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.

I finally took my own advice, and read the latest installment in Randy Bass and Bret Eynon’s blog for the Chron, an installment titled “A Plan to Develop and Spread Better College Teaching Practices.” I’ve long been an admirer of their work, individually and collectively — I met Randy in the early nineties, around work with networked writing programs (does anyone remember those?), and I’ve already referenced Bret’s admirable “Making Connections” project which not only collects and extends previous work on eportfolios but promises to take on much more. One plan they shared to develop and spread better college teaching practices was of course the Visible Knowledge Project, which perhaps more than any other single endeavor, convinced me that going digital was a game-changer for teachers, that it could transform not only the teaching activity but the collaboration and development around such activity in consequential ways, and the overarching reason was there in the title: it made what people were doing more visible, share-able.

Excited by the authors and their title, I was also energized by our own plan “to develop and spread better college teaching practices” with the CUNY Academic Commons. Coming with such high expectations, I confess I found the installment oddly formal and abstract, and that surely is at least as much my fault as theirs. It was unfair to expect a full plan, of course, much less one that spoke directly to our plan. What they did was invoke work that pointed in the direction of a plan, much of it by “almosting” it (to use Stephen Dedalus’s convenient coinage). So they mentioned “repositories such as Merlot,” for instance, but also “focused communities of faculty …. such as the Lesson Study Project at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse, or the Faculty Inquiry Network linking California Community Colleges” and “rich exhibits at Inside Teaching, from the Carnegie Foundation, and the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive.” They might also have mentioned Project Bamboo, that nascent endeavor Steve Brier described to us at the January CAT meeting, which combines the reach of Merlot with the social networking of some of these newer and more focused projects (but is by no means “there” yet).

The burning question is why these are all only “almosting” what we need as a plan and a structure — why, for instance, you can almost see the virtual tumbleweeds blowing through Merlot. (And the question behind the question is obviously what we can do to make the CUNY Academic Commons do and be more.) Part of the answer, I think, has to do with a word that recurs throughout Bass and Eynon’s blogging: “community.” That’s a problematic word when academics use it precisely because (as  Joseph Harris, drawing on Raymond Williams, pointed out some years ago) it always seems to be used positively. And there’s plenty that is problematic about “community”  — dissensus within, enclosure from without, too-blanket a conception, and often the presumption rather than the fact of community in the first place. These enduring problems with community are complicated by our present situation, the fragmentation of our time and our pursuits, the way “networking” seems to place demands on us more than bestow benefits, etc. We need the Commons to help us forge communities and a larger, overarching sense of community without giving us all the problems that can come with “community.”

I think it (and we) should stand a decent chance for some reasons that are probably worth mentioning (though I’ve already made this so long it exceeds my own attention span). One is the way being part of CUNY situates us: we are connected whether we like it or not by certain circumstances — geographical, institutional, economic. (One thing that defines “real” community is shared problems.) But we are also loosely connected, too loosely in some cases and to some minds. (Nothing is more common in CUNY cross-campus talk than fear of “re-inventing the wheel” — in working long and hard on what another campus has already worked out.) So we have pre-existing bonds, but we also have real needs to bond further. That bodes well for the Commons if we can make it work for us.

And we don’t start from scratch. Bass and Eynon have called for “an R&D division for teaching in higher education,” yet we have that. (It’s just too unorganized to call a division.) When I read that, I was brought back to a meeting the Sloan Foundation set up a few years back between some of us in online education and a bunch of people who do corporate e-training. In introducing the academics, Frank Mayadas (the Sloan program director who set up the meeting) said that we were the ones who had been doing the R&D around new forms of teaching. And we have. What we haven’t done is pull that together. What we haven’t ensured is that those of us who are working on new forms and new modes don’t find/feel that is an isolated and isolating experience. (The first comment on the most recent Bass/Eynon blog installment came from J. Elizabeth Clark of LaGuardia, who said, “We really don’t yet have many digital teaching communities, except for those of us working on similar projects. We really need to move in this direction so that our working lives mirror our teaching lives and our everyday lives.”) If we could use the Commons to bring our work and our needs together, we could do the Commons — but also ourselves — a lot of good.

No, I’m not going to say anything about CUNY’s experience with Blackboard 8. (Later.)

Yesterday, a colleague at the University of Central Florida, Chuck Dzubian, wrote to ask what I thought of Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Writing in the 21st Century.” Here’s what I wrote back:

I like Kathy’s piece. It is a little like the presentation she gave as the keynote for the big e-portfolio conference we had here at LaGuardia last year.

BUT (that’s a big “but”) ….

I think it’s all very oversimplified — a cartoon history and a cartoon call to arms. I acknowledge the inevitability of reductive thinking — one of my heroes, Terry Eagleton, says that without it thought itself would not be possible — but this ultimately is a serious flaw with the piece, and it needs some redressing.

KBY is a real assessment guru, and she has certain traits of a folks of that ilk. (Pardon if I offend.) She likes generalizations, patterns, models. This makes her history pretty bad, and her assessment of the present (“a new age”) worse — if quite thought-provoking. Her argument verges on technological determinism (of that rather more rare variety, the Pollyannish) at several points, but it is really most dangerous and dubious when it comes to her rosy examples. The “THIS IS SPARTA!” example (did she see “300“?) is, for instance, an elevation of a kind of verbal tic or literary/networked echolalia to the status of liberating collective/self-expression. You need to go to something like the beginning of Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (with its analysis of an affluent couple exacting networked vengeance on an Hispanic teenager who didn’t return a cell phone) to get a fuller consideration of the not-so-smart mob behavior that KBY is celebrating here.

I don’t mean to be too negative, but this is way too pat. The great lesson of the history of literacy is that there never is a “new age”: change is always underway, but nothing is ever lost — old prejudices, old behaviors, old forms keep persisting. Her two great examples are really testimonies to two very old acts of communication persisting in slightly new forms, two acts which might be reductively described as “SOS” and “Kilroy was here.”