blackboard
Yesterday I was asked by a good friend and mentor the following question: “What’s next?” And it made me stop and think, I guess since I don’t have a Ph.D. and I’m in “IT” I should be thinking about an administrative position, right? I mean you can’t be an instructional technologist forever, right? It’s just a position you take until you become a bonafide administrator or decide to head back into teaching, it’s a liminal identity that ultimately one must surrender to make more money or have more independence or have a bit more power, right?
Well, I answered quite frankly that I really don’t want to do anything else. I do not want to be an administrator, it would completely divorce me from where my particular strengths lie: getting people excited about what they do and helping them muster the courage to experiment wildly. I really, really like what I do a lot, and I think I’m pretty good at it. In fact, I’m better at it than I have been at anything else I have ever done, perhaps with the exception of watching movies. But, there’s no future in it, right? I mean, come on Reverend, you’re an instructional technologist for Christ’s sake. I’d say 99.99999999999% percent of the population has no idea what that title means, and 99.9% of the instructional technologists aren’t too sure either. Well, that’s what I am, and the more I look around the world of educational technology the prouder I am of this fact. But thinking of how to articulate this idea was immediately daunting. I really don’t have the energy at the moment to write it all up or re-think why I need to say how this question has moved me to the point of reflection and deep consideration.
Well, luckily I don’t have to, because Matt Gold (a dear friend) did something special for me today. He pointed me to a post I wrote almost a year ago that addresses this question head-on. It’s a post I had all but forgotten about, yet he remembered it and commented upon it this very evening (when I needed it most) as if he were intentionally pushing me to re-read it–which his too kind comments actually did. So, taking my inspiration from Matt I am going to “radically re-use” my own thoughts from an old post to answer the question of what an instructional technologist is, at least in my feeble mind. (As an aside, I don’t think I have ever realized the full power of blogging my ideas regularly for the last three years until this evening, where my own ideas come back to lift my spirits in a existential moment of uncertainty and exhaustion, so thank you Matt from the bottom of my heart!)
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What is an instructional technologist?
The difficulty of such a question is in many ways tied up with the larger problems with such a conference as EDUCAUSE, and actually framed quite clearly the heart of the presentation Gardner Campbell and I gave yesterday: it all depends on whether you want to focus on teaching and learning within a community or the ease and efficiency of administrating a system?
The answer to this question will ultimately decide whether or not one professor or ten professors or an entire campus is willing to use dynamic, loosely joined open source tools like WPMu, Drupal, MediaWiki, etc. If the focus is on administration and not teaching and learning than an enterprise, “turn-key” solution like BlackBoard will work perfectly. And you can spend all your time talking about the technical details of the proprietary system’s latest features or even its unbelievably bad “blog” and “wiki” building blocks, or how “open” it pretends to be, etc. I really can’t (or rather won’t) argue with anyone on this count, for the two ideas are conceptual forks in an approach to the digital landscape of education. But if and when one chooses the enterprise CMS more times than not that choice has more to do with administration than teaching and learning. And as a result of such a choice the role of the instructional technologist is effectively limited to routinized training that demonstrates the limited capabilities of any one system. All of which effectively makes the instructional technologist an administrative assistant providing technical help. It is the still birth of a profession that is still gestating. Little or no imagination goes into this process and the limits of possibility are always already defined by the technology mandated. A position that should be exploratory and imaginative is reduced to the administrative realm in the name of efficiency and doing the greatest good for the largest number.
Let me be entirely clear here, an instructional technologist should not, I repeat should not, be an administrator. To conflate the roll of an instructional technologist with administrative work is to sap it of its transformative vitality. Instructional technologists should do three things, and do them well: 1) work closely with faculty on imagining possibilities, 2) live within the latest technologies and 3) imagine and experiment with possibilities regularly. The less time an instructional technologists spends thinking about administering a system, the more time he or she can actually do these three things. This is, without question, the reason why WordPress Multi-user has been so appealing for UMW. The administrative onus is shifted to the teacher and the student. They have their own space that they control. It becomes their charge to think through the possibilities of the system, rather than being told how it works. They have to discover what works, how it works, and why it works. It is this transformative process that is all too often relegated to system managers rather than intelligent people who live in the interstitial spaces of ideas and imagination like students and instructors. It is in this liminal spaces of thinking through and imagining what such a tool can do (rather than being overly concerned with how to actually do it) that our work happens. This is when the possibilities are imagined and old conceptions and new directions coalesce and by extension morph.
In my current job I don’t administer UMW Blogs, I build community and interact with both professors and students on a regular basis. I’m not so much concerned with the technology (and if an instructional technologist isn’t—should students and faculty be?), rather I am an interested and engaged participant in the transparent intellectual life of the university. That is what an instructional technologist must do! There is no other definition that makes sense. The conversations about teaching and learning’s intersection with technology is the inspiration undergirding what has been taking place for the last several years at Mary Washington, and has in many ways fueled the transformation through a larger grass roots effort. The change starts with a conversation, not with a directive. The transformation is imagined, not administered.
Which leads me to my final musings on this topic after the presentation. The point at which I start administering systems or training folks on BlackBoard on a regular basis is the moment I walk away from this occupation. There really is no reason why anyone off the street who has read the respective CMS manual can’t do that as well as me. And I would gladly defer to them. To become an administrator and/or to fashion oneself as a leader means to often extract yourself from the actual relations that are the basis for re-imagining the space of teaching and learning. Why aren’t instructional technologists understood as something other than either one of these categories? You don’t need to be a leader to be a great instructional technologist who catalyzes change in an environment. Moreover, you really shouldn’t be administering anything because it would be taxing the invaluable time spent imagining and exploring the innumerable possibilities of these tools with faculty.
There is no question we are in an absolutely fascinating moment of flux in this field, and what becomes ever more apparent is that the role of the instructional technologist at campuses is understood as transitional at best. A job that will prepare you for a directorship, a higher degree, or some other administrative position in IT. Such a conception of this crucial role is in many ways defined by the hierarchical system of academia much like teaching and learning with technology is defined by learning management systems like BlackBoard: it’s limited in its structural imagination. While I was speaking with people at the conference about their own situations and the administrative route of academia I became evermore certain that budgets, meetings, and management more generally are important for numerous reasons, but in the end often compete with the time-intensive work of fostering conversation and inspiring imagination throughout the community more generally about teaching and learning with technology. And while the right management can foster the conditions for this conversation, the point is that what we are talking about is doing it, not constantly re-visiting the fact that technology and pedagogy “might” have a future on campus. For that is in many ways a given, it is the type of experience a professor or student imagines where a majority of the work still needs to be done. That is the invaluable role of an instructional technologist, and he or she may very well be one of the most crucial figures on college campuses today.
Yet, the position has been circumscribed and denigrated by IT directives and administrative exigencies to the point that this desperately needed space for freedom and experimentation on campuses around the world has become one of obedience, fear, and “service.” And I put service in quotes here because while my role is to serve the faculty and students, as well as to foster a community of openness, tolerance, and exploration (which I value dearly, and firmly believe is the role of everyone who works on a college campus–or in education more generally), an instructional technologist can only accomplish this in their particular field by being granted the freedom to follow their own imaginative and critical ideas about this constantly emergent space. Right now, this is seldom the case, and to be quite frank with you, I have seen the other possibilities out there, and they are meager at best. Mary Washington is one of very few models for what an instructional technology outfit should be doing on a college campus, and the UMW professors are arguably the best example of how faculty should be partnering with instructional technologists to explore the implications of the changing landscape of publishing, discourse, media, and socially created knowledge that everywhere surrounds us.
Instructional Technologists of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your BlackBoard chains!
A question Shawn asked in writing about social objects last week made me wonder… What if Facebook worked like Blackboard (or pretty much any other LMS)?
Imagine if every fifteen weeks Facebook:
- shut down all the groups you belonged to,
- deleted all your forum posts,
- removed all the photos, videos, and other files you had shared, and
- forgot who your friends were.
How popular or successful would Facebook be then? How popular or successful is Blackboard now? The closed learning management system paradigm is bankrupt.
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.
Sorry, we’re open used courtesy of oknovokght.
I have to be honest with you, I’m getting more and more confused with the term “open” when used in the context of educational technology these days. The term has been popular in software development for decades, particularly in relationship to free and open source software (FOSS). This approach is premised on community development which means sharing the source code freely, rather than patenting an application and closing it down. Open source applications have had considerable success over the past decade, and much of the usage of the term open in regards to education, such as Open Education Resources (OCR), Open Courseware (OCW), open content and open access, is credited to the principles and successes of the open source development initiative.
The term is often abstracted from any specific resource to signify a political position of “openness,” often referring to something both conceptual and concrete all at once. And while the technical definitions of what constitutes open content can quickly become a legal minefield of licenses and attribution clauses, the general idea of openness in education might be understood as something beneficial to the community at large by providing a means of freely sharing one’s work with others—all made infinitely easier given the new world order of “free and open” digital publishing and distribution platforms. Openness has for many in the educational field become synonymous with a kind of “common good” that benefits both teachers and learners worldwide.
Hell, bloggers I read regularly have the term open in their titles: David Wiley’s Iterating Towards Openness, Bill Fitzgerald’s Open Academic, and Alec Couros’s Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy: Open, Connected, & Social (that’s two opens!). And over in Great Britain there is the legendary Open University, rich with an unfair advantage of knowledge and innovation represented by cats like Tony Hirst and Martin Weller. In fact, Brian Lamb’s struggles with publishing and distributing open content with loose syndication systems might be the best example of everything this term has come to represent in regards to expanding the educational resources available while thinking about the open web itself as the learning management system.
So, I thought I kinda knew what open meant when it came to educational technology and the like. Well, I thought I did, but there is some serious linguistic confusion emerging as of late that has me thinking about this ubiquitous term. Take a look at the following excerpt of an article (actually, it reads more like a press release) from Inside Highed Ed, which outlines BlackBoard’s announcement that they’ll be “connecting” with the open source course management system Sakai:
“There’s been some concern in the [open-source] community that this is a giant attempt to suck everything into Blackboard…. It really is done in the spirit of trying to be an open company, [to] really focus on something that will add value to the student experience,” Fontaine said.
So Blackboard’s an open company now? Is John Fontaine, Blackboard’s “technology evangelist” (yep there’s another fucking term out the window), confusing open with public, as in publicly trading? This may seem like a “knee-jerk” reaction—as the article promised there would be—but have we come to the point in our terminology where there are no fine distinctions anymore? What does “open” mean in this context? Is this the same open company that has re-opened its suits against Desire2Learn?–a fact that this article fails to mention, and kudos to Jeffrey Young’s article in the Chronicle which gives us at least that.
Point is that an announcement like this has very little to do with open source innovation, and everything to do with a marketing strategy to linguistically co-opt the term open. The word is used 21 times in this article, and while BlackBoard is working with the IT staff at Syracuse University to create a “dongle” (I refuse to call it a bridge) to connect with Sakai (hardly revolutionary),the actual language in the article is what’s important. BlackBoard is attempting to “brand” itself (which reminds me of a post I have brewing about the constant references to “personal branding” in education—but I digress) with the concept of openness. It’s a sales tactic, pure and simple. And the next time your BlackBoard rep comes to campus, they’ll not only be able to say we can do what those open source CMSs can, but he/she’ll even be able to say, “Hey, don’t worry about all those open source CMSs, we’re in bed with them now. We’re open too! Would you like me to show you the dongle?”
Which brings me to Sakai. After the Sakai Paris 2008 conference, Michel Feldstein suggests there is “a new Sakai” on the horizon. And he could very well be right, and while I was underwhelmed by what I saw of the old Sakai, the next two years could very well be a watershed for this open source application. Nonetheless, Sakai and Moodle have everything to gain by some kind of seamless integration with BlackBoard, and these open source applications by their very nature can take advantage of the opportunity thanks to the altruism(?) of BlackBoard. Let’s face it, by such a move to connect with these open tools (that aren’t that much cheaper in the end) BlackBoard gets that much more of a competitive edge in a market they already dominate. And, in my humble opinion 
, both Sakai and Moodle represent the worst kind of “learning” application (whether or not they are open source): course management systems. They ape the functionality of BlackBoard, but just in an open source model—they are course specific, they have few features that actually enhance learning, and they smack of an outdated model of ownership, control, and management—which makes them administrative tools, not learning tools.
What we have here is “large tools tightly joined.” And the moniker they are using to sell you this grand innovation is “openness.” In fact, why stop there, why not throw in another key term that has defined openness and innovation on the open web:
But Fontaine said that wouldn’t be the case. He said the connector would be “bi-directional,” giving users the ability to make a “mash-up” of data from different software systems.
Hey, it’s a data mash-up too! What it is is capital’s co-opting of the terminology of so many of these open tools and practices to erase any difference and assimilate any potential edge of a term like open into its brand.
I guess open is the new closed, and I’ll have to think twice before I use it so freely any time soon. Like lambs to the corporate slaughter. Looks like EDUPUNK is the only pure alternative 
YAAY! I am also going to smash all my corporate-made computers and hand-build my own. It’s NOT about the vehicle – it’s how you use it…
— Lee (no last name provided) dismissing EDUPUNK on the Chronicle article
As a person who has been involved in quite a bit of social activism, and done way too many interviews where I felt the resulting article was to the side of the real point, I have to say the fact the Chronicle has now covered EDUPUNK is incredibly significant, no matter what the slant. This term is literally less than a week old, and it is already disturbing people. That’s very very, good. And the fact the article links to our little blog-ring here means that the article can say whatever it wants (and kudos to the Chronicle reporter for being linky here). People interested in the concept can wander over into our conversation and get a level of analysis deeper than the “let’s smash blackboard” dismissal.
And since they may be wandering over here, let’s clarify that.
First — on why this ends up being about Blackboard… well, is there another LMS of the size and influence? Of course not. Any discussion of LMS use in America is going to focus primarily on Blackboard, and if people don’t like that, they have only Blackboard and their government to blame. EDUPUNK didn’t grant them the patent, and EDUPUNK didn’t crush competing options through lawsuits and buyouts.
But let’s get to the main point, the thing that becomes clear once we get past EDUPUNK as terminal smashers rhetoric.
The movement is primarly creative, not destructive. It just looks like destruction to those who haven’t seen creativity in a while.
They didn’t get that about punk either, as Iggy himself tried to explain in a CBC interview:
Look, the movement is not anti-corporation. Google makes a profit, as does WordPress, as does pbwiki, as does Twitter (well, ok, not technically *profit* there, but still).
What the movement is about is this — while Blackboard was busy trying to leverage their foothold in the University to get into the business of dining hall management, video surveillance, and door access control, this little thing called Web 2.0 happened. And suddenly the technology Blackboard had for learning began to look — well, old. Junky. Very 1999.
So while Bb spent their efforts trying to become the single sign-on point for your instiitution, professors, frustrated with the kludginess of the actual *learning* part of Bb’s suite, started looking elsewhere for solutions.
Their first discovery was that they could do everything they were doing in Blackboard for free, and much more easily.
But the second discovery was the kicker. The tools they adopted encouraged them to not lock their stuff away in a password protected course. And suddenly, they got a taste of open education. The tools they adopted had a true web DNA, and encouraged them to use a variety of other tools together in a loosely coupled mode. And suddenly, they got a taste of what it was like to build your own custom learning environment.
They started to experience the creativity that the web can unleash, and experienced for the first time that connectivist thrill people had been going on about.
And it was then, with their courses out on the net for all to see, having developed Wordpress pages that mashed together video with slideshares with twitter updates and del.icio.us feeds, having witnessed students commenting on posts right next to people from across the world, having seen authors of books responding to their student’s reader response essays, directly —
It was then that it hit these people. Blackboard was never a learning tool.
It was an access control system.
That detour into running your dining hall cards and your security cameras? It wasn’t a detour. It was the core business, extended into other realms. To Blackboard, it’s the same business. You pay your money, you get to get in and get the food.
And I think a lot of people realized at that point that Blackboard did not have (and never did have) the slightest idea what the web was about. Once you see how access control, and not learning, is at the heart of what they do, reading their promotional material becomes amusing. Even the better advocates for Web 2.0 over at Bb can’t escape the pull of the force. Here’s their promotion of their new Web 2.0 collaboration tool, Scholar:
That’s really what Scholar is all about. The whole idea is to enable academic resource storing and sharing among people with the common focus of education…a “validated network”, if you will. All Scholar users are instructors, students or staff from educational institutions and therefore you can consider most of the resources on Scholar “vetted”. It certainly saves me time and effort in a lot of the research I do everyday.
You see, it’s Web 2.0 — with access control! And this is from one of the more astute people over there. But she can’t fight it. It’s in the DNA of the company.
Look here’s the deal in a nutshell. If you believe there’s not much difference between the business model and mission of your Dining Commons, and the business model and mission of your university or college, by all means, give your vendor the keys. Let their feature set determine what you do in your classroom. Get excited about all the people you can keep out of your academic endeavor. Tie your roster and your building access into the same central database.
Seriously. I don’t have a problem with that. From a student service perspective, it may be exactly what you want. Go with God.
Just don’t confuse that with education. Keep your education EDUPUNK.
Jim Groom brings a new term into being in a recent post — edupunk.
There’s a couple reasons why I find the term useful, but the most important is that it captures the cultural revulsion many of us feel with the appropriation of the Learning 2.0 movement by corporations such as Blackboard. Learning 2.0, like punk, is a DIY movement. Like punk it favors technical accessibility over grand design.
And to people like us, Learning 2.0, if it is to remain relevant, must not be relegated to the dustbin of “features” or “products”. It’s neither a product or a process, but a way of approaching things, of which products are only one of the results.
Yet all the 2.0 formulations — Classroom 2.0, Learning 2.0, and even Web 2.0 itself — work against this very notion that what we are chasing here is not product, but style. What does the 2.0 version number symbolize if not a shrink-wrapped box or set of features?
What began as a clever pun has outlived its usefulness to us. We’ve known that for a while, but as companies begin to reduce the social web to a set of ingredients in their products — we have to go further than whether product x allows trackbacks or not.
“Edupunk” gets us there — with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate apropriation it hits a lot of the right notes.
The wrong notes it hits are mainly historical — because of course punk had surprisingly little social impact — and it’s worth remembering the same attiudes that kept it pure relegated it to being a tribal phenomenon rather than a broad cultural movement. Punk culture valued its exile from the mainstream. We want to change the world.
That inevtiably leads to a lot of compromises. But when we stray too far into the world of enterprise software, three-month timelines and eight page budgets — when we have to concede the assessment system will likely be a centralized corporate affair — on days like that, maybe edupunk is the cassette we throw into the tape deck on the way home, the tape that reminds us loudly of who we are, in three chords or less.
It’s obviously late here … thoughts?
With my no-internet, hippie-like vacation to Montauk behind me now, I can return to the bava and continue the excruciating futility that is my life online. I enjoyed the time away because I was able to do something I hadn’t done in too long, i.e., read a few books that have nothing to do with a course I was either taking or teaching. One of the books I read that has me both excited and scared is Ernst Jünger’s 1957 novel The Glass Bees (Gläserne Bienen).
I got this novel back in 2000 when it was re-published by the New York Review of Books, and it sat on my shelf for almost eight years. And I am now convinced it had to sit there for that long. For this book wouldn’t have meant half as much to me had I read it before my full-fledged, self-obsessed foray into the land of the lost, a.k.a the internet, almost four years ago. I happened upon this novel last week when I was searching for something to read on my shelves. I was immediately drawn in by the fact that Bruce Sterling wrote the introduction, whose talk on “The Internet of Things” I had recently listened to. I took this as a sign that the lattice of coincidence was in full effect, and I decided to give it a go.
Sterling’s introduction immediately grabbed me, his description of Jünger’s novel as anachronistic in the most uncanny of ways is perfectly put when it comes to the social and economic realities of this dark, visionary novel. This quote from Sterling’s introduction (which you can read in its brief entirety here) made me realize that this isn’t just a novel I should read, but one I need to read:
Jünger perceived that industrial capitalism is a ridiculous game, so he proved remarkably good at predicting its future moves….[He] understands that technology is pursued not to accelerate progress but to intensify power. He fully understands that popular entertainment comes with a military-industrial underside.
This passage brings into sharp focus a scary reality that often gets overlooked (or is it intentionally downplayed?) in educational technology, namely that the utopian, blue sky ideas of technology as a singular harbinger of possibility and liberation ignores the cold and all-consuming role that capital plays in the shaping of technology as means of control. Now I understand that this struggle is by no means unilateral, and that for every instance of technology as a means to consolidate power for capital, there is another instance in which that same technology can be used to undermine the fallacious logic of capital’s vision of progress.
So the question that this book (as early as the introduction) immediately forced me to consider is where do I stand in this equation. More specifically, how do I understand the work I am doing in the field of edtech when in comes to the intersection of progress, power, and the voracious appetite of capital to co-opt and re-package the labor of others as its own, patented, insanely expensive, proprietary product?
This line of inquiry came into sharper focus when talking to Brian Lamb and Keira McPhee at Freddie’s Bar in Brooklyn soon after finishing the novel. After my vociferous and impressionistic explanation of the ways in which the novel was not about technology, but the relations of power and capital through an idea of technology as a figure of progress, Brian suggested how this wasn’t unlike BlackBoard’s newest product announcement, their “Next Generation” of Learning Management Systems, BlackBoard 8.
What is BlackBoard doing? Well, they are taking the experiments and innovations of thousands of people and re-packaging them as their own, unique contribution to the educational world of Web 2.0. And why are they doing this? Well, to survive as a LMS, but that survival is not necessarily dependent on a technology or an innovation, rather it is a means of taking the imaginative experimentation of others and wrapping them up as product that can be bought and sold like a pair of shoes. Their insanely irresponsible advertising for BlackBoard 8 suggests that Academic Suite release 8.0 will “enhance critical thinking skills” and “improve classroom performance.” What LMS can do this? What Web 2.0 tool can do this? This is total bullshit, how can they make such an irresponsible claim? These things are not done by technology, but rather people thinking and working together. Our technology may afford a unique possibility in this endeavor by bringing disparate individuals together in an otherwise untenable community, yet it doesn’t doesn’t enhance critical thinking or improve classroom performance, we do that, together.
And this move by BlackBoard to commodify the labor of others is exactly the problem with the idea that educational technology “is about the technology,” which Gardner exclaimed in his swan song presentation at UMW’s Faculty Academy. It was a great talk, but an insistence that what we do is about the technology and not the community around the ideas is a dangerous one. The two go hand-in-hand, and I am sure Gardner realizes this, but in my mind the technology is often the means through which the communal acts are traced, recorded, and archived. The learning happens not as a by-product of the technology, it is, or rather should be, the Raison d’être of the technology. The teaching and thinking happen within the medium of texts, videos, film, images, art, conversation, game playing, computers, etc. Technology may provide new ways of delivering and accessing this information, and mark the basis of many a medium, but the idea of a community and its culture is what makes any technology meaningful and relevant.
This is why the idea that “it is about the technology” makes BlackBoard 8 so troubling to me. If it is about the technology, then capital can quickly realized this fact and co-opt all the hard work by so many to move outside of the taylorized vision of educational technology grafted upon our institutions. If the technology is what is important, than what do we say if a faculty member or student notes that Bb can do what del.icio.us can, or can “mash up” YouTube, Flickr, and Google Earth maps like WPMu, or can make content at long last open, or has a slick AJAX interface, then we what what can we say about the technology?
BlackBoard will leverage their relative omnipresence to gouge schools everywhere into using their tools because they can, and they’ll sell them up with all the administrative, vending machine, and surveillance cameras one could dream of. This is what we are missing. BlackBoard makes an inferior product and charges a ton for it, but if we reduce the conversation to technology, and not really think hard about technology as an instantiation of capital’s will to power, than anything resembling an EdTech movement towards a vision of liberation and relevance is lost. For within those ideas is not a technology, but a group of people, who argue, disagree, and bicker, but also believe that education is fundamentally about the exchange of ideas and possibilities of thinking the world anew again and again, it is not about a corporate mandate to compete—however inanely or nefariously—for market share and/or power. I don’t believe in technology, I believe in people. And that’s why I don’t think our struggle is over the future of technology, it is over the struggle for the future of our culture that is assailed from all corners by the vultures of capital. Corporations are selling us back our ideas, innovations, and visions for an exorbitant price. I want them all back, and I want them now!
Enter stage left: EDUPUNK!
My next series of posts will be about what I think EDUPUNK is and the necessity for a communal vision of EdTech to fight capital’s will to power at the expense of community. I hope others will join me.
Also, sorry this tangent went so far afield, I am currently working on a Wikipedia article for The Glass Bees, which hopefully will fill in all the gaps I left here. But in the end, you should really just read it!
So, to pick up on parts 1 and 2, part 3 is an examination of some of the uses and possibilities of feed-driven architecture for dealing with the varying ways we might understand a portfolio, which—as Stephen Downes notes here—is in the midst of a pretty significant transformation. A change premised on re-imagining the portfolio as not so much a static receptacle for work completed, but a dynamic space for both reflection and presentation of an on-going development, or “portfolio-ing” as Alan Levine’s comment points out. This shift parallels the way many are approaching their actual work in this field (and many others, something Jon Udell calls professional blogging) as part of an ongoing, networked conversation about process and collaboration, rather than some isolated, fixed product.
An RSS-Driven Departmental Portfolio Review Project
All of which makes me think about the project Professor Sarah Allen and I have been working on for her Writing Process course. Each member of the class was asked to create their own blog and post various papers and revisions to the blog as a kind of digital notebook in which they would publish the work for peer review and feedback (all of which fed back into the course blog, a now “classic” course aggregated model for using blogs at UMW). The class was focused on process, and part of the approach was to understand writing as a dynamic, unfolding art form that must be labored over with numerous revisions, iterations and approaches.
During this year’s Tech Fellows program Sarah and I came up with an RSS-driven framework for delivering the “final” version of a English majors essays to a secure space so that faculty could conduct a blind review for assessment purposes. The samples would come from a select group of English courses (Sarah’s Writing Process course being the test case). Traditionally this was handled through a BlackBoard drop box, wherein the essays were uploaded without students names and then reviewed by faculty. To do this they would have to download the papers, print them out, comment on them, than convene with other members of the review committee to discuss the them.
The thought Sarah and I had was there’s has gotta be a better way to streamline this portfolio review process. So, what we did was rather simple, Sarah had all her students writing in their own blog throughout the course of the semester, and publish their revised essays as they finished them. Once a student considered an essay to be a final version, they tagged it with “final paper.” We got the sitewide RSS feed for every post tagged with “final version” and fed them into a blog called ELC Assessment.† The assessment blog is now populated with final, anonymous essays that the department review committee can comment upon from anywhere and have a distributed discussion about the writing, better yet it is all easily protected so that only English, Linguistics and Communication faculty can access it (we left the example open, because it’s a proof of concept).
UMW Lablogs
UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik provides yet another example of how an RSS-driven infrastructure can make things a whole lot easier, and provide students with a practical portfolio of their lab work. I posted about this project earlier this academic year and Steve and I will be presenting it at the EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference. This was a grand experiment, and I think it has some serious possibilities for thinking about managing a scientific portfolio of experimentations and labs.
In short, Steve Gallik developed an entire suite of online laboratory resources wherein students can record the results of their experiments, something he terms an Online Laboratory Suite. Well, if that’s not impressive enough, Andy Rush and Steve Gallik conceptualized a way to take the experiment results for each student and create a RSS feed for it. When each student signs up for an account on Steve’s Online laboratory Suite, they are immediately sent an RSS feed that they place within a spam-blog plugin like FeedWordPress on their own blog, choose the category to publish it to, and before you know it they have an aggregated, feed-driven lab notebook (or a LabLog) of their work that automatically updates as they complete their online labs.
What I like about this project is how clearly it suggest that whether or not you can program your own laboratory software like Steve Gallik, having a publishing platform that is framed around syndication effects everyone. If we do have online lab software being used by a department, isn’t it about time we expected to have an RSS feed for student work? Steve’s LabLogs represents a powerful model for thinking about how students can easily re-publish their own labs into a format they can control, re-publish, and re-purpose as they see fit.
The Macaulay Honors College E-Portfolios Using WPMu
Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Technology and Learning at The Macaulay Honors College (part of the CUNY system), has been pushing the envelope in terms of the small pieces loosely joined approach to integrating technology into teaching and learning. Joe, with the agile help of Jeff Drouin, has been using open source CMSs, wikis, and blogs to great effect during his first yearat Macaulay. After a few brief e-mail exchanges with Joe about using WPMu as an e-portfolio system, he invited me up to talk his crack cadre of graduate student Tech Fellows about the small pieces loosely joined approach to educational technology. And as always, I focused on the work UMW has been doing with WPMu in particular.
It was great fun for me, in particular because I started out in this field as a tech fellow at the CUNY Honors College almost four years ago. So going back talking about this stuff was pretty cool, and I could warn them to resist getting too deep into blogs and wikis lest they get hooked and never finish their dissertation, only to find they have become a fanatical, raving EdTech lunatic
So I recently discovered that Joe has decided to pull the trigger on a WPMu driven portfolio project, and it is alrady up and running, you can read more about it on his blog here and see the actual site here. How cool! Joe is an impressive guy, and he is not afraid to experiment with these powerful, open source publishing platforms, which at CUNY means a lot. To quote Jon Udell talking about UMW two years ago, Joe has really put the Macauly Honors College in the catbird seat when it comes to instructional technologies. He is not afraid to experiment with a wide array of open web and open source tools, and he understands the importance of deploying them rapidly and always already as beta to see how they will fare. That is the pace you need to keep currently, and it is why most of the rest of CUNY is screeching to a devastating standstill when it comes to instructional technologies (Baruch being the other brilliant exception, thanks to Mikhail Gershovich and Luke Waltzer).
Moreover, Macaulay has a manageable incoming class of 300 students every year, all of which are distributed amongst seven different senior colleges of CUNY (I think it’s seven?). A small college loosely joined that may prove an extremely powerful example of how these tools might bring a de-centralized learning community into some kind of online focus. Needless to say, I love Joe’s style and I’ll be watching the Macauly Eportfolio project closely over the next year.
OK, that’s enough about e-portfolios, now it’s time to get ready for Faculty Academy, miles to go before I sleep.
† We got the feed for this tag by first using sitewide categories feeds for WPMu where all the posts were categorized as “final paper,” but the MuTags RSS feed extension—which you have to pay $50 for—will prove the better option, for students can just tag their posts as final paper (or what ever) and you get a sitewide feed for the tag without the sitewide categories feed hack which can get ugly. Once you have the sitewide RSS feed for this tag, just activate the FeedWordPress plugin and it will automatically re-publish any post within the WPMu environment tagged “final paper.” What’s nice about the FeedWordPress plugin is that it will sync all changes to a previously published post. Also, you have options to not include post author, you can prevent a linkback to original post, as well as the ability to place all feeds for a certain tag into a specific category of the assessment blog (so all of Sarah’s class papers will be placed in the category “Writing Process”). Groovy! —or should I say Groomy?
I find myself experiencing a kind of joyful obsolescence at the moment while reading the recent stream of posts from Andre Malan’s blog. I’m nothing short of blown away, and if you are at all interested in WPMu as an educational publishing platform (that will, indeed, prove the prototype of a “BlackBoard killer” sooner than later) you should really be reading his blog regularly. He has a series of posts that have nailed the various ways to approach WPMu as syndicated publishing platform for teaching and learning, and his examples in this post point to one nuanced, open-ended vision of eduglu that Jon Beasley-Murray articulated at Northern Voice last year: students should be able to use any blogging platform they want and simply feed it into an aggregating course blog . Well, Andre has delivered the goods.
Take a look at the test case he is currently working on with Jon’s Spanish 312 course. If you mouse over the list of student blogs in the sidebar you’ll quickly notice that they have their blogs on a variety of different services such as Blogger, Xanga, Livejournal, WordPress, Movable Type, etc. And all the feeds are being brought into one course site (or Ghost Blog as Andre calls this flavor of the various types of course blogs). Moreover, such a setup is made infinitely easier with the Add to BDPRSs WordPress Plugin which provides the ability to let the student add their own feed to the Ghost Blog.
Now, one question that will inevitably arise is whether or not you can feed only a particular category of a blog (or a specific tag) into a this Ghost site in the event a student is using their blog for more than one course, or as a general publishing space for all his or her ideas. I know this is possible with WordPress, but I am not sure how all the other services deal with category/tag feeds, this will probably change from service to service and may suggest the value of using one platform over another if this capability is not readily available.
Nonetheless, the ease with which a publishing platform like WPMu can allow students and professors to create, share and ultimately control their own work suggests that this is the model of the future. Finally a framework that allows one to manage and control his or her intellectual life digitally apart from a university; a system that illustrates how we can begin to use these tools as a digital notebook/portfolio/sandbox that can be easily shared with others and made to resonate thoughtfully on innumerable levels; a methodology that suggests the work you are doing during these formative years of your education is valuable, should be maintained by you, and is of use to others. That is the message the LMSs have utterly failed to communicate. The architecture of these aracane systems intentionally insulate students and faculty from the ideas of others, thereby fracturing the very heart of the open experience that teaching and learning should represent at its best. The design of this model up and until now has basically communicated to students that their work is worthless and their existence within a digital learning community is tantamount to just another netid on a server.
Aside from all the profiteering and greed that has come to characterize the struggle for dominance in the LMS market (with BlackBoard leading the way in this deaprtment, as opposed to anything resembling innovation), the plain fact is that their model is obsolete and students like Andre and his cohort are framing the future of digital education one blog post at a time. And I can’t even begin to tell you how fired up that we have them on the open team!
Blackboard Wins Lawsuit Against Desire2Learn.
I wonder if open source LMS software became a serious threat to their market share if they would sue Sakai and Moodle?
