Where I live, there are a lot of places to run, including a lot of Penn State land used for Agricultural Progress days in the summer. I love running there, not only because there is no traffic on the roads at Ag Progress during much of the year, but also because the up and down is challenging but fairly even.
Even better, lately they've been working on route 45, so all the traffic in one section of the road is gone--that's it--gone. A two lane, normally 45 - 55 mile-per-hour road (actually, most people go even faster than that), with fields on either side and the ridge off to the left. Great views, as long as you're not looking to get hit by a car, or by some idiot who decides to pass in a no-passing zone, causing you to leap into the ditches beside the fields. The construction period is pretty much running Nirvana to me, since I can avoid the slant at the side of the road and still have a good surface to run on.
So the last two days I've run down route 45 to the construction zone and back--that gives me a good 1-1.5 miles of the no-traffic-we're-constructing-here, another .5 miles of farm road through Ag Progress, and only a mile or so of actual-traffic-watch-out-road on the way back to my house.
But here's the thing. On both days--BOTH, mind you--at least one driver passed me going really fast toward the construction. At first, I thought perhaps those drivers didn't see the clearly marked "Road Closed" signs they'd passed, but now I think it's something deeper.
You see, it goes kind of like this:
Runner is running in left-hand lane of road. Car zooms by, Driver looking at Runner like she's an idiot to be running in the middle of the left-hand lane. Driver turns back to driving, only to see that road really is closed. Driver slams on brakes, managing to stop short of the actual barrier.
Driver pauses. Driver continues to pause. Driver pauses some more. Then, slooowwwwly, Driver backs into a driveway, slooowwwwly turns around, and slooowwwwly passes Runner going the other way. Driver now avoids looking at Runner at all costs, in order to preserve his/her dignity.
Interestingly, I really see this as an analogy regarding how lots of people (even me, sometimes) look at life. There are rules, but surely they don't apply to me. I'm different. I'm special. I'll just ask them to make an exception. Only, see? You can't. 'Cause Dude, the road is closed. There is no exception, no excuse, and no way to avoid using the detour. It's a little reminder that none of us is too special to be the exception all the time, that the rules are often there for a reason, and that, essentially, we're all equal in some things. The road will no more open for Steve Jobs or Barack Obama than it will for me. And that's nice.
I've spent most of my running time now trying to think up a sign I can hold up to drivers who learn they are not the exception. Something like, "Welcome to your Humanity!" or "Come back soon, and learn who you really are!" Or something. Could be fun.
After reading Cole's most recent post, I went back and read the one prior to it for context. Taken together, I think they both make some really important points. The first post discussed his attendance at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tech Forum, and the second was a further reflection on that experience. I remember being rather angry at (and dismissive of, I'll admit) a lot of the comments that followed the Chronicle article that was written about Cole's presentation, which was entitled "Web 2.0 Classrooms Versus Learning."
"Versus?" I thought. You've got to be freaking kidding me.
I frankly didn't like how superior reading the comments to that article made me feel. What I was doing was no different than the audience member who said to Cole, "If that is scholarship, we are all doomed." Life is never that simple, and I don't like it when folks make anything an "us" vs. "them" kind of debate. To me, that's the worst kind of sloppy thinking. So what was it that made some people so seeminly dismissive of what Cole was trying to say?
After thinking about it for a bit, I realized that I was again comparing it to the Clay Shirky blog post I've been cogitating over for the past few weeks. In there, he says,
"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. . . .
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution."
I honestly think that a lot of folks in the academy are just plain scared of what's coming. It IS a revolution, and when people say that Web 2.0 is not scholarship, or that it's fluffy, or even that it's irresponsible, I see that as a form of fear. The old stuff is starting to look broken, and we haven't yet figured out what systems and institutions will replace it. Or even if they will be replaced.
Professor X may not have really thought of Web 2.0 as scholarship, because it just may require him to examine just what he's been doing all this time. If we use as analogy the revolution Shirky discusses, that of the invention of the printing press, Professor X is a scribe. I'll bet you that there were plenty of scribes sitting around talking about how printed books weren't "really" books, but it didn't save them. That kind of conversation isn't helpful, and it certainly didn''t give the scribes a place in the new world order. I think we should aim to do better.
Cole says, "I am committing myself to the notion of the conversation and the notion of breaking through the bullshit walls so many of us (and I am in that crowd) lean on -- walls that make us safe and don't push us to work towards shared meaning and understanding"--and I know he means it. I also think that Penn State is having these conversations in ways that are useful, even if change doesn't happen at a pace that might satisfy the radicals amongst us (and I'd like to be included in the group, please). But it also reminds me that I need to keep my energy focused too--on having real conversations instead of de-politicizing everything I say so as not to offend.
What I'd like to do is to strike a balance in order to get past the fear on both sides: the fear of revolution and the fear of offending, the fear of losing status and the fear of losing place. What's coming is going to be a great leveler of hierarchies, and in some ways, I think we're all going to need to hold hands and run into the flatness together.
I've been meaning to post this for nearly a week, but I've been struggling with how to express all the thoughts in my head around these ideas. Not just the ideas themselves, but also the fact that what I'm going to say here is probably going to irritate some people. I don't like to make folks mad, but there are things that need to be discussed in higher education--and they need to be discussed by organizations, not just by students in classrooms. So I guess I should also do the little caveat that "the thoughts here are my own, and not necessarily reflective of my institution or any of its sub-units." ☺
Recently, David Parry (@academicdave) posted a link to a blog post by Clay Shirky with the following Tweet:
"Today's academic read: @cshirky on the future of newspapers and journalism-If you change a few words he is also talking about the university"
I like the way Shirky thinks, and I always find Dave's comments intriguing, so I read the blog post almost immediately--and nothing has really been the same since. (See "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable") The following section is a brief summary of his thoughts. Trust me, I will get to the education bit.
You see, Shirky's premise is that newspaper and media professionals saw the Web coming, but made the erroneous assumption that just giving themselves a "digital facelift" would be enough to carry them through. That the newspapers tried many different models to try to make money through the Internet, even as their subscriber base was shrinking, but that the "unthinkable scenario" was one with which they weren't prepared to deal.
The unthinkable scenario, according to Shirky, was that the different models the newspapers tried (subscriptions, micropayments, walled gardens) didn't work, and that sustaining traditional models of copyright not only wasn't going to work, but, per a quote from Gordy Thompson, "suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off."
At its essence, Shirky's argument is that the advent of the free-flowing nature of the Internet, and the ways people like to share, is making the print newspaper business obsolete. But the business itself refused to see it. Per Shirky:
"When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. . . . One of the effects [of this] on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away. . . .
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem."
He also compares the time we're in now to the time period just after the invention of the printing press. Elizabeth Eisenstein's book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, notes that we are pretty clear on what life was like prior to the printing press (circa 1400), and also pretty clear about what it was like around 1600. But what did it look like during the revolution? During the great change? It turns out that that time, like this one, was chaotic. "Old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy."
"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing."
I'm making this longer than it should be, especially since I am really hoping all of you will read the post yourselves. The thoughts that have been churning in my mind since reading it are all over the place, and have to do with not only where I currently work, but also around the whole idea of higher education.
How can our institution respond to the revolution? Heck, forget the institution--how can my division respond? In a world where information is plentiful, where much of it is free, and where informal learning can occur just in time and wherever you want, is the academy still relevant? Credentialing is one thing, but how would that work in an era of free an open information?
And about that online learning thing--is that, too, a "digital facelift" for higher education that will ultimately be a model that doesn't work?
Another thought I had was around the idea of experimentation. If indeed "The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place," then are we trying enough new and creative ideas in higher education that we might have a chance of getting some of the "new stuff" we need? Or are we creating "innovation departments" that are shunted to the side and easy to ignore? To that end, how in the heck do we do wild experiments when we sit inside large, complex bureaucracies? Particularly ones where funding can be an issue?
This is not to say that things aren't happening at my institution. One division is especially good at thinking creatively and providing platforms for students and faculty to engage in ways that are vastly different than we used to. There are also experiments happening with open educational resources from the offering side of things. But is what we're currently doing enough?
The basic issue for me is that we can be slow to change, and we can't afford to be. When experimentation on a large scale is difficult, and "looking like" others is what institutions value (this may be especially true in the case of tenure-seekers), then we are missing what Shirky might call "octavo volume" opportunities. The man who invented the octavo volume didn't know at the time that it would make literacy cheaper and more portable--but it turned out to be a "key innovation."
Don't get me wrong--I love my job, and I love where I work. I get juice from the idea of getting up every day and trying to move forward an agenda I believe in--learning, no matter who you are or where you live. But that having been said, I think we need to start asking the hard questions of ourselves--including whether or not we should exist at all. If the idea that we might "go away" is not on the table, then what else are we missing? Do I think that my division, my larger unit, or even the university itself is going away any time soon? No. Do I think we're in real danger of obsolescence if we don't start really talking about the elephant that sits quietly in the corner? Absolutely.
So here's my attempt to start the conversation. Have at it. ☺
I was, however, very pleasantly surprised. Very. The session dealt with storytelling in organizations. Not just the dominant stories told by the organizations themselves, but also the shadow stories that cut in some way against the stories the organization tells about itself.
The dominant story of your organization can be found all around you--in the layout of your office building, the placement of people inside their offices (or cubes), in how you are greeted by the reception desk, to the posters, art, and other images on its walls. Look around you: what is your organization’s dominant story?
But is it the only story?
The need for both dominant and shadow (liminal) narratives is a large part of Tyler’s work. The dominant story need not always be bad (and in fact at PSU is quite good), but we lose something by not attending to the shadow stories around us. In fact, the greater the dissonance between the shadow stories and the dominant ones, the more important it is for us to pay attention.
How do organizations do this? Well, though that’s the topic for next week’s session, I actually have a few thoughts about how it’s done now. Let me tell you a story...
Once upon a time, ‘back in the day’ if you will, I worked at an organization where the production of courses for distant students was paramount. Pressures during particular times of the year were very high, and while the organization was really good at saying, “we support you--we’ll back you,” when push came to shove it was often “we’ll just have to manage this one time, for the good of the order...” There was a lot of turnover, because folks felt so totally overworked, felt that they couldn’t take time to professionally develop, and a host of other reasons.
Enter one of my co-workers. A creative, out-of-the box (box? we don’t need no stinkin’ box!) thinker, she hatched a creative idea that took root and blossomed beyond our wildest imaginings. We launched a little “news” magazine called The Garlic. Modeled after The Onion, it was an underground publication, basically making fun of everything and everyone around us in the most ridiculous way. We put the AVP in a Lenin hat, created a fictional Frankenstein of a ‘perfect’ employee, and also wrote one story where the director needed to attend ‘vegetable sensitivity training’ because he kept offering people produce from his garden. In short, it was ridiculous. Full of hyperbole and exaggeration.However, the items we made fun of were things that frustrated us at work (well, maybe except for the produce. That was just funny). Course tanking in enrollments? Simple! Write a story where we enroll everyone attending a football game, and the problem is fixed! Subject-matter experts not delivering content on time? Put in an ad to “grow your own faculty!” Overcrowding an issue? Photoshop your own “bunk desks” to create more space!
Grow your own faculty!
The issues were hilarious, and of course, word got out. However, instead of shutting us down, we were encouraged this medium as an outlet. It was fun, it was safe (being behind password-protection), and better yet, it gave the administrative types the ability to see what irked us without it becoming personally threatening. I’d like to say that some of the items written about were taken care of due to the stories we crafted, but I don’t know if that was ever the case. It did, however, give us a creative outlet for our shadow stories that we didn’t have before. And it prevented those from blowing up in anyone’s face.
It also created one of the most collegial and cohesive work environments I’d ever been in. Everyone had a story, and ideas poured in. Which brings me to the main point I’m hoping we cover next week--how do we create social spaces constructed for listening to these shadow stories in a way that helps and enables the organization to succeed? And how do we build the trust needed so the storytellers come forth?
Twitter continues to build community in the spaces I seem to be occupying more and more. I was first introduced to this space by Brad Kozlek way back in November of 2006. There was some flurry around this platform at PSU in early 2007, but after the TLT Symposium that year, it seemed to fall off for a lot of folks. This year, however, and again before the Symposium, it really seemed to take off. The community of users around PSU has grown significantly, and I have found connections between folks whom I might never have met otherwise.
Micala's Photo of Her Tweet Meet Nametag
The community spontaneously had what we are calling Tweet Meet yesterday at lunch. It grew out of an idea from James Endres Howell Tweeting a less-than-enticing meal last week. I'd just come from a very good lunch at a local Chinese restaurant, and we ended up deciding (again, via Twitter) to have a lunch there the following week. At that point, Dana Carlisle Kletchka suggested that the Twitnesses (James's term--and I love it) should also be able to come. And thus it began.
We ended up having 12 folks from around campus joining around a table at the same Chinese restaurant, discussing the nature of Twitter, community, and identity. The great part about this, at least to me, was that no one at the table knew everyone else at the table. Given that, there were still some surprising connections between people whom I never thought would know each other. The connections occurred in a myriad of ways, too, from having the same hairdresser to working on Second Life projects together, to meeting over other social networking technologies that might be used for students at Penn State, to just being Twitter friends.
Cole Camplese, who is teaching a graduate class on community, identity, and design, was there, and he talked a lot about how his students are finding the Twitter space a useful one to make deeper connections with each other, even though they occupy the same physical classroom for his class. This is the most useful thing I'm finding, as well--Twitter as a way to create and deepen connections that can also occur in the physical spaces I occupy.
Note: I still owe my post on the Symposium. Haven't forgotten, but just haven't gotten there yet. Maybe Twitter also appeals to me because 140 characters is a lot less pressure, huh?
The Pirate's Dilemma
Traditional games have players in the same place playing the same game. Online games generally have distributed players playing the same game on the same site. Web "games" (for lack of a better term) have players in the same place playing the same game on (possibly) different sites (e.g., when you have a resident class do an online scavenger hunt). Here, you have totally distributed players and teams, all playing the same game--but on different sites. There is some aggregation here (like the Colorwars site itself), but the aggregation is the sole means of keeping the game together.
Let's examine the first challenge. I'm to take a picture of myself in my team uniform throwing a rock, paper, or scissors. I upload the photo to Flickr and tag it in a particular way. Tomorrow evening we have a bracket style tournament to see who continues. I'm assuming that they'll use the tags to pull these things in and determine in some technical way who goes "up against" whom.
This to me is really mashing up (for lack of a better term) the concepts of Web 2.0, community, online gaming, and a host of other things (silliness among them). But I like it. It's taking the scavenger hunt/webquest idea one further. It remains to be seen how it'll all turn out, but I'm really looking forward to it!
From the 2006 TED conference. A talk from Sir Ken Robinson
about creativity and education.
Robinson defines creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have
value." This comes about by using an interdisciplinary way of seeing
things. In other words, creative people are generalists, not specialists. But
what are we training people to be?
The talk information notes: “Sir Ken
Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an
education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it.
“Why don't we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it's
because we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative
thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies--far from being cultivated
for their energy and curiosity--are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible
consequences.”
Robinson says, “The education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mine the Earth—for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us.” What should be the future of education, and how can we stop educating children out of their creativity?
Video is 20 minutes long, but well worth every minute.
Interview with Scott Gray
