Bennington College’s president, Liz Coleman, speaks about the place of the liberal arts and how Bennington is framing their approach to educating engaged citizens.
Her speech touches on so many points of interest: a generalist approach to education to the importance of civic engagement. This is a TED talk worth watching.
A University of Richmond student on his blindness and how learning about government services changed his life.
Thanks to Lit Maxwell for sharing this.
This past Thursday and Friday the MISO Survey team met to work on revisions to the survey instrument. This is something the survey team does every two years to keep the survey up to date. Since we value the ability to provide longitudinal analysis, we’re conservative about adding or removing things from the survey.
The MISO Survey is “a Web-based quantitative survey designed to measure how students, faculty, and staff use and evaluate the services and resources of colleges and universities with merged library and computing units”. We’ve had some non-merged institutions participate along the way, since the survey is a useful measure of how these often complimentary services are received.
With so many services and resources to measure, the MISO Survey takes a while to answer. Some questions are optional, but the core questions on use, importance, and satisfaction. The average time to complete the survey is 18 minutes, and that’s been a problem for some institutions.
In response to concerns about time to complete the survey, we’re going to give institutions more options on which sections or even specific questions are included in the survey. For example, while the questions about frequency of use are interesting, we’ve found over the last few years that there’s more interest on how important faculty, staff, and students consider our resources and services, and how satisfied they are. So the section on use will be optional going forward: available to institutions who would like to know this information, but not required of all institutions. We’re confident that enough institutions will continue to ask these questions that the validity of the responses across institutions will persist.
We’ve also made some changes that correct duplication in the survey. There is a section in the survey that asks whether you use a particular technology, such as course management system, blogs, etc. Several of the items in this list duplicate questions in the frequency of use section of the survey. Since institutions can look at frequency of use to determine overall use, we can remove items from our “use of tools” section like the course management system, making fewer options for each respondent to use.
One challenge we haven’t yet figured out is how to ask questions about support for faculty research. At all of our institutions, faculty across the disciplines have a variety of computing needs at both the desktop and server levels. Few of our organizations have a research computing unit, and so we respond to each new research opportunity with an ad hoc group comprised of the people with the expertise to support the required technology. The challenge is to find a way to ask questions about this support that aren’t interpreted in as many ways as there are respondents. Do we focus on the word “research”? “Grants”? Something else?
The survey has one question that asks “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with support for your specialized computing needs?”. But I’m not sure “specialized” is the right word either.
I’m going to take the next week or so to try and come up with wording for questions that get at support for research/grant/specialized computing. In the meantime, we will be preparing an updated version of the survey so it can be tested at each of the five sponsoring institutions. We’ll be testing the revised questions with faculty, students, and staff over the summer so that the new survey is ready to go when the next survey cycle begins in the fall.
Kenji Yoshino, author of the book Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, came to campus last week. Yoshino is a professor at the NYU School of Law. He’s currently writing a book on Shakesepare and the law, which I plan to read.
Covering is part cultural argument, part memoir. In it he tells the story of his struggles with identity as a gay man, and as the son of Japanese immigrants. Yoshino describes covering as the third and last phase in the integration of any person (or group) with a stigma.
The first phase is conversion. An example would be how a gay man or woman would try not to be that way. It could also be a person of color who tries to be white. The second phase is passing, where conversion is no longer sought, but aspects of personality are hidden from others. The third phase, covering, takes place after a person has “come out,” but that they still conceal aspects of their identity to conform to the perceived mainstream.
In his talks on campus, Yoshino took pains to point out that while his story was a positive one, he acknowledges that there are significant chances for pain as others consider coming out or challenging the “mainstream” status quo. At the PETE lunch, he acknowledged that as a lawyer, he is fairly thick-skinned when he encounters pressure to hide his identity.
Others in the room said that they were not so thick-skinned, and a conversation ensued about the difficulty personally and academically when issues of orientation, race, or gender are picked on by students. Yoshino said that he discloses his orientation in his constitutional law or civil rights courses, but not in the literature courses he teaches, since orientation is not a topic in those courses. In explaining his orientation he identifies himself as a person coming from a particular point of view but he also emphasizes that he welcomes a vigorous debate.
Two of the big difference between Yoshino’s classes and those at a small liberal arts institution are the age of students (his are 23, undergrads closer to 18) and grading is anonymous in his (and most) law schools, but not in most liberal arts classes.
Yoshino’s solution to covering demands is cultural, not legal. He prefers a conversation focused on universal human rights rather than civil rights for a growing (and unmanageable) number of groups seeking protections. When a company or peer makes a covering demand, there should be room for a conversation about the reasons for that demand. If the reasons are rational, the demand to cover should be accepted. But reasons shouldn’t be accepted based only on organizational or “mainstream” cultural authority.
Chris Faigle sent along an article from our local NBC station that UVA plans to close most of its public computing labs by the summer of 2011. It’s a fiscal decision in a rough economy, with a stated rationale that with 99% of students bringing their own laptops to school, there isn’t a need for public computers.
This reasoning seems contrary to the pervasive use of public machines I see here at Richmond. It also runs contrary to data from the MISO Survey, a quantitative measure of faculty, student use and satisfaction with higher education IT and Library resources and services (disclaimer: I am a member of the MISO Survey team).
This past year was the first year that institutions took the survey for a second time, giving us our first longitudinal look at students, faculty, and staff. Within a 3-year period, students reported a 9% increase in laptop ownership (from 84.4% to 93.6%). In that same period, use of public computing labs on campus rose at a statistically significant rate (Time 1 mean 3.59 on a 1-4 scale, n=2617, STD 1.25; Time 2 mean 3.66, n=1949, STD=1.21).
It would be interesting to research the reason for an increase in public computing at the same time as a rise in laptop ownership. Is it specialty software? The social aspects of public labs? Insufficient power support for laptops on campuses?
I agree with the cost concerns around public computing. At Richmond, we’re concluding a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure proof-of-concept project, with the hope that we will be able to make software available to students on their own computers (similar to NCSU’s VCL) or at least via a thin client solution. There will always be a need for fat clients in some spaces, but these alternatives will make our environment easier to manage and our resources more ubiquitous. But UVA’s move seems unsupported by the data, and I will be curious to see what the long-term impact is for their students.
The Chronicle has an article this week on the University of Michigan Press becoming a part of the Library. Scholarly publishing continues to change quickly in this economy.
“It removes the bottom line on a book-by-book basis,” he said. “Basically we will be judged for staying within a budget,” just as academic departments are. “In a sense, it will allow us to do more things that are consistent with university objectives, as opposed to commercial objectives.”
It’s an interesting fiscal move, and I wonder how it will bode for UMP in the long run. I also wonder whether most Library’s commitment to open access will mean yet another shift down the road for this and other university presses. I am encouraged by the Durham Statement, which our own Law Library hopes to pursue. If enough presses move under the Library, and if Law schools are able to convert to open publication systems, we will have gone a long way towards opening up the academy.
Postscript: It’s interesting to come across an article just a couple of hours after my original post, but the University of Michigan Library is hosting events on open access. While there’s no connection between these events and UMP folding into the organization of the Library, I wonder if the two subjects will be discussed someday.
This morning’s New York Times has an article on copyright and YouTube. Warner Music and YouTube have an agreement that has YouTube pulling down content from their servers even when it seems the posted videos are within Fair Use guidelines.
“The law provides a four-point test for the fair use of copyrighted works, taking into account things like the purpose, the size of an exerpt and the effect the use might have on the commerical value of the actual work.”
The deal between Warner and Google seems to be that any content merits a take-down if it has any identifiable copyrighted material in it, whether it’s a sign language teacher using a bit of Foreigner in the background or a family video that has some music playing in the background. The argument seems to be that while YouTube users are noncommercial, Google is profiting from site traffic, and the media companies arguing that all content is thus commercial.
At Richmond, we’re researching copyright and fair use with a goal to more liberally interpret fair use so that the video work our students do – which often includes snippets from commercial music – can see the light of day. I’m encouraged by the report from The Center for Social Media, which argues that transfomative uses, like the ones our students have for copyrighted material, are legal.
What today’s article in the Times tells me is that while transformative uses may be legal, we’ll need to host the content ourselves rather than host it on a for-profit service like YouTube. While it’s disappointing to lose the opportunities that YouTube offers in terms of letting more people see our student’s work, I still find hope that we will someday soon have a policy that allows student scholarship to be seen beyond the classroom.
World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.
Someday Second Life or its successor might be like this.
Thanks to NMC Virtual Worlds for calling attention to this video.
Friday I sat down with Fred, Sharon, and Joe for the first meeting of the Second Life Richmond island Zoning Board. Despite the Gartner Group putting virtual worlds into the Trough of Disillusionment in 2008, we’re getting more interest on our campus. In addition to Sharon and Joe, faculty in Business and Psychology are in world with classes.
Joe has always been an advocate. He was there when we owned a parcel on the mainland (every now and then I visit the old landmark – it’s currently a furniture sky mall). He brought his class in world in the fall of 2006, and was one of our biggest reasons for moving to a private estate.
Sharon has been involved too, from participating in NITLE events to recent work starting a Global Studio on the island. Sharon has been particularly good at encouraging our Second Life to be free of the conventions of our First Life. We don’t need more brick buildings, though having some visual cues connecting our virtual space to the campus is nice.
We met to discuss the future of our island. Things have grown organically, and all of us agreed that we could do it better if we started from scratch. So what’s coming? We see the need for five kinds of spaces at Richmond:
It will take some time for us to reconfigure the island, but some things are already beginning. The group has agreed to meet regularly to fine-tune our use of our virtual space.
Twitter’s had a number of problems lately. Seems it all started when they had the system down for upgrades a couple of weeks ago. Since then they’re on par with Second Life for technical problems. The two blur together for me: is it Twitter that has the database problem, with Second Life affected by VPN connections between servers, or is it the other way around?
All of this has me looking for alternatives. I don’t think I could stand Pownce again. I never liked the design and their AIR client was too buggy.
Jaiku was worth another look, though. It’s missing my social network, but overall it wasn’t as awkward as Pownce. My biggest problem with Jaiku was that I kept getting redundant Twitter feeds hours after the fact. A Tweet from D’Arcy would echo from Alan and Andy long after I’d seen it, with the attribution confused. It was like an echo chamber, with no way to stop. So I stopped watching.
But with Twitter in trouble I thought it was worth another look. And I’m glad I stopped by.
First thing I noticed was a note from Jaiku itself (1 month, 2 weeks ago no less):
Jaiku will be moving to the new Google App Engine. More on the Jaiku blog: http://tinyurl.com/3o2kkr
I figured by this point the move would be done. So what had changed? The first thing I checked was if I could use SMS on my iPhone to send Jaikus. Back in the day, it just didn’t work. My only choice was to have a Safari bookmark, which I didn’t like. Now? The test message went through, I was able to reply, and now I can use SMS to sent to Jaiku.
More importantly, as I started browsing my friends, I noticed an option for each feed they send to Jaiku: I can unsubscribe from just that feed. So now I can get Alan’s Jaikus, his Flickr stream, but not his Twitter feed or CogDogBlog if I don’t want.
That’s exactly the kind of control I would need for Jaiku to work. And so I’m back. Not giving up on Twitter yet – I’ve been playing with brightkite lately and like the ability to send posts to Twitter – but I am going to post to Jaiku more, just to see what happens.
