By Lisa, on April 21st, 2012
 Yesterday these Kony posters appeared in our neighborhood. I knew they would get torn down as soon as people saw them this morning, so I went out early to take some snaps.
As I pulled up to the first one, a man (good-looking, maybe in his late 20s?) got out of his car and headed toward the sign. He leaned down to my open window and said, “do you know anything about this?”.
I said, “No.”
He said, “I think I know the kids who did it. It was kids.”
“Oh.” I said
“They don’t bother me.” I said. He looked puzzled.
“I figure it means they’re thinking”, I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s just it,” he said. “They’re not thinking. It’s a Facebook thing.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe it will make other people in the neighborhood think, and that would be a good thing.”
Pause, as he turns away.
“I’m an educator,” I say, “It goes with the territory.”
He looks at me curiously. “Wait a minute,” he says, “Are you a teacher?” (This immediately reminded me why I never use the word “educator” – I have no idea why I did.)
“Yes.” “Where?” “MiraCosta.”
“I think I had you,” he said. (I avoided sighing – people saying that to me used to mean something completely different.)
 “Then,” I said, “You should know I like this sort of thing.” He smiles and rips the sign down, going back to his car. I drove to another part of the neighborhood to get more snaps before he finished his morning endeavors.
Yesterday I had a conversation with a colleague who is otherwise very intelligent about the world. In fact, he teaches about culture. I was complaining at how few of our colleagues have any understanding of new media, the internet itself, or the role of these elements in our culture.
He said, “Well, I’m not on Facebook, if that’s what you mean.”
“But your students are,” I said. “Don’t you think you should get in there and try to understand what’s going on? You could learn more about how they think.”
“I don’t like Facebook,” he says.
So I’m thinking (as I imagine the FB “dislike” thumbs-down in my head), is this how we deal with this? We don’t want to use it ourselves, so we aren’t interested in understanding it? Do we think the same thing about other kinds of knowledge and understanding? How do we teach our students if we don’t understand something that has become so quickly a major part of our culture? What do we teach our students if we don’t understand this?
It’s not “a Facebook thing”. Or if it is, it means we need to understand what being a Facebook thing means, and that it doesn’t necessarily translate as “doing what my friends do” or “living in a different space”. Facebook, and the whole internet, affects our lives every day, whether we have accounts or not. And when students (and former students) and teachers don’t get that, it’s a bad thing.
By Lisa, on April 18th, 2012
On PBS radio, Kevin Whitehead’s review of Jenny Scheinman’s ‘Mayhem’ included a quick comment that if one of the songs was “taken out of context” it would be heard differently.
There are wide-open moments on Scheinman’s “Devil’s Ink” that, taken out of context, could pass for modern composed music.
Which made me wonder how a piece of a song could be taken out of context? It would have to be informed by other songs or other knowledge.
 Of course, an individual song can be taken out of context — bands like Pink Floyd and Radiohead didn’t want their songs to be sold separately in iTunes. Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare is meant to be heard in a certain order – so is Queen’s Night at the Opera. Album rock is based on the album, not the individual songs.
But context can be important for bits of knowledge as well. And this connects (really it does) to my students coming to class not having done their reading.
I complained about this on John Mak’s blog, in answering his query about flipping the classroom, where I described the problem in my hybrid class, where lectures and readings are online, and on-site time is for discussion:
Several students seem to “forget” to do the online work at all, having been “trained” to just show up in a class. The time in class, now joyfully turned over to “discussion”, doesn’t go as well when students don’t do the online readings.
The readings provide context for what we talk about in class. Reading about what happened (yes, including some facts) provides the context for both the primary sources and further discussion.
And yet, there is no reason for a person to realize they do not possess context for their ideas. They may think their thoughts spring from an internal source, without connection to their culture, upbringing, or surroundings. Only their presence is required to engage in criticism, on any subject.
Such disconnected idea-building could represent a moment of spirituality, but is more likely to express simple ignorance.
People who cannot think within a pattern of intellectual endeavor (mathematical, historical, literary, scientific) lack the context within which to put the bits and pieces of information they may encounter.
The Nowhere Man in Yellow Submarine knew a million details, but had no knowledge.
So the entire purpose of education is to provide context. Or, at least, it is its central purpose. Providing facts and forcing memorization, we say, doesn’t do that – you only learn the details. But could enough facts, stuck together however tenuously, create a net that becomes a context? Can we rearrange the songs to make an album?
Or is it necessary to have someone else (expert, professor, teacher, curator) create the album, so that we hear the individual tunes as a contextual package?
Perhaps the controversy between the constructivist or connectivist pedagogies and the instructivist pedagogy is mostlya bout context. The constructivists and connectivists want the students to build their own contextual package, inductively, and the instructivists want to provide the contextual package, within which students fit the specifics, deductively.
Either way, it seems to me, the goal is the same.
By Lisa, on April 14th, 2012
 No, I am not a big fan of the James Cameron film, mostly because of the awful script and the inability of the two leads to rise above it.
I have also not been a big fan of tweeting “history”, in historical reinactments done via Twitter. I critiqued the approach heartily almost exactly two years ago.
However, I have now been to two museum exhibits of artifacts from the Titanic (including the current one in San Diego), and tonight I sit here watching Twitter as the Carpathian steams in to pick up survivors, and I have to say, it’s ridiculously riveting to watch the disaster unfold on Twitter.
I have followed both Real-Time Titanic and TitanicVoyage out of the UK publishing house The History Press for the last couple of days. Both have done a great job in creating a suspenseful account of what professional historians like to call (often disdainfully), “popular” history, Real-Time Titanic using a third-person, journalistic style and TitanicVoyage marking posts by the type of tweeter (#captain, #crew, #thirdclass) for an even more harrowing first-person tone.
As with most of the popular history I’ve enjoyed, I was drawn to a single aspect of the subject, in this case the problem with the Marconi wireless radio just a day before they hit the iceberg.
Apparently, the transmitter went down.
And apparently, they broke the rules to fix it.
Naturally, this sent me on a hunt for rules about Marconi wireless, and the stories of the young men who worked the radios. I found a respected article by Parks Stephenson, a fascinating page on the wireless telegraphists, a website “specialising in radio aspects of the Titanic disaster since 1999“, and a recent article from Atlantic Monthly on the importance of radio to the survivors. None of the creators of this stuff are, to my knowledge, professional historians. They are enthusiasts, of history and radio.
Even if only parts of the stories are true, it is possible that a couple of young men took apart a radio against some sort of policy to make sure it transmitted, and if they hadn’t then a day later when Titanic hit an iceberg they might not have been able to send the distress call.
Conclusions can thus be made about the value of mechanical tinkering, and not being afraid to break the rules, and professional pressure to do your job (hundreds of passenger-sent messages were sent from the ship by radio).
It’s harder to explain, though, the emotional impact of watching it unfold, in “real time” 100 years later, as if it were happening now and we could hear the screams of the people freezing to death yards from the lifeboats. There was a certain War of the Worlds aspect to it, even though Twitter is not really the radio and one couldn’t unknowingly follow the Twitter stream the same way people unknowingly tuned in to Welles’ show.
And again this odd use of Twitter makes me rethink the role of stories and history and the enthusiasts who put it all together, and I’m filled with nothing but respect for their work.
By Lisa, on April 7th, 2012
You know, I teach History. (I capitalize the word because I mean the formal academic discipline, not the subject of the History Channel or that category in the New York Times Review of Books.)
Back in the 1960s, there was an argument at universities about “relevance”, with student activists claiming that what they were learning was not relevant to their lives. Their work, and that of the faculty who supported them, has given us fields like women’s studies, Native American studies, Asian philosophy, sociology of the family, etc.
 One of the courses that was criticized most at the time was Western Civilization. It was seen as promoting Dead White Guys history, leaving out women, poor people, and other elements of society. It was seen as elitist, Euro-centric, and, worst of all, irrelevant. Although the course itself did not die (I’m teaching it), the materials and approaches changed. Women scientists and scholars of the past, social groups that had little say in texts, and even international influences, gradually have worked their way into lectures, textbooks, and scholarly focus. This is taking several generations, despite the fact that social history became a major field in the 1940s. It is only recently that you can find textbooks that put women and ordinary people within the narrative, instead of in boxes and “features” that continue to marginalize (quite literally) their contribution to the flow of history. (Children, by the way, have yet to appear as historical actors – I hope I see that before my career ends, but I doubt it.)
At the same time as this necessary shift has been taking place, the desire for relevance has gradually entered the pedagogy of college classrooms as well, with professors of traditional subjects being encouraged to not only make learning more “active”, but to provide lots of connections to today’s issues and the daily lives of students. We are asked to examine ways in which our subject is applicable to students’ lives, and the implication is that we should adjust our teaching and our subject matter accordingly.
I find it contradictory that just as we are finally creating a history of adult society as a whole, a history that includes people who may not be like ourselves, we are seeing pressure to teach history as more directly connected to the lives of our students. And I say…no.
It’s not that I don’t think current events aren’t a good way to talk about history. I do that whenever I have a chance to talk with students, in class or out of class. It’s that the purpose of history is not just to understand today’s events; it’s to understand who we are. And by that I don’t mean only who we are today, but who we are in the context of a history that extends back, way back, beyond ourselves.
To teach a person, especially a young person who’s lived 20 years or less, a history that is relevant to their daily lives is, quite literally, short-sighted. Their daily lives are simply too small. Older people have small lives, too, which may be confined by lack of knowledge about things that don’t seem to immediately concern them.
Many of my students go to college, or go back to college, to get real-world skills and a job that pays well. They see those G.E. areas that don’t interest them as hoops to jump through. Their horizons are narrow and many are quite content that way. Only a few are, as we say in our superior professorial tone, “here to learn”.
The “relevance” approach also plays into the idea of strategic learning — students believe they only need to learn things they see as immediately relevant to their lives. That’s very superficial.
To me, the purpose of higher education is to broaden people’s horizons, not work within them.
I don’t want to make history relevant to their lives today, to who they are today – I want to make it relevant to the educated person they wish to become. And if they don’t wish to become educated, then it’s my job to try anyway, to introduce them to ideas beyond themselves, from times in which they haven’t lived and thus find difficult to understand. I want to show them universal ideas, and controversial ideas, and interpretations of the past in an effort to have them understand some of the context in which they live as historical human beings, not just themselves and their small world.
The relevance of that perspective, if they see it at all, will not play out until long after they leave my class, as they enter the flow of history to make their own contribution. And when they look back, they need to see more than themselves.
By Lisa, on April 4th, 2012
This is a story of failure. Not, at first, the good kind of failure, the kind that leads to growth. In this case, it’s the kind of failure that leads you to go back on the trail, to find that tree around which you tied the ribbon, and take the other fork in the road.
For many years, I did all my web stuff myself. This was before a whole lot of software or webware – it was all HTML, which I taught myself from a For Dummies book (Quick Reference, 1997). Oh, and we had Webboard 1 (they’re on 9 now) for threaded discussion. Geeks used IRC and other ways to talk in real time. The sound of the modem was music to my ears.
Then Web 2.0 happened, and it was so exciting and easy to use all the cool stuff. Flickr for photos! Blogger and WordPress.com for blogs! Twitter for microblogging! You could post all your stuff, even create stuff, and there it is, all for free. No need to know HTML!
I should have known better. I’m a historian.
Problems at Pedagogy First!
Most of our participants at Pedagogy First!, at our encouragement, have been using Edublogs or WordPress.com for their blogs. At first, these blogging services provided for free the means to upload the things our participants created as part of the class. But, as time has gone on, fewer features have been enabled for free accounts at these services.
The number of plugins that both services offer has also decreased. We have been exploring workarounds in response to the decline in services like embedding media. First it was Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo, where you could just by typing the URL into WordPress.com but Edublogs wasn’t so easy. Then we couldn’t get Edublogs to embed Jing or Slideshare (and WordPress.com could only if we used Vodpod).
Now our intrepid participants are posting audio and sure enough, WordPress.com won’t let them embed audio on the free account using an upload. So the trick here is to upload ones audio “somewhere on the web” and put in a shortcode like [audio http://myserver.net/myaudio.mp3].
To upload “somewhere” means they really should have access to a web folder somewhere and know how to ftp to it, or try a service (I tried yourlisten.com, but it didn’t work). As they helped each other, they discovered Soundcloud could work. But this sort of thing is dicey and inconsistent, and it freaks out the newbies. Come on, everybody, let’s run all over the web looking for ways to do something simple!
Problems for Me
At the same time, I have been experiencing problems with my own free services. Posterous won’t convert my video to embed it, regardless of the codec used. I recorded the weekly message to my students in Eyejot, and it didn’t send it to me for four days. Flickr wants money to share my photos with others.
And then I look at ds106, harbinger of all things self-participatory. Jim Groom at UMW just raised money for a separate server, and they’re giving students domain names and web hosting so everyone can run their own blogs (not, you’ll note, using WordPress.com or Edublogs).
Going Backward
So is it time to go back to that tree? Back up (beep, beep, beep) the road of Web 2.0 “freemium” service providers, who (like insurance companies) are charging us more and delivering less, and get back to that DIY spirit? I always recommend some DIY anyway – keeping your files on your own computer to protect them from loss, never writing anything directly into a system. Now we may have to build learning units around it.
As we revise the syllabus for next year’s Pedagogy First! class, I’m asking my colleagues whether we should recommend some hosting, and teach everyone how purchase hosting space and create their own blog (as ds106 did last year). Our college’s super computer guy is happy to administer some WPMU blogs for MiraCosta participants, which is wonderful, but every plugin will have to be approved and updated, and/or faculty will need to be taught how to use their web folder and upload things, a whole different level of web comprehension. They won’t know why they should make the choice between uploading to their web folder and uploading into WP — too many choices is bad for newbies. And, if this year is anything to go by, 75% of participants won’t be from MiraCosta, or won’t want a MiraCosta-controlled blog. We’ll need to teach them how to not only set up a blog but get a hosting account (likely at Hippie Hosting for $12/year), install WordPress, and then set it up. It’s a year long class, but still…
This was the sort of thing we taught in 1998. Here’s some HTML. Here’s how to ftp. Now have fun. Blog platforms should make it easier, but in their current push toward monetization, they really are adding another layer, something else to be learned, instead of substituting for that back end knowledge. We didn’t whine in 1998 about learning the back end — you had to know some in order to teach online.
Walking away
As for me, I’m creating a new WordPress blog of my own and using Posterous Importer to transfer my ds106 blog. And I’m crawling through those php.ini files trying to fix problems, knowing I cannot expect novices to do that in the fall.
I also know, of course, that you can never really go back….
By Lisa, on April 1st, 2012
Posterous has refused to convert my video for the last time. It was bad enough that they started “Spaces” (adding extra clicks and not working in Firefox anymore), then they got bought by Twitter. But the whole point of my ds106 blog is posting my own audio and video creations, so this is the last straw.
I read at Lifehacker that the self-hosted WordPress plugin Posterous Importer didn’t work , but they’ve fixed it and it does, very well.
So to do this, I created a database on my hosted server and installed (another) WP blog from WordPress.org. Then I followed the 5 minute install instructions. Then I made a mistake.
At this point, what I needed to do was create a plain text file called php.ini that had the settings I want so I can upload big media:
[PHP]
max_execution_time = 300
max_input_time = 600
memory_limit = 60M
upload_max_filesize = 200M
post_max_size = 32M
Then I needed to upload this into the wp-admin folder before I imported my Posterous.
Next step was to get the plugin Posterous Importer and activate it, then give it the information to download my blog. It worked very well (except that it linked back to Posterous for the files that were too big because I didn’t do the php.ini file first!).
Because I’m using Quicktime files, I also needed to get the QuickTime Embed plugin and use its shortcode to create a player for the files I uploaded, so I did have to clean up a few posts, but overall this is going great.
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