Posts Tagged twitter
Three Reasons to Use Social Media in Hard Times (MLA 2011 Version)
Posted by Brian in Presentations, Technology on March 18, 2011
It’s been so long since this year’s MLA ended that you might wonder why I’m going to the trouble of posting my second talk. Hasn’t the moment passed? Does anyone care about what I said two months ago, even if you weren’t there? And considering the arguments that I make in this talk about social media being faster than regular scholarly communication, isn’t there some irony in my taking so long to get this up? So it goes.
I have a ream of excuses (from snow to THATCamp Southeast) for why I’m a bit behind the curve on posting this talk. But the reason I’m finally getting to it today is the Day of Digital Humanities (AKA #dayofDH). As I wrote in my first post this morning on my Day of DH blog, the digital humanities is not only about Digging into Data and distant reading but is also about the digital distribution of humanities scholarship. Hence, a long delayed blog post.
As I mentioned when summarizing my MLA, this talk was part of the “New Tools, Hard Times” panel, where I spoke alongside Marc Bousquet, Rosemary Feal, Marilee Lindemann, and Chris Newfield. Meredith L. McGill moderated the session. Marilee organized the panel and was generous enough to invite me to play along. Marilee blogged her talk and Chris posted his reflections on the panel. And if you want to read the VERY lively tweetstream for the session, look at the hashtag archive for #newtools.
The one thing that I wish I had done differently with my talk is change the title. Writing for ProfHacker has taught me the value of a title that promises discrete numbers. Your audience knows as they’re going in exactly how many data points you’ll be giving them. What’s more, there’s a suggestion that these data points will be something discrete, something that they can apply and use in the future. Those are some of the reasons why I chose the title I did. But personally, I found the title too similar to the talk I gave in Trinidad last October. It’s more than a little, however, likely that no one else pays enough attention to what I’m doing to notice the parallels. I attribute the lack of creativity in titles to how late I was up re-working on the talk the night before I gave it. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d call it “The Glass Tower: Social Media in the Academy in Hard Times.” But then I’ve gone ahead and committed the terrible sin of the colon-ized academic title. Perhaps it’s well enough as it is.
What follows is the text that I used when presenting. In a few places I ad-libbed, but you’re getting the gist here. And I’ve included the images that accompanied the text (images precede the text). In rare cases, you’re missing part of the dynamism of the transitions, and you’ll just have to consider that a good reason to see me give my next talk in person.
Three Reasons to Use Social Media in Hard Times
Good afternoon. I’m glad to be present today. You may have heard that I was unaccountably absent from last year’s MLA. Of course, if you’ve heard that—or have even heard of me—it’s largely due to the confluence of two trends: hard times in the academy and social media.
The hard times that the academy has been facing recently have been well documented, and unfortunately SUNY Albany is not so much a watershed as a disappointing continuation of a trend. While the number of positions advertised in the MLA’s Job Information List during the last academic year ended up being higher than Fall 2009 led us to believe [PDF], it remains true that most college classes are taught by people who are not on the tenure track. As Marc Bousquet has written about today’s job “market,” finishing one’s PhD is often the best way to make sure that one will never teach college again. My own difficulties with finding even an interview for a “proper” job is my dubious claim to fame and the reason I’m sharing a seat at this table with these more distinguished panelists.
At the same time that the academy has been going through furloughs, hiring and pay freezes, and the erosion of public and private funding, we have been discovering social media. We, like everyone else, use social media for managing networks of friendships. But academics increasingly use social media, both in their research and teaching: for example, a recent Chronicle article cited a survey that suggests more than 30% of faculty are using Twitter.
While this rise in social media is merely correlated with hard times in the academy, it’s still a relationship worth noting. My own, academic use of social media coincides neatly with my own hard times in the academy. I began blogging at the same time I began applying for jobs, in the fall of 2007; I started using Twitter shortly after returning from the 2007 MLA in Chicago; I built my own website in Spring 2008 and radically overhauled it as I was going on the job market for a third time in 2009.
As a whole, I believe many academics view social networking in the way the philologists probably viewed the new criticism: it’s new, it’s what younger scholars are doing, and, perhaps most damningly, it’s “not how things have been done.”
All of this is true, to an extent, and the university is an institution that prides itself on continuity and tradition. But given the hard times in the academy, I’m skeptical that we can hope for continuity. For good or ill, the university is a-changin’. So with that, I’d like to quickly touch on three reasons why hard times call for us to use social media:
It’s cheaper; it’s faster; and it’s more open.
It’s Cheaper
Although we don’t have money to meet with each other as often as we may have had in the past, we can use social media to help us communicate with one another even if we can’t attend. My own experience shows that this can still be effective. Not only did my own paper for last year’s MLA go viral on a small scale, but I was able to participate in other sessions remotely as people tweeted about what they were hearing or blogged their conference talks. I could ask questions in real time and have them relayed to the speaker in the conference rooms.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t have support to attend conferences or to be engaged in professional development. Indeed, we must assert that participation in these venues is necessary to being scholars. But even when money is not such a pressing issue, there are always more events than time. Social media helps us be in multiple places at once.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t have support to attend conferences or to be engaged in professional development. Indeed, we must assert that participation in these venues is necessary to being scholars. But even when money is not such a pressing issue, there are always more events than time. In the interest of time, however, I’ll just point you to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence.
It’s Faster
Speaking of journals, social networks are much more efficient at disseminating information and scholarly work. This is something you intuitively know if you’ve ever had a journal fall behind on their publication schedule once they’ve accepted one of our articles.
I had a great opportunity to observe a case study of the speed of social media this week in connection with the “Because” manifesto, which was written by a friend.
On the morning of Tuesday, January 4th, the first tweet about the manifesto went out. (It happened to be from me.)
Shortly after my first tweet is sent, people begin retweeting it. And some of them work for The Chronicle.
In retweeting, some people pull out excerpts that resonate with them.
Others comment on what the message says.
Some people offer suggestions for how the MLA could respond.
Another response on Twitter is that people start talking about how the post is “making the rounds.” This naturally gets more people reading it and spreading the post further.
Even AdjunctHulk weighs in.
Not everyone is going to give Paraphernalian a free pass.
And others don’t find that Paraphernalian speaks for his or her experience in the Academy.
Eventually I realize that I have to include this brief history in my talk, which I had already written.
And finally the post gets picked up by Inside Higher Ed. All of this in less than 24 hours.
Social media is fast enough to provide us and our work with a large audience—one that outstrips what we can normally expect from our publications. As Paraphernalian wrote to me privately, it’s “Weird that more ppl will read this than anything I wrote as an academic.”
It’s More Open
Too often the justifications made by state legislatures to cut funding is that no one is really sure what academics do with their time and money. Social media, then, can help those outside the academy understand what we do in higher education.
Suddenly the academy isn’t as shielded from the outside world. It’s no longer an ivory tower.
We’ve become much more like a glass tower. Or as Dan Cohen puts it in his forthcoming book, we move from an ivory tower to an open web. Helping people see how hard professors work is part of helping the academy when we’re in hard times.
Academics are not always especially good at sharing their work with other people. But I think that social media helps us get over that mistrust as we get to know each other better, through what Clive Thompson has called a “social sixth sense.” Social networks, in other words, help those of us inside the academy share our work and ideas, as well as our lives with one another.
Perhaps those who feel most disconnected from an academic community are the contingent labor among us. Even if you’re at a school that invests in you and cares about you, you might not have time to participate in your 9-to-5 academic community because you’re teaching too much or you’re on your way to the next school. The openness of social networks can allow the most disenfranchised among us to find community, then.
Perhaps my attitude about the importance of openness for the academy in hard times is cavalier, a function of my (relative) youth, inexperience, and lack of a tenure-track position. After all, it’s always important to be circumspect when communicating online. That being said, I have to admit that I’ve opted to be fairly open in my online interactions and that it’s had a salutary effect on my career. I’m speaking here now in large part because of it.
As such, if I may propose some questions for discussion, I’d ask how us to consider how we can advise graduate students in effectively using social networks in an academy which appears to be permanently facing hard times. And secondly, to return to the subject of publishing, to what degree should academic freedom be extended not only to the area of one’s research but also the mode/method in which that research is conducted and presented?
Dr. ProfHacker, or How I L3rn3d to St0p Worry1ng and <3 teh fail!!1! (MLA 2011 Version)
Posted by Brian in Presentations, Prof. Hacker, Research, Teaching, Technology on January 27, 2011
As you might have intuited from a previous post, I had the opportunity to attend the recent 2011 MLA Convention in Los Angeles. One of the panels that I spoke on was organized by Jason B. Jones and featured a trio of the ProfHacker team on the theme of “Hacking the Profession: Academic Self-Help in an Age of Crisis.” Here’s the description of session #48 from the official MLA program: “This roundtable discusses how we narrate our academic lives online, whether in blogs or on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or in any other format. In particular, we are interested in how we talk about failure or, more gently, about the common problems that plague any academic life: the class that doesn’t quite work, the committee that’s driving us crazy, or the article that can’t quite find a home.”
To insure that we had plenty of time left for discussion, we decided to practice what we preach and give our talks in the Pecha Kucha format (AKA 20 slides at 20 seconds per slide). This was my first time giving a talk in this style, and I found it a very interesting exercise. Often I write my talks and only come to the images later, but I found that I had to work on both simultaneously since the slides would determine where I would be in the moment of my argument. I also discovered that in 20 seconds I can say at most 4 lines of 12-point Times New Roman text. I liked the whole approach well enough that I’ll definitely include a Pecha Kucha presentation the next time I teach.
What follows is the text that I cribbed from when presenting at the MLA. In a few places I ad-libbed, especially on the first slide. But you’re getting the gist here. And I’ve included the images that accompanied the text (images precede the text). Make sure you don’t miss Natalie M. Houston’s talk from the same session on “Happiness Hacking.”
Dr. ProfHacker, or How I L3rn3d to St0p Worry1ng and <3 teh fail!!1!
Title, introduce myself.
Admit to this being my first time doing Pecha Kucha. 
The problem of the academy, especially the humanities, is that we’ve been too easily waylaid by the ideal of the romantic genius. We think we need to be like the people we study. That we as scholars must be solo geniuses. And we believe that genius scholars never have problems…or failures.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Failure is a common human experience. As little as academics seem like humans at times, then, we need to plan on having failures. And we shouldn’t consider it unusual or untoward. Some academics have become better than others at this.
In a 2007 article in Wired, Thomas Goetz considered the problem of “dark data,” information that is abandoned since it doesn’t conform to hypotheses or doesn’t yield a dramatic enough outcome for a high-profile publication. Reporting on failures is valuable, writes Goetz, because “your dead end may be another scientist’s missing link, the elusive chunk of data they needed” (Goetz).
A possible solution to this problem is the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, which, Goetz notes, “has offered a peer-reviewed home to results that go negative or against the grain” since 2002. Since that same year, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, reports on “experiments that do not reach the traditional significance levels…[t]hus, reducing the file drawer problem, and reducing the bias in psychological literature” (JASNH website).
These two journals play an important role for their particular fields by making “failure” public. Perhaps the idea of publishing unsuccessful research is not applicable to every field. But while we do not yet have a Failed Lacanian Interventions Quarterly, many academics are talking about failures in their professional lives as a whole. These discussions about research, teaching, and service take place on blogs, on wikis, and on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
The advantage of discussing our failures in public is that we can get help from other people. As an example, in Spring 2010 I taught a senior-level seminar. I’d taught the class once before and it had been really successful. Last January, I found myself in a classroom setting where I couldn’t get the students to talk to me. In a discussion-based class, it was obvious that I was failing.
My frustration with the situation resulted in my trying several different in-class activities. But at the same time, I wrote online about the difficulty of the experience that I was having. (You’ll notice from the tenor of these tweets that I was more caught up in the notion of my own genius rather than noticing that I was failing my class.)
Meeting with the director of undergraduate studies and asking him for help was useful, but so too was the response I received from my network of colleagues who had had similar experiences in the past. In particular, Erin Templeton saw my plaint and wrote a ProfHacker post about how silence is golden…until it isn’t.
Erin’s post begins by recounting her own “failure” in getting a class to talk and what steps she took to both get her students talking and in coming to terms with what she could not change. Among other things, she suggested methods that she had learned from other academics public narratives. (You’ll notice a virtuous circle happening where one person narrates publicly and others get the benefit.)
I never did get that class talking as much as I had hoped to, but narrating my experiences and asking for help online—rather than staying locked in my ivory tower—improved not only the class’s interactions, but also my own abilities as a teacher. ProfHacker became, in a sense, a Journal of Negative Results.
At the risk of patting ourselves too much on the backs, however, I’d like to suggest that ProfHacker and the work of others like Tenured Radical, Dean Dad, Sisyphus, and many more expose a different sort of failure: the general failure of the academy to make plain many of its most regular practices, from mentoring to writing letters of recommendation.
Narrating our lives need not only be about personal failures, then, but a desire to correct the failures of the academy to make its customs navigable to those who are new. By discussing how the academy works—even when it isn’t working so well in its present circumstances of “hard times”—we provide opportunities to diversify who can be successful in the profession.
There are increasing numbers of academic self-help books. Many of these are really useful, from Donald E. Hall to Kathryn Hume to The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career. But these books are limited in being from only one point of view. The advantage of narrating your academic life publicly is that you can hear from a wide range of interlocutors.
It’s this wide range of interlocutors that makes a university interesting. Large groups of creative and interesting people working together are also what author Steven Johnson suggests is responsible for innovation. In other words, Johnson’s book argues against the model of the solitary genius, against the idea that one person can repeatedly create something ex nihilo.
The advantage of narrating your life online, failures included, is that whether you are at a large research institution or not, you can participate in large group conversations that not only inform but also create, such as the real-time, crowdsourced publication Digital Humanities Now or the comment threads at ProfHacker.
Now, it might seem problematic to be narrating our personal and institutional failures when the academy is facing such hard times. After all, how can we expect state legislatures or individuals to continue funding our campuses if they are aware that we fail at times?
Contrary to expectations, however, I think that showing our failings might make us more sympathetic to those outside of academia. Instead of being the romantic geniuses in our ivory tower, we start to look a little bit human. And humans and human experience is what lies at the heart of the university.
In 2009, Google made a splash when it announced Wave. In 2010, Google made a splash when it announced that it was going to kill Wave. If you’d ever used Wave, this probably came as no surprise. I believe there’s a lesson that we can learn from Google, however. Admit our failures—including the academy’s—and do so quickly. Then talk about them.
Thanks.
(Omni?)Present at the MLA
Posted by Brian in Research, Teaching, Technology on January 12, 2011
Last year I gained some attention for not attending the Modern Language Association’s annual convention. The notice that was paid to my situation and to the paper that was read on my behalf took me completely by surprise. That feeling of surprise persisted throughout 2010 as people occasionally sent emails or told me at events that they had heard of me. Standing in for the present absence [paywall] of many contingent or non-tenure-track at the yearly meeting of the MLA—and all the other conferences or department and faculty meetings—was not what I had had in mind when I stayed home. But I’m grateful that my paper resulted in increased attention being paid to the effects of labor casualization in the university.
Because I’m lucky, I have a job now. And because I’m even luckier, I’ve just finished attending my fifth MLA convention, where I spoke on two panels. I say “my” MLA with good reason. Previous to the 2006 MLA Convention, I’d heard that the yearly meeting wasn’t especially enjoyable: people only went for the job interviews; the presenters always took too long and there was never time for Q&A; the lobby was full of the dead gazes of nervous candidates; and conversations were stunted by the sizing up of one other’s badges—their names and affiliations. So I was stunned when I got to Philadelphia, where I was slated to give a paper. For three days straight, there was something fascinating and fabulous happening. Every hour of the day there was something that I wanted to attend. I saw Michael Bérubé and Bitch PhD (RIP) speak about their blogging. I saw Dave Parry (although I didn’t know him at the time) and others talk about the Wikipedia. I attended talks about the authors I was writing about in my dissertation and talks given by friends in my program. I met Katherine Hayles, someone whose work intrigued me and who chaired the panel that I spoke on. I bumped into one of my favorite undergraduate professors in the book exhibit and caught up on the last 4.5 years. I hung out with friends from grad school, met scads of new people, and ate one of the best meals of my life. What had been billed as a soulless gathering at a terribly inconvenient time of year turned out to be quite possibly the most interesting three days of my academic career to that point.
I was hooked. I planned to go back to the MLA the following year since I would be on the market for the first time. But I was very much looking forward to it. In Chicago in 2007, I had two interviews, but I went for the fun of it all. I met Matt Kirschenbaum and Joe Tabbi for the first time, the latter offering me the opportunity to work some on electronic book review and the ELO Directory. I caught up with Jason Jones and his family. I ate a montecristo. In 2008, I hit San Francisco with one job interview, but I was also moderating a panel on Twitter with Dave Parry, Matt Gold, and John M. Jones. The first MLA tweetups took place, and I met so many people whom I had come to know online that listing them would verge on the obnoxious. And the work of my peers continued to keep me rushing from one hotel to the next, as I tried to decide between incredible When I decided not to attend the 2009 convention, then, I was as disappointed by my missing out on what I suspected would be both a great intellectual feast and a fabulous party.
Although any notoriety I was enjoying in March 2010 had come my way primarily by my not attending the conference, I knew that I could pull a(n accidental) stunt like that once. So I began submitting paper proposals with the hope that I could speak in this year’s program. Others kindly invited me to participate in round tables that they were organizing. And after Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the MLA, wrote to threaten (in a tongue-in-cheek manner) to not accept my panels unless I showed her an airplane receipt guaranteeing I would be at the 2011 convention, I learned that I would have the chance to speak on two different panels. I’ll blog the talks from those panels in a day or so, but I wanted to quickly recap some of what my MLA looked like this year–to the best that I can recall, at least.
Thursday
- On arriving at the JW Marriott on Thursday morning, I found myself riding on an escalator behind someone who looked very familiar. He seemed to have noticed me and was looking quizzically at me as well. Neither of us had yet found name tag holders. Right before I could speak, he turned fully to me and said, “Excuse me, are you Brian Croxall? I’m Michael Bérubé.” This is not how you expect your conversation to go with the Second Vice President of the MLA. He was very kind and asked about my new job.
- I started Thursday with some media training that I and approximately 20 other people (including many ProfHackers had been invited to. Rosemary Feal and Mark Aurigemma provided two hours of helpful and revealing strategies for how faculty can effectively interact with journalists. Expect a ProfHacker post soon on the subject from myself or one of my colleagues.
- For the very first session of the MLA, I attended a panel on labor in the digital humanities (DH), which featured Tanya Clement, Mark Childs, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Amanda French, Carl Stahmer, with William Thompson presiding. The conversations ranged from debating the extent to which non-programmers can really expect to learn code well enough to contribute to a project (Carl said no), to the degradation of digital humanities projects due to the evaporation of labor after a grant ends, to Amanda French’s commonsense (and therefore all the more radical) suggestion that funds from grants be used in part to fund the training of graduate students so they can learn basic programming concepts and therefore become more able to communicate with their DH collaborators. Tanya Clement even read a portion of the whitepaper that she and Doug Reside have been preparing for the upcoming, NEH-funded Off the Tracks meeting that seeks to limn out pathways for DH scholar-programmers (their term, which she pointed out is contentious). At the end of this panel, I was very happy to get to meet Richard Grusin for the first time. His (and Jay David Bolter’s) book Remediation had a profound effect on my dissertation. This, by the way, is what’s cool about the MLA, in case you missed it.
- Directly after this panel, Natalie M. Houston, Jason Jones, George Williams, and myself got to speak about hacking the profession on a ProfHacker-organized and -themed panel. Natalie’s posted her talk, and I’ll put mine up shortly. I really enjoyed the Q&A, which featured tales of poems about burritos and George regaling us with his boxing days. In this panel, I got to meet Kathy Harris for the first time—someone with whom I was able to collaborate a bit on a timeline— and Bill “Thomas H. Benton” Pannapacker, who wrote a blog post on The Chronicle of Higher Education about the panel.
- Following a one-panel interlude where I’m afraid I zoned out more than anything, having hit a wall, I had my second (and final) speaking engagement. The “New Tools, Hard Times” panel featured Marc Bousquet, Rosemary Feal, Marilee Lindemann, Chris Newfield, and myself talking about the use of social media in the academy in hard times. I will simply say that I was floored to be on this panel with these people. My talk is forthcoming, but Marilee has posted hers and Chris has already blogged his reflections on the panel. And if you want to read the VERY lively tweetstream for the session, look at the hashtag archive for #newtools. During Q&A we were all happy that questions were coming in from people who were not at the convention and were asking about issues of anonymity in the academy. Perhaps the best question came from Matt Kirschenbaum who wondered whether work in social media was actually counterproductive at a point as it too often ends up being uncounted by the academy. This is a good question to keep in mind, but I appreciate the fact that my being presently off the tenure track means that I don’t have to worry as much about whether my contributions online count. Or in other words, while I haven’t grabbed the brass ring of the tenure-track job, I do get to exercise a tremendous amount of freedom in how I spend my energies and time. It’s kind of ironic, then, that I have some academic freedom that the tenured and especially the tenure-track faculty lack.
- At this point, I hit a wall, but had a fabulous dinner—and even better conversation—at Cork Bar.
This was eventually followed by some night caps (orange juice for me!) with friends. And Rosemary Feal introduced me to Gerald Graff.
Friday
- Friday morning started early with a show-and-tell round table of new digital projects. As I tweeted, I was most taken in by some of the new visualizations (still in beta, unfortunately) that John Walsh of The Swinburne Project demonstrated and “For Better For Verse,” an interactive tool for teaching scansion and prosody, which is headed up by Herbert Tucker of UVa. Then I got a personal tutorial on NINES and 18thConnect from Laura Mandell.
- I then took in a panel where Ryan Cordell presented on his work on Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad.” Ryan’s work is fascinating, but even more was his ability to present effectively. He really taught the audience about his work, rather than reading directly from the page. He made it plain that even more traditional talks can be shifted from what is supposed to be the norm at the MLA. I hope that Rosemary Feal really does ask him to do a video about effective presentations.
- I then hurried over to the book exhibit. It’s always fascinating to see what new books are coming out (not to mention how much money I can save). But the real draw this year was the Narrating Lives project, which participated in the larger theme of the conference established by MLA President Sidonie Smith. There wasn’t a line when I arrived, so I was quickly briefed and waivered, and I recorded a one-minute video that talked about why I look forward to the yearly MLA and what made me go to graduate school in literature and language.
(You can tell from my presentation that the media training hadn’t quite sunk in yet.) All in all, I’m really excited that the MLA is looking for such user-generated content. And I’m even more thrilled that Kathi Berens recorded two videos along the theme of “It Gets Better,” talking to those—like her— that are not on the tenure track. - Next on the schedule was a session on “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities,” which featured Kathy Harris, Alan Liu, Tara McPherson, Steve Ramsay, and Bethany Nowviskie (who, due to illness, was channeled by Steve), and Brett Bobley of the NEH, with Kathleen Fitzpatrick chairing (all links are to either the speaker’s blogged talk or to their Twitter account). The speakers each had about 3 minutes to present their perspective on the Digital Humanities. Perhaps most electric was Steve’s polemic (which appears to be his public persona and one which he performs exceptionally) in which he considered “Who’s In an Who’s Out,” a subject that seems to come up frequently in DH. He suggested that knowing how to code is all but required in DH and presented a definition of DH: it’s “about building things.” Steve has blogged his reflections on the panel, and they’re worth reading. Personally, I very much like his definition of building as requisite to DH. I’d suggest that it doesn’t have to be limited to one’s research, however, since I think DH can happen in pedagogy just as well as research. (See Chris Forster on this important point.) But during the discussion, Alan Liu argued that he’s not so much a builder as someone who steals or is a bricoleur, and I think that that’s possibly closer to my vision of myself than one of a builder. It was a very good conversation, but one that I also felt I’ve heard a lot recently, either in person or in the blogosphere about just what DH is. In the end, I wonder to what extent these questions really come down to wondering about how we should train the current generation of graduate students. After all, if we are to prepare people for DH positions, we need to make sure they will be able to have the skills that programs will be looking for. But I don’t know if we’ll ever get as specific in training as we are in breadth requirements for PhDs. The current (and previous) generation of DH practitioners seem to all have taken idiosyncratic paths, and that’s one of the things that makes the community vibrant. I’d hate to lose that (although I recognize that not everyone has the time or opportunity to pursue these paths). Perhaps this is why we keep talking about it. If you want to see more of the conversation, look at the archive for the hashtag #309. One of the things that I found most interesting about this panel was how packed the room was: standing room only, and it was clear that there were a lot of people there who simply wanted to learn about what the digital humanities were. Due to all reports I saw from last year’s MLA, the digital humanities sessions in 2009 were also packed, but were in much smaller rooms. This year saw DH given larger space, but it still wasn’t sufficient. I saw MLA staffers counting attendance during this session, and I think it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll see still bigger rooms in 2012.
- After the DH History and Future panel, I stayed put for a session on “The Open Professoriate” (Twitter hashtag #openprof) featuring Samuel Cohen, Amanda French, Dave Parry, Mark Sample, and Erin Templeton, with Matt Gold chairing. At the moment, only Amanda has blogged her talk, but I am sure that we’ll see more of the talks made available soon given that the openness of faculty’s research, teaching, and lives was the subject of the day. The Q&A was again very lively, and I asked the panel to what extent we should count on large corporations such as Google or Twitter to have our interests of openness at heart. It’s not that they are necessarily more or less profit-driven than the universities most of us work for, but I think that many of us—myself certainly included—forget to consider that we are creating value for the web companies that we contribute to with our searches and discussions. Not that this makes me want to be less open; after all, I’d rather have accessibility. But we need to be aware of everyone with whom we’re consorting in the quest toward openness. I was glad to see the MLA embrace conversations suh as these as well as the standard literary discussions.
- I stuck to the same room for one more talk, and got to hear Stanford’s Dan Edelstein talk about the mapping of Enlightenment correspondence in the Mapping the Republic of Letters project. The visualizations and the patterns they have been discovering by building a massive archive of early modern correspondence is intriguing and brought the conversation from the meta level of the #309 panel back to the practical. Fascinating work and well worth following.
- Following Dan’s talk, I moved to the Electronic Literature Organization‘s meetup, where I caught up with Zach Whalen and Kari Kraus and met Jentery Sayers and Mark C. Marino for the first time. Again, one of the reasons to attend the MLA in my experience is that everyone is there. And even if you don’t get a lot of time to talk to everyone, simply seeing each other in person helps to make possible new chances for working together or learning about what’s at the bleeding edge of different fields.
- After a DH-filled dinner of sushi, the final event of the evening was the MLA Tweetup, which Rosemary Feal sponsored. While it will likely not get the press coverage that 2009′s did, it was still nice to see in person many of the people whose tweets we had been reading throughout the first two days of the conference. I’m sure not everyone there was someone that was on Twitter, since it appeared to include some bleed over from the audience for President Sidonie Smith’s keynote address. Still, it was amazing to see so many people there, who were engaged in the Twitter side of the MLA. And the ambience was something to behold:
Saturday
- For my final experience of the MLA, I joined the fun run that Dave Parry had organized for as many MLA participants as were crazy enough to be consider spandex and black turtlenecks at 7am.
Dave and the others at the front of the pack took pity on us and kept it manageable. Fortunately, I had a strategy.
As was the case throughout so much of the MLA this year, it was great to have Rosemary Feal involved. She mentioned before the run how much she appreciated that the run got organized. At the risk of putting words in her mouth, I think she was pleased to see young blood at the MLA. But I also imagine that she enjoys seeing spontaneous organizing taking place: the activities of the underconference.
I don’t want to come off saying that there aren’t any problems at the MLA. There are things that I think can be fixed at the MLA. For one, it would be great to find ways to get those presenting in traditional panel formats (not everything can be pecha kucha, after all) could present rather than read directly from the page. After all, we’re all teachers. Why do we think that we need to communicate to one another in a different mode than we communicate to our students? Second, I think that the MLA can do more to embrace openness. In particular, the MLA should avoid paywalling information related to the conference, such as the program. Part of this trouble is due to the program being published as an issue of PMLA. But it shouldn’t fall to the crowd to hack and republish the simple PDF. If we are in hard times (and boy are we!), then we should be doing everything to make information about ourselves public. How can we expect people to understand what it is that we do in this profession if we don’t let them see what it is we’re discussing? (See Kathi Berens calling for the same openness on her blog.) But these problems are things that we can fix. They aren’t impossible. And on the whole, I’m feeling quite positive about the direction the organization is headed in.
I know that some people think the MLA is stodgy, solipsistic, and stressful. But that’s not my MLA. And I’m glad I was present.
EDITS: Added the photo at the Cork Bar, courtesy of Kathi Berens.
WordPress Books
Posted by Brian in Reading, Technology on November 5, 2010
Last week I asked several people on Twitter if they could recommend any books on WordPress. We’re working to more effectively implement a WP Install at Emory for faculty use and for low-key digital scholarship projects. (Bigger projects will most likely be running on Omeka.) A few others asked that I make the list available once I’d collected it, so I’m taking this opportunity to do just that. These books are listed in the order the recommendations came in.
- Ethan Watrall recommends Head First WordPress
by Jeff Siarto.
- Dimitrios Diamantaras recommends Smashing WordPress
by Thord Daniel Hedengren.
- Bill Wolff recommends WordPress For Dummies, 3rd Edition
by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.
- Boone Gorges recommends Professional WordPress
by Hal Stern, David Damstra, and Brad Williams.
In an ideal world, I would be able to purchase all of these texts, and I’m trying to ascertain what the library budget will countenance. If it comes down to my ranking them in the order of preference, however, I will probably rank them as follows: 3, 1, 4, 2. But that ranking is simply based on what I’ve been able to learn about each text as I’ve read through different reviews of their contents and their approaches.
It’s worth mentioning that a number of people whose Word Press-fu I admire chimed in to say that they didn’t use books. Jeremy Boggs and Amanda French both indicated that they haven’t really used books in the past. Instead, they turn to online resources when they have questions they can’t crack. Amanda specifically referred to the WordPress Codex as a helpful place to go for information. Moaçir de Sá Pereira recommended New2WP as a place that he’s used on on more than one occasion. And Boone reminded me that his own blog, Teleologistic has descriptions of interesting WP hacks.
I think that when I asked the question, I was hoping that there would be some consensus as to which source would be the best for learning more than I do at the moment. Absent that, I look forward to drawing on all the different options as I get my hands dirtier. I do think that a book will be what I’m after at first just so I can avoid switching back and forth between browser tabs.
If we’ve missed some of the texts that you think are critical on WordPress, please let me know. (Here’s where you can see that I’ve been writing for ProfHacker for quite some time: I can’t end a blog post without an an appeal to the imagined reader.)
Five Reasons to Use Social Media in the Classroom
Posted by Brian in Presentations, Research, Teaching, Technology on October 5, 2010
I’ve just returned from a few days at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (Trinidad). I was invited by the campus’s Instructional Development Unit (IDU) to deliver the keynote address at the presentation of their biennial UWI / Guardian Life “Premium” Teaching Awards. The theme that they asked me to speak on was “Teaching Excellence and Social Media,” something that I was excited to spend a few weeks thinking about more concretely than I have had the chance to recently since I am not currently teaching courses.
It was apparent that the theme struck a chord with many of the campus’s faculty. An afternoon conversation between myself, the Programme Coordinator (Dr. Anna-May Edwards-Henry), and thirty or so faculty members about the practicalities of using social media in the classroom and some of the assignments that I’ve designed was exciting and helped me refine some of my own ideas further. But it wasn’t just the university that was interested in the topic. We were also interviewed on television (watch us from 1:37:25 to 2:00:50) and radio; and these weren’t PBS stations: they were morning shows that are among the most viewed/listened to programs in the morning. Imagine if Good Morning America or Today cared enough to talk about social media — or even just education. (I’m not holding my breath for an invite.)
In the interest of continuing the conversation about social media and putting “theory” into practice, I wanted to post the talk and the accompanying Prezi here. (Prezi takes a lot of time to do well, in my opinion. But if your audience hasn’t seen a Prezi before, your time will be well repaid.) If you want to see how the presentation was linked to the talk, you can see a marked-up copy on Scribd.
“Five Reasons to Use Social Media in the Classroom.”
Introduction
- In an article titled “Fear and Trembling,” Ellen Nold discusses the difficulties of getting scholars to use the computer creatively in their teaching and research. In a statement that might just as well be directed towards social scientists or natural scientists, Nold suggests, “What is preventing humanists from using the computer…is merely their belief that they cannot use the machine. It is ironic that a group known to undertake calmly and surely the study of Latin, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Swahili, or Gaelic often balks at the much simpler task of learning the more logical, far less capricious language of the machine.”
- Nold’s critique of fear and trembling on the part of scholars when faced with new technology is timely. It addresses some of what is at the crux of integrating social media into the classroom: nervousness and uncertainty on the part of the professoriate…which is interesting since the article appeared in 1975…and was discussing the use of the revolutionary, computational tool: the word processor.
- Thirty-five years later, I’d be willing to guess that word processors have become second nature and indispensable to most of us. The only time “fear and trembling” might apply to the tool is when Microsoft radically overhauled the menu interface for Word 2007.
- If we’ve become used to using the word processor, surely we can become used to using social media in the classroom
- Of course, one difference between the two is that the word processor is something that professors adopted before students. In this case, the tables have been turned. We, perhaps, are the students when it comes to social media.
- As such, we should perhaps briefly note what exactly social media is.
Definition of social media
- When we think of social media, we tend to think of a few big players: Facebook, Twitter, perhaps MySpace, Friendster, Orkut
- These social networks are certainly social media. But social networking is not the only type of social media.
- When I talk about social media, I prefer a wider definition. (Something along the lines of the definition on the Wikipedia, itself a social medium)
- Media are how we communicate with one another. Throughout the 20th century, we developed ever more pervasive and sophisticated broadcast/publishing media that could reach more and more people: radio, traditional book publishing, television, and eventually the Internet.
- But access to these electronic and print media was expensive and centralized. Even the Internet was expensive and limited at first, despite all the utopian rhetoric associated with it.
- With advances in technology in the 1990s and in the 2000s, the cost of participating in content creation fell. Suddenly, almost anyone could be involved in publishing or broadcast.
- When almost anyone can be involved, the media landscape suddenly becomes more communal, more participatory, more social.
- Social media supplements traditional media models. Podcasts occupy the same space as radio; blogs and wikis play along with traditional print publication; and YouTube takes over television.
- In short, you might say that any time we get our students creating and responding to one another online that they are using social media.
Social Media In the Classroom
- So that’s what social media is. As Howard Rheingold puts it, “The power of social media in education […] derives from their affordances for forms of communication and social behavior that were previously prohibitively difficult or expensive….”
- Lowering the costs means that it’s easy for all of us to use social media in the classroom.
- But just because it’s easy to use doesn’t mean that that use will necessarily be excellent. So how do we go about encouraging excellence in the classroom with social media?
- As far as I’m concerned, the first step to being effective with social media is to ask yourself why you want to include social media in your classes.
- What are you hoping to accomplish? What learning outcomes do you desire?
- And you don’t just need to know why you’re using social media for yourself; you will need to make it clear to students why we are using social media in the classroom.
- We owe it to them to clarify how a new assignment—something very different from what they’ve probably done before—will help them learn the course’s content better.
What, then, can social media add to the regular classroom dynamic or experience? Let me suggest five ways to think about these additions.
1. It gets the class knowing each other better, which improves the classroom dynamic.
- I believe that getting people to know their classmates is an important thing that social media can do.
- We all know that it’s easier to teach a class at the end of the term than in the beginning. After several 15 weeks, we know one another better. You know who they are and you know their personalities. You can get away with a slightly different pedagogy, and everyone has developed relationships that make it easier for them to talk to one another.
- When used in the classroom, social media can do the impossible: speed up time. We move more quickly to those last weeks of the term where we know one another better and consequently reap the benefits of that increased contact with one another.
- This happens when one uses Twitter or when students read each others’ blog posts.
- Football fan
- Faren’s story
- In this moment, she explored the tool for its ability to shape our perceptions of her.
- Discussions really did improve when using Twitter in the classroom.
- People asking each other for help with assignments
- They help each other because they have come to know each other better. Social media is, in other words, a gift economy.
2. It provides a different pathway for people to be talking to each other and to be participating.
- As Monica Rankin (UT Dallas) wrote : “Most educators would agree that large classes set in […] auditorium-style classrooms limit teaching options to lecture, lecture, and more lecture. And most educators would also agree that this is not the most effective way to teach.”
- So another way that I’ve used Twitter in my classroom is as an in-class backchannel.
- So what I do is I project the students’ tweets on a large projection screen like this. As I teach, the students are welcome to send messages from their phones or computers, and all of the messages end up behind me.
- This proves helpful in a lecture-based course because in that format, students normally do not have the chance to engage with the teacher. The professor is simply talking at the front of the room.
- Using Twitter in this way allows the students to talk to each other and also to me.
- There’s always a backchannel. This just allows me to capture that backchannel and make it public, inviting the students to communicate with each other.
- I can look at the screen and respond to questions and get immediate feedback on what I’m doing.
- There’s the chance that the students will post sarcastic things about what I’m doing or some mistake that I’ve made, but that still indicates that they are engaged with class material.
- In a smaller, discussion-based class it can also engage those who are less vocal.
3. It allows the conversation to continue easily outside the space and time of the classroom. It makes things asynchronous.
- The asynchronous nature of social media means that you and your students can get to things when you have time for them or when you’ve had more time to consider. We all know students—again, the less vocal ones—who take longer than others to formulate what end up being very insightful comments. Social media in the classroom gives these students a different avenue and a different temporality for presenting these viewpoints.
- It also gives the entire class a way to continue discussing the course material, whenever someone wants to. You no longer have to depend upon being in the same place at the same time to learn.
- Digital office hours, accomplished via IM
- Wikis
- My favorite social media assignment uses a wiki.
- A wiki is a tool that allows multiple people to edit a document and to track the changes made to it.
- For each day of class, I assign a small group of students to write notes—a summary, key passages and terms—and publish them on the wiki.
- Suddenly, group work is much less painful thanks to the technology. They don’t have to be in the same place at the same time.
- The asynchronous approach has the final benefit of keeping my students thinking about my course material.
4. It provides students with transferable skills and toolsets that they will use after completing university.
- How to write clearly and persuasively is perhaps the most important thing I teach students in my literature classes. So writing is good.
- But if they also know how to write online? That’s better.
- Writing online—blogs, tweets, wikis—is an important skill for this century. I want my students to have other abilities that will distinguish them when they meet with employers.
- One of the ways I accomplish this goal of teaching new skills is through an interactive timeline assignment.
- Timelines, Google Docs, and HTML
- It’s not only particular tools or technologies that matter, it’s skills. Working in social media teaches the students how to collaborate on a team (wikis)—something that humanities classes in particular don’t teach by default—and how to behave in a networked environment.
5. The fifth (and last) reason to use social media in the classroom is that it opens the classroom to the world.
- How often have you heard students ask, “Why does this matter?”
- Because social media tends to be public, classes that use social media open themselves to participation from the wider world. From other students.
- You can also bring guests into the classroom using Skype. These guests can include other scholars, authors, or maybe just native speakers of the language your students are learning.
- Alternatively, assignments can ask students to engage with the wider world. Many of my friends who teach political science or film assign their students to write new entries for the Wikipedia. They contribute to the world’s wider knowledge and it’s suddenly clear why what they’re doing matters.
- And because social media is open, it’s something we can capture. We generate our own record of what we’ve learned. This record can be of use to students in the future. It’s something that they can show to other people (parents?).
- And in this sense, it opens the classroom and the learning experience to the larger world.
Conclusion
- So there are five reasons to use social media in the classroom. Even with those reasons, you might still feel nervous about its inclusion.
- But just remember…
- We’re ALWAYS been social. We use a profoundly social space in our teaching—the classroom—, and being social is how we’ve always been excellent. It’s certainly a trait of those who are being honored this evening.
- Just because we’re already social, however, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try supplementing our classroom with something new, like social media. The reasons for using social media in the classroom are so overwhelmingly positive that it’s worth the experiment and the risk of becoming uncomfortable for a short period.
- It is possible to have teaching excellence and social media in the same classroom.
- We just have to be willing to become students again ourselves.
- Thank you.
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