

But I’m writing also to test some of my theories about the roles of openness and honesty in the formation of knowledge. What I love most about the blogs of the guys I cite above is that they very much use their spaces to think through ideas in process. Jim is especially not afraid of being extremely wrong, and I only hope that if I can keep this space alive for even a short while I’ll have a sliver of the same courage. If you base “everything on truth and reality,” and if when you fall you fall over properly, it seems to me that whether or not you have a “brand” becomes irrelevant. Your work’ll be right there.

photo credit: crazyoctopus

And yet he got away with this racist remark when the NBA passed its dress code rule a few years ago:

I don’t mean to say [this] as a snide remark toward a certain population in our society, but they have a limitation of their attention span, a lot of it probably due to too much rap music going in their ears and coming out their being….The players have been dressing in prison garb the last five or six years. All the stuff that goes on, it’s like gangster, thuggery stuff.

Now, he’s lecturing the Phoenix Suns, who the Lakers face in the Western Conference Finals starting tonight, for taking a stand against the reactionary Arizona immigration law while he at the same time speaks out in defense of it.

He sits smugly on the sidelines and whines incessantly about the officiating in-between games (when they can’t T him up). Yes, he’s a good coach, handsomely rewarded for his 10 championships (at over $10 m a year). But six of those were won with the best player to ever play the game, and three were won with Shaquille O’Neal at the heights of his powers as the most dominant force of the past generation. Last year’s championship was his most impressive by a mile.

Contrast him with the Suns, a team of veterans that plays at warp speed, and is propelled by over-35s like Grant Hill and Steve Nash who play the right way and have paid their dues, but have never won a ring. They disagreed with the immigration law and at the urging of their owner (Robert Sarver) wore jerseys that read “Los Suns” as a protest, risking significant backlash and the loss of gate receipts to take a stand against a reactionary law.

They should have been praised for it, and you’d think that a hippie like Phil Jackson would support them.  But he’s a fraud.  I hope the Suns win in 6.

Update: here’s more from nola.com on Piazza’s role on the series.

First, we read a short book, like Peekaboo Puppy, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Goodnight Gorilla.

Second, we turn off the lights and turn on the Twilight Constellation Night Light.

Then, we put on a song and have a cuddle. We tried the cry it out thing, and after a couple rough nights, it worked ok. But then teething, ear infections, and general lack of parental constitution landed us at this new process, and it’s worked pretty well (at least for our first shot at getting him asleep at night). I know that without a doubt we’ll have a drag it out sleep war in our future, but I’m not much for grand parental theories about getting them to sleep. Both my wife and are I pragmatists, for better or worse. We’ll try to be systematic and think about the consequences of the decisions… but we’re not much for short term sacrifice when we don’t have much faith (no matter what other parents say about sleep training) in the long term returns. Besides, this process is the opposite of onerous.

Usually, my boy’s asleep before the end of a couple songs. Often, he gets real drowsy, and I put him down and rub his back until he falls asleep. The whole time he’s chilled out and adorable, and I absolutely love this time we spend together. Sometimes, when the music turns off, I use a glowing seahorse (that plays Handel’s Messiah) to transition him.

When my 6 year-old daughter was his age, before she developed stronger opinions than Robert Hughes, we were able to choose the music that she listened to, and used it as an opportunity to expose her to sounds we really liked. We’re trying that again with our second. He doesn’t need any particular song, so I’m fortunate to be able to try different tunes out.

Below is a playlist of songs that have recently been in the 8:30 pm rotation at our house. Maybe they’ll bring some smiles and peaceful zzz’s to yours. Hope you enjoy.

photo credit: DieselDemon

I changed it. I’ll probably change it again. I’m kind of jumping in here with half-formed plans, hoping the plunge will help me form them.

I’ve had this space for a while as an aggregator and digital cv, and it was called, smartly, “Luke Waltzer: Educational Technologist | Historian.” When I was about to hit publish this afternoon I shuddered at the header, and quickly changed it to A Blog of My Own A Space of My Own.  I’ve written at and edited Cac.ophony.org for a few years now, and have gotten to feeling somewhat restrained by that space: our wonderful fellows post there, and I feel as though increasingly my posts there should be tied to my ed tech work at the College. But I want to write about other things, too — sports, music, politics, parenthood, history — and don’t want to feel I have to think twice before doing so.  So here I am.

Bloviate it is… for now.  Not only am I hostile to the concept personal branding, but I also have the good fortune of sucking at it.

We’re midway through the season, and I’m having a blast. For the most part, the kids are awful. They suck big time. They suck so bad that more than half the time they don’t even know that there’s a game going on. They suck so bad that they aren’t embarrassed when they purposefully shoot the ball into their own goals.

And yet, they’re actually getting better. They’re dribbling more confidently. On occasion, they’ll even pass the ball. It’s pretty amazing to see a 6 year old girl look up, see her teammate wide open across the field in front of the goal, and to watch her kick it to him. It doesn’t even matter that instead of shooting the ball on goal, he picked it up and went and got an orange wedge. It was a moment.

The improvement and comfort they’re developing with a ball at their feet means that there’s actually some space opened up for myself and the other coaches to do some teaching. The overarching goal of this enterprise is fun. Next in line is to develop in the kids an appreciation of the game. If they can get some skills out of it as well: score.

So, imagine my surprise when during last week’s game I felt a trickle of competitiveness flow through my veins. We played against a team that has a kid who should be playing with 8 or 10 year-olds. He destroyed us. He had 10 goals before half-time. Every time he touched the ball, he dribbled it around our team and scored. Most of our players didn’t care. Our best goal scorer turned to me and said, “there’s no way we can beat them. He’s way gooder than me.” Then he called the other team a “bunch of dummies” and sat down.

Yet, we have one player who’s shown an affinity for playing determined defense. This kid rarely smiles and talks very little. But he listens, he watches, and he loves to take the ball from other kids. After realizing that the coach of the other team was never doing to take their little Messi out of the game, or even say something to him like, “pass the ball to your teammates… you don’t need a twelfth goal,” I decided I would put my best defender on this kid to see if we could stop him. I instructed our kid to just stay in front of him; that’s all he had to do, all he should do. Our kid looked at me and nodded. He was determined.

He did his best. He really did. The stud only scored four more goals the rest of the game, and our defender got his fair share of take-aways. But on one play towards the end of the game our kid just plowed this dude. It wasn’t dirty, he just played through the ball, knocked Pele Jr. on his butt, and then rolled over his head. I realize that description doesn’t make it sound clean, but it was. That Ronaldinho went crying to the sidelines doesn’t make it a dirty play.

I was so proud of our kid, of all of our kids. Not because he hurt another player, but because he totally spilled it in pursuit of an unobtainable goal: stopping Lebron James. The other kid learned a lesson too: this is exactly what happens to highly-skilled players. Probably better he learned it now than later. And I hope that other coach was paying attention, because he put his own player in that position.

Jesus Christ. Am I totally nuts? Is this what it’s coming to? They’re SIX! I look forward and see my middle age filled with repeated efforts to calibrate my passion and competitiveness and love of a game well-played to moments that require restraint, good graces, and perspective. I don’t want to be the coach screaming on the sideline at a bunch of 12 year-old girls.

But I get it. I really do.

While I’d like to think that I sound like Otis Rush when I agonize over quitting Facebook, truth is, I probably sound a lot more like Jack Twist.

I find Facebook’s well-documented privacy shenanigans completely abhorrent, and, like Nancy Baym, I admire friends and acquaintances who have up and left. I’ve been trying to better understand my own rather visceral reactions to all of this and why I’m so hesitant to quit. Many who have left are fine with Twitter being their primary mode of online social connection. I’m not, and here’s why.

On Facebook, I’m connected to people I grew up with, went to Hebrew school or college with, to family members and to friends I’ve made in adulthood. They’re teachers, lawyers, journalists, professors, writers, nurses, doctors, engineers, social workers, artists, musicians, coaches, students, business folk, congressional aides, soldiers, and retirees. They’re Jewish, Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Atheist, secular humanist, and there’s a few who’ve dabbled in Santaria. Many, but not all, are to the left of center, and most are to the right of me. These are folks from every step of my life, and I feel a lot of warmth in that space. When I post anecdotes about or photos of my kids, people comment or like or share stories of their own. When I post interesting things I’ve read or watched or listened to, people thank me, or pass along what I’ve shared. It’s a validating space, not least of all because of the bonds of affection I share with these folks. At one point or another they’ve all been non-digital “friends” of mine; we all occupy a space in each others’ memories. I don’t really have the time — or even, in many cases, the inclination — to put in the effort to stay in close touch with every one of them. But each I feel warmth towards, and think they probably feel it towards me too; ultimately, it’s nice to share an interest in each others lives. While it’s possible I’d be able to recreate this without Facebook, I think it’s doubtful. It wouldn’t be a tragedy to lose, but I’d miss it.

On Twitter, I’m connected to people I know mostly through work; either through CUNY or edtech/Wordpress or scholarly connections. Though I tweet personal things quite often, this is primarily a professional network. With a few notable exceptions, the people who talk to me on Twitter (those who @ me) are people I’ve known outside of the digital realm. I’ve had no shortage of folks whom I’ve spoken to on Twitter who’ve never acknowledged my presence, and while I don’t take it personally, I do find it kind of rude in an abstract way. When someone eng@ges me, I try my best to respond.

My Twitter network, though larger, has nowhere near the ethnic, religious, or class diversity of my Facebook network. When I put out a question, generally people who are my friends outside of Twitter are the ones who respond. I know that’s not the experience of many of my Tweeps, but it’s been mine. The bonds of affection that characterize my Facebook network are rarely present for me on Twitter; when they do appear in a shared story or a knowing quip, they’re especially noteworthy. My Twitter network does inspire and challenge and inform me more than my Facebook network. But at the same time, if I disagree with something or try to engage someone on an idea, I am almost never satisfied by the exchange.

Someone (whom I’ve met and like very much) retweeted the other day something along the lines of “Facebook is for who you went to high school with; Twitter is for who you WISH you went to high school with.” Gotta say, this is one of the more obnoxious things I’ve read. I don’t like all the people I went to high school with; but I don’t hate the fact that I went to high school with them. I am what I am because of what was. I feel like there’s a lot of this kind of snobbiness and self-righteousness and posturing in my Twitter network (says a poster who’s prone to snobby self-righteousness). I know I’m free to construct the network I want to have, but since Twitter is primarily a professional space, I feel I mostly have to construct the network I need to have. There are certain people I follow because they say smart things, even if I don’t think I’d really like hanging out with them. That calculus isn’t really present for me on Facebook, which filters I think into my overall affection for the network. Twitter can be a warm place, but it’s not always: there are people in my network who’ve displayed serious anxiety about a decision or the arc of their lives, and who’ve been met mostly with silence. On Facebook when this happens, I tend to see an outpouring of support. Twitter is great, but it’s a wholly different experience from the one I have on Facebook, and couldn’t really fill the gap that would be created if I deleted my account.

I keep telling myself that the next Facebook privacy fuck up will send me packing. In reality, I just don’t know. Facebook, you suck. I’m gonna lock my info down, but I don’t know if I can quit you.

We were very unlucky in that we could not get the live stream to work.  But we’re happy to be able to bring Clay’s talk to you now:

Performing Diasporas is centered around artists-in-residence — in 2010-2011, Maya Lilly; in 2011-2012, Randy Weston; and, both years, Mahayana Landowne — each of whom’s work engages questions of group and individual identity formation. These artists will perform throughout their residencies, and also lead and participate in workshops. Much of the programming, however, will be directed at incoming students. The first year experience for the next two years will revolve in large part around exploration of the project theme: the Freshman Text will be about diasporic identity, the artists-in-residence will perform at August’s Convocation, and significant components of Freshman Seminar and the curricula of selected Learning Communities will be devoted to the theme.

As part of the Steering Committee planning this project, I’m especially excited by a few particulars. Too often the administrative labor of higher education falls into silos whose work is narrowly focused and lacks programmatic coordination with other initiatives at the College. This project is structured to counter that impulse by drawing several partners into a collaborative effort to inject consideration of both the arts and the themes of identity and diaspora into the curriculum. Obviously, this will most directly impact our first year students. But it’s also good for everyone at the College for the various moving administrative parts to find synergies. The project will raise the profile of BPAC, inject the first year experience with a variety of new ideas, and dovetails nicely with Dean Jeff Peck’s Global Studies Initiative.

The project also will also help lead Blogs@Baruch into its next phase. Last Fall, we began supporting Freshman Seminar. 1200 first year students wrote more than 6500 blog posts to 60 weblogs, all of which were aggregated ultimately into a single space. FRO Blogging was a success, if solely because we were able to pull it off with little time to plan. Feedback from last Fall’s students and the Peer Mentors who led the seminars suggested the desire for more creative leeway and fewer required blog posts (students were expected to author at least six reflections on enrichment workshops they attended over the course of the term). The feedback also showed appreciation for the social component of the project; students used their blogging to get to know each other and to form community, something that’s always a challenge at a commuter campus like Baruch.

We’ve redesigned FRO Blogging to incorporate this feedback and to intersect with the goals of Performing Diasporas. There will be three specific components to FRO Blogging in Fall 2010:

• Students will be required to write blog posts at the beginning and end of the semester reflecting on their adjustment to college and, in the middle of the semester, will post monologues about their own backgrounds that they develop with their Peer Mentors (who will receive training). Selected monologues will be shaped and then performed by professional actors at an end-of-the-semester event: “Baruch’s Voices.” In Spring 2011, students who are interested in performing their own monologues will workshop them and then perform at a series of Coffee Houses.
• Each seminar will be asked to develop its blog over the course of the Fall semester. We will push this process along by crafting prompts that are distributed weekly and that encourage students to reflect upon and share their own stories. Peer Mentors will guide the process, with assistance, and students will be nudged, but not required. At the end of the semester, the most fully developed sites will be recognized with an award. This is an experiment in voluntary buy-in, and we realize that student investment of effort will be uneven. Yet, the constraints of a non-credit course make this approach necessary, and the goal is less to have students develop polished public spaces than to get their feet wet thinking critically about how to present artistic and intellectual material on the open web.
• Finally, I’m excited to note that we’ll be rolling out BuddyPress this Fall, which will add a social networking layer to Blogs@Baruch, and afford students additional opportunities to connect with and get to know one another.

Ultimately, what I like most about this project is that it treats our students as creators and makers of knowledge, not merely as consumers. Baruch students are among the most interesting students in the world, and yet few of them seem to realize this (in fact, that’s one of the things that makes them interesting). Performing Diasporas, because it will draw our students inside productive processes and creates multiple opportunities for them to see and share the art in their own lives, is going to be something special to watch.

The potential answers are vast. They include, but are not limited to, extending the classroom by tying together face-to-face meetings; creating opportunities for the social consideration of course material; imagining a range of audiences; staging larger assignments; inviting and providing a platform for students to easily create and share work that is visual and/or aural in nature; providing a tool for nurturing, reinforcing, and tapping into the sense of community in a course; and, of course, easily sharing course materials with students.

Faculty who are relatively new to teaching with technology usually design course sites that take advantage of one or maybe two of the possibilities above. So, I have to give it up for Mikhail Gershovich and his students, who are absolutely killing it on the course blog for “Topics in Film: Fear, Anxiety, and Paranoia.” I’ve tried not to blog about this course blog because I don’t want to be seen as buttering up the boss. But when students showed up this week for a presentation dressed as zombies and attacked one of their classmates, I simply had to bite the bullet and write about this awesomeness.

They’re using their blog for a variety of purposes:

First, Mikhail uses it to share information with his students so that they can easily access course readings and find their way to a wide range of required and recommended films, compiled from disparate locations.

Second, the students are posting in a rotation to very specific prompts that he spent much time designing, and which mix an emphasis on close readings of text and film, allow students to write to reflect, and encourage students to find visual representations of their ideas.

Third, Mikhail has very much constructed the blog as a kind of social glue, tying students together by encouraging all to get Gravatars (though only some have… I’m surprised Dr. G hasn’t docked their grades), to comment regularly, and to write freely.

Fourth, the students will be using the blog to develop and present remixes or re-enactments of short sections of films they’ve engaged this semester, and will write to reflect upon how going inside the productive process impacts their perspectives on both the themes of the course, and the art of film overall.

So, kudos to this group: this is a ton of work they’ve taken on, and they’ve done so openly, creatively, and collaboratively. Mikhail has taken advantage of various support services in the most productive way, from the library’s subscription to the film repository Swank.com, to his Twitter network (where he crowd sourced ideas for films, readings, and discussion), to his awesome educational technologist — me — who he’s consulted on both technology and assignment design. We’re lucky to have their model to build upon.

I encourage you all to check out the site, and to scare the students by leaving some spooky comments.

*note: Jim Groom posted about this course blog simultaneously.

A variety of constituencies at the College have begun using the system for a range of internal and external communication. We have some fantastic librarians at the Newman Library, and they’re using Blogs@Baruch for a Reference Blog, an Idea Lab, and a Graduate Research Blog. They’ve also begun using CommentPress to discuss a Library Planning document. The Institute shares many interests and goals with the College’s librarians, and we have so much to learn from them. I’m particularly interested in collaborating with them to explore the role of technology and self-publishing in cultivating digital literacies among our students. This semester’s conversations were a great start.

The Baruch College Honors Program has begun using Blogs@Baruch this semester for a number of projects. They’re now hosting their homepage on the site, taking advantage of WordPress’ elegant content management features, and offering the staff an easy way to stay in contact with students (current and prospective). Also, first year Baruch Scholars have been given their own blogs to cultivate over their careers here, and their posts aggregate here. This is envisioned as a kind-of low stakes eportfolio project: give the students the space, and encourage (but don’t require) them to explore it. Another interesting Honors publishing initiative is the Change For Kids blog, where students working as reading tutors in a number of New York City elementary schools are blogging about their experiences, taking advantage of the opportunity to collaboratively reflect on and work through the challenges of working with children. Kudos to the Baruch Honors Program!

Frank Fletcher, the Executive Director of the Graduate Programs at the Zicklin School of Business, has been spearheading the business school’s move towards self-publishing. Frank has been encouraging his colleagues in Zicklin to explore a variety of initiatives on Blogs@Baruch over the past six months, and is now publishing to Lexington 24:25, where he’ll highlights developments in the MBA program and “identify emerging needs and trends in management education.” We look forward to supporting Zicklin, particularly in their efforts to connect Baruch students with potential employers and alumni.

Three journals are now hosted on Blogs@Baruch. Lexington Universal Circuit: A Journal of Economics and Politics is edited and authored by Baruch undergrads, launched last month (see details here), and we look forward to seeing that project continue to evolve. Dollars & Sense, which used to publish the selected journalism of Baruch students once a year as a beautiful (but costly to produce) magazine, now publishes on a rolling basis, for free, using Blogs@Baruch. While I myself miss the bound hard copy version, and see this transition as a microcosm of the larger troubles facing journalism, I’m happy that the faculty members who oversee the project– Josh Mills and Andrea Gabor– see the opportunities that are made available by self-publishing. For instance, student work produced in the fall doesn’t need to wait until the spring for publication; a wider range of work can be featured; and it’s now easier to share the work of our students with a much broader audience. Finally, iMagazine, the journal of student writing overseen by the Baruch College Writing Center, is in the process of migrating to Blogs@Baruch; stay tuned for a launch early next calendar year at this url.

There are other ongoing initiatives: the journalism department is using Blogs@Baruch to plan a new The East 20s, a food news site being created by the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch, and to serve the multimedia reporting of its students. The Baruch College Teaching Blog remains active. And, well, we can even include Cac.ophony.org as a Blogs@Baruch initiative; our fellows have simply been killing it this semester.

These are just a few of the most exciting non course-based uses of Blogs@Baruch; there are others in the planning stages that promise to take advantage of the power of this publishing platform to create unique opportunities for members of the Baruch community to interact with each other and audiences beyond the campus. One is our plan to support selected student bloggers who’ll be tasked with chronicling their lives at the College for a broader audience. I’ve often said that we have the most interesting students in the world, but few of them know just how interesting they are. Blogs@Baruch, by providing multiple paths into the work our students and faculty are doing, makes the case more powerfully than I ever could.

WPMu continues to provide a flexible platform for our faculty members to structure and explore online communication and composition in their courses. Course blogs this semester have been used to aggregate individual student portfolios in a Do-It-Yourself Publishing course, for students to share and comment upon Shakespeare Scene Studies, to blog about journalism internships (password protected), to write about food and sustainable agriculture, and to show off their multi-media reporting. Students have debated current events on a blog devoted to reading and discussing the New York Times (password protected), blogged about blogging as journalists, and added stories to Writing New York. Some faculty members have been using Blogs@Baruch as their course management system, while others have used it to try to create public writing opportunities for their students.

For a full listing of course blogs, see our “projects” page.

One project in particular embodied the excitement some faculty members and students bring to their work on Blogs@Baruch. Professor Shelly Eversley, in the English Department, had her American Literature students produce pod and vodcasts that analyzed texts they had encountered over the course of the semester. Buoyed by Cogdog’s “The Fifty Tools”, I did an hour in class on free digital story telling tools (including Voice Thread, Yodio, Gabcast, and Podcast People), and also gave some advice on how to construct a story that balanced narrative, analysis, and style. The students produced amazing work, which they collected here in advance of their voting for the initial American Literature Podcast Awards (the ALPs). They ended the semester with an awards ceremony, and have continued to post their thoughts about the class to the blog in the week since.

Here’s two of my favorite videos from the class:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Prof. Eversley’s project exemplifies the useful energy that multimedia tools can help students invest in their coursework. These projects are not substitutes for the critical engagement with a text or a canon that some might argue can only be attained through writing an essay; rather, they are additional paths towards that engagement. These students were excited about showing off their work, used the city as a laboratory and an archive, helped each other master the technology, and showed deep engagement with their chosen texts. This is good teaching and learning, and we’re happy to support any faculty member who challenges herself and her students to use a variety of tools and literacies in their effort to produce knowledge.

Kudos to all of our intrepid faculty and their students for providing us with yet more examples of innovative pedagogy on Blogs@Baruch. We look forward to Spring 2010, and in particular two film courses that will be taught on the system. Blogfessors, come on down!

As I noted a couple of months ago, we had severe constraints in launching this project, so we focused primarily on the technological implications of getting it off the ground. We didn’t have sufficient time to either develop a well thought-out curriculum or to work with the Peer Mentors who oversaw the sections to help them pedagogically manage the work of their students. We might have had we gone with a pilot project, but for various reasons that suggestion was scuttled, and we proceeded full-bore.

These caveats aside, I think the project was a resounding success. It’s generated a staggering amount of data and also some important questions for us to address, and also helped us see what’s possible with more thoughtful design and oversight.

More than 6200 posts have been authored by first year students and aggregated into a single space. The vast majority of these posts are student reactions to a variety of “Enrichment Workshops” that they were required to attend. As you might imagine, many of the posts are more descriptive than analytical, and some come across as check boxes to be completed on the way to a requirement. The best posts, however, evidence deep and enthusiastic engagement with the workshops or with other elements of transitioning to life at Baruch.

We’ve already begun to discuss with our colleagues Mark Spergel and Shadia Sachedina how we can encourage posts that students are excited to write and also to read and comment upon. We plan to come up with a range of models and prompts that students can choose from that intersect with some of our broader goals for the project: cultivating digital literacy in our students (I plan to talk and think more with Boone Gorges about this), easing their social and intellectual transition to college, and helping them more nimbly and thoughtfully integrate social media into academic work. I envision a series of assignments that build towards these curricular goals, while also generating the kind of shared reflection that our colleagues in Student Life want to see. I also think we have the great opportunity to show off what interesting lives our students lead. This is a unique institution, and blogging in Freshman Seminar can show the world just what Baruch College and CUNY are about.

The Peer Mentors are key to this improved design.  We’ll expand the training that they get so they’re better prepared to guide their charges. Next semester, four sections of Freshman Seminar are running, so we finally get to run that pilot project we originally envisioned, though with the implications of scaling the thing up already known.  In the summer we’ll likely do some outreach directly to incoming students before school starts so that they are aware of this component of Freshman Seminar, and can hit the ground blogging.

As we plan a new design, we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to make sense of all of the data we’ve collected. It’s difficult, though not impossible, to design an assessment of data that’s been collected without assessment forefront in mind. Ryan Androsiglio, a psychologist in the Baruch Counseling Center, is helping us look at the project to see what questions can reasonably be asked of it.

We were able to perform a much less formal assessment of the program by soliciting feedback from Peer Mentors and First Year Students themselves. Both groups were between lukewarm and mildly-positive in their feedback, and each desired more leeway in what was blogged about and how.  The Peer Mentors I spoke with were quite clear that the strongest component of the project was the social cohesion it encouraged among the students in their seminars.

For a commuter campus like Baruch, FRO blogging has become a powerful tool simply because it creates more opportunities to interact. To encourage this, we’re seriously considering integrating BuddyPress into FRO 2010.

The social benefits of FRO blogging are already crystal clear; we now need to work on defining reasonable curricular goals, and a plan to implement them.

Mikhail Gershovich accepts the Mike Ribaudo Award at the 8th Annual CUNY IT Conference

Two events over the last ten days drew into sharp focus what we have accomplished and also some of the challenges we face. At the 8th Annual CUNY IT Conference, the Schwartz Institute was awarded the Michael Ribaudo Award for Innovation in Technology. Mikhail, Suzanne, Tom, and I were recognized along with administrative teams from John Jay and the CUNY First project, as well as our good friend Matt Gold, Project Director for the CUNY Academic Commons. The Commons is like a sister project to Blogs@Baruch, since we’re using the same software, and we share ideas, labor, and a philosophy about what support for technology at the university level should entail.

It was an honor to be recognized for our innovations and, especially, to share the honor with Matt, since it signaled to the broader CUNY community that the work we’re undertaking is not only viable, but forward-looking and vital to the work of the University. At the risk of sounding like an ingrate, though, I noted that the certificates we received read that this was an “Information Technology” award. I’ve made the point before, and will make it again: instructional technology is not information technology. This is actually acknowledged in how the Ribaudo is awarded, as it’s split between the two areas (even if the split is not represented on the certificate). This is more than a semantic argument: we need to encourage our communities to understand the differences and to constantly reexamine how the University’s information technology architecture relates to and interacts with the deployment of technology in the service of teaching, learning, and scholarship.

It’s always nice to get an award, and last week brought hearty congratulations from inside and outside the Baruch community. In the midst of these pats on the back, however, I learned a little bit more about the difference between information technology and instructional technology. At approximately 7pm on Wednesday evening I happened to look at one of our blogs, and saw the dreaded:

(What follows is a bit technical: click here to jump to the rub).

The error appeared on all subdirectory blogs, while the main blog was completely white. I logged into the command line, verified that MYSQL was running, and saw that the load on our server was fine. The documentation I was able to find suggested either a MYSQL problem or a plugin conflict; I deleted all plugins, with no improvement. Now, instead of the “Error Establishing a Database Connection” I was getting what geeks refer to as the “White Screen of Death” across the entire installation. Having exhausted pretty much the extent of my command line knowledge, I sent out emails to our contacts at BCTC, and waited for a response.

A couple hours later, I was contacted by a sysadmin at BCTC; he had gamely returned to work on his way home from the gym to take a look at our server. He immediately noticed that the directory that holds Blogs@Baruch was about 98% full. We knew that we were approaching space limits, but I had (mis)calculated that we could make it to the end of the semester (when we’ll be moving the entire installation over to a new server). I was puzzled, however, because we had this issue once before and it didn’t cause an outage– it just caused an error in our database backups that resolved as soon as we opened up space. I hoped opening space would clear up our problem, but it did not.

We both thought that the database needed to be repaired, but neither of us were comfortable issuing the repair commands. The admin at BCTC contacted MYSQL, and got assistance repairing and then restarting MYSQL. 1 am, no improvement. We’d have to wait until morning.

At 6 am I took another look at the server to see if I had missed anything, and began to respond to users who were emailing about the site. I posted a query to our premium support forum with Automattic describing the problem, and got a quick response from Donncha, the lead developer of WPMu. Unfortunately, my question included a distracting error that I found in the log that was caused by a bad Phpinfo file I had put on our server (in my haste I wrote the file in Text Edit at home, which put additional characters into the file that I wasn’t able to see). Donncha thought we might have been hacked, and asked me to check our .htaccess files, which looked ok. I caught my mistake, and explained it (along with a note apologizing for not being a system administrator). Apparently I wasn’t clear, because Donncha kept pursuing the PHP error… we weren’t communicating well. He suggested I use error_log() to track down where the PHP problem was.

In the meantime, emails and phone calls from users were flowing in, and I did my best to explain to as many as possible that we were investigating the problem and should be live again soon. Internally, though, I wasn’t so sure; we had exhausted our knowledge and the knowledge in the free forums, and the premium forum to which I was posting wasn’t yielding results. Jim Groom suggested we contact Ron and Andrea Rennick, who I refer to as the “WPMu Wonder Couple,” to see if they might be able to help us out.

Within 3 hrs of Jim’s suggestion, BCTC had vetted Ron and granted him temporary access to our server; he located and fixed the problem in about 20 minutes. In the meantime, Barry Abrahamson, who runs the servers for WordPress.com and also posts to the premium support forum, had offered to do the same.

Turns out the problem was one that I had caused while trying to fix the space issue. When I deleted the plugins in mu-plugins, I failed to delete the Supercache file that sits outside of the plugins folder, inside of wp-content. I also deleted the existing cached pages. Ron concluded that:

Once you ran out of disk space, pages expiring in supercache were being refreshed as empty files. Eventually nearly all of your pages were cached as empty files. I disabled supercache by renaming advanced-cache.php in wp-content. MU checks for the file and includes it in the processing if it exists.

He later added:

I did some testing locally and reproduced the white screen by deleting the contents of the cached version of the index.

Here’s the rub: we got through it. Ultimately this was two small problems masquerading as a big one. We ran out of space, then I failed to properly disable a powerful plugin running on our system, which disabled the entire install. We were down less than 20hrs, and that was only because I wasn’t systematic enough to pick up on the way Supercache works. To a certain extent, something like this was inevitable. All sites go down, even the Big G. It’s the risk you run when you work online, and reasonable end users can accept it– it helps if those running the site aspire towards transparency.

The outage confirmed my belief in open source applications, and particularly the communal ethos that (often) animates them. Three friends: Boone Gorges, Jim, and Zach Davis, offered assistance as soon as they learned of the problem, and moral support because they’ve each been in similar situations. The offers of hands-on help were reassuring, but I didn’t really need them because I was already in contact with the three most knowledgeable WPMu people in the world.

The outage also reminded me that being able to type stuff at the command line and get stuff in return does not make one a system administrator. I’m a humble educational technologist, and I depend on information technology to get my work done. When the lines are blurred– and I blurred them here more out of necessity than conceit– trouble may ensue. Had I been able to look holistically at the problem and troubleshoot it methodically, I probably could have caught the error. But inexperience and the pressure of supporting 3k+ users clouded my vision and convinced me the solution to the problem was out of my reach. These are valuable lessons to carry forward on this project.

Within an hour of Blogs@Baruch going backup, Baruch College’s enews arrived in my mailbox, containing a congratulations to the Institute on the Ribaudo Award. I clicked on a link and landed happily at our pretty little homepage, which was humming nicely along. When I closed my laptop, I still managed to feel pretty good about the week.

PS: I’ve learned that the following cultural artifact can help one oversee an enterprise publishing platform:

The LUC was founded by Michael Pinto-Fernandes and Sarwat Joarder, two Baruch undergrads who have worked tirelessly to get their journal off the ground, recruiting writers and editors from Baruch and other campuses. They’ve been an absolute joy to work with, and have thought deeply about everything from the design of their journal, to the intellectual property considerations of online publishing, to recruiting and managing a stable of writers, to integration and growth within the Baruch community.  The writing on the site is serious, thoughtful, well-sourced and solidly argued. Currently, there are 5 pieces published, and you’ll likely find much to both agree and disagree with.

The LUC — when combined with the recent transition of Dollars & Sense and the pending move of iMagazine to our system– marks the beginning of a new phase of self-publishing at Baruch College, where Blogs@Baruch supports members of our community as they make their unmediated voices heard. While I’ve worked closely with the LUC crew on the creation of their journal, and helped them think through both the implications and mechanics of online publishing, we’ve always agreed that the content is theirs, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s Left or Right, whether it’s right or wrong.  Therein lies one of the best arguments behind Blogs@Baruch: this is a tool to help our students thoughtfully navigate the world of web, and to do so on their own terms.

So, congratulations, Michael, Sarwat, and the rest of the LUC crew: we look forward to following the LUC as it grows (and we might chime in with a comment or two), and we commend you on your ambition!

Also: as always, Lessig provides a captivating model for integrating text, images, and art into a presentation.

The room features 24 new large screen iMacs, loaded with the latest productivity software. A quarter of the machines have dv-decks, a dozen have microphones, all have nice Sony headphones, and students can arrange to borrow HD cameras for their assignments. The faculty workstation controls a beautiful projector and two flat panel displays, which can be tuned show cable news or the screen of any computer. JBL speakers in the ceiling provide terrific sound.

What struck Tom and I most, however, was how the space was laid out, with workstations on the exterior and a seminar table in the middle. Talia’s post last week wondered about the impact of computers on the writing classroom. Space was conceived in Studio H in such a way that everyone can see what everyone else is doing… there’s simply no hiding. The class can move from the workstations to the table for discussions, editing sessions, or workshops. This flexible approach to classroom design is terrific, and reflects the goal of the Journalism Department to create a newsroom-like atmosphere for the students.

In a conversation with Vera, we imagined an assignment where students could watch a YouTube clip of a breaking news story — a press conference, perhaps — and then attack it like a newsroom would on deadline. This is not a new assignment idea, but Studio H allows faculty members to more realistically mimic the conditions of a news room, with noise, movement, openness, connectivity, chaos, and even a large digital clock counting down to deadline. What a great example of how space can create pedagogical opportunity.

Congrats to the Baruch Journalism Department and its students on this wonderful new addition. We have a long history of supporting the department’s blogging and multimedia reporting initiatives, and their students do fantastic work. We look forward to seeing and helping publish the work that Studio H helps makes possible.

Baruch Freshmen at Convocation, September 2009. Click to see photo in its original location.

Yowser.

Each Seminar is directed by a Peer Mentor, a talented upper level Baruch student responsible for helping newcomers adjust to life at Baruch. The seminars meet every other week, and Freshpersons are required to attend lectures, panels, exhibits, seminars, and trainings, distributed across six “enrichment” areas over the course of the term. Then they’re supposed to blog about their experiences, and discuss them when they meet with their classmates.

Launching the project was a bit of bear, as we had to create the blogs, get the users registered, tie the whole deal together, and give some training to the Peer Mentors, who are crucial to the project. Ultimately, I created a custom theme (built on Carrington Blog), with certain core components to which each section would have access– a List of Seminars and Peer Mentors, a Guide to Blogging for Freshmen (produced by the Office of Student Affairs, who directs FRO), a description of the six enrichment areas, and a Google Calendar that displays upcoming events. I then created a Mother Blog, which syndicates posts from across the sixty sections of FRO, using the FeedWordPress plugin. The Mother Blog collects and stores all of the posts in one place, allowing faculty and administrators to look in on the writing that’s happening in FRO. Students are thus contributing to small discussions in their seminars, and also to a broader discussion among all Freshmen.

Thus far, they’ve been writing quite willingly. In the fewer than three weeks since this thing was launched, we’ve aggregated about 900 posts; at the pace we’re going, we should reach well more than 4000 unique posts by the end of the semester. That doesn’t even begin to address the commenting, which has varied in intensity across the individual blogs. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to mirror comments between the original location of the post and the space where it is republished… if we did, and we hope to be able to do that soon, the level of dynamism would increase.

Needless to say, we’re looking at an awful lot of writing, and we’re trying to make sense of it in a few ways. We’ve created categories on the Mother Blog for each of the six enrichment areas so that posts directly pertaining to them can be easily sorted. This will allow the two administrators who oversee FRO– Mark Spergel, the Director of Student Orientation and Freshman Year Incentive, and Shadia Sachedina, the Associate Director of Student Life– to get student perspectives on the wide range of extra-curricular programs the school offers. Further, simple searches will allow certain segments of the Baruch community to see what students are saying about them. For instance, many of the early posts offered student perspective on tours of the library. Our librarians have already begun searching for “library” and “library tour” on the FRO blog to read student responses. Several blog posts have engaged Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, the Freshman text.

Other searches hold the potential to help identify students with like interests: “photography,” “history,” and “football” all offer returns. Such a use of the FRO Mother Blog suggests another function that this project can play, perhaps more effectively in future iterations: social networking. As a commuter campus, we constantly struggle to help our students see themselves as part of a community, and FRO attempts to address that tension. Integrating Blogs@Baruch into FRO makes that attempt much stronger, as students can more easily find, connect, and engage with their classmates through our platform. Next year, I’d love to get BuddyPress working in this project to foreground the social networking component… but, one step at a time.

At the end of the term, we’ll have, easily collected and archived, multiple writing samples from the majority of incoming students. With some more thinking and organization, this holds great potential for assessment, integration into writing instruction, early intervention, and assistance for ESL students. Ultimately, this project allows us the opportunity to further the core missions of Blogs@Baruch: increasing the amount and variety of writing that our students do, and nurturing critical thinking about the use of digital tools throughout the Baruch College community. Given the hectic nature of our launch this year, we weren’t able to spend enough time thinking collectively about the general education opportunities embedded in this project. I had argued that we should do a pilot with 20% of the sections so that we could be sure to more closely support our users and think more intensively about the implications of what we’re doing, but for various reasons, a small-scale pilot wasn’t feasible. But when we do this again, we know that the canvas works, what the challenges are in the mechanics of the thing, and how to improve our planning. We’ll be able to make a more significant investment in helping the Peer Mentors better understand the possibilities and implications of doing college work on the open web, crucial knowledge that they can then pass on to all Freshpersons.

Here are some other pics from the last few weeks.

The Boy is eating, sleeping, and doing that other thing that babies do like a champ.  He gets fussy in the evenings, but is generally pretty easy to soothe.  We’re much more relaxed with him than we were with his didi at this age, and I think that at least some part of his agreeable behavior is attributable to our confidence.

It has been a challenge managing Kaya’s enthusiasm about her little brother.  She’s unquestionably positive about the whole endeavor, but a bit antsy about where she fits in.  She is also suffering from an extreme case of listenitis.  The most common refrain around our parts is: “Kaya.  Kaya.  Kaya.  KAYA!”

In the good moments, we get family cuddles and smiles:

In the less good moments, we get grand collisions of fussiness (hit play):

For the most part, though, she’s helpful, and we try to remember that she’s doing her best to adjust her expectations of just how much attention she can expect from her mommy and daddy.  She’s as assertive as ever; if I promised to play with her, and I’m trying to calm the Robester down, she’ll let me know that I made a promise and, dammit, we’re gonna have that game.  That’s good for her, good for us, and ultimately its good for Roby.

I’m psyched to see how our family dynamic evolves as Roby becomes more sentient.

In childhood, many Bengalis take on two names that follow them through life. The bhalo nam, or “good name,” is the name that appears on legal documents.  The dak nam, or “nickname,” is used in more casual settings.

Roby’s sister, his mother, and his mother’s two sisters only have bhalo nams, perhaps because their names are so naturally cute that they’re totally dak-like.  Though “Roby” is similarly short and sweet, we have been rehearsing potential dak nams for the young ‘un.

Following are a few contenders.  And, forgive the scatological nature of some; the boy just doesn’t give us much to work with:

• Gaseous Clay
• Farty McCarty
• Mr. Poopy Pants
• Belchy McBurpenstein
• Robespierre
• Roby Dooby Do-Da-Day
• Roby Robe Robi
• The Robester
• Robe Bryant
• Baby Brudda
• Hank

Any other suggestions?  In the meantime, here’s a bunch of recent pics:

Warning: this may not be of interest to those unrelated or unimpressed by the simple feats of a 1 week-old.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The name “Roby” (pronounced “Row-bee”) is derived from the Bangla pronunciation of Ravi, which means “sun.”  We settled on it because of its compatibility with his didi’s name (”Kaya and Roby” seemed to us to naturally roll off the tongue), and because it feels both familiar and unique at once. It’s also close to the name “Ruby,” who was a cherished member of the Waltzer family (my grandfather’s brother, and Kaya’s cousin Jasper’s great-grandfather). We had some disagreement over the way it would be spelled– momma wanted an “i” while daddy wanted a “y.”  Ultimately, momma relented, agreeing to spell it any way I wanted… although when I suggested we spell it “H-a-n-k,” she pulled that offer off the table.

Needless to say, we’re ecstatic, and looking forward to the challenge of managing and raising DushtuThey instead of Dushtumay.

Here’s some of The Boy’s first photos:

Stephen Francoeur

(By the way, I published this through an email to Posterous).

((tag: online-publishing, webtools))

Posted via email from Luke’s posterous

LW add from inside Cacophony: I had to come into the Cacophony post to clean up the links and image… seems as though keeping the html formatting and attachments elegant through the push might take some work.  Further, it looks as though the tags didn’t talk to the Cacophony tag function.  So, the push is janky… but the potential is still there.

Excuse me, I have to go put the crib together.  In the meantime, 1 year old Kaya just about sums it up:

She’s now at an age that I vividly remember, and attending her dance recital last month made clear to me that watching Kaya proceed through her childhood will be accompanied by memories of my own.  I’ve thought much about that dance recital over the past few weeks.  It provoked in me an odd mixture of emotions with which I’ve yet to adequately come to grips– I was so proud that she was performing something she worked hard on for months, and impressed by the level of support the community was showing for these girls who strutted their stuff confidently across the stage.  At the same time, I was horrified by the sexualization of pre-pubescent girls evident in many of the performances, and bothered by what I saw as an emphasis on showiness and performance rather than on craft and enjoyment.  While the event was pleasant on the whole, there was simply no need for the expensive, ornate costumes sported by each group.  I know, I know… they’re just kids, let them have their fun.  But that’s my point.  I feel that the dance would have been much more meaningful and perhaps even more fun with a dozen girls in black leotards stripped of the myriad cultural references that signified to the audience so much adorable cuteness.  The kids are naturally adorably cute without all that stuff… shed it and let them show what they’ve learned, for crying out loud!  Of course… I couldn’t have been prouder of Kaya, and tears streamed down my cheeks throughout her entire performance.

Another component of the recital that bothered me was that such a high percentage of the kids were white.  This is nothing against you, my potential white reader, and certainly nothing against white kids, but rather a byproduct of my strong preference for diverse communal experiences.  The mixer last night was majority minority, which was surprising because the state statistics show that the school is 80%+ white.  P and I remembered that there had also been a mixer in the morning, and thought maybe most of the white families had attended that rather than the evening event?   Who knows.  Maybe white people are less likely to let their kids stay up that late.

The school serves close to 600 students from pre-K to 2nd grade, and was impressive… art and music rooms support vibrant programs, a new playground was just completed for the pre-k and kindergartners, and the library even had a half dozen iMacs.  My elementary school had none of these things (well, we did have a great new playground, which Mrs. Waltzer helped put together, even if she wouldn’t allow me to go on the monkey bars), but I loved it then and remember it fondly now because of the kinds of people I was exposed to as a Verlinden Little Red (school pictured at left).  I had some good teachers and developed academic skills; but more importantly, I was exposed to a variety of types of kids and families and ways of looking at the world, which shaped me just as much as learning how to read or add and subtract.

Kaya’s about to become a Bulldog (the mascot of her elementary school), and I hope, hope, hope that when she looks back upon her own elementary school experience as an adult she feels its lasting impact as deeply and fondly as I feel mine.  She did turn to me after we toured the school last night and said “this looks like it’s a fun school, dad!”

That’s a good start.

photo credit: tantek

I was excited to get the Call For Papers for the CUNY IT Conference, scheduled for December 4.  This year’s theme will be “Information Technology/Instructional Technology in CUNY: Managing Complexity,” and the presentations will ask:

1. What works? How has technology not just changed but improved our instructional and administrative practices? What tests have been met? What value added? What innovations deserve to be extended and duplicated?
2. What works together? What mixtures of modes or services are available? Are we moving to the use of “mash-ups” in teaching and administration, combinations of applications that work together? How do we manage and sustain such combinations?
3. What helps us work together? What innovations allow us to be mutually supportive? What are we doing in the way of training and mentoring? How are we spreading the word to colleagues, introducing them to new methods and technologies?
4. What points to a shared direction? What changes on our horizon are most promising, most scalable and sustainable? What developments call for collaborative and strategic thinking? What changes are especially important to a multi-campus university?

Themes the past four years (there doesn’t seem to have been a theme in 2006) have included: “Instructional/Information Technology in CUNY: The Catalyst for Transformational Change,” “Instructional/Information Technology in CUNY: Future Present,” and “Instructional/Information Technology in CUNY: How Is Change for the Better?”

The notion of “Managing Complexity,” when combined with the questions italicized above, contains more of an argument than did themes from previous years.  Yesterday George Otte, CUNY’s Director of Academic Technology and a former Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, wrote a post that details much of the thinking behind “Managing Complexity,” and that also effectively shoots dead the notion that any single service can meet the edtech needs of our campuses.  This is a very important administrative recognition of the argument that’s been at the core of our experimentation with personal publishing platforms for the past few years at the Schwartz Institute.

The 2009 CUNY IT Conference promises to be yet another in the series of events that has sustained and further distributed throughout CUNY the energetic consideration of the role of technology in the university of the future.  I hope to see more panels that explore the relationships between information technology and instructional technology, that challenge and complicate the client-services model of technology that prevails throughout much of the university, and that highlight and celebrate the innovative teaching, learning, and research projects sprouting up at the campuses.

One additional note: David Pogue, who keynoted the most recent IT Conference, will come back for a return engagement.  While he was certainly an entertaining presenter, it might have been nice if we had someone who could draw into sharper focus for the community just what’s at stake in the reimagination of the role of technology at the university.

At times her perspective is blurry, but she sure does get smiles…

Hope you all like the new site… We promise, it’ll be a lot more active in the coming months… bear with us as we work out some kinks.

The tag cloud above was generated by participants at CUNY WordCampEd, which took place last week at the Macaulay Honors College (click to enlarge).  Mikhail and I co-organized the event with Joe Ugoretz of Macaulay and Matt Gold of New York City Tech, and we were astounded that we had to close registration a week ahead of time.  When we started planning, we thought we might get 50 registrants, bringing together the folks like ourselves who’ve experimented with WordPress throughout CUNY and who believe deeply in the core components of our mission on Blogs@Baruch.  Instead, we had well over 100 folks who wanted to come, and though we had an overflow room with audio/video connections to accommodate the hordes during morning and afternoon keynote sessions, we still had to turn some away.

The desire to take part in this event — and, even more, the energy palpable at Macaulay throughout the day — are testament that something is happening at CUNY.  This feeling was present in December at the CUNY I(nformation) T(echnology) Conference, which paid more attention to instructional technology than it ever has before.  I think some of the same spirit and energy infused the 9th Annual Symposium, which for the first time, in my opinion, captured the richness and opportunity embedded in our shifting modes of communication.  At all three events, the Twitter backchannel produced what Boone Gorges has called a “catalytic effect” on the proceedings: collective reflection on the presentations by those on Twitter filtered back into the participation of the audience, which found its way back into the tweets, and so on.  I felt very little passivity at these meetings. (Here you can see Tweets for the Symposium and CUNY WordCampEd).

But Twitter only deserves a splash of credit for the sea of enthusiasm present at Macaulay last Friday.  CUNY’s BlackBoard disaster this semester (which you can read about in this piece from The Clarion) no doubt shifted some energy our way as committed teachers and administrators look for alternative edtech solutions.

We welcomed that sort of attention.

In the morning presentations, Jane Wells, from Automattic, pitched WordPress (a bit tongue-in-cheekly) as a “BlackBoard Killer” and emphasized the openness of the WordPress community to input from its users.  Her presentation captured all that we like about experimenting with WordPress: embrace of perpetual beta, humility, the celebration of collectivist approaches to problem solving, and the constant striving to improve. Dave Lester, from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, presented ScholarPress, a suite of WordPress plugins that map course management functionality onto WordPress blogs (doing what BlackBoard does, but much more elegantly and affordably), and also talked about integrating Zotero’s research tools into WordPress.  Baruch’s own Zoe Sheehan Zaldana then wowed the audience with her wonderfully imaginative use of WordPress in photography and digital animation courses, embraced the potential of “shame” on the open web as a pedagogical tool, and emphasized the useful energy created when students participate in a unique space whose aesthetic reflects the work of their course.

Our good friend Jim Groom returned to CUNY like a prodigal son to give the afternoon keynote (“Open By Design”), and spoke eloquently and powerfully about how the role of the instructional technologist should be refined in today’s university, the centrality of “openness” to the mission of CUNY and how that should be reflected in our approach to supporting teaching with technology, and the opportunities self-publishing offer universities to train their students for the future.  He also threw a few good shots at BlackBoard, and raised the very important and underexamined question of why CUNY pours millions– that’s right, millions– of dollars into this clunker of a software instead of investing in the people who build the relationships and the models that inject such powerful energy into events like the IT Conference, the Symposium, and CUNY WordCampEd.  Thanks to Dave Lester, Jim’s talk is archived here.

This was a generative event, and it represented the congealing of a community around the shared idea that our institutions’ weight should be behind a scaling approach to support for educational technology that necessarily goes well beyond BlackBoard.  That box is simply not enough.  Rather than helping us explore knowledge and identity, nurture community, and pass on to our students critical approaches to engaging with information  — core components of a liberal arts education –  BlackBoard argues that education is a marketplace.  Here’s my money.  Give me my single sign on and my learning.

Clearly, the participants at CUNY WordCampEd have had just about enough of this, and are looking to Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaualay, the CUNY Academic Commons, and each other for alternatives. With that in mind, I’d suggest that the next stage of edtech at CUNY hold the following core principles.

Instructional Technology is not Information Technology
For too long, instructional technology has been enveloped within the broader notion of information technology.  We need to drive a permanent wedge between those two areas of university life in the understandings of our communities.  Information technology makes our phones and networks and computers and smart boards work, and collects and protects student, staff, and faculty data so that we can get credits and get paid. This is crucial stuff.  But it’s not about teaching and learning.

Instructional technology is about pedagogy, about building community, about collaboration and helping each other imagine and realize teaching and learning goals with the assistance of technology.

There must be a close working relationship between CUNY’s information technology shops and instructional technologists, and they must respect each others’ concerns and interests.  But they must be separate.  When information technologists choose instructional technology solutions, you may get something like BlackBoard, and a community that feels as though the only relationship to technology should be a client-service one.   When instructional technologists administer servers, you may get something like less-than-ideal load times, plugins that expose vulnerabilities, and a system that bursts at the seams when you scale.

We need to acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses, to work with and learn from one another, and also to complicate our community’s understanding of technology.  Some components — like phones and networks — should be, above all, reliable.  Some others — like blended courses, or the integration of made multimedia into a course — require more thought, investment, and understanding from students and faculty.  Making clear the separation between information and instructional technology can help nurture this understanding.

But we must remember… the central mission of a university revolves around teaching, learning, and scholarship.

The Community is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
The most exciting component of CUNY WordCamp Ed was the connection and sharing that took place at the event, a feeling that’s also present on the Academic Commons.  There was the implicit recognition that we have much to learn from each other, that there are many interesting projects popping up around CUNY, and that we can only benefit from making public and sharing our work.  The Commons can provide a canvas for this, but it will not run on its own… it requires, above all, a commitment to sharing, to both taking and giving.  We also should harness and seek to reproduce the generative energy of events such as WordCamp Ed, not only with end-of-the-year conferences and symposia, but with meet ups and sharecases throughout the academic year that disperse that energy.

EdTech Solutions Should Grow from the Bottom Up and then Transplant
Experimentation with WordPress at CUNY has been a bottom-up process, which serves as a counterpoint to the imposition of BlackBoard, a top-down solution.  Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaulay, and the Commons each began small and grew as they integrated more users and diversified their functionality in response to the needs of the communities they serve.  As such, they each reflect those communities in certain visible ways.  Blogs@Baruch provides public space for Baruch’s strong journalism, writing, and arts programs, and is making inroads into the Zicklin School of Business and the Freshman Seminar; ePortfolios foreground the unique experiences of the Macaulay student; and the Commons is a vibrant and evolving location for all of CUNY to meet and organize.

A new edtech model for CUNY should acknowledge this progression from the bottom up, and imagine ways to project it outwards throughout the university.  One of the arguments for centralizing administration of BlackBoard was that the community colleges had fewer resources than senior colleges, and centralization of course management software was assumed to make resources more equitably distributed.  Of course, now every school has an equally bad solution.  But the notion that those of us with resources should share the wealth with the colleges who have less is an important one.  I can see a model where senior colleges host WPMu installations for community colleges (using domain mapping), and share support– though, the community colleges– many of which have as many instructional technologists as does Baruch– must pony up support and resources when they can.

Grow from the bottom up and then transplant.

End Users Need to Take Ownership of Online Teaching and Learning Tools
Let’s not be shy about reminding our users of their responsibilities, and our users shouldn’t be shy about asking for help, clarification, or if something is possible.  WPMu and other open source solutions not only benefit from a “do it yourself“ ethos, they require such an approach.  They can’t function and grow without the investment of the community.

A course management system — BlackBoard (at a fraction of the current price), or, preferably, Moodle — could be one component of a tiered support sytem for instructional technology.  Users should have access to an easy way to post documents, access class rosters, and keep a gradebook.  But this is not teaching and learning.  A second tier could exist via distribtued canvases like WPMu or Mediawiki or cloud applications like Flickr and YouTube, where faculty and students can maintain their own spaces and depend on asynchronous support– with a solid server and documentation, such a process can run itself.  A third tier would offer customized solutions for more advances users– Zoe’s rotating flash headers on Blogs@Baruch, or customized spaces to show off class projects or for special departments or programs.  A fourth tier would be a research tier, and entail the imagination and realization of native solutions (such as the Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool) or the exploration of the next wave of innovations (semantic web comes to mind).  You could cover all of the edtech needs of your community with such an approach; all that’s needed, as Jim said, are the instructional technologists and community understanding to shape it and make it operate.

Integrate Digital and Media Literacy into General Education
Universities are constantly updating their general education programs. If they’re not, they should be.  Far too few clear out space for coursework that focuses on exploring how the ways that information is produced and consumed are changing in the digital age.  Such work is often outsourced to librarians, who are generally on the leading edge of a campus’s understanding of these trends, and do yeoman’s (and, often under appreciated) work.  Or students get trickling components of digital literacy spread haphazardly through their work in the disciplines.

Why not, at a place like CUNY, have 1st year seminars devoted to nurturing critical research skills, understanding online information and identity, learning to look and listen, and mastering how to negotiate the digital life of the campus and the city?  Set students up with eportfolios, and teach them how to cultivate their spaces.  Introduce them to scholarly uses of tools with which they are already familiar, but which they perhaps haven’t learned to use critically or with rigor.  Make them write; help them connect, share, and explore the visual, the textual, and the aural experience of the web.  This is something that will be useful to them throughout college and beyond.

As Jim has eloquently argued, CUNY is so well-positioned to harness the energy of the participants in CUNY WordCamp Ed, and to put it to good use.  Let’s keep working.

(IMAGE CREDITS: Thanks to Joe Ugoretz for conceiving, compiling, and sharing the CUNY WordCampEd Tag Cloud.  The other images are from Flickr, in order of appearance: Pip, D’arcy Norman, Ohad, and the Seattle Municipal Archives).

Keynote

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Q&A

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This video is 12 minutes long.

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This video is 10 minutes long.

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In response to a question about how these tools have altered or challenged our sense of time, Gardner offers this wise nugget, which just about sums up his approach to thinking about all of this stuff:

Thinking at that meta level as much as we can without driving ourselves bananas is the only kind of thinking that persists through whatever the next tool is going to be.

This clip is about 25 minutes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Truck Stop,” from 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re going to start off with four videos (we’ll publish them over the next four days) from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World.”

What I love about this particular workshop is the generous balance in Gardner’s approach to Web 2.0: he talks with equal interest about the inanity present in much online conversation and the new implications for connectedness offered by the Web 2.0 world. Unlike many thinkers who’ve chimed in on communication in a Web 2.0 world, he sees it as neither a panacea or a harbinger of doom. His interest is in exploring the broad, rich ideas generated by these new methods of communication, and in generating more questions than answers.

We were so fortunate to have Gardner play such a significant role in our Symposium for the second straight year. His enthusiasm was infectious, and his social note taking was prodigious.

In this first segment, Gardner and the attendees of his workshop explore Twistori and Twittervision, two Twitter apps that offer provocative examples of how “connectedness” is changing in the Web 2.0 world. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to catch the beginning of this workshop; we pick things up a few minutes in, and this first video is a shade under 20 minutes long.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I thought I’d share a few thoughts about how I use and perceive the service, which I joined about a year ago.

I’m not a Twitter evangelist; I don’t think it’s for everyone. If you’re using it and you don’t know why, maybe you shouldn’t be using it?

Twitter is not a platform, it’s an application that allows you to construct and dip in and out of conversations. You should @ often.

Anyone analyzing tweets only as stand alone statements will see self-absorption and “innate incoherence.” They miss the point.

Yet it’s easy to be misled by how Twitter works, because most answers to the question “What are you doing?” aren’t interesting.

But that’s not how the people I follow or I use it. Most of the people I follow instead answer the question “what are you thinking?”

If you follow interesting people who think interesting things, then it follows to think that their tweets might be interesting.

Over time your mind’s eye will learn to identify tweeters who have something relevant to say and to find yet others. Read critically.

The people I follow on Twitter aren’t necessarily my “friends.” Some people are comfortable with 100% virtual friendships. I’m not.

(I’m not raining on online friendships, I’m just saying they’re not for me).

The people who aren’t my friends whom I follow on Twitter I consider “acquaintances.” I think that’s a fairer name for what we share.

I’m willing to bore friends, but I try not to bore acquaintances, because some day, I might want them to be my friends.

I don’t — or try not to — complain about traffic or the academic #jobmarket, because, really, who’s interested in my bitching?

I bitch about traffic and the #jobmarket to my friends, and rarely think twice about confronting them when we’re hanging out.

I always think twice about confronting someone on Twitter. It’s not polite to disagree with acquaintances, though sometimes it must be done.

Mostly, though, I avoid confronting others because arguments in Twitter are unsatisfying. Neither party gets sufficiently into it.

So when I disagree with a tweet, I resolve the disagreement by reading and thinking more, writing a blog post, or talking with friends.

As a result, my tweetline offers a path into my life, reading, and thinking that’s perhaps a tad more upbeat than the real thing.

Ultimately, Twitter works for me because through it I am exposed to people that push and prod me to think and read more deeply and broadly.

I follow links from educators & historians & journalists & technologists whose judgments I respect. I learn. Hopefully, I also contribute.

“Blog to reflect, tweet to connect.” @bgblogging Claim anything more for Twitter, you’re either selling something or setting up a straw man.

As such, Twitter is not for people who have uttered the following statements:

“Twitter won’t work because it’s not profitable.” “Twitter can’t save journalism.” “Twitter encourages our worst impulses.”

Those statements are usually uttered by people with closed worldviews, with minds already made up.

Twitter, like everything else, is purposeful only if you use it with a purpose.

Last week the class abandoned its use of Blogs@Baruch to instead use a group on Facebook called “Baruch Blogs Down!”

photo credit: Squid P. Quo

The name of the group is a reference to server problems we had at the beginning of the term, which were resolved almost two months ago; we’ve been up without interruption for almost 60 days. In fact, members of the class were posting to their blogs without problem for a good six weeks before they switched to Facebook.

The faculty member apologized when it was pointed out to him that the name of the Facebook group was insulting and mocked the work that had gone into building our system and supporting his course, last semester and this. He noted that the switch wasn’t planned, that his students suggested the move and the group name, and that they were more comfortable using Facebook to exchange thoughts about course material. So he went with it.

I have problems with this on a few levels, even beyond the insulting group name. First, the only argument to go to Facebook — which I accept is completely the faculty member’s prerogative — seems to be that the students “felt more comfortable” with the application than they did Blogs@Baruch. Comfort with a medium has pedagogical value, for sure; but you’d like to think that more than students’ comfort would determine the choosing of a technological solution.  I’m not sure that it did.

Second, there’s the implications of using Facebook in an instructional setting given the recent conflicts over their Terms of Service and assertions of ownership over user content. I don’t think the class discussed what was to be gained and lost from switching platforms; the students just lobbied the professor to use something “easier,” not better.  These points are both problematic in no small part because this is an Internet Marketing class!

Finally, there’s the inaccurate implication embedded in the group’s name, which appeared in a public forum. I’ve thought a bit about this, since I, too, have been guilty of snarking a piece of software. Blogs@Baruch was down periodically early in the semester, and that had a negative impact on some courses’ use of the system. We DO deserve to get called out for failing to deliver what we promised to deliver.

Yet, there’s a difference between mocking us and mocking a behemoth corporation with a closed source product.   The difference embodies one of the core issues in instructional technology, which is often seen as a subset of information technology rather than as its own unique area of university life that requires the establishment of relationships and understanding across the disciplines.

If Blackboard goes down, users of the system are helpless, and can only wait for word that the system is back up.  They can call someone, but that person can only tell them that a ticket has been submitted.  Users of Blogs@Baruch have a name, and a number, and someone who can explain to them what the problem is and how it is being addressed. If something on the system isn’t working the way they want it to work, they can speak with someone about hacking it, adapting it, fixing it, strengthening it. Blackboard is a closed box without a face, whereas Blogs@Baruch is an open sandbox that gives back in proportion to what you put in. Blackboard is primarily an administrative system that allows the delivery of information. Blogs@Baruch is primarily a tool for the creative use of technology in instruction.

The faculty member (who has graciously apologized and changed the Facebook’s group’s name) should have realized this; he had benefited from our close support in the past and had been told to contact us if and as problems arose. He never did.  Instead, he treated Blogs@Baruch as information technology, as a data delivery service, and wasn’t really interested in bringing the system and its flexibility to his pedagogy. He and his students saw no difference between Blogs@Baruch and Blackboard or the escalators in the Vertical Campus.

So, I’ve learned a couple things from this episode. First: snark is fine, but if you’re gonna snark, do it in an informed way or in a hidden place, or you going to be called out.  Second: we need to do a better job of explaining to members of our community what Blogs@Baruch is and what it isn’t. If you can’t see any difference between what this system potentially provides and what Blackboard or Facebook provide, then those systems will probably work just fine for you.

Everywhere I look, and, it seems, in everything I read, folks are trying to understand, articulate, or make their mark upon these changes. The “change” we’re living through is much deeper than the promises put forth by Barack Obama in the construction of a positive message for his campaign. Packer spoke of a “tectonic shift” that’s impacting every area of American life.

Journalism is transforming before our eyes. Newspaper after newspaper is folding, altering its processes, or drastically reducing its staff and, as a result, the depth and quality of its coverage.  Newsrooms everywhere are being forced by executives and bean counters to do “more with less.”  Yet as David Simon and others have noted, the notion that you can possibly do “more with less” is, for want of a better term, bullshit.  You do “less with less.”

Unused newspaper racks clutter a storage yard in San Francisco, California. From Boston.com; image taken March 13, 2009. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

As stark and clear as that point may seem, some legitimately see opportunity in the restructuring of American newsrooms. “Crowd-sourcing” and “citizen journalism” seek to take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to tap into existing pools of knowledge to generate and disseminate information. Journalists — those still in the business — break into camps that are either horrified or energized by the prospect of outsourcing society’s news gathering responsibilities. The most serious of them struggle through the implications of such a direction, asking what will be lost, what will be gained, and what professionalization means in an era that empowers the voice of the amateur.

Clay Shirky recently published a much-discussed blog post about the state of newspapers, comparing our moment to the moment when the printing press was invented, and focusing on the chaotic nature of the transition from one world to another.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…

Shirky concludes that we don’t know, and won’t know for some time, what the future of journalism is going to look like.  The most important thing is that “we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’.”  Then, “the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’”  What we need is lots of spaghetti against the wall, for “any experiment designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.”  He acknowledges what’s lost by the death of newspapers, allows us space to mourn, but ultimately settles on the point that what matters most is journalism, not the form that it takes.  He also lays the lie to those who, in the name of entrepreneurship, self-servingly claim that they have a crystal ball rather than a handful of wet spaghetti.

Journalism is not the only realm in American life that’s standing upon shifting ground; higher education is also in the midst of a wrenching transition.  In The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Frank Donoghue argues that the humanities professor many readers of this blog aspire to become is going the way of the newspaper, swept into the dustbin of history by the market forces and corporatization that increasingly restrict the choices available to well-meaning university administrators. He argues that the humanities aren’t in crisis; this would imply some future return to normalcy. Rather, a liberal arts education as a requisite component in the formation of an informed citizen, and the celebration of the university as the location where that process takes place, with the professor as a central figure, is dead.  A liberal arts education will increasingly become a luxury rather than the norm, replaced by vocational training and the transfer of skills that have only direct and measurable correlations to bottom lines.

Stanley Fish posted a reaction to Donaghue’s book in January, highlighing the rising percentages of undergraduate courses taught by part-time labor and the ascendancy of the “for profit” university, where information delivery is all that matters.  An earlier blog post from Fish glibly dismissed the value of studying the humanities altogether.  Doing so is its own argument, he says, providing or needing no external justification.  If the study of the humanities instilled in one the desire to learn the great moral lessons of the ages, Fish lamely argues, “the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts… as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.”

Fish finishes his meditation on The Last Professor with the observation that, thank goodness, he was born at the right time.  “Just lucky, I guess.”  Fish’s landing ultimately on his own good fortune contains none of the perspective evident in Shirky’s post. The possibility never dawns upon him that he might actually be in a position, from his lofty perch nestled just off the front page of the New York Times website and his influential provenance at two universities, to highlight or even demand an alternative trajectory in higher education.  He doesn’t seem to want one or think one is necessary.  He accepts the notion that the humanities has little “value added,” and returns to his study, satisfied by his ability to find support for his arguments in the schmuck-like behavior of some of his colleagues.

Does the sea change pinpointed by Packer and Shirky have relevance to the university of the future?  If Donaghue and Fish are correct, that future has been written, and those of us who’ve chosen to make our life studying and helping others study the humanities are just plain out of luck.

There’s ample evidence however that something similar to the revolution in journalism is happening in academia, though perhaps not so publicly and at a pace that’s less compressed.  This week the University of Michigan Press announced that it was going digital, a move that has consequences for the intense and troubled world of academic publishing.  Also, Mark Bauerlein, whose work on “kids these days” I have significant problems with, wrote a provocative paper about the future of higher education in which he argues “the coverage project is complete,” and that graduate schools and P&T committees should be putting more of an emphasis on good teaching.  I disagree with the first argument (admittedly, his statement was about literature and not history, which is my field, and which hasn’t been “covered”); but I concur wholeheartedly with the second.  Donaghue argues something similar when he notes that the culture of the professoriate, to its own detriment, has integrated an emphasis on competitive achievement and productivity that internalizes the values of the very market forces external to the university that find no use for the liberal arts.  Ultimately, Fish’s “I got mine” conclusions are frustrating because this is a moment when humanists should be reasserting the value of their disciplines to the intellectual life of the nation and, like Bauerlein attempts, proposing directions for the university of the future.

Implicit in the distributed community of educational technologists that I’m a part of — some have called us “edupunks,” but I no longer think that term is big or sufficient enough — is the sense that we are all together involved in shaping the best model of the future university.  I’ve long felt that the most compelling aspect of the 1960s — for all the positive and negative legacies that decade has bequeathed us — was the broadly dispersed sense that the future was up for grabs, and that one’s actions could help shape that future.

Each of the above examples is student-centered, yet also allows space for the researcher to grapple with and reflect upon large questions. They benefit from supportive administrations that recognize the importance of giving scholars the opportunity to explore and develop new ways of thinking, learning, teaching, and connecting. They don’t necessarily attack the university of the past, but rather imagine a future where participants break out of restrictive silos of departmental politics and disciplines and the campus as we knew it to explore relationships with the world that are, at their core, humanistic.  These, it seems, must be core components of any vision of the future of the humanities.

Then again, maybe Fish and Donaghue are spot on, and those of us creating new courses, constructing new modes of learning in and across our disciplines, and digging through archives are punchlines in some cosmic joke.  I acknowledge that these examples offer no direct answer to Fish and Donaghue’s argument that the humanities won’t be valued and funded because they don’t contribute in obvious ways to the creation of wealth and, like it or leave it, our society prioritizes that question.  Yet the continued broad exploration of the humanities, like  journalism, is absolutely crucial if our society is going to strive towards a better version of itself.

Shirky’s articulation of our moment as a transitional and perhaps revolutionary one reminds us that the future is yet to be written. We all have a profound stake in working towards our vision.  We all need to pick up some wet spaghetti.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I don’t know enough to be able to comment intelligently on the extent to which GE is to be lauded or criticized for its smart energy initiatives. I do know though that I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I don’t particularly care if I’ve contributed to their viral ad campaign.

(H/t to Andrew Sulivan, who wrote when presenting a movie similar to what I just recorded, “Prepare to have your mind blown all over your keyboard”).

The Ticker, the student newspaper at Baruch, just published Aaron Monteabaro’s very nice feature story on Miya Owens, who was the 1000th user to register. Ms. Owens embodies the strongest part of our argument for Blogs@Baruch: the more chances that students have to write, the better writers and communicators they will become.  She’s a student in Prof. Bridgett Davis’s “Journalistic Writing” course, and a contributor to Writing New York, a site devoted to reporting on local news that Prof. Davis and her colleagues Roz Bernstein, Vera Haller, and Andrea Gabor have built over the last two years.  Prof.  Davis notes that the “blog not only prepares her students for adapting to the challenges of the so-called ‘new media’ era, but also ignites in them ‘a passion that harks back to the old days of journalism.’”

Right on, Professor Davis, for embracing and employing passion as a pedagogical fuel.  And Ms. Owens — who is considering postgraduate study in business or law — is a student the Baruch community can be proud of.  She understands the centrality of writing to her education at Baruch and her career beyond school, and welcomes the opportunity to write in a space that’s read not only by her classmates and professor, but which is also open to the world at large.

So here’s to Miya Owens, Professors Davis, Bernstein, Gabor, Haller, and all the other students and faculty members who are making Blogs@Baruch go, go, go.

Image for art courtesy of Facebook.com

Rest easy, Cacophoners; I just removed the “Share on Facebook” option from the “Share This” widget that appears beneath every post.

For those who don’t know, Facebook changed its Terms of Service last week, asserting a perpetual claim to use however it wishes certain content that you post on FB or that is shared on their network via a hosted “Share on Facebook” button.   A similar policy was in place prior to the change in terms on February 4, but Facebook’s claims to your  content used to expired when you deleted items or deleted your account.  That option ultimately gave users control over their content.

No longer. Here’s the key passage from the new ToS:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

Here’s the clause that was removed:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

This has produced no shortage of outrage, as well as a totally inadequate response from FB honcho Mark Zuckerberg that essentially asserts the ToS does not reflect Facebook’s true feelings about user generated content (to which friend of the Institute Matt Gold responds: “What matters is what they *do* with user info, not how they “think” about it!”).

Amanda French of NYU posted a really helpful run down of various ToS’s on other user generated content web sites, which highlights just how off-base and egregious Facebook’s claims are.  Boone B. Gorges of Queens College wonders about the pedagogical ramifications of this change, and also about what Zuckerberg’s response teaches us about the concept of  “sharing” in the digital age.

Ultimately, I hope Facebook sees the error of its ways, because it provides a unique, valuable, and often elegant service.  I have a network on FB which is almost entirely separate and serves a different purpose for me than my networks on Twitter, Ning,  LinkedIn, or BuddyPress; I’d hate to see that diminished.  At the same, anyone who blogs on Facebook’s blog utility should think long and hard before continuing.  Photographers who share their photos through Facebook should reconsider, or at least start watermarking the hell out the images they share.  Musicians shouldn’t upload MP3s of their compositions.  Faculty should reconsider any educational uses of Facebook.  Our students should be informed (though that’s nothing new).  Web masters should zap those “Share on Facebook” buttons from their sites (for clarification, if you post a link directly into Facebook, the claim doesn’t apply).  And those of us who have posted pictures of our kids on Facebook so that cousins abroad and childhood friends can follow their growth should be prepared to see those images used without our notification or permission.

Oral communication instruction is traditionally somewhat neglected in the ESL curricula and services of colleges. Many programs focus on reading/writing proficiency and give only nominal, if any attention to listening/speaking skills. The imbalance is due to a great extent to college entrance requirements and grading practices in college classes: Students are often only tested for reading and writing proficiency but not for speaking skills. With the correlation between spoken and written proficiency in nonnative speakers being only moderate, it is no surprise then that some students graduate with low proficiency in spoken English.

This status quo is in stark contrast to the skills needed for integration into the college community and success in the workplace. In fact, oral communication skills are consistently ranked most important by employers of business as well as liberal arts graduates. Yet, every semester, nonnative students report that they are being asked by teammates not to speak during group presentations so that team grades are jeopardized. They also report being dismissed from job interviews due to comprehension-inhibiting accents.

It is paramount, therefore, that we address oral-communication competence. Two services are available for students at Baruch College: (1) Students can go to the Student Academic Consulting Center (SACC, VC 2-116) and make an appointment for free one-on-one tutorials with a professional speech tutor. (2) Students can visit the new ESL Lab (VC6-121, enter through VC6-120) and practice with the excellent software, audio, and video materials there. See http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for hours, instructions, and materials.

To give an example: It’s the beginning of a semester. An (ideal) instructor collects writing samples and engages his/her students in speaking activities to determine whether a student may need assistance. The student is then encouraged (required?) to make an appointment with one of the speech tutors at SACC (the tutors, by the way, are all professionally trained speech pathologists and ESL specialists). During the first meeting, a diagnostic conversation/reading takes place, and the tutor determines which speech patterns are the cause of he students comprehensibility problems.

While the student may already have an idea about some patterns (e.g., differentiating between /r/ and /l/), some problems are more difficult to determine. For example, many languages have a syllable-timed rhythm (i.e., syllables have the same length); English, however, is a stressed-timed language (i.e., the rhythm of a sentence is determined by the regular beat of the stressed syllables only). Try to say the following sentences out loud as you clap your hands on the stressed syllables. You will notice that the sentences take the same amount of time, although the first one is much shorter than the last one. This is because of the stress-timed nature of English.

The lion came.
The lioness came.
The lionesses came.
The lionesses arrived.
The lionesses have arrived.

Comprehensibility problems often arise from stress problems; e.g., when a speaker from a syllable-timed language used his/her native rhythm to speak English. A staccato delivery ensues that makes it difficult for English listeners–who are used to listening for word and sentence stress–to follow the speaker.

In any case, once the student is diagnosed, the tutor will help the student produce the speech pattern correctly in one-on-one tutorials. When the student can produce the speech pattern, he/she needs to practice to commit the new pattern to muscle memory. It is said that our body has to practice a new movement (including speech organ movement) 1,000 times before the movement becomes muscle memory. Please see the Accent Reduction FAQs at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for more information.

Ideally, a student should see a speech tutor once a week and practice individually in the lab several times a week. With regular practice, significant progress can be made, even in the course of one semester. Please alert your students to these services. and remind them that, to change speech patterns, regular practice is necessary

How sweet of Autoland to capitalize upon the Obama-inspired can-do spirit in the country in an attempt to separate me from my credit.

This Sunday is the Super Bowl — that annual bacchanalia of gluttonous consumption — and as many of us settle in to watch the Steelers and the Cardinals (in what should be a very good game), we’ll be scratching our heads at subtle and not-so-subtle attempts to tap into the national mood, for profit.  Commercials during the Super Bowl cost $100,000 a second, and while a few are clever and original, most treat viewers as pigs who like nothing more than bikinis, chicken wings, beer, and trucks.  Cultural and consumer trends tend to filter into these ads, threaded through anthropomorphized animals and talking babies.  Clips last year mocked wine tasting, mismatched celebrities, showed how easy it is to buy stocks, and hawked GPS systems.

I’ve got two predictions.  One: Christine and the Loyalty Team at Autoland aren’t the last folks who’ll invoke Obama in a sales pitch to me this week.  And, Two: Steelers 24, Cardinals 20.

* 10-minute post-post update. Just sent to me by my wfe, who was much more diligent in her research… check out this Pepsi ad that will run Sunday, especially the logo at the end:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The bulk of the study is focused on describing, analyzing, and sharing prime examples of six “technologies to watch,” which are organized by their “time-to-adoption.” Click the image above to download a copy of the report; it’s interesting reading for techies and non-techies alike. Here’s a summary of the “technologies to watch”:

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

• Mobiles: making services and information readily available to students and staff on portable devices such as iPhones and Blackberrys. For an example of what this looks like, see Stanford’s iApps Homepage.
  
• Cloud Computing: a new way to think about computers, software, and files, which takes advantage of “data farms,” or collections of computers that distribute processing and storage. You no longer need to run productivity software on your hard drive; Google Apps, for instance, supports word processing, presentations, spreadsheet design, and calendars that are accessible, shareable, and functional through a web browser, wherever you are. The vanguard in this development is data intensive cloud computing used by the hard sciences, but this also has implications for students and staff, who, perhaps, need not rely so heavily on Microsoft Office in coming years. (Though not mentioned in the Horizon Report, last September, CUNY’s Online Baccalaureate began a “Virtual Application Streaming Pilot Project,” a local cloud computing experiment).
  

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years

• Geo-Everything: mobile phones, cameras, and other handheld devices can now automatically attach “geolocative” information to data they produce, such as photographs and videos. Researchers and teachers are exploring ways to integrate this functionality into their work via annotated maps, visual narratives, and game-based learning. See Community Walk and Paint Map for examples.
• The Personal Web: individuals and groups are exploring the “creation of customized, personal web-based environments to support their social, professional, and learning activities using whatever tools they prefer.” At the Institute, we call this “personal publishing,” and it is the core idea behind Blogs@Baruch, which was mentioned as one of five exemplary “Scholarly Community Blogs” cited in this section. Other examples of “The Personal Web” include Omeka, an open source software developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which allows anyone with access to a server and a MYSQL installation to build and share online collections of artifacts; and SMARTHistory, an “edited online art history resource to augment or replace traditional art history texts.”

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

• Semantic-Aware Applications: the “semantic web,” according to Wikipedia, “is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.” Some refer to this as Web 3.0, or “using the web as what to write with.” Educause sees the development of “tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract imbedded meaning.” Woah. Few examples of the semantic web in higher education exist. Patrick Murray-John, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, is exploring what opportunities new tools that look treat online materials as data may have for the studying of teaching, learning, and thinking.
• Smart Objects: “a smart object is simply any physical object that includes a unique identifier that can track information about the object.” Think about a package that’s tagged with a bar code that is scanned and allows you to track it; or the library book you have that’s way overdue. Products based on this idea are entering the consumer market, and could be used in archaeology, medicine, and in combination with Geo-Everything approaches. An example being developed by researchers at the University of Florida would continuously monitor patients for a variety of conditions as they went about their normal lives.

We’re pleased to be included in a report of this magnitude, and to see such a wide variety of innovative deployments of technology. These are interesting times!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via RateYourStudents.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hat tip to Hillary Miller, via Facebook.

Click to See Full Size

According to The Gothamist, the flyer on the right was scattered around the campus of New York University last week.

The flyer announced NYU’s “In and Of the City Financial Aid Plan,” in which students who were unable to fork out 50k/year were told their families could save more than $43k annually if they instead attended CUNY.

Turns out the thing was a fake, produced by a group that calls itself “Students Creating Radical Change,” who “made up the flyer to encourage discussion about NYU’s treatment of its students, and to encourage students to question their university’s priorities.”  Essentially, the group protests that NYU does not provide sufficient financial support for its students, and focuses instead on expansionist behavior in the real estate market.

The letter to The Gothamist in which the students claim responsibility ends: “Oh, one other thing: we have nothing against CUNY. We just thought a ‘go to CUNY’ plan would make a neat flier. In fact, CUNY is facing its own financial problems these days – check out http://www.cunysocialforum.com/ for info on the student resistance to budget cuts and tuition hikes in the state higher-ed system.”

I might rant about the fetishization of protest embodied by this episode, which is more performative Yippie distractionism than the purposeful speaking of truth to power.  I might compare the postscript about CUNY to the utterances of folks who use phrases like “I have lots of black friends” or “I don’t mean to cast aspersions” when saying objectionable things.  I might snark about grammatical errors contained within the group’s statement, or attack the snobby implication that to go to CUNY is to slum it.

The fact of the matter is, especially in this economy, the group has a point (even if it isn’t really their point).  The cost of NYU is ridiculous, and is an education there really 8-10 times better than what one could get at CUNY?  From anecdotal evidence, applications for early admission to the Macaulay Honors College are up more than 30% from last year.  I think it’s pretty safe to say we’ll see an increase in CUNY and SUNY enrollments over the next couple of years.

So, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.  I’m not sure there’s that big a difference between an underpaid adjunct teaching a course with 40 students and and an underpaid adjunct teaching a course with 55 students.  Bring it on.

h/t BooneBGorges

Jim, the 6th of 7th children, was aware of only one photograph of himself as a baby. One. But last week a Facebook friend from his old neighborhood tagged an image of him at 3. Jim’s post praises Facebook for being good at connecting people with the past, and at making the sharing of memories so much easier than it was just a few years ago. This would have been possible without Facebook; but it would have been more difficult, perhaps to such an extent that it wouldn’t have happened at all. There’s a powerful argument in there that connectivity tools don’t just impact the way that we relate to one another, but also can impact the way we relate to our individual and collective pasts.

This post was on my mind when I began playing with Google Street View, a component of Google Maps that offers street level views of particular locales. This isn’t a new tool, but Google has been steadily adding images as its van tours and shoots different localities (here’s a list of what’s been added). I was surprised to see that the neighborhood in which I grew up has been photographed. North Genesee Drive is of no great consequence — beyond being sandwiched between the neighborhoods that produced Magic Johnson and Malcolm X — but there it is, ready for your virtual tour.

I haven’t been back to my old neighborhood in years, and was pleased that I was able to recreate the bike rides and explorations of my youth, even if through a somehwat antiseptic, Googleized filter. There was no cutting through yards, lemonade sales, or bullies to run from. My memory can fill those things in. Mostly, it was pleasant to visit from my desk in New York.

Here’s a gallery of screen captures; click through for captions.

I recognize that this particular application of the tool appeals to me on a nostalgic level, and while that’s fine for personal blogging and Facebooking and all that, it’s hardly a pedagogical argument. The images above affect me and the kids I grew up with more than they’ll affect you.

But it’s also pretty easy to see how tools like this, free tools available from your desktop, can be integrated into college curricula. Studying the Lower East Side at the turn of the century? Compare the built environment of Hester Street from Jacob Riis’s photographs to images of the area on Google Maps. Use Google Maps to explore planning and architecture in urban, suburban, and exurban neighborhoods. What can we learn about Barack Obama from a virtual tour of Hyde Park? Find images of parks in three different European cities; how does their location and construction reflect their usage? Locate five “Chinatowns.” How are they alike or similar in organization? Writing a term paper on the Atlantic Yards? Use Google Maps to show how construction will restrict traffic. The possibilities are endless. Google Maps won’t tell us everything we need to know about any of these topics; but then, no single source will. A virtual tour of a street or a neighborhood can impart a sense of location and feeling that can augment other information on the path to knowledge.  (I should also note that Jim is also ahead of the curve on this).

In the movie below, I use Google Maps to recreate the walk from my home to Verlinden Elementary School. Yes, again, I know, the nostalgia trap; but I was struck by the sheer number of possible jumping off points for discussion, reflection, and investigation produced just by reliving that two block walk. There’s something exciting about an exploratory process that encourages one to explore even more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, I’ll let out a little secret: here’s where we get all those phrases we throw around that make most normal people feel like there’s a whole world out there they’ll never understand.  (hat tip Barbara Sawhill)

I tried to accomplish a few things with this redesign.  Mostly, I wanted to update the look of the site… the previous version was a bit clunky, a bit 2003 1999, and I didn’t feel it was popping.  As I usually say when Mikhail critiques my design (which is often): I’m no great aesthete, and certainly not a graphic artist.  But I think this version is markedly better, cleaner, and more inviting.  2008.  2009, even.

The inviting part is really the key, because we’d like to make this page not just a portal to the wide range of blogging being done throughout the Baruch College community, but as a sort of digital commons where ideas and resources and teaching and learning can be shared within the community and beyond.  So I’ve tried to structure the new site in a way that makes it easy to share a lot of different kinds of information, and for visitors to peer in and get a sense of how folks are using this technology at Baruch.

The site includes:

A Home Page with featured blogs and links to recently updated and particularly active blogs on the system  At the bottom of the homepage, RSS feeds pull in posts from the CUNY News Wire, from the Baruch College Teaching Blog, from Cacophony, and from the Ticker.  I’m working on a links list that will be customized for particular pages within the site, and will be using this as a space to tinker, to play with, and to show off the functionality that the WordPress community is constantly building.  All of this is living, and will evolve.

An “About” page with a mission statement about this project :

Blogs@Baruch was built on the following core beliefs:

• College students should write regularly in all disciplines and in a variety of formats and genres
• Faculty should have available support for their efforts to create avenues for student communication
• Open-source technology has an important role to play in the future of higher education, and colleges will gain much from experimenting with a wide-range of open-source technology solutions
• Community users of centrally-administered software should share both the burden and excitement of innovating with technology.  While a strong support network is necessary, a do it yourself ethos should be prominent
• WordPress Multiuser is the most powerful and flexible blogging system available, and can be effectively customized to fulfill a wide range of the communicative needs of the college community

A “Projects” page where visitors can take a look at current and past blogs and sites supported by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute.  About three dozen blogs are linked, though some are password protected. Student blogs– we’ve got about 140 going right now– are not linked from this page.

A Blog where we’ll draw attention to specific things happening throughout the system and make announcement that might be of interest to our users.  This space will, over time, we hope, merge with what’s under the “Support” area, where I’m going to be adding to and refining what I hope are helpful materials– FAQs, a manual for WordPress customized for users of this system, suggestions for using weblogs in college teaching, instructional screencasts, and handouts for faculty to use and adapt.  The manual is in need of an overhaul, and this section will be tightened considerably in the coming weeks.

A “Contact” page for visitors to easily contact us.  Features a reCaptcha, for those curious.

Ultimately, we hope users and visitors will find this helpful, and will share in and contribute to the information it provides.  Scott Leslie recently wrote a powerhouse blog post on the ethics of and obstacles to sharing in higher education.  Leslie argues that institution-driven, overly-organized approaches to sharing tend to halt and stutter, while organic, individualized networks are more likely to thrive.  He posits lots of ideas about why and how this is, and concludes ultimately that planning to share gets in the way of actually doing it.  I take and sympathize with his point.

At the same time, I think the technology that eases sharing is still relatively underused and also undertheorized at Baruch and throughout CUNY.  One of our goals is to model just what a distributed learning environment is.  We’ll be using this new space to push, to compile, and to provide paths to useful information for our wildly diverse range of users.  It will ultimately be up to the users of the system to find value, and maybe to contribute some of their own.

The beauty is that they can do that just by getting a blog and sharing their work with the world.  If there’s value, and it’s put out there, it will be found.

In the interest of practicing what I preach– and since I totally relied on the fruits of the Google as I designed the new home for Blogs@Baruch– click beneath the fold for some techie detail on the redesign.  If the words “CSS,” “widgets,” “plugin,” “WordPress theme,” “hackalicious,” and “pwnd” mean nothing to you, no need to read on….

• This new site is based on the Thematic WordPress Theme Framework, which offers 13 different widgetized areas, and the ability to develop child themes using CSS that will allow you to maintain your customized style through theme upgrades.  I should have probably created a child style, but I didn’t figure out how to do so until I was already deep into hacking away at the some of the php and css files.  This might come back to bite me later on, but I’m rather sanguine at this point that I can dig myself out of holes I’ve dug myself into.
• Customization, made possible by a secured version of the Userthemes Management plugin: in the Thematic file structure, I’ve hacked the following files:
  • Sidebar.php: added search and login code
  • Header.php: added click to get home, hacked out the branding code, and tweaked the menu
  • Footer.php: added “Baruch is CUNY” logo, and moved site info down a div tag
  • Library/extensions/hooks-filters.php: added code to make “home” button appear in menu
  • Library/styles/default.css, I hacked to bits; I also an images folder to hold the footer and header images.. the header image is from the Baruch College Visual Standards library of images
  • I made a couple of changes to Library/layouts/2-c-r-fixed.css, which controls spacing of the different areas of the blog
  • I created two Page templates for displaying mediawiki pulls and screencasts without interference from sidebars
• Active plugins:
  • Dagon Design Mailer for the contact page, with reCaptcha active
  • Flickr Badge Widget, to show those Baruch photos on the front
  • Widget Logic, to control what widgets appear on what pages
  • Wiki Inc, to link to the wiki where our manual lives
    • I had some problem with the Wiki Inc plugin, so much of the support section is actually written directly into WordPress, save the FAQs and the screencasts.  For some reason, I can’t get images to pull.  Brian Lamb and Scott McMillan from the University of British Columbia, who work in the group that produced the plugin, generously gave me some of their time, but we couldn’t get it going.  I’ll return to that, because it’s a kick-ass function.

That’s all for my anatomy of a hack.  So easy, even a historian can do it.  If you have any ideas for additional enhancements, please share them.

When Obama took the stage last night, I was struck immediately by just how somber he looked.  He seemed both humbled by the moment and completely cognizant of the utter mess he’s set to inherit.  In the most soaring section of his speech, he cast the history of the past century through the eyes of Ann Nixon Cooper, born in Georgia in 1902 to a former slave.  He recounted the greatest American achievements of the last 100 years — women’s suffrage, the New Deal, World War II, the Black Freedom Movement, the moon landing, the fall of the Iron Curtain — interspersing, in the rhythm of the black church, the phrase “yes, we can” to connote that when Americans have faced existential challenges, the majority of them have repeatedly congealed around a shared, fundamental belief in the nation.  He then pivoted to the future, imagining his daughters looking back upon the 21st century, pitching this moment as the one where we chose to give them a history about which they could be proud.  This segment effectively situated the election in our national story and comfortably acknowledged its implications for the history of racism in this country, without letting the idea overwhelm the whole.  It was an “omni-American” moment, drawing upon the pain and richness in our national experience to present an integrative vision of history.

Yet, his sober body language cut somehow against this profound statement of hope, and did so in a way that actually gave me more confidence in his ability to become the greatest president in more than a generation.  This is a politician who is keenly self-aware, who said in May 2007, while reflecting upon his trouble in the earliest debates, “there’s a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.”  In an 180-degree turn from the current occupant of the White House, here is a man who struggles with ideas, who challenges himself to synthesize, who speaks to Americans as adults who can be trusted to see more than two diametrically opposed sides to an issue.  This is the temperament that allowed Obama to surge against the backdrop of an economic crisis, to soar above Rovian politics; it’s the persona that injected humility into his presentation last night, that led him to address in sympathetic terms those who disagree with him; and it’s the proper tone to lead the nation as it begins to face this next wave of existential challenges.

This man can’t solve all of our problems, doesn’t portend the end of race, and is bound by difficult choices.  But I can think of no better leader for this moment.

Some additional, random thoughts:

• Delano. S. Fitzgerald. Baines. Herbert Walker. Hussein.
• For the first time in my life, we have a President who may be able to convince some people that government is not the biggest problem in their lives.
• It will be fascinating to watch the Republican Party as it struggles to pick up the pieces and to find a voice.  It will be at war with itself.
• Obama will be the first president my and many of your kids will remember throughout their lives.
• It’s almost as remarkable for a former community organizer to win this office as it is an African-American.
• The passage of Proposition 8 in California should lessen the joy progressives take forward from yesterday.

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks.  According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”

What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes?  Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.

Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition).  If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project.  For details on how the technology works, click here.

This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network.  reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process.  All of us together are smarter than we are added up.

Brilliant work.

(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)

I was in Michigan this past weekend, and drove past the “North Oakland County Victory Office” of the McCain Campaign, just west of Pontiac, twenty miles north of Detroit. A placard near the street read “Get your McCain-Palin lawn signs here!” The building looked like a small bait shop, set back from the road, in the middle of a big parking lot with few cars. No one seemed to be there. On a Saturday afternoon. A month before the election.

This could have been a reaction against the McCain campaign deciding to give up on Michigan late last week. But when compared to what I’m reading about Obama’s organization, the two campaigns are running entirely different ground games. A few examples of what Obama’s been doing:

Here’s an ad that the bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley made in support of Obama. It’s in heavy radio rotation in Virginia:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUOfaIyv4Bs

Here’s a report from the Fulton (MO.) Sun, about the Obama campaign’s use of TTY devices to call hard-of-hearing voters.

Here’s a link to the iPhone Obama Application (pictured at right), which sorts contacts by state (putting battlegrounds at the top), and makes it easy for individuals to find their way to campaign events, make calls on behalf of Obama, or get details on the candidate’s take on particular issues.

The Obama campaign bought a tv channel on the Dish Network. Channel 73 will be playing all-Obama programming through the election.

Here’s some reporting on the campaigns from fivethirtyeight.com; a couple of bloggers have visited both campaigns’ offices throughout Colorado and Missouri. Key section:

Let’s be clear. We’ve observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn’t like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director.

The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it’s a whirlwind. People move. It’s a dynamic bustle. You can feel it in our photos.

Finally, for those who think Obama’s been too reticent to hit McCain hard: think again. Much of the more aggressive and negative stuff is happening on a subterranean level (although that’s about to change with a national ad on McCain and the Keating Five). Spanish language commercials (radio and tv) are running in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada tying McCain to Rush Limbaugh, saying he has “dos caras,” or “two faces.” This morning I heard a report featuring a call from a Virginia Obama-supporter to an undecided voter. It began with a reminder that John McCain would be the oldest President ever elected. The caller then brought up the specter of McCain’s death, talked about Sarah Palin’s embarrassing interview with Katie Couric, and then asked the person on the other line if they really want her as their President. In national tv appearances and the debates thus far, in recognition of Obama’s campaign against “politics as usual,” the candidate and his running mate have avoided a negative or derisive tone or even challenging Palin. I think Biden probably could have field dressed Palin last week had he wanted to. Instead, he treated her and her substanceless winking — to paraphrase Garry Shandling– like how “Johnny Carson treated Charo.” (It’s only fair when acknowledging Palin’s winking to also note Biden’s botox. He did, however, answer a few of the questions). At the local level, the Obama campaign has a bit tougher.

There’s a direct correlation between the sophistication of the Obama ground game and the Democratic gains in affiliated voters. In Pennsylvania, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 486,000 in 2000 and 580,000 in 2004. Now? 1.15 million. In Nevada, four years ago Dems trailed by nearly 5000 registrants. They currently hold an 80,000 voter edge. In Florida, the Democrats have added 130,000 more voters than the Republicans over the past four years. If you’re an Obama supporter, those numbers are very encouraging.

Other factors explain this swing, including the unpopularity of the current administration and the downturn in the economy. But it would be foolish to discount the effectiveness of the Obama machine in organizing its base, supporting voter registration (especially among the young), employing technology, and effectively tailoring its message to particular constituencies. Obama and Biden know who their audiences are, and how to speak to them.

Admittedly, I haven’t been following the McCain campaign as closely as Obama’s, but I’ve seen no evidence that there’s much innovation or energy at its core. Yes, Palin has fired up the Republican base. But has that led to more organizing or a flock of volunteers in key locations? Aside from McCain’s increasingly negative ads and his hope that the economy becomes less central to the campaign, a few yard signs are all I’ve really seen.

* Late update: Ben Smith has a piece in Politico on Obama’s “quiet efforts” to target black voters… subterranean for real.

to: john.mccain@maverickymaverick.gov
from: dmccourt@youhavegottobekiddingme.edu [Sent On Behalf Of American Public]

subject: extension?

Dear John,

While I sympathize with the demands of balancing both legislative and campaign issues, I cannot, in accord with historical policy, grant your request for an extension on the debate. Dean’s excuses can only be granted in the cases of health or personal emergencies, and would need to be submitted to me in writing.  A physician’s note is also acceptable.

Regards,
Dana McCourt

---

On Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 12:00pm, John McCain wrote:

sorry to bother you and i know this request is late but i have been really busy and i want to call an emergency meeting with the president and understanding all the material is taking up a lot of my time so i find myself woefully underprepared and i am throwing myself on your mercy. can i get an extension over the weekend on the debate so i can present my best work to you? or should i get a dean’s excuse?

thanks,

john

Several faculty have agreed to post to the blog regularly, and to lead an ongoing conversation about teaching at Baruch College.  Surprisingly, there are very few blogs like this, which provide the opportunity for members of a college community to discuss pedagogy outside of their disciplines.  This is a unique and exciting development for the college and for CUNY, and I look forward to much interchange between the folks who post to and follow that blog and Cacophonites.

That said, the activity level on the two candidates’ Twitter pages does seem to back up the overarching thesis.

Check out these screenshots.

Obama’s:

McCain’s:

(Note the “Location” each has signified.  Obama sharply “outsiders” his online presence.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

He even wrote a song about his:

When I’m writing, my “little hater” tells me I need to find a fifth or a sixth corroborating piece of evidence before I can make a claim, and even after I do, the damn thing still comes out tentative.  He sometimes makes me think that the idea that I just came up with can’t be anywhere near as good as I originally thought because, well, I’m the one who came up with it.  Someone else probably wrote something similar somewhere else, and I just haven’t seen it yet.

I’ve about had enough of this bastard getting in my way.

Sometimes, when I need get a post up on this blog, I start writing about interests that I don’t get to explore when I write reports, papers, proposals, or emails.  It’s possible to tie almost anything into that topic taped up there across the header.  “Write what you know” isn’t useful just for getting our students to break through their shells.  It’s also a useful way to put your little hater on his heels, get the engine revving, and start a conversation.

Writing teachers everywhere: this is not change you can believe in.

(kudos to TPM)

Apart from Facebook’s support for connectedness and competitive word twisting, the site allows users to issue  “status” updates whenever they want.  This is a delicate but  powerful art form.  I’ve encountered the following kinds of updates:

Literal: “Luke is working on a blog post”
Self-promoting: “Luke just published this: http://cac.ophony.org/2008/07/24/status-anxiety/”
Philosophical: “Luke is”
Frustrated: “Luke is, but perhaps not according to Human Resources”
Resigned: “Luke isn’t”
Ironic: “Luke’s productivity is unaffected by the distractions of Facebook”
Literary (direct quote): “Luke is under the brown fog of a winter dawn”
Literary (reference): “Luke thinks the only thing keeping him visible is his whiteness”
Historical: “Luke thinks the run on Indymac echoes the Panic of 1893″
Informed: “Luke just got run over by Bob Novak”
Uninformed: “Luke thinks McCain is being too heavily scrutinized by the press”
Anticipatory: “Luke is looking forward to the new season of Mad Men”
Anguished: “Luke keeps writing the same &%#(*&@  sentence over and over again!”
Confessional: “Luke watched Steel Magnolias last night, and is still crying”
Curious: “Luke wonders how many kinds of status updates there are”
Evangelical: “Luke thinks there will never, ever, ever be anything like The Wire on TV again”
Nerdy: “Luke is a csstud and a phpimp”
Political: “Luke is chanting No Justice, No Peace”
Supportive: “Luke thinks that no matter what (redacted)’s dissertation adviser says, the work is top-notch”
Onomatopoeic: “Luke thump thump thumped three miles at the track” (that one is also alliterative)
Swinging: “Luke is be-bop-be-dee-bop”
Sporting: “Luke is yelling ‘Go Green’”
Stumped, Disinterested, or Over Forty: ” ”

Of course, there are other ways to announce your status, or lack thereof, to the world.  There’s Twitter, which gives you 140 characters to say what you’re up to (”microblogging,” they call it).  There’s the status menu feature of an instant messaging client.  There’s all sorts of ways to unify these statuses, to change them on the fly; or you can choose to keep them separate.

Yet, I imagine the following uttered in the border-state twang of a dear BLSCI comrade: “who cares?  I don’t want to know what you’re doing, and I don’t want you to know what I’m doing.”  Of course not.  A status update is not really a status update, but rather a chance to blast your friends with a small dose of personality to break up the monotony of the day.  It’s fun, it’s a challenge to be creative, and it’s a chance to stay connected with a community.

Understandably, the Obamas ain’t pleased, finding it tasteless and degrading.  The fear is that this image, widely distributed, may give credence to the misinformation going around about the couple.  As someone put it to me, “this plays into the suspicions of the morons who ‘don’t do nuance.’”  To which I replied: “Since when has the New Yorker cared about those folks?”

People will be talking about this cover, and though it may not reach the level attained by Saul Steinberg’s “New Yorker’s View of the World” or Maira Kalman’s “New Yorkistan,” it will be getting the magazine some attention.  So, perhaps as far as the magazine is concerned, it’s effective communication… but it’s also requiring the reader/listener to bring a lot of context to the table.

* Late update: in the interest of “Equal Time,” Edge of the American West offers this:

Here he is, with the other two Nikundiwe boys:

Kaya has been venturing into new levels and style of argument recently, testing what she can get past her parents and what she can’t.  But, frankly, she’s not that good at it yet.  I’m sure by the time she’s 15, she’ll be a pro, and we’ll be defenseless (aside from tracking the GPS chip we’ll have implanted in her rear end).  Now, though, she tries to dupe us with great vigor, and is prone to the crash and burn.

Exhibit A.  I’m shooting baskets in Jiju and Jiji’s driveway with her, and she decides to go inside, but stops to take the top off of one the four or five lanterns that line the walkway.

“Kaya,” I say, “don’t play with those lights.”

She takes another few steps, stoops down, and takes the top off the next lantern.

“Kaya! What did I just tell you?”

“You said not to play with the lights.”

“Well, then why did you immediately play with the next one?”

“Because I didn’t hear you.”

About these pictures, Kaya said “I took em at Grandma’s house, and I like them. The first one is a kind of medium face, then there’s two nice faces, and then there’s a silly face. It looks very pretty and I love the pictures. And I love mommy and daddy. That’s it.”

Peter O’Toole, on Fresh Air, telling Terry Gross about shooting the dangerous scene pictured above for Lawrence of Arabia.

I love how O’Toole takes her question and turns it into a narrative, reveling in the details, painting a picture, and ending with a bang. As is often the case, Gross asks a follow-up question that leads to a coda by O’Toole that sums up not only the moment and the story, but also his entire approach to life.

Tiger Stadium photo credit: hassgocubs

I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.

So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.

Comerica Park photo credit: kw111786

As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.

Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.

Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.

The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.

Comerica Park Scoreboard photo credit: McPhloyd

One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.

At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.

Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.

At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.

The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.

Edupunk (here are musings and run downs by Mike Caulfield, Stephen Downes, and D’Arcy Norman) is a new name for ideas that have been bouncing around the progressive edublogosphere for some time, namely, that higher education humanity needs an alternative to proprietary course management systems and the philosophy of teaching and learning that they implicitly promote. At the core of edupunk are older pedagogical stances unrelated to technology: an ethic of self-reliance, the valuation of student-centered experiential learning, and the rejection of the “banking concept of education.” Edupunk seeks to update and adapt these ideas within the rapidly evolving realm of edutech.

I’m coming a little late to this particular conversation (last week I was DIYing the walls of my house with a wallpaper steamer and buckets of paint– domesticpunk), and hope I can add something to the celebration/elaboration. Seems to me that “edupunk” is a useful term, though, like all metaphors, it breaks down in the end. It has successfully congealed and branded the thinking that’s at the core of the unease many of us working in this field have with the way things are done at most schools. It’s good that it’s been picked up by the Chronicle, and it’s fantastic that more people are finding their way to Jim’s blog these days.

I fear, however, that the attention to the phrase may distract from the work that produced it. For instance, I’ve been been trying to square the circle of my dislike for punk music and culture with my love and appreciation for the work of the cats who’ve rallied to this term. I see a rejectionist ethos and cliquish sense of superiority behind much punk music and culture, and I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the edutech movement that I feel a part of. I’ve always been more of a funk and soul man myself, and think that the affirmation native to those genres, the love and depth of feeling at their center, are much more pleasant (and just as useful) rhetorical and political stances. A brilliant administrator I once worked with, wise enough to know what she didn’t know and to defer to folks like Jim and Zach Davis on all things digital, once said, “we want to use technology to seduce students to our pedagogical goals.” That seems more Barry White than Johnny Rotten.

In that spirit, I present: edufunk.

photo(shop) credit: skywaltzer

Or, how about yet another metaphor: edujazz.I sense in the discourse around edupunk an appreciation for messiness, even a distaste for form. I’m not sure this lends itself to the best teaching. The pedagogy that I’ve been exposed to and have practiced as a teacher of history is much more like jazz… lay down a structure, and leave plenty of space for improvisation. This allows a variety of types of learning to happen in a classroom, acknowledges that both facts and the skills to interpret them are important areas to work on, and encourages our students to explore from within material that we’ve laid out with a set of goals in mind. I’m all for the “guide-by-the-side” approach to teaching… but the work that went into the Ph.D. I’m about to earn does qualify me, I think, to do a bit more than that at times.

This metaphor is translatable to how we, as instructional technologists, nurture critical approaches to online learning, particularly in how we can “seduce” talented teachers to experiment with new forms. Our Institute is incredibly lucky to have the autonomy to deploy and develop whatever software we deem pedagogically appropriate, so to a certain extent we are isolated from Blackboard. Baruch’s IT shop also recognizes that an institution of higher learning should offer a range of solutions to its community, even if those solutions compete with one another. BCTC blesses and supports our experimentation.

Yet Blackboard still runs wild at this university, and we are constantly engaging with faculty members and administrators who refuse to see the differences between the solutions we promote and what BB offers. BB’s appeal is in its antiseptic pre-fabrication, in the very fact that it doesn’t force faculty to take the extra steps to really consider how Web 2.0 and distributed learning open up new pedagogical possibilities. As a result, many faculty graft onto it existing modes of learning, fearful of allowing technology to “get in the way.” They get on Blackboard, get off, and move on.

Some faculty members do use Blackboard quite successfully, particularly for collaborative projects. Good teaching is good teaching, no matter where it happens or how it happens. Our job as instructional technologists, I think, is to explore the new possibilities and modes of learning that Blackboard happens to work against. If that software gives faculty members what they need to accomplish what they want, then so be it. But if faculty are interested in making full use of distributed learning, in continuing to learn themselves, and especially in truly empowering students, they need other solutions.

Edujazz, emphasizing structure and improvisation, can help reach out to faculty who are reticent to give up their control and jump into the pit with the edupunks. This argument evolves from my work in an academic service unit, where my job is to help a wide-range of faculty members experiment with this stuff. Such work requires, and benefits from, sensitive responses to their concerns. An anti-authoritarian, anarchic response will ultimately accomplish little. The DIY approach of edupunk is a great goal, but often times DIT– Do It Together–is necessary, and even preferable. Helping faculty members translate their pedagogical structures to a new environment goes a long way towards mollifying their concerns about the impact of technology on their students’ learning. The students, if the structure is sound, can handle the improvisation.

Now, behind the scenes, hell yeah, I’ll cavort with the punks. Jim’s named a movement, even if the contours of that movement still haven’t yet been fully defined. The politics of this stuff and the consideration of the logic of capital are deeply important, and should constantly be a part of the conversation. If a university is going to spend millions on a limited and problematic application, it should probably be able to explain why that solution is better than cheaper alternatives. I haven’t seen that done yet.

Until it is, there’s work to be done. So, edupunks, edufunks, eduheads, or whomever: keep doing your thing.

Guess who’s the line leader?

Meghan and Kaya

Megan, Kaya, and Meghan

Bella: “Who ARE these kids playing with Kaya?”

The Bean:

Craft time!

Daddy got three seconds with the Bday girl!

There were fights over this swing, and hurt feelings.

Yaz and Bella

Let them eat cake.

“Buckets” Waltzer

Our youngest (and cutest) guest, with his mommy.

Our oldest (and proudest) guest, with her girls

From the “first signs of the apocalpyse” department here at Dushtumay… click me.

Three.

Two.

One.

Zero.

Of course, she’s allowed her own music.  I know our tastes will likely diverge through her adolescence, and we’ll have less of a chance during those years to connect over common sounds.  That’s part of why I’m so glad that she’s worked the Dino-5 into her rotation recently.  This collection of hip-hop heads is organized by Prince Paul, who produced the landmark De La Soul albums 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul is Dead, and Buhloone Mind State, and features Ladybug Mecca (formerly of the Digable Planets), Chali 2na (Jurassic Five), Wordsworth (an underground Brooklyn MC who appeared on records by A Tribe Called Quest and Blackstar), and Scratch (the vocal turntable, formerly of the Roots).  Their debut album is a storybook, narrated by the poet Ursula Rucker, about 5 dino friends at their dino school.  My kid is now walking around, rapping in the deep voice of 2na’s character, T-Rex, “I may be big and scary, but I’m really pretty nice.”

What’s so striking about the Dino 5 for me is the way they capture the essence of hip-hop as it was during its golden era in the late 1980s-mid 1990s, before capital swooped in and co-opted what was once predominantly an alternative and oppositional art form.  Popping off about your fly Adidas or your adversary’s nappy head and rotund relatives, rapping about dancing, music, girls, boys, friends, enemies, and the neighborhood.  Most of that gave way to Big Pimpin’, bling bling, and baseless braggadacio.

Hip-hop is still a vibrant art form, always will be, but there’s a reason that the areas of the music that challenge listeners aurally, poetically, and politically moved “underground,” out of site from the casual observer who doesn’t have the time or the passion to dig for those sounds.  Hip-hop ain’t dead, y’all, far from it; it’s been integrated in interesting ways into other forms, it’s been globalized, and there’s still plenty of innovation happening.  Yet hip-hop’s foundational meaning has been clouded over the past generation by its loudest voices.

So I’m happy to share with my daughter a feeling similar to what I got during my adolescence, listening to De La transmit live from Mars.  The Dino 5 represent the best of hip-hop: role playing, storytelling, deep danceable beats, learned references and musical quotations, wicked flow, and lyrical playfulness.  Their music is both nice enough for a four year-old and “nice” enough for her purist dad.  Kid tested, pops approved.

As my daughter takes her first tentative steps towards reading, it heartens me to be able to introduce her to the poetry and artistry of hip-hop with something that’s her speed.  Soon enough, she’ll be barraged with beats and words and sounds.  The Dino 5’s album gives her hip-hop that’s more sophisticated than the corny rapping on Sesame Street.  Hopefully, it will help her sort through the cacophony that she’ll meet as she grows, and find something that’s as meaningful to her as the music of my youth is to me.

Here’s a couple of brief clips to tack sound onto my words.

T-Rex struggles with how other kids see him, and hopes that they can think twice about how nice he may be:

Tracy Triceratops has a tough time keeping her voice down:

Posdnous introduces the “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989):

I’ve become interested in this question while following our Anthropology/Sociology working group, and also through my own surfing.  A relatively new blog–The Edge of the American West–run by historians Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman from U.C. Davis, has quickly become one of the better U.S. history blogs.  What makes it good is a steady flow of mixed content: scholarship and book reviews, “This Day in History” posts, pick-ups on contemporary political issues and reporting, and some discussion of teaching.  Mix in the authors’ fine senses of humor and an occasional reference to sports and, voila, you get pretty good insight into just what it is historians do.

Early in The Edge’s life, Rauchway answered the question, “Why Blog?”  I was particularly struck by his fourth reason:

To change the profession: be the academic discourse you want to see in the world. You want historiography to move quickly, have relevance, be sharper? You can’t make it that way book review by book review: but you can if you blog.

This argument supports the notion of a blog as a personal publishing platform, as an opportunity to get your name and voice out there, and to contribute to the shaping of the discourse in your field.

So, how about it, BLSCI fellows?  Your very own blog, and all the opportunity that comes with it, is now just a click away.