About a week or so ago I got Robert Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country which I have been totally digging. The book has been reinforcing an informal education I’ve been getting through my various conversations with Folklorist Gary Stanton and Musician/Artist Kent Ippolito (who gave me the book –thanks Kent!) on early 20th century American music. It’s a series of sporadic discussions, and it has been a lot of fun for me to listen to some music from the various genres (which all seem to share some interesting relations) from the 1920s and 30s –which is the focus of Crumb’s book.

Crumb's Hereoes of Blues, Jazz, and Country

Crumb’s sketches of the artists are wonderful, my favorite is the one below of Sleepy John Estes. And each image is accompanied by a very short (one to two paragraph) discussion of the artist and their particular musical strengths along with how many “sides” they recorded ( a side of a 78 album was anywhere from 2:30 to 3:30 minutes long, which basically meant the length of popular song).

Sleepy John Estes

Anyway, along with the amazing assortment of Crumb’s interpretations of the artists there is a CD that features a sampling of their songs. I hadn’t heard any of them before except one, which was part of the soundtrack from O' Brother Where Art Thou, which was Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” found for your listening pleasure on YouTube here, and embedded below:

Skip James’ career is fascinating, here is a brief excerpt as told by his Wikipedia article:

As is typical of his era, James recorded a variety of material — blues and spirituals, cover versions and original compositions — frequently blurring the lines between genres and sources. For example, “I’m So Glad” was derived from a 1927 song by Art Sizemore and George A. Little entitled “So Tired”, which had been recorded in 1928 by both Gene Austin and Lonnie Johnson (the latter under the title “I’m So Tired of Livin’ All Alone”). James changed the song’s lyrics, transforming it with his virtuoso technique, moaning delivery, and keen sense of tone. Biographer Stephen Calt, echoing the opinion of several critics, considered the finished product totally original, “one of the most extraordinary examples of fingerpicking found in guitar music.”

Several of the Grafton recordings, such as “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues”, “Devil Got My Woman”, “Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader”, and “22-20 Blues” (the basis for Robert Johnson’s better-known “32-20 Blues”), have proven similarly influential. Very few original copies of James’s Paramount 78s have survived.

[[The Great Depression struck just as James’ recordings were hitting the market. Sales were poor as a result, and James gave up performing the blues to become the choir director in his father’s church. Skip James himself was later ordained as a minister in both the Baptist and Methodist denominations, but his involvement in religious activities was sketchy.

For the next thirty years, James recorded nothing and drifted in and out of music. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In 1964 blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. According to Calt, the “rediscovery” of both Skip James and of Son House at virtually the same moment was the start of the “blues revival” in America. In July 1964 James, along with other rediscovered performers, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Several photographs by Dick Waterman captured this first performance in over 30 years. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon, and Vanguard labels and played various engagements until his death in 1969.

The release of his song about “hard times” coincided precisely with the Great Depression, making the market for his recording evaporate and his musical career that much tougher. Yet the song captures the haunting uncertainty of difficult times, while simultaneously providing a reassuring voice of someone who has not only endured them, but created something great within them.

Image thanks to Lulu Vision

Here at UMW we have been going through a CMS Review. It has been a pretty interesting project, and while I only tangentially involved, I have been following the basic rhetorical thrust of the sales pitches from companies like Desire2Learn, BlackBoard, and Angel (well be getting in-house demos of Sakai and Moodle next week).

As any faithful reader of the bava may have already guessed, I’m not particularly a fan of Course Management Systems. But, at the same time, I am beginning to understand the perceived need for them in higher ed. I find it interesting that most of the questions in a CMS review center around issues of the gradebook and quiz functionality, which seems to really highlight—as Jerry would argue rightly, I think—that these systems are predominantly about administrative management of courses rather than teaching and learning. Fair enough, I should just swallow my medicine then, right? Maybe, and I’m trying to become more amiable and compliant. I really am, I swear.

But humor me for second. This evening I was thinking about a particular strand of NYC movies such as The Warriors (1979) Times Square (1980), Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), C.H.U.D. (1984), Alphabet City (1984), Crocodile Dundee (1986), Bright Lights, Big City (1988), State of Grace (1990), New Jack City (1991), and several others. While these films represent a wide range of genres, they have something in common in my mind which is a filmic framing of New York City as a wilderness, a frontier of crime, violence, and more generally fear. A vision feeding upon the perception of New York City during the 60 and 70s —with the white flight to the suburbs—as a reflection of the state of general “decline” of urban centers (we can understand that decline in a whole host of race and class-inflected ways). Just think about the title of the film Fort Apache, The Bronx, which alludes to John Ford’s Western classic starring John Wayne titled Fort Apache (1948) (though Ford’s film is far more sympathetic and complex a look at the Native Americans than Fort Apache, The Bronx is of the inhabitants of the South Bronx), it is a self-defined frontier film relocated back to the cities of the East Coast. During the late 70s, throughout the 80s, and into the 90s (when the process is just about complete), a new battle for a return of “civilization” in America’s “once great” cities emerges. It is the rise, in several different forms, of the “urban jungle” film, a space that must be exposed, condemned, and re-conquered—and film was one place this happened.

Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier does a phenomenal job of examining the details of “urban renewal” as deep-rooted shift in both the political economy and culture of U.S. cities during the late twentieth century. The very language of the process of gentrification of urban areas has taken on the frontier imagery of the West: urban pioneers, urban homesteaders, urban cowboys, etc. Films like those above trace this shift in myriad ways, and capture the cultural impact of re-framing American cities as frontiers of crime, violence and difference that need to be both civilized and assimilated, which more often than not means the undesirable element of any given city need to be made invisible, hidden from public view, which C.H.U.D. does a wonderful job at suggesting with the transformation of the displaced populations of NYC living under the city in old Subway tunnels (also known as Mole People, a reality compounded in the 80s when President Reagan put the majority of America’s mentally ill patients from clinics, hospitals, and treatment centers around the country on the streets) into monsters that were created by the very government that tried to hide them (I love this movie!). And there is more to say about each of these films, I mean Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee is just the kind of rough and exotic cowboy needed to fight the rampant crime in NYC, and ultimately he liberates the city and himself from the violence that often characterizes any frontier (frontier, in my mind, proving a a very different linguistic formulation than the more nuanced and complex idea of a borderzone which examines the flow of fluid identities through space). And I could talk about all these movies at length, but that is another post, or series of posts, about New York City gentrification in the movies. Suffice it to say, you can read movies as social, political, and cultural traces of the re-imagining of the urban centers as frontiers that need to be subdued, and which are re-claimed and occupied by the middle and upper-classes during the late 90s and 00s.

So what the hell does any of this have to do with educational technology and CMSs? Everything, in my mind. Course management systems as we know them today emerged roughly 10 to 15 years ago (with the watershed year being 1997) as a means of creating virtual learning environments. The very logic of these environments was to create applications that could manage the administration, delivery, and discussion based components of a course online. About this time the CMS became ubiquitous in higher ed as a possibility for managing document distribution, rosters, forums, etc. Companies like BlackBoard emerged as all-in-one solutions for managing courses online due to the relative difficultly of using the open web in the late 90s given the unilateral nature of content delivery, limited access to the web, and the general difficulty designing and maintaining one’s own space. Course management systems fit a need, they were designed for a learning environment that posed a high threshold of difficulty for two-way participation.

Yet, over the the next ten years the web becomes a far more conducive space for dynamic interaction and participation, while at the same time internet penetration throughout the Western world becomes more and more ubiquitous. At the same time applications that offer similar functionality as course management systems begin to emerge at a fraction of the cost of centralized, proprietary systems. And the interest in emerging technologies with different approaches begins to appear, the early interest in learning object repositories and metadata might be understood as a foil to the parallel interest that emerges a bit later on with blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.—with the ease and simplicity of the later seemingly winning out over the labor intensive and static model of the former (I am treading on unfamiliar ground here, so feel free to fire away). So what we have here is a failure to communicate the emergence of a frontier in educational technology, the space of harnessing the possibilities for teaching and learning on the open web that are no longer limited to the logic of an outdated system like the CMS that provides a controlled space for basic interaction online around course materials given the apparent limitations of the early web. Yet, the logic of such a system morphs into a logic of institutional control, security, and convenience. What changes is not the actual underlying technology of CMSs as outdated systems of delivery and management centered around a course, but the general sense that the internet is a dangerous place (which it is) and teaching and learning needs to be cordoned off from that (which is questionable). The design of CMSs don’t change over this period of time, but their logic and raison d’etre does. And while the power of tools such as blogs, wikis, and RSS for creating engaging, interactive spaces for collaboration and discussion made simpler with syndication technology like RSS is amde more and more apparent, the rhetoric of fear, terror, and a protected and centralized space for teaching and learning becomes vocalized more and more.

So, what happens? The companies that make the CMSs gentrify the frontier, they try and assimilate the power of these tools within a controlled space that is safe, closed, and convenient. It is two pronged attack exploiting fear and protection of the students and teachers along with a promise of a centralized convenience and peace of mind. So, like the artists that moved into SOHO and the Lower East Side of NYC in the 60s and 70s, their pursuit of an affordable and diverse alternative to mainstream logic ultimately paves the way for capital to roll in and develop and gentrify these neighborhoods, eliminating most, if not all, of the original spaces that made them interesting and compelling to begin with. This is the lot of educational technology right now, those professors, IT folks, and instructional technologists who pioneered the field of educational technology on the open web over the last decade are watching their work be incorporated into a machine that is selling them back the fruits of their experimental labors as a shiny product that elides the very context of its relevance. Course management systems are the sterile environments of gentrified and wealthy cities like New York’s Manhattan that has very little left of its original luster, and what can be discovered comes at a cost that is prohibitive to the everyday citizen. The machine is, indeed, using us!

Are there alternatives? Is such a move irreversible? I don’t know, but when I read Barbara Ganley and trace her thought I do have hope for different models of thinking about teaching and learning within a digital framework. There are new frontiers emerging, and I want to be on them.

ShareThis

Complaints are already circling about the title of the upcoming X-Files feature, X-Files: I Want to Believe. Chris Carter, the original creator of the X-Files, justifies the title by saying:

It’s a story that involves the difficulties in mediating faith and science.

An apt theme for where we are, culturally.

At any rate, a crappy title I can handle. The real challenge will be fulfilling the expectations of fans who have waited six years for this. Almost as tough: capturing the interests of those who won’t have nostalgia tugging on their wallets. Best of luck, Mulder and Scully. I want to believe, too … that the film will be not be sucky.

Setup: Part One

One of the requirements for my Masters in English¹ was the standard scholarly research course. The major assignment of the course was to create a bibliography on a subject or author and then compose a bibliographic essay from the findings. I chose to research H. P. Lovecraft because I’d been interested in his fiction and his influence since my undergrad years.² The result of that project was a pretty extensive EndNote bibliography of Lovecraft criticism from 1990 to 2004.

Setup: Part Two

I’ve been playing with Zotero for over a year, and enjoying the improvements the Center for History and New Media folks keep cranking out for it. ³ I’ve also kept in the back of my mind the idea that I should get that Lovecraft EndNote library into Zotero, and then I should probably poke around and see if I can revise or expand it.

Converting Bibliographies

I’d had trouble with this, though, because it was a pretty large collection. My browser would freeze when attempting to import an EndNote XML file. This morning, I found bibconvert, a really handy online tool that will convert a number of bibliographic formats. I uploaded my EndNote XML and converted it to BibTex format (apparently, the preferred Zotero import format) in less than a minute. I imported the result into Zotero, also in less than a minute, and now have my entire Lovecraft bibliography in Zotero ready for tweaking, expanding, etc. Happy!

Side Note: Diigo vs. Zotero

I’ve observed the recent flood of educators switching to Diigo, and I think that’s great. It’s a really good tool with a lot of excellent features. I still use both del.icio.us and Diigo: del.icio.us for saving everything (personal, academic, professional, etc.) and Diigo for saving and annotating educational/academic pages (which are also sent to del.icio.us).

But I also use Zotero for any serious research project, and here’s why: Diigo and Zotero are not designed to do the same things. Diigo is primarily a bookmarking service, allowing users to save, annotate, tag, and organize web pages. Zotero is primarily a bibliography service, allowing users to save, annotate, tag, and organize sources, whether they are online or not. Certainly, Zotero is full of tools to make that process easier if you’re working with an online source, but you’re not limited to online sources. Also, Zotero and Diigo export their data in significantly different formats, gearing Diigo exports more for transfer between bookmarking services and Zotero exports more for transfer between bibliographic services.

Next Steps and Hopes

I still feel a bit limited with Zotero because the sources sit on my computer and can’t be easily shared with others. I certainly can’t build a collection collaboratively with others. But, as CHNM has promised, both of these limitations should be removed in the near future. Hope, hope.

These limitations aren’t solved by Diigo, either, because I can’t collaboratively build a bibliography of sources on Diigo, nor could that bibliography later be exported into a format easily adopted by scholars. I would love to see a Diigo-like ease of use and collaboration for a Zotero-like focus on bibliographies. Maybe CHNM’s plans for Zotero will deliver that or something close. Hope, hope.

Finally, I’ll be looking for some online research groups devoted to Lovecraft in the next week or so. If I don’t find any, maybe I’ll start some myself.

Resources

For anyone interested:

• My Lovecraft bibliography (currently unedited): RTF, EndNote, BibTex, Zotero
• My bibliographic essay (currently unedited): Google Doc version or CommentPress version⁴
• An admittedly bad PowerPoint that summarizes the bibliographic essay (currently unedited)

Feedback

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience with any of these tools, or some answers/guesses to these questions:

• Anyone know about any Lovecraft-centric online research groups?
• Is my analysis of the differences between and limitations of Zotero and Diigo correct? I think it is, but maybe I’m missing something …?

Any other comments are also welcome.

Footnotes:

1. Teaching of Writing & Literature at George Mason University
2. In fact, my roommate and I used to get groups together pretty regularly to play the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. An ideal game for casual play, actually, because everyone ends up dead or insane by the end of the night. More recently, I’ve introduced my girlfriend to the Call of Cthulhu CCG, an interesting but complicated game.
3. I’m excited about their plans to add server-based syncing and group-managed collections, at which point I think Zotero will be THE go-to tool for creating, storing, and sharing annotated bibliographies.
4. If you’re into Lovecraft at all, I’d love to see some of your comments there. I setup CommentPress on a WordpressMU install just to see what it would be like. If it keeps working, the plan is to post some other shorter writings there and, perhaps, created some sub-blogs for longer works. We’ll see …

I’m a big fan of Lost.  As a fan, I found this video mash-up hilarious, annoying … and strangely helpful.

Previously on Lost: What?