Dissertation Excerpt: Implications for LIS Education

Just wanted to share an excerpt from my dissertation, the big take-aways for the field of library and information science.
The help desk manager at the UIUC Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Jill Gengler, once said that the kinds of people she wants to hire (and inspire) are “positive problem solvers.” I don’t have enough words to express how much I agree with this sentiment. These are the attributes of the people I met in my research who truly helped to foster digital literacies and enabled their libraries to have visible impacts. Throughout the process of the dissertation I couldn’t help but compare my experience with graduate studies in LIS to what I was observing in the field. I had the privilege and honor of attending and working with one of the highest ranked institutions in the world in several capacities: as a student, researcher and instructor for several years. Throughout most of the period I frequently struggled with feelings of being an outsider or rebel because of my consistent desire to focus on practice and optimism (solutions), which was often regarded as unscholarly, naïve or arrogant. At one point it even led me to reject affiliating myself with librarianship entirely, but the better answer, I later determined, was to take ownership over what I wished for my area of study to be. In that vein, I posit that LIS must address several major issues:
Identity. LIS has a branding problem. Too many people think librarians are the rigid old ladies who go “shuuush.” They think libraries are boxes full of books and inert silence. They don’t think of public TV production centers, talking gingerbread men or the building as a hard-earned symbol of social justice for an African American neighborhood, or as many of the other possible associations present in the stories of my site visits. We need to alter what libraries and library and information science means to people, and we can do this by teaching—socializing—our future public librarians with professionalization that emphasizes human and technology services as much as reading materials or organization. Libraries should bust out of their walls and into their communities and on to the internet to be heard and seen differently.[1] As a field of research we need to think and talk about ourselves differently as well. Instead of defining the field as being in a state of crisis over information needs, we can construct it as being in a state of proactive responsiveness. We are not the handmaidens for information merely here to serve other fields, we are innovators and leaders with all things connecting people and information.
Diversity. Public libraries serve patrons of all kinds, and yet library science is continually one of the most homogenous areas of study. This is true in terms of nearly every socio-analytic category (race, class, gender [2]) and often in other ways, like personality types or disciplinary background. The impacts of our lack of diversity is sometimes surprising, like when it results in intolerance for conservatism, Christianity or optimism, and also sometimes very unsurprising, such as assumptions of default whiteness or expecting every student to own a smartphone with an unlimited data plan and penchant for checking email. Of the librarians I spoke to over half of them expressly and independently indicated they did not come from a background in the humanities. They were from fields like IT, business, education, social services, art and communications. Some of them were even a little disorganized and many of them showed that they appreciated change and yearned to be flexible. A few even said they weren’t all that excited about books. Above all they were able to connect with patrons as diverse as they were, and found assets and opportunities in the knowledge and needs those patrons had to offer for library services. Our ability to relate to communities, patrons and technologies, as well as our motivation and capability to teach and innovate, is reliant on our diversity.[3] There are many trajectories for tackling issues of diversity in LIS institutions, including altering recruitment strategies, better supporting and sustaining students, recruiting and funding faculty of different backgrounds and crucially working recognition of the importance of diversity into curriculum, particularly information science classes and projects.
Research and Teaching. A large share of research that comes out of iSchools appears to be on academic libraries and academic topics. Much of the curriculum and body of publication focuses on critical analysis of important issues, like discourses in literature or methods of information organization and abstraction, but not active and direct implementation of solutions and services in fields related to information. If the study of library and information science is to actually inform what goes on in public with information professionals then we should be working more actively with institutions beyond the academy. This includes researching with partners like corporations, schools and community libraries and emphasis on areas like community informatics, digital literacy and usability. Practicums and internships are a well-recognized method to engage master’s students in this, but PhD and faculty-level research and scholarship must follow suit as well. Like many areas of study PhD’s in library and information science often do not go on to fill tenure-track positions at research universities, and consequently experience in practice-based and teaching settings can be very important, it ought not be seen as a ‘distraction from true scholarship.’ On the other hand, research methods are not evenly taught in many institutions. Master’s students may not get the opportunity to learn about how to conduct social science (or other kinds of) research and PhD’s are often not familiarized with action, participatory and community-based methodologies common in fields like health, education or psychology.
Several times throughout my research I was asked by librarians (who already had a Master’s degree) if my school offered any continuing education for librarians who wanted to better understand what they were doing or who wanted to develop innovative programs like makerspaces in libraries. There is an enormous opportunity for life-long learning in LIS education that can be built upon pre-existing frameworks like online course systems or organizations like the OCLC to ensure that a given librarian’s degree doesn’t have to be stamped with a certain vintage. Just think of what might happen in an LIS research center explicitly set up to be a public (or corporate or school) library program and systems innovation lab![4]
[1] A developing array of strategies for this can be found on the ALA website, at http://www.ala.org/advocacy/advocacy-university/public-library-resources.
[2] See http://www.ala.org/research/librarystaffstats/diversity for some relatively recent statistics for the overall profession, or http://dmi.illinois.edu/stuenr/index.htm#race for a very recent representation of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This may be in part due to the field’s position as an exclusively graduate area of study, but the graduate level in the social sciences, arts and humanities show that the severity needn’t be the case.
[3] The ALA explicitly promotes this ideal with examples like the diversity standards for the ACRL, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/diversity.
[4] The Harvard Library Innovation Lab (http://librarylab.law.harvard.edu) might be an example of this. Admittedly I’m more excited about the development and deployment of in-person programs than online systems. The Center for Digital Inclusion (http://cdi.lis.illinois.edu/cdi) here at the University of Illinois may be an example of this.

A School Invention Project

In 5th grade my primary teacher had each student in his class independently come up with an invention. Parents were allowed to help but it had to be mostly driven by the kids themselves. Mine was a golf putter with an aluminum tube attached to the side that could hold and deploy balls that would enable you to rapidly practice putting and assess the nearby ground. This was probably the kind of project that ultimately helped to propel me into the worlds I’m in now.
I only remember a few of the other kids’ inventions – mostly the ones that were really bad. Some kind of pizza turn table and a basketball hoop with a laundry basket mounted on the bottom. Makes me wonder what enabled and inhibited creativity in us back then.
Anyway I was reminded of all of this during our past winter holiday family outing when my 10 year old cousin and I deployed what we affectionately dubbed “the bowling stick” – a 2 meter long flimsy PVC pipe with a confusing, twisted assemblage of pipe parts and pads for chair legs attached to the bottom. It was the invention of my Aunt, who really intended it to be a low-impact Adaptive Bowling instrument that required a little more skill than a ramp that she and my grandmother could use. For my little cousin and I, however, it breathed new life into bowling like nothing else could have. Normally the game seems pretty predictable: you fling a ball down the lane, aiming for the center pin hoping to knock them all down… and after regular practice can get spares and strikes quite easily. There’s little in the way of thrilling competition or real athleticism involved, I get the sense that it’s more about having an easily interruptible game medium that can serve as a pseudo-escapist way to punctuate conversation.
Enter the stick. Neither one of us knew how to use this thing, and while it felt a little like hockey it was much harder to control the heavy ball. It was adjustable and you could use all kinds of techniques to send it down, amounting to a substantial amount of silliness and chaos. Anyway I thought it would make an excellent updated version of the 5th grade invention project:

First and foremost it could be used as an excellent excuse to teach physics and engineering – angles and spinning with the ball, bending and tensile strength of the stick, force created from different swing techniques , friction of various surfaces and so on.
As a kid I would have been pretty bored by talking about this kind of physics until we actually had to apply it! And that’s the beauty of this thing – you could take what you learned and attempt to make improvements to your technique and the actual construction of the device, and then observe and test them in an iterative and scientific method type fashion. What happens when you add more or different prongs on the end? Alter the wheels or put pads everywhere instead of just on the bottom?
A variety of models could be developed around each kind of ball propulsion technique, with advantages and disadvantages and instructors could help students to learn that it doesn’t have to just be about speed or efficiency. Perhaps the controlled-instability and unpredictability makes the game more fun. Might there be other improvements, like making it height-adjustable for multiple players or able to hook on to a table without falling over? How might the aesthetics alter the experience we have using the stick?
And this of course could build into other related projects: can we make a new off-shoot of bowling based on this stick? What makes a good game? What would it take to make a Kickstarter out of it? Do we need to create a video and how do we categorize and present the features or benefits? How can research data be collected about health impacts, possible damage to the floor or other issues that might come up?

Anyway just a thought. I’m not really qualified to be a full-time teacher for 10 year olds but if any of them want to come to the Fab Lab to pioneer a bowling stick, just tell them to drop me a line. I sent the same cousin home with an Arduino this year. $10 says she loses or breaks it, but maybe, just maybe, she’ll get to thinking about what to invent with it 🙂

What’s Missing in Digital Aristotle – RE: CGP Grey and the limits to learning with the internet

I love CGP Grey. And Hank and John Green on YouTube. But I don’t think a customized version of this sort of thing is the ideal future (or solution) to education. Here’s my take – start by watching this video:

Two experiences come to mind:

I teach (and previously attended class) in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC (GSLIS). It’s regarded as one of the most highly-ranked schools in the country and has many cutting edge programs, including a distance learning system known as LEEP. While LEEP isn’t exactly what he’s talking about here it has many characteristics in common – the school acts as an intermediary for providing learning materials, assignments, guidance on subjects and evaluations, at a comparatively lower cost for all involved. Students generally pursue these materials on their own timeline (save for a 2 hr online class held at a regular time) and largely in front of a computer screen. One of the biggest problems with LEEP (in my opinion, though we have some research on this topic) is that students find it harder to be engaged when they’re stuck in front of a screen instead of amongst peers in a classroom. We try to counteract this by having on-campus days for in-person activities, which usually go well, but fact of the matter is their motivation is often less because they’re often less committed to participating in a class. Students listen to lectures while doing their dishes, slack on doing online readings and so on. And these are top-tier masters students. It’s easier for them to not care because we trust them to do more self-guided learning and we don’t check on them as much. I don’t think this problem is endemic to online learning, I think there’s a lot of variance in how much people actually enjoy learning at all. Many of the undergrads at U of I aren’t here because they like or want to learn, they’re here because it’s the path that’s been laid out for them.
I’ve had a few years of experience teaching classes in informatics in GSLIS for both graduate and undergraduate students. A lot of the time we’re working on technical application skills, like building websites or learning to code, and since this stuff moves at a pace that’s too fast for even me to keep up I do a lot of referral to online learning resources like videos and sites like Lynda.com or the Khan Academy. I do what I can to inspire ideas, answer questions, provide interesting, challenging and realistic assignments and create an environment where students work together and feel supported. I encourage only self-driven potentially-independent individuals to enroll. Even in this environment I’ve noticed that as many as half in a given class has difficulty driving themselves to evaluate and make the most out of learning materials out there. They often have trouble caring about it given all of the other classes and deadlines on their plates, especially when it’s a “learn at your own pace and work at will” kind of setting.

So, as you’ve probably guessed, my issue with CGP Grey’s idea here is that he’s missing three big issues that relate to education:

Motivation – This varies a lot by individual but often times people can’t be entirely (or optimally or joyfully) self-driven. They need to be paid for work, get recognition for it by others, or find it constantly relevant to their in-the-moment tasks and challenges. Online learning faces a myriad of issues with motivation. Look into Nicole A. Cooke’s research for more on this issue. I think many of the people who learn online effectively in technical fields have inherited motivation and self-teaching strategies from prior in-person schooling in their early years. If my college (and above) level students struggle with this I can’t imagine what high schoolers and below in socially excluded settings go through.
Socialization – Another reason we have people in school is to teach them how to participate in society – as part of the workforce, as citizens in countries or communities, and as individuals. Online learning doesn’t provide as much of an opportunity for this, and I think it can even be dangerous. I make all of my kids learn about how racism, sexism or homophobia relate to technologies, regardless of if they want to because it’s part of our duty as educators to work to do so. If a learner gets to just pick and choose material Ala-cart online they’ll avoid this total package that I think is so essential to holistic and contextual learning. If we make them take ‘perspective-taking 101’ how can we assure that they’ll ever advance past the first class? How do we even know this kind of thing can be taught without real human-to-human interaction? How do we prevent ‘personalized’ from becoming ‘isolated’ in negative ways?
Edutainment – I’m not really convinced the internet is going to have any less interference and distraction than TV, radio or the other technologies that have failed to be our saviors in years past (see the 2:30 mark in the video). How many hours have been lost to people watching cats on the internet? There’s a reason that educational material is not the most popular – there’s not as much money there. Many instructors already feel pressured to be especially entertaining to compete with this stuff, I think this will happen on the web too. TL; DR is one of the most infuriating expressions of this I think I’ve ever run into.

So, ultimately, what am I saying? That we shouldn’t have personalized online learning? No, not at all! Does a Digital Aristotle program have a place within schools? Absolutely. Is it a good idea to split kids up by ability within given subject areas, instead of age? Sure. Can self-guided learning be powerful? Probably more so than any other type!
I’m saying I’m excited to see models where we can solve issues with motivation, continue human-to-human socialization and avoid being pwn’d by digital capitalism. I don’t know what these are yet but they’re certainly not a bunch of kids just being plugged into computer sockets in a classroom (or at home) with no real teacher. As much as the fallout from standards might cause problems (like exams being a horrible method for assessment) I think having some sense of what we want all students to know and do is useful. If we are going to implement systems like Digital Aristotle let’s be careful about ensuring they can work with an entourage of strategies to ensure well-adjusted, adaptive learners.

Two Stories About Webcams

I do a lot of things that I don’t realize are odd, I think. A couple of stories:
1) Back in college we had a great community with a lot of trust and freedom. It was the fourth floor of the non-substance dorm, Snyder, where we all lived along a hallway and left our doors unlocked. Since we’d go hang out in each other’s dorm rooms frequently it was nice to see what people were up to first online – the usual stuff like video games, movies, playing guitar, homework, etc… We took this to a level beyond simple texts or instant messages though – four of our dorm rooms were equipped with webcams that could be easily viewable online. At some point I even put together a webpage where people could see all four rooms at the same time. They didn’t reveal the entire room, so people could still have privacy, or cover the camera, but I think it speaks loads about our perceptions of privacy and comfort. This was in the same time as the debut of Facebook when everyone was very open on this system, categorically listing details on themselves for the sake of a search system built around them. I know we were privileged as boys who were unlikely to be raped or robbed, but sheesh, it’s a stark contrast to the atmosphere nowadays with the NSA and identity theft and so on. In some ways it makes me nostalgic – I like friends wanting to come visit me and generally want to have nothing to hide.
2) Many people are annoyed with the lack of eye contact with webcams. You look at their picture on the screen and see one another looking slightly above, below or to the side. Luckily I’m absurd and have dual display computers, and have solved this problem. I pin the camera between the monitors, right in the center, and move the Skype window so it spans between the two. It doesn’t always fit the other person’s face position perfectly, but it helps me look right at them and the camera at the same time. As an added bonus it hides the picture of myself, so I won’t pay much attention to what I look like when speaking, which feels more natural. I wonder how long it will be before we have cameras behind the screen!

From sexism in science to examining my own capacity for sexism

In reaction to -> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/2013/10/14/standingwithdnlee-sciam

I’m glad the article focuses some on her positive impacts and solutions – those are what are most important to me 🙂 It’s a little worrisome though because this Ofek thing seems to be an instance of outright straight-forward disrespect and ‘ism’ – wound up into one moment and reply. I think a lot of it is more structural, persistent and crafty than that. Like, for instance, a lot of industries rely on participants who are essentially workaholics to be competitive to get limited positions and grants. This doesn’t seem bad at face value, but might exclude people who have alternative values – say, those who see the importance of having a family, collaboration through friendship in the workplace or doing engagement to bring in diverse perspectives, etc… Essentially a woman who wants to have a family or a person from a different culture who wants to take care of their grandmother or whatever gets penalized and this sort of thing feels like structural ‘ism’ to me. When we make our talking points mostly about people in white hoods we lose sight of the redlining.

I guess on the flip side I have no idea how to deal with resocializing men. I’m especially bad at connecting to and influencing guys who are sexist. In the overt ways I’d disagree with, anyway. Dudes really into violence and running over animals in pickup trucks and guys who think verbal expression of emotions is for weak people.
I mean I guess my definition of sexism is debatable – a friend once took the position that my suggestion that all people should have the capacity to be more assertive and rely on individual agency underscored an emphasis on a greater masculine narrative – from the one end I can suggest that girls should reclaim territory: to be a person who is ‘assertive’ and ‘confrontational’ shouldn’t be the turf of just men, but both genders, but on the other end it excludes alternative structures of interaction, such as trying to encourage everyone (but particularly men) to be more ‘passive’ or ‘reconciliatory.’ In other words what I see as an idealized social form (compassionate, informed, positive assertion) might be considered masculine and to suggest women need to match it might be sexist because I’m asking them to conform to the masculine norm. But if most did then it wouldn’t be a masculine norm anymore. I think she was mostly just mad at me for not really truly recognizing the costs and barriers that exist for women to do this (again, my ability to believe agency matters more than structure is not just optimistic, it is enabled by my vast swaths of privilege), but on another level I guess she could be right – I may just be sexist. Even if I just use positive encouragement (promote girls who are assertive) as my mode I’d end up marginalizing those who differ. Hell paying more attention to more attractive women than less attractive women is downright sexist and for me that’s in large part driven by hormones and decades of social conditioning – I do it automatically without thinking (but can choose to override it and do my best to do this). I probably have more sexism in me than I care to admit and therefore more ability to connect to other sexist men than I might realize but some of this stuff is so ingrained and nuanced that I have to make it a big soap box project to do it – and nobody wants that. It really seems so radical. Like sure, I can recognize that genders are social constructions and try to convince people that we should move beyond them. But ain’t nobody gon understand that ish. Or maybe I just suck at explaining and convincing. Or maybe that’s better done through time and life exposure and not words.
Ah well, speaking of soap boxes that are about to crumple beneath my ego…

The Value of STEM?

Just some disorganized thoughts on this one. So we have this concept called STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education – where the US falls short according to many measures (though, interestingly, our national report card has yet to include engineering until recently). People invoke it as a kind of mandate frequently, and to what purpose matters quite a bit:

If the question is should we be doing things like trying to get more socially excluded populations into engineering – I’d say absolutely yes. This has as much to do with how we broadly socialize women and people of color to participate in society as it does how they experience education (yes, this too is part of socialization, I realize).
If the question is if we should emphasize STEM activities more in schooling – I’d say maybe. I wonder what STEM is in opposition to (or an advancement over).

Step 1
First off, what are we missing if we break it down by basic subjects?
The humanities, social sciences, languages and the arts.
Scratch that, we’ve got STEAM, advocates who take the position that design is what makes innovation in any STEM field possible – I’d agree on all accounts, except for say, math.
And, actually, there’s an interesting similarity between Art and Math – they both gain considerably more value when embedded in application. Math for Math’s sake is about as relevant or job-related as Art for Art’s sake, I think. Graphic design to communicate ideas or make interfaces more usable – or – statistics and predictive algorithms to make experiments possible or to solve problems – these seem to ring more true to innovation and “usefulness” for me.
Update: Er, scratch that too – according to the NSF “Science” here includes the social sciences. I think many people aren’t including these when they refer to STEM, however. Anyway, continuing…
So, generally, do I think we have too much emphasis on the social sciences, languages and humanities in schooling?

Well, at the K-12 level I’m not sure we actually have any significant social science. I mean sure there’s geography and social studies (which is history, really) but generally I don’t see a lot of psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science in high school – and I think actually it would be great to have more of those. In high schools like mine the tests we were being taught for (ACT/SAT sure but also more importantly AP tests) didn’t include those, they included emphasis on base subjects like math or English.
Languages, I think offer another similar dimension. Sure learning French or German is probably less useful and a sign of privilege or specialization. But you had better bet Spanish, Portuguese, Russian or Chinese would help you greatly in the future economy and job landscape.
And then we land on the humanities. Generally I’d say that we teach the same American-centric history too many times and that English focuses far too much on making sense of written texts instead of the grand entourage of media we engage with today. These issues aren’t an unsolvable problem, though, we could just focus more on contemporary history and on cultural studies that think of “text” in a multimodal kind of way. And both of these areas help to emphasize important subset skills – perspective taking, critical inquiry and rhetoric – or the effective expression of ideas.

So, really, I’m not ready to say we should deemphasize them. I would, however, be ready to suggest that we replace Math class at the high school level with Engineering class – where advanced math would be taught but always in application to something – integrated into practice where possible.
Step 2
Second, what are these disciplines (or subjects) really about? I feel like we’d be better off to think about it in terms of literacies or skills. What kinds of competencies do we want our students to have coming out of an education system. STEM, to me, suggests the following:

Science – Experimentation, causality and empiricism, internally consistent truth
Technology – Well, for me this is digital literacy, and I’ll get to in a second
Engineering – Problem-solving in an applied context, most often with physical objects or systems
Math – Problem-solving and algorithms in an abstract context

So, really, I’d agree that we might not be focusing enough on some of these skills, but I’d also say that they’re not any more important than others that might be cultivated by the humanities and social sciences – critical and creative thinking, expression and perspective-taking and so on.
Digital literacy is hard to really reconcile in all of this – I see it as a composite of skills and perspectives – but on another level you could think about just pure competency in being able to manipulate tools as a fundamental. That is, everyone should know how to type, use a mouse and find information on the internet. In my dream world I’d rather say everyone should know how to question the black box, reverse engineer, remix, program, control a 3D interface, draw with a mouse, present stories on the internet and so much more. As you can see my categories already branch into any number of the skills and areas mentioned above.
Step 3
So, in other words what’s this really about?
I think it’s about an assumption of mapping schooling to jobs. We have great demand for jobs in STEM (and STEAM, really) but not so many in the humanities like history, English and cultural studies or social sciences like sociology, anthropology and political science. And, really, that wouldn’t be a problem if the humanities were like aviation or sculpture, where only a few people go in, make it out and land jobs, but instead we have situations like UIUC, where our highest enrollment major is Psychology (1150 students in 2013), but there is probably not that much demand for people in psychology-related careers. Similarly we have a rather high count of people in communications (742), political science (552), and animal sciences + vet med (applied but probably not that many jobs – 923). Engineering, science and business majors dominate the majority of enrollment, comparatively. The other “useless” majors aren’t actually as populated as you might expect – English (323), history (217), sociology (207), anthropology (126), global studies (195), recreation (163) and so on. Though you do see interesting things like 300 PhD’s in computer science or 90 PhD’s in English but that’s a different issue.
So, at the end of the day – I think I want to go back to just focusing on ways to integrate engineering and other practice/problem-solving based learning into all curriculum for kids and focusing on areas where we have inequalities, such as women enrolled in engineering, or, from a different perspective that’s important to me in particular, men (or extroverts or people of color!) in library science. 🙂

Gets Me Some Tech Skills

I was asked for ideas on how someone who has a very strong humanities and social services background could work on “website making/social media/general tech skills” and this was my reply.

As often stated (probably?), I think website design can be broken down – writing copy, writing code, doing graphics/layout and designing experience (UX; a combination of all). You probably don’t need any more practice with the first but the other three have many avenues. UX is worth your while and severely needed in the nonprofit world, but you’ll have to do some translation for many of those folk. Coders don’t exist there. Developers are a rare pink unicorn in one of those scenes from planet earth with millions of birds. Coders often aren’t socialized to do world-saving work, and they get paid gobs in other fields. Graphic design is handy for all of the things (print, web, identity, making, life) but also kinda hard to learn without specific projects. Luckily you have some of the foundational skills, like the ability to notice details or general concepts like negative space.

SO substantive resources:

For coding – you could learn HTML/CSS but I think it might be more helpful to learn an introductory language like PHP (and MySQL for databases to go with it – this is what WordPress is based on). There are many free online resources, start with W3C Schools and go to something more serious from there. More hardcore (application-specific) people may tell you to go for Python or something off of this list -> http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/sites-to-learn-coding-online
Graphic design – I have a book that’s trapped in storage in Glen Ellyn right now that has a hundred great design challenge prompts. Tasks like make a mail-order army of robots. I’ve done a few and like it, but I think learning how to operate fancy-pants programs is as much of a challenge as figuring out how to make things look good. One route is to learn to make great looking designs using simple tools, like Powerpoint 2010 or 2013 (better the newer you go) or another is to just start following scripted tutorials for Photoshop or Illustrator. Try learning the pen tool to make paper cutting designs, you can make money better than Kay Wahlgren and help dad retire. I can probably get you any Adobe program you like, or try Inkscape or Gimp (the true we-have-no-money route).
User Experience – See if you can get into this class -> https://www.coursera.org/course/hci. Don’t bother with the assignments, just watch them. It’ll teach you concepts behind usability and user testing methods. Or you could try reading The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley. My professor uses this to teach composite design in LIS (an interdisciplinary field that likes people!).

I think ‘social media’ skills are a little overrated. It’s worth learning the capabilities and social norms for each network or medium but I encourage people to pick just a couple and commit investment to those. Generally my impression is that what lies beneath them are good writing for the affordances of each and a sense for audience – things I suspect you already have 🙂 But this might also be that I just feel annoyed by continuously hovering over a monitor watching the endless flow of information stream by, with meager attempts to redirect it amongst the flurry of hyperactive internet squirrels. I’d rather be more selective and intentional with my attention, something I think I’d even call a digital literacy. Yes, thank you Howard Rheingold, but I still think meditation is silly.

I’m not sure what general tech skills might be. You can move a mouse and type pretty darned well, and glean information from different screen formats rapidly in a non-linear fashion. Check.

Anyway I think you nailed it. Pick a project. Shattons of nonprofits need help. I just talked to the Urbana Independent Media Center Python Users Group the other day. The Fab Lab has plenty of things they could work on for us – a better sign in system, automated inventory, an interactive project board or hacking the CCK in our broke-ass Drupal install to be friendly for retirees. Or many groups have crappy looking websites or need better flyers or logos or good looking report designs. Perhaps better than this – you could learn video production and help a group produce their image on YouTube by telling a story about the impacts they make (CI Club example – http://youtu.be/_pBjjW2E2Mg), a lot don’t have time or knowledge to do this kind of thing. Or many service users whom they have never tested and may have vastly different understandings of computer interfaces than they do. I learned my friend’s mother doesn’t really know how to save and upload photos of her daughter to Facebook to share so she just tags herself in them instead. This is in part an interface design issue – I’m sure the system could be recreated to facilitate this behavior and perception of use.

If you need projects I have plenty here for you, but I suspect you have a network up there that could use the help 🙂 Hope that helps!

And on the upswing

Karma has a way of working itself around. ‘Nuff unpleasant vibes on this place lately I think.
I’ve been reading Netsmart, by Howard Rheingold, in response to a suggestion by Sally Jackson (one of the founding gods of the Fab Lab!). It serves as the motivation for much of this post, but also a worthy bit of literature for the dissertation pondering process.

Beyond Flaws

I’ll start with a happy snippet. I’ve been hanging out with these hydro engineers lately and they’re great. One reason I like them so much is that they’re very willing to proactively accept and support people despite their flaws and differences. One of our friends forgot to buy a bus ticket to get to Chicago for a flight and realized this about 6 hours before at 1am on a Saturday night. Almost without hesitation a trio stepped up to drive him directly up to the airport, crashing on a family couch before heading back the next day. They were only hung up on his mistake and forgetful personality for a sum of about two minutes, and actually really saw the ride as an outstanding opportunity to hang out. The group hasn’t even known each other that long, a year or so, and they’re willing to go to bat for one another like this.

Books on Bicycles

Rheingold identifies five literacies that together constitute a view of digital literacy (of a kind; he says they’re in process of changing the world):

Attention
Participation
Collaboration
Critical consumption of information
Network smarts

Most of what he mentions is nothing particularly new to the canon, but it does partially address what has been an open question for me for some time. I’ve asked many students and scholars what attitudes and perspectives they believe facilitate a person’s ability to effectively learn and employ digital tools. It’s easy to get a myriad of answers, and really it all depends on your granularity, but I’ve been particularly keen on patience, persistence, curiosity and independence. Motivation and confidence underline all of these, but the reason I bring any of them up at all is that they illustrate the cultural and personality-oriented dimensions of digital literacy – we learn, perform and express ourselves in contexts that shape our interpretations of meaning. Anyway what’s notable about his arrangement so far is attention. He suggests readers rethink how they direct attention, what they place it on, and why they do so.
For instance, multitasking often isn’t actually what it’s often named – if you’re driving in the car listening to music you’re probably actually multitasking, but most of the time we’re using computers, switching rapidly from screen to screen, we’re actually quickly task-switching – and there’s a cost each time we do so, which may vary by individual and circumstances. To be digitally literate might also include being cognizant (critical) enough of your own tech-toy uptake to mindfully direct your attention. I don’t think this means simply not being on Facebook or refusing to use Wikipedia. I do think this means taking a step back, examining your behaviors, goals and generally what matters, and then acting in accordance. My decision to read Rheingold’s book on an exercise bike instead of via audio book is actually a result of this process for me: I’m scribbling on the pages.
Tom Fairbank suggested I read the book Nonviolent Communication (Marshall Rosenberg) a while back and I’ve finally started to dig into it a bit. Besides being useful for determining how to better talk to people like my mother (and also wonder if when Tom talks to me with these methods if I am becoming my mother) it relies on a set of principles that matches Rheingold’s concern for attention:

Make observations
Take stock of feelings (yours and others)
Pay attention to needs
Make requests to proactively facilitate needs

An example the book gives is a teacher complaining about how she hates giving students grades. She states it as “I have to give grades because the district makes me” but this doesn’t actually recognize that she really has a choice. If she replaces the language that implies a lack of choice it comes out something more like “I give students grades because keeping my job is important to me, I’ll lose it if I don’t.” Note how the emphasis of ownership of problems, honesty and, ultimately goals and needs changes form between these two. I think it goes hand in hand with the bit about how we place attention on technologies.
My interactions with people that are mediated by electronic mediums are many but often cause frustrations – I’m great at observing how people miss emails or imply things through action (or more often lack thereof) but I don’t think I communicate my feelings and needs about it as much or as poignantly as I ought to sometimes. One observation, as of late, is that in-person interactions are downright more successful for me, I’m seeking them out more often. Which leads to the next item…

Quitting Opayboopud

OkCupid sucked for me. I mean granted I was trolling the website from the getgo – my user name was “JeffGinger” and eventually I became so disillusioned with it that my profile actively read “I’m probably using this website wrong. If you message me I’m just going to invite you to do something in person.” Anyway I kept finding myself crawling around on there at late hours of the night when I was feeling lonely, hoping there’d be a new girl hiding or, by god, a response to any of the messages I sent out. It was demoralizing – nobody ever answered and people didn’t pay attention to me because my profile wasn’t mysterious and I’m not generally all that handsome. Even when the site worked and I went on a date with someone I quickly realized I can’t handle getting to know someone who lives 50 minutes away and has no natural intersections with my life.
There are many reasons people find online dating troubling. It’s a kind of shopping mall effect – so many people to choose from, and yet so many reasons to not like them. Everyone is neatly categorized and identified and yet they’re all idyllic representations of self that probably don’t capture actual (or critical) dimensions. And, after it all, if you can’t find a person on the site, with its millions of choices, then by god there must be something wrong with you.
Clearly it does work for some people. I’m told in Chicago there are so many people who use it that are comfortable with casual dating that it’s functional. Down here in Chambana, a town teeming with single youth of all kinds, my observation was that it was a place for people who have comfort issues or trouble getting to know others. At one point I counted 8 people from GSLIS on there.
Funny interlude story – a professor from my department used the site. She was very mature about it – sent me a message saying hello, establishing a kind of friendly “there’s no shame don’t worry I won’t pay attention to you” kind of rapport. Very good of her. I then tried the same move with a fellow PhD student (who I know finds me extra annoying) and she never answered, despite being active following. To this day I am terrified of her.
Anyway I don’t mean to hate on it too bad. I know some people have success with the site and really need it to facilitate their personality. Or perhaps they’re a single mom, whatever. Point it I think it’s terrible for my personality type. I am infinitely happier meeting people through friends in real life and letting the mystery and interest be organic, rather than declared or implicit from the start. Rheingold (see, he’s back) also offers a perspective on this I really like:
I found Baron instructive regarding specific ways social media challenge traditional definitions of sociality. Baron is right, in my opinion, to urge us all to cast a critical eye on any form of socializing that can be turned on and off at will. In my own life, volume control has been a net benefit, but it’s not without its shadowy side. My craft as a writer demands that I spend my days mostly alone in a room. Given my circumstances, gaining the power to click into a virtual community increased my daily social interaction, since I was already isolated. After twenty-five years of online socializing, however, I understand (and caution others against) the danger of confining myself exclusively to communities I can click on and off. I’m healthier, and so is my society, because I’m embedded in family, neighborhood, hometown, campus, and social cyberspace. The people I’ve met online as well as mostly communicate with through virtual means have come to my rescue in times of peril, bought me lunch in Amsterdam and Istanbul, showed me caring, and shared the fun that any kind of community worthy of the name strives for—but I learned long ago that I also need to maintain my face-to-face connections.
I think with something like dating and relationships you’ve gotta be able to be exposed to that person – fully, in their real life context. I’m friends with a lot of people at the Fab Lab that I would have never ordinarily found if I didn’t just get exposed to them by working and being present around them. Every relationship I’ve had that’s been successful has been in a context where she knows me through seeing me around my friends, actively engaged in life. It may be just a way to get past my lack of Ryan Gosling good-looks, but more likely it’s a way for people to reveal the categories OKC will never capture.
And, in the meantime, when I’m feeling lonely these days I reach out to people who aren’t romantic interests that I haven’t been investing enough in. It’s a much healthier response 🙂

By God, That’s Coincidental

Okay, last one. There’s been an oddly large amount of coincidence (good fortune) in my life lately. It’s kind of wanting to make me believe in God. I mean, I guess I already do, in that I see God as love (and also a social construction that has very real human-shaped-second-order agency!), but this all seems too convenient to not be the result of something more personified. Who knows, I’m just gonna keep working on extending the positive event chain.

Jeff Goes Shopping for Clothes at the Mall

A step-by-step:
1)      Try to determine if trendy clothing store is not just for women
2)      Attempt to find men’s section (the one floor or back corner)
3)      Get harassed by store person who unleashes a fury of trendy fashion words like triple bootcutcuff and tapercraftseams
4)      Claim “just browsing” defense and scamper away to seek style of clothing that has been out of fashion for 2 to 5 years
5)      Give up, go to Sears or JC Penny
6)      Easily find preferred clothing style, but only in sizes for giant people
7)      Wonder why clearance rack is only XXL sizes
8)      Find potential item worthy of purchase, ask phone for an estimate on the number of slave children required to make it
9)      Travel to thrift shop to be ethical, find only tattered clothing for huge old people
10)   Give up and buy exact copies of current clothes on Ebay

Jeff Goes Shopping for Clothes at the Mall with Gulsim (circa 2011)

1)      Complain unnecessarily about consumerism and materialistic culture
2)      Be shut up by being told that he too can be attractive (girls don’t say this to Jeff, generally)
3)      Gulsim finds clothing that is inexpensive and not made for extreme hipsters or fat people
4)      Go home happy!
I am still resolved to open a store called “Men: Skinny and Average” for dudes with wastelines under 34 inches, sizes M, S, and XM and clothing that comes in types such as ‘long’ and ‘thin’ and ‘extra pockets.’
Perhaps I should just shop in the children’s section more often. Because, you know, 5’11 at 150 lbs is child size?

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