Technology

(Pictured right is a segment of the Minneapolis light rail system. I'm back in Oklahoma and will resume writing about political issues with my next post.--Kurt Hochenauer)

Is there growing interest in using open source scripts and applications in higher education? I think this is true after attending the MERLOT Conference in Minneapolis last week.

As I mentioned in previous posts, MERLOT stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. The organization helps college professors and instructors incorporate new technologies in their online and onground classes in a variety of ways. It serves as a clearing house for technology-related learning objects and resources. It publishes JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching). It holds annual conferences that bring together educational technologists from around the world.

There is little doubt that collaborations and business relationships between technology-related corporations and universities continue to dominate how American faculty and students create and advance knowledge in the virtual world. This partnership will continue to thrive, but I sense more administrators, faculty, students and informational technologists are becoming sympathetic to the open source model.

Why wouldn’t they consider open source given the uneven economy?

College tuition continues to rise across the country at astronomical rates, and some of that money obviously goes to support needed technology opportunities for students. As students pay more and more, it is only natural that administrators and faculty might look to get as much technology for the buck they can. Administrators at public colleges also have a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers as well. That responsibility should at least include considering the low cost of open source.

Open source is a free system of scripts and software. Some popular open source platforms include Moodle, which is perhaps the most popular course management system in the world, and the content systems Drupal and Joomla. There are also free open course scripts that focus on operating a business. The script that provides the foundation for the popular browser Firefox is free software.

The beauty of open source—and I’m an open source proponent—is that you can modify the script to fit your purpose. The only requirement is that your modifications must be made available to anyone else using the particular script. What this means is that faculty, students and information technologists can work together in an education environment to design systems and software. They can network with other universities across the country as well.

Corporate course management systems are more administration centered. One MERLOT keynote speaker, Bernie Dodge, said administrators often simply dump a lot of money into technology systems in order to solve a problem because they are looking for a quick fix. But is this sustainable? What about developing informational systems that involve all stakeholders?

Operating a large Moodle site, of course, is not without its costs. It requires developers and script administrators in ratio to the overall use of the script, but it is less expensive than corporate systems now on the market. Louisiana State University recently moved to Moodle, and one Louisiana educator told me in an elevator at the conference that the entire state was moving to Moodle. San Francisco State University recently moved to Moodle as well. The El Paso School District also started using Moodle.

Moodle and open source scripts are not, in their essence, anti-corporation or anti-money. In fact, people use open source scripts to make money all the time, and there are a plethora of opportunities to make money with open source in educational applications.

But when the basic scripts and the ensuing updates are free, then universities are already ahead of the game before they hire their first programmer.

The open source model also reflects the growing interest in sustainability. The scripts can be maintained locally, and you know exactly what type of product you are getting. You can then work together as a community to make your system better. As students work on systems, they learn the computer languages they will need to succeed in our digital world. They can use this knowledge to go into the corporate world or not, but at least they have a choice.

I’m at the 2008 MERLOT Conference in Minneapolis this week so Okie Funk will be bringing you the recent developments in online higher education in the next two or three posts. I’ll get back to politics—though it has been increasingly difficult to separate educational issues from politics under the President George Bush administration—next week.

MERLOT stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. The organization helps college professors and instructors incorporate new technologies in their online and onground classes in a variety of ways. It serves as a clearing house for technology-related learning objects and resources. It publishes JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching). It also holds annual conferences that bring together educational technologists from around the world. It works in conjunction with leading universities and major technology companies.

In the past, I have given presentations at MERLOT related, in part, to the larger implications of how we empower students in online classes to create Web-based knowledge centers or learning objects. A pressing need, as I see it, is to develop academic systems and protocols—big and small—to generate more content-oriented Web material and digital texts as more and more students take online courses.

This year, my presentation is more pragmatic. I’m scheduled to give a three-hour workshop Thursday on the course manage system Moodle, which is based on open source programming. Moodle is a widely popular course management system that allows professors to teach online or supplement their regular onground classes. I use Moodle in my own courses.

Open source programming is a system of free—that’s right FREE—scripts that are essentially based on the computer language of php and its interaction with databases. Moodle is one of the most popular scripts, which is used by millions of students and faculty. One of the most important aspects of Moodle and other open source scripts is that developers/professors can modify and improve particular systems, and then, if significant, these improvements become part of the main script.

But the focus of my workshop is more pragmatic. How do you create a course and teach on Moodle? How do you add discussion forums and wikis? How do you create exams? How do you keep a grade book on Moodle that allows individual students to view their progress in particular courses?

There is also a major workshop exploring the use of Second Life in educational systems. I have tentatively tried to engage my students with learning opportunities on Second Life, and interest is quickly growing. Moodle now has a connector, titled Sloodle, which allows the two systems to work together. Some universities, including the University of Texas, now offer courses on Second Life. Second Life’s growing popularity as an educational site is one of the hottest issues in online higher education right now.

Here’s the description about the Second Life workshop:

“Communities of Practice emerging in 3D Virtual Worlds such as Second Life are creating learning experiences heretofore unavailable to teachers and learners. The SaLamander Project at The University of Oregon is a MERLOT Community with a mission to collaborate, find, index, and discuss aspects of the 3D Virtual World "Second Life" that have educational value and share in the research, development, and training opportunities associated with those factors. This workshop requires that participants feel reasonably comfortable navigating in SL.”

Are we ready for the future of online education?

Harvard Professor Robert Darnton’s recent article in The New York Review of Books presents several salient arguments about texts and libraries in the electronic age. Darnton shows us the instability of texts and how information tools throughout history have progressed from scrolls to the codex to movable type presses to the Internet. He then ends with a fair and robust critique of Google Books. The bottom line for Darnton seems to be the old-school library, the one with the shelves of hard-copy books and dusty reading rooms, is still as important as ever. The traditional bibliographer, pouring over crumbling, yellow book pages, lives on, according to Darnton’s vision.

No one can dispute the importance of the “physical” library just as no one can stop the growing popularity of the “electronic” library. People can fetishize and romanticize both types of libraries, and, in his article, Darnton certainly romanticizes hard-copy books, along with their feel and smell. Darnton, to be sure, is not opposed to new electronic methods of collecting and disseminating information, but, overall, he does make a somewhat defensive and romantic argument in defense of the past. Books and their intellectual derivatives, as an almost spiritual concept, have haunted the imaginations of scholars and poets alike for centuries. Darnton is no exception, and no one should hold it against him.

The pressing questions of electronic academic scholarship, though, as Darnton and other scholars, such as Jerome McGann, are well aware, transcend the spirituality or what we might call the fetishism of books. Darnton notes that the Google Books project, which essentially aims to put all non-copyrighted books online, has not hired a single bibliographer. McGann, in another article, notes: “Just when we will be needing young people well-trained in the histories of textual transmission and the theory and practice of scholarly method and editing, our universities are seriously unprepared to educate such persons. Electronic scholarship and editing necessarily draw their primary models from long-standing philological practices in language study, textual scholarship, and bibliography. As we know, these three core disciplines preserve but a ghostly presence in most of our Ph.D. programs.”

As far as I can discern, both Darnton and McGann do not look to aggressive political solutions to the problems facing the academy in terms of maintaining the world’s most important texts in electronic formats. Yet as corporations take over control of the world’s texts and information—and I do not think this is understated—the academy needs to assert itself as a principal guardian of Web-based books and other texts. This demands a political solution. We can rank a book or another text in terms of the number of hits it receives on the Internet, but someone needs to rank its “truth” and its aesthetics and its situational place in history and culture. But the more the academy slips behind the technological curve, the more it will suffer in terms of public funding and philosophical support, disabling it to serve as the Web-based book guardian, and, consequently, the corporations, under the neoconservative rubric, will own our knowledge. Perhaps, our grandchildren will want to research in library reading rooms instead of using their wireless laptops, but that seems unlikely at this point.

In this post, I want to argue in three broad areas that sometimes overlap, building on Darnton’s article and the ideas of McGann and other scholars concerned with electronic texts. First, I will argue professors need to become more politically involved in refuting neoconservativism as they lobby the federal government to fund a massive program that will enable trained scholars to put critical editions of e-books and sites devoted to academic pursuits on the Internet. My second area deals with how the ideas of both those who romanticize the past and future in terms of books and information have created a philosophical stalemate in the academy as it transitions to electronic scholarship. My third area ruminates about the new language of the Internet. This language is changing the ways we write and read. It also poses new challenges for scholars in terms of learning new computer languages and also learning how to analyze such languages.

Neoconservatives and the “Market” of Knowledge

Universities and colleges have changed measurably under corporate models of education over the last fifteen or twenty years. A new middle management cadre has taken over much control of class sizes, assessment and even training and development for faculty. Tenure remains under attack at many universities under the guise of post-tenure review or other evaluation methods. Overall, faculty salaries in relation to inflation have continued to decline. Students pay more in tuition and less aid is available to them. Many students must borrow from the corporate banking trough in order to complete a college education, and then the government will garnish their wages if they do not pay up. It is a brutal, unethical system. Business professors, most of whom support this new corporate model of education, make a lot more money than liberal arts or math or science professors these days. For a complicated set of reasons, many in the academy accept these developments has foregone conclusions.

All of this can be seen as the triumph of neoconservativism in higher education, and new victories of the political movement, despite the Republicans’ declining approval ratings, are recorded on a regular basis in academia. As Stanley Fish points out, the University of Colorado, for example, is raising money for a Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy. Meanwhile, many colleges cannot even offer affordable, decent health insurance to their faculty and staff.

But these are only the most visible signs of the continuing neoconservative takeover of higher education. Less recognized and discussed are the ways huge monopolies, such as Microsoft and Google, have taken over how information is written and disseminated. What student or professor, for that matter, can get by without Word or Power Point--both of which shape how texts get created, how we know--or Google’s powerful search engine? Google ranks by hits; Britney Spears beats Sophocles. Slowly and surely, American universities have abdicated their philosophical duty to seek truth outside of the influence of money and other vested interests. (I am a big proponent of open source code applications, and some universities embrace this inexpensive technology, but it remains the exception.)

The point here is that professors and instructors must become more politically active in terms of refuting the neoconservative argument, which is premised on the idea that markets are the central guide to how we should live and know. This transcends political party, but obviously my argument is weighted heavily against Republicans. The main argument of this anti-neoconservative position should be that knowledge and critical inquiry must be protected against market forces. We should teach Latin at colleges even if there is little interest in it among students. This is an old story, perhaps, but one that bears repeating often in our current corporate-manic realities. Money tells only one story about our lives.

If the results of the 2008 elections signal the demise or weakening of neoconservative influence, and signs are quite positive this could happen, then the academy should push for a massive program to place more critical editions of texts and more academic-related Web sites on the Internet. These publicly funded texts and sites would then be owned by all of us. I envision a $1 billion a year program for at least a decade. The money could be distributed to small and big projects. The project could be operated by a board of respected scholars under a specific rubric and mandate. Meanwhile, some of the money could go to our Ph.D. programs to train new bibliographers to edit and maintain texts and information on the Web. This transcends disciplines. One might think Internet2, of course, could be the conduit for this new information, but will it be absorbed by corporate ideology? It appears so.

Petticoats and Second Life

Darnton makes an argument about the body of the book in this way: “When I read an old book, I hold its pages up to the light and often find among the fibers of the paper little circles made by drops from the hand of the vatman as he made the sheet—or bits of shirts and petticoats that failed to be ground up adequately during the preparation of the pulp.”

In the next paragraph, Darnton attempts to further qualify this type of analysis: “I realize, however, that considerations of ‘feel’ and ‘smell’ may seem to undercut my argument. Most readers care about the text, not the physical medium in which it is embedded; and by indulging my fascination with print and paper, I may expose myself to accusations of romanticizing or of reacting like an old-fashioned, ultra-bookish scholar who wants nothing more than to retreat into a rare book room.”

The language of Darnton’s self-incrimination or admission, however you view it, does not diminish the stereotypes and reality of the “ultra-bookish” scholar concerned with quaint fonts and paper quality. Of course, fonts and paper quality and measurements can tell a story about a book whenever and however it was published, but one must ask how much the fetish of loving or experiencing the physicality of books outside of the text has kept scholars from exploring the new realities of e-books or producing academic-related Web sites. For example, Darnton writes about the transitions of scrolls to the codex in publishing history, but fails to adequately address the simple fact that electronic texts are also scrolls, albeit virtually infinite in concept, and that font use in Web-based texts are surely as important in how we read as it was in the nineteenth century. Can we smell an electronic text? No, but we can use the control-F function and search immediately for words. We can embed images, video and audio in our books. How does that change the way we read? How does that change the way we write?

Conversely, just as Darnton and other book fetishists romanticize the past, so do technologists within the academy often romanticize the future. There have been wonderful, time-saving advances in academic technology that allows us to research at ever faster speeds. Primarily, academic researchers save much time on retrieving basic information, such as dates, name and location. It is virtually instantaneous. Professors can obtain full-text articles on the Internet and use databases available from libraries. The speed of conducting research seems boundless, and all texts could conceivably be on the Internet in the future. Can you imagine such a world? Meanwhile, students will attend classes as avatars on Second Life. It goes on and on. But corporations will need to make their profits and this could slow the process as they squeeze the last dollar from every student they can with their latest technology. More importantly, speed and convenience will never replace critical inquiry, which takes as much time as ever. Academics form arguments and test them against the historical record and contemporary culture. There are always setbacks and re-thinking, and very few scholars add original and groundbreaking philosophical ideas—I think of Darwin and Freud here—to the world. More likely than not, scholars simply add small evidence or expand big ideas or show how an idea has manifested itself years later.
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The two extremes within this bifurcation cancel each other out, and we are left with stasis. One group of scholars clings to the smell of books; another group clings to an uncharted technical future now dominated by corporations. This bifurcation need not be. As I mentioned earlier, the paper scrolls of the past and the computer scrolls of the future have much in common. But, more importantly, the study and reading of hard-copy books should never cease as the academy adjusts to new technologies. The main point is the academy needs to embrace its bifurcated self without fetish or romance.

Language and the Internet

Web-based texts and information create larger philosophical questions about knowing.

How do we read an Internet text, say an e-book or blog, as opposed to a hard-copy book or article? What are the psychological differences? Certainly, we “know” something differently when we read about it or see a photograph about it? How does this manifest itself today when an Internet text can contain any number of images, videos and audio files? How, for example, does a video embedded in a text affect how we know something? How does hyperlinking affect reading on the philosophical level? How does the way in which a text appears on a site affect our reading? How do our individual computer screens and their resolutions influence how and what we know?

Then, again, how does new technology affect how we write? How much should we hyperlink? How do we cite a hyperlink or distinguish their importance, what word or words should we highlight? What differences are there between how sentences are constructed for hard-copy publication compared to Web-based publication. Does Web-based writing demand an exaggerated awareness of how texts appear on the page? Does this enhance or hinder our writing? What about the long-held separation between author and publisher? Is that a relic of the past in terms of Web-based writing?

These are just a small group of questions for academic bibliographers concerned with Web-based publications, and some academics have tried to address these issues. But there are more and more questions and, as technology advances, there will be questions we cannot yet conceive.

Then there is the question of computer languages, from older software languages that ran on DOS to html and its variants to php to database construction and beyond. These languages deserve their own rhetorical study, from their basic structures to their psychological and philosophical expressions. How, for example, does the basic html blockquote tag function in blogs today? How does php’s focus on interactive objects change the definition of a text from something static to something always in movement, always changing? How do computer languages function within the academic framework of presenting knowledge? How do they shape how we know? Should today’s bibliographers know computer languages? Which ones?

The academy faces many challenges after foundering under a political system heavily dominated by neoconservatism for the past seven years, and the 2008 elections may yet sentence it to even more years of corporate constraints and baggage. But safeguarding knowledge and critical inquiry from a small group of profiteers and monopolists seems the most pressing challenge of them all.

(Darnton’s article, “The Library in the New Age,” appears in the June 12, 2008 edition of The New York Review of Books).