Chris Boese's Weblog

NYTimes: In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus

July 24, 2003

In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus

By LISA GUERNSEY

The University of Maryland, it started as an innocent question posed in an e-mail message to those attending WebShop, a three-week lecture series about the Internet.

"Does anyone else think it would be a good idea if we all had IM available to us during these lectures?" asked Sinan Aral, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, referring to instant messaging. "Several times after questions, I wanted to 'whisper' to someone across the room or send a relevant link."

Mr. Aral discovered that he was not alone. The next day in the auditorium, which was outfitted with a wireless link to the Internet, a group of people booted up their laptops, opened their IM programs and spent the next three hours happily exchanging notes during the presentations.

The "IM circle," as it became known at the June lecture series, soon attracted more than a dozen people at a time. As the speakers ran through their PowerPoint presentations, the room hummed with the tip-tap of IM chatter.

"Is this really an economic issue?" wrote one audience member in response to a presenter's remark. "Experiments like this are too structured," wrote another. "Did he really just say that?" asked one. "Wow! He did," someone responded.

No, that wasn't what they were saying at all...

LOL. I worked on a lot of these issues while involved with the Clemson University Laptop Program.

There are two sides, of course. Looking from one angle, as a teacher who has used computer-assisted NON-lecture-based pedagogies for more than 10 years, I've eagerly embraced the discussion-oriented, active learning possiblities technology can bring into the classroom. You might be surprised, but most of the people doing this in higher education for the better part of the nineties were ENGLISH TEACHERS.

Yeah, and that's the rub. Other than the few schools using studio teaching in the sciences, as the Pew people for innovation in education promote (as Rensselaer was a leader in that area as well), in MOST schools, the sciences are NOT where you will find pedagogical innovation with technology.

The sciences showed up at the computer-assisted pedagogy table right about the time university administrators all wanted sexy laptop programs to brag about, and since those administrators knew so little about where technology and pedagogy were making in-roads at their own schools, they went courting to the sciences to look for places to pass off their multi-million-dollar grants.

And lecture Professor Yellow-Note was only happy to take the money, add wireless laptop to the lecture hall, perform gigantic Power-Point note-dumps on WebCT or Blackboard, and simply drone on as before, only now before rapt audiences of laptop note-takers.

And then some of these profs discovered the note-takers were not so rapt. Hell, students could read the Power-Point note-dump (put up on WebCT by the overworked graduate assistant, of course, the same one who grades the strict-memorization garbage-in, garbage-out exams) in five minutes before class started and spend the rest of the period doing whatever on the laptops.

There have been studies done, btw, big ones, on the lack of effectiveness of the lecture-model for teaching. Oh, and these studies do point up how much can be learned from a dynamic, charismatic lecturer, only to note that such personages are less than 2% or so of the actually folks standing before any given lectern.

IMing? You bet. Emailing. Surfing. Downloading. Students are very busy and industrious. So, as they told me when conducting their studies into the laptop program at Clemson. Professor Yellow-Note started telling them to close their laptops during class period (forget having electronic notes to search, eh?). Started requiring that the laptops be closed.

Welcome to our brave new world of electronic pedagogies and innovations in the sciences. Maybe they should have a few more multi-million dollar grants to figure out what they are doing wrong.

Will it be webcast too?

Day to Day Premieres

From Capital Public Radio web site, in Sacramento:

NPR’s first new newsmagazine in a generation, Day to Day will originate from NPR West in Los Angeles, with veteran NPR correspondent Alex Chadwick hosting. Conceived by the creators of the leading morning and afternoon radio newsmagazines, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, the show will deliver NPR news and information content in shorter segments, with more stories in the hour, important news updates, and intriguing features and commentaries. There will be familiar voices from an array of NPR News correspondents and commentators as well as contributions from content partner Slate Magazine, station-based reporters, independents, and fresh new voices.

“Day to Day will give listeners NPR substance with a twist: smart, funny, thoughtful, quirky material—a great break and refresher in the middle of a busy day,” said Chadwick. “Listeners will hear updates on key news, original stories, and provocative ideas about the attitudes and trends that shape our world.”

”Day to Day is going to be a ‘must hear’ show,” says KXJZ’s station manager Carl Watanabe. “Host Alex Chadwick is one of the most respected broadcast journalists on radio. His inquisitive, irreverent and light-hearted approach will be the perfect fit for a mid-day, NPR news magazine show. Alex’s background includes hard news stories, health and financial impact features, and human-interest stories—and he’s done them all with dedication to both informing and, when appropriate, entertaining the listener. ...”

Alex Chadwick has spent more than two decades in a variety of roles at NPR, both on and off the air. He is currently host and chief writer for the award-winning series “Radio Expeditions,” about the natural world and its different cultures, co-produced with the National Geographic Society. Chadwick came to NPR in 1977 as host and producer of NPR’s morning news service and has hosted and prepared reports for public radio’s most listened-to newsmagazines, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, as well as Weekend Edition. He has reported from Central and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Chadwick recently earned the Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting and has twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for foreign reporting, along with an Emmy, a Peabody, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award for reporting on the disadvantaged.

I'm a big fan of All Things Considered, Morning and Weekend Edition, so this looks interesting to me.

Sacramento Business Journal

The program, Day to Day, is National Public Radio's first new newsmagazine in a generation. It will originate from NPR West in Los Angeles.

Conceived by the creators of Morning Edition and All Things Considered, Day to Day will deliver news and information in shorter segments. A CPR press release said it will have more stories per hour and offer "intriguing features and commentaries."

The short format, I think, may lend itself to webcast "chunking" and hypertextual linking more so than the longer shows, so I will watch and see how it goes. Wonder if this stuff is available on my iTunes? I haven't even tried it yet.

Also, I rely on webcast NPR content mostly these days, since I only have a 5 minute commute, and odd work hours, so the only way I can hear the wonderful quirky things I love is off the web.

Should add that I put Marketplace in this category too, and maybe Fresh Air. But Marketplace, when I had a long commute, about saved my life and kept me laughing.

Chris

Jeff Jarvis beta-tests blogs

This is interesting. He's got beta-test blogs of the new AOL Journal, Buzz Machine II and a Typepad blog, BernardsBlog.

My only comment so far (and AOL Time Warner is my employer, but I have no connection to the AOL Journals project, and I don't even use my free employee AOL account) is, gee, there is a whole lot of AOL "branding" going on, eh? Let me count the ways (not being a beta-tester, I can't know if this is customizable or not):

Top AOL navigation bar (I'm so glad the CNN site finally got rid of that Netscape navbar, months before all the Netscape people got laid off)

Big AOL Journals logo ("Your thoughts. Your Blog. Our Branding Across Your Forehead")

Thick gray divider. Is this distinctive to the template, part of the "look and feel"? If so, then it is part of the branding.

I just tried to create one myself, just to see if it will let me with my AIM screen name. Nope.

So technically, this isn't a beta-test Jarvis is doing, but rather, something for AOL members only.

I remember reading that detail, back when I posted on it here in the first place (Buzzmachine: Blogs and Big Media).

On the AOL Hometown page, tho, there is no mention that the option is members only. The teaser goes like this:

Pen an AOL Journal

Everyone has a story to tell; what's yours? Create an AOL Journal about your summer vacation, being pregnant or trying to find a new job. AOL makes it easy, fast and fun!

Then it says "Create a Journal Now!" No mention of membership vs AIM free screen names. Ah well.

For the record, I've been making some TypePad blogs, so I might as well link to them on here. Not a lot of content up yet, as I'm still playing with all the features and giving feedback. But it is definitely fun.

And for the record, I will disagree with Jarvis that AOL is easier than TypePad.

AOL could be easier than TypePad, I can't compare that, but I can say TypePad is EXTREMELY easy, and not just from my point of view. I'm also running a test on a newbie, a friend at work who has never blogged or made a web page before. And he's doing all right. He got pretty jazzed the other day once he figured out how much power he had over the templates. Started changing things up all over. Woo woo.

And none of that odious branding all over the place from the TypePad folks either. I will wait another day to wax philosophical about the dubious value of the "branding" division of marketing.

Anyway, my TypePad blogs are:

Headpiece Filled With Straw

and

So you want to start blogging, but you're shy...

Chris

ps heh heh, like I got any truck to talk about branding and ads being evil and all that, when a week ago I started sprinkling Amazon Associates links all over my site. Perhaps after all these years online, I've finally gone over to the dark side...

Doc Searls on "You are what you have no choice about eating"

I just gotta give a witness on this one. Wrote something similar as Doc did back in the 5 year old piece a while back on another site, and this jarred me again this time. The stuff with the video recorders on computer drives just bears so much watching (as does my suspicion that pro-sumer digital video recorders deliberately have signal degradation to prevent exact copying, but inadvertently screw over people using them to make original films in this democratized medium, nothing like SONY and others cutting off their noses to spite their faces).

Anyway, here's a few juicy bits from what the Doc says at You are what you have no choice about eating (I love that title!)

Here's ReplayTV's New Owners Drop Features That Riled Hollywood, by Eric A. Taub, in the New York Times, offering more evidence that commercial television would rather have you for a consumer than a customer, The piece begins,

Last month the maker of ReplayTV, a line of digital video recorders that allows consumers to record and store hours of their favorite television programs on hard drives instead of tape, agreed to remove two features from its devices that simplified life for consumers but complicated business for entertainment providers.

ReplayTV's new 5500 model, which will go on sale next month, will no longer be able to skip entire commercials automatically without recording them or to send recorded programming over the Internet to other ReplayTV users outside a home network. The recorders will, however, still be able to store large libraries of programming indefinitely and allow users to skip manually through recorded commercials in 30-second increments.

Brings to mind an old piece, There's No Demand for Messages, which still makes some good points, five years after it was written — not long before TiVo and ReplayTV invented the PVR business that commercial broadcasting has been trying to throttle ever since.

And I just love this bit too:

Deep down in its little stone heart, the TV advertising industry, along with those who depend on the gargantuan inefficiencies inherent in TV advertising's antique business model, don't want viewers to be involved in the industry. They don't want consumers to become customers. In their business model, consumers are products sold to advertisers. They are not customers. Giving them the means to become customers means giving the market the means to kill old business models and create new ones. Since they can't imagine the latter, they lobby and litigate to protect the former. Very effectively, too.

Required re-reading: Larry Lessig's Free Culture keynote from last year's OSCon.

I know people will think I'm brown-nosing but...

The thing I love most about people is when they have strange and quirky senses of humor.

goddess help me

Chris

Mena gets a Dollar Short on AOL Weblogs

Since I'm supposed to be beta-testing TypePad (don't ask, I got behind this week, but this weekend, WATCH OUT, cuz I'm doing some designing and shit... erm, famous last words, but watch out anyway).

I'm just interested in seeing how this stuff all plays out, so watching and learning, watching and learning.

Just a few key bits here from Mena Trott's post:

Not a Dollar Short: AOL Journals

[...]

The fact of the matter is that fundamentally, they hit the core weblogging elements on the mark. What they are doing -- whether called journals or weblogs -- is in fact weblogging. The elements are there, the output is familiar and the user behavior resembles all that us "real webloggers" would recognize. This isn't just some message board with a blogging label slapped on -- the AOL Journals team is taking the time and effort to get this right and that's highly commendable. Within a company the size of AOL, this is an amazing feat.

While this sort of praise could be read as a "they didn't crap up their product like we expected and that's good," I'm sincere in saying that they have a good product on their hands. As a weblog tool maker, am I threatened by AOL Journals? I don't think so. We're marketing our tools to entirely different audiences and our users require the level of functionality and customization that would be overkill 1000 times over for AOL. Having tens of millions of AOL users exposed to weblogging can only be a good thing for Six Apart and since we knew that a weblog offering from AOL was coming, we have gotten used to the idea that we'll be sharing the space with a number of the world's largest companies. Yeah, we're the underdogs. Yeah, we're small. But if we sat around all day thinking about all the different ways that the big companies could crush us, we wouldn't have anything for them to crush.

My new column is up today, on news feed readers

CNN.com - Welcome to the 'new' Web, same as the 'old' Web - Jul. 14, 2003

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News
Monday, July 14, 2003 Posted: 6:10 PM EDT (2210 GMT)

(CNN) -- Do you remember the day you first surfed the Web, stretched out your arms over the vastness of cyberspace, teleported from site to site with an almost exhilarating power? Or alternately, sat waiting for "fat" pages to load?

Well, hang on to your hats boys and girls, because your experience of the World Wide Web is about to change, possibly for the first time since Mosaic, one of the first graphical browsers, was unleashed in 1993 from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

etc etc

Online file-swapping comes to book publishing

Harry Potter and the Internet Pirates

[Get the book or audio CD, which is just to die for with Jim Dale, at Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix at Amazon.com]

Now isn't this fascinating? Many, perhaps even in the television or radio business, would blindly assume that digital media file-swapping, a black market in bits, something outside the cash economy that would prove Alvin Toffler and Nicholas Negropont's points (PowerShift and Being Digital), would automatically exclude something so Old-Old-Media as alphabetic letters on a white screen, nearly 900 pages worth, here in this "late age of print" (Bolter).

And how wrong we were. Perhaps it wasn't books that were dying in the American attention span. Perhaps it was just the quality of the books that is killing alphabetic literacy. As in, if the book is good enough and people want it, a real economy of supply and demand (with bits) will spring up to supercede the manipulated and controlled monopolistic publishing industry.

I say this with nothing against Scholastic and the British publisher of Harry Potter, as it is refreshing that the book's release is relatively free of monopolies and chains, at least at one point in its distribution cycle.

But oh, the sweet irony. Especially for all those who would pronounce Project Gutenberg a bust. I love Project Gutenberg as protectors of the public domain. Meanwhile, this other stuff is happening in the political wing. The public domain will not be denied, and you can put that in your copyright pipe and smoke it.

Chris

Harry Potter and the Internet Pirates. The publishing phenomenon around the young wizard appears to be forging a new chapter in the digital copyright wars. By Amy Harmon. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

[...]

So far, authors and publishers have mainly stood on the sidelines of the Internet file-swapping frenzy that has shaken the music industry and aroused fear among makers of motion pictures. But the publishing phenomenon around the young wizard appears to be forging a new chapter in the digital copyright wars: Harry Potter and the Internet pirates.

A growing number of Potter devotees around the world seem to be embracing the prospect of reading the voluminous new book (766 pages in the British edition; 870 in the American version) on the screen. And at least some of them are assisting in the cumbersome process of scanning, typing in or translating the book, which its author, J. K. Rowling, has not authorized for publication in any of the existing commercial e-book formats.

We don't need no education

Suddenly JK Rowling's character of Professor Umbridge takes on new context. Folks in the US should take note! The satire in the 5th Harry Potter book likely has deeper meaning as the villain for Brits than for the US, although the US is not far behind.

[Get the book or audio CD, which is just to die for with Jim Dale, at Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix at Amazon.com]

I have to excerpt some of this out. It is just too rich.

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Schools | School tests breach UN convention, envoy claims

School tests breach UN convention, envoy claims

Will Woodward, education editor
Monday July 14, 2003
The Guardian

The government is breaching the United Nations convention on children's rights by imposing a targets and testing regime in English schools that ignores their needs, a UN representative has warned.

In an interview with the Guardian, Katarina Tomasevski, special rapporteur on the right to education for the UN commission on human rights, said she believed the British government was in technical breach of the convention.

Article 29 says education should be "directed to the development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential".

She said that the current system of tests at seven, 11, 14 and 16 for children in England was designed to fulfil government objectives rather than meet the needs of children.

Professor Tomasevski also argued that the government's support for tuition fees contravened the convention, which calls for governments to "make higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means". She said that in Britain, universities were being given "designer labels" and education was being defined as "merchandise".

I made a web page for my uncle, who passed away Wed July 9, 2003

It gave me something to do when I was feeling sad. Hard to get other work done.

Gordon W. Barton, 1935-2003