USC Phd student Alex Leavitt followed her proposal by inviting other academics to make 2012 their “Year of Code.” Numerous people across the twitterverse are also participating in Codeacademy.com‘s #codeyear.

Davidson and Leavitt’s calls to code, both of which espouse a leftist politics of democratic or Do It Yourself coding, make me reflect on the different values that are currently competing in the software programming and academic spheres; proprietary models v. open access/open source models. In particular, the academic debate about open access to academic knowledge recently reared its head in Congress, when in December of 2011 the Research Works Act, an act that would block mandates of public access to federally-funded research, was introduced to the House of Representatives. This act is likely a response to recent moves on the part of the Obama administration toward better access to scientific publications (see the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 and the subsequent Request for Information on Public Access to Digital Data and Scientific Publications). While the Research Works Act will probably not pass, it speaks to the conflict inside and outside academia between privileging information and disseminating information, between profit and public interest.

What, one might wonder, might code coming from within the academy, produced, as Davidson envisions, by an educated public, look like? And, in terms of student grades or professional tenure, how would it be evaluated?

It is an interesting exercise to compare Google and Facebook with academia. Google and Facebook are widely successful because they are a contradiction–they are free to the public and friendly to the non-expert, yet their code is secret and they make money from said public through ads.  They are open but closed, profit-making but free. American academia, on the other hand, makes its “secrets” available, but only to those who pay large amounts of money and who strive to become experts.

Traditional academic tenure and evaluation is alien to the kind of collaborative (and proprietary) code farming that Google encourages. How could a tenure committee evaluate one coder out of a team of hundreds? Even with a trail of changes made by each individual, it would be almost impossible to separate that person’s work from that of others. Of course, not all coding is done collaboratively, but I would argue that most large scale projects with major impact are. As more examples of academic coding emerge, the tenure process will hopefully adjust to accommodate new modes of authorship in the digital age.

One high-profile academic seems frightened at the prospect of academia’s descent into the digital. Stanley Fish calls “‘blog’” “an ugly word” for its impermanence.  As someone who wants his critical insights to be “decisive” and “all [his],” Fish dislikes thinking of himself as a blogger–a figure who seems so interconnected with everything around him that he ceases to exist. Fish is disturbed by this possible loss of identity and “linearity,” by the web’s tendency to move “into a multi-directional experience in which voices (and images) enter, interact and proliferate in ways that decenter the authority of the author who becomes just another participant.” Poor Stanley Fish experiences this every time he opens his browser.

Fish goes on to quote Kathleen Fitzpatrick as affirming this death of the author:  “all of the texts published in a network environment will become multi-author by virtue of their interpenetration with the writings of others.”

I would argue that coding and other digital forms of authorship do often invoke this sense of the networked self to an even greater extent than traditional scholarship. In part that is probably because online social networks allow scholars to continually mix and concentrate their ideas with the ideas of others. Seeing one’s own voice as just one tweet in a tsunami of tweets can be a bit humbling. But then again, when people band together and find like ground, their accomplishments can be even grander than what one can do alone. There is a happy medium that can be found between solo pursuits and selfless proprietary software. I am optimistic to note that a vast amount of software developed through academic institutions is open access and open source, including as Sakai, Weka, and Stanford NLP software.

Back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT created ELIZA, one of the first computer programs (chatter bots) that could maintain a meaningful conversation with humans. ELIZA was created to help patients in need of psychotherapy. ELIZA software responded to patients by using pattern matching techniques – providing answers based on similar keywords. The name ELIZA was inspired by Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, who learns to speak as a member of the elite society.  After some interaction with ELIZA it was possible to discern that ELIZA was a program, however some people believed that ELIZA was a real person.

A Turing test is usually used to evaluate how well a software program imitates humans. Created in the 1950s by Alan Turing, the test helps differentiate between humans and computer programs that imitate human intelligence. During the test, a human judge is assigned to chat with a human and a machine. If the human judge is able to guess who is who, the software program fails Turing Test. The test is implemented in an annual Loebner Prize competition that evaluates the most sophisticated chatter bots.  One of the winners of Loebner Prize – A.L.I.C.E.  is able to maintain a conversation, however in spite of receiving three Loebner Prizes, it still fails to pass Turing test. Another chatterbot Cleverbot won Machine Intelligence Competition in 2010  and passed Turing Test by only 42 percent.

A recent trend is to apply artificial intelligence for the development of personal assistant programs in mobile devices. Dragon Dictation software types down everything you say, and a Genius Button imbedded in hardware of some Android based phones is at your command at all times – finds locations, replies to your emails, calls your contacts and performs other routine tasks. Personal assistants can send emails, post to social media sites, take notes, translate, look up weather, update calendars, find directions and talk to their owners. While Apple’s Siri received a lot of attention in the media, there are similar programs available on Android Market, such as SpeakToIt and Jeannie. To help understand accents, a Singapore company SingTel created DeF!ND, software that understands Singlish – English spoken with a Singaporean accent.

While the use of Artificial Intelligence in mobile applications is on the rise, how this technology will develop? The usage of such applications in academia is also intriguing. For example, can students benefit from using “personal assistants”? Will it be possible to create technology that looks up references, helps in doing homework, or automatically creates and posts assignments by the deadline?

photo credit: slowburn♪

How did we achieve such progress? Not easily. According to Matt Ridley, the author of “The Rational Optimist”, the stone tool was the only technology for more than a thousand millennia and the bodies and brains of prehistoric men changed faster than their tools. Only later in our history did people begin developing newer and better technologies such as the fishing rod, the wheel and agricultural tools. The rate of invention has accelerated rapidly during the past two centuries.

The development of communication technologies was central to this change.  For centuries the fastest way to deliver information was on a horseback. Still, people would wait for their mail for days, weeks and even months. The materials needed for such information dissemination were scarce too: horses were expensive, paper and ink were not readily available for everyone, and people overall had less than desired literacy levels.

The invention of Gutenberg printing press changed the way information was produced, however the dissemination of information was still relatively slow. The optical telegraph was invented in France in the 18th century. Multiple towers were built around the country. Messages were delivered by conveying visual signals: a sender would send the message; a recipient of the next tower would get the message while looking at a telescope and transfer it to a person sitting on the top of another tower and so on. On a good clear day, a message could reach from Paris to the South of France in one day, on a gloomy day it would take longer. The quality of messages was below optimal as a lot of errors were made along the way. Soon enough, optical telegraphs were replaced with electric telegraphs, and the first transatlantic message was sent in the 19^th century. After that, the speed of transmitting information became faster and cheaper almost every decade. The radio, telephones, television and finally the Internet lowered the cost of communication, and made information fast and pervasive. Later, mobile technologies connected people around the world including countries that previously did not have even land lines. Faster means of communication allowed people to share ideas more easily, further accelerating the rate of technological innovation.

Ridley explores the notion of “collective intelligence” as a driver of innovation. The stone tool required the creativity and skills of one person and was made of one material – the rock. The smartphone tool needs the creativity and skills of thousands of people. Phones are made mainly of plastics, metals, ceramics and glass. To produce these materials copper, gold, lead, nickel, zinc, beryllium, tantalum, lithium, cadmium, crude oil, limestone and various liquid crystalline substances are required. These materials are mined, combined with other materials in a processing plant and shipped to the manufacturer. Software developers write various applications using computers and servers that are produced by others who use a range of materials in their work. Nano technologists, quantum physicists, inventors, entrepreneurs, marketers, advertisers and countless other people contribute to the creation of a single device.

Natural curiosity forces us to come up with better communication solutions and the advancements in communication technologies has allowed us to use our minds collectively to produce a wider range of goods. With advancements in technology we are able to create elaborate and complicated tools in a short period of time because we draw upon the knowledge of multiple people. Although no one person can recreate these tools on her own due to their complexity, the collective knowledge generated by people enables creativity and innovation. Non-experts with great ideas now find it easier to collaborate with experienced specialists, and to contribute greatly to the emergence of new technologies that may enrich people’s lives, while helping us progress even further from the Acheulian axe.

But seeing as some of my BLSCI colleagues might be awaiting something from one who could talk some smack but still state facts, get down to brass tacks, not exactly attack but risk a lack of tact, and maybe attract fellow hacks to take a crack at McCracken. Wise-cracks and shellackings, maybe followed by retractions and being sent home packing.

Or maybe a pact. But not exactly to shack up intellectually with this jack of all trades and his tract on value-extraction.

Alack, what to make of McCracken?

I started calling myself an anthropologist not too long ago, and since Dr. McCracken does as well, I suppose we have something in common. I suppose our differences are an invitation for me to police the boundaries of our discipline. The stakes seem to be broader than just defining what a proper understanding of anthropology or ‘culture’ can or should be. In any case, for all their propensity to deploy opaque jargon, anthropologists don’t maintain a monopoly on the concepts and methodologies of their field. Ethnography is increasingly popular in business, law, design, as well as other academic disciplines. The right to talk about culture belongs to everyone. I don’t think many anthropologists would object to that sentiment.

That said, McCracken’s take-away message was that successful companies need to be hip to culture and its vagaries, especially of a certain category of people he referred to repeatedly as the ‘Qydz.’

The Qydz are, as I understood McCracken, a rather large and underexamined tribe. They actually live among us, rather than in some faraway rainforest or mountainous highland. (At least, we aren’t so interested in the Qydz residing in such remote lands.)

These Qydz are the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism. Any business worth its salt should devote its energies toward studying the values and aesthetic tastes of this people. For the Qydz are nothing else if not consumers. And oh, the stuff they consume! Baggy jeans! Flip-out keyboard texting gizmos! Snapple!

Apparently, the Qydz are not born or raised. They have no provenance, no parentage, no institutions that foster their development. They simply appear in their present form (or ‘respawn’ as they might say in their own video-game parlance), as autonomous beings arranged into ‘generations’ we can only designate as ‘X’ or ‘Y’ (no word yet on any Generation Z sightings). Qydz culture prizes individualism, but their collective will is mighty and a thing to be feared only if business does not have the products to appease them.

Three female Qydz foraging for sustenance (not such a rare sighting, actually)

For McCracken, the wants of the Qydz are limited only to their own imaginations, which, he contends, are limitless. Business can only hope to track the Qydz desires by means of increasingly sophisticated trend-tracking technology and–gasp!–ethnographic methods. Yes, really getting to ‘hang’ with some Qydz is a thrilling and potentially dangerous experience.

Academics spend oodles of time with Qydz, but McCracken may lament the time professors waste speaking to them, teaching them of our ways of life, rather than listening to and observing them. Pity.

It is increasingly clear that the Qydz are a natural resource we must safeguard carefully, lest they begin to imagine and wish for things business cannot manufacture and sell to them.

Great former tribesman Qydz referred to as Qurt Qobayn (center). He is still revered on t-shirts and other sacred memorabilia as an unsatisfied customer.

In 2005, Google launched its ambitious project to digitize books. It has already scanned 12 million different titles so far. There were lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild against Google regarding a violation of copyright laws because a majority of these books (about 8 million) were out-of-print but still copyright protected. Under the new settlement reached in 2008, authors have control over how and when the material is displayed and receive a share of market revenue. The below video clip features Robert Darnton who criticizes this move as excluding the interests of readers, libraries, and the public good from the process.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18V0OAsLB9s[/youtube]

I am one of those old-fashioned people who prefer reading in print instead of on screen. But I can’t help but admit that electronic books might be our future destination, particularly considering the younger generations who were born digital. What bothers me the most is not whether or not we should trust the good will of Google, which is, after all, a profit-making private corporation. What is scarier is, as Darnton argues, we as users are not just ignored by one legal settlement and commercial deal between the Authors Guild and Google but excluded from any knowledge of what is happening behind the scene.

The LUC was founded by Michael Pinto-Fernandes and Sarwat Joarder, two Baruch undergrads who have worked tirelessly to get their journal off the ground, recruiting writers and editors from Baruch and other campuses. They’ve been an absolute joy to work with, and have thought deeply about everything from the design of their journal, to the intellectual property considerations of online publishing, to recruiting and managing a stable of writers, to integration and growth within the Baruch community.  The writing on the site is serious, thoughtful, well-sourced and solidly argued. Currently, there are 5 pieces published, and you’ll likely find much to both agree and disagree with.

The LUC — when combined with the recent transition of Dollars & Sense and the pending move of iMagazine to our system– marks the beginning of a new phase of self-publishing at Baruch College, where Blogs@Baruch supports members of our community as they make their unmediated voices heard. While I’ve worked closely with the LUC crew on the creation of their journal, and helped them think through both the implications and mechanics of online publishing, we’ve always agreed that the content is theirs, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s Left or Right, whether it’s right or wrong.  Therein lies one of the best arguments behind Blogs@Baruch: this is a tool to help our students thoughtfully navigate the world of web, and to do so on their own terms.

So, congratulations, Michael, Sarwat, and the rest of the LUC crew: we look forward to following the LUC as it grows (and we might chime in with a comment or two), and we commend you on your ambition!

“This is key to emphasize, for even if we can postulate a relation between a product of creative work—source code—and a democratic ideal—free speech, there is no necessary or fundamental connection between them (Ratto 2005). Many academics and programmers have argued convincingly that the act of programming should be thought of as literary—‘a culture innovative and revisionary close reading’ (Black 2002; see also Chopra and Dexter 2007). As with print culture of the last 200 years (Johns 2000), this literary culture of programming has often been dictated and delineated by a copyright regime whose logic is one of restriction. New free speech sensibilities, which fundamentally challenge the coupling between copyright and literary creation, must therefore be seen as a political act and choice, requiring sustained labor and creativity to stabilize these connections” (449).

Coleman’s words remind me of Mikhail’s recent post in which he weighed in on the question of openness of the VOCAT. I was excited to read that he believed the VOCAT should be free and open wide to other institutions and other developers, to benefit not only many other students and schools but also the tool itself so that it may evolve in ways we’ve never foreseen.

I also think that that’s how William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace,” envisions the Net in his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. With all the futurist horrors of mechanization of humanity imagined by the novel, it implies that the net can still be the brave new world for us as long as it remains open and public.

Following the conversation via Twitter. Photo by Alan Levine.

If you attended the Symposium on May 1, you no doubt saw that Twitter played a major part in the event: as a topic of conversation (as in Gardner Campbell’s session), as a means of broadcasting what was happening over the course of the day, and as a way to connect with others out there in in the Interwebs interested in what we were talking about.

Our friends in media services wheeled over a beautiful 46″ flat panel display, which we used with Twitter Camp to display all tweets tagged #blsci as they came in. By the end of the evening portion of the event, there were almost 300 tweets on the Symposium from attendees as well as a few other folks chiming in or sharing our tweets with their networks. (See Boone Gorges’ great post on the use of Twitter as a backchannel at the Symposium for more on the impact of microblogging on the day’s conversations.)

Naturally, we wanted a record of all this and started looking into ways in which to pull all #blsci tweets and save them for posterity. Unfortunately, there was no one good option. The native Twitter search was ok, but only returned a few tweets at a time. Twazzup was very nice but only returned about 100 tweets. Hashtags.org returned even fewer results grouped according to no clear logic at all. (These sites are fine for following tweets live, but not so much for archiving old ones.) A Twitter contact in Texas suggested a Python script (scary) that didn’t quite work right either.

Then, our good friends Lucas Thurston and Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding, the genius code-poet developers of our Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool (VOCAT), came up with a solution: a simple PHP script they called Tweetripper that dumped all the tweets we needed to a text file. When we ran it, Tweetripper, which came with simple but thorough instructions, gave us something that looks like this (these are just a few of the day’s tweets in reverse chronological order):


#blsci Elbow suggests we should learn the skill of ignoring audiences during speaking/writing. Says @jeffjarvis closed eyes during talk.
TiffanyPR
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:56:08 +0000

Elbow: first audience when writing must be yourself. #blsci
lwaltzer
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:50:59 +0000

A Twitterati gallery has emerged at the rear of the audience at #blsci. This might be related to the need for outlets.
boonebgorges
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:48:05 +0000

Afternoon speaker, Peter Elbow, is taking the stage. Author of "Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process."; #blsci
TiffanyPR
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:48:01 +0000

Wish I was at #blsci!
katemo
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:36:52 +0000

Fantastically stimulating conversation at Baruch Communication Symposium #blsci. Boring academics? Nay. They are the Twittelligentsia!
alberrios
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:10:04 +0000


Perfect. Just what we were looking for: a way of creating a record of all the furious tweeting from a remarkably stimulating and memorable event.

Zach and Lucas wrote this script absolutely pro bono, in the interest of others out there like us interested in a way to archive tweets. They created something the community wanted and shared it, enabling others to tweak it and adapt it and develop it further. That is the spirit of open-source right there. So, in that spirit, here is the Tweetripper script for those not afraid of a command line interface. Use it well. If you modify it, let us know.

I thought I’d share a few thoughts about how I use and perceive the service, which I joined about a year ago.

I’m not a Twitter evangelist; I don’t think it’s for everyone. If you’re using it and you don’t know why, maybe you shouldn’t be using it?

Twitter is not a platform, it’s an application that allows you to construct and dip in and out of conversations. You should @ often.

Anyone analyzing tweets only as stand alone statements will see self-absorption and “innate incoherence.” They miss the point.

Yet it’s easy to be misled by how Twitter works, because most answers to the question “What are you doing?” aren’t interesting.

But that’s not how the people I follow or I use it. Most of the people I follow instead answer the question “what are you thinking?”

If you follow interesting people who think interesting things, then it follows to think that their tweets might be interesting.

Over time your mind’s eye will learn to identify tweeters who have something relevant to say and to find yet others. Read critically.

The people I follow on Twitter aren’t necessarily my “friends.” Some people are comfortable with 100% virtual friendships. I’m not.

(I’m not raining on online friendships, I’m just saying they’re not for me).

The people who aren’t my friends whom I follow on Twitter I consider “acquaintances.” I think that’s a fairer name for what we share.

I’m willing to bore friends, but I try not to bore acquaintances, because some day, I might want them to be my friends.

I don’t — or try not to — complain about traffic or the academic #jobmarket, because, really, who’s interested in my bitching?

I bitch about traffic and the #jobmarket to my friends, and rarely think twice about confronting them when we’re hanging out.

I always think twice about confronting someone on Twitter. It’s not polite to disagree with acquaintances, though sometimes it must be done.

Mostly, though, I avoid confronting others because arguments in Twitter are unsatisfying. Neither party gets sufficiently into it.

So when I disagree with a tweet, I resolve the disagreement by reading and thinking more, writing a blog post, or talking with friends.

As a result, my tweetline offers a path into my life, reading, and thinking that’s perhaps a tad more upbeat than the real thing.

Ultimately, Twitter works for me because through it I am exposed to people that push and prod me to think and read more deeply and broadly.

I follow links from educators & historians & journalists & technologists whose judgments I respect. I learn. Hopefully, I also contribute.

“Blog to reflect, tweet to connect.” @bgblogging Claim anything more for Twitter, you’re either selling something or setting up a straw man.

As such, Twitter is not for people who have uttered the following statements:

“Twitter won’t work because it’s not profitable.” “Twitter can’t save journalism.” “Twitter encourages our worst impulses.”

Those statements are usually uttered by people with closed worldviews, with minds already made up.

Twitter, like everything else, is purposeful only if you use it with a purpose.

I vant to learn Inglich

After watching the video, I became intrigued with the site where he made it, xtra normal, which has the motto “If you can type, you can make movies.” You choose the scenery and characters, provide text, add sounds, camera angles, movements, and a few other features, and a 3-D animated video is created. It’s still in beta, and has some quirks that need to be ironed out, but add this to your tool box of “Gee whiz!” fun things you can do on the Internet. Of course, I had to play around with this new tool, and got hooked. So I put together this silly little video introducing this blog.

Warning: once you start playing around on this site, it is extremely hard to stop.

I want a cool phone. I am going to hold out ( with my old chunky Nokia) for a super duper model that can do all the things Japanese cell phones can do: read barcodes, serve as a credit card, have fingerprinting system to protect my data. Wow.
This might happen soon thanks to some amazing technology being developed to serve the needs of the disabled. New software developed for cell phones will allow low vision users to read supermarket products info or street signs. Or how about a program which allows the physically disabled to guide a computer mouse by neural impulses, or imagine a solar system visualization program where a blind person would use a forced feedback device to feel three-dimensional reconstructions of terrain on other planets (whaaaat???). Soon there will be worldwide open-source Web site on which disabled persons and software developers can collaborate on new ideas and add to existing programs. Most of these projects are run by universities and supported by some business like Goggle, but they are to be non- commercial, open-source projects. Very cool.

And on a related note, check out this New York Times Magazine article about the guide animals for the disabled. It is not just dogs anymore. Now it’s monkeys for quadriplegia and agoraphobia, guide miniature horses, a goat for muscular dystrophy, a parrot for psychosis and any number of animals for anxiety, including cats, ferrets, pigs, iguanas and ducks.

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.

Jim, the 6th of 7th children, was aware of only one photograph of himself as a baby. One. But last week a Facebook friend from his old neighborhood tagged an image of him at 3. Jim’s post praises Facebook for being good at connecting people with the past, and at making the sharing of memories so much easier than it was just a few years ago. This would have been possible without Facebook; but it would have been more difficult, perhaps to such an extent that it wouldn’t have happened at all. There’s a powerful argument in there that connectivity tools don’t just impact the way that we relate to one another, but also can impact the way we relate to our individual and collective pasts.

This post was on my mind when I began playing with Google Street View, a component of Google Maps that offers street level views of particular locales. This isn’t a new tool, but Google has been steadily adding images as its van tours and shoots different localities (here’s a list of what’s been added). I was surprised to see that the neighborhood in which I grew up has been photographed. North Genesee Drive is of no great consequence — beyond being sandwiched between the neighborhoods that produced Magic Johnson and Malcolm X — but there it is, ready for your virtual tour.

I haven’t been back to my old neighborhood in years, and was pleased that I was able to recreate the bike rides and explorations of my youth, even if through a somehwat antiseptic, Googleized filter. There was no cutting through yards, lemonade sales, or bullies to run from. My memory can fill those things in. Mostly, it was pleasant to visit from my desk in New York.

Here’s a gallery of screen captures; click through for captions.

I recognize that this particular application of the tool appeals to me on a nostalgic level, and while that’s fine for personal blogging and Facebooking and all that, it’s hardly a pedagogical argument. The images above affect me and the kids I grew up with more than they’ll affect you.

But it’s also pretty easy to see how tools like this, free tools available from your desktop, can be integrated into college curricula. Studying the Lower East Side at the turn of the century? Compare the built environment of Hester Street from Jacob Riis’s photographs to images of the area on Google Maps. Use Google Maps to explore planning and architecture in urban, suburban, and exurban neighborhoods. What can we learn about Barack Obama from a virtual tour of Hyde Park? Find images of parks in three different European cities; how does their location and construction reflect their usage? Locate five “Chinatowns.” How are they alike or similar in organization? Writing a term paper on the Atlantic Yards? Use Google Maps to show how construction will restrict traffic. The possibilities are endless. Google Maps won’t tell us everything we need to know about any of these topics; but then, no single source will. A virtual tour of a street or a neighborhood can impart a sense of location and feeling that can augment other information on the path to knowledge.  (I should also note that Jim is also ahead of the curve on this).

In the movie below, I use Google Maps to recreate the walk from my home to Verlinden Elementary School. Yes, again, I know, the nostalgia trap; but I was struck by the sheer number of possible jumping off points for discussion, reflection, and investigation produced just by reliving that two block walk. There’s something exciting about an exploratory process that encourages one to explore even more.

The two pieces of technology that really blew me away, however, were a printing device called Presto, and an enlarger.  The enlarger looks like a combination TV/overhead projector.  If there is something my grandmother wants to read, she places it on the machine, and it appears enlarged on the screen.  This enables her to read everything from the directions on prescription bottles, to her favorite philosophical texts, to emails from her grandchildren.

That’s right–my 99 year old grandmother loves email!  My grandmother is unable to use a computer, but we can send her emails through the Presto machine, which looks like a regular HP printer.  Over the weekend that I visited, daily horoscopes arrived, and several birthday wishes.  After the emails are printed, all she has to do is walk them over to her enlarger and boom–she is able to remain connected with friends, family, and the outside world.

The best communication I have with my grandmother, however, is decidedly low-tech.  It is face-to-face, looking her directly in the eyes, squeezing her hands, and telling her that I love her.  However, because we live a thousand miles away from each other, and the phone has become an impossible barrier, email has to suffice.  As soon as I got home from my trip, I sent her an email filled with photographs of our visit.

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks.  According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”

What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes?  Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.

Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition).  If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project.  For details on how the technology works, click here.

This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network.  reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process.  All of us together are smarter than we are added up.

Brilliant work.

(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)

Now that’s American ingenuity.