cac.ophony.org

As an editor for the Radical History Review, I spend a lot of time counting characters (text characters that is).  Duke University Press, the publisher of the journal, allows a fixed number of journal pages per volume.  Short of typesetting an article, the most accurate way for RHR editors to estimate the length of a given article or entire issue is to count characters (yes, spaces count, and so do footnotes).  Occasionally we have a space crunch toward the end of a volume and the pressure is on.  If there is a huge overage, the game is political, determining which authors might be willing to postpone publication of their piece to a later issue.  If it is a smaller amount, authors and editors are forced to tighten the text or remove/shrink images.  It doesn’t take long before the cutting war becomes a word-by-word battle where every character counts (and the hefty penalty fee assessed by the publisher for overage looms large).  When we begin constructing an issue, the 600,000+ character space seems vast,  but as it comes down to the wire claustrophobia sets in.

Unlike a Twitterer bending to duck a 140-character limit, the journal author/editor can go only so far with creative solutions since the text must adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style and Merriam-Webster Dictionary.  Although the dictionary is growing it doesn’t allow for the creative abbreviations being pioneered by twitterati.  It usually means following Strunk and White’s advice: “Omit useless words.”  Not surprisingly, the intense editing done under the character-limit gun tends to yield excellent results.

As we help our students discover the value that comes along with the frustrations of editing, I think that space constraints can play a valuable role.  When a student shortens a text or tweet, they are employing some of the same skills necessary for communication efficiency in other contexts.

New technologies are not the first to put a price tag on characters.  An Op-Ed in the New York Times over the summer pointed to some humorous abbreviations invented by penny-pinching telegraph senders facing 15-character and 10-word limits.  I am intrigued by the expressions that the editors of the “The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code” (1891) deemed worthy of inclusion.  Some of them are not phrases I see often these days (“can you recommend to me a good female cook,” abbreviated “CRISP”); others are (“taxation is oppressive”, “ORGANISM” for short).

Here is an excerpt, including some other abbreviations you may choose to use in your next tweet:

ABANDONEE Abandoned in a sinking condition
ABETTING Everything depends on the ability with which it is (they are) handled.
ABUSAGE His (their) absence is rather mysterious.
ACESCET Has met with a trifling accident.

I see that this post is already at 2775 characters, so I best stop here.

The Lost Museum is a pretty creepy place to go to.  Going to the site at night alone while everyone is sleeping freaked me out …  Who made the site so freaky?

Those are the words of one of my students in an urban history course at Baruch College, written after completing an assignment at a virtualized version of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum (originally located at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street between 1841 and 1865).  The student seems to have meant the comment as criticism, but I believe it is in fact a high compliment to the makers of the Lost Museum website.  If you haven’t visited before, I recommend that you check out the site.

A team at the American Social History Project and the Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center developed the project between 1996 and 2004, programming with Flash and Softimage animation software to offer online visitors a deeply interactive experience.  User participation is heightened while navigating through the empty museum (in a first-person, role-playing video game format) as visitors seek clues to determine which of Barnum’s many enemies may have burned down the museum in 1865.  Along the way, they encounter historical information about the museum, the city, and the nation during the mid-nineteenth century.  So, the fact that my student expressed fear in virtually wandering through an empty, dark, 100-year-old museum filled with items ranging from fantastical creatures to war memorabilia means that the site designers succeeded at temporarily transporting him to another place and another time.

Earlier this week, Luke did some virtual transport of his own, leaping 600 miles and many years back to the site of his childhood memories in Michigan, crafting a media-rich tour of the locale.  As his title suggests, he did all this through story telling, a technique that does not require a high speed internet connection and new age video processing, but can demonstrably be enhanced by it.

While teaching with the Lost Museum, I noticed that my students questioned the material they encountered on the site far more meticulously than that of their textbook and navigated through it with greater confidence.  Some commented boldly about the political turmoil in New York City over slavery evident in the antebellum museum.  Others drew accurate conclusions about Barnum’s pioneering role in shaping 19th century entertainment: “Barnum must have been very good at manipulating the audiences to buy the load of nonsense he exhibited at his museum.”  A third group zeroed in on minute details: “As for the cage with a bunch of different species of animals that can eat each other, how many times did Barnum have to restock the cage?”

I found a similar tendency by students to raise probing questions when studying tenement living on the Lower East Side with the aid of a virtual tour constructed by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.  One of the apartments is empty, but the rest are restored with period furnishings.  Unfortunately, you have to go to the museum in person to interact with role-playing actors and get a more visceral feel of the claustrophobic conditions.  Next time around, I will plan to add a street-level tour of the surrounding neighborhood, as imagined by Luke.  Maybe by then, someone will have invented a simulation of the hustle and bustle of Hester Street so my students can push through the crowds to visit their favorite street peddler (and Luke can restore the cast of characters that roamed North Genesee Drive).

One question I wish to raise here is, what are the risks and rewards of utilizing tools such as the Lost Museum in the classroom?  My examples in the last two paragraphs touch on a benefit of such a tool.  As for disadvantages, I wonder whether virtual tours of the past can “flatten” the past by making it seem too easy to visit.  Many of my students reflected on the process by which the site was constructed, and they tended to demonstrate a firmer grasp on the insurmountable distance between life in 2008 and 1865; but others struggled to contextualize the sites they encountered, even when prompted by the site to do so.

I am curious to hear from folks in other disciplines about the prospects for using computer simulations to enhance teaching your subject.  If the historical-minded among us wish to debate the merits of computer-mediated teaching of the history curriculum, I am of course also up for that, but I will wait for comments before getting into that discussion.

To open up this new year, I would like to extend a discussion that got off to a good start in 2006-7: the new possibilities and challenges associated with the fact that we increasingly–whether we like it or not–have an online persona to project, or at the least protect. Kate got this ball rolling with her post, “Excuse me, sir, but your online persona is showing.”

I came across a closely related article in today’s New York Times, titled “Putting Your Best Cyberface Forward.”

The image above, lifted from the article, clearly communicates the main point. If you have the chance to read the piece you will find a couple of intriguing findings by social scientists studying online behavior patterns, but mostly confirmation of what you already know. Even the author of the article partially acknowledges this, comically noting,

“The scholars found it common for online daters to fudge their age or weight, or to post photographs that were five years old. Also, the world is round and the chemical symbol for water is H2O.”

However, even if the contents of the article don’t teach us loads, it is important to note that the article appears in the “Fashion & Style” section, not in “Technology”, speaking to the expansion of this issue far beyond the technical.

Mikhail recently pointed out to me the cover article from the December 3, 2006, New York Times Magazine: “Open-Source Spying” (available digitally to NYT members or for a one-time charge here; or through “Proquest Newspapers” or “Business & Company Resource Center” databases). As he noted, and I have been spending some time thinking about, the article raises some interesting questions related to our use of blogs, wikis, and other information sharing technologies in the realm of education.

Despite intelligence analysts’ emphasis on secretiveness, their success relies heavily on collaboration. This phenomenon is not new, but has been gaining more attention post-9/11 as agency leaders consider (or are forced to consider) altering traditional, hierarchical structure in the face of a newly-defined enemy. “To fight a network like Al Qaeda,” says a professor of defense at the Naval Postgraduate School, “you need to behave like a network.”

Based on this philosophy, U.S. intelligence agencies are piloting new (relatively cheap) information systems modeled after “Web 2.0 technologies” such as blogs and wikis, to see if systems that favor rapid, relatively free flow of information can outperform their current (very expensive) systems, which favor secrecy but restrict inter-agency communication. Supporters of the new technologies hope they will enable analysts across agencies to effectively ‘connect the dots’ (disparate shreds of evidence turned up across the world). They aim to harness “the wisdom of the crowd” (ranging from large groups of government analysts to huge groups of public amateurs depending on the security level) in the manner of Wikipedia, drawing conclusions that even the sharpest experts can reach in isolation.

Not surprisingly, the use of information technology to disperse more information to more people raises challenges for spies, some of which overlap with those encountered by educators. The most prominent problem is data overload. One interviewee points out that the already difficult challenge of finding a needle in a haystack is not alleviated by new technologies that make it easier for more hay to be dumped onto the pile.

Additionally, there is the hurdle of achieving a critical mass of users. Particularly in the case of wikis, the power of collaboration lies in numbers. In the case of an inter-agency intelligence wiki now being piloted this means persuading thousands of employees to participate in the new venture, requiring a major cultural shift in communication. In the case of blogs, a similar situation arises where traffic remains low until a dense enough network of links moves a certain blog into overlapping discussions.

The bottom line here is that the spies are taking a page from the social networkers. Whether they succeed or not is yet to be seen. My question is what can educators learn from the spies? To what degree do universities face an analogous problem as the intelligence agencies, and what might effective inter-departmental, inter-faculty, or inter-student collaboration look like?