Last Wednesday I attended, with some other fellows from the institute, the Digital University conference at the Graduate Center. Several times during the day, and during a reception in the evening, projects that participants had worked on were demonstrated. A list of several was started by Matt Gold who moderated the pedagogy workshop.
Many of these projects were original and inventive in their use of technology. I was particularly struck by this comparative representation of all the different iterations of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This website allows you to follow the evolution of the text and easily compare several editions. It’s simple to use, elegant in a very minimalistic way, and does its very specific task very well. Several projects demonstrated at the conference had similar goals, of essentially displaying a large amount of information in a graphically effective way. There was a very striking and “pretty” application using self-generating spiral graphics to demonstrate genealogical information, for example.
But what next? I’ve had the opportunity to look at several such projects over time, and the web is full of similar attempts, that never get much use besides being demonstrated in conferences. How is a project like this meant to be used in teaching? I’m sure many of you are familiar with MERLOT, the site where, in my experience, many such brilliant ideas go to die. I feel like many of these projects begin from a “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” perspective, without careful consideration of what they will actually be used for.
Of course, the designers of these projects can validly claim that these are flexible tools with many possible applications, and that it is up to the instructor to make the best use of them. But technology has traditionally been designed and developed to deal with specific problems. Why should instructional technology be any different?
Can’t you, or shouldn’t you, really ask this question about all intellectual products? I mean, how many dissertations sit lifelessly on the shelves of libraries? How many books join them? As Kathleen Fitzpatrick noted at the Digital U conference, the average print run from a university press is 400. That’s a pretty limited impact.
I also am not sure I agree completely with your claim about the traditional, specific purpose of technology design. Yes, much has been designed to solve specific problems; but much has also been designed to explore problems, or has been applied to uses not originally intended. I think we’re still in an early, exploratory stage in the production of digital resources where models and norms are being developed, and specific value tends to be more diffuse. (I say this as someone who built a decidedly web 1.0 digital resource several years ago that (I’ve heard) is still occasionally used in high school courses.)
The value I took from the Dig U revolved around how digital tools and methods elevate and make open the processes of doing intellectual work. The most valuable tools (including In Media Res, IFB, what CHNM has produced, and many others) create and capture multiple paths into living processes. The best instructional uses of technology I think tend to follow that same core principle.
I’m not sure the comparison with dissertations is fair. Dissertations are “supposed” to be contributions to a field of knowledge, not a field of teaching, and, usually, expected to make a very specific and very targeted intervention in that field. They have a very limited audience by design, but they have a target audience.
[I was also pretty annoyed by the stupidity of that 400 number being tossed about, when it was also made clear that the 400 volumes were being purchased by libraries, not individuals, meaning the potential amount of readers could be a lot higher (or much, much lower).]
Even if value is more “diffuse”, I hope it can still be demonstrated in some way.
I have to question some of the assumptions embedded in your comment. Why are fields of “knowledge” and “teaching” separated? The pedagocical impulse at #du10 challenged that separation in my opinion, and if anything the open education movement has accelerated the rate at which students are viewed and expected to be producers of knowledge themselves.
Sure, it’s rare to “teach” dissertations, but if the underlying issue here is how do we asses the value of academic production, then certainly we need to look more at specific rather than intended consequences. Yet your assertion seems to accept the value of dissertations and limited run books based solely on either their intended interventions or scarcity; my point was, shouldn’t we demand the same demonstration of “value” of those resources as digital ones?
To be sure, the digital projects discussed at #du10 spanned from in-class assignments to open peer review processes to OER repositories, so certainly the value in them must be approached on a case-by-base basis.
Of course, there’s also the question of “value” itself, which is hardly a fixed-in-space idea. Take the example of the Draft Riot exhibit I built years ago. I happen to think it has value in and of itself because of the way it contextualizes on a timeline and a map the progression of the riots, and because it pulls together and captions a range of primary sources produced around the event. But just sending a class its url isn’t going to be “valuable.” It needs to be integrated with broader readings, discussions, and within the trajectory of a course, just like any other “text.”
I’d also note that I don’t think the 400 number is stupid to throw around at all, since so few academics realize that all of the energy that goes into producing a peer-reviewed monograph leads to so little. If our goal is to get our contributions out to as broad an audience as possible, why wouldn’t we work to circumvent such an outmoded process when the technology to do so while maintaining scholarly standards is readily and cheaply available?
Yeah, I know the answer: tenure and promotion.
Fairly or unfairly, visualization projects often face this objection — that they are nothing more than pretty pictures, and they have no real use value.
Putting aside that argument — even though I’m not sure we should, since aesthetically beautiful digital projects are valuable in and of themselves and have the ability to produce pedagogical gain by provoking/increasing student engagement — I think you’re missing the scholarly core of projects like Ben Fry’s edition of Darwin (and it’s important to note that even though these projects were brought up in the course of a workshop on pedagogy, most of them weren’t conceived of as pedagogical projects).
These projects are most properly understood as data visualizations — attempts to render in graphic form huge amounts of data in such a way that the visualization itself becomes the scholarly apparatus, rather than an illustration meant to accompany some other piece of text. The Ben Fry project takes a huge set of data — the multitude of textual edits Darwin made on successive editions of Origin of Species — and renders them in a visual form that excites exploration and investigation. Furthermore, that visualization has the power to reveal *patterns* of change in the data that might not have been discernable had the data been presented in a different form (in, say, a series of print-bound books, or in a table listing variations). This point is crucial.
There is a pretty robust set of visualization projects coming out now that deal with data-mining questions like “what do you do with a million books” and that otherwise build off of Franco Morretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees and other texts. I’d point you toward Lev Manovich’s lab, which is working on a series of important visualization projects. In this semester’s Core 2 class in the CUNY GC ITP program, we just did a unit of visualization last week. I’d urge you to read the following article, which we considered as we looked at a range of visualization projects:
Jessop, M. Digital visualization as a scholarly activity. Literary and Linguistic Computing v. 23 no. 3 (September 2008) p. 281-93
And, to sum up, I’d say that the important question isn’t, “and then what” (though that is a good question to ask), but rather “how are we to make sense of so much data?” Visualization offers one compelling way in.