This blog is dedicated to thinking about what it means to be a "scholar" in our globalized digital age. The profession is arguably undergoing more change than it ever has, yet many universities remain steeped in tradition and repetition. If our students are always online, what is the use of the classroom? In an age of electronic book readers, are books outdated? Why are not all our conferences held online? If everything is accessible everywhere, then why do we need universities?
After a few months of interruption, I am committed to getting back to this blog.
I'd like to start this year by sharing a little discovery that I made recently and that I am planning on using in class soon. Part of creating a modern classroom experience, as I have already argued on this blog before, involves developping increasingly student-centered teaching. This inevitably requires a lot of class participation and sharing by students of their results with others.
I have run into a recurring problem which I'm sure others have encountered. Most classrooms are still basically equipped mostly for one person to speak. There is one microphone and one microphone only, and one's best choice is often to simply ask students to talk louder. I'm not a great believer in walking around with the microphone to interview students à la TV show, this really takes too long and it looks silly (and might even be intimidating to students). Having an assistant pass along the microphone is not much better. But microphones are really necessary if one is to hear (and most importantly, if other students are to hear) what others have to say in big classrooms which invariably have very sub-standard acoustic qualities.
I don't really see myself going to my Dean arguing that all students should be given a microphone, or that somehow the rooms should be equipped with a high tech sound system that can amplify the voice of whoever is speaking (I'm assuming such a thing exists but I could be wrong and I'm sure it'd be expensive). This is bound to become more and more of a problem and could prove a durable obstacle to making classrooms more interactive (I am talking of classrooms of 25 or more). Moreover, it will have the predictable effect that after a while students will self-select and only those with the loudest or more piercing voices will elect to talk.
In the spirit of using what is rather than reinventing the wheel, I did have a flash, which is that students at least these days all come to class with a laptop. Now, most of these laptops, I figure, have two things: 1/ an audio recording capability, and often an incorporated microphone of the recording sort (although whether it can be more than that is precisely the question) and, 2/ an audio producing capability (ie: integrated speakers). My intuition then was that there must be a way to link the two so that the input becomes output and, in a word, one turns every laptop into a personal amplifying microphone. Convinced that this must somehow be possible I googled a bit, only to find that there was very little on the topic, and what there was was quite negative. Some seemed to suggest that one would have to use the recording function, but I that sounded contrived. Anyhow, after looking around a bit, I'm very happy to say that I have found the solution and that it is dead simple:
Your students need to have one of these small external laptop microphones that can be bought for about 5$. As far as I can tell, my system will not work with embedded webcam microphones.
Connect the microphone to the microphone entry on the laptop (the one that has a little microphone next to it and is generally red or pink)
Go in the volume settings of their computer (I'm talking PC here, but it can't be that different with Macs), go to properties and make sure that the "microphone" box is ticked
Go back to the sound controls and increase the volume of the microphone (it is typically muted)
Your computer has just turned into a microphone!
This is so simple, I am surprised it is not used much more often, even in conferences where we increasingly go around with laptops. Talk about crowdsourcing and saving money...
One of the things that I have been getting out of new technologies that enhance class participation is a new sense that a number of students who typically did not partidcipate much, are now much more keen to do so. Whether it's because the technology allows me to break the class into smaller groups, or because technologies provide a certain degree of anonymity, there is a whole portion of students in my class who never raised their hands who are making their presence felt. This is very encouraging. One of the problems I have sometimes had in the classroom is a sense that it is difficult to engage everyone at the same level. Typically, the bolder students end up monopolizing participation as others settle in the comfortable belief that someone will always break that uncomfortable silence. I think of my classes more and more as networks or series of networks in which communication becomes very decentralized and multilayered; at any one point, students might be commenting on a back channel, talking to each other about an exercise, voting, etc. It is much easier to participate when you know the consequences of being "wrong" will be imperceptible. The Chronicle's "Wired Campus" has a post on "how interactive technology can help minority students learn", and that may well be an added benefit. Technologies are an equalizer of sorts, where the ability to authoritatively and comfortably speak in front of a whole class may be very much an acquired skill, one shaped by education and background.
For all the clamor about Web 2.0, there still is not to this day a fully integrated collaboration tool that would allow academics to work simultaneously and seamlessly with RAs or students, even as this becomes more pressing by the day. The existing tools are either 1/ expensive and software specific (sharepoint), or 2/ free, online and collaborative but with limited editing functions and, especially, no integration with popular bibliography editors such as Zotero or Endnote (also, they create problems when reverting to Word which, for most journals' purposes, is still the standard when it comes to submission), or 3/ allowing collaboration with the main word processors by allowing sharing of files but not simultaneous editing (Webdrive). Only a company like Onedrum so far seems to offer something like what academics need. It's just a pity they don't offer Word collaboration yet.
It is quite remarkable, when one thinks of it, how much even 20 years after the emergence of the internet in universities and that wonderful invention, the hyperlink, how little academic products, whether what we produce as scholars or ask our students to submit, actually link to anything. The link is still the parent pauvre of academia, a second best solution to proper footnoting. So time and time again, we will find an article mentioned in an online text or article and have to search it independently on the web or elsewhere. For most of us, the footnote will be a deadend, a bridge to nowhere. This is not just a minor waste of time, it also prevents us from making more connections between different pieces of scholarship, and limits our abilit to navigate knowledge. These connections themselves and the paths they create seem to be an interesting byproduct of contemporary scholarship - indeed something that one might want to study to delineate fields, etc. They facilitate forms of intellectual peregrination and dialogue between academic artifacts that are probably well worth the effort. We still pretend to footnote, though, as if knowing the volume and page number of a piece was more important than having the stable link to its opening page. This is bound to change sooner or later. First, the increasing amount of academic material on the internet, including material that is only produced for and available online, will make it increasingly artificial to refer to paper versions that no longer really exist or are just gathering dust somewhere. Second, more and more of the work we do will be posted directly online. Sometimes, it will just be in the form of uploaded pdfs that still subscribe to the canons of footnoting, but increasingly it will be in pure electronic forms (websites, blogs, fora) where footnoting will be inconvenient and irrelevant. It is high time we started hyperlinking more systematically.
I recently fell upon Michael Mandel's "Justice course" at Harvard. This a spectacular concept. It is, in a nutshell, the web version of a course that Mandel has been teaching at Harvard for years on issues of ethics and law. The site includes readings, videos of the lectures. It is professionally produced and structured as a series of "episodes" like your favorite TV soap. The course makes for an exciting watch, and almost gives one the impression of being at the lecture. I suspect it could be hugely successful.
This strikes me as the way of the future, somewhere between an open and a brick and mortar university, a website and a course. It suggests fascinating interrogations. If entire courses become available online that are beautifully made, allow for active learning and provide entire readings, these will sooner or later create considerable competition for the real thing (by which I mean not Mandel's own real-world course, but other similar courses in justice). It is not simply a question that students will become more aware of what is out there and ask their instructors to offer them something similar orbetter (although that too may happen), but that increasingly students may flock to online courses, if these turn out to be much better conceived. I am not suggesting that the online course might soon displace the seminar or the tutorship, but it might certainly displace ordinary lectures, especially if those lectures are not as good as the virtual thing.
There is also a lesson to be learned in terms of universities' openness. Traditionally, universities are based on a strong sense of inside/outside, where a select few are allowed to participate and others not. There are undeniably beneficial effects on the community, but these are mostly indirect, and attending a university institution is still a way of being privy to a special form of knowledge, imparted only to those who have been allowed to sit in classes. The idea of breaking down the walls is both very appealing and a little scary. Some profs may like the idea that they are not potentially talking to the whole world but, precisely, only to the select few. Moreover, there may be a feeling that universities, in opening up, are undermining their business model and their air of exclusivity.
In practice, of course, we are still a long way from this. If anything, putting at least a few courses online increases a university's aura, and is a bold statement that is bound to attract attention, and increase students' willingness to attend. But some of the bigger questions will need to be asked sooner or later. It may be that this online-nization of courses is a prelude to a re-centering of universities around small group, participatory forms of teaching/learning that cannot as easily be replicated virtually. Maybe the virtual course, with its assortment of readings and prerecorded sessions, will little replace the old textbook. Students will be expected to have "seen" the lecture before they come to class, so that they can get down to the serious business of asking questions and thinking through problems. Or it may be that universities will increasingly mesh with the web, and that distance education, which has already been making formidable strides in the last decades, will become even more appealing and lead to a complete reorganization of the academic world.
At any rate, I sense that there will be huge benefits to early adopters. There will also be risks to diversity and of a number of students drifting towards the easy or better marketed course, at the expense of hearing a different voice. And of course seeing a lecture is never quite the same as being there, especially if one is burning to ask a question. But there is a lot of space for more, and extraordinary openings for the many who would not have attended university, but might nonetheless be interested in "attending" a "Harvard class".
So far, professors and students who wanted to save on their printing whilst not hurting their eyes reading from monitors all day had two options, one high end and the other low end. The high end one involved dishing out a whoping for an IREX 1000, which comes with an extra large 10.2 inch display. Great for those bigger Pdfs and a very nice design, but the target audience was really business professionals. Very hard to convince my students to put more money into what is in the end just a spin on a technology that has been around for thousands of years than most would put in their laptop (although arguably they would save money on the long run). The low end alternative was to go for one of the now many mass-market ebook readers. The problem with those is that they are really made with paperbacks in mind, not academic books, textbooks or articles. Reducing these to show on a 6 inch screen (as in the Kindle) made for very cramped reading.
It now seems that at last a new generation of ebook readers is about to emerge that targets among others this huge intermediary academic market. Both Irex's DR 800 and Plastic Logic's QUE have considerable promise. The QUE has an 8.5 x 11 inch screen, whilst the DR800 boast an 8.1 diagonal. The QUE has a gesture based interface, whilst the DR800 works with a stylus. Both are clearly Pdf friendly, and based on open platforms. Both have wired and wireless capability. The QUE is scheduled to premiere in Vegas on January 2010, whilst the DR800 should be out before Christmas. The QUE is set to be a little cheaper (around 300$) than the DR800 (around 400$), but both are below one psychological threshold (500$) and the QUE at least is just at what the industry sees as the key threshold (300).
By the time these start to appear in the classroom, I suspect it will not be very long before profs and students alike embrace them. I have made the case here before, but students are tired of carrying around bags full of paper, and both profs and students wary of the waste involved in printing thousands of pages a year. There may be some interesting pedagogical effets as well. Right now, a lot of the readings that I or my students do tends to be on the computer. But the computer is a particularly bad place to read, and not only because it is chronically bad for the eyes, not to mention the back. The problem with reading on the computer is that it is the equivalent of reading in a crowded and very distracting room. One is at the mercy of email and chat notifications and the constant temptation of looking things up on the internet. As a result, the quality of our reading experience has gone down drastically. It is urgent for universities to reinvent the act of reading as an act that requires exclusive attention and is not constantly interrupted by the demands of the digital world. As far as I can see, decently priced, highly portable epaper reading devices will create more opportunities for us to detach our reading experience from the computer, consciously decide what we actually want to read and what we can just skim through (because of the decision about what has to be downloaded). It will, on the long run, make for a more balanced digital academic learning experience. Therein lies the simple beauty of reinventing paper.
A few months ago, I participated in a conference for the first time via Skype. I definitely wanted to go, but it turned out to be too complicated and costly. I was going to cancel despite having prepared a paper, until I suggested the possibility to the organizer who kindly accepted. This was as new to the host as it was to me, but we decided to give it a try. The conference was an all day event. I was up very early because of the time difference, so we could do a sound and image check with the technician. Set up was easy, and as the conference began (this was a workshop type of event), I was introduced to the other participants as someone who was going to be in the room virtually. Eventually, my turn came, and I did my presentation as best as I could from my office desk with my image projected on a screen via videoprojector (a little Orwellian, maybe). Overall, this was clearly a mixed experience, although I'm glad I tried it, and got many things out of the conference.
On the good side:
At least I diid not miss out completely. I could hear other participants loud and clear, and got a clear sense of where debates were going. I almost did not miss a thing.
The other participants heard my paper and I probably managed to get a few ideas accross
The cons, however, are quite many:
I was there but I wasn't there. It's not just that I did not get to discover Boulder, Colorado, it's that I essentially missed on all of the things that make conferences interesting and fun. By that I mean the sheer pleasure of meeting colleagues, interacting with them, and learning about their work. Maybe a slightly different configuration could have yielded more in that respect, but I can't imagine the participants carrying the laptop around with them during coffee breaks just to keep me in the loop. They didn't and I don't blame them. Maybe one day if handheld devices can carry a clear videoconferencing signal, but even then.
There is another problem to not being present, which is attention deficit. Here I was, watching a conference all day, but from the privacy of my office and, subsequently, home. The distractions were many, and it wasn't as if anyone at the conference would have noticed (I suspect after a while the screen saver turned on, and I was just drowned in an aquarium of slow moving sea creatures). It's harder to be distracted at a conference where you will at least occasionally make eye contact with the speaker.
There were several little technical problems, which turned out to be quite fundamental. One of them is of course that the camera at the conference was static. This was especially frustrating during question and answer sessions, sort of like wearing a virtual corset since I could not look around and see who was asking the questions. That deprives you of a lot of contextuality and understanding of the dynamics at stake. I know logitech has a camera that will track sound or movement, but I think the ideal would be for remotely controlled cameras (after all, I want to be doing exactly what I would normally be doing in a conference which is to gaze around freedly). This sounds really simple, but a thorough Google search yielded no results, so I'm assuming the product doesn't exist, at least not in a mass produced and commercially available way.
After long periods, Skype will often stop. That created some minor awkwardness. Should I ring into the conference to tell them that I have been disconnected and ask them to accept our video conversation? Is the sound on and will I interrupt the speaker? Then there is the complex etiquette of not signalling that you have been cut off and waiting for someone to realize that is the case. Will people think that I was not interested in listening in the first place, that I was in fact quite happy to be disconnected? I think these questions of virtual etiquette still require some substantial thought.
Anyhow, to conclude, I was reasonably happy with the experience and I would do it again if this was a conference I really wanted to attend but couldn't. However, and quite predictably, this is really no substitute for human presence at this stage, and in fact doesn't come close to a proper conference experience.
I have been asked by readers recently what I actually use for a backchannel. In the spirit of keeping it simple, I have found that todaysmeet is probably the simplest tool of its kind at present, although no doubt there is room for improvement. The beauty of todaysmeet is you can set it up in as many seconds as it takes you to type the name you want to give to the "room" where your students will "meet". You do not have to signup or login, nor do they. The room will self-destruct at the time you decide (which can be quite long). All you need to do in class (or before) is communicate the URL to your students. You can also embed todaysmeet in a powerpoint presentation, for example by downloading this little app.
I know that Twitter has fast emerged as a favorite for backchannelling. The only problem I see with using Twitter is that you do make the content of the backchannel accessible to the whole world (potentially, not that it would make much sense to outsiders, or be of much interest). I'm not in principle against knocking down the class walls, but this is not necessarily something everyone wants to do. Let's say that todaysmeet provides you with a modicum of virtual privacy...
To immediately follow up on the previous post and give an example of the sort of thing I have been looking into, "backchannels" are slowly making their way to classrooms. A backchannel is essentially a way for an audience to communicate its thoughts as it is attending a presentation, in real time, typically via the web and onto a screen. Think of the moving captions that one typically sees at the bottom of TV screens during the news, sometimes emanating from viewers. It is therefore a web-based, 2.0ish, class-room integrated chat. Backchannels emerged in the last few years, particularly in techy conference, as a way to foster interactivity. I have heard some commentators refer to it as "listening to the murmur". Typically, in any large audience, only very few people will muster the courage to ask a question. We are all familiar with the phenomenon in class. Although the eager participants may be some of the best students, it is also a significant drawback to only ever hear from a minority of the class, and the active ones may "crowd out" other voices with the passage of time. A backchannel allows you to bring into the conversation the "silent majority" of students who do not normally participate. Not only that, but I think it allows you to bring them in in a new way, less formal and constraining perhaps than an oral question, which students may fear will be irrelevant or for some reason or other expose them to ridicule. In a future post I will explain what tools I have used for this, and which I recommend, but in this post I will only reflect on the nature of the tool as a pedagogical device.
First, a few warnings:
Students will begin using the backchannel as a way to make jokes. This is de bonne guerre, as far as it goes. Once the tool becomes more familiar, useful and constructive comments will be made. Notwithstanding, you may want to indicate a few ground rules (no personal comments, no derogatory comments). I find that jokes are ok as long as they are funny and actually related to the content.
This is the SMS generation so we should become accustomed to short, nimble comments. This is just as well because that is probably no more than you can read even as you lecture. However, the shortness does create a certain beat, which you want to surf on rather than constrain.
It will be in the nature of some of these comments that they are not questions, or comments that require much futher comment. Not all comments are worth responding to. Students will read them. Comments should be seen as part of the development of thoughts proposed in the classroom.
Anonymity or not is an issue. I think it does encourage students to participate, but there is always the odd risk that things will get badly out of hand. I am not committed either way just yet. Some students have logged in under their own name, whilst others have chosen pseudos. I think it is not unreasonable to let them decide.
Some profs have experimented with moderation, typically by an RA (you wouldn't want to be moderating as you teach). This is not a bad idea, but it depends on the size of the class and how much you think your students are the kind that need to be moderated.
I am not totally settled on whether this is a fantastic idea or a really bad one yet. What I can say is this:
Students responded positively and I think like the classroom as a place of experimental pedagogy. In fact, the rapidity with which they started participating suggested that this may have been something that they had started expecting would emerge sooner or later. Needless to say, I did not have much explaining to do about the technological aspects
The possibility of making smart comments online is probably a motivation for some students and may make them more attentive
I tended to notice comments sometimes after they were made, which created some awkwardness when I tried to backtrack to whatever (good) point a student had made.
I need to get better at multitasking on a podium. I can see the potential for classes becoming a lot more chaotic and less linear. Maybe not a bad thing?
Quality of comments went up with sessions
I got a distinct feel for how at least some students felt about the subject matter. The critical comments were most noticeable, and it occured to me that maybe they were easier to make using this medium.
I think good backchannel participation sends a positive signal to the class by highlighting a certain level of engagement with the ideas discussed.
You may have a problem if only part of your students use laptops in class. I am planning on remedying this by exploring options that allow students to send messages by SMS. I think the ubiquitous netbook is probably not far down the road.
There is a danger that even if the comments are good, students will be distracted by them and wander off.
It may be useful to ask questions specifically for the backchannel rather than just wait for spontaneous comments. If you have lots of students, though, that poses instant problems of aggregation for which other tools may be better suited.
The amount of thinking that has gone into renovating the classroom, what we do in it, how we interact, and even what defines the classroom in recent months is phenomenal. It is clear that we are only a few years from a true revolution in classroom practices, in comparison to which the introduction of powerpoint presentations in the 90s will soon look like a very old story indeed. One thing that has struck me since the gradual introduction of laptops in many classrooms, to which Wifi was soon added, is how little is being done with the available technology. Laptops sit there, but they are largely idle from a pedagogical point of view. At best, laptops are used as sophisticated typewriters to take notes; at worst, as we all well know, they are used to do anything from chatting to playing poker or watching movies. Laptops loaded with communications technology are used to communicate with the outside world, but never to interact in class. It is remarkable how little progress has been made in harnessing the power of such tools to forge a new classroom experience. In fact, the attitude has often been one of suspicion from some academics. Witness the debates on whether Wifi should even be available in class - I even heard talk of acquiring expensive technology to scramble the Wifi signal which the University had just spent considerable amounts of money equipping us with. Computers are seen as a distraction rather than a pedagogy enhancer and a tool that has the potential to revolutionize the way we teach. The main problem is of course bridging the emerging "screen divide" in class. Computers are used to escape class occasionally, and the screen itself creates a physical bareer between students and teachers (admittedly that physical bareer is getting smaller with the new generation of netbooks but still). More importantly, wired laptops create a (some would say unfair) competition for profs. As students become more and more used to being just clicks away from the information they need (or think they need), it is only natural that they should start expecting forms of teaching that are themselves more interactive, hyperlinked, and participatory. The way out seems to be to find ways to invite oneself in the computers or, more realistically for the moment, to make computers an integral part of the learning experience. New, fast and cheap web technology is making this possible. In forthcoming posts, I will present some of my current experiments with these tools, but my sense is already that if we are to get students' attention we need to incorporate into low-tech (and quite often justifiably so) teaching, elements of high tech that rival with what students are becoming accustomed to.
Sobering thoughts from Jamil Salmi, the director of higher education at the World Bank, in an interview given to Le Monde as UNESCO's higher education international conference opens today. Asked whether "virtual universities" might become a solution for poor countries, he points out that those students who are in most need of being given access to higher education are typically those who are most excluded from new technologies. This is either because the technology is not there (a World Bank report calculates that the average African university has about as much bandwith as a US household - and for a much greater price), or because students lack the sort of autonomy that would allow them to make the most of it. New technologies, according to Salmi, do not offer "a serious alternative" to traditional universities, or at least a combination of actual and distance learning. It should be noted that the Conference's introductory report, highlights "distance education and new applications for information and communication technologies" as one of the major trends in today's "Global Higher Education". Its authors insist that "the demise of the traditional university will, in our view, not take place any time soon" and point to a "profound and pervasive disconnect between employing new ICTs and leveraging them to enhance quality" - something to which this particular blogger amply subscribes. The truth though is that in some places the revolution has been considerable, whilst in others it has not even yet begun. The trend towards greater use of ICTs "has exacerbated between 'haves' and 'have-nots' ". Still, there are signs that something truly momentous in on the way, not least of which the existence of 24 mega-universities that offer distance education online, some of which boast more than a million students...
This is probably one of the most endemic and stress creating problems for academics with computers, the perennial problem of having different files and different versions on your home and work computers, not to mention your conference laptop. Ever been opened a PowerPoint presentation in class, only to realize that this is not the latest version on which you had worked late at night the day before? Or that, arriving at a conference, you left the last version of your paper on your office computer?
I suspect this is a problem that academics encounter more than many professions: we typically like to work from both home and the office, and spend a lot of time on the road. Some of us may have solved the problem by only having one laptop, but I see that as unpractical if you need to carry it around with you everywhere you go. Besides, chances are that a lot of us still rely on stationary desktops which are much more comfortable for every day use, and are provided by our universities anyhow.
So, enter the problem of multiple local storage. Typically most universities will provide you with a remote access to a drive. Mine does. The problem is these remote drives are not very practical. You need to be on a vpn to access them, and once you do it's really not advised to try to open a document directly from them, because chances are at the first network disruption your document will crash. In an ideal world, if I always had plenty of time ahead of me, I would meticulously drag the documents I just worked on locally back to my remote drive and erase all local copies, thus ensuring that I only have one neat drive out there with all my most up to date files. In the real world, I never really have the time to do that, or to do it properly, and I thus run quite frequently into the problem described in the opening paragraph. What is more, I have a bad case of "version angst" to the point of having hesitations about going back to some articles out of fear that I am not working on the most up to date version (irrational, I know).
Of course, I could resort to emailing documents to myself, or carry a USB around with me all the time (or only work from that USB), but the first is just too Web 1.0, and the second is frankly a bit perillous.
What I need therefore is a good syncing solution, one that ideally does all the work for me without me ever having to do anything about it. I want all my files on all my computers to look pretty much rigorously the same at all times. And while I'm at it, I want to be able to access them easily from anywhere in the world, even from a computer that is not mine. Now that would be liberating.
I'm pretty new to syncing, and as often a lot of people have been working on it for quite some time, but it sounds like this is a good time to hit the market. To sum up the evolution of the last 5 years, as I understand it (i.e.: as a pure consumer who has no understanding of how the technology works):
Initially you had what were essentially remote back up solutions. Every now and then you could upload all of your documents and feel relatively safe in the knowledge that there was a safe copy out there. But in a sense my university already does that, and it is not what I am looking for. If in addition to syncrhonizing my local files I have to upload them to some website (I don't even mention issues of confidentiality and security), then this is simply taking more precious time.
Then proper syncing tools started to appear. Some were applications that still needed you to actively supervise the process, but others were programmable (allowing you to indicate when and how the syncing should occur) and would then work automatically. However, they typically did not provide universal accessibility, and served merely as channels between multiple computers. One of the limitations was that both computers had to be online to communicate.
Then syncing tools started to emerge that would store your files online. This had two advantages. First, your computers did not have to be online or turned on. When one was, its files would be synced with an online folder, whose content would then in turn be synced with whatever other computer you turned on and put online. Second, your files become accessible from anywhere online, even on a computer that is not yours and that is not set up to synchronize. Essentially the syncing device combines the advantages of synchronization with those of an online backup. What you still couldn't do in this already quite advanced scenario, however, is either share your online files, or edit them directly on the WWW.
Enter the cloud and Web 2.0 revolutions, and the last hurddles are falling one after the other. Not only can you now share some of these online files, but you (and your collaborators) can increasingly work on documents directly from your browser thanks to cloud applications such as Zoho or Google apps. The combination of cloud and Web 2.0 is really the deal breaker here, and a huge step forward for travelling, collaboration-hungry, yet occasionally forgetful academics.
I leave out the whole issue of syncing with phones and personal organizers because I tend to think that's pushing it for most academics, and in fact something I'd rather avoid, but for those of you who are interested, it is an option.
So ideally, you want a product that combines all of these evolutions into one. Today, some are still little more than sophisticated backup tools (memopal,mozy, carbonite), or sync tools rather than storers (e.g.: Synctoy). Some allow you to backup files online and work on them in the cloud but won't allow you to sync them locally (e.g. Box, which I otherwise very favorably reviewed recently). These seem to me like they are anticipating a little on developments and assuming that we are ready to take the big step of going fully, 100% online. Most of us, however, are not entirely (well, many not at all) on the cloud yet, nor likely to be for a little while. What we want is just enough of the cloud, particularly for collaboration purposes, but still be able to come back to the solid ground of our local drive and software every now and then (because we are not always online, because we use heavy applications that only work locally). Some products will do the syncing but fail to offer either sharing features or cloud computing (the otherwise excellent sugarsync still has that significant limitation).
But there is a new generation of such products that essentially fulfills the ideal equation: sync + backup + sharing + cloud access. So far, I think only one comes close and it is the latest born, the nicely named: Syncplicity. I've tried it, and it's so amazingly easy it has frankly made me extatic. This is the closest I have ever been to finding a piece of technology that solved a chronic, painful problem in an effortless and elegant way. There was a little client app to set up, and Syncplicity then began to upload thousands of my local files. The online file is now an exact replica not only of particular files, but of 1/ my "my documents" file, 2/ my desktop, 3/ my pictures and 4/ my music (yes, I it seems I can now have my itunes library on all my computers), and 5/ my university server file.
It features full integration with both Google apps and Zoho, as well as the photo editor picnik (I'm sticking to Picassa for the moment), and Facebook (but that's really just to more rapidly share your photos there, which looks like a distinctly non-academic activity to me). You can also connect your account to Facebook The beauty of it is that, apart from the cloud and collaborative aspect, this is the last time I really need to think about it: I consider the problem solved and with a degree of satisfaction that also makes me feel like I do not even have to be on the lookout for alternatives for quite a while.
I used to have 3 computers: I now only have one!
Oh yes, and it's free up to 2GB (the standard, it seems), and 9.99/month or 99/year. That's a very sweet deal.
(well, the last bit is a little tongue in cheek, I can't synchronize my software accross computers obviously, but I will blog soon on how to synchronize my Firefox extensions so that my browsing experience is not too radically different between computers).
A while ago, I commented on how Irex's Digital Reader Series was the first e-reader that offered an A4 size screen, and thus might have an impact in the academic world. Alas, Irex technologies seems pretty oblivious to this niche (quite a substantial one), and very little in their advertising or their marketing (starting with the price) suggests so far that students or profs are their target of choice (more like businesses). Not so with the new version of the Kindle which seems to have the ambition of making a strong entry in the academic market, and move away from exclusive focus on what had been the Kindle's main market so far, fiction and your latest bonkbuster. The 9.7 inch screen of the new Kindle is not quite A4 yet, but it is bigger than most popular ereaders, except the Digital Reader Series. At about half the price of the latter (359 $), and a concerted campaign involving pilot projects in several US universities, it seems that it really stands a chance of success. As I have argued before, this would almost certainly lower students' book and printing expenses over, if not the first, probably the first two years.
Factors that will constrain whether the Kindle becomes the new norm academically include the ease with which your average downloaded pdf will be transferrable to the device. If the Kindle becomes just a way of buying expensive books at almost the same price as their paper version through Amazon, the point may well be lost to students. Accessibility of e-books in library catalogues would also be a huge trigger to the development of an all-electronic solution, with potentially considerable environmental benefits. And of course it is important not to forget that, whatever its success, the Kindle remains a uniquely parochial, US based product, which at present shows remarkably little inclination - or capacity given some of its technological options - to conquer the world of non-US universities (last time I checked, there were a few). Still, it has to be admitted that the product, which is as thin as a magazine and can store up to 3, 500 books, is pretty slick (it has an almost Apple-ish feel to it) and could easily become a conspicuous item on many (US) campuses. All we need now is a few more competitors...
In some ways, many of the technologies that have been created in the last two decades have merely accelerated academic research. To break-neck speeds, mind you, but still only accelerated it, essentially through making us virtually closer and enabling communication. The email is, in some ways, a new take on the p-mail, rather than something in a class of its own; online chats are just a virtual equivalent of something we used (and probably should still) to do in corridors; many academic websites are still only of interest to us to the extent that they enable access to the real thing, i.e.: scanned versions of articles. A lot less time is spent merely finding information, and hopefully a lot more analyzing and organizing it, but to an extent the core of academic research has not changed much.
But there are a few technologies which have arguably thoroughly changed the way we think and work. Here are a few which I think make a qualitative rather than simply a quantitative difference:
Wiki-ing: Arguably wiki-ing has always been possible, but the technology has so drastically reduced the entry cost to doing it that it might as well be credited for having created it. By introducing real time collaboration on writing projects wiki-ing stands for a general model of research that is naturally much more collaborative than most writing ever was. It also contributes to the development of codes and ethics of collaboration, as well as a certain informality and decentralization.
Full-text search: as long as we only use databases to access knowledge faster than we would in a library, we are essentially conducting research in the same way that people did centuries ago, except the libraries are much, much bigger, and we can access them from anywhere much faster. The minute, though, research is not by title, or even by a few painstakingly entered Boolean keywords, but through the intuitive strings of words that are then located in million upon million of integrally scanned volumes, we are no longer simply flipping through pages electronically: we are, arguably, retrieving pretty much exactly the information we asked for (with all the advantages and pitfalls, of course, something I have already posted on). In a superficial way, at least, we are interacting with great masses of knowledge that would simply have been inaccessible to us before.
Hyperlinking: hyperlinking is arguably new. Not so much an improvement on cross-references in footnotes, as an entirely new way of endlessly drawing connections between knowledge bytes.
Blogging: if ever the internet created a new literary/research concept it is the blogs. Blogs fill that crucial gap between intuitions and what gets published, specialist research and vulgarization, what can only be published tomorrow and what can already be said today.
And while I'm at it and as I'm using it, here are a few more reasons why I reckon Zoho is marginally superior to Googledocs:
Greater clarity and word-processing look than Google
Page view allows you to see where page breaks will occur and how many pages you have
Constantly visible word count (rather than having to go into tools to ask)
Page setup menu that allows you to work on header and footer
Icon to insert footnote directly on tab (no need to go into insert menu, gains time, although it would be great if keyboard shortcuts were also available)
Left bar allows me to see all my documents, as I'm working on one (better than having to flip through tabs)
Anyhow, the devil is in the details, but I think all of these in fact add up to quite a lot for the purposes of paper development. I strongly recommend trying Zoho to all profs and graduate students.
I am still looking for the piece of online gadgetry that will allow me to seamlessly collaborate on documents with research assistants and graduate supervisees. Collaboration is increasingly becoming the key word in my research, and so collaborative tools have become indispensable as I try to move away from the email model altogether, and its cohorts of quid pro quo, lost versions and clutter. I think I may be nearing the (temporary) end of my quest with a combination that is both functional and relatively simple.
I must admit I have grown increasingly frustrated with the use of Google apps (mostly docs in my case) for collaborative purposes. It is not simply that, frustratingly enough, Google docs is not integrated with citation and bibliographic software such as Zotero or Endnote: no cloud word processor is. It is rather that, for any intensive use (outside typing the notes for a presentation or a lecture), Google is really not that great. It just seems to have lots of bugs, little annoying things that go wrong with your fonts, footnotes that end up not where they should be, weird spaces that are created each time you insert one. Another problem is, given that at one point one has to revert to a desktop word processor to do the footnotes (not great, that, not being able to work on the footnotes and biblio as one goes), I would really value the ability to move easily from Google docs to Word.
At any rate, given that for the foreseeable future many people will continue to use desktop apps, there is still the need to be able to move from one to the other. And one thing that Google docs does not allow you to do is store Word documents (for example) as Word documents; it will, instead, automatically convert them to Google docs, essentially not allowing you to use apps as a file sharing device. As it happens, the switch from Google docs to (or back to) Word is not so easy, and all of the formatting and even footnoting needs to be painstakingly redone, something which I long outsourced to RAs but which is obviously a not very good use of their time. And this is from a relatively lazy Google user who is fine with the basic magic of collaboration, puts a high premium on moderate centralization and not multiplying logins, and is generally quite happy at this stage with something that "just works".
In other words, I think what is needed at this stage is a good file sharing capability to work with multi-users (ie: research assistants and students), but that can be accessed and modified by the various participants in a way that doesn't alter the format too much and makes it usable eventually on any platform, cloud or local. I had tried Zoho before which I like because it seems more committed than Google to taking its word processor seriously and giving it more of the features that your average desktop word processor would have. But I hesitated transferring from Google docs to Zoho because of mixed reviews and the weight of inertia (even though at first glance Zoho is better). Something, however, has just tipped the balance in favor of Zoho, and that's Box. Box is a very simple, very clean online file sharing utility. Like Google, you can create shared folders to which you easily upload files for common use. But unlike Google you can upload the files in their original format, say a Word document as a Word document.
Fine, but that sort of thing has existed for a long time, and what's the use of shared files if one cannot collaborate on them simultaneously and avoid creating nightmarish problems of versions? Here's the trick. Once a Word document has been uploaded (alongside any other type of document), Box, which has been very good at concluding agreements with various other cloud outfits, provides you with a whole menu (customizable, check it out) of things to do. One of them is editing the document with Zoho. The beauty of the editing in Zoho is not only that it looks more familiar than Google doc's interface (more like a word processor and less like a blank html page, in other words), but that you can then save the document (into your Box file) as a Word document. If you download the Box stored Word document, it will then look pretty much like the orignal Word document with your edits, not like some draft that has spent too much time in a digital no-man's land.
Have I just discovered a complicated way of doing something simple? Of course, Office has its own online collaboration tools (officelive), which have never really worked for me, and require the other person to be using the same software, which is increasingly not guaranteed. At any rate, Microsoft products were not exactly designed for the web, so I'm more than happy to give the new guys a chance (essentially officelive is more storage that editor, and I'm not too surprised either). And of course, what I am suggesting one do with Box, is really something that one could do with Zoho alone in a sense, because it is really Zoho's integration with Word that is quite remarkable.
But I think the two - Box and Zoho - work really well in tandem. Box is really a file sharing platform that acts as an access point to all kinds of cloud tools for your stored documents: you can fax, pdf, blog post, modify pictures, and even transform your text into audio (more on that later), not just with Zoho obviously. Moreover, as just a nice place to store stuff, I think that Box will be less intimidating to some of my students colleagues who are maybe not quite ready to embrace a full cloud solution such as Zoho.
Even if Google apps were to conclude an agreement with Box and allow me to edit my Box stored Word documents online, I would still stick to Zoho. Zoho is obviously a good online word processor, but it is also a fully integrated office suite. Whereas Google apps also makes that claim, you will find that Zoho offers many services that Google doesn't such as project management software, which can be great for complex research collaborations.
So all in all, the Box/Zoho combo offers, in my opinion, the best option to date by far, and one that is eminently suited to the collaboration needs of the "nomadic academic". It doesn't force one to chose between the desktop and the virtual world, but instead tries to create a fluid interface between the two. As such it is less suspect of trying to make us captive to a particular software or company, even as it leads the way in the cloud revolution.
Check out this elevator pitch by Raju Vegesna, self-described "Zoho evangelist":
The previous post reminds me that it is just as well that more and more newcomers are making their way on the market of online teaching because WebCT/Blackboard and Moodle are showing severe signs of strain and user discomfort. They are just too much like the clunky, expensive, proprietary desktop software they are supposed to replace. Google and Amazon may be getting it more right, but they are for the most part not dedicated to teaching, and there may be something scary about entrusting huge conglomerates with our teaching tools (then again, we did that with some famous operating system developers for two decades). But even there nothing quite matches the Firefox model, and that browser's ability to allow third-party developpers of all sorts to contribute gadgets and add-ons, making the browser endlessly personalizable, and drawing on the huge reservoirs of creativity and inventiveness out there. It sounds to me like this sort of flexibility is what we will need: collaborative tools created collaboratively for collaborative purposes, rather than simply one oligopoly replacing another.
As a further sign that a cloud revolution is on the way comes in the form of Amazon's entry in the online teaching software market, via AMS in Education. Right now, as part of a promotional effort, Amazon is offering free access to selected projects. Amazon's tools seem geared towards relatively heavy scientific endeavors that require an important IT infrastructure that otherwise would not have been very costly to build. In fact, Amazon tends to promote teaching in areas that interest it most, such as "courses in distributed computing, artificial intelligence, data structures, and other computer and storage-intensive subject matter". Still, the model is an interesting one. My sense, however, is that some of the know-how developped in this context might one day be used in other environments. The project is already helping collaborative research on a scale unprecedented before, as with the University of Oxford's "Malaria Atlas project" which is an attempt to create the most detailed malaria risk map ever created.
As time goes by, I am getting an increasing sense that something of a big lie is going on in the academic world. This is the "lie" by which we continue to publish paper books and in paper journals, libraries continue to buy the same, and many still behave as if paper rules supreme when many if not most of us (and I am not even talking about students) access our bibliographical resources electronically, whether it is through specialized journal databases or the likes of Google books.
Two parallel worlds have now been emerging for some time, each a reflection of the other but in complicated ways. For example, it used to be the case that the paper world preceded the electronic one. Millions of past volumes were scanned to make their way into databases. This movement is still going on, but perhaps more interestingly more and more research is being published electronically before it goes in print. After a while, it may dawn on some of us that going through print is pretty meaningless. I suspect the only reason why we do it is because universities still value paper and the whole structure of peer reviewing it implies.
But I've had the sense in the last few months that once I posted a paper and it got hundreds of downloads, once it has met its audience better than it might ever do after appearing in a random journal, then the incentive to essentially republish it in paper is really not that big. Then there is the timing issue: electronic publication through a repository like SSRN or my own university repository means that submitting and publishing have become one and the same thing, allowing me to publish an almost complete version litterally the minute I have checked the last footnote. And it is not as if some form of peer reviewing cannot occur with purely electronic journals.
It’s not exactly a secret, but for those of you who use citation software and haven’t checked out how it can be linked to Google scholar, go to "preferences", then bibliography manager and chose from Endnote, Bib TeX, RefMan, RefWorks or WenXianWang. You have just considerably simplified importing article references to your citation manager. From now on, each time you obtain a Google Scholar search result, you will see appear, just below the result, an "import into (whatever software you are using)" link. The software will open automatically once you have clicked on the link. A great example of integration between Google and a piece of proprietary software.
Less impressive, however, is the fact that you cannot use any citation software with Google docs. That will have to change in the future because my sense is that it is one of the most significant obstacles to adoption of Google docs (or other similar cloud applications) by academics, who are otherwise natural users of such collaborative tools. Right now, I use Google docs in the early stages of drafting my papers with the help of research assistants and then always at one point have to go offline and back to Word to actually do some serious footnoting. Not great.
I just thought I would post the entire project statement of "Liquid publications", which shares many of the concerns of this blog when it comes to publishing:
The world of scientific publications has been largely oblivious to the advent of the Web and to advances in ICT. Even more surprisingly, this is the case even for research in the ICT area: ICT researchers have been able to exploit the Web to improve the (production) process in almost all areas, but not their own. We are producing scientific knowledge (and publications in particular) essentially following the very same approach we followed before the Web. Scientific knowledge dissemination is still based on the traditional notion of “paper” publication and on peer review as quality assessment method. The current approach encourages authors to write many (possibly incremental) papers to get more “tokens of credit”, generating often unnecessary dissemination overhead for themselves and for the community of reviewers. Furthermore, it does not encourage or support reuse and evolution of publications: whenever a (possibly small) progress is made on a certain subject, a new paper is written, reviewed, and published, often after several months.
The Liquid Publications community proposes a paradigm shift in the way scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, evaluated and maintained. This shift is enabled by the notion of Liquid Publications, which are evolutionary, collaborative, and composable scientific contributions. Many Liquid Publication concepts are based on a parallel between scientific knowledge artifacts and software artifacts, and hence on lessons learned in (agile, collaborative, open source) software development, as well as on lessons learned from Web 2.0 in terms of collaborative evaluation of knowledge artifacts.
The main concepts are illustrated in the papers below (doc and pdf format, feel free to reuse the content, there is no copyright). The preliminary version of the work below was posted on ACM Ubiquity (http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v8i03_fabio.html). This work inspired the LiquidPub project, where research institutions from various scientific disciplines, publishers, and societies come together to develop and validate concepts, algorithms, and tools that define and instantiate the Liquid Publication concepts.
In a nutshell, the approach proposes the following ideas and contributions:
1. It introduces the notion of Liquid Publications (and, analogously, Liquid Textbooks) as evolutionary, collaborative, multi-faceted knowledge objects that can be composed and consumed at different levels of detail.
2. It abstracts (and replaces) the notions of journals and conferences into collections, which are groupings of publications that can be based on topic and time but also on arbitrary rules in terms of what is included and how the quality of publications is assessed for them to be included in the collection. Collections can themselves be liquid. We believe that journals as they are conceived today (a periodic snapshot of papers on a given topic, selected by a restricted group of experts and based on submissions) will soon become obsolete both in their printed and electronic forms.
3. It proposes a radically different evaluation method for publications and for authors, based on the interest they generate in the community and on their innovative contributions and that is maintained in real time and possibly without reviewing effort (peer reviews can be used as a complement). The method also encourages early dissemination of innovative results. Around these main concepts, we advocate the need for services that benefit authors, readers, reviewers, conference organizers, editorial boards, and even evaluation committees. Examples of such services are an analysis center for helping committees to assess the scientific quality of people and publications, ways for people to bookmark papers or people of interest and to define collections, and an authoring/sharing/versioning environment for maintaining and evolving liquid publications and for the fruition of their content.
Although the change advocated here is dramatic, the transition is not. The current state of affair in knowledge dissemination is at an extreme of the Liquid Publication concepts, where papers are "solid" and static, collections are periodic snapshots of submissions, and evaluation is based on peer review by a team of "experts". The liquefaction and embracing of the concepts proposed here can be gradual to facilitate acceptance by the community at large.
I will return to some of these themes in fortchoming posts. I would just like to point out that point 1, particularly the redefinition of scientific production as consisting in "evolutionary, collaborative, multi-faceted knowledge objects that can be composed and consumed at different levels of detail" is indeed very much what knowledge is becoming on the web, but also very much what challenges traditional academia and publishing houses. The Liquid project has emerged from Trento University, and it seems like it is the sort that has the potential to shake some of the inertia of the publishing world.
A recent study published in Computers & Education and provocatively subtitled "can podcasts replace professors?" shows that students who listened to their lectures on podcasts and took notes scored higher in exams than students who actually attended the class. Surely this is a striking finding.
There is inevitably resistance by academics to uploading their lectures, and making them downloadable for students. If students can access their lectures online, the reasoning goes, what incentive will they have to actually attend classes? But that is not a particularly convincing argument. If the only reason that your average student goes to lectures is because they are not accessible online, then the question of whether to upload is presumably answered.
The better view is that students will go on attending at least the better lectures (those that offer something that is not reducible to a recording) even if those are podcasted, and that for many podcasts will only be a complement, a way exploring material that has already been discussed in class. I can see one major benefit: at least students will spend less time taking down what is being said, in the knowledge that it will be available somewhere else. Moreover, if some students have a strong auditive memory, then there is no reason why we should deprive them of a way of maximizing that. For the rest, maybe it is for professors to rethink the added value of presence in a class, and how they can continue to provide something irreplaceable, even as new technologies seem to delink knowledge from the classroom as a place.
There may remain a number of more idyosincratic reasons why, despite the arguments in favor, we are reluctant to make our lectures available. One of them might have to do with the ephemeral character of all lectures, essentially a free exploration of an area of knowledge, prompted by student questions, and on which one might not always want to be quoted. But podcasts need not be divulged to the entire world (more on that issue, though, in a future post).
It is a phenomenon that I have only begun noticing, but I sense that one of the greatest impacts of new technologies on the classroom may not simply be on renewed access, communication and pedagogy, but also something more fundamental linked to interactivity and a change in what one might call (a little pompously) "classroom governance".
In some ways, the authority of the professor was based on the poverty of participatory technologies. The tools simply did not exist that would have made the constant or at least regular taking into account of the evolving interests of students. There were, no doubt, ways of adjusting, not least of which was a more Socratic method that emphasized questions and exploration. But apart from the fact that such method is not available for big numbers (and hard to master for small ones), it always posed some challenges ranging from the problem of "shy students" to its class and orality centredness.
Tools like i-clicker are an interesting metaphor for what the classroom might become more generally. They serve to aggregate multiple responses by students to questions in real time, in ways that are arguably superior to a show of hands. They make student opinion, preferences and even mistakes seem to matter in the trajectory of a course. They introduce a welcome element of real time. Another example is various chats and forums organized virtually around class. These make it possible for academics to at least be more enlightened about what students are finding interesting and to organize courses accordingly.
None of this, of course, is quite democracy. Teaching still seems to a degree based on the ability to impart knowledge by someone more versed in a particular discipline or trade who by necessity must offer a form of centralized guidance. But there is no denying that courses are increasingly shaped by participatory technologies that make it difficult for profs to claim that they did not know what the students really wanted out of a class.
Over the last decade, it is a euphemism to say that research, particularly in humanities and social sciences, has been revolutionized by both the creation of huge databases of scanned material, and their accessibility via the internet. We now have access, through library subscriptions or independently, to the equivalent of some of the best libraries in the world.
What is less clear is how this availability and its particular format is affecting the way we do research. It is generally assumed, partly rightly, that it is simply making it easier and quicker. However, in line with recent studies of how tools such as Google not only help but redefine the way we process information (see the Atlantic Monthly's intriguing "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", I believe electronic research is in fact often qualitatively different from what we used to do not so long ago when scouring through endless racks of books.
Here are a few of the ways:
"Lateral vision": because the internet is not discipline focused, electronic research makes it much likelier that one will run into material on similar topics from other disciplines. Electronic research thus makes it more likely that one will be tempted by interdisciplinarity (of the good and bad kind, of course)
"Capillarity": electronic research is perhaps uniquely suited to exploring threads of information, allowing oneself to be led from one source to another through the process of constant reformulation of research queries. In that respect, the web tends to replicate the mind's own organization as a series of thoroughly interlinked path (or maybe it is the other way round).
"Tunnel vision": in obvious tension with the above, one of the risks is that the internet, by helping us to access the information we need, will lead us to access only the information we need, at the expense of anything else. Search engines give us the, perhaps illusory, ability to constantly point a microscope at a cosmos. They are less good at giving us the broad picture, and obviously can encourage us to confuse information with knowledge. Maybe this is an argument in favor of search engines not becoming "too good," lest we always find the answer to the question we search, as opposed to stumble upon new questions we never suspected one could ask.
"Key word drivenness": electronic research is in a sense always purposeful research as it must be triggered by search terms. It is therefore rarely primarily gratuitous, in the sense of involving random exploration that is not preceded by the formulation of a question. This can encourage bare hypothesis formulation (to the extent that any choice of word search is the formulation of at least a minimal hypothesis), but it can also encourage narrow instrumentalism.
"Misleading finitude": one of the dangerous illusions that databases and internet searches encourages is that somehow the whole (or a very substantial part of) human knowledge is henceforth accessible at one's fingertips. I suspect there is a lot that falls between the cracks as a result of such misleading assumptions. It is not merely that not all knowledge is effectively accessible (far from it), but also that at least some knowledge will never be accessible in electronic form.
I don't know if it's quite what it's made to be, but Wolfram alpha is being touted by its creator, physicist Stephen Wofram, as the best thing since Google. Essentially, the idea is to have a search engine that understands "natural language", in other words one that will assess your search terms as something more than a random assortment of words, but as an actual question, meriting some answers more than others.
Will "the Wolfram" become the new standard for search engines, in a virtual world that has already witnessed striking successes and failures? More importantly for this blog, is this something that could affect academic research? Google, particularly google scholar, already does quite a good job of gathering material that is relevant. It is certainly a far cry from providing only material that is relevant, let alone actual answers, but with a good sense of where the good stuff is, I believe it is already an extraordinarily helpful way of locating information.
By the same token, I've often thought that more could be done in terms of gathering complex information than merely giving me 8, 556, 111, 059 results for my search terms. I have sometimes dreamed of a "virtual research assistant", not so much someone who would replace my actual RA, but a tool that would speed my RAs work, and allow him/her to devote time to more important tasks than sifting through dozens of pages of search results. Mind you, that is not exactly what Wolfram alpha claims to do, but certainly the idea that providing answers rather than data is the next frontier for sophisticated search engines is an interesting one. Surely if the Wolfram understands my research querries, then it will also have a better grasp of how I want them answered.
What is needed is not only the ability to understand questions, but also smart ways to organize answers. For example, I would like a search engine that would reduce overlap, or allow an option to highlight only relevant paragraphs (perhaps assembling them in one master document with links), or visually map results and the relationships between them (e.g.: on the basis of who cites who). Maybe the challenge will be for search engines to become a little more transparent about some of their working assumptions and allow us to tinker with those more. Spare us the maths and the algorithms, I only mean the general definition of what counts as "relevant".
The Wolfram is as yet untestable except for select invitees, but is due for release in May. This is a very fast evolving field and, although the Wolfram is by no means uniquely geared towards academic needs, it may introduce some very worthwhile improvements.
SSRN is great and useful. They’ve done a great job of creating a one stop for all sorts of literature, published or unpublished. It’s nice to be able to see download counts. But they could do better in terms of the data they provide, and how one can analyze it. Knowing the ranking of your papers out of all 100, 000 papers that were ever posted on SSRN is not particularly helpful. I personally don’t read much into the fact that one of my pieces ranks 30, 000 and another 80, 000. What would be much more interesting is to know the ranking of my paper among comparable papers. And ideally, one should be able to choose what one means by “comparable”. It might mean papers on a given topic, or published at a certain time, or in a given country. In other words, users should be allowed to quizz the database in as many ways as they want and are useful to them, rather than be provided with a limited set of clunky graphs.
It will probably take a bit of time in universities, but it is noteworthy that a number of businesses (and certainly many individuals) are already heavily relying on "cloud computing" (General Electric, . Cloud computing refers to the use of online software, i.e.: software that does not depend on any local (hard drive) installation but that can be accessed from any internet connected computer. A good example is Google Apps. There are many advantages to cloud computing, but I can think of several that will be of particular interest to academics and students:
Cloud computing makes it much easier to manage different versions of documents by... eliminating the existence of different versions. One of the main reasons for the multiplication of versions is the use of multiple computers, something which is quite endemic in universities (home, work, travel). Cloud computing means that your applications are accessible from anywhere in the world from any computer.
Cloud computing lends itself much better to collaboration because it is already by definition online, i.e.: in a shared space
Cloud computing can lead to very significant savings. In a context of economic recession that is increasingly felt by universities, cutting on the considerable expenses of academic institutions to equip themselves with costly proprietary software seems like an obvious move. Typically, cloud software is much cheaper than the traditional local software, when it is not free. Moreover, cloud software makes it possible to use netbooks, light and simple laptops that are considerably cheaper than normal ones, and I predict will become a favorite with students. Cloud computing and netbooks could also help to bridge the global digital divide that is so evident between first and third world universities.
There is a revolution involved and it has to do with the fact that computers these days are mostly about accessing the internet (something that students are well aware of), rather than "intelligent business machines". I predict some resistance from universities, particularly big acquisitions oriented IT departments, who will raise issues of confidentiality and security. They will have a point, but the truth is students are already and will be increasingly relying on cloud software that simply better fulfills their needs. At one point, some of these mass licence acquisitions will have to be reconsidered. It would be great if universities pioneered this movement, which will happen anyhow through "technologlical flight". There is evidence of some cooperation, for example the Google/IBM project offering millions of dollars to universities to develop cloud computing projects (not the same thing as universities actually using cloud computing, but obviously connected).
In a previous post, I hailed the arrival of the A4 ebook reader and suggested that the e-book would one day replace the coursepack and textbooks because of sheer convenience and savings for students (rising costs of textbooks, by the way, is an ongoing concern). In line with previous posts on "academic sustainability", however, I also want to make the point that digital technologies are part and parcel of how the profession can and should reduce its carbon emissions.
First, a few facts. It is generally estimated that a cord of wood (the publishing industry uses very little recycled paper, probably for less than 5% of its books) can produce enough pulp for 1, 000 to 2, 000 pounds of paper (depending on grade). Let us assume that on average it takes two trees to produce a cord. Assuming that the average textbook weighs about a pound, it can take up to 4 trees to produce up to 2, 000 books, or if you prefer one tree for every 500 books. That may not seem like a lot but obviously it has to be multiplied many, many times over to fills the needs of even a modest faculty within a modest university. But that is not all. There are the energy costs of producing and delivering the books.
Compare these probably quite staggering environmental costs to those of an ebook. An ebook uses no trees, and absolutely minimal energy to produce, download and read. Actually going through the book will use a fraction of what it would do to even read it on your computer, as e-books are not screens. In 2003, Greg Kozak, a student at Michigan U presented a thesis in which he compared the life-cycle of ebooks and printed books. He argued that a paper book created four times the greenhouse gas emissions, needed three times more raw material and 78 times more water than an e-book reader. But wait... Yes, you heard correctly, that is obviously compared to the e-book reader, not the e-book itself. As to an e-book... Well, let us just say that the environmental or physical cost of the ebook is probably substantially less than the cost of flipping through the equivalent number of webpages (at least the ebook, once downloaded, does not have to be sustained by a huge infrastructure of servers, cables, and computers).
As Greg puts it (and bear in mind he was writing in 2003, i.e.: a fairly long time before academically usable e-books appeared):
From an environmental standpoint, it is difficult to argue against the integration of e-readers into a school’s curriculum, especially if the original user chooses to retain rather than resell the book or if the utility of owning the book expires (i.e. the book is discarded). The most notable observations gleaned from this study are as follows: • Environmental burdens associated with electronic book storage (i.e. server storage) are small when compared to the physical storage of books (i.e. bookstore). • E-readers eliminate personal transportation-related burdens since they allow for instant accessibility to digitized texts (i.e. anywhere there is Internet access). • E-readers are more compact and are less material intensive than the equivalent number of printed books. • Although the most significant contributor to the e-reader’s LCA results, electricity generation for e-reader use had less of an environmental impact than did paper production for the conventional book system.
In other words, the e-book is the promise of incredibly minimizing the environmental costs of the publishing industry in general. These are hardly negligible (as documented in the Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts Study of the book industry (2008) - consider not printing!). Most of the world's paper is supplied by forests, not from timber farms, and thus leads to deforestation and all the associated ills. The total footprint of the publishing industry has been estimated at 12.4 million metric tons per year, and the total use of trees is about 30 million. Oh, and just in passing: it takes 75, 000 trees to produce one edition of the Sunday New York Times. Finally, about 70% of the industry's carbon footprint is caused by the production of paper, so there is hardly any quibbling about where the main issue is. Although the industry is making some effort, understandably enough none of it involves massively transferring to ebooks (if you can't afford the rather steep 95$ of the above mentioned study, I suggest the following powerpoint presentation ).
It's important to add that while all of the above is true about the entire publishing industry, academic books are very likely candidates for transferring to e-publishing.They are books that need to be carried around a lot and are typically heavy. They are typically not the sort of book (with some exceptions, obviously) one necessarily develops a strong sentimental bond to, which would make one want to keep them on shelves (indeed, textbooks in general are quite ugly as products). Finally, they are books that age very badly and quickly become out of date and useless.
As long as the massive availability of digital academic material only translates into ever more printing on university printers and photocopiers, the digital revolution will in fact make the environment worse off than in a traditional printing scenario (if only because typically, profs and students will photocopy less than they will print - the latter is, after all, only one click away). It is time to concretize the paperless promise of the digital age, and to take one small step towards "academic sustainability".
It has to be said that Google docs, whose academic potential was remarked on from the very start, can also specifically revolutionize the way one works with research assistants. That has certainly been true in my case. I tend to have many, each working on different projects, thus raising the costs of managing them simultaneously. One of my difficulties as an academic has always been not only trying to cope with the incessant email flow, but also juggling with different versions of documents. This last was a problem made particularly acute by sometimes having different RAs work on the same project. It could lead to substantial loss of time.
Google docs is not the only online collaborative tool out there and in future posts I will comment on how others work, but it has the advantage of its simplicity. Once access has been granted to an RA, we can both be working on the document, even at the same time (to the point almost of seeing his or her typing appear as I am myself working on it). Using google docs has not only solved the multiple versions problem, it has also I believe reduced the volume of my correspondance with RAs. One of the reasons is that I typically create a folder that has not only the document we are working on (say, the draft of an article), but also all relevant documents (literature, instructions, etc). Posting is also a more efficient way to make available than emails, in that it saves you the trouble of having to look up email addresses, or mailbox overflow, etc.
Finally, one thing I have discovered is that I can of course keep track of what my RAs are doing simply by logging onto the document, and finding out what has changed (helpfully, Google allows me to see when and what edits were made). I'm a bit ambivalent about this. At times, it makes me feel like I'm "spying" on my RAs, and they should really be able to choose the moment when they "submit" their work. But that, in my experience, is precisely what doesn't work very often with RAs, and which is wrong with traditional, dyachronic modes of collaboration. Give one a mission and too much time and chances are, however competent, that they will stray of course gradually. Insufficient supervision on my side is often a problem, but I find that no amount of guidelines I can give in advance will ever prepare them for the complexity and diversity that they will encounter.
Being able to check the evolution of their work every now and then, before it is excessively redacted and polished, can be a way of spotting mistakes or confusions early on. Rather than send an email, I will write the corrections straight into the document. Overall, my sense is this will reenforce a sense of collaborativeness (we are all writers of a larger master document), and do away with some of the more hierarchical aspects of the prof/RA relationship.
In the end, perhaps Google doc's most useful feature, is it can provide a fluid way of Wiki-ing collectively in a way that makes research feel really like team work.
As is now well documented, SSRN rankings are increasingly taken into account in some hiring and promotion decisions, particularly in US universities. While an objective measure of impact on the field is clearly not superfluous and can provide an indicator of something that is relevant, it is easy in a world obsessed with quantification to attribute too much importance to such rankings or to misinterpret them. As has been pointed out by some commentators, textbook chapters for example, are likely to receive many hits, even as most would hesitate to see them as more than a minor academic genre. This intuition about textbooks captures something, but the problem runs deeper. None (or very few) of us publish for “all of the social sciences”. We all publish for and within certain sub-fields, some of which are clearly bigger, both in terms of participants and audience, than others. Clearly this has an impact on counts and rankings. Someone working on the “general theory” of a given topic is likely to be of interest to more people than someone, say, working on some narrow empirical investigation. Some topics are simply more popular than others, but for no profound scientific reason except that they seem to attract a lot of attention. The fact that a field is smaller of course is in itself scientifically and intellectually neutral (except maybe when the field is close to one, i.e.: where the author writes for him/herself). In other words, one should not be sanctioned for engaging in highly specialized research with a small readership, which is what too much attention to SSRN rankings will inevitably lead to. What is necessary is to compare what is comparable, i.e.: if anything the number of downloads of other scholars working in a similar field or on the same topic. How one defines that field will of course be tricky, but it is the only way that SSRN statistics can yield more than anecdotal or frankly misleading information.
It is a testimony to the massive demand for quality knowledge sources on the web and the potential of online libraries: after only a few days of operation, and up to 10 million hits an hour, the Europeana library had to be taken down, whilst the engineers work on an alternative plan. This prevented me from testing the library for academic research purposes, but I suspect Europeana will be a very healthy alternative and complement to Google books. It adds a compelling multimedia experience to its collections, and might in the process allow a much richer form of access to education. Besides, I am always a little wary that too much of the world's knowledge and access to it is being channelled by Google. In fact, we need more than Europeana, we need two or three similar projects, possibly emanating from other regions of the world.
One of the great (and until recently quite unnoticed) things about p-publishing is that once something has been published, it is published “for ever”. That of course has its drawbacks when, upon receiving the offprints, you notice a huge typo on the first page, or your attention is brought to some major logical fallacy underlying your argument. One’s ideas about a topic may also evolve to the point that one will regret what one once wrote (that process may in fact begin the minute we have sent a manuscript to the editor). Then again, there is value to making an intellectual statement “at a particular point in time”: “This is what I thought then, on the basis of the evidence available and the ideas that came to me in those particular circumstances. I may have moved on, but this was my best attempt at the time, etc”. This is what one might call the “burden of finitude”, the exigency that what one publishes be somehow one’s final word on, or at least one’s best try at the issue at a particular temporal junction.
One can speculate that the awareness of finitude, of closing off, is also what made us alert to the fact that our message would somehow become severed from us, to have a life of its own, that we somehow can never take back what now exists in print, and that we should therefore do our very best to write it according to the highest, most painfully exacting standards. Maybe what made p-publishing great (and daunting) was this notion of irreversibility and the particular onus it places on us to perform to the best of our abilities, in the sure knowledge that we will not get a second chance.
Nothing threatens finitude more than e-publishing. An electronic paper (such as those posted on SSRN) is not so much published as “available”. It is online at the author’s discretion, only to be taken down at the author’s whim. We can constantly update, improve, re- arrange our production. We could be adding finishing touches to papers the entire duration of our intellectual lives. Papers, then, become much less the “best statement of our position at point t” that was the industry standard so far, and more our temporary, even tentative, statement of what “we think we think” at a particular junction.
There are both positive and negative aspects to this. The positive aspect, of course is that papers may be updated continuously, allowing readers to benefit from the best available information, and our own presumably ameliorating insights. After all, do we really need to keep in circulation stuff that we now think is frankly erroneous or misleading? Maybe it is a good thing that we should encourage intellectual producers to “retire” some of their most ill-inspired thoughts. We all have a few “horrors” in our publishing closets. Academic production, moreover, could become more of an ongoing, continuous, organic intellectual development. The transience of ideas, their rootedness in particular circumstances might thus be vividly illustrated.
But there are drawbacks. First are our own insecurities about our writing and the risk that we will not only “publish” but also “unpublish”, “republish” and “postpublish”. The “publishing moment” in the p-world is a liberating one precisely because, even as we know that we may live to regret some of the things we wrote, we know that we are eternally off the hook when it comes to that particular publication. It seems that e-publishing, on the contrary, engages intellectual professions’ neuroses with a vengeance. If we can pull out everything that we feel no longer represents our core beliefs, then we could quickly put ourselves in situations where we experience chaotic anxiety about our scattered intellectual messages.
Second is the danger of sloppiness. I can post this half-baked paper now, in the sure knowledge that I can correct it later. Of course, this is partly illusory: the chances that someone will read a second or third version of one of our papers is for most of us very small. So there is a very real risk that one will compromise our "audiences'" pleasure by publishing too early, or at least too quickly.
Third, I think it is worth challenging to an extent the assumption that “me at t + 1” knows better than the old “me at t”. Of course, this is indeed assumed, especially in disciplines where better, sounder judgment is meant to flow from experience. But I can at least vouch that it has not always worked for me. I have at times been a better scholar about certain things in the past than I am today or will be in the future. I can’t imagine that I would be alone in this, even if not all of us are like that. In that respect, reform may lead to regression, and we may retrospectively amputate our work from what of made it salient, right, inspired, etc, even if at a later stage in our careers we may see it differently.
Fourfth is the danger that the whole point of publishing will be missed. Maybe what we value in p-publishing’s definiteness is not that it is “as right as can be” but that it represents, with all its imperfections, a testimony to a particular, dated intellectual fermentation. If we constantly erase our traces by going back to the scene of our intellectual crimes, how can anyone reconstruct our evolutions? And maybe it is our mistakes, our imperfections, the fragile equilibrium of a position that unravels the day after we publish it that makes the precarious beauty of all intellectual argumentation.
Fifth, transience is probably not great for intellectual exploration. If everything is transient, why should I read it now? Why should I read it at all? Come back when you have something you feel confident enough about that you are ready to stand by it for a reasonably long time (if not for ever) should be the emerging standard of respectable e-publishing. There is also a point about academic emulation and honesty. I once had the experience of sharing with an author a manuscript that criticized one of that person’s manuscripts. Each time that person got back to me, he subtly changed the version of his article in a way that numbed my criticism. At the end of the day, I had the impression of always shooting at a moving target, that it was unfair that the article I was criticizing wouldn’t sit still for a minute allowing me to gain focus. I thought dialogue was great, but I wanted that person to let me know what he thought maybe not in the absolute, but at least in some half definite way at that point in time. On a smaller scale, this is a frustration many of us have experienced with some debaters who are particularly adept at reformulating their argument as they go. This cannot be a good way to conduct intellectual debate. Imagine ebooks that would evolve as soon as they had been reviewed, leaving the reviewer to have reviewed a henceforth non-existing book, a shadow of a book. By blunting the edges of criticism such a development could compromise some of the motivation for engaging in publishing and intellectual debate in the first place.
Sixth is the smaller point that, if we think of posting electronically as something which is, among other things, supposed to stimulate intellectual discussion in our disciplines, then staggered publishing runs the risk that people will have read quite different versions of the same work, thus rendering proper intellectual discussion more difficult.
Some of this may have practical remedies. Having the intellectual honesty to not change papers from within significantly, or to highlight the existence of separate versions if one cannot bear an earlier one;presuming against anything other than light editing to not unduly blur one’s message and the discipline’s focus. But a more principled question lies behind all this: to what extent do we really own our past intellectual production? By analogy with children, the vocation of our intellectual offspring is maybe to become its own thing, to walk with its own legs, and to in a sense become an artifact detached from us. We should not behave vis-à-vis our articles like overbearing parents who cannot stand the thought of their gaining autonomy and require from them a strict conformity to our beliefs of the moment.
have wired and wireless capability. The QUE is scheduled to premiere in Vegas on January 2010, whilst the DR800 should be out before Christmas. The QUE is set to be a little cheaper (around 300$) than the DR800 (around 400$), but both are below one psychological threshold (500$) and the QUE at least is just at what the industry sees as the key threshold (300).
But there is a new generation of such products that essentially fulfills the ideal equation: sync + backup + sharing + cloud access. So far, I think only one comes close and it is the latest born, the nicely named: 
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