When we talk about open publishing, open creating, students having the tools to be their own media sources, not just consumers, this is what it means. Lights? Cameras? Nah. I’ll just do it on my phone!

Yesterday, in a very exhausting but exciting Macaulay Orientation Technology Day, we hosted all 363 of our incoming freshmen for lunch, workshops, and of course the eagerly-awaited laptop distribution! This year we also gave the students laptop sleeves for the first time, which resulted in some of them (as you can see from the photo!) discarding the boxes their shiny new laptops came in just as soon as they left they Graduate Center. But we did give them more than that–things which (we hope) they won’t discard as eagerly.

On the tech side, I got to try a (very impromptu, but successful) first public attempt at using Poll Everywhere. Very fun, and I may post more about that another time. (Why use “clickers” when all the students already have cellphones?) The Tech Fellows also gave some very well-received workshops–introducing Leopard and the Mac, showing the students (most of whom were not experienced with Macs at all, even if they enjoyed my joke about the tattoo on their knees) what these new machines could do. Photobooth, as always, was a big hit, except for the students whose cameras didn’t work (it seems most of those cameras revived later. Not sure what happened there.)

But the most interesting, and risky, part came with the rollout of the Macaulay Eportfolios to all these incoming freshmen. I admit I was a bit worried that the whole WPMU installation was going to fall apart when it got hit by so many people all trying to create eportfolios at the same time. And in fact there were some glitches, especially at the peak (which seemed to come right around 430 PM in the 3-5 PM workshop session). When that happened, some people got “invalid authorization key” error messages–although those seemed to go away if they just tried again after a minute or two. The system also stopped sending me the automated notifications of new blogs being created for a while–it picked up again later in the evening, but there were a whole bunch–probably around 40-60, for which I never got a notification. Even worse, some of the eportfolios seem to have been created, but bogged down in a weird way so that they’re there, but with no CSS whatsoever–and no users, either. Those will ultimately be deleted, I suppose. But still, we got about 200 eportfolios created in the same two-hour period. Not a bad start.

Most of them are still in their default state, but a few students have already gone in on their own and done some updating–trailblazers! For us, now, follow-up is going to be key. Getting some attention to those trailblazers, doing some show and tell, getting some commenting and sharing going, and adding some students from the upper classes, too…all of that is going to be part of this year’s work. Or fun!

It took me longer than I wanted, but I finally managed to get the Macaulay Eportfolio site up and running. I’m very pleased with the initial installation–this is using Wordpress Multi-User as an eportfolio platform, something that more and more people are starting to do. It was a long process to decide what would be best for Macaulay students–and I know there are many possible solutions to this kind of question. But WPMU offered several advantages for our needs. After some email exchanges and a visit with Jim Groom, I felt that the advantages really made it worth a try.

Those advantages, in brief:

• Free and open source. It’s always good to conserve resources, and it didn’t sit well with me to shell out many thousands for a product that we might not stay with for very long, and that would then, by virtue of the money we spent, also own us–or at least hold a lien.
• Easy to use and maintain with a small staff–and no full-time programmers. Wordpress has a huge and helpful community, and I and the Tech Fellows have extensive experience with using it, changing it, fixing it, and extending it.
• Easily customized (templates) look and feel. Wordpress has so many themes, with such a variety of looks. Most of the “regular” eportfolio systems go too far in one direction or another. Either they’re completely standardized with at most a little color change to express individuality, or they’re wide open and thus very difficult for students to navigate the process of customizing their appearance. Wordpress themes, which give a range of different attractive options, easily switched or re-switched, or even altered (or created from scratch) by more advanced students, seemed like a perfect compromise
• A cabinet of curiosities/museum. This was kind of the controlling metaphor I wanted for the eportfolios, and Wordpress really lends itself to that. For a while I was stuck on the repository idea (the box in the basement metaphor). I was really considering that the eportfolio system had to be a full-service system, with the area for “dumping” all the artifacts or content integrated with the system for reflecting on and presenting that content. But Jim Groom (in one of those should-have-been-obvious brilliant recommendations) unstuck me from that. The repositories are out there, easily available, and it’s just not necessary (or even really advisable) for me to focus on providing them. With YouTube, flickr, Google Docs, voicethread, odeo, etc., why bother to focus so much on providing that “box”? As a cabinet of curiosities, or as a museum, it’s possible to just pull all the content and rearrange it, to walk around or to sit with it, to show it to others in a guided tour, or to have private rooms, or members-only displays. The metaphor’s not perfect, but it got me moving in the right direction, and I integrated it into the site description.
• Easy to organize and reorganize. This one may need a little work with Wordpress, but the idea is that the categories become the organizing tool. Like tagging, the categories can be post-facto, rather than predetermined, and there can be multiple (or adjustable) categories for any item. That’s key I want integrative learning–seeing relationships between and among different learning activities, to be built-in to the eportfolio.
• Reflection and interaction central. Once the repository is separate from the system, the posts become reflection and consideration…and even better, they also provide the interactive element through comments. If an eportfolio lives and grows, and encourages collaboration and development…well, that’s what it’s there for. And rare.

Those are the basics (apart from the ones I’m forgetting), and it remains to be seen how it all works out when (probably in the fall) students really start using the system.

One of the best things we have here at Macaulay is the Tech Fellows–so however it all begins to roll out, I’ve got them for support, and ideas, and development, too.

More updates as this develops!

At BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis has a post on “GoogleU”–and it’s a theme that Will Richardson has picked up before and returns to again.

And of course it’s an idea I discussed (in SF terms) some time ago.

I think the idea is growing–the idea of open education, or distributed university, whatever you want to call it–where learning is by choice, and engagement is the motivation. I know it’s growing and discussion of it is growing in the edublogging community, but I’m also thinking about what students are thinking about it–or if they’re just doing it.

As many have mentioned, at least in our current system, credentialing is the big issue. But I’m thinking (and seeing) that students are perfectly able to separate what they must do for credentials (grades, enrollment and registration, degrees), from what they want to do (and will do) for their own learning (travel, social networking, wikipedia-ing, discussion forums, gaming, and working).

And a big part of the idea of the University of the Future is that we no longer will have such strictly-defined categories as “student” or “teacher.” When classes or learning can be for anyone, from anyone, then the person who is learning at the moment is the person who is teaching at another (or at the same) moment. And that person (or those persons) might be any age–any level of experience–not just anywhere or anytime in space or time in the world, but anywhere or anytime in their own life-space and life-time.

So “where are the students” or “what do the students think” becomes more of a limiting question than an opening question.

This year’s CUNY IT Conference was a good one for me–although different than it’s been in the past. I got to see people from my various communities in CUNY, including some I don’t see so often anymore. As time goes by and my CUNY role broadens, so do those communities–so it’s even more fun, like a reunion, to see and greet them all. I was still recovering from a bad cold, so I had to be careful about hugging and handshaking (and forgot about that more often than I should have–apologies to anyone I infected!).

I also was pleasantly surprised and honored to receive (as a member of the Consortial Faculty of the CUNY Online Baccalaureate) a Mike Ribaudo Award for Technological Innovation. A beautiful certificate, and (it’s rumored) a Zune are my reward–but the recognition was worth a lot more.

And I moderated two very successful panels with the Macaulay Honors College Instructional Technology Fellows. That was another difference for me–instead of presenting on my own, I was a convener and moderator–letting the ITF’s do the real presenting. And their presentations were fantastic. I’m so happy and impressed to be able to work with such a brilliant group of colleagues. Their work with the students, their willingness to try new things, to think about pedagogy, to learn new technologies from scratch…I can’t take credit for any of that, but I sure do enjoy seeing the benefits.

Of course the conference also had its drawbacks–as it always has. Because it tries to meld the two kinds of “I” in “IT” (”Information” vs. “Instruction”…but more specifically, it’s administration vs. teaching/learning) into one conference, there’s a division of audience, and a division of types of panel, that doesn’t always quite work. (Jim Groom has an excellent blog post on this subject) Presentations about telephone systems or ID card scanners make a totally separate “track” from presentations about using wikis for interdisciplinary seminars–and the limited space and time of a one-day conference makes it so that there is only room on the program for a few presentations all together–somebody is always going to get left out. And that means that it’s just impossible to get to see everything you want to see. (This was even worse for me, because with two panels of my own, I just couldn’t make it to some of the panels I really wanted to attend–for example, Jim, Mikhail Gershovich, and Matt Gold’s presentation, as well as Howard Wach’s).

I know how hard the conference committee works to balance these two directions in putting the program together, and I think they usually do manage to maintain a fairly even balance. Last year I tried to do a numerical count, and it was just about dead even. But it could be that these two directions just don’t belong in the same conference.

Yet on the other hand, maybe there’s really something to be said for getting these two areas, the people in these two different roles, to talk to each other. That doesn’t happen at this conference very often, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. Or at least I like to hope not.

My own role these days is an attempt to bridge those two directions–or actually to reinvision the traditional hierarchy between them. At Macaulay we’re making a real effort to put teaching and learning first and foremost–to make the administrative/IT side totally answerable to, and totally in the service of, teaching and learning. And maybe there’s part of an answer there. Traditionally it’s the administrative side that has held the reins. They have had the money, they have had the decision-making power and the institutional influence. And all too often their priorities and interests have been very different from the teaching and learning side’s. And all too often their attitude toward the teaching and learning side has not been positive (and that goes both ways, possibly).

I’ve written before about how I think that has to change–and now that I’m in a position where I’m really actively trying to change it, I think that just flat reversing it, putting the reins in the hands of the other side, will not take care of the problems all on its own. I do think that the ultimate authority, the ultimate influence, really does have to be on the teaching and learning side, but I also think there has to be more room for conversation, communication, and mutual respect than there has generally been. If that is possible.

In the course I’m co-teaching in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Interactive Technology and Pedagogy program we’ve been talking about some of the skills and tools that students need to know and use in the media universe. We discussed (it was a digression, as I remember) how access to information sometimes can be a curse as well as a blessing, if students don’t have the appropriate questioning, critical, and researching skills.

And then serendipitously I was reading Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings (I read the first part long ago, when it was a Hugo-winning novella, and only recently discovered that Silverberg had added another whole section to expand it into a full novel.)

In Silverberg’s imagined post-lapsarian world, some kind of pickled human brains take the place of networked computers…but there’s still that same problem:

Any citizen has the right to go to a public thinking cap and requisition an information from the Rememberers on any given subject. Nothing is concealed. But the Rememberers volunteer no aid; you must know how to ask, which means you must know what to ask. Item by item you must seek your facts. It is useful for those who must know, say, the long-term patterns of climate in Agupt, or the symptoms of the crystallization disease, or the limitations in the charter of one of the guilds; but it is no help at all to the man who wishes knowledge of the larger questions. One would need to requisition a thousand informations merely to make a beginning. The expense would be great; few would bother.

For larger questions, neither the Rememberers nor the internet can be of much help…at least not without the real skills, almost enough to be a Rememberer, or more than a Rememberer, yourself.

It’s not like there aren’t enough iPhone reviews out there, but this is mine! If you don’t want to read my whole review, here’s the bottom line.

I love it. It’s great. Some flaws, but nothing that can’t be corrected, and even with the flaws, it’s totally, totally worth every penny.

Now–my background. I’m moving to the iPhone from the Treo 650. I owned the Treo for almost three years, and I liked it very much. Bought it new for full price (which was only a little less at the time than the iPhone is now), and used it every day. I am not one of the high-powered productivity fiends who are the biggest Blackberry customers. I don’t depend on the phone or instant email for critical business. I also used my iPod every day, for music and podcasts.

So–the iPhone. Let’s take the categories of the functions it offers.

The Phone. First of all, it’s a cellphone. It’s a great phone. I don’t care about voice dialing, had it on the Treo and never used it even once–never even set it up. I do have a bluetooth headset (just got it a couple of weeks ago) for when I’m driving, and it paired immediately with the iPhone, no trouble at all. The sound quality for listening and talking on the iPhone is terrific. Much better than I’m used to, and that’s the case when using it held up to my head, using the speakerphone, using the bluetooth headset, or using the builtin mike in the iPhone earphones (that was a surprise feature! More about that later).

People have complained about ATT reception and service areas, and that has been no problem for me whatsoever. In fact, with the Treo, I had Sprint, and that was much worse–in my own house, I got almost no reception at all. With ATT, I get great reception everywhere so far.

The controls (dialing, hold, conference calling) and the contacts (especially the picture caller ID) are just perfect–efficient, easy to use, even attractive (and more about that later). You can’t add custom ringtones, a fact that people complain about, but that doesn’t really bother me. I almost always keep it on silent and vibrate anyway. The vibrate might be a little weaker than it was on the Treo. It would be fun to use my own mp3 (I used to use the bosun’s whistle sound from Star Trek) for a ringtone, and if they make that possible later it would be good, but it’s far from essential.

It does get a little warm when you hold it to your ear on a long call–like any cellphone.

The Internet The browser is great. The screen (and this is a feature that helps everything on the iPhone), is the brightest, clearest, most beautiful screen I’ve ever seen. It’s absolutely gorgeous, including in bright sunlight. Having the pages display as real websites, not a WAP-crippled version, really helps. I can even read the small text sometimes without zooming in, and when I need to zoom, it’s quick and easy and intuitive. The browser is super fast on wifi, and even though people complain about Edge, even on Edge it’s much faster than what I was used to from the Sprint Treo. Flash support would be a very good addition–that’s the biggest lack, but from what I hear, it’s coming soon–maybe by the fall.

The Keyboard The lack of a period key on the main keyboard is a little bit of a drag (although I learned that it is a drag–if you drag your finger from the “123″ key to period, you don’t have to really leave the main keyboard), and it’s taking some getting used to for me to appreciate the auto-correct function, but after even just about half an hour of using it, I could see that it’s going to be way better than the Treo. I wouldn’t want to type long extended things on it (this post is typed on my computer, not the iPhone), but that’s the case for any portable device. For small emails or text messages, or for URL’s, it’s going to be faster and easier than the other keyboards, I’m sure.

I don’t mind the lack of touch feedback. The visual feedback is good, and there’s sound if you want it turned on. I never was able to type on the Treo without looking anyway–and I don’t think people do that on the Blackberry (I may be wrong). Another thing that seems to get ignored is that mechanical, physical keyboards tend to break or get clogged up with gunk. On the Treo, the “H” key was reluctant to register for quite some time–overuse and dirt, I’m sure. That will never be a problem with the iPhone keyboard.

Email I’ve used it with gmail and with POP access to another (work) server. It’s totally fine. The engadget review mentioned a delay in moving from one message to another or in deleting messages. I notice no such thing. It’s almost instantaneous. Unfortunately, there is no bulk email deletion–you do have to go one at a time–and that’s a drawback. Also, in Gmail, because of the way Gmail structures “conversations” you get a copy in your inbox of every message you send. Too bad, but it’s not an iPhone problem, it’s a Gmail problem.

Of course there’s no push (other than Yahoo). You can set it to auto-check at different intervals (every 15 minutes is the most frequent), but I’m not doing that. If you really get hundreds of emails a day, you’re probably better off with a Blackberry. But that’s not me.

Here, too, the screen and the appearance help a lot. If you get html email, the colors and fonts show right up. If you have picture attachments, they show up, too. The way things slide on and off the screen, or into the garbage can when you delete them–the animations–are fantastic.

iPod The sound quality is great. The navigation in cover flow, and the album art (again, the beautiful screen), it’s all beautiful. The included headphones have a (very tiny) little microphone/button built in to the cord–and that allows you to pause, resume, or go to the next song without taking the iPhone out of your pocket. It also automatically pauses the music and lets you answer a phone call, just by clicking it, and then resume the music after the call. You don’t have to put the phone to your ear–just click and talk.

There is one big bug right now. You can not browse the web and listen to the iPod at the same time. Well, you can–but it will constantly crash (not a major crash–it just stops playing the music) every few minutes. I’m hoping they’ll fix that soon. I don’t want to browse and listen to music all the time, but it is one of the promised features, and I do want to be able to do it, when the opportunity arises. It’s been widely reported, so I’m sure Apple’s aware of it. It’s clearly a bug, and whatever it takes, it needs to be fixed.

I’ve read the complaints about not being able to use third-party headphones without an adapter. To some extent that’s true. However there are a few things to mention about that–one is that the iPod headphones that are included seem to be better sound quality than included headphones used to be with iPods, and the little clickable microphone thing on the cord is a big, big benefit. So third-party headphones might not be so necessary. The other thing is that the jack is actually a standard jack, it’s just recessed (maybe to protect the jack from twisting or pulling of the cord?), so most third-party headphones, because of the rubber sleeve around the jack, won’t fit. But–what I did with the cord for my car’s cassette adapter and my Sony headphones is very easy. If you take an Xacto knife and shave away some of that rubber, you don’t need any adapter, or anything. Your headphones will work just fine. It’s a little ugly, and messes up your headphones’ appearance (not much, but a little), and I can see that if you had a super-expensive pair you might not want to do that, but it works fine for me. In fact, I’m planning to do even more surgery, I think, and graft the Sony earbuds onto the iPhone cord, so I can have the comfortable earbuds with better sound, and still use the clickable microphone thing.

Other Features The camera is great–much better than the Treo (however, it is a cellphone, not a digital camera). No video, but maybe someday, and again, you can use a real camera if you want video. The Google maps feature is amazing–clear, sharp, and (in wifi) very fast–satellite view looks fantastic.

The YouTube is fun–and I’m seeing great teaching and learning possibilities there. It’s easy to upload videos (student-created or instructor-created) to YouTube, and students can then watch them on a portable device, in the field, in a museum, on a walking tour, at the library…and those videos can be screen captures, slideshows, maps, logic puzzles–there are lots of possibilities. Even better, one thing that the iPhone has that iPods don’t, is a speaker–not a great speaker, but decent. So YouTube videos, or video or audio on the iPod function, can be shared. That’s a great benefit-students can share content with each other, working collaboratively, with a little portable device.

I think it’s likely, too, that there are more features to come–the thing is basically a very small computer, with a phone, that can be carried around. It’s approaching the ideal tricorder. It doesn’t have all the sensors yet, although the proximity sensor that it uses to sense a nearby face and turn off the screen might have some interesting possibilities, like the sensors that determine the orientation and automatically flip the screen to landscape or portrait mode. I’m also interested in the camera as a sensor–reading bar codes? facial recognition? character recognition? It’s not the highest resolution ever, but I think the use of what is actually a visual sensor for teaching and learning (in a mobile environment–outside the classroom) deserves more thought.

The Notes function is lame. It doesn’t sync with anything.

The Calendar is excellent–mostly (again) because of the screen and interface. It syncs great with iCal, but unfortunately just puts all your calendars into one–doesn’t keep them separate if you have separate calendars for, say, work and home. So that’s a flaw.

The SMS is good (but no automatic smilies )–and if you really want chat, there is Meebo, the Weather is fine, the Clock and Calculator are fine (the Clock has some good functions, the Calculator is very standard–neither one is anything to get excited about, but who really gets excited about clocks or calculators? Not me).

I don’t have any use for Stocks, and haven’t even looked at it. I’d eliminate it if I could. Couldn’t care less.

Syncing is really quick and easy–and you can disconnect in the middle with no problem. Another feature that I haven’t seen anyone mention is that you can sync to different computers for different things. I have my music library on a PC, so I sync to that for the iPod function, and my contacts and calendar on a Mac (that syncs to Google Calendar), so the iPhone can sync to that machine for those functions–it’s not tied to one single computer for syncing.

Overall I can’t say enough for the look and feel. INTERFACE MATTERS. That’s the big lesson of all Apple products, and the look and feel here are really revolutionary. It’s just so much better than any other similar product that there really aren’t any similar products. The animations and interactions are not just eye-candy. They help make the device more usable, they play into our intuitive senses of how things work and what we’re doing. And the screen is just so great to look at!

The flaws are not serious…and the fact that Apple can fix them (and will they? I think so–hope so), transparently, automatically, when you sync, which you’re going to do anyway!

The very biggest flaw (aside from the crashing when browsing and listening to music, which is clearly a bug that needs to be fixed), is that there is no way to read ebooks. I may be one of the very few people in the world who actually likes to read whole books on the portable device, but I read many of them (dozens) on my Treo, and with the great screen on the iPhone, it would be so, so much better. Apple has to come up with something for this. ITunes can already handle pdf’s, so I’m hopeful. But this is the only really serious drawback for me–reading on the subway one-handed, without having to take a paper book out of my bag, had become a very pleasant routine for me.

Again, bottom line, this device is great. And no, I didn’t wait in line at all. I walked into the Apple store (with my wife and kid) at a mall in New Jersey just off the highway on my way home from vacation, bought two iPhones, and walked out. No shortage, no struggle. And the activation on iTunes took all of 10 minutes–for two iPhones–once I got home.

There are more features and more things for me to discover–and I probably forgot to mention some things here–but that’s the general response.

Call me fanboy if you like! I can’t protest!

It’s not often that “excellent” and “Blackboard” can go in the same sentence, but the University of North Carolina has released a (free, Creative Commons Licensed) tool that helps to add some excellence to Blackboard–or at least take away some of the anti-excellence. bFree quickly and neatly grabs the content from an exported Blackboard course–one of those zip archives that are hard to deal with in any way except importing them back into Blackboard or tediously going through all the weirdly named files to find your content. It doesn’t (yet) export discussion forums–but for most of the main sections it works perfectly. It preserves the file and folder structures, and lets you export to either a collection of files neatly arranged in their folders, or even to a website.

Catherine Stimpson had a piece at Inside Higher Ed yesterday about the 2006 report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for and Promotion. The first thing that struck me was a statistic.

The MLA report estimates that of every 100 English and foreign language doctoral recipients, 60 will be hired to tenure-track positions within 5 years. Of them, 38 will be considered for tenure at the institution where they were hired. Of them, 34 will be awarded tenure.

So that makes me one of those 34 out of 38 out of 60 out of 100. Unless I’m figuring the odds wrong (quite possible), that’s actually a bigger number than I would have expected. I’m glad to be tenured, of course, but it turns out that it really doesn’t feel (to me at least) as completely a relief as everybody said. I still think about my career, where it’s going, I still have ambitions and new ideas, and I don’t seem to feel like I’ve totally “made it” or finished.

Stimpson (and the MLA) make another important point, too.

Moreover, because of those new communications technologies, much scholarly inquiry is now being done digitally. Some of the most important work about and in digitalized scholarship is appearing from university presses, an invaluable resource that the task force correctly praises and for which it seeks more institutional resources. Yet many departments are clueless, all thumbs in the old-fashioned sense of the phrase, in doing evaluations of digital scholarship that respect peer review. Of the departments in doctorate-granting institutions that responded to the MLA’s survey, 40.8 percent report no experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 65.7 percent have no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format.

Now, this (deplorable) situation doesn’t really match with my experience, at least not recently. At my own institution, electronic publications were evaluated, were accepted, and did play a part in the decision to grant me tenure and (later) promotion. So that’s a good thing. But it’s also a relatively new thing, and this is something where most departments absolutely need to get on board. Electronic formats, electronic publication, holds the promise of the most exciting new venues for scholarship and publication–because the work can get out there farther, and faster, for more interaction, criticism and comment, than more “traditional” venues can every achieve.

And there’s another area, too, where I think most departments and administrations are “all thumbs,” inexperienced, missing the boat. Scholarship of teaching and learning (which my institution does value) is neglected too often, at too many places. I’ve heard too many stories of faculty who do this kind of work having to really struggle to get the work recognized and accepted in tenure and promotion decisions. I’m glad the MLA is urging more attention to electronic publications…and I’d like to see them urging more attention to SoTL, too.

A great quick introduction to Web 2.0, and while it makes points that many others, including me, have made before, I like it a whole lot better than the other ways the points have been made.

It does a great job of using the medium to illustrate the medium…and all in less than five minutes.

Best of all is the conclusion: “We’ll need to rethink copyright/ authorship/ identity/ ethics/ aesthetics/ rhetorics/ governance/ privacy/ commerce/ love/ family/ ourselves.”

Excellent work by Michael Wesch and Digital Ethnography @ KSU.

Over at cac.ophony.org, I jumped rather harshly on a pretty innocent careless remark by Luke:

No faculty member really wants to teach a course entirely online

and it’s grown into a very interesting discussion in the comments there. My colleague Phil Pecorino joined in, Luke responded with some fascinating further challenges and thoughts, so did I, and I think some excellent questions are being raised.

And it’s traveling a bit farther, with a great blog post by Jim Groom at bavatuesdays. Jim makes some good points about choosing (and conceptualizing) the “space” of an LMS. But I want to expand a bit on one point he makes near the end. He says:

On a space like BlackBoard there is no way to engage a community space beyond that defined by the course unit. A different kind of social experience that necessarily flows out from the classrooms into the building halls, dorms, cafeterias, etc. has no real outlet in a BlackBoard environment. It is this space of collaboration, socialization, and interaction beyond the unit of the course that is not being translated adequately into these virtual learning spaces.

I think this is an extremely important criticism of Blackboard–and of Learning Objects (which is promoted as blogs/wikis/etc. for Blackboard). It’s a criticism that I’ve made quite loudly about Learning Objects, both to them and to our own CUNY people, for almost two years now. In my mind, a blog or wiki that is closed, not public, defeats about half (or more) of the benefit of these tools. Every time I’ve made this argument, though, I’ve been met with the claim that because the LO tools can be “exported,” they’re really public after all. But that export is just a static website–a collection of files. It’s no longer, once it’s exported, a blog or wiki or anything of the kind. (But there is a promise that they will, soon, actually be shareable and open within a program or institution, or at least for a specific student across courses, even if they’re not truly completely public)

But all is not lost, or so terrible, really, even with these tools. Over time (and with the opportunity to use them myself), I’m a bit more convinced of the utility of a “walled garden.” There is something to be said, there are productive uses, for closed (or semi-open) social software tools, too. “Walled” means “closed,” but it can also mean “protected,” and that’s not always a bad thing for all students.

And here’s the other important consideration–the fact that the institution (or program, whatever) uses Blackboard (or whatever closed CMS) does not mean that that’s the only thing available to classes in the program. It’s obvious, I know, but I think it’s worth pointing out. Sure, in the CUNY Online Bac, or my own campus, Blackboard is the “official” CMS, but all the tools of the public Web 2.0, all the social software, is still out there. It’s possible, and really not too difficult, to have the best of both worlds–use Blackboard for what Blackboard’s good for, and use wordpress blogs, writely, YouTube (as my colleague Tony Picciano wisely recommends), mediawiki, tikiwiki, flickr, wikispaces, myspace, etc., etc., as needed, and when desirable.

It’s important to keep looking, and keep developing, new tools–even while “stuck” within the walled garden of Blackboard. Link in, link out, and get the benefits of public and open, at the same time and in the same course as Blackboard is the official “big” tool.

I can’t say I’ve done too much of this myself recently, since my own teaching has been so limited to just the one course–but I’ve done a lot of it in the past, and I’ve encouraged and helped faculty at my own campus to do the same.

But there’s more to be done with this theme, definitely–especially in campus-based open solutions (or part-open, or closed/open), to create more effective virtual campus-wide learning communities. And cross-campuses (cross-CUNY for example), and within regions, or interest areas, or academic disciplines, or nations–all the way out to the whole huge wide open public of the interblogowebsphere.

I’m announcing it here, first, even though it’s not really being announced publicly quite yet. But I think it’s ready, and I think it’s worth announcing. I’ve been working pretty hard to get this up and running, and I like the way it’s turning out. The TWT (Teaching with Technology) Spotlight is my effort to get some informal but informative conversations with BMCC faculty out into the audiospace–so that colleagues can hear and think about what other colleagues are doing in their classrooms. I also wanted to give an example (a very basic one) of how educational podcasting can work beyond lecturecasting. It works well, in my opinion, when it’s short, frequently updated, conversational, and directed at a specific audience with a real interest in the content. There are other criteria, too, but these are the main ones for this podcast. It could be the first of many (or at least, several), and student voices might be the next step.

Last week I was at the Educause Conference in Dallas–the biggest Instructional Technology Conference around. Thousands of attendees (I heard anywhere from 7,000-10,000), all the vendors in the world, giving away all the pens and post-its and rubber balls and tootsie rolls in the world, and me. This conference (and Educause generally) is heavily tilted toward people serving as Chief Information Officers (by whatever alternate title), Instructional Technology (or even Information Technology) Directors, with some Instructional Designers, and some faculty. Mostly, though, this is a conference for the tech side, the T in IT.

Educause is good about making sure that vendors pay for making the conference-goers comfortable–nice conference bags (faux leather backpacks), delicious snacks in the exhibit hall, and so on. They’re even better about organizing a good number of sessions where people actually get to talk to one another, instead of sitting passively and checking email while a speaker goes through a powerpoint. But where they really do well at this major conference is in getting some big names for the general sessions (held in an arena that’s about two-thirds the size of Madison Square Garden). Ray Kurzweil, for example, who blew my mind quite thoroughly (intelligent virtual personalities for interacting with software, and handheld devices without screens–displaying information or immersive virtual reality directly on our retinas…all by 2010!)

But for me, the most impressive and inspiring session was S. Georgia Nugent’s closing general session, “The Tower of Google.” Dr. Nugent is the president of Kenyon College, and more importantly, she understands the promise and the perils of educational technology, and much more importantly, she’s a classicist.

It was that fact, the fact that she’s a professor of classics first–that she’s an experienced and skilled teacher and scholar in an academic field (more particularly in the liberal arts, and even more particularly in the humanities)–that made me think about my own position, and what kind of technology position (or technology person) is really most important for an institution of higher education.

Dr. Nugent was able to connect history, and philosophy, and she understands and struggles with the concept of translation. She thinks not just about efficiency, but also about freedom–academic and otherwise. A college is not a corporation…we have different goals, we have different methods, we have different needs. And the people best-prepared (not exclusively, and not always, but generally) to work in that environment are the people who are themselves academics.

Too often, I think, technology gets pushed under the “IT” people–with the emphasis on the “T” (technology), rather than the “I” (instructional). And that doesn’t work well in an institution that really is about the “I”–and is really about more than just the “I,” but also the “P” (philosophy) and the S (scholarship). We’re not really producing anything in a university…we’re thinking–thinking deeply and thinking widely. Sometimes that mission conflicts with the T, but in higher ed, the T should really be at the service of the P and the S (and probably the rest of the alphabet, too).

Which brings me to another “I”…me! The kind of position I see for myself (eventually, probably not as soon as I would like), the I that I would be, has to be at a level where I can use and apply my own experience as a teacher…and as a humanist. Not sure where that would be, or how it could happen. For one thing, it has to be a position that recognizes how integral technology is to all the endeavors of the college, by giving the position policy-making power, budget, oversight and insight into the whole range of college departments. For another, it has to be a position that is clearly situated in the academic side of the college administration, with authority over the technological side.

If I’m going to be an “I” in IT (or even, if I can hope, an “I” in CIO), I’m going to be that in a way that sees my academic background as primary, and my technological strength as an added bonus. In most places, I’m afraid, the I’s in IT are people who have technological strength primarily or sometimes, unfortunately, only.

Just finished John Varley’s excellent new novel Red Lightning, and one passage really deserved quoting. The narrator is a seventeen-year-old (maybe eighteen at the point of this passage), just graduating from Burroughs High School on Mars.

His description of his plan for his college education is a near-perfect match to what my favorite art historian has been saying in several posts.

As usual in SF, Varley is commenting more on what’s going on now, then what will be going on then, and the approving nature of that comment made me want to quote the whole passage, even though it’s a long one:

Blame it on the web, like so much else. These days you could attend classes virtually. The universities resisted it, but eventually they were confronted by a de facto situtation, and gave in. You no longer have to go to Boston to attend Harvard. If you know enough to log on to online classes you can become a web freshman. No entrance exam necessary. Hooray for equality!

Of course, there’s equal, and then there’s equal.

And there’s practical, and there’s impractical. There’s nothing to prevent you from attending an advanced seminar at the Sorbonne, everything but some highly select honors courses is webcast these days. That doesn’t mean you will understand what they’re talking about. so all but a few supergeniuses start out in the traditional way, with Physics 101 or Introduction to African History, and work their way up. When you think about it, it’s good for everybody. The geniuses can proceed at their own pace, and they can do it from Manhattan or the rudest sheet-metal hut in Calcutta. People who never had a chance to see so much as a blackboard in the past are now able to get an Ivy League education, if they’re up to it. Excellence can now actually select itself in academia, at least until the point where you actually arrive on campus and are faced with prejudice and politics and academic bullshit. Or so I’ve read, in researching the pluses and minuses of web school. Mostly pluses, to my way of thinking, the big one being that I could stay on Mars for a few more years, at least, just like that boy or girl in Calcutta doesn’t have to figure out how to pay for transportation to and lodging in Paris.

But eventually, the different levels of equality come into play. You can get a degree from Stanford and never leave your igloo in Nome, but it’s not quite the same kind of degree you’d get if you lived in the ivy-covered dorms. The sheepskin itself will look identical, but simply by googling the student you can find out if her or she actually attended in the flesh. So, people being what they are, an Attending Degree, or AD, was more prestigious than a Web Degree, or WD.

But there’s a remedy for that, and so far as I can tell it adds up to what Mom calls “that rarest of human institutions: a meritocracy.”

You can start out as I plan to, attending classes via the web. You get graded like everybody else. Then, if you look like Hah-vahd material–that is, if you are smarter than some of the legacy admissions already there–you will be invited to attend in corpore. Doesn’t matter if you’re our boy from Calcutta, or a girl from Chad, or some poor child who actually lives in Boston but never had a chance to attend a good school.

As for picking a school, there’s another alternative these days, and it’s what I’m leaning toward.

Don’t pick.

If I’m going to be on Mars anyway, what do I care about singing “The Whiffenpoof Song” with a lot of drunken Elis? I’d never make the rowing team to bring glory to dear old Cambridge. I don’t give a hoot about either American football or real football. Other than reasons like that I don’t see the point of identifying myself with any particular school. In this academic strategy, you simply attend the classes that appeal to you. On Monday morning you can be in a class in Johannesburg, follow it up with a seminar in California, and that afternoon attend lectures in Japan and Buenos Aires.

If a certain professor turns out to be boring or incompetent, just stop going. Professors hate this, they call it the Neilsen Rating system of education. It’s mostly the ones whose web attendance is low who complain, though.

You can cobble together your own educational strategy, chart your own path, design your own specialty, if you wish. You may not even want to pursue a degree, you may just want to learn sutff and go from there.

That’s really what we’re seeing the beginning stages of right now. Varley seems to be implying a little more synchronous contact in these classes than I think is going to be ideal or common. But he’s not quite explicit about that, and thinking further, he is talking about distance learning from a pretty huge distance (Mars), and the speed-of-light limitation alone would have to require that the courses be asynchronous. Generally, though, he’s got the right picture, and the plausible extension of it that he provides could be a roadmap, or at least a guidepost, for the directions we’re heading. Not utopian directions (especially not in the novel as a whole), but positive ones, generally, nonetheless.

It’s a very fun book, even beyond this one (sort of a throwaway) prognostication, with some great gadgets, well-developed colonial society, gripping post-tsunami landscapes, evil post-nationalist governments, plenty of 9/11 references, and much more. The fact that it’s narrated by a teenage boy makes comparisons to Heinlein’s juveniles unavoidable. Varley gets compared to Heinlein plenty–he has a similar libertarian strain (some very strong Second Amendment rhetoric in this one), and a similar tendency to sneak in lectures without letting them bog down the plot or detract from the likable and eminently competent characters. Like Heinlein’s juveniles, this one would work very well for teenage readers (and I don’t think the sex and drug use should change that at all–although Heinlein’s editors, but not Heinlein, would probably disagree with me on that). And it also works very well for this adult reader.

Red Lightning is a sequel to Red Thunder, and it really made me want to go back and re-read that one. Unfortunately, I can’t find my copy! Looks like I may be placing another order with the SFBC soon.

Jeff Cooper, from TappedIn, is working on an article arguing against podcasts in education, and he asked for feedback on some of his points. I gave it to him there, but I think they’re points that could come up elsewhere, too…so I’m giving that feedback here, too…quoting his points and then giving my responses. My “hacksaw is not a hammer” theme is one that I hammer on quite frequently, but it’s one that I think is relevant to a lot of the critiques of a lot of technologies. So it bears repeating.

I argue that text (chat) means a step forward in education, whereas podcasting actually represents a step backwards.

I think we have to be very careful in making any kind of broad claim, whether positive or negative, about any specific educational tool. Podcasting is neither a step forwards nor backwards–and the same can be said for text (chat) or multimedia, or the chalkboard or overhead projector or even writing.

Any technology should be used for what it does well, and not used for what it does badly. A hacksaw makes a terrible hammer, but that doesn’t make it a bad tool. It’s only a step backwards if you try to use that tool for driving nails.

However, it’s certainly the case that (particularly in education) we’re often subject to trumpets and drumrolls announcing that each new tool is going to be ultimate answer to every question. And of course, that’s not true for podcasting.

1. Audio needs real time listening. Time is a commodity missed by most educators and students. Text may be easily scanned and searched and read at 400 wpm. Archives of Podcasts will not be listened to in the future whereas text will be read.

This is a deficiency of audio only if you think of audio as a replacement or substitute for text.

But there are things that audio can do that text quite simply can not do. Books have been available for some centuries now, but people still tell stories to children, present orally at conferences, and listen to music. Written letters have been available even longer than books, yet people still enjoy conversation.

If podcasts are seen (as is too often the case) as just a way to distribute the exact same content, thoughtlessly “translated” into the audio medium, then, yes, they fail in that regard. But if the content is intentionally and thoughtfully produced for the audio medium, taking advantage of its strengths, then it can be much more successful. All the best podcasts do exactly this.

In addition, the idea that podcasts can not be scannable or searchable is no longer accurate (although it was at one time). Podcasts can be played at fast speeds for scanning (without any distortion) thanks to Apple.

Even more exciting, Podzinger and Podscope have begun the process of indexing the content of podcasts by keywords, so users can go directly to a specific point or subject in the cast. Although this is not yet perfect, it’s a very good start.

2. Audio is one to many and basically perpetuates the “sage on the stage” rather than “guide on the side” approach… old style didacticism vs. constructivism.

Although many podcasts do replicate the one-to-many, “sage on the stage” approach, this is far from the only way to use this technology. Podcasts at their best recreate conversations–and allow students, as well as faculty, to participate and broadcast. In this sense, opening up the world of “radio” to a huger audience–allowing production rather than just reception, podcasting can be revolutionary (not just for education).

Podcasting makes a perfect medium for producing “think alouds” and conversations where experienced and novice learners can model how to approach a text (or image, or math problem, or science experiment). It’s also excellent for oral performance (by students, by authors, by teachers, etc.) of literary works (poetry, stories, drama).

3. Lack of hyperlink. Text chat not only allows multiple threads (many to many and indeed even synchronously), but also allows quick and easy hyperlinking to resources. You’re not going to get that easily in a podcast (if at all).

On the other hand, text chat does not allow the same emotional contact and nuance of expression as the human voice. And the “enhanced podcast”–rapidly becoming easier to produce and easier to receive–certainly does allow hyperlinks…as well as pictures, video clips, emphasis by combination of text and sound.

Additionally, podcasting can include musical enhancement (or other types of sound files–bird calls, heartbeat sounds, ambient sound, etc.), which is completely absent or impossible in text, and which can greatly enhance the educational experience.

4. Bandwidth and connectivity. This tech issue will increase the digital divide. Not only do podcasts require higher end connections, speakers, mikes, etc. they represent another level of what may go wrong with tech.

Bandwidth is always an issue–but audio files do not require a very high end connection at all, and the speakers and microphones involved need not be anything more than the standard included with every desktop computer and most laptops.

5. Lack of multitasking. With text you may be holding several simultaneous conversations, researching links in other tabs and reporting back, copy/pasting prepared dialogue and getting access to a whole realm of resources you can’t get with audio.

One of the main benefits of podcasting is that it does allow (some kinds of) multitasking. It’s perfectly possible to listen to a podcast at times and during activities which would make reading impossible. (Podcasts are great for driving, for riding on a crowded bus or subway, for washing the dishes, for working on restoring an antique radio in the basement–OK, that last one might be personal to just me!).

Also, podcasts are (at least potentially) mobile–both for listeners and for producers. A podcast can be heard and learned from in a museum or on a walking tour–where it would not be possible to read. And students can produce podcasts by recording interviews or comments “in the field”–to be edited later.

The experience of interviewing and editing and thinking about how to make the points in this medium is an experience which is different from writing a paper…but it’s not an experience which is necessarily educationally inferior, by any means.

I think that to argue *against* using podcasts in education is just as much a mistake as it would be to argue in favor of *always* using podcasts in education.

We should, instead, be arguing for using podcasts (or any other technology) in education–but using them well.

Let’s not use hacksaws for driving nails, or hammers for cutting a piece of pipe. Instead let’s work on the best way to design and use a hammer for its specific purpose, and the hacksaw for its purpose.