So, someone sent me this link:

http://chaucer.umuc.edu/blogcip/collectanea/2008/06/scattering_thought_across_the.html

It's a recent blog posting by Georgia Harper, a widely recognized copyright expert and friend of a friend. In it, she cites an article by Nicolas Carr in the Atlantic entitled, foolishly, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

So here's what I wrote back:
 

Georgia’s getting a little conservative here. She has made a substantial contribution to the field of copyright… precisely because she has synthesized so much of the material on copyright available on the web! In other words, no-one looks to her for the nature of cognitive theory, rather they look to her as a kind of compendium of details and best practices in copyright… in other words, she is bizarrely exactly what Carr is arguing against. Still, she’s easily forgiven, and widely respected in her field…

 
Carr is quite another case. I’ve never been fond of him, because he doesn’t get it, and never has. He’s responsible for all that talk about tech being the fifth utility, which always made me mad, but which network engineers, who don’t get the demeaning implications, keep repeating.

 
As for his argument: I used to get frustrated with Martin and others at NMC who developed a trope against ‘Technological Determinism’, as if there were some kind of natural thought process unaffected by the technology of distribution. The counterarguments to that are so obvious as to rend the idea ridiculous, and Carr makes them (Plato, Nietzsche, Gutenberg). But he cites them, and then leaps to a completely wrong conclusion. He’s blinded by his own self-interested cultural advantage. Based on his education and his social class (and his mindset), he is exactly the kind of person who benefited from the old means of distribution, the pre-web consciousness. Then, citing someone else, he makes this leap: “Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”

 
Wolf’s work is interesting, and he demeans it by taking it out of context and using it for his own purposes. He wants to argue that what he’s used to, what he has benefited from, is the best possible thing. Essentially, he’s arguing that long texts are good, that long things are what smart people read, and it makes them even smarter. Not exactly an argument designed to please a poet, who would cite the tradition that the best thing is “many things in few words”. In fact, any poet worth his or her salt would argue that prose readers (and many prose writers) are dullards, who need things to go on and on and on before they can “get it”. There’s a huge difference between “deep” reading and “long” reading, and when Carr conflates the two, he betrays a fundamental misunderstanding.

 
So, ok, Carr’s no intellectual luminary, and perhaps it’s unfair to ask him to be one. Let’s just take his point on its own terms: “In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.”

Let’s drop the last phrase, since Carr seems to believe, wrongly, that we give birth to “our own ideas”, but admits by his own choice of verbs that we do no more than become their step-parents. Now, if I were writing a “long book”, would I want the reader to make his “own associations”, draw her “own inferences and analogies?” Doesn’t such a scenario argue precisely that the reader has stopped reading?  Are we to think that Nabokov wanted us to stop paying attention for a few pages while we were off contemplating? Or that Virginia Woolf wasn’t carefully constructing every sentence? As if she wanted her readers to wander off, distracted?

 

In fact, Woolf is relevant here. Take this passage:

“The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being.... The line raced through the girl's fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream.”
 

So, yes, Woolf values contemplation as an imaginative act, which leads to discovery. But the girl is not reading or writing when she gets there, the reading or writing is just the way in. In fact, to say that reading en soi is contemplation ignores the last 75 years of cognitive theory. Carr confuses the two activities for his own self-serving purposes. A good poet can induce that same contemplative state in just a few lines.  And what exactly is that state? Is it not the mind leaping all over the place, ranging broadly, in fact, hyperlinking? And understanding, in a Heideggerean sense, the interconnectedness of things? Doesn’t the “web reading” Carr deplores get us closer to that? And who is he to demean, in print, the lived experience of so many millions of web readers?

I heard a story on NPR today about a gas station in California. They were getting six dollars a gallon for gasoline. What would have been unthinkable a couple years ago seems all too real now. And there's no end in site. Some people say we've already seen Hubbert's peak, others say it's just around the corner. Last week, we saw a near future prediction of oil at two hundred and fifty dollars a barrel. Demand in developing countries keeps going up, and there's strong pressure to modernize in those places, and that means more energy. So, the question of the day is: what will a university look like if oil hits that price?

At first glance, it doesn't seem like a big deal. Universities don't "make" anything, so we don't have to worry about raw materials, the way a manufacturing plant would. Numbers like that could lead to economic troubles, but during a recession, University enrollments actually go up. But what we do work with is people... people who need to get to the University, and who need to be taken care of once they get there. And then there are the ones who won't come at all...

Lets take the first group: knowledge workers who need to get to campus. They've been spreading out, further and further, over the last two decades. That trend will certainly reduce: people will start moving closer to campus. Still, given the housing mess, many people will be stuck in the homes they're already in. There will be much clamor for alternative schedules:my guess is that some universities will go to a four day, monday wednesday tuesday thursday schedule, which will cut commuting costs by 20 percent. There will also be clamor for telecommuting, more online learning, etc.

I've heard some people saying Universities will consolidate buildings, given the sharply higher cost of climate control. I don't know about that one... most places are already pressed for space as it is. And clearly there will be other pressures, that will be obvious when we get there, but which we can't imagine now.

As for the direct effect on academic technology, I think it will be substantial. Let's review: in the 80's, things were nascent. People could see potential, but we weren't there yet. In the 90's, things exploded. Whole new career tracks and departments were born. Suddenly, we were looking at networked machines on every faculty desk, labs bursting at the seams, the web going wild. In this decade, we built things out, and found that a University without technology is unimaginable. And now, if oil does go that high, the technology may be the only way to keep a University going.  All the things we've already been doing will only become more critical. Server virtualization, remote desktops, video and video conferencing. People are always predicting the death of this field, that we'll simply be subsumed to normal operations. That's looking less and less likely every time I stop for gas.

"For this the wisest of all mortal men
Said, he knew nought but that he nought did know;
And the great mocking master mocked not then,
When he said, Truth was buried deep below."

                                       -Sir John Davies

I have reason, lately, to be thinking about the concept of shared hallucinations. It seems as if we start to believe in something, and pretty soon we stop asking questions, as if the basic problem were solved, and we're just working on the details and trying to figure out the next steps. Remember the old days of MOOs and MUSHes? If you missed it, a MUSH was a text based networked computer "environment." You telnetted in, and could type back and forth with others. There were text descriptions of rooms, gardens, you name it, and you simply suspended disbelief and entered the described world. MUSH stood for Multi-User Shared Hallucination.

MUSHes and MOOs were how I first got into this field, and where I first saw this tendency towards unquestioned belief. People lived their experiences and, as Eliot said, we tend to become attached to our own field of action (Actually, he said "love of one's country begins as attachment to one's own field of action"). We were a hardy band of pioneers, but it was easy to see some people were suspending too much disbelief. Still, people wanted to communicate with each other, and they were attached to their means of communication. Some of them got stuck. I remember 'talking' with some coders, and suggesting there might be a way to make the environment better with some graphics. They preferred to stay in their text based world.

As for me, I started on a MOO, then I started using email. Then the web came along, and then instant messaging. I'm pretty much stuck there., but my son has friends who don't use either anymore. They facebook their way through existence the way I email/web/IM through existence. I have younger son who doesn't even do much facebook anymore, most of his communication with his friends happens on World of Warcraft. He's at level 70 (the highest level), so he's not trying to beat the game. It's almost completely a social thing, which puts it in the realm of graphical MOOs and MUSHes.

His mother is always telling him to log off and do his homework. She sincerely believes it's just a game, and he's wasting his time when he should be learning. And for her, for all of my generation, learning means reading. Or rather, reading, talking, listening to what learned people have to say (for example, professors). Remember that attachment to our own experience? We have a positive learning experience, and it's natural we want to share that means of experience. But do we really question what we know, or are we in the realm of mystical belief? If we're encouraging our colleagues to use the technology in our classroom, shouldn't we actually know how 'learning' happens?

My argument is that we don't know.Yes, I've read Vygotsky. Yes, this week I spent a couple hours listening to a podcast of Howard Gardner's latest lecture about the five minds. And I've had Piaget drilled into me for years. Oh, and twenty years of teaching, and before that my own experience of learning. And yet, all I can tell you is what worked in my case, which is far too small a sample. Who can tell me, beyond these basic, reductive ideas, what learning really involves? And if we can't say that, what are we doing encouraging our colleagues to use the technology for pedagogy (or androgogy, depending on your persuasion). Are we simply spreading mystical belief? Trying to get them to enter into yet another Shared Hallucination?

Yes, we try to measure outcomes, but what are we measuring, really?  I don't believe course evaluations are *simply* beauty contests,  but I'm not sure they're much more than cultural measurements, either.  They certainly can't tell us much about the actual learning process.  Consider, for a moment, our phraseology: "watch and learn." "Listen and learn." "Learn by doing." "Let's do this exercise together." Is any of this really helpful, or are we just thoughtlessly repeating actions and phrases we've seen and heard?  Enough with the mysticism, already!

We know that past approaches all have some successes and some failures. The Socratic method works for some, and self-selects its successive practitioners. Talking things out is sometimes helpful, but sometimes leads to circular reasoning (imagine the people in Plato's cave talking things through!). Active learning does build skills, but isn't great at conceptual breakthroughs. Constructivism is just as self-selecting as the worst of the Socratics.

We need to have the courage to say 'we don't know' if we're ever going to move forward. We don't know what learning actually is, and we don't know how best to encourage it. But we do have hints and guesses. I know the future is under no obligation to mimic the past, but I also know I should pay attention to what I do, and what those around me are doing. Most of my intellectual activity is online. I have the advantage of having six sons of learning age, and most of their activities are in intellectually rich online environments. The knowledge I gain from watching, and experiencing, how they actually work takes us past the realm of mysticism, and leads me to, yes, believe that they have much to teach us about the learning process. Now, we just need to have the courage to admit that they've learned something we haven't, and the courage to change our pedagogy based on that knowledge.

There is much talk lately about change, and how it will effect Academic Technology shops. We all remember how the web changed everything in the 90's, and the mantra then was "get on the web and ride the wild wave." But these days, all the talk is of the "cloud", and many people are wondering 'How do you ride something that's so insubstantial?' By the cloud, they mean the entire collection of hosted services 'somewhere out there.' We've gone from mainframe word processing to PC based Word in professor's offices to... what? Google docs? Julian didn't have Office on his home machine, and was always having problems transferring local files around. So I showed him Google Docs, and he's using that now. Now, I don't have to support (and constantly upgrade) software on his machine, and he can get to it from anywhere. He doesn't need me anymore...

Which is fine, but it has implications for our role in Academic Technology. All over the world, shops like this one are building survey engines for web-based university research. We can give our colleagues exactly what they need, and make sure that data privacy concerns are respected, since we hold the data about our research subjects (in many cases, our students). But researchers can now just go to something like survey monkey, set it up, and go forward, never asking some of the questions we are (rightly) compelled to ask. We can all come up with dozens of examples of this kind of thing. Why run a hosted email system, when you can just push student email out to a provider? Why host a central website, when departments can arrange for hosting out in the cloud? Why run Peoplesoft or Banner, when Kuali is moving forward, and some of the professional associations are already talking about hosted solutions for these functions? Why go outside the university for a blog, when we could easily download and set up blogging software on university servers we have available to us?  ;)  And if everything goes that way, what will *we* do?

I don't have an answer, but I have some metaphors and a possible strategy. First, the idea of 'utility computing,' or talk of 'the fifth utility,' makes me grind my teeth. We're not plumbers, and we're not helicopter mechanics. When I hear people saying things like "we succeed when we're invisible" well, that's the certain pathway to extinction. So, what should we say?

There's a hint from the old war stories about the mainframe era. Some of those people were reluctant to give up their high priest status, and we're the ones who crashed the gate. We need to make sure we don't become what we overthrew. We also need to take our own ideas about pedagogy (or androgogy) seriously.  If we're telling our colleagues to get over being the sage on the stage, and become the guide on the side, maybe we should think about what that means for our own work.

And now, a hint about strategy. We started digital media services (DMS) 8 years ago. We had no idea what we were doing, or how, we just figured it was possible. So we streamed lectures, we did audiocasts, heck, we even streamed basketball games, off a streaming server. Pretty soon, we set up an archive server. Pretty soon, people were calling us to make sure their lectures got streamed. Then, a few years later, we all know what happened: youtube, and all the rest. When that hit, we were already up to speed with video production. And now, since we're up to speed, the university is using DMS for some of the production things, and guidance about what's possible, they used to outsource.

In other words, we still need to ride the wave, and while it's ok to get tubed, we need to go fast enough so the tube doesn't crash down on us. And just as we need to stay ahead of the curl, we need to stay ahead of the cloud, or at least on the edge, so we can see where we may be going, Think of the old surfer at Windandsea, who knows where the rocks are, and how the riptides behave, but also knows the joy of just getting on the board and riding the endless wave...

So, we all know that learning new (to us) programs can be dull and frustrating. Part of this has been mitigated in the last few years by screen capture and video tutorials. But they still need to hold interest, and a little humor helps.

Anyway, Edward came into my office and pointed me to something I hadn't yet seen. Cleaning up the language a little bit, we'll link it as You're not very good at Photoshop

Warning: before you click, you should know this will work well with students, but may not be well received by your colleagues on the faculty, especially if they're followers of Quintillian. Nothing obscene, but some of the language is not necessarily safe for work.

It is, easily, the most amusing Photoshop tutorial I've even seen. My colleagues were poking their head in, wondering why I was laughing so hard...  ;)

It turns out the MPAA has admitted they got some numbers wrong. Like, very wrong:

MPAA Overstated Students' Role In Losses Due To Piracy

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205917178

Maybe the RIAA will follow suit?