A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace.

Some have argued that children and youth acquire these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture.Three concerns, however, suggest the need for policy and pedagogical interventions:

The Participation Gap — the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

The Transparency Problem — The challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.

The Ethics Challenge — The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.

Educators must work together to ensure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, can articulate their understanding of how media shapes perceptions, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities.

A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement.

As I think about the eCitizenship project I’m helping to design for a macroeconomics course, one thing I keep coming back to are those challenges — the Participation Gap, Transparency Problem, and the Ethics Challenge. It might be naive, but I think a good assignment is going to have to touch on all three of those elements to have maximum impact. I don’t think all three of these things have to be at the core of the assignment, but if your assignment is not bumping up against all of these issues in some way, you may not be engaging with the material in an authentic way….

In my view, basically the president is a socialist, a person who craves for collectivist, government solutions to problems, and is deeply distrustful of private enterprise.

Always a proud day at the Chronicle.

Update: So what about this Vedder guy that the Chronicle hires to write this tripe? Well, as always, he has connections to the Scaife Foundation via the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, an organization that works closely with Phillip Morris Tobacco (which is now called something like “Altria” I think). Vedder’s SourceWatch profile contains this interesting line about his work at AdTI:

Later that year Vedder served as “peer-reviewer” for a pro-tobacco junk science report: Science, Economics, and Environmental Policy: A Critical Examination also published by AdTI.

Charming!

Incidentally, I sometimes do wonder why I do this source checking. Why bother debunking this stuff, when the Chronicle is such crap?

I think we know the Chronicle is crap, but I think most people have very little idea how much of that is because of external money which supports the junk research that keeps the Chronicle running. And I think people are still failing to make distinctions, good people with good aims quoting the Vedders of the world because they believe that his talk about an “open-source university” is roughly parallel to say what Brian Lamb or Downes means by that.

What I want to achieve by this is primarily to make people embarrassed for quoting former Junk Tobacco Science Guns-for-Hire. If I provide even one person with a link to send to their friends saying “Subject: THIS Richard Vedder???”, that ends up being profoundly important.

The media narrative pretty much determines what is in the realm of social possibility. The other side gets that, which is why they pour millions of dollars into foundations like Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and that’s why they win, pretty consistently. We tend to think the media narrative is irrelevant to what we do, which is why we lose, again and again.

Remember how the media companies in were going to fix the web back in the late 90s? Remember AOL/Time-Warner? Sites that looked like CD-ROMs? Breathless pronouncements that sites would soon all be in Flash? (Or worse, the boss that told me that with PDF perfected HTML would be over probably within the year).

Remember crappy sites that were all in Flash? Because Grandma didn’t know how to scroll? Remember Microsoft’s WebTV? (I actually interviewed for the WebTV group ***shudder*** it was a dark, dark time). Remember CD/Web hybrids? Where you bought the CD to get access to the internet piece?

Remember Encyclopedia Britannica getting funky by blessing us with its product on the web? (The servers crashed from first day visits! Always a good sign for the IPO!)

When I watch people poking at their App Store Skinner Boxes, it’s so deja vu it hurts. You get WebTV on that?

None of these are new thoughts, I guess. But I’d never quite formulated that the trajectory of the mobile internet is following nearly exactly the trajectory of the early web, and the people involved in mobile tech are trying to bring their model into the internet the same way the content people tried to bring theirs. I mean, it’s almost the EXACT rhetoric, and the EXACT trajectory, month by month.

I know, we’re all sick of reading about this. But I guess what I’m saying is that today I’m choosing to be optimistic. HTML 5 is on the way, and if history is really following the same trajectory things will get worse for a little bit, and then we’ll snap out of it.

And yes, I know — the situation is worse this time — no net neutrality on phones, sites like the app store hard wired into 24-month contracted devices. It’s an awful mess.

But let me have this moment of optimism, b/c it’s precisely the fact it looks so MUCH like 1999 that I can’t help but be optimistic. Remember what else happened in 1999? Napster. And Napster basically saved the world, showing a generation of people the power of P2P, and inaugurating Web 2.0.

There are things churning below the surface here that can blow the doors off of whatever Steve Jobs concocts. And as with Napster, it will happen — it HAS to happen — because companies can’t respect boundaries. They have to overreach, it’s in their nature. And the rest flows inexorably from that fact.

I have faith.

• Identify the major assertions made on Meet the Press (both by the host and the guests) each Sunday.
• Fact-check them.
• Publish the results of the fact-check on a blog.

Whoa! Pretty radical idea, right?

You have to be involved in politics for about two minutes before you realize that the scope of what is possible in public policy is largely determined by the press narrative, and that narrative often plays fast and loose with facts.

You can’t have a functioning democracy with a dysfunctional press. And what Meet the Facts realizes is that the net-enabled citizen has a venue to apply pressure to the press to take its job seriously. Twenty years ago, you’d have to throw up your hands, or maybe write a letter to network management.

Today you are your own press, and it’s important that students realize they have both the power and the responsibility to debunk bogus press narratives publicly. No, not every statement on every station or in every paper. Not every day. But where they may have some specialized knowledge or skill, part of the road to good public policy (and good citizenship) is protecting the quality of public policy information.

The effort to bring scholarly rigor into public policy debates used to be a core function of the universities once upon a time, before Wal-Mart started buying their own departments at state institutions, and Sunday talk-shows ditched university professors in favor of think-tank drones as guests.

I think it’s high time we get back to that core function, and I think our students would benefit greatly from involvement in the effort.

So I don’t know if I have time to go through and debunk the spin of this report, or really even read it fully. But I almost started reading it, until I noticed that all the authors are from the University of Arkansas in some department called the Department of Education Reform.

Well, THAT’S an interesting sounding department!

So I looked it up. Here’s what that department is about:

“Education Reform” is a subject of particular interest to the Walton family, the Waltons of Wal-Mart, that is. A few years back, the Wal-Mart Foundation gave the UA $300 million, the largest private contribution ever to a public university. There were strings attached. The establishment of the Education Reform Department was one of them. Other wealthy critics of the public schools, including Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman, have also taken an interest in the department’s work. The kind of reform the department and its benefactors have in mind has to do with charter schools, vouchers, and keeping teacher unions under control, if not eliminating them entirely.

The Waltons have a long history of self interested philanthropy — if they are in an area it is almost always because it advances the interest of either Wal-Mart or the founders (in this respect they are different from the Gates Foundation, for example, which brings an ideology to the table as well, but is generally not about advancing the fortune of Gates or Microsoft). Look for more from this group, and be sure to refer to this report as the “Wal-Mart report on Higher Education” — because that’s what it is.

Um, so I kind of convinced David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven fame to put a Flattr button on his AMAZING 300 Songs site.

I don’t know if you know this site, but it’s incredible. It is a near daily blog that tells the back-story of one Camper Van or Cracker song a day, and the stories are as lyrical and quirky and down-to-earth as his musical canon is.  You would read these stories even if you didn’t know these songs, that’s how good they are. Many of the stories, in fact, end up, for me at least, being a sort of rethinking of the 1980s and 1990s, capturing the parts of that social environment we seem to have forgotten about. There is something so honest in his retellings that it forces you to rethink your own experience of that time.

You really should read every bit of it.

But here’s the thing. I talked him into using Flattr, via a blog comment.

Who David Lowery is to me is a sort of artistic demi-god, a guy who managed to capture my particular experience through those years of being simultaneously deeply overwhelmed with emotion and loss and joy and at the same time possessed always by a cynical detachment and suspicion. He had a talent that is almost disappeared now — a talent of combining the political, social, and the personal in these seamless creations that resonated like a tuning fork off the hum of the age.

OK, that’s who David Lowery is to me. Here’s who I will be to David Lowery if more people don’t Flattr him: I’ll be the dick that convinced him to get on this stupid Flattr thing.

Please go and Flattr the 300 songs project.

If you want to Flattr this article to get this announcement more attention (this is one of the first major musicians to get on Flattr that I know of — we should promote this) , then yes, please Flattr it — BUT DON’T FORGET TO FLATTR 300 SONGS TOO.

If you are not on Flattr, here’s an excellent reason to get on it. Even if you only use it to donate a couple bucks a month to David Lowery, that’s a good enough reason to sign up.

[Remember, please rate this story up, but most importantly, give to 300 Songs, maybe starting with the button on this post]

Perhaps I can’t see the forest for the trees, but I see traditional skunkworks projects as most likely digging us deeper into a hole, forcing an us vs. them mentality among working faculty, and ultimately throwing a wrench into the cogs of progress.  At least, that’s what I see for shared governance institutions like mine.  There’s not enough top down force at an institution like mine to protect a separate experimental project with a substantial budget for more than five minutes.

We’re not Lockheed Martin or Microsoft. We’re more like Russia under Nicholas,  ruled by ten thousand clerks.

But I’ve been thinking a bit about the skunkworks concept and I’d like to make two observations.

The first is we already have a bit of a skunkworks: it’s the Academic Technology Office of any university. People consistently talk about how EDUPUNK came from college professors. But it didn’t. Most of the major people associated with EDUPUNK come from some sort of Academic Technology background, and Ground Zero of the movement comes from a Academic Technology group that spent its budget on increasing its staff, not technology.

That’s not a coincidence, and if people would recognize that we could get going with this already.

So, while I’m sure this will be dismissed as self-serving,  there’s a really simple Skunkworks Lite,  ready-made and shovel-ready. Just take your Academic Tech group, and overstaff it with brilliant, adventurous people. Give them the right to prioritize their own work based on impact on quality and access.  Then release them into the wild.

Then sit back. Honestly, that approach will probably work seven times out of ten. It has worked at UMW.  I’m watching it work here.

The second opportunity is Summer Session. Most state schools are feeling the pressure to ramp up summer offerings as a revenue generator. The words we keep hearing around here is that the Governor wants to see a “year-round campus.”

At the same time, there’s not a lot of programming in place already, and the unique challenges of running summer session means most traditional offerings have to be rethought before being offered.  Institutionally, Summer Session has none of the political landmines of the Fall and Spring semesters. You’ve got a blank check to reimagine the college experience entirely.

So why not do it? Why not explicitly encourage Summer Session programming that pushes the envelope and breaks out of the traditional classroom models while still providing students with the benefits of place-based education? At the morning startup meeting today, our provost announced something pretty close to that — that the rise of the summer session was a huge opportunity to rethink education and try new ways of teaching.

Double your Academic Tech staff, and watch a thousand Edupunks bloom. And tie Summer Session expansion to innovation in curriculum and delivery.

I really think it could work….

There’s lots of great scholarly definitions that I could discuss, but I’m most interested in accurate definitions we can get laypeople to understand. So the definition I use most often is:

“Openness is a general preference towards connected, visible, and sharable practice over unconnected, hidden, and unshareable practice.”

It’s not exactly journal-ready, but it seems to work, and if you dig deeply into the implications of that definition some pretty neat stuff emerges.  So you can get people to both to understand the initial statement, and then help show them what truly agreeing with that statement might mean.

If you feel like commenting, I’d love to gather other definitions.

What I’ve been thinking a lot about is addresses, or more properly, unique universal names (some early thoughts on cell phones numbers as names  here).

Here’s my most recent stream of thought. This is a PogoPlug:

Now, PogoPlug is a very cool device, because it’s part of a movement to making the cloud personal (Purists will say a home-based cloud is an oxymoron. It isn’t.) The idea here is rather than paying Dropbox or drop.io fees, or screwing around with MediaFire or DivShare, you just hook up your USB drives to share files, using the interface to set permissions, and become your own cloud, with all those files now accessible through a URL PogoPlug provides you.

But let’s think through what exactly PogoPlug provides. It doesn’t provide storage — you have the storage. It doesn’t provide the connection — you have that too. And the software is trivial, the bulk of what this does runs on software pretty much in existence for twenty years.

What PogoPlug provides is a unique address.  It gives you a linkable URL on the Internet that can always reach your USB drive, no matter how many times your home internet provider switches out your IP address from under you. And if we look at a lot of the darling services of the web right now, be they Dropbox or SoundCloud or what have you, we find that the real value-added in many of these products is the power of stable addressing. There are other interface features, community stuff, etc., but the big draw is storage space with a stable reachable address.

That’s an incredibly powerful thing, but I guess the question is how we reached a point where, 20 years into the web, we need PogoPlug to distribute a stable address to us.

I wish I knew more of the history of public infrastructure, but it seems evident to me that we understood early on that things like street addresses needed to be defined by governments. My street address is not supplied by FedEx. It’s *used* by FedEx, and UPS, and the USPS, and political canvassers, and the Church of Latter Day Saints. But the democratic (and frankly, free market) element of it is that anyone can use that address, that address is not dependent on my continued relationship with a corporate entity. The zip code I use on hundreds of sites to localize information was not bought from Kinkos.

That’s better for a market economy and better for individual empowerment. New competitors in mail, politics, and religion don’t have to invent personal addressing systems to enter into competition, and the stability of my address is not dependent on some sort of vendor lock-in.

Jim Groom has talked about this for a couple years, it’s not a new thought, certainly. But I think it’s helpful to tease out the different parts of our reliance on corporations. At the moment I’m not so stressed about using Google software or storage. Free tools, especially those designed for loose coupling, can be pretty empowering to students. I helped bring down a politician using Blogger in 2006 — and a lot of that sequence of events might have not happened if I had had to set up a server and a WordPress instance. It would have taken me away from my core concern, and probably hurt my efforts.

But the naming bothers me. All those posts I made in 2006 are all filed under the address nh-02.blogspot.com and those articles are referenced by news stories, etc. I worked hard to get them to the top of search results under that URL. Should Blogger ever go Ning on me, I’d have zero options. I’d either have to pay up, or lose the connections those articles have built up in the four years since I posted them.

That’s extremely dis-empowering, and it’s a story that happens again and again as we build up our reputation under commercially provided addresses.

Dave Winer  posted somewhat recently on a publicly provisioned space that would have nothing but pointers that translate web requests to your domain into references to the corporate or non-corporate cloud services you were using:

The thing we’ve always needed and didn’t have is a place to get a user id and password that wasn’t owned by a big company and was still as simple for the user as the ones operated by the big companies. 

Ponder that for a moment, and imagine what would happen in the app space if each developer could count on say 10MB per user of storage, enough for a lot of pointers into space managed elsewhere. Sort of like what Twitter was planning with annotations, but not owned by Twitter. 

And stop there. Identity with a small amount of storage. The API should be DNS. We need to make it easy for people to get their own domain for life. We could even come up with a new TLD for it, somthing like dot-id. davewiner.id. That would be me.  

This to me seems the big point. I don’t mind Google managing my mail, or even Blogger managing my blog posts, but I do mind them owning my identity. And the social and market effects of corporations being the people that control addressing are wholly corrosive to both competition and democracy.

I’ve wandered a bit here, I suppose. But a lot of the reaction I’ve seen to Jim and Brian’s post has been that it’s a sort of No True Scotsman claim, that those that don’t follow openness down to the end of the FLOSS road are not truly open, and therefore can’t speak to openness.  But I don’t think the article advances dogma, at least as I see it. And what it has spurred in me is a desire to really reflect deeply on what my core concerns with the use of corporate software in education are. Address lock-in is one of those.  Ad-supported service is a second (somewhat lesser) concern which I’m still thinking through, which maybe I’ll write about next week.

Also, there may be some materials posted here: http://edcampkeene.org, but it’s not much of a “materials” conference, so we’ll see.