We hear lots of talk about the rise of “nonlinear thinking” in the Digital Age and “interactive writing” in Web 2.0, but I take “effectively communicate orally and in writing” as a straightforward, linear practice, one that serves best in most scientific settings. And business, too, according to my brother the actuary, who told me a while back: “Anyone who can write is a major asset in business.”

Um, I think I hang out with a pretty 21st century crowd, but I can’t remember “lots of talk” about “nonlinear thinking” or “interactive writing”.

Ironically, this is a place where Bauerlein could easily demonstrate that he is not constructing a straw man by doing his readers the courtesy of linking to the “lots of talk” he supposedly hears. That would allow us to evaluate his argument, and allow Bauerlein to frame his discussion of this issue as part of a larger dialogue.

That’s the sort of stuff we’d like students to know. That the lack of links to cited viewpoints here is a good indication the author is just making stuff up, and arguing with people that are at best marginal figures in the 21st century skills movement, and at worst completely fictional creations. In other words, we would like our students to know how to do things like use the connections the network provides to evaluate the trustworthiness of information on the network (and, in turn, use connections to demonstrate their own trustworthiness and good faith, as well as carry the discussion forward).

Here’s a guy talking about these sorts of issues. And another. And another. And another.

Etc. I could list a hundred others.

This is what I’m hearing “lots of talk” about.

But hey, what employer would want people who understand these things, right?

Now the Pew Report, of the other hand … ; )

Seriously though, it is an interesting conversation we’ve begun here, and as ideas that have been swirling around the edublogs for a while start to go mainstream, these issues of attribution are not always going to be easy to navigate. But despite the difficulty, it’s important that we begin to better integrate the discussions on the blogs and those in more traditional literature, and, given that, I really want to thank both Teddy and Jon for taking the time to get this right.

Leigh’s a bit upset with Jon Mott’s recent EDUCAUSE report. Stephen agrees somewhat.

But I come here to defend Jon, not to attack him. I’ve met Jon Mott at a number of conferences, he’s smart guy, and a guy I’m really happy to have on our side of the equation. He’s a person that’s making some really interesting things happen. And he’s a nice person to boot.

But there is a problem, not with Jon, but the way the system works. For instance, part of that report revolves around a chart named “Loosely Coupled Assessment Workflow”.

I certainly don’t have the gripe that Leigh has (I don’t go that far back!) but I remember the exact day I coined the term “Loosely Coupled Assessment” nearly three years ago, and I remember how odd many of my IT colleagues thought the concept was at the time. But I thought I had really nailed something, and had framed it more precisely than I had seen it framed before. And I was taken enough by the term that I named my post after it.

And Stephen Downes, bless him, must have thought it was noteworthy at the time as well, since he cited it later that week in OLDaily. Which means, in addition to the hundreds that read my post, thousands read the summary of it, and got introduced to that particular formulation of that idea in July 2007.

And ultimately, at a certain point, these things just get in the air. I probably pulled off of people I didn’t realize in that Loosely Coupled Assessment post. Additionally, I assumed everybody reading my post knew the set of people that really moved this “loosely coupled” idea forward in other areas. I didn’t think I had to quote Weinberger or Blackall, because people reading me had read Weinberger and Blackall.

These things are so much “in the air” that I’m not even sure that Jon read my post or the summary — it’s quite possible someone else at some point called what he was doing “loosely coupled assessment” and the name stuck. It’s quite possible he was working on this idea well before 2007.

I don’t want our blog world to become a copy of the frozen sterile and gridlocked academic discourse we are fleeing. I want it to continue to be a conversation, and not to start reaching a 1:1 content to footnote ratio. I don’t want us to start bulking up our posts with ridiculously detached prose in an effort to be “citable”. (Heck, this post is way too long by my standards).

But at the same time, you can’t imagine how painful it will be for me to now sit in meetings with people from IT and have them quite literally try to educate me about this new thing called “Loosely Coupled Assessment”. And believe me, this will happen. It has before.

The problem with that, besides pride, is that the “loosely coupled assessment” idea now comes back to Keene State College, three years later, without a hint that the idea came originally, in part, from people within our organization. And the next time I criticize an idea coming out of EDUCAUSE in front of IT I’ll just be that crazy blogger again. Because I’m not cited in “academic” literature, it goes down the memory hole, and I have no more sway or reputation locally than I did before. I’m just that guy who is always the eduSkunk at the vendor party.

I have to repeat, this is not Jon’s fault. He is actually much more gracious in that article than most would be, giving credit to the same people I revere (and people that have done so much more than me) — the UMW crew, Brian Lamb, etc. Jon is one of us.

But I think there is a problem with the system. If you want to get something published, you have to choose to source stuff to peer reviewed journals, not blogs. This results in a sort of idea laundering that serves to hide the fact these ideas are coming from those crazy bloggers that everyone derides. And because these articles don’t redirect people into the conversation that produced the ideas in the first place, it keeps the people dependent on EDUCAUSE reports dependent on EDUCAUSE reports.

Which is, of course, the entire point of the current conventions.

It’s not wrong that Jon’s article can’t find a way to reference me — I could have made use of the status here to accomplish some things with IT, but I’ll live. But it does seem very wrong that Leigh and Stephen aren’t mentioned, and it’s telling to me that this not a result of the author (who is, among other things, a very prolific blogger) but of a system designed to devalue the conversation happening on the blogs while simultaneously pillaging it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

“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.