Computers and Education – Page 11

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.

Philosophy 366: Student digital ethnography

Derek, Kat and Yosuke in my Philosophy 366, Computers and Culture class voluntarily put together a short video summarizing a survey they took of the classes use of computing. See Philosophy 366 Ethnography. I like the variety of ways they showed the information from having characters talking in WOW to other students holding sheets of paper. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is more information in the video than just the summary information on the cards. Short videos are becoming an argumentative form.

Drucker: Blind Spots

Johanna Drucker has an essay in the Chronicle about how humanists should be involved developing their work environments, Blind Spots. She has a nice phrase for the attitude by some scholars that someone else should do the work of developing the knowledge environment of the future – she calls it the “hand-waving magic wand approach to the future”. She concludes here essay,

Unless scholars in the humanities help design and model the environments in which they will work, they will not be able to use them. Tools developed for PlayStation and PowerPoint, Word, and Excel will be as appropriate to our intellectual labors as a Playskool workbench is to the chores of a real plumber. I once bought a very beautiful portable Olivetti typewriter because an artist friend of mine said it was so elegantly designed that it had been immediately put into the Museum of Modern Art collection. The problem? It wasn’t designed for typing. Any keyboardist with any skill at all constantly clogged its keys. A thing of beauty, it was a pain forever. I finally threw it from the fourth-floor tower of Wurster Hall at the University of California at Berkeley. Try doing that with the interface to your university library. Now reflect on who is responsible for getting it to work as an environment that supports scholarship.

We face a critical juncture. Leaving it to “them” is unfair, wrongheaded, and irresponsible. Them is us.

Johanna’s essay is addressed to scholars reminding us that we need to take responsibility for working things out. There is, however, another audience that needs to be addressed and that is the audience that believes that humanists aren’t the right people to be involved in designing infrastructure. The argument would be that there are professional software engineers who are trained to design portals for communities – they should be given the job so we don’t end up reinventing the wheel or doing a poor job. Obviously the answer lies in a creative design collaboration and humanists with computing development experience can play a crucial role in the mix, but how do we build such teams?

What Is Infrastructure?

I’ve written another essay. It seems to be what I do in Sundays. This time I’m trying to work out What Is Infrastructure and how it is different from supplies? The question is a way into trying to understand the role of big projects like TAPoR or Bamboo, both of which I am involved in (at very different levels.) As I thought about it I came to a couple of conclusions:

Defining things as infrastructure or cyberinfrastructure is a political move that tries to change how we frame services so we can propose different (and ongoing) ways of funding them. To be more blunt, defining a service as infrastructure moves it from something you ask for a limited grant for to something you ask for ongoing funding for (or something you set up a consortium to provide ongoing funding for.)
I can imagine a lighter way of weaving infrastructure out of existing industry provided stuff that we should take seriously.
Humanities research infrastructure should be public as in available to everyone and available internationally. Not only can the public participate in humanities research, but opening it up to the public is away of engaging them. Perhaps the relevance of the humanities lies not in their products, but in their participatory processes. Philosophy is not a science best done in a lab that will eventually produce a cure for ignorance. Philosophy is a love of wisdom we should share because we never owned it and we were never appointed its keepers.

Why not crowdsource the humanities? What would it take to make the (arts and) humanities the public disciplines? What sorts of infrastructure would engage the broader public?

Hall: Digitize This Book!

Digitize This Book! by Gary Hall is an interesting book at the intersection of cultural studies and humanities computing. The book seems to be addressed mostly to the cultural studies crowd arguing that “do cultural studies writers, thinkers, and practitioners not also need to experiment with ways of being ‘militant’ in a positive, innovative, creative, and constructive fashion in their own situations, institutions, and places of work?” (p. 206) The book is a sustained defense of the Cultural Studies e-Archive (CSeARCH) and other computing projects that Hall has initiated. He is trying to make space in cultural studies for projects we would recognize as humanities computing projects. To do this he argues against “transcendental politics” which assume a commitment to a particular political analysis in order to open room for actions, like starting an open archive, that cannot be demonstrated a-priori to be in support of capitalism or not. He ends the book with,

A fixed, pure and incorruptible institution could only be a violent, transcendental, totalizing, and totalitarian fantasy. One could even argue, after Derrida, that it is precisely the structurally open and undecidable nature of the situation – the fact that an institution or archive can be used to facilitate the forces of capitalism and globalization – that gives it ethical and political force. (p. 214)

Now I tend to shudder when I read phrases like “the forces of capitalism”, partly because I don’t understand the tradition of thought that takes such things as givens, but I don’t, as many colleagues do, believe we should therefore shun cultural studies or other forms of post-modern thought. Hall is interested in something important and that is the ethics and politics of digital work. To avoid discussing the ethics and politics of what we do in the university or as developers of digital works is to ascribe to a naive and unexamined ethic. Many avoid politics because the discourse has been politicized by second rate cultural studies folk who think shaming others for not being militant is a form of engagement. Hall is trying to open room for a form of politics beyond politics (or hyperpolitics) where we can act without knowing for sure what the consequences of our actions will be. That is the heart of ethics for me, acting (or not, which in turn is a form of acting) in the face of insufficient knowledge or ability. We always do things without being sure, ethics is knowing that and trying to deal thoughtfully with the ignorance.

Part of what I am saying here, then, is that certain forms, practices, and performances of new media – including many of those associated with open-access publishing and archiving – make us aware that we can no longer assume that we unproblematically know what the “political” is, or what sorts of interventions count as political. (p. 196)

Hall in his actions (like CSeARCH and the Open Humanities Press) and in his writing is trying to reach out to those in open access circles and in computing circles. We who are too buried in the techne should reach back.

You can find earlier versions of sections on CSeARCH like The Cultural Studies E-Archive Project (Original Pirate Copy), but, ironically, I can’t, find a copy of Digitize This Book!. No one has bothered to digitize it, no doubt due to the copyright notice as the beginning (p. iv) that states,

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. (p. iv)

Is there a contradiction between the injunction of the title (“Digitize This Book!”) and the copyright notice? What is the status of a title when it comes to rights? Should I digitize the book?

To be fair to Hall, the chapters of his previous book, Culture In Bits are available on CSeARCH and I assume he will make Digitize This Book! also available after a suitable interval. Perhaps someone knows him and can update me or point me to a digitized version already open.

Note: since writing this someone passed on a note to Gary Hall who kindly pointed me to online copies of other chapters. See my more recent blog entry with the links.

Hall makes an interesting move at the beginning of the book to position open access as a middle way for the university between the commercialization of the university and the (impossible elitist) return to whatever it is we think we were doing in the humanities in the good old days. I find it interesting that Hall believes “cultural studies has for some time now arguably been the means by which the university thinks about itself …” (p. 13). I’ve seen no evidence of this – cultural studies to me seems to want to position itself as outside the university critiquing it in the Socratic gadfly tradition rather than taking a role acknowledged by the university. It would probably come as a surprise to most university administrators that cultural studies is doing this for them and somehow represents the university’s institutionalized reflection. And therein lies the promise of Hall’s book – that there is type of creative activity we can all engage in, through which we can imagine the university by modeling it. We don’t need approval to set up open works. We can use the technology to become a way for the university to think about itself.

Singularity University: Exponential Silliness 2.0?

Ray Kurzweil, who has been predicting “spiritual machines” (AI) for a while now, has been appointed Chancellor of the Singularity University. The Singularity University is based at the Nasa Ames and supported by Google (and Moses Znaimer, another visionary wannabe.) It’s mission is to focus on exponential advances leading to singularities where you get a paradigm shift. The Overview describes the aims of the University thus:

Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanityâ€™s grand challenges.

The University thus seems dedicated to a particular, and questionable view of technological development which looks to a future of dramatic paradigm shifts triggered by these singularities. For example, the goal of the Academic Track “Future Studies & Forecasting” is “cultivating the studentâ€™s ‘exponential intuition’ â€” the ability to fully grasp the magnitude of possible outcomes likely to arise in specific domains.” No room here for modesty or skepticism.

The University is not really a University. It is more of an institute funded by commercial partners and providing intensive programs to graduate students and, importantly, executives. I’m surprised NASA is supporting it and legitimating something that seems a mix of science and science fiction – maybe they have too much room at their Ames campus and need some paying tenants. Perhaps in California such future speculation doesn’t seem so silly. I guess we will have to wait until about 2045 when the intelligence singularity is supposed to happen and see.

But what is the Singularity? The Wikipedia article on Technological Singularity quotes I. J. Good as describing the “intelligence explosion” that would constitute the singularity thus:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an â€˜intelligence explosion,â€™ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The key for an intelligence singularity (as opposed to other types) is the recursive effect of the feedback loop when a machine is smart enough to improve itself. That is when we go from change (whether accelerating exponentially or not) to the independent evolution of intelligent machines. That is when they won’t need us to get better and we could become redundant. Such dramatic shifts are what the Singularity University prepares paying executives for and trains graduate students to accelerate.

It is easy to make fun of these ideas, but we need to be careful that we don’t end up confidently predicting that they can’t happen. Kurzweil is no fool and he bases his prediction on extrapolations of Moore’s law. Futurology will always be risky, but everyone has to do it to some degree. For that matter there do seem to be moments of accelerating technological change leading to dramatic paradigm shifts so we shouldn’t be so sure Kurzweil is wrong about the next one. I should add that I like the proposed interdisciplinarity of the Singularity University – the idea is that dramatic change or new knowledge can come from ideas that cross disciplines. This second organizing principle of the University has legs in this time of new and shifting disciplines. We need experiments like this. I just wish the Singularity University had had the courage to include academic tracks with the potential for critical engagement with the idea of an intelligence singularity. Why not a “History and Philosophy of Futurology” track that can call into question the very named premise of the University? After all, a real university should be built on an openness of mind we would call intelligence, not dogmatic certainty in a prediction.

Federation: The Brief to Government on Technology

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (known as the Federation) has some interesting briefs for government up on its site. One brief, the Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology: Regarding Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage (PDF 65KB) April 2008 is a response to the federal government’s science and technology strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage. The response, authored by Noreen Golfman, President of the Federation, points out how the humanities and social sciences, “have long contributed in direct and meaningful ways to the achievement of the priorities of the government. The Federation believes that our research contributions are invaluable not only to the economy and the science and technology strategy but also to the cultural and political prosperity of Canada.” (p. 1)

The argument in the response starts with “Creativity and communication are at the heart of our disciplines in humanities and social sciences” and then moves on to show how creativity and communication play out in three “advantages” called for:

entrepreneurial advantage
knowledge advantage
people advantage

It is always strange to read documents that are not about advancing knowledge for everyone, but achieving national advantage. Didn’t they get the “nationalism is out” memo? Of course, that is the game of national policy and I’m sure the academic games appear just as dated from the outside. (“Didn’t they get the idealism is out memo?”) Golfman tries to engage the policy on its own terms and show how the social sciences and humanities are important to the advantages sought. Where I disagree with Golfman is about creativity. I don’t think we actually do a very good job in the humanities and social sciences developing creativity. The arts, especially when practiced, do a much better job. We probably do a better job at “critical” than “creative.” At least that what we tell each other.

Interestingly the response mentions TAPoR at the University of Toronto and IBM under “entrepreneurial advantage” on page 3. TAPoR is one of two examples of projects that have partnered with companies to everyone’s advantage. One of the ways that projects like TAPoR engage creativity and communition is through a particular type of thinking through technology that involves developing technologically rich objects as part of our practices. We don’t just read and critique, we design and craft as they might in the arts. But lets not forget what is important,

The end game is as much about a better Canada as it is about a more economically competitive
Canada. (p. 1)