EduGlu Sandbox

This is the third year I am doing my roughly annual tradition of taking a week with the blog posting on this site put on “mute” (or muzzle) as I will take all my writing to blog via the comment space of other sites.

It’s a huge treat to be in San Antonio for this year’s ELI Annual Meeting. The first morning was more than a little overwhelming as I’ve met a succession of some of my favorite people in the field, and a remarkable number of people who I had never met personally but felt like I knew via virtual channels. I’ll try to return to the social dimension in a future post.

Though it was a minor bruise to my ego to have my presentation proposal turned down (and a much greater sadness that my would-be collaborator isn’t here), at this moment I can honestly say I have no regrets at all. For once I won’t be picking at my presentation wiki until the last possible moment, and I’ve resolved to kick it up a notch from my usual pathetic conference blogging performance.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Bryan Alexander speak on at least a dozen occasions, and I’m an avid follower of his work, so on some level I felt like I knew what to expect going into his morning-long workshop on Web 2.0 storytelling. But being in Bryan’s presence is akin to seeing a virtuoso musician perform, and it takes a certain amount of critical effort to maintain my focus on the subject matter, rather than simply marveling at his fluency, erudition and wicked humour. I don’t find myself able to offer much by way of synthesis at this point, but a few capsule observations:

• Based on shows of hands, maybe a quarter of the participants had run a blog, or used Flickr, or heard of Twitter, but everybody had edited a wiki.

• I look forward to diving a bit deeper into Adrian John’s The Nature of the Book, Ted’s Caving Journal, Dreaming Methods, the Improv Encyclopedia, “She’s a flight risk” and Googlization.

• Bryan astutely noted the special affordance of aphorisms in the discourse of Twitter, and I look forward to following Jenny Holzer’s Twits. And I have no idea how the Loose-Fish, Good Captain retelling of Benito Cereno will play out in my feed, but it will be fascinating to find out.

Alan Levine had the funniest line of the day, in the context of a surprisingly durable debate question: “If you don’t have at least a shred of interesting content, then you won’t have community. You’ll have Facebook.”

Along those lines, there was a thoughtful observation concerning the discourse implied by new media, one I nonetheless found a bit troubling. A participant (whose name I missed) noted that higher education has traditionally elevated the value of some voices above some others, cited the imbalanced power dynamic between professors and students as an example, and suggested that new media was having a welcome leveling effect. I’ve made similar arguments in the past, so on a basic level I got and agreed with the sentiment. But as it happened, Bryan had a presentation slide up that mentioned both Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson. It seemed to me that any value system that reduces the contributions of the Pynchons and Gibsons as no more worthy of attention as that of anyone else is to indulge a simple relativism, and that something very valuable is lost in the process. It seems beyond question that at this moment in history the pieces on the game board have been swept up into the air, but also that it is incumbent on us to articulate new values which make sense in the new media reality. I suspect I will be returning to this tension shortly, as it has come up in other forms a few times already here at the conference.

Technorati tags: ELIAnnual08, literacy, digital storytelling

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