Imposter Syndrome and Writer's Block

This short video by Seth Godin is an instant classic for me.

Why do we have writer's block? What we actually have is a fear of being judged, a fear that our stuff won't be good enough, and so we say I don't have any ideas - I don't know what to say. No, you have plenty of ideas, but you're worried they're bad ones. The solution is simple - you just need more bad writing. If you do enough bad writing, it is inevitable that some good writing will slip through.

Making imposter syndrome go away is a difficult fool's errand, because the harder you try to reassure yourself and to rationalize, the worse it gets. The answer is to realize that you are an imposter and so am I. That when we feel like an imposter, it is a good thing, because it shows we are onto something. We're doing something that might not work. We're doing something that's worth sharing.

Security and NFC/RFID

An interesting post today from Bruce Schneier points to an article about hacking the MBTA CharlieCard (Boston's public transit system). I couldn't help but think back to Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother that came out in 2008. I reviewed it back in early 2009.

One of the major plot points includes the protagonists rebelling against an overreaching government by messing around with transit cards by reading and reprogramming them by simply bumping the reader against them in people's pockets. Apparently something more or less the same has been occurring since then up in Boston, made easier and easier with commercially available scanning equipment.

In the book, they were reprogramming cards to make it harder for the government to use people's travel pattern data against them. In real life, people are just getting free rides.

The Enlightened Eye

I just wanted to jot a few notes down from Elliott Eisner's 1991 book The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice.

Eisner discusses 6 features of qualitative study:

• qualitative studies are field focused; that is, anything that is important for education is potential subject matter, from observing teachers in the classroom to how children play to the design of the trophy case in the school
  
• the researcher as instrument; we all make judgments as to what is or isn't important, and calling out one's own biases is as important as identifying those of others
  
• a qualitative study is interpretive; thick description, motivation, underlying attitudes, and nuanced differences are essential
  
• expressive language and presence of voice; this goes along with the researcher as instrument in that it is false to assert a neutrality that does not exist
  
• attention to particulars; rather than run details through a statistics engine to arrive at a general statement, the analysis of outliers and unique details of an individual situation, individual, event, or object provides a flavor that is often lost
  
• triangulation; qualitative researchers look for multiple sources to validate findings, not a sterile statistical test of significance.

I'm reminded of the story of a quantitative and a qualitative researcher observing a man mowing his lawn. The quantitative researcher measures the length of the grass before and after it is cut, in addition to the average and standard deviations of the length of the grass of his neighbors, and explains that he was cutting his grass in order to keep it within a certain threshold acceptable for that street. The qualitative researcher asks the man why he is cutting his lawn, to which he replies he is doing it early in the morning to get back at the neighbors who were up late loudly partying the night before.

Of course, both quantitative and qualitative are important, and you can't really have one without the other. Straight quantitative research loses touch with reality fairly quickly, and qualitative research simply isn't scalable. Problems can be identified by either method or a combination of the two. Heavy quantitative analysis is often used to develop and validate interventions that work for the majority, but then qualitative work is necessary to really understand whether the desired effects are taking hold and to work with those who don't fit in the majority mold.

No More Books

It's interesting how an initiative touted by one group as being a revolutionary improvement will often be seen as counterproductive or ineffective by another group.

At a recent faculty meeting, where discussion of a new writing center was taking place, I was witness to such an example. One faculty member pointed out that as important as it is to help students improve their writing, which the writing center is intended to do, there is unfortunately something else that has the potential to hurt our students even more.

What's the insidious plague about to be unleashed on our students' writing skills? It is an initiative aimed at reducing the amount they have to read. If we require them to read less, it will have direct impact on their ability to write. Well, of course, the matchup between reading and writing seems pretty obvious, but why would anyone propose to dramatically reduce student reading?

It turns out the faculty member misunderstood the initiative. The proposal is to create integrated learning environments where students can access multimedia, direct themselves to activities based on formative quizzes, oh yeah, and read. His understanding was that the multimedia and pretty websites were going to replace books.

While it's true that the goal is to move away from traditional printed textbooks, the same text from the publishers is going to be integrated in an electronic form with the bells and whistles that improve student engagement and track progress in ways that a plain old book could never do. I know a lot of publishers create companion websites where students can access some bonus materials, but they're not integrated with the text. Bringing them together in one place reduces the extraneous cognitive load associated with having the text and bonus features in completely separate mediums, giving them more time and mental capacity to devote to their reading.

Improving Teaching by Understanding How People Learn

A colleague recommended a book he's been reading, “How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School” by the National Research Council.

In the introductory chapter, they give some important concepts for teaching based on an understanding of how people learn. The main points:

• student initial knowledge and conceptions provide a foundation for further learning


• frequent formative assessment encourages metacognition and leads to deeper learning


• need to teach education students to help their students recognize and replace incorrect preconceptions


• in-depth coverage of fewer topics is better than superficial coverage in many topics


• to be an effective teacher, you need to have done in-depth study yourself


• assessment must test at the level teaching occurs, that is deep testing for deep teaching (students will do poorly on superficial testing if they've been taught for deep understanding)


• metacognition needs to be planned into the curriculum

The whole book is graciously provided online for free. See the complete table of contents.

Little Brother

Introduction

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author and activist. His book Little Brother stands in both the science fiction and activism camps. He builds an argument for everyone to learn more about the technology that is pervasive in our lives, with a story of daring teenagers taking on the government. The book's byline, "Big Brother is watching you. Who's watching back?", hints at this showdown between technophiles and bureaucrats. San Francisco is turned into a police state after the Bay Bridge is blown up by terrorists. A group of teenagers fight back against abusive behavior by agents of the government, using their tech-smarts to expose injustices and force the government to reign in an overzealous Department of Homeland Security. Although at first glance the storyline appears over the top, neither the injustices being done nor the technologies used to expose them are very far off from what is happening today. Political ideologies aside, what saves the lives of these kids and many others is education and openness.

Background

The most obvious work that this book may be compared to is George Orwell's 1984. In that book, Big Brother is the iconic face of The Party (or government), and Winston Smith is the protagonist who rebels and is eventually brought into submission by The Party. At the beginning of Little Brother, the protagonist Marcus goes by the handle w1n5t0n, pronounced Winston. The term Little Brother is used by the media in the book to describe the members of the Abuses of Authority movement, "who watch back against the Department of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism measures, documenting the failures and excesses." There are several similarities in the storylines, with characters devising methods to avoid surveillance, dealing with issues of who to trust, and government-sponsored torture. The most notable deviation from the 1984 script, other than Marcus being a nonconforming teenager rather than an experienced government employee like Winston, is that Little Brother has a relatively positive ending. Although the strings are not tied up as neatly as a Perry Mason episode, it's not at all a stretch to say that Marcus and friends "win" in the end.

Another book that provides a more scholarly approach to a similar topic is Larry Lessig's Code: Version 2.0. Both books point out that technology may be manipulated to whatever end we desire. The only way to ensure biases or bugs are eliminated is through transparency, since trust is often lacking. An important concept in Lessig’s book is that of latent ambiguities, which come about since technology moves faster than the law. A current example of this is the complaint from the Author’s Guild that Amazon’s e-book reader Kindle would be able to read books aloud without…gasp…purchasing audio rights. [Doctorow's response to the Kindle controversy]

Little Brother is aimed at young adults. It seeks to lure in these digital natives with fast-paced action, distrust of adults, cool technology, and a sprinkling of sexuality. It is important that this next generation make the leap from being consumers of technology to producers, so there will be new creators of technology to take the place of the baby boomers as they begin to retire.

In the foreword of the book, Doctorow states the following: "This book is meant to be something you do, not just something you read. The technology in this book is either real or nearly real. You can build a lot of it. You can share it and remix it. You can use the ideas to spark important discussions with your friends and family. You can use those ideas to defeat censorship and get onto the free Internet, even if your government, employer or school doesn't want you to."

In the afterword, Bruce Schneier, a well known security technologist, and Andrew Huang, a researcher known for hacking the Xbox, point out the amount of dysfunction in the world today. Security through obscurity seems to be the pervasive method in the world for keeping us safe; however, openness and courage to stand up for our freedoms is what will make us safer. Schneier admonishes us to pay attention to the world and try to figure out how it works, and by doing so we will begin to worry about the things that will actually make us safer and stop relying on technologies that can be defeated with a little bit of knowledge and a ballpoint pen.

Summary

The book follows the exploits of a seventeen year old high school student, Marcus Yallow, who uses technology to his advantage work his way around the technical measures instituted by his school district to keep the students in line. The school is truly a place that Paolo Freire would speak out against, as students are monitored and disciplined for speaking their minds; they are oppressed, rather than being allowed to participate in the learning process.

In rebelling against the oppression, these students learn about and utilize technology to encrypt chat sessions, block RFID tracking, and confuse gait-recognition cameras in the halls. As they are out skipping school, a terrorist attack occurs, and Marcus and his friends are picked up by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as possible suspects in the attack. After being held and questioned for several days and then released, they return to a city which has been locked down by the DHS. Innocent people are being stopped and questioned by police to ask why they visited certain parts of the city, since they are tracked by their RFID cards that are used for payment on bridges, toll roads, and mass transportation.

Marcus organizes an underground movement utilizing a special Linux distribution called ParanoidLinux that could run on Xboxes that had been handed out for free by Microsoft the previous year. They teach other youth around the city to reprogram RFID cards to throw off the DHS's data mining techniques. The movement gains momentum, but eventually it becomes obvious that the DHS has infiltrated the so-called Xnet. A small group of Xnet members use encryption technology to create a trusted group within the Xnet. The more this trusted group organizes and tries to rebel, the more they realize that the DHS is closer to figuring out who they are. Their only choice is to go public with the abuses being handed out by the DHS, as they bring in more agents and apply more pressure to finding these supposed terrorists.

In a conversation with his father, who did not know Marcus was the leader of this group rebelling against the DHS's tactics, his dad points out that, "The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining. The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?" Marcus' response was, "Taking away our privacy isn't catching terrorists: it's just inconveniencing normal people." His father seems willing to accept the inconveniences of being stopped without cause while looking for the bad guys, while Marcus is actively fighting for rights guaranteed us in the Constitution. In the process they address some of the latent ambiguities that Lessig discusses in Code: Version 2.0.

The publisher provides a free Teacher's Guide which contains writing activities for students with thought-provoking questions to help students enhance their analysis of the book. This is a nice addition for classroom use, covering issues such as understanding truth and reality, history, research techniques, code transparency, privacy and surveillance, righteous rebellion, torture, legal and civil rights, marketing techniques, protests, trust, and problem solving. There is really something in this book for everyone. With the book’s Creative Commons license, a teacher can download and distribute the book for free to students. If the sex or some of the language is a little too risqué, it can be legally modified.

Evaluation

Very little can hold the short attention span of the upcoming generation, but this novel has what it takes to keep them motivated to turn the page while learning a little bit about technology. The action and exciting technology are enough to keep the reader hooked, even as Doctorow explains the basics of cryptography, networking, IP tunneling, and RFID. It is enjoyable to learn more about the technologies, even though most people would not admit to being interested in such things. He directly ties technology into the story and how these teens are using the technology to fight back. Schneier states, "Cory invited me into the last few pages of his book because he wanted me to tell you that security is fun. It's incredibly fun. It's cat and mouse, who can outsmart whom, hunter versus hunted fun. I think it's the most fun job you can possibly have. If you thought it was fun to read about Marcus outsmarting the gait-recognition cameras with rocks in his shoes, think of how much more fun it would be if you were the first person in the world to think of that." Doctorow did a good job of showing how fun and interesting a more advanced understanding of technology can and should be. With the afterwords by Schneier and Huang, he ties back to his statements at the beginning of the book to explicitly remind the readers why he wrote it.

Unlike movies like Independence Day, Jurassic Park, and The Net, where technology is incorrectly utilized in unrealistic ways, the technologies in Little Brother either already exist or would be relatively easy to implement. The ParanoidLinux distribution mentioned in the book did not exist at the time the book was written, but interested Open Source programmers have begun putting together an operating system that mirrors the capabilities mentioned in the book. Much of the software used already exists, but the ParanoidLinux distribution is simply bringing them all together in one package. The use of real technology is very important, as it removes some of the need for suspension of disbelief, making it easier to get lost in the story.

A more in depth look at the characters in the story, however, reveals a superficial, one-dimensional nature to most of the players. There was just a lack of complexity that was somewhat distracting. The evil characters are pure evil. His friends and family are either 100% supportive of him or want absolutely nothing to do with his plans. We do get inside Marcus' head as the majority of the book is written in first person, from his point of view. We see Marcus' inner struggle and growth as the reluctant leader in the rebellion he spawned on a whim, but see little character development in those around him. Marcus does have fights with one of his friends and his girlfriend, but they seem to be more devices in furthering Marcus' growth rather than their own. I kept waiting for the twist, like his girlfriend being a spy or his dad working to help the DHS improve its data mining techniques as they close in on Marcus. That twist never came. Even the supposedly surprise DHS informant was not out of line with previous interactions with that character.

Conclusion

As technology departments at universities around the country struggle to attract females into their programs, Little Brother can be used as a recruiting tool. There are just as many tech-savvy, important females in the story as there are males. Computer Science suffers from a lack of understanding among both males and females as to what you can do with a degree in that field besides sitting in a dark basement writing line after line of code. Being able to program is an important part of the story, but so is understanding and using technology that has been created by others in unique ways.

I hesitate using the term "must-read", but Little Brother is high up on my recommendation list. It is not often that a book with a decidedly technology-rich storyline can reach out to both readers that are tech-savvy and less knowledgeable in a way that makes them want to learn more. Doctorow makes it easy for his readers by telling them what he wants them to do when they finish the book, presenting a compelling story, concluding with another call to action, and providing a list of more sources to turn to with their new-found interest in security, technology, and counterculture books and electronic resources.

Everything is Miscellaneous

I just finished Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. The overarching theme of the book is that all the choices we make have political implications, whether we know it or not. Even something as simple as alphabetical order can discriminate or be manipulated. Having a last name that begins with BA, I'm very aware that I end up very close to the beginning of most lists; however, I hadn't realized the extent of the controversy over the years regarding this unnatural ordering system until reading this book.

The following are a couple of quotes that I liked for one reason or another and that I was able to find again later:

College students' silverware drawers, Delicious, Flickr, the BBC, and Wikipedia are miscellaneous in different ways, except for one thing: How their content is actually arranged does not determine how that content can and will be arranged by their users.

All of the examples in the above quote were ones that the author had discussed in the preceeding pages. The author included the following by Ted Nelson, who came up with the term hypertext some 40 years ago:

People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

Both quotes above touch on the fact that data is messy and that by freeing it from the rigid forms we like so much, it can be accessed more naturally by ourselves and by others.

For a fun example of a mashup that takes Flickr photos and combines them with chopped up corporate slogans, tied together with the tags that describe the photos, check out The Ad Generator. Some don't make sense. Some are hilarious. Overall, they are as meaningful (for better or worse) as real advertisements. They work because of all the metadata available for each picture. An interesting addition to the program would be to include location information from Flickr photos and combine that with information about where the user is located (easily gleaned from the user's IP address), and create localized ads that make even more sense for that user. Google and others are actually doing this kind of stuff when it comes to targeting ads.

Just last week, I was having a conversation about what it means to be computer literate. What can we expect students to know already when they come to USU, and more importantly, what should they know in order to be successful here? I mentioned that I thought it would be interesting to look into requiring students to show they know how to contribute to a wiki and post to a blog. The other person mentioned that they could see how the blog thing could be important, but they didn't think that being able to edit a Wikipedia page would be worth anything. If anything, I thought that would be one of the most important things we could be having students do as part of their CIL tests. By understanding how people contribute to Wikipedia, they will be able to better analyze the content of whichever Wikipedia page they find information on, since it will be the inevitable starting point for most of their papers, whatever the topics happens to be. So I really appreciated reading Weinberger pointing out that Wikipedia's openness is what makes it such a valuable resource.

In another recent conversation, it was posited that computer literacy included knowing who to go to solve a particular problem with your computer. I think it needs to go a level deeper - that technology users need to understand that everything does not always go smoothly. It's not enough to know that you can call the Helpdesk, describe the problem, and follow their directions to fix it. You have to expect that there will be problems, be prepared with a backup plan, and firmly push away the blame arrow from yourself. It's not your fault if your computer freezes up, just as it isn't your fault if you can't figure out how to navigate a company's website. It is your fault if you immediately give up. As technology becomes more and more messy, there will be issues to work through, but the results we get back will be more useful to us than ever before.

As I've read about many of the Web 2.0 sites mentioned in the book, it has been helpful that I've actually used most of them to some extent. I've generally started out skeptical with all of them. Why would I want to blog? Why would I want to upload and tag all my photos using Flickr? What's the use of bookmarking pages with Delicious? Yet once I start using each, I understand the purpose, and I connect to the community that I didn't realize was around me. It hasn't always been easy. When I first tried uploading pictures to Flickr and started troubleshooting why my appropriately tagged photos were not showing up in a conference feed like they should have, I was frustrated, but I didn't give up. I finally figured out that since my account was new, it had to be verified by someone at Flickr before my pictures would show up, and they eventually did. As I mentioned above, the key was to keep trying and not blame myself. I still haven't started Twittering yet. I don't see the purpose, but I'm getting closer to trying it. I know that at some point I'll enter the world of Facebook, but as of yet, I refuse.

Web 2.0 Rhetoric

Some things look good on the outset and turn sour quickly, whereas others start slowly but eventually work their way up to a reasonable conclusion. Selber's Multiliteracies for a Digital Age seems to fall in the latter category. As I made my way through the first half of the book, I struggled to find purpose in his words. There was not necessarily any problem with anything he said, but it seemed redundant and pointless.

As he turns from functional literacy (appropriately utilizing technology in the correct context) and critical literacy (recognizing and questioning the politics of technology) to rhetorical literacy, the purpose of his book starts to make more sense at the same time that the fear swells within me that I will in some way use the word rhetoric incorrectly. After consulting the Wikipedian Oracle to help me understand this strange word, I find myself no more enlightened as to its meaning, yet less uncomfortable due to the fact that the Wikipedia community has also had a difficult time putting together a concise definition.

The main point behind Selber's chapter on rhetorical literacy is that the way we communicate now is fundamentally different than it used to be. As Wiley points out, taking old lecture slides and posting the PDF to a website does not transform it into online content. It's offline content that has been copied and pasted onto the web. Materials and methods of communication that we use have to follow the Web 2.0 rhetoric of connecting and remixing content from various sources in a dynamic way, rather than publishing static articles.

photo by sylvar
Selber points out that the popularity of WYSIWYG html editors have made it easier for more people to design effective interfaces that are optimized for the content they are creating, which is an important component of rhetorical literacy. I would go another step and point out that even WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver are becoming passé. The interface has taken a back seat to the content on the web, as it should be. That is not to say that the interface does not matter, but using the appropriate content management system (CMS) means that whatever client requests your content will automatically get the content optimized for that client, whether for mobile devices, RSS feeds, etc.

Just this past week, a question was asked regarding the availability of personal web space, since the campus server that currently provides web space for faculty and students will be shut down soon. Several options are actually available from the IT department, but none of the new options allow users to upload entire existing sites; they have to upload their content into the CMS and choose one of its preexisting templates. One user pointed out that he has 10,000+ files in his website on the old server that he does not want to have to sort through and that most faculty would likely not want to redesign their websites as well. My response was, "I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing to have to redesign a website once in awhile, especially if doing so places it into a CMS that makes it easier to maintain. How many people really want to spend a ton of time working on their own from-scratch website anymore?" Looking at that particular user's site, it has some good content, but the interface is very confusing and difficult to navigate, with personal and professional content intermixed. No tagging, no RSS, and no networking tools means outdated pages that no one ever looks at.

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

Every once in awhile a book comes along relating to a topic you understand and perhaps even enjoy and proceeds to remove any desire to associate with that topic ever again. This book by Stuart Selber is not quite to that point yet, but I am only halfway through it, so give it time. The most important contribution so far is Selber's insistence that computer literacy goes beyond just being able to do things using a computer. We have to be able to contextualize our use of technology and use it appropriately.

photo by austinevan
Like Steph, I question the place of the English department to fret about computer literacy any more or less than any other department on campus, as important as the concept happens to be. The author appears troubled due to the fact that English departments, for whom this book is written, are not regularly consulted in matters relating to computer literacy at most institutions around the country.

I have to challenge the author's anecdotal assertion that any given department would not be consulted when it comes to something as foundational as computer literacy. Anyone who has spent any time at a higher education institution knows that every decision made goes through multiple committees made up of faculty who volunteer (or are volunteered by the department head or dean) to spend their time ensuring that the needs of faculty and students are being met (in no particular order). Those who do not know anything about computer literacy are those who choose to ignore it.

Selber's point is well taken that institutional computer literacy requirements focus generally on a disembodied understanding of technology. What does he really expect it to be, however? For most students, the basic knowledge about computers is the same across disciplines. We all press the same little button with a 0 and a 1 on it to turn on the computer, and we all need to keep our operating systems and applications patched (yes, even the Mac users). Within a major, the skills needed to succeed may be different and should be integrated across each department's curriculum based on what makes sense for that department or major. Imagine an Electrical Engineer trying to tell the English faculty what technologies should be included in their courses or vice versa.

What I would hope is that English faculty or anyone else that happens to read this book would take away that they can't depend on someone else to make their students literate, because it takes on different meanings for different people. The institution is right to establish a baseline knowledge set to be considered computer literate, but after that the departments have to properly situate further literacy instruction and practice within each field.

Writing On-Line

I found an interesting old book at the library a few days ago while looking for a different book. The one I wanted is missing, even after requesting that a librarian search for it. The book I found instead, published in 1985, is titled Writing On-Line: Using Computers in the Teaching of Writing. To clarify, when they talk about writing online, they mean writing with a word processor.


It is interesting in light of the topic this week in one of my classes, discussing the effects of Web 2.0 technologies on writing. The editors note that the purpose of the book is to caution against getting caught up in the hype surrounding computers, but rather proceed with implementing the use of computers in the classroom based on careful research.

A few paragraphs really caught my eye:

It's invitingly simple to log random flittings of thought, to etch them blithely in phosphor and with the blip of a key to store them on a disk. Somehow, I figure, they'll eventually prove useful, like the broken stepladder I dragged home last garbage night. If you write regularly, you already know that your best stuff is lodged somewhere in a vast cerebral ragbag-that a writer's ultimate, irreplaceable resource is the chaos that lives just beneath the outer dress of reason.

A word processor can make it slightly easier to tap, that's all. Easier because it can bring tantalizingly close to print what psychologist Lev Vygotsky termed "inner speech", the fluid medium somewhere between pure thought and its externalized linguistic formulation. I can sit here on a good night and, without contriving to, simply let things come, catch perhaps a thousandth part of what swarms to mind. This machine has brought home to me how taxing is the physical act of writing, how lopsided the contest between mind and hand. For better or worse, less of me will remain unsaid because of the speed and ease and even intimacy of computer-assisted writing. (Stillman, 1985)

Does that sound like any bloggers you know?

There's something for the wiki advocates among us as well:

Researchers soon moved on from a stage model of the writing process, where writers prewrote, wrote and revised (ideal writers, anyway, allegedly wrote this way; student writers seemed to write because we told them they had to, and just wanted to get it out of the way). This model didn't begin to describe accurately the ways actual writers compose; it was too neat, too simplistic and just plain wrong no matter which writers were studied. Now strong evidence leads to a view of the writing process as recursive and idiosyncratic. Flower and Hayes (1981), two leading researchers whose work is drawn in part from problem-solving research in cognitive psychology, are among those who see the writing process as a more complex series of processes than the three-stage model (Sommers, 1985).

These same discussions are happening today, with some professors banning the use of Wikipedia in class papers at the same time that others help their students write a wiki-based textbook.


Flower, L. & Hayes, J.R. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32.

Sommers, E.A. (1985). Integrating composing and computing. In J.L. Collins & E.A. Sommers (Eds.), Writing on-line: Using computers in the teaching of writing. Upper Montclair, New Jersey: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Stillman, P.R. (1985). A writer (and teacher of writing) confronts word processing. In J.L. Collins & E.A. Sommers (Eds.), Writing on-line: Using computers in the teaching of writing. Upper Montclair, New Jersey: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Politics

I sometimes feel like Don Walsh in The Chromium Fence. The political issue in this story is not as relevant as the politics themselves. Politics do not seem to ever change, as the issues at stake ebb and flow - peace, energy, hygiene, arts, education, religion, economy, healthcare, recreation, immigration, transportation, morality, etc. We move up and down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but no matter our level, there are two opposing points to argue.

As Don refuses to take sides in the political battle taking place because of the extreme nature of the two positions, his counselor points out,

You see, Don, you have a psychological inability to come to grips with an issue. You don't want to commit yourself for fear you'll lose your freedom and individuality. You're sort of an intellectual virgin; you want to stay pure. ... You've got to make a decision. You've got to resolve this conflict and act. You can't remain a spectator. ... You haven't quite got to the point of facing reality. But you will.

I find myself asking what's so wrong about Don's position, probably because I straddle the fence on some issues myself and refuse to register with either of the major political parties. I believe both have strayed far from what their founders intended and that neither is as concerned with the issues their polemicists debate as they are concerned with maintaining the status quo, that is, their own power.

So am I maintaining my integrity as Don asserted he was doing or am I separating myself from society by registering with a minor political party? Am I, in effect, ripping up my vote and allowing myself to be disposed of just to make a statement?

I maintain my own beliefs about the issues, and it is only by apathetically restraining from making a choice between the two equally but oppositely distorted views of reality that an actual choice is made. In voting one way or the other, my vote is truly thrown away, because in this world of artificial dichotomies, one vote does not make a difference. Every vote for a third party, however, lends credence to the claims of third parties, gradually increasing support and funding until they hold enough sway to start influencing the actions of the major parties. There will actually be another option to replace them if they don't temper their extreme beliefs and learn to compromise.

One day, we'll have the opportunity to choose among instead of simply choosing between in our elections. That is worth sacrificing for.

Closing courses

An email was recently sent to instructors of online courses to let us know that Summer courses would be hidden unless we specifically ask them to remain available for students to access.

Each new semester we hide the previous semester courses from students as a means of protecting copyrights on multimedia content and preserving the security of assessment materials and other content items.

Compare that to Kevin Young's Human Physiology class that wrote a textbook using technology to encourage access rather than to hide it.

For classes of mine that have used wikis or even just static webpages that only the instructor can edit, I often refer back to them later - much more often that I will rifle through old notes or a print textbook that I probably sold back to the bookstore.

Desperate Commercialization

As I continue to make my way through Philip K. Dick's stories, a few of those stories presented what could be construed as a warning message against the crass commercialization that we see in our lives - made all the more interesting by the fact that they were written about 50 years ago. It appears that the pace over the last half century has not slowed down in moving us towards becoming completely inundated with advertisements for garbage.

In Sales Pitch, Ed, the weary commuter, makes his way home across the solar system while being attacked on every side by advertisements. Once his spaceship makes it home he is approached by sales robots roaming the sidewalks. Nowhere is safe, as the indefatigable fasrad robot enters their home and commences to demonstrate its abilities until such time as Ed agrees to buy him. This drives Ed over the edge, and as he tries to escape to another planet that runs at a much-slower 20th century pace, the fasrad stows aboard and continues to give his sales pitch. Ed all but destroys his ship, pushing the rockets faster than his craft could handle and opening the throttle all the way when the fasrad goes in the back to check on the rockets. As the crippled ship with Ed pinned under the debris starts its 2 day approach before a spectacular fiery descent over the rural planet he wished to visit, he relished the silence he would enjoy the last few hours of his life. The half-destroyed fasrad then makes its way towards a captive Ed to continue its sales pitch and ruin any chance of a peaceful end for Ed.

photo by Lorri Auer

In Foster, You're Dead, marketers have sold everything they could possibly sell, and change their sales tactics to sell shelters and other devices to save people's lives in case of a supposedly imminent attack. As soon as Mike's dad gives in to his constant pestering for a new shelter, the next big thing comes out and his dad has to return the shelter to the store because Christmas season sales at the family store are low due to everyone buying the new protection devices to hit the market.

These stories are a sad commentary on our society, as everything we see or do is sponsored by some company or another. All video that is shot must be scrubbed of any intellectual property references, lest anyone accidentally get free advertising or that it be construed that a passing glimpse of a logo on a t-shirt constitutes endorsement of the video production by the company whose logo was recorded. It will be interesting to watch Google over the next 10 years (they were incorporated 10 years ago yesterday) to see how their business model possibly changes. They have built their current empire on the back of targeted advertising, but perhaps as their products become more ingrained in society, they will be able to phase out advertising as their primary revenue source in favor of charging service fees to use their products. What is worse - paying for a product or receiving it free with advertising? For years, we received TV free in exchange for ads, and now we pay hundreds of dollars a month in cable and satellite subscription fees and we still have to watch the ads, unless we're willing to pay extra for a time shifting device like TiVo which lets us skip through the ads that aren't smart enough to trick it.

In Pay for the Printer, we find a society that has been decimated by nuclear war and rebuilds with the help of the Biltongs, a race of creatures that can make copies of objects brought to them. After 150 years go by, humans have been dependent on the Biltongs to print everything for them that they need and have lost all ability to build anything. The Biltongs begin to wear out and people realize that they can't build things without tools, but they can't build tools, because they don't have tools. Society has to start anew, learning to build rudimentary devices, with the few leftover pre-war devices and objects as goals to work towards.

On Michael Pollan's NYTimes blog, he posted the question Why Bother? That is, what difference will one person make in the climate change war? If I change my light bulbs, bike to work, eat locally grown food, and turn down the thermostat in my house, will I really make a difference? He places the blame for this predicament we find ourselves in on specialization. We do our job, our one little piece of the assembly line, and by focusing on our specific job, we don't think about all the costs that come into play. We blog about how we need to save the environment, while composing our eloquently loquacious posts on computers powered by coal-fired plants. We don't see those coal-fired plants, because that's someone else's job, so we forget they exist, except to the extent that we need to blog about them so we can get rid of them.

Stephen Dubner points out on the Freakonomics blog that being a locavore is inefficient, however. So specialization helps us all be more efficient but reduces our individual skills to the point that no one person can survive by him or herself. With so many of our manufacturing jobs being outsourced to China, with or without us paying attention to the fact, we are suddenly taken by surprise that lax quality control and cost cutting measures have resulted in many of the toys we give to our children being produced with large amounts of cancer-causing lead in them. Oops. Yet the Wal-Mart parking lot remains full.

The Turning Wheel

Having not read any of Philip K. Dick's short stories before, Fair Game was a fun introduction to this sci-fi author. Of the ten stories that I've read so far, it was my favorite - a mixture of tense moments with a light, yet morbid touch at the end. I found myself pulling for Professor Douglas, anxious for what was to happen. With what little I had read about Dick's writing style, I knew to keep my hand over the last couple lines of the story to avoid accidentally experiencing the Aha! moment even a paragraph early. I wasn't disappointed.

photo by Michel Filion
In contrast, while reading The Turning Wheel, I found myself disliking the protagonist Bard Sung-wu, yet finding much more deep meaning in his story. His inability to comprehend those who lived in different circumstances with supposedly less access to education bothered me. I couldn't wait for him to find out that the Bards were really the fanatic cult and not the Technos. As Sung-wu rants and raves both aloud and in his own thoughts about the terrible state of things and the possibility of the classes mingling or even marrying, I thought of a former professor of mine from India telling us about the caste system there and its purpose to keep the ruling party in power and keep the peasants under control. That is, this kind of thing is happening today.

Sung-wu continues his annoying display of superiority over all he meets until he ironically finds himself being taken care of in a household of the lowest class. When he realizes the power they have over his life, he breaks down and confesses his fear of dying before he has a chance to make amends for his sins. It is interesting that he does this right in the middle of a philosophical discussion with an eloquent Techno, who points out that using technology to improve the world around you is not necessarily out of line with divine processes. Sung-wu, as part of the highest and most enlightened Bard class, has been taught (and teaches) that we must accept everything as it is, yet the lowest class of society is more technologically advanced due to their willingness to fix those elements around them that are broken and to try new things. He completely misses this point that Ben explains to him, as he is worried about his own future, but then he experiences it himself by accepting technology which will save his life. In exchange for saving his life, the Technos save themselves from further scrutiny by the goverment with Sung-wu's dismissive report about the extent of their activities, thus allowing them to continue to covertly work towards re-inventing technology that has been lost because of the repressive governing class.

In the end, sharing technology contributed to the survival of all those involved, whereas artificially suppressing the dissemination of technology through legal and cultural means caused an entire society to lose what it did have at one point.

Qualitative Research

I've been starting to get a little different picture about research than just straight statistics as I've learned a little about qualitative research lately. As a researcher, I’ve never considered myself a positivist, but postpositivism seems to draw me in, although not quite as narrowly defined by Denzin & Lincoln (1998). In terms of teaching and learning, I consider myself a constructivist.

I can see myself doing some mixed-methods research. That only makes sense, especially as described by Silverman (2000), that research methods should be chosen based on the problem being addressed, not based on personal preference. More often than not, it seems likely that both qualitative and quantitative methods can be used together to provide the best picture of what is actually occurring.

Carspecken’s (1996) discussion of qualitative research as being most useful to criticalists, looking to solve social inequalities and bring about positive social change, is a good place to start. Of all the issues we deal with in society, much can be measured using quantitative methods, but without actually jumping in and feeling the human side of what is going on, it is often less than useful to know there is a correlation between two variables.

We may be able to show by the numbers that the legalization of abortion in the United States led to a drop in crime two decades later, but where do we go from there? (Levitt & Dubner, 2005). Does that make abortion good? Do we see other social problems crop up, even though crime drops, due to the increase in abortions? Is there something else society could be doing that would prevent the unwanted pregnancies to begin with? Is there even a causal relationship there at all, or were both phenomena caused by something else? How does any of this help the people with unwanted pregnancies and are weighing their options? Once the numbers show us that some phenomenon is possibly occurring, qualitative research needs to come in and help us decide where to go next, because in order to make decisions we often need a complex, detailed understanding of the issues (Creswell, 2007).

Silverman (2000) provides some good advice for students, to avoid casting too wide of a net at the expense of any depth to the analysis. I call that the encyclopedia approach. Most of the readings on qualitative research recommend to the researcher to keep his or her mind and senses open to everything. We should be willing to change our research questions, and we should record all possible information that we can. Basically, Silverman is trying to say that although we need to be open to what the research collection might find, at some point, a line needs to be drawn and the paper written. That scope issue seems to be less of a problem with quantitative research. If anything, quantitative research seems to be so focused at times that it is not really applicable anywhere. That is interesting to note, since it is normally qualitative research that gets the bad rap for not being generalizable, at least according to the quantitative researchers.

Stake (1995) helps make sense of scope by pointing out that when qualitative researchers are expected to be open to whatever phenomena they find, they are not expected to study every phenomenon, but they are permitted, if not expected, to change the focus of a study while it is in progress. That, of course, is definitely not allowed with most quantitative research.

Stake (1995) provides an interesting chapter on the role of a researcher, as a teacher, an observer, a participant, a storyteller, an advocate, etc. Thinking about all these roles, the ethical issues we face, whether doing quantitative or qualitative research, really seem to come to the surface. People depend on researchers to provide trustworthy information, following acceptable practices. Stake’s experience of writing a positive report on a successful urban school in Chicago next to another researcher writing a negative report about a very similar school in the same area demonstrates the potential to observe and report very different information from the same or similar observed circumstances. Sometimes such differences are on purpose and other times due to naïveté on the part of the researcher.

Qualitative research makes a lot of sense as a way of balancing out some researchers’ dependency on raw numbers. It is unfortunate that qualitative research gets portrayed at times as not representing good research or as being too soft, although qualitative researchers can also be too hard on their quantitative counterparts for ignoring the context around their numbers.


Carspecken, P.F. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research: A theoretical and practical guide. New York: Routledge.

Creswell, J.W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry & research design: Choosing among five approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Denzin, N.K., & Lincoln, Y.S. (1998). Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Levitt S.D., & Dubner, S.J. (2005). Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. New York : William Morrow.

Silverman, D. (2000). Doing qualitative research: A practical handbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

The River of Doubt

I read the book The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey before the semester started, but now just as we're getting to Spring Break and the book is due back to the library I've got just a moment to post about it.

This is one of those books that could be made into a three part movie and there will still be pieces left out. It was put together over about four years by former National Geographic writer and editor Candice Millard, based on diaries, letters, magazine articles, and books written by those involved in the expedition.

It recounts Theodore Roosevelt's journey with his son Kermit along with several others to explore Rio da Dúvida or River of Doubt, now renamed Roosevelt River, a tributary of the Amazon in Brazil. I won't do it justice here, but this was an amazing story. After Roosevelt had been out of the presidency for a term, he decided to run again, but was defeated. In order to overcome his depression from losing so badly, he decided upon this expedition. It was supposed to be somewhat of a token expedition down a tame, well-known river, similar to his hunting trips to Africa, but it ended up being a battle for survival down a completely unknown river deep in the rain forest. Roosevelt eventually died from the illness and injury he sustained on the River of Doubt.

The rich description of the teeming wildlife, both flora and fauna, and how they have specialized and adapted to remain hidden from predators and maintain symbiotic relationships with other life in the rain forest is such that you can picture yourself floating down the river on one of the heavy dugout canoes they used through piranha-infested waters. Between fighting the wildlife, a lack of proper supplies, and disagreements amongst themselves, it is a wonder they completed their journey.

The entire time they floated the river, the natives who lived along the river were watching them, in disagreement about what to do with these invaders. It was only the lack of a centralized leadership among the native tribes which led to indecision about whether they should allow Roosevelt's team to pass that saved them from being killed by the Indians.

As dark and terrible as this sounds, the book is a testament to these strong men who were able to survive based on their will to live and their strength, and makes this such an amazing story. There are so many details I should list, but you will be better served by reading the book than listening to me rave about it.

Freakonomics

I just read the book Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. The authors admit that there is no central theme to the book, which is really a series of individual essays that are loosely tied to one another.

Each chapter consists of comparisons between unlike groups of people to make a point. KKK members and real estate agents maintain power (or at least used to in the KKK's case) by protecting the information that they hold. A high school quarterback works hard against the stacked odds of becoming a star, while crack dealers work for minimum wage while hoping to make it some day as a big time drug dealer. Sumo wrestlers in Japan and school teachers in the U.S. sometimes cheat by throwing matches or by changing student answers on standardized tests, even though both professions are considered honorable and above such activity.

Other than these comparisons, there are some controversial findings. The drop in crime in the 1990s was due to abortion becoming legal back in the 1960s. More kids die in swimming pools than from guns in the home. It doesn't matter what school parents send their children to when they have a choice; the fact that they are willing to send their kids to another school means more than the new school itself. Sexual assault rates are lower than what is usually reported, but no one can publicly dispute those numbers due to political pressures.

The book does not cover traditional economic research topics, but in the foreward, Levitt explains that he's not really interested or competent when it comes to monetary policy, fiscal policy, econometrics, and the stock market. The research seems more like Sociology than Economics, but calling him a "rogue economist" sounds better than a "rogue sociologist". Levitt's PhD dissertation at MIT covered several political topics such as campaign spending, incumbent advantage in elections, midterm elections, and politician voting records.

Regardless of the topic of Levitt's research, this book should be required reading for any new PhD student. The book does not necessarily purport to solve any great world problems but rather encourages people to be a little more skeptical and to try to think more about why things happen how they do and to ask more questions. Basic research concepts are covered, such as correlation vs. causality and choosing correct data to measure.

The World is Flat

I read Tom Friedman's book The World is Flat a couple years ago. The only thing that I remembered reading before as I went through it this time was the introduction on the golf course in Bangalore and a vague recollection that he talked about Wal-Mart a lot. I don't know if he just changed it that much when he updated and expanded it from the original or if so much information has been stuffed in my head since starting my PhD that everything else has been displaced. Perhaps it's just my focus was different this time that it all seemed new. My focus this time was on how the flat world affects education, rather than business.


One point that stuck out to me (perhaps since I had recently read Wiley's report to the Secretary of Education) was Friedman's tenth flattener, The Steroids. These are new technologies that amplify and turbocharge all the other flatteners, making collaboration possible in a "digital, mobile, virtual, and personal" way. Wiley extends and slightly changes that list to digital, mobile, connected, personal, open, and participative. The specific technologies that Friedman lists as steroids are increasing computing and storage, IM and file sharing, VoIP, videoconferencing, computer graphics, and wireless. Since the book was written, wikis and blogs and exploded in popularity and Google has popularized online office productivity software. If I'm writing in my blog or working on a googledoc, and I have to go somewhere, I just close my browser and walk away, and I can pick up where I left off on any other computer. If you don't want to keep all your information online, you can install OpenOffice and Firefox or even an entire operating system (Linux) on a USB drive and carry your OS, programs, and documents with you. You'll notice it's the open source software that can be carried around. A few years ago, I remember seeing someone that got Windows 98 running on a CD through a painstaking process. The latest versions of Windows would make it even more difficult to accomplish something like that because of DRM and because of the bloat that would make them too large, but it doesn't matter, because the OS and office productivity software are becoming irrelevant, just as printed syllabi, textbooks, and DRM-protected, non-open content are becoming irrelevant. We are becoming used to being able to collaborate online from anywhere, and the classroom should be no different.

Something else that got me thinking, as I've been reading lately about open source, open content, copyright, and licensing mechanisms, was when Friedman talked about Japan and China working together. Even with the bitter feelings the Chinese still have towards the Japanese who occupied their country and used biological weapons to kill millions of Chinese, the Japanese are outsourcing to China. The economics override the hate. That made me wonder if at some point we'll see some collaboration among Richard Stallman, Larry Lessig, Steve Ballmer, Tom Giovanetti, and Marilyn Bergman. Stallman's and Lessig's licenses, GFDL and CC, don't currently work together even though they're on the same team. The software and recording industries seem pretty much united in their opposition to anything being open, although Ballmer does claim that he likes to see open source development happen using Microsoft products. If Lessig and Stallman can't present a united front, however, how will anyone be able to withstand the attack from the MPAA/RIAA/ASCAP/Orrin Hatch/Microsoft front?

Friedman points to the Apache project as a good example of how development could happen using an open foundation. IBM worked with Apache to ensure those using Apache would be legally protected and able to use Apache for free. Anyone can now use Apache as a base to build more free stuff, just the same as they can use it as a base to serve up commercial services. He gives the mash-up example of realtors combining Google Maps with Craigslist to produce an always-current map of houses and apartments for sale or rent in a certain city. The businesses that will survive the outsourcing of many common tasks, according to Friedman, are the ones that localize, defined by Joel Cawley of IBM as "[taking] all the global capabilities that are now out there and [tailoring] them to the needs of a local community." One of the important functions of the OER movement is in providing resources available to anyone that are compatible with technological and legal frameworks that allow localization.