Google selected me as one of (the many) Google “Glass Explorers”, thanks to a tweet I sent saying how I would use Google Glass, namely:

#ifihadglass I’d find myself in the shoes of Vannevar Bush’s walnut-wearing (social) scientist, & I’d remember the names of my students :).

— halavais (@halavais) February 21, 2013

What this means is that I will, presumably over the next few months, be offered the opportunity to buy Google Glass before most other people get to. Yay! But it is not all good news. I get to do this only if I shell out $1,500 and head out to L.A. to pick them up.

Fifteen hundred dollars is a lot of money. I’d be willing to spend a sizable amount of money for what I think Glass is. Indeed, although $1,500 is on the outside of that range, if it did all I wanted it too, I might still be tempted. But it is an awful lot of money. And that’s before the trip to L.A.

To be clear, the decision is mostly “sooner or later.” I’ve wanted something very like Glass for a very long time. At least since I first read Neuromancer, and probably well before that. So the real question is whether it’s worth the premium and risk to be a “Glass Explorer.”

As with all such decisions, I tend to make two lists: for and against.

For:

• I get to play with a new toy first, and show it off. Have to admit, I’m not a big “gadget for the sake of gadgets” guy. I don’t really care what conclusions others draw relating to my personal technology: either whether I am a cool early adopter or a “glasshole.” I use tech that works for me. So, this kind of “check me out I got it first” doesn’t really appeal to me. I guess the caveat there is that I would like the opportunity to provide the first reviews of the thing.
• I get to do simple apps: This is actually a big one. I’m not a big programmer, and I don’t have a lot of slack time this year for extra projects, but I would love to create tools for lecturing, for control, for class management, and the like. And given one of the languages they support for app programming is Python–the one I’m most comfortable in–I can see creating some cool apps for this thing. But… well, see the con column.
• I could begin integrating it now, and have a better feel for whether I think it will be mass adopted, and what social impacts it might have. I am, at heart, a futurist. I think some people who do social science hope to explain. I am interested in this, but my primary focus is being able to anticipate (“predict” is too strong) social changes and find ways to help shape them. Glass may be this, or it may not, but having hands on early on will help me to figure that out.

Against:

• Early adopter tax. There is a lot of speculation as to what these things will cost when they are available widely, and when that will be. The only official indication so far is “something less than $1,500.” I suspect they will need to be much less than that if they are to be successful, and while there are those throwing around numbers in the hundreds, I suspect that price point will be right around $1,000, perhaps a bit higher. That means you are paying a $500 premium to be a beta tester, and shouldering a bit of risk in doing so.
• Still don’t know its weak points. Now that they are actually getting shipped to developers and “thought leaders,” we might start to hear about where they don’t quite measure up. Right now, all we get is the PR machine. That’s great, but I don’t like putting my own money toward something that Google says is great. I actually like most of what Google produces, but “trust but verify” would make me much more comfortable. In particular, I already suspect it has two big downvotes for me. First, I sincerely hope it can support a bluetooth keyboard. I don’t want to talk to my glasses. Ideally, I want an awesome belt- or forearm-mounted keyboard–maybe even a gesture aware keyboard (a la Swype) or a chording keyboard. Or maybe a hand-mounted pointer. If it can’t support these kinds of things, it’s too expensive. (There is talk of a forearm-mounted pad, but not a lot of details.)
• Strangleware. My Android isn’t rooted, but one of the reasons I like it is that it *could* be. Right now, it looks like Glass can only run apps in the cloud, and in this case, it sounds like it is limited to the Google cloud. This has two effects. First, it means it is harder for the street to find new uses for Glass–the uses will be fairly prescribed by Google. That’s a model that is not particularly appealing to me. Second, developers cannot charge for Glass apps. I can’t imagine this is an effective strategy for Google, but I know from a more immediate perspective that while I am excited to experiment with apps (see above) for research and learning, I also know I won’t be able to recoup my $1,500 by selling whatever I develop. Now, if you can get direct access to Glass from your phone (and this would also address the keyboard issue), that may be another matter.
• No resale. I guess I could hedge this a bit if I knew I could eBay the device if I found it wasn’t for me. But if the developer models are any indication, you aren’t permitted to resell. You are out the $1,500 with no chance of recovering this.

I will keep an open mind, and check out reviews as they start to trickle in from developers, as well as reading the terms & conditions, but right now, I am leaning to giving up my invite and waiting with the other plebes for broad availability. And maybe spending less on a video enabled quadracopter or a nice Mindstorms set instead.

Or, someone at Google will read this, and send me a dozen of the things as part of a grant to share with grad students so we can do some awesome research in the fall. But, you know, I’m not holding my breath. (I do hope they are doing this for someone though, if not me. If Google is interested in education, they should be making these connections.)

Related posts:

1. Glass factory
2. Google plus what?
3. The Privacy Trade Myth

That’s not to say endorsements are generally meaningless, although, for reasons I’ll discuss below, even the full text endorsements on LinkedIn have a systematic problem. But the basic issue here is: who are these people and are they qualified to judge?

I Like You as an X

As a friend noted upon receiving an endorsement in a field she has had only marginal experience with, and the endorser knew nothing about: “how can it possibly make sense for someone to endorse me for something I know nothing about? He might just as well endorse me for operating a crane :).” It is because endorsements are merely proxies for an expression of trust. There are no criteria for endorsement, nor anything beyond the binary “skilled or not.”

And it seems the interface is designed to encourage endorsements, with one recent implementation letting you do mass endorsement of a set of skills. The truth is, even with close colleagues, I have only a passing knowledge of, say, many of my LinkedIn connections’ teaching abilities. Some of them have been my students, and so they probably can say with some authority that I have the skill “teaching” but even then, are they saying I am a “good” teacher, a “great” teacher, or just that I am a “minimally acceptable” teacher.

Paging Mauss

One of the root issues of the new endorsement system is one it shared with the old endorsement process: implicit reciprocity. There was nothing built into the old system that provided this, but there was certainly the feeling that if you endorsed someone, they should endorse you back.

Perhaps this is in some general sense true of such textual endorsements in the real world, but if so, the connection is very tenuous. If I write a letter of recommendation for a student, I don’t expect her to write one back for me–not immediately at least, and probably not at all. Likewise, if I write a short endorsement for a consultant, for use in getting new clients, I have no expectation of a similar endorsement back. But on LinkedIn, it seems that one endorsement directly begets another. I suppose you could analyze this and see how many one-way endorsements there are, but I suspect there aren’t very many. I now generally don’t endorse people with textual statements, unless they specifically ask, because I don’t want it to look like I am attempting to get endorsements back. And, just to make this more complicated, if they don’t endorse me back, I wonder what this means.

This reciprocity is made even more extreme in the case of the new endorsements. When I get an email, and follow it to linked in, it prompts me: “Now it’s your turn.”

The idea of turn-taking is deeply ingrained in our social lives. Someone has done us a turn, and now we are expected to reciprocate. And just to make matters easier, I can by-pass all this messy “thinking” and just endorse-’em-all.

Brand Will Eat Itself

It’s not clear why LinkedIn would do something like this: increasing traffic at the cost of making their system laughable. Yes, I suppose they could just quietly kill off the project, but I suspect that a lot of people would be hopping mad if their hundreds of meaningless endorsements suddenly were no longer featured on their page.

Imagine an alternative LinkedIn–one that included elements of a portfolio, and asked for you to assess the work presented, or indicate the basis of your endorsement. Not just a collection of mutual back-scratchers (I’m forgoing the more obvious metaphor as this is a family blog), but a space in which people could say something real about their colleagues and their competencies. I suspect such a network would blow LinkedIn off the map.

Related posts:

1. What makes up a badge?

In order of importance:

Clean: I mean really clean. I’ve been in too many mid-range “nice” hotels with hair on the bathroom door. In the room where I am writing now, there is a fairly wide assortment of black hairs on the ceiling of the bathroom. I get it–it’s hard for many people to reach; get a stool!

Frankly a lot of this has to do with looking clean. Hotels choose materials that are supposed to wear well and not need replaced. However, many of these get funky pretty fast. I generally prefer things like hard floors and less textured walls not because they are comfortable, but because they give the impression of being clean. Likewise, modern furniture isn’t always my favorite, but it often seems cleaner.

Some people, I guess, find peeling wallpaper and worn carpets charming. I do not. Part of being clean is being relatively new, or at least “like” new.

Bed & Linens: I loved the Bed Wars. My current room has the Sheraton bed, which rocks. The linens are a little rough, but generally, this bed is way more comfortable than mine at home. Given these rooms are mostly for sleeping, this is really important. I don’t care if the other furniture is sparse or cheap, as long as the bed is good.

People: Every staff person I see should be the friendliest person I’ve met today. Honestly, a hotel that falls short on a lot of these other things will be saved by the right people behind the front desk. It’s not that I don’t care that you have had a long day, or that you are not thrilled to be working the late shift–I genuinely do. But part of your job is to believe that I am the best thing that has happened to you today, and to make me believe it too.

Dark and Quiet: Why, oh why, do hotels install blackout curtains that don’t close completely. I want a black room. And I want it as silent as a tomb. I know there is only so much you can do about this once a place is built, but given that I lived in an apartment in a pre-war building where you couldn’t hear the neighbors, I don’t know why that’s impossible for hotels. Even with this, you should provide ear plugs and a eye mask in every room. (I bring my own.)

Shower Pressure. I want insane amounts of hot water at a moment’s notice. And I don’t want the curtain touching me. (I’d prefer there were no curtain.) And I want a high shower head. I like the rain shower heads in the ceiling, but the only hotels where I’ve encountered those, I think, are in Europe.

Location / transportation: Of course, location, location, location. But especially in cities with good public transportation infrastructure, I love being across the street from a subway stop, and easy access from the airport. If I have to park, I want to park myself (I hate valets) in a garage under the hotel. I also love hotels that are across from a market, and an easy walk to a wide range of restaurants.

No Waiting: I should be checked in no more than 3 minutes, and out instantaneously. Even if you are friendly, I don’t want to wait. I want to get showered and get some sleep.

No Tipping: Unfortunately, much of the world is picking up the US tipping culture. I would happily pay more for a room where they payed their staff a salary that did not require tips and instituted a no tipping policy. It’s not going to happen, I know.

Usable Fridge: In the room I’m in, there is a fridge with minibar stuff. They charge you $25 if you empty it and put your own stuff in. They charge you $25 to rent a fridge. It’s not about my comfort and convenience, it’s about how much discomfort you want to inflict for those unwilling to pay. The principle of the thing annoys me. I know there are people who pull stuff from the mini bar. If it were only marginally more expensive than the market downstairs, I would too. But I’m not paying $0.25 an oz for Perrier. And given what I’m paying a night, you could buy me a fridge and send it home with me.

Water. Speaking of which: on a $200 room, you can afford to provide a 1l bottle of purified water. Hell, bottle it yourself, I don’t care. At this one, they want $3 for that 1l bottle. They do give you the tiniest bottle of water you’ve ever seen for free. Do not capitalize on my dehydration!

Net. You would think, given how often this is raised, one of the large chains would really leverage free WiFi. A number of the mid-range and economy hotels do. I want WiFi in my room. I rarely touch the TV, and although I’ve ordered movies for the kids at some point, I don’t think I have for myself in at least five years. I don’t need a phone. But I need net. The hotel I’m writing this in has basic net for $13 a day and higher speed for more. Interesting idea, but make the basic free, and you’re getting somewhere.

Light. I hate anemic lighting, and despise fluorescents that buzz or whine.

Ninja maids: I want my room made up within seconds after I leave it. At the very least, when I’m away for four hours, I shouldn’t come back to a dirty room.

Design: I love hotels that have taken design seriously, and don’t look like every other hotel I’ve been to. Again, the Europeans do way better on this account in my experience. I get that people feel more comfortable with a design they’ve seen before, but I would rather a bit of funkiness. And when in doubt, add water features and greenery.

Note that there are a bunch of things I really don’t care about. I don’t need a fancy lobby; they’re sometimes fine, but I’ll go hang out in the lobby of some other hotel if I need one. I don’t need a giant room: as long as I can move comfortably–especially in the bathroom–I’m fine. Unless it’s a resort, I don’t really care about the pool or gym. And as long as there are good restaurants around or attached, I don’t need a hotel restaurant. I’d far prefer they give me some local delivery options than having to rely on room service, generally. (Though if you are going to do room service, be sure to offer Eggs Benedict with real Hollandaise!)

I realize that hotels have to cater to different kinds of guests, as well as to individual differences. But if you follow the above guidelines, at least I’ll have some places to stay.

Related posts:

1. Coolest. Hotel. Ever.
2. None of my business
3. Talon: SUV from hell

I was thinking about this during the Digital Medial and Learning conference in Chicago this week, and especially during the session titled Make, Do, Engage. The whole conference has a double set of themes. The official theme has to do with civic culture, and my favorite sessions this year have talked about new forms of activism and ways of encouraging social justice. But there is also a focus (including a pre-conference) on making stuff. Panelists spoke about ways students subvert game construction, the idea of jugaad, and thoughts about hacking-based media literacies. There seemed to be an interweaving here between building “stuff” (technology) and building government, and learning. This nexus (learning, politics, and making) was very present at the conference, and hits directly on my specific intersection of interests, so it has been an especially engaging conference for me this year.

In particular, the question is how to lead people to be more willing to engage in hacking, and how to create environments and ecosystems that encourage hacking of the environment. Rafi Santo talked a bit about the “emergence” of the hashtag as an example of Twitter’s relative hackability when compared with Facebook. (The evolution of features of Twitter is something I write about in a short chapter in the upcoming volume Twitter and Society.) Chris Hoadley also talked about the absence of any sort of state support for physical infrastructure led people to have to engage in their own hacks. This recalled for me a point made by Ethan Zuckerman about Occupy Sandy as being an interesting example of collective action that had a very real impact.

At one point Ingrid Erickson mentioned that she had been talking with Rafi about “do it together” technologies–making the hacking process more social. But part of me is much more interested in infrastructure for creativity–forcing people to work together. No one would wish Sandy on any group, but that particular pressure, and the vacuum of institutional support, led to a Temporary Autonomous Government of sorts that stepped in and did stuff because it needed to be done. I also recalled danah boyd mentioning earlier something that anyone who has ever taught in a grad program knows full well: placing a group in a difficult or impossible situation is a good way to quickly build an esprit de corps and bring together those who would otherwise not necessarily choose to collaborate. With all of these ideas mixing around, I wonder if we need a new aesthetic of “undoing it yourself.”

Yes, I suppose that could be what jailbreaking a phone is about, or you might associate this with frame-breaking or other forms of sabotage. But I am thinking of something a bit more pre-constructive.

I went to a lot of schools as a kid; more than one built on one or another piece of the Montessori model. At one, there was a pile of wood, a hammer, and some nails. It wasn’t in a classroom, as I recall, it was down at the end of a hall. If I asked, they would let me go mess with it. It was dangerous: I managed to hammer my thumb with some consistency. And I would be very surprised if they had an outcome in mind; or even if I did. I think I made a model boat. I don’t think anyone would have guessed it was a model boat unless I had told them.

In a more structured setting, piles of Lego bricks might want to look like what is on the cover of the box. And I am sure there are kids who manage–at least once–to achieve the vehicles or castles shown there. But that’s not why you play with Lego. Some part of me really rebels against the new Lego world, with the huge proliferations of specialized pieces. But the truth is that as a kid the specialized pieces were the interesting bits, not the bare blocks. The core 8×2 were there almost as a glue to keep the fun bits together.

Especially in the postmodern world we celebrate the bricoleur, we recognize hybridized work and kludges as interesting and useful, but far less thought is put into where that stuff comes from. Disassembly precedes assembly. I’m interested in what it means to be an effective disassembler, to unmake environments. There is space for scaffolding only once you’ve actually torn down the walls.

I think we need an Undo-it-Yourself movement. People who individually loosen bolts and disconnect wires. Who destroy mindfully. Those who leave junk in your way, knowing that you might see yourself in it. Our world is ripe for decomposition. New ideas about how we shape our built environment and our society are not born out of the ashes of the past, but out of the bits and pieces that are no longer attached the way the Designer intended.

I am not advocating chaos. I’m not suggesting that we should start an evil organization that turns every screw we encounter twice anti-clockwise. Perhaps what I am suggesting is something somewhere between the kit and the junkyard. Something with possibilities we know and we don’t know. Disassemblies of things for playing with.

Related posts:

1. DML Conference 1st Draft
2. iPad for $250
3. Binary Encoding

To provide what is perhaps too brief a gloss on Mitch Resnick’s critique, he is concerned that the badges come to replace the authentic learning experiences. He illustrated this by relaying a story about hiking the Appalachian trail, and having people talk about “peaking”–hitting as many peaks as possible in a given day. This misses the reason for doing the hike in the first place. He worries–as Alfie Kohn did about gold stars–that badges will be used to motivate students. He showed a short conversation between Salmon Kahn and Bill Gates in which they joke about how badges shape kids’ motivations. I am really glad that Resnick raises (and keeps raising) these issues. When badges end up replacing learning, rather than enhancing it, we are producing an anti-learning technology. We need to not be creating a technology of motivation, but one that provides recognition, authentic assessment, and an effective alternative to traditional credentials and learning records.

Which brings us to Oz, and a charlatan wizard from Kansas. You may not remember this, but when Dorothy and her friends show up to get their hearts and minds, the wizard instead awards them with badges. To go back to the source:

“I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy.

“Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man, but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”

“Can’t you give me brains?” asked the Scarecrow.

“You don’t need them. You are learning something every day. A baby has brains, but it doesn’t know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.”

“That may all be true,” said the Scarecrow, “but I shall be very unhappy unless you give me brains.”

The false Wizard looked at him carefully.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “I’m not much of a magician, as I said; but if you will come to me tomorrow morning, I will stuff your head with brains. I cannot tell you how to use them, however; you must find that out for yourself.”

“Oh, thank you–thank you!” cried the Scarecrow. “I’ll find a way to use them, never fear!”

“But how about my courage?” asked the Lion anxiously.

“You have plenty of courage, I am sure,” answered Oz. “All you need is confidence in yourself. There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger. The True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid, and that kind of courage you have in plenty.”

“Perhaps I have, but I’m scared just the same,” said the Lion. “I shall really be very unhappy unless you give me the sort of courage that makes one forget he is afraid.”

“Very well, I will give you that sort of courage tomorrow,” replied Oz.

“How about my heart?” asked the Tin Woodman.

“Why, as for that,” answered Oz, “I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.”

“That must be a matter of opinion,” said the Tin Woodman. “For my part, I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur, if you will give me the heart.”

“Very well,” answered Oz meekly. “Come to me tomorrow and you shall have a heart. I have played Wizard for so many years that I may as well continue the part a little longer.”

In the end, he gives them tokens in the book which the three companions take to be real. But in the movie, these mere tokens are replaced by their modern equivalents: the diploma, a testimonial, and a purple heart.

Now, as someone who sees badges as useful and helpful, it may seem odd to raise this as an example. After all, the Wizard keeps his eyes wide open about the value of things like military badges or diplomas. He has no illusions about the ways in which these things are abused in the strange world of “Kansas.” And, as I said, he is a faker.

On the other hand, the Wizard’s actions are about recognizing the achievements of the three. The viewer, of course, knows that the three already have demonstrated their desired abilities, through their journey along the YBR, and their experience meeting with a significant challenge. They have already achieved more than they themselves knew. Badges represent recognition, and as those in the badge community who like the game mechanics metaphor (I don’t) say “leveling up.” In this case, the badges are being used not just to let the world know about the protagonists’ achievements and experience, but also to open their eyes to their own accomplishments–to mark that learning as important.

There will continue to be a tension between motivation–stepping up to meet others’ achievement–and recognizing the achievements of learners. It’s an important tension, and I think there needs to be a significant amount of focus on how we can effectively walk that line. How can we avoid the worst kinds of badging?

I don’t have a good answer to that, but I have two suggestions:

First, the evidence behind the badge should not–cannot–be ignored. Right now the “evidence link” is optional for the OBI. I am happy it is there at all, but I wish that it were required. Of course, it’s wide open–that “evidence” could just be a score on a quiz. But there is the potential for backing badges with authentic assessment. I would love for badges to essentially be pointers to portfolios.

Second, I think it’s vital that learners be involved in the creation of badges. People often drag out the apocryphal quote from Napoleon about soldiers giving their lives for bits of ribbon. There is a significant danger that the future of badges will be dictated by the state (at whatever level) or standardized curricula. I think it is important to keep badging weird. One of the best ways to do that, and to undermine the colonization of badging by commercial interests and authoritative educational institutions is to makes sure the tools to create and issue badges are widely available and dead simple to use.

Related posts:

1. Re-Presenting Badges
2. Badges: The Skeptical Evangelist
3. Reddit, Course Discussion, and Badges

There are lots of other things I would like to try, including BuddyPress, but this is a simple one-time site that works well for the seminar style of discussion.

For your stacking pleasure, here are the plugins currently on my course site, copy and pasted with their existing descriptions from my plug-in page, along with a short explanation in italics of why I have it installed. I’ve also left out Jetpack and the other plugins that are installed by default.

CommentPress Core

CommentPress allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. You can use it to annotate, gloss, workshop, debate and more!

I’ve been using CommentPress for a while now. Others seem to like digress.it, but after being stung with an error early on, I largely abandoned it. I experimented with an install this semester before deciding to stay with CommentPress, which is even better with some recent improvements. I like being able to do my course readings and lectures as WordPress Pages, keeping the Posts for a running a course blog. (I usually change the default setup so that the blog goes back to the front page.)

Comment Rating

Allows visitors to rate comments in a Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments can be displayed differently. This plugin is simple and light-weight. Configure it at Settings → Comment Rating.

I wanted a way for students to indicate agreement or appreciation without posting “+1″ or “I agree!”

Comment Reply Notification

When a reply is made to a comment the user has left on the blog, an e-mail shall be sent to the user to notify him of the reply. This will allow the users to follow up the comment and expand the conversation if desired. 评论回复通知插件, 当评论被回复时会email通知评论的作者.

So the major issue with CommentPress is that comments don’t show up in temporal order, and it’s hard to see if someone has commented on what you have said. The new “activity” tab helps, but I also want to make sure people can get bugged via email.

Email Users

Allows the site editors to send an e-mail to the blog users. Credits to Catalin Ionescu who gave me some ideas for the plugin and has made a similar plugin. Bug reports and corrections by Cyril Crua, Pokey and Mike Walsh.

I already have this function on my university system for students who are actually for-credit students, but since I like to open my classes, this lets me email everyone in the course.

My Page Order

My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.

Like it says… This makes it easier to arrange the order of pages into the order I want for the course.

Peter’s Login Redirect

Redirect users to different locations after logging in. Define a set of rules for specific users, user with specific roles, users with specific capabilities, and a blanket rule for all other users. This is all managed in Settings > Login/logout redirects.

As noted below, I make everyone using the site register. The downside of this, is that it forces them to the Dashboard. Especially for students unfamiliar with blogging, this can lead to rapid freaking out.

Registered Users Only

Redirects all non-logged in users to your login form. Make sure to disable registration if you want your blog truely private.

I don’t disable registration until a week or two after the semester begins. Everyone signs up for an account, and the blog is protected. I sometimes make fair use of copyrighted materials, but that doesn’t mean I want to republish to the entire world and get myself in hot water. So, we need to put a front door on things.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notifications. It includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts or suspend all notifications.

Seem like overload with the above plugin for notifications? Yeah, it probably is. But I want participants to know when people want to talk.

WP-DBManager

Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database.

Unless you are lucky enough to have your campus IT folks backing you up, disaster is on your plate. You think it’s bad when your blog goes down? Imagine what happens when your class explodes. I back up the file system, then have this email me a copy of DB so that I won’t lose comments, etc., in case of a complete meltdown/lost host/hacked site/alien invasion/etc.

WP-UserOnline

Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress site.

As I said, I want to build in more in the way of awareness. That probably means bringing in BuddyPress, and the variety of plugins that allows. For now, this just lets users know that they are not on the site alone. (Though they often are.)

Comment Leaderboard

I haven’t bothered to wrap the below snippet into a plug-in, since I didn’t expect a lot of people would need it. For now, if you are interested, you can drop it right into the top of your Theme Functions (functions.php):

This creates a new widget on the dashboard that lists all the users on the site, along with the number of comments they have made, the total upvotes the user has received, and the score of their highest upvoted comment.

function wpmods_dashboard_widget() {
  global $wpdb;
  $where = 'WHERE comment_approved = 1 AND user_id <> 0';
  $comment_counts = (array) $wpdb->get_results("
    SELECT user_id, COUNT( * ) AS total, 
    SUM(comment_karma) AS karmasum, 
    MAX(comment_karma) AS karmamax
    FROM {$wpdb->comments}
    {$where}
    GROUP BY user_id
    ", object);
  echo '<table><tr>
        <td>Username</td>
        <td>Total Comments</td>
        <td>Total Karma</td>
        <td>Peak Karma</td></tr>';
  foreach ( $comment_counts as $count ) {
    $user = get_userdata($count->user_id);
    echo '<tr><td>' . $user->display_name . 
     '</td><td align="center">' . $count->total . 
     '</td><td align="center">' . $count->karmasum . 
     '</td><td align="center">' . $count->karmamax.
     '</td></tr>';
  }
  echo '';
}

function wpmods_add_dashboard_widget() {
  wp_add_dashboard_widget( 
    'wpmods-custom-widget', 
    'Comment Count', 
    'wpmods_dashboard_widget' );
}

add_action( 
  'wp_dashboard_setup', 
  'wpmods_add_dashboard_widget' );

Let me know if there is another plug-in I should try!

Related posts:

1. Redirect Loop in WordPress
2. CommentPress and Diigo
3. NoFollow for Word Press

One of my earliest questions, asked a couple of years ago, about badges and the Open Badge Infrastructure is whether you could put badges into the infrastructure that the issuers didn’t intend (specifically) to go into the OBI. And here we have a great example: the “I walked 5000 steps” badge you see here. When I earned it, via FitBit, it let me share it via Facebook or Twitter, and so I did. Now, on my FB page is a note that I was awarded the badge.

The question is simple. Can you have a “helper app” that takes badges earned on FitBit, or on StackOverflow, or on Four Square (you get the idea), and places them in my badge backpack. Let’s just assume for the moment that these badges, like the FitBit badge, are sitting somewhere out in the open. So, here are some of the questions this raises:

Who owns the badge image

Can I assume, since they are allowing me to put the image on FB, that I can use the image to represent myself in various venues, particularly if the badge is “properly earned”? E.g., is my use above “fair” or am I impinging on their copyright/trademark by using the image? Legally, it seems to me that they could easily claim that they haven’t granted me an explicit license, though I think it would be a mistake to *stop* the flow. After all, why give a badge if you don’t want people to display it? So, at this point, I would say it is an issue of asking forgiveness rather than permission…

More technically, I would assume that the “helper site” would cache the image, rather than providing the OBI with the original image location on, e.g., the FitBit site. That means the helper site would be taking on some liability, but I assume they could easily claim to be a DMCA safe harbor and have appropriate take-down processes?

More generally, the ownership of badge images is likely to become a pretty hot topic. All of the sudden, a lot more people are creating trademarks, and they are likely going to be coming too close to comfort to one another.

Finally, on this topic, I could create a badge that suggests that the FitBit badge was earned, but was my own badge design. At that point, I think there isn’t much FitBit could do to complain. But it would make so much more sense if you could just use the initial badge image.

Are you that person?

The issue of stolen glory is tougher. If you have this middle layer, how does it know you are who you say you are on the other services? If they have some form of data sharing or identity API (e.g., OAuth) there may be ways to “connect” to the account and demonstrate ownership, but these are not universal.

For systems that do not provide an open API for authentication, you would have to play with some kind of work-around to get users to prove they have access to the site. That is possible, but likely too cumbersome to make sense. Luckily, OAuth seems to be more common these days than it once was, and it might be possible to set up a kind of middle layer that helps users on systems that already employ badges move those badges to an OBI backpack. (Some of this could likely be made easier with broad adoption of Persona, but even if I am encouraging my students this semester to set up a Persona account, I’m not going to put too many eggs in that basket until it gets widespread adoption.)

BadgePost2

I unceremoniously killed off the BadgePost system. It was a great learning system, and I can see how it might be useful to others. That said, I think it makes more sense to leverage existing systems. And I like the idea of building a kind of “middle layer” that can draw on badge systems that already exist. I expect my early targets to be:

• FitBit: why not?
• FourSquare: Since even people who no longer use it seem to have 4sq badges :).
• Reddit: They have no badges, really, but we can layer our own on based on karma alone. (Like the Reddit badge for this course, though more automagically generated.)
• WordPress: There is an OAuth plug-in for WordPress already, and several badge plugins. Should be possible to leverage a WordPress site running the right stack…

Related posts:

1. Reddit, Course Discussion, and Badges
2. Badges: The Skeptical Evangelist
3. ELD12 Presentation: More on Badges

I had a few fairly trivial achievements, on various fronts, something my new Faculty Annual Report does a nice job reminding us of on the career side. I learned to have a new disdain for the Phillips head screw. I finally got my tread desk set up. With a great deal of help, I think the association I help run has made some significant improvements. But there has been a bit of learning to do little things better, I think.

It was a year, if anything, of transition. I’ve moved a lot in my life, but the move to Arizona and the purchase of a house here was a much bigger deal than I had expected. And Manhattan and Phoenix are very different places in more ways than the weather. I love a lot about our new home base, but the transition has been far more difficult than I would have expected. I feel deeply uprooted, which is strange for someone with no real roots to speak of. In the end, this year will be remembered mainly for that: “the move.” I hope it will be an inflection point for the better, but to be honest, it’s too soon to tell. I think it was a good move for me, but I don’t know yet if it was the best choice for my family. I am hopeful, though.

For me 2012 is then a year of ambiguity. I’ve laid the Wheel of Fortune; the magic eight ball says “Ask Again Later.”

2013 Tracking

I’m not going to make resolutions; or rather, my resolutions should be apparent in the things I am tracking. I will be keeping a record of:

• The number of articles or chapters I submit each month
• Grants applied for
• The number of blog-posts each month
• The (self-reported) good class meetings I have
• Student teaching evaluations
• The hours spent on various projects (in order to see where effort is best maximized)
• Food eaten (just opened an account on My Fitness Pal
• Steps taken (Fitbit is charged, and this time, leashed!)
• Some other random bits

I don’t have goals for most of these yet–or rather the goals are intentionally fairly mutable. I’ll adjust as I see fit during the year, coming up with different goals, metrics, and categories as we go.

I’ll also keep a list of one-off accomplishments, and things learned, that don’t easily fit into quantification.

I plan to put these together into an Annual Report at the end of the year. This isn’t the first time I’ve planned to do so, but perhaps that’s my single resolution this year: to keep track consistently.

Related posts:

1. New Year’s Resolution #6
2. Glorious Five Year Plan
3. This year’s performance measures

I want to be able to argue that online courses are as good as their offline counterparts, but it’s difficult, because we don’t really know that. And this is for a lot of reasons.

The UoP Effect

First, if traditional and elite universities had been the originators of successful online courses and degrees, or if they had promoted those successes better (since I suspect you can find some pretty substantial successes reaching back at least three decades), we wouldn’t have the stigma of the University of Phoenix and its kin. For many, UoP is synonymous with online education, particularly in these parts (i.e., Phoenix).

Is UoP that bad? I don’t know. All I have to judge them on is people I’ve met with UoP degrees (I was not at all impressed), and what I’ve heard from students. What I do know is that they spend a lot of money on advertising and recruiting, and not very much money on faculty, which to me suggests that it is a bad deal.

Many faculty see what UoP and even worse for-profit start-ups are doing and rightly perceive it as a pretty impoverished model for higher education. They rightly worry that if their own university becomes known for online education, it will carry the same stigma a University of Phoenix degree does.

The Adjuncts

At ASU, as with many other research universities, the online courses are far more likely to be taught by contingent faculty rather than core tenure-track faculty, and as a result the students are more likely to end up with the second-string. I’ll apologize for demeaning adjuncts: I know full well that if you stack up the best teachers in any department there is a good chance that adjuncts will be among them, or even predominate. But on average, I suspect that a class taught by an adjunct instructor is simply not as good as one taught by full-time research faculty. There are a lot of reasons for this, but perhaps the most important one is that they do not have the level of support from the university that regular faculty do.

I’ve been told by a colleague here that they wanted to teach in the online program but were told that they were “too expensive” to be employed in that capacity. And there is a model that is beginning to separate out course design, “delivery”(ugh!) or “facilitation,” and evaluation. But I suspect the main reason more full-time faculty don’t teach online is more complicated.

Online is for training, not complex topics

This used to be “Would you trust a brain surgeon with an online degree?” which is actually a pretty odd question. Brain surgeons in some ways have more in common with auto mechanics than they do with engineers, but the point was to test whether you would put yourself in mortal danger if you were claiming online education was good. Given how much surgery is now done using computer-controlled tools, I think some of that question is moot now, but there remains this idea that you can learn how to use Excel online, but you certainly cannot learn about social theory without the give-and-take of a seminar.

It’s a position that is hard for me to argue against, in large part because it’s how almost all of us in academia learned about these things. I too have been taught in that environment, and for the most part, my teaching is in that environment. As one colleague noted, teaching in a physical classroom is something they have been taught how to do and they have honed their craft; they do it really well. Why are they forced to compete for students with online courses when they know they would not be as effective a teacher in that environment?

But in many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Few schools require “traditional” faculty to teach online, though they may allow or even encourage it. As a result the best teachers are not necessarily trying to figure out how to make online learning great. We are left with the poor substitute of models coming from industry (modules teaching employees why they should wear a hair net) and the cult of the instructional designer.

Instructional Designers

As long as I’ve already insulted adjuncts, I’ll extend to instructional designers. I know a lot of brilliant ones, but the “best practices” make online education into the spoon-feeding idiot-proof nonsense that many faculty think it is. It is as if the worst of college education has been simmered until you get it down to a fine paste, and this paste can be flavored with “subject expertise.” Many are Blackboard personified.

When you receive a call–as I recently did–for proposals to change your course so that it can be graded automatically, using multiple guess exams and the like, it makes you wonder what the administration thinks good teaching is.

I am a systematizer. I love the idea of learning objectives aligned with assessments and all that jazz. But in sitting through a seminar on Quality Matters recently, we found ourselves critiquing a course that encouraged participation on a discussion board. How did discussion align with the learning objectives? It didn’t. OK, let’s reverse engineer it. How can you come up with a learning objective, other than “can discuss matters cogently in an online forum” that encourages the use of discussion-based learning. Frankly, one of the outcomes of discussion is a personalized form of learning, a learning outcome that really comes out as “Please put your own learning outcome here, decided either before or after the class.” Naturally, such a learning outcome won’t sit well with those who follow the traditional mantra of instructional design.

QM has its heart in the right place: it provides a nice guideline for making online courses more usable, and that’s important. But what is vital is making online spaces worthy of big ideas, and not just training exercises.

The Numbers

I like the idea of the MOOC, and frankly, it makes a lot of sense for a lot of courses. It’s funny when people claim their 100-student in-person class is more engaging than a 1,000-student online course. In most cases, this is balderdash. Perhaps it is a different experience for the 10 people who sit up front and talk, but generally, big classes online are better for more students than big classes off.

Now, if you are a good teacher, chances are you do more than lecture-and-test. You get students into small groups, and they work together on meaningful projects, and the like. Guess what: that’s true of the good online instructors as well.

I think you can create courses that scale without reducing them to delivery-and-test. ASU is known for doing large-scale adaptive learning for our basic math courses, for example, and I think there are models for large-scale conversation that can be applied to scalable models for teaching. It requires decentering the instructor–something many of my colleagues are far from comfortable with–but I am convinced highly scalable models for interaction can be developed further. But scalable courses aren’t the only alternative.

I think the Semester Online project, which allows students from a consortium of universities to take specialized small classes online, is a great way to start to break the “online = big” perception. Moreover, you can make small online course materials and interactions open, leading to a kind of TOOC (Tiny Open Online Course) or a Course as a Fishbowl.

Assessment as Essential

I’ll admit, I’m not really a big part of the institutionalized assessment process. But it strikes me as odd that tenure, and our continued employment as professors, is largely based on an assessment of the quality of our research, not just how many papers we put out–though of course, volume isn’t ignored. On the other hand, in almost every department in the US, budgeting and success is based on FTEs: how can you produce more student hours with less faculty hours. Yes, there is recognition for effective and innovative teaching. But when the rubber hits the road, it’s the FTEs that count.

Critics of online education could be at least quieted a bit if there were strong structures of course and program assessment. Not just something that gets thrown out there when accreditation comes up, but something that allowed for the ongoing open assessment of what students were learning in each class. This would change the value proposition, and make us rethink a lot of our decisions. It would also provide a much better basis for deciding on teachers’ effectiveness (although the teacher is only one part of what leads to learning in a course) than student evals alone.

This wouldn’t fix everything. It may very well be that people learn better in small, in-person classrooms, but that it costs too much to do that for every student or for every course. The more likely outcome, it seems to me, is that some people learn some things better online than they do offline. If that’s the case, it would take the air out of the idea that large institutions are pursuing online education just because it is better for their bottom line.

In any case, the idea that we are making serious, long-term investments and decisions in the absence of these kinds of data strikes me as careless. Assessment doesn’t come for free, and there will be people who resist the process, but it seems like a far better metric of success than does butts in seats.

Related posts:

1. Rank Teacher Ranking
2. Mind the MOOC?
3. Buffet Evals

Using existing social software for course management is also nothing new. The code that runs Slashdot has been used for course management, and there is a robust community of people using WordPress and other blogs to run their courses. (I’ve done this for well over a decade now.) So, why Reddit?

Over the last few semesters, I have been experimenting with a badge system, tagged on to a home-rolled portfolio structure. It wasn’t really what I intended at the beginning, but it kind of evolved into that. And it looked a heck of a lot like Reddit, once things were said and done.

I got there backwards. My interest was not just in “discussion” but in developing students’ ability to argue, critique, and ultimately, to assess the work of others and their own work. Some of that includes “meta-assessment”–or what otherwise might be considered meta-moderation. This shows up in a lot of online discussion environments these days; Reddit is just one. I think Stack Overflow presents an equally strong contender here, but given the topic of the course, I settled on Reddit.

Both Stack Overflow and Reddit offer their code for download (and expansion, etc.). For now, I think that’s unnecessary. That said, I am wondering how hard it would be to simply layer a badge system on top of Reddit (or a Reddit clone). As I said, I got very near to something that looked like Reddit or Stack Overflow by trying to create a system that allowed users to upload something for peer evaluation. I can imagine a badge system that would observe a particular post on Reddit as a claim to a badge, and evaluate the comments (potentially giving higher weight to those who held expert-level badges in the area), generating a badge that could then show up in someone’s OBadge Backpack

The only tricky part of this might be to make sure that the person claiming to be the poster is actually the poster. That authentication bit (see every IAmA post!) is not obvious or easy, without the user revealing their email. I suppose they could be asked to post using a particular code for “linking” their email to a Reddit user-ID, but this seems more than a little clunky.

This could be done with reddit.com directly without ever touching the code. A browser plugin might actually be able to handle all the UI, as well, leaving the backend on a fairly quiet server somewhere.

Related posts:

1. ELD12 Presentation: More on Badges
2. Badges: The Skeptical Evangelist
3. What makes up a badge?

I’m not stupid–I know that astroturf exists and that Amazon Reviews are a good place for it to exist. Heck, I even bought a book on Amazon that tells authors to do it. I bought the book because it was well-reviewed. It was not a good book. It did get me to plead for folks on Facebook to review my book on Amazon, and a few of them (mostly former students) took me up on the offer.

First Review

I don’t write many Amazon reviews, but I happened across some of them recently. One of the first I wrote was in 2007 for a first novel by David J. Rosen called “I Just Want My Pants Back.” I picked it up in the lobby of our apartment building where I suspect someone in publishing or media worked and discarded her readers’ copies. I got a lot of early reads from big publishers this way, and then returned them to our communal library.

Not wanting to slam an early author–I’m professorial like that–I gave the book three stars. I’ll admit here, that is where the reviewing system first failed. It really deserved two. The extra star was to pull it up to a “Gentleman’s C.” As of today, it has an average of four stars, with 32 reviews. It was made into an series for MTV, which if the novel is any kind of indication, is probably shown to inmates in Guantánamo. (If this sounds harsh to Mr. Rosen or anyone else, pull out those fat paychecks from MTV and feel better.)

Second Review

Now, 32 reviews is usually an indicator to me that an average review is actually pretty legitimate, so where did things go so wrong? Let’s start with the review directly after mine, posted about two weeks later, which is titled “Jason Strider is a modern day Holden Caulfield” and penned by first-time reviewer R. Kash “moneygirl”. Whoa–not shy with the praise there, and it seems we differ in our perception of the work. How did we come to such a failure in intercoder reliability?

We know that Ms. Moneygirl is a real person because her name is followed by the coveted Real Name™ badge, which means that she has ponied up a credit card that presumably reads “R Kash.” That this is her first review may be a warning, but frankly it was very nearly my first Amazon review as well, preceded only by an over-the-top accolade for this very blog. (Given my tendency to dissociation, this is only a mild conflict of interest.) Her other two reviews are also 5-star–but we will get to that.

Despite the “real name” and a self-reported nickname and home city (New York), it’s difficult to find out much more about Ms. Kash without some guessing. But a little noodling around suggests that Rachel Kash on Twitter is a fan of the MTV show. Despite the demure pony-tail photo, I think there are some clear connections to a Rachel Kash who writes for the Huffington Post. Her profile there notes she

is a fiction writer who tweets under the name @MomsBitching. She is also the founder and principal of KashCopy, Inc., a copywriting and brand strategy consultancy. Rachel currently lives with her husband and young son in Brooklyn, New York.

She writes fiction, as does her husband, David Rosen. Yes, the author of the book and the subject of Ms. Kash’s first and second reviews on Amazon. Given this, “I hope to see a lot more from Rosen in the future,” could be read in multiple ways. But I think it’s awesome that his spouse is also his number one fan.

Third and Fourth Reviews

The third review comes from someone who was writing his second review. The first review he had written was for the game NBA Live 2004, which coincidentally (?) had close ties to hip-hop artists. (This conspiracy stuff makes you paranoid.) If it is astroturf, it is very forthright astroturf: “This book was passed on to me by a colleague at MTV and I read it in one day.” Perhaps it is only me who wonders if this was at work? For those keeping score, we now have two 5-star reviews, in addition to my three-star.

The next review is the first one published after the book’s actual release date of August 7, 2007, and it is from “Honest Reader” who may very well be just that, but doesn’t review on Amazon much. This was it. He loved it though.

Fifth Review

The fifth review was from a Lisa Violi in Philadelphia, making it our first review from outside the New York area. That is her “real name,” unlike the previous two contributors, and some quick Googling suggests she’s not directly connected either to the publishers or MTV. (Though more thorough searching might turn up a connection.) Her review was one star: “A snore.” This was only a second review from her. All the rest are five star, including Christopher Moore’s Lamb. Perhaps we just have similar tastes, though–and the crowd is against us.

Six and Seven

The next two reviews bring us more unbridled praise. This is the second review from M. Gilbar, “Handsome Donkey,” of a total of four reviews. Each of his reviews garnered five stars. The name really doesn’t get us anywhere. We could take a wild shot in the dark and guess that it might be Marc Gilbar who does something called “branded entertainment” for Davie Brown Entertainment. Given that there is a “Marc Gilbar” who has used the handle “Handsome Donkey” before, perhaps this is not too much of a stretch.

Anne Marie Hollanger is not “real name” certified, and if the person goes by that name elsewhere, she’s hard to find. I suspect it might be a pseudonym. Another five-star review.

Et Cetera

I am not suggesting that all the reviews that disagree with mine are plants. Erik Klee, number eight, has over 200 reviews under his belt, and while I might not agree with his taste in books, I cannot but admire his dedication and careful reviews. Even in this case, where he gives the book five stars, I find enough in his review to form my own opinion, which is strong praise.

There are some interesting other names. Is number nine, Mat Zucker, that Mat Zucker? Is the book appropriately skewered by an acupuncturist? How many of the reviewers are also book authors? Why has Mike Congdon gone through the trouble of setting up a second RealName certified account to write back-to-back five-star reviews of the book? (I am assuming that if he is the Congdon that works for the company that does MTV’s books is coincidental–after all, very few companies are more than a degree from Viacom.)

I could spend all day noodling around the interwebs. Many of these people have public profiles on Facebook naming their friends. I could start printing out photos and hanging yarn connections from wall to wall. I am not sure where that would get me. But I am bothered by that average review, particularly when it seems so heavily influenced by the first few reviews. It seems like there is great enthusiasm for the book in the first few reviews, and then again when the MTV series comes out, but that the four isn’t entirely representative of the reviews outside these peaks…

It also seems like at least some of those earlier commenters might be more than a little interested in the success of the book. I suspect this isn’t an aberration, except perhaps in how mild the influence is. I picked this example pretty much at random when I ran into my short list of reviews for things on Amazon. So, the question is, what can we take from this and is it something we can fix?

Satisficing and BS

You are going to say you don’t actually care about the reviews, and I believe you. I am not an idiot–I read them with a huge grain of salt. But I do read them and they do influence me.

And I am not suggesting that you do what I just did, and launch an investigation of the reviews every time you want to buy something. At present, you can buy a used copy of the book for $0.01, and frankly, you can read it in less time than it took me to track down a hand-full of the early reviewers and write this up. In other words, you could know the answer to whether you would like the book, with 100% certainty, faster than it would take to play amateur detective online. So what we are looking for here is a heuristic; and maybe a heuristic that can be automated.

How much reviewing do you do?

One metric might be how much reviewing you do. Frankly, I trust reviewers who review a lot. It may be that they are paid off as well–it can happen. But when I look on, for example, TripAdvisor and see a bunch of one-star reviews from people who have reviewed only this one hotel, and four-star reviews from people with a dozen reviews under their belt, I am going to assume the one-stars are written by the competition.

That’s why Tripadvisor provides badges for those with more reviews, and indicates how many of those reviews have been considered “helpful.” Without clicking through on Amazon, it’s difficult to know how many reviews each of the contributors have made.

Meta-reviews

One might expect that meta-reviews would just replicate the review totals, with people voting against those who disagree with them. But by name, they are less about agreement and more about “helpfulness.” In fact, Amazon does provide a summary based on the most helpful positive and negative reviews. In the case of this book, the most helpful favorable review gave the book four stars, and was written by someone with 854 reviews to his name. The most helpful unfavorable review gave it two stars, and was written by someone with 59 reviews to his name.

You could weight the averages by their helpful/unhelpful votes. Doing so in this case actually ends up with closer to two stars than four. But this isn’t really the best solution. Research has shown that Amazon’s ratings are unsurprisingly bi-modal–you generally only have a review of something if you like it or dislike it. This favorable/unfavorable breakdown is far more useful than the average number of stars, but Amazon continues to show the latter.

Reliable Sources

The Real Name badge is intended to indicate that a reviewer is more likely to be credible, since they are putting their name behind their review. But other metrics of performance would be helpful as well. How often do they review? Are their reviews generally helpful? These are revealed on profile pages, but not next to the review itself. Also–many of the five-star reviews in this case were from people who only gave five-star reviews. I can understand why–maybe you only feel moved to review the stuff you really love (or really hate). But maybe these could help?

Flock of Seagulls

Finally, there is the question of collaborative filtering. Taste is a tough thing to measure. Some research has suggested that average movie reviews have little impact on the decision to see a movie. Part of that is because we don’t trust the person we don’t know to give us movie advice. My mother told me she enjoyed Howard the Duck and I knew that I would never trust her opinion on movies again.

Likewise, it is perhaps unsurprising that I agree with the review from a person who gave five stars to a book by Christopher Moore, but disagree with the review from the person who gave five stars to a book by Danielle Steele. There is nothing inherently wrong with liking either of these authors, but de gustibus non est disputandum.

Of course, Amazon was a pioneer of pushing the “those who viewed/bought this item also liked…”. I’m a little surprised they don’t do something similar for reviews.

More action research needed

There’s actually quite a bit of lit out there that does things like trying to summarize Amazon reviews automatically, discover what makes a review helpful, and whether helpful reviews have more influence on purchase decisions. Would be fun, if I were looking to waste even more time, to write plugins that helped you to construct your own shortcuts for metrics on reviews, but this would require more time than I have.

Related posts:

1. Amazon.com links
2. The Coming Gaming Machine, 1975-1985
3. Mini-reviews

Noodle knows I’ve got a ton of writing that needs to be done, like yesterday. Just so I can keep it straight in my head:

* The #g20 paper. This was an awesome paper that was nearly done two years ago. The data is dated, which is going to make publishing harder, but the ideas and analysis are still really interesting and good, I think. I just need to finish off a small bit of analysis (oh no! that has little to do with writing!) and write the sucker up.

* The aforementioned book. Or at least a couple of the chapters for it, which are now about five years overdue.

* A short piece on Enders Game.

* Updating some research (eek, more non-writing) and writing it up (phew).

* A dozen other little projects.

I also, however, have a bunch of other pressing things: planning for two new courses, maybe coding up a new version of my badge system (although, unless somehow funded, that needs to be a weekend project), and of course the ever-present AoIR duties.

Oh, did I say weekends. Yes, the first caveat to my pledge: I’m trying not to work weekends. My family is my first priority, and while that is easy to say, it’s harder to do. So I will endeavor not to do any work on the weekends. I’ve been trying to do that so far, and it’s not really possible, but it’s a good reach goal. Oh, and I’m taking a chunk of Thanksgiving week off, since my Mom and all her kids and grandkids (including the ones in Barcelona) are coming together at our house for the first time in probably more than two decades. But I’ll do a make-up in December.

Second caveat: I’m counting posting to the blog (since this is where I used to do a lot of my pre-writing). I’d like to count email too, since I did a solid 6 hours of catching up on email today, but I think that’s a no-go.

Really what we are talking about then is four consecutive weeks of completing 6,000 words each week. That may not sound very ambitious, but given how hard it was to push out the last 5,000 words (it took way more than a week–sorry editors!), I think that 1,200 words a day is plenty ambitious. Oh, and by doing it as Monday-Friday weeks, I get to start next Monday. Procrastination FTW.

Now that I’ve managed to negotiate myself down, it doesn’t seem like much of a challenge, but there it is. I will report on my goals here on a weekly basis. I may try to add some other metrics (time on task, people mad at me, etc.) as we go forward. But for now: words, words, words. (Though only 573 of them for this post.)

Related posts:

1. New scholar of Oz
2. Google Scholar Juice

I’ve been supportive of marriage equity for some time. Unlike Obama, this isn’t a position I’ve “evolved into.” But I’ve been supportive in that low-key, slactivist way: I’ve given a bit of money to the Human Rights Campaign, and written letters to editors and to legislators. It has always, to me, been an annoyingly clear case of not providing the same right to everyone. But I will also admit that this comes with a heavy dose of white straight male privilege. Among those I normally interact with, the idea that those who are not white and straight should enjoy the same human rights is beyond legitimate debate–it’s obvious. But it also means that I can agree with this and too easily forget what it has taken to get here. Stonewall was before my time, and not having been in the position of being targeted because of my sexuality means that while I can be deeply empathetic, I will never fully understand that struggle. It is too easy for me to say equality should be the norm, and falls toward the “I don’t see race,” sort of comment.

So, I think there was a lot more to celebrate at Gino and Glen’s wedding than the coming together of two individuals, or of two families. There was more than I could know. That’s probably true of all weddings, but here, I felt like I should have known better, and should have appreciated more what this meant. It wasn’t just making possible what couldn’t have legally happened two years ago. It wasn’t just the state recognizing that they had unjustly excluded some people from a certain certification. It was a step in the lives of two men who had faced a similar set of injustices throughout their lives.

By the time we got to the vows and the exchange of rings, Kai had had enough and Jamie had brought him to the back of the church where he could be a little less disruptive. Jasper, at this point, was sitting on my knee in rapt attention. And more than anything else, seeing the wedding through his eyes made me rethink my own perspective.

Jasper, like me, thinks of Uncle Gino and Uncle Glen as friends–he likes both of them a lot. It was not by design that Jasper’s first wedding was for two men, and I hadn’t really thought much about it, but I am deeply thankful that this, for him, is what a wedding is. Just as I am glad that for Jasper, the president has always been black. I am also aware that this is a very naive version of race and gender equity. I know that these issues are more complex and deserve deeper consideration. But I also enjoy my own naive appreciation, that I share with my son, that two of my favorite people get to be married. And that alone, even outside of the historical context and of the struggle, is something that is worthy of joy and appreciation.

Congratulations Gino and Glen, and may you grow together even more in the years to come.

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I have always considered 13 a lucky number, and I feel particularly lucky that we have the opportunity to come back to the United Kingdom for IR13.0.

I recently moved to a new house, and in the process ran across a T-shirt from the first IR conference I attended in Minneapolis a dozen years ago. At the time I was a graduate student in communication, and while there were a few faculty members and other students in my home department who were quickly trying to come to grips with what the internet might mean for our field of study, we were certainly not a program that focused on the internet in particular. It was a wonderful experience to come to a conference and not only meet a group of scholars who were reading the same things I was and thinking about many of the same problems, but to encounter theoretical approaches and practical methods of inquiry that were unfamiliar.

Twelve years covers a lot of ground in “Internet Time” and today it is hard to find a disciplinary conference that doesn’t have a crowd of people looking at the social and cultural effects of networked information technologies. But it remains difficult to think of another conference that attracts such a significant number of the most influential scholars in our field. Just as importantly, you will find that the Internet Research conference opens its arms to students and other newcomers to our field, and remains at a scale that–while large–still encourages the kinds of real conversations that make great conferences great.

I hope you will find time to talk to some of the many volunteers who have helped this year’s conference happen, including the members of the conference committee: Ben Light, Feona Attwood, and Lori Kendall. (Michael Zimmer is with us in spirit.) It takes a lot of volunteers to make this work each year, and I want to thank the volunteers here in Salford, the editorial committees, the awards committees, and the many reviewers who have helped us get here. And finally, I would like to thank our sponsors–both those who have been with us for many years, and those who are new to us in Salford.

I always come home from an Internet Research conference with more ideas than I know what to do with. Coming to a conference with that as an expectation is a high bar for success, but one that I hope we meet for as many attendees this year as we have in past years.

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The Coming Gaming Machine, 1975-1985

Abstract

The early 1980s are sometimes referred to as the ‘Golden Age’ of computer games. The explosion of video games–in arcades, as home consoles, and eventually on home computers–led many to question when the fad would end. In fact, rather than an aberration, the decade from 1975 to 1985 shaped our view of what a computer is and could be. In gaming, we saw the convergence of media appliances, the rise of the professional software, and the first ‘killer app’ for networking. During this period, the computer moved from being a ‘giant brain’ to a home appliance, in large part because of the success of computer gaming.

Introduction

Sony’s offering in the game console arena, the Playstation 2, was among the most anticipated new products for the 2000 Christmas season. Although rumors and reviews added to the demand, much of this eagerness was fueled by an expensive international advertising campaign. One of the prominent television spots in the US listed some of the features of a new gaming console, including the ability to ‘tap straight into your adrenal gland’ and play ‘telepathic personal music.’ The product advertised was not the Playstation 2, but the hypothetical Playstation 9, ‘new for 2078.’ The commercial ends with an image of the Playstation 2 and a two-word tag line: ‘The Beginning’ ¹.

The beginning, however, came over twenty-five years earlier with the introduction of home gaming consoles. For the first time, the computer became an intimate object within the home, and became the vehicle for collective hopes and fears about the future. In 1975 there were hundreds of thousands of gaming consoles sold, and there were dozens of arcade games to choose from. By 1985, the year the gaming console industry was (prematurely) declared dead, estimates put the number of Atari 2600 consoles alone at over 20 million world-wide².

The natural assumption would be that gaming consoles paved the way for home computers, that the simple graphics and computing power of the Atari 2600 was an intermediary evolutionary step toward a ‘real’ computer. Such a view would obscure both the changes in home computers that made them more like gaming consoles, and the fact that many bought these home computers almost exclusively for gaming. But during the decade following 1975, the view of what gaming was and could be changed significantly. Since gaming was the greatest point of contact between American society and computing machinery, gaming influenced the way the public viewed and adopted the new technology, and how that technology was shaped to meet these expectations.

The Place of Gaming

When the University of California at Irvine recently announced that they may offer an undergraduate minor in computer gaming, many scoffed at the idea. The lead in an article in the Toronto Star, quipped, ‘certainly, it sounds like the punchline to a joke’³. As with any academic study of popular culture, many suggested the material was inappropriate for the university. In fact, despite the relatively brief history of computer gaming, it has had an enormous impact on the development of computing technology, how computers are seen and used by a wide public, and the degree to which society has adapted to the technology. Games help define how society imagines and relates to computers, and how they imagine future computers will look and how they will be used. The shift in the public view of computers from ‘giant brains’ to domestic playthings occurred on a broad scale during the ten years between 1975 and 1985, the period coincident with the most explosive growth of computer gaming.

Games have also played a role in both driving and demonstrating the cutting edge of computing. While they are rarely the sole purpose for advances in computing, they are often the first to exploit new technology and provide a good way for designers and promoters to easily learn and demonstrate the capabilities of new equipment. Programmers have used games as a vehicle for developing more sophisticated machine intelligence⁴, as well as graphic techniques. Despite being seen as an amusement, and therefore not of import, ‘the future of “serious” computer software—educational products, artistic and reference titles, and even productivity applications—first becomes apparent in the design of computer games’⁵. Tracing a history of games then provides some indication of where technology and desire meet. Indeed, while Spacewar might not have been the best use of the PDP-1’s capabilities, it (along with adventure games created at Stanford and the early massively multiplayer games available on the PLATO network) foreshadowed the future of computer entertainment surprisingly well. Moreover, while the mainstream prognostications of the future of computing are often notoriously misguided, many had better luck when the future of computing technology was looked at through the lens of computer games.

Computer Gaming to 1975

The groundwork of computer gaming was laid well before computer games were ever implemented. Generally, video games grew out of earlier models for gaming: board and card games, war games, and sports, for example. William Higinbotham’s implementation of a Pong-like game (‘Tennis for Two’) in 1958, using an oscilloscope as a display device, deserves some recognition as being the first prototype of what would come to be a popular arcade game. Generally, though, the first computer game is credited to Steve Russel, who with the help of a group of programmers wrote the first version of the Spacewar game at MIT in 1961. The game quickly spread to other campuses, and was modified by enterprising players. Although Spacewar remained ensconced within the milieu of early hackers, it demonstrated a surprisingly wide range of innovations during the decade following 1961. The earliest versions were quite simple, two ships that could be steered in real time on a CRT and could shoot torpedoes at one another. Over time, elaborations and variations were added: gravity, differing versions of hyperspace, dual monitors, and electric shocks for the losing player, among others. As Alan Kay noted: ‘The game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer’⁶.

In many ways, Spacewar typified the computer game until the early 1970s. It was played on an enormously expensive computer, generally within a research university, often after hours. Certainly, there was little thought to this being the sole, or even a ‘legitimate,’ use of the computer. While time was spent playing the game, equally as important was the process of creating the game. The differentiation between player and game author had yet to be drawn, and though a recreational activity—and not the intended use of the system—this game playing took place in a research environment. There was no clear relationship between computer gaming and the more prosaic pinball machine.

However, after a ten year diffusion, Spacewar marked a new kind of computing: a move from the ‘giant brain’ of the forties to a more popular device in the 1970s. Stewart Brand wrote an article in Rolling Stone in 1972 that clearly hooked the popular diffusion of computing to ‘low-rent’ development in computer gaming. Brand begins his article by claiming that ‘ready or not, computers are coming to the people.’ It was within the realm of gaming that the general public first began to see computers as personal machines.

Perhaps more importantly, by taking games seriously, Brand was able to put a new face on the future of computing. At a time when Douglas Englebart’s graphical user interfaces were being left aside for more traditional approaches to large-scale scientific computing, Brand offered the following:

… Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice, was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use:
1. It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.
2. It encouraged new programming by the user.
3. It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadhand (sic) interface of live graphics display.
4. It served primarily as a communication device between humans.
5. It was a game.
6. It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and disrupted multiple-user equipment).
7. It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)
8. It was delightful. (p. 58.)

Brand’s focus was on how people could get hold of a computer, or how they could build one for themselves. The article ends with a listing of the code for the Spacewar game, the first and only time computer code appeared in Rolling Stone. He mentions off-handedly that an arcade version of Spacewar was appearing on university campuses. Brand missed the significance of this. Gaming would indeed spread the use of computing technology, but it would do so without the diffusion of programmable computers. Nonetheless, this early view of the future would be echoed in later predictions over the next 15 years.

On the arcade front, Nolan Bushnell (who would later found Atari), made a first foray into the arcade game market with a commercial version of Spacewar entitled Computer Space in 1971. The game was relatively unsuccessful, in large part, according to Bushnell, because of the complicated game play. His next arcade game was much easier to understand: a game called Pong that had its roots both in a popular television gaming console and earlier experimentation in electronic gaming. Pong’s simple game play (with instructions easily comprehended by inebriated customers: ‘Avoid missing ball for high score’) drove its success and encouraged the development of a video gaming industry.

Equally important was the tentative television and portable gaming technologies that began to sprout up during the period. Though Magnavox’s Odyssey system enjoyed some popularity with its introduction in 1972, the expense of the television gaming devices and their relatively primitive game play restricted early diffusion. It would take the combination of microprocessor controlled gaming with the television gaming platform to drive the enormous success of the Atari 2600 and its successors. At the same time, the miniaturization of electronics generally allowed for a new wave of hand-held toys and games. These portable devices remain at the periphery of gaming technology, though these early hand-held games would be forerunners to the Lynx, Gameboy and PDA-based games that would come later.

By 1975, it was clear that computer gaming, at least in the form of arcade games and home gaming systems, was more than an isolated trend. In the previous year, Pong arcade games and clones numbered over 100,000. In 1975, Sears pre-sold 100,000 units of Atari’s Pong home game, selling out before it had shipped⁷. It had not yet reached its greatest heights (the introduction of Space Invaders several years later would set off a new boom in arcade games, and drive sales of the Atari 2600), but the success of Pong in arcades and at home had secured a place for gaming.

The personal computer market, on the other hand, was still dominated by hobbyists. This would be a hallmark year for personal computing, with the Altair system being joined by the Commodore PET, Atari’s 400 and 800, and Apple computers. Despite Atari’s presence and the focus on better graphics and sound, the computer hobbyists remained somewhat distinct from the console gaming and arcade gaming worlds. Byte magazine, first published in 1975, made infrequent mention of computer gaming, and focused more heavily on programming issues.

Brand was both the first and among the most pronounced to use gaming as a guide to the future of computing and society. In the decade between 1975 and 1985, there were a number of predictions about the future of gaming made, but most of these were off-handed comments of a dismissive nature. It is still possible to draw out a general picture of what was held as the future of gaming—and with it the future of computing—by examining contemporaneous accounts and predictions⁸.

Many of these elements are already present in Brand’s prescient view from 1972. One that he seemed to have missed is the temporary bifurcation of computer gaming into machines built for gaming specifically, and more general computing devices. (At the end of the article, it is clear that Alan Kay—who was at Xerox PARC at the time and would later become chief scientist for Atari—has suggested that Spacewar can be programmed on a computer or created on a dedicated machine, a distinction that Brand appears to have missed.) That split, and its continuing re-combinations, have driven the identity of the PC as both a computer and a communications device. As a corollary, there are periods in which the future seems to be dominated by eager young programmers creating their own games, followed by a long period in which computer game design is increasingly thought of as an ‘art,’ dominated by a new class of pop stars. Finally, over time there evolves an understanding of the future as a vast network, and how this will affect gaming and computer use generally.

Convergence

1975 marks an interesting starting point, because it is in this year that the microprocessor emerges as a unifying element between personal computers and video games. Although early visions of the home gaming console suggested the ability to play a variety of games, most of the early examples, like their arcade counterparts, were limited to a single sort of game, and tended to be multi-player rather than relying upon complex computer-controlled opponents. Moreover, until this time console games were more closely related to television, and arcade video games to earlier forms of arcade games. Early gaming systems, even those that made extensive use of microprocessors, were not, at least initially, computers ‘in the true sense’⁹. They lacked the basic structure that allowed them to be flexible, programmable machines. The emerging popularity of home computers, meanwhile, was generally limited to those with an electronics and programming background, as well as a significant disposable income.

As consoles, arcade games, and personal computers became increasingly similar in design, their futures also appeared to be more closely enmeshed. At the high point of this convergence, home computers were increasingly able to emulate gaming systems—an adaptor for the Vic-20 home computer allowed it to play Atari 2600 console game cartridges, for example. On the other side, gaming consoles were increasingly capable of doing more ‘computer-like’ operations. As an advertisement in Electronic Gaming for Spectravideo’s ‘Compumate’ add-on to the Atari 2600 asks ‘Why just play video games? … For less than $80, you can have your own personal computer.’ The suggestion is that rather than ‘just play games,’ you can use your gaming console to learn to program and ‘break into the exciting world of computing.’ Many early computer enthusiasts were gamers who tinkered with the hardware in order to create better gaming systems¹⁰. This led some to reason that video game consoles might be a ‘possible ancestor of tomorrow’s PC’¹¹. As early as 1979, one commentator noted that the distinction between home computers and gaming consoles seemed to have ‘disappeared’¹². An important part of this world is learning to program and using the system to create images and compose music. Just before console sales began to lose momentum in the early 1980s, and home computer sales began to take off, it became increasingly difficult to differentiate the two platforms.

Those who had gaming consoles often saw personal computers as ultimate gaming machines, and ‘graduated’ to these more complex machines. Despite being termed ‘home computers,’ most were installed in offices and schools¹³. Just as now, there were attempts to define the home computer and the gaming console in terms of previous and future technologies, particularly those that had a firm domestic footing. While electronic games (and eventually computer games) looked initially like automated versions of traditional games, eventually they came to be more closely identified with television and broadcasting. With this association came a wedding of their futures. It seemed natural that games would be delivered by cable companies and that videodisks with ‘live’ content would replace the blocky graphics of the current systems. This shift influenced not only the gaming console but the home computer itself. Now associated with this familiar technology, it seemed clear that the future of gaming lay in the elaborations of Hollywood productions. This similarity played itself out in the authoring of games and in attempts to network them, but also in the hardware and software available for the machines.

Many argued that the use of cartridges (‘carts’) for the Atari 2600, along with the use of new microprocessors and the availability of popular arcade games like Space Invaders, catapulted the product to success. Indeed, the lack of permanent storage for early home computers severely limited their flexibility. A program (often in the BASIC programming language) would have to be painstakingly typed into the computer, then lost when the computer was turned off. As a result, this was only appealing to the hard-core hobbyist, and kept less expert users away¹⁴. Early on, these computers began using audio cassette recorders to record programs, but the process of loading a program into memory was a painstaking one. More importantly, perhaps, this process of loading a program into the computer made copy-protection very difficult. By the end of the period, floppy disk drives were in wide use. This remained an expensive technology in the early days, and could easily exceed the cost of the computer itself. Taking a cue from the gaming consoles, many of these new home computers accepted cartridges, and most of these cartridges were games.

The effort to unite the computer with entertainment occurred on an organizational level as well. Bushnell’s ‘Pizza Time Theaters’ drew together food and arcade gaming and were phenomenally successful, at one point opening a new location every five days. Not surprisingly, the traditional entertainment industry saw electronic gaming as an opportunity for growth. Since the earliest days of gaming, the film industry served as an effective ‘back story’ for many of the games. It was no coincidence that 1975’s Shark Jaws (with the word ‘shark’ in very small type), for example, was released very soon after Jaws hit the theaters. The link eventually went the other direction as well, from video games and home computer gaming back into motion pictures, with such films as Tron (1982), WarGames (1983) and The Last Starfighter (1984).

In the early 1980s the tie between films and gaming was well established, with a partnership between Atari and Lucasfilm yielding a popular series of Star Wars based games, and the creation of the E.T. game (often considered the worst mass-marketed game ever produced for the 2600). Warner Communications acquired Atari—the most successful of the home gaming producers, and eventually a significant player in home computing—in 1976. By 1982, after some significant work in other areas (including the ultimately unsuccessful Qube project, which was abandoned in 1984), Atari accounted for 70% of the group’s total profits. Despite these clear precedents, it is impossible to find any predictions that future ties between popular film and gaming would continue to grow as they have over the interceding fifteen years.

This new association did lead to one of the most wide-spread misjudgments about the future of gaming: the rise of the laserdisc and interactive video. Dragon’s Lair was the first popular game to make use of this technology. Many predicted that this (or furtive attempts at holography¹⁵) would save arcade and home games from the dive in sales suffered after 1983, and that just as the video game market rapidly introduced computers to the home, they would also bring expensive laserdisc players into the home. The use of animated or live action video, combined with decision-based narrative games or shooting games, provided a limited number of possible outcomes. Despite the increased attractiveness of the graphics, the lack of interactivity made the playability of these games fairly limited, and it was not long before the Dragon’s Lair machines were collecting dust. Because each machine required (at the time) very expensive laserdisc technology, and because the production costs of games for the system rivaled that of film and television, it eventually became clear that arcade games based on laserdisc video were not profitable, and that home-based laserdisc systems were impractical.

The prediction that laserdiscs would make up a significant part of the future of gaming is not as misguided as it at first seems. The diffusion of writable CD-ROM drives, DVD drives, and MP3 as domestic technologies owes a great deal to gaming—both computer and console-based. At present, few applications make extensive use of the storage capacities of CD-ROMs in the way that games do, and without the large new computer games, there would be little or no market for DVD-RAM and other new storage technologies in the home. Unfortunately, neither the software nor the hardware of the mid-1980s could make good use of the video capability of laserdiscs, and the technology remained too costly to be effective for gaming. A few saw the ultimate potential of optical storage. Arnie Katz, in his column in Electronic Games in 1984, for example, suggests that new raster graphics techniques would continue to be important, and that ‘ultimately, many machines will blend laserdisc and computer input to take advantage of the strengths of both systems’ ¹⁶ (this despite the fact that eight months earlier he had predicted that laserdisc gaming would reach the home market by the end of 1983). Douglas Carlston, the president of Broderbund, saw a near future in which Aldous Huxley’s ‘feelies’ were achieved and a user ‘not only sees and hears what the characters in the films might have seen and heard, but also feels what they touch and smells what they smell’¹⁷. Overall, it is instructive to note the degree to which television, gaming systems, and home computers each heavily influenced the design of the other. The process continues today, with newer gaming consoles like the Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s new Xbox being internally virtually indistinguishable from the PC. Yet where, in the forecasting of industry analysts and work of social scientists, is the video game?

A Whole New Game

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, arcade games and console games were heavily linked. New games were released first as dedicated arcade games, and later as console games. The constraints of designing games for the arcade—those which would encourage continual interest and payment—often guided the design of games that also appeared on console systems. In large part because of this commercial constraint, many saw video games (as opposed to computer games) as a relatively limited genre. Even the more flexible PC-based games, though, were rarely seen as anything but an extension of traditional games in a new modality. Guides throughout the period suggested choosing games using the same criteria that they would apply to choosing traditional games. Just as importantly, it was not yet clear how wide the appeal of computerized versions of games would be in the long run. As one board game designer suggested, while video games would continue to become more strategic and sophisticated, they would never capture the same kind of audience enjoyed by the traditional games¹⁸.

Throughout the rapid rise and fall of gaming during the early 1980s, two changes came about in the way people began to think about the future of gaming. On the one hand, there emerged a new view of games not merely as direct translations of traditional models (board games, etc.), but as an artistic pursuit. The media and meta-discourse surrounding the gaming world gave rise to a cult of personality. At the same time, it became increasingly difficult for a single gaming author to create a game in its entirety. The demand cycle for new games, and increasingly more complex and intricate games, not only excluded the novice programmer, it made the creation of a game a team effort by necessity. As such, the industrial scale of gaming increased, leaving smaller companies and individuals unable to compete in the maturing market.
This revolution began with home computers that were capable of more involved and long-term gaming. As one sardonic newspaper column in 1981 noted:

The last barriers are crumbling between television and life. On the Apple II you can get a game called Soft Porn Adventure. The Atari 400 and 800 home computers already can bring you games on the order of Energy Czar or SCRAM, which is a nuclear power plant simulation. This is fun? These are games? ¹⁹

The capabilities of new home computers were rapidly exploited by the new superstars of game design. An article in Popular Computing in 1982 noted that game reviewers had gone so far overboard in praising Chris Crawford’s Eastern Front, that they recommended buying an Atari home computer, if you didn’t have one, just to be able to play the game²⁰. Crawford was among the most visible group of programmers who were pushing game design beyond the limits of traditional games:

Crawford hopes games like Eastern Front and Camelot will usher in a renaissance in personal computer games, producing games designed for adults rather than teenagers. He looks forward to elaborate games that require thought and stimulate the mind and even multiplayer games that will be played cross-country by many players at the same time, with each player’s computer displaying only a part of the game and using networks linked by telephone lines, satellites, and cable TV.

Crawford extended his views in a book entitled, naturally, The Art of Computer Game Design (1982), in which he provided a taxonomy of computer games and discussed the process of creating a video game. He also devotes a chapter to discussing the future of the computer game. Crawford notes that changes in technology are unlikely to define the world of gaming. Instead, he hoped for new diversity in gaming genres:

I see a future in which computer games are a major recreational activity. I see a mass market of computer games not too different from what we now have, complete with blockbuster games, spin-off games, remake games, and tired complaints that computer games constitute a vast wasteland. I even have a term for such games—cyberschlock. I also see a much more exciting literature of computer games, reaching into almost all spheres of human fantasy. Collectively, these baby market games will probably be more important as a social force than the homogenized clones of the mass market, but individual games in this arena will never have the economic success of the big time games.²¹

In an interview fifteen years later, Crawford laments that such hopes were well off base. Though such hopes were modest—that in addition to the ‘shoot the monsters!’ formula, as he called it, there would be a ‘flowering of heterogeneity’ that would allow for ‘country-western games, gothic romance games, soap-opera games, comedy games, X-rated games, wargames, accountant games, and snob games’ and eventually games would be recognized as ‘a serious art form’—he suggests that over fifteen years they proved to be misguided²². In fact, there were some interesting developments in the interim years: everything from Sim City and Lemmings to Myst and Alice. A new taxonomy would have to include the wide range of ‘god games’ in addition to the more familiar first-person shooters. In suggesting the diversification of what games could be, Crawford was marking out a new territory, and reflecting the new-found respectability of an industry that was at the peak of its influence. The view that ‘programmer/artists are moving toward creating an art form ranging from slapstick to profundity,’ appeared throughout the next few years²³.

During the same period, there was a short window during which the future of gaming was all about the computer owner programming games rather than purchasing them. Indeed, it seemed that the ability to create your own arcade-quality games would make home computers irresistible²⁴. Listings in the BASIC programming language could be found in magazines and books into the early 1980s. It seemed clear that in the future, everyone would know how to program. Ralph Baer noted in an interview in the same year that students ‘should be able to speak one or two computer languages by the age of 18, those who are interested. We’re developing a whole new generation of kids who won’t be afraid to generate software’²⁵. By the time computers began to gain a foothold in the home, they increasingly came with a slot for gaming cartridges, much like the consoles that were available. In part, this was dictated by economic concerns—many of the new manufacturers of home computers recognized that software was both a selling point for the hardware and a long-terms source of income²⁶—but part of it came with a new view of the computer as an appliance, and not the sole purview of the enthusiast. Computer games during the 1980s outgrew the ability of any single programmer to create, and it became clear that, in the future, games would be designed more often by teams²⁷.

Connected Gaming

By the 1980s, there was little question that networking would be a part of the future of gaming. The forerunners of current networked games were already in place. The question, instead, was what form these games would take and how important they would be. The predictions regarding networking tended to change from the highly interactive experiments in networked computing, to the experiments in cable-television and telephone distribution of games in the 1980s. A view from 1981 typifies the importance given to communications and interfaces for the future of gaming. It suggests that in five years time:

Players will be able to engage in intergalactic warfare against opponents in other cities, using computers connected by telephone lines. With two-way cable television, viewers on one side of town might compete against viewers on the other side. And parents who think their children are already too attached to the video games might ponder this: Children in the future might be physically attached to the games by wires, as in a lie detector²⁸.

A 1977 article suggests the creation of persistent on-line worlds that ‘could go on forever,’ and that your place in the game might even be something you list in a will²⁹. Others saw these multi-player simulations as clearly a more ‘adult’ form of gaming, that began to erase the ‘educational/ entertainment dichotomy’³⁰. The short-term reality of large-scale on-line gaming remained in many ways a dream during this period, at least for the general public. But the ability to collect a subscription fee led many to believe that multiplayer games were ‘too lucrative for companies to ignore’³¹. Indeed, the multiplayer games like Mega Wars could cost up to $100 a week to play, and provided a significant base of subscribers for Compuserve³².

The software industry had far less ambitious plans in mind, including a number of abortive attempts to use cable and telephone networks to distribute gaming software for specialized consoles. Despite failures in cable and modem delivery, this was still seen as a viable future into the middle-1980s. Even with early successes in large-scale on-line gaming, it would be nearly a decade before the mainstream gaming industry would become involved in a significant way.

Retelling the Future

The above discussions suggests that when predictions are made about the future of gaming, they are often not only good predictors of the future of computing technology, but also indicators of general contemporaneous attitudes toward the technology. Given this, it would seem to make sense that we should turn to current games to achieve some kind of grasp on the future of the technology. It is not uncommon to end a small piece of history with a view to the future, but here I will call for just the opposite: we should look more closely at the evolution of gaming and its social consequences at present.

Despite a recognition that games have been important in the past, we seem eager to move ‘beyond’ games to something more serious. Games seem, by definition, to be trivial. Ken Uston, in an article appearing in 1983 in Creative Computing on the future of video games expressed the feeling:

Home computers, in many areas, are still a solution in search of a problem. It is still basically games, games, games. How can they seriously expect us to process words on the low-end computers? The educational stuff will find a niche soon enough. But home finance and the filing of recipes and cataloguing of our stamp collections has a long way to go.

A similar contempt of gaming was suggested by a New York Times article two years later: ‘The first generation of video games swept into American homes, if ever so briefly. And that was about as far as the home-computer revolution appeared ever destined to go’³³. More succinctly, in an issue in which Time named the personal computer its ‘Man’ of the Year, it notes that the ‘most visible aspect of the computer revolution, the video game, is its least significant’³⁴. Though later the article goes on to suggest that entertainment and gaming will continue to be driving forces over the next decade, the idea of games (at least in their primitive state) is treated disdainfully.

This contempt of gaming, of the audience, and of popular computing, neglects what has been an extremely influential means by which society and culture have come to terms with the new technology. Increasingly, much of the work with computers is seen from the perspective of game-playing³⁵. Games are also central to our social life. Certainly, such a view is central to many of the post-modern theorists that have become closely tied to new technologies, who view all discourse as gaming³⁶. Within the more traditional sociological and anthropological literature, games have been seen as a way of acculturating our young and ourselves. We dismiss this valuable window on society at our own peril.

A recognition of gaming’s central role in computer technology, as a driving force and early vanguard, should also turn our attention to today’s gamers. Recent advances in gaming, from involved social simulations like The Sims, to ‘first-person shooters’ like Quake that have evolved new communal forms around them, to what have come to be called ‘massively multiplayer on-line role playing games’ (MMORPGs) like Everquest and Ultima Online, the games of today are hard to ignore. They have the potential not only to tell us about our relation to technology in the future, but about the values of our society today. Researchers lost out on this opportunity in the early days of popular computing, we should not make the same mistake.

Notes

1. A copy of this advertisement is available at ‘AdCritic.com’: http:// www.adcritic.com/content/sony-playstation2-the-beginning.html (accessed 1 April 2001).
2. Donald A. Thomas, Jr., ‘I.C. When,’ http://www.icwhen.com (accessed 1 April 2001).
3. David Kronke, ‘Program Promises Video Fun N’ Games’, Toronto Star, Entertainment section, 19 March 2000.
4. Ivars Peterson, ‘Silicon Champions of the Game,’ Science News Online, 2 August 1997, http://www.sciencenews.org/ sn_arc97/8_2_97/bob1.htm (accessed 1 April 2000).
5. Ralph Lombreglia, ‘In Games Begin Responsibilities,’ The Atlantic Unbound, 21 December 1996, http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/digicult/dc9612/dc9612.htm (accessed 1 April 2001).
6. Stewart Brand, ‘Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,’ Rolling Stone, 7 December 1972, p 58.
7. Thomas.
8. While there is easy access to many of the popular magazines of the period, it remains difficult to obtain some of the gaming magazines and books, and much of the ephemera. The reasons are two-fold: First, academic and public libraries often did not subscribe to the gaming monthlies. Often these were strong advertising vehicles for the gaming industry, and as already suggested, the subject matter is not ‘serious,’ and is often very time-sensitive. More importantly, there has been a strong resurgence of nostalgia for gaming during the period, and this has led to the theft of many periodical collections from libraries. It is now far easier to find early copies of Electronic Games magazine on Ebay than it is to locate them in libraries.
9. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), p. 228.
10. Jake Roamer, ‘Toys or Tools,’ Personal Computing, Nov/Dec, 1977, pp. 83-84.
11. Jack M. Nilles, Exploring the World of the Personal Computer (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), p. 21.
12. Peter Schuyten, ‘Worry Mars Electronics Show,’ New York Times, 7 June 1979, sec. 4, p2, col. 1.
13. Richard Schaffer, ‘Business Bulletin: A Special Background Report,’ Wall Street Journal, 14 September 1978, p.1, col. 5.
14. Mitchell C. Lynch, ‘Coming Home,’ Wall Street Journal, 14 May 1979, p. 1, col. 4.
15. Stephen Rudosh, Personal Computing, July 1981, pp.42-51, 128.
16. Arnie Katz, ‘Switch On! The Future of Coin-Op Video Games,’ Electronic Games, September 1984. Also available on-line at http://cvmm.vintagegaming.com/egsep84.htm (accessed 1 April 2001).
17. Douglas G. Carlston, Software People: An Insider’s Look at the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), p. 269.
18. William Smart, ‘Games: The Scramble to Get On Board,’ Washington Post, 8 December 1982, pg. C5.
19. Henry Allen, ‘Blip! The Light Fantastic,’ Washington Post, 23 December 1981, C1.
20. A. Richard Immel, ‘Chris Crawford: Artist as a Game Designer,’ Popular Computing 1(8), June 1982, pp. 56-64.
21. Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design (New York: Osborn/McGraw-Hill, 1984). Also available at http:// www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/ and at http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.html (accessed 1 April 2001).
22. Sue Peabody, ‘Interview With Chris Crawford: Fifteen Years After Excalibur and the Art of Computer Game Design,’ 1997, http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Chris-talk.html (accessed 1 April 2001).
23. Lee The, ‘Giving Games? Go with the Classics’ Personal Computing, Dec. 1984, pp. 84-93.
24. ‘Do it yourself,’ Personal Computing, Nov/Dec 1977, p. 87.
25. Ralph Baer, ‘Getting Into Games’ (Interview), Personal Computing, Nov/Dec 1977.
26. Carlston, p. 30.
27. Ken Uston, ‘Whither the Video Games Industry?’ Creative Computer 9(9), September 1983, pp. 232-246.
28. Andrew Pollack, ‘Game Playing: A Big Future,’ New York Times, 31 December 1981, sec. 4, pg. 2, col. 1.
29. Rick Loomis, ‘Future Computing Games,’ Personal Computing, May/June 1977, pp. 104-106.
30. H. D. Lechner, The Computer Chronicles (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1984).
31. Richard Wrege, ‘Across Space & Time: Multiplayer Games are the Wave of the Future,’ Popular Computing 2(9), July 1983, pp. 83-86.
32. Jim Bartimo, ‘Games Executives Play,’ Personal Computing, July, 1985, pp. 95-99.
33. Erik Sandberg, ‘A Future for Home Computers,’ New York Times, 22 September 1985, sec. 6, part 2, pg. 77, col. 5.
34. Otto Friedrich, ‘Machine of the Year: The Computer Moves In,’ 3 January 1983.
35. Richard Thieme, ‘Games Engineers Play,’ CMC Magazine 3(12), 1 December 1996, http:// www.december.com/ cmc/ mag/ (accessed 1 April 2001).
36. For overview, see Ronald E. Day, ‘The Virtual Game: Objects, Groups, and Games in the Works of Pierre Levy,’ Information Society 15(4), 1999, pp. 265-271.

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But maybe not in the way University of Virginia Rector Helen Dragas and others seem to think. For those not playing at home, the UVa recently went through a very public and destructive firing and rehiring of their president. The reason, it turned out, is that their Board of Visitors seemed to think the university should be engaging in creative destruction more quickly. Or something similar to that. They wanted more motion, faster. And MOOCs seem to be the current darling of what elite institutions can do to… well to forestall the inevitable.

To be clear, I agree with the economic doom-casters. I think we are in for a cataclysmic and rapid change in what universities do in the US. I think it will feel a bit like an echo of the newspaper collapse, and in particular, we will see a large number of universities and colleges not make it through the process. Part of that is that there will be challengers outside of traditional universities, and part of it will be that traditional universities will find ways of reaching new students. A big part will be rapid changes in how universities–particularly private universities–are funded.

But I think Siva has MOOCs wrong, in part by assuming that there is a thing called a MOOC and that it is a stable sort of a thing. In particular:

He notes:

Let me pause to say that I enjoy MOOCs. I watch course videos and online instruction like those from the Khan Academy … well, obsessively. I have learned a lot about a lot of things beyond my expertise from them. My life is richer because of them. MOOCs inform me. But they do not educate me. There is a difference.

So, there is a question of terminology. Are Khan courses MOOCs? Let’s assume they hold together into courses and curricula, even then, are they MOOCs? Are MIT’s Open Courses MOOCs? I think calling these MOOCs makes about as much sense as calling a BOOK a MOOC. These are the open resources that make up an important part of a scalable online open course (a SOOC! I can wordify too!).

The main issue here is, I think, his insistence on this idea of “education.” I don’t think I believe in education any more. I’m not sure I believe teaching is much more than setting the stage for the important bit: learning. But he is suggesting that there is more here. That education consists of more than just learning.

But I also think it is way too early to guess at what “MOOCs” do well, when they are a moving target. The idea that calculus or chemistry instruction scales well but history or philosophy does not I think has a lot more to do with institutional structures and university politics than it does with the nature of learning these things.

I think one of the major problems universities–both the elite institutions Siva is talking about and the “less elite” universities and colleges–is that they are the wrong tool for the problem they face. They face students coming to college not well prepared by high schools. The first two years is remedial work, often outsourced to adjunct labor. And since the university wants to put its resources into the “meat” of education, the cool stuff students don’t get to until senior year, they are screwing up what is happening up to that point.

The result is Bio 101 and English 101. Courses that best reflect the worst in college education. They are either 30-student courses taught by first year grad students and/or adjuncts, or 1,200-student courses that involve showing up to class, memorizing key terms, and regurgitating them into the appropriate bubble on a Scantron form. It’s not the 20-person senior seminar on Kierkegaard’s less known knitting patterns that are the target of MOOCs, it is the Bio 101s.

Now, part of the problem is that many large state schools (and small private colleges) only have Bio 101s. I regularly had students at the senior level at SUNY Buffalo who had never written a term paper. At Quinnipiac (which boasts very few giant lectures courses), I heard something similar. As bad as Bio 101 is, it’s a cash cow for the university. If you are able to can that cash cow, all the better.

But here’s the trick, if you are able to can it, and make it available to all for free, it’s not a cash cow, it’s an open service to society. It is not the best solution to the problem (reminder: the problem is failing public secondary and primary education in the US), but it is a stop-gap that doesn’t soak the student.

At present, scaled courses follow the trajectory of scaled courses in giant lecture halls over the last two decades: lecture and multiple choice. The real innovation in MOOCs is the potential for creating networked learning communities within these massive courses. I think it’s possible we can do that. I also think it’s going to take a lot of work, and a lot of time. Which means money.

So, if administrators are excited about MOOCs, I say: good. If they don’t understand the monetization of open education resources, I say: join the crowd.

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This is one of those cases where fostering the elite is a good thing. Nothing wrong with funding community colleges or making tuition at four-year institutions more reasonable, but we are systematically undermining our country both economically and culturally by undercutting our large research universities. All hail the MOOC, and for goodness sake, make higher education function more effectively, but don’t use it as an excuse to take the “research” out of research university…

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As I did with Buffalo, I feel moved to provide something of a post-mortem, a review of the university without feeling like I need to pull any punches. As I look over what comes below, I realize that it might be seen by some as a bit more bridge-burning than intended, but it’s nothing I didn’t say privately as a member of the community. I still hold the faculty in high esteem, and I still think there is great potential in Quinnipiac. Perhaps what is reflected below is my belief that such potential is not being effectively realized.

Ultimately, Quinnipiac was not the best fit for me. I am not an impartial observer, and what worked poorly for me might work very well for others. QU has a surprisingly large number of dedicated, bright teachers, and that it is a good fit for them speaks volumes about the university as a whole.

What’s Great About Quinnipiac

1. The Campus

Some of the architecture is a bit love-it-or-hate-it, though most (all?) of the buildings were built by the same firm, so you get fairly consistent design cues. The natural situation of the main campus at the foot of Sleeping Giant, and the York Hill campus, with a view over the foothills is breathtaking. Especially in the autumn, walking northward on the campus can be awe inspiring.

The grounds are kept neat and taken great care of. Many of the parents get the feeling of a country club, which no doubt is by design. It can feel a bit corporate, and perhaps because I am more accustomed to the scale of larger universities, when I first arrived it felt a lot like a private high school. The library is comfortable and attractive. The new Rocky Top student center feels like a comfortable lodge resort.

It falls a bit short when it comes to classrooms, which also are very reminiscent of high school classrooms, for the most part. On the new graduate campus, the similarity to a corporate campus is much more extreme: that’s what it was (Blue Cross) until just a few years ago, and the office suites and meeting rooms are much more comfortable and conducive to seminars. But on the main campus, the inside is rarely as pretty as the outside.

2. Student-Centered / Class Size

Although this is changing, I think, it was great to come from an impacted public university and undergraduate course sizes in the hundreds to a department with an average undergraduate course size of 16. It appears that isn’t sustainable, and there are pushes to change to way teaching load is calculated, but the largest room on campus couldn’t hold the smallest freshman lecture from a large state school. On the other hand, the graduate courses, particularly online, are too large.

There is also a real focus on teaching and improving teaching among most of the faculty. There are the star teachers you would get on any university campus, but the median teacher is also excited about teaching and supported in many ways by the administration in their teaching role. Likewise, I think that QU serves the average student better than most schools do, and provides not nearly as much for the exceptional student. I suspect just the opposite is true for many large state schools and elite private universities.

3. Collegiality

There is still the feeling that it is a small school, and faculty know one another and are genuinely friendly. I feel like I probably missed out on some of this, since I lived so far away. But the truth is a lot of faculty live far from the campus (if not as a far as I do). Actually, it may be that lack of proximity that promotes collegiality. It may also be that the School of Communications was more friendly than some of the other schools. (I get the feeling there was some strife in one College in particular), but I think, on the whole, the faculty got along well with one another and there was less plotting, scheming, and arguing that there is on many campuses. This extended also–for the most part–to administrators, though many faculty seemed to have a conflicted view of the president.

4. Resources

This is a hard one, but generally speaking, there was money to do things you wanted to do. Or, at the very least, you didn’t feel like you were working under the sword of Damocles the way you might at a school reliant on state funds. If you had an interesting project that appealed to the president, you didn’t have to jump through tons of hoops to make it happen.

5. Students

They were the best of students, they were the worst of students. I can’t comment too much on the undergrads, but we attracted some amazingly bright, articulate, and dedicated graduate students during my time at QU. I said it more than once–I would put the top 50% of our classes up against any grad program in the US–and maybe even up against any of their top 50%. In many cases, proximity or subject matter drew them to QU, but they could have thrived in any strong program.

What Isn’t

In the end, the things that are wrong outweighed the above advantages for me.

1. Mission Shift / Administrative Caprice

If you don’t like what the university is doing, wait a few years. In some ways, it feels like the president likes retail therapy. You know what we need? A medical school! How about a school of engineering! These are the most recent ventures, but they are at the expense of the core existing programs at the university. Better to be large and mediocre than small and excellent. No doubt, this has something to do with the need to collect tuition from a larger student base. It’s frustrating, of course, when the gaze and resources of the president’s office wanders, but more frustrating that you don’t know which way to look. By the time I left, I had mission fatigue, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

2. Teaching Load

Very simply said, the teaching load is unreasonable, compared to that at peer institutions, and it’s beginning to show. When I joined, it was less, and while it has shrunk on many competing campuses, at QU the teaching expectation seems to have no downward pressure. It doesn’t help that there isn’t a teaching load any longer–you are assigned some kind of teaching by your departments. There isn’t a clear expectation of the number of courses or FTEs you are expected to teach. Moreover, by devolving the decision for teaching loads to the department chairs, they have created a recipe for even distribution of teaching loads, and crowded out any time or incentive to do research.

3. Library

The library is a great space, but not useful for research. Every serious researcher on the campus had finagled access to a real research library somehow–many by buying a Yale card. I mentioned at a publishing conference that QU didn’t have a subscription to ACM’s Digital Library and someone from ACM noted that they would price things so that everyone could get access. But even after putting him in touch with our library, nothing. I recognize that underfunded libraries are a problem everywhere, and as I said, there are good things that the libraries do, but it isn’t a beacon on the campus. While it may serve some of the undergraduate mission, it isn’t big enough to support researchers.

4. Publicity / Tuition Dollars

This may be true of any private university, but there is always a tension between selling yourself and focusing on doing great work. A lot of time and effort is spent on recruiting and making the university look good to the outside, sometimes to the exclusion of improving the core educational experience. At least this is what I heard from students, who felt the campus tour (for example) was deliberately misleading. Efforts to “manage” some of the PR crises on campus (racist incidents, etc.) resulted in an administration willing to stifle both student and faculty comments in public. Sometimes, again, this feels like presidential hubris, as in the case of kicking the Society for Professional Journalism off campus for their critical remarks or taking a Title IX case to court rather than settling it.

Folks on the West Coast of the US generally have not heard of QU, and as you move east, in many cases they know us as a polling institute first, and college second.

As the relevance of universities are increasingly questioned, it’s also hard to establish the value of an undergraduate education at QU. That’s not to say it’s a poor education: I think the faculty serves students reasonably well. The question is whether it’s worth north of $200K. I suspect our tuition is slightly more than that of most private universities, though certainly not in the NYU/Sarah Lawrence range. (On the other hand, QU’s president is one of the 36 in the nation to receive a seven-figure compensation package–the only place where QU ranks in the top 36, I believe.) In many cases, parents are well able to pay the costs of QU, and perhaps because of location or some other determinant they feel the relative value of that money makes the tuition tenable. But I’ve talked to many students who leave our program with wholly unrealistic views of what they will be earning, and student loan debt that–without parental support–will be crippling.

In Sum

I guess what it really comes down to is that QU doesn’t allocate resources the way I would: money or institutional will. On the money side, I think they could do a lot more to support faculty, especially research. I suspect many faculty at many institution feel this way, but if you look at things like office space, teaching loads, and general support for research on some of QU’s peer campuses, it becomes clear that this is not a priority for QU.

And then there is the culture bit and the lack of a shared, consistent mission. It’s not about messaging, it’s about a real sense of purpose. I think many among the faculty and staff at QU are pretty happy about the way the university is already. And as I’ve said, I think there are many reasons for them to be happy with it. But that also provides a bit of a sense of complacency, and little real reason for change.

I still consider myself a friend of QU, and I see a great deal of potential, especially in the School of Communications. I suspect that in the long run it will continue to improve and will find its way toward a future than many at the university can get behind. In the shorter run, I’m off somewhere new, somewhere I get the feeling is already moving quickly. It’s a bit more risky in some ways, and moving is always hard, but I am eager to work in an institution that seems to share my interests and values more closely.

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1. Quinnipiac gains ground
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“The trade” is simply that you are permitted to use a system like Facebook for free, and in return you give them permission to sell information about what you say and do on the service. This trade has been criticized on a number of grounds. The user often does not understand what she is giving up, either because it isn’t clear what damage that loss of privacy might bring in the future, or that the deal is cleverly concealed in 30 pages of legalese that constitutes the End-User License Agreement. Others suggest that privacy itself is a human right and not any more subject to barter than is your liver.

But Doctorow doubles down on the myth of the trade, suggesting merely that it is a bad deal, a deal with the devil. You are trading your immortal privacy for present-day reward. I don’t disagree with the details of his argument, but in this case I don’t know that the devil really is in the details. Maybe it’s not a deal with the devil, but a deal with a Tengu.

A tengu, for those who are not familiar, is a long nosed beastie from Japanese mythology, often tied to esoteric Buddhism and specifically the yamabushi. (Those of you who have visited me in the office have probably seen one or two tengu masks, left over from when I lived near the Daiyuzan Saijyouji temple.) The deal with the Tengu is sometimes told a bit differently, with, in one case, the human claiming that he is afraid of gold or mochi (and the Tengu producing these in abundance to scare him off), or a tengu getting nailed with a splinter while a woodcutter is doing his work, and complaining about the human tendency to not think about the consequences of their actions. In other words, there is a deal, but maybe the end user is making out like a bandit.

Right now, it’s not clear what value Facebook, to take our earlier example, is extracting from this personal data. Clearly it is part of some grail of behavioral marketing. Yes, they present ads based on browsing behavior now, and yes, I suspect those targeted ads are more effective (they’ve worked on me at least once), but I’m not sure that the marginal price Facebook can command for this data adds up to all that much, except in the aggregate. Indeed, for many users of the service, the bet against future value of privacy is a perfectly reasonable one to make.

I’ll put off for now an argument that comes dangerously close to “Zuck is right,” and suggests that our idea of “privacy” is pretty unstable, and that we are seeing a technologically mediated change in what “privacy” means not unlike the change we saw at the beginning of the last century. In other words “it’s complicated.”

Doctorow seems to suggest that all we are getting from this deal is a trickle of random emotional rewards in the form of responses from our social network. Is this the same guy who invented Whuffie‽ Those connections are not mere cheap treats, but incredibly valuable connections. The are not provided by Facebook (or Twitter or Google, etc.) but they are brokered by them. Facebook is the eBay of social interaction, and so they take a small slice out of each deal. Can Facebook be disintermediated? Of course! But for now they are the disintermediator, making automatic the kinds of introductions and social maintenance that in earlier times was handled by a person.

In other words, if there is an exchange–and again, I’m not sure this idea of a trade adequately represents the complexity of the relationship–it isn’t at all clear that it is zero-sum, or that the user loses as much as she gains.

This does not at all obviate some of the solutions Doctorow suggests. Strategically lying to systems is, I think, and excellent way of mediating the ability of systems to tie together personal data in ways you would prefer do not happen. But I suspect that people will continue to cede personal data not just because the EULA is obscure, or because they poorly estimate future cost of sharing, but because they find it to be a good deal. Providing them the tools to be able to make these decisions well is good practice because arming citizens with both information and easy ways of making choices is essentially a Good Thing™. But I would be surprised if it led to less sharing. I expect just the opposite.

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2. Why would I need privacy?
3. Digital Privacy Lecture

Edit: Hmmm. Slideshare is being flaky on the audio… sorry.

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1. Thinking it could be a small shift or change in the way we did things. It took time to explain what we were doing, why, and how. But that time was well spent. The failure here was a failure in scaffolding for using the system. It requires some dedicated time, just as any challenges to existing structure do. Now I devote a good part of the first week to using the system.

2. Too many little badges. I started out with a pattern seen on a lot of websites: make the first badges easy. I still have a “how to get a badge” badge. (Actually, it is the “Human” badge–pictured above and fairly easy to get.) But I’ve moved to fewer, more substantial badges. Several reasons for this. First, a more substantial badge is valued differently. It carries more weight. Second, because there is a certain amount of overhead for earning a badge, it makes sense to chunk things a bit larger. Getting that balance right is key, and not easy.

3. Conflated badges. This is the other side of the above. In one course I had a badge for basic blogging, in which you were required to post on a self-hosted blog (not, e.g., Blogger or WordPress.com), because I wanted to know they could get hosting, set up a domain, and install the software. In another course, this wasn’t as essential, but I had to do another “basic blogging” badge. In other words, I ended up with badges that were bound to the course, when I wanted to avoid that. Again, hard to get away from rolling too much in if you are doing substantial badges.

4. Identification issues. This is both technical and a policy issue, but I’ve gone through a number of authentication processes. I’d love to federate with the university’s system, but also want to let others in. I’ve considered Facebook Connect, or OpenID, or something, but just need to settle on something. Because it will aid with the Open Badge Infrastructure, that will probably be Persona (née BrowserID). There is a part of me that would like to see this integrated into Blackboard, and a much, much larger part urging me to resist the dark side.

5. Bad peer reviews. I actually talked a bit about this in the previous post. It’s really hard to get people to post more than a word or two. Need to figure out some way to reward those who do, and encourage the practice. (Yes, extrinsic reward, but how else will they come to understand the intrinsic value of critique?) Maybe a system by which the recipient meta-judges the critique? Perhaps the number of words of critique you type leads to a bank of credit for getting your own critiques and endorsements? I don’t know.

6. Badly written rubrics. I’ve always hated rubrics, thusly I’m bad at writing them. I’ll need to find some great examples to use.

7. End of the semester rush. I also have no deadlines. I like it that way, but I don’t like the mad rush at the end of the semester. I’ll have grades moving forward, and they will be based on maintaining steady progress toward the end of the semester.

There’s a lot wrong in the details of the technical implementation (and even more in terms of the actual code) but these are some of the issues I had at the broader design level.

Related posts:

1. Brief Introduction to BadgePost Prototype
2. BlogPost Progress Report: peer assessment
3. What makes up a badge?

It doesn’t really work, but it works well enough, and thanks to some patient and very helpful students, I now know a great deal more about how badges can work in higher education. I make no claim to my successes being best practices, but I at least know more now than when I started, and figured I would share some of this experience.

Why did you do that?

More than a decade ago, I coded my first blog system for a course, though the term was not widely used then. I did it because there were particular kinds of interactions I wanted to encourage, and existing applications didn’t do quite what I wanted them to. I created my BadgePost system for the same reason. I am not really a coder (I dabble) but what I wanted did not exist, and so I took a shot at prototyping something that might work. (As an aside, I also hope that what happened with blogs happens with badges, and I can download the equivalent of WordPress soon instead of having to roll my own.) I knew I wanted:

Peer assessment. I wanted to get myself out of the sole role of sole reviewer. In many cases peers can give better advice than I can. One of the main difficulties of teaching is rewinding to the perspective of the student, and that can be easier, in some cases, for those who have just learned something. I wanted to enable that kind of open peer review in both hybrid courses and those taught entirely online.

Mastery. I also wanted desperately to get away from letter grades, as they seemed like a plague, not just for undergrad courses, but for grad as well. Students seemed far more interested in the grade than they were in learning something, a refrain I’ve heard frequently from a lot of my colleagues. I wanted to move the focus off of the grade.

Peers as cases. Students often ask me for models of good work, and because I change assignments so frequently, I rarely have a “model.” The advantage to open assessment that travels beyond a single course is that there are exemplars to look at, and (hopefully) they are diverse enough not to stifle creative interpretations by new students.

Unbundling the credential from the course. I had a number of problems that seemed to swirl around the equation of course time to learning objectives. For one, in the required technical courses, some people came in with nothing and others with extensive knowledge, and I wanted to try to address the issue of not all students moving through a program in lock-step. I wanted a back door to reduce redundancy and have instructors know that their students were coming into a course with certain skills. Finally, I wanted to give students a range of choices so that they could pursue the areas they were most interested in.

I also wanted non-paying non-Quinnipiac students participating in my courses to have a portable credential to show for it. And I wanted paying, matriculating students to have an easier way of communicating the kinds of things they had learned in the program.

I won’t cover all of these in detail, but will expound a bit more on the assessment and assessing piece…

Peer Assessment

There have been suggestions that the credentialing aspect of badges is separate from the process of assessment that leads to the badge, but in practice I think it’s both likely that they get rolled together, and beneficial when they are. Frankly, students don’t see the distinction, and they can reinforce each other in interesting ways. So, while I have done peer critique in the past, from the outset here, I wanted to get students involved in the process of granting badges via peer critique.

A lot of this was influenced by discussions with Philipp Schmidt and the application of badges in Peer2Peer University. I have long stated the goal of “disappearing” as an instructor in a course, and the place where that appearance is most obvious is when it comes to grading. (And assessment, not the same thing, but bound together.) From the outset, I saw the authority of a badge as vested in the material presented as evidence of learning, and the open endorsement/assessment of that work by peers.

Lots of reasons for this, but part was as a demotivator. That is, my least favorite question on the first day of classes is “how do I get an A?” I am always tempted to tell the truth: “I don’t care, and I wish you didn’t either.” So, I wanted badges to provide a way of getting away from that linear grading scale. I went so far as to basically throw grades out, saying that if you showed up on something approaching a regular basis, you’d get an A.

I should say that this was a failure. If anything, students paid more attention to grades because the unique system made them have to think about it. It wasn’t onerous, but a lot more of the course became about the assessment process. And it’s funny, my desire to escape grading as a focus and process turned a 180, and I am now all about assessment. I should explain…

I hate giving traditional tests (I don’t think they show anything), and hate empty work. And while I now know I like ideas around authentic assessment, from the outside these seemed a lot like more of the same. Now, not only do I think formative assessment is the key element of learning, but that the skill of assessing work in any field is what essentially defines expertise. Being able to tell what constitutes good work allows you to improve the work of others, and importantly, of yourself. At the core of teaching is figuring out what in a piece of work is good, what needs improvement, and how the creator can improve her work.

Beyond Binary

I had expected students to do the work, apply for a badge, and then either get it or not. A lot of other people new to badges seem to have a similar expectation. Just the opposite occurred, and a lot of the changes to my badge system have been to accommodate this.

First, a lot of work that really was not ready for a badge was submitted. I kind of expected students to be very sure of the work that they submitted for a badge, in part because of my experience with blogging in classes, and seeing that students were more careful about their writing when it was for a peer audience. Instead, students often presented work that was not enough for a badge, or barely enough for a badge. I was pleasantly surprised by how much feedback, and in what detail, students gave to their peers.

One of the more concrete changes I made to the system was to move from a binary endorsement (qualified or not, on a number of factors), to a sliding scale, with the center point being passing, and the ability of reviewers to come back and revise their “vote.” As a result, you can see from the evidence of a badge not just what the student has done, but whether their peers thought this was acceptable or awesome.

I’ve also been surprised by how many nominated themselves for “aspirational” badges. When a user selects a badge, it is moved into their “pending” category, and I was confused by so many pending badges that had no evidence uploaded. But students seem to click on these as a kind of note to themselves that this is what they are pursuing. This, incidentally, leads to a problem for reviewers who look at a pending badge before it is ready, and find that process frustrating, but one of the things that needs to improve in the system is communicating such progress. I didn’t plan to need to do that, since I saw badges as an end point rather than a process.

The Reappearing Teacher

The other surprise was just how interested students were in getting my imprimatur. But the reason, in this case, was not the grade–they had that. They actually valued my response as an expert a bit more, I think. This was a refreshing change from students turning to the back page of graded paper to see the grade, and then throwing it out before reading any of my comments. No doubt, some of this comes from a lack in confidence in their peers as well, and I’ve found that in some cases this lack is reasonable.

In some ways, I’m trying to encourage the sempai/kohai relationship, of those who have “gone before” and therefore have more to say about a particular badge. I’ve been reluctant to limit approval to only those who actually have the badge (in part for reasons I’ll note below regarding encouraging reviews), but I may do more of that. There are some kinds of assessment, though, that don’t require having the badge. I don’t need to know how to create a magic trick to be amazed by it, for example. So I don’t want to rule out this kind of “audience assessment.” There is also space for automated assessment. For example, for some badges you need to show a minimal number of tweets, or comments, or responses to comments, or (e.g.) valid HTML. There is no reason to have a human do these pieces of the assessments, though I would hate to see badges that did not involve human assessment, in large part because, again, I think building the capacity to do assessments is an important part of the system.

The Other Motivation

I began by hoping students would ignore the grading process, and have evolved to think that they should pay a lot of attention to assessment. In some courses, students have jumped into peer assessment. In others–and particularly the undergraduate course I’m teaching this semester–they were slow to get started. I want to think about why people assess, and how to motivate them to be involved.

When I did peer assessments in the pre-badge world, I assigned a grade for the quality of the assessment provided. I want to do something similar here, and a lot of this comes of a discussion with Philipp Schmidt in Chicago last year. The meta-project here is getting students to be able to analytically assess work and communicate that. Yes, you could do an “expert assessor” badge, or something similar, but really it is more essential to the overall project.

One way to do this is inter-coder reliability. If I am considered an expert in the area (and in the current system, this is defined as having badges at a higher level than the one in question, within the same “vertical”), those with less experience should be able to spot the same kinds of things I do, and arrive at a similar quantitative result on the assessments.

So, for example, if someone submits the write-up of a content analysis, two of her peers might look at it and come up with two very different assessments of the methods section of the article. Alice may say that it is outstanding, 90/100 on the scale of a particular rubric. Frank might disagree, putting it at 25/100. Of course, both would provide some textual explanation for why they reached these conclusions. Then I come along and give it a 30/100, along with my own critique.
The dynamics of getting students to do peer assessments (some courses they did a lot, some they have not), and my involvement in the assessment, is an interesting piece for me. In this case, Frank should receive some sort of indication within the system that he has done a good job of performing the assessment.

I’m still working out a way to do this that isn’t unnecessarily complex. Right now there is a karma system that gives users karma for performing assessments, with multipliers for agreeing with more experienced assessors, but this is complicated to “tune” and non-intuitive.

There is also the issue of when various levels perform the assessment. For the above process to work, Alice and Frank both need to get their assessments in before I do, and shouldn’t get the same kind of kudos for “me too” assessments after the fact.

Badges

None of this is necessarily about badges, but it leaves a trail of evidence, conversation, and assessment behind. One of the big questions is whether badge records should be formative or summative. As I said, the degree to which students have engaged in badges as a process rather than an outcome came as a bit of a surprise to me. Right now, much of that process happens pretty openly, but I can fully understand how someone well on in their career may not want to expose fully their learning process. (“May” is operative here–I think doing so is valuable for the learning community!)

On the other hand, I think badges that appeal to authority undermine the whole reason badges are not evil. Badges that make an authoritative appeal (“Yale gave me this badge so it must be good.”) simply reinforce many of the bad structures of learning and credentialing that currently exist. Far better is a record of the work done to show that you understand something or can do something, along with the peers that helped you get there, pointed to and easily found via a digital badge.

Balancing the privacy needs with the need to authentically vest the badge with some authority will be an interesting feat. I suspect I may provide ways of hiding “the work” and only displaying the final version (and final critiques) to the outside world, while preserving the sausage-making process for the learning community itself. But this remains a tricky balance.

Related posts:

1. Badges: The Skeptical Evangelist
2. Badgepost Failures
3. Free Range Assessment

So begins an article in what has become one of the truthiest sources of news on the web. But it is no longer time for mid-semester evals. In most of the US classes are wrapping up, and professors are chest-deep in grading. And the students–the students are also grading.

Few faculty are great fans of student evaluations, and I think with good reason. Even the best designed instruments–and few are well designed–treat the course like a marketing survey. How did you feel about the textbook that was chosen? Were the tests too hard? And tell us, were you entertained?

Were the student evals used for marketing, that would probably be OK. At a couple of the universities where I taught, evals were made publicly available, allowing students a glimpse of what to expect from a course or a professor. While that has its own problems, it’s not a bad use of the practice. It can also be helpful for a professor who is student-centered (and that should be all of us) and wants to consider this response when redesigning the course. I certainly have benefited from evaluations in that way.

Their primary importance on the university campus, however, is as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Often, they are used as the main measure of such effectiveness. Especially for tenure, and now as many universities incorporate more rigorous post-tenure evaluation, there as well.

Teaching to the Test

A former colleague, who shall remain nameless, noted that priming the student evals was actually pretty easily done, and started with the syllabus. You note why your text choice is appropriate, how you are making sure grading is fair, indicate the methods you use to be well organized and speak clearly, etc. Throughout the semester, you keep using the terms used on the evals to make clear how outstanding a professor you really are. While not all the students may fall for this, a good proportion would, he surmised.

(Yes, this faculty member had ridiculously good teaching evaluations. But from what I knew, he was also an outstanding teacher.)

Or you could just change your wardrobe. Or do one of a dozen other things the literature suggests improves student evaluations.

Or you could do what my car dealership does and prominently note that you are going to be surveyed and if you can’t answer “Excellent” to any item, to please bring it to their attention so they can get to excellent. This verges on slimy, and I can imagine, in the final third of the semester, that if I said this it might even cross over into unethical. Of course, if I do the same for students–give them an opportunity to get to the A–it is called mastery learning, and can actually be a pretty effective use of formative assessment.

Or you could do what an Amazon seller has recently done for me, and offer students $10 to remove any negative evaluations. But I think the clearly crosses the line both in Amazon’s case and in the classroom. (That said, I have on one occasion had students fill out evals in a bar after buying them a pitcher of beer.)

It is perhaps a testament to the general character of the professoriate that in an environment where student evaluations have come to be disproportionately influential on our careers, such manipulation–if it occurs at all–is extremely rare.

It’s the nature of the beast, though: we focus on what is measured. If what is being measured is student attitudes toward the course and the professor, we will naturally focus on those attitudes. While such attitudes are related to the ability to learn new material, they are not equivalent.

Doctor Feelgood

Imagine a hospital that promoted doctors (or dismissed them) based largely on patient reviews. Some of you may be saying “that would be awesome.” Given the way many doctors relate to patients, I am right there with you. My current doctor, Ernest Young, actually takes time to talk to me, listens to me, and seems to care about my health, which makes me want to care about my health too. So, good. And frankly, I do think that student (and patient) evaluation serves an important role.

But–and mind you I really have no idea how hospitals evaluate their staff–I suspect there are other metrics involved. Probably some metrics we would prefer were not (how many patients the doctor sees in an hour) and some that we are happy about (how many patients manage to stay alive). As I type this, I strongly suspect that hospitals are not making use of these outcome measures, but I would be pleased to hear otherwise.

A hospital that promoted only doctors who made patients think they were doing better, and who made important medical decisions for them, and who fed them drugs on demand would be a not-so-great place to go to get well. Likewise, a university that promotes faculty who inflate grades, reduce workload to nill, and focus on entertainment to the exclusion of learning would also be a pretty bad place to spend four years.

If we are talking about teaching effectiveness, we should measure outcomes: do students walk out of the classroom knowing much more than they did when they walked in? And we may also want to measure performance: are professors following practices that we know promote learning? The worst people to determine these things: the legislature. The second worst: the students. The third worst: fellow faculty.

Faculty should have their students evaluated by someone else. They should have their teaching performance peer reviewed–and not just by their departmental colleagues. And yes, well designed student evaluations could remain a part of this picture, but they shouldn’t be the whole things.

Buffet Evals

I would guess that 95% of my courses are in the top half on average evals, and that a slightly smaller percentage are in the top quarter. (At SUNY Buffalo, our means were reported against department, school, and university means, as well as weighted against our average grade in the course. Not the case at Quinnipiac.) So, my student evals tend not to suck, but there are also faculty who much more consistently get top marks. In some cases, this is because they are young, charming, and cool–three things I emphatically am not. But in many cases it is because they really care about teaching.

These are the people who need to lead reform of the use of teaching evaluation use in tenure and promotion. It’s true, a lot of them probably like reading their own reviews, and probably agree with their students that they do, indeed, rock. But a fair number I’ve talked to recognize that these evals are given far more weight than they deserve. Right now, the most vocal opponents to student evaluations are those who are–both fairly and unfairly–consistently savaged by their students at the end of the semester.

We need those who have heart-stoppingly perfect evaluations to stand up and say that we need to not pay so much attention to evaluations. I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.

Short of this, we need to create systems of evaluating teaching that are at least reasonably easy and can begin to crowd out the student eval as the sole quantitative measure of teaching effectiveness.

Related posts:

1. Media law student evals
2. More on ratings
3. Student evals for porn class