Because there’s nothing smarter than a dumb ant.
I’m continually impressed with the great work that the folks at USC do. Almost weekly, they serve as inspiration in one form or another. Here’s the writeup of their Youtube Channel. Does your U have one? In addition, here’s Mark Marino’s unveiling of Pageflake, yet more inspiration.
The Ning site for the Institute is up and running. It’s just getting out of the gate. People have signed up, some additions have been made, but we haven’t begun to spend significant time there. I feel confident that if people start to see it as a place where they can do a lot of their work, that more activity will occur there, but there are a few who are relatively active. Of the 20 or so faculty in the institute, 17 have signed up. Some of these, however, are grad students and non-faculty. I’d like to see more people get involved.
Everyone’s bizzy now with the end of the semester grading, portfolios, meetings, conferences, etc, and given the amount of work going on around the institute, it’s comforting to know that there’s been this much involvement. From my call that I put out last week for folks who wanted to be test pilots with me in the Fall using Ning and the blog function, I got a handful of replies, just about what I wanted.
Next semester, I move from Queens to Staten Island, and David and Chiara (who I’ll be joining) are very open to networked environments, so we’ll be working closely together and I’m pretty sure getting a lot of crap done and enjoying ourselves in the process. I’m really looking forward to the Fall.
In any case, here’s my IWS widget (since wordpress doesn’t allow tampering with CSS.) (One day soon, I’m gonna start blogging from my personal domain and move the colony.)
Before Spring Break two weeks ago, I mentioned my frustration with having to use the Blackboard CMS systems in my comp classes. As I said back then, I was pretty fed up with the clunkiness of the system and the lack of intuitive movement it allowed. I spent a good portion of Spring Break migrating my courses from that system to using Blogs in the classroom, and I knew then as I know now that it was going to be a challenging pedagogical maneuver.
Many of my students had started getting accustomed to the Blackboard system, and while they didn’t like it, they had begun to adapt. At right about that moment, I told them that they were going to love this new way of doing work, that it would make their writing more relevant, and, overall, the electronic mode would be easier to use. The majority of the students welcomed the change and they have told me in conferences that they like using their blogs better than they did the earlier system, so all-in-all, the move has gone well, but, still, the hardest part was getting them weaned off of something they had grown accustomed to and onto something new.
Overall, I’ve been rather pleased with their blogging and am turning to their posts as a matter of interest and hobby and learning a lot from what some of them have to say. They’ve been given the freedom to write about whatever they want, just like any blogger, and they’re responding in turn. I often find myself laughing and engaging their posts. Some of them are starting to get noticed in the larger blogosphere, and just about all of them are seeking to bring traffic to their sites. So far, things are looking up with the use of blogging in the class, and while I’ll need to make some tweaks for future courses, particularly in the areas of design and other media, I feel like this is shaping up to be a productive pedagogical approach.
Still, a CMS like BB, while clunky, is designed for classroom space, and blogs are not, and while it’s fairly easy to use blogs as a management platform, I can imagine other ways. There’s a company called 21Classrooms that lets you create an account for a class with students in it that incorporates a home page where announcements can be posted and allows you to navigate to individual student blogs. But this site has its limits. The largest being that the site is teacher controlled, and so while this is a good idea for middle school bloggers, I’m not so interested in being the blog police at the university level. The second limitation is cost. You can create an account and get access for free, but the space you’re given is paltry, and to make the system work, you’d almost certainly need to purchase the upgrade. Hardly worth the trouble.
On a similar note, I happened to catch Chris Anderson (editor for Wired, author of The Long Tail, etc.) on Charlie Rose not long ago, and Chris had mentioned how he saw that social networking, in its Facebook and Myspace iterations, was currently still in its infancy.
When pressed, Chris recommended Ning for a more localized platform of social networking. I have just begun to explore Ning, but it appears to do two particular things quite well. First, it allows someone (anyone) to create their own social network and invite members to join that network. The creator can include options such as forums, multimedia pages (photos and video), upload documents, and create blogs. So if you think about running a drupal CMS (which I’ve toyed with and decided against, particularly because it doesn’t allow the member to design their own blogs), Ning offers the same ability. Individual members can run their own websites, blogs, post their own videos, forums and so on. They have a genuine sense of autonomy but they happen to be connected to a social network. So the second advantage is that the heirarchical order of CMS’s seems to fade into the background and each member enjoys the same freedoms of the network’s creator.
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Some colleagues and I are putting together a panel for the Thomas R. Watson Conference entitled the New Work of Composing. It promises to be an exciting conference. I’ve included a draft of our proposal below. 250 words limit. The current version is 251. Deadline’s tomorrow.
The recent cacophony of new and intersecting social media environments has made it imperative that scholars, teachers, and students find methods to work that are consistent with this emergent public phenomenon. There are many things that we still have to learn concerning the intersections among school, the public, and digital environments, but one thing we do know—our methods have to change. This panel forwards three related ideas that help advance a praxis towards implementing strategies that help scholars and teachers keep up in a world whose boundaries are in continuous flux. More specifically, the presenters assume that there is an increased interest in working with students in virtual environments and each presenter puts forward a different way of mapping our bodies as well as our cognitive awareness in three different virtual domains: namely—sims, synesthetic cities, and Web 2.0.
The first speaker will discuss Sim City societies and present them as an experiential backdrop to argue that it is possible to effectively guide students towards more complex networks of ecology by showing how the game provides a middle ground between civic knowledge and civic know-how (method—understanding virtual ecologies). The second speaker describes a synesthetic city that re-maps students’ relation to the world by describing a shift to an understanding of biograms that are sensitive to a shifting topology (method: understanding biograms). The third speaker analyzes recent trends in Web 2.0 environments and explains that non-linear writing strategies should be complemented by theories of emergence (method: understanding complex adaptive systems).
Someone I work with hit me and a few others up with an article idea that had come to him after his students bombarded a discussion list inside of Blackboard. (As I’ve said before, BB has been the standard sameness around SJU.) He hit us up wondering about the phenomenon and about how the traditional role of teaching intersects with these out of control writing phenomena.
I was glad to hear it and explained that what happened and happens is that the activitiy is a phenomenon, and it is an emergent phenomenon at that. If you have ever dabbled in complexity theories or read stuff like the famous 1979 Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Braid then you might notice relationships between that discussion board explosion and these studies.
People like Steven Johnson, Mark Taylor & many others have talked for a long time about how communities and cities work. There is no person in control, but stuff happens, and it happens productively, intelligently, without agency, and without teacher interaction. Part of the trick is getting in tune with that emergent phenomenon, respecting it, and letting it develop. It requires stepping out of the driver’s seat, taking risk, and having faith. As our fetishism for a romantic expressivism and need for originality has shown, these are hard things for academics to relinquish.
Johnson, who happens to a neighbor of mine, wrote Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. This book would be particularly helpful. It is a popular book, very smart, and very accessible. The section that he has on ants explains how complex and intelligent their communities are but each individual ant, although unintelligent, acts as part of the community in response to other ants’ pheremones.
I had students read this book on emergence last year at Texas Christian University. They were absolutely enthralled by the book, and learned a lot about community.
But the issue that my colleague was pointing to (for me, at least) is the issue between how agency breaks down with the rise of new technologies, how it is hard to relinquish our (modernist) authority in the classroom, and how an understanding of collective intelligences can be a productive way to think about writing in the classroom. We’ll see where this goes, but, for me, this would be a pretty easy article to produce on my own.
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