Peter Black's Freedom to Differ

Social networking in education

Inspired by The Economist's debate on the following proposition, "Social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom", dannah boyd (perhaps surprisingly) argues the case against social networking in education:

In their current incarnation, social network sites (SNSs) like Facebook and MySpace should not be integrated directly into the classroom. That said, they provide youth with a valuable networked public space to gather with their peers. Depending on the role of school in their lives, youth leverage these structures for educational purposes - asking questions about homework, sharing links and resources, and even in some cases asking their teachers for information outside of the classroom. SNSs do not make youth engage educationally; they allow educationally-motivated youth with a structure to engage educationally.

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I have yet to hear a compelling argument for why social network sites (or networking ones) should be used in the classroom. Those tools are primarily about socializing, with media and information sharing there to prop up the socialization process (much status is gained from knowing about the cool new thing). I haven't even heard of a good reason why social network site features should be used in the classroom. What is the value of knowing who is friends with who or creating a profile when you already know all of your classmates?

This not to say that technology doesn't belong in the classroom. Information access tools like Wikipedia and Google are tremendously valuable for getting access to content and should be strongly encouraged and taught through the lens of media literacy. Email, IM, or other communication tools can be super useful for distributing content to the group or between individuals or even providing a channel for group discussion (in-class or out). Blogging tools and group sharing tools are also quite valuable. Having to produce for the group instead of the teacher can work as a powerful incentive; most youth don't want to be embarrassed in front of their peers and pressure to perform can be leveraged to the teacher's advantage. But why social network sites? To the degree that they support blogging and group sharing, sure... but that's not the key point of them at all. They key features that make them unique are: profiles plus visible, articulated and surfable friends' lists. I simply don't get why these are of value in the classroom.

I'm not saying that social network sites have no value. Quite the contrary. But their value is about the kinds of informal social learning that is required for maturation - understanding your community, learning the communicate with others, working through status games, building and maintaining friendships, working through personal values, etc.

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Finally, please adult world, I beg you... stop fearing and/or fetishizing technology. Neither approach does us any good. Technology is not the devil, nor is it the panacea you've been waiting for. It's a tool. Just like a pencil. Figure out what it's good for and leverage that to your advantage. Realize that there are interface problems and figure out how to work around them to meet your goals. Tools do not define pedagogy, but pedagogy can leverage tools. The first step is understanding what the technology is about, when and where it is useful, and how it can and will be manipulated by users for their own desires.

Read more here.

Generation Google

Ars Technica summarises an interesting British report on how young people use the internet:

A new UK report on the habits of the "Google Generation" finds that kids born since 1993 aren't quite the Internet super-sleuths they're sometimes made out to be. For instance, are teens better with technology than older adults? Perhaps, but they also "tend to use much simpler applications and fewer facilities than many imagine."

The report (PDF), sponsored by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee, tries to get beyond the stereotypes to find out just how good young people are with information technology, and what the implications are for schools and libraries.

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It's true that young people prefer interactive systems to passive ones and that they are generally competent with technology, but it's not true that students today are "expert searchers." In fact, the report calls this "a dangerous myth." Knowing how to use Facebook doesn't make one an Internet search god, and the report concludes that a literature review shows no movement (either good or bad) in young people's information skills over the last several decades. Choosing good search terms is a special problem for younger users.

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Another common trope is that respect for authority on the Web is dead (with Wikipedia usually cited as an example) and that there are no more "experts" on the Internet; it's all about peer knowledge. The report calls this a "myth" as well, saying that "research in the specific context of the information resources that children prefer and value in a secondary school setting shows that teachers, relatives, and textbooks are consistently valued above the Internet."

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So what's true about the Google generation?

• They like to cut-and-paste. "There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue."
• They prefer visual information over text. "But text is still important... For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty."
• They multitask all the time. "It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills."

But libraries, generally headed by members of "the greatest generation" rather than the Google generation, need to be careful about how they try to meet the needs of the next generation. Jumping headfirst into hot new technologies like social networking can easily backfire. The report notes that some librarians are opening MySpace and Facebook pages, trying to make their services hipper to students, but that "there is a considerable danger that younger users will resent the library invading what they regard as their space."

Read more here.

Lawyers, blogs and money

James Grimmelmann considers whether legal academics should commercialise their blogs:

Drafting my disclosure statement reminded me of an issue I’ve been meaning to discuss for a while. I don’t blog for money; I’m uncomfortable when other legal academics do. For the most part, we don’t need the money to operate our blogs, so bringing money into the picture creates some unnecessary tensions.

This is not a condemnation of commercialized blogging. When a corporate executive writes for a company blog, the self-interest is both obvious and irrelevant. Full-time bloggers, like full-time journalists, need to get paid or they don’t eat. And plenty of hobbyist bloggers would have a hard time if their blogs weren’t self-funding. My concerns are more specific to legal academic blogging. Professors have a special calling. We’re paid to be intellectually independent.

Nor am I saying that law professors should never mix the blogging arts with commerce. There’s no firm line between blogging and other activities in the public eye. Just as it’s okay to for professors to be paid to write op-eds, best-selling books, and newspaper columns, it’s okay for them to be paid to blog. Glenn Reynolds blogged for four years for MSNBC; it was a great gig for a law professor and good for the academy that he took it.

My point is only that adding money to a blog introduces a set of subtle interlocking pressures: maximize readership, drive readers to ads, measure everything. The steps some legal bloggers take to satisfy these pressures can undercut the free flow of ideas at the heart of the scholarly ideal.

Finally, some blogs are so popular that their hosting costs are beyond what any one academic should be expected to pay out of hobby money. These blogs need sponsors just to exist. (Perhaps law schools could treat them as faculty promotion expenses—but that would raise a different set of independence concerns.) These blogs have no choice but to wrestle with the issues I’ll describe below. The rest of us, though—and that’s the overwhelming majority of lawprof bloggers—have moderate readerships and few expenses. We can avoid the tensions altogether, and I think usually should.

Let me explain.

Read more here (from The Laboratorium).

Lessig and PowerPoint

At Concurring Opinions, Robert Ahdieh discusses Larry Lessig's amazing use of PowerPoint (although admittedly he doesn't actually use Microsoft's PowerPoint):

Following up on Deven's recent, well-deserved praise of Larry Lessig's Free Culture, I wanted to mention the rather distinct grounds on which I've often had occasion to praise Lessig:  His use of PowerPoint.

I've long had doubts about the the value of PowerPoint as a pedagogic tool. Essentially, I'm unsure what it adds. Often, I hear folks talk about visual learners, but does PowerPoint - at least as commonly used - do much for such learners? Too often, I see speakers use PowerPoint simply to squeeze in more information, with less structure, thought, and analysis, than they might otherwise bring to their remarks. Listeners, I have consequently come to suspect, may actually be learning less with PowerPoint. Perhaps I'm not yet ready to conclude that the crash of the space shuttle Columbia can be traced to PowerPoint, as some have suggested.  Given its capacity to bury and obscure relevant information, though, I'm not far off.

Some time ago, however, a friend forwarded me this link, to a talk and PowerPoint presentation by Lessig, back in 2002. (Even if you've seen it, I'd encourage you to sample it again, as a truly amazing piece of work.) Basically, by the spare use of select words and phrases, Lessig successfully conveys both his broad themes and a substantial amount of information, in a way that even visual images - let alone line after line of PowerPoint text - could never have done. I'm confident that my absorption of the relevant ideas and material was exponentially greater than my normal (perhaps abnormally low) rate.

Here, Lessig credits someone else with helping to create the final product, perhaps affirming Deven's point about his modesty. At a minimum, though, he deserves credit for his excellent judgment, in recognizing a good thing when he sees it.

Read more here. 

Blawg Review of the Year

The best Blawg Review of 2007 has just been announced here. Congratulations to Colin Samuels for Blawg Review #137.

Wikipedia for dummies

Thanks to this article in The Guardian, I now know about the simple version of Wikipedia:

The English version of Wikipedia, the online reference resource that anyone can edit, now contains almost 2.2 million articles. The French version has just over 600,000, the Polish about 450,000. On the bottom tier, the versions boasting between 20,000 and 40,000 articles include Bosnian, Basque, Vietnamese - and something called Simple English.

If you're wondering what the latter means, here's the Simple English explanation: "Articles in the Simple English Wikipedia use fewer words and easier grammar than the Ordinary English Wikipedia." It's intended for students, children and people who are learning English, but it's also used by people who find that the basic grammar and vocabulary "helps them to understand unfamiliar topics or complex ideas".

Article continues

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In contrast to the accumulative and needlessly prolix articles often found in regular Wikipedia, the Simple English version tends to stick to commonly accepted facts and rarely tells you more than you want to know. Lindsay Lohan's entry runs to just three sentences, one of which is "She plays the guitar very well and has done many singing parts." In contrast, the standard Wikipedia version of her life is 4,000 words long.

Simple English is based on Basic English, an international language devised by Charles Ogden in the 1920s, which is confined to just 850 words, and a Voice of America protocol for overseas broadcasts called Special English. Those writing for the Simple English Wikipedia are advised to limit themselves to about 1,000 common words and to avoid idioms and ambiguity of meaning. Of course, one could argue that certain of life's complexities simply cannot be conveyed in this manner, but then again, what you don't know about Lindsay Lohan won't hurt you.

Read more here.

Lecturer bans Google and Wikipedia

I must admit I was really surprised to see that this story - Lecturer bans students from using Google and Wikipedia - made news in the UK (via The Argus) in the first place, and was stunned to see it pick up internationally (see, for example, here).  I was surprised because I would have though almost all academics would prefer it if students used more rigorous academic and intellectual research methodologies than a few internet searches.  That is not to say that Google and Wikipedia can't be a part of research (indeed it is worth noting that both Google and Wikipedia may reveal to a researcher valid and interesting sources that more traditional searches may not), but simply that they should not be the beginning and the end of research.  While there is no doubt that to simply ban Google and Wikipedia is silly, it is equally silly that a sound-bite from one UK lecturer has made news all around the world.

Facebooking to expulsion

Another "watchwhat you post to Facebook story" (for a previous example, see here):

... Using Facebook can also get you booted out of college.

That’s what happened to T. Hayden Barnes, who, according to a piece recently published by InsideHigherEd.com, was “administratively withdrawn” from Georgia’s Valdosta State University. A student in his sophomore year, Barnes evidently managed to upset Ronald Zaccari, the university’s president, enough last May to get shown the proverbial door. His crime: opposing Valdosta’s plan “to build two large parking garages with $30 million from students’ mandatory fees.”

Barnes didn’t have a very cordial relationship with the university before his forced departure. In the spring of 2007, he posted fliers critical of the scheduled development; sent letters to school administrators as well as the campus newspaper; and wrote mass emails to the student body. He was a busy and quite vocal chap before his expulsion, for sure.

The outstanding factor, though, for Barnes’s withdrawal was evidently a picture posted to his Facebook profile in which he portrayed a collage of images showing president Zaccari, a bulldozer aside the proposed parking garage, and the phrases “No Blood for Oil” and “S.A.V.E.-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage.”

Translation: Zaccari found that Barnes signified a “clear and present danger to (Valdosta State)” and proceeded with his removal, which he said would only be reversed if the student could prove to have been examined by a non-university psychiatrist to certify that he was “not a threat to himself or anyone else, and that he would receive ‘on-going therapy.’”

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Such stories of controversy involving social networking sites are abundant – and will only continue to grow in number. I simply found this particular dispute to be especially worthwhile to mention, as it involves the topics of online protest and free speech. The questions I put to you now are: Do you think Barnes’s expulsion was warranted? Do you find this instance involving Facebook unusual? Do you recall any similar conflicts occurring?

Read more here (from Mashable).

Be careful what you Facebook ...

A warning to us all ... be careful what is on your Facebook profile, as you never know who will be looking at it one day:

A Cambridge University admissions tutor has admitted he checks up on students applying to his college by browsing their Facebook profiles. Dr Richard Barnes, senior tutor at Emmanuel College, confessed in the college magazine.

"This has been the year in which I joined Facebook," he wrote. "I have to confess that I actually joined to see what I was missing and also to check up (discreetly) on applicants for a college position. I had been alerted to the value of this by some of our members in the City." Cambridge University played down the comment as a "throwaway line". "You know perfectly well how our admission procedures work," said a spokesman.

Read more here (from The Guardian).

Forrester: "within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today"

Forrester has released a report titled Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds.  This is the executive summary:

Virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com, and more business-focused offerings are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools. Major companies and public-sector organizations — such as BP, IBM, Intel, and the US Army — are investing heavily in virtual world technologies. But it's still early, pioneering days. You've practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools — setup can be arduous, navigating in a 3-D environment takes practice, and processing and bandwidth requirements remain high. But within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today. Information and knowledge management professionals should begin to investigate and experiment with virtual worlds. Use them to try to replicate the experience of working physically alongside others; allow people to work with and share digital 3-D models of physical or theoretical objects; and make remote training and counseling more realistic by incorporating nonverbal communication into same-time, different-place interactions.

Read more here.  This summary makes some big claims about virtual worlds in business, but from my perspective I think it will be particularly fascinating to see how higher education institutions as well as politicians and governments take to these virtual worlds.

(Hat tip: ReadWriteWeb.)

Zotero

Attention students! 

Mashable reviewed a browser plug-in today, called Zotero, that after a quick test run seems to be a great tool for helping you with your online research.  Mashable described it as "your online research assistant":

Zotero (pronounced “zoh-TAIR-oh”) is a new browser plugin that is aiming to help you with your online research for any number of projects.

This tool will help you automatically store citations of webpages used in your research, store PDFs, take notes, export information, integrates with WordPress ... basically it sounds like it will take out all the tedium of research and just let you concentrate on the important parts of looking for sources ...

Currently the plugin works with Firefox 2.0, Netscape Navigator 9.0, or Flock 0.9.1, and is suited for cross-platform performance on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Read more here and visit Zotero here.

WUDC 2008 update

An update to my previous posts on the World University Debating Championships (see here, here and here) ... and unfortunately Queensland E didn't make the Grand Final but congratulations to:

• Oxford A
• Monash A
• Sydney A
• Cambridge B

Colm Flynn's World Debating Website has all the details here.

WUDC 2008: Queensland through to Semi-Finals

An update to my previous posts on the World University Debating Championships (see here and here) ...  Queensland E (Evan Goldman and Lauren Humphrey) have made it to the semi-finals.  Congratulations!

Colm Flynn's World Debating Website has the full results from the Quarter-Finals and the draw for the Semi-Finals here.

Congratulations again to the whole Queensland contingent and good luck to Evan and Lauren in the semi-finals (and hopefully beyond).

WUDC 2008: Queensland through to Quarter-Finals

An update to the post on the World University Debating Championships from Tuesday (see here) ... all three remaining teams from the University of Queensland (Queensland A, B and E) have made it to the quarter-finals!  Congratulations again to  Evan, Lauren, Tom, Julian, Charlie and Alice.

Colm Flynn's World Debating Website has the full results from the Octo-Finals and the draw for the Quarter-Finals here.

World Debating Championships: The Break

Colm Flynn's World Debating Website has posted the 32 teams that have made the Octo-Finals of the World University Championships, being held this year at Assumption University in Thailand.  You can view the full break here, but I wanted to congratulate the three teams from the University of Queensland who broke this year (from memory, UQ has never had three teams make the break before ... but let me know if I'm wrong):

3. Queensland E: Evan Goldman and Lauren Humphrey
19. Queensland A: Tom Gole and Julian Ensby
29. Queensland B: Charlie Ashton and Alice Heathcote

Congratulations to Evan, Lauren, Tom, Julian, Charlie and Alice and the rest of the UQ contingent.  I'll try to keep you posted of how they go in the rest in the competition.

More on whether legal academics are miserable

On Sunday I contributed briefly to an ongoing as to whether law professors (legal academics) are miserable (see here). Paul Caron of TaxProf Blog has a good roundup of the extensive commentary generated by his original post.  Read the wrap up here.

 

Maine law students versus the RIAA

Interesting news from p2pnet.net:

One of the most important, but as yet largely unrecognized, Big Music stories to break this year centres on a small university legal clinic in Maine.

And, it’s about to cause a revolution in the P2P filesharing war launched by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, p2pnet posted just before Christmas, going on:

“In what’s probably a world’s first, not lawyers, but student attorneys at the University of Maine School of Law’s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic have themselves taken up the fight on behalf of fellow students.

“Hannah Ames and Lisa Chmelecki from the Cumberland clinic are now officially representing two Maine students.

“Ames and Chmelecki are being guided by clinic director and U of M associate professor Deirdre Smith.”

We added:

“This could be the true beginning of the end for the RIAA in its attempts to bring students to heel, turning them into compliant consumers of corporate product under threat of legal persecution and severe financial penalties no student can afford.”

...

Will the Maine case show other US universities with law programs, besieged by RIAA threats and extortion letters, a way to help both their own students and perhaps people at other schools, at the same time providing invaluable and highly relevant training?

And for anyone who’s thinking students won’t be up to par, “An experienced practicing lawyer, I reviewed the brief prepared by student attorneys Hannah Ames and Lisa Chmelecki, under professor Smith’s supervision, and these young people did a bang-up job in exposing the fact that the RIAA has no case,” Recording Industry vs The People’s Ray Beckerman told me, going on:

“I think this is a very important development, and may represent a turning point in the RIAA’s unlawful campaign against college and university students.

“The RIAA’s campaign employs a false legal theory, nonexistent evidence, illegal ‘ex parte’ practices to catch the students off guard, and improper joinder of unrelated cases, to make it economically and practically impossible for the students to fight back.

“By taking up their cause, university law school legal clinics can make an important contribution to copyright jurisprudence at this historic time, and allow the cases to be decided on their merits, rather than on default.

“The Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Maine has taken an historic first step. I believe many others will follow, and that the RIAA’s litigation campaign will be altered by this new and important addition to the ranks of the defenders.”

As I said in our first post on this, “If other student from clinics not only in the US but around the world follow the examples of Ames and Chmelecki, the stage will be set for a series of confrontations and lightning strikes even the highly paid expert Big 4 legal teams won’t be able to handle.”

Definitely stay tuned.

Read more here.

Are legal academics miserable?

The Volokh Conspiracy summarises an online debate about the happiness (or otherwise) of US law professors:

Paul Caron of TaxProfblog claims that law professors tend to be unhappy and tries to explain why. He argues that legal academia is a "miserable" job because it is characterized by 1) anonymity, 2) irrelevance (inability to see any impact your job has on the lives of others), and 3) "immeasurement," (inability to measure whether you are succeeding at the job or not. UCLA lawprof Steve Bainbridge takes issue with Caron's assessment, pointing out that there is no proof that law professors are, on average, more unhappy than professionals in other fields. He also notes that professors do not in fact generally suffer from anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement. I think Bainbridge generally has the better of this argument. In particular, he is absolutely right to note that academics don't lack for measures of their success (or lack thereof). Our achievements and failures are measured by citation rates, conference invitations, offers of visiting positions, promotion to tenure, pay increases (which at many schools are at least partly merit-based, and of course student evaluations. None of these measures are perfect. But collectively they should give most professors a reasonably good indication of their professional standing.

In addition to the points Bainbridge makes, I would note that it's hard to believe that being a lawprof is an unusually "miserable" job in light of the fact that there are so many more people who want get into legal academia than there are jobs available. According to AALS data, in most years, less than 15% of applicants for entry level law professor jobs succeed in getting a position. That is a very high demand for a "miserable" job, especially when we consider the fact that most of these applicants could earn higher salaries as private sector lawyers. It's possible that all these sophisticated graduates of top law schools (and sometimes of PhD programs as well) are misinformed, though I tend to doubt it. In any event, very few people leave legal academia to go into the private sector, even though people who already have lawprof jobs are presumably well-informed about how "miserable" such positions are.

There are also important advantages of being a professor relative to most other professional jobs. They include opportunities to travel to interesting locations, an unusually high degree of control over your schedule, and spending most of your time working on issues that interest you.

Obviously, some professors really are "miserable." And the job certainly isn't right for everybody. I know people who are happy working at law firms who would hate the academic life. However, it's unlikely that the life of the average lawprof is more miserable than that of the average professional in most other fields.

Read more here.  I know I'm certainly not miserable, but I do wonder sometimes if a number of my academic colleagues are ...  I'd be interested to hear your thoughts (particularly if you are an Australian legal academic reading this blog) ...

"Professor Uses Copyright Threats After Joke Commercial Uses Some Of His Lecture"

Techdirt reports on another misuse of copyright:

So many stories of copyright being abused, so little time... The latest, as sent in by Jon and a few others involves an MIT professor who got upset when he found out that a commercial for a Ricoh copier happened to use a tiny bit of text (2 sentences) from one of his published lectures to set up a joke.

...

You can see the full lecture, but the quotes in the commercial come from the sixth paragraph. The professor then sent a legalistic letter to the folks who made the commercial, who have agreed to "settle" by donating $5,000 to two science related charities. Once again, though, we're seeing a misuse of copyright law in action -- even if the end result is positive (some extra cash for some science charities). It would seem like a clear case of fair use here, where the use of these lines in the commercial were unlikely to damage the commercial potential of the professor's work. It's yet another case where someone is using copyright to try to control all aspects of his work, when that's not its purpose at all.

Read more here.  And here is the ad:

Learning 2.0

Yesterday I posted on Dating 2.0 and Cybercrime 2.0, and today it's Learning 2.0.  TechCrunch alerted my attention to  Larry Ferlazzo's post on The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2007, where he lists the top 14 web applications for learning.  Read Larry's list here (I know there are quite a few of these I'll have to play with over my holiday).

Taking stock of the legal blogosphere

At The Volokh Conspiracy this week Orin Kerr looked back at the legal blogosphere in 2007, provoking a range of responses:

Several law bloggers have chimed in with interesting responses to my post yesterday on the possible stagnation in the blawgospere in 2007.  Paul Caron has collected some facts; Dan Solove has some extended thoughts and predictions; Scott Greenfield notes the important role of niche blogs; and both Brian Leiter and Glenn Reynolds share more brief responses.

UPDATE: Carolyn Elefant weighs in at Legal Blog Watch.  Also, for a look back on my prediction of where the blawgosphere was going from back in October 2005, see here.

Read it here.

Uses for Facebook

Bill Ives looks at how Facebook is being used as a corporate intranet by some companies:

A few weeks ago I wrote a post, It is Time for Facebook Fridays: A Idea that Should Spread, that briefly mentioned Serena Software’s policy of allowing employees one hour of personal time during the workweek to spend on their Facebook profiles and connect with co-workers, customers, family and friends. Last week I spoke with René Bonvanie, the SVP of worldwide marketing, partner programs and online services at Serana, to learn more about the program and I discovered there is much more to learn.

In my first post I referred to an article on their policy which I felt was somewhat mis-titled, Serena Software Adopts Facebook as Corporate Intranet, and said that they are not really going that far. Well, I was wrong.  Serena is really replacing its existing intranet with Facebook as a front end linked to a low-cost content management system behind the firewall. Here are the reasons why and what they have seen so far. When I heard the story, it makes sense to me, and falls under the categories of “why not?” and walking the web 2.0 talk.

Read more here (at The FASTForward Blog).  I find this interesting as I been thinking recently that in an educational context Facebook could be used as a learning management system, in lieu of Blackboard or Moodle.  Is anyone aware of any institutions or courses that are using Facebook in this way?

You're doing your PhD on what?

In what really turns into a profile piece of dannah boyd, the Washington Post's Monica Hesse begins by gently poking fun at the academic study of social networking:

First to Facebook were the teens. Then came the money, the market researchers and the media. And now come . . . the academics.

In the last six months, Rochester Institute of Technology scored $150,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop courses in computer-based social networking, Cornell got $2 million for research, and the University of Michigan added a "social computing" concentration to its School of Information. You can now major in MySpace, sort of.

The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication dedicates its current issue to social networking sites, and contains articles with titles such as "Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site" (referring to Cyworld, the Facebook of Korea).

The race is on -- to an extremely obscure wing of the ivory tower. Who will own the study of the social networking sites? Is it computer science or behavioral science? Is it neuropsychology or artificial intelligence? PhDs around the country are trying to figure out, in their esoteric and socially awkward way, how to get in while the getting's good.

Let the theorizing begin.

Read more here.

Public intellectual practice

There have been two thoughtful posts on public intellectual practice this week I'd like recommend to you to (especially if you are an academic): Mel Gregg at home cooked theory and then Barry Saunders at investigativeblog.  I won't repost any extracts here (as I fear it would not do justice to their nuanced thoughts and observations).

"Get Naked with John Palfrey"

Compete's Stephen DiMarco has an interesting interview with John Palfrey, Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  Read it here.

Cyberlawyer 2.0

The Economist looks at why Larry Lessig is shifting his attention to corruption:

Mr Lessig has concentrated for a decade on copyright law and its interaction with the internet. So he left some people feeling confused earlier this year when he announced a new focus for his campaigning efforts: tackling corruption. Not everyone understood that this change in academic and activist emphasis is more of a shift in strategy than in substance.

Read the full piece here.

Uni by iPod

Ars Technica reminds us that the iPodification of education is a double-edged sword:

When last we visited the use of podcasts in the academic world, professors were using basic software to expand the classroom experience onto YouTube and the iPod. Since then, the effort to make academic material go mobile has become increasingly sophisticated and commercialized. On one end of the spectrum, software now has the ability to create a searchable, indexed database of all on-campus lectures. At the other, it allows students to avoid key parts of the academic experience by skipping the reading.

...

I'm less enthusiastic to hear that a company called Raybook is bringing the ultimate academic shortcut to the iPod: Cliffs Notes. These condensed descriptions of major works of literature are promoted as providing the sort of insight and overview of the work that you might receive in the classroom. In reality, they're generally viewed as providing a way to come to grips with the basic concepts of a literary masterpiece without bothering with the slow and messy process of reading it.

The iPod versions are said to contain the full text available in a Cliffs Notes pamphlet, along with character and chapter summaries and short quizzes. Any iPod that can display photos can also display character interaction diagrams and other visual material. The best thing (from the viewpoint of a desperate student) is that the material can be downloaded and installed at any hour of the night. Right now, the content manager is in beta, so I did not try one out myself in order to check out the quality of the material.

Regardless of the quality of the material, three trends are converging to make a professor's life ever more challenging: every student is carrying a growing collection of electronic devices, those devices are getting smaller and harder to spot, and they're gaining the capacity to hold an ever-larger amount of academic material. Pretty much any student can now turn a quick bathroom trip into a mid-exam cram session. Professors seem likely to face the choice between implementing draconian security measures during exams or defaulting to an honor system in the face of this electronic onslaught.

Read more here.

Debate Team

As a former high school and university debater, I am intrigued by the new documentary, Debate Team.  Although it is based on the strange world of US college debate (very different from the British Parliamentary style of debating I did at university), I think some of the themes are probably common to all forms of debating.  My favourite quote from the trailer: "Advice to future debaters - just give into the ridicule".  Anyway, here is the trailer:

And this is the synopsis:

Debate Team is a documentary that takes you inside the strange and exciting world of competitive college debate.

It's a complex realm ruled by logic and wit, where debaters armed with towering stacks of documents do verbal battle at 360 words per minute, and nearly every argument ends in nuclear annihilation.

One hundred and eighty of the best debate teams in the nation came to compete for the National Championship at San Francisco State University in 2005. Only one would leave with the title.

Debate Team examines the obsessive nature of intercollegiate debate, the forces driving these young people and the mythology that sustains them in their struggle.

What emerges is a picture of an intense and fragile subculture, filled with irony and absurdity, threatened from the outside and from within. Whether trying to rescue or raze it, these debaters are the superheroes of that world.

"I just can't be a college student without Facebook"

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington blogs about an email he received  yesterday:

A reader sends a touching email today, complaining that his Facebook account has been deleted for no reason:

Dear Michael,

I’m a college student at University of Michigan and Facebook has deactivated my account. I’ve noticed, from reading your blog, you have connections to Facebook’s staff. Can you please forward this email to someone or do something… I just can’t be a college student without Facebook. I did nothing to have my account deactivated… it just happened late Sunday night. I’ve emailed them, but they don’t care.

Steven
xxxx@umich.edu

I did a quick search for Steven on facebook but search is still down, so I have no idea if this guy’s profile is back up or not. And frankly, I don’t care all that much, ’cause the last thing I want is for everyone with a Facebook customer service issue to start emailing me.

But that sentence in the middle of the email that says “I just can’t be a college student without Facebook” fascinates me. What other brands have this kind of loyalty? Heroin?

Anyway, good luck in your quest to get Facebook to care about you again, Steven. And let me know how it all works out. I sincerely hope that this tragedy does not force you to drop out of college and…shudder…resort to becoming a MySpace user along with the rest of the unwashed masses.

Read more here.  From my perspective, the scary thing is this: I totally get what Steven is saying and why he is so upset.  What does that say about me?

Uni by YouTube

Greg Whitby's Bluyonder considers the recent decision of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to have its own YouTube channel:

The University of NSW recently launched its own channel on YouTube – the first Australian institution to do so.  It’s no surprise given most students entering university today have virtually grown up online.

While it’s a great marketing strategy, it recognises where today’s students are.  Although the channel will broadcast some lecturers in an attempt to reach potential students, it captures the ubquitous nature and popularity of Web 2.0. 

This is the democratisation of knowledge - no longer contained within lecture theatres or classrooms but shared.  Learning becomes accessible, anywhere, anytime.  Transportable, transparent, relevant and exciting.

The University of NSW is to be applauded but we still lag behind. iTunes has developed a store dedicated to education called University. It’s ‘the campus that never sleeps’ -  allowing universities across the US to upload audio/video lectures, interviews, debates, presentations for students - any age, anywhere.  And it’s free. It’s astounding and exciting to think that a cohort of students and teachers from a school western Sydney can watch a biology lecture from MIT.

The challenge for us is to open our K-12 classrooms to a new audience - to share knowledge as professionals and to showcase quality learning and teaching as we move from isolated classrooms to a connected global learning environment.

Read more here. I agree with Greg's comments.  In the Law School at QUT, which is where I work, we have for some posted audio recordings of our classes online so that students can download and listen to their classes anywhere, anytime.  But we post these classes only on our Learning Management System (LMS) - previously OLT now Blackboard - which means that they can be accessed and downloaded only by our current students.  What UNSW and others institutions in the US are doing is fundamentally different because they are making their classes available to the world, not just those students who have paid for the privilege to attend that institution.  I don't know what QUT's position would be if I wanted to place my lectures online for anyone to watch and/or listen to, but I would like to think I would be able to do so. 

I believe that opening up the classroom to a much broader audience has rich educational potential as it widens the perspectives and discussion that can had on the topic being taught or considered by the teacher and the students.  In a small way I've noticed this with a blog I have run with John Swinson for an LLM unit we teach - Legal Regulation of the Internet.  In  addition to our students posting comments to the blog, we have got comments from people all over the world.  Often these comments approach the issues in a different, but very relevant and interesting, way from the students in our class.  Thus it is enriches the class debate and discussion and as a result the broader educational experience.  Posting whole classes online can only take this further.

Therefore, I'd suggest that posting classes on YouTube (or elsewhere on the internet) is not just Web 2.0 trendiness or good marketing for the institution, and that there are in fact sound pedagogical reasons for doing so.

"If you believe the booklovers, most of what’s on the internet is crap"

In a must-read two-part piece for New Matilda, Sherman Young,  a Media Studies lecturer at Macquarie University, looks at blogs, wikis, blooks and the future of publishing.  Read Part 1 - "Everybody Writes" - here and Part 2 - "But a Blog is Not a Book" - here.

US blogger threatened with lawsuit after accusing school district of fraud

From Ars Technica:

A blog criticizing the Galveston, Texas, school district is facing legal action after the district objected to some of the comments on the site as libel. Now, the site operator has been contacted by attorneys who are demanding that she remove the offending material.

School districts tend to be contentious places; there's always some scandal involving funding or the placement of a new school or the proposed curriculum for the kids. Much of the grumbling among parent groups used to take place offline, though, and now that it can so easily be published for all the world to see, bloggers might need to pay more attention to exactly what they're writing.

In this case, the "GISD Watch" blog (run by parent Sandra Tetley) has written plenty of unflattering things about school officials. Posts on the site refer to school trustees as the "Lack of Trustees" and the "Council of H'Eight"; the head of the district is referred to as "Superintendent Evil." While that might make for an excellent comic book figure, it also indicates just how relentlessly personal some of the site's criticisms are. And that's not getting into the insinuations and accusations of fraud.

Lawyers for the school tell Galveston's The Daily News that they have no intention of squashing free speech, they simply want specific (and in their view libelous) accusations about alleged crimes removed from the site. Lawyer David Feldman calls the 16 posts in question the most "personal, libelous invective directed toward a school administrator" that he has ever seen.

The GISD Watch blog has taken to the calling the school's action a SLAPP suit (a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), despite the fact that no suit has apparently been filed. Tetley told the paper that she would be willing to remove anything libelous from the blog, so long as she does not have to tone down her opinions.

Read more here.

The History of YouTube

This video is a part of a study on YouTube conducted by an anthropology class at Kansas State University. For a full script of this video, along with references and notes, see here:

QUT saga comes to end

The Australian Higher Education Supplement's Snitch marks the end of the so-called freedom of academic speech controversy at QUT:

Noonan's last laugh
JUST as the unhappy saga of Michael Noonan's PhD project on the disabled at the Queensland University of Technology seemed close to playing itself out with the resignation of John Hookham and Gary MacLennan, the PHD candidate could not resist penning a "good riddance" note.

"The end of Hookham and MacLennan's careers at QUT is a wonderful day for freedom of speech and for my freedom as a student to pursue important and challenging research," Noonan said in an email.

"I am proud that I stood up to them, I am proud of QUT and my supervisors and I am grateful for the unwavering support of the QUT community."

Noonan said QUT management and vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake had "acted to protect me as a student at all times".

But he was saddened the university's and taxpayers' money had to be spent on the two men, who were paid a reported $200,000 each in an out-of-court settlement.

Read it here.

Too harsh?

Techdirt asks do grade changing hackers deserve 20 years in jail?

Over the years, we've had numerous stories of kids caught changing their grades by hacking into school computer systems.  However, is it worth a $250,000 fine and 20 years in jail?  That's apparently what two men face after hacking into California State University's computer system and changing their grades. The guys have been charged with "unauthorized computer access, identity theft, conspiracy, and wire fraud." Obviously, these guys did a bad thing, but it's hard to see how the possible sentence matches with the crime. Of course, it seems unlikely that any judge would give them the maximum sentence, but even hearing that it's possible just for changing your grades seems ridiculous.

Read more here.  I can't help but agree that 20 years does seem ridiculously excessive ... I'd probably settle with the offending students receiving failing grades for the classes/units they hacked.

Go Fu*k Yourself

The Fu*k Index is a strange hybrid; part sex driven by its voyeuristic possibilities, part social experiment, part computer science project, and part enjoyable time-waster.   All up, sounds perfect for a Facebook application aimed at the college/university crowd.  This YouTube video sort of explains it:

Mashable has more of the details:

It’s a Facebook application launched by former SNL writer E. Jean (she currently writes the Ask E. Jean advice column in Elle magazine). E. Jean is now working on a book, all about college “love.”

And in what appears to be an attempt to break Kinsey’s record on the amount of data collected regarding human sexual behavior, she’s set up a quiz on Facebook.  Your answers will remain anonymous, but if you’re snarky enough, you may get quoted in her book (anonymously, of course). 

Now that’s all fine and dandy, and I’m sure that everyone on Facebook is dying to give up their bedroom (or dorm room, or diag) secrets. But there are a few perks thrown into this Facebook app that may encourage you to participate. For starters, with the collection of all this data, you can see how you stack up with the rest of the user base as you proceed with the Fu*k Quiz.

Additionally, there are all sorts of predictions that can be made based off of the data collected from you, in comparison with the data collected from th rest of the users. That means that the Fu*k app can predict how often you’ll be getting some, how good your next partner will look, and if they look better than the partners of your Facebook friends. It will even tell you if you’re getting some more often than your friends.

Read more here.  Or just visit The Fu*k Index here.

Using Wikipedia as assessment

Ars Technica discusses Wikipedia as an assessment tool:

The use of Wikipedia as a source of information for classwork has been widely reported on and has even happened in classes taught by our own Ken Fisher. But this may not mean that Wikipedia has no place in the classroom, if Martha Groom at the University of Washington-Bothell has her way. Instead of letting her students rely on Wikipedia as a source, however, Groom has turned it into a destination for their classwork: in place of a term paper, her students were required to create Wikipedia entries.

Groom, who teaches environment and ecology classes, presented her experience at the 2007 EDUCAUSE conference, which focuses on IT in the education environment. Her initial goal was simply to provide some meaning to the college-level term paper, which typically has an audience of one (the professor) before ending its career in a recycling bin. Groom hoped that assigning students the task of creating a Wikipedia entry would make the effort more meaningful, since students were writing for what might be a wider audience and with the intention of providing a general public benefit. She also suggested that the project would be a good introduction to the academic world, which focuses on the production and dissemination of knowledge.

...

The Wikipedia community, however, was not as impressed. One article didn't survive for 24 hours following its introduction, and four additional ones were ultimately deleted following extensive discussion, their contents merged into existing entries. Groom also noted that some of the comments in the ensuing discussions "were delivered rudely."

There were also some practical issues regarding the use of Wikipedia, primarily related to the process of posting in the appropriate markup format.

Read more here.  I'm interested in Groom's experience because I experimented with using a wiki I set up for the my constitutional law classes this semester.  The idea was that they would create entries and contribute to the discussion, in effect building a collaborative set of notes for the unit.  Unfortunately my experiment failed.  On reflection I think it didn't work for a few reasons.  First, it wasn't assessed (although it would have helped them for their assessment) which made it seem like extra work.  Second, although students are very familiar with accessing Wikipedia and other wikis, they were not comfortable with the technical process of writing and/or editing wiki entries (even thought it is really quite straight forward once you've done it a few times).  Based on discussions with students, I think this technical barrier was probably ultimately the more significant of the two.  Anyway, I hope to continue experimenting with wikis as an educational tool as I believe they could be utilised very effectively, but I need to spend more time reading the relevant literature on the experiences of others and thinking about the pedagogy of their use.

Association of Internet Researchers Conference

At Snurblog Axel Bruns is blogging the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in Vancouver.  Read Axel's posts here.

Information R/evolution

Professor Michael Wesch from Kansas State University (the creator of the brilliant Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us video - see here - A Vision of Students Today - see here) has posted another video, Information R/evolution.  This is how Wesch describes it:

This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.

CLEAA National Conference

This afternoon I spoke at the Continuing Legal Education Association of Australasia Annual Conference on blogs and blogging.  You can download my PowerPoint slides here.

A Vision of Students Today

Professor Michael Wesch from Kansas State University (the creator of the brilliant Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us video - see here) has posted another thought provoking video to YouTube - A Vision of Students Today.  He describes it as "a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime":

QUT likely to settle dispute with lecturers

Yesterday I blogged that The Australian was reporting that QUT had "reached an out-of-court settlement with two academics who were suspended without pay after criticising a controversial thesis about comedy and the disabled" (see here).  However today's edition of The Courier Mail isn't quite as definitive:

A BITTER row between the Queensland University of Technology and two lecturers who criticised a PhD student's thesis is likely to be settled out of court.

Negotiations between lawyers for Gary MacLennan and John Hookham and QUT continued this week ahead of a pending three-day trial set down to start in the Federal Court in Brisbane on Monday.

...

Sources suggested yesterday that the pair would receive a payout but would not work at QUT again.

However, QUT vice-chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake said the matter had not yet been finalised.

Read more here.

On a related note, when I read this story on News.com.au this morning I was amused to see an advertisement for QUT running beside the report:

Tolerated use

For Slate V Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu asks are you breaking the law right now?

QUT settles dispute with lecturers

Earlier this year I blogged several times about the suspension of two academics from the Queensland University of Technology (for example, see here and here).  According to today's The Australian, the dispute has now been settled:

THE Queensland University of Technology has reached an out-of-court settlement with two academics who were suspended without pay after criticising a controversial thesis about comedy and the disabled.

The settlement between Gary MacLennan and John Hookham and QUT vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake was announced by Justice Jeffrey Spender in the Federal Court in Brisbane yesterday.

However, the academics and the university declined to comment and no details of the settlement were available last night.

The suspension for six months without pay by Professor Coaldrake in June sparked vigorous debate over the right to free speech and the boundaries of taste and offence in modern comedy.

...

It was unclear whether the lecturers would return to work at QUT under the agreement.

Read more here.

Legal bloggers down under

The Sunday Age published a piece yesterday looking at legal blogging in Australia:

One local law firm, Freehills, has embraced the US practice of using blogs — or "blawgs" as law blogs are called — to raise its corporate profile, launching two blogs by Australian lawyers in its Singapore office. Many specialist lawyers and academics are blogging on pet topics such as intellectual property. And some younger lawyers are using blogs as therapy, writing anonymous "secret life of a law firm" web diaries about luxuriously appointed "billable hour" hellholes, where workaholic senior partners drive junior associates through 18-hour working days.
...

According to "Legal Eagle", a Melbourne lawyer and academic and author of the blog the Legal Soapbox, "Anonymous Lawyer"-style expose blogs will always be rare because blogging is so dangerous for junior associates.

"Most of the blawgs I know are written by academics, law students, judges' associates or barristers," she says. "If you work in a large law firm, there's not enough time to indulge in blogging. Billable hours mean that you have to account for every six minutes and billing targets mean you spend all your time working. And young solicitors would be too afraid of being found out and sacked. The Melbourne legal community is so small, and everyone knows one another."

Meanwhile, blogs by specialist lawyers are proliferating, with themes covering issues from professional liability to environmental law. Australian academics also blog, said Queensland University law lecturer and former blogger Kim Weatherall. But they are unlikely to ever do so as feverishly as their US counterparts because blogging doesn't fit with Australian universities' mechanisms for recognition of achievement and performance.

"Blogging probably interferes with prospects for promotion, because it takes time away from more immediately fruitful aspects of work," Ms Weatherall says.

Read more here.  For the record, I would agree with the analysis offered by both Legal Eagle and Kim.  That said, I should add that my employer (QUT) and my immediate supervisors are not only aware of my blogging but are very supportive of it.  So given that, coupled with the fact that I enjoy doing it, I doubt I'll be following Kim into retirement or Legal Eagle into anonymity.

That's the way the cookie crumbles

An intriguing contest from the Berkman Center:

StopBadware and the Berkman Center are hosting an online video contest to help explain web cookies to average internet users.

Help answer these common cookies questions:

* What is a cookie?
* How do cookies work?
* How can cookies be used?
* How is the data from cookies used?
* How can cookies be misused?
* What options does a user have to manage cookies?

The top few submissions, as determined by a combination of YouTube viewers and Berkman staff, will earn their creators a trip to Washington, D.C., where their videos will be aired and discussed at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s November 1-2 Town Hall workshop entitled “Ehavioral Advertising: Tracking, Targeting, and Technology.” Several prizes will be awarded, including one grand prize of $5,000. The contest will run until October 20, 2007.

How do you enter? Just create a short video explaining cookies, upload it to YouTube and submit it to our YouTube group, and then officially enter the contest through our submissions form. Of course, be sure to read all the official rules and guidelines first!

More info about the contest is here.

Carmun - Wikipedia meets Facebook

Mashable describes Carmun in this way:

It’s a site that helps you bookmark and organize information from across the web. You can also ask questions and give answers to users that could use a little help on the academic front. With the social sharing aspect of this bookmarking and collaboration tool, you can go to Carmun in order to find resources that someone else has bookmarked. This saves you time, and helps you get your school work done faster.

It’s kind of like what Facebook meant to be until kids at frat parties learned the ease with which photos can be posted and shared.

Read more here.  This fun YouTube clip explains the concept a bit more:

I wonder if there is an Australian equivalent? 

Lectures on YouTube

The  University of California at Berkeley is now posting lectures and events to YouTube.  Ars Technica reports:

The University of California at Berkeley has joined the ranks of YouTube partners by providing a number of full course lectures and other special events through YouTube. The school announced the availability of its own YouTube channel yesterday, with over 300 hours of video available on YouTube. This includes lectures on bioengineering, physics, chemistry, peace and conflict studies, and other topics. There's even a lecture by Google co-founder Sergey Brin on search engines.

Berkeley says that it is the first university to make full courses available through the popular video-sharing site. It is, however, not the first time it has delved into digital distribution with its lectures. The university has been offering webcasts of its courses and events online since 2001 and added podcasts in 2006. It also offers a number of audio lectures through iTunes U on topics such as art, history, computer science, mechanical engineering, and legal studies.

Read more here.  And check out this lecture for SIMS 141 - Search, Google, and Life with Google founder Sergey Brinby:

Web 2.0, two years and a day later

Law Blog Metrics marks the two year anniversary of Web 2.0:

The term "Web 2.0" became popular in tech circles following the first O'Reilly Media's Web 2.0 conference in 2004. On September 30, 2005, Tim O'Reilly wrote a piece summarizing the subject "for the rest of us," What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Download oreilly_web20.pdf  Today, we celebrate the two-year anniversary of the popularization of "Web 2.0" (albeit one day late).

The editor of Law Blog Metrics, Joe Hodnicki, also makes this announcement:

We relaunch this blog tomorrow as Law X.0 to cover news, resources and information about developments in web communications, knowledge management, information technology, and education technology as they apply (or can potentially apply) to the legal academy. Law blogs will continue to be an important focus of this blog but in the broader context of Web X.0. Individuals interested in contributing to this blog are invited to contact me at joe.hodnicki@gmail.com. [JH]

Read the full post (which includes an excellent summary Web 2.0) here.

"Is Wikipedia really a pariah of knowledge?"

From Splat! Blog:

There seems to be a growing number of media voices speaking out against Wikipedia. Academics are also quick to look down their noses at the online encyclopedia (which threatens to reduce their book sales dramatically in future years). Free, accessible knowledge available to all? What a criminal idea.

It’s worth remembering that John Wycliffe, who in the 14th Century became the first man to translate the bible into English, was branded a heretic and possession of his English translation of “god’s word” was evidence of heresy. The punishment was being barbequed to death.

A few centuries later John Locke earned the wrath of the ruling classes by declaring that every person’s mind was a “blank slate” at birth and education was beneficial to all people, not just the wealthy.

I wonder if the bilious venom spat toward Wikipedia today is not in some way analogous to these historical antecedents.

Read more here.