Listen: turquoise-tales-of-flossie-fillet

[Please note, I am asserting my fair use right to this material, as it is provided here as a necessary sample to supplement the educational and editorial purposes of this post, is posted at a severely degraded 64kb/s, and is posted for a limited period of time. See http://w2.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.php for more details.]

I'm kind of "written out" on educational technology at the end of the day. So I figured I'd take a page from Jim Groom and write on a subject close to my heart.

For me, right now, my particular obsession right now is psych-pop. And for whatever reason, I've decided to make my first post on psych pop on Turquoise. Turquoise only put out a couple of singles, but they were quite good, both on the A and B sides.

Flossie Fillet was the B side of thier first single (Decca F 12756), released in March of 1968. I'm not aware of it placing on any charts, and wonder if given Decca's venture at that time into the Deram label had overextended some of their resources, causing them to reduce the payola some material. David Kubinec has indicated this was the case with The World of OZ's Muffin Man single, which was released a couple months later through Decca, and it might help to explain why a band who had their demos produced by Dave Davies and John Entwistle seems to have gotten no radio lift at all from a solid single.

There's a couple things I like about this single. It's got a nice tight, restrained intro, with a bit of decent studio work -- it comes down from a simple guitar riff to that big chord low on the piano backing it up. And typical of the Kinks style this song embodies, it doesn't expand on that much, repeating it twice and then launching straight in.

Once in, it jumps into a nice tight snare beat, but the really catchy bit is when they pull out of the tight snare verse into the chorus where the song opens up. There's a bunch of things at play here that make it an appealing shift:

• The lyrics move from the crowded, polysyllabic verses to a nice simple monosyllabic chorus with some length to the notes.


• Melodically, you can hear this effect pretty easily -- listen to what a jumble of consonants the verse sounds compared to the chorus.


• The chorus operates on the typical "verse as narrative / chorus as reflection" distinction, but brings with it that British pop irony as well - it's the first subjective assertion in the song, and there's at least that appearance of complexity that light irony creates.


• The notes appear to be left open in the chorus -- if there is a piano in the verse, it's dampened, but here it opens up and fills in the white space, to accompany the less constricted drumming.

On the whole the song, which some suggest as being about a flea circus, fits in with the general psych-pop standard trope of birth-school-work-death from 5,000 feet on hallucinogens. Besides the payoff of the chorus, the real climax of the song is where we learn that the Tales of Flossie FIllett "all happened in a day." It's a weak payoff, but decent enough in light of the execution of everything that surrounds it. It doesn't hurt that it repeats the song title in this bit "the tales of flossie fillet/ all happened in a day" -- as a listener your waiting for that title in a song like this as a key to what the heck is going on.

The one thing I find a little disappointing I suppose is I'd rather see it go out on the chorus, rather than descend into this list at the end (and a list that just sounds too novelty pop at that) -- but I suppose that would mess up the focus on the "all happened in a day" lyric -- as the song is here, that lyric is the last verse line before the chorus, so it doesn't really compete with other lines for focus.

Since I can't find the lyrics online to link to I figured I'd type out what I could here:

It all happened so many years ago
Nobody knows, because nobody wants to know
Barbara Boffman (???) and [unintellible] Sand
They're the founding members, the leaders of the land

It's very sad
That they should spend
All of their lives
Then it should end

Flossie Fillett, she has just been born
And so has Hector, and friendly Percy Porn
When they're forgotten, who will take their place?
Another Flossie, with a different face.

It's very sad
That they should spend
All of their lives
Then it should end

If they could see
The lonliness that surrounds me
If I could go
To stay at 15 Antrim Road

As we leave them, the band presents a tune
[Unintelligble] on the xylopohone, Bessie on bassoon
You'll never believe, what I have got to say
The tales of Flossie Fillett all happened in a day

It's very sad
That they should spend
All of their lives
Then it should end

Flossie Fillet, it's time for her to go
Say goodbye to moon the loon, and Digger and Dr. Dose
Don't forget the little man who couldn't pronounce his name
[Unitelligible]
Johnny Too-Good in a car from going round and round
[????] is in a kilt and going up to tune
Anita Gray and Catherine Day have come to take a bow
All effects are face to face, who did it we don't know how
[and so on...]

Well, it's happened. Arne Duncan is going to be the next Secretary of Education.

The theory of magic lawyer powers has prevailed.

Don't get me wrong. I think one can have a completely irrelevant degree, and do a fine job.

But isn't it just a little bit interesting that when Obama was looking for a Secretary for the Department of Energy he was able to find a person that was a Nobel prize-winning physicist who had also distinguished himself as an administrator? And that when he went looking for an economic team, he grabbed highly respected economists who also had some administrative skill?

But when he considered who should lead the Department of Education, Arne Duncan, an administrator with no scholarly or professional credentials in the practice or theory of teaching, did just fine.

Put aside the union wars, the phonics vs. whole language debates, the perpetual war between the just-sit-still-and-learn-dammit crowd and the people that think we might grasp a little higher.

Put all that aside.

Because what you have here is the government view in a nutshell: Energy and climate change are about science, the economy is about, you know, economics.

And education? Education is just an administrative headache we haven't solved yet. But with the help of some varsity-basketball lawyer types, we'll get it all sorted out.

I find tracking the Secretary of Education appointment news maddeningly difficult. And that's distressing to me, because some of the names I've heard floated would be absolutely disastrous. And others I've never heard of heard of, have no time to research, and the media does not help me one bit.

So how to judge? How to take a position in this circus?

Here's a simple way. No frickin' lawyers for Sec of Ed.

I know that sounds oddly arbitrary, but you have to remember that the Washington bubble is such that most legislators are lawyers, and they have this insane idea that people with law degrees are imbued with some special power. After all, they're all lawyers, and they're reviewing global warming data, right? So law must be a fine preparation for anything.

Well, for writing laws it's not so bad. Otherwise, not so much. The fact is that the competency test for lawyers in the political sphere is always less than that for non-lawyers (guess, for example, what Blago's degree is in?).

The incomparable Greg Palast gets this, and points out that Bush's lawyer appointment Michael Brown was largely responsible for the destruction of New Orleans. (He's a lawyer, right? He could run FEMA!)

And the set of lawyers Obama is looking at for Sec of Ed is not much better. Here's Palast:

But here we go again. Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select Joel Klein as Secretary of Education. If not Klein, then draft-choice number two is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago.

Say it ain't so, President O.

Let's begin with Joel Klein. Klein is a top notch anti-trust lawyer. What he isn't is an educator.

Klein is as qualified to run the Department of Education as Dick Cheney is to dance in Swan Lake. While I've never seen Cheney in a tutu, I have seen Klein fumble about the stage as Chancellor of the New York City school system.

Klein, who lacks even six minutes experience in the field, was handed management of New York's schools by that political Jack-in-the-Box, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The billionaire mayor is one of those businessmen-turned-politicians who think lawyers and speculators can make school districts operate like businesses.

Klein has indeed run city schools like a business - if the business is General Motors. Klein has flopped. Half the city's kids don't graduate.

Klein is out of control. Not knowing a damn thing about education, rather than rely on those who actually work in the field (only two of his two dozen deputies have degrees in education), Klein pays high-priced consultants to tell him what to do. He's blown a third of a billion dollars on consultant "accountability" projects plus $80 million for an IBM computer data storage system that doesn't work.

What the heck was the $80 million junk computer software for? Testing. Klein is test crazy. He has swallowed hook, line and sinker George Bush's idea that testing students can replace teaching them. The madly expensive testing program and consultant-fee spree are paid for by yanking teachers from the classroom.

[Sorry to quote at length, but it's a crime to cut off a good Palast rant.]

Here's Palast on another lawyer Obama is considering:

The anti-union establishment has a second stringer on the bench waiting in case Klein is nixed: Arne Duncan. Duncan, another lawyer playing at education, was appointed by Chicago's Boss Daley to head that city's train-wreck of a school system. Think of Duncan as "Klein Lite."

What's Duncan's connection to the President-elect? Duncan was once captain of Harvard's basketball team and still plays backyard round-ball with his Hyde Park neighbor Obama.

But Michelle has put a limit on their friendship: Obama was one of the only state senators from Chicago to refuse to send his children into Duncan's public schools. My information is that the Obamas sent their daughters to the elite Laboratory School where Klein-Duncan teach-to-the-test pedagogy is dismissed as damaging and nutty.

Mr. Obama, if you can't trust your kids to Arne Duncan, why hand him ours?

Lawyer Duncan is proud to have raised test scores by firing every teacher in low-scoring schools. Which schools? There's Collins High in the Lawndale ghetto with children from homeless shelters and drug-poisoned 'hoods. They don't do well on tests. So Chicago fired all the teachers. They brought in new ones - then fired all of them too: the teachers' reward for volunteering to work in a poor neighborhood.

Starting to get the picture? (By the way, why are you still reading me? Go over and read Palast. And add him to your Google Reader, the man is one of the last investigative journalists in America).

But if these two choices are death, how do we judge the twenty other possibilities thrown at us?

I repeat, treat this like a search committee, with a good starting filter. No Lawyers.

You'd filter out a lot.... here's the most recent trial balloon from Team Obama, Michael Bennet:

DENVER  --  A lawyer-turned-educator known for getting teachers to support merit pay, Denver schools superintendent Michael Bennet may be a candidate to lead the U.S. Department of Education under President-elect Barack Obama, according to a published report.

I don't have time to research this guy, but you know what? He's out of the running.

More on this later, but I wanted to throw this out to see if anyone had any thoughts on it.

You've probably heard that to stave off the next Great Depression, the government will intervene in the form of a massive stimulus package, focused on infrastructure.

What gets interesting is not that the government may need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get us out of this, but that there don't seem to be enough places to spend it. Here's Krugman on that point, several days ago:

Infrastructure spending will take time to get going — a new Goldman Sachs report suggests that projects that are “shovel-ready” are probably only a few tens of billions worth, and that a larger effort would take much of a year to get going. Meanwhile, it’s very questionable how much effect tax rebates will have on consumer demand. So it may be hard for stimulus to get much traction until late 2009 — and that’s even if Congress goes along, which may be a problem given all the bad analysis and disinformation out there.

You can see the problem -- you want to spend on infrastructure, because infrastructure builds future economic success while employing people in the near term. People get employed building a light rail system, for instance, and when it's finished it attracts business, cuts down on fuel consumption, lowers road maintenance costs, and allows employers to draw from a broader employee pool.  But there's only so many light rail plans (and other construction plans out there) that are "shovel-ready" - designs have to be approved, things priced out, etc.

While I know construction is the gold standard of infrastructure -- and a particularly effective tool for broad stabilization of the economy -- I wonder if just a sliver of money could be made available for a shovel-ready educational project: opencourseware.

As Wiley and others have pointed out, OCW fits the infrastructure description. The production of OCW is a capital expense, and the American public would be left at the end of the investment with a tangible good (or set of tangible goods), regardless of whether the project continued (and this part is the key to successful stimulus -- hiring 6,000 teachers only to lay them off at the end of the year does long term harm as a stimulus, whereas hiring 6,000 people to produce educational materials does not). And the same way that new roads and new cables opened up broad productivity gains in previous eras, open educational resources are likely to create benefits for some time to come.

Is it shovel-ready? I think so. The stimulus could fund a broadly horizontal project. For every school that can get 10 professors to agree to release their materials, have the federal government fund one OCW staff member. And since we're looking to invest as much money as fast as possible, twenty professors gets you two staff members, and so on.

At that level of staffing, the demands placed on central IT should be minimal. The type of work is lightly technical, and happens to be a useful experience for any light technical worker who has been laid off and looking to broaden their skill set. There's a strong OCW community already in place to provide newbies guidance -- which should reduce the strain on central IT (or Academic Affairs, if that's where it is run from).

I doubt this would be a huge stimulus, but it could be one small place where the stimulus might go. My back of the envelope calculation on it says it could put anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 people to work who would in the space of a year produce anything from 20,000 to 200,000 courses or other educational materials.

Definitely worth thinking about -- a stimulus project that in one year catalogs the content of almost any course one could imagine, all across the U.S., while keeping the newly unemployed insured and off the unemployment rolls.

What's not to like?

(as always, everything I say here is my own opinion, and does not represent the views of my employer, the OpenCourseWare Consortium...)

Probably the best job I ever had was teaching writing -- and I still keep an eye out for interesting methods of rethinking the teaching of composition. In the waning hours of NaNoWriMo last night I found a decent one. Desperate to make it over the finish line by typing anything (anything!) resembling novel prose, I grabbed a copy of my new favorite comic, G. Willow Wilson's Air, and began to novelize it, purely as a writing exercise.

Here's the great thing -- with the plot points and dialogue hammered out (and in this case presenting the superb material -- AIr is a masterpiece), I was really free to explore the psychological elements and descriptive aspects of the plot. I would say that only 10% or less of the words came directly from the page of the comic -- but the other 90% was much better written than the slop I had been churning out, especially given the mad pace I was typing at. It's a refreshing way to focus for a bit more firmly on style and psychology...G. Willow Wilson, for example, creates a wonderful character -- a stewardess who fears not crashing, but endless falling. It's her genius that she can sketch that out in just a few lines of dialogue. But it's exactly that spareness in the comic that makes the idea so fun to play with in prose:

As she stocked the meal and drink cart in the serving area, she realized that the falling sensation had gone, at least temporarily. It had taken longer this time certainly, but it had gone in the end. It always did. Up here at cruising altitude she felt right, and as the plane leveled off she reassembled herself, smoothing her skirt and splashing a bit of the ice water on her face.

There was an old joke, one that her passengers had told one too many times in one too many languages for her to fake a laugh at anymore. It was simple, people said -- they had no fear of flying -- it was the crashing they were worried about. It was a folksy saying that had always cut her more than any of her passengers could imagine.

For Blythe wasn’t afraid of crashing. Far from it. She was afraid of not-crashing. She was afraid of the falling that would never stop.

It was as a kid she had first felt it. Lying awake in bed, as she let go into sleep, a moment before drifting off, there it was, the sensation of rushing downward, endlessly backward, with no landing in sight. She’d panic and startle awake, heart racing. A hypnagogic startle her doctor had called it -- but to her it was always a last desperate flail, a grab at the last bit of cliff wall rushing past as she fell and fell and fell, a startle behind which was the belief that if she did not wake up, right now, right this second, she would slip into a death not of endless sleep, but of endless acceleration.

Anyway, for those still struggling in the trenches of Freshman Comp and Creative Writing, you could do worse than to have your students pick up something like Air and novelize it. As with so many things in life, the constraints of such an exercise give you more freedom than you can imagine.

I am sad to say that I never read this book before now. The way this book had always been presented to me was on the merits of its premise, which I am sure you all know, either through word of mouth or the film -- it's about a world where firemen burn books to keep the world safe from the effects of reading.

A good premise, I always thought, but if I want something premise-driven the novel is my last stop, behind comic books, films, and video games. What I like in a novel is execution and density.

I finished this book last night, and I'm stunned by it's beauty.

What I had never understood until now was just what a brilliant writer Bradbury was. There are passages in this book that are a mixture of Joyce, London, and Steinbeck all rolled up in one. (Am I overselling now? Possibly. But not by much.) Here's a sample:

Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women's faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enamelled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colourful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlour, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned forward at the sound of Montag's swallowing his final bite of food. They listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that if you touched these three staring brows you would feel a fine salt sweat on your finger-tips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the sub-audible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode.
Montag moved his lips.

"Let's talk."

There's a second thing at work here too. I always heard that this book is about censorship. It's not. There are long passages in the book that specifically say the censorship is merely window dressing. The book is about what happens in a TV culture, where art and news becomes mere repetitive activity rather than individual experiences. There are some wonderfully comic moments in it dealing with the vapidity of television:

"I had a nice evening," she said, in the bathroom.
"What doing?"
"The parlour."
"What was on?"
"Programmes."
"What programmes?"
"Some of the best ever."
"Who?"
"Oh, you know, the bunch."
"Yes, the bunch, the bunch, the bunch." He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odour of kerosene made him vomit.

Why Bradbury is relegated sci-fi while no-talents like Roth are elevated to canon status I'll never figure out. Maybe that's another post. But I woke up this morning after having finished this book yesterday, thinking -- I need to tell people what I don't think I was ever told: that this book fires on all cylinders, that the idea is, in a way, the smallest part of it, as clever and insightful as it is. If you're looking for something to read over Thanksgiving, it would be hard to do better.

Incidentally, this book has rekindled my interest in reading sci-fi novels -- I've read some cyberpunk, but would welcome some suggestions, particularly of books with a depth of psyche in them, like this one.

So that was the title I was tempted to throw on the recent post over at OCWBlog. It seemed impolitic over there, but if you are stopping by here, you know me and the spirit it's offered in.

The heart of the OCWBlog post is this graph:



I've been frankly a little surprised, since signing on at OCWC, at the rift between the edubloggers and the OCW community. A lot of edubloggers seem to think that people in the OCW community just don't get the larger picture. And a lot of people in the OCW community think the edubloggers talk too much and produce too little.

I can say with  confidence that both of those perceptions are completely wrong. The edubloggers I know have slogged long and hard to get real things done. And people in the OCW community don't claim OCW is the be-all/end-all of open education. Sometimes dedication to an idea requires analysis, sometimes just blood, sweat, and tears. The people I have met doing OCW implementations at their institutions are some of the brightest, most self-analytical, big picture people I have had the pleasure of knowing -- they've just decided, for the moment, to channel that energy into production and institutional change.

And yes, some people are great at the grassroots piece, some are great at the institutional piece. But we're insane if we believe that only the grassroots piece of that equation is producing "real change".  Which is what I've been hearing lately, in exactly those terms, in twitters, blogs, the comments on blogs (particularly the comments, actually), and emails.

As the graph shows, that claim is probably verifiably false. Most of that big swath of red there is not grant-funded, most of that red swath does not represent rich institutions, and most of it represents initiatives committed to continuing even in the face of this economic downturn. And all of it is accomplished by people who turned at least part of their attention to aligning the institution with open education goals.

If that's not real change, what is?

We're lucky, as a movement, to have people approaching this issue from both the bottom-up and top-down. In my experience it's the combination of those two approaches that gets change done.  So let's rejoice in that, and not see it as a burden.

From Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com:

I have written for perhaps a dozen major publications over the span of my career, and the one with the most thorough fact-checking process is by some margin Sports Illustrated. Although this is an indication of the respect with which SI accords its brand, it does not speak so well of the mainstream political media that you are more likely to see an unverified claim repeated on the evening news than you are to see in the pages of your favorite sports periodical.

One of the questions triggered by the Frontline program [on Lee Atwater] is what would have happened if Atwater were still alive today; might he have had more success in undermining Barack Obama than Steve Schmidt apparently did? My answer is very probably not, because the blogosphere serves as the fact-checkers that the mainstream media is too negligent to employ.

Jared Stein writes on his blog that UVU has decided to go open, using a very simple mechanism:

Now UVU is not just a vocational/trade school (though I daresay there is more than one administrator who would like to de-emphasize that fact now that we are a university); most of our programs are in the liberal arts and sciences, and I know faculty in those areas will be interested in sharing what they are doing, too. Because we have only recently become a university, I know we have a lot of faculty who are seasoned and enthusiastic teachers, not researchers, and that may make them more likely to share what they do best. So our approach has to facilitate these folks as well, and keep the process as unencumbered as possible. To this end, the process we have proposed neglects the OCW/OER labels, and focuses on re-licensing of UVU-owned (”work-for-hire”) content under a Creative Commons license. At this point it’s a single form, and once it’s been signed by UVU administration the faculty member will be free to publish the content under any medium available.

Jared talks at length in the post about some of the issues he's struggled with, echoing some of Scott Leslie's concerns about the role of institutions in sharing in general:

The most important part of this announcement is not that UVU will be engaging in opencourseware, nor even that we can officially join the OpenCourseWare Consortium—the key for me is having the chance to explore and articulate a vision for openness at UVU, and how we might proceed in a way that contributes uniquely and with impact.

Scott argues that a problem with institutionally-guided sharing is “they [the planners/sharers] didn’t actually know what the compelling need was, it just sounded like a good idea at the time.” In our case the “need” has driven me from the beginning. Instead of just saying, “Hey, OCW is cool and the OCWC has a lot of big names (not to mention the press coverage!)” I had to decide why anyone in the world would care that Utah Valley University, a former trade college, would be sharing it’s course content, activities, and educational materials.

I think there's quite a number of people on the grassroots side of things that feel this way. When you're in the trenches the PR piece and the recognition piece doesn't seem to matter much. And frankly there's always something that feels a little slimy about PR -- and I say that as a person who does PR.

My feeling on this is pretty simple. The OCWC membership is a tactic, PR is a tactic, grant funding is a tactic, having lunches with your provost is a tactic, a simple form is a tactic, merit pay is a tactic.

And at OCWC we try to provide other tools you can use, finding presenters, pairing people with like interests up, trying (in despair recently) to build a healthy news network up. We're constantly looking for other things we can offer people to get the job done. (In other words -- we're needs driven as well).

But ultimately, if people can get the job done without us, that's fine too. The fact is the boundaries are not rigid here. If UVU is successful with their approach, I am absolutely going to get Jared's form and put it into the toolkit as a resource -- a path for people to choose if they want. And whether UVU comes on board with us or not, whether they call what they are doing OCW or not, they are encouraged to come to any and all OCWC conferences and talk with the people on the ground doing it in other institutions, or lift copy they need from the OCWC Toolkit.

In the best of worlds these boundaries are naturally blurry, because this is not ultimately about membership -- its about a movement. We're all in this together, no matter what the terms, and to my mind success is the best proof of efficacy of method. Congratulations to Jared and others at UVU on successfully pushing this through!

This always seems to come up in edupunk conversations, and seems to be one of the main attacks against edupunk, even from great people who I respect no end -- hey, they'll say, we can't have a knee-jerk reaction against corporate solutions. They aren't necessarily evil.

It may surprise you, but I completely agree. In fact, I'll go one step further, corporations are never evil.

Corporations are the wrong thing to be looking at. They aren't evil or good -- they merely *are*. It's the environment and the market that needs to be considered.

Markets are healthy or sick. And when they are sick, due to patent silliness, an oversupply of easy credit, or lack of regulation, all corporations will end up doing things against the public good.

Right now the reason the LMS market is sick is that Blackboard has no natural predators, due to a variety of factors, but primarily due to the particular structure of university purchasing systems combined with some early advantages Blackboard possessed (I do not see the patent issue, as awful as it is for the current market, as the main reason for their dominance). Blackboard is not evil, but its current situation is like a snakehead dropped in the Potomac to feed. And sitting around deciding whether it deserves to eat all those other fish is beside the point.

Snakehead 1.0. Image via Wikipedia

You see, I'm willing to admit, from a purchasing standpoint, that this feature or that feature of NG will improve the lives of students. I don't see much indication that Blackboard has gotten past their core mission as an access control company, but, hey, more amazing transformations have happened. I think they don't get openess in a really fundamental way, but still, if it became in their interest to do so, they could be quick learners.

All that is interesting, and fodder for future blog posts. But no matter what the value of Blackboard's individual actions, the fact is the LMS market ecosystem is sick, and will remain sick until Blackboard develops natural predators. I'm not really interested in the feature list of Snakehead 2.0. Compared to the larger context, the feature list is a minor point.

So I thank the gods for people like Jim Groom, the killer catfish who jumps on their every move, and scraps it up against all odds. People will say he isn't reasonable, but when you are trying to address a balance of power issue, it doesn't always pay to be reasonable. Sometimes you just gotta pull the rope as long and hard as you can.

Jim does that every day, here's to him.

Update: Jim challenges me in the comments, and in response I have to reformulate. Blackboard is not a snakehead in a peaceful pond, a fish out of water as it were. Blackboard is what happens when a teaching technology company evolves to conform to the enterprise software pond. It's attributes that we dislike are results of the enterprise purchasing system, not the causes of the environment, though they may perpetuate it.

Taking a half-day, and then doing some GOTV. Because of anticipated parking problems a lot of the polling places have been shifted since 2006 (and even since the primary), so there's a real need to get people that information.

Aside from the polling, which indicates a likely Obama victory in NH, I'd be very surprised if Obama lost here -- NH voted Kerry in 2004, there was a blue wave here in 2006, and things have only gotten worse for the GOP since. The one sticking point? In 2004/2006 the Iraq withdrawal issue was made clearer. People here are sick of the war, and want it over, tonight if possible. In 2006 there was a very clear distinction -- the Democrats are for getting out, the Repubs for staying in. But because of filibuster and presidential action that difference has become muted (which was the intent of those actions).

I don't think it's enough though, and I predict a win stronger than Kerry/Bush here.

One of the under-covered elements I'm seeing lately is that after 20 years of New Hampshire independents saying they support divided government (different parties in control of the the different branches) and complaining about gridlock people have finally realized they have been smoking crack. Divided government equals gridlock. Obama is talking about reaching across the aisle, but the independents in New Hampshire at least are taking it one step further -- they are going to give a one-party progressive government a go. [Partially this is interesting because we saw what a one-party conservative government did -- it got stuff done. All really horrible stuff, but stuff.]

If anybody wants the skinny on what's happening here, go to Blue Hampshire. It's a great look at what's going on on the ground. It may be a lottle spotty today, because so many posters are out on GOTV, but it will still be worth the read.

Just as people I know have finally come round to using Pandora Radio I've grown sick of it.

I can't remember when I started using Pandora, and as you will see in a minute, that's part of my problem with it. The first song I bookmarked was in March of 2006, but I think I may have started even before that.

I can remember how excited I was about Pandora at first. I had been crawling the MP3 blogs, sampling bands, burning CDs for local friends, and listening to web radio station KEXP for the next band to fall in love with. I ran a mailing list called culture whore, where friends and I traded recs.

It was a lot of work, frankly.

Then I turned on Pandora, and it did it all for me. No more of the inevitable Mars Volta song in my KEXP stream -- I didn't like it, bam! it was gone. It was a radio station built exactly around my tastes, always expanding, and requiring no effort from me. A dream come true.

And so I stopped trolling the blogs, stopped listening to normal Web radio, stopped making mix CDs for friends. I would just come in in the morning and turn on Pandora.

And about 2 years later (in March of this year) I quit using it, finding that the two years I had used it had been a bit of a musical wasteland for me, despite all the great bands I had discovered. And the only explanation I could give was that it had "Muzak-ed my music".

While most people are flocking to it now, I expect that most music-lovers will follow a similar trajectory. In fact, I've talked in the past six months to quite a number of early adopters who are off Pandora now, and it's interesting to compile some of the reasons they cite, with one or two issues of mine thrown in:

• They don't like the lack of authorship: A web radio show of the KEXP or WFMU type is put together by a person. And to listen to it is in some sense to engage in a dialogue with that person.  When John in the Morning -- a DJ I have listened to since I lived in Seattle -- when he plays a track off the new Pedro the Lion CD he's making an assertion about that track, and when he follows one song with another song, moving from Sense to early Portishead, that's something we can mentally give a thumbs up or thumbs down to -- in a way that is just impossible with Pandora (sorry).


• They don't like the lack of an object: A radio show that occurs on Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. is an object for discussion. So is a mix CD, or an album. People can listen to the exact same thing and discuss their different reactions to it. A canonical object is a shared cultural experience in a way that a randomly mixed personal playlist is not.  And while I can share my "station" in Pandora, it merely replicates my preferences -- no person is hearing the same songs I am in the same order, never mind the same time.


• The singles culture deadens you: The chunks of experience in Pandora are 3 to 4 minutes long, and delivered to you without effort. I remember the periods of my life before Pandora being marked by the albums I was listening to. I hear Superchunk's Here's to Shutting Up and I can remember the particular e-learning projects I was working on at the time. When Belle and Sebastian's Boy wIth the Arab Strap plays, I'm transported to early days with my oldest daughter, a tiny peanut we rocked to sleep to the tones of "Sleep the Clock Around". And so on. But honestly, around two years ago that association stops. My life has no soundtrack. I think that's a combination of the things above -- that resulted, as I said, in Pandora "Muzaking my Music."

I'm back to albums and radio stations now, and it feels good. My daughter and I have been listening to the new Submarines album, and I have no doubt that she is creating memories too. I've re-engaged with my mailing list, and put the music blogs back into the RSS.

And it feels human. It feels like waking up after a long slumber.

That's the problem with the Web 4.0 vision of intelligent agents -- without intent and authorship and humanness -- at least as part of the equation -- having better music is somewhat meaningless. I'd rather have John in the Morning play stuff I don't like 20% of the time and have that be a connection with authorship than Pandora play what I like a 100% of the time.

What does that have to do with OCW? I suppose this. There's some talk about OERs fitting into some kind of humanless delivery system -- the dynamically assembled dream of Web 3.0 or 4.0 or whatever it is. That's good for some things.

But there is always going to be a hunger to connect with those larger authored enitities, big chunks of shareable cultural experience ordered sequentially and representing someone's vision with which you'll interact. Albums, Radio shows, Mix tapes, and yes, courses. If there's a reason OCW matters in a world that wants to dynamically assemble OER it's because the idea of authorship and voice is core to to our sense of humanness. OCW is like the album format -- it's not the only way to do authorship and voice, to humanize our efforts and allow us to share intentional experiences, but it's one way. And that, ultimately, makes courseware worth doing, no matter what future technology may make possible.

[Or shorter version, I guess: OCW is album rock.]

Chronicle today, in front page article:

Poll: Students Less Engaged Than Thought

In four key states, a poll sponsored by CBS News, UWIRE, and The Chronicle has found, undergraduates tend to favor Barack Obama. But not many are working for him.

The core of which is this statement:

Students taking active roles in the campaign seemed to prefer tried-and-true ways of participating, the battleground poll found. Just 2 percent had posted videos about a candidate on YouTube, while 11 percent had donated to a campaign, 13 percent had helped with a voter-registration drive, and 13 percent had volunteered with a campaign.

The article had this to say about how that compared to past years:

...

Yep, nothing on that. Nothing either on how that compared to the general population (and if one in seven of your adult friends is volunteering, I guarantee you're an activist).

So here's an attempt to add context, via studies of 1996 and 2000 participation:

Much smaller percentages of students reported participating in other political activities, including political protests (3.7% of the 1996 sample and 3.6% of the 2000 sample) and political rallies (4.0% of the 1996 sample and 4.5% of the 2000 sample). Only 10.3% of the 1996 sample and 7.9% of the 2000 sample reported any involvement in a political campaign. These figures were comparable to those reported by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERD during the latter half of the 1990s (Sax et al., 1995; HERI, 2000).

So if the surveys are comparable at all in methodology and definition of participation, you would see a headline here that student participation has nearly doubled since 2000.

Nearly doubled.

That, to any reasonable commentator, would be the salient fact.

Final note, the article says this about showing support:

Only 34% said they had displayed a campaign sign or worn campaign-related apparel or a button, and just 31% said they had recruited a friend to support a campaign.

Only one out of three is visibly supporting a candidate? That's low?

I am always suspicious of self-reported political behavior surveys. But if we believe this survey means anything, it says there is a massive wave on the way.

So, I've stopped hacking around on my blog, and settled on the new theme. And we're sticking with it.

And for the first time since I launched this blog I've given it a title other than my name. The name, Tran|script, is meaningful to me, because it was the name of one of my first major OER projects. From 1997 until the birth of our first daughter in December 1998, my wife and I spent much of our free time scouring bookshops in Seattle for interesting books in the public domain, than scanning them in for free use by educators. We'd decide to get old pictures of famous buildings, and build an archive of pre-1928 photographs book by book. We built the front page to try and tie those resources to current events -- we'd take old 9th, 10th, and 11th edition Encyclopedia Britannica articles on perjury and put them up to tie them to the devleoping Clinton story. We developed a mystery game that used the buildings, called "The Demolitionist" where students would have to sort through the photographs of buildings, and explanations of styles of architecure to figure out what building a fringe guerilla group had targeted for bombing.

As we said back in 1998:

Mission

If one accepts John Dewey's definition of education, then tran|script is an educational site. The philosophy behind the site is simple: education is not a process of spoon-feeding students facts, but of empowering students to create. So, unlike the majority of educational sites, tran|script has made substantial effort to make available the resources students need to create compelling presentations and programs. The contents of the image and text archives are free for non-profit educational use. The contents of the feature archive demonstrate what students can do with the materials

I still think a lot about those days, and how Nicole put up with me, and actually even eagerly embraced my insane project -- and how great the promise of the web seemed to be at that point. So part of the title is nostalgia, and a reminder to myself to never lose that idealism that propels you, when you see a gap, to fill it, to just get it done.

But the other part of the title relates to why I originally chose it. I felt what we were doing by putting these materials up was giving back the world the cultural transcript that rightfully belonged to everybody. And I think if you look at most of the stuff I write about, on this site and others, it's about democratizing access to that transcript -- both by critiquing the powers of the MSM, and by encouraging students to participate directly in the discussions that shape our world. So I think it's still a decent title all these years later.

Thanks for dealing with my trip down memory lane -- maybe it's this election coming up, maybe it's just my natural tendency to get nostalgic in the midst of a New England fall -- but today, particularly, I'm really optimistic about the future, and so indebted to everybody out there that has moved it forward. Looking at my copyright statement on that site, I see now how I was stumbling around in the dark -- unable to trust public domain, but having no idea how to cut a middle ground -- problems that were being solved at that very time by David Wiley (though I wouldn't know this for many years). And looking at the gallery concept is quaint in an age of decentralized weblog publishing -- "Send us your projects, and we''l publish them for you"? Really? And it's been accomplished, mostly, by people moving this forward in the interstices of other tasks, with what time they could scrounge....

I guess I'm saying -- "I love you all, man..." and isn't it great that we're all here, all these years later...and even though I'm buried in my job right now, I'm going to get back to blogging here regularly, so please stay tuned.

Oh, and here's to you Nicole, who really made all this possible, though I always forget to say that. I don't think we're all that separate from those days, despite the roller-coaster ride of kids and career. And that's pretty amazing.

I'm not the first to say this, but as much as I hate polling culture, I think Insta-polls have done a surprising amount of good.

It used to be the pundits would spend the hour after the debate telling everybody who intelligent people thought won. Then the next day the pollsters would call everybody, and voila -- a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now they sit there, knowing the polls are coming in that night, and that all the nonsense they are spouting is about to be disproved. And when the polls come in they say things like "Well, I still maintain McCain won on points, but clearly the campaign is solidifying because the polls show that independents believe that Obama won 53-22."

Really, is that what they believe? What's the definition of winning then?

It's confusing times to be a pundit. They were originally supposed to be predicting what how voters would react -- horse-race journalism, sure. But a wonderful sort of horse-race, where reporting could influence the results.

Now that they've started to lose that ability, via insta-polls and citizen journalism, it's becoming clear to everyone how in the bubble they are. You can't watch a bunch of pundits talking about how John McCain controlled the debate and made ground before the polls come in that night, and then see the polls show the biggest Obama spread yet without wondering what these people could possibly bring to the table in terms of insight.

I mucked my theme some time ago, then decided I was too sick of it to fix it. So I went through approximately 2 billion WordPress themes, before deciding I'd build a new one from the ground up based on the Sandbox theme.

I don't have time to do it all at once though, so please be patient as the look of the site shifts over the next couple weeks.

Oh, and for the nostalgic among you, enjoy:



Oh, wow.

I was playing KEXP on my computer over the weekend, and I say to my five year old "Hey isn't it cool we can play a station from the Internet on the computer?"

She looks at me like I'm stupid.

"On the computer?" she says, quizzically.

"Yes." I say.

She laughs. She thinks I'm being funny. "Daddy," she says, "the Internet is the computer".

To a five year old the computer and the network are redundant terms.

Jim Groom notes the creation of a Copyright Czar. The bill is here. I'm guessing since the "Drug Czar" idea worked out so well, the government just couldn't help itself.

You want to know how screwed up the world is? The sponsor of this bill, Patrick Leahy, is a huge Grateful Dead fan. From Wikipedia:

Leahy is a fan of the Grateful Dead. He has not only attended concerts, but has taped them, and

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="202" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

has a collection of the band's tapes in his Senate Offices. Jerry Garcia visited him at his Senate offices, and Leahy gave a tie designed by Garcia to Senator Orrin Hatch (who responded by giving Leahy a Rush Limbaugh tie). Surviving band members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart have participated in fundraisers for Leahy and his Political Action Committee, the Green Mountain Victory Fund. Leahy also appeared in a videotaped tribute to the Dead when they received a lifetime achievement award at the 2002 Jammys. His Senate website notes this response to a question from seventh grade students from Vermont's Thetford Academy who asked Leahy which Dead song was his favorite, he replied: "... my favorite is "Black Muddy River" but we always play "Truckin'" on election night at my headquarters."

Peace, Love, and Selling Out.

So I posted this news item over on the OCWC blog, but given the touchiness of the whole "free" debate, I thought I'd put my own thoughts on the matter over here.

The first thing to realize is the Consortium has no position on for-profit ventures involving courseware. We don't endorse them, we don't attack them. And our members can decide on exactly how they wish to enforce their copyright -- the Consortium requires that institutions release at least ten courses to non-commercial use -- but beyond that institutions have discretion in how they choose to manage their licenses. It's a baseline, not a line in the sand.

So with that off the table, let's talk about commercial use.

I tend to not be as religious about it as some. I tend, for example, to see a difference between ad-funded efforts and resale efforts, and I think the share-alike clause tends to cover many concerns that the non-commercial does. Were I releasing something, I'm not entirely sure I'd forgo the non-commercial restriction -- I think, quite frankly, it'd depend on the nature of what I was releasing. The goal would be to get it into the hands of those people that could use it in the most effective manner possible. To the extent commercial activity does that I'm in favor. To the extent it doesn't, I'm opposed.

So, do commercial ventures ultimately aid or hinder the distribution of material? I think that ends up being a policy issue -- not a philosophical one, which is why tracking these ventures like AsiaOnline ends up being so important. If we could get past the "free as in beer" tirades and start looking at some real world data we might actually get somewhere on this, or at least find some common ground.

That's why I greet things like AsiaOnline with a combination of excitement and trepidation. I think the movement is young enough that we can bear to see how some of these things play out. The key here is not resistance, but vigilance.

I know, an edupunk forgoing resistance for vigilance ... have I sold out already? But for every EMI there are a dozen Matador and Merge records, a dozen indie labels that make the revolution possible -- how do we distinguish between the two? How do we foster innovation and distribution while preventing monopolization and appropriation? I'm may be accused of begging out, but I'm not entirely sure we have an answer on that yet. In the meantime, there are numerous ways to proceed, and that's good.

Sorry, but this is horrendous news:

A federal judge in New York today put the kibosh on the planned publication of a contentious book version of the popular (now defunct) fansite, ruling it violates Rowling's creations.

U.S. District Judge Robert Patterson Jr. dismissed defense arguments that the Lexicon was protected under fair-use provisions of copyright law.

I know readers here won't need a primer on how ridiculous this is. The right to compose literary guides to extant works has existed for hundreds of years. Take, for example, the multiple guides to James Joyce's Ulysses (incl. one written by his friend Stuart Gilbert). Or the guides to Middle Earth, many of which I would guess Rowling has on her own bookshelf.

Art has always been a conversation, and works like lexicons are one of the many aspects of that conversation. But it is apparently more important for the courts to protect the rights of millionaires to make more money than it is to keep that conversation open -- just yet another example of our culture's readiness to raid the infrastructure of the past while refusing to pay our own productions forward. Rowling's influences: C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, Roald Dahl, and J.R.R. Tolkein would shake their heads in disgust at this behavior were they alive today. My sense is all those authors thought they were building a world to be shared between them and their readers, not building a walled garden with a EULA pinned on it.

Because I'd really forgotten what a typical business laptop looked like, I thought I'd not make trouble and just have my new job give me a standard business laptop. You know, being the new guy, I didn't want to ask for all kind of weird blogger crap.

It's been kind of an interesting experience, because I am so used to only having a home laptop, I'd forgotten how streamlined your average corporate machine is:

• No integrated webcam


• No SD card reader


• No integrated micrpohone


• No pre-installed movie editing software

I don't think this is unique to my current situation, mind you. I'm sure most universities have quite similar default machines.

And I take full responsibility for not thinking through my request for a default install -- other than the absence of new media features it is a sweet machine, and I found an old webcam to throw on it and I'll buy some movie making software and screencasting apps.

But isn't it funny we live in a world where business machines have MS Access and InfoPath installed by default, applications that only 2% of the end users will utilize, but things like movie making software and webcams and screencasting apps are still an oddity on business machines?

Might one of the simplest things to do at a university be to talk to your IT department about what a modern default install and hardware config might look like? Just in case a professor *does* get an urge to Skype someone or hang out in Second Life or webcast her class?

If we are serious about participatory media, it belongs in the base spec.

I've been looking for examples of agile solutions to real world problems to put into a presentation I'm giving on my last day here, and this one just fell into my lap today:

IN the past, said Stacie R. Hankins, a special assistant at the United States Embassy in Rome, when the ambassador prepared to meet an Italian political figure, the staff would e-mail a memo about the meeting and attach biographies of those who would be attending to be printed out.

Today, she said, they still produce the memo, but “now they attach a link to the Diplopedia article” — Diplopedia being a wiki, open to the contributions of all who work in the State Department. The ambassador, Ronald P. Spogli, frequently reads the biographies on his BlackBerry on the way to the meeting.

The advantages are obvious, in efficiency and in saving paper, but it has required a leap of faith, too. For, theoretically at least, anyone at the State Department could have edited the biographies Mr. Spogli was reading — unlike traditional resources.

I love stories like this -- stories of stodgy, bureaucratic agencies trying to reverse their ossification with new lightweight tools that promote a culture of openness. So many times when I'm talking to people about this technology they feel separated from the heroes of DIY community, assuming that people that start things like LibriVox or flu wiki must be technical geniuses (wrong) or exist outside of the business constraints most people live in (ok, point taken).

But when you read stuff like this, it resonates with people in large organizations:

The advantage of Diplopedia, she said, isn’t necessarily the ease of creating new material, but the ease in finding information. “The political section used to keep biographies on political people, and the economics people kept biographies on economics people,” she said. “It was not always up to date. You didn’t always know what the other had.”

The practical information, likewise, is material that was floating around the halls of the State Department, but not typically written down.

“Not to resort to clichés, but it demonstrates the long tail effect,” Mr. Johnson said. “A lot of things are not things that you would put on a traditional Web site. If someone directed a desk officer to create an article, it would not be about how to order lunch. That might seem trivial — but getting food into the main State Department building is not an easy task.”

If anyone else has examples of open tools penetrating into Kafkaesque realms, please share. I'll update this blog with them as I find them.

So what happens when you're in the middle of playing Halo, and someone from the New York Times calls you for off the cuff analysis? Well, this:

But even without the straight ticket, Mike Caulfield, a co-founder of bluehampshire.com, a political Web site, said he expected Mrs. Shaheen to win.

“People kind of treasure their indecision,” he said of New Hampshire residents. “They kind of hold on to it much longer than people in other places might. But if 2006 is any guide, the independents will break very hard for the Democrats.”

I stand by the quote though. The reporter was primarily calling me not on the race, but looking instead for some demographic context. And yeah, "indecision" is what I said, because I do think it's ambiguous whether this is a good thing about NH-ites. I blame the primaries, where you're always more interesting as someone in the process of deciding than as someone who has signed on.

I do wish that Dean Barker, the BH co-founder who is a nationally recognized expert on this specific race, had been called instead -- but by a fluke, he was on vacation this week in some undisclosed location.

I loved reading Jon Udell's post on net-enhanced democracy. Back in 2006, when I started to do what Jon did so wonderfully in his essay, the hope was exactly this -- that some generally less political individuals would take these tools and do what poli-bloggers were doing -- dig out the backstory and deflate the press coverage on very specific issues.

And while Jon is in no way your average person, the fact he was able to get his specific answer on pellet stoves outside of any political support network is pretty amazing.

But as I sit here today reading Jon's essay on how Sununu used his vote on cloture to gut clean energy initiatives from the Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 Energy Independence and Security Act [thx, Jon!], I can't help but think of the bill that was put in limbo by a cloture vote today, a bill that would have doubled heating aid to low income families this winter.

The Democrats tried to schedule that heating aid bill for a vote, and the Republicans stopped them.

Reading Jon's essay caused me to think about the reasons I haven't looked up how Sununu voted on this newer motion -- because ultimately it doesn't matter what his vote was. The truth is what your individual Senator does on bills matters quite a lot less than you think.

Let me explain why.

The reason why the heating aid bill (S. 3186) did not pass a cloture vote is because the Republicans have been trying to get an offshore drilling provision in a passable bill for a while now, and the mechanism they have used to do this is to filibuster any bill the Democrats see as must-pass, and have the leadership make a deal: we'll stop our filibuster if you pass our offshore drillling agenda.

The current focus of this effort is a bill on the floor right now: S.3268. This bill was originally about limiting market speculation in oil futures, a policy most Americans support (and most Senators support). However, the GOP has decided to filibuster bringing this bill to a vote unless it includes provisions that lift offshore drilling bans.

Today the Democrats tried to table this speculation bill which has been in filibuster limbo for days now so that they could move onto a widely supported heating aid bill. In an effort to up the stakes, the Republicans effectively filibustered a motion to bring the heating aid bill to the floor. (Some people may be confused by my use of the word filibuster here, but filibustering does not require speeches anymore -- under Senate Rule 22, it simply requires requesting a cloture vote to end debate then defeating that motion. This is, for all intents and purposes, a filibuster.)

So they've kept the heating aid bill off the floor, despite the fact that as we speak families are scrambling to figure out how they are going to heat their homes and want to see firm action from the government. And the GOP has done this as a way to increase their chances of getting offshore drilling passed.

Now why would they engage in such a game of chicken?

The idea is this -- the public sees the Senate as controlled by Democrats -- if the Democrats can't get the heating aid passed, the Republicans can point to the fact the Democrats are a "do-nothing" Congress that cant get anything passed.

On the other hand, if they are successful in getting the offshore drilling provision into something, they've managed to force major legislation through the Congress using only the 41 votes it takes to filibuster. And even if they are not successful at this, they get to keep the debate about offshore drilling, which they think will play well in certain key states.

This strategy, paired with a media that loves the "Democrats in disarray" meme, has allowed the Republicans to stop major legislation in the Senate at levels that are historically unprecedented. Here's a comparison of cloture votes over the last 30 or so years:



[This graphic above is from here, but the best history on this is from McClatchy, which continues its tradition of being the only news agency doing its job. We are currently at 127 cloture votes with 5 months left in the session.]

Notice the outlier? This is not a story you'll hear in the media. But it is impossible to understand any vote in the Senate without understanding this strategy.

Which brings me back to today's heating aid bill. The Republicans need 41 votes to hold this bill hostage to offshore drilling concerns -- or more specifically, they need to make sure there are not 60 votes for cloture (cloture requires 3/5 of the Senate to vote Yea, not 3/5 of present Senators).

So what's the strategy here? It's called Catch and Release. The Republican leadership gets all the votes it needs -- 41 people to vote Nay or not show up. Then it hands out passes -- they let certain vulnerable Senators up for reelection vote for the bill (or in this case, possibly Senators from the oil-heated Northeast.). Those passes could theroretically be up to 8 in this session, but it's usually somewhat less.

As long as they don't cut it *too* close they can block the bill and burnish a couple "maverick" crendentials.

So did Sununu get a "catch and release" or not? Did our other Senator, Senator Gregg get one?

Internet tools can tell you that -- but what they can't tell you is that in this case it doesn't matter, that what matters in this case is an overall party strategy which has been used to rule from the minority in a historicaly unprecendented way. And that the money here that matters most is not neccesarily the donations of the industries to the individual campaigns (though, believe me, that matters), but quite possibly the general slush of party senatorial campaign money.

Given that -- what is the best approach to building our emerging digital democracy?

I think it's maybe what we see here. I'm an optimist ultimately -- Jon's discovery regarding where his wood pellet tax credit went *is* significant in the way it personalized the issue -- the specificity of that really brings the issue home. And it's significant in that it showed the media narrative around the issue to be what it is -- a farce.

Those are big and important things. But I think it's also significant in that Jon's post prompted me to post this explanation here, on my personal blog, rather than the progressive venues I'd normally post it to. As more people delve into these tools, the conversation around how our process really works can occur. And hopefully it can start to occur in channels outside the poliwonkablogosphere that I love so much but that others, well, not so much.

The first reaction to tools in the hands of novices is always that the novices don't have the proper context. But use those tools and the context will come to you. Whether you asked for it or not.

Update: I broke down and checked THOMAS. John Sununu, our Senator who is up for re-election this fall, voted for cloture. Judd Gregg, who is up in 2010, did not.

I'm excited beyond words to annouce that starting August 25th I will be working for the OpenCourseWare Consortium as their first Director of Community Outreach. Or at least we think that's the title of the position. This is the job that appeared in OLDaily some time ago as a marketing job.

For me, there's a great bit of serendipty in getting this postion. I started my career in e-learning more than a decade ago, and one of my first projects, back in 1997, was what we'd now term an OER project. In 1999, I convinced my employer to make pre-literacy sofware available free on the internet and we put up some of the first flash-based educational games (if you have younger kids, check the link out, it's still pretty cool stuff). I became enamored with the net-enabled learning-by-doing approach of Cognitive Arts, and was lucky enough to be a senior engineer on the Columbia University Online project 2000-2002.

I've kept up with the issues in net-enabled education, but in more recent years my professional and personal life has been more centered in community organizing and publicity, both in movement politics and for my college. And I've enjoyed that, a lot. I'm frankly probably a better community organizer and media guy than I ever was a programmer (although I do miss the long diet coke filled nights where it's just you, your tunes, and 108 lines of python that need to ship by morning).

I had been looking to get back into the net-enabled learning space more fully, and had made some steps towards that at my own institution, but then this job appeared -- which is essentially community organizing and movement politics (sort of) for the educational issues I care about.

How cool is that? I honestly looked at the ad, and understood for the first time that the two phases of my career didn't have to be separate.

Am I gushing here? Yeah, I guess. I can't help it.

I'll say more about this when I start, but couldn't resist putting up something now. And if you're a reader of this blog and want to tell me what *you* think the OCW movement should be doing, don't hesitate to email me at caulfield dot mike at gmail dot com. No matter what we decide to call this position, outreach is a whole bunch of what it's about, and ultimately that means more listening than talking.

I started to type this as a response to the gracious comment Ismael left me on the Stallman post, but it quickly got big, so I am putting it here:

Ismael writes:

The rationale behind my quote of his about art (not actually a literal quote, but actually faithful to what he said) was that:
- if we’re talking about content/works/software that are needed, as tools, to reach other goals, they should be free
- art did not fall in the previous category
- art, as a subjective expression of one’s ideas/feelings, should not be changed by any means (e.g. Richard M. Stallman would not allow any derivative works of his writings not to go out of context, or find he’s being attributed things he did not actually said ;)

First I want to thank Ismael for taking both the initial time to transcribe this lecture of Stallman, and to clarify it. (And I agree with him that from the point of view of most people, the medical patents statement is the most interesting -- just not my area)

So to the point --

I think the "practical=tool" clarification helps, but ultimately does not rescue Stallman's argument. To me, at least, it embraces a Romantic and Early Modern view of art. And it's a view I've found quite interesting -- I have always thought, for example, that Jakobson's "Poetic Function", which defines art as essentially as a message that turns in on itself -- that is, as a message that does not direct itself toward externalities -- that analysis is one of the genius moments in 20th century intellectual history. I read the lines "the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination", his definition of the Poetic, and I'm still stunned at how many threads of modern thought come together in that beautifully simple but stunningly creative insight.

So I'm more than interested in attempts to define Art and aesthetic thinking as something in space apart from the prectical and directed. And tellingly, the other name for the Jakobson's Poetic function it the "autotelic" -- that which is an end in itself -- and this jives nicely with Stallman's distinction. That's not coincidental, since Stallman and Jakobson are pulling from the same Art for Art's Sake influences, but it's significant.

Yet even in 1961, Jakobson saw this as a *function* -- that is, there is no such thing as poetry in a sense -- there's a poetic element in everything. And the things we call poetry and art are traditionally things which are constructed to highlight the relation of the message to itself. But while the function has clear abstract boundaries, the artifacts that function illuminates do not. And we now have about 40 years of post-structuralist theory showing us that is indeed the case.

So back to the point -- to the average person, I suppose, art is not a tool -- because they enjoy it as readers. They revel in the autotelic. But to the artist, new art is always demonstrating ways to solve their own artistic problems. It's no different in some ways than physical invention. Camera obscura, a tool, had a profound effect on Rennaisance Art -- but so did Giotto's realism. To the artist, and even to the astute viewer, art is always a set of tools, characters, plot devices and the like that they can rip out and use.

And of course it does not stop there. Fan fiction is a good example, but we don't have to go twentieth century on this...here's DaVinci's Last Supper:



And here's Giampetrino's from some years later:



What was an output of Da Vinci's artistic process becomes an input into Giampetrino's own. It's not the world's most original work, but as long as correct attribution is made, why shouldn't Giampetrino use Da Vinci's work to develop his own style?

Similarly, many of my wife's friends use photos taken by someone else to make paintings from. To the photographer, the photograph may be meant to be autotelic, but to the painter who uses it, it is another tool in completing their own ends. Likewise, the painting one creates from the photograph could end up as a piece of website layout, or the background of a WordPress theme.

There's a solution to this, but Stallman can't use it. The solution is to say that the photographer gets to decide whether his photographs are meant to be tools for graphic designers and artists (in which case he gives up his freedom) or art (in which case he preserves his rights).

But that rests the division in the intentionality of the producer, not in any attribute of the object. And if we vest that distinction in intentionality, we might as well all go home -- to say that the producer should determine how his own work should be used is to say that the concept of Free Software is dead. I choose to see my code as my personal self-expression, therefore you can't copy it.

That's where we were *before* Stallman's innovative movement, and I have no intention of going back.

I don't mean to minimize the massive problems in Art here, with everything from compensation to attribution. It's not an easy subject -- it's far more difficult than coming to terms with whether printer drivers should be free and open. And I'm guessing that's why Stallman wants to wall it off from his more core concerns.

When I saw this summary of part of Stallman's talk in Barcelona, it irked me:

When a work embodies practical knowledge you’re going to use for your life, it should be free and it should be free to be modified. It’s not the case of art. Art should be shareable, but not modifiable.

Caveats: this is a summary of what Stallman said by an audience member, not a direct quote.

But as stated, the distinction doesn't hold water.

I'd have to do an entire blog post series to enumerate the many ways such a distinction is untenable, but here's a quick example:

Say I find a book that tells me how to use a spreadsheet to better compute inventory, and as a small business owner, I modify that document and publish pieces of it into my employee handbook. That's practical, I guess, and therefore free. Why should I have to rewrite something that's already been written? Better to build on the work already done, and move things forward from there.

And I suppose the spreadsheet information should be still free to me even if my business does something "impractical" like publish novels. By bettter managing inventory, we can bring better art to the public more cheaply, and it would be wrong (morally wrong in Stallman's world) to set up policy to prevent that.

Here's another way to bring better art more cheaply to the public though -- a fan fiction approach. As a publisher of books, if I could publish the best fan fiction for say, Doctor Who, then from the point of view of my publishing house, that's incredibly practical. Making Doctor Who and its related characters "free" would unleash a ton of untapped creativity, and like the best open source sofware, would allow people with a talent in one area (plots and dialogue) to put their effort into a larger frame they couldn't create by themselves (characters, backstory, world creation) but can certainly extend.

Now, can someone show me how a concept of "practicality" clarifies this situation, making the rights in the first situation fall toward society whereas in the second situation they fall towards the author?

I'm not saying, incidentally, that all art should be absolutely "open", or that fan fiction should be freely publishable by for-profit publishers. I really don't know how to make sense of the new world of copyright (though I would start by making no copyright last longer than 20 years -- which would give you access to seven of the ten Doctors anyway -- and I would vigorously protect all non-commerical distribution of fan fiction).

I am saying that Stallman's take on Art, if the quote is accurate, is strangely static -- and seems to not acknowledge that art builds on past work in ways that are not unfamiliar to software engineers. There may be a way to separate software from hip-hop, fan fiction, and that Christian company that clips all the bad bits out of movies -- but I haven't seen it yet.

I agree that we have to start thinking of the ways in which Art is different from software and recipes. Only the most committed monist would deny that. But like most issues in Art, picking this apart is bound to be a messy endeavor no matter what, and my guess is "practicality" is the wrong string to start pulling on.

(h/t OLDaily for pointing me to the summary)

If you want to understand why the word-that-must-not-be-named spread like wildfire, you need only read the Inside Higher Ed article on Blackboard "partnering with Syracuse University to develop a way to integrate Blackboard with Sakai."

Jim has a nice post on Blackboard's co-option of "openness" in their statements on this project. As for me, I continue to find it amusing that quotes from Blackboard leadership almost always follow the term "learning" with the term "login". In the quote in the current press release, "login" appears almost eight words after "learning", making for a couple tense moments:

“Students should not have to worry about whether different technology is powering their online learning environments for different classes,” said Michael L. Chasen, Blackboard’s president and CEO, in a prepared statement. “With a single login users should have access to all of their courses and course material. There should be one place they can go to get all of their course information.”

Did you catch that?

learning (0) environments (1) for (2) different (3) classes (4), With (5) a (6) single (7) login

Blackboard as an access control company anyone?

God save the single login. No matter what it costs!

But I think I differ with Jim in what I feel the most interesting part of this whole deal is. I don't feel that there is any real danger of Blackboard co-opting the term "open". In fact, in the current press release the line:

With Project NG, Blackboard is working to create a more open, flexible platform that allows educators to better personalize, customize and integrate their educational ecosystem.

reads to me more like white noise than anything else. It's a bit of exquisite corpse poetry, apparently composed in the interstices of an edtech conference.

And the rest of the release? I just can't work up a steam about it, because the whole thing is too darn amusing. I mean, how open is your system if the two owners of the systems have to "partner" to get the systems integrated?

And the line:

“Students should not have to worry about whether different technology is powering their online learning environments for different classes..."

Hilarious. The point is not whether "Students shouldn't have to worry about whether different technology is powering their online learning environments." The point is I shouldn't have to care what Blackboard thinks is a "legitimate" worry to get stuff out of their system. What I decide to worry about is really none of their business.

It's the difference between engagement and openness. Engagement is admirable, but it is essentially interacting with the world on terms that you define.

Openness is letting the world interact with you on terms the world defines.

That difference is crucial, and should not be forgotten. As engagement with the broader community, this effort is not a bad thing. But it has absolutely nothing to do with openness.

I've created a new site that bascially aggregates the offlining posts from this site: Offline Thinking. The idea is to eventually get others to post on it as well via tag based syndication.

The design of the site is stripped-down WordPress template -- the theme is meant to be ASCII-friendly in case you want to download it to your Sony Reader or Kindle. All the headings are marked with surrounding characters, and there's a minimum of layout junk to get caught in your select operation. I'm working on ASCII-friendly blockquoting as well.

Anyway, check it out, and let mr know what you all think.

So last month we had an embarrassment of riches with intelligent articles on the perils of multitasking and the online rabbit hole.

This month, please welcome blowhardization, the inevitable second round of the public multitasking debate where bloviators are given extra time on the mike, and the more intelligent voices are gonged off stage.

Exhibit A: the recent Chicago Tribune article: "So how dumb are we?". After drifting over Carr's excellent essay, and giving a nod to another book, the writer decides to spend nine of her twenty paragraphs on this guy:

The question is hotly debated in academic circles, where Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein further turned up the temperature with his recent book, "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future." Its subtitle: "Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30."

Who's Bauerlein? He's the English professor that formerly made a name for himself criticizing how "liberal" our college campuses were:

Academics may quibble over the hiring process, but voter registration shows that liberal orthodoxy now has a professional import. Conservatives and liberals square off in public, but on campuses, conservative opinion doesn't qualify as respectable inquiry. You won't often find vouchers discussed in education schools or patriotism argued in American studies. Historically, the boundaries of scholarly fields were created by the objects studied and by norms of research and peer review. Today, a political variable has been added, whereby conservative assumptions expel their holders from the academic market. A wall insulates the academic left from ideas and writings on the right.

His influence in the Tribune article extends well beyond the eight paragraphs that quote him. In fact the Tribune author's lede:

NEW YORK—Who hasn't snickered at "Jaywalking," a "Tonight Show" segment in which host Jay Leno flummoxes unsuspecting young people on the street with such tricky questions as: In what country is Paris located?

is strangely similar to the first lines of Bauerlein's book:

Everybody likes the "Jaywalking" segment on The Tonight Show. With mike in hand and camera ready, host Jay Leno leaves the studio and hits the sidewalks of L.A., grabbing pedestrians for a quick test of their factual knowledge.

So it's not a surprise when Bauerlein shows up six paragraphs later to answer all the hard questions that less stellar lights such as Nick Carr have posed. This may look like a newspaper article, but in reality it's a genre that astute readers are familiar with -- it's a book promotion piece plus extras. It's not a book review -- nothing in the article actually examines the premises of Bauerlein's work in any systemic way. It's an article written based on book, fueled by a promotional push.

Nick Carr doesn't have a book out, or at any rate one on this subject that will sell, so he's a footnote.

So if you ask why blowhardization always has to happen, there's why. Because Bauerlein, Keen, and others write books that make people feel good about what they never learned, and argue their points without any disturbing ambiguity. That sells books, which generates press, and by the time this game of telephone ends people receive a debate that has all the nuance of an Andy Rooney rant.

I'm fully prepared to believe that Google may be making us stupid. But they are still remain rank amateurs compared to the press.

It seems every year for the past several years there's been a couple of weeks where there is a flurry of intelligent articles about the dangers of multitasking and the hivemind. Then the inevitable blowhardization of the subject sets in, the intelligent voices fade and the Grandpa Simpsons come out of the woodwork. And we wait another year for the subject to get back on track, hoping next year will be the year that we can sustain a rational discussion about these core issues without falling into techno-utopianism or decline of civilization hyperbole.

I'm not sure that year is upon us yet, but the latest crop of articles out has made for one of the more enjoyable weekends of reading I've had in some time.

Nick Carr, my favorite IT contrarian, writes one of the best summaries of the issues of the hivemind I've seen, and offers some new insights to boot.

Get past the title (for some reason Carr is addicted to titles that undercut the nuance of his articles). The article is actually strongest when it is not focussing on Google, and in fact the discussion of Google's particular influence is the one place where the article almost comes off the rails. In particular, I'm not completely sure the argument that the CPM/CPC structure of web financing exhibits a uniquely pernicious influence on the structure of the web is correct. Haven't print media in general, and magazines in particular, been using similar models for a century now? I'm willing to buy the argument in a smaller dose, I suppose -- I have to guess that the advent of the magazine (as replacing the journal) had some deletorious effects on attention, and began the reward system for page flipping that we now see in spades on the Internet.

But as for the rest of the article, it's very good, and models precisely the sort of end-to-end depth of argument that the web may be eroding. Get past the title and read it, it's the sort of article you'll love even if you disagree with it (and I do disagree with quite a bit of it).

Christine Rosen's essay is more pedestrian fare, but as an example of the argument that seems to emerge once a year on multitasking it's a wonderfully compact iteration. There's a good layperson level overview of some of the recent science, some discussion of the cost to business, and of course, some talk about the effect on our personal lives.

And among other things, it contains this little nugget:

In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”

It's always tempting to riff off of science nuggets like this in inappropriate ways. But that skills vs. knowledge distinction in evaluating multitasking seems fertile ground, even apart from what the fMRIs may say.

It's worth noting The New Atlantis is tied to the conservative think-tank the Ethics and Public Policy Center -- worth noting because although Rosen's article is pretty clean of conservative baggage, these things very quickly fall into specific political ruts. There is a larger frame that some would like to advance -- that if we just go back to reading what we're told, maybe the Great Books front to back, everything's going to come up roses. That is, the question of multitasking ultimately plugs into some people's lack of comfortability with the hoi polloi being in the driver's seat, and an uncomfortability with hierarchical lines disappearing in general.

I'm not sure why that has to be, but it's inevitable that the Sean Hannity's of the world will be gloating in the coming month over the Myth of Multitasking, as if this is some victory for God, guns, and Reagan. I'd like to figure out why -- if we could peel that part of the debate off, we'd get a lot further with this...