Festival Report/Ch8StormingtheAcademy

Storming the Academy

Storming the Academy Drumbeat Web Festival Looks at the Changing World of the Internet Group from Duke explores future of learning at gathering of educators and technologists By Andrea Fereshteh Tuesday, October 26, 2010 print | ShareThis

DURHAM, N.C. -- How can ideas such as open learning and peer-to-peer assessment transform traditional higher education? Those are some of the questions Duke scholars will consider at Mozilla's first international Drumbeat Learning Freedom and the Web Festival Nov. 3-5 in Barcelona, Spain. The festival brings together educators, students and technologists to discuss how the Internet is changing learning and shaping the future of education. Part of a class taught by Duke professor Cathy N. Davidson, the group of three Duke students, one Duke alumnus and one graduate student from UNC-Chapel Hill, will explore how to rethink traditional syllabi, publishing and peer review, and grading as part of two days of interactive programs titled "Storming the Academy." "We're using the lessons of open web development to infuse traditional higher education with new pedagogies, methods and interdisciplinary cross currents," Davidson wrote in a recent email message. Her students also have created a "FutureClass" website featuring a multimedia documentation of all their activities at the festival. The site will host a "class in a box" toolkit developed during the festival with methods for applying the open web to innovation in education. "Our chief idea is that face-to-face learning should not be taken as a given in education but as an affordance, as an opportunity, not a default," Davidson wrote in a recent blog post. "Here's the mantra: If your classroom can be replaced by a computer screen, it should be." Cathy Davidson Q&A: Cathy Davidson Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival Ideas online are often like needles in haystacks. You explore one and encounter many brilliant projects. Cathy N. Davidson is the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English at Duke University and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. She is also the co-founder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). Pronounced "haystack": it is an international network of educators and digital visionaries committed to the creative development and critical understanding of new technologies in life, learning, and society. One of their projects is the Digital Media and Learning Competition. This participatory learning challenges young people to explore and engage using digital media - a more familiar landscape. With guidance from interdisciplinary experts in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, students create while learning. Cathy hacks education and wrote a well-known piece: How To Crowdsource Grading. She is a leader inspired to alter our paths of education using collaboration that hacks stacks with needle precision. We are honoured to have Cathy join us at the Drumbeat Festival and asked her a few questions: What will you do at the Drumbeat festival? We are planning to host a rolling, interactive three-day workshop on "Storming the Academy," where we engage in a variety of projects, activities, and contributive exercises to end up with a "class in a box," a toolkit that anyone can use to find ways that the methods and mechanisms of the Open Web can be applied back to make innovation in the academy. Whether peer-reviewing systems for grading, developing a tool for representing minority opinions in a crowd or a tag cloud, crowdsourcing syllabus development, or creating devices to aid students in their reading assignments or in building online reading communities as they read difficult works, we will be putting together the components of new forms of interactive, peer-inflected education that we will make public in process and, edited, later on and that we hope will help others to experiment and innovate. Who are you looking forward to meeting? My list is so long I don't know where to begin. Among others: Joi Ito! I know Mimi and have followed Joi around but never met him. But I'm also interested in the youngest, most quirky, most idiosyncratic of students. I want to know why they are coming, what they think they will learn. I learn from them. What is the most exciting thing happening in education and the web today? All the forms of open and peer-to-peer learning are thrilling. I'm also a huge admirer of schools using games and game mechanics to teach core subjects in K-12. In more traditional education, I am thrilled that Duke University has asked me and HASTAC to develop a new, visionary "re-professional" Master's in Knowledge and Networks (MAKN) that both looks deeply at the new forms of reading, writing, communicating, and interacting online in a historical and philosophical context but then also immediately offers students the challenge of applying deep learning to designing new communications systems for learning institutions, community organizations, and small businesses partnering with the program. The program is for computer scientists who have no training in the lived, real-world challenges of information dissemination today and for those in the arts and humanities who need to develop their skills in programming or web design. We’re accepting comments for the new "re-professional" master's degree, Master's in Knowledge and Networks. Cathy participated in Duke University’s Ustream “Office Hours” in September 2010. Her session was titled: “Learning in the Digital Age”:

1) Can you tell me how HASTAC got started? I helped create a program at Duke in Information Science + Information Studies in 1999, when I was Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, that was for programmers, developers, and for those thinking seriously about social and aesthetic potentialities of the World Wide Web and the Internet. Around the same time I also helped create the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute that is committed to the idea that "knowledge should be shared." Then, in 2002, I was at a national meeting of directors of humanities institutes around the country and one after another said that the humanities and social sciences were "antithetical to the Information Age. What? The greatest revolution in how humans create and share knowledge, how they read and write, how they communicate and interact in all human history---and there's no space there for the human and social sciences? One other person in the room agreed, David Theo Goldberg, director of the system-wide University of California Humanities Research Institute. We stepped out of the meeting and created HASTAC and have been collaborating on books and projects ever since.

2) What is your background and why are you interested in the free sharing and reuse of knowledge? As a kid, I was math all the way. I assumed I'd go into AI and was very excited by computational philology. But there were no women at all in that field and I wanted to support myself so I began to indulge my love of writing and veered into English. But I've always written about information technologies and how they change our interactions. My major contribution in that field is Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, about the change that comes about with steam powered presses and machine-made ink and paper. Libraries, schools, mass literacy, the public's ability to own books all make for changes in class structure and in American representative democracy. And also to new cultural forms: the mass-produced novel began with new print technologies and was reviled by many of the patrician founding fathers. It was the video game of the late 18th century.

3) What would you say is your main motivation for working on free and open education?

Most of the features of education that we now assume are standard were actually developed to support the Industrial Age. On the whole, we're doing a good job training students for the twentieth century. We're only beginning to imagine what structures we need to educate students for the 21st century. There are many lessons from open web development that need to be transferred to traditional education.

4) How does HASTAC work? How many people are participating, and from what institutions? What kinds of projects are they working on? What are the goals? HASTAC is a network of networks. We are dedicated to three interconnected goals: creative development of new media and new tools; thinking critically about the role of technology in society, education, and social life; and participatory forms of learning. We mainly think through ideas and use our www.hastac.org website to publicize projects, tools, and new media applications being pioneered by any of our community members. We're about 4800 strong now, including nearly 200 undergrad and grad students (HASTAC Scholars) from over 70 institutions. They receive a small but institutionally meaningful scholarship of $300 to be the "eyes and ears" of HASTAC. They blog, network, share ideas, develop tools together, appear on panels or pursue projects, and mainly create an online community that then translates into their research and other projects. We also administer the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation annual $2Million Digital Media and Learning Competitions.

5) Does HASTAC seek to influence research practice as well as teaching? How so? Yes we are as dedicated to new forms of interdisciplinary research as we are to new peer-informed modes of teaching.

6) What do you think is the relationship between free software and open education? Why is it that so many people who are interested in one, are working on building the other? If you believe that the best way to develop software is for free, collaboratively, and led by community interests, you know that expertise does not have to be hierarchical, top down. If you believe code should be open so it can be studied, modified, used, and repurposed, you believe that knowledge can be interchangeable and applied and you have a different idea about the "ownership" of ideas. If you believe in those principles, then you have to question a form of Industrial education that is based almost entirely on credentialing, on certifying, on one person granting a degree of excellence to another, rather than in the ways we, collaboratively, demonstrate excellence by performing well. Traditional education is antithetical to the peer-to-peer learning modes of open software development.

7) What are the main obstacles standing in the way of an entirely affordable, accessible, high-quality, and open world of higher education? Are they technological, social, matters of government policy or the conduct and structure of institutions? Tradition dies hard. Once you establish a hierarchy of what counts as the pinnacle of excellence (with Oxford and Cambridge in England, Harvard in the U.S., Tokyo University in Japan and so forth), it is hard for those who have profited within that system of hierarchy to admit that reputation is not always equal to excellence, that esteem does not necessarily lead to innovation. In fact, those who have enjoyed certain forms of power and privilege often find it hard to relinquish the standard by which they have achieved distinction and value. So institutional resistance, deeply nestled within the class system and reward systems, would top the list. There are also hundred of millions of dollars, actually more like billions on a global scale, resting in the current system so there is much resistance to major change. I would say resistance to change is always a combination of technological, social, policy, and institutional resistance.

8)Do you think institutions (like Duke, for example) will largely adapt to the new reality or will educational innovators have to find workarounds? Duke is a very young institution relative to its peer institutions (the Ivies and Stanford and big public universities such as Michigan or Berkeley). Half of Duke graduates have graduated since around 1980 or so. Its major reputation also comes in the 1980s--and interdisciplinary, innovative, bold programs have been where Duke has made its mark. It is very traditional in some ways, and then quite innovative and bold in others. For example, we were vilified in 2003 when we gave music listening devices called "iPods" to entering Freshmen and invited them to invent away. They came up with dozens of academic uses and helped develop video capacities in them and podcasting, and all kinds of innovations. But that was considered "beneath" a major respectable university. We made the cover of Newsweek for our audacity. Not tell students how and what to do? Trust students to explore? That was considered quite extreme. And, within the institution, not everyone was happy (although some of us were ecstatic). Every educational innovator strives for major change while also figuring out the workarounds.

9) There are concerns about participation in open education by traditionally disadvantaged student populations. What is the best way to reach these students? This is a real concern. HASTAC has made a point, to work with Minority-Serving Supercomputing Association and other associations dedicated to underserved and disadvantaged populations and to host a number of HASTAC Scholars from such institutions. To tout open source and replicate social inequality seems a contradiction and terms and is inexcusable.

10) Your hope and interest in participating in Mozilla Drumbeat Festival?

We are not primarily developers, but educators who are inspired by the open Web. We want to be able to show that "thinking" is an activity and that "interaction" can occur with note cards, pads, marker pens as well as on a computer. We want to be inspired by open universities and open sources of knowledge to push the transformations in higher education and we know there are lessons in excellence to learn from the highest forms of collaborative research and work. For HASTAC to have a tent at Drumbeat underscores how many of us in the academy are looking for a new way.

11) Anything else you'd like to say about the future of education? What will education look like in 2020?

If we do not take stock of the systems of education, K-12 and 12-20, we will not be able to prepare for the future. We need to rethink how we test, how we measure ability and disability, the different ways we can combine talents and collaborate. The HASTAC method is known as "collaboration by difference," and it is a way of structuring interaction so that the quirky, decentered, odd or eccentric voice not only can be heard but can make a difference. As someone said recently, difference is not our deficit but our distinction. I believe that we will have very different forms of testing by 2020, that disciplines will be more merged, that school will be more project based and more integrated into communities, with less separation of town and gown, of the theoretical and the practical. - Show quoted text -

Co-founder, HASTAC www.hastac.org Co-director, HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition www.dmlcompetition.net

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Anne Balsamo on "Storming the Cloud/Crowd"

11:00-12:50

Storming the Cloud/Crowd
Activity Leader: Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California

An interactive, collaborative performance and tag cloud activity designed to explore the ethics of the crowd, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and minority expression. Tools: index cards, pens, large sheets of paper, a couple of helpers, a crowd.

Technology is about the way cultures are made. Cultures of the moment, cultures of the future, tinkering ("ways of the hand").

Audience selecting three words that best describe their experience with collaboration, then pair with someone you don't know, share your three words and pick ONE word that describes a quality of collaboration across difference that you feel is important. The sociality reality check!

Words from the crowd:

serendipity discomfort introduction open confusion engagement empathy respect

Imagine an app where what is priviledged is the minority voice, not the loud, crowd voice. What about the inverse, priviledging the fringe voice?

Rhetoric continues that the open web is a level playing field, not so sure it is for everyone across the board. There are hierarchies and assumptions encoded in the technology (i.e. in a tag cloud).

Curation and collection can reiterate dominant opinion. To curate multiplicity is a different model.

Alternative models/iterations of tag clouds:

can we modulate the tag cloud based on different characteristics, things like geographic location, self-identifying nature of tagger?

computers can cluster, perhaps show random tags that people can "like"--figure out computationally clusters of tags (similar to Netflix model) that represent/appeal a different user

Is there anything out there that already exists that represents a range, allows you to look at tags through different characteristics/values? How to capture qualitative differences?

Not about building a tool, but developing literacies for reading nuances of tag clouds and other potentially exclusionary technologies.

How do we build that literacy by building a smarter application. We are going to use clouds, how to make it speak its knowledge in ways that don't alienate minority/fringe voices

Hackerbus goes out into the community to find people/voices being excluded -- how do we "evangelize" in the same way? "Click on the small tags!"

Ways students are going to learn in the future is knowing how to navigate a tag cloud. Going beyond the "big words" (similar to going beyond first page of Google results)

Teaching the politics of the small print and what that means. Understanding we can visualize in different ways is key to building better tools for the future or improving existing tool-- political literacy around the small print is key.

how can we make our tools self-reading and encourage users to question/think critically about the tools? How can we make that process visible in the interface of the tool itself?

The response to not being heard means you are constantly moving to find new place wwhere you can be heard. Constant moving confounds process of cultural production, futher alienates.

Danger of imposing on people the need to engage difference. Who gets to decide the difference?

Is there a space in the offline world where engaging with difference happens in a productive way, how can we emulate that online?

Why aren't we building conviviality tools?

Stop thinking of tools as static, they change with how we use them.

Some of us believe that tools by virtue of their existence embed things, but that does not mean that it is necessarily deterministic, but must consider critically.

What if we want to build a tool that hacks whatever is out there that serves the conviviality of the crowd so that you don't feel forced.

Maybe it is not a tool, but the openness of the data. Have to develop the skills for people to interpret the data in critical ways.

Thursday, November 4 14:00-15:50 Storming the Syllabus: 21st Century Literacies

Activity Leader: Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University

Deconstructing  the "assignment" with peer-to-peer learning techniques and tactics. How  can we transform traditional syllabus-making through peer-to-peer  interactive learning techniques and tools? Tools: index cards, markers,  butcher paper, a wiki. 

CHALLENGE QUESTIONS FOR OUR SESSION: IF OUR IDEAL FUTURE STATE IS TO HELP OUR STUDENTS BE THE BEST POSSIBLE PARTICIPANTS IN THE FREE AND OPEN WEB, THEN WHAT LITERACIES ARE MOST IMPORTANT FOR REACHING THAT GOAL? WHICH RESOURCES ARE BEST FOR UNDERSTANDING AND MASTERING EACH LITERACY? WHAT METHODS ARE BEST FOR TEACHING/LEARNING?

Some 21st Century Literacies---What are others? • Attention: What are the new ways that we pay attention in a digital era? How do we need to change our concepts and practices of attention for a new era? How do we learn and practice new forms of attention in a digital age? • Participation: How do we encourage meaningful interaction and participation? What is its purpose on a cultural, social, or civic level? • Collaboration: Collaboration can simply reconfirm consensus, acting more as peer pressure than a lever to truly original thinking. HASTAC has cultivated the methodology of “collaboration by difference” to inspire meaningful ways of working together. • Network awareness: How we both thrive as creative individuals and understand our contribution within a network of others? How do you gain a sense of what that extended network is and what it can do? • Global Consciousness: How does the World Wide Web change our responsibilities in and to the world we live in? • Civic Responsibility: How we can be good citizens of the Internet when we are off line, working towards real goals in our communities and using the community practices of sharing, customizing, and contributing online towards responsible civic action off line? • Design: How is information conveyed differently, effectively, and beautifully in diverse digital forms? How do we understand and practice the elements of good design as part of our communication and interactive practices? • Narrative, Storytelling: How do narrative elements shape the information we wish to convey, helping it to have force in a world of competing information? • Procedural Literacy: What are the new tactics and strategies of interactive games, where the multimedia narrative forms changes because of our success or failure? • Critical consumption of information: Without a filter (editors, experts, and professionals), much information on the Internet can be inaccurate, deceptive, or inadequate. How do we learn to be critical? What are the standards of credibility? • Digital Divides, Digital Participation: What divisions still remain in digital culture? Who is included and who excluded? How do basic aspects of economics and culture dictate not only who participates in the digital age but how we participate? • Ethics: What are the new moral imperatives of our interconnected age? • Advocacy: How do we turn collaborative, procedural thinking on line into activism in the real world? • Preservation: What are the requirements for preserving the digital world we are creating? Paper lasts. Platforms change. • Sustainability: What are the metrics for sustainability in a world where we live on more kilowatts than ever before? How do we protect the environment in a plugged-in era? • Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning: Alvin Toffler has said that, in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in one’s tracks, see what isn’t working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn.

The one thing you don't see, is the one thing you can't see. Attention blindness! See the Gorilla experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo . For everything you see, there is something you don't.

Q: What makes these new skills? Not necessarily new, but perhaps need to be reframed/reconsidered. These skills in the unique context of our now interconnected world. These are great categories for thinking about learning,

Do we need to rethink ethics for the 21st century? How do we start to thinking about new codes of ethics / how to be responsible for new tools or environments.

Unlearning: we live in a moment where questioning what we assume to be truths is increasingly key.

Procedural learning: implies process . could be applied to gaming, creating algorithms, programming.

Literacies versus profencies. Literacy=ability to interpret, i.e. interpretting visual data

Advocacy--two fold-- what if you are person that sees the proverbial gorilla (see attention experiment) and advocating for that alternative view. Requires proficiency of self-advocacy, but must also be literate in performing critical thinking/perception of bias.

Design is dead, learn to undesign. Less is more. There is room for failure in design process. Failure is an important part of the process.

If you want to transform, but are still using old methods of assessment, a prescribed method of analysis, you will fail.

Collaboration: suggest that collaboration might be new and radical idea for learning. The thing that we call collaboration may be the long tradition of cooperation, rather than true collaboration. To truly collaborate in which all people come together in equity and move forward and make progress is one of the most important literacy. Defining true collaboration: one in which no sense of hierarchy in who holds creative and progressive control over learning experience.

What do we mean by literacies?

What really has changed in the grand scheme of things? Looks to me more like we are returning to what has been cultivated as human faculties, prior to industrial rev, tribal, communicative, collaborative. You can't help but learn peer to peer. I'm not sure we are seeing anything "new", but perhaps very, very, very old, but maybe returning to a state that was suppressed by industrial rev culture.

Is this list from a Western perspective? In Spain, governmnet has tried to introduce new civic class in higher ed "education for citizens"--been a huge struggle, teachers don't want to give this class, but are promoting disobedience by not teaching it b/c it reflects different biases and because lesson is in substitute for Catholic religion lesson. Issue of different values and different resources. Has anyone mentioned that by not teaching it, they are, in fact, teaching civic engagement (teaching civil disobedience!) We have to assume there are different conceptions of the different values/literacies in different cultures.

What are the methods to make apparent that which you can not see? If you are going to teach "unlearning" how do you do that? what does that look like?

-- shifting physicality of space? --distraction techniques -- reconsidering the topics we address in class. focusing more on different ways to apply what we are learning. force students to shape what they are learning --culture shock -- doing everything backwards---instead of working towards the test, you work backwards, rather than going through history, look backwards to see how we got here --"shifting the clock" forcing people to engage in areas where they normally don't (i.e. do three things you are not the expert in, i.e. engineer in an art space, artist in coding, etc.) see what someone with different assumptions/biases/skills have to do the same task.

               Is that unlearning? To me unlearning means you have to believe "everything you learned in wrong."
               Learning--unlearning--relearning--you have to realize that everything you understood is entirely bound by your experience. So, when shifting roles you have to go outside of yourself to consider what your expertise has blinded you too. 

Thursday, November 4 16:00–16:50 Storming the Syllabus: Introduction to Culture and Technology Activity leader: Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California

This activity explores and performs the affordances of face-to-face learning in a large “Introduction to Culture and Technology” class. How can a large co-located class of 200+ people contribute to collaborative, participatory learning? This session also introduces an application-in-process called “Learning to Love the Questions,” a semantic web application (a “reverse oracle”) that provides questions, not answers, about the cultural nature of technology. Tools: index cards, markers, butcher paper, a wiki.

COURSE BASICS: 200+ Students: University students; sophomore/junior/senior levels; ages: 18-23 (born between 1990-1994); Los Angeles; Private university; All majors; No prior requirements; have laptops; are not NECESSARILY "prosumers."--not the ones who would be making stuff/hacking themselves, participants, not makers.

Key Learning Objectives: To enable students to learn....

1) How to describe key elements of contemporary techno-culture. This is a categorical learning objective: What is technology? What is culture? How are technology and culture related?

2) How to describe the important elements of technological culture within a particular geographical area: i.e., the U.S., North America, the Pacific Rim. This is a cross-categorical learning objective: How does techno-culture manifest in different contexts? What are the different ways in which people relate to similar technologies? i.e., the internet, the www, social networking applications.

3) How to use new technologies that are central to the reproduction of contemporary culture: wikis; desktop creative apps; social networking apps (which ones). This is an instrumental learning objective.

4) How to imagine possible new uses for embryonic technologies. What needs doing in the world? What technologies can help? How do you know if something is unique? Does it matter? How does one acknowledge the influence of the past? This is a creative learning objective to stimulate the development of the technological imagination.

5) How to critically evaluate the cultural implications of a potential new technology from multiple standpoints. This is a methodological learning objective: to train students in the arts of critical thinking of something that does not yet exist.

6) How to make personal evaluations about what technologies to use in the future. This is an ethical learning objective: to inspire students to think about the implications of their own technocultural fascinations and investments.

Teaching technology/culture

• To create new knowledge across disciplines--all have something to offer • To identify the horizons of new research • To engage multiple intelligences • To create deep knowledge: to know something is to "know it" from multiple perspectives • To serve as the foundation for the education of the next generation of scholars, scientists, engireers, humanists, teachers, artists, global citizens

Not about reproducing communications or humanists, but a new kind of liberal arts. A kind of domain of understanding at the university level.

Multidisciplinariy= collaboration among the creative disciplines

Learning how to take culture seriously in the use of new technologies --public interactives --technologies of imagination-when you build something that allows for novel forms of expression you are building a platform for the imagination --technologies in the service of social good --collaboration technologies--are technologies of culture, you are enabling people to make culture

Ethics of interdisciplenary collaboration-- --intellectual generosity --intellectual flexibility --intellectual confidence -intellectual humility -intellectual reliability

Key learning objectives for this class: • Describe key elements of contemp. technoculture • How to describe the important elements of tech culture within different settings--the technocultures is different around the world • How to use new tech that are central to the reproduction of contemp culture wikis, desktop creative apps, social networking apps, • How to imagine possible new uses for embyonic technologies. What needs doing in the world? What technologies can help? How do you know if soemthing is unique? Does it matter? • How to critically evaluate the cultural imaginations of a potential new technology from multiple standpoints • How to make personal evals about what technologies to use in the future. This is an ethical learning objective: to inspire students to think about the implications of their own technocultural fascinations and investments

Students from FutureClass demoing the Classroom Attention Barometer --platform independence --ease of use --mobile and desktop --no registration --real-time --open source

What else has been done that is like this? Profs sometimes have after-class surveys, but not real-time. And clickers, designed for large classes. How is this different? Clickers cost $$, this uses existing technology. Clickers require profs to pre-process lectures/map questions and checkin points. This provides real time feedback at any point! Also allows profs to review data to see where attention flags--would have to figure out how to record and sync time with data.

How do you account for no one paying attention for a long period of time? How will you account for divided attention?

Possible--random check ins, timing out the "attention status" after an amount of time, prompts them to update their attention status

Interested in further development of Classroom Attention Barometer, get the source code, connect, etc. @ futureclass.co

11:00–11:50

Storming the Syllabus: Learning to Learn on the Open Web
Activity Leader: R. Trebor Scholz, The New School

The simple and large ambition of this meet-up is to find out how to use digital media for learning. Building upon an annotated collaborative concept map of tools, services, methodologies, and social practices on the “Mindmeister” platform, this workshop will be a collaborative reflection on the use of digital learning tools (http://www.mindmeister.com/66229100/digital-media-pedagogy).

Tools: Mediawiki, WikiSpaces, Moodle, Prezi, SlideShare, WordPress, TED, Google Scholar, JSTOR, OpenOffice, Google docs, Facebook, Ning, Dropbox

defining "education" as within the academy versus more loose "learning"

Identifying a process. Envrionments are not agnostic. You can choose one and decide it's really good for education. If people can decide they like one, update it, etc. it gives them more ownership.

loosely coupled learning- agreed upon goals

start with a challenge to students-motivating challenges at the outset --don't tell them how to solve it, ask them to define the right questions

other methodologies you would recommend?

-collaborative creation of a document in a wiki--away from notion of solitary work-- how do you assess those contributions

--mediawikis are my favorite tool--ask students to collaboratively work on projects and review revision history to consider who did what (esp. for developing metacommentary and processing)

--essays on googledocs and interlinking them rather than using ning, etc., because of collaborative comment functions, they can see my comments back to them, much easier working environment than a wiki

--teaching on social networking sites? Yes, if it matches the specific outcome, not prioritizing teaching of skills through social networking space, but as a place to build on, iterate on what they are doing face to face (i.e. YouthNetwork), also allows peer to peer learning, but make sure we provide a framework to make sure everyone is on the same page in terms of expectations and learning outcomes and the reason we have picked this particular tool and then integrate that tool back in to the classroom?

privacy issues using social media in the classroom; how to integrate Facebook, Ning, etc., while respecting student privacy

Facebook never seems to work--people express themselves differently in classroom

Possible problem with using Moodle, other collaborative tools, many voices talking at once/over each other, hard to maintain focus, trying to find ways not to moderate or censure, but to flag importance -- One option: subgroups can be used, tagging, etc. can be used to flag critical content without discouraging tangential/smaller conversations

In teaching undergrads have found that they have a "hostile" relationship to email. Only about half open their emails. Shift to texting, texting mailing lists (few use twitter)

Wish list:

--need publicly editable annotated bibliography tool--does that tool exist? Zotero possibly developing that functionality--through website you can share annotations and tags, etc.

Gathering information, requiring registration from students doesn't work (forced collection of data)

If you had something that made RSS feeds and had a way to pipe it however they wanted, so that user could pick their preferred delivery message

What technologies do students use?

--FutureClass- digital commons and Buddy Press website, incorporates all social media into a single site, upload docs, annote, twitter etc. : http://futureclass.co

Asking students what they use is key--don't force the learning environment on them--it should be organic, using a tool in which they are already engaging and where they want to be. That engagement is primarily outside the institution, so there is a real challenge to make it a key portion of the face to face class-- How should we be doing this? How to make that conversation efficient--how to initiate the conversation, so you aren't asking the instructors to learn 17 different new tools that they won't use.

How do we deal with access issues, particularly in K-12 where Facebook/Twitter is locked down, texting just runs up parents text plan, phones are removed from classroom. Still need destination sites and set systems need to customizable so that you can identify why people are using specific systems and then target kids in a relevant way in a "destination site" (i.e. why does facebook work and how to leverage that?)

Problem is nearly entirely social--how to convince university not to spend a huge amount on Blackboard, alternate tools seem to already exist

Understanding the commercial relationship of higher ed/student--committment to level of control, academic standard, etc.--universities need to figure out how to allow some flexibility and relinquish some control

copyright issues -- universities owning materials/tools created in their learning spaces

Mailing list:

Group will create a mailing list to continue the conversation beyond this session. Join mailing list here: XXXXXXXXXXXX

12:00–12:50

Storming the Grade Book
Activity Leader: Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University

Inspired by the  "storm" created by Cathy Davidson's blog post, "How To Crowdsource  Grading" that was picked up everywhere from the New York Times to Digg (http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/how-crowdsource-grading), this collaborative session will build a wiki resource of peer-to-peer alternatives to traditional grading. 

CHALLENGE QUESTIONS FOR OUR SESSION: IF OUR GOAL IS TO CREATE THE IDEAL FUTURE CLASSROOM, THEN WHY SHOULD WE GRADE (TO WHAT PURPOSE? FOR WHAT GOALS?) AND HOW SHOULD WE GRADE?

Contract Grading

Peer grading of blogs by weekly paired peer leaders

Blind Group Peer Evaluation by Secret Ballot

Peer Grading Where Recipient Did Not Know Who Would Be Doing the Grading (lottery method)

Transparent Peer Grading (recipient knows accessor before and after grading)

Game mechanics/Computer-enabled process assessment

Tale of the first unveling of crowd source grading (Cathy's blogging about new forms of grading, which was inspired by end of semester note by 2 students)

• • no multiple choice testing in Norway! (first mc was TOEFL)

MC good predictors of taking MC

developers of major Amercian MC test? No Child Left Behind? SUbsidery of Blackwater, the contract security people, recently taking heat for mowing down civilians. Zoinks.

Student has to answer the challenge--that can be done in multiple ways

Given the constraints of academia, how can we push those constraints for transformation?

Who evaluates whether the answer is right or wrong?

Other methods to challenge students besides traditional grading?

Why grade?-- Place for dialog about why students are here? Defining what it means to learn? Defining learning objectives

In US -- some graudate/undergraduate programs are going to pass/fail system

Grades create artificial goal posts, turns learning into "education". The premise of what education is for differs . . . method of chosen assessment must map to learning objectives

We are very narrow in what we choose to grade. Having resources may be more important that having "facts"

fear from North american in europe that north american systems trheatening european, "enlightened" systems

focus on improving test scores and mastering the assessment method rather than focus on enabling learning

14:00-15:50

Storming Publishing and Peer Review
Activity Leaders: Ken Wissoker (Duke University Press) and Whitney Trettien (Duke University).

In this session  we will pool intellectual and technological resources to build a toolkit  of readymade plug-ins to help scholars begin creating their own  webtexts, and we'll brainstorm tools to move the field forward. We’ll  collaboratively write and peer review a creative webtext; share exciting  new digital scholarship that utilizes the expressive power of the web;  discuss possible models for CC licensed and open access academic  publishing; brainstorm the future of peer preview in the wake of the Shakespeare Quarterly/Media Commons experiment; and explore how crowd sourcing and social media could shape academic publishing in ways beyond peer review.

Resources: (Hyperlinks to all listed resources below at http://stormingtheacademy.wikispaces.com/Storming+Publishing+and+Peer+Review)

Duke University Press Two Bits, by Chris Kelty; published by Duke University Press (2008) both in print and as a remixable e-text.

//Shakespeare Quarterly,// "Shakespeare and New Media" open review website "Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review," New York Times article on Shakespeare Quarterly's web-based peer review process (23 Aug 2010).

Gutenberg-e, e-books in history from Columbia University Press

Expressive Processing, by Noah Wardrip-Fruin; an experiment in blog-based peer review

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular Digital Defoe rhizomes

"Googling Peer Review," by Mike O'Malley (19 October 2010)

"Assessing the Future of Peer Review," AHA Today (7 June 2010)

"Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values," by Dan Cohen (27 May 2010) "Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values (Part 2)," by Stephen Ramsay (28 May 2010) "Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values (Part 3)," by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (28 May 2010)

Pros of peer review/publishing • Forced you to focus/elaborate your idea • Catch all system, you work once and it serves many purposes • Gift economy • Distributed process, requires faculty/reviewers throughout field/world • Portability • Pushes the field beyond the bounds of the discipline • More avante-garde/cutting edge than those that are colocated at the same insitution (external and credentialized knowledge that is not produced internally) • Production of actual physical objects • Conceptual qualities • Comes to people in more popular form like magazines, etc. translation of work into world at large • Permanency • Ideal of meritocracy • open to submissions

Negatives of peer review/publishing • Very inflexible and slow, ages to publish • Easy to be corrupted--you don't know who is behind it • Limited snapshot- it only governs one part of the process--things are excluded from the final product (i.e. the failures) • Limited review audience, perhaps with biases • Gigantic profit management machine for Elsevier • So much of apparatus of publishing is centralized • Hate Digital Rights Management (DRM) • Can be conservative • Can be hard to find scholarly publishing (decline of bookstores, not enough networking, not enough cross press communication structures) • The form itself--books and articles (that's all we've got?) • Time to go through the crisis • Volunteer labor required to produce • Lack of value/justification • increased centralization and what that means with regards to access--the titles that a library can afford to subscribe to and what that means for the voices that are represented in the scholarly discussion--less marginalized/fringe voices • blackhole • funneling • walmartification • form

Shakespeare Quarterly experiment: Added labor, problematic tradeoffs, it had a big problem of the amount of labor that was involved. Used CommentPress to allow paragraph by paragraph commenting. Did not get as many comments as they wanted. Biggest problem was not having the right tool. That might be where we want to go.

Giving people points for the qualities of their reviews would be a really good thing. But if you're good and people like the owrk you do, you'll get asked more and more and not be able to do it.

What do people thing about the curate first, then have asystem for peer review? A more open system where a community of people have more input on reviews etc.?

THe borader input could be at the curatorial level--should this get sent out to be reviewed? Could that be semi-open: I put up s/g to be reviewed by my FB friends, but not to the whole world. Curatorial communities--places for thigs to go.

Do journal boards work like this? Reviewer communities? Or are all the reviews done by anyone in the world?

The notion of recognition: If you're from a good publisher like Duke, you kind of can ask anyone. But if I want to get something reviewed for the Caadian Joural sf X, not so much.

Reviewers will come back and say, this looks like a good project, but not one for Duke. So they're projecting both about the work itself and about the community/publisher that they think it's important for.

In terms of the actual practie of who does the reivewing, the smaller the journal, the more the reviewing is done by friends of the journal.

There's a different process--who identitfies innovation--ina smaller area.

Media Ecology--a very small communitiy, not looking outside of their community. That's an emerging discipline, so it's a weird place in time bec. they're defining their field.

You oculd do more, as say, Duke, if you rolled out more books than you already do Just to roll out hugher numbers, print on demand, and suddenly little simple pamphlets become s.g more bec. people look at them bec. they're from a good publisher, even tho not a great publishing rubric. They're very well edited, have review boards, so only saving $$ on design and a little administrative. Also a question of speed--it can be really fast. Fromsubmittla to publishig in this way, 5 months. More presses shoud ldo that.

Print On Demand: Libraries perspective: UMich hasa machine that can print a perfect bound book in minutes--costs $4 and resells for $7-10. They use it largely for reprints of books in the public domain. Also galley copies for their Press. So it's not just on demand, it's also at the point of need.

Once there's more of an ability to buy pdfs, more readily, it can change the international cost for books.

Printing isn't radically transforming the way or what people write. Do other technologies change those things more? CommentPress, web sites, mixed media, Word Press, Sophie (concensus is that Sophie is not more). What makes it so hard for these tools to make it? THere's post-Vectors tool, Scalar. It's not a particular field, and it's not just linear writing, but also can edit story lines, etc.

Each unit has a text componenet, a visual component, and it's done so you can either choose a view that's mostly text with some visual, or mostly visual with text. The person who designs it designs a path through it, but the reader can define their path too. Need s/g more like WordPress that has media and text together, and wouldn't need a programmer to make it work.

What it takes to make Vectors is really resource and time and labor intensive. A non-saleable project that takes way more $$ to create it.

Vectors is also hiring developers to work and collaborate on the projects.

ALso brings up tenure, promotion, etc. Probably don't want to go down this rabbt hole today. Another challenge that we need to address if we want to change the whole system.

It's laso important to recognize that the way things are now is the waty they've been done for a long time. But things have already changed--email not putting article in an envelope and sending it--so we need to figure out how to putll a thread across the process and see that trajectory,

THere are more and more journals accepting digital essays, but they're not getting that many submissions bec. people don't know what they need to know submit.

Non-North American Examples?

There were many....but I missed them.

Cathy Davi=dson: the ROOM (novel) What wd be the literacies required for the digital world ideas experments experiences part of an edu exp to prepare and enrich them for the world I don’t have ap rojector that’s working so we’redoing TALK In this version of this cals I’m teaching next semester I’m starting ATTENTION is one of the literacies that’s my field and what I’m researching most

ORANGE CARDS: Ethics Design Participation Digital Divide Critical Consumption (crap detection) Attention Network awareness Global consciousness Collabaortaion Procedural literacy –game mechanicseach action create another series of possibilities Civic responsibility Narrative/storytelling Unlearning/ Learning Opennss Freedom Sustainability Preservation Advocacy

The way attn works is that anything you see there’s something you don’t see

Gorilla/basketball players (we stop to watch the video) Anything

Now you see it how the brain science of attention will transform the way we live work and learn

The reason I start w/ the gorilla experiment I saw it immediately b/c I’m dyslexic I knew I wdn’t beable to count the tosses profs are counting the baseketballs There were 70 of us only 3 that saw the gorilla Plays back into what Emily was talking about Minority opinion ½ the ppl think it’s important to count the basketballs and others are saying—hey the gorilla!!!

How do you train for a world? Both are essential skills HASTAC= collaboration by differece Instead of this seeming like a basic weakness/structural principle of the visiual cortex I see this sas a great mgmt principle Structural situation thru tools, conditions, specifying that one person’s role is not to pay attn

Bald guy w/ goatee and striped shirt p2pu Glasses

Account for different visions That’s a metaphor for everything learning disabilities the way if oyu have only a groupd of scientists miss other histories sense of who contributes and what counts Only have a bunch of ppl in the humanities iss al ot of what’s ahppening in the tech The tool creators often don’t have artists involved in the planning and building and conseptualizing of tools

I <3 that the ahcker bus has figurd outhat a real problem for our communityi s al ot of us look like upper class white ppl How do we build tools that do that

(Cathy is conducting a seminar )

Yet a gain the hacker bus has come up as our metaphor

Johannes: I’t sa complete social exclusion system if we just wait for ppl who already know to turn up

Cathy if we’re buidlgin all our platform and our tools so that we can use them, who’s the we that’s being excluded and not aprt of what ‘were doing

Striped shirt guy: instead of attention, INTention: hormones involved in paying attention There’s a process of acting and motivation that happenscloser to

The one thing you cannot see is what you cannot see It is impossible to see <what you can’t see> http://stormingtheacademy.wikispaces.com/Storming+the+Syllabus+Literacies

CHALLENGE QUESTIONS FOR OUR SESSION: IF OUR IDEAL FUTURE STATE IS TO HELP OUR STUDENTS BE THE BEST POSSIBLE PARTICIPANTS IN THE FREE AND OPEN WEB, THEN WHAT LITERACIES ARE MOST IMPORTANT FOR REACHING THAT GOAL? WHICH RESOURCES ARE BEST FOR UNDERSTANDING AND MASTERING EACH LITERACY? WHAT METHODS ARE BEST FOR TEACHING/LEARNING?

Some 21st Century Literacies---What are others? • Attention: What are the new ways that we pay attention in a digital era? How do we need to change our concepts and practices of attention for a new era? How do we learn and practice new forms of attention in a digital age? • Participation: How do we encourage meaningful interaction and participation? What is its purpose on a cultural, social, or civic level? • Collaboration: Collaboration can simply reconfirm consensus, acting more as peer pressure than a lever to truly original thinking. HASTAC has cultivated the methodology of “collaboration by difference” to inspire meaningful ways of working together. • Network awareness: How we both thrive as creative individuals and understand our contribution within a network of others? How do you gain a sense of what that extended network is and what it can do? • Global Consciousness: How does the World Wide Web change our responsibilities in and to the world we live in? • Civic Responsibility: How we can be good citizens of the Internet when we are off line, working towards real goals in our communities and using the community practices of sharing, customizing, and contributing online towards responsible civic action off line? • Design: How is information conveyed differently, effectively, and beautifully in diverse digital forms? How do we understand and practice the elements of good design as part of our communication and interactive practices? • Narrative, Storytelling: How do narrative elements shape the information we wish to convey, helping it to have force in a world of competing information? • Procedural Literacy: What are the new tactics and strategies of interactive games, where the multimedia narrative forms changes because of our success or failure? • Critical consumption of information: Without a filter (editors, experts, and professionals), much information on the Internet can be inaccurate, deceptive, or inadequate. How do we learn to be critical? What are the standards of credibility? • Digital Divides, Digital Participation: What divisions still remain in digital culture? Who is included and who excluded? How do basic aspects of economics and culture dictate not only who participates in the digital age but how we participate? • Ethics: What are the new moral imperatives of our interconnected age? • Advocacy: How do we turn collaborative, procedural thinking on line into activism in the real world? • Preservation: What are the requirements for preserving the digital world we are creating? Paper lasts. Platforms change. • Sustainability: What are the metrics for sustainability in a world where we live on more kilowatts than ever before? How do we protect the environment in a plugged-in era? • Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning: Alvin Toffler has said that, in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in one’s tracks, see what isn’t working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn.

More energy paying attn if yr not taking external I define attn not as a deficit but as that oyou’re focusing on at this moment when yr

I wd begin by teaching attention and not teach anything else. What projects, tools, ets we’re gg to contrubte together

What’s going around is little cards where I’ve listed balnk cards Talka bout and come up w/ a ranking system for what constitutes important literacy

Comment (Red leather jacket and red flower hair Spanish Mayo) 21st century What is NEW skills –some we needed before like ethics Cathy: New requirements Are there different kinds of ethics Diff code of ethics are they relevant to you not that first time in human history are we required to add new components for a digital age maybe we shd start w/ ethics—anything new about ethics for the 21st c

Red jacket—I think they’re equally important

Procedural literacy You can have procedures for unlearning and relearning Algorithms Video games as a strategy

This is most like a traditional seminar/lecture

Losing me…

Anna: advocacy: proficiency of self-advocacy Tables of other advocacies It made methink of advocacy in 2 diff ways

Design: In a way design is dead :learn to undesign less is more

Woman with black / silver scarf Fostering emergence How does design allow for more emergence And failure as a necessary step In a classroom and an open learning environment

Can’t transform w/ o trsanforming assessment Intrinsically if yr using prescribed method of analysis that has to fail and not ian good way

But once you’ve admitted that tht std is not Abcd some std where failure means failure

If you take away failure as a possibility in yr class it changes everything sometimes I ‘ve never not found it to be good If an A isn’t the goal it changes everything

Allison P2PU collaboration I think it might be new nad radical and the thing we call collab may be the long tradition of teaching cooperation which I think is more of a “coping method” than true collab And to truly collab in which all ppl come together in equity is one of the most important 21st c litracies

[cathy gets up and moves everyone around so the annoying woman in red is on the hot seat all I know is I don’t want to be here anymore]

Instead of imposing the discussion all we do is add more things to the list Literacy is a failed project

Are there other ocnce

Cathy: it’s not intended to be conclusive,conclusive, prescriptive

All pieces of paper are blank on one side Some are blank on both sides You can draw or write any word you want on one piece of paper

(here’s what I said: Judaism: the law: conversation: oral torah became written torah at the point where it was written down the converstion stopped what was important was the conversation—not memorizing old debates It’s amendable, amenable to amendment)

Collabaration: requires understanding of a shared task

This is nnot the New liberal arts

We’re talign about literacy Big issue in developing countries huge # of ppl who don’t have access to basic literacy We all become digital at some point and the digital divide is huge I’m really concerned about I live in my own experience w/ my own kids Outside of my own little world

(Across the square is coming drumming) on the wall pictures of different guitars)

I’m wondering what educators are thinking How can this change and become more complicated to amnage It seems like you can actually

Bald guy wit hstripes

I can’t aswer that from a fresh start We’re going from an industrial age to a digital one These ades are nothing compare to how long people have lived It’s a flickr What really has changed in the grand scheme of things It looks to me more like we’re returning to what has been cultivated as human faculties for millions of years before the indsutral revolution tribal communicative collaborative eve nif not cooperatve we can’t help but learn peer to peer it’s automaritc and to say that’s not happening is a huge fallacy I question that we’re seeing anything new we mightb be seeing something extremely old We’re disconnected Partly because the Ethnosphere is deterioriating Things that are deep down inside of us might be coming out again are terrifying but have always been there

That’s a brain dump on that point

Red jacket: in spain the gov’t has tried to introduce a new class as part of formal education

School for citizen ship Teachers are doing disobedience—they don’t want to give this class or giving it in English to take it off importance –[indoctrintion] Comment from hastacer--they are teaching it by not teaching it—boycotting civil disobedience is a fine form of engagement

Sandy: values and literacies are not the same thing you have to have the literacies to think critically bout the values

Cathy stands up and moves: which resources wd yu use to teach And what methods wd you use to teach each value or literacy Some of that gets insturmentalized when you think what resources and methods yr gg to use to t each those things

Unlearning: come up w/ use cases read 20 of the 300 pages Methods for unlearning Craezy wisdom Culture shock is the best Neurologically in every other way Anna; doing everything backwards:

Start w/ the tesdt : build it in stead of giving the students History learn it forwards instead of backwards It’s just I think of the worrd backwards To give the assumption That cd be procedural Making the students the teacher It’s just oing in the opposeite direction IN mgmt terms it’s the equivalent of culture shock

See others who don’t share yr assumptions trying to share yr problem w/o those assumptions

It’s humiliating

Cathy : look back on what you thought you know Seeing wht ppl who weren’t trained in yr skill saw

What has my “expertise” blinded me to? 

JADE: Mozilla Drumbeat: Learning, Freedom and the Web On November 3-5, Mozilla Foundation held their inaugural Drumbeat Festival on Learning, Freedom and the Web in Barcelona, Spain. These are some of my observations and thoughts on the event. I will also be completing a digital ethnography piece on the event to be shared at a later date. Sociable: • • Post Information o Date: Monday, November 08, 2010 Time: 4:39 pm Category: (un)conferences, digital Tagged drumbeat, festival, mozilla, open web Discussion: 1 Comment • Post Navigation o « …and there was THATCamp RTP o Last week, from Wednesday to Friday I was in Barcelona, Spain for the first Mozilla Drumbeat festival on Learning, Freedom and the Web. I was there as part of the HASTAC Storming the Academy tent and as a student. I didn’t get to wander too much, but that is okay. I am using the Storming the Academy tent as a field site for an ethnography project so it makes sense. It is also so interesting to hear what people are saying. I went to drumbeat with one question: “How do you imagine the involvement of tradition forms of Higher Education in the future of Freedom, Learning and the Web?” I actually had responses from everyone I spoke with other than “but how are we going to credential” which is not something that has happened yet in academic settings. Most people there were in agreement that the approach to learning and spaces of learning needs to be more holistic. However, people were still unwilling to completely let go of some of the ideals of industrialized education. They are just re-imagining them and making them more flexible. I would have to do more reflecting and exploring to determine if I think that is a good thing or a bad thing. Things that were great: • Gunner, quite possibly the best facilitator ever • The quality of everything • Conversations • Technology • Variety of people there Things that could have been better: • More local involvement (I am still not clear how locals are kept out of a conversation on the city as a classroom) • Volunteers to translate so participation is more open • Finding a means to encourage exploration • Putting people/tents closer together • Drink/Snack Stations (coffee, water, fruit, crackers throughout the event) • Longer time for sessions So, on to the points that I am trained to observe that were reproduced (as is normal and also abnormal) at the event. There was a very clear lack of diversity. In terms of people of color there were a few of us. I believe there was one other black American female and one European African female (she was amazing. Her name was Nadia, and her project makes my heart sing. It is called the Prototype Project, and yes, you should check it out). There was also at least one black American male from, from Chicago… and… I might have missed some people. There were some asian males, from all over, meaning US and UK asian ;0), but not as many as one often sees at big tech events. I also came in to contact with one asian female from the states. So that was interesting. Now on to the abnormal/positive observation: THERE WERE SO MANY FRIGGIN’ AMAZING WOMEN at the event. I didn’t realize, though I’m sure I’ve seen it before, that Mitchell Baker, the Chair of Mozilla Foundation, is a woman. And she was just one of too many to name who were in attendance. She and Cathy, the prof from the Duke class I was there with, gave the keynotes. That was super empowering. Also, even though they didn’t speak about it openly, the people who were interested in using digital media and the open source culture for advocacy were there, and we found each other. That was a wonderful thing. New Things I learned about that I am now all about from Drumbeat: • Learning without Frontiers (yes please) http://www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com/ • The Vienna Hack Bus (I love fun and tinkering and that is all this is) http://www.hackbus.at/ • The Prototype Project (totally earned a double mention) http://www.theprototypeproject.com/ • Universal Subtitles http://universalsubtitles.org/ • Web Made Movies (this is amazing) http://www.drumbeat.org/webmademovies • Switch Craft (Crafts meet technology!!!) http://www.iHeartSwitch.com (there was so much stuff I missed and didn’t get to play with though. I am so sad about that. Even the things mentioned above I only saw briefly.) So, I will go in to more detail about what I observed/did/the point was for me in the digital performance ethnography thing I am in the process of working on. I will post and update and link from this blog once it is ready (hopefully by the end of this crazy month). I am hoping I get invited back to next year’s event and that next year is in Amsterdam… but Amsterdam is just a personal preference.

Barcelona, Spain. November 5, 2010. At the closing ceremony of the first international Mozilla Drumbeat Festival on "Learning, Freedom, and the Open Web," Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker announced that five projects previewed at the Festival had been selected for further development by Mozilla, including three presented at HASTAC's "Storming the Academy" tent. Mozilla will take these projects forward from the prototype stage and for six months will feature them on the newly designed Drumbeat homepage (http://www.drumbeat.org/). Two of the HASTAC projects were proposed by one of HASTAC's founders, Professor Anne Balsamo (University of Southern California), as part of her ongoing work on the technological imagination. The third was prototyped by students in FutureClass, the peer-led tutorial on collaboration that Professor Cathy Davidson organized at Duke University. Five members of FutureClass accompanied Davidson and the HASTAC@Duke team to Barcelona and ran a three-day schedule of activities, demos, apps, and sessions as part of the "Storming the Academy" programming.

During the three days of the Festival, many new tools, apps, wikis, and other projects were prototyped or worked on collaboratively and brought to fruition. A Badge Lab was assembled from many volunteers and dedicated others to prototype badges that could gather information available publicly about a user and award a badge to the user to authenticate his or her past contributions, a way of instantly credentializing members of the open source and other contributor communities based not on external forms of credentials (such as college degrees) but on past contributions to the web. Video Lab also prototyped a remarkable new tool that can be used to transform any video into a website, pulling in data from the web, and also translating the video content simultaneously on the page, all generated from open content on the web. For a full list of these activities, see http://www.drumbeat.org/ For the full Storming the Academy tent schedule, visit: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/mdailey/storming-academy-tent HASTAC was the only organization representing the world of formal, higher education to be invited to be a community partner in this inaugural Mozilla Drumbeat event.

"We could not be more thrilled by our participation in the Drumbeat Festival," said Davidson, a cofounder of HASTAC and the principal administrative director of HASTAC's day-to-day operations, which are based at Duke University. When Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg (of UCHRI) first began gathering together colleagues like Balsamo, Ruzena Bajcsy, Kevin Franklin, Larry Smarr, John Seely Brown, Kathy Woodward, Tara McPherson, Julie Klein, and many others across the humanities, arts, engineering, and computational sciences to begin HASTAC's mission of transforming, reforming, and "storming" the academy with lessons modeled on the open web, they looked to the Mozilla Manifesto for inspiration. "It is truly thrilling that Mozilla not only invited HASTAC to participate in this first international festival but helped provide scholarships for some HASTAC staff and for the FutureClass students so we could serve as community partners. The excitement, enthusiasm, and collaborative spirit across the world of educators and open source and open web developer community was ideal. And to have three of our projects chosen by Mozilla as worthy of support--including one student-initiated project--is beyond our dreams."

HASTAC, as a network of networks, is dedicated to three intertwined goals: creative development of new technologies for learning and research; critical thinking about the role of technology in society; and new forms of participatory peer-learning and collaboration inspired by the open web. "We called ourselves the 'Mozilla of Higher Education' long before we had any connection with Mozilla," Davidson jokes. "It was great to hear others using the same designation for us. It is also exciting to be a conduit between the digital media and learning community and the open web learning communities. Together, we are a powerful alliance and we hope we can have an impact on policy. We all have to work to keep the Web an open learning space for humanity and the future."

HASTAC administers the annual $2 million Digital Media and Learning Competitions sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. One aim of the Mozilla Festival was to connect the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) open web developer spirit more closely both with learning programs for young people and with formal education as well.

The three HASTAC-sponsored projects that will receive extended developer attention from Mozilla are:

(1) Minority Voices in the Cloud/Crowd: Anne Balsamo's work on the technological imagination stresses that many of the digital tools upon which we have come to rely heavily embody some of the hierarchical assumptions of society more generally. In the HASTAC tent, she ran a performance and critical session called "Storming the Crowd/Cloud" to illustrate how minority opinion--fringe views, decentered views, eccentric views, unconventional views, or views by those who are not primarily in power (including feminist views or those by people of color or who are not in dominant cultures worldwide)--can be "in the fine print" rather than central in tag clouds and other ways of representing "the crowd." With Mozilla Foundation, she will work towards developing a new way of representing minority opinion and of reminding/educating users of visualization tools of de-centralized data that emerges from their searches.

(2) The Classroom Organizer: In her session on "Storming the Syllabus," Balsamo posed the question of what digital tools could help those of us required to teach large two-hundred person classes to break through the normal lecture format. She noted that she does not lecture, even in large required classes on "Introduction to Culture and Technology" but there is no current tool that allows her to rearrange a large class into small groups. Using the slow "unconference" process during a fifty or even a hundred-minute class period is unproductive and even demoralizing, since more time is spent on organizing than on thinking and working together. With Mozilla Foundation, she will work on a tool that almost instantaneously allows students to organize by interest-group, preference, or another specialized method in order to pursue a project or an idea in a small group setting.

(3) The Classroom Attention Barometer (CAB): FutureClass at Duke University has been responding to the challenge of finding new, interactive ways of learning in a co-located classroom, including the large lecture classroom. One method that FutureClass came up with arose from class discussions on attention and feedback. Most feedback devices simply record thumbs up or thumbs down assessments of faculty performance, creating an antagonistic relationship rather than finding ways that those in a class can participate, along with the professor, in a meaningful experience. FutureClass posited the idea of a device that every student could log into at the beginning of the course that would allow them to indicate moments of their most engaged and intense attention. The professor could either have this information broadcast live or, if superimposed onto a time-stamped recording of the class, could be viewed later. Research shows that no one pays attention to a lecture or even a performance uniformly. Where is attention greatest? The device could be used for real-time feedback, subsequent reshaping of a lecture, or could eventually have other components added, such as windows (also timestamped) where students could post ideas, questions, other resources, or engage in (moderated or unmoderated) social networking among themselves. A prototype of the original CAB was developed by Sam Iglesias, a recent Duke alum who is auditing FutureClass, and Andrew First (Pratt School of Engineering, Duke, 2010), a friend, now working at Google, who is not part of the class itself. It was previewed in the Storming the Academy tent at the Drumbeat Festival by Iglesias and Nick Bruns, a senior at Duke. FutureClass will work with the Mozilla developers to incorporate additional features into CAB.

Running the Storming the Academy tent at the Drumbeat Festival were Cathy Davidson (John Hope Franklin Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English at Duke), Mandy Dailey (Executive Project Manager for HASTAC and the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition), and Nancy Kimberly (Project Manager for HASTAC and the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition) plus five students from FutureClass: Nick Bruns (Duke 2011); Robert Curtis (Duke 2012); Jade Davis (Ph.D. student, Dept of Communications, University of North Carolina); Sam Iglesias (Duke alum, 2008 and Duke MBA, 2010); and Whitney Trettien (Ph.D. Student, Department of English, Duke). A sixth student, Mary Caton Lingold (Ph.D. Student, Department of English, Duke), worked very hard contributing to the FutureClass success in Barcelona but was unable to accompany the group. Other Storming the Academy sessions were run by Anne Balsamo (University of Southern California) and Trebor Scholz (New School).

All of the Storming the Academy sessions, all of the apps and demos, and all three of the tools that Mozilla will help to develop come out of extended discussions not only of how to build tools but of the role of tools in learning and in the need to consider cultural issues in tool development. In other words, all three exemplify core HASTAC values. HASTAC has pledged to keep its network informed of the progress on the development of these tools and others that may grow out of this partnership dedicated to "Learning, Freedom and the Open Web."