Historians sometimes reinvent themselves. Or maybe it’s better to say that historians who are very famous, or not famous at all, sometimes reinvent themselves. If you’re very famous (like Simon Schama) you can do whatever you like. If you’re basically unknown (like me) you can also do whatever you like. But if you’re an acknowledged expert about One Big Thing, I suspect you can’t do anything else.
I’ve been working for a few years on making Victorian England my new specialty, and I’m also writing a novel that takes place in 1862. To find good resources and just enjoy the era, I’ve joined some Victorian-focused Facebook groups. People post old photos:
These are London Bridge in 1890, the top one facing north, the other facing south. And oh, the traffic! I’ve read that the bridges were often jammed in the 1860s, and it looks like by 1890 they weren’t any better. Can’t you just imagine yourself trying to cross the street?
Then someone on Facebook asked whether the stairway was still there:
Let’s go look! (And get a load of all the “temporarily closed” on Google. Might want to take some screenshots — this will all be history too, remember).
So I “drop down” my little G droid* and go look.
Hmmm… looks like maybe the top of a stairway? I’d better drop down by the river bank for closer inspection.
A ramp! Much nicer than stairs for lots of people. Plus you don’t have to go out past the church and turn left to get onto the bridge.
The ease of doing this sort of thing amazes me. An armchair traveler in the 19th century could sit at home and read books to go to wonderful places all over the world. I can drop down my G droid anywhere and walk around (well, click around).
I can’t go to England this year, but I can do this. The Google Map images are relatively recent. I can walk down streets. I can look up old maps and then go see what’s different (I do that all the time for research). I can even go to webcams like this one and see places in real time. I can start up Google Earth and see buildings in three dimensions.
All of which beats relying on H. Rider Haggard for my view of the world. But I would like a wingback chair, please.
___ *I know the droid is called “Pegman”, but why should it be a man? I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a man.
I confess to being depressed by a summer article in The Economist, “The second half of humanity is joining the internet” (June 6). In the spirit of Thorstein Veblen’s critique, poorer parts of the world are getting on the internet*, mostly though mobile phones. And even fewer people there than in the developed world are using this online time to learn things.
The Economist article did not specifically count online courses, only “education information/services”, but the use is pretty low. And it likely includes looking up something on Wikipedia so you can win a game, or checking the weather.
People everywhere do the same thing: use the internet mostly for “timepass” – passing the time by communicating with friends and family, playing games, and watching videos. I’m not saying these things don’t cause learning. They do. But the purpose is entertainment and emotional satisfaction, not becoming an educated citizen.
It just serves to remind me how truly wide the gulf is between those who value education for its long-term benefits, and those who just want to pass the time. Are the people who get satisfaction from intellectual challenges rare? If so, will the smartphones make them even more rare?
Because that’s the crux of the issue. When all this internet-y, web-by stuff began, we educators were all excited. Vast libraries of information! Massive open online classes! Anyone can learn anything from anywhere!
I’m not anti-entertainment. I’m a huge classic movie fan, and I watch a lot of TV programs where one character calls another “Inspector”. I read modern novels just for fun, or to get to sleep. I’m not always working, always teaching, or always learning.
But I am again reminded of the old Zits cartoon:
The internet relies on huge servers, and uses tons of resources. It only seems “clean”. The mobile phones contain rare earths, the servers are so hot they need to be in the Arctic, the power plants chug away so we can have long power strips full of our charging device plugs. It’s odd to make that sacrifice just so that people can play Fortnite from anywhere.
Perhaps our goals were too utopian. The article points out that our vision of the subsistence farmer checking weather on his phone to save his crop doesn’t really happen. But why shouldn’t everyone use the internet for whatever they like? And can’t we learn wonderful things on our own? Some little boy somewhere is watching a Zeffirelli clip on YouTube and is inspired to become a great set designer. Some little girl is watching the US women’s soccer team and will be a great player. Is formal education a more important use of technology?
After two decades online, however, I am saddened that there hasn’t been a little more educational uptake and a little less “Whasup?”.
* I used to be very careful to distinguish the web from the internet — the internet is the entire online structure, while the web is the world wide web accessed through a browser. The recent dominance of the “app” and sites requiring log-in is closing the web, and has become the most-used aspect of the internet other than email.
If you’re from around here, you know what a surf report it: “moderate waves today, let’s call it waist-high” a la Scott Bass on KPBS radio.
This is a report of today’s web-surfing, which is kinda different. Sometimes it’s piled a lot higher than my waist, but today I learned a lot, much of it triggered by Twitter posts. I don’t think I’m the only one who uses the “like” heart to file things for later, so I could find these again.
History Assessments
Except the first one. Somehow I found the Stanford History Education Group, and their Beyond the Bubble assessments. I’m not sure why I’ve never heard of this, but it’s a collection of items for teaching U.S. History. While geared toward the high school AP crowd, the method here is quite useful for college history. The primary source is embedded into the assessment. So for example, there would be a newspaper engraving of a protest from Harper’s Weekly, then a short list of facts related to that engraving, then open short answer questions. Sometimes these asked students to assess the veracity of the document itself in light of the other facts, or they might ask the student to say what the source tells us about the era.
These are short (usually just two short answers) and there’s a rubric with each one, indicating the level (proficient, emergent, basic) of various student responses. Some even include sample student answers that one is likely to see. Although undoubtedly intended to be used solely by the instructor, it might be interesting to give the rubric to students and have them analyze their own work!
The site has many assessments that a teacher could download, but it was their design that gave me ideas, because I could create my own assessments for any primary source I have.
And it was kind of eerie that I had just changed all my Learning Units to be inside the assessments. I must be very trendy in terms of design!
Cycloramas
Next, I found a serious gap in my knowledge about the history of media. A tweet by Civil War historian Lisa Tendrich Frank led me to a Smithsonian Magazine article on the restoration of the cylcorama in Atlanta. Apparently, during the 1880s, cycloramas were a huge draw as entertainment. Painters created 360-degree paints, attached to the walls of a circular building, and people would come to experience it. The article notes a scene might have a dirt floor and some trees to add a reality-inducing effect.
Beginning in the 1880s, these completely circular paintings started appearing from half a dozen companies, such as the American Panorama Company in Milwaukee, where Atlanta’s canvas was conceived. APC employed more than a dozen German painters, led by a Leipzig native named Friedrich Heine.
Half a dozen companies? How could I not have known about this? This isn’t just virtual reality, it’s late 19th century entertainment for the people. The closest I’ve gotten to in-the-round entertainment was the film they used to have at Disneyland, America the Beautiful, a movie made with multiple cameras that surrounded you. Yeah, I know, in days where the Google truck drives through your neighborhood, this may seem archaic, but it was very cool.
So now I have a whole research area to discover.
Paratexts
Can I use this word in a sentence? It shouldn’t be new to me: it’s a word I keep bumping into, but somehow it never entered my thinking as something I could use.
A tweet by early Americanist Michelle Orihel sent me to Digital Paxton, and reading the post I had an Aha! moment. Advertising and editors’ notes and issue numbers, as included in Victorian periodicals, would be paratext! I may not have a theory, but I at least have a structure, an interpretation, a word I can use for what these types of things are.
Some days it’s enough to learn one new useful word.
Blackmail
The last item for today was a piece of email spam. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to open these, but there was no attachment and I decided to read it. I found it fascinating.
The title was:
Security Alert. lisa@lisahistory.net was compromised. Password must be changed.
The email went on to explain that my account had been hacked, my information and surfing habits downloaded, and they wanted money, paid in Bitcoin. The blackmailer explained how s/he got access:
How I made it: In the software of the router, through which you went online, was a vulnerability. I just hacked this router and placed my malicious code on it. When you went online, my trojan was installed on the OS of your device.
I noticed that there aren’t any contractions where you’d expect, indicating this person does not speak English natively. The OS of my device?
They also claimed to know that I have pornographic habits:
A month ago, I wanted to lock your device and ask for a not big amount of btc to unlock. But I looked at the sites that you regularly visit, and I was shocked by what I saw!!! I’m talk you about sites for adults.
I want to say – you are a BIG pervert. Your fantasy is shifted far away from the normal course!
There’s a normal course for the viewing of pornography online? I had no idea. But that explains why so much money was being requested.
I’m know that you would not like to show these screenshots to your friends, relatives or colleagues. I think $701 is a very, very small amount for my silence. Besides, I have been spying on you for so long, having spent a lot of time!
Wait, $701? Cheap at twice the price!
After payment, my virus and dirty screenshots with your enjoys will be self-destruct automatically. If I do not receive from you the specified amount, then your device will be locked, and all your contacts will receive a screenshots with your “enjoys”.
I guess we’ll see…
(Discovered after posting: turns out this is a known spam thing and I should dedicate as much worry about it as I have already done. So that’s five things learned online today!)
On my travel iBook I have a sticker of a TARDIS, because my computer is a time machine (it’s also bigger on the inside than the outside).
I’ve been doing more reading in the book Culture and Education (1990), and found a paper that explored the topic of student tutors in the 19th century, and their similarity to student assistants in modern American graduate schools. I was delighted, since my own work is somewhat similar in methodology and theme.
It was written by a Myron Tuman. Since I don’t find many scholars to talk with about my work, I thought I’d look him up on the web. What happened was a time machine journey.
Academia.edu took me to his work going back to at least 1988, although it didn’t list this article I’d been reading. I discovered he had published also about online and computer issues as we both entered the increasingly online world of education. I tried to find him at the University of Alabama website, but he isn’t listed now.
I found him at RateMyProfessors, where some students laid into him back in 2006. Last month the Tuscaloosa News published a retrospective that mentioned him earning an Outstanding Professor award 25 years ago (that would be about the same time I was awarded mine). I found him on Facebook, where he posted up to the end of last year, mostly family stuff. And finally, Constant Contact took me to his retirement party (looks like about two years ago), with photos of Myron enjoying the celebration.
In other words, I went through someone’s whole career in 15 minutes, a career that ran parallel to mine in several respects. Given the recent “radio silence”, I don’t know whether I would contact him now, but in some ways it feels like I already have. That’s disorienting, to say the least.
Just like the old days, a blog post dedicated to helping me remember how to do something.
I have a lot of research material in Google Books, mostly free books from the 19th century, and some pretty obscure titles. Many I’ve been able to download as pdfs. But I wanted a list of all my books in one category (Google calls them bookshelves), and it would only show me 10 at a time.
Well I don’t want to Next, Next, Next. So I did the old-fashioned thing and looked closely at the URL. And there it was, the number of entries:
Yes, it’s finally time to move. No, not my real-world house, but my server. Yes, I know it’s a rental, but…
I’ve been at Lunarpages since 2004. That’s a long time. And in that time, Lunarpages has gone from a groovy startup where you could call and get a person, to a business-centered company where they give you grief about SSL. And yell at you when someone hacks your blog. It got so bad I had to move to WordPress.com, so that tells you something.
In the meantime, my online colleagues Jim Groom and Tim Owens (I think I met them online back in the early CCK08 and first-run ds106 days?) started Reclaim Hosting. Faculty and student focused, Reclaim has provided excellent service to many, but I couldn’t move until I knew for sure that my students wouldn’t need access during the changeover. My sabbatical starts Friday – the time is now.
What do I use rented space on a server for? Well, everything, judging by my account stats. I have 31 MySQL databases, 6 subdomains, 5 FTP accounts. I’ve downloaded dozens of scripts, and many versions of Moodle, and run them. Not to mention the 23 GB of files. But this is exactly what needs mentioning.
You know how people downsize their dwelling as they get older? Time to downsize. The web has matured, not always in ways I approve of. And my college had gone over to Canvas, which I don’t approve of either. As the world cares less about creative ways to do things, I find that most of my files are no longer used. Broadband speeds have increased so much that my zillions of .mov files, painstakingly compressed to make them work on dialup modems, then digitized, then ripped from digital, then compressed more mildly – this has left trails of media files. Do I use any of them? No – everything now streams from YouTube or Vimeo.
Here’s a sample of just one lecture file from just one class of my six classes:
This is a lecture on the High Middle Ages (a great era for technology – come take my class!). The top file is the online lecture. The second one is text for a page that opens with a mouseover image, the manor map .png. Then there are my original audio files of me reading this lecture, recorded long ago as aiff and compressed through some antique application that no longer exists to make them .mov. There’s a poster image for a media file (took hours to make in my old freeware gif program) that now plays on YouTube, and then the most nostalgic item of all: the redplay.mov file. It’s a button that when you press it, the lecture audio file plays. I have red ones for this class, blue ones for others, and I made them myself by stealing a graphic and using code I learned from a book called Quicktime for the Web. (You can also see .mp3 files I made later, but my old Mac was acting up and used the origin dates.)
Good times, man. The old days, when I was up half the night learning media compression and stealing bits of code from various places, including printed books. When my HTML for Dummies book got worn out from use. Before Google, before learning management systems. Back when on the internet no one could tell you were a woman, or a non-coder, or just a historian who never really liked computers but was determined to teach online and do it well, reducing the “distance”. A time when I’d install programs from Fantastico to try polls and self-grading quizzes, when I could learn just enough Javascript to make stuff happen, cobbled together my own web pages with cool embedded stuff, having no idea what the hell I was doing, and later when I hacked Dreamweaver and WordPress. When students said, “wow! this is a cool class! all my others are just text”.
Nowadays, the databases don’t operate anymore because most of them were Moodle and Lunarpages gave me so much grief about Chinese hackers that I disabled them all. I no longer use all the cool apps I can run on the server, because Canvas won’t serve scripts that are inside of html pages. After two years trying to hack Canvas, I know what can be done, and none of it requires programs I run on my own.
So although Reclaim can migrate all my stuff over, for free, I’m saying no thanks. I’ve got only 10 GB on the Reclaim plan, but these days that should be plenty. So I’m spending a few days moving those old files out of the folders, and I’ll get it all under 10 GB (8 really) or bust. It’s an opportunity to pack up the stuff and put it in storage on a hard drive, upload everything and check it, decide whether I want to start up databases to run old stuff or just let my work (POT certificate classes, Moodle classes, old web pages) just fall off the Internet. It’s all backed up. I think I’ll let it stay that way.
With the death of John Perry Barlow, it is time to start writing the history of the open web.
Usually, historians are poor analysts of current events, and poor predictors of the future. Just look at Woodrow Wilson, idealistically trying to build a world of peace after the Great War. One of the problems is that we cannot write the history until something ends*. It is too soon, for example, to write the history of school shootings in America, or of post-rational politics. We are in the middle of these things.
In 1893 at an American Historical Association conference, Frederick Jackson Turner announced the end of the frontier. In his view, the “wild west” was over. The western frontier had served as an escape valve throughout American history, providing a place for dreamers and those who just didn’t fit in to start a new life, take their chances. But gradually the frontier was contained, mapped by geographers, fenced by ranchers, crossed by railroads. And while imperialists might use Turner’s proclamation to support their own internationally expansionist goals, the point was that the wild west was done, and therefore it was time to write its history.
So now it is time to write the history of the open internet, the electronic frontier, as Barlow called it. As in the wild west, the freedom that marked the early web would be contained, civilized, and gradually controlled by commercial and government interests. As it closed, the shift in the nature of the space gave birth to new threats. Where on the open web bad disruptors were restrained by the community, commercial spaces made possible abuses never seen before, and controlled by no one. From trolls to cyberhacking to international meddling in elections, the enclosed spaces themselves gave rise to horrors.
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather…I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.
Sometimes historians get to experience historical change themselves. While never a computer expert, I learned in the 1980s the mysteries of ProDOS and the Apple IIe. To me, computers were only sophisticated word processors, each generation enabling me to correct errors and write faster. Using Netscape in the late 1990s, I began teaching history on the wild web, grading assignments by email and posting lectures in HTML that I learned from a book.
In education, the wild west began to diminish with the advent of the learning management system, and I spent the next dozen years or so fighting to keep online college classes free of the imposed pedagogy inherent in these systems, even as I learned to use them myself. I also dreamed that the artisan way of doing things would survive the growth of mechanized online teaching. Blackboard and now Canvas are the educational equivalents of Facebook and Google – entities that began with a worthy goal but now manage information in controlled commercial spaces. And, as with the web in general, this control paradoxically encourages the worst elements to emerge. College courses, for so many students the opportunity to think freely, now feature a level of standardization and accountability that Henry Ford would have envied.
I still believe, like Barlow, that the freer the space, the less opportunity there is for abusing our fellow human beings. But all that has passed. It is time now to write the history of the web that was open to all, when everything was possible, where the disembodied voice spoke to a world that wanted to listen and learn. Historians take dreams and wrap them up, explaining events in a way that gives meaning and context. So this is a wrap: the electronic frontier is closed.
—
*Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France may be the one exception to this rule.
Straight from the “if you can’t change your mind, how do you know you have one?” department, I am writing an early American history course that violates many of the precepts I have been teaching to online instructors for the last 15 years.
Don’t rely on outside material
No, I have not gone over the the Dark Side and course cartridges. But in trying to avoid my same old thing (writing out and recording lectures with images), I am instead creating custom segments of Films on Demand videos. I even plan to use some as discussion prompts. If anything happens to Films on Demand, I’m sunk. I have consulted with our library specialist, who says it’s stable – that’s certainly more of a guarantee than, say, something on YouTube.
Create all your own stuff
Nope, I’m not. I’m relying on a textbook and sources I put together, a few lectures from me, and my own connecting text on we pages. But a lot of the “meat” is created by other historians instead, those with actual studios and lighting and funding and doctorates.
Don’t create long video lectures
Done it, 30 minutes on the Salem Witch Trials using Screenflow. And it’s not actually that good.
Don’t create discussions where the main goal is to discuss
Doing it, creating two-level discussions where they respond emotionally to a video prompt falsely encouraging two sides, then leading them deeper, as I used to do in my old old method from 2007 (an eternity in internet years).
Don’t forget it’s college, not high school
I’m creating an extra credit assignment that has them use a colonial cookbook to make something from their family and share video/photos. And we’re gonna discuss things like whether slavery was wrong and whether the South had a right to secede (they’ll be chewing on the edge of their playpens).
Have them create something meaningful that’s important to you
I planned to do this – I really did. I even told Laurel Thatcher Ulrich I was going to do it, stealing her idea from Tangible Things. But after hours of gathering bookmarks with specific search terms to make sure that students really use primary sources from the colonial era, I have had second thoughts. This is probably from seeing the inevitable 19th century romantic paintings being posted as “primary sources” for the Salem Witch Trials, the Boston Tea Party, GW crossing the Delaware, and other 17th and 18th century events.
This last I’ll think about some more.
But thus I go forth, violating my precepts with equanimity if not actual common sense.
There are a lot of threads coming together in the blogosphere that are helpful as we look for connections between what we do as teachers and what we’ve elected to the White House. I confess this has occupied my mind since the election, even though I was not surprised by the result.
Brexiteers marching in York
5 days before the vote
Why wasn’t I suprised? Because I was in England during the Brexit vote. I was at the University of Durham talking to students who were afraid of losing their fellowships and their continental relationships. I had dinner with historians who were nervous about the vote, but reassured by the continual press coverage saying Brexit couldn’t win. When they asked me about Donald Trump (this was in June, remember) they wanted the same assurance he couldn’t win. When I said he certainly could, for the same reasons I was seeing Brexit marchers in the streets of York, I depressed a lot of people (even a Scotsman, which I thought was impossible).
At the B&B where I was staying, the middle-class owner said her heart said Brexit, but her knowledge that young people were the future made her vote RemaIN. The woman in the kitchen wanted out. The night before the vote, the London Times confidently announced a RemaIN victory, with lots of cool graphs showing which demographic would vote which way. Then Sunderland results came in, and everyone discounted it because it was Sunderland (depressed, northern). Then the rest of the results came in.
The cab driver, the morning after the vote, told me he was “over the moon” with happiness – he was convinced millions would return from the EU to bail out the NHS. I knew that wasn’t true. It had also become very clear to me that, as the B&B owner had said, the RemaINers were voting with their heads, and the Brexiteers were voting with their hearts, here in a country I had long considered a bastion of rationalism. America is not a bastion of rationalism. We are the nation of independent pioneer types, where freedom is new and still to a great extent untried. We assume, we take for granted — only 50% of us vote.
I’m sure those historians at the University are wondering what they did wrong, in the classroom and with their students. Of course their students, like ours, the ones who voted, didn’t vote for this. But I’ve been teaching for 26 years, not just the past 10 or so. And to a certain extent I’ve bought into the democratic ideals of the Twitter revolution, even as I’ve acknowledged echo chambers and the potential of the new mass media to be less mass, and more media, and to connect crazy people and give repressive ideologies a bullhorn.
So it’s fascinating to read the work of Audrey Watters this week, and to follow her trails. One particularly scary article, for the way it’s written as well as its subject, is Willie Osterwell’s What Was the Nerd?, which notes that white outcast coders and basement nerds may be at the heart of the new rise of fascism (it was certainly refreshing to see someone use this word other than me). Helen Beachem responded to Martin Weller, whom I followed on Twitter throughout the Brexit election. Weller posted brilliantly in September on the “unenlightenment” in open education. His work noted an issue I’ve been following for awhile: the deliberate turn away from rationalism and factual information, something I saw way back in 2008 as Glorifying the Doofus.
What Helen Beachem writes is that educational technology needs to be re-evaluated for its role in what’s happened. She points out that those who are learning successfully online were already successful in education, but that the promise was to do more, to develop everyone as independent learners, to work for a kind of establishment educational plan to counter the new market in e-learning. Taking students outside our institutions, we must be careful:
Suffice to say that when we help students into those unregulated spaces where their learning is unfettered by institutional management systems, assessment deadlines and fair use rules, we are not sending them into the country of the free. We are sending them to the data warehouses of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Weiner.
She also notes that the Brexiteers used social media as advertising, with no one taking responsibility for the emotional response that led to the spread of irrational ideas. She refers to those who live online as “adrenalised and hooked”. The online space itself needs to be interrogated, the culture where we all click and send and message and retweet and like posts — all this has “the illusion of elective power but none of the responsibilities of citizenship.”
Michael Feldstein considers that there are issues of literacy. He notes the political polls that were wrong, and that learning analytics has the same weakness. Data is narrative, he says, and we need to be “literate” (by which I think he means liberally educated, experienced, critically thinking) teachers to be able to make that data useful, and to question it as needed. In this view I see the possibility to reclaim teaching as the experienced construction of narrative that is informed by, but is not dictated by, information, because it acknowledges that information itself may contain inherent interpretations.
I am processing all this, trying to determine where I stand as a community college instructor of History, the one telling my students that nothing is unprecedented. While I have been happy to explore and live in online spaces, I have only rarely asked it of my students. While I have raged against the LMS and other “closed silos” for over a decade, 90% of the online courses I offer have remained in a protected space. Aware of my students’ lack of web savvy, I have asked that online resources be mined, and used, I hope critically. But clearly there is much more work to do.
Made with Blabberize to upload the image and animate the mouth, Google Translate to translate the French, Natural Reader preview to make the French voice, Snapz Pro to screencast record the audio (and Quicktime to stitch the audio sections together), Audacity to convert to mp3 for upload to Blabberize (yeah, I know, but Quicktime is faster for me), YouTube to upload and add English captions, HTML cc_load_policy=1 in embed code to force English captions to show.
On my travel iBook I have a sticker of a TARDIS, because my computer is a time machine (it’s also bigger on the inside than the outside).
I changed this from 10 to 100 and got them all.
In the meantime, my online colleagues Jim Groom and Tim Owens (I think I met them online back in the early CCK08 and first-run ds106 days?) started 
