Untitled and Undecided

I don’t read Wired that much but this article by Daniel Roth was kind of provocative. It presents a few schools where some reforms have been implemented that would try to make kids all “geeks.” Okay, so that’s not particularly provocative. The interesting part to me is how the means to this end is to break down youth culture in the school and to surround them by adults throughout the day:

But more important, Rosenstock keeps the students surrounded by adults. There are no teachers’ bathrooms or lounges. Parents roam the halls. And the students are required to present their work to outsiders. This, it turns out, is the key to geekifying education. “A big chunk of the school experience is having them hang out with the adults they could imagine becoming,” says private-equity manager Tom Vander Ark, former head of education investments for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a onetime school superintendent. “A big high school has a youth-owned culture. You’ve got to break that.”

Huh. Rather than see schools as being the proxy for a particular style of “adult culture” with many  kids getting the shaft, it turns it completely around and sees that youth culture pervades schools. That’s reminiscent of Paul Willis’ argument in Learning to Labour (Put rather poorly: Youth have some agency in their path to the class reproduction that is a product of schooling). I don’t know who Daniel Roth is or if the schools that he’s talking about are as rosy as he presents them, but this really is getting my brain going.

As an aside, perhaps the school referred to above might also break down typical “adult culture” in the school as well and perhaps that makes as big a difference as the break down in youth culture? After all, the adults lose their bathrooms, lounges, and have to be around kids all day. A study of the adults at that kind of school would be really interesting to compliment a study of where “youth culture” get relocated.

I am one of the co-organizers of a workshop being held at the ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition in Berkeley at the end of October: Understanding the Creative Conversation – From Modeling to Engagement.

We particularly looking for ways to increase the conversation between technologists, social scientists, and those in the humanities. Creativity is a rather ambiguous concept and it opens up a space for conversation from people in a lot of different disciplines, so don’t let the “cognition” scare you if you prefer other approaches.

Key dates:
- submission of position statements deadline: August 12, 2009
- notification of acceptance: August 19, 2009
- workshop date: October 27, 2009

Please let me know if you have any questions (dperkel (@) ischool (.) berkeley (.) edu). And please forward along to faculty, students, practitioners, or others who might be interested.

Today, Megan Finn and I will be kicking off the first class of a six-week course on the History of Information. We have adapted the syllabus from the class taught annually by Professors Paul Duguid and Geoff Nunberg in order to accommodate teaching a 17 week class in only six weeks. As of right now, we have 49 students enrolled plus more on the waiting list. Let’s hope we don’t scare anyone off today…

Here is the class website

On today’s Inside Higher Ed we get some of the backstory on a service that offers students variable length corrupted files to turn into professors as they scramble to finish papers late.

Some quotes I enjoyed:

“Cheating is not the answer to procrastination! – Corrupted-Files.com is!” — The point is that somehow students face a simple choice when faced with a deadline they haven’t planned for: either turn in a ripped off paper or buy time with excuses. This site gives you better excuses. Obviously those are the only choices the site’s creator wants people to think about. Sadly, all of students’ other options aren’t even mentioned in the article. I guess I could list a few, but maybe I’ll let people think for themselves on this one.

“I used the corrupted file excuse back in my college days (I’m 25) as I started my first business at 19 so I didn’t have much time to do my schoolwork. When I couldn’t get an extension, I sent my professors a corrupted file to buy me time. I know this was not the most ethical thing but as a young entrepreneur, I did not have much of a choice as I valued my employees well above my academics.”  Well, this is America. Who can argue with that logic? The phrase “young entrepreneur” just warms the heart.

“Who are the best customers? “Not to anyone’s surprise, but my best clients are from Ivy and top tier schools. I guess the more perfect people think you are, the more likely in life you are to cheat to keep that perception.”" Hmmm… wonder if Berkeley students would do something like this? I’m teaching this summer and I better get my corrupted file detector working.

This advice that “The only way to learn to write is to write, so write every day!” is not new to me at this point in my PhD career. My colleagues and I discuss it all the time. But, it’s hard advice to follow sometimes. And often people just say this but don’t show their examples of the unedited, unfiltered, stuff they say they write when they write something everyday.

A recent post by Ken Plummer on the Writing Across Boundaries series provides such an example. The example is a nice short paragraph he says he wrote between 7 and 7:30 am one Sunday morning while visiting a friend. The point of the paragraph is that maybe social scientists should try to write more like poets do. He acknowledges poets’ own “world of pretense” (to match social scientists’ “puffed up pretense,” but then goes on to say that the lesson from poetry is that they make every word, every syllable, count. I like this view of what my writing should aspire to, though I don’t think–and I don’t think Plummer thinks–that our research papers should aspire to be poetry:

Sociology spends as many words as it can possibly use (as many as it takes for a Ph.D., a journal article or a book) – long, complicated, incomprehensible, often neologistic words – in searching for its truth. The poet by contrast elects not to waste a syllable or sound. Think of the words you use and make every word matter.

Nevertheless, as I write this blog post, I can’t help but wonder if choosing poetry as a comparison adds more confusion than it’s worth. After all, there may be more about poetry that we should try to avoid in our papers than what we should choose to copy. Poets, it seems to me, obsesses over the visual and aural properties of words and phrases in ways that we may not want to even come near to.

(However, Ray McDermott’s recent talk at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco gives me pause here. Essentially, he performed a spoken word analysis of John Dewey and Paul Radin that was quite powerful. Hard to say more… you had to be there. Which might be the reason why it’s not a “paper”. Though both are pragmatists and Plummer’s short post is partially titled “pragmatics”….hmmmm… I’m losing everyone here.)

When I started to write this post, I thought that while it was nice to see one of these examples of “what you write at 7 in the morning before giving me advice to write every day” was helpful, it might have been a particularly intimidating example because it’s so well put and so profound. But, maybe (maybe! I haven’t done the analysis either) Plummer’s point about poetry is a little off and that’s what makes it an even better example than I thought.

The Digital Youth Final Report has been launched. Apparently, the press has made it’s move on this (NYT, SFGate). More to come…

http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report-announcement

People always tell me that any crisis of confidence I have as I do my research and writing is likely to be shared by others. Intellectually, I know this. Emotionally, I often don’t experience it this way. Nevertheless, it is refreshing to hear from a scholar and writer of Marilyn Strathern’s experience and quality sum up exactly how I have been feeling during my last several writing projects:

I write all the time, but what marks off new tasks from old (or going over old ground) is finding myself plunged into something close to despair.   I lose confidence, my self-esteem plummets, it is clear that everyone has already said things better, and it had been quite absurd to take on a task that now seems insuperable.

In my case, I don’t “write all the time” (though that would be a good idea…), but the rest resonates.

The “gap” between “between what needs doing and the capacity to do it,” Strathern says, “can actually be a prerequisite to writing at all.” They can be the “threshhold of creativity” when:

…past certainties melt away, and everything one thought was at one’s fingertips (materials, notes, analyses) slips out of grasp.  For myself, at least, it is climbing out of the crevasse, emotionally speaking, that is the writing.   I am solving a problem not (just) on the desk, but somewhere else in my life, while at the same time knowing that without the urgency of that dissolution the writing, on the desk, won’t do the gathering work it is meant to do.   The process of writing is dealing with the crisis.

This is wonderful stuff to stew on. I love the idea of each new significant writing project being a moment of significant crisis. It certainly has felt that way to me, most recently on that paper I posted last week. Nevertheless, while it’s comforting to know that I am in much better company that I previously might have imagined, I still am not sure I want to embrace crisis every few months or so. Perhaps the challenge is to learn to enjoy crisis and avoid Strathern’s feeling of “despair.”

Anyways, it’s a short essay called “Outside desk-work“. I am now looking forward to the rest of this new series coming out of Durham University.

I am off to London to attend the Fifth Anniversary Conference of Media@lse, which is the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics.

I’ll be presenting a paper that is part of ongoing dissertation research. It’s called Peer pedagogy in an interest-driven community: The practices and problems of online tutorials. I co-authored the paper with Becky Herr-Stephenson who has been a colleague of mine on the Digital Youth project for the past three years (and a current collaborator on the MacArthur Foundation’s efforts to create a Digital Media and Learning Networked Studio).

Here is the abstract of the paper:

While many have celebrated youth participation in online activities as an empowering opportunity for socialization, creative expression, and learning, how this participation plays out in practice is not well understood. In this paper, we consider the ways in which peers teach and learn through the creation and posting of tutorials within a self-described online community of artists and media producers. We describe the practices associated with the production of tutorials in terms of genres of participation, modes of engagement with new media. Within the genres of participation framework, creating tutorials can be seen as a way to earn reputation and demonstrate expertise within the alternative status economy of a specific interest-driven community. However, we also show that tutorials can be a source of tension between participants in such a community, as members may view tutorials and their relationships to learning and improving one’s craft in contradictory ways.

The talk that I am going to give on Monday will mainly cover the second half of the paper–the point about tensions over the value of tutorials. While it seems that tutorials on deviantART are generally fairly popular and valuable to members of the site, it was interesting to hear that not everyone feels that way. We are still trying to figure out what it all means. Therefore the paper is still a work-in-progress in many ways and we welcome any feedback.

Having a page “under construction” seems very very old school to me. But, as I move my blog and site over to some new space at school, then under construction is the best way to describe it. Well, it’s a way.

This past week, NPR has been doing a series on The E-mail age. I haven’t listened to all of them. In fact, I found the series serendipitously because of a story I was looking for that I heard on the radio this morning on Chinese Fans of American TV Shows, which I may try to come back to in a later post.

I listened to a few of the email stories that struck me because of their relevance to Digital Youth research.

First up: Connected Kids Talk to Many at Once. That seemed to be an old topic, but maybe there’s something new here based on the provocative abstract:

Beyond e-mail, there are ever more ways to connect and communicate: text messages, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, IM and, for the old fashioned, phone calls. Help! How many connections can one person manage? How do people decide what is the best way to keep in touch?

The piece is rather strange. It’s four minutes long and there are two people featured by the journalist, Laura Sydell. The first person is actually not a kid at all, but an adult, Lenny who is 35 and is a marketer at a “Silicon Valley tech firm.” From Lenny, we hear a bit about all of the different technologies for communication that he uses and how he segments those he uses depending on situation. He describes how he can have “multiple layers of conversation” as a part of his job (Skype calls with clients, while text messaging colleagues at work, etc.). Sydell reports that when she arrived he had three IM windows open at the same time. Apparently, he used six different technologies of communication in the forty five minutes that Sydell spent with him.

This is actually quite interesting, but so far, nothing to do with kids.

Almost a minute and a half into the story the voice of Stanford Communications professor Clifford Nass comes in and talks about how at one point psychologists would have said that these kinds of multiple conversations shouldn’t be able to happen–due to “interference” which can lead to “mixed up” and “chaotic conversation” for the brain to process–but they are. Okay, sounds reasonable: theories of communication and psychology need to be refined and reconsidered (besides, sometimes I feel like my head is exploding when I have too many conversations going at the same time).

But here’s the funny transition, about halfway through, and where kids finally come into the story:

Nass says he and other social scientists suspect that many of us are walking around a little mixed up. But, it may be different for people who adapt to it versus those who are growing up with it.

Enter 16 year old Sonia (or Sonja?). Sonia is ending an IM conversation when Sydell walks into the room and, like Lenny, has a few up on the screen of her computer at the same time. She’ll talk to up to six people at once, we learn from Sonia. We also hear that she uses different communications for difference purposes, depending on the context. So far, sounds a lot like Lenny.

Lydell says that even Sonia can get overwhelmed. Going back to the point of the story, though, we didn’t hear Lenny getting overwhelmed. Not that he doesn’t, but we didn’t hear about it. (I should add that I’m not sure Sonia’s quote really supports the interpretation of “overwhelmed.” Decide for yourself around the 3:20 mark.)

The piece ends with Nass making some good points about how, historically, communication media, for the most part, don’t replace each other when they are invented. Though that point has been made before it’s worth repeating over and over again until people stop claiming otherwise. Thus, it seems like that all of us will have to deal with more and more choices of media going forward.

Okay. I am still trying to figure out how this story ended up with the title that it did and what it says about any differences between kids and adults.

To recap: here’s what I heard, at a little more abstract level.

1. 35 year old marketing guy is using many different communications media, has reasons for using different ones with different people, and often has many conversations at the same time.
2. Researchers once thought this not possible. In fact, maybe adult brains are still a little mixed up by all of it (implication: Lenny is an outlier). Ah, but what about those “growing up” (different than “adapting”) with all of this?
3. Answer: 16 year old Sonia is is using many different communications media, has reasons for using different ones with different people, and often has many conversations at the same time.
4. Conclusion? We will continue to have lots of choices in communication technologies going forward and, well, we’ll learn to deal with them.

I think I know what Sydell (or is she paraphrasing Nass and the other social scientists?) are trying to say when they differentiate “adapt” vs. “growing up with” but I’m not sure that this distinction would really hold up as we unravel what “growing up with” really means. Superficially, sounds like “adapt” just a younger age, but adult brains, as I keep hearing more and more, don’t just stop developing. I can’t really get into this here and now, but it’s worth thinking about some more.

Even though I really enjoyed the responses that Lydell elicited from her interviewees and even liked the little concluding points offered by Nass, what bothers me about this story, is that it seems to be designed to fit into the larger narrative of how adults and kids are so different from one another when it comes to technology. I won’t say more on my thoughts on that now (mainly because they are largely incoherent and I’m still working through them). But, titling this story “Connected Kids Talk to Many at Once” and then trying to turn the story on a difference between those who adapt vs. those who grow up with seems kind of sloppy considering how what Sydell reported on doesn’t seem to fit at all.

An obvious alternative framing might have been: given all that we have heard about kids and adults being so different when it comes to technology, how are Sonia and Lenny so similar? In what other ways might they be different?