Ruminate

I guess if "MySpace Whore" is out, then being a "link whore" is out too? What happened to Danah is sad and a bit funny, reflecting a strangely reductivist view of language that is completely at odds with technological affordances of communication. Maybe she should have run her whole proposal through a translator and put it in Victorian era speech. Ah, the possibilities. MySpace Harlot? Link Strumpet? MySpace Courtesan? Link Tart? Lady of Easy MySpace Virtue?

Oh, and the title is a bit of Blake, who wrote:

"What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate?"

[ruminate, myspace whore, link whore, language]

David Wiley writes:

I think we may know how to mashup “even unpopular tools,” depending on
what one means by mashup. By mashup, I mean utilizing a wide range of
individual tools (like flickr, delicious, technorati, etc.) and
aggregating the results of those uses into a collection of data that I
can do new things with. If this is what we mean by mashup, I think that
RSS and our imaginations give us most of the answers we need.

I agree with David, though with two rather large caveats: ease-of-use and federated data sharing.

RSS does give us the base to remix using different tools, but the ease-of-use and integration can stand a lot of improvement. This is also a matter of conception and terminology: simple aggregation is relatively easy, even for the non-technically inclined, but real remixing still has a long way to go, particularly if students are going to be able to synthesize, remix, and share. I still find myself having to go through contortions (custom programming) just to achieve relatively simple integration from different sources.

Finding a way to federate data is also going to become more and more important. It’s an interesting feature of many social tools that they thrive as they scale… the more users, the better the experience will be for each. As early pioneers  like flickr and del.icio.us are joined by dozens of competitors, the fractured store of data impacts the whole system.

Ultimately, for example, it shouldn’t matter if a user chooses del.icio.us, furl, spurl, or others as their front-end to manage their bookmark data, the core of that data should be federated across systems. Rather than compete in the zero-sum game of locking users in, these services should compete in terms of interface, features, and data mining techniques to the pool of aggregated data.

If there is no sharing, then all the remixing tools in the world become weakened (if not irrelevant) because people will be operating solely within their own, limited ecosystem and an artificially stunted folksonomy.

[ruminate, social software, remix, rss, edtech, federate]

The New York Times on student email:

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

These days, they say, students seem to view them as available around the clock, sending a steady stream of e-mail messages — from 10 a week to 10 after every class — that are too informal or downright inappropriate.

[...]

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

These days, they say, students seem to view them as available around the clock, sending a steady stream of e-mail messages — from 10 a week to 10 after every class — that are too informal or downright inappropriate.

Every instructor who uses email has seen “problematic” behavior: email devoid of context or reference, meaningless or missing subject lines, needlessly personal, off-topic– the list is long. And there are a lot of email conversations I am slowly pushing to distributed web discussions, primarily so students can learn from one another. But I don’t regret a minute of the thousands I’ve spent answering student email… on the whole it works well.

I like the approach someone shared on a mailing list, approaching the subject with students framed by the notion that “it isn’t wise to antagonize and irritate your instructor” and  then sharing common-sense tips. I would add to that the importance of:

• setting expectations for response time (you may send email anytime you like, I may not respond immediately)
• explaining why these are important as a function of the difference between instructors and students. It isn’t power. It isn’t arbitrary. It isn’t about rules for the sake of being rules. It isn’t even just about volume. It’s that instructors deal with far more mail from people they don’t know that well to whom they are obligated to respond.

I personally found some of the attitudes by faculty in the article disappointing. One faculty member writes of being emailed by a student:

“Should I buy a binder or a subject notebook? Since I’m a freshman, I’m
not sure how to shop for school supplies. Would you let me know your
recommendations? Thank you!”

Her response: no response at all. It seems clear to me that this student needs some help, why not an encouraging note pointing her to student advising resources meant to deal with new students?

Another writes of the “presumption” on the part of students when 10 of them send drafts of their papers requesting comments. Why not be happy that students are asking for feedback at all, explaining the difficulty of that volume, and setting new expectations for students and/or directing them to writing centers and other resources?

The money quote, though, and what really scares faculty (I think) is buried in the article and stated in a way that students recognizing that they are paying consumers is a bad thing:

While once professors may have expected deference, their expertise
seems to have become just another service that students, as consumers,
are buying. So students may have no fear of giving offense, imposing on
the professor’s time or even of asking a question that may reflect
badly on their own judgment.

To which I say again what I’ve been saying for a while: we are dealing with new students, new teaching, and new models of communication… the mores and expectations of the old models don’t apply and we shouldn’t expect them to. Let’s spend time shaping the new instead of bemoaning the old!

[ruminate, edtech, email, instructors are people not gods]

A Reconsideration of the Impact of New Media Writing Technologies on Today’s Composition Students is interesting outside of consideration of just the group of “composition” students. The study’s results are worth a peek and could be seen as at odds with the notion that the emerging group of digital natives are the “remix generation.” If composition students, of all people, are “primarily, if not exclusively, consumers of web texts” and “are likely “(com)posers”–students using and reading new-media, but not composing themselves with it, critically assessing it and its influence on culture and literacy practices” as posited in the study’s conclusions can we really feel confident that there is some general population trend of movement from being a (com)poser (which seems unduly negative) to being a composer?

[ruminate, writing, remix, composition]