Category: academic cultures

A response to a successful industrialist’s lecture on the humanities

Recently our university hosted a prominent member of the Chicago business community whose interest in the humanities has led him to philanthropic giving to our institution. It has also put him in posts of high esteem on national boards and committees designed to discuss how to make the humanities more prominent in our current STEM-heavy media climate and economy.
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Digital Humanities Speaker Series: Embodied Learning

In February, the Humanities Department at IIT was fortunate enough to host a talk from Dr. Leilah Lyons in our Digital Humanities Speaker Series. Dr. Lyons is assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago as well as Director of Digital Learning for the New York Hall of Science, a hands-on science museum. Her work focuses on making digital museum exhibits more effective sites for learning and engagement through the use of embodied interaction techniques.

In the clip below, she talks about how new technologies can be used in conjunction with embodied interaction research in order to teach museum patrons difficult concepts. This display, for instance, lets zoo patrons experience the effects of global warming on polar bears:

 

Gender and Technological Change Class: First Blog Assignment

Today in class we talked about how the articles you brought in highlighted themes and concepts we’ve already read about in class. I’d like you to think about them a bit more and write a short post of no more than 400 words by this Friday at 10pm.

Specifically, I’d like you to come up with a new insight based on the juxtaposition of the two articles you read in your small group today (your article and your partner’s article). In coming up with that new insight, go back over the syllabus and look at what we’ve read up to this point. Try to relate your insight to one of the articles we’ve read for class. In so doing, don’t just focus on similarities but also try to show how your insight is new and different from that author’s argument. In other words, why should we be interested in this  idea you’ve come up with? What new thing does it teach us?

Your posts will not show up immediately–I will approve a selection of the best posts shortly after the deadline. At that point, please revisit the blog to take a look at your classmates’ contributions and feel free to comment on them.

I look forward to seeing your responses!

Digital Humanities Spring Speakers

The new semester is just about to begin here at IIT, which–in addition to new classes–means a new set of speakers for our Digital Humanities Series.

On February 14, we’ll kick off the spring lectures with Leilah Lyons, a specialist in human-computer interaction from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Lyons studies and designs interfaces for museums that allow patrons to engage with exhibits, thereby collaborating in the museum learning experience through the use of computers. Lyons’s work shifts the focus, and the power dynamic, of public technologies from top-down design and deployment methodologies to ones that incorporate the user as a powerful participant in the learning and teaching process. Her talk will focus on her work on the CoCensus project, and how to design and deploy informal learning interfaces.

After that, on March 13th, we’ll be hearing Stephen Jones of Loyola speak on “The Emergence of the Digital Humanities.” His talk will draw on his new book of the same name, and discuss the development of digital humanities as a field of academic inquiry.

Here’s a podcast of him talking about his previous book on the Nintendo Wii,  Codename Revolution, which was published in the MIT platform studies series. (Direct link: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/MITP_Codename.mp3) Even if you’ve never played with a Wii, or yours is now collecting dust, this is a fascinating discussion on its origins, technology, and social meanings.  In fact, students in my STS class this spring will be reading parts the book–I’m looking forward to seeing what their take on it is.

Finally, on April 11th, we’ll hear from Jennifer Thom of the Newberry Library. Thom will talk to us about her cutting-edge work on the creation of digital archives and publications. Her projects include research into new search methods and search design, and how to present information digitally that may be difficult to apprehend even in its original paper versions. In particular, Thom will discuss her work on the Foreign Language Press Survey, a project that uses the TEI encoding scheme to classify translations of 19th and 20th century newspaper stories from the foreign-language press in and around Chicago.

All staff, faculty, and students at IIT are welcome to attend the Humanities Department’s digital humanities speaker series, as are scholars, staff, and students from other local universities. We hope to see you there!

 

MOOCs are doing a head-fake on higher education

Clay Shirky recently did an interesting post on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the future of “non-elite” educational institutions and the students they serve: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/

There are some misunderstandings of higher educational funding models in Shirky’s post, and the first few paragraphs comparing higher education to the demise of the music industry are problematic and likely to get your dander up, but if you stick with it through the end, it has some interesting insights to offer–as do the comments.

Shirky’s argument is that most current critiques leveled against online learning, and especially MOOCs, don’t take into account the reality of our higher educational landscape, but instead focus on comparing elite, top-50 liberal arts colleges and their educational benefits to MOOCs etc., ensuring that the comparison is specious and unhelpful. He cautions that we may be missing the point of where higher education is going in our devotion to an admirable, but limited set of ideals rooted in a rather classist and nationalistic view of how higher education “works.”

Shirky notes: “The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled [from the physical/social ones].” The historian of computing in me can’t help thinking about how unbundling (of software) was also once thought preposterous and largely undoable, but soon thereafter helped to nearly destroy the market dominator–IBM–and completely changed the landscape of computing.

In other words, MOOCs and online learning, intentionally or not, are doing a “head-fake” of sorts on the “traditional academic model” (or rather, the academic model of the top 50-150 colleges and universities in the nation). Many of us working in these institutions may think that online, free courses are competing with what we have to offer, when really they’re setting up a whole new landscape: they’re looking to replace our teaching, learning, and research models without competing on the same terms. This is dangerous, but also exciting. It means that it doesn’t matter if, like IBM, we can say the way we do things is better; what matters is if the way we do things is still as applicable and flexible as the new modes and methods coming into play.

This got me thinking about what more I can do to meet these issues head on in my own academic practice. As Shirky’s post crucially notes–and many who write on MOOCs neglect to remember this–universities are not just about teaching, but about research. Research, and knowledge production, are really the raison d’etre of the university, with transmission of that knowledge (teaching and public engagement) being only about half of that equation or less. Right now, research publications are the main way knowledge is produced and disseminated to students, colleagues at other institutions, the government, and the public. It’s fair to say this isn’t the greatest system–many more people could be reached, for instance, than currently are. Soon, it’s reasonable to assume, universities will transition to using tools like MOOCs to disseminate research and new knowledge. In other words, we lack vision when we think of MOOCs as merely low-level teaching tools for getting standardized courses out to anonymous students.

Therefore, for academics to adapt to the coming new models of education, we will need to–perhaps counterintuitively–focus more on research and squeeze teaching into less time: teaching through MOOCs will, quite possibly, become the new way that we get our research out into the wild, taken seriously, and used as part of larger intellectual, social, and economic debates. (Don’t believe me? Think about how radio, TV, and podcasts have all, in historical turn, stood in for reading in serious and major ways.) Just as we effectively give our research publications  “away for free” to advance the state of human knowledge now, we may give our teaching and research content away for free via online courses for the same reason. That there don’t currently exist the same economic gatekeepers (Gale, SAGE, IEEE, etc.) for the latter as for the former is of little long-term concern: they will evolve as we begin to transition en masse to new forms and methods of creating and distributing research content.

One thing I am thinking of doing to start to meet this transition head on is to continue my exploration of blended learning models and tools. I’ve used this blog over the course of the last semester to invite–ok, require–students to participate in public intellectual exercises. They’ve engaged in online discussion and written their short “papers” in the comments of this blog rather than writing them on paper, for only me to read, or posting them behind the great wall of Blackboard, where they would effectively be lost after the semester’s end.

Next, I plan to try to use a teaching model that further “flips” the class lecture/discussion model, perhaps by (as some of my colleagues do) recording lectures in advance for students to watch online, and then using in-person class time to have something that more resembles a discussion section. Right now, I try to combine both lecture in discussion into the class period, and this only works well some of the time–usually when the students have been diligent in doing the reading (and unfortunately many often aren’t–or they come to class and mentally doze behind laptops even if they’re “prepared”).

The down side of these new tactics is that they will leave less room for error, either on the part of myself or on the part of students: misunderstandings that could be easily rectified IRL will assume more importance and negative impact when students rely on a non-interactive time-shifted recording. And this model will require more student prep time outside of class for the average student—not only will they have to do the readings before each class, but they will also have to devote over an hour to listening to a lecture. Many will not do both, I am sure. For my part, the enhanced prep time will require me to offer fewer graded assignments, likely reverting to a more traditional model of midterms, finals, and perhaps one or two papers during the term.

But as Shirky points out, to think that this sea-change will present us with a new option equivalent to the old is to misunderstand the whole point of change. And I’m all right with that uncertainty, because these types of problems–and the intellectual stretching required to solve them–is the whole reason I got into this game in the first place.

Conference Cultures

This year I had the odd fortune to have all three of my major academic conference commitments occur right in a row. I went directly from the Society for the History of Technology in Copenhagen, to the Turing in Context II Conference in Brussels, to the Midwest Conference on British Studies in Toronto.

Although this was a bit grueling, it gave me perspective that I don’t think I’d have gotten if not for the close juxtaposition of conferences. I began to notice things about the conferences’ cultures that made each intellectual environment unique, and I think it can be neatly summed up by characterizing them, in order, as being
1) convivial
2) questioning
3) collaborative
(Say it out loud to appreciate the alliteration.)

1) Society for the History of Technology (SHOT)–> Convivial

Although the name of the conference might sound like we’re stuck in the past, doing hopelessly dry technical histories, that’s thankfully not the case at all. SHOT is a big tent in the best sense of the word, and it welcomes people who work on technology either as their main interest or as a part of their larger constellation of intellectual concerns. The definition of “technology” is as wide as one wishes to make it: last year the paper that got the prize for best new scholarship was on the technology of ballet pointe shoes and dancers’ bodies. The year before it was on British imperial geographic surveying tools. A few years before that, the prize went to a paper on the language surrounding abortion techniques.

Skyline of Copenhagen

Which brings me to another point I only just realized while writing this: women are very well-represented at SHOT. More than you might imagine given the name of the conference. Of the three prize papers mentioned above, all of the presenters were women, and I believe this year’s prize went to a woman as well. The main book prize this year also went to a lady: Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries, which won the computing subgroup’s smaller book prize as well. Perhaps even more importantly (to me, at least) is that there is not one rigid, right way to perform gender at SHOT: I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I can be myself there more than at other conferences I’ve attended, and still have lots of similar people to talk to.

Overall, this 250-450 person conference generally feels much smaller than it is because there is a huge emphasis on conviviality and on welcoming new members who have a wide range of interests. SHOT was the most welcoming and friendly crowd I encountered early in my career, and it encouraged me to stick around and pay it forward. SHOT strives to expand the scope and perspectives at work in the history of technology as a field, which paradoxically means welcoming folks who don’t necessarily see that as their main field. I think that’s all to the better.

2) Turing in Context II–> Questioning

The outside of the conference venue, the Royal Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences

This conference was one of several European conferences set up to celebrate the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, by looking at aspects of his work and life. Aside from meeting folks from a variety of fields, from robotics to history, one of the highlights of the conference was the screening of a new docudrama about Turing’s work and, perhaps more importantly, how his work impacted his life. It will be have a few limited screenings in the US: Codebreaker.

Perhaps to be expected for an interdisciplinary conference with a high proportion of philosophers and scientists, the mood of this conference was interrogative. Not in a bad way at all, but there was much more critical engagement with and amongst the presenters and the participants. It certainly kept one on one’s toes!

3) Midwest Conference on British Studies–> Collaborative

A subconference of the larger North American Conference on British Studies, the MWBCS gives midwestern scholars of Britain an additional chance to meet and present their work. This was my first time going to the conference, and I enjoyed it greatly.

Snatching a view of Toronto from the airport ferry was about all I could muster at this point

I was struck by the culture of paper-delivery was at the MWBCS. The emphasis was firmly on reading very eloquent prose that had been committed to paper well in advance (by contrast, a more conversational/explanatory mode of paper delivery reigned at both SHOT and Turing in Context). At times, this paper-reading could get to be a bit much: some presenters, short on time, sped up the reading of their papers to an almost comical pace. But, I shouldn’t complain: by the time my 9am Sunday presentation slot rolled around, it was all I could do to just read my paper!

The most interesting thing about my interactions at MWBCS was how collaborative they were: everyone to whom I spoke went out of their way to connect their work to mine, either in theme or in topic. It made for a conference that was both friendly and also extremely useful–I came home with a list of articles and authors to follow up on. My only complaint is that I wish there had been more folks committing their thoughts to twitter: at SHOT, one of the ways I often meet like-minded scholars is through seeing their tweets, responding, and then meeting them in person before the conference closes. At MWBCS, the more formal, paper-note-taking culture of interaction made this unlikely, and in fact, I sometimes wondered if tweeting in a session might come off as rude, whereas at SHOT it is common and expected.

Whew, well, that’s about it. I’d be interested to hear more about your experiences at these conferences, if you went. Check out these two other posts on SHOT 2012 for more perspective:

Laine Nooney

Alex Bochannek