Category: Computers and Education

Cluster hires in digital humanities

Thanks to Michael I have found out about two different cluster hires in the area of digital humanities/new media:

  • UI’s next cluster hires will be digital public humanities | Iowa Higher Education. The University of Iowa is hiring a cluster of 6 positions over 2 years in “digital public humanities.” These will be partly funded by the Provost and partly by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. This is their second cluster.
  • Georgia State University has a Second Century Initiative that targets areas for cluster hiring. Faculty and deans submit thematic proposals that are then evaluated. “New Media” is the theme of one of the eight winning proposals. There are 4 positions around New Media including New Media and Documentary Investigation, Interactive Media Design, Digital Humanities and Digital Music Technology.

There are a number of interesting facets to these cluster hires:

  • Universities are no longer hiring just one digital humanities person to get things going – they are hiring clusters of related positions. As the digital humanities and new media fields evolve it is becoming clear that no one person can cover the entire field. This is a sign of maturity and the explosive interdisciplinarity of the digital. Further, it is now clear that a university can’t expect to do digital humanities at a leadership level with just one person.
  • These positions look like they will go into traditional departments while still staying linked in an interdisciplinary thematic area. Much could be said about the advantages and disadvantages of this model (how exactly do you keep the hires from spinning back into their discipline in order to get tenure?), but politically it is much easier to sell to departments in times of stress. This way departments get some renewal, even if the person hired is for a new interdisciplinary area. Ideally the person also acts as a catalyst in the department linking them into the thematic area.
  • Digital humanities is being integrated into new media, electronic music, and interactive media design. This makes sense since the digital humanities has always had a constructive and creative side. It has been a field that is about the poesis – the making – of multimedia works as much as about the critique of cyberculture. In our practices and need for infrastructure we have more in common with visual artists, composers, and new media designers. The Multimedia program I help develop at McMaster took exactly this approach and we were a richer unit for it.

Lecture Capture: Research on its Effectiveness

Does recording and then podcasting lectures help learning? I always expected it would be a waste of time that might encourage students to fall behind. According to research I am wrong.

From an email newsletter that I like about teaching called Tomorrow’s Professor I learned about a report from the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching on Lecture Capture: A Guide for Effective Use (PDF). The authors, Erping Zhu and Inger Bergom, make some interesting points:

  • There is no evidence that student attend less.
  • Students can concentrate on listening instead of taking notes when there is going to be a podcast posted. This is a good thing – note taking is not learning.
  • Students use podcasts to go over difficult ideas – they can back up and replay. They use captured lectures to review (instead of notes?)
  • Videocasts can be more effective than live lectures because students at live lectures can be distracted by the prof (or others), while with video they can concentrate on the slide.

Until now I didn’t think capturing lectures would be worth it, but watching students slavishly take notes at the expense of learning has always bothered me. Telling students to not take notes doesn’t do any good. If they can count on podcasts or video then they might relax and think about the issues.

Institutions In The Digital Humanities

At the Digital Humanities Summer Institute I participated in a three day advanced consultation on “Scaling Digital Humanities. I posted my conference report here, but I have just finished editing the short presentation I gave on Institutions In The Digital Humanities. This is an outline of work I am doing to document the history and institutions in Canada supporting the digital humanities as part of a project led by Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra looking at The Academic Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada.

One thing that became clear from the meeting is the diversity of support available across Canada. I have been developing a definition of what I consider to be basic support for research computing in the humanities:

  • Access to a social lab with specialized workstations, digitizing equipment and software. Labs with lots of computers will be underutilized (unless you use them for training) as most of us have our own laptop; what is needed is the specialized stations to support conferencing, and specialized tasks like video editing, book scanning and so on.
  • Access to digitization facilities to able to acquire evidence for research.
  • Access to support that can quickly set up basic off-the-shelf web research utilities from distribution lists, blogs to wikis.
  • Access to a virtual machine where projects can install the tools they need for specialized projects and not have to worry about standarization or conflicts with other projects. Providing humanists with a locked-down CMS which you can only use to publish static pages does not allow us to use the wealth of open source tools and languages out there to create innovative research environments. Neither should security or standardization rule any longer. Humanists should be able to get a virtual machine set up with sufficient storage for any project that has the programming support needed.
  • Finally, and most importantly, access to good advising and technical support so as to be able to develop projects, apply for funding, and get project management support without being a humanities computing expert.

Alex Sévigny responds to Wente

Alex Sévigny, who I worked with closely at McMaster, has written a good response to Margaret Wente’s column in the Globe about What is the most pressing problem facing Canadian universities today? (Tuesday, April 13, 2010) Alex, in What’s wrong with Canadian universities – part 1 argues that it is not professors who are the problem, but funding levels that have been frozen at 1990 levels. Wente’s column title “Universities are sitting ducks for reform” makes it sound like it is simple – stop paying for research and you can get a lot more students educated for a lot less money. Alex’s answer is that the profs are not making that much when you think about how long it takes to educate them and how hard they work. He concludes with,

Canada needs a powerful, national vision for post-secondary education. And it needs it now. Post-secondary education is the key to prosperity from today until the year 2100.

The policy-maker who comes up with one will be remembered as one of this century’s great visionaries.

TOMORROW – why education matters.

Since reading her column I have been thinking about how I would reply, and here are some of the things that need to be considered before we shoot any sitting ducks,

  • Education is a provincial jurisdiction in Canada which means that the federal government is constrained in how it can show leadership. The Federal government can and does invest in research (think research councils, CFI, graduate scholarships and so on). This means that the province may not save that much by cutting support for research (as Wente thinks they will) since it isn’t coming from the province.
  • The big problem is that health is eating out every provincial budget and it is the “third-rail” of Canadian politics. As health budgets rise faster than inflation the amount left over for other mandates is less and less. It may be time to move higher education to the federal level just so it can be protected from health (along with everything else.)
  • The problem with so many enthusiastic sitting-duck solutions to the university is that they all isolate one function in a complex institution and say that that is what universities should do and nothing else (and therefore we can save money by not funding the others stuff.) Universities are like cities – they serve many functions in an integrated fashion. Modernist architects thought it would make sense to separate the functions of the city (people live in one area and all stores are in another) and then plan cities rationally. As a result we got such stupid ideas as downtowns with no residents to spoil them and shopping centers you can’t walk to. Separating out the functions of a university may seem rational, but would lead to all sorts of inefficiencies. The obvious example is separating out the research function. Much of the cost of research in the university goes to things like better libraries, support for graduate student research assistants, support for postdoctoral students, support for conferences and support for labs that are also used for teaching and training. There is a massive efficiency when you have both the teaching and research function paying for good laboratories, good libraries, graduate students and so on. If you remove the research function you will get a large high-school without the learning resources funded by research. And … we will still have to pay for the research function if we want any creativity, innovation, new knowledge, and design in Canada. Another way to put this is that we should beware of simple solutions when dealing with complex phenomena like universities that are some of the most persistently successful institutions known to humankind.
  • Wente, like many, takes a swipe at the humanities in her column. She writes, “Natural sciences will fare better than the humanities because, as U.S. commentator Walter Russell Mead remarks, taxpayers are not going to subsidize research in critical literary theory much longer.” Another simplistic prediction based on a isolating a tiny part of what happens in the humanities. I suspect taxpayers will continue to pay for educating students to do such basic things as read for themselves, think for themselves and write effectively (for themselves or others.) Without literacy nothing else makes sense and critical theory and literary theory are part of that. After all, do you really want students being taught to read, think and write without some theorizing about what that means? For that matter, do tax payers really want literacy taught by people who don’t themselves read and write critically? Actually, given how less and less is coming from taxpayers, the issue is more what parents paying tuition want and, as the liberal arts colleges of the US has shown, they will pay quite a lot for small classes, lots of critical thinking, and yes, even critical literary theory taught by those evil professors who get to do research. Another sign that this is true is that parents and students still seem to prefer universities to colleges despite all the evidence. The prestige of the university degree is tied to the quality of the professoriate. The colleges don’t systematically support research and so they get a different form of teaching engagement. To be honest, I suspect that there is better teaching going on in many of the college programs – smaller classes, more attention, and more creative opportunities – but parents and students are still voting for universities as they are currently run in large numbers. Maybe they haven’t heard that the universities are soon to be colleges without the trades.
  • An often unspoken belief is that the humanities are not the best use of funding, however, some universities are discovering that they are the most cost effective disciplines educationally. You don’t need the labs of the sciences, you don’t need the studios of the arts, you don’t need the expensive business profs of commerce and you don’t need the small classes of medicine. If we want to educate tens of thousands of more students cheaply we should expand the humanities. (See The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit in the Chronicle for more on why the economics of education favor the humanities.) The reason the humanities is cheap is that in many universities the undergraduates are taught in large classes by sessionals who are paid worse than high-school teachers (they are paid by the course). The profs are doing administration (hiring all the sessionals every term), teaching graduate students, and supervising very large classes that have lots of teaching assistants (who are paid even less than sessionals, though not always.) If we ran universities like the colleges with a provincial instructors union that insisted on fair contracts and manageable class sizes it would probably cost more than the current system that exploits all the recent PhDs who do the sessional teaching. That’s what the York strike was about, and we will see more such strikes if we institutionalize a class of poorly paid instructional staff as a way of saving money.
  • Which brings me back to research in the humanities. Research in the humanities and social sciences is crucial not just to basic literacy but to Canada’s global engagement. Take any national newspaper and most of the stories in the front section have to do with things that we research. You simply can’t send Canadians to fight in foreign countries without a reserve of expertise about the languages, histories, cultures and politics of the world – and that is why we need research. Universities are the only institutions that maintain global expertise across a broad range of cultures, literatures, histories and politics so that we have the knowledge needed for business, diplomacy, international relations and, yes, even war. The humanities and social sciences are the ever refreshed encyclopedia of the human world. This expertise is maintained through research and training of graduate students. Axing research in the humanities and social sciences would dramatically reduce Ontario’s ability to participate in a global economy and politic. Ontario would be the sitting duck if the only research conducted on human and social matters was done by ideologically funded think-tanks or the accounting firms that specialize in expensive consultations that give politicians the answers they want. Margaret Wente, of all people, should know this, trained as she was in the liberal arts, working as she does for a newspaper that trades in the type of knowledge the humanities and social sciences prepare us for.

In short, if we listened to the enthusiasts, which Dalton McGuinty is unlikely to do, despite what Wente says, there would be minimal savings cutting the research function, there would be a dramatic loss in knowledge capacity, and all we would get is very large high schools with underpaid staff that eventually would unionize and strike until working conditions were decent, something that should happen anyway, but without the loss of research on the way. In the meantime Ontario would lose the best and brightest to other countries, because the university was the first truly global institution.

It is probable that Wente overinterprets McGuinty when she spins his call for “honest conversations” into a functional focusing on mass education. McGuinty knows that universities are self-administered and resistant to orders; I doubt he will hack at the universities given his support of K-12 education. I suspect he wants to know how the province and the universities can best handle the extra 20,000 students anticipated. They might explore a number of ideas like:

  • Have a conversation with the high-schools and bring back grade 13 (and then see if the universities will bring back the 3 year degree)
  • Work with the colleges to offer more 2-year diplomas (and connect them with university programs to provide a pathway for students who want to go on.)
  • Create more joint college/university programs that provide hybrid academic and professional training.
  • Let some of the universities privatize. With the savings you would get by not funding the now private universities you could fund a new university in Toronto (which is where the demographics say the university seats are needed.) Alternatively you could ask the University of Toronto to develop another campus, as they have worked out most of the kinks to a multi-campus system.
  • Provide seed funding for a provincially run system that attracts foreign students to Ontario’s universities and make sure the foreign students are paying the full cost.
  • Start a number of charter small liberal arts colleges that can compete with the big universities by providing different patterns of education (as in small classes.)

GRAND NCE funded

The Graphics, Animation and New Media Canada Network of Centres of Excellence has been funded, see NCE News Release.

New Media, Animation, and Games — these technologies are the building blocks of the Digital Age. The Science, Technology and Innovation Council report in 2008 recognized this as a priority research sub-area within Canada’s Science and Technology Strategy. This application responds to the needs identified in that report. The GRAND NCE will undertake a comprehensive research program whose goal is to understand the underlying technologies and to make selective advances in a coordinated, multidisciplinary setting that lead to social, legal, economic, and cultural benefits for Canadians.

This brings significant challenges because the ability to access, manipulate, and disseminate information in its various media forms radically changes on almost a daily basis. The research program will meet these challenges through a dynamic set of interconnected projects built on a conceptual framework of five themes. Three themes focus on the technology clusters identified by the Science, Technology and Innovation Council: (1) New Media Challenges and Opportunities, (2) Games and Interactive Simulation, and (3) Animation, Graphics and Imaging. The other two cross-cut the first: (4) Social, Legal, Economic and Cultural Perspectives, and (5) Enabling Technologies and Methodologies. Thirty projects each explore a different aspect of selected problems. Fifty Network Investigators lead projects, with Collaborating Researchers and Partners from the public and private sectors participating as domain experts and receptors to exploit the resulting new knowledge and technologies. (Executive Summary)

This truly interdisciplinary NCE is led by Kellog S. Booth at UBC and includes network investigators from across the country. The U of Alberta lead is Jonathan Shaeffer. I’m one of the network investigators at U of A and will be working on serious games. Isn’t that grand!

Federation of American Scientists :: National Summit on Educational Games

The Federation of American Scientists held a National Summit on Educational Games that has released a report titled, Harnessing the Power of Video Games for Learning. This is not, despite the sponsor, a scientific report. It is a call for funding for research into educational games. The report, however, slides into hype about American competitiveness. I think the pitch is that games will save American education and keep the country competitive. So, for example, on the first page it reads,

The success of complex video games demonstrates games can teach higher order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change.

The phasing may be unfortunate, but I read this as suggesting that financial success demonstrates educational value. Does that mean that the success of Celine Dion demonstrates that pop music can teach higher order skills? Further on they write,

Many companies and industries have transformed themselves by taking advantage of advances in technology, and new management methods and models of organization. As a result, they realized substantial gains in productivity and product quality while lowering costs. No such transformation has taken part in education. Education is not part of the IT revolution. (p. 6)

How can scientists say that education is not part of the IT revolution? Have they been to a school or university recently? For that matter, where are the companies using computer games to teach management methods and models of organization? (Perhaps the financial sector was playing a bit too much World of Warcraft to worry about managing our pensions.) My impression is that gains in productivity have come through automation and inventory control.

My counter proposal would be to invest in board games for teaching higher order skills. Lets bring back Monopoly (or the Landlord’s Game it was based on) as a way of learning about property, mortgages, and bankruptcy. Board games would be cheaper and probably teach the same higher order skills.

I’m sure I’m being unfair, and they do call for more research into what skills games could teach which is needed.

Peking/York Symposium

This week I was at the Peking/York Symposium organized by the Faculty of Arts at York University. See my conference notes are at philosophi.ca : York Symposium. The symposium focused mostly on the development of new media programmes and research in arts in the comprehensive university. There were representatives from major Canadian universities with art faculties and two Chinese universities. The challenges in a comprehensive university include how to work with other disciplines like computer science and engineering as computing is woven in. The arts have issues very similar to humanities computing – issues of labs, recruiting faculty, maintaining infrastructure, developing interdisciplinary programmes and fostering interdisciplinary research. While it is easy to call for interdisciplinarity it is harder to develop real structures that support appropriate clusters.

Canada 3.0 Forum: Stratford Declaration

Ian Wilson of the new U Waterloo Stratford Institute talked to the York/Peking Symposium on the Canada 3.0 Forum among other things. He talked about the Stratford Declaration (reproduced below) that emerged. It is a national declaration that calls for a Canadian project.

Canada 3.0 – The Stratford Declaration June 22, 2009

On June 8-9, 2009, over 1500 people interested in the digital economy gathered in Stratford, Ontario to review and debate the opportunities and challenges for Canada’s future. Canada 3.0 brought together industry, government and academia in workshops and discussions all focused on Canada’s digital future.

Recognizing the need for urgent attention to the issues of digital media, the participants in the Canada 3.0 Conference agreed to the Stratford Declaration:

• Success in digital media will be central to national prosperity in the 21st century. This fast growing field is producing jobs, ideas, products, services, companies and opportunities at a rapid pace – but Canada is not yet a world leader.
• Canada has the potential to be internationally competitive in this field on a sustained and focused basis, but it will not get there based on current trends.
• The foundations of Canada’s digital economy and society are not yet strong and stable. Significant upgrades are required to the digital infrastructure, including both the technological infrastructure and made-in-Canada digital content.
• Consistent accomplishment in the digital economy will require collaboration, partnership and collective action on an unprecedented national and cross-sectoral scale. Canada must use the digital revolution to reinvent the manner in which this country trains, educates, creates new businesses, cooperates, serves the population and views its collective future.
• Canada’s competitive advantage lies in its ability to bridge the technological and content fields, and to thereby produce and deliver internationally competitive products and services. The creative talents of this country must be connected to the technological potential of this age.
• Canada must become a global test-bed for new digital products and services and must be seen as a new economy incubator where consumers, governments and companies are known for embracing digital innovation.
• Canada needs to produce a regulatory and legal environment attuned to the 21st century and needs to use these arrangements to propel the nation into a position of global leadership in digital rights management.
• The digital ecology produces global competition for talent, ideas, patents and emerging companies. Canadians need to make a strong commitment to the country as a place to train, innovate, work and prosper if the digital economy is to flourish.
• There is an urgent need for a national project of such scale, scope and impact that Canadians come to understand the potential of the digital economy and that produces the collaboration, cooperation and cross-country engagement necessary for international digital leadership.
• Canada must set an ambitious target – to become the first truly digital nation in the world – and must move with urgency and determination toward this goal.

Canada 3.0 – La Déclaration de Stratford Le 22 juin 2009

Les 8 et 9 juin 2009, la ville de Stratford, en Ontario, a accueilli plus de 1 500 intéressés qui se sont penchés sur le dossier de l’économie numérique et ont débattu les possibilités et défis qui se dessinent pour le Canada de demain. Réunissant des délégués de l’industrie, des gouvernements et du monde universitaire, la conférence Canada 3.0 a été le théâtre d’ateliers et d’échanges portant sur l’avenir numérique du Canada.

Conscients de la nécessité de porter une attention immédiate aux enjeux liés aux médias numériques, les participants de la conférence ont entériné la Déclaration de Stratford :
• Au 21e siècle, la réussite des médias numériques sera au cœur de la prospérité du pays. Emplois, idées, produits, services, entreprises et débouchés se multiplient à un rythme effréné dans ce domaine en plein essor. Cependant, le Canada n’y occupe pas encore une position de chef de file mondial.
• Le Canada possède tous les atouts requis pour affronter de façon durable et ciblée la concurrence internationale dans le domaine. Cependant, ce potentiel ne se réalisera jamais à moins que le pays ne change de cap.
• Le Canada ne dispose pas encore d’assises stables et solides en ce qui touche l’économie et la société numériques. L’infrastructure numérique doit faire l’objet d’améliorations marquées, notamment sur le plan de l’infrastructure technique et des contenus numériques de confection canadienne.
• En matière d’économie numérique, la cohérence des réalisations nécessite une collaboration, des partenariats et une action concertée sans précédent à l’échelon national et intersectoriel. Le Canada doit profiter de la révolution numérique pour réinventer ses modèles de formation, d’éducation, de création de nouvelles entreprises, de coopération et de service au public ainsi que pour revoir la façon dont il envisage l’avenir collectif de la nation.
• L’avantage concurrentiel du Canada tient à sa capacité de conjuguer techniques et contenus et, ainsi, de produire et de diffuser des produits et services compétitifs dans l’arène mondiale. Les talents créateurs de ce pays doivent être « branchés » sur les possibilités techniques de notre époque.
• Le Canada doit devenir une plateforme mondiale d’essai des nouveaux produits et services numériques. Il doit également être perçu comme un incubateur de la nouvelle économie où consommateurs, gouvernements et entreprises se distinguent par leur capacité de faire place à l’innovation numérique.
• Le Canada doit se doter d’un milieu réglementaire et légal qui s’accorde avec le 21e siècle. Il lui faut également miser sur de telles dispositions pour se propulser au sommet du palmarès mondial de la gestion des droits d’auteur électroniques.
• L’écologie numérique alimente la concurrence mondiale sur le plan des talents, des idées, des brevets et des nouvelles entreprises. Les Canadiens doivent s’engager résolument envers leur pays pour en faire un lieu où apprendre, innover, travailler et prospérer. Le développement futur de l’économie numérique en dépend.
• Il est urgent de lancer un projet national d’une envergure, d’une portée et d’une incidence telles que les Canadiens en viendront à saisir les possibilités offertes par l’économie numérique et qu’il en découlera la collaboration, la coopération et la mobilisation intersectorielle requises pour l’exercice d’un leadership numérique mondial.
• Le Canada doit se fixer un objectif audacieux — devenir la première véritable nation numérique du monde — et s’employer prestement et résolument à atteindre cet objectif. (This is from the Facebook Page.)

Intensity Challenge in Humanities Computing @ the University of Alberta

Well we have started the first Intensity Challenge experiment for the Humanities Computing MA students and selected Computing Science graduate students. The idea of the challenge is that, working in teams, they have a week to to a challenge project. This year’s project is to develop an Alternate Reality Game. Next Tuesday we all gather and the teams present their games, designs, or whatever they do for this challenge. Let the team with the most points win!

The point of the challenge is to give incoming students an immediate experience of how different humanities computing is here – to orient them to doing team projects with multiple components using the resources at hand. Here is the FAQ from our instructions:

Do I have to be good at something to participate? Absolutely not, but you need to be willing to try. One of the goals of this is to help you figure out what you want to learn and how to learn with others.

Will you tell us what to do? Absolutely not! You are a graduate student. Figure out what you want to do and how to do it. At the end we will tell you how we would have done things, if you ask us. There will, however, be times when you can meet with people on campus who can help you.

I will need to go to a class during the week – is that OK? Of course, work it out with your team. Managing the time of team members with differing commitments is a real challenge, and a skill we all need to improve.

I think this is neat, but have to work during that week. Can I audit? No, this isn’t for credit so there is no such thing as auditing. You participate or you don’t. The key is how you communicate the work you have to the team. Ask a team if they will include you. It is up to them.

I have a friend who wants to do the music for this, but she isn’t a graduate student. Can others help out? Of course. Like any real project, the more you can involve the right people the better. Just don’t exploit anybody.

How much do we have to write up? That’s something you have to work out. A Design Document can take different forms, but there are faculty members with this sort of expertise. Track them down!!! We will tell you some of the things you should include, but part of the project is figuring out its scope.

What do I present at the end? Present your game. Be creative. Perhaps answer some of the questions we asked at the end of page 1. Make sure you know how to present in the HuCo lab (Old Arts 112). If you don’t know how presentations are structured, then ask around.

Does the game have to be fun? Depends on your objectives. Is it a Serious Game? Is it a “game” at all? You might want to discuss “games” with your team. Perhaps your team could answer this question with a game.

Can we cheat? Sure, if you can figure out what cheating is. That doesn’t mean we will be impressed. What you shouldn’t do is anything illegal, unethical, dangerous, or academically dishonest (don’t plagiarize.)

Is this experience a game? Not really, it is designed to give you experience running a project all the way from conception to delivery, even if incomplete. This experience will inform the more detailed discussions in the courses ahead. On the other hand, there might be some playful aspects, and we might throw in a few curves as the week progresses.