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.

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

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 Not only does it rely on “out of date assumptions about immigrants” (the not-digital kind), the implications, he says are dangerous: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.

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.

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.

“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).

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.

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.

Framing the discussion
I framed the conversation by raising three recent examples/incidents that have been on my mind:

Recently at the Designing for User eXperiences conference (DUX’05), a designer in the audience asked a question that boiled down to this: “How can I design for user experience if once I put my products out into the world, they pretty much ‘die.’ They are no longer mine and they are being used in ways that I never intended” (not an exact quote except for the ‘die’ part). My thought was that once a product is finally out in the world being used in ways never intended it can finally be described as being “alive.” Either way, there is a point that “user-centered design” practices often try to design systems for specific purposes for specific people (or types of people) and not for unanticipated uses by unanticipated users. In what ways does designing for appropriation fly in the face of user-centered design? In what ways could it fall nicely in line with user-centered design?

If anyone has seen a teenager’s MySpace page, you may notice that it has a particular “aesthetic” that comes partially as the result of people customizing pages by cutting and pasting HTML and CSS code into various profile-editing forms. It’s not clear to me if this was ever intended by the MySpace designers (my thought is that it was not, but that’s not from personal conversation with them), but it certainly is an important part of current social practices on myspace.

In Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy (2000), Andy DiSessa (in UCB’s education department) argues that appropriation is a critical aspect to systems that are designed to promote learning and literacy. He also points out numerous examples of things that his research team saw in the classroom with kids and teachers using his software that he never anticipated and were critical parts of the groups’ learning experience with the software (see Chapter 3 if you’re really interested in this topic in his book…). One argument he makes is that a system has to be open in various ways and this is critical to learning:

“A computational medium that does not let all its users create to suit their own instincts will miss probably the most powerful principle of appropriation and arguably one of the most powerful principles of learning. Owning and knowing are fraternal twins. Owning leads to knowing and vice versa. (p55).”

Before the discussion, two other people in the group provided some resources that would help frame our discussion. One person pointed out an interesting workshop from CHI 2005 (ACM’s Conference for Human Factors in Computing) called “Designing Technology for Community Appropriation” (organizers’ papers here, participants’ papers here). Another said that the topic reminded him of Paul Dourish’s new paper, to be presented at CHI 2006, called “Implications for Design”, which argues for a new way of considering the relationship between ethnography and design practice:

…Ackerman critiques the intuition that people adopt and adapt technologies because the technologies are poorly designed, and that better designed technologies would obviate the need for such adaptation and appropriation….

…Certainly, though, what [ethnography] does is to refigure “users” not as passive recipients of predefined technologies but as actors who collectively create the circumstances, contexts, and consequences of technology use. HCI research has, of course, long had an interest in aspects of the ways in which people might configure, adapt, and customize technologies. This ethnographic view, though, focuses not simply on how people explicitly transform or program interactive technologies, but how those technologies take on specific social meanings through their embedding within systems of practice. As a focus of HCI research attention, “design,” in this sense, goes beyond giving form to technologies to encompass appropriation – the active process of incorporation and co-evolution of technologies, practices, and settings.

Recap of the discussion
The conversation began with a discussion of what the word “appropriation” actually meant. There was some debate as to whether or not we were talking about making something “one’s own” or making something one’s own for purposes not intended or anticipated by the thing’s designers. Now that I look back at how DiSessa and Dourish use the word, it seems to have to do more with making something one’s own. And to some extend this aligns with definitions I have found in The American Heritage Dictionary: “To take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself, often without permission” and in Webster’s: “1. to take exclusive possession of…3) to take or make use of without authority or right.”

(Aside: Note that both of these definition seems to also include the notion of “misappropriate,” a word, I pointed out in the discussion I had seen in court rulings which seemed to imply steal. Looking at both definitions, I think it’s interesting how the “mis-” seems redundant. But if you go with just the notion of “making something one’s own” then the “mis-” is an essential distinction. Also, I wonder at their emphasis on appropriation as an act of one individual as opposed to a group. Also, I am starting to wonder about the relationship between appropriate as an adjective and appropriate as we are using it here. A tricky question could be: “Is it appropriate to appropriate?”)

But, people in the group did point out a common use of the word did have a lot to do with the idea of using something in a way never intended, and this would be one way of making something one’s own. A canonical example brought up had to do with the Roland 808, a product released in the 1980s that was intended to allow musicians to record drum rhythms (we might have talked about guitar tracks in our discussion, but I am having trouble finding any articles that go beyond drums here…). But people did not like the sound and other products seemed to do a much better job. It was not until techno’s rise in the mid-late 1980s that a new community found a whole new use for the product, which ended up making Roland a whole lot of money as they turned the company towards developing the 808 as a tool primarily for the unanticipated uses for which these new communities had appropriated the product.

Later in the conversation, someone made the suggestion that appropriation may have to do as much with unanticipated “users” as it did “uses.” Perhaps making this distinction would help us tease out the right definition of the word appropriation. I raised another example of “appropriation,” when fans of TV shows appropriated the content of those shows in the creation of works of fan fiction (see Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers for one academically-oriented account). These fans were the intended audience of the shows’ producers. But, the uses to which these fans were putting these shows were not a) anticipated and b) welcomed. Now that I think about it, one could also argue that these fans were appropriating VCRs in ways that may not have been intended: as video editors rather than just recording or playback devices.

A member of the group brought up a tension between products that that were designed to be potentially used for a wide variety of things, but perhaps they were “mediocre” for those uses, and products that were designed really well for one thing. I later called this the problem of the swiss-army knife. Does designing for appropriation mean that you can’t try to design something really well for one purpose? Do you have to try to design swiss army knives?

Along these lines, someone talked about notions of “resistance”: when a product is really good at what you are designing it for, it has not resistance for that use and a lot of resistance for other uses. I wonder if this also implies that a product that is not really designed well for one purpose partially resists all purposes? Or if perhaps the uses for which a product can be appropriated are the ones that are the least resisted?

This discussion links to one we had later in the meeting about the relationship between the word “appropriation” and the word “affordances” (Don Norman, who introduced the term to me through his book “The Design of Everyday Things” has a good article summarizing recent (?) thoughts on the use of the word here). Is “affordance” a better word, or a more useful word, for what we’ve been talking about? Is designing for appropriation about maximizing the affordances? We talked about the affordances of paper and the unanticipated uses of paper that the material affords (crumpling up and throwing at people).

Someone mentioned the intended uses of a hammer in relation to a subtle warning about the use of hammers that I had never considered. While a hammer is great for hitting in nails (and removing nails) and probably hitting other things, there is also a warning sign on many hammers that says, “Do not hit hard objects.” Why? Because you can chip the hammer.

The discussion turned at some point to learning. Someone brought up the fact that discovering how to use tools, what tools to use when, was something that was a part of an apprenticeship. People watch, learn, and participate with teachers, mentors, and others, when they figure out how to use tools. What happens when you separate consideration of the artifacts from the processes of coming to learn how to use them? Does that lead to appropriation? Or is appropriation a part of the apprenticeship process?

A member of the group raised another provocative question: is appropriation the result of a misinterpretation or misconception of product? Or is it the result of an intentional “misuse.” We found examples of both (CD tray as full coffee cup holder, parking meter as empty coffee cup holder were brought up at various times which raises the interesting question of caffeine and misuse).

Someone put forward the idea that there is a relationship between art and appropriation, that art is an example of “extreme appropriation” because artists often ask the question: What can I do to specifically be interesting, to specifically use something for some purpose in order to explore the a variety of questions related to that thing, such as its place in culture.

Is “designing for appropriation” a contradiction in terms? This was another fun mind-bender for the group. Once you put in your head the idea that appropriation may be possible and that you should consider it, are you designing for “appropriation” or for some intended use which would no longer make it appropriation, even if you can’t predict what that intended use might be. Is designing for “openness” or “flexibility” the same thing? So, as companies are now releasing APIs for all of their products in the hope the creative people will combine services to create new products, is this a way of designing for appropriation?

(As another aside, this is a practice that someone decided should be called a “mash-up” the use of a term that is in itself an appropriation of a term to describe a genre of music having to do with DJs combining music, often from wildly different artist-genres. My favorite is a Wings-Eminem mash-up called “A Slim McShady” from “Go Home Productions.” When I first heard the use of the word “mash up” to refer to combining APIs, I cringed, though perhaps the continual cycle of appropriation here makes the use of that term, unfortunately, appropriate. Uh oh. Making myself dizzy.)

We discussed whether or not there was a physical counterpart to APIs? One possibility that was posited was that of standardized parts. Standardized parts could be considered the physical equivalent of hackability. Something being hackable (software) is fun and challenging, perhaps encouraging appropriation.

We ended the meeting by turning more towards the question of methods. Does “Participatory Design,” a method for designing products in which people who may be the intended users of those products and designers work together in the design process. Perhaps the notion of “participation” should be extended. Do people need to have a better understanding of what it means to design or of what can be designed given the constraints. Would examples of appropriation come out earlier?

This led to a rather challenging question for all of us in the room: do the traditional methods of designing and evaluating design ensure that designers could never observe the possibilities for appropriation? Usability assessments, laboratory experiments, task analysis, and heuristic evaluations frame the issues to be evaluated so carefully, that how would anyone be able to use these methods to even consider the possibilities of appropriation? I followed this up with linking this issue with participatory design methods: despite the goal of creating a good team from participants and designers, if it is not possible to truly eliminate the power differences between participants and designers, would even participatory design help design for appropriation?

Another method posited was that of the “technology probe” something that is put in the world (or given to individuals) that is equipped to record data about its own use and then can be analyzed as to how it’s being used.

One person suggested that even designers brainstorming on this issue could help lead to characterizing a product along the following dimensions: a) what does our product do according to the uses that we have prescribed and intended? b)what could someone do with our product given my features? c) what could people not do with our product?

Finally, right near the end of the discussion, someone said that the conversation was leading towards three different levels of being able to design: a) a technical level, b) a process level, and then c) a higher level, perhaps a philosophical level. At that last level, designing for appropriation might involve a philosophical position. The example raised had to do with the photo-sharing site Flickr and its decision to remove any drawings from being public or searchable (discussion here). Flickr here is either taking a philosophical or economic stance on this issue that is inherently about member appropriation of the site. What is the relationship to “big” things like “democracy” and “economics” and designing for appropriation.

The conversation ended appropriately with someone saying something to the effect of: “Wow, we raised many more questions and didn’t resolve any.” That seemed like a fitting ending to a great discussion.

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?

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?