networks: July 2006 Archives

Last week, when I was young and impetuous, I made a couple of suggestion re the WPA Technology Outcomes Statement. In the interests of positivity, I thought I might revisit one of the suggestions, namely

How about developing an awareness of the variety of search strategies made possible by the combination of physical and electronic information sources?

One of the things that I think is hugely important here is that too many think "search" is simply a single process, delimited by pluses, minuses and quotes. "Strategies" too often refers to the ability to narrow your Google results down from 1 million to 50,000 or so. Problem is that this vision of search is not unlike bobbing for apples. It's a little flip of me to say so, I suppose, but it's true. And at one point, that's what web tech and search tools permitted.

With Google, the tools improved. The strategies? Not so much. For all of the good that Google did, driving out some truly horrid site design and searches so slow you could almost hear the hamster running in the wheel, PageRank was a huge advance that made us pretty darn lazy. There's still plenty of value to be had from Google, but it's still an information retrieval service. I use it on a daily basis, but I use it in a very specific, constrained way that takes advantage of speed and the particular needs I have.

What's happening now is something that Ebrahim Ezzy calls "Search 2.0" over at Richard MacManus's Read/Write Web:

Third-generation search technologies are designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

Yeah, yeah, third-gen but 2.0. Where this essay (part 1 of 2) potentially misleads is in the implication of 2.0 as something that will replace 1.0, when it's more likely that they will work in concert. One of the things that these new search engines have in common is their potential use specifically for Long Tail information. (I'll get to a review of that book one of these weeks.) The more specific the object of your search is, the fewer people there are who are likely to want it, and thus the less accessible it will be via Google, barring some arcane system of +this and -that. I'm not going to find a new book in my field via Google, unless it's to look up the web address of a publisher.

One of the things that Search 2.0 is about is not finding X, but finding Y who knows X. Here's an example: a friend asked me how I find new music. Usually, it's a combination of three things: what my friends (with similar tastes) are listening to, what selected reviewers (with similar tastes) are recommending, and what iTunes tells me are the proximate bands, songs, and playlists.

Let me talk about that last for a second, because it can sound counter-intuitive if you think about it. I'm talking about "searching" for something that I already know/have, in order to see what else is in its neighborhood. We do it in the library sometimes, right? If we know one book is useful, we might see what else is on the shelf around it. Now think about a service like del.icio.us as a site where thousands of users are building dynamic shelves or neighborhoods. Bookmark an article that you know you want to work with, and you can use del.icio.us to find all the other users who are bookmarking it, all the other things they've bookmarked beside it, and the terms they've used to categorize it.

Goodness knows, these systems and engines are far from perfect. Nick Carr, for example, observes that sites like Amazon are limited in their usefulness:

Fallows makes one observation that hits home with me. He describes how underwhelming he finds all the automated product recommendations that are always being thrown at you on the web. "In nearly a decade with Amazon," he writes, "I've yet to experience the moment of perfect serendipity when it discovers a book I really like that I wouldn't otherwise have known about." I, too, have been waiting years to experience that moment - with Amazon, with Netflix, with iTunes, with all of 'em.

These are Long Tail companies with Short Head motives, and so this isn't that surprising to me--their market share is built on factors other than specialist searches (like convenience, e.g.). I find Amazon almost completely useless for automated recommendations. But they also enable more specialized, community recommendations, and these I've found useful. If I've liked several of the books on a Listmania list, there's a good chance that I'll add one or more unread ones from it onto my Wish List. And there are a few situations where I've found autorecs useful, like when I'm returning to a particular genre after a hiatus, for instance.

As some of us non-science disciplines start to catch on to the benefits of these kinds of networks (e.g., AnthroSource, MediaCommons, et al.), the tools will exist that allow alot of people to bypass Google altogether. Not that the occasional apple bob isn't necessary, mind you, but it shouldn't be the first and last step.

The other little piece of optimism that I have is this: once we start acknowledging the value of this kind of searching and KM, then perhaps more broad-based support will exist for the construction of resources that take advantage of it. Imagine the iTunes interface, for instance, as a gateway to the scholarship in a discipline, where professors can put together "playlists" of texts in the same way that users now publish mixes, only these playlists are the syllabi for the graduate courses taught in the discipline or the bibliographies of our articles and books.

What I come bumping up against again and again is that we're too accustomed to treating our expertise as disposable. How many hundreds of times a year do we put together carefully thematic and specifically paced syllabi/playlists, only to bury them in desktop folders and wastepaper baskets? We don't collect that information in any systematic fashion because our vision of the web lacks an understanding of the motivation behind links and networks. Google was successful precisely because PageRank algorithmizes that motivation, and if these Search 2.0 tools succeed, it will be by leveraging the networks even further.

I hope we're not still bobbing for apples.

That's about it from me. There's some spots above that probably need filling out, but it's getting late. This is part of what I mean when I say that we need to understand search better, both for ourselves and for our students.

(Almost forgot: Dean)

Party like it's 1996

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This is not the rant I alluded to a post or few ago, but it is probably going to be a bit of a rant. Over the past couple of days, there have been a number of appeals in various fora for feedback on the "Technology Section" of the WPA Outcomes document. You can follow the link to look at the comments thus far offered, but allow me to reproduce it here:

Computer Literacy

Multiple problems arise from constructing any set of prescribed first-year outcomes relating to technology. Two problems are foremost:

(1) Schools and students who have access to technology are more likely to have the prescribed knowledge or skills than students who have limited access to technology. By imposing a set of outcomes related to technology, we are making school harder for those who are lower in the socioeconomic spectrum of society and consequently have less access to technology.

(2) Teachers may be encouraging a non-critical approach to incorporating technology into writing classes.

Teachers need to avoid using technology for its own sake (and for the sake of those who sell it); on the other hand, students who have a critical awareness of technology and how to use it when writing are more employable than students who do not. Within those parameters, we propose the following set of outcomes:

By the end of first-year composition, students should have a critical understanding of digital literacy, including:

  • use the computer for drafting, revising, responding, and editing.
  • employ research strategies using electronic databases
  • conduct web-based research and the evaluate online sources
  • understand the difference in rhetorical strategies used in writing traditional and hyper-text prose/graphics.

Okay. I'm going to set aside the strange language of describing this as a "techno-plank," and move straight to the fact that there are 3 big advantages to posting this in blogspace. First, it allows for the posting of comments. Second, given the right platform, it would allow interested parties to subscribe to an RSS feed of the follow-up comments, rather than having to visit the page repeatedly. Third, placing it online allows for links to be placed to the WPA homepage and/or the original Outcomes Statement to which this is intended as an addition.

Color me nitpicky, but this page only manages one of three. On the third point, I tend to remember URLs, but otherwise, I would have had to look it up, and from the homepage, the Outcomes Statement is 2 levels in, and that's if you're lucky enough to guess that it's in the WPA Guide, and then that it can be found among the WPA Position Statements and Resolutions. It's all but buried in the site. Frankly, that's too much work to accomplish what seems to me to be a pretty natural task request--the ability to access the larger document of which this may soon be a part. The page accomplishes the 1st advantage, and I can understand why the 2nd wouldn't be seized upon--it's a fine point and requires more familiarity with blog platforms than most of my colleagues probably possess. The third point, however, is pretty basic and reasonable.

But that's just form, you might argue. At least it's up there. And yes, I agree--it is up there. So let's turn to the statement itself. Some of my exasperation with the statement is mitigated by the purpose of the OS in general: "These statements describe only what we expect to find at the end of first-year composition, at most schools a required general education course or sequence of courses." In other words, I understand the problems that "outcomes" present, having written a few in the course of my own career. And yet.

It says something, I think, that the OS in general strongly asserts the importance of expertise and authority, while this technology statement's overwhelming tone is one of apology and qualification. The OS explains that "th[is] document is not merely a compilation or summary of what currently takes place," but rather an attempt to "regularize" expectations. In other words, the document makes some room for asserting goals rather than simply reflecting a status quo. And if my impressions of how this document is typically deployed are correct, then its primary audience is administrative.

Then why would it begin with a statement about why it should be ignored? This self-refutation takes up nearly 50% of the statement itself, and basically allows an audience to dismiss it. We all know that access is uneven. What we all don't seem to know is that access to literacy is similarly uneven. "[T]hose who are lower in the socioeconomic spectrum of society" are also likely to have more trouble accomplishing the goals of the main OS, but this isn't posed as the sizable obstacle that it is here.

The second objection? I don't really know what that means, although I suppose there are hints below: uncritical appears to involve "using technology for its own sake (and for the sake of those who sell it)." If I wanted to get really snarky about this, I'd talk about how many textbooks (themselves a technology) are assigned for their own sake (and never or rarely used) and/or for the sake of those who sell (and/or write) them. Maybe the parenthetical above is a swipe at the class-in-a-box people, but it's a little ironic that it's just as applicable to the class-in-a-book people.

So how bout we start this statement with the kind of positive, assertive statement that chracterizes the main OS? Something like:

Although writing has a long and varied history, as we enter the 21st century, it is essential that we recognize the crucial connection between writing and information technologies. Computers are no longer (if they ever were) souped-up typewriters; the Web and the Internet more broadly have transformed writing at a fundamental level. As a result, responsibly designed writing courses, at every level, can no longer afford to ignore technology.

I like that a lot better, but then, I'm not a WPA. To my mind, in a document for administrators, the "foremost problem" shouldn't be either of the two offered. I would add a paragraph to the end of the statement explaining that resources and training, for teachers, are a vital part of supporting these outcomes. I would cast this as an ongoing investment for which the outcomes are the reward. But that's me. I'm pretty sure that whatever "uncritical" actually means, it has more to do with a lack of pedagogical support than it does with teachers shilling for companies.

(btw, "on the other hand" students "are more employable"?? That is the only statement of technology's value in this entire document. Wow. That's really really weak. Really. And no, the main OS doesn't "justify" writing, but it also doesn't undercut it.)

The specific outcomes are pretty vanilla, although I would argue that they were no less true back in 1996 than they are today. Is it possible to bring them forward without dipping into specifics that might become obsolete a year or two down the line?

"use the computer for drafting, revising, responding, and editing"--it's hard for me to imagine that this is actually necessary any longer, but oh well. It would have been a goal rather than a baseline minimum back in 1986. I'd prefer to see something about multiple platforms (including word processors) used in the composing process.

"employ research strategies using electronic databases"--odd phrasing. Employ strategies using the databases? How about developing an awareness of the variety of search strategies made possible by the combination of physical and electronic information sources?

"conduct web-based research and the evaluate online sources"--I'm not sure why this and #2 are separate. Far as I can tell, they're the same outcome with different sites. Unless we're going to indulge the assumption that nothing is published and available in a database that needs evaluating with the same "critical" eye. Nope. We're not. Combine these two.

"understand the difference in rhetorical strategies used in writing traditional and hyper-text prose/graphics."--Okay, this is fugly. First of all, false binary. Second of all, "hyper-text"?? Qu'est-ce que c'est? Third of all, "prose/graphics"? How about an awareness of the effect that media have upon rhetorical strategies, preferably achieved through the production of a varied range of texts (look under Processes in the main OS, and you'll see that this is already there, btw.)?

So far, I've just taken what they've offered and revised. Do I have a wishlist? Oh yes:

  • Some appreciation/understanding of the rhetorical impact of design in various media
  • Some introduction to the cultural impact of technology in particular venues
  • Some experience with social software, whether it be email lists, MOOs, MMORPGs, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, facebook, myspace, etc.

That's top of my head stuff, but I'm sure if pressed I could generate others. There's the problem of outcomes statements, of course, but surely we could be asking a little more than this document currently does. And we could be apologizing for it a little less. Prefacing an outcomes statement with the reasons why it's problematic just strikes me as self-defeating.

And while all this certainly sounds like I don't appreciate the work that undoubtedly went into this statement, that wouldn't be correct. I recognize how tough stuff like this is, but I think it's also important to realize the opportunity that it represents, and that opportunity isn't served well by some of what appears there.

That's all. I hope that the conversation that ensues at the WPAC next week is productive.

Update: the 4th advantage of blogspace is trackbacking, so that long-ass, windy rants like mine can be recorded on the site itself. Oh well. Maybe I'll leave a comment there, pointing.

Update 2: I forgot to link to Jeff's comments about the TOS, which prompted me to look at the thing in the first place. D'oh.

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This page is a archive of entries in the networks category from July 2006.

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