Aug
23
2010
Openness By Michael Caulfield | Comments turned off

Defining Openness

Ironically, I can’t seem to post to the EDUCAUSE OPENNESS list (possibly signed up under my old MIT address?). But a question came up on the list of how we want to define openness.

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.

Aug
20
2010
Openness, eCitizenship By Michael Caulfield | 1 comment

Addresses and Power

I’ve been thinking a bit about Jim and Brian’s article, and trying to better understand (and triage!) my concerns.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

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.

Aug
18
2010
Uncategorized By Michael Caulfield | Comments turned off

EdCamp Keene Today

Follow on twitter: #edcamp

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

Aug
17
2010
Uncategorized By Michael Caulfield | Comments turned off

Justin Bieber and WMD

Update:  Ha ha — Matthew Ragan and I downloaded it and sped it up in VLC player, and guess what — It Works! (It’s heavily treated, with a lot of vocal articulation removed, but hey).

Which, actually, just proves my point. We’re better than the press….

Original Post:

I’m going to check this out for myself after Edcamp stuff, but  my guess is in about twenty minutes the internet will realize that instead of sounding hauntingly beautiful like this:

J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

Justin Bieber slowed down sounds just as horrible as Bieber at normal speed. See, for example, this:

And then we’ll hear the ooh ahhs of the press about how we can’t trust the Internet because of Back to the Future Day or the Bieber hoax. And what are we going to do without the press to protect us from this stuff.

Just remember when you read them saying that that are literally hundreds of thousands of people dead tonight because in the space of a year the press couldn’t find the time or money to verify or debunk WMD claims against Iraq.

That sounds unfair, but it’s not. When we talk about whether the rise of networks is a problem for myth-busting, the press would like to argue from a position of superiority, despite being largely responsible for most of the great castastrophes of this past decade.

When the Justin Bieber ruse results in two wars, a slide into a torture state, and a public that thinks that coming deflation might be a good thing, I’ll read their snarky article. Until then, the smugness will remain a bit sickening.

Aug
16
2010
Openness By Michael Caulfield | Comments turned off

Are Directory Holds Increasing? (And, If So, Why?)

Just talked to a professor who mentioned the number of directory holds she is seeing has increased rather dramatically.

Directory holds are where a student submits a request that name, email, and telephone number not be published publicly.  A second, more restrictive option actually forbids Keene State from even acknowledging they are attending here.

Faculty are notified when students in their classes have directory holds. I just talked to the second faculty member who told me in the past year holds have increased dramatically — they’ve gone from a rare occurrence to something that inevitably two or three students in a class will have.

I’ll try to get actual numbers on this at Keene State, but is anyone else out there seeing this sort of thing? (And what’s causing it? Not quite the digital native picture we are fed, is it?)

Aug
13
2010
Uncategorized By Michael Caulfield | Comments turned off

It’s not Consumer and Producers, It’s Creators and Receivers

Was talking to Jon Udell last night about various things, and I went into my current rant that while the iPad doesn’t limit users from using the open web, it engages in the pernicious activity of “retraining consumers”, that is taking users who have become comfortable in the co-creative space of the web, and teaching them, through interface, to see that mode as a design flaw solved through the acquisition of digital commodities.

You all know the full rant, no need to repeat it. But I noticed as I was talking I did what I always do — I said “I want to keep the line between consumers and producers blurry.” And it felt a little strange, and worn. Awkward coming out of my mouth.

Today, reading this excellent interview with Paul Booth, I realized why. I’ve been fighting to blur this distinction for over a decade now, but every time I say “Consumer” or “Producer” I’m reinforcing it by placing the discussion in a commodity economics frame:

So much of our discussion about media is based on these metaphors that we often forget that they are, indeed metaphors at all. For example, when we talk about “consumers” and “producers” of media, we’re engaging in a discourse that uses gastronomic language to describe commodity economics. In other words, we talk about media in the same way that we talk about food. And the natural end result of this metaphor certainly portrays fans (and other active audiences) in a rather negative light: if media companies “produce” and audiences “consume,” then what fans create through rewriting or remixing is “garbage” (or worse: a very nasty metaphor indeed). I think this metaphor ultimately limits the conversation, so even if one talks about “productive consumption,” one still remains mired in this commodity mindset.

That’s brilliant, and I think it points to a real failure, at least on my part, to understand how the frame has hobbled this discussion. Booth goes further:

One of the main paths I follow in the book to re-look at these metaphors is to see how a different economic model – the gift economy – could work to establish a new way of describing fandom in the digital age. Both Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and your blog post about the gift economy were quite influential to my thinking in this respect. In contrast to a traditional commodity economy, a gift economy values the social relationships the exchange of gifts brings. I think that if we re-examine the media creation process from a gift economy point of view, what we find is that the categories of “producer” and “consumer” simply don’t function in the same way anymore. Instead of media “products” being made for “consumers,” content “gifts” are exchanged between both creators and receivers. The media text is a gift, which the receiver can reciprocate through attention, feedback, fandom, or even purchasing advertised products. A gift economy metaphor implies a stronger relationship between content creators and content receivers, with more potent feedback implied between the groups. There is also a greater collaborative potential between audiences and creators, and a more fluid dynamic between the two. I certainly don’t deny the economic imperative behind media consumption in general, but I think that in concert with a commodity economy metaphor, the gift economy helps create a more complete picture.

Again, I know this. Gift economies have always been a part of my understanding of what “production” of open content was — but have I grasped how central that reconceptualization is for people to get open content?

To give a simple example from yesterday — people at a meeting I was in were talking about how there’s no communication about progress on initiatives  on campus, and couldn’t people write up more stuff. That would solve it, right?

And I said, look, the thing is people do write up stuff, but nobody reads it, so they stop writing it up. If you want people to write up stuff you have to commit to reading it. That’s at least as important as writing stuff up.

To me, that is a statement that makes a lot of sense in a gift frame. You can produce stuff without people consuming, but you can’t give a gift if no one will receive it. People want to see open content, *still* as a production problem. Why aren’t we producing more open content? And even reuse questions become about whether we’re producing the RIGHT open content.

But it’s not a production problem, it’s a gift problem, right? And I don’t think we’ve thought through the implications of that.

In any case, these thoughts are a bit of a jumble, but I wanted to get them up….let me know your thoughts.


Aug
12
2010
eCitizenship By Michael Caulfield | Comments turned off

“The user of social software is the group, not the individual.”

Two weeks ago I was asked by a non-profit to present to a group of community activists on how to use social media, and, in particular, blogging and online communities, to advance civic agendas. I haven’t been doing much politically with blogging lately, but I like to help out, so I said yes.

As I walked through it one person in the audience began to interrupt me every time I used my experience adminning Blue Hampshire as an example. Blue Hampshire was unfair, he said, a dictatorship. It was a small core group of people that think they run the site overlording it over the broader community.

To give you a sense of the current size of Blue Hampshire, we launched in late 2006, and recently posted our 10,000th diary and 95,000th comment. There’s something like 5,000 users signed up. So the idea that Blue Hampshire is a small group of people is pretty laughable. But it is true there’s a core group of users that dominate the site, maybe a dozen people that have become more than simple users.

More on that in a minute. In any case, this guy had been troll-rated on the site, then ultimately banned from the site for being inflammatory. And he felt wrongly accused. The site was undemocratic he said — it was against free speech, and he was sick of it. How could a site treat him, THE USER in this way.

I’ve met people with grudges against Blue Hampshire before, and it’s always the same thing — why am I not as important in the community as everyone else, on day one? Why are you not serving me, the consumer of the site?

And the answer is because the site isn’t there to serve you, Doofus. The site exists to accomplish some ends. The site is designed to advance a set of common goods. The purpose of Blue Hampshire, by and large, is to

a) get more Democrats elected,
b) get better Democrats elected, and
c) make sure elected Democrats are held accountable, and
d) advance a more balanced media narrative than we currently see on these issues.

And the supporting dialogue on that is often

a) what exactly should we expect Dems to do, on what schedule,
b) what should the media narrative be, and
c) let’s remind ourselves why the Republicans are horrible since we just cut into group cohesion by arguing about Dems and the media narrative.

Your influence as a user, on a healthy site, is a function of to what extent your activity supports those group-defined social goods. In other words, to quote Shirky, the user of social software is the group, not the individual. If you are consistently acting in a way that hurts the interests of the group, the group has to defend itself. If it doesn’t, the group slowly becomes its own enemy.

This, as Shirky points out, is why government always springs up, even among anarchists. You need some form of government to protect the group from destroying itself. And if you see government as merely a pact to protect user rights, and not as something to adjudicate what Chief Justice Souter called competing goods, you’re lost.

In any case, I used to worry about banning, because I misunderstood my obligation as a site manager as being an obligation to users. It’s not. The obligation is to the group. Part of what makes a healthy group is consistency, transparency, and fairness in banning, but that’s still a question about the group, not the user. The question is always what sort of society are we aspiring to on the site — as an admin, you have to understand that user rights on the site derive from that vision, not the other way around.

Anyway, back to the meeting. Fine, says this guy, I don’t need Blue Hampshire anyway. I do my blogging on Facebook now.

Good luck with that, I say, as politely as I can manage. (I think I was very polite and patient, personally)

Anyway, I wake up this morning to find out this guy, Keith Halloran, supposedly “wrongly” banned from Blue Hampshire for inflammatory language, has become a bit of a star. From the New York Daily News, the charmingly titled N.H. Democrat under fire for reportedly saying Sarah Palin should have crashed with Ted Stevens:

A New Hampshire Democrat is under fire after reportedly posting a public death wish for Sarah Palin.

Keith Halloran, a Democratic candidate for state representative in New Hampshire, took a swipe at Palin on Facebook after former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens died in a plane crash on Monday.

“Just wish Sarah and Levy were on board,” Halloran wrote, apparently taking aim at the former Alaska Gov. and her daughter’s ex-fiancée, Levi Johnston.

It’s worth remembering the reason Blue Hampshire is not overrun with this sludge is because site admins are vigilant about this, and try, as much as possible, to not let this stuff happen on site. Stuff does get through, and the admins can’t control everything in a site with thousands of registered users. But they do pretty good.

It’s an incredibly unappreciated job, I can tell you, from having done it for a couple years. You get called a dictator a lot, you get pissed emails from people you’ve banned or users whose posts you’ve deleted. On the other side you get calls from people wondering why you’re not reining in user x on issue y. It’s a really sucky, sucky task.

But the benefit, on a good day, is you don’t wake up to find that your site has just undermined the very goals people joined it to advance. So Kudos to Dean Barker and the other admins that stayed there to do the hard slog of community management. You done good.


Flattr this

Aug
10
2010
Openness By Michael Caulfield | 3 comments

“If we’re successful, it means that everybody can be a creator”

I’ve had zero success in getting people to sign up for Flattr (with the exception of my beautiful and talented wife).  I don’t think people realize what a radical effect a gift economy could have on the world.

Peter Sunde is basically trying to free the web from harmful corporate influence by rethinking the nature of money itself. That’s huge.

You want a web not supported by AdWords? One that’s not based on running people through mazes to determine what deodorant to advertise next to a letter from their Grandma?

A world where people can afford the $10 or $20 to host their own site instead relying on Blogger? A world where your favorite artists can afford supplies? A world where musicians are not steamrolled by huge corporations?

More importantly — a world where, as Sunde points out, everyone can be seen as a creator — a world that starts to chip away at the many ways we use corporate money to create a culture divided into creators and consumers.

Then please, get on Flattr. You don’t like the money? You worried that getting $10 off your blog a month makes you look cheap? Too Rock and Roll for that?

Then give it to the Red Cross, or your favorite indie musician. Or upgrade your server bandwidth. But start doing the work of building an alternate gift economy, b/c so much of our future depends on that. We can talk all we want about how a few people making marginally better consumer choices will improve the world somewhat, but nothing changes until we start rethinking the nature of money and purchasing itself.

As some friends recently said: Talk – Action = Zero. Sign up!

Aug
10
2010
Learning and Learning Technology By Michael Caulfield | 3 comments

EdCamp Keene Will Bridge the K-12 / Higher Ed Divide (Now with Proof!)

Short note — we’ve hit our limit on EdCamp Keene attendees of 115.  We expect at least 20% melt, but that still leaves us with well over 80 participants.

So how true were we to our initial goal? You’ll remember we wanted to create an event that got passionate people from both the K-12 and the Higher Ed worlds to talk to one another.  Preferably about educational technology and active learning and 21st century skills.  As it said on the pitch page:

Part of the idea here is that it’s stupid that K-12 teachers and college instructors have different conferences on technology and learning. Sure, there are differences in what we do, but honestly, we’re going to do a lot better if we pool our knowledge on what works and what doesn’t. The dream is college professors and K-12 staff and educational technologists getting together to steal each other’s best ideas – in technology, project-based learning, net-enabled pedagogy  – and hopefully learning a bit more about each other’s contexts in the process.

College educators learning about the neat stuff going on in K-12. K-12 educators seeing the neat stuff going on at the college level. All of us talking about ways to do it better. Sounds cool, right?

So how are we doing with that, eight days away from the conference?

Judge for yourself. Here’s a list of the participant’s institution types and job positions.

I might be biased, but damn if this isn’t a great mix of people that just might get the job done:

Day Job

Level of institution

Instructional Designer

College

Academic Tech

College

Teacher

Primary

Instructional Technology Integrator

Secondary

Collaborative Content Coach for Technology and new position HS Resource Room teacher

All

Special Education Teacher

Middle School/Junior High

Teacher

Primary

District Social Worker, 504 Coordinator and McKinney-Vento Liaison

District

Instructional Designer

College

Technology Director

Primary & Secondary

Professor

College

Program Coordinator

College

Director of Technology

Secondary

Professor

College

Professor

College

Instructional Design & Faculty Support

College

School Psychologist

Primary & Secondary

Professor

College

Special Ed. Teacher

Primary

Ed tech

Secondary

Teacher & Adjunct Prof

Secondary

Professor of Education

College

Educational Technologist

Primary

College Student, Teacher, OLPC-er

Secondary

Teacher

Primary

Coordinator of Community Service

College

Instructional Designer

College

Educational Technologist

College

Teacher

Secondary

Special Ed Teacher, AT Specialist, Educational Technologist

Primary

Coordinator of Experiential Education

College

Faculty Coordinator for Online Courses/Online Instructor

College

Instructional Technologist

College

Instructional Technologist

College

Art Teacher

Primary & Secondary

Upward Bound

Secondary

Professor and Researcher on Transition Plans

College

Teacher

Secondary

K Teacher

Primary

Science Teacher

Primary & Secondary

Dean of Professional Studies, Keene State

College

Technology Evangelist

Other

Professor

College

Sustainability Coordinator/Instructor/Lect.

College

Community Service Coordinator

College

Tech Director

Secondary

Adjunct faculty

College

Director of Curriculum & Instruction

Primary & Secondary

Teacher

Primary

Teacher

Primary

Teacher

Secondary

Principal

Secondary

Principal

Primary

Professor

College

Teacher

Secondary

Associate Principal

Secondary

Chief human resource officer

Virtual Learning Academy Charter School

Provost

College

Teacher, grade 5

Primary

Learning specialist

College

K12 Ed Tech and KSC Adjunct Faculty

Both K-12 and College

elementary principal

Primary

Dean, Arts & Humanities, Keene State College

College

Dean, Sciences, Keene State College

College

professor

College

Educational Counselor

Secondary (HS) & College

Academic Counselor & Coordinator of Supplemental Instruction

College

Student Teacher in the fall

Primary & Secondary

Director of Online Education and Training

College

Administrator

Primary

Teacher

Primary

Principal

Primary & Secondary

Adjunct Professor, among other things

Graduate School

Director, Antioch Center for School Renewal

College

Librarian, Information Wrangler, Tech Maven

College

Antioch University New England Professor

Graduate Program

Student, media, student media

Student

Professor

College

Assistant Principal

Secondary

Professor

College

Media Specialist

Secondary

retired/educational consultant

Secondary

Admissions Director

Graduate School

Teacher

Secondary

Special Education Para-educator

Secondary

Professor

College

Librarian

K-8

High School Principal

Primary & Secondary

Educational Technologist

Primary & Secondary

Tech Teacher – 15 yrs K-8

Primary & Secondary

Tech Integrator

Secondary

Technology Integration

K – 12

Educational Technologist

Primary & Secondary

Lecturer (adjunct faculty)

College

School Library Media Specialist

Primary

Tech Support

Other

Library media associate

Primary

Professor

College

Graduate Student

Secondary

Teacher

Secondary

Library Media Associate

Primary

Professor

College

Informal educator

Secondary

Technology Director SAU 6

Primary & Secondary

Professor

College

Professor (Librarian)

College

Special Education Teacher

Primary

Information Literacy Librarian, Mason Library

College

Professor

College

Student

GradSchool

Professor

Professor

College

PROFESSOR, PHD STUDENT

COLLEGE AND k-12 CONSULTING & NON PROFITS

College Administrator

College


I should add that we have people coming from as far north as Maine and as far south as New York City (well, technically, Long Island).  Along the way we’ve also picked up some local co-sponsors — the Antioch Center for School Renewal, the Southwestern NH Educational Support Center, and the Marlboro College MA Program in Teaching with Technology.

I should add, finally, that the New Hampshire  Department of Education has been incredibly helpful in helping us get the word out.  They really got this idea very early on, and promoted this to people they thought might be interested.

So now all we have to do is run the conference… Wish us luck!

Aug
9
2010
Learning and Learning Technology, Openness By Michael Caulfield | 3 comments

Interlibrary Loan is the Prototypical Red Balloon Project

New projects need prototypes. When twitter first came out, people often asked me what it was. And to the extent I told them it was an entirely new thing they would tune out. I realized very quickly however that there were two ways to describe it that got people to sign up — to bloggers, I described it as microblogging. To others, I described it as a “mailing list for text messages.”

Jon Udell has talked about this phenomenon. I can’t find the post at the moment, but most successful explanations of new ideas run along the “It’s like X, but Y” line:

  • Email is like mail, but it’s on your computer
  • Web Search is like searching your computer, except it’s the web
  • Blogging is a journal you publish to everybody (c.2003 explanation)
  • Twitter is like a group mailing list, but for text messages
  • or, Twitter is like a blog, but for all the things too small for blogging
  • YouTube is Public Access Cable for the Internet (c.2005 explanation)
  • Scribd is like YouTube for documents
  • Google Wave is like …. um … well, you see what happens when you don’t have an analogue….We’ll miss you Google Wave

Anyway, I’ve been looking for prototypes for AASCU’s Red Balloon Project that are accessible to people, and take the geekiness out of the idea of applying networked approaches to higher educations pressing problems. Things that are common experiences, but show networked approaches in action.

Here’s my first prototype. It begins with this guy, Joseph Rowell:

We’ll come to Rowell’s place in history and how it relates to ILL in a minute. But first, let me say this, you can’t read the history of this guy without crushing on him a bit. Here’s a bit from his bio over at the UC Berkeley site:

In July of 1874, Rowell graduated with 22 others—the second graduating class in the history of the University and the first to have received instruction on the Berkeley campus. At graduation Rowell was appointed Recorder of the Faculties, Secretary to President Gilman, and Lecturer in English. But the following year, he received the entirely unsolicited and unexpected appointment of University Librarian.

…

New to librarianship, Rowell toured other libraries seeking advice. He described his experience with characteristic enthusiasm and aplomb.

“An ignorant young man from western wilds, armed with not a single letter of introduction, but only a card bearing his own name and title, barged into the sanctums of librarians of high and low degree, was welcomed with cordiality everywhere, and was given every possible facility and help in his investigations. How proud I am to be admitted to the ranks of a profession officered by such scholars and—gentlemen! Freely have I received; freely must I give.”– Joseph C. Rowell, The Beginnings of a Great Library: Reminiscences

It’s sometimes funny to me how networked learning and open education people are treated as blue-sky techno-utopians. My sense is that if you put a nineteenth century guy like Joe in a room of university administrators today, he’d most likely end up drinking with Brian Lamb and Jim Groom. [What the heck happened to us in the 20th century? How'd we sink to such a state of learned helplessness?]

In any case,  young Joe Rowell, looking at the lack of books on his new library’s shelves, came up with a neat idea:

In the absence of sufficient funds, Rowell turned beggar and borrower, and many were the additions, permanent or temporary, which resulted from his tireless activity… In 1886, Rowell advocated (and practised without official sanction) interlibrary book loans. The benefits were so evident that the Regents finally, in 1894 and again in 1898, gave their approval to this device, now so well known. Thus, the first officially approved interlibrary loaning of books in the United States was initiated by Rowell. Today any citizen of the State, through his local city or county library, may borrow books from the University Library.

It’s probably unnecessary giving all this history, but I want to really drive home how old an idea this is. Or maybe not so much that this idea is old, but that it was thought of by somebody, on a particular day. And given that it was not initially officially sanctioned, the idea was not obvious until people saw it work.

I’ve taken a long time coming to my point, but here we are. There is not a single professor or administrator in your University that has not used Interlibrary Loan. And if we look at what Interlibrary Loan has done, it has made every institution stronger. It has resulted in research being done that could not otherwise have been done, and as a result, probably resulted in lives being saved, and human knowledge being greatly enlarged. It has guaranteed that students from small state schools have had access to the best education. It has reduced cost and increased quality. It has advanced democracy. It has benefitted students and professors alike.

But Interlibrary Loan wasn’t given to us by the Gods. We didn’t arrive as a species to find it in place.  My guess is it wasn’t just invented by Rowell either, but that like most of these things it was invented a lot of places all at once.

But it was invented. There was a certain point in history where people started to realize that the infrastructure they had — whether it was the mail system, or the newly cataloged collections, or what have you — this infrastructure combined with an eye for common gains could result in a better life for everybody.

That’s what Red Balloon is for me. It’s the search for ideas as powerful as Interlibrary Loan, ideas where we find out that if we work together, and get out of our narrow institutional frameworks, we can change the world.

My favorite quote in Rowell’s story is when he is first given the job as librarian. He asks if the position is permanent. Professor Sill (history omits his first name, unfortunately) reflects on the fate of the struggling fledgling institution, which is only in its seventh year.  ”As permanent as that of any of us,” he replies.

For different reasons, in this world of furloughs, layoffs, downsizing, and the like, that reply feels about right today. Like Rowell, we are looking at an uncertain future, scarce resources, and seemingly insurmountable challenges.

We can think small, and engage in the narrow thinking that says what we have is ours alone, and that the boundaries of our institutions are absolute. We can see the world as a zero-sum problem and get back to solving the issues of our individual institutions.

Or we can look at the vast opportunities made available by an infrastructure Rowell would have died for — the Internet, teleconferencing, next-day mail, online social networks, social micropayments, collaborative software, regional travel, print-on-demand, cheap digital video, screencasting, crowdsourcing, mobile phones — and say what’s the opportunity here? And more especially — what is the opportunity if we use this technology and infrastructure not as discrete institutional assets, but as an architecture for us all to collectively advance the common good?

Joe had a mail system, a card catalog, and a good attitude, and he invented an InterLibrary Loan system out of that. We have technology undreamed of back then.

Surely we can think of something to do with it, right?

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