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07.14.10 Posted in Personal, Reading, kindle by Shelley

Summer break: a time for me to catch up on my recreational reading.

My summer classes aren’t exactly over, but with one class down, I actually have some spare time early this summer. I’ve been eager to dive into some fiction, but I had a really hard time selecting a book to read. I finally settled on a book I’ve picked up several times over the past few years but never got around to reading, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I downloaded the sample to my kindle a while back, but couldn’t get through it. I don’t know what made me try again, but I’m glad I did (I’m not usually into thrillers, but this book was engaging and character-driven, and I never got caught up in investigative details). So I spent the past couple of weeks reading the entire trilogy only to find out that the author, Stieg Larsson, died before the books were published, and therefore I will not have the opportunity to read more about the quirky and endearing computer genius, Lisbeth Salander. Crap.

I looked a bit into Larsson’s background and discovered that we share a birthday (August 15th) and a love for science fiction. What was most striking for me, was that writing these books, for Larsson, was sort of a hobby. He had written all three before he sought to publish them. Of course, Larsson had been a writer all his life, and he planned on ultimately penning 10 novels in the series, but it is interesting that he initially created his legacy for himself and his own pleasure. I think there is a lesson in that. And I’m certainly glad the books were published, but I’m a bit ambivalent about his girlfriend completing the fourth book…this thing may be better left to rest.

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Virtual Learning Spaces

07.01.10 Posted in Social Media by Shelley

I’m just kicking off a new project at Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) where I will [hopefully] be exploring ways to expand the idea of virtual learning spaces. A cursory google search of virtual learning spaces lists all kinds of spaces that students interact with on a traditional computer (think second life or blackboard), but lately I’ve been really intrigued by the idea that a physical space can also be a virtual space. I don’t mean replicas of spaces like you find in Second Life, but rather two distinct physical spaces, like virtual icing on the physical cake.

I’m a big William Gibson fan. A few years ago, I bought and read his latest book, Spook Country. In it, Gibson describes the idea of geohacking, which one of the characters uses to create location-based art. The idea is that you go to a physical space, put on some virtual reality goggles, and can see some memorialized event that occurred at some point in history at that specific location (the one explored in the book is River Phoenix’s death at the Viper Room in LA). Perhaps people were already doing this in 2005 when Gibson wrote his book, but certainly it is possible to do this type of thing now. There is something exciting about the idea that a sub reality exists within a physical space. This was not one of the reasons included in Read Write Web’s list of reasons people use location-based social networks, but I think it actually is a drawing factor of these services: it is a sort of sub-culture.

So, this is the impetus for my new project at MOSI. I’m not going to talk about how I plan to implement this virtual space until I am further along, but I have some ideas. The goal is to give visitors some sense of ownership in the physical space that is not achievable without a virtual experience. Plus, I hope that it deepens the overall experience at MOSI and perhaps improves the learning that happens within the physical space.

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What do I think? You Choose.

06.18.10 Posted in Media, Moxley, Social Media, education, elearning by Shelley

After reading The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age and “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age,” I was left feeling extremely optimistic and extremely frustrated. There were so many things to like about these reports, yet I found myself raging against many of the points the authors made. The upshot is that I think I’ve discovered that I’m not an extremist on either side of the technology in schools divide. As a result, texts that are extreme tend to irritate me, and I find myself wishing someone would take a more neutral (and maybe more realistic) stance. So, in honor of Cass Sunstein’s idea of the Daily Me (which, incidentally was not his idea but I like the way he used it), I’m going to let you choose which post you want to read: the post where I love these articles or the post where I don’t. If you liked these works, click the like button. If not, click the dislike button. Or maybe you want to live on the edge and switch it up. Whatever. Each will lead you to a post listing either the 5 reasons I like the ideas in these texts or the 5 reasons I dislike them.

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Share and Share A Lot

06.16.10 Posted in Moxley, Social Media by Shelley

I really loved Lawrence Lessig’s Remix. I especially liked his distinction between me-regarding and thee-regarding motivations. Lessig does a good job of describing why and how we contribute to the open internet. We are obviously in a state of flux. Tensions between for-profit and open (some of which profit and some of which do not) projects lead to a number of questions about motivation, sustainability, and fairness.

The problem with motivation is that motivations must be evaluated from a number of perspectives. First, we must consider the motivations of the contributor. What makes a person write scripts to beautify Second Life? I think Lessig does a serviceable job outlining these motivations by distinguishing between community spaces, collaborative spaces, communities, etc. Another consideration, though, is the motivation of the space creator. Lessig uses the Star Wars mashup site as an example. While fans were technically permitted to create derivative works, any works created would be owned by the franchise.

So, here motivation leads to questions of fairness. How much ownership should a fan creator have over derivative works? I get the feeling that fans are on the losing end of this battle. If Lucas and Co. declare widespread ownership and people still create, then what is the motivation to enable freedom of creation? Inevitably, questions of fairness will ultimately lead to questions of sustainability. At what point will fans refuse to create if they are not granted ownership of their works?

Perhaps there is a solution between an open and closed copyright system. If the purpose of copyright according to the Constitution is “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” then it seems to me the creators should have rights to their works. The problem, here, is that in mashup culture, we have two types of creators: the original creator and the mashup creator (and sometimes even a mashup of a mashup). The issue is obviously complex. But if we blindly allow mashups (or similar) of all works, then we risk devaluing the original works. Further, there seems to be a sense of entitlement driven by our materialistic culture; I want to use that work, so I should be able to. But if I come up with an idea, is it right for someone else to profit?

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems that recent attempts to create stricter copyright laws stem from the fear that others profiting from a particular creation will ultimately diminish the profitability of the initial work. Personally, I think this is a just concern. I also think that mashups are an important part of social culture as are fan sites. Yet fan sites make money in the form of advertising revenues and are generally building upon work that is currently popular (i.e. Harry Potter), so even the old copyright laws would not allow fans to use the works. The creative commons licensing allows for a variety of options…I especially like the share and remix with attribution but non-commercial purposes. I wonder, though, how this addresses issues of social capital, and what of fan sites that earn money? If social capital is increasing in value, how can that value be attributed to the original author. So, a person can’t make money of another’s work, but they can become famous…are we ok with that? Does this stifle creativity as some claim?

I interpreted some of the open examples cited in Lessig’s text as subtle manipulations of the open culture. Most of the early projects seem to have developed democratically: a free resource for the people by the people. As we move toward more of a hybrid economy, though, we need to be wary of for-profit enterprises looking to exploit the contributions of users willing to contribute for social reasons. While there may be a rise in the value of the social economy, the fiscal economy is still the driving force in American culture. I think as time goes on, we will see far more of these latter examples attempting to enter the market.

Oh, and in case you’re interested, Educause has several podcasts of Lessig: This is a video of his keynote at the 2009 Educause conference. His talk begins at 27:57. I like this version because it has a video of the talk and his slides in the same place. This podcast is an interview that covers much of the same information but is only 30 mins and can be downloaded to your iPod.

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Open

06.14.10 Posted in Moxley, Social Media by Shelley

I think the highlight of GLS 6.0 was the closing keynote by David Wiley. His talk, Openness and the Future of Education, was enlightening, amusing, and educational, everything a closing keynote should be. As luck should have it, I am also reading some other texts on open-sourcing this week, so I now have a few examples to share on the topic. Wiley talked about a professor in the US who, in 2008, claimed copyright on all of his lectures and declared student notes derivative works. The irony is that professors are meant to spread their knowledge, yet this professor is attempting to prevent the spread of his own knowledge. I have included Wiley’s entire slideshow at the end of this post, but two of the slides really stuck out to me. This is the idea that we are moving from a closed, isolated society to a connected, open one. In the second image, he simply changed the words then and now to education and everyday. Truly, it is clear to see that the thinking about openness of academic works is stuck in the yesterday of publishing.

While it is easy to see the value in sharing knowledge, there is a number of fears associated with openness that Wiley didn’t acknowledge. First and foremost there are issues of economics. This is something Steven Weber sort of takes on in his working paper, but at a much grander scale than most academics are concerned about. Putting aside concerns about tenure, there is still something authentic about a published book that a student or peer can hold in his or her hand. Weber talks about gift economies, but I’m not sure academics are lining up to gain social status for giving away intellectual work. We are comfortable giving enough to talk about our work at conferences, but even that is usually in the wake of a recently published or soon to be published article that solidifies our intellectual ownership and the value of the work. I suppose one could argue that open source does not infringe upon that intellectual ownership, but I think there are questions of value associated with open source. Many vocal proponents of open source are those who have already received tenure and/or established themselves as authorities on a given topic. While there is certainly value to the world in opening work to the public, I think we are still negotiating the value to the researcher in these academic situations.

In other situations, such as the open-source software situations Weber talks about, I think open source makes a lot of sense for many reasons. For one, open-source creates competition in the marketplace and likely causes proprietary companies to develop better products. It also gives programmers the opportunity to hone their skills and perhaps qualify for better jobs. Finally, it gives users who cannot afford or do not want proprietary products similar tools that they can then customize for their own needs. I do think that we are moving toward an open marketplace, but that doesn’t mean the transition will be easy! Check out Wiley’s TedTalk and slides below:

Here are Wiley’s slides. There are a lot of them, but it is totally worth the read-through:

Openness and the Future of Education

View more presentations from David Wiley.

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On Why I [heart] Henry Jenkins

06.14.10 Posted in Moxley, Social Media, conferences by Shelley

Last week I attended Games, Learning, and Society 6.0, a small conference about learning and games. One of the highlights was the Henry Jenkins keynote (and definitely the David Wiley keynote, which I’ll talk about in another post). In his white paper, Jenkins talks about the new skills required in our emerging participatory culture. Some time has elapsed since the publication of that paper and we are beginning to see the consequences (both good and bad) of participatory culture.

Jenkins said something that I want to think about more. He said that the connections made from becoming part of a network leads to a sense of empowerment. I want to think about this idea in two separate contexts: learning, which he discussed in the white paper, and political activism, the topic of his keynote. First, activism. Are we becoming a more activist society? Jenkins claims that the networks enabled by the internet allow people to come together around popular culture, and that what we choose to consume in popular culture says something about us politically. This convergence of fantasy and reality enables groups to leverage popular culture in order to get media attention for their causes. Check out this video he used as an example:

So, networks are empowering groups to take political action, and often, popular culture helps either emotionally connect the participants or facilitate the movement. Jenkins went on to talk about the ability of networks to mobilize a discourse and cause us to rethink the relationship between power and technology. Of course all this talk made me think about Cass Sunstein and his principle of polarization. So, on behalf of LIT 6934, I asked Jenkins what he thought of the Daily Me idea and the risk of further polarization of our society, this time around popular culture. I thought his response was pretty good but maybe a touch optimistic. He claimed that such polarization happens around political sites but that pop culture sites can actually mediate these tensions. He cited WOW (world of warcraft) as an example; in the 2008 election, WOW members were interviewed about their political affiliation (if you’re interested, check out this video). They swung for Obama, but there were a fair number of McCain supporters as well. In the end, a lot of political discussion happened on the forum, but in a less heated context. Despite this optimism, Jenkins did recognize the tendency toward polarization and indicated it was a problem that does not yet have a solution.

Jenkins did a good job of showing that networks are at least empowering for some people and can inspire political action. But I want to see if networks can be empowering in learning environments and inspire students to seek knowledge. Yet it seems impossible to equate the two. At least for now, we are talking about small movements of political action, and in education, small groups of empowered students (while perhaps inspiring) do not solve some of the deep-rooted issues of student participation. Jenkins states, “today’s children learn through play the skills they will apply to more serious tasks later” (p. 10), but a number of studies indicate that transfer of learning from play spaces is actually much more complex. We want to avoid creating a false sense of empowerment where students feel like they are mastering a certain set of skills only to find those skills are irrelevant offline. I think Jenkins is absolutely right that networks can be empowering, and I think that sense can be leveraged in educational settings, but I think we need to be careful about the claims we make, ensure that we are using technology in a way that truly fosters learning, and recognize that when we talk about participatory culture, we are excluding an important part of that culture.

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