Scratch: Block Programming

Image of ScratchScratch is a visual programming language for kids developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT. You program by plugging blocks together and you can then share and comment on projects through the web site.

I heard about this listening to Nicholas Negroponte’s TED talk on “The vision behind One Laptop Per Child.” (A project to develop a $100 laptop for millions of kids to learn with around the world.) Scratch is the sort of free downloadable programming environment he imagines will be used on the OLPC by kids.

CAUT: Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom

The Canadian Association of University Teachers recent Bulletin has a timely story about Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom. The story is about Lakehead University switching over to Gmail. The switch means that students and faculty now have gigbytes of email space as opposed to the megabytes they had from the campus run service (a situation similar to what we have at McMaster.) The switch also raises privacy concerns because Google’s terms of use includes the following:

As a condition to using the Service, you agree to the terms of the Gmail Privacy Policy as it may be updated from time to time. Google understands that privacy is important to you. You do, however, agree that Google may monitor, edit or disclose your personal information, including the content of your emails, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Use and the Gmail Privacy Policy. Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using Gmail, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country.

As Google ads functionality so that they can offer more than just email I suspect this problem will be more acute. Soon we might see universities outsourcing calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, and web site functions.

Moulthrop: Learning, change and the utopia of play

Stuart Moulthrop has a delightful articles, Learning, change and the utopia of play in the recent and first issue of Learning Inquiry (Pages 51-7, Vol. 1, No. 1, April, 2007). He discusses how computer game play and learning could be rather than how they might be exploited. He starts by talking about open culture and how games encourage learning through modding and changing meaning in open works which is a more active way of learning. Mouthrop makes an interesting point about the difference between interacting with a game and reading. He goes out of his way to call attention to the ways academics are slipping into talking about “reading” games as if they were “texts”. This point can’tbe overemphasized.

Readers absorb and acquire. Browsers, surfers, interactors, adventurers, players – pathworkers all – explore and experiment. In pathwork, we do not process the symbol system to yield some ultimate, univocal meaning, but rather investigate and perhaps realize some of its possibilities: but always some, not all. Any contingent recognition extracted from the system is framed against a network of alternatives, experienced or imagined. Interactive systems make substantially different demands and inculcate ways of thinking about signs quite distinct from those enforced by writing … It seems very odd, then, to call this reading. (p. 55)

The reason we are tempted to talk about games as text goes back to our academic sense of authorship.

From the dissertation forward, most academic humanists are also trained, evaluated, and promoted as solo performers. So when a professor of literature or media studies works with a software designer, student, or professional, each goes home to a very different social space. The professor repairs to a private office, the designer most likely to a cubicle farm. It is interesting to consider this difference in scenery as the architectural correlative of open versus closed cultures. The professor is expected to reflect and write, a process that for humanists generally ends in some kind of monograph. The software designer either contributes components to a team project, or perhaps manages the team, and the product of these labors comes with many names attached. (p. 56)

Presumably learning through games encourages learners to understand themselves as part of larger projects rather than as Cartesian heroes meditating alone on thought.

What Moulthrop is worried about is how games could be exploited in learning. They could be used as rewards or used to drill skills. In any case we need to consider how a game is not a game when used for a purpose, especially that purpose children dread, learning.

Indeed, games probably appeal to children largely because they are excluded from the formal culture of school. If this distinction is neglected, games might be used simply as extracurricular rewards: learn your lessons, earn playtime. Much worse, they might be brought into the classroom only as delivery systems for reinforcement of narrowly defined goals, i.e., as drill-and-practice resources for standardized tests. Needless to say, both these approaches strip away the dimension of “open culture” or re-creativity, since they would necessarily limit, not realize, possibilities for change. (p. 54)

Offshore learning

Tutoring is now available over the Internet from India. A BBC News story Multinationals lead India’s IT revolution (Steve Schifferes, Jan. 24, 2007) reports about how companies like TutorVista are selling tutoring for North American kids at rates like $99 a month, unlimited help.

How long will it be before we have university marking being contracted off-shore?

The same BBC News series includes a story, Here is the US news from Bangalore, about reporters in India covering news in the US.

MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure

The MLA has released the report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. The Executive Summary reports,

Even more troubling is the state of evaluation for digital scholarship, now an extensively used resource for scholars across the humanities: 40.8% of departments in doctorate-granting institutions report no experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 65.7% report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format. (p. 3)

The 4th recommendation is that,

Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship. (p. 3)

Bravo! As Scott Jaschik puts it in a story on Rethinking Tenure – And Much More in Inside Higher Ed, departments should

Accept “the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media,” ending the assumption that print is necessarily better. (And to the extent that some professors and departments don’t know how to evaluate quality in new media, “the onus is on the department” to learn, not on the scholar using new media, Stanton said.)

Donna Stanton chaired the MLA task force and provided the briefing for the quote.

Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this.

Live coding: Impromptu

Live coding is coding as performance. Matt alerted me to a Impromptu which is a programming language designed for sound coding performances. There is a gallery of sound performances and code at the site to give an idea of what the live coders might be typing to get what effects.

Live coding would seem to be connected to realtime coding competitions like live coda when the coding challenge is performative and the competition environment can be witnessed as a performance.

Pedagogically I wonder if live coding is more effective than write-compile-run coding. Certain languages like Ruby have live coding environments that let you type commands and see the results immediately. What is different here is the idea of language created for live coding in a performative context.

Second Life Activities

I’ve noticed a number of interesting activities that are using Second Life as their virtual site. The Infinite Mind in Second Life is a web page about interviews with people like John Maeda and Kurt Vonnegut that were broadcast (took place?) in Second Life. (You can see photos and read agout it also at The Infinite Mind blog.)

CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion is a law class about argument outside of court and on the net. The class is by Harvard prof Charles Nesson and his daughter Rebecca Nesson. There is a trailer video that explains the class and how you can join through Second Life. There is an interesting moment when you shift from the video of Nesson to video of his avatar in a recreation of the same space.

Note how video is the way virtual encounters are being documented.

Thanks to Johnny for the Infinite Minds link and Peter for the Harvard link.

ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences

ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences has released their final report.

Their recommendates are:

  1. Invest in cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences, as a matter of strategic priority
  2. Develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and access
  3. Promote cooperation between the public and private sectors
  4. Cultivate leadership in support of cyberinfrastructure from within the humanities and social sciences
  5. Encourage digital scholarship
  6. Establish national centers to support scholarship that contributes to and exploits cyberinfrastructure
  7. Develop and maintain open standards and robust tools
  8. Create extensive and reusable digital collections

I note that the development of robust tools is one of the recommendations (along with open standards). See my earlier post Humanities Cyberinfrastructure.

Wireless Lecture Halls

Wireless browsing in classes has mixed benefits, CU research finds (Bill Steele, Cornell Chronicle) reports on a study of wireless use at Cornell in 2000. The study isn’t conclusive, but its clear a lot of students are using wireles to chat, surf, and do other tasks. Not that we didn’t do the same, but with paper.

This link came from an article in Slate Goes to College – A week of articles about higher education. Of interest is also the article about Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs – When academics post online, do they risk their jobs? By Robert S. Boynton.