Tributaries

Changes brought on by the internet are more often long-fuse time bombs than quick explosions, and current and coming changes heralded in higher ed seem cases in point.

That, at least, was the general sense  I got when catching up on some reading. I was working through a backlog going back to being on a panel at EDUCAUSE, one of several conferences in the fall spinning off announcements that breed equal parts buzz and skepticism. The big announcements there included Pearson and Blackboard competing to offer the big open LMSs, which was passing strange considering the parties involved. Not long after, the Sloan-C conference  on online learning coincided with the release of the annual survey of online learning that is now in its ninth year. That survey always has a thicket of commentary shoot up around it, and this year was no exception. (One of the better reviews of the survey is in our own Tony Picciano’s blog.)

Of all the commentary the survey spawned, perhaps the most provocative, at least for me, was a New Republic article titled “A Much-Needed Challenge to Low-Quality Universities” by Kevin Carey. Probably cued by the survey’s own admission that growth in online learning isn’t at the pace it was (though still growing at a rate that surprises those who thought the trend was spent or at least would be flatlining because the economy is), Carey argues that the change in the offing could indeed be huge precisely because it is incremental (but apparently relentless).  He invokes Peter Drucker’s notorious claim that ”Universities won’t survive” — something that would come to pass in three decades, and said a decade and a half ago.

So Drucker’s wrong, right? Not so fast, says Carey. He says that “what we’ve also learned during that time is that some correctly apocalyptic predictions take longer to come true than others. The newspaper industry thrived for nearly a decade after the dot-com boom, and then collapsed. Amazon.com didn’t push Borders into the grave in 1999—it took until 2011.”

I can’t resist the temptation to qualify some of these supposedly done deals. I’m pretty fond of my digital subscription to the New York Times, for instance, and arguably get more out of the paper now that it’s not paper –giving me news alerts on my iPhone, etc. I think the collapse is more like a mutation or metamorphosis, and the same thing is likely to happen in higher ed. You could say we’re in a very busy chrysalis stage.

What this talk of apocalypse by accretion does do (even if we back up and call “apocalypse” something like “fairly dramatic change over time”) is help shed some light on non-trends. I mean the steps back when we we’re in a two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back shuffle. Every once in a while, the electronic frontier feels a little too wild to some. and they decide, by gum, that there’s going to be more order in this town (like there used to be). So you have Georgia Tech shutting down student wikis or the University of Missouri banning the recording of classroom lectures. The thing is to see that these are steps back in a march forward — no more like turned corners than any other attempts to stuff the genie back in the bottle.

This is not to say that progress is inevitable. Like Millard Fillmore, our most forgotten president, I’d acknowledge that we sometimes mistake change for progress. Change is inevitable. Whether it leads to real improvements is a real question, perhaps one for another time.

So many things make me think about or seem to relate back to the Commons that I’m rarely surprised by that anymore. But I didn’t expect Thomas J. Friedman’s “memo” to China’s President Hu Jintao to be one. His NY Times op-ed piece caught my eye this weekend because of another surprising conjunction: in something titled “Advice for China,” the subject line of the “memo” read “The Arab Spring.”

Actually that wasn’t so surprising. Point #1 was about the inadvisability (and the near impossibility) of censorship, and how that was borne out in so many places, so often by means of digital/social media. (Already I was thinking about the Commons, having gone on record about its openness being key to its generativity.)

But it was really Point #2 that caught my eye:

The second trend we see in the Arab Spring is a manifestation of “Carlson’s Law,” posited by Curtis Carlson, the C.E.O. of SRI International, in Silicon Valley, which states that: “In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.” As a result, says Carlson, the sweet spot for innovation today is “moving down,” closer to the people, not up, because all the people together are smarter than anyone alone and all the people now have the tools to invent and collaborate.

Hmm. I’m not thrilled about “moving down.” (I put it in the title at least as much to problematize the phrase as to celebrate it.) I’ve developed a distrust of spatial metaphors, something that goes back to an argument James Joyce had with Wyndham Lewis (but this is not the place to go into that).  Suffice it to say that spatial metaphors tend to deny time and process, affirm hierarchy, and do other suspect stuff. Still, the participle  “moving” qualifies that denial of process. And it’s not people on high who are moving down (like some contemporary form of noblesse oblige). It’s that “sweet spot for innovation”  that’s making this move.

I think we see that affirmed daily, in the bits of news or insight we get tweeted, the interactions we see aggregated, the sudden or surprising affinities that are also provocations. For me, all of this was extracurricular before the Commons. Now, though the Commons still feels extracurricular, it has brought work closer to play and colleagues closer than they’ve ever been (particularly in the ease of contact and the serendipities of connection).

If this is the sort of thing that’s happening, that’s good. It should happen. There ought to be a law. And apparently there is.

Here’s the final part of the talk I gave at Queens College a week ago, broken up by its tripartite title: “What Will Happen, What Could Happen, What Should Happen.” In the previous (middle) installment, I had been speaking of the twin perils threatening our experience of the Internet:  whirling chaos and corporatized control. When conjuring two evils, a standard move is to identify the lesser one. That might seem an easy call here. Why wouldn’t we prefer multiplicity, even hard-to-manage multiplicity, to the monopolistic throttle? But the proliferation of possibilities does have its genuinely pernicious side. The open web has given us viruses, worms, denial-of-service attacks, and other fun stuff. One thing openness is open to is the unsafe. And one attraction of the locked-down approach is that it can lock the unsafe out.

John Zittrain is very much aware of this threat in The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. In many ways that is what his book is about (though I’ve linked to the wiki rather than the book). While he takes the perils of malicious hacking seriously — truth to tell, he makes them seem really scary (apocalyptic doomsday stuff) — he feels openness is vital, primarily because that’s where we get what we most value: innovation. And he feels that innovation, or productive change, is so valuable that it’s worth risking disruptive change.

So Zittrain argues against  the corporatized and the locked down — the equivalent of the tethered appliance (his term). He poses and unpacks a critical field between disruptive change and what he calls appliancizing: he calls this generativity, and it has five aspects: leverage (making it easy to do more), adaptability (making it easy to change), ease of mastery (making it easy to adopt), accessibility (making it easy to gain entry), and transferability (making it easy to share). To an educator no less than a technologist, these are all desiderata. Our best uses of academic technology will maximize each one of these.

I think the CUNY Academic Commons, the social network built by CUNY academics for CUNY academics, has these features – including their downsides, since they are not risk-free propositions. (We need to be wary of the downsides, but we need to embrace the generativity, so in each case I sketch the trend and the tension, indicating where we want to go, and how far may be too far.)

Leverage (enabling people to do more/other/better than before)

• Working when possible and necessary –>working whenever the spirit moves: The “anytime” nature of online interaction frees groups from need to arrange a time and get a room, but it also invites incursions on members’ time, fragmenting attention and diffusing energies.

Adaptability (structures are matters of convenience & serviceability, not tradition & governance)

• Compartmentalization –> recombination and even re-compartmentalization: Freed from those places (topoi: disciplines, departments, campuses) to which they were assigned, faculty can follow interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary interests, regroup and reconfigure. But realignments involve refocusing, choices of new alliances, even new kinds of enclosures.

Ease of Mastery (openness and adoptibility make choice, not expertise or role, the motive force)

• Externally imposed direction –> self-direction: While hardly unconstrained, deciding where to invest time and effort becomes more a matter of choice rather than assignment. Choose well. Marshaling time becomes increasingly critical, as does deciding which options to pursue or invest in, since the alternative is a scattering of attention and investment.

Accessibility (scope of activity is not dictated by rank/organizational experience)

• Hierarchical relations –> flattening and re-formation: The imposition of a social network imposed on a work culture defined by rank and position has a democratizing effect that is both liberating and disturbing: authority, once characterized by limited access, is now forged by responsiveness; leadership is gauged by helpfulness, not determined by a chain of command; expertise is demonstrated by engagement in conversations taking place across the social environment.

Transferability (the ease of sharing, of cross-fertilizations)

• Ownership –> co-authorship: The ability to say, “This is mine” is undermined by the collaboration that characterizes the new environment. Individual contributions (posts to a forum, additions or revisions to a wiki, entries on a group blog) are not hard to pinpoint, but they are contributions to a larger whole, a group effort. The individual has to give some motive force and ownership over to the group, while the effort is less malleable by individual will, more subject to group dynamics. When our best work comes from putting our minds together, academia needs to rethink rewards and promotion standards.

If you think of your own work with academic technology, whether it’s online and/or blended learning (the Big Kahuna at present) or some other aspect like work with educational gaming, open access publication, podcasts and rich media and so on, you are likely to see these features (both the benefits and dangers) reflected in your own work. But the great exemplar for me, the macrocosm of our many microcosms, is the Commons.

So the alternative to the twin dystopias is not a utopia, a no-place, but a real place. And since we’ve been talking about movement and change, it would be better to cast this place, not as a static site, but as a vessel in motion, navigating between the Scylla of monopolistic lockdown and the Charybdis of whirling change.

In my last entry, grandly titled What Will Happen, I allowed that my prediction was only the tiniest of inferential leaps. What will happen is basically what has happened and what is happening: technological change gathers momentum as well as speed. So we’ll be using more technology, and there’ll be more of it to use. But what will that get us, and where? That’s harder to say since we seem to be at a fork in the road, and neither path seems promising. In fact, I called them the twin dystopias.

On the one hand — this is the direction pointed out in the “Web Is Dead” argument made by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolf — what we get online is what we pay for, or at least that’s increasingly the case. Entrepreneurs have managed to make the Internet pay by delivering stuff directly to us (and not just stuff but services, especially “apps”). Formerly, we would search for and often stumble upon things on the still largely open Web; now they come right to us, often on new devices, and with a bill.  This might be preferable to those who know just what they need, but it also conjures up a cyberfuture that is increasingly monetized, corporatized, and locked down, with everyone marching in tune.

The opposite face or evil twin of this online Monopoly game is what pay-as-you-go software-as-service is in response to: the way things used to be (and to some extent still are): “Open, free, and out of control.” (That is the wonderfully succinct way the “Web Is Dead” article described the World Wide Web before the advent of services and apps, when it was just you, your browser(s) the Web.) If that centrifuge of possibilities wasn’t totally out of control, it was fragmented, complicated, redundant, and damned near impossible to keep up with. So the opposite of everyone marching in tune is everyone dancing as fast as they can, trying to keep up with the changing kaleidoscope of things they might like, use, and need (including the likelihood that these things would disappear or transmogrify almost without warning — since a world so changeful is populated with ephemera).

These, then, are the twin dystopias:

Courting Chaos. It’s not hard to see how the proliferation of devices and services can threaten to overwhelm us, fragment our attention and suck up all our time. If you’re an administrator or faculty developer, there’s the added concern of what, in this flood of technological change, you should put your money on. What’s going to have legs?  What’s going to be washed away in the next wave?  These are not easy questions to answer, and not knowing where to focus one’s energy or resources can be a big obstacle to getting invested in the first place.

Chained to a Big Change. The anxiety may not be over what to choose, but over being stuck with what gets chosen. Our activities may be modified and even commodified by forces beyond our control. A world so interconnected gets shaped by the means of connection, defining the forms and formats we use to interact. Those that gather currency become our standards of exchange. (Is there really any other good reason most documents are generated in Microsoft Word?) We may even wish that, say, scholarly or textbook publishing settles on a stable business model so we don’t have worry about what device or standard or format to use. If that means seeing a particular corporate logo or clicking on a corporate icon (the way many of us see/use Adobe now), so be it.

If you feel you are already living in not one but both of these dystopian visions (and you are), you will also see what’s really scary about them: they are not mutually exclusive. You can be overrun by both the monopolists as well as the myriad possibilities. That prospect gives special urgency to and places special demands on what should happen (the next installment).

On Tuesday the 12th, I gave a talk at Queens College with the hubristic but hopefully provocative title “What Will Happen, What Could Happen, What Should Happen.” It was a fairly long talk — brevity is not my strong suit — and so I thought I would break it (and the title) into three parts.

This first part is, I confess, the least interesting. At least when I was teaching in it, we pretty much proscribed predictions in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program at the Grad Center (though we did spend a fair amount of time making fun of analyzing predictions gone awry). So the only predictions I do are no-brainers.

What will happen, then? Teaching and learning will be increasingly tech-mediated. (I’m not saying it will be better or worse, just that the involvement of technology will be increasingly ineluctable.) Does anyone believe that’s not true? Does anyone think will get this particular genie back in the bottle?

That the genie’s out is not the hard part to figure out. Making out just what the genie is up to — now, that’s not so easy.

We know that because what will happen has happened. And I’m not talking about technological determinism (declamations of which are also proscribed by the GC’s  Tech & Pedagogy program), but I am talking about what the Wall St types like to call game-changers. In the history of technology, these may be easiest to see in military history, from the smelting of metals to the long bow and the siege engine, from the invention of gunpowder to the Manhattan project.

And it has happened in the history of higher ed. We are at a point roughly analogous to what has happened in 15^th Century: you had 30,000 texts in Europe at the beginning at the beginning of that century, and 9 million at the end, because you had a tech revolution in the middle. The impact on the clergy is well known: these keepers of sacred texts and traditions were worried about an unmediated transmission of them to the laity.

But those who taught in the relatively young universities of the time also felt threatened — potentially automated out or existence, as it were, or at least endangered by the printing press. (Let’s say you were an expert on Aristotle; what would it mean if Aristotle himself could “speak” to your students? What need for you to tell them what he said, then?) This was of course  a failure of imagination since a professoriate that could not imagine surviving the book has become one that can’t imagine life without it. The apparent threat was a boon, like the VCR and now the DVD to the movie industry.

There are important differences. It took a long time then. The rise of the reading public took centuries and another revolution (the industrial, and the rise of the bourgeoisie). But then it’s easy to see that, of all the important differences, the most important is the rate of change.

I’m awful with dates except ones that I can get killed for forgetting — like the birthdays of my children — so I know, for instance, that the birth of my oldest (1983) coincides with release of CD players/discs, and that of my youngest (1990) with Tim Berners-Lee’s gift of HTTP and HTML to the world (making the World Wide Web possible).

Getting a handle on the accelerating  rate at which we’ve adapted to and adopted new technologies, you probably should go back less far. For instance, the students coming to us now were born with public access to the web (1993). Here are some other watershed dates and what they represent the advent of now. Try to imagine life without them, even the most recent.

To bring us up to the present, there’s nothing better than Chris Anderson’s overdramatic article in last month’s Wired declaring the “the Web is Dead” – actually just “in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.”

If this doesn’t instantly resonate, maybe the way Anderson begins his article with how we (or our children) begin the day does:

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web.

This profusion of services and plethora of devices isn’t chaos, but it is a lot to keep up with. Compared to it, the Web – which James Gleick memorably described as history’s largest library, but with the texts all scattered about in no particular order – now seems like a center that no longer holds. How can teachers ever keep up with all this?

But there is another way of looking at those devices, networks, and systems I just mentioned. If you think of each of those – of Google, of Facebook, of the iPod and iTunes, etc. – you realize that if change has escalated, so has momentum. A recent NY Times article stressed “positive network externalities” as economists call them – the way networks and devices become more powerful and valuable as more and more people use them. These create the opposite of chaos: hegemonies of function (so if you search, it’s likely to be through Google; if you network with friends and relatives, it’s likely to be through Facebook, etc.).

I’m already straying into the second part — the twin dystopias of What Could Happen (which are presumably highly inferable at this point), so I’ll stop here.

Ask ten people to pick a modifier for “connection” and at least one will say “dropped.” In this case, it’s my fault. A blog post I did way back in June, one calling for an open access online journal here at CUNY, most likely focused on the scholarship of teaching with technology, got a good discussion on “starting an online journal” going in the group with the unwieldy but apt name Open Access Publishing Network @ CUNY (OaPN @ CUNY).

And then I dropped the ball. The fact is, after having over a dozen people of just the right sort say they were willing to play a part, I realized we were all well into the Great Summer Diaspora. Trying to get people together on next steps then just wasn’t practicable.

So much of the discussion, too, had been about things we need to talk further about. People had, for instance, raised the issue of differentiating the proposed journal from extant instantiations like JOSOTL and IJOSTL and especially JOTL. There were also similar enterprises underway locally, notably the launching of an open access journal for the Graduate Center’s  Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program — to wit, the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.

There was also the more basic stuff to discuss — what roles willing participants would have exactly, what the journal would be called, where it would be housed, how it would be supported, how matters of design and layout would be handled, how submissions would be solicited and reviewed, and so on. These necessarily need to stand as open questions until key players come to key decisions.

So let’s get the key players together and talk. I think the next step is face-to-face discussion, with all the possibility of interruption, redirection, and productive cacophony that allows.

I realize there’s something ironic about needing a face-to-face meeting to clinch matters raised in an online discussion about an online journal, but we presumably all understand why. Two summers ago, listening to a Gartner executive, I heard a particularly compelling way of explaining why face-to-face communication is so important; the guy from Gartner was comparing F2F to different levels of communication — email, phone calls, teleconferences, virtual worlds, etc. — and noted that the difference was escalating bandwidth, with maximum bandwidth being the one fully immersive environment: being there (not telepresence but full presence).

So we can try that. I just got the news of a cancellation of something that would take up most of a day two weeks from now. So I can offer up a whole day: September 2nd. It’s not too far off, but not right upon us either.  I’ve set up a Doodle poll for all the times I can reasonably suppose people might show up for. If you are interested in participating (you needn’t have declared yourself earlier), pleased go there and identify your preferences and/or availability (or leave a comment if you can’t make that date but still want to participate and be kept in the loop). Once I have some sense of the best time, I’ll secure a place to meet, probably at the Grad Center, certainly in Manhattan. I’ll also use the discussion forum in  the OaPN @ CUNY group to announce the poll as well, and to give updates.

I hope you agree that a collaborative effort to mount an online journal for CUNY is an exciting prospect, and that a meeting on it is worth making. So I hope to see those who are interested face to face — or F2F, as they say — availing ourselves of maximum bandwidth. (I realize that’s a back formation, like our habit of calling certain guitars “acoustic guitars” when, before the advent of electric guitars, they were just guitars. When I described F2F to the Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost Alexandra Logue ( @alogue ) as “maximum bandwidth,” she, a behaviorist, said, “You mean maximum exposure to stimulation.” Exactly.)

We need to start an online journal, one that will offer the best that’s thought and said in the scholarship of teaching and learning with technology. We have reached an ideal juncture of need and opportunity. CUNY gives us the scope. The Commons gives us the reach. Events like the eight annual CUNY IT Conferences have given us the experience, extended by campus events (like LaGuardia’s Making Connections conferences on eportfolio use) and newer conferences as different as those on The Digital University and Technology in Math Instruction.

Such events don’t provide the only grist to the proposed mill, of course, but they are evidence of how often a presentation or paper on online instruction or tech-mediated teaching is lost to all but a few assembled at a particular moment in time. These losses promise to escalate as the we move forward with new projects and initiatives: the ebook project, the online composition pilot, the hybrid initiative.

Why, as we evolve and document new practices and pedagogies, shouldn’t we have a means of vetting and disseminating what will be useful to the larger community? That feels (and frankly is meant to feel) like a rhetorical question.  We should.

There’s work involved, of course. I can see how that could be off-putting to some. I spent seven years as the co-editor of a refereed scholarly journal (the Journal of Basic Writing), so I’m acutely aware of how much time can be drawn off by such a commitment. And the investment sometimes has too-subtle returns. The best way to manage the publication of other people’s work is to make your own contributions of time and effort invisible, guaranteeing that yours is literally a thankless task.

Still, there are satisfactions. To the sort of people who are drawn to such work, they scarcely have to be mentioned, but one needs to be stressed. An online SoTLwT journal would be so useful and would garner such attention that it would not just enrich our institutional culture but help to change it. Such an enterprise would draw superb collaborators to it.  I really think we just need to get the call out to begin building a great team.

So consider this an invitation (or something more bracing: a dare or challenge, if that helps). I am hoping that those who might be interested would go to the forum on this in the Open Access group (and we will probably need to create our own group shortly).I am not especially concerned that I am sending this out even as the great summer diaspora begins. Convening (except online) is presumably not an issue, and the downtime summer usually brings will give those who might be interested in getting involved some time to think of and come to terms.

One last thing: I’ve mentioned the scholarship of teaching and learning (and its acronym, SoTL — usually pronounced to rhyme with “total”). There’s lots of stuff on that out there. (One good collection is at the Illinois State site.) I’ve made that unlovely acronym still more so by adding a “wT” to it, but a look at the recent preponderance of work on the scholarship of teaching and learning with technology will suffice to suggest that this is where much of the work in SoTL is going.) There is so much out there that one discussion might be to focus still more — on work in CUNY specifically, or even in certain disciplines or kinds of courses. But such discussions await the self-identification of the discussants. If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll consider being one.

Those who may have missed Anya Kamanetz’s DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education got several chances of late to get at least a sampling – e.g., her contribution to the “debate” staged by the NY Times under the title “College Degrees Without Going to Class,” the recent interview of her in the Chronicle, and her “Adapt or Decline” piece in Inside Higher Ed. (Arguably the best introduction to her thinking, short of the book, is an extended video of her holding forth for half an hour.)

Inevitably, what she sees as an opportunity — to cut costs and forge new paths given the availability of open educational resources (OER) — seems a danger to others. David Wiley says in a recent blog post that if you turn students “loose with links to some OER and expect good things to happen for more than 5% of them, you’re just off your rocker.” Similarly, Michael Feldstein, in his blog E-literate, holds that most “students are not autodidacts,” and so it is not clear to him that “the blossoming of open education for their more fortunate peers will do anything for them other than suck the much needed funds out of an already badly underfunded education system.” These takes exasperate Stephen Downes who thinks they confuse the baby with the bathwater: “The reason we have so many students who are utterly unable to learn for themselves is precisely *because* of corporations and institutions.”

To circle back to Anya Kamanetz, her “Adapt of Decline” imperative is a slightly more evolutionary version of “Do or Die.” But it’s addressed to institutions. And the people who, well, people those institutions have their own spaces in which to move and their own decisions to make. That would be a good reason to note that Anya Kamanetz’s imperative is, as the Chronicle article notes, a “moral imperative” — to give the full headline “Anya Kamenetz Invokes ‘a Moral Imperative to Cut Costs’ With Technology.”

This might be a call for some personal if not institutional adaption. ‘Tis the season for textbook adoption. It could be interesting to break the mold, go for something new — digital content, open access publications, e-resources from the library, things you can link to rather than have your students buy. It’s not a giant step. But it’s a step. If your CUNY faculty, your university is already taking steps to save your students money on texts. Why not go the institution one better?

I want to recommend something I recently stumbled upon (literally: using StumbleUpon, I found something praised on Slashdot and tracked it down to its source): misleadingly titled “Books in the Age of iPad” — my first thought, in the wake of all the iPad hype, was “I don’t need this” — it turned out to be a very thoughtful (and, for me, revelatory) meditation by a publisher and designer on what the possibilities posed by digital content mean for “for books-makers, web-heads, content-creators, authors and designers.”  As I read what Craig Mod had to say, I thought of a critical audience he didn’t mention: faculty.

He begins with Maximum Provocation:

Print is dying.

Digital is surging.

Everyone is confused.

GOOD RIDDANCE.

But what he is saying “good riddance” to is definitely not books. It is to the “disposable books” (his term) — books that don’t need to be books. His other term for this is “formless content”  (content whose meaning is not determined by the container) as opposed to “definite content” (content whose meaning would change if the container did).

Complicated by further distinctions and examples (laid out in beautiful design, by the way), this is of course not an absolute distinction, but it is definitely a thought-provoking one. For those contemplating CUNY’s eBook RFP, for example, it may help to cut through all the confusion about devices and formats and so on. When we discussed that last week at the monthly meeting of the CUNY Committee on Academic Technology (a private group on the CUNY Academic Commons as well as a University committee), I was hearing considerations that to some extent crystallized as I read Mod’s piece. What among the material we would have our students read or look at is formless and what is definite content? Remember that the latter can be digital content, not just books. And there are still odder compromises and symbioses. When I first started using Project Gutenberg, one of the  attractions was using digital means to create historically accurate facsimiles of literary texts as they originally appeared.

Of course, I’m speaking from vantage point of my (erstwhile) discipline, and I think one of the great questions here is how this distinction would play out at different kinds and levels of instruction. For me, the critical thing that Mod’s piece reinforces is how technological change almost never confronts us “either/or” choices, but with “both/and” options — always more complicated. Just as the VCR and DVD did not kill movie theaters (but made us all think more about what to watch where and when), the opportunity to assign digital content as well as traditional print textbooks has ramifications that are going to require thought, and what Mod has to say may be of some help in thinking them through. It certainly seemed so to me.

I need to be careful, and not just because one person’s myth is another person’s religion. I was motivated to post on this because of a commentary piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed titled  “Combating Myths About Distance Education.” My first reaction to this was to roll my eyes, thinking “Oh no, not again.” One of the great myths is that “distance education” is an appropriate term for online education (and not, increasingly, a misnomer). But an even greater myth is that whatever-you-call-it is easy to define (and so to combat or dispel whatever one regards as myths about it): all you need to do, according to this myth, is tell the truth, and the scales will fall from the eyes of the unbelievers (or believers, depending on your perspective).

Well, the truth is that things get more blurred all the time. Is online ed about distance or local outreach? (Increasingly, it’s the latter.) Is the true point of contrast face-to-face? (Then what about the single biggest growth area, hybrid or blended learning?) Is it all about asynchronous interaction — a sentiment so widely shared at one time that it made sense to call the biggest journal in the field the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks? (Then what about all the work with synchronous interaction, especially in the very course management systems and programs that used to be wholly asynchronous?) And then there’s the fact that the Chronicle of Higher Ed has never been friendly to online ed, loving to invoke specters of diploma mills, spy cams, and faculty being automated out of existence, all of which is just plain silly.

So I didn’t expect much from the article. I was pleasantly surprised. I can’t say it was full of revelations, but it resisted easy generalizations and stereotypes. The real gripe of the author, a librarian at Yale who teaches a variety of library and literary studies courses online, is that he gets no respect — senses that online ed people are the Rodney Dangerfields of higher education. Memorably, he noted that one “big state university” he taught for “does not even acknowledge its online instructors as members of the faculty on its Web page. In the department’s eyes, I am, like Pinocchio, not a ‘real boy.’”

There were things in the article I disagreed with, inevitably. For instance, he draws an easy distinction between undergraduate and graduate instruction that, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is another thing that’s blurring, and blurring because of online ed (and what access to the internet does to the need for instruction as “information transfer”). Inevitably, to make his point, he restored to generalizations, even stereotypes.

So what amazed me most — what motivated me to go online and post about this — was one of those generalizations I did not take exception to. In fact, I’m not sure it is a generalization with exceptions — which, of course, violates the general rule for generalizations. In contrasting online with face-to-face instruction (and the possibility, even invitation, posed by the latter to let the student sit there passively in the classroom), he says that when students  “take good courses online, they are required to be full partners in their learning process.” I realize you have to stress that key word “good” there, but, if you do, that holds — and so does the contrast if you insist you’re comparing it with good F2F instruction: there are simply too many barriers to full partnership in the classroom, like the impossibility of everyone answering a discussion question almost any time one’s posed (a standard expectation in online instruction).

So I came with low expectations, but seem to have found a real touchstone. Or should someone tell me to take my rose-colored glasses off?