The Skinny on the Media Show

June 11, 2010 by Brian Hughes

The Media Show – a show produced by EdLab’s video team that came out of the After Ed TV project, and a product of Gus Andrews’ imagination – recently won the Fair Use Award at the Media that Matters Festival (see the posting here). The particular episode that won the award (above and on youtube) is a look at the use of Photoshop in advertising, and a short history of image manipulation. Here’s Gus’ description of the show and the episode:

The Media Show is a YouTube channel series staring puppets Weena and Erna, two high-school-aged sisters skipping school to spend time making their own videos in an abandoned storage closet in an advertising agency in New York City. The show’s model of media literacy aims to reconcile the exuberance of fan-created media with a critique of ad-driven corporate media.

In this episode of The Media Show, My Hotness is Pasted on Yey!, Weena and Erna happen across a terrible graphics job in Cosmopolitan, leading them to the website Photoshop Disasters, which gets them thinking about other photo manipulation throughout history. Stalin, Hitler, OJ Simpson, Beyoncé—who hasn’t been touched by photo alteration in some way? The girls explore art and propaganda and end up playing with Photoshop themselves, taking control and manipulating their own appearance.

Perhaps even more exciting than the development and grow of the YouTube-based show, is a case study Gus has developed for using The Media Show in schools (see the Pressible site). We hope this will create an inroad for using these video resources in new and interesting ways.

For example, earlier this spring Gus worked with students at a Brooklyn High School using The Media Show to support a media literacy curriculum about advertising. Skye Macleod supported this collaboration and helped produce videos about the experience (see them here and here).

We’ll showcase the case study in the next few months on the EdLab website, and look forward to talking with educators (and others!) with an interest in this resource.

See more on the history of The Media Show here.

“The Summer of Pressible” EdLab Seminar

May 20, 2010 by Brian Hughes

Thanks to Molly’s great documentation, I have some recollection of the seminar I participated in yesterday. We’re counting down the days to our launch event, and are busy making final modifications to the platform. It’s going to be a lot of fun helping people use it this summer (NKOTB notwithstanding).

Taking responsibility for the impact of software

May 16, 2010 by Brian Hughes

Here’s Steve Jobs, from a recent email thread with Gawker’s Ryan Tate:

Do you create anything, or just criticize others (sic) work and belittle their motivations?

This last missive from Job’s is a nice rejoinder from a back-and-forth with Tate about Apple’s iPad platform (and related technologies). And if you don’t look too closely, you might be impressed by it.

By now it’s well-known that Apple draws the ire of the free software community. But Steve Jobs take the time (here in a private email conversation) to clearly articulate his views and motivations. Really? A CEO taking the time to pursue an email flame war with a spiteful blogger? Very respectable. Admirable, even.

That’s what it seems to take these days to engage the public, especially in the software development space. And I like Jobs’ response and his insistence on participation: he asks (I paraphrase), “Are you at least engaged in similar work?”

But wait, is that enough? Tate started the email thread by criticizing Jobs’ abuse of the language of “revolutions.” Does Jobs offer an adequate defense?

Jobs’ response is related to a too-easy dismissal: “If you don’t do X, you can’t criticize it.” But I don’t think that’s Jobs’ attitude in this case. Tate’s criticism against Apple is steeped in deep knowledge of the software world. I think Jobs’ is asking for empathy, saying (again I paraphrase), “It’s hard to bring these new technologies into the world, isn’t your quibble with us a minor one? Why can’t this discussion be more civil?” Or even, “It’s a mistake to equate what we’re doing here with something important.”

But then that’s why Tate is right and Jobs is, ultimately, a corporate ass: Jobs isn’t taking personal responsibility for his company’s ridiculous (“it’s magical” and “it’s revolutionary”) claims. Jobs’ insistence on deflating the significance of the iPad’s implications for the software community flies in the face of Apple’s language describing it. Once you say it’s revolutionary, there’s no going back and saying that you didn’t mean “in a cultural or political way” (Jobs’: “It’s not about freedom”).

So, frankly, this exchange turns out to be as offensive as it is instructive. I’m glad Tate shared it. Sure, we can empathize with Jobs… it is tough making great things. Especially complex things. But the work of understanding them – seeing their implications, assessing their value, and measuring their impact – is a shared responsibility between both developers and consumers. Indeed, it’s part of the cost of doing business, though easy to forget.

So, how can a development group take responsibility?

Do an impact study and publish it
Build assessment into your development process
Perform ongoing data analysis and research, and share it
And, of course, talk openly with your customers (at least Jobs got that one right!)… with luck, they’ll engage you in a fruitful conversation about culture, politics, and the future.

Can (and should) generalists lead experts?

May 13, 2010 by Brian Hughes

When does one decide to become a generalist? When did I?

Seth Godin insists that “art” should play a central role in the workplace. In Linchpin, he argues that seeing work as art is not only good, but imperative. I believe, however, that Godin would be better off calling his linchpin a generalist rather than an artist. This shift also highlights a consequence of Godin’s view: namely, that there are really two (very different) roles for linchpins: at the top of the proverbial corporate ladder, but also at the bottom. (After all, while considering his great flight attendant-come-linchpin as a maker of “generalism” rather than “art” is less satisfying, I think it’s a more reasonable view.)

Godin doesn’t say much about the linchpins that are stuck at the bottom. The good thing for reigning capitalists: they’re cheap, and relatively helpless. Why? There are so many of them. Democratic education is designed to produce generalists – but a sad consequence of poor educational performance is that it leads to bad generalists. Isn’t developing expertise a natural response to this situation? Indeed, hasn’t this been the emergent role of “higher” education? But now the predicament: the milieu of abundant expertise has taken the glamor away from generalism.

So what’s it like to be a school-aged person in the world today? You don’t have to look very far to see an abundance of despair (or, perhaps more tellingly, decadence). I think the reign of expertise is at least party to blame: expertise is the new mediocre, and the media’s obsession with expertise obscures the role of generalists.

March 31

May 11, 2010 by Brian Hughes

Molly’s mousing visualizations are really great. I like how this image in particular starts to capture a pattern of her screen-based work — a rhythm that likely emerged over many hours.

An irony of scholarly attribution

April 15, 2010 by Brian Hughes

I have been thinking about the academic honesty issues for a while now. So far my best ideas are in my draft essay, Challenges on the Horizon for Scholarly Attribution (another Knol experiment).

My interest in academic honesty came out of my exploration of the copyright wars, and my subsequent considerations of ownership in academic culture. Policies about scholarly attribution (acknowledgements, citation, and so on), for example, are the result of beliefs about the importance of acknowledging ownership of ideas – at once protecting authors’ livelihoods as well as allowing us to trace the history of an idea through multiple author’s works.

I have struggled to untangle these two goals not only to better understand the intention behind academic policies, but also their effects. My purpose is twofold: 1) to suggest that AHPs reveal a conflict between the scholarly and educational goals of academic culture, and 2) to show how limitations conceived by intellectuals under the sway of copyright law have a dramatic negative impact on educational opportunities.

From the abstract of my essay:

This essay explores how new tools demand that educators rethink the goals and effects of policies that prescribe originality in scholarship. The example of appropriation in art, and the conflict between appropriation and copyright law, will not only suggest how new tools can allow individuals to overcome limitations of policy to a productive end, but how we may value originality differently as a result of technological change.

An additional sidenote about my interest: those familiar with copyright law (and especially those who are critical of it) can appreciate the irony that academic honesty applies to ideas themselves – which is not the case with copyright. Thus, academics have seemingly gone one step further than so-called capitalists to protect themselves and their trade at the cost of individuals’ ability to freely “create culture.” This is perhaps my strongest motivation to continue to create an analysis of this urgent matter. I believe that the future of education depends on ending this embargo on unattributed intellectual production. (Which is not to say that attribution doesn’t have a proper role in education.)

Pens as social tools for classrooms

April 14, 2010 by Brian Hughes

Tino Agnitti, the founder of IRPens.com, gave a seminar presentation about his entrepreneurial experiences today at EdLab. I really enjoyed his keen insight into his current work, ideas, and past experiences working on projects. He told his story of starting a business around the “IR Pen,” which is significant for the EdLab since it’s a good example of a technology-inspired educational tool.

For me, his company is in an analogous position to Apple creating the iPad – they are working on refining a computer/human interface. In Tino’s case, he is allowing his customers to engage a more social computing experience: the user will likely stand in front of a projected image and manipulate screen objects in a very direct way than is currently the norm. Plus – and this is where I think the iPad analogy really does some work – there is a great hardware/software combination potential. (For example, Tino showed how one could create OS and software shortcuts by writing text on the wall.)

I wonder how this kind of technology will be used in educational settings in the next 5-10 years… Today, I think the fact that it’s still a novel technology might be it’s biggest draw (I’m reminded of the related Techknowledge series on the “Wii in the Classroom” below). But one can see the innate social nature of technologies like this, and it’s not hard to start imagining this kind of interface working its way into all aspects of work and play.

[brightcove video=”3250891001″ /]

My other favorite ideas from the seminar:

Build a “feedback interface” into any technology (especially for the end-user – in the IRPen’s case it’s part of the software).
Tend carefully to the balance between a product’s price and your future product development cost (Tino: “What’s your value proposition?”).

Tino at work:

Starts the day by reviewing (and working on) problems… tech problems, customer problems, etc.
My question for Tino or anyone else: if one always waits until the afternoon to work on product development (designing the product), are they going to eventually fall behind others who don’t have to worry about problems of all kinds (see above)?

Tino doing project management:

Looks forward 6-10 months.
Puts the necessary steps into order in project management software.
Very important: organic search results and creating a “buzz” campaign.
“Exit strategy is as important as entrance strategy”

More about the product:

IRPen works with Smoothbaoard software
“Wiimote Whiteboard” freeware for macs

Thanks Tino!

Building a better institutional archive

April 7, 2010 by Brian Hughes

“How do you make an institutional archive more social?”

This question was put forth by EdLab in early 2006. It’s kind of a strange question – it makes more sense if you consider how “Web 2.0” had settled in as a useful framework in our collective imagination. We faced the task of creating a digital repository for the first time at Teachers College, and we wanted to do it with style.

We created PocketKnowledge (PK), and launched it later that fall to the College community. Phil the Pocket was born. In theory, PK did everything DSpace did, but better. The community could upload and tag items. A folksonomy could emerge. Uploaders could set different permission levels to control access to their content. And so on. From the project documentation:

[We] formed a multi-disciplinary team of students, designers, software developers and institutional representatives to implement a digital archiving solution for Teachers College, Columbia University. After an analysis of existing archiving tools, our interests pushed us in the direction of developing a custom tool to serve a set of functions that was not possible with existing archiving tools, but which we determined was possible with available technologies.

Existing digital archiving software – such as the widely implemented DSpace – did not offer a “social” solution for arching. DSpace employs “gatekeepers” who oversee the uploading of new material into the archive – often librarians who grant permission to upload materials, organize the materials into established categories, and tag the material with standard keywords.

PK was designed to overturn this librarian-centric model, and put power (and responsibility) in the hands of content creators. It is different from DSpace in many ways, and is successfully social to a discerning eye.

Was PK social enough? Probably not. And the definition of “social” has only steepened in the past four years. Here is a shortlist of ideas about how it could be more social that I’ve been able to collect:

Tag any document on the fly (currently only content owners and admins can do this)
Curate new collections of items (currently only content owners and admins can do this)
Create a personal “profile” page with favorite PK items
See “popular related” items for any item
Simple versioning control for items (to better facilitate group work)
Available email updates when users interact with items and collections

I wonder what ideas others might have now. And, should we continue down this path at all? Is it time to give up on the idea of a social archive? After all, we’re social in many ways… why should my archival materials extend my range of social interactions further? (And aren’t there already better methods for this?)

In spite of these worries and concerns, I think it is still a seductive opportunity. The best answer to the question may be a relatively simple one:

“Give me an extremely lightweight publishing opportunity that supports and is supported by (and is partially obscured by) an educational institution to which I have accepted as a platform and community for intellectual work.”

Linchpin on my mind

April 6, 2010 by Brian Hughes

In his book Linchpin, Seth Godin offers repetitive and often simplistic arguments, and actually makes a difference. By the end I really couldn’t fault him for his mistakes. He crafts his story into a compelling meditation on life and work.

He throws a lot of words and ideas at the problem of how to be indispensable, but I think he nails it here: emotional labor is tough, and the value of this kind of work will increase over time. Well, at least I hope so (I’m not exactly betting on my knowledge of cooking). Expending emotional labor and “giving gifts” is tough. The emotional labor of selling an idea is tough. The emotional labor of working with a group is tough. It’s also fun.

I still remember my experiences in classrooms during my first year in grad school. I remember feeling, for the first time in my life, that I chose education – that I didn’t have to be there. It was such a freeing feeling that for the first time in my life I participated. I raised my hand. I spoke up. I spoke out. I challenged others. I tried to move the conversation.

Those interactions weren’t easy. They probably weren’t perfect either (hey, who hasn’t been snarky about the student who spoke one too many times?). But for the first time in my life I was really attentive to emotional labor as something that was worth doing. I think it came with the territory: if you aren’t going to engage others intellectually and academically in a class in graduate school, when are you planning to do it?

I found undergraduate classrooms more difficult to navigate. It sometimes seemed as if too many people felt they had to be there. At those times, the best I could do was carve out a niche where I could work alone. Maybe the opportunity to engage others was there for me if I worked for it. But I’m not sure. I’m sure it can work at any time – in the classroom and beyond – as it worked for me in grad school.