Contech

One of the perils of the migration to digital format for books, magazines and newspapers is the threat to future generations of researchers.  In fact, one researcher warns that if the current trend continues we could be headed for what he calls a “digital dark age,” according to  Jerome P. McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.    The problem is accessibility.  Think about trying to play a VHS tape when there are only DVD players around.   Several generations from now, much of the data we produce could be lost to inaccessibility.   And, there’s a lot of digital content, some 369 exabytes at last count.

This has very real implications for sociologists and not just those of us interested in digital culture.  A wide range of cultural products (think music or film) and large data sets (think GSS or the census data) are vulnerable to being lost in the “black hole” of inaccessibility.   Part of the problem is proprietary software.   Remember WordPerfect?   Perhaps you don’t, but it was a word-processing software product popular about ten years ago.  Today, no one’s using and few people have heard of it.  If you get a file that’s saved as a WordPerfect document, chances are you won’t be able to open the file and whatever content is in there is effectively lost.    McDonough argues that part of the solution to the threat of a “digital dark age” is open source software.   So, for example, instead of using Microsoft Office’s proprietary “Word” program, if more people used OpenOffice (an open source word processing program), digital content would be less vulnerable to unintentional loss.

That’s only part of the solution, however, as digital content is also vulnerable to deliberate erasure:

“E-mail is a classic example of that,” he said. “It runs both the modern business world and government. If that information is lost, you’ve lost the archive of what has actually happened in the modern world. We’ve seen a couple of examples of this so far.” McDonough cited the missing White House e-mail archive from the run-up to the Iraq War, a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

The power to erase content, and along with it, important parts of the historical record is not new.  This is something that sociologist Poulantzas warned about thirty years ago in his Political Power & Social Classes.   The difference with digital content is that this sort of information-power-move is much easier to accomplish.    Of course, some are taking note of this threat, and working on preservation through a variety of digital collections, but sociologists would be wise to take note of this trend.

A new agreement in a $125 million lawsuit by the Author’s Guild against Google  would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials via Google’s Book Search.   This, along with several other new developments, raises a persistent question about the future of the book in the digital era.  With the recent endorsement by pop culture icon Oprah of the Kindle,  has prompted some to suggest that the e-book reader may go mainstream.    Whether or not people want to read books delivered via electronic delivery devices remains to be seen, as there is still considerable resistance to the format.    In his article, “The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World,” Clifford Lynch argues that the literal translation of entire books to digital devices is less likely than the emergence of new genres of texts created specifically for digital devices.     I doubt that the book will go the way of the card catalog, but this is certainly a moment for contemplating the place of the book in the digital era.

A couple of days a week now, I’m commuting to work via MetroNorth (regional rail line). It’s not bad as commutes go, but it does have me scouting around for good podcasts. I’m a bit of a news junkie, so tend to catch up on Olbermann’s show via podcast (and of course, there’s Maddow), but that tends to wear thin after a bit even for this ardent political news junkie. So, I was delighted when a friend put me on to the Canadian Broadcasting’s series on “How to Think about Science.” It’s got some wonderful interviews with some notable scholars, including the two I listened to on Monday: Richard Lewontin and Evelyn Fox Keller. Certainly not for everyone, but fun times indeed for geeks who enjoying thinking about science. You can access the podcasts via the CBC’s website or via iTunes. Enjoy!

This article, from Bryan Alexander, illustrates the way that the web, and particularly social media gets talked about in higher education. Bryan does a nice job deconstructing the – ooh~scarey! – image that the editors chose to run with the story. It’s ironic that this piece appears at just the time when the Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a new study, co-authored by sociologist Barry Wellman, that addresses the talk the pervasiveness of social media in most households.  The study also points out the way that technology brings families together. Here’s a little from the Pew on this study:

Instead of driving people apart, mobile phones and the net are helping them maintain social ties, says the Pew Internet report.

Families are also among the keenest users of technology, the survey of 2,252 Americans revealed.

It found that using the net was often a social activity within families, with 51% of parents saying they browsed the web with their children.

“Some analysts have worried that new technologies hurt family togetherness, but we see that technology allows for new kinds of connectedness built around cell phones and the internet,” said Tracy Kennedy of the University of Toronto who helped to write the Networked Families report.”

Personally, I see a lot of fear and loathing of technology in higher education.   And, I also come from a family that’s not incredibly connected via social media.   Yet, my chosen-family and friends are mostly in the “always connected”  category.  I’m curious about what sorts of things people may be hearing and seeing unfold in their own institutions of higher learning and in their own families. Do you see the kind of disconnect that my juxtaposition of these two articles suggests?

My friend Howard Rheingold, (author of Virtual Community and Smart Mobs), has just launched the Social Media Classroom. The site includes an open-source (Drupal-based) web service for teachers and learners. It offers a whole bunch of stuff, generally referred to as “social media” (or, “digital media”) in an integrated platform. Courses using the SMC can select from a menu of social media, including integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets and video commenting. There’s also a “classroom” side to the platform that includes various bits of curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. And, possibly the best part, is that it’s all free. Or, as Howard puts it: It’s all free, as in both “freedom of speech” and “almost totally free beer.” Free is good.

It’s Blog Against Poverty day, and that coincides with the unit in my Intro Sociology courses on social stratification.  Coincidence or the divine intervention by Durkheim?  Who’s to say.

I’ve been screening documentaries to show with this unit and ran across, “People Like Us.” It’s a fine film for the intro classes and one I’d recommend for most sociologists teaching at most universities in the U.S.   It’s got some good expert interviews and some amazing footage of rarely-seen people of the upper classes!  And, the story of “Tammy” – a woman who walks ten miles a day to her job at McDonald’s is heartbreaking.  However, the film’s got a fairly pronounced white-suburban bias, or at least, that’s pretty clearly the intended audience.   About the only place that people of color ever show up in the film is in the section on “Bourgeois Blues” about the struggles of the black middle class.   I just don’t know that my students, who are predominantly black and Latino, urban and from poor backgrounds,  are going to relate to the film in a way that’s meaningful for them.     Instead, I’m thinking of either using “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” or “The Corporation,” to provide them with some insight into the current financial crisis.

As part of one of my current research projects interviewing feminist bloggers, I attended a Blogher conference over the weekend.   BlogHer.com is a syndicate of 1,500 blogs written by women.   At the opening session, one of the organizers discussed some interesting stats about women blogging from a recent random sample survey. The survey, conducted in 2008 by Compass Media with Blogher, sampled 1,250 female Internet users through a nationally representative panel, and 5,000 visitors to BlogHer’s network. Here’s some of what they found:

• 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogsophere every week (15.1 publishing, 21.1 reading and commenting)?
• Women are so passionate about blogging that large percentages of women said they would give something up to keep the blogs they read and/or write:

  – 55% would give up alcohol

  – 50% would give up their PDAs

  – 42% would give up their i-Pod

  – 43% would give up reading the newspaper or magazines

• More than half of women surveyed consider blogs a reliable source of advice and information

You can download a presentation with more about that survey here. One of the things I found most interesting about the opening remarks was that among women who blogging at Blogher, 43% are watching less television to keep up with the blogosphere.   I find that’s generally true for me.  What about you – blogging more (including reading more) and watching the tube less?

“Hack the Debate” is a joint effort of CurrentTV (the network founded by former Vice President Al Gore) and Twitter.com for all the debates in the US presidential election this month (hat tip to Stephanie Tuszynski and Anders Fagerjord on the Association of Internet Researchers listserv).

This means that if you watch the debate on CurrentTV, you’ll see running commentary of live “tweets” along with the regular broadcast. The way it works is some producer working over at CurrentTV will be working “backstage” during the debate and selecting messages from Twitter and sending those to go live and appear on your TV screen at home. (The backend of this is very similar to the job I used to have in the IT-world, back when I was producing live online events, but I digress.)

While Current and Twitter are both promoting this as a “first” time this has ever been done, it’s not. In fact, these sorts of short messages (SMS) over television has been common in Norwegian TV for at least five years now, possibly more. You can read more about it here:

Enli, Gunn. “Gatekeeping in the New media Age: A case Study of the Selection of Text-Messages in a Current Affairs Programme.” Javnost – The Public 2007;Volume 14.(2) s. 47-63

A new survey, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s E-Business Institute, reveals students’ preference for “lecture capture,” the technology that records, streams and stores what happens in the classroom for later viewing.   There’s more about the study here, with a focus on the financial costs to universities for doing this.  I’m skeptical about “lecture capture” technology as a workable solution for delivering useful content in a way that’s financially profitable.   Personally, I’m more interested in the bottom-up, DIY-side of what this means in terms of pedagogy and technology. 

First, in terms of the pedagogy, I see this trend converging with the shift in the use of PowerPoint that Jon was just pointing out here recently.   There’s an excellent piece in the current issue of Theory, Culture & Society by David Stark and Verena Paravel that makes a compelling argument for the visually-based (rather than text-based) use of “digital demonstration technologies” such as PowerPoint.  While Edward Tufte has been famously critical of PowerPoint as evil for the cognitive style that bullet points promote, Stark and Paravel argue that Tufte’s is not the last word.  They contend that demonstration and digital technology are interwoven with politics now in complex ways.  (And, as an aside,  I think it will be interesting to see how this trend transforms job talks and conference presentations in the future.)    What this means in the classroom, is that the really memorable lectures are no longer the “chalk and talk” (if they ever were), but the multimedia and image-driven lectures with minimal text.

And, there’s a growing body of evidence that text-plus-images is a powerful and effective.   For example, in his book, The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, (Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0521838738), Richard E. Mayer reports on a decade of his research demonstrating that multimedia are effective in both learning and retention.   Mayer concludes graphics help text and that text plus animation is better than just text alone.

Someone who’s leading the way in this is Howard Rheingold, futurist and honorary sociologist.  Howard’s teaching now at Stanford and UC-Berkeley, and he’s sharing some of what goes on his classes over at his vlog.   He creates short “lectures” as video podcasts, and these are also available as download through iTunes.   Howard, who is a friend, has talked about what a thrill it’s been for him to get these videos on his iPhone.   It’s one of my goals (for the year, if not this semester) is to get at least one of my lectures into a downloadable video format.  Getting there is something else and that leads me to the second part that I find fascinating here, and that’s the tech-side.

How can sociologists, professors and interested academics DIY?  That is, how can the rest of us transform lectures into downloadable videos if they don’t have access to the kind of “lecture capture” technology asked about in the survey?  One way to do this is through iMovie or Final Cut Pro (FCP), both Apple software products for video editing.  For most sociologists and other academics without a strong background in media, putting a lecture on video and then editing it down can seem like a daunting task (FCP has a notoriously steep learning curve).    Another way is to take a visually-driven PowerPoint, import it into GarageBand (Apple’s audio recording program), and add audio on top of it.   It’s actually very simple to do, as a colleague explains in this piece.

In my view, the transformation in digital technologies and what Stark and Paravel call the “new morphology of demonstration,” is going to compel all of us to change what we do in front of the classroom and in front of academic audiences.

According to a recent report at Inside Higher Ed, some colleges are moving to connecting students and faculty via Instant Message.  At Ivy Tech Community College, in Indiana, serves more than 115,000 students a year on 23 separate campuses across the state, adopted an instant messaging platform called Pronto, from the collaborative learning software company Wimba.  Here’s how Andy Guess describes it in the article:

Like a turbocharged AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, it lets students chat online with their professors in text, audio or video form, for virtual office hours or impromptu question-and-answer sessions.

Unlike the free IM clients students are already familiar with, though, the software integrates with existing course management systems, such as Blackboard and Moodle, so that their buddy lists are populated with the classmates already signed up for a specific course. Students also see each other’s real names, with identities that are validated through the system — no “sk8rdude21″ who may or may not be your group partner — and they can save their chats for later consultation.

Several years ago, I experimented with being available to students via Instant Message for “virtual office hours.”  It was a new-enough idea at the time that it was sort of thrilling, for them and for me.  But, I have to admit, the thrill wore off pretty quickly.   In part, that was because of the blending of “public” and “private” personas on the IM client.  I may want to share my IM handle with friends, but it’s another thing to be that accessible to students.   And, the most frustrating part of me as a professor was that after the semester – and this experiment – ended, all my students were still on my “buddy list” and they continued to contact me via IM long afterward.   Perhaps this why I no longer use IM much.   Still, I think that a proprietary system that’s directly tied to class rosters, uses people’s real names, and  – perhaps most importantly – goes away at the end of a semseter, might have potential for creating a sense of belonging to a campus community.   This will be an interesting development in social media to keep an eye on.