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On the un/death of Goo* Read*

March 29, 2013 in blog, if i were in charge, social media, tools with 2 Comments

It feels like a particularly dark time around the Interwebz these days–I don’t think it’s just me. I’ve been studying and working with new media for a long time now, and so you’d think that I’d be sufficiently inured to bad news. For whatever reason, though, it feels like the hits have kept coming over the last month or so. There’s plenty to feel down about, but since this song is about me, I wanted to collect some of my thoughts on the changes that are happening with two pieces of my personal media ecology: the demise of Google Reader and the recent purchase of GoodReads by Amazon.

I’ve been soaking in a lot of the commentary regarding Google Reader, ever since it happened while I was at CCCC, and while there’s a lot of stuff I’m not going to cite here, there were a couple of pieces in particular that struck me as notable. I thought MG Siegler’s piece in TechCrunch was good, comparing Google Reader’s role in the larger ecosystem to that of bees. Actually, scratch that. We’re the bees, I think, and maybe Reader is the hive? Anyway, my distress over the death of Reader is less about the tool itself and more about the standard (RSS/Atom) it was built to support. I understand why there are folk who turned away from RSS because it turned the web into another plain-text inbox for them to manage, but as Marco Ament (of Instapaper fame) observes, that was less a feature than user misunderstanding. As more folks turn away from RSS, though, Ament suggests, we run the risk of “cutting off” the long tail:

In a world where RSS readers are “dead”, it would be much harder for new sites to develop and maintain an audience, and it would be much harder for readers and writers to follow a diverse pool of ideas and source material. Both sides would do themselves a great disservice by promoting, accelerating, or glorifying the death of RSS readers.

The larger problem here is that, in our Filter Bubble world of quantified selves and personalized searches, this kind of diversity is an ideal that is far more difficult to monetize (a word I can barely think without scare quotes). Most folk I know now use FB and T as their default feed readers; I’m old-fashioned, I think, in that I tend to subscribe to sites through Reader if the content I find through FB/T is interesting to me. It may be equally quaint of me to like having a space where the long tail isn’t completely overwhelmed by advertisements, image macros, and selfies. I get that.

Where the Reader hullabaloo connects for me with the recent Amazonnexation of GoodReads is Ed Bott’s discussion of Google’s strategy at ZDNet–again, the point isn’t so much that Reader itself is gone, but that Google basically took over the RSS reader market, stultified it, and is now abandoning it. It’s hard not to see the echo of “embrace, extend, extinguish” operating in Amazon’s strategic purchase. The folks at Goodreads deserve all the good they’re getting, and they’re saying the right things, of course, but this is Amazon’s third crack at this, if you count Shelfari and their minority stake in LibraryThing, and it’s hard for me not to see a lot of Goodreads value in terms of their independence from Amazon. Amazon’s interest in Kindle has kept them from any kind of iOS innovation, and it’s almost impossible for me to imagine them keeping their hands out of the “data” represented by the reviews and shelves of Goodreads members. While Amazon’s emphasis on “community rather than content” was revolutionary once upon a time, their reviews are now riddled with problems (and that’s when they’re not being remixed as admittedly hilarious performance spaces). It was the absence of commercialism and gamification that made Goodreads a somewhat valuable source of information for me–despite their best intentions, I doubt that will last.

If I had to wager, I’d guess that within a year or so, the G icon will turn into an A, and the app will be retuned to provide mobile access to the broader site primarily. GR’s model of personal shelves will be integrated onto the site with A’s wish lists, and people who liked that will also like 50 Shades of DaVinci Pottery. Startups will focus their energies on softer markets, as they did when Google “embraced” RSS, and we’ll probably be the poorer for it.

Back in the day, I remember feeling the full cycle of excitement when Yahoo absorbed sites like Flickr and Delicious, hope that they would help them go to the next level, and disappointment as they proceeded to neglect them into has-been status. I feel like we’ve been burned often enough now to be able to move pretty much straight from the purchase announcement to the disappointment. And I still don’t begrudge these folks the rewards they’ve earned. But, I’ve got to be honest–this “do no harm” stuff sounds a lot like the squeaky hinges on the barn door closing after the horses have bolted.

Migrating the MLA JIL from list to service

September 19, 2012 in academia, if i were in charge, tools with 4 Comments

I left a comment over at Dave’s excellent discussion of the MLA Job Information List, and part of it was picked up at Alex’s equally worthwhile followup, so I thought I’d expand on it here. Here’s the comment I left:

I was going to make the same point that Alex makes vis a vis the costs of the JIL vs. the costs of the conference itself for both interviewers and interviewees, especially all those years that we were forced to compete with holiday travelers for both plane seats and hotel rooms. The list is the tip of a very lucrative iceberg that has supported the MLA for a long time.

I wanted to second your comments about opening up the job list database, which for all intents & purposes is the same (inc. the crappy interface) that they used in the mid-90s. A much richer set of metadata about the jobs could be gathered by MLA (and made available to searchers) if the arbitrary scarcity of the print list is set aside and MLA were to take their curative obligation seriously.

There’s been no small amount of buzz lately surrounding the MLA JIL, our fields’ annual posting of open academic positions. For a long time, that list has been proprietary to MLA. At one time, institutions paid to have their positions appear in the list, and prospective applicants paid for a print copy of it. I don’t remember the exact year that the online database version of the JIL went live, but I’m tempted to place it at around 1996 or 1997. At that time, database access was granted to those who’d purchased the print version. It’s never been an especially elegant solution, as some of us would gladly have paid less money and forgone the print version. And as many people have observed in this discussion, the JIL is a monetary imposition on those who are least able to bear it, (often debt-ridden) graduate students and/or contingent faculty, at a time where the costs of application (mailing, copying, dressing, traveling, boarding, eating) are already substantial.

MLA appears to be taking steps to mitigate some of these costs (open JIL, Interfolio), which is good. But for me, there’s an additional layer that needs to be addressed. One of the arguments that MLA made in opening up access to their publications is that they provide curation, such that allowing authors to make copies of individual articles available doesn’t damage the brand. I don’t disagree with this. But I would love to see them extend the same logic to the JIL, and see them take a more active role in curating that information.

For several years now, there have been other, free alternatives to the JIL (departmental & institutional sites, disciplinary listserves, word-of-mouth, et al.). The MLA JIL is not strictly speaking, necessary any longer, and as more programs move to Skype or phone interviews, the monopoly the organization once held on the interviewing process may also be in danger of fading. Frankly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, although it’s going to be a long time before those changes affect the overall process. There’s little difference in cost if you’re attending MLA for one interview or for twenty, but once applicants can get away with not attending at all, that will change things. (I’m interested to see if offering a Skype interview as an alternative to MLA will someday soon become an institutional mandate along the lines of equal opportunity/access.)

Anyways. If I were in charge (a phrase I think so often that I’ve made it a new category on my blog) of the JIL, the first thing I would do would be to update its horrific interface, which hasn’t changed substantially since the days of its first appearance.

I can’t imagine the cringes that this interface elicits from my colleagues in “Technical and business writing,” particularly insofar as they have experience with usability testing and/or identify with terminology a little more recent than “business writing.” There are some basic tips for searching at the end of the help link, but really, there’s so little to work with that those tips are obvious. (want more results? check more boxes.)

Okay, I lied. The problem with this interface is actually just symptomatic of the curation problem. If the JIL is just a text file, then really, all you can do is text matching. And if you charge departments by the word (which they used to do, iirc), then you’re actually incentivizing a lack of information, and crippling your service. And that’s the point that I want to make here: the MLA should be thinking of this as a service rather than a list, a service they provide (and can and should improve) rather than a list that they sell in both directions (pay to get on it, pay to get it).

Part of what MLA should be doing is standardizing the categories of information that institutions provide to prospective applicants, and encouraging members to supply that information. I don’t have a full list to hand, but I think it’d be helpful for any number of people to know things like institutional type, salary range, replacement vs new hire, teaching load (both numbers and distribution), administrative expectations, course caps, service duties, startup costs, travel/research funding, sabbaticals, mentoring/advising expectations, and to have specializations separated out into primary, secondary, tertiary, and so forth. I don’t know that we would all agree on this list, and institutions would certainly be able to opt out, but imagine being able to sort the JIL data by all the variables that inevitably go into our hiring decisions (from either side).

On the search side of things, the ebb and flow of our various fields are a lot more complicated than the small list on the JIL database lets on. When we hire someone here (a freestanding writing program with a doctoral program), it goes without saying that our primary area for the position is rhetoric and composition. Often, we also have particular subcategories in mind, without which an application wouldn’t be considered. But then, we also have a wish list of areas not currently covered by our faculty–those might not be as high a priority as others, but they are still potentially valuable for applicants to have. Here’s an example. Several years ago, we were concerned about whether or not our program was preparing students enough in terms of methodology. No one hires a “methods person” per se, but when we hired in a different area, one of the questions we asked all of our candidates was how they would approach our graduate course in methods. I think it very likely that digital humanities will be an area like that over the next several years. Departments may prioritize that in pools of applicants that list the content areas they “need.” There should be a way to communicate that kind of nuance, through some form of tagging, multi-faceted categories, etc. As Alex points out, “Of the 56 results that return when searching for rhet/comp and asst prof, 10 are not rhet/comp specialist jobs of any kind, but maybe want someone who has some rhet/comp training.” For me, that’s a pretty obvious (and ongoing) failure of the interface. (I should also mention that the only way currently to find this out is to read through 6 separate pages of 10 entries each, since there is no way to filter results or choose how many entries per page to display. Ugh.)

Some schools already provide information like this (and like the litany above) in their ads, cost and space be damned. And others go to great lengths elsewhere to provide context for their positions on listservs or their own pages. The existence of these workarounds (which have been common for years now) should be a sign to MLA that the “service” they currently provide is little more than a text file and the Find command from the Edit menu of a word processor. It could be so much more: Dave’s ideas of an open API and a Google Maps mashup are brilliant, and they’re the kind of things that I’d love to see MLA take some lead on. At the very least, though, it’d be great to see them take some responsibility for the service that so many of us have paid for, over and over and over.

UPDATE: fwiw, the first job ad I saw after I wrote this post contained the sentence, “Interviews will take place at the MLA convention in Boston, though video conferencing is an option for those not attending the conference.” I’d be willing to bet that, within 3-4 years, this will become standard practice, as hiring schools continue to look for ways to cut costs. Not sure when it’ll tip to the point where it’s safe to pass on MLA as an applicant, but that day is sooner than most of us think.

UPDATE2: following a suggestion from Bill Hart-Davidson, Jim Ridolfo did a quick map/mash of the JIL data at http://rhetmap.org/.

 

Add technology and stir!

June 22, 2012 in pedagogy, tools with 1 Comment

Apropos of little other than some background reading that I’ve been doing this week, I think I’m just about finished with the arguments about how we need to be careful about “not letting technology drive our X.” Right now, the arguments I’ve been scanning are about pedagogy, but this would just as easily apply to any other set of practices.

Actually, maybe it’s a little apropos of the whole kerfuffle happening at UVA right now. I was certainly struck by the astounding media illiteracy of the UVA Board of Visitors, whose sense of kairos needs an upgrade from its current early-90s version. The idea of pulling out the old “news cycle” trick–making major decisions/announcements after 5pm on a Friday and hope no one notices until next week–was some pretty dynamite strategery on their part.

One of the undercurrents of the blowback has been their apparent infatuation with other elite institutions’ efforts at staking out MOOC turf, and the dismissiveness with which that infatuation has been described. So maybe it’s that attitude that has been resonating with some of the reading I’ve been doing lately. (And while I’m taking issue with that dismissiveness here, that’s not to say that I condone any part of what happened at UVA–I think the tech stuff is a symptom of a much deeper problem.)

And yeah, I get it. The correct answer is that technology should be adopted cautiously and with sound pedagogical reasons behind that adoption and for better reasons than novelty and/or change’s sake. What bugs me about the correct answer, I guess, is that it assumes some degree zero world of pedagogy, as though our current practices aren’t themselves implicated, imbricated, and often enough, driven by the available technologies. Once you teach a course online, with all of the ups and downs that that brings, you realize that face-to-face conversation is itself a technology with certain affordances.

Just because that experimentation happened 4 or 5 centuries ago doesn’t mean that print technologies didn’t have to go through the same phases of novelty, resistance, adoption, diffusion, invention, and experimentation. The difference is a matter of naturalization and invisibility, not an issue of technology vs an atechnological pedagogy.

Maybe I’m personally coming around to a position that’s actually in favor of an “add technology and stir” approach. I can name a number of occasions where that was basically what I did in the classroom. I would rather experiment with the technology (and explicitly invite my students to do so along with me) than wait for the “tool” that matches my goal. So, a couple of years ago, I asked students to use Tumblr to do an annotated bibliography project (a lot like what Ryan Hoover describes, only he used Prezi, which I wish I’d thought of!), with no other real motive than wanting to see what/if/how Tumblr might contribute to my classes. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Just like every other course and every other assignment I’ve ever designed, technology or no.

The fact is that what pedagogical expertise and commitment I have is going to be present regardless of whether I’ve slowly and carefully adopted something or decided to do it on a whim. Just as there’s no degree zero of technology when it comes to pedagogy, there’s no degree zero of pedagogy when it comes to adopting technology for the classroom. Someone, somewhere, has to do the stirring, and I’m kind of tired of the idea that it shouldn’t be me.

Mecology 2012

May 29, 2012 in tools, writing with Comments Off

It occurs to me that, if I start trying to toss out manifestos on a daily basis, I’m going to burn myself out pretty quickly. So I thought I’d reflect today on some of the changes brewing that led me to resuscitate my weblog.

I really have no idea if the term is mine, but a long while back, I started using the word “mecology” for a couple of different purposes. It crams together the phrase “media ecology,” but also “me” and “ecology,” which put me in the mind of Ulmer’s mystory (among other puns). I’ll have you know that mycology is taken–insert “fun guy” pun here. :)

Anyhow, for about 7 or 8 years, I’ve been occasionally asking students in my (technology-oriented) courses to do what I call either mecology or T+1 assignments. I ask them to take stock of the various platforms, media, tools, software, et al., that they use to process information. It’s something like a literacy autobiography, I suppose, but one that is more focused on their present-day habits and usually their engagement with contemporary ICTs. It’s a nice opening assignment, one that gets them thinking about how they structure their activity, and it’s a great way for me to get a sense of what they’re ready to do in my courses and where we might focus our attention. The T+1 assignment (where T is their current distribution/structure of activities) asks them to choose one application, add it to their mecology for the semester, make a good faith attempt to really integrate it, and then write up a brief reflection at the end of the term. It’s a nice low-stakes way to have them try something new, and it’s an assignment that’s worked well for students along the full spectrum of tech expertise.

When I designed the assignment(s), my own mecology was pretty well established and consistent–this was back in the early days of the first iteration of my blog, and options were far more limited than they are now. My homepage was my base of operations, although it split time with my blog for that purpose. Everything else fed back to one of those two static locations: Flickr, Delicious (back when we had to remember where the dots went!), Bloglines, et al., with a healthy dose of email for keeping track of my activity, participating on discussion lists, and so on. It’s probably less simplistic than I’m making it sound, but I really had the sense of a stable location, from which everything else flowed or attached. And it lasted for a solid four or five years like that.

Cut to today, and things got a lot more fluid and messy. I sat down yesterday to try and actually visualize my mecology a bit, and quickly gave up. Right now, I work from 4 primary devices: phone, ipad, and home & office desktops, with a fifth (my laptop) that’s pretty much used for speciality work (conferences, meeting with specific software needs). My ipad’s become a lot more central, a shift that happened because of my convalescence in no small part. It’s now my primarily email device–and the difficulty of typing on it without a separate keyboard has made me less responsive (and less inclined to hoard). Some applications are cross-device for me, while others that could be tend to be associated in my mind with one or the other (I generally prefer FB on my desktop and Twitter on my ipad, for example). My “home” feels distributed to me among this site, FB, and Twitter, and so I’ve been trying out different arrangements to see how they fit. Right now, I have the sense that they’re working at different scales for me. I’m not as worried about the audiences for each, although that may change. The next circle out would probably include a lot of plug-in style apps: Instapaper, Google Reader, Scribd, Slideshare, Academia.edu, LinkedIn, GoodReads, etc. Some of them are more central than others, but they’re all defined for me in terms of specific tasks, and they generally feed back into the center. There’s another circle outward, where I’m still thinking about what to do regarding social bookmarks–a habit I fell out of (and regret doing so)–and a few other apps that I’m trying out somewhat haphazardly.

I don’t really have any grand conclusion here, except to note that it’s about damn time I took my own advice/assignment, and rethought how everything is fitting together. Also, it’s nice to question that fit every once in a while. The past couple of weeks for me have been about rediscovering a sustainable structure and flow that can help me write regularly and be more present to myself.

The Tweetability Index

May 27, 2012 in academia, conferential, tools with 2 Comments

wherein I consider the hows, whats, whys of Twitter at academic conferences

I am decidedly pro-Twitter, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time apologizing for it or even necessarily advocating for its use. Though if you push me, I will. I think that Twitter in particular (and FB to a lesser extent) provides an extra social layer of activity for conference goers, much better access for folks who aren’t there, and a crowdsourced guide to the area (making the academic conf less of a non-place a la Augé). And honestly, for those who aren’t interested in using it, there’s no real loss in either direction. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it doesn’t need to be.

RSA is kind of an odd bird in our field, conference-wise, which is part of what’s got me thinking about this:

 

RSA, for those of us on the comp side of things, is the one conference that steadily and selectively publishes conference proceedings. As a result, I think that many people write the “publishable” version of their talks (and subsequently read them aloud), rather than versioning them out. I have to admit, the last thing I have time to do when I’m prepping for a conference is to write a whole separate version. I’m at a place where I simply do the presentation version, without worrying about the published volume. I still have my slides from 2010, for example.

All of this is by way of explaining why I think there are some presentations that are significantly more difficult to tweet than others. And part of that has to do with what I would describe as a “close writing” style: dense, careful, accretive, etc. I like close writing as a term, because I think that it’s possible to write in a specific register for an audience of close readers. And in fact, that’s not an unusual style to find in print. It’s not good or bad; rather, it’s a style tailored to a particular medium and audience. Conference presentations are a different medium, of course, and I won’t rehearse the kajillion people who have critiqued the humanities for their (lack of) expertise when it comes to delivery (“How can you know so much about rhetoric, but not be able to…?!” blah blah blah). In a closely written essay, skipping words or flipping sentences matters. It undermines your credibility, makes your ideas more difficult to follow, and for those of us with serious introversion and/or stage fright, it piles on the anxiety.

And yet. There are advantages to writing for presentation a little differently. One of the things I started doing, even before I finally made my personal shift to speaking from notes rather than reading, was to place an upper limit on the number of words in any sentence. I started paying really close attention to the intricacy and order of my clauses. A lot of closely written essays are like mysteries, whose final payoff doesn’t arrive until the end. But when you listen to such an essay, it’s really hard to hold all the moving pieces in the right places in your head as you’re getting there. You don’t get to go back and read it a second time to make sure you understand. So in writing for listeners (v readers), I started trying to go with a much more pyramid approach–even if it was something as simple as laying out the basic structure of my talk at the beginning, and tossing in a signpost or two. Here’s what I’ll talk about today, here’s where I’m going next, here’s what I’ve told you, etc.

It seems to me that there’s an added challenge when it comes to Twitter. Imagine a talk where the speaker is providing a blockquote from another scholar, and someone in the audience livetweets that the speaker is drawing on Theorist X regarding Topics A, B, and C, and sends it out there. Whereupon our speaker finishes the quote, and then announces that it’s the opposite of what s/he wants to focus on today. That kind of move is innocuous in print; on Twitter, it can misrepresent the speaker’s position, and any number of consequences might flow from that mistake. One of the things I try to be careful about as I’m tweeting is just that sort of issue–I try to be careful to make my tweets genuinely representative of the talk, but also informative for someone who might not be there. It’s tricky stuff, and close writing can make it trickier.

I do think that writing with more signposts is one easy solution, as are shorter sentences, more direct sentence constructions, and less reliance on the epiphany model of print scholarship. In a presentation, the audience is there (barring the occasional rudeness). Instead of worrying about holding something back until the end so they’ll keep reading, it’s important to provide them with some help so that they don’t get lost and stop listening.

This is where the staring at the floor thing doesn’t make lots of sense to me. I think that a closely written essay can be made a lot more accessible to an audience with a slide deck that has nothing in it but words from the presentation itself. I don’t know that folks would want to do the full-on Lessig style presentations, but honestly, even a few slides with outline or section headings and citations (h/t @johnmjones) can provide signposting even if the essay doesn’t. But I’d go one step further, and actually drop in thesis statements onto slides–we already have a model for this in the form of “pull quotes.” I’m a Presentation Zen guy, so I do this already (with big splashy pix), but a deck of 8-10 pull quotes, sized appropriately for tweeting? That’s a matter of 10-15 minutes of copy/pasting from an essay, and all of a sudden, you’ve made your essay easier to follow and much more shareable. And a co-panelist can run the deck from your script, if you don’t want to divide your attention. (You can do something similar with handouts, yes, but then you’ve got to worry about logistics (copying, distribution, last-minute edits, etc.).)

For me, the shareability is a big point. I’ve gotten copies of 5 or 6 presentations (either scripts or vids) over the last few months from people whose work I heard about through conference twitter streams. In a couple of cases, they were from complete strangers at conferences I’ve never attended. On a couple of different occasions at RSA this week, I had people contact me privately to ask someone for a copy of one of the presentations I tweeted–those are connections that simply aren’t going to happen if we have to wait until the published volume comes out (and only then, if a paper is selected).

So I guess, technically, I’m not arguing here that everyone should be using Twitter so much as I’m saying that we should all understand what it entails to present to an audience where Twitter is used. A slightly different point, but worth making, I think. And something I’m thinking about for the talk I’ll be giving in June.

Sync 2

May 22, 2012 in tools with Comments Off

I wish I knew who to thank for this, but a couple of weeks ago, I got turned on to IFTTT, a simple little site with lots of interesting applications. I signed up for it, then forgot about it until a couple of days ago. IFTTT stands for “if this then that,” and it really isn’t more complicated than that. The site allows you to activate “channels” of activity, like WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Tumblr, and a bunch more. Then it allows you to set up conditional actions based on things that happen in those channels.

For example, if someone tweets with a particular hashtag, IFTTT can add it to a facebook page, post it on WordPress or Tumblr, create a note of it for you in Evernote, etc. I’m currently in the process of rejiggering my whole personal mecology, and I’m finding the potential for this tool to be pretty incredible.

So I was thinking: if you were running a conference, and wanted an easy way to archive those tweets that contain links to presentation scripts, videos, slide decks, et al., it’d involve two steps. First, I’d create a separate #hashtag for conference materials (no one wants to have to wade through 100s or 1000s of conference tweets to find those materials), and then, just set up a recipe on IFTTT to archive (on FB, WP, Tumblr, wherever) those tweets (and thus the links). Leave it on for a week or 2 after the conference, publicize the heck out of the alt-hashtag, and voila. You’d have a single page that links to all the docs, blogposts, etc., with presentation materials.

Super easy, and it would save folks the trouble of hand-updating an archive page, not to mention the need to scour a twitter feed for this info.

Thanks again to the person who tipped me to IFTTT — if I manage to retrace my steps, I’ll link back to the page where I found it…