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STS Class First Blog Assignment: How To Reconcile Freedom and Order?

Last class we discussed readings from Langdon Winner, Norman Balabanian, and others that showed us how technologies, and in particular technological systems, have embedded within them certain social values.

We saw how technologies often promote certain values, or require certain social, economic, and political landscapes and relationships, sometimes without our even fully realizing that they do. Through looking at examples of Amish technological choices, we got some appreciation of how difficult it can be to take control of technologies in the service of a larger social or moral goal.

At the end of the class, I asked whether you thought there was some overarching social goal that Americans value as much as the Amish value fellowship, and whether that American social goal shapes, or can shape, our technological decisions. General class consensus was that Americans’ highest social value might be “freedom.” Balabanian and Winner, however, clearly show us how many technologies erode or deny freedom–particularly ones that have become part of our daily lives in industrial and postindustrial societies.

So, if Americans value freedom above all else, how does that square with our technologically-saturated society? Are these two things at odds? Or does it only seem so? Or perhaps, upon further reflection, you might come up with a different overarching social goal that seems to inform American technology? Write a concise blog comment of no more than 600 words that tries to answer these questions. Be sure that your response has an argument–in other words, make a clear, strong, and creative point in your essay that teaches us something new. After you’re done writing, please read some of your classmates’ responses and post a reply to at least one.

Your blog comments are due by 5pm on Wednesday, 1/30. Your comments will not show up immediately after you post them: I will approve the comments at 5pm 1/30 after everyone has had a chance to submit. Note: please put an extra line of whitespace between paragraphs in your essay, otherwise the text will run together (WordPress doesn’t recognize paragraph indentations).

I look forward to seeing your responses!

HIST 380 and HUM 380: Test Post for Comments

Before our next class, please post a comment on this blog entry to ensure that you have no difficulties posting. You do not need to use your real name if you do not wish to, but if you choose a pseudonym be sure to stick with it for the rest of the semester.

For your comment, please write one sentence on something we’ve covered in class so far that you found interesting. Please post your comments no later than 5pm on January 26th.

Digital Humanities Spring Speakers

The new semester is just about to begin here at IIT, which–in addition to new classes–means a new set of speakers for our Digital Humanities Series.

On February 14, we’ll kick off the spring lectures with Leilah Lyons, a specialist in human-computer interaction from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Lyons studies and designs interfaces for museums that allow patrons to engage with exhibits, thereby collaborating in the museum learning experience through the use of computers. Lyons’s work shifts the focus, and the power dynamic, of public technologies from top-down design and deployment methodologies to ones that incorporate the user as a powerful participant in the learning and teaching process. Her talk will focus on her work on the CoCensus project, and how to design and deploy informal learning interfaces.

After that, on March 13th, we’ll be hearing Stephen Jones of Loyola speak on “The Emergence of the Digital Humanities.” His talk will draw on his new book of the same name, and discuss the development of digital humanities as a field of academic inquiry.

Here’s a podcast of him talking about his previous book on the Nintendo Wii,  Codename Revolution, which was published in the MIT platform studies series. (Direct link: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/MITP_Codename.mp3) Even if you’ve never played with a Wii, or yours is now collecting dust, this is a fascinating discussion on its origins, technology, and social meanings.  In fact, students in my STS class this spring will be reading parts the book–I’m looking forward to seeing what their take on it is.

Finally, on April 11th, we’ll hear from Jennifer Thom of the Newberry Library. Thom will talk to us about her cutting-edge work on the creation of digital archives and publications. Her projects include research into new search methods and search design, and how to present information digitally that may be difficult to apprehend even in its original paper versions. In particular, Thom will discuss her work on the Foreign Language Press Survey, a project that uses the TEI encoding scheme to classify translations of 19th and 20th century newspaper stories from the foreign-language press in and around Chicago.

All staff, faculty, and students at IIT are welcome to attend the Humanities Department’s digital humanities speaker series, as are scholars, staff, and students from other local universities. We hope to see you there!

 

History of Computing Class: 4th Blog Comment

In Who Controls The Internet we’ve read about a variety of episodes in the history of the internet and the world wide web that may be a bit surprising. The authors have cherry-picked these events to make a particular point about where the ‘net is going, and where they think it should be going in the future. 

In an essay of no more than 500 words, tell us what the overall argument is that the authors are making about how the ‘net and web should continue to develop. What is the “call to action” presented by the book to readers? Support your contention with at least 2 specific examples (events described within the text) and be sure to account for the global context of the web–don’t just focus on events that occurred within the USA.

Note: You only need to do this blog comment if you would like extra credit or have missed doing one of the other blog comments. Comment is due Thursday, Nov. 29 by 10pm if you choose to do it.

MOOCs are doing a head-fake on higher education

Clay Shirky recently did an interesting post on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the future of “non-elite” educational institutions and the students they serve: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/

There are some misunderstandings of higher educational funding models in Shirky’s post, and the first few paragraphs comparing higher education to the demise of the music industry are problematic and likely to get your dander up, but if you stick with it through the end, it has some interesting insights to offer–as do the comments.

Shirky’s argument is that most current critiques leveled against online learning, and especially MOOCs, don’t take into account the reality of our higher educational landscape, but instead focus on comparing elite, top-50 liberal arts colleges and their educational benefits to MOOCs etc., ensuring that the comparison is specious and unhelpful. He cautions that we may be missing the point of where higher education is going in our devotion to an admirable, but limited set of ideals rooted in a rather classist and nationalistic view of how higher education “works.”

Shirky notes: “The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled [from the physical/social ones].” The historian of computing in me can’t help thinking about how unbundling (of software) was also once thought preposterous and largely undoable, but soon thereafter helped to nearly destroy the market dominator–IBM–and completely changed the landscape of computing.

In other words, MOOCs and online learning, intentionally or not, are doing a “head-fake” of sorts on the “traditional academic model” (or rather, the academic model of the top 50-150 colleges and universities in the nation). Many of us working in these institutions may think that online, free courses are competing with what we have to offer, when really they’re setting up a whole new landscape: they’re looking to replace our teaching, learning, and research models without competing on the same terms. This is dangerous, but also exciting. It means that it doesn’t matter if, like IBM, we can say the way we do things is better; what matters is if the way we do things is still as applicable and flexible as the new modes and methods coming into play.

This got me thinking about what more I can do to meet these issues head on in my own academic practice. As Shirky’s post crucially notes–and many who write on MOOCs neglect to remember this–universities are not just about teaching, but about research. Research, and knowledge production, are really the raison d’etre of the university, with transmission of that knowledge (teaching and public engagement) being only about half of that equation or less. Right now, research publications are the main way knowledge is produced and disseminated to students, colleagues at other institutions, the government, and the public. It’s fair to say this isn’t the greatest system–many more people could be reached, for instance, than currently are. Soon, it’s reasonable to assume, universities will transition to using tools like MOOCs to disseminate research and new knowledge. In other words, we lack vision when we think of MOOCs as merely low-level teaching tools for getting standardized courses out to anonymous students.

Therefore, for academics to adapt to the coming new models of education, we will need to–perhaps counterintuitively–focus more on research and squeeze teaching into less time: teaching through MOOCs will, quite possibly, become the new way that we get our research out into the wild, taken seriously, and used as part of larger intellectual, social, and economic debates. (Don’t believe me? Think about how radio, TV, and podcasts have all, in historical turn, stood in for reading in serious and major ways.) Just as we effectively give our research publications  “away for free” to advance the state of human knowledge now, we may give our teaching and research content away for free via online courses for the same reason. That there don’t currently exist the same economic gatekeepers (Gale, SAGE, IEEE, etc.) for the latter as for the former is of little long-term concern: they will evolve as we begin to transition en masse to new forms and methods of creating and distributing research content.

One thing I am thinking of doing to start to meet this transition head on is to continue my exploration of blended learning models and tools. I’ve used this blog over the course of the last semester to invite–ok, require–students to participate in public intellectual exercises. They’ve engaged in online discussion and written their short “papers” in the comments of this blog rather than writing them on paper, for only me to read, or posting them behind the great wall of Blackboard, where they would effectively be lost after the semester’s end.

Next, I plan to try to use a teaching model that further “flips” the class lecture/discussion model, perhaps by (as some of my colleagues do) recording lectures in advance for students to watch online, and then using in-person class time to have something that more resembles a discussion section. Right now, I try to combine both lecture in discussion into the class period, and this only works well some of the time–usually when the students have been diligent in doing the reading (and unfortunately many often aren’t–or they come to class and mentally doze behind laptops even if they’re “prepared”).

The down side of these new tactics is that they will leave less room for error, either on the part of myself or on the part of students: misunderstandings that could be easily rectified IRL will assume more importance and negative impact when students rely on a non-interactive time-shifted recording. And this model will require more student prep time outside of class for the average student—not only will they have to do the readings before each class, but they will also have to devote over an hour to listening to a lecture. Many will not do both, I am sure. For my part, the enhanced prep time will require me to offer fewer graded assignments, likely reverting to a more traditional model of midterms, finals, and perhaps one or two papers during the term.

But as Shirky points out, to think that this sea-change will present us with a new option equivalent to the old is to misunderstand the whole point of change. And I’m all right with that uncertainty, because these types of problems–and the intellectual stretching required to solve them–is the whole reason I got into this game in the first place.

History of Computing Class: 3rd Blog Comment

What is the (implicit) argument about who or what controls data in the chapter we read from Stephen Levy’s In the Plex? And what is the argument of the chapters we’ve read so far from Goldsmith and Wu’s Who Controls the Internet?

Write a comment of 3-4 concise paragraphs (no more than 450 words total) that talks about how these two arguments are actually at odds with each other. How can you bring them into conversation, or alignment, by using your own insights and historical examples from class? If you’re stumped, take a look at this article to help you think through the connections.

THIRD BLOG COMMENT DUE Thursday Nov. 15 by 10pm

Disasters Class: Post Your Article Links

Post the links for your 4 articles in a comment here. Run your searches in Galvin library’s online newspaper databases, not just on the open web using Google. Be sure the articles come from reputable news sources like major newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall St. Journal) or news magazines (The Economist, Wired, Newsweek). As a reminder, the topics are:

1) Dumpster diving

2) Timothy Jones, an expert on food waste and former head of the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona

3) Bill Clinton’s “Good Samaritan Act”

4) Locovore movement

 

Disasters Class: In-Class Exercise

For class today, you listened to a podcast from NPR’s This American Life and Planet Money that sought to explain mortgage-backed securities and the housing crisis. You also read an article about the recent problems at Knight Capital.

Today in class you will think about these two events to try to come up with potential solutions to the problems presented. The catch is that the solutions cannot rely solely on the action of national governments, or on the actions of consumers (in other words, a “buyer beware” model). You should also include a brief explanation of why those two models of solving the problem wouldn’t be ideal.

Before you present that orally in class, however, I would like you to fire up your neurons by posting a brief paragraph (no more than 4 sentences) on how the podcast and the article are related. The goal will be to post that quickly enough so that your classmates can read it while they’re working on the rest of the assignment.

Note: if you were not present in class today, you should write out an answer to all of the above and post it in the comments in order to get credit for the 4th blog assignment.

Disasters Class: Assignment 3

Note: This post represents a live-blogging experiment in class. I put up the prompt during class and students worked in teams of 2 to come up with an argument, for which they got online and IRL feedback from me and other students, before posting their final collaborative essays.

_____________________________________

Last class we ended by discussing Nader’s and Carson’s insights together.  We came up with the idea that sometimes culture, government, and industry are in a causality loop and that infrastructure, perhaps counterintuitively, cannot be effectively planned, but can only respond to problems and disasters–“real life testing” in a sense. But, this idea is not really going to work for the Bhopal disaster. Think about how to create a new insight that has explanatory meaning for Bhopal.

Bhopal Memorial Statue: http://www.mp.gov.in/bgtrrdmp/
Your comment should answer the following:

How does the Bhopal disaster differ from the environmental and public health disasters described by Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson? In your answer, have a clear argument and address how infrastructure and government play a role. The key here is to come up with a new insight, being mindful of what we’ve already gone over during last class. It may help to begin with clearly, concisely defining and characterizing each specific “disaster” Nader and Carson brought to light, and then move on to discussing Bhopal. Try to keep it to no more than 3 paragraphs.

Work in groups of 2 and post a first comment that clearly states your argument in no more than 1 to 2 sentences. If your  argument is replicated by someone else’s group, both groups will have to change their arguments, to make it less obvious and more original. In order to share your arguments and posts, I will approve the comments in real time. Once your argument is approved verbally or online by me, you will do a finalized comment with your whole essay. The deadline on the syllabus still applies. Be sure that your single comment has both of your wordpress handles on it so I know who worked on which entry.

Conference Cultures

This year I had the odd fortune to have all three of my major academic conference commitments occur right in a row. I went directly from the Society for the History of Technology in Copenhagen, to the Turing in Context II Conference in Brussels, to the Midwest Conference on British Studies in Toronto.

Although this was a bit grueling, it gave me perspective that I don’t think I’d have gotten if not for the close juxtaposition of conferences. I began to notice things about the conferences’ cultures that made each intellectual environment unique, and I think it can be neatly summed up by characterizing them, in order, as being
1) convivial
2) questioning
3) collaborative
(Say it out loud to appreciate the alliteration.)

1) Society for the History of Technology (SHOT)–> Convivial

Although the name of the conference might sound like we’re stuck in the past, doing hopelessly dry technical histories, that’s thankfully not the case at all. SHOT is a big tent in the best sense of the word, and it welcomes people who work on technology either as their main interest or as a part of their larger constellation of intellectual concerns. The definition of “technology” is as wide as one wishes to make it: last year the paper that got the prize for best new scholarship was on the technology of ballet pointe shoes and dancers’ bodies. The year before it was on British imperial geographic surveying tools. A few years before that, the prize went to a paper on the language surrounding abortion techniques.

Skyline of Copenhagen

Which brings me to another point I only just realized while writing this: women are very well-represented at SHOT. More than you might imagine given the name of the conference. Of the three prize papers mentioned above, all of the presenters were women, and I believe this year’s prize went to a woman as well. The main book prize this year also went to a lady: Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries, which won the computing subgroup’s smaller book prize as well. Perhaps even more importantly (to me, at least) is that there is not one rigid, right way to perform gender at SHOT: I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I can be myself there more than at other conferences I’ve attended, and still have lots of similar people to talk to.

Overall, this 250-450 person conference generally feels much smaller than it is because there is a huge emphasis on conviviality and on welcoming new members who have a wide range of interests. SHOT was the most welcoming and friendly crowd I encountered early in my career, and it encouraged me to stick around and pay it forward. SHOT strives to expand the scope and perspectives at work in the history of technology as a field, which paradoxically means welcoming folks who don’t necessarily see that as their main field. I think that’s all to the better.

2) Turing in Context II–> Questioning

The outside of the conference venue, the Royal Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences

This conference was one of several European conferences set up to celebrate the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, by looking at aspects of his work and life. Aside from meeting folks from a variety of fields, from robotics to history, one of the highlights of the conference was the screening of a new docudrama about Turing’s work and, perhaps more importantly, how his work impacted his life. It will be have a few limited screenings in the US: Codebreaker.

Perhaps to be expected for an interdisciplinary conference with a high proportion of philosophers and scientists, the mood of this conference was interrogative. Not in a bad way at all, but there was much more critical engagement with and amongst the presenters and the participants. It certainly kept one on one’s toes!

3) Midwest Conference on British Studies–> Collaborative

A subconference of the larger North American Conference on British Studies, the MWBCS gives midwestern scholars of Britain an additional chance to meet and present their work. This was my first time going to the conference, and I enjoyed it greatly.

Snatching a view of Toronto from the airport ferry was about all I could muster at this point

I was struck by the culture of paper-delivery was at the MWBCS. The emphasis was firmly on reading very eloquent prose that had been committed to paper well in advance (by contrast, a more conversational/explanatory mode of paper delivery reigned at both SHOT and Turing in Context). At times, this paper-reading could get to be a bit much: some presenters, short on time, sped up the reading of their papers to an almost comical pace. But, I shouldn’t complain: by the time my 9am Sunday presentation slot rolled around, it was all I could do to just read my paper!

The most interesting thing about my interactions at MWBCS was how collaborative they were: everyone to whom I spoke went out of their way to connect their work to mine, either in theme or in topic. It made for a conference that was both friendly and also extremely useful–I came home with a list of articles and authors to follow up on. My only complaint is that I wish there had been more folks committing their thoughts to twitter: at SHOT, one of the ways I often meet like-minded scholars is through seeing their tweets, responding, and then meeting them in person before the conference closes. At MWBCS, the more formal, paper-note-taking culture of interaction made this unlikely, and in fact, I sometimes wondered if tweeting in a session might come off as rude, whereas at SHOT it is common and expected.

Whew, well, that’s about it. I’d be interested to hear more about your experiences at these conferences, if you went. Check out these two other posts on SHOT 2012 for more perspective:

Laine Nooney

Alex Bochannek