A Memorable Fancy

Erik Marshall's Blog

A Memorable Fancy header image 1

Affordable Education and Technology

March 6th, 2010 · General

Check out  this provocative video by Dan Brown (not the DaVinci Code author) exhorting educators to  use technology more effectively, and to basically change the structure of education, or risk losing students like him by becoming irrelevant. Towards the end, he powerfully says “I dropped out of school because my schooling was interfering with my education”

Brown’s history lesson at the beginning is provocative, but his appeal comes about 3 minutes in. What I like is that he brings social class into the discussion, albeit a bit sketchily. Luckily, Dave Parry at Academhack discusses the video and teases out some of the class elements.

So, can one get an equal education online as in a classroom? If you are looking for knowledge and information only, yes. But there should be something else that college teaches, something that comes from college life, from interaction with peers and professors that you can’t quite get online. Unfortunately, with larger class sizes and the increasing use of overworked part-time labor, these things, as Brown points out, may be disappearing.

→ No CommentsTags:

A few links to prove I’m not dead

February 5th, 2010 · General

Chuck Tryon has an interesting personal post about the death of Miramax.

Christy Dena has an inspirational post about transitioning from the “Training Wheels” of  the Ph.D. to whatever comes next.

Some liveblogging about a talk by Julie Cohen about networked selves.

Some of my own stuff:

Have I told you I am coblogging about a topic I have been thinking about for a long time: Attention Theory?

On an extremely lighter note, here’s a link to my silly tumblr with which I have no idea what to do, and to which I have just posted a picture of a snake smoking a cigarette.

→ No CommentsTags:

Makers

January 5th, 2010 · General

In Makers, Cory Doctorow does what he does best, creating a near-future world that seems plausible and relevant tomorrow, instead of centuries from now. The novel follows a group of inventors, investors and bloggers through a movement made up of loose networks of tinkerers repurposing junk to make cool new inventions. Huge, centralized, top-down corporations are replaced by these quick-moving, loosely affiliated groups. The novel follows two of the tinkerers, Lester and Perry, who, after the New Work movement fails,  make a crowdsourced ride that is created with items contributed by riders. Their nemesis is an executive in the  company and attraction that seem to be Doctorow’s near-obsession: Disney World. Much of the power of the New Work movement and the ride come from Suzanne Church, traditional journalist turned celebrity blogger.

Like many of Doctorow’s previous novels, Makers snakes around many interesting hot-button issues, including copyright, bio-modification (Lester goes through a faddy radical surgical procedure to lose weight), decentralized business, corporate finance, blogging and other social media journalism. Doctorow pits big traditional media companies against smaller entrepreneurial startups to highlight the tension between the litigious old guard and the potential for an entirely new model for economic and technological ingenuity.  The strength of his writing lies in mixing technologies that already exist with educated guesses about tech that might exist tomorrow, some of which may very well be motivated by the novel itself.

This is Doctorow’s longest novel, and it feels it. The prose is, in many places, uncharacteristically inelegant and repetitive. He explains some of the concepts two or three times through dialogue of multiple characters, and his description of interpersonal relationships is awkward at best.  With a thorough edit, the 416 pages of the hardcover could have been reduced to 350 without losing much.

That said, he is a master of complex plot and even more complex social commentary, and the book is well worth the read. If you don’t want to shell out the money and don’t mind reading onscreen, the book is available free online at the Tor website.

→ No CommentsTags:

Oh, the Humanities!

December 31st, 2009 · General

Everyone is talking about Brian Croxall’s provocative MLA paper right now, so I might as well jump on the bandwagon.  Go read the paper, if you haven’t already, but here’s a quick summary: Brian couldn’t go to MLA because he had no job interviews there and couldn’t afford the cost of attending, so he had his panel chair read it for him and he posted it on his blog at the time the paper was being read. The paper itself is about the difficulties, financial and otherwise, of being a part-time instructor. He includes some stunning statistics, and the catchy parenthetical statement: “And yes, that means I do qualify for food stamps while working a full-time job as a professor!”

Both the content and the mode of communication are interesting to us here. First, the content.  It is no secret that universities are  relying more and more on contingent faculty (alternately called part-time or adjunct), and that many of these faculty hold advanced degrees, often a Ph.D.  It also comes as no surprise that many new Ph.D. candidates have trouble finding tenure-track jobs, although the numbers are stunning (Croxall claims that many rejection letters mention 400+ applicants). Discuss the relationship between these phenomena in the comments if you wish.While not surprising, it is quite depressing for humanities scholars, for whom the holy grail of jobs is usually the coveted tenure-track position at a research university. Many of us simply don’t know what else to do, and have spent so many precious years crafting a dissertation and teaching for peanuts that we have either forgotten how to do anything else or neglected to learn anything else. Or it could be that we just don’t want to give up the dream. Check out Bitch, Ph.D.’s blog entry, especially the comments, for a robust discussion about this.

If Croxall had simply read the paper as scheduled, I suspect he would have had a sympathetic audience and interesting discussion among the dozens of scholars attending, and then it would have been forgotten. Maybe someone would’ve tweeted or blogged about it, but I doubt the Chronicle of Higher Ed would have picked it up. Let’s recap. I did not attend MLA, but I follow @briancroxall (as well as reading his blog and perusing Prof Hacker as often as possible), who tweeted about the paper the morning of. I read it and retweeted it, as did many others. Those of us following #MLA09 on twitter noticed the shitstorm, which led to more readership , and are now blogging about it, which will likely lead to more (check out his tweet about spike in visitors after the Chronicle article). Instead of being quickly forgotten, this paper ends up being potentially the most-talked about aspect of MLA this year, and propels Brian Croxall into an academic-blogger-media celebrity, for whatever that’s worth.

The social media-twitter-blogosphere has moved the discussion quickly to a more public discussion. These two components — speed and breadth — are what have long been missing in the academy, and comprise some of the most exciting aspects of using new media in conjunction with old-fashioned face-to-face conferencing. In terms of longevity of the discussion, that is yet to be seen.

I hope that the mode of communication does not overshadow the message. Academics in digital humanities are finding innovative ways of communicating and understanding communication, and are working to revolutionize the ways in which we read, discuss, archive, and view texts, however we may define that ever-changing term. But the context in which we do that seems to be shrinking. Whether digital or not, humanities scholars are facing a glut of Ph.D. production and a scarcity of academic jobs. Like it or not, those of us with higher degrees are going to have to find new ways to work, and new venues in which to do this work. The problem is systemic, and many solutions have been proposed (e.g. unionization of contingent faculty and decrease in Ph.D. production), but for those of us at, near, or just beyond the finish line, the academic future looks more grim than ever before.

I am approaching that finish line, and I have come to realize that my Plan A (t-t job) is unrealistic. It is still Plan A, but I need to find a realistic Plan B (and C and D). Like many, I came to grad school because I love to write, and I am passionate about teaching. Earning a living doing both will be difficult. I realized this at at time when I felt I was too close to quit.  I have seen other graduate students quit the program, and many of them are quite happy in their new jobs. That said, I will be on the market next year. I will send out applications. I will (probably) go to MLA. In the meantime? I will continue to work as a part-time instructor. I will continue to do freelance tutoring. I will blog. I will tweet. I will keep my eyes open for opportunities to use my diverse skillset. I will keep you updated.

Happy New Year.

→ 1 CommentTags: ···

Twitter Backchannels

November 22nd, 2009 · General

The phenomenon of backchannels has fascinated me lately. It started at danah boyd’s talk at U of M (.mov version) back in October, where a twitter hashtag (#danahjsb) was announced early on. Although I didn’t know anybody there, I ended up in a conversation with others in the room while the talk was going on, and I learned as much from the backchatter as from the talk.

If you are not at the conference or event in question, you can use backchannels to eavesdrop. Take, for example the Internet as Playground and Factory conference (#ifp09), which had some heavy-hitters attending. Monitoring the backchannel discussions allows non-participants to interact with those present, and to keep abreast of the various topics being discussed.

The concept is not new. Students IM or text each other in class. Other social situations often call for subrosa communication. The most interesting difference is that the use of public social networking tools like twitter make the process public, and allow people to interact with strangers, or with people whose phone numbers or other info you don’t have.

A couple caveats. First, I wonder about the split in attention required for such discussion. If I am engaged in a backchannel discussion while listening to a speaker, can I really fully attend to what the speaker is saying? How much can I really do at one time? The second caveat is specifically twitter-related: the twitter search doesn’t seem to stay current for very long, so backchannels don’t persist as archives, but are useful really only during or just after an event.

While I am concentrating mainly on academic conferences, I imagine backchannels would be a good way to organize and communicate in other arenas, such as political events. Does anybody have any examples of backchannel communication in other areas?

→ No CommentsTags: ·

Rage

September 28th, 2009 · General

Sally Potter’s Rage is as compelling for its mode of release as for the content. It was released exclusively to mobile phones last week over seven days, and then online and on DVD, as well as in select screenings in the UK. The premise of the movie is that a young man named Michelangelo is recording interviews of people involved in a fashion show, but he is doing it all on his mobile phone, so the premise fits the release. Shot on mobile phone, released on mobile phone.

My initial reaction was that I love Sally Potter but do I really want to watch a movie on my iPhone? I gave it a try, and it was an interesting experience. Each installment is around 18 minutes, so I made sure the phone was plugged in to avoid battery drainage. I watched the first two in quick succession, but then didn’t get around to viewing the rest, as I found it hard to find 18 minutes where I wanted to hold my phone in landscape mode. There is no crosscutting or editing at all, except to change from one interviewee to another, so it definitely feels like something shot on a phone.

The film itself is interesting enough; with a star-studded cast (Steve Buscemi, Dianne Wiest, Jude Law, Judi Dench…), and some intrigue, it holds attention. I ammore interested in the context , however — will people who watch this on mobiles form a different opinion from those who first see it in theaters or online?

→ 2 CommentsTags: ·

Google is creeping me out

September 24th, 2009 · General

Remember back when gmail was new and they were talking about targeting ads to people based on the contents of their email, and some people were freaking out? Not me. I didn’t really care. I’m all for privacy and find most web ads distasteful, but this didn’t bother me too much. I’ll tell you what is, though.

First of all, Google Voice. I have been messing around with it a little, and it’s pretty cool, including the transcription of voicemail to text, which can then be texted to you or saved on the server. But there is something about this that makes the hair on the back of my neck rise a little. This means that all of my voicemail is now searchable.  Does this mean they can target ads based on VM? And who owns my voicemail. The issues here are identical, I think, to those of email, so why does this bother me now?

Breaking News! Further Google Voice creepiness: As I was composing this, I checked my Google Voice account, and discovered something strange. The other day I had a text message conversation with a friend who uses Google Voice, but I was using my regular phone, which is tied to GV, but I wasn’t using GV itself. When I checked GV, the entire text message conversation appeared in my text transcripts there. Both sides of the conversation.

Secondly, Picasa Face Recognition. I downloaded Picasa 3.5, and it found 2000+ photos in my library with faces. I started tagging them, and names from my (Google) contacts started conveniently appearing in the box as suggestions. To tag someone, it seems, the person must exist in your contacts. After tagging a few, I was amazed to find that Picasa suggested other photos that might be the same person. It correctly identified a slew of pics of me, with and without glasses, with long hair and short. The only pics it missed were partial or side views, or pics of me with a thick beard. My concern here is the same as before. By including this technology and tying faces to contacts, Google is attempting to make pictures face-searchable, which is fine for private collections, but, again, creepy and possbily intrusive on the web.

I don’t have any deep theoretical or philosophical reflections about this, nor any sky-is-falling proclamations about the loss of privacy, etc. I’m just saying that it creeps me out.

→ 1 CommentTags: ·

Addendum: Moore on Obama

September 23rd, 2009 · General

In yesterday’s post I pointed out that Michael Moore does not foreground the links between the campaign funding Goldman Sachs and others gave Obama and Obama’s economic policies thus far, speculating that Moore was going a little easy on the big O.  Well, Moore did an interview with ABC’s Nightline in which he says that he put that piece in the movie basically to say to Obama, “we’re watching you.” This makes sense to me. He also states, as I suggested yesterday, that the subject of this film, capitalism,  is really what he’s been talking about in most of his other film.

Here are some links.

The Nightline page, nicely titled “Michael Moore on Capitalism: ‘Anti-Christian,’ ‘Anti-American’ System”

A clip of him telling Obama we’re watching him.

→ No CommentsTags:

Capitalism: A Love Story

September 22nd, 2009 · General

The event. I had a chance to see a sneak preview of Michael Moore’s new movie Capitalism: A Love Story on Sunday at, of all places, the GM headquarters in Detroit. Moore was there for a Q&A after, as was Mary Kaptur, the democratic congresswoman from Toledo. For some video of the controversy surrounding the event, go to his website or this video.  For footage check out this video (in which you can see me in the audience around 6:00). I don’t have much to say about the Q&A or the setting itself, except that it was enjoyable and informative, but not as much as the movie itself.

The film. I went into this film with medium-to-low expectations.  I liked Sicko, and I generally enjoy Moore’s films with some reservations that I’ve already mentioned. This film is his best. It contains some of his trademark antics, such as driving a Brinks truck to banks to get the taxpayers’ money back, and, as usual, he does lengthy  interviews with victims of the crisis — people who have lost their jobs and homes while corporate CEOs get richer.

But instead of only attacking, ridiculing and exposing, the film also performs a good analysis of and potential solutions to the underlying problems. He traces a lot of the crisis to Reagan’s program of massive deregulation of the financial industry and subsequent gutting of the FBIs white collar crime division. The film gives a lot of time to the Republic Window and Glass takeover of December 2008, as well as to a couple worker-owned businesses, and calls for greater democracy in the workplace as well as in the economy.

Perhaps the most striking portions of the film are those involving Toledo Congressowman Marcy Kaptur, who opposed the bailout, calling bank CEOs criminals and accusing them of hijacking Congress. She has also called for people to stay in their home is evicted, and challenge the banks to produce an actual mortgage, which may be impossible in many cases, due to bank practices of chopping up loans and trading them.

The thesis of the film is that Americans are no longer in control of the economic system in the United States, and that we must act to reintroduce democracy into all areas of government. For Moore, capitalism as it is practiced today is antithetical to democracy, as it concentrates 95% of the wealth into 1% of the population, who then control financial regulations, tax codes and, generally, congress. He does a good job supporting this through historical analysis as well as anecdotal examples.

My biggest reservation about the film is the treatment of President Obama. The film posits Obama’s campaign as a desire for change in the system, which makes sense, but fails to evaluate his actions so far. It mentions that all of the major banks contributed heavily to his campaign, and it attacks Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, and company, but without making the relevant point that (as Aaron Petcoff points out) Obama appointed them, or without explicitly drawing the connections between the campaign contributions and the appointments. There is a case to be made the Barack Obama so far has done little or nothing to fix these problems. I suspect Moore doesn’t criticize him too much because it is early in Obama’s presidency, and the main point is not to  sit back and rely on elected officials, but to take action to keep them accountable.

This film should energize those on the Left. For those on the Right, I hope criticism of the film goes beyond ad hominem attacks (Moore is a hypocrite because he makes so much money in a capitalist economy; Moore is fat and loud and obnoxious, etc.) or taking small snippets out of context. I don’t really hold out much hope for this, but maybe this film, if nothing else, can spark serious discussion of our economic situation.

→ 1 CommentTags:

CFP

September 16th, 2009 · General

Ran across these this morning. If you know of others, let me know, as I think I will post journal/chapter CFP in new media and film from time to time.

  • Here is a CFP for a chapter on Internet and Surveillance (pdf).

(Apologies for not posting more often. I’ve been immersed in research/writing.)

→ No CommentsTags: