Growing up Online

Another fine documentary from PBS’s Frontline series came to my attention: Growing up Online, broadcast 22 January 2008. I don’t know how, just yet, but I’ll have to make room in some of my classes to show at least some of the segments.

One good thing about this documentary is that it attempts to keep the hysterical “omigod, your kids are doing whatever they want online” attitude in check long enough to point out that socializing online is not a passing fad – it’s now part of the everyday media environment.

Watch the full programme and explore additional materials here.

Filed under: Education, Media Theory, Social media, Technoculture , Education, Media Theory, Postgrad, Technoculture

City Session

“Haunted places are the only ones that people can live in” writes Michel De Certeau.

This week, I’ll be leading a seminar to a few choice locations in London. Inspired by Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City”, we’ll be doing a bit of philosophy with our feet. These sessions are about the space into which contemporary database-driven, networked “new media” fit. It is not so much a series of seminars about technologies of new media, as an invitation to think about the relationship between media and space.

Of course, the privileged medium of this section will be the walk. Walking is a “mapping” exercise, an experience of a place which connects the “Concept-city” of the map, the plan, the architect to the everyday practice of lived space. The narrative space of a formal walk, with storytelling and an itinerary to match, fits somewhere in between Certeau’s categories, belonging neither to the map or plan nor to the flow of everyday experience.

Therefore, for a few days we will treat selected bits of London as a story-space, an environment which simultaneously stores memories of the past, serves as a source of raw material for new stories, and provides a backdrop to imagined ones.

Some online resources to get us started:

Digital Urban blog – interesting resources on mapping and urban planning:
http://www.digitalurban.blogspot.com/

London Google Earth Streaming and splicing landmarks – lovely example of what Certeau calls the concept-city:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij4Pwg4RqjY

Cities in Games video: The Getaway (a video game set among London locations)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8huO9KihVZ0

Hackney Boys video (driving). This is a very “Certeauian” video of two guys driving around, capturing a bit of the experience of navigating around the city, with all its incidental sights and sounds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfUbApIHUk0

Filed under: Education, Media Theory

Second Life and E-learning

My presentation at My So-called 2nd Life was about new possibilities in the market for 3D e-learning platforms. I focused on what Second Life (or analogous platforms) could become, and why there are some interesting opportunities in the education market right now.

We can summarize the history of internet-based e-learning as a progression from asynchronous communication to synchronous: Initially, teachers adopted the older models of correspondence courses and distance-learning by putting course content online: First, virtual course books and handouts (static HTML), then virtual classrooms (e.g., WebCT, Blackboard), and now “blended learning” in a distributed learning space encompassing both classrooms, tutorials and online interaction (face-to-face, online support materials, email access to tutor, discussion boards, class blogs, etc.).

In practice, teaching is about 3 key elements: Content, supporting materials, and most importantly dialogue. Conversation, as we know, is inherently unpredictable and off-topic. The strength of the conventional seminar, from Plato onwards, is that it allows for digression. Learning is not the linear acquisition of content. It’s the activity of leading the student around an area of interest, knowledge or skill so they can explore it and acquire it themselves. True pedagogy, in that sense, can’t bee too much “on the nose” – it has to incorporate a sense of potentiality, of the unexpected and unrehearsed.

Second Life can teach a valuable lesson to those seeking to develop educational software that allows for digression: It is now the internet’s premier 3D environment for user-generated content. Second Life is Web 2.0 as a spatial metaphor. Like SL, an e-learning platform has to be as open as possible – the interface has to allow for new tools to be built from scratch within the environment.

Universities, schools or corporations require e-learning systems that demand only standard internet-skills of the students, and a very small initial skillset of teachers. If it takes more than 5 minutes to figure out how to put up a basic page and upload some handouts, there’s something wrong. Rule of thumb: If it requires training sessions, your software has problems.

Now, Second Life can definitely be used for education purposes. There’s already a lot of very interesting e-learning activity going on there. However, those activities are conducted by participants who are already Second Lifers – access and skills are not an issue for them to begin with. Second Life is not easily accessible because of (1) the bandwidth and computing requirements (at minimum a Mac G4 or a Windows machine with a beefy processor and graphics card), and (2) the skillset and vocabulary required to navigate the world. Hence, Orientation Island:

Here’s my avatar, Garth, about to graduate. A proud moment for all concerned.

The very need for Orientation Island shows that Second Life is not accessible and lightweight enough to use in mainstream education and training. This is the key challenge for anyone who wants to develop such a system. Of course, Prof. Charles Nesson of the Harvard Law School made the news recently for teaching a class inside Second Life. As a proof of concept, that’s fine, but as a feasibility study it fails on one simple premise: He needs a tech-support staff of seven (see the video here) to do it.

Nesson’s video raises a key question for me: Do we really need a spatial metaphor to navigate an online learning environment? The user needs an exponentially larger skillset to build and use a 3D online environment – whether it’s for education or collaboration. (Active Worlds Educational Universe (AWEU) is an attempt to translate this into education, still very much at the experimental level). One benefit of a 2D interface is it’s lack of features, simple skillset required of users, and a modest demand on computing resources and bandwidth.

With those practical restrictions in mind, here’s a loosely defined list of opportunities, ranging from short term to extended long term:

Short term: (1) 2D Web 2.0 options for teachers, using a blog/wiki platform for simple delivery of audio with visuals, chat, discussion boards, shared text/audio/video resources (blogs, wikis), allowing both private and group voice communications.

Medium/long term: (2) A 3D platform built on top of option 1, with integrated voice communication (unlike Second Life Education with it’s Vivox solution). This could possibly be divorced from a “universe” like Second Life and hosted on a secure intranet. This would need a “lightweight” interface that is far more immediately usable than SL’s. (Interestingly, the new World of Warcraft is a good example of such an interface, see Greg Kasavin’s Gamespot review video).

This could be an optional 3D “virtual classroom” module, serving as an environment for online seminars, hangout for distance learners, etc.

Extended Long Term: (4) Augmented Reality options, overlaying the real world with 3D information. A digital space could be imported into a physical environment (classroom, lecture theatre, outdoor park, performance space, private living room, etc.), and a student could attend a seminar from home, interacting with an illusion of full-size avatars in his/her living room.

Of course this is just a brief sketch of possibilities. The key point is that Second Life holds many lessons for developers of educational software, but in itself the SL world is right now not a feasible place for most education/training providers to build an outpost. However, the possibilities it raises cannot be ignored. Anyone interested in the potential future of e-learning would be foolish not to play in Second Life and other online environments.

Filed under: Education, Social media

How do you pronounce MMORPG?

Mike Butcher of Mbites.com has invited me to speak at the My So-Called 2nd Life event, organized by NMK. Mike will be leading presentations and discussion on the business, culture and evolution of synthetic worlds as media platforms.

My own contribution will focus on entrepreneurship, e-learning and education. I’ll blog more about it closer to the event (anyone who tells you they plan presentations weeks in advance is lying), but I predict it will draw heavily on experience and ideas that come from working on the Upstart project.

Whatever ends up as the main point, I’ll definitely kvetch a little about the words we have for environments like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and (from my native Reykjavik) Eve Online.

Have you tried pronouncing “MMORPG”? It looks like a rude word in Klingon. I’ve seen “MUVE” (multi-user virtual environment) around, but try using it in a sentence (“Second life is a social MUVE, not a violent one”). I like the term “synthetic worlds,” which comes from the economist Edward Castronova. He writes about online environments in accessible, acronym-free English in his book Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (2005), and in this article, and I wholeheartedly recommend his work to anyone who wants to understand the economics of buying an EverQuest magic sword on eBay with US dollars.

I’ll try to present in plain English, but I’ll be practicing my Klingon pronunciation of MMORPG just in case.

Filed under: Education, Social media

Blackboard, the Metallica of e-learning

Blackboard, the owner of WebCT, the cumbersome monolith of Learning Management Systems, has been granted a patent on the very idea of merging email, web, chat software and secure hierarchical access into a single enterprise system, for use in training or education. Having been granted the patent in the US, Blackboard promptly sued its rival Desire2Learn, claiming that the latter owes them royalties.

Surprise! Academics, including myself, are furious. ABC News has a good summary of the instant, hostile reaction by the academic community, an extensive Wikipedia entry has been assembled on the prior art of Virtual Learning Environments – arguing that key inventions in the field, including the development of the original Blackboard system at Cornell University, firmly belong to the intellectual commons and have been developed for decades in an environment fostered by public funding.

Of course, the legal argument is complex, hinging on the distinction between independent and dependent clauses in the Blackboard patent, concisely summarized here in Alfred Essa’s The Nose blog.

It’s possible that Blackboard’s case may hold water, in the context of US patent law, and that there is no need to worry about a shrinking of the commons and suffocation of innovation because of litigious private corporations sucking all the intellectual property out of the public realm by patenting innovations pioneered and utilized in publicly funded education.

But that’s beside the point.

Academics are notoriously touchy about the privatization of public good – in particular when that public good takes the form of widespread ideas, processes and practices. Acting with unusual speed for a university, Oklahoma State University has voted with its feet and is now dropping Blackboard/WebCT and migrating all courses over to Desire2Learn’s system, in protest. I would not be surprised if others followed suit.

Why? Because Blackboard is learning what Metallica learned years ago when they became the litigious poster boys for the music industry’s war on file-sharing: Alienate your customers at your own risk. In this case, Blackboard looks like a monopoly trying to squash competition and innovation across the entire field of education.

The vehemence of the response to Blackboard’s patent is instructive. It’s not that a previously popular company has now made one misstep: Blackboard was already unpopular for pursuing a monopoly on Learning Management Systems in higher education by buying up its competitors rather than competing on grounds of usability, innovation and flexibility.

Ultimately, the reason for the hostility towards Blackboard is that they appear to teachers the world over to be trying to colonize part of the toolbox of pedagogy itself. Academics know that there is no real distinction between conventional learning and e-learning, because the two are hybridized in practice all the time. Therefore, Blackboard’s move looks like an attempt to privatize pedagogical techniques that teachers had assumed belonged to the greater educational commons.

Now excuse me, I need to go file a patent on this brilliant new invention of mine – it’s called a “seminar”…

Filed under: Education, Social media

The Intellectual Long Tail

Last autumn I got a dose of my own medicine. I assigned a chapter out of Don De Lillo’s White Noise in a first-year course with 100 students. The folly of this became apparent when I set a short essay-question on the famous chapter on the most photographed barn in America. When I got the essays I was surprised (and irritated) to find that a significant number of students had plagiarised. Some took just a couple of sentences, maybe a paragraph, others lifted entire essays in the silly belief that their sudden increase in vocabulary and ability to string together clauses and subclauses properly partitioned by commas and semicolons would go unnoticed. The other giveway was a sudden familiarity with the work of Jean Baudrillard.I should have known there were pages and pages out there on White Noise, all of them easily googled.

This would not be so embarassing if I hadn’t, only a few months earlier, published an article in M/C Journal titled “Copy/Paste: The Joys of Plagiarism”, arguing that the current anxiety about plagiarism in higher education is misplaced. It’s not about finding more ways to police our students; it’s about educators being more creative in the assignments we set.

One way to do this is to disrupt our received canon, and focus assignments on material that has not been obsessively covered already. In marketing-speak, we should be mining the long tail of the intellectual heritage of our disciplines for insights, examples and questions that cannot be answered with a few clicks of the mouse around Google, Yahoo, etc. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop having my students read Marx, Gramsci, Barthes, Foucault, Hall, and so on; instead, the pressure is on to give them examples and objects of study that they will need to write creatively about. Instead of prisons or institutions, why not ask them to apply Foucault’s “means of correct training” to shopping malls, IKEA stores, or McDonald’s restaurants? Whatever it takes to stop them from copying the Wikipedia entry on the Panopticon and trying to pass it off as their own.

And Barthes? Oh, I have a few choice Flickr photostreams in store for that…

Filed under: Education

Why I Like Online Paper Mills

Barclay Littlewood is doing a service to UK higher education. He is the owner of ukessays.com and his experience of student writing is rather different than that of most university lecturers – it has bought him a Lamborghini.

He is the star of a Guardian article about essays for sale online. Littlewood has become rich by taking advantage of two things: The web and universities’ tendency to want more money for less tutoring. This means larger student numbers, less contact with instructors and more sense of anonymity – all of which fosters the sense that no one really cares about the individual’s work, and that they won’t notice a bit of plagiaristic pilfering here, a little cheating there.

What is to be done? Well, Littlewood’s challenge to the higher education establishment seems about to be met with decisive action: “Vice-chancellors, university managers and senior academics were expected to attend the conference in the autumn which would look at all aspects of online essays” says the article.

I, for one, am relying on Barclay Littlewood to get these fine people to do more than just look.

Here’s what I’d say if I was invited to that conference: If you don’t want students cheating on their coursework, combine the consistent use of plagiarism-detection software with an emphasis on process-based learning and smaller class sizes. It’s simply harder to fool a teacher who knows the student and can differentiate between improved performance and a sudden injection of paid-for coursework.

Every university wants to be the last to install plagiarism-detection software. It’s expensive, not just because of the subscription costs, but because first they’ll have to set up an electronic submission system for the entire institution. A smart vice-chancellor will have other universities do this first, then adopt whichever systems prove to be the least expensive and most efficient. However, the setup costs are the least of the trouble: When the system is online and working the universities will find that staff quickly get overwhelmed with paperwork, plagiarism hearings multiply, and the student-retention rate will go down while the plagiarism-rate skyrockets. Neither is a good thing, because it can get you into trouble in the league tables.

Moreover, this technical solution would still leave Barclay Littlewood in business.

With plagiarism-detection systems, his estimated £200 million market would perhaps shrink but not go away, because it would become prohibitively expensive to write essays that would not get caught. Cheap, in this business, means mass-produced, with identical components that the plagiarism filters would easily sniff out. Bespoke services would still have a viable product to sell, but the cheaper outfits selling the same essays over and over would soon land so many students in trouble that they would soon get a toxic reputation.

Higher prices for reliably unique essays would mean that it would stop making economic sense for most students to buy them, except in large classes with high-stakes final essays.

By contrast, in courses with diverse assignments that are specific to the material (and not repeated year-to-year), buying coursework quickly stops making economic sense. For example, if a student in my Media Theory course were to hire a papermill to write all the marked essays, this is what it would cost according to the Guardian: Assuming the charge is a laughably cheap £30 per 250 words, four 1,500-word essays would cost a total of £720. For all this the student still has to sit a 2 hour exam on the key texts of the course. In order to earn a final mark of 60% (the bottom of the 2:1 range) the student would have to score a cumulative 65% on coursework, and 45% or more on the final exam where all the questions assume a working familiarity with the texts covered in the essay-assignments. In short, to get a comfortable mid-2:1 score while scraping a pass on the exam, the student would need to purchase essays that average a 71% score. More likely, unless the student does well on the exam (itself a set of essay-questions) s/he would end up paying £720 for a 2:2 mark in one course. And that’s just 30 credits out of 120 for the year.

Value for money it ain’t.

My point here is simple: If 60% of students now resort to cheating in some form, it is time to change the game. The responsible alternative is to assign coursework that emphasizes process, includes a variety of assignments, and does not put all the pedagogical eggs in the basket of one final essay – possibly using other, less easily-bought means of assessment than essays.

Papermills might actually prove beneficial if the provoke some novel innovations in university teaching. Along with the garden-variety cut/paste plagiarism from online sources, coursework-peddlers are the predictable byproduct of universities’ own “pack ‘em in, charge a premium” attitude to education. We simply must get a bit more creative in the kinds of activities, assignments and methods of evaluation that make up coursework – at least something other than an essay around Easter time.

Who knows? Perhaps Barclay Littlewood and his fellow paper-pushers will make us a bit less predictable, and a bit more playful.

Filed under: Education