Untitled and Undecided

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.

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

Henry Jenkins recently came to speak to the School of Information (audio here). While much of the talk was on his take on the notion of new media literacies, the beginning of the talk was more focused on the problematic concepts of “Digital Native” and “Digital Immigrants.” He recently wrote about the these metaphors that both academics and the popular press often invoke to refer to a sense that that the consequences of “those kids today” being born into an internet-ed world make their brains fundamentally different from those of their parents and the rest of us adults.

So, even though I’ve been lucky to have had easy access to a computer since I was in elementary school, have had difficulty writing essays in long-hand for the past ten years, and my laptop and I are best of friends, I am still an immigrant to some digital world. Jenkins talks about the power this metaphor had for him at one point but also why he can no longer use it. Not only does it rely on “out of date assumptions about immigrants” (the not-digital kind), the implications, he says are dangerous:

Yet, I worry that the metaphor may be having the opposite effect now — implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other.

I agree with Jenkins here. Additionally, however, I would add that the metaphors also imply a universal notion of what “kids today” do. This to me is just as silly as trying to describe what the rest of us do in universal terms.

One of the themes that the researchers on the Digital Youth project have discussed for the past three years is how complex the world of young people looks when you start to compare across situations and forms of technology use. We have been delighted and surprised by both the differences and similarities between what participants in our studies say and do and things that we thought and did in our pre-Internet days. For example, Christo Sims found at that…surpise…kids in rural California still value all of the freedoms that come with getting a drivers license (even though they should be able to do everything through the internet…right?). Starting our research with the assumptions that go along with the rhetoric of a generation gap would have been costly.

Recently, a UK study made some empirical findings to help bolster this critique of the notion of digital natives and digital immigrants, of the obvious generation gap.

Besides having one of the greatest report covers I’ve seen for an academic publication, some of the findings were quite interesting. The researchers used data presented in other studies (surveys by other organizations, such as Ofcom) and did their own research on how the so-called “Google Generation” and older people used various library services (note that the term “Digital Native” predates the rise to prominence of Google so this “generation” may be even younger, but it’s hard to say how to relate the terms precisely…). Their conclusion: the idea of a generation gap is overblown and misunderstood. When there are differences amongst age groups, they note that they don’t know what can be attributed to generational issues or what can be attributed to moving through different life stages:

This is a powerful reminder that people have different information needs at different points in their lives. There are very very few controlled studies that account for age and information seeking behaviour systematically: as a result there is much mis-information and much speculation about how young people supposedly behave in cybersace.

Later, they point out that while it is “generally true” that younger users are “more competent with technology” (confidence level: medium), they also believe that “older users are catching up fast.” Note that they don’t present empirical results that justify this sense of “catching up,” but it seems no more far-fetched than the idea that young people “naturally” are more competent than their parents.

They have several pages addressing the usual claims made about younger generation vs. their elders and they shoot down most of them (see pages 18-20).

Here, their conclusions actually make a great deal of sense:

“In a real sense, we are all the Google generation now: the demographics of internet and media consumption are rapidly eroding this presumed generational difference. The evidence indicates that more people across all age groups are using the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies widely and for a variety of purposes…

In many ways the Google generation label is increasingly unhelpful: recent research finds that it is not even accurate within the cohort of young people that it seeks to stereotype.”

There’s a lot of other stuff worth checking out in the study, especially if you are a librarian or educator.

Read the full report (warning: large PDF).
Go to the “Google Generation” project page.

I recently read Jenny Cook-Gumperz’s historical account of the relationship between schooling and literacy (”Literacy and Schooling” in The Social Construction of Literacy*). Drawing on the work of other historians of literacy, Cook-Gumperz argues that history shows that widespread reading and writing in Europe and the U.S. occurred prior to the advent of schooling and formal institutions to teach them. There are two components to this account that I found particularly surprising and compelling because they directly speak to some of the contemporary debate and discussions–both in academia and in school policy makers’ offices–concerning the role of new media, schooling, and what might be meant by “new literacies.”

The first has to do with the scope of the term “literacy.” There are a number of research traditions concerning literacy, such as information literacy, media literacy, and others. Researchers over the past few decades have started to take note of the emergence of multiple forms of literacy, rather than just one. Furthermore, even outside of research people have started to talk about “visual literacy,” “media literacy,” “math literacy” (or numeracy), “computer literacy,” “web literacy,” and others. So today we have a sense that literacy should be always thought of as literacies, in the plural. There are multiple forms of literacy and depending on local contexts, the skills, knowledge, and tools that people bring to the practice of literacy are also multiple. What Cook-Gumperz shows in her work is that prior to “professional schooling,” almost 200 years ago, there was also a sense that “literacy” meant many things. In other words, it was schooling, or “schooled literacy,” that prior to the last couple of decades that gave us the sense that literacy was just about the abstract ability to read and write, a unitary thing.

So what were people reading and writing in the centuries prior to schooling? This question of form and content of reading and writing practices leads me to the second part of Cook-Gumperz’s overall argument that is key in light of today’s discussion of new media and literacy. Widespread literacy in Europe and America centered around multiple forms of popular culture: “broadsheets, ballads, and political tracts provided a key means for political discussion and recreation…” (p. 24). In fact it was the perceived fear of dangerous effects of popular culture by the elite coupled with the perceived liberating and empowering effects of reading and writing by others that paradoxically came together to fuel the movement towards the establishment of schools that would teach literacy.

In contemporary debate, especially regarding the internet, media production software, and other tools in the hands of public, many have noted the relationship between these new forms of media and popular culture and have hoped to find a way to harness the enthusiasm for popular culture and somehow institutionalize it through schools. The goal: find a way to incorporate what motivates young people outside of the classroom into the classroom, both in terms of the kind of subject matter and the technologies that young people today are interested in.

My point here is not to comment on whether or not this mission can be successful or not, or even if it’s a good approach to thinking about learning. Rather, the point is to raise the question of whether or not we are a semblance of repetition of history. Certainly, many are concerned and afraid of what negative effects new media and technologies are having on today’s youth. And others laud the possibility that new technologies and popular culture can and will unlock their creative imaginations. Finally, there are others that will see the use of these new media as critical to the skills required to compete in the so-called “new economy” workforce. I can’t help read Cook-Gumperz’s account of the Western history of literacy and wonder: if these interests all align and particular uses of new media become validated by society through institutionalization and schooling will we see a return to a more singular view of literacy, one that broadens the acceptable tools of literacy but not the acceptable social practices, that some scholars have been fighting for decades?

*Note, I read the chapter in the first edition. Apparently, she has spent some time re-writing the version for this second edition, but my understanding is that the basic argument is the same.

At the end of last semester, Ryan, Megan, and I sat around and talked about how it would be useful to write a nice semester recap, a chance to reflect on what we’ve been up to. I usually do this as a sort of “progress report” for my advisors, but Ryan said that he was thinking about blogging his, and I found what he wrote really interesting; even though I thought I knew everything he did this semester, it’s a lot different to read someone’s reflections than just hear what they have to say everyday about what has been going on. So, I thought I’d follow suit and write my own Fall 2006 recap.

When classes started again, it didn’t feel like I was at a beginning. I was in the middle of writing human subjects proposals for various Digital Youth projects and preparing for my first conference presentation at the DREAM Conference of Digital Media and Informal Learning. The conference was held at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. It was attended mainly by Europeans, the majority of whom were from Scandanvia. It was a great experience for me, because I was so unfamiliar with most of their work. I also met many interesting doctoral students, some with work that surprisingly similar to mine, such as Oystein Gilje’s, and others that were quite different. I really enjoyed the presentation of this paper on game design and toy theater by Jacqueline Reid-Walsh.

My presentation on my “Copy and Paste Literacy” paper went well, in that I got some good feedback from people with a lot more experience than I do. Some people really liked the ideas presented, some people didn’t get it, and I think some people thought that I was kind of out of my element. I’m trying out Slideshare and thought I’d include my presentation (warning: without notes, I’m not sure how useful it is…):

(As an aside, the “Copy and Paste Show” on Rhizome decided to include my paper on the reading list. The rest of the show is a bit more interesting, though. Check it out…)

Usually people say that the best part of a conference are the conversations that happen in the halls and the connections you can make between your work and others. That was a great part of my time in Denmark, but I have to say that my favorite moments were hearing some of the keynote talks, especially the keynote roundtable where James Gee, Julian Sefton-Green, Sonia Livingstone, and Glynda Hull spoke very candidly about their views on topics. One of which took aim at the title of the conference.

Already, I had begun to pick up a lot of chatter of people questioning the continuing usefulness of the distinctions between “formal learning,” “informal learning,” and “non-formal learning.” Julian Sefton-Green (author of the 2004 Futuralab report on the topic of informal learning outside of school claimed on his blog before the conference that he would be arguing that the term “informal learning has become a way of describing the value of digital technologies but that the term has no real meaning—there is only learning” (http://www.julianseftongreen.net/?p=12).

This issue was the first on the table at the Keynote speakers’ roundtable. When asked to comment on the usefulness of the distinction, Hull argued that that we should just toss out the distinction. I think she said something to the effect that looking at contexts for learning doesn’t include or exclude either informal or formal. Sefton-Green followed up by saying that the term came out of a perceived historical necessity: people had been focusing so much on learning in classrooms that they had been completely ignoring learning everywhere else. But now, what difference does it really make? Now, there is only learning or not learning. Livingstone argued that we should be looking at what kinds of institutions organize learning. Finally, Gee weighed in by acknowledging that while the concept of “informal learning” may have had some value, we also can’t ignore some of the problems it has caused, primarily that for a while people had ignored all of the teaching that goes on between people in “informal learning.” He argued that “teaching is always going on.” The literature on informal learning, he claims, has largely ignored the parents’ “curriculum.” Livingstone later said that an important question may be to look for what is continuous across a range of contexts.

I had already been a bit concerned about the notion of “informal learning” going into the conference, but this conversation and others at the conference made me really concerned. It’s a term that seems to resonate in many circles, and was a part of the thinking behind the Digital Youth project. So, I don’t know if it’s worth trying to change people’s minds about it. But how should I use it, if at all, in my own work? In response to one of Gee’s point above, we probably have a valuable contribution to make in thinking about the teaching between peers, “technementors” (see Freshquest by Megan Finn et al.), parents, and siblings. Many of our projects are trying to address this issue and have been from the start.

The week after returning from Denmark seemed like the real beginning to my semester as I scrambled to catch up on classes and start new stages of my research. The smartest decision I made was to add Paul Duguid’s and Geoff Nunberg’s class on the “Quality of Information” to my schedule, despite having to play major catch up. There are very few people that I have met who can deliver 2-3 hour lectures that are incredibly interesting and entertaining, yet each of them did an amazing job. I ended up writing a paper on the search for quality information about the video game Bully, which launched last October but was on some people’s radar for much of the year and half between the actual release date and the original game announcement way back in May of 2005. The original focus of the paper was on how members of a Bully fan site negotiated and made sense of the variety of rumors and misinformation, but I slowly turned to pouring through the version history of the Wikipedia article on Bully and noting how the article evolved with respect to a few pieces of information, including the release date, the rating, and the game’s presmise. I didn’t reach any grand conclusions, but I did get the sense that on Wikipedia the model is that information is assumed to be quality until someone makes an edit. Lack of discussion, verification, or change over time implies quality. However, on the fansite, lack of verification, comment, or discussion usually seemed to indicate a lack of quality. The notion of “quality” comes only from interaction, discussion, and active verification. I can’t generalize to other Wikipedia articles, but my research left me a bit more confused and ambivalent about the site (despite the fact that I still use it). I think that someone needs to do a detailed study on the site by looking at how people actually read and use Wikipedia articles in their everyday practices, not by studying what is in the articles themselves.

Another class I took last semester was my second on the topic of literacy. Taught by Laura Sterponi, this is one of the core classes taught in the School of Education for their doctoral program in Language, Literacy, and Culture and consists of a heavy dose of theory and writing on a range of literacy related topics. The class had many small writing assignments and no major project to complete the semester, but I wrote a paper for my third class on Computer-Mediated Communication, that tried to show the relevance of the study of literacy to thinking about CMC. The basic point of the paper was to argue that scholars who have been researching literacy have been studying “mediated communication” in the form of writing (and more recently other media). In my CMC class Coye Cheshire and Andrew Fiore repeatedly made the point that it’s important when thinking about CMC to think about the “mediated communication” part of the acronym and to not get too distracted by the “computer” part. Therefore, the relationship between literacy and CMC seemed clear to me, but required a lot of thinking and writing.

All of this has helped me think about my ongoing work on literacy practices on MySpace, though I don’t have any grand statements to make here. I spent roughly ten hours a week last semester doing participant observation at a youth and technology center where I had a chance to watch how some teenagers use MySpace in their “natural” environment for using it. My thought is that one way, by no means not the only way, to understand online social networking is not by just studying online interactions, but by talking to people and observing them and their tools as the use them. This isn’t that novel a proposition, but it is challenging to make it all work. The jury’s still out for me on where this research is taking me.

One place where I hope it’s taking me is the development of a good dissertation topic. I feel myself playing the role of a stereotypical PhD student in this regard…where everything is fairly interesting, but nothing seems captivating enough to want to spend years on, only to one day suddenly realize that there is life after dissertation, so I might as well just pick something…anything. My plan is to find that something soon. This semester will be difficult, but fun, I think.

However, I am refreshed after a great winter break. I’m glad I took some time off over break to learn to ski (it’s taken me way too long to get off the little bunny hills. Now I have to get off the slightly bigger bunny hills.). I also had a first trip to Hearst Castle and a first time attending an Indian Wedding. Each of those firsts have its own stories for my friends and family.

Well, maybe something for this site as well. The most fascinating part of my Hearst Castle trip was learning more about the working relationship between Hearst and architect Julia Morgan. While I recognized her name from various Berkeley sites, I didn’t know much about her. The tour guide talked mostly about Hearst, while the exhibits and other materials talked a great deal about Morgan as well. However, what I saw is how much Hearst Castle is a product of the their collaboration. The creativity and “genius” was not so much in the vision of Hearst or the execution of Morgan, but in the interplay of their ideas and work over the course of many years. And of course, it is likely that there are others in this story who are critical but who remain nameless. If I were to do a historical paper on collaboration and creativity, I might start with the building of this castle.

A (former) colleague of mine, noting what I write on my bio, asked me the following question:

“In three sentences of less - ‘Why is collaborative media production for kids important?’”

My response:

I think it’s important for kids to have opportunities to learn to produce media, beyond film and text, because it provides another outlet for creative expression and a hook into participating in various communities outside of their classrooms. Not only might they learn technical skills that prove useful down the road, they learn how to learn, and potentially engage in a deep committed learning. Doing all of this with other people, kids or adults, provides three additional benefits: a) some research in learning argues that people learn better when working with others; b) it provides a social experience that may be increase motivation and desire to participate; and c) perhaps most importantly, I think that working with others help spark some who are not the “solo genius type” to be more creative and actually produce better quality work (not to mention other benefits of just learning how to work with others and experience a chance to understand diverse view points).

Last summer, I had a chance to watch a group of teenagers use MySpace during their breaks while attending a summer program. I wondered what sorts of technical skills they were getting hooked into in the process of figuring out how to customize their pages using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I wanted to know how this process of profile creation and maintenance could be seen as some new form of literacy (if at all).

Over the past six months, I have pursued this while learning a lot about different perspectives of what “literacy” even means to different people. Surprising in some ways, not surprising in others, the whole notion of “literacy” is highly contested. To some, it’s about the technical skills you learn in the process of consuming or producing media (a broader way of looking at reading and writing text). To others, literacy is a social process that has more to do with how people come to learn the language, tools, and conventions of engaging with particular communities. “Literacy,” then is not singular. There are many different literacies to learn.

I have just finished a paper in which I explore the production of a MySpace profile by using a model of literacy that tries to reconcile the social perspectives and the technical ones (see Andrea diSessa’s Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy).

In the paper, I argue that:

• The appearance of a MySpace profile can be attributed to both social and technical factors that are difficult to disentangle.
• It might be the case that learning to use HTML and CSS is an important technical skill to learn as part of participating in communities on the web. But, even though MySpace provides a hook into this world, the way in which they have implemented the site makes me believe that it’s not an environment where learning these languages can thrive.
• However, a more important technical skill required to participate in various communities is the ability to copy and paste links to media of all different forms. These media links have a critical role to play in how a profile looks visually, how people project themselves, and how people communicate with each other (including links in comments). Most importantly in terms of thinking about literacy, just because copying and pasting is a relatively “simpler” skill than coding, doesn’t mean it should be considered a less significant practice. Sometimes, its the simple, almost unnoticeable, actions that are the ones that spread quickly.
• A consequence of this perspective of the importance of copying and pasting of links, is that it throws up a theoretical challenge to notions of “reading” and “writing,” “consuming” and “producing.” I argue that we need some new terms to help us think about practices like copying and pasting which seem to be neither media consumption nor media production, neither reading nor writing.

Luckily for us, some pretty smart people like Mimi Ito, Henry Jenkins, their predecessors, and contemporaries have already been talking about this for quite a while. They have used terms like “participation” and “remix” that help us see the value of the production of MySpace profiles in a way that theories of literacy have not quite grasped yet.

I will be presenting the paper at a conference on informal learning and digital media in Denmark in September. In the meantime, here is a copy for your reading enjoyment. If you have any feedback, comment away. I’d love the input.

This past week at GroupTalk, an “informal, student-run, participatory forum for addressing challenges in Berkeley research projects at the intersection of people and technology” I raised the questions:

Is it possible to design for appropriation and unintended uses? If so, how? If not, why not?

In this post, my primary goal is to present the notes from that discussion. At the same time, my notes are incomplete. It was hard to capture everything and I found myself mixing up my own interpretations of what was said and what the person saying might have said. Therefore, I have decided to also go ahead an add some additional commentary. If you participated in that conversation and think that: a) I have missed something completely, b) misunderstood a point that you or someone else made, or c) have any reactions or thoughts since then, please comment below! (And, of course, to everyone who didn’t participate, feel free to weigh in however you see fit).

My motivation for raising these questions is based on my interest in investigating the design of socio-technical systems while somehow coming to an understanding of groups’ everyday practice in relation to media production.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday in my class on “Literacies: Old and New” (no course website available), we did a review of some of our past discussions on Goody and Watt’s “The Consequences of Literacy” (1968), parts of Goody’s The Domestication of the Savage Mind, and excerpts from Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. Our purpose in reading these works (and others in the next few weeks) is to get a sense of some “classical” views and theories of literacy as we turn towards what ideas of “new” literacies might mean.

All of these readings argue for distinctions and differences between primarily oral cultures and ones that have a system of reading and writing. To greater and lesser extents, they have been criticized for being being overly technological deterministic and of not paying enough attention to cultural and social practices that informed and contributed to the development of systems of reading and writing. Professor Andy DiSessa called our attention to a lack of consideration for “everyday practice” of what people actually do.

But what Prof. DiSessa also pointed out is that these pieces paint a picture of the development of writing and reading as a) taking hundreds, if not thousands, of years and b) that different social classes experience writing and reading at different stages, that a technocratic elite is usually the first to become proficient in writing and reading and then literacy gradually (through processes undefined!) becomes more widespread. The key questions for us, then, as we think about “new” literacies (depending on what that really means, of course…) include: Can we somehow identify what stage we may be at now with respect to media literacy or computational literacy? Are things changing faster now than they might have before (so tempted to say “yes!” and so wrong to assume)? Can a technocratic elite be “side-stepped”? What does this really mean?

These issues are important because more and more schools are starting to recognize that new forms of literacy should somehow be taught to students. And that “skills” associated with technological literacy are essential to survival in today’s world. This past week, for example, the Educational Testing Service announced a new test to measure “teen tech literacy”, perhaps in response to arguments like these I have some serious doubts about this initiative and this perspective on what it means to be literate.

Let’s assume for a moment that the word “literacy” even is appropriate (technological, computational, media, “new”…) it seems that what formal education is trying to do here is to push new literacy practices to the masses out of the sole domain of a technocratic elite. Sounds good. Only, I wonder who today’s technocratic elite might be with respect to these practices? I wonder if the elite can be found amongst kids and teenagers, rather than adults who seem to want to impose some “right” and “wrong” way to use technology. I guess the argument goes that kids need to be taught how to think critically about they use the technology at their disposal (if this is, in fact, part of what “literacy” means). But I also think about all of those teenagers on MySpace who are communicating through blog-like things, using images, audio, and video and can’t help but think that they are somehow learning new practices (literacies?) that put them way ahead of the rest of us. If they are elite in new forms of this multimodal, multimedia, forms of communication, what does this say about the time it might take for these practices to become a part of everyday literate culture?

In my last rambling post on thinking about the potential learning that might go on when kids get a hold of HTML in MySpace, I mentioned a possible objection to notions of “learning” when equated with “cutting and pasting.” Namely, what is learned from cutting and pasting? Isn’t it the equivalent of copying another kid’s math homework?

A few days after writing, I was in my first day of class called “Literacies: Old and New” and this idea came up again in a different context. Professor Andrea DiSessa was showing us work done by middle schoolers using his Boxer software (online description not where it used to be… sorry for no link) and mentioned how kids were able to copy and paste Boxer scripts from a shared library of Boxer scripts and that this helped the cutter/paster build more complex projects. He also talked about the satisfaction kids had when walking through their scripts with less experienced kids, which was often followed by enthusiastic idea exchanges. DiSessa posed the question to us: can one claim that this is some new sort of “cut and paste literacy?” And, if so, how might it relate to textual literacy, where quoting is encouraged, but “copying and pasting” is the equivalent of plagiarism? I think that his point went way beyond making sure to attribute source code to original authors.

Two colleagues of mine found this interesting and mentioned having explicitly heard the term “cut and paste literacy” or “copy and paste literacy” or something like that before. I did a quick search and found a few potentially interesting links:

A 21st Century Challenge: Preparing ‘Cut and Paste’ Students to be ‘Information Literate’ Citizens, by Paula Murphy of the Teaching, Learning, and technology Center at UC, published online in 2002.
Educating the Cut-and-Paste Generation.(teaching information literacy) published by HighBeam Research (warning: I have no idea who this group is and didn’t want to pay for the article or deal with the trial version…).
Cut, Paste, Publish: The Production and Consumption of Zines by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear in 2001.

I have not read these pieces thoroughly (or at all, in the case of the second one). My point here is to just give some evidence that this is not something “new” (as in just thought about for the first time in 2006), and that there is probably a lot more literature out there to go through, in both academic journals, popular press, and other venue.
To end on an ironic note, while cutting and pasting these links and titles, I realized that I may be helping boost their ranking on search engines, even though I haven’t read them. If I hadn’t realized this, would I have been demonstrating an “illiterate” or “non-literate” practice associated with cutting and pasting? And how that I have decided to leave the links in, even though I still haven’t read them, what am I demonstrating?