jill/txt

I absolutely loved Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, a young adult novel set in a very-near-future San Francisco where high school students’ every move is tracked by censorware in their laptops and on the school network and surveillance devices in the hallways. Of course, students learn how to evade much of this, and when terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and the Department of Homeland Security turns the country into a totalitarian, total-surveillance horror, it’s high school kids who hook up their xboxes to create an alternative network and figure out ways of showing the cowardly complying adults how outrageously their government is treating them. At times the novel is a little too pedantic - three pages explaining how PGP encryption works can get a little tedious - but the story’s good enough to forgive this.

Better yet, I gave the novel to my 13-year-old daughter, and to my delight, she also loved it. This is the kind of stuff I want her to learn about the web and privacy and how the world works. And now she knows what PGP encryption is - not a bad thing in my book.

Today Cory Doctorow tweeted a link to a lesson plan he created to teach kids network literacy - not the kind that is taught in schools today, which largely involves teaching kids to assume everything they do will be surveilled, yet that they should guard their privacy by being terrified of putting anything at all online. No, Cory’s lesson plan has kids learning about the censorware they’re submitted to, figuring out how it harms their learning, how arbitrary it is, how people get around it and how to find out more about it. My favourite assignment?

7) Research how to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and use the procedure to discover how much your school or school board spends on censorware.

Is there something similar to the FOIA in Norway? Can Norwegian students find this sort of information as well?

After reading Little Brother I wondered how realistic the heavy surveillance of high school kids was. Quite realistic, I suspect. I already knew that every move students make in It’s Learning, the LMS most schools in Norway use, is tracked by the teacher (something my 13-year-old was shocked to hear: they’ve never been told this), but the laptop every high school student gets and is required to use also comes with many limitations on how students can use them. Freakforum.nu seems to be where most of the discussions about this are - for instance, How to get administrator access to your computer. Norwegian media has written recently about surveillance of high school kids - worryingly, kids studying media at Elvebakken videregående in Oslo think it’s fine that their every move is watched so long as the purpose “is good” and their private email isn’t read by their teachers. Camera surveillance in schools would be great, they think, and while they don’t want radio surveillance sewn into their own clothes, they’d approve of it for little kids. According to Dagsavisen, in Nord-Trøndelag all high schools have installed an “Employee Computer Monitoring Software” called 2 AMI MAS on all student laptops, which according to the website tracks everything:

MAS captures and securely stores records of all user activity – not just on the internet but in every application including email, word processing, spreadsheet applications, instant messaging and online.

Happily, the Norwegian -.. is skeptical to all this, as they certainly should be. As a commenter on the article in Dagsavisen wrote, this certainly appears to be in contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child:

1. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.

What are we teaching our kids? That they should assume their every move is being tracked? What kind of a society is that?

I hope these kids read Orwell’s Big Brother AND Doctorow’s Little Brother.

Tomorrow I’m guest lecturing at NHH in Ingeborg Kleppe’s class Exploring Online Consumer Communities.

I’m gong to talk about corporate blogging in general, and about the ethics of commerical blogging. Students will have their laptops, and as it’s a three-hour class there’ll be ample time for students to do some work of their own as well. I’m planning to do an in-class blog analysis session, building on the blog reviews I used to do with my web design students, and with further inspiration from Mack Collier’s Company Blog Checkup Series. I’ll show the students some examples of Mack’s posts about company blogs, too, and perhaps use his hints on how to revitalise a company blog (warning: you have to sign up for a free but advertisement-ridden membership to read that). Main points: don’t primarily try to sell stuff on the blog, it’s not a brochure (that’s your homepage) - make it a conversation: link to other sites, not just to your own site, share information about more than just your products, respond to comments, link to readers’ blogs, comment on their blogs. The advantages? You’ll get rapid feedback from customers, and customers will trust you more.

The assignment sheet I’ll hand out follows the fold, along with a list of blogs for students to analyse.
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Mack Collier of The Viral Garden has been running a series called The Company Blog Checkup Series, where he analyses company blogs for flaws, perfections and what could be done better. They’re interesting reading, and I’m thinking they might make a good basis for a student assignment at some point. I’m not teaching any courses this year (hurrah for sabbaticals!) but I’m giving a guest lecture at The Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration later this semester, in a course on viral marketing taught by Ingeborg Kleppe - and of course I’ll be there to talk about blogs. It’s a three hour session, which is too long for just a talk. I think there are no computers, but there’d be time to hand out printed screenshots of a company blog and have students do on-the-spot analyses of it. You’d need at least two or three screenshots I think - the front page, a single post with comments, and maybe a third page with other posts - but even with just that, you could certainly look at some of the points Collier tends to discuss, and others. Is there a clear author of the posts? Do posts invite reader engagement? Does the blogger get involved in the comments? What kind of posts are there? Is there engagement in a larger conversation (links to other blogs)? Does te blog promote its readers? Are posts frequent or sporadic? Does the writing style work? The layout? What more could this blog do?

Really this would just be an updated version of the Blog Review assignment I had students do a few years ago, but more, well, market-oriented and obviously useful. At least to students of marketing.

Oh, and by the way: if you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field, running some kind of a series on how to be excellent in whatever that field is seems to be a popular - and successful - approach these days. Collier uses a great photo of himself holding a stethoscope, implicitly calling himself a blog doctor - although comparing the photo to the photo of himself in the sidebar, I’m not sure it’s the same person - and what’s that woman’s face doing pasted on top of the stethoscope?

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has run a very successful series on How to Build a Better Blog in 31 Days, where he posts a tip a day - but more cleverly, invites readers to get involved by posting their own tips to their own sites. He doesn’t require them to link back to him, but if they submit their tips through a form on his blog, he promises to link to them. Brilliant: he promotes his readers, making them happy and building community, AND he gets the kudos of coordinating a large community effort to gather ideas about how to improve a blog.

For the second semester running, I have not succeeded in getting my students enthused about blogging. Let’s be frank: most of them hate it, only a very few of them actually post assignments on time and only the guy who already was an active blogger uses it as I’d intended. And this is in a course where the topic of the first half of the course is blogging, where they have to include two blog posts in their portfolios at the end of the semester, thus contributing to their grade, and where I’ve worked hard to make sure there are interesting assignments, we’ve blogged in class, I’ve posted feedback, asked them to give each other feedback etc etc etc.

Basically they just ignore it all. And they’re smart interested students. Who are bizarrely enough writing papers about blogging while saying they don’t really understand blogging. Because you’ve only posted three posts to your own blog, I tell them, tearing my hair out.

Kara Dawson thinks the initial novelty of blogs, that made students enjoy them a few years ago, has simply worn off:

Sure, blogs have changed the face of communication, and brought new opportunities, new relationships, new forms of recognition, and even new earning potential to many people. But not to everyone.

Certainly not to my two classes of graduate students who ended the fall semester blogged down and blogged out. In the past, when I had required students to write blog postings in my courses, the assignment was at least a novelty. But last semester, it just seemed a snore.

To my surprise, after our American and Canadian exchange students showed the class FaceBook, most of them signed up and are using it quite actively. Perhaps simply because it still has that novelty?

In today’s class we’re going to look at the transition to print and we’ll discuss how technology and culture interact - and we’ll do some more blogging, too. Easy reading this week: just chapter two of Bolter’s Writing Space, which is about writing and technology.

I think we’ll start with the good old “Helpdesk i middelalderen” sketch - which is conveniently available on google video, youtube and various other places as well as on the NRK website.

I’ll show a brief powerpoint so we can look at pictures of incunabulas, which is always satisfying, and we’ll discuss the chapter from Writing Space as well as looking at the changes Elizabeth Eisenstein writes were engendered by print. We’ll draw on the concepts of technological determinism and alternate approaches to understanding the relationship between technology and culture in discussing this.

Finally, students will re-read page 19 of the section from Writing Space, where Bolter argues that technology and culture are so entwined that you can’t really talk about technology changing culture - they both change - and then we’ll discuss how that can be understood in relation to the different approaches to the relationship between technology and society/culture that Chandler outlined (hard and soft technological determinism, socio-cultural determinism, voluntarism, and our addition, co-construction), and that we discussed last week. Then, after a plenary discussion, they’ll blog their conclusions.

OK, we’ll be blogging in the IKT og læring or ICT and learning segment I’m teaching. How could we not? We start today, and this time we’ll be using Wordpress.com’s hosted blogs, rather than Blogspot - that way I’ll get the ease of a hosted system students can “own” after the course (good pedagogy for them to own their blogs and also I don’t have to worry about post-course comment spam) and I get trackbacks and so on. (Was it Martin who suggested this at Blogtalk?) Here’s the course blog I just set up, which will in time link to the student blogs they’ll be setting up today.

ICT, by the way, is European for Information and Communication Technology. I have no idea why the abbreviation is only in use in the EU - I suppose funding bodies describe the internet and things as ICT so everyone else follows suit so they’re eligible for funding.

In my talk on Network Literacy last week, I said that many students won’t know what to write in that empty white box they see when they log on to Blogger.com or whatever system they’re supposed to be blogging on. To learn how to blog, most students will need some specific assignments. Once you’ve done some blogging and have experienced ways it can be done, it’s much easier to find that you actually want to blog something and come up with your own ideas for blog posts.

Jamie asked for some examples of such assignments, and digging around in my teaching and blogging category, the list I started became so long I thought it should be its own blog post.

• First class: have them set up their blogs and write a brief post about what they hope to get out of the course - or any of those other kinds of first-class-things. (Blogger.com is easy enough that setting up a blog realistically only takes them a few minutes; if you use another system you may have to set up their blogs beforehand - making everyone install MovableType from scratch in their first class in 2003 was a disaster. Installing a blog for each of 60 students using MovableType in 2004 took ten hours. Therefore Blogger.com. There are of course many other options.)
• Read other students’ blogs and leave comments on at least two of them.
• The teacher explains what trackbacks are and shows how bloggers link to each other. Talk about weblog conversations - the visualisation of a blog conversation in this story tends to make sense to students. Make sure trackbacks are enabled, and then ask them to write a post in their own blog that responds to a post in a co-student’s blog - and that they link to that post. Talk about how this works - what’s the difference between a discussion in comments and between blogs?
• Last ten minutes of class: Summarise the most important things you learnt this class in your blog.
• Redesign your blog. (If learning HTML/CSS, and/or if thinking about identity online, self-representation etc
• Write a blog post explaining why you redesigned your blog as you did. Link to sites that inspired you.
• Discuss traditional academic citation techniques and look at examples of different ways in which bloggers cite their sources through links. Use /and/or redesign the blockquote feature in a blog post where you use a quote from another website and link to your source.
• Write a how-to guide for your co-students - my students did this on their own in the process of learning web design (e.g. a colour-blind student explained how to design for colour-blind people, a topic I hadn’t thought of discussing) but this is something the teacher could give as an assignment.
• Have students write reviews of other blogs (though be aware of ethical issues)
• Have a look at some of Jenny Weight’s ideas
• Do small group tasks and instead of (or as well as) doing the full class open discussion afterwards, have students write individual blog posts answering the small group assignment towards the end of the class. Many will actually finish a blog post at home if they’ve started on it in class, but hardly any will write it at home if they’ve not already started it - well, unless it’s compulsory and being graded. Here’s an example
• A total failure was having students look at confessional, diary-style blogs, discuss characteristics of the style and write a blog post in that style. They did great on that assignment, but then proceeded to use that style in all future blog posts…. uh oh…

Do you have any additions?

I suspect that the blogging I used to have the students doing in previous iterations of this course probably saved a lot of student email. Students read each others blogs, asked questions and answered questions in them, and when they succeeded in a task they’d struggled with they blogged how they’d solved the problem.

The reason I haven’t had them blogging this year is that
a) Blogging was great with 30 students. I could track their blogs and I did a great job connecting the blogs and cross-linking and showing off good student posts and stuff. When the class grew to around 70 students I was overwhelmed - I don’t think it’s possible to keep track of such a large group. Even if you put a lot of extra time into genuinely following 70 blogs, I’m not sure you’d mentally be able to facilitate such a group in the way I think you need to do to get most students keen enough to put some effort into their blogs. Some students will get it instantly, of course. Others need more practice and experience to see what good it’ll do them. It’s helping them use their blogs to discuss and network that’s the challenge.
b) I’ve been very ambivalent to blogging in the last few months. I.e. blogging when you’re a slightly established academic rather than a grad student seems to be more about self-presentation than about communication. Maybe it always was in a way but it didn’t feel like it.

So maybe what I need to do is figure out a way of doing blogs - or something similar - in a large group. Perhaps there’d be a way of having students share the task of nurturing the network?

Rob Wittig’s blog course this semester looks great! A lot of work for the teacher, I fear, but I think perhaps that’s just that the US system works differently. And that I’ve just been talking with the administration about our “resource analysis” of funds spent per student in our various classes. Teaching sure looks different from this side of the table…

Hm, how exactly shall I set up my web design and web aesthetics (hitherto taught as webdesign and critical analysis of new media by blogging) course next spring. It’s amazing; it’s only September, and I’m already late in planning next semester. They want us to have finalised schedules by October 12, so international students, who have to apply early, can see which classes won’t crash.

An article I wrote a few months ago called “Weblogs: Learning in Public” is out now in On the Horizon, which is a strategic planning journal for the educational sector. It’s in a special issue edited by Drew Davidson, with lots of other papers about videogames and new media in education - I particularly like the one by Mia Consalvo about cheating and walkthroughs as educational techniques. The electronic version is subscribers only, but your library may have the paper version. If you want a copy, email me and I’ll email you the final version. Update: I reread the copyright form and it’s less draconian than I thought, allowing me to post a copy of my version (not their edited, laid out version) on my website. So here you go (that’s a PDF, btw)!

Lilia writes interestingly about her discomfort with being researched by students who’d been given the assignment of writing a wiki page about her research. She doesn’t mind being researched, but was uncomfortable about whether or not it was OK for her to respond to this public research on her by blogging about it and linking back to them. Had they been her peers, she wouldn’t have hesitated (as I read her, anyway), but they’re not her peers, they’re students just entering this realm who are being required to do this research and who are learning how to do it. In a way my post the other day about a student’s blog with lots of great links on fictional blogs ran in to the same problem when my sending unexpected readers to this student resulted in her sloppy citation practice being exposed. Such public exposure of learners’ mistakes (and of course learners will make mistakes, that’s the whole point of learning) can lead to far direr consequences than the harshest disciplinary measures taken by a university. Which would you rather: fail an exam or have your name indelibly connected to something bad on the internet? Which could potentially affect your future the most? (more…)

Technology becomes popular in certain countries or cultures because of either a) mass events or advertising, or b) social networks. At least, that’s what Ross Mayfield surmises, based on presentations at the blog conference in Paris, looking at blogging in France (hot, due to massive advertising) and in Germany (not much of it) and the success of Orkut in Estonia (one of the founder’s best buddies is Estonian). Being rather a francophile, I like the French blogging point:

The vibrant growth of the French blogosphere is something to behold. French is the second largest language and half of students in France blog. This is due, in no small part, to Skyradio telling their listeners to Skyblog what they think at most commercial breaks — a multi-million dollar advertising investment from an MSM to make blogging cool. Effective, considering they have 1.5 million bloggers according to Pierre Bellanger’s presentation.

Skyblog seems an interesting project. Basically it’s a radio station that’s adopted the internet not simply as a means of distribution or publicity, but as a community that (I think) feeds back into the radio:

L’Internet n’est pas pour nous un moyen de diffusion, c’est une part organique de la radio. (..) Nous ne sommes plus une radio qui a des auditeurs, mais des auditeurs qui ont une radio. The internet isn’t a mode of distribution, it’s an organic part of the radio. (..) We are no longer a radio that has listeners, but listeners who have a radio. (from a transcript of an interview with Pierre Bellanger, who runs Skyblog)

The integration of mass broadcast and community contribution is interesting. Kind of like Slashdot for radiolisteners, I imagine. Though I must admit I’ve not really explored Skyblog yet, so maybe I’m all wrong?

I’m reading old hypertext papers and found Andries van Dam’s keynote for the first ACM Hypertext conference in 1987 (or ACM library). van Dam created the first working hypertext system at Brown University in 1967 in collaboration with several other scientists, including Ted Nelson, and also greatly inspired by Doug Engelbart. He’s also known for his important work in computer graphics. He’s still at Brown today. What particularly interests me is the ways in which van Dam used the multi-user hypertext system(s) at Brown for teaching in the humanities.

His description of the way they used hypertext with literature students struck me with its similarity to the ways many of us want to use blogs today. Students in this “experiment” from the seventies had three exposures to the hypertext system. First they simply added their own annotations to a poem. In the second and third iterations, they had other students’ annotations and links to work with as well as the poem itself and their own work.

Michael Joyce wrote that reading hypertext fiction is primarily about rereading . I think writing in this social, hypertextual internet might be largely about rewriting. Blogging isn’t simply episodic, because we don’t simply flow with the current of episodes moving from idea to idea. When we write a blog or read a blog over time we stand with both feet planted in a river of thought as water flows around our feet; always changing yet always the same. We blog many of the same kinds of things again and again from different points of view taking new points into account. Blogging for years is an expansion of van Dam’s students approaching a poem three times, each time with new layers of annotations from their peers.

It’s useful to note that teaching with hypertext and in networks has a solid history.

Here’s van Dam’s description of the project:

So, very briefly, I’ll describe two experiments. In one, funded by the Exxon Education Foundation, a physicist and I did a course called Man, Energy and Environment. Students did a lot of reading of hypertext on-line about the subject, but no writing. Then we did a much more ambitious experiment in the following two years, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. For this English poetry course we used a very large hypertext with well over a thousand links. Three times a week students had to sign up for an hour each on our one and only Imlac graphics workstation and do their reading and their commenting on-line, following trails, making trails. We used a kind of progressive disclosure: the first time through they saw the poem they were supposed to critique and analyze, with no references. The second time they saw it with a few links to other poems on the same subject or by the same poet. There would also be some word glosses, some professional analyses, but still not very much context. And they would be reviewing what other students had written on the first pass (more…)

If you haven’t already looked at Mena Trott’s post announcing that Moveable Type 3.0 will suddenly be, well, rather expensive, really, go check out the awesome list of trackbacks. Customers talk back - on the corporate website. Wow.

I note with amusement that my use of Moveable Type with my students isn’t even on the pricing list - US$699 is the maximum price, and that only covers 20 authors and 15 blogs. I have 55 active blogs with an author each in my installation. Moveable Type handles it, but obviously it’s not built to make administration of that many users and blogs easy, and indeed, it is a pain. I think it’s fine to charge for software, but suddenly going from free (beer not speech) to pay without warning isn’t that cool. And given the software doesn’t work very well for the purpose, that price - or whatever they’d charge - is too steep. There’s no way I’m going to ask my students to install Moveable Type themselves again, so I guess next year’s web design students won’t be using Moveable Type. Anyway, the default templates are really complicated for students to figure out, and there’s the spam issue, which admittedly might be improved with the new version.

Wordpress has been recommended by several (it’s recommended in half the trackbacks to Mena’s post), and it’s GPL which is good. My university’s already installed Simplog (previously called MyPHPblog, and websited here), but with little info about features). Simplog is open source too. It’s simple alright, perhaps too simple - last time I checked you couldn’t edit templates, only choose from a list of presets - but I notice the new version has trackbacks and comments and it would (gloriously) require absolutely no administration from me.

Our university’s committed to using open source software (at least, that’s the theory) so I really should switch, I guess.

I asked my students to write a review of a blog of their choice. Several of the reviewees have read the reviews and left comments, mostly amused, some flattered, some disagreeing with the reviewer. One of them though, upon discovering that he has readers, is considering quitting blogging altogether. Vegard Johansen, another reviewee, is happy that he received good reviews, but writes that

Anmelder man en blogg eller en personlig hjemmeside sitter det alltid en privatperson bak, s� da b�r man heller velge � skrive en positiv omtale om noe man liker enn � skrive en lunken anmeldelse av noe man kanskje ikke i utgangspunktet liker eller er interessert i. (If you review a blog or a personal website there’s always an individual behind it, so you should choose to write a positive review of a site you like rather than a luke-warm review of a site you dislike from the start or aren’t interested in.)

Only a few days ago Lilia asked how one ethically uses material from weblogs when doing research. Obviously, I now have to ask a related question: Is it unethical to ask students to write reviews of weblogs?
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