Class Acts

I finally finished reading the Jim Collins bestseller Good to Great just before the holidays. I am sorry it took me so long, because this one is truly worthy of its best seller status. I was happy to finish reading in time to work some of the book’s concepts into a week of the “Globalizing” class during which we spent a great deal of time talking about how students could synthesize course concepts–what we’ve learned thus far about technology, NGOs, global governance, etc etc–with the actual construction of organizations that they are currently or may be members of in the future.

For my brief review of the book itself, I direct you here.  Here are my initial thoughts on use of the book in the class:

• Good to Great is about far more than business: The first problem I had using excerpts from the book in the class’s weekly reading was that none of the students were business majors.  Most were sociology and government majors, and few of them seemed to appreciate the idea of Good to Great being more than a business book.  I stressed to them what I stressed in my own review: that Collins is writing about great organizations, not necessarily only about great businesses.
• Technology will not save the world: Most of us agree that technology will make the world a better place, but Collins devotes all of Chapter 7 to demonstrating how technology is a tool to make your organizations better, not to give your organizations purpose.  Organizations–be they business, non-profits, or NGOs–must be very clear on their own core purpose before they can hope to make the best use of technology.  One ought not to invest in technology for its own sake, but rather to assist in the achievement of a group’s real mission.
• Economics are important: Coming from a business background, I have often found myself frustrated with the notion of technology as a means to utopia.  We diverged to this topic again in class, but the bottom line is (from my view) that the web is a great balance between the free and open source model of participation and the traditional business model that asks “where are the dollars that keep the wires hot and the servers turned on?”

Bottom line: Good to Great is a wonderful read for anyone who is involved with organization building.  If the non-business students can get past its decidedly business approach, many will find that Collins is particularly insightful, regardless of what kind of organization you are building.  The aspiring entrepreneurs–both financial and moral–are sure to find it useful.  It is, at any rate, a very well written counter-balance to the social-minded impulse of many sociology students.

Innovators face the challenge of obtaining acceptance of their ideas among their peers.  The fears of traditionalists are absolutely justified though; why should educators innovate?  What real benefits to learning will be realized through bold use of new technology?  Customers buy new products because businesses create real value in those products.  Unless a product is going to be of use to a customer, that customer has no reason to pull out the checkbook.  Students and educators are no different than consumers.  Unless technology possesses value to the learning process, they will not invest their time, talent, and resources in making a program work.
There are many different potential values of educational technology, but a good way to start thinking about your value proposition is to remember that schools fulfill three fundamental academic missions.  In a discussion I had in April 2006, James Groves, a Dean at the University of Virginia, specifically suggested that schools:

• Generate knowledge; schools—be they primary, secondary, or universities—are in the business of generating knowledge; whether a student writing a paper at her desk or a professor researching a chemical anomaly in his laboratory, schools constantly create, repackage, and output new information;
• Keep knowledge; universities in particular have long served as repositories of vast amounts of knowledge; libraries, individual scholars, and archives possess some of the world’s most significant academic information;
• Disseminate knowledge; the most obvious purpose of any school is to share knowledge with the students that attend.

The Internet has surely changed the specific nature of these three purposes.  Knowledge is increasingly generated not by scholars concentrated on single campuses, but by diffuse networks of many thoughtful minds around the world.  Knowledge is kept less on the shelves of great libraries, and more and more on the millions of Internet-connected computers worldwide.  Finally, knowledge is no longer available solely to students in classes, but rather to the Internet world at large.  If nothing else, these fundamental changes ought to provide motivation for educators to adopt new technology so that they may adapt to the changing knowledge networks of the world around them.
Policymakers, administrators, and educators are challenged—given these three core missions—to implement technology applications that create value in these areas.  A good test of success for any new program is to determine if it improves either the ability of schools to generate knowledge, store knowledge, or share knowledge

In 2006, Megan Kennedy was just an eighth grader in Hill City, Kansas, but she recently had a chance to shine not as a student, but as a teacher. Megan and several of her classmates participated in a program at her school known as “GenYes,” where students drew on their daily-life knowledge of technology to teach the teachers. Her group worked with a local kindergarten teacher to make a movie using Apple’s iMovie software so that the teacher’s students could learn a visual lesson about clocks. The kids in the young class were not the only students to benefit from the lesson, though. Megan reported that “We showed her [the teacher] how to upload the video from the camera, cut clips and add titles to the bottom of the slides. Next year, we’re going to do a Web page for her and link it to our movie.”

Several years ago in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, the local school system faced two problems. The first was that many students were graduating high school without any desire to continue their education, and some lacked the technical skills to enter the workforce. The second problem was that the schools’ computer systems were a disaster of unfinished local area networks, aging hardware, and abysmal technical support due to staffing shortages. Fortunately for Berkeley Springs High School, County Technology Coordinator Curt Heldreth had a plan. Over the course of several years, Heldreth built a first rate IT training program that provided instruction and A+ Computer Technician certification to students while turning the thirty or so kids he taught in any given year into the county’s dedicated computer staff. Students quickly embraced every project as their own, and technicians-to-be have been spotted throughout the school system for years now as they pull wires through ceilings, troubleshoot computers, design web pages, and even help to lead faculty development sessions.

To call Berkeley Springs’s program a success would be an understatement. Not only did the district save hundreds of thousands of dollars on IT costs, but individual students from all walks of life have become successful in their own rites. One of the first graduates of the program joined the Air Force, where he graduated at the top of his electronics school class, and found himself helping to teach some of those Air Force classes himself. Another student became the subject of an article in Newsweek about kids from rural areas who go on to prestigious universities; he is currently studying electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and business at Carnegie Mellon. Yet another program alumnus enrolled at the College of William and Mary, started a business, and became intimately involved in the technology world.

The lesson from these stories is clear: empower students to learn and grow beyond what traditional education is able to do, and those students will return dividends more substantial than what any pre-information revolution educator could have ever dreamed.

Article about Megan Kennedy’s project

Modern technology is designed to fit into a modern lifestyle, and to broaden human possibilities by reducing or eliminating old obstacles.  In other words, do not limit the potential of technology by trying to make it fit inside of outdated models and narrow-minded boxes.  A website can be as simple as a textbook on a screen, but why should we so limit ourselves if the website can, in fact, do more?  Learning and exploratory capacity is maximized when students and instructors understand the true potential of the tools they have available to them, and are willing to boldly push the limits of that potential in order to realize gain.  Do not sell yourself, or the resources available to you, short.

I recently concluded a major project that looked at the issue of educational technology in a social, technical, curricular, and policy context. While the William and Mary course that inspired this blog was wholly unrelated to the area of k-12 educational technology (which is the primary focus of my recently completed project), I do have some interesting insights to share. These various thoughts will be published over the course of my next several blog posts.

One does not require statistics to see that the information revolution has had a profound impact on the lives of America’s youth. Students (and adults) have logged onto MySpace and Facebook by the tens of millions, Apple’s iPods have become one of the era’s defining cultural icons, and cellular telephones have proliferated. But as change in youth behavior has become a social consequence of the information revolution, many schools have seen technology not as an opportunity to be embraced but rather as a threat to be guarded against.

Cell phones are now in the hands of most Americans; Apple computer had sold 49,818,000 iPods by the end of second quarter 2006. Many of these portable devices are in students’ hands; a recent study showed that users between the ages of 18 and 24 spend 22 hours per month, compared to the national average of 13 hours per month, using their cell phones.

While students spend more and more time using technology, schools spend more and more energy devising ways to keep that same technology out of the classroom. A simple Google News search for the query “school bans cell phones” uncovers a plethora of articles accounting many different school systems’ decisions to restrict student use of the devices. Similar measures, such as the one taken in Anderson County, Tennessee, have restricted use of iPods and “other electronic devices.” Higher education institutions have taken a dramatically different approach, however, as Duke University, for example, in 2005 initiated a program that provided iPods to all incoming students so that they may be used for instructional purposes.

Students’ use of new technology in their daily lives, however, runs much deeper than telephone and iPod gadgetry. Many in America’s 18-25 year-old population keep a profile on the Facebook Internet service. Facebook, like its cousin “MySpace,” is a leader in a new breed of Internet services known as “social networking” or “social computing” defined as “The application of computer technology to facilitate interaction and collaboration.” I decided one morning to monitor the Facebook page for an upcoming campus event at the College of William and Mary. My anecdotal findings were quite phenomenal. The event—a concert and party held by a local band and fraternity to raise money for children in Honduras—began the day with a single host and a handful of guests. Throughout the day as I checked the page several times, I saw that more event hosts were added who, according to the site, did not even all know each other. The guest list, meanwhile, grew at a shocking rate. By the end of the afternoon, a handful of party hosts from different social circles had managed to promote a benefit concert that had 75 confirmed guests, 75 possible guests, 34 guests that would not be able to make it, and 245 students that had yet to RSVP. After corresponding with the event planners through e-mail, I learned that the venue’s occupancy was 150 people, with room outside for about another 150 to listen.

On the surface this may seem unremarkable. I, however, had just seen a single person start planning a benefit concert, seven more strangers decide that they wanted to help, and nearly the entire venue be filled by word-of-mouth communication in a single day. And, even more remarkably, these students had managed to accomplish the task, one that years ago would have taken weeks of planning and countless hours of work, using nothing but the Internet.

Similar stories of social networking technologies working their way into the daily lives of students and institutions can be found elsewhere. In mid-April 2006, Police in Kansas used MySpace to foil a planned school shooting on the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. The plot would have involved five plotters and a lengthy “hit list” of victims, but authorities found guns, knives, and ammunition in the possession of suspects thanks to leads obtained online. Lives of students and teachers were saved thanks to information obtained on a website that did not exist three years ago.

Yet, despite the rapid spread of social networking services in students’ private lives, concerns about privacy, bandwidth consumption, and in-class distractions have led many school districts to ban these popular websites.

Students, for their part, have been adept at developing countermeasures to administrative restrictions. In November 2005, for example, a high school sophomore in Oregon was able to connect to his home computer from a school computer lab, pulling MySpace.com through the Internet via his home Internet connection. The school had responded to the perceived threat of MySpace, but students were able to effectively trick those school filters into allowing unrestricted access to the “off-limits” website.

These examples of student culture (surrounding technology) at odds with schools’ administrative reactions illustrate the conflict between technology and established educational norms. Social organization—the ways that students interact with one another and live much of their lives away from school—has been made much more nimble and mobile thanks to the Internet, but yet many schools have thus far been very hesitant to adopt these technologies in a manner that enhances the educational process. Schools are challenged in one respect by the distracting and revolutionary influences of gadgets and new web services, while they simultaneously work to leverage cutting-edge technologies for legitimate educational purposes. The fundamental challenge is for educators and the courses that they teach to stay relevant. Students are increasingly growing up with ready access to new communications technologies. These resources are an intrinsic and natural part of their life and, as such, resources that students expect to interact with in the classroom. To not integrate technology with instruction, and to cling to old methodologies is to risk making certain academic pursuits less relevant within the broader context of society.

Instead of becoming technology innovators, many schools have become technology resistors, and have passed on a wonderful opportunity to enhance the quality of their instruction.

Let us explore one of the political implications of all this, namely, community groups. The internet is not the first institution to be accused of bringing out and reinforcing dreadfully individualistic tendencies. American democracy itself has always been seen as a rather unfortunate feeder of over-individualism, as well as tyranny of the majority (although checks and balances have served us fairly well on that front). Does the internet only ingrain these problems, or can it offer a way to solve or at least bypass them? According to the almighty Wikipedia, Tocqueville thought that association, the coming together of people for common purpose, would bind Americans to an idea of nation larger than selfish desires, thus making a civil society which wasn’t exclusively dependent on the state.

Wellman points out ways in which networked individualism can help at least some sociopolitical problems: “At times, the Internet’s lack of communicative richness can foster contact with more diverse others. The lack of social and physical cues on-line makes it difficult to find out if another online community member has similar social characteristics or attractive physical characteristics. Asynchronous communication gives participants more control over the timing and content of their self-disclosures. This allows specialized relationships to develop from shared interests rather than be stunted at the onset by differences in social status. This focus on shared interests rather than on similar characteristics can be especially empowering for members of lower-status and disenfranchised groups.” For my part, I see the internet as being more shaped by our “selfish desires” than ameliorating them. However, it is one of the most important institutions that is both unusually free from the controls of the government and is a thriving civil society thriving because of it.

An online presence is basically the inputs and reputation(s) that a person has online: the sum of their activities trackable to certain online roles or avatars. Note the incompleteness of such an identity: Wellman asks, “Will networked individualism deconstruct holistic individual identities? A person would become the sum of her roles, and need to present multiple personas to the world. This compartmentalization of personal life—within the household, at work, and in communities — may create insecure milieus where people do not fully know each other.” This is a fairly straighforward question that nevertheless has no clear way of judging an answer.

In what ways is an online identity different from an identity as a member of offline communities? Entry and exit costs are a point worth considering. Many online communities, for example a collection of people who routinely post on a message board or blog, have very low entry and exit costs. They are open for anyone to join, whether in a reading or contributing capacity. Individuals will post often and make their name recognizable for a while, and then drop out without explanation. For those who make (or aspire to make) a living or a serious pursuit out of internet contribution, consistent and popular contributions are a must; but in the majority of cases, people contribute for fun and abruptly stop when it is no longer fun or affordable. Among those who have the technology, time and interest are the limiting elements here, not usually money or social bonds; and time and interest are volatile and personal things. Online anonymity is almost a kind of Ring of Gyges, in that it separates consequences from social behavior and standing. Its results in internet society are, on the one hand, flame wars, spam, and a certain level of disconnect, since people cannot be trusted as easily to fulfill commitments; but on the other hand, a new level of personal pride that manifests itself in grammar nazis, Wikipedia editors, and collective rating efforts like Digg that place trust in large numbers of people to display good sense in very limited and specific roles. This kind of participation has instilled into users an individual sense of duty to impartiality and accuracy rather than mere opinion, in the case of Wikipedia; and a gratifying sense of taste sharing and mutual informing in the case of Digg.

Wellman talks about handling conflicts in his three models: in Little Boxes, solutions include coup, revolt, and irrevocable departure; in Glocalization, back-biting and keeping distance; and in Networked Individualism, avoidance and exit. This reflects the decreasing exit costs associated with increasing despatialization and choice over where and how one interacts with people. However, Wellman claims that when going in that direction, the cost of entry actually increases – or at least, joining in becomes harder due to interactions being harder to observe. Although I might agree that on a hypothetical level, access can be more thoroughly restricted when random in-person encounters are ruled out, on a practical level, one’s overall joining-in options are nevertheless expanded greatly due to more content and groups if nothing else. The shockingly wide range of anonymous-friendly or simple to enter communities supports me here, I believe.

While Wellman argues that the current Glocalization is giving way to a global, information-based Networked Individualism, I am not convinced that “meatspace” is becoming obsolete. Instead, I see that while mobile technology is indeed allowing for a nonspatial social scene, people are quickly finding new ways to link previously detatched information to locations. These locations are not always local, so it is still a sign of increased globalization; but I think that the still-recent lack of adequate mapping technology gave a false sense, for a while, that people no longer cared about place.

One fascinating local tool is a Google Maps application called the Gmaps Pedometer. You can trace a jogging or biking route on the map, and it will calculate cumulative mileage, calories burned, and even when to take rests. This popular new application is intensely local and spatial, when used for the intended purpose, and requires more physical activity than most of us are comfortable with. A shocking departure from pure bytes, indeed. Sites like Freecycle and Craigslist rely on location to organize transactions, though it’s true that such deals are more interest-related and less face-to-face activities than walking into a store or going jogging. Google Maps mashups are existent or certainly forthcoming for Freecycle, Craigslist, Ebay, etc, further allowing for a more visual and spatial organization of location data.

On the global side, map mashups are quicky proliferating as a tool for awareness, journalism, and political lobbying. The Tunisian Prison Map was somewhat of a landmark in political mashup history (as recent as it has been!). Another interesting case is Greenpeace France’s Genetically Engineered Corn Google Maps mashup. After the French Government banned the mashup, Greenpeace France created crop circle symbols to mark the sites in real life. The interplay between online and offline information is becoming more graceful, more common, more suited to the needs of the people, and more easily authored by laymen. Map mashups are, after all, a Web 2.0 phenomenon.

One final example is Facebook. Facebook is often touted as a superior social networking application to Myspace and others because it has different kinds and levels of networks within it, and privacy controls for each. A user can belong to up to five networks, though most only belong to one or two. Networks are available for colleges, high schools, companies, and regions. Events, groups, and other tools can be specified as pertaining to specific networks. People are eagerly rushing to define themselves not just by their interests, but by their geographical communities and the things they see every day in the real world. This is another sign that while people are becoming less dependent on location in order to communicate, one important aspect of themselves as a person that they want to communicate is location. This seemingly enduring importance of physical and spatial identity in the human psyche should be reassuring to those who, like me, need to be reminded that they are not defined solely by their online presence.

Next (or soon thereafter): what is an “online presence” anyway?

This post will describe some themes brought up by Barry Wellman, a professor at the University of Toronto, in his essay “Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism.” Following posts will examine some issues raised by the article.

Wellman presents three models of social and work community interaction. Little boxes is a model that describes traditional, face-to-face, spatially-dependent modes of communication and interaction. Examples include office meetings, block parties, and neighborhood homeowners’ associations.

Glocalization is what Wellman terms the contemporary hybridization and intersection of spatial and nonspatial networks. Even use of the internet has a spatial component to it, since most people use the internet from a computer they keep at home, school, or the office. When you instant message someone, you can expect them to be at one of these places; even their away message might specify where they are. Wired phones are another example of place-to-place communication.

Networked Individualism is, as Wellman describes it, the resultant and emerging nonspatial extreme. This is true person-to-person contact according to Wellman, which brings up the question of what a person really is. Certainly this kind of ‘person’al interaction is free of many potential biases and distractions, such as appearance, accent, or social standing, that are to some degree peripheral to what a person really feels represents himself. Mobile technology as well as increasing personal travel and mobility is stripping our identities of their roots in places, and emphasizing our identities as we choose to express them through an increasingly widening range of mobile media, though text content is still the predominant way of expressing oneself on the internet.

These three modes of communication are all relevant for the three kinds of online community that I talked about in my last post. Wellman’s are categories of those to whom we network, and the means of communication by which we do it; mine are categories of purposes for which we network, and the motivations and goals thereof.

It seems to me there are three kinds of online community.

First, there’s a sort of nebulous community brought together by interest – say, a blog with its regular commenters. The people there don’t meet physically or even necessarily have a stated goal – just a shared interest. But they get to know each other, and build off of each other’s contribution.

Second, there’s online communities devoted to some goal, for instance activist communities. This might include things like Indymedia, where there’s accountability and leadership structure but no set schedule of contribution. Another one is a group called Critical Mass – I was on their listserv for a while – and what they do is get people together to bike in DC. It’s really something of a protest, since DC is pretty unfriendly toward bicycles, and they certainly had to talk over issues like safety, dealing with cops, regrouping if you get scattered, etc. as well as what their goal was: whether they were going to follow all the laws or not.

Third, there are companies and full-time, established NGOs who work pretty nuch like a normal organization, with a hierarchy, payroll, meetings, and a work day, even if it’s not 9 to 5.

So let’s look at the most nebulous kind first, because this is where people’s motivations and identities are most purely influenced by the internet structure.

When you get on the internet, why do you do contribute? What’s your motivation? Because it’s fun. You update your Facebook profile, write a blog entry, comment on someone else’s blog, edit a Wikipedia article, and post a YouTube video of something you and your friends put together. You do all these things because it’s fun. And the result is your friends can know more about you, or other people in a community can get an impression of you and your opinions, or you can feel the satisfaction of improving something. All fun.

Let’s look at how individuals and communities form on the internet. And yes, I would say that individuals “form” on the internet, because who you “are” there is just whoever you present yourself to be. It’s your profile, your avatar, as it’s known in some groups. Building up an online identity – real or projected – by producing information or commentary establishes a personal connection, fan club, style, etc. which keeps attention. And when you can express yourself and people pay attention, it’s gratifying. That’s a large reason why people do it. Status, reputation.

Of community participation: It’s easier to find a community, easier to participate, easier to build up a reputation simply by participating more than everyone else. But it’s also simple to drop away: people don’t have the social expectations of formality and politeness, or giving reasons why you’re suddenly never on the net, that are expected in the real world. It’s still a community endeavor, but the individual is even more fully in control of how much, when, and why they participate. A sense of entitlement to privacy, ironically.