Liveblogging NITLE, “Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in a Digital Age”, 3rd panel

Third panel is on the use of Web 2.0 in the classroom.

Alexandra Juhasz of Pitzer College is talking about her use of YouTube in a class, both viewing and production work. (You can see the work under the tag MediaPraxisme at YouTube.)

Juhasz feels that as a learning environment, YouTube was primarily a failure in her class’ experience.

Going public via YouTube was almost entirely a negative experience for the students. Also felt that the architecture of YouTube makes it impossible to form a community. Juhasz felt very uncomfortable as a pundit and trying to operate in a mainstream context, the course was mostly framed as something to mock when it was covered by MSM. (Though she points out that once they got into interviews, the reporters actually understood the course pretty well.) Early on the students were trying to learn how to make videos (like many YouTube posters) but of course YouTube comments aren’t a very nurturing environment.

Very interesting insights from the students into the idea of the classroom as a private or sanctified space, as sequestered from a generalized or public context. Also to some extent the antagonism between doing intellectual work and public work.

Students learned to make ideas visual–and compact.

I’m really, really struck at the parallels between what this class learned and what I think the students at Swarthmore’s War News Radio have learned about the translation point from intellectual work and communicative work in broader contexts, about how important it is to learn how to represent complex questions in compact ways that are native to a particular media form.

Class ended up discovering the more obscure, less viewed corners of YouTube.

Definitely makes me think about the problems involved in teaching about games and play as well: subjects which the public imagine as frivolous (which are in fact frivolous or entertaining in some sense) they believe cannot be or should not be studied. My basic response is still, “How can you think that something that billions of people do (and pay to do) isn’t interesting? How can you think that there is nothing to study or talk about there in a liberal arts classroom?”

Juhasz felt that the students got tired of being stuck with entirely amateur forms of knowledge, were tired of the disorderly, anarchic environment within YouTube, wondered what (or whether) education is ever compatible with entertainment, but also wondered a lot about their own preconceptions of YouTube and entertainment were preventing them from thinking about the possibilities.

Funny video comparing YouTube and Sakai.

Great presentation, very interesting. The class strikes me as having been a “beautiful failure”, the essence of liberal arts education–do something, find out if it works, both as a class itself and in the thing you’re studying. Use a class to investigate and produce knowledge that’s both practical and intellectual.

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2nd presentation, Geoffrey Proehl, University of Puget Sound, about a dramaturgical wiki, in reference to a production of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.

Found early on that an existing dramaturgical website wasn’t really doing anything that couldn’t have been done in a more conventional publication format, wanted to think about a “virtual workspace”. Need to co-edit texts, many participants in co-editing. Potential collaborators may have difficulty coordinating in the same time and place in pre-digital dramaturgical labor, the wiki overcomes a lot of these issues. Big benefits to the dramaturgs themselves, maybe not that big an impact on the actors themselves.

Personal note: This is a simple thing, but it’s often overlooked, how important digital collaboration is for making asychronous work possible, for people who cannot be in the same space at the same time to work together. There’s always the old question, of course: what do you gain through presence that’s missing?

For another collaboration, when they were at a stage where it felt too raw and unfinished to put it in a public space, they sequestered it behind a Blackboard password.

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Jason Brown, Pomona.

Talking about faculty desires for tools and how little they have to do with the reality of staff capability and technological infrastructure.

CPanel as possible solution for what faculty need in terms of web access, but also WordPress as a great way to give various faculty what they may need for web pages. WordPress, he argues, is easy to deal with, flexible, tons of plug-ins.

Fantastico in CPanel as a way to deal with multiple installs.

Thinking about outsourcing the entire server; virtual private server as a way to deal with it.

Personal note: Hi, Eric and everyone else at Swarthmore ITS! I am understanding much more right now about LiquidWeb. Yes, I am another one of those dumb faculty who has opinions in advance of knowing what’s going on. Sorry, kthnx.

Personal note: some people are really, really good at putting together presentations. Jason Brown is one of them.

Funny but also some serious thinking about the issue of outsourcing in general. All email at Pomona is outsourced to Microsoft or Google, so as he sees it, the issue of whether to do it is over, and it’s now about what can be done within that context. Important to produce for the scholarly and knowledge commons right now even within outsourcing.