EduGlu Sandbox

Henry Jenkins ELI Keynote address is podcasted here.

Jenkins opened with the sensible observation that contrary to media reports, Middlebury College’s much ballyhooed “banning” of Wikipedia was in fact a reasonable first step toward generating a dialogue, and an opportunity to open up the research process, one that can be conducted grounded in reason, not fear.

His subsequent talk proceeded fairly logically from there, and rather than me attempting a comprehensive summary, I’d say your time is better spent reading Jenkin’s own notes on a similar talk given six months ago or Bryan Alexander’s initial response — which he somehow published before the end of the session!

But again, a couple of my own quick takeaways:

• Jenkins made the rather obvious point that new literacies require the old literacies, that we are expanding literacy not displacing it. Obvious, sure, but do I remember to offer that caution when I argue with people about Wikipedia?

• In a succesion of action verbs describing how we deal with the flood of information in new media environments, I thought the best one was “negotiate.” Expect me to run that word into the ground.

• At one point Jenkins bemoaned how “most of us don’t know how to live in a collective intelligence.” To which I thought, most people don’t know how to live, period. That isn’t meant to be a flip as it sounds. We struggle to manage our friendships, our family relationships, our diets, our time, our finances, our engagement with civic institutions… why the hell would our ability to negotiate (HA!) inside complex and shifting cognitive constructs be any different?

My favorite part of the talk was his assertion that Wikipedia represents a challenge to the academic community to reclaim our role as public intellectuals. Bryan twitted the proposition: “What if each American academic spent 5 minutes in 2008 editing Wikipedia?” (My quick reply is that a significant proportion would get hooked, and end up spending a lot more than five minutes.)

Along those lines, I want to point to a very cool Wikipedia project that is part of a class taught by my UBC colleague Jon Beasley-Murray, “with the collective goals …to bring a selection of articles to “Feature Article” status (or as near as possible) by April 10.” Some of the topics are well-known, others don’t have entries at all.

Let’s break this exercise down a bit:

• Students will need to demonstrate all the traditional literacy skills (researching accurate materials, writing lucidly, determining and adopting the appropriate tone, etc…)

• Students will gain new media literacy skills, as they negotiate (HA HA) wording with other users (and anyone who has seriously engaged in a Wikipedia authoring process knows this requires some sophisticated social and diplomatic skills), and also work to make the articles notable enough to others to gain the desired “featured article” status. Students will thus gain an intimate knowledge and understanding of how Wikipedia really works.

• Rather than simply writing a paper that gets graded by a professor or TA and then returned, the outcome is publicly accessible. The activity is authentic, not simulated, and the product is a wildly popular open resource.

• The technology cost to the institution, and the required input from technology support staff at the institution - $0

The wild part is, Jon comes up with a cool idea like this pretty much every semester. Can’t wait to see what he thinks of next…

Technorati tags: ELIAnnual08, span312, literacy

HAL Beta 0.66, originally uploaded by jurvetson.

I’m back from the ELI Annual Meeting in San Antonio, wading through the emails I’ve been ignoring, looking in on Twitter trying to recapture a little of that unthreaded love thang weave — thankfully it’s been as unstable as normal, so I’ve been forced to move ahead.

I have three, maybe four (we’ll see how brave I am) posts percolating in my head, and I really do want to get them out. The accumulation of sleep deprivation, the inrush of daily employment taskage, reconnecting with family, my own cognitive weakness, I can feel the intensity of my impressions receding. Nothing would make me happier than sitting down calmly, taking a stress pill and thinking things over, and maybe doing justice to the many fabulous contributions people made to my learning this week. But if I’m going to salvage anything out of the experience, I need to let go, get what I can up on the open web, and accept the limitations thereof.

So, some fragmented, non-integrated responses to the session led by Gardner Campbell, Serena Epstein and David Moore entitled “Information Fluency as Curricular Innovation: New Media Studies in General Education.”

• First off, there was a hell of a scheduling dilemma. Because I attended this session, I missed George Siemens discuss Connectivism (I do hope to catch up via the podcast), and also Cole Camplese’s session…

• Gardner’s opening remarks framed the challenges beautifully. How do we reconcile the fact that the web, while being the most powerful technical medium of expression ever created, can be described as fostering a culture whole greatest literary achievement is “LOL”? How does the academic community step up, move towards a mindset in which attention to the means of communication is “baked in” to the curriculum, and not simply “bolted on”? To be truly curricular new media needs to be seen as legitimate inquiry, about “habits of mind,” and not merely a set of useful skills.

• The New Media Reader proved to be an immensely useful core textbook, and can definitely be a useful resource for anyone who cares to integrate these issues meaningfully into higher education. I need to snag myself a copy.

I was simply blown away by the poise and intelligence of the students, and by how differently the two of them approached their final projects (representative of how diverse the methods of new media studies can be).

• David Moore fought valiantly through a flu bug, presented a detailed and impressively grounded overview of the challenges implicit in the structure of discussion forums, and outlined a very promising model for a recommender and referral model that goes deeper than the Slashdot model, one that reminded at least one attendee of eBay.

• Serena Epstein had a much more visceral and artistic approach to the new media domain. She showed a short excerpt of her final project film, and I am a bit sheepish to admit how much I related to the slacker angst the clip depicted.

Later that night, I watched Serena’s whole film, and was moved in a number of respects. First off, it’s just a fine piece of moviemaking. I was especially affected by the sections acted out by Gardner and Shannon Hauser… But the part that just smacked me was the post-film final blooper reel, of all things. Something about what it revealed of what a teacher-student relationship can be… My throat actually tightened up when they walked out of the coffee shop together.

Yes, this culture can foster something a little deeper than LOL.

Technorati tags: ELIAnnual08, Gardner Campbell, literacy, new media…