I have checked my facts to get the story straight. Microsoft and Blackboard formed an alliance in April, 2001. See this link for details: Blackboard and Microsoft

McCloud on Laurel

My hero Scott McCloud (okay, he's one of my heroes) offers a graphical commentary on some themes of Brenda Laurel’s recent Utopian Entrepreneur at the MIT Press website. (There’s an explicit allusion to McLuhan’s graphical turn in there to delight Jim.)

I’m a resolutely anti-commercial theologian—y’all may have been able to guess that from my harangues about copyright—but I insist that theologians, especially media-literate theologians, need to pay attention to marketers and entrepreneurs. We (and I’m not talking about the participants here) who typically treat different media as more or less neutral modes presentation stand to learn how these media look to people who dedicate their lives’ energies to using media in non-neutral ways. Jim, I think, made the point that the mode of presentation itself communicates much significant information (“information” as opposed to “noise,” not necessarily information-as-content). He was speaking in reference to PowerPoint, at which point several of us chimed in, and of course it’s an utterly McLuhanian premise.

Another good Lessig link (thanks to David Weinberger) at Darwin magazine.

It took till Thursday morning, but I finally found a quotation I was looking for.

Many of you will already have heard Edward Tufte’s line, “Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely,” but at a recent seminar at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet Law, Jason Matusow of Microsoft declined to give a PowerPoint presentation because, according to a report from the seminar, he called it “an affliction on conference-goers.”

Larry Lessig has a news site that notes his public appearances and media references, but the location one really wants is his Creative Commons site.

And the site for mediAgora, the proposal for an online model of licensing and rewarding artists as well as mediators and distributors, is here, with a discussion weblog here.

Greetings, all--Wednesday afternoon and a couple of links I wanted to call to your attention. First, in conjunction with Mary's suggestion below, I wanted to point to The Shifted Librarian. Jenny is always on top of copyright, free-access, and e-publishing matters. Mary, does your husband know about "Why You Should Fall to Your Knees and Worship a Librarian"?

Second, Larry Lessig is reputed to have given a bang-up presentation at the Open Source Convention; this site offers a thorough overview of that talk.

I second Mary's commendation of the Budapest Initiative. I signed on a while ago, but had forgotten about it by the time we met.

Hi all -- It's only Tuesday afternoon (today is the day we left Wabash), and I've already found a better set of resources to share. I wish that I had had time to talk with my husband about the Lessig books before I left, he's been a treasure trove of ideas since I've gotten home. In any case, check out the Association of Research Libraries special report on open access, and particularly the Budapest Open Access Initiative. I think we should try to get our institutions to sign on to it. Don't worry, it's nowhere near as radical as some of the ideas I was playing with! I think it's actually something many if not most of you would support!

Teaching and Technology

August 10-13, 2002
Evaluation of the Conference

Many thanks for your participation in this weekend’s conference. Please help us ascertain the strengths and weaknesses of the program for our time together, in order that we can learn the most about how the Wabash Center can better collect and amplify the energies and insights of practitioners of technologically-inflected pedagogy in theology and religion.

What about this conference did you find most exciting, provocative, most stimulating or satisfying?

What were the best, strongest elements of the conference (and what distinguished them as particularly good and strong)?

What elements of the conference could have been improved (and how could these have been improved)?

What will you take back to your home institution from your participation in this conference?

How would you suggest that the Wabash Center continue the work begun at this conference?

Trevor: It should be more hypertextual than other things often are. There should be links between Mary's article and AKMA's response to it, and somebody we've never heard of from North Dakota has something to say and we don't know what to think about him.

AKMA says: Like evolt.org's rating system.

Some e-journals on teaching and technology:

Journal of Religion and Education
Teaching History with Technology
Journal for Research in Mathematics Education
Academic Leadership
Deliberations on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Journal of Technology Education
Comparative Education Review
(and on and on via Google and Yahoo--just a selection)

Sheila: Peer review is a key point.

Mary: Let's go back to the idea of an open-source place to distribute things, with review online by well-informed readers review it?

Richard: I like this, bu tI can't commit to it. I'm committed to the guild, to biblical studies, to teaching, to my family. I can't add another piece on. I'd love to help, but I can't commit to help Mary.

Paul: The "put it up like Amazon" idea might have some merit. Peer review is sort of opposed to what you're trying to do in certain respects. If you have online review, you're getting legitimation right there, and it's open to other readers.

Lucinda: I don't think there's enough material and interest for another field-specific journal on teaching theology and religion.

George: I think it's about a change in consciousness in favor of global access, free access, peer review.

Sheila: If Blackwell would permit access, but that's not likely.

Dianne: One of the reasons TT&R needed "credibility" was the nay-saying about whether teaching and learning was a topic for scholarly engagement. But people are clamoring for the technological angle.

Paul: There is a great interst for this. We sent out more single issues of TT&R 5/1 than any other issue. But what about connecting with peer reviewers? What about editorial board? Who will eidt these particular pieces? It would be work.

Mary agrees--it would be work, without an immediate incentive. But I'm hungry for a level of conversationon these issues. I want to support that on some level. These technologies make it possible to conduct this world-wide conversation. Can we show up here next year with a collection of articles, and so on?

Mary: What if we formed an Editorial Board for an e-journal on teaching theology and religion in connection with technology? Not to compete with TT&R, but to

What if Wabash brought each of us back next year, and if we each had four or five articles to put in the pool to be ready for the publication? And just launch it?

Richard: With links to TT&R and other such journals so that we're not competing with them, but complementing them.

George: In 1995 or 6, Tom Longstaff came to show us Mosaic, and what they were doing with the excavations at Sepphoris. We felt that we couldn't do that--but it posed questions to us about what we can do, what we would do if we had the money, what we would talk about. It's along process, it's a battleship that takes a long time to turn. Part of the point is to show people what are the possibilities.

Trevor--pay more attention to how they use technology, dispel determinism, rebuild trust ans responsibility, and embody responsible use of technology institutionally. I'm hesitant about the last. I cringe at something that wants to make itself an institution, that wants to strengthen the institution for its own sake. To help institutions see how better to serve people, to listen to people, yes; but not the institution for its own sake.

Wes--it's dependent on the first three. It draws the first three together and perpetuates them. In dispelling determinism, it's not just that the machine isn't determined, but that the uses aren't determined.

Trevor: they look both to the past and to the future, to the chalk and the plasma screen.

Mary: and to see the very process of institutionaliszation as technological itself. But I want to talk to you about our dreams, too. We were talking about ideas that aren't necessarily Wabash ideas, but might be allied to Wabash. I have commitments that aren't the same as Wabash commitments, but I'd like Wabash to hear them. Here are my points for my Manifesto.

Bob distinguishes the specifically teaching-and-learning issues from the broader cultural issues about digital transition.

Lucinda suggests that Wabash create a group of consultants based on the existing model, gathered them once a year for conversation and catch-up, and Jim would help train them in the skills of consulting. If your goal is to cultivate this important conversation among faculty, among theological educators. That's not all: what is it tha tyou want to happen in those schools that you're cultivating this conversation about? After the intervention, what? do they have monthly conversations?

Richard has never felt the idea that the Wabash Center would revolutionize the practice of teaching overnight. He'd want to step back from that momentum to see the Center's long-term momentum further productive tech engagement.

Bob says that it's worth having specific consultants for teaching and learning with special regard to technology.

Dianne: We specifically noted that both theological schools and liberal-arts settings involve teaching and learning in ways that engage Weinberger and Brown & Duguid, at a point of special strength for teachers with our intersts (as Trevor said).

Ok.... here are few ideas I'd like to consider for a possible "manifesto" that we could promote to universities and seminaries at large:

• 
  Course content kept in open public access, but confining relationality of dialogue (and perhaps, perforce?, reserve materials) to pass-word protected materials


• Full compliance with web accessibility guidelines


• Consider pushing the use of something like Nicenet


• Support the use of open source software as an ethical commitment (eg. Open office.org) (part of this, or adding to it, don’t use Word formats to exchange files)


• Utilize and support network technologies that are open (e2e)


• Clear fair use policies that promote an open commons


• Promote technology choices that favor access


• Teach media/digital literacy as a core competency


• Promote open source development of substance


• Core pedagogy is constructive, collaborative


• Promote policies nationally and globally that are principled in these ways

What do you think?

Lucinda says, about consultants, the Idea would be that a consultant would go to an institution and talk with the faculty about teaching with technology? What is the goal? The consultant will be there and leave--what will the program address? There's a level of discourse you want to promote, that you're not hearing.

George says There are different levels of consultation, depending on the needs of different schools. The job of the consultant would be to initiate the discussion, to intiate the vision, and or to enhance the discussion and the vision, depending on where the school is.

Dianne re-emphasizes that the issue concerns teaching and learning; they need to understand how technology plays a key part of that conversation.

Jim has done 15 of these consultancies. What are they already doing? One of my goals is, if a piece of chalk works, use it. I try to model things, so they can see how things could be done. But it varies from place to place. But there is a technique, and it helps to have someone coming from inside the community, not some IT guy who doesn't understand teaching and learning in theological education.

Dianne says that the conversation we've just had is far removed from the kind of discussion we've been having. Another part of the issue is that part of a consultant's role would be to find out where the institution's engagement with the issues might be.

Jim asks for 3 days, and devotes to spending the first day to listening.

Dianne says we need an outlet for these papers and ideas.

Trevor points out that people who can speak to different sets of people,saying the same thing in different languages, are rare--so we want to identify as consultants people who can ahng out with techies, then make that intelligible to people who think that computers are the devil.

Mary suggests that some alternative to institutionally-defined locations, a resource free from the fetters of the Old Institutions.

Richard suggests that Wabash's regular consultations should all involve technology. Moreover, there should be a regular consultation for people making their entry into technology and education. Then there should be a third level of higher-level practitioners involving technology, but especailly concerning teaching. Mary cites the example of the Visible Knowledge Project as an existing example of such a project.

Richard notes even a fourth level of things we didn't even know were going on.

Some links to technology and teaching in liberal arts colleges:

CLAC: The Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges
NITLE: National Institute for Technology in Liberal Arts Education

Lucinda asks what the need is that we're discussing. Wes notes that they're different needs.

Trevor observes that one thing that's going on is the question, "How do we use technology appropriately to teach?" not just because it's there. Another is, "How does technology explode the possibilities of how to teach, how to disseminate information, to think theologically?", the bleeding edge that we've mentioned. We should distinguish the two. It might be worth being able to tell a professor who puts 20-year-old lecture notes on PowerPoint that he's not doing anything different, that it would be hard to get a paper cut from that.

Here's a proposal we're talking about at Luther (Mary's seminar) that might be one way to focus a conference and get us doing something that could be in print.

Jim notes that we don't address the business community very richly. Bob reminds us about lawyers and economists.

Wes: What are four or five fundamental issues facing theological education? We could collect four or five essays addressing the role of technology relative to these topics?

Mary wonders whether the Minnesota Consortium's conference might be a venue for that kind of discussion. Bob points out that a group of theological educators don't count as multidisciplinary.

Mary: primary focus ought to be on teaching and learning, and to the extent that digital technologies contribute to that, we could support them.

Where from Here?

What are the major issues facing faculty? What are the best ways for the Wabash Center to respond now and in the short-term future?

What are the best interventions that the Wabash Center could make concerning technology and teaching? What are the major issues facing faculty?

Beginning Ideas of Where to Go from Here

Peer-review of digital media

Making available consulting theological technologies

Writing for Teaching Theology and Religion

More conversations such as this one, perhaps scheduled for videoconferencing with regional meetings (Luther is actually planning such a conference)

Better planning for Lilly grants, so that regional granting is coordinated and mutually-reinforcing

National version of Jim's computer camp

Bringing together IT/library people, students, and faculty to work together

Faculty technology associates--grants to buy out half your teaching load, so you have time to work together, deliberate, and talk with other practitioners

A sort of apprenticeship

The discourse we've been having is unique; we've had good discussions about the commodification of technological dimensions of institutional practice

Is this group committed to seeing these ideas through? Why try to reconstruct the discussion we've been having here, toward electronic publishing, a conference, a printed volume of essays? Dianne reminds us that we have to re-do some of this conversation when we get back home. It's both/and.

one silent site

ez3kiel

Benefits and Banes of Technology

Mary points to Tom Boomershine's claim that "we reason more by sympathetic identification than by philosophical argumentation," and discusses various ways in which electronic media amplify the extent to which we can bring to the classroom the means of "sympathetic identification."

Borgmann and Technology

(Paul Myhre at work)

7:43 PM  

Edward Tenner's "Why Things Bite Back"

   posted by Paul Myhre at 7:18 PM  

Problems and Hazards of Technology and Pedagogy

Wes invites us to extend our conversation to the question of whether our uses of technology are regressive, or iatrogenic, or redemptive (in terms proposed by Tenner and Stahl).

Tenner sketches "revenge effects" of technology. That's not a side effect or a trade-off; the revenge effect is the tendency in the world around us to get even.

First, Tenner proposes "rearranging" problems--problem not solved, but relocated.

"Repeating" effects produce the problem over again, at a higher pitch (the expectation increases even more than the technology eases

"Recomplicating" effect: electronic archical storage, deregulation of the telephone industry, health care.

"Regenerating" effect

"Recongesting" effect in which the new space or time gained by technology is quickly filled.

Shift of problems from the acute problem to the chronic risk. Technology is always technical, organizational, and cultural; there's no way to eliminate the risks of technology.

(Stahl) Redemptive technology should always be rooted in
1 The search for the common good.
2 Commitment to justice
3 Expressing creativity (restoring creativity in the world of work)
4 Reciprocity (not expertise)
5 Wholism (taking into account all three aspects of technology all the time)

Wes proposes the 6th criterion, "respecting the space for conscience."

1 Cultivate patterns of attentiveness
2 Dispell determinism (to restore the fullness of free agency)
Wes just taught a class wherein undergrads expressed the beliefs (a) that technology would make life better and (b) that there was no way for them to affect that change.
3 Rebuild trust and responsibility (no "black boxes"--as Borgmann's distinction between a "thing" (fireplace, for instance) and a "device" (a furnace))
4 Common sense should be institutionalized (we should re-imagine institutions)

   posted by AKMA at 7:17 PM  

The Holy Land 3D Animation CD-Rom, TerraExplorer Pro - ROHR Productions Ltd., P.O.B. 23312, Nicosia 1681 Cyprus - $35.00.
Email: info@rohrproductions.com

   posted by Paul Myhre at 5:14 PM  

Forward Into the Past

George wants to get back to the medieval model of education, where learneres apprentice themselves to teachers; that reminds Bob of the Clerk from the Canterbury Tales:

       A CLERK ther was of Oxenford also,
That unto logyk hadde longe ygo.
As leene was his hors as is a rake,
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake, (290 )
But looked holwe and therto sobrely.
Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy;
For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office.
For hym was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie.
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre; (300 )
But al that he myghte of his freendes hente,
On bookes and on lernynge he it spente,
And bisily gan for the soules preye
Of hem that yaf hym wherwith to scoleye.
Of studie took he moost cure and moost heede.
Noght o word spak he moore than was neede,
And that was seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quyk, and ful of hy sentence;
Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche. (310 )

   posted by AKMA at 5:12 PM  

I want to add in John Hockenberry's argument about the brain/body issues ... The Next Brainiacs

   posted by Mary Hess at 5:02 PM  

Bill McKibben's The Age of Missing Information

Dianne:

   posted by Dianne Oliver at 4:52 PM  

Again on Weinberger

Bob mentions the difference in perception of space between the pre-linked generations and the hyperlinked generations.

Mary highlights the ways in which the Web makes manifest what French theory discusses more abstractly. She cites the role of jokes ("transgressive" discourse) and the way that newbies zoom right in on humor as one of the first thing they latch onto.

We get into a huge argument about whether one can "love" online, what "love" or "touch" mean. Someone invokes a comparison to the communion of saints; is that an example of virtual community? No; the saints are really present. But if one virtualizes online community, doesn't that imply the concomitant virtuality of the communion of saints?

Can we be human online? Wes notes that he teaches a fundamentally archaic discipline: the craft of preaching.

Are online interactions "real"? Can teaching interactions authentically involve real people? Everyone's getting into it; members argue on one hand, that online interactions lack the depth and power of physical relationships, whereas others argue that online interactions differ, but are not dundamentally distinct from, physical interactions. George cites Phaedrus 275d: "Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing."

   posted by AKMA at 3:59 PM  

Billy Collins poems

   posted by Paul Myhre at 2:38 PM  

Jim Rafferty on David Weinberger

Jim begins by pondering the cover's connection to Marshall McLuhan, and imagining various ways in which he would represent Weinberger's message to potential readers. Jim likes Weinberger's phrase, "how deeply weird things really are." Jim notes that the members of this group seem not to use Usenet much; that suggests that Weinberger's conflation of the Web and the Internet may conceal more problems than it solves. Jim's presentation rests principally on quotations

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined—we are the small pieces. Jim highlights the ways Weinberger talks about the Web as "place-ial," not spatial. "The unit of time on the web is a story." Weinberger contrasts Hallmark with Blue Mountain as an example of the ways Hallmark fails to understand the difference in the way the Web works. Weinberger highlights human imperfection and the brokenness of the Web as sources of the Web's strength.

Weinberger talks about marketing on the Web: "faceless masses replaced by face-ful masses." "On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people." He contrasts the physical-world monthly meetings of the Emily Dickinson Society with a Usenet version of the the same group. Danny Yee has reviewed more than 500 books, and has received 1.5 million hits; how many people see the New York Times Book Review?

Weinberger talks about what it means to have a "body"; he goes on to talk about the ways we are socially embodied. Why do you care enough to read this person's web page? "Realism is denial." "We have the illusion that we can master a world not of our making, if we are just hard-headed enough." Jim just wishes he would make these things more graphic.

   posted by AKMA at 2:37 PM  

Bob Royalty's Notes on Brown and Duguid

For what these are worth, here are Bob's notes on The Social Life of Information:

Summary Notes
Bob Royalty
Wabash Workshop on Teaching and Technology
August 12, 2002
Enthusiastic about this book. Ties in with several intellectual and cultural interests (sociology of knowledge, social history, and cultural criticism). Good book for a critical techno-enthusiast.
Surprising then that I disagree with some of its final conclusions
Business market; easy read. Repetitious but not, I think, thin.
Bios: Xerox PARC (and my overlap). Liberal thinkers in best part of term
Port wine
organizational theory
literary criticism
Dickens, Samuel Johnson
Duguid PowerPoint at MITCI
Thesis
arguing against the idea that “information and its technologies can unproblematically replace the nuanced relations between people” (xvi)
written against endism, futurism, and infothusiasm
written for careful examination of social location, practice, communities that shape our interaction with world/work/people/technology/information
change in society not occurring where or how predicted, or for reasons assumed/cited by “pundits”
arguing against tunnel vision and the pushing of badly designed technologies
disintermediation, p. 6 (life of the news)
Futurism: Housewife of Future; Minority Report : assumptions of stability in society with technology changing

Chapter 1: Limits to Information
Can problems be solved and change affected by throwing more information “out there”? All about information overload
Bits and atoms; Industrial Revolution and Information Revolution
Looks at “myths” of the new economy; e.g. home employment peaked in the 1950s and has declined ever since; administrative overload has only increased in the 1990’s
“myth of information is overpowering richer explanations” of what we do and how society changes (or will change)

Chapter 2: Agents and Angels
fairly detailed look at the problem with “bots”
tools shaping or shaped? Claim is that bots act or will act like humans but argument here is that humans are being imagined as bots by infothusiasts
what do you really get with Google’s hits? Examine the duplicate, redundant, and useless information out there
and one of my RAs from Stanford is at Google
bots break down systems that humans have learned to negotiate (markets for instance)
inertia serves a social good

Chapter 3: Home Alone
examination of the problems of the home office and the useful social functions of being in social setting (aka community)
social character of work: people as resources
compare dept meeting to Wabash workshop
See pp. 79–81
Production paradox from 1973 to 1990

Chapter 4: Practice makes Process
management fads of the 1980s and specifically reengineering
Xerox Reps

Chapter 5: Learning—in Theory and Practice
Information, Learning and Knowledge
p. 121: “factory hands” vs. “information consumers”
communities of practice
learning and identity: learning about and learning to be
Training vs. Learning
Learning is demand driven and a social process
people learn quickly and efficiently when they need to
People unfit to use simple tools (program a VCR) are allowed to drive
Car technology is socialized such that we no longer think of it as technology
Everyone in our society has spent a great deal of time being socialized into ideas of driving
no one gets together to program a VCR
Networks of Practice (AAR) vs Communities of Practice (Wabash Consultation)
p. 145 Technology supports existing communities but poor at creating them
blogger pre conference
on line teaching

Chapter 6: Innovating Organization, Husbanding Knowledge
How does innovation and learning take place?
If only HP knew what HP knew: can’t post information and think it will become knowledge
Value of place vs. “virtual communities”
Xerox and the GUI and the Mouse vs. Apple
heterogeneity within cultures
complementary innovation (what else do we need to make all this work?)
power supply
wireless
etc
clustered ecologies (Silicon Valley)
Challenge to Endisms
death of distance
death of the firm
both provide social location for networks and communities of practice

Chapter 7: Reading the Background
Vinegar story, p. 173–4
Value of paper: use has increased greatly
e books mimic books
darts p. 183
READ p. 185
news (also in chap. 1) is socially produced
Communities are bound together by texts
Not information but interpretation
heretics, p. 193: same information as the “orthodoxy”
tension between fixity and fluidity, “time binding” vs. “space binding” communications
preserving communication across time, immutable
delivering across wider space, mobile
newer data more likely lost than 200 yr. old ms.

Chapter 8: Re Education
Future of the University: IBM add
pushes us to think about teaching and learning as more than the delivery of information
technology serves a pedagogical purpose by pushing us to think about what information we are doing in delivering any information at all
READ p. 213
Universities credential: they warrant
and they allow undervalued learning to take place under the radar screen
student will not sign up for an “off the wall” course as a single on-line course but will when couched in a 4 yr degree
See p. 220–1 re undergraduates and graduates
importance of developmental theory and pedagogical theory
Distance learning: what do we mean by distance?
underrepresented communities who live right next to Stanford
Digital and Domestic communities: pp. 226–7
Educating Rita
Theory of the Devolved University
Futuristic
Idealistic
Impractical
Violates several of their rules I think

Beyond Information
beware easy assumptions about resources and constraints
249–50 Code of Code
Conclusion

   posted by AKMA at 11:59 AM  

Lisa Nakamura's book recommended by Mary

   posted by Dianne Oliver at 11:51 AM  

Bob Royalty on Brown and Duguid

Bob is talking us through Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information. He has lived in Palo Alto, knows some of the characters in the story, and sympathizes with the argument. They argue against "infothusiasm," "end-ism," and the notion that technology can unproblematically replace the nuanced interactions among human actors. Bob recommends especially chapters 1, 7, and 8 (as pertinent to academics).

B&D discuss information overload, the labor environment, administrative overload, about learning, about the human aspects of transferring knowledge, the more-than-merely-verbal dimensions of paper-based communication, about (in the end) the connections between technology and pedagogy.

Sheila observes that she found chapter 8 unsatisfactorily confusing. B&D envision a fundamentally different kind of institution without physical proximity between teachers and learners, one that represents a pedagogy of absence that John Carroll Univ. has decided deliberately to eschew. Mary notes that Luther Seminary can't afford to rule out distance learning. Most of what students learn, they learn accidentally. They learn from adventitious encounters.

The credentialling process comes into focus in this context. Various members of the group bring up the positive and negative dimensions of credential-granting--mostly the negatives.

Richard argues that accidental learning doesn't necessarily depend on physical proximity.

Richard and his wife stopped off on the way to Crawfordsville to show a quilt to friends they know from online, whom they had never met before. AKMA chimes in that he has experienced very rich relationships with friends whom he knows from online. Trevor speaks up to defend the dichotomy, in the name of the intensity and the non-interest-driven ways that human physical interactions involve. Wes sympathizes. Sheila points out that varying definitions of "community" seem to be in play. George speaks up for difference among communities, but not ruling out the idea that this or that might be a different kind of community.

Mary and Bob engage a vivid, thorough discussion of the hermeneutics of embodiment, into which Wes and AKMA jump.

AKMA adduces the example of epistolary correspondence; Wes questions the pertinence of that example. Trevor defends the distinction between physical and virtual relationships, but we have to go to lunch.

   posted by AKMA at 11:05 AM  

Patrick Lynch's web site

   posted by Dianne Oliver at 9:49 AM  

Trevor suggests

two links on ideas about resources:

Fred Kniss,
Disquiet in the Land.

Author(s): Kniss, Fred.
Title: Ideas and Symbols as Resources in Intrareligious Conflict :
The Case of American Mennonites [bibliog]
Source: Sociology of Religion 57 (Spr 1996), p. 7-23
Standard No: ISSN: 0038-0210
Language: English
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: Sociology, Christian (Mennonite)
Mennonites -- Controversies.
Social conflict.
Document Type: article
Update: 199712
Accession No: ario19960000190002

   posted by AKMA at 9:43 AM  

Mary Hess on Lessig

Mary's arguing that Open Source software and a cultural commons have tremendous theological significance.

Bob Royalty is skeptical about the far-reaching consequences of DMCA and so on; he understands that artists don't get a fair share of the money he pays for a CD, he recognizes that the record companies are evil, but he just thinks there's something ethically unsupportable about an open-architecture system.

Trevor and Richard foreground concerns about the status of Canadian dissertations, some of which were hijacked by Contentville and sold for profit.

Paul wonders how Lessig's argument affects teaching. He alludes to a CDROM that George produces for his classes, some content of which may not comply with copyright law in its strictest construction. Richard wonders how George's CDROM differs from plagiarism. That stirs up a whole swarm of controversy. AKMA argues that the problem with plagiarism is fraud, not reproduction. George defends his practice because he doesn't claim to have made the images.

Bob tries to return to the fundamental ideological conflict: scholarship is about exchange and critique of ideas, whereas business is about profits. We are not just scholars, but are implicated in various business practices in multifarious ways.

As we argue some about copyright, about benefits for creators, about what Brown and Duguid will call "the myth of disintermediation," AKMA calls the group's attention to Kevin Marks's mediAgora proposal.

   posted by AKMA at 9:29 AM  

RESPONSE TO READINGS - MONDAY, AUGUST 12

Discussion about Lessig and possible connections to teaching theology and religion. -Mary
Mary also discussed Lessig's second book, The Future of Ideas.

Discussion about the content of Brown/Duguid and possible connections to teaching theology and religion. - Bob

Discussion about the content of Weinberger and possible connections to teaching theology and religion. - Jim

   posted by Paul Myhre at 8:24 AM


   Sunday, August 11, 2002  

Hawking's The Theory of Everything

   posted by Dianne Oliver at 8:27 PM  

Sojourners Magazine online

   posted by Paul Myhre at 8:17 PM  

Project Muse

   posted by Bob Royalty at 8:07 PM  

JSTOR-The Scholarly Journal Archive

   posted by Paul Myhre at 7:48 PM  

What Dreams May Come

George begins the dreamwork by suggesting that the work of symposia like this continue at a series of yearly conferences, at which technology leaders might further their interaction and mutual provocation. Richard remembers the need for a regular forum for scholars in the field of theology and religion to talk through the pertinent issues. He suggests something to happen every year, at which anyone interested could come, addressing everyone from newbies to visionaries.

Mary dreams of teachers and students connecting globally, where the convergence involves not just privileged white upperclass students, but whereby all participants to learning may meet on open, respectful terms. Wes supposes that the Western provenance of high-tech would itself reinforce Western privilege, though Mary commits to striving toward that ideal.

Trevor's big dream involves texts, texts that might be radically available online. AKMA jumps in and sketches his dream of a venue for the dissemination of texts, which could offer small sums to authors for the rights to make texts freely available online. Manuscripts could be peer-reviewed, carefuly edited, and prepared for PDF to ensure high quality. Print-on-demand publishers could hold a prerogative to print the physical repesentations of the work, paying royalties to the author. The heart of the enterprise would be the goal of making texts radically available, as Trevor says. Questions of prestige and tenure do enter in, though. In conversation with one another about the problem of institutional reinforcement, Wes suggested the idea of establishing clinical professorships to acknowledge the contributions of technologically-active scholars.

What Sheila would like to see is Information Technology people who have some theological training, as some librarians are research librarians in theology. Jim observes that that sounds like his job description!

Jim described his dream to conduct his computer camp on a national basis. He'd likewise love to build a website as an open technological resource. Wes would want to do that in homiletics (also with video clips). AKMA mused about the possible benefits of having Monday morning papers publishing sermon reviews; Bob noted that he wants his students to be well-equipped to interrogate the very notion of a "sermon review."

Paul sketched a vision for offering training for lay academies through online avenues. Wes suggests that Sojourners and Other Side are working on a project such as this.

Richard wishes for the time when uses of technology are seamless, when using electronic media in class comes as easily as using chalk or a podium.

George dreams of reaching a point where he would not be limited by technology. Trevor adds that the ways the the North American academy produces and authenticates knowledge structure and constrain teaching (and learning).

Wes and Bob devote some attention to redemptive and regressive manifestations of technology. Bob alludes forward to The Social Life of Information, tracing the process that transforms the "factory hand" to Dilbert's cubicle-dwellers, the ways commerce reifies human energy.

   posted by AKMA at 7:24 PM  

Looking In

This afternoon, onlooker Naomi Chana sent the following email message to the Wabash participants:

would you believe that my university has a
policy of dumbing all faculty PCs down to Windows 98?!
(Thankfully, I managed to circumvent that edict.) I
think it's as much a problem with Microsoft's stingy
one-year site licenses as anything else. Here's
hoping you'll take some of those issues up.

Finally, of _course_ the classroom is a sacred space
-- at least, in J.Z. Smith's sense of "sacred space"
rather than, say, Eliade's. In other words, ritual
marks the space as sacred, and conducting a class
(whether lecture, discussion, or more exotic variants)
is most decidedly a ritual. You have your directed
attention, your assertion of difference, your systemic
hierarchy.... What I keep wondering is which parts of
the Internet, if any, are sacred spaces, and how that
should affect our conduct as we work online (should we
remove our virtual shoes beforehand?).

I should poke around the Wabash Center's website and
see if there are any future conferences of this sort
in the works; I'd really enjoy attending a "teaching
and technology" workshop that didn't have me bored out
of my mind within the first five minutes. ("Now, this
program is called Blackboard, and here are the numbers
for the divisional IT liaisons who can help you set it
up....") The conference sounds great so far -- have
fun!

Thanks, Naomi, and keep in touch.

   posted by AKMA at 7:19 PM  

Sunday Evening - Dreams

What would you do if you could implement anything whatsoever in how you could teach a course?

   posted by Paul Myhre at 7:18 PM  

Big Dreams

We've had a filling, delicious dinner, during which no two sentences passed without someone saying, "What if we. . . ?" The discussion tonight concerns the dreams we have for realizing possibilities in technology and teaching.

   posted by AKMA at 7:16 PM  

Another DMCA site at Educause

   posted by Dianne Oliver at 5:05 PM  

Digital Millenium Copyright Act
Anti-DMCA Website

   posted by Paul Myhre at 4:59 PM  

Open Knowlege Initiative http://web.mit.edu/oki/

   posted by Paul Myhre at 4:50 PM  

Virtual Indian Village

   posted by Paul Myhre at 4:42 PM  

One Box voicemail

   posted by Paul Myhre at 4:35 PM  

Imminent Technology

It's not strictly "imminent," but we'd like digital video cameras, hooked up to iMacs, running iMovie. Much of the possible "imminent technologies" involve technologies that are presently available, but at too high a price.

Some talk about videoconferencing. It has applications relative to pastoral counseling/training; mock training sessions take place with commentary subsequently.

What about a mailable device for videoconference interviewing? Some of us have done this with more inexpensive cameras.

"Executive Decision Maker" for theological decision-making.

3D modelled environments for Hellenistic settings, for Jerusalem (off-season and in Passover); for simulated worship in different settings; for mounting exhibitions of visual representations ("art," sculpture, and so on).

Lessig's cultural commons--a new set of cultural assumptions about intellectual property.

   posted by AKMA at 4:24 PM  

Emerging Technologies:

Ink Link

C-Pen

   posted by Paul Myhre at 4:20 PM  

Emerging Technologies

4:17 PM  

Comment from Wes (and a point made by Diane as well): Powerpoint example of a technology that encourages (seduces?) us to overteach and not empower students as independent learners. Problem of critically engaging the students. Or as Diane said, undermines effort to decenter the teacher and center the subject and active student learning. Richard response: issue of pedagogical design. There has always been good and bad teaching; technology can be used well or poorly.

   posted by Bob Royalty at 3:07 PM  

Good Teaching

Among the responses we've given so far include:

• Attention to the visual cues that our handouts give to students
  
• Making possible kinds of collaboration with colleagues in remote locations
  
• “I teach better because of the satisfaction I get from my involvement with technology.”
  
• The technology per se hasn’t been the key thing, but the technology has forced me to prepare a storyboard to plan how a web page is going to unfold. I have to plan my classes much more carefully—whether my primary technology that day is chalk, or whatever.
  
• It allows a lot more time for reflection; it allows me to review what I was doing from the learner’s perspective.
  

  Excursus on information overload: it’s okay to supply an information overload, if you also help students negotiate the way through the rain forest.
  

• Teaching students to write works better on paper. Yes, but the give-and-take, informal interaction of online discussion, students develop some skills in argument and conversation. So online discussion can begin those skills.
  
• If you structure assignments differently, you can get different (better) results, even for writing.
  
• Students who don’t talk in class will often engage in online discussion—and this improves the class itself. Often the students will themselves begin to contribute more in class after they’ve been recognized for the soundness of their online postings.
  
• PowerPoint: It enables us to incorporate materials that just aren’t convenient to use in other ways (music, images, video).
  
• PowerPoint requires me to sift through my notes to develop concise summaries of the points I was trying to make, and also to add maps. Moreover, by handing out the notes that constitute the PowerPoint presentation, I enable students to pay attention to the finer points of what I’m trying to say (they already have the bullet points in hand). Students don’t lose the train of an argument by trying to figure out what was the last date I cited. And it requires me to structure the exam differently, so that they don’t just regurgitate my bullet points; I have to set up the exam to test for more synthetic capacities.
  On the other hand, much of what we use PowerPoint for amounts simply to do more elaborately things we’re used to doing more laboriously.
  
• Big debate over courseware (BlackBoard occupies center stage), of which I lost track while I was looking for something else.
  
• Courseware has enabled me to teach at a level appropriate to majors, because I can answer the more elementary questions online while teaching to the more advanced students.
  
• Big debate over webpage diting programs: FrontPage vs. Dreamweaver? Everyone speaks up for Dreamweaver, or at least against FrontPage. IT departments love FrontPage because it helps them exercise control.
  
• In response to a question from Lucinda, the group discusses the difference between home-brewed webpages (on one hand) and courseware (on the other). The principal response involves the privacy that goes with BlackBoard, and the integration of registration information also. What you can do with home-brewed webpages? Anything you imagine.
  

Coffee Break again! When we come back, before dinner, we'll concentrate on imminent technologies.

   posted by AKMA at 2:22 PM  

Wabash Center Digital Project Grants

   posted by Paul Myhre at 2:17 PM  

How can we teach better, and what particular dimensions of available and imminent technologies contribute to teaching better? How can teachers in general teach better through available/imminent technologies?

   posted by Paul Myhre at 2:14 PM  

Other Technology Grants

   posted by Paul Myhre at 2:07 PM  

Technology Grants

   posted by Paul Myhre at 1:56 PM  

Question from Wes: who among us needs the electronic technological operating enviroment (as opposed to tools) to do the essential part of our work?

   posted by Bob Royalty at 11:50 AM  

UDTS Ministry and Techology certificate program

   posted by Paul Myhre at 11:31 AM  

Money There may be a divide between seminary and religious graduate institutions and undergraduate/universities in terms of funding sources and opportunities.

   posted by Bob Royalty at 11:27 AM  

Benton Foundation is an excellent example of engagement with issues concerning the digital divide.

   posted by Paul Myhre at 11:03 AM  

More Complaining

Coffee break is over, so we're back to griping.

• Teachers don't have an incentive to do anything technological in teaching, because it won't be recognized for tenure.
  
• We get facilities, technology, and applications, but no one to show how to use them.
  
• We can learn how to use things ourselves, but our organizations don't know how to deal with technology.
  
• Why aren't theological educators more active in interrogating issues relative to the digital divide? The Benton Foundation is good on this, but where are our seminaries?
  
• Time.
  
• Clergy don't do a good job of drawing on the strengths of knowledgeable people in the congregations and communities. What is it about our teaching that prepares people to go out from seminary and ignore the specific aptitudes of congregants? The problem persists in every way, but new developments on the technology front makes that more obvious.
  
• Technology cen also provide an avenue for empowering people who wouldn't themselves be leading the worship. It distributes authority, because it may be the fourteen-year-old nerd may have control over what shows up on the screen in worship.
  
• The relation between technology-for-worship and technology-for-teaching invokes lots of problems. The classroom invokes some of the same issues; is the classroom a sacred space? In a culture within which technology has so prominent a presence, do we say something fundamentally anti-Incarnational by excluding electronic technologies? (We can't exclude "technology" from churches; electric lights, organs, flying buttresses, even books all count as technologies of one sort or another.
  
• The heart of the matter isn't technology; it's managing people and organizations.
  
• Administrators who see a demo and say, "I want that," whether it works or not, whether it's useful for teaching or not, whether it's compatible with existing institutional technology or not.
  
• Money. Business departments, science departments, get lots of technological support, whereas theological departments get slim pickin's. What about software written for my needs? Grants may be available, but are the granting agencies clued in enough?
  
• Theological agencies are too ingrown; entrepreneurial thinking would find very different sources for support.
  
• Certification and credentialling impede learning.
  
• Buildings get money; faculty positions can get money; but it's hard to get money for the ongoing services for technology, and even harder for projects that build outward on technological premises.
  

Time for lunch. . . . After lunch, we'll begin talking about ways we can each better through available and imminent technologies.

   posted by AKMA at 10:55 AM  

An interesting flow in the discussion this morning for the last hour or so (9:30-10:30). It moved from griping about particular institutional problems (IT control, administrative resistance and myopia, student resistance), as chronicled by AKMA, to institutional rewards, that is promotion and tenure for technological innovation (eg. the "electronic dossier" vs. a list of journal publications), to resistance within the guild (represented by the ATS) to sharing technological innovation and research. The model of the sciences was presented as an alternative: immediate access, sharing of data, replicable experiements. The thread in our discussion was identified by a number of people as power (and I'm adding my voice to that). Why the resistance to sharing a new Greek grammar (as if there will really be something new, innovative, or wealth-producing about Greek grammar?). My sense is that humanists, perhaps people in religion especially, identify their scholarly and intellectual power in their "creations": papers, research, web sites, sermons. Technology then becomes another power issue within our scholarly/institutional lives: who understands it, who uses it, who shares it.

   posted by Bob Royalty at 10:34 AM  

Medline provides an online resource example

   posted by Paul Myhre at 10:19 AM  

Complaining

We're beginning today by getting complaints and frustrations off our chests. One of us began teaching at a college where the math department controlled access to the Net, and they argued that internet access would be wasted on humanists.

• Students complain if they're asked to do anything outside the classroom.
  
• Departments don't recognize efforts to use technology--it's not publication, or service, or teaching, or any other thing (and if students complain, pioneering online activity is actually a detriment in one's evaluation).
  
• IT departments control issues: faculty can't load anything on their institutional machines.
  
• Single-platform ideologies--faculty being denied access to the kind of machine they're familiar and comfortable with.
  
• Control is the big issue we've been fighting for five or more years. . . .
  
• The difference between administrative issues relative to computing (on one hand) and pedagogical/research issues.
  
• Not control, perhaps, but stupidity. The server structure was recently upgraded to 1998 capacity. Departments have autonomous budgets and technologies, so that business schools and computing departments serve their interests and purposes, leaving humanities departments to fend for themselves.
  
• Where does institutional capital go, especially when the institution's capital is limited.
  
• And when you do innovate, everyone else takes up your time asking how you did it.
  
• Resistance arises in situations where students don't get respect for their capacities, for their needs
  
• Technology means change, and people and institutions don't want to change
  
• Faculty who don't want to share, who want to own and control. We're not in a money-making enterprise anyway; let's give it away. It's not a profit center, it's pedagogy.
  
• On the other hand, the profession doesn't reward us for what we put online; if it's published, it counts.
  
• We care more about the scholarly endeavor of building on the wisdom of the past, we have to trust that there will be a place for it.
  
• We need a way of recognizing online activity. This is a way the Association of Theological Schools could act positively for technological growth, instead of simply trying to control and restrict innovation. Academic journals likewise provide a helpful model, with refereed accreditation. Physics departments have negotiated this sort of thing very successfully (some journals still want to publish, others don't).
  
• Copyright is an impediment
  

And more. . . . but now we're having a coffee break.

   posted by AKMA at 9:47 AM  

Unpacking resistence - What really frustrates us about trying to bring technology into our pedagogical practice? What social, technical, material obstacles impede our using technology effectively for our teaching? What impedes teachers in general from using technology effectively?

   posted by Paul Myhre at 9:41 AM  

Sunday Morning Introductions

At Mary's behest (I'm not a great one for Group Process), we're beginning this morning (after prayer) by going around the table and introducing ourselvse one to another. Everyone has come at the meeting from different directions, some of us relatively recently, some of us from the punch-card and paper-tape era.

   posted by AKMA at 9:29 AM