Feb
5
2010
Uncategorized By Michael Caulfield | No comments yet

The Chronicle and Glenn Beck Agree: The ISI Civics Test Is Big News

Says The Chronicle of Higher Education in the article “College Makes Students More Liberal, but Not Smarter About Civics, Study Finds“:

Previous [ISI] surveys have found that, in general, college does not bring students up to a high level of civics knowledge. According to the institute’s 2008 report, based on a survey of 2,500, people whose highest level of educational attainment was a bachelor’s degree correctly answered 57 percent of the questions, on average. That is three percentage points lower than a passing grade, according to the survey’s authors.

Let’s leave aside the idiotic assertion that “That is three percentage points lower than a passing grade” when of course what a passing grade is is decided by the Institute. Let’s forget that “civics tests” have become a favorite press tool of the right in the past several years, and in many recent, high profile cases have been faked. Let’s look over the fact that two minutes of research shows that ISI has been in the news recently for being the administrator of the Collegiate Network, an organization that forms much of the link between the conservative activists turned alleged phone tamperers down in Louisiana:

Three of the four young men charged in the alleged bugging attempt at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office Monday were involved in the well-funded, opportunity-rich world of conservative campus journalism in recent years, a link that provides potential clues about how the men knew each other and why they came to hatch the alleged plot.

James O’Keefe, Joseph Basel, and Stan Dai each founded or lead the alternative conservative newspapers on their respective college campuses.

[...]

Fostering the growth of alternative media on campus — publications that are more often National Review-style opinion journals than reporting-intensive newspapers — has been a tactic of the conservative movement for decades. The Collegiate Network, for example, was founded in 1979 and supports over 100 papers per year. CampusReform.org, the campus component of the Leadership Institute, employs 16 staffers. [Talking Points Memo, 1/26/10]

Bai, Basel, And O’Keefe Were All Involved With Collegiate Network Student Papers.

Let’s forget that the major funder of the institute releasing this study is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, to the tune of $6 million. That’s a fund controlled by Richard Scaife, known as the “Funding Father of the Right”.

Forget the felonies, forget the funding.

Lets just consider this.

On its home page, the ISI explains what the report is, not with text, but by embedding a video of Glenn Beck praising the study. If you let this clip play on the ISI web site, you can see Beck play a video showing pictures of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and people talking about gas chambers and mass executions — he labels it the “History Progressives Don’t Want You To See”. [Because, for those unfamiliar with Beck's rhetoric, Obama is Hitler, and is utilizing a world police force to eventually enslave and gas us.]

This is the video proudly displayed on the FRONT PAGE of the report site. Can the Chronicle not click a link? Are they incapable of performing a Google search?

Why would I subscribe to a magazine that did not even do the most rudimentary vetting of the “studies” it is covering?

This is garbage. I half believe the reason why the Chronicle keeps its paywall up is that the pieces that float out to the open web are so patently ridiculous that if they dropped the paywall they would be ridiculed out of existence in a week.

Garbage, garbage, garbage. And hopefully shame.

Feb
4
2010
Learning and Learning Technology, Openness By Michael Caulfield | 9 comments

Stop capturing classes, and start capturing explanations.

What does “Good Enough” OER look like?

It looks like Sal Khan.

I just saw his stuff via Jon Udell, and it blew me away. Technically, it’s not under an open license, but every single person involved in OER should look at the site. Right now.

Forget the “lecture capture” vendors. Don’t worry about editing out false starts. Don’t spend any money on post-production.

Just explain stuff to people. Online. And remove it from the context of the class, make it modular.

Stop capturing classes, and start capturing explanations.

We lay on the fainting couch in the OER world sometimes and worry about reuse — well here’s your answer. Sal’s work has been viewed end-to-end 10 million times. That’s more than anybody at MIT or Yale. He has 33,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel.

You have people at your college right now that can do this. I have people at my college that can do this.

Let’s get them to do it.

Feb
2
2010
Openness By Michael Caulfield | No comments yet

Is Facebook Doppleganger Week the Largest Scale Copyright Infringement in History?

Most of you have heard of Facebook Celebrity Doppleganger week by now. Because viruses spread unequally I think it’s actually in week three.

The way it works is simple. You change your profile picture to that of a celebrity that someone once told you you look like.

Here’s what I find interesting — it looks to me like between a half and a quarter of people in my neck of the woods are doing this, and I would bet that not a single one of them stopped to think if they were infringing on the rights of the person who took the photograph they used.

Really. Grandmothers, kids, technophobes. A massive amount of people who just assumed this was perfectly fine.

Because, of course, it *is* perfectly fine. You wouldn’t know it from recent history, but using media in this way is as fair as fair use gets.

For quite a number of people, this may have been the first mashup they’ve done (yes, mashup: your profile + a celebrity photo = strangely appropriate pairing, that’s a mashup). And copyright wasn’t even a thought, even when that Facebook TOS checkbox came up.

Once you express yourself with extant media, you start to realize media is words, and banning it’s reuse makes as little sense as banning words.

Millions of people created their first mashup this week, from grandmothers to schoolchildren. And copyright didn’t cross their mind.

Worth thinking about.

Jan
29
2010
Learning and Learning Technology, Openness By Michael Caulfield | 1 comment

The iPad and the Timex/Sinclair 1000

When I first saw the tweets flowing about the iPad presentation I was skipping, I half-jokingly said what I’d rather have is a Timex/Sinclair 1000.

But it was a weird moment, because I then went and go a link to an image of the TS-1000 and it all came flooding back. It was a huge emotional rush. Not to get too sappy, but it threw me back to a moment in time where I became the person I am now, sitting in front of a TV screen writing Basic loops, and playing rudimentary games in 1983, typing in some piece of code that would simulate the Towers of Hanoi that my Dad printed had photocopied for me from god-knows-where. And when I looked at the iPad image after that, it didn’t make me angry as much anymore as just sad.

I didn’t fully understand that until I just read Payne:

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.

Amen.

Jan
27
2010
Learning and Learning Technology, Openness By Michael Caulfield | 3 comments

Belated Realization About the Romance of Mobile Learning

I just realized that everything I said below about the Apple Tablet and newspapers applies almost directly to Higher Education and mobile learning.

I think it’s quite likely the reason that mobile learning is consistently overhyped, despite its obvious defects, is that implicit in the image of a student watching a lecture on his phone in a bus is the idea of higher education as a distributor of content, rather than as a community hub. It’s a way of going forward technically while doubling down on the old paradigm.

That is to say, the problems that Schank and Downes have articulated around it are precisely why it is attractive. A world without keyboards is a world where the old paradigm can survive.

Jan
27
2010
Openness By Michael Caulfield | No comments yet

The Real Reason That Newspapers Think the Apple iPad Will Save Them

It’s really amusing to watch newspapers and magazines talk about how the Apple Tablet will save them. Here’s an fun example:

Should Steve Jobs introduce Apple’s tablet (the iPad, iSlate, iTablet, or perhaps iBook) at the company’s press event on Wednesday, the device will likely contain a number of features: users will be able to play games on it, surf the Web, read e-books, and much more. But perhaps the most important feature it may contain will be the ability to save the press from its demise.

The author then continues, inexplicably:

At the end of a failed 15-year experiment in giving away its product, the press (newspapers and magazines) has begun to renounce free.

The author goes on for the bulk of the article talking about the problem of “free”. Which is interesting, because of course the tablet will have exactly the same capabilities to support paid content that laptops did.

The thing is it’s all misdirection. The reason the Apple Tablet is so comforting to newspaper people has nothing to do with “free vs. paid”. The reason it’s comforting is that at first glance, it looks like that meddlesome keyboard has finally been removed. And whether they realize it or not, that’s what’s behind their sigh of relief — the desire for a world without keyboards, where newspapers won’t have to reimagine themselves as communities, or link to materials outside their own website, or let people aggregate their news next to competing sources, or allow readers copy and paste text for comment into other channels.

Of course, it’s bunk: we’re in a post-keyboard world for good, no matter what the hardware is. It’s a state of mind. But I suppose they need their nostalgia….

[Note: I'm not watching the presentation, but I'm guessing there's a bunch of stuff on input/interactivity. But that's beside the point -- the point is when you *look* at it, you don't see a keyboard, hence, instant magazine! And then it rained ponies.]

Jan
22
2010
Openness, Politics By Mike Caulfield | No comments yet

The Internet is a Human Rights Issue Except When It's Not

Hillary Clinton, yesterday:

In a sweeping, pointed address that dealt with the Internet as a force for both liberation and repression, Mrs. Clinton said: “Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society. Countries or individuals that engage in cyber-attacks should face consequences and international condemnation.”

Elsewhere, it’s just another Thursday in some godforsaken nation:

Verizon is terminating internet service to an unknown number of repeat copyright scofflaws, a year after suggesting it was not adopting a so-called “graduated response” policy.

While it was not immediately clear whether other internet service providers were following suit, the move comes as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are lobbying ISPs and Congress to support terminating internet access for repeat, online copyright offenders.

All the while, the United States has been privately lobbying the European Union to “encourage” so-called three strikes policies, according to leaked documents surrounding a proposed international intellectual property accord.

Jan
13
2010
Music, Openness By Mike Caulfield | No comments yet

Artificial Scarcities

A good friend of mine asked me what I thought of the Lanier article in the NYT. Well,  first reaction is that I’m sick of this media narrative:

“Person X was once part of the Digerati. Now they have have turned against it! The fact that they were for it before and are now against it proves something more than people just being against it!”

Blah. I’m done with that narrative. Guess what? Sometimes old people see the error of their ways, and sometimes they just get cranky. The only way to tell the difference is to look at the quality of the argument.

So let’s look at the argument:

In the book he disputes the assertion that there’s no harm in copying a digital music file because you haven’t damaged the original file.

“The same thing could be said if you hacked into a bank and just added money to your online account,” he writes. “The problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function.

This is actually a quite elegant metaphor, because it gets to the point: the scarcity is artificial, a construct of law, and the reason we create the scarcity is because supposedly the scarcity results in better art being created. Copyright is essentially a system of price support. Which doesn’t make it bad or good, of course, it makes it useful.
He then goes on to detail what the recent lack of scarcity has broken:

Sure enough, some musicians have done well selling T-shirts and concert tickets, but it is striking how many of the top-grossing acts began in the predigital era, and how much of today’s music is a mash-up of the old.

“It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,” Mr. Lanier writes. Or, to use another of his grim metaphors: “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”

Really? That doesn’t match anything I’ve seen. I’ve been a music fan my whole life, and I have never seen the array of creativity and talent that I see now in the alternative music scene.
Now does it have superheroes? The Jimi Hendrix that stands up and revolutionizes guitar? The Dave Davies fuzzbox moment? No, because we are in a postmodern era, and because with everyone more connected *more* people take part in the evolution of music. Just as safe sea travel ended the Age of the Explorers, so broadband ended the age of the music superhero. But you know what? It was the age of the music superhero that was the anomaly, not the other way around. It was a one-off. And I’m sorry for Lanier and his experimental music that he missed it, and there are no more openings for a Robert Fripp or Brian Eno, but there’s no more openings to be Sir Hilary or Henry Hudson or Marie Curie anymore either.
For those that can accept the beauty of the new paradigm, music has never been better.  For Lanier, I guess, not so much. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except of course he wants to enforce artificial scarcity to get his world of heroes back.  It sounds like a weird sci-fi plot to me, frankly, not a reasonable argument.
[Note: that sci-fi plot idea is solely my idea and my idea alone -- DO NOT USE. I'm brilliant, and one day the world will pay me millions in recognition.]
Jan
13
2010
Learning and Learning Technology By Mike Caulfield | No comments yet

Writing to Top Desired Skills in AAC&U Report

The newest AAC&U employer poll will be released next week, and the AAC&U has said that written and oral communication will, for the first time, surpass collaboration as the skill most desired by employers.

What I would love to see teased out, though, is what kind of writing employers (and students!) want. I’ve never been docked at my job for improper MLA citation. I have, at times, been accused of being too academic in tone.

So much of academic writing is driven by the need to be perfectly precise, rather than concise and clear, because the medium through which reputations are built — the academic journal — is profoundly non-conversational. Or rather, journal articles are written in precisely the way that conversations would happen if there were 18 months in between conversational turns.

I’d argue that the writing students need, both for employment and personal empowerment, has to be more conversational than that. And while that has always been true, in an age where mass communication is giving way to mass conversation, the need for such conversational skill has never been more pressing.

Jan
8
2010
Openness By Mike Caulfield | 1 comment

Stealing Whuffie

Just a short thought from the car-ride to work today.

If we are moving to a reputation based economy, where one’s ability to make a living is based on their network reputation, stealing attribution is a far greater crime than stealing intellectual property. The newspaper reporter who does not link to the blog that actually broke the story they are covering is committing grand larceny compared to the petty theft of pirating movies (all of which come with intact credits).

After all, steal a man’s fish, he goes hungry for a day. Steal a man’s ability to fish…

Adding: When students write for an audience of one (e.g. the teacher) they aren’t really stealing whuffie if they don’t attribute correctly. They have nothing to bestow, so they haven’t really robbed reputation (in the way that the article of a journal article might). Which means (I’m sure you saw this coming) that getting them to understand attribution requires they publish for a real audience….

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