Purely Reactive

Part I was my first post on this blog to “escape” comment and my only one to explicitly invite comment, so I’m on my own here. It may well be that the expectation is that I should finish what I started, not leave things hanging. Very well.

My basic point in that previous post was that, contrary to one explanation for why online learning has plateaued, I don’t think the re-ignition of the growth in online and blended learning awaits some new technological innovation we don’t have. And I say that despite seeing, just yesterday, a reaffirmation of that position in the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s “Wired Campus” blog: “Online Programs: Profits Are There, Technological Innovation Is Not.” Stepping around the swamp of speculation about online learning as a cash cow (think how many ships of foundered on those shoals), I’d say what we’re really waiting on is a fuller  understanding what of we have in online teaching and learning now, at least potentially.

That understanding, I would aver, is not unlike the understanding western civilization had to move to in its last great technological revolution (using the term as it should be used, to signify real upheaval and overturning). When, in the mid-1400s, the advent of the printing press meant that, not just the putative Word of God, but the words of Aristotle (and a host of other past luminaries) could be put in the hands of the literate laity, professors were as frightened as clergy that they were being superannuated, “automated” out their jobs as mediators of truth, learning, information.

That turned out not to be the case, of course, though it took centuries of growing literacy (we’re still working on that) to get the full sense of what the change was (and was not). Books didn’t replace teachers. They enabled teachers, empowered teachers, required teachers.

Ditto technology. It has made faculty more important than ever before. Their job was never (just) information transmittal. Books would have sufficed for that. But what we’re after is not information, but knowledge. Knowledge is the fruit of interrogation, interpretation, application, criticism, synthesis. You need teachers for that. They have plenty of work to do. And technology helps. Arguably, it helps most of all by getting us past the idea that the transmission of information is the great goal.

Nobody puts this better than John Seely Brown, particularly in a keynote talk he did at the University of Colorado’s 2005 Teaching with Technology Conference. He is all over the place in the talk, making fascinating observations about how amateur astronomers are outdoing their professional counterparts, partly because they engage in more online collaboration. I might have missed the key insight at the end if I hadn’t been listening to this as a podcast (and during a long run). He suggests that we are moving from one model of education, particularly college education, to another.

The old model is a one-way exchange: people who have information give it to those who don’t have it. This is basically a packaging operation: wrapping up thought (in lectures, courses, books) and presenting it. As JSB reminds us, this is not the only model of education. He notes that the model of graduate education was always supposed to be different — not one wherein people with information give it to those who don’t, but one wherein everyone has access to information while one among them (the teacher, of course) is especially good at navigating through it, understanding the gaps and tensions, pointing out the really productive points of inquiry. Now, says JSB, there’s no good excuse not to use this model with undergraduates and not just in graduate seminars. The general and remarkable access to information — a 24/7 proposition — should free instructors to focus on the really fun parts of teaching: the invitations to critical thinking, the fruitful interventions, the point-of-need support, the re-directions of attention, the due recognition of accomplishment.

In short, it’s not the technology that needs to change, but the teaching. And the change has already begun. What technology has done is enabled the change by being a transformative medium: not old wine in new bottles (because that’s boring) but something different because done differently. Students are likely to resist the change as much as some faculty — thinking is hard work — but the problems and solutions are pedagogical, not technological.

That, at least, is one way of looking at it.

Telling tales out of school again: I was at a discussion of online learning at 80th St (CUNY Central) last Friday. We had been asked to read a much publicized, government-sponsored meta-analysis of studies of online and blended learning. In the press (the NY Times for instance), this had been billed as a study that (finally) showed online learning produced even better outcomes classroom-based learning, with blended learning proving better still. I could go into the skepticism the study has inspired, even among advocates of online instruction (see John Sener’s comment on the “good news,” for example), but I’m more interested in where we go from here. I think the premise of the meeting was that now, as never before, we ought to get going with online and blended learning. These alternatives are now established — and the institutional benefits are presumably transparent with enrollments spiking, new faculty hires hitting new records, and students ever more interested/acclimated.

Typically, I was interested in something else entirely. I’ve been doing faculty development for online/blended learning for a decade (and even a fair amount of “administrative development,” if you know what I mean), and so part of me was already feeling “been there/done that.” But I had also prepared for the meeting by looking into what else I might find that was useful. I had read, in addition to the study, recent surveys of online instruction’s growth like the latest annual Sloan-C survey. One point of interest was that, now that an article of faith was established fact (as studies go, anyway), there was still such resistance to online learning, registering as strong doubts about quality, especially from faculty. (A pretty compelling example of the genuine fear online learning inspires in faculty appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Ed a couple weeks ago as “The Dystopia of Distance Learning.“) And slowing growth belied the turned corner. It had been decelerating even as evidence of successful outcomes had been gaining steam.  Now, according to some, it was even stalling. That was in fact what one maven had said in a Reuters release the day before the meeting and picked up by publications like USA Today:

Richard Garrett of Boston consultant Eduventures Inc. said interest in online education may have plateaued for now, awaiting innovations that will transform the experience beyond screen imitations of the brick-and-mortar curriculum.

There seemed to be no intended irony to this appearing immediately under the heading “BELLS AND WHISTLES?” I suppose that was one of the things that made me take notice. For me, the ironies always pointed in the other direction. Who thought classroom teaching so wonderful that it should be the gold standard? Was comparability (or better) the great desideratum? Or should we look to reinvent instruction? When the printing press made teaching something other than transmission through an intermediary, it redefined the roles of clergy and academics. Are we due for another such redefinition?

If we are, I don’t think this can or will happen by awaiting some technological innovation we don’t yet have. And I certainly don’t think it will happen by doing all we can to make online courses the simulacra of classroom-based courses (what we used to call, in the old days, “course conversions”). What will make it happen? I’d like to leave that as a question right now. Even if all I’ve said thus far is mere preamble, and I guess it is, it’s also a lot to wade through. So I’ll give myself some breathing space (and others a chance to weigh in), and try to push this further in the next post.

I have been struggling with others (”with” both in the sense “together with” and “at odds with”) on how open the CUNY Academic Commons should be. This is hard stuff.

Why? I realize, with some chagrin, that I do not embrace a wholly open conception of the Commons. I am against closed doors and gated communities — password protected sites, proprietary software circumscribing proprietary holdings — but I also resist the sense that anything goes. As I said to one colleague, how would we feel if the CUNY Academic Commons (emphasis presumably on the adjective) were swamped by bureaucrats or undergrads (looking for places to bureaucratize or socialize respectively)?

I don’t consider that a wholly rhetorical question. Enamored of the alternative space(s) for intellectual property created by the Creative Commons, I felt sympathy as well as trepidation when I read a mockery of its core values expressed in the now-notorious (and anthologized) “Letter to the Commons”:

We appreciate and admire the determination with which you nurture your garden of licences. The proliferation and variety of flowering contracts and clauses in your hothouses is astounding. But we find the paradox of a space that is called a commons and yet so fenced in, and in so many ways, somewhat intriguing. The number of times we had to ask for permission, and the number of security check posts we had to negotiate to enter even a corner of your commons was impressive. And each time we were at an exit we were thoroughly searched, just in case we had not pilfered something, or left some trace of a noxious weed by mistake into your fragile ecosystem. Sometimes, we found that when people spoke of ‘Common Property’ it was hard to know where the commons ended and where property began.

There is some mischief but some justice in such comments.

I would feel more vulnerable to the veiled charges of hypocrisy and elitism if I were a person of principles. I’m not. Like a good rhetorician (and latter-day Sophist), I regard everything as contingent: a product of the people involved, the circumstances at hand, the matters of the moment. Intention (that will-o’-the-wisp) does matter to me, and I think it should matter to the Commons. In our particular case, we have framed a mission statement, and we should be guided by it (or amend it if we choose not to be).

There we’re explicit that the Commons is primarily intended for faculty, and as a place to “to support faculty initiatives and build community through the use(s) of technology in teaching and learning”; the intention is to “nurture faculty development through sharing replicable materials and best practices.” (These are ambitious goals, but they are also clear about not trying to be all things to all people, an ambition I don’t have.)

I think invoking the mission statement helps us in other ways: that its first words are “The Academic Commons of The City University of New York” justifies our requiring a CUNY email address for those who log in and post. The emphasis on the core mission of the University, teaching and learning, also helps to set (admittedly flexible) boundaries on the use of the Commons by students, administration, and staff, hedges against such admittedly far-flung scenarios as its getting swamped by undergrads or bureaucrats.

I do not think there is a contradiction between being a public site and having an intended audience. That may mean we are not absolutely open, but I then I don’t believe in absolutes.

The ubiquity of information, combined with what’s happened in the economy (an economy that, like Monty Python’s flying sheep, did not so much fly as plummet), has spurred another round of discussions around what teachers (and colleges and universities) are good for. Drew Gilpin Faust’s  “Crossroads” piece in the New York Times — “The University’s Crisis of Purpose” – is an example, one that tries (strains?) to rise above utilitarian demands to articulate a higher calling for institutions of higher learning. Yes, goes the gist, a college education is important for getting a better job or income and also for keeping up with Joneses — especially the Joneses (whatever their names actually are) in Europe and Asia — but a college education is so much more than that. So it’s said. But not very well. We are so lame about saying what that “more” is. Less lame or at least time-honored attempts — notably Newman’s Idea of a University — would sagely note the effort has been going on forever (in Newman’s case, as justification for borrowing from “pagans and unbelievers” and even Protestants).

Something similar happened when open education and/or online education got a lot of supposedly smart people struggling to say what the role of the instructor is or should be. And we’re in another such cycle. One listserv I’m on has noted that the upswing in enrollments and the downturn in the economy have made online instruction the “cutest kitten on the block” right now. With everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Barak Obama touting online education, reporters are once again asking what the prospects are for some kind of turned corner. While important steps like Cape Town Open Education Declaration seem not to be on their radar, ventures like the University of the People are, and so some are asking why we need to bother with bothersome things like accreditation. Inevitably, when they hear of PLEs and the like, they ask if we even need to bother with the instructors.

I always have some dread of as well as interest in the discussions that ensue. There’s lots of talk about the importance of making sure students pass muster — the instructor-level equivalent of the utilitarian issues Drew Gilpin Faust was trying to get beyond at the institutional level. But we weary quickly of talking about instructors as enforcers — too uncool — and that’s when things get really bad. Out come the ineluctable phrases “sage on the stage” and “guide on the side” –  directly connected to my gag reflex at this point — and there’s something already shopworn about the variants like ” sage on the side” and “guide on the stage.” Again, we’re struggling with things we’re not very good at articulating — often, I guess, because we’re being too generic and general.

What we too often don’t get into is how invested we are in what lies behind the notional terms “course” and “instructor” and “student”: so much cultural baggage and historical weight and institutionalized investment that we don’t have to worry about any of them going away soon. We can talk all we want about “communities of practice” and their importance to learning while forgetting that they usually don’t need to be set up. They are so vital that they are almost always already there wherever  learning is going on. There are exceptions, I suppose, but I also suppose that to be a really effective autodidact you have to have an intelligence on the order of someone like George Eliot.

So what happens when you stumble into situations where you have real (social) learning going on without a “course” or “instructor” or “student” — where, moreover, there are  no established alternative structures (e.g., apprenticeships) or even communities (peer/practitioner networks) because the practices are so new?

That’s a situation I think we now face in open education and online learning resources to some extent, with the great shining example (my favorite, anyway) being the CUNY Academic Commons. Still in beta, but due for general release very soon, it has to open itself up to what you might call “community formation”: groups will have to define themselves on the Commons, both practically and conceptually. Some are pre-existing communities of one kind or another, while some are groups just trying to get started. A representative of one of the latter wrote me over the weekend and asked, essentially, who would set that group up. I wrote back to say, essentially, that the Commons was a platform, not a service, but I and others would be willing to help with specific questions.

However inadequate that response might have seemed to the person I was replying to, it represented a leap of faith for me. It’s not as if I only imagine those “others”: there are people I could name right now. The problem is they are already people who have done the lion’s share of the work on the Commons, people approaching burnout. The activity they generate/bear represents an example of Clay Shirky’s power law distributions — as he puts it, “Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.” Those who accept more responsibility for the Commons, for instance, are going to do so much more than the larger number who want to tend their corner, or to lurk. And that’s fine.

But maybe we could broaden that A-list of people who welcome others, offer help, or share how they set up a group with a group in formation. I wouldn’t want this to be a call for more “leadership” –  such a loaded term. And this would be more subterranean anyway, as befits an online resource. Here it’s not a matter of commanding the spotlight or the megaphone but of reaching out in quiet touches, individual contacts with new arrivals, correspondence across groups and areas of interest. It would have to be motivated by willingness. I guess what I’m hoping for a vast conspiracy of the willing.

Alternative title: Block That Metaphor

I’ve been working on a presentation that is supposed to give some sense of our own dear CUNY Academic Commons to the outside world, and I have to have the requisite visuals. I thought it might be worthwhile to give folks a sense of what I came up with, though this was with more than a little help from Matt Gold et alia.

First, I wanted to show what the Commons is not. Well, not altogether, anyway. There were completing conceptions that did not quite capture all that we wanted the Commons to be.

Competing Conception #1: A Repository of Stuff. For that, I came up with

An image inspired by Borges' "Library of Babel"

and, because Borges’ piece is very much about endlessly receding taxonomies (”To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A’s position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity …”), also this:

A taxonomic concept map on how to do taxonomies

Few things could suggest, better than these paired images, that the twin challenges of categorization and location for such a “repository of stuff” are dizzying. But if that conception is not the “right stuff,” neither is the whole-hearted focus on social interaction.

Competing Conceptions #2: The Gathering Place, the Agora, the Hub

It’s not enough to bring people together. Even and especially if you do manage to do that, you may only have a crowd.

Sunbathers at Manhattan Beach

Too much lollygagging? Maybe. Alternatively, I pictured it as part marketplace, part traffic jam.

Hyderabad Traffic and Market

The Commons is not (or not just) a place to come, hang out, interact. This is a more contemporary conception than a static repository, but it does have the enormous challenge of getting people to come and also structuring that activity without getting in the way of it. The watchword for such sites is often “If you build it, they won’t come” — and then what are you going to do?

Well, you could go organic. What these conceptions don’t take in is notions of growth, development, evolution — each a different way of framing the summum bonum of what we wanted the Commons to be and have.

Better Metaphor #1: Roots and Branches. Matt sent me this picture of a well-rooted tree as a possible image for the Commons:

Roots, roots everywhere

Lots of roots, but just one trunk — which reminded me that a stand of trees is often a clonal colony, that tree roots can beget new trunks in rhizome-like fashion. The great example is Pando [from the Latin for "I spread"] – aka the ”Trembling Giant” of Utah (a clonal colony of aspen trees with an interconnected root system that may be the world’s largest organism). I found a picture of those aspens on Wikipedia:

Quaking Aspens

These Quaking Aspens may quake and tremble, but we probably want a better suggestion of activity than that.

Better Metaphor #2: The Beehive.

Matt also sent me Jim Groom’s post “WPMu as Beehive,” which featured this image.

Honeycomb

That, strictly speaking, is not a beehive but a honeycomb — though what better visual way to drive home the point that you could have an organic image/metaphor that foregrounded storage? What I wanted was just such an image, but with some activity in it — some busy bees:

The idea of the beehive is especially useful because it helps to stress that, if you feel forced to choose between the repository and the hub of activity, you’re submitting to a false disjunction. As the beehive reminds us, you can have your storage and your activity too, your honey and your buzz. Social networks are about stuff as well as interaction. Facebook has become the largest collection of photos in the world, for instance. What might a Facebook for academics become?

One good thing about not posting for a while: you’re subjected to so many things to react to that you start to wonder if, taken together, they might add up to something. There were lots of little things that made me think they do, but the big things were The 6th Annual Blended Learning Workshop in Chicago and WordCampEd in CUNY just a couple weeks ago. (For the latter, I’m linking to a recent blog post which is also an omnium gatherum of other posts and commentary on the event.) The former I’ve been in on (as a conference planner) since the beginning (almost since the turn of the century), but it was my first WordCampEd. And I might not have seen what they have in common if we didn’t have the Call for Proposals coming out for our own CUNY IT Conference (the 8th Annual). The test is to come up with a theme that is a big enough umbrella but still says something about where we are and/or where we are headed. For why this year’s theme felt like a no-brainer, I have to go back to CUNY’s problems with Blackboard.

As should be common knowledge by now (and this has certainly been dealt with elsewhere), many if not most of CUNY’s problems with Blackboard were not actually problems with Blackboard (but washed-out bridges to it). That, as far as I’m concerned, is part of the point. The really interesting thing is less the problem(s) than the inadequacy of any single-shot solution. In the wake of the Blackboard outages, a lot of the talk was focused on leaving Blackboard 8 for some other version of Blackboard (versions 6-9) or some other commercial course management system (Angel, Desire2Learn, etc.) or some open source CMS (Sakai, Moodle, etc.). And the problem with these ways of addressing the problem(s) wasn’t really that getting CUNY to switch would be as easy as getting an elephant to do backflips in a closet. It wasn’t even that, at least with commercial platforms, Blackboard (aka Blackborg) could go on assimilating the competition, as when it ate Angel recently. It was that switching CMSs meant trading Tweedledum for Tweedledee. There would be no real gain in functionality. (If you don’t believe me, go comparison shopping at EduTools.)

But that is moot. What the two conferences taught me was that it isn’t about platforms anymore. Well, it is — has to be — but the game has changed. It’s about managing myriad tools and choices now — the flavors of social media you can use with students, the various disciplinary dispensations and constraints, the divergences even and especially within disciplines according to pedagogical style, the powerful centrifugal forces introduced by the students (what they know, want to use, have been exposed to). Decisions about these happen at so many levels — institution, department, instructor, student — that there can be no one ring to rule them all.

If I’m looking for a CMS now, it’s no longer a course management system; it’s a complexity management system. There are a million plates spinning on poles that we have to keep jiggling. There’s the need to balance innovation with resource management, flexibility with planning, choice with some sense of a shared landscape, especially one where effective practices don’t just emerge but can be recognized. (We can only get so far with random acts of innovation.)

Like everything else I think about here lately, this takes me back to the (necessity of the) CUNY Academic Commons. If there is any way we are going to handle all that we must — keeping up, connecting up, sorting out what works (if only for some, or in certain contexts, or whatever other conditons you want to attach) — we have to do that collaboratively. There is no other way. To keep a million plates spinning, you need a lot of pole jigglers.

You know how your familiar haunts look different when you’re showing them to out-of-town guests? How Penn Station or Grand Central or a subway junction like the one at Columbus Circle or Union Square suddenly seems much more complicated when you see it through an out-of-towner’s eyes? That’s sort of the way I felt when I was showing the CUNY Academic Commons to those assembled at the Office of Academic Affairs meeting last Friday. (This was an OAA Senior Staff meeting — people reporting directly to Executive Vice Chancellor Logue.)

This is not to say that people weren’t receptive. On the contrary, they were very complimentary. I heard heartening comments like “This is just what this university needs.” And Matt Gold and I had gone over the best things to show beforehand. I even had a few soundbites like “This is sort of like a Facebook for academics.”

You probably winced a bit at that (I know I do), but what I was trying to get at, and followed up explicitly with, was some sense of the value we are placing, not just on social interaction, but on serendipity. We want that sense of happy discovery: I didn’t know there was a group on THIS, or I didn’t know So-and-so was interested in THAT, or I didn’t know another campus was also doing work on THE OTHER THING. I’m a fan of StumbleUpon, and I want the stumble-upon effect of hitting on just the thing even though it was a thing you didn’t know you were looking for: in our case, the chance meeting with someone whose interest you share, the epiphany that that you’ve chanced upon a section of the wiki you can and should contribute to, that sort of thing. That’s hard to convey in a guided tour — not that I didn’t try

But seeing this with others’ eyes, imagining what it would be like to enter for the first time, also made me aware that an emphasis on social networking and serendipity, on what you might stumble upon, might just lead to stumbling, even fear of falling. (I guess I was especially aware, in a roomful of university deans, of what a prospective user might think who doesn’t have a lot of time, who doesn’t want too much [or even any] social implication.) What do we do for the new users who come with specific needs or the out-of-towners whose biggest concern is not getting lost?

I should say that I think the answer doesn’t lie in design — at least not entirely. A system can only be so navigable; a home page, only so informative. But it occurs to me that the reference to train or subway stations might be more apt than I had thought at first. How about something like an information booth? In addition to help documentation, site maps, and the like (and it would be great to have that), how about a prominent feature of the Commons that asks the new user or out-of-towner if they’re looking for something, if they need help. (I’m not thinking of the “contact us” feature with an anonymous e-mail address.) What if, for instance, we had something people could post that would immediately be sent to members who are  online and/or relayed by RSS feed to those who aren’t? If we could make the digital equivalent of sitting in a Welcome Booth or Information Desk fully collaborative,  the lift for the individual member wouldn’t be that great, and the responses could be almost synchronous even if they were asynchronous.

Someone could even get back to me right away with the suggestion that there’s a place for suggestions for the Commons, and it’s really not the proper province of blogs….

We in CUNY like to think we’re big. And we are: a multicampus university with nearly a quarter of a million degree students — the largest urban university system in the world. So when I was recently asked to review the program document for Project Bamboo, “a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort” involving over 110 institutions, I realized I had a chance to see what thoughtful people were saying about a project still larger than the CUNY Academic Commons, and still, like ours, very much in the beginning stages.

I’m impressed by the thought and work that has gone into this draft, and I think there’s a great deal to learn from it, particularlly from the Scope of Work section. But I also see a general flaw that I hope don’t afflict the Commons: Bamboo seems too technology-driven, too interested in how, taking the what and the why as givens or as questions largely answered by the status quo.

The reason Bamboo seems so tool-focused and technology-driven comes, strangely enough, from the realization that it shouldn’t be: the articulation of the Program (2.3) is framed just that way: “Because Bamboo is much more than technology, the program includes three distinct areas of focus and leadership: Bamboo Explore, Bamboo Plan, and Bamboo Build.” These areas are oddly incommensurate. Bamboo Explore (2.3.1), because it is about needs assessment, focuses on givens, presumes community.  Very little is said about it beyond making it the realm of requirement gathering. Bamboo Build (2.3.3), at the other end of the time spectrum in this oddly linear plan, is about tools we can come up with only after Bamboo Plan  (2.3.2) has done the prioritizing and planning. So of course the most is said about Bamboo Plan, the mapping activity predicated on satisfying existing needs by means of tools yet to be developed, even determined.

I suppose somewhere in the discussions someone has said that this is about community-building as well as tool-building, and that these are transformative as well as recursive activities, but things are not laid out (and certainly not numbered) that way. Instead, we begin where we are, by asking what needs we have now that things we can build will address. This has a kind of logic to it, but I think the plan reifies what’s wrong with most technological development: it doesn’t acknowledge how means transform ends (admittedly a hard thing to do at the outset). And so it is essentially about using tomorrow’s tools to address yesterday’s needs.

The counterintuitive power given the status quo in what is supposed to be a great leap forward does have much to do with where and how you start. I’m willing to stake a lot on the idea that, even and especially in big projects, it actually makes sense to build the plane and fly it at the same time. That way you’re in transit when you try to figure out where you are and what that may mean about what you need.

April 1st was CUNY’s annual joint meeting of the Academic Council (the council of CAOs or chief academic officers) and the Administrative Council (the council of COOs or chief operating officers). The focus is always on the budget, but it is also about whatever other especially pressing issue confronts the University. This time it was enrollment growth.

CUNY has grown 16% in FTEs (full-time enrollments) over the past five years. That’s dramatic growth, but economic downturns have a way of moving dramatic growth into the realm of high drama. This year, applications are up 11% over last year. On average, students are taking more credits. Retention has improved (one of the main but also under-acknowledged reasons for enrollment growth, too often thought to be all about new applicants).

What pushes this into the realm of high drama (as if you don’t already know) is that we are pressed for space. Even if all building plans are completed, CUNY will be 10% behind the national standard for accommodating current enrollments. And we know enrollments are on the rise. Dramatically. What’s more, it’s not as if CUNY cram more and more students into large lecture classes (even if we wanted to): only a little more the 10% of all the classroom space in the University can handle classes of 50 or more.

When I hear such facts, two words occur to me: blended learning. If ever there was a time for a reasoned use of partly online and partly on-campus instruction, it’s now and in the immediate future. More pedagogically sound than large lecture courses (which depend so much more on passive absorption, so much less on interaction), they also, at least conceptually, could allow us to recoup classroom space (to say nothing of saving commuting time for both faculty and students).

To make this idea a practical reality, we’d have to get organized. Any use of blended learning for the conservation of classroom space would have to be carefully planned. This goes without saying. What’s at least as obvious, given our recent experiences, is the need for greater confidence in the technological means. We’ve been buffeted by problems and outages, so much that some CUNY faculty have declared that they’ve had it with Blackboard in its current version and centrally supported form.

Like everything else about academic technology that needs work and thought these days, this strikes me as an opportunity for the CUNY Academic Commons. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to support an innovation, to nurture it and refine it into full viability. If we can use the Commons to discuss the kinds of strategic planning that would allow blended learning to create real institutional benefits for us, we might be able to move BL from a means of pedagogical enhancement to a means of improving access and increasing revenue. If this isn’t a use of technology that administrative leadership can get behind, what is? And if this isn’t the time — a tough time when we have problems academic technology can help us solve  — then when?

In a case of asynchronous synchronicity, I was hit all week by digital surfacings of the same topic, one I was sensitized to by a couple of relevant books I’m looking at, one titled The Paradox of Choice (about how we are hobbled rather than empowered by the putative option of having the “best” of whatever) and one titled simply Glut (which wryly looks at the “information age” historically, finding we always seem to have felt overwhelmed, desperate for the ultimate key or codex). These probably had me primed for a host of online mentions of what one piece in Inside Higher Ed called “Knowledge Overload.”

Ordinarily my reaction to locutions like that is to bemoan the semantic slippage besetting us these days. Information overload is really about data, not information (information should make you feel informed, right?), and knowledge in phrases like “knowledge management” is really just about information. Something has to happen to information — some activity, typically within some community of practice — to turn it into knowledge.

But, as it turns out, Ken Coates, in his piece on “Knowledge Overload,” was not misusing the term. He was talking about so much activity on the part of scholars that it has no reasonable outlet, just unreasonable ones, like being on one of 50 sessions run concurrently at a single, fairly well-focused conference (one of the examples given in that piece). In another piece, almost a companion piece, from Inside Higher Ed later the same week, Scott McLemee reported on the announcement from the University of Michigan Press that it is shifting to digital publishing. Keeping up with change (and sheer volume) is a challenge that justifies (almost demands) that university presses consider such a move, and McLemee has little patience for those who “will read about Michigan’s initiative and decide it means turning monograph publication into YouTube with footnotes, more or less.” But his is not an unequivocal acceptance of the inevitable:

When the University of Michigan Press blog promises the creation of “a rich, functional and efficient publishing environment,” it seems appropriate to feel a pang of dread — not just for the future of a great academic press, but for scholarship itself. Substitute “publishing environment” with “dining experience” and you have the language of the fast food industry.

And even that may miss the point. McLemee talks about the experience of disseminated knowledge, whatever its form, the activity of reading, an individual experience. Coates hints (but only hints) at something more: “There may well be a convergence possible between Academe 1.0 and Academe 2.0. New technologies certainly do find things faster and share them more broadly.” And later Coates asks whether “we, in the world of Web 2.0, really need to constantly add to the number of published – and sadly unread – academic journals and books. Can we not elevate the scholarship of synthesis and interpretation back to the highest rank of professional inquiry, recognizing the remarkable talent needed to bring together in a readily digestible form the accumulated insights of thousands of scholars?”

More almosting. If this is just pure distillation and synthesis, that sounds about as attractive as a scholarly Reader’s Digest or Publishers Weekly. But if we think of this as an activity that brings to light something that otherwise would not be visible — like “Making Invisible Learning Visible,” the current HASTAC forum led by Randy Bass and Bret Eynon — then we have something that is more useful, something possible only through collaboration, a way of making knowledge in the process of sharing it. I think this is much more than distillation, though we have a lot to do and a long way to go. This is partly a way of updating and repurposing what we already know, partly a way of keeping up with what we don’t know but need to, partly a way of sifting what we most need to know locally and globally, short term and long term. I think of this sifting process as the Long Haul, kind of the way Chris Anderson describes the Long Tail: a way of playing out the possibilities so that everyone can find out what they most need, what’s the best fit, what’s the thing that really makes a difference. I heartily hope this is one of the things the Commons allows us to do for the knowledge we need to realize the possibilities of academic technology. Heaven knows we do need it.