The Five Year Plan

CIO is discussing the (not-so) long range plan, in preparation for a discussion with our bosses, and we've thought of developing a set of images of a day in the life of a faculty member or student. Here's my early-morning effort to think a couple of years down the road.

The prof

• rises to a first cup of coffee and the morning papers on the bedside tablet PC, then heads downstairs to her study. Her blog shows eight revised files from the seminar students and she dictates a short reaction to each. A couple of the student postings to the class space need Web resources added, and she does one of these for each student, storing a collection of screen shots and commenting as she works. She reflects that they’re getting good at thinking hypertexually, and they continue to surprise her with the trains of association spinning out fromarc a reading and class discussion to a favorite film, a tentative political stance, a recent discussion on another class’s blog.
• The morning mail has a short video edited from last Friday’s senior seminar by the department assistant (one of the junior majors), and this she pronounces ready for the students' review and discussion  as she opens access on the departmental blog.  There is a clever parody of the President's discursive style from her grad school friend, and she drops this to the "humor" panel on her blog.  The revised agenda for the workshop next week she decides can wait until the evening, but as she drops it onto the "professional, pending" panel she includes a note to be sure the interactive display will work at wi-fi speeds in the lounge area of the conference building, where she hopes to discuss her panel with colleagues after the plenary session.  Since the next message is the Provost's second reminder, she dictates a short paragraph on how the new coffee bar in the art gallery has enhanced interdisciplinary discourse, then
• settles into preparing for her afternoon class.  The draft survey from last Thursday's lab session has collected 200 and some responses from across the campus, and she checks to make sure the macros are in place for today's demo on aggregating data, producing charts, and representing the findings statistically.  There are several additions to the shared links page for the course, and a particularly ingenious idea for the main study that evokes an e-mail pat on the back for the student (with links to a couple of journal articles relating to the hypothesis in question). One of the readings for today's class is a classic paper on the integration of "hard" and "soft" methodologies, and she re-reads the difficult section explaining the formulas and makes three minor changes in her annotations to the students' file copy of the reading.  She will remind them that each mention of this reading in the class blog or individual work should include a link to the original document with its archived comments by students and herself and its dynamic links to search agents pointed at scholarly papers non-trivially referencing this one and to the wikipedia entry on the author.
• She starts a working lunch in a corner chair at the coffee bar, but she is joined by her colleague in the reading group (the only one of the 17 other members she ever sees in person), and they chat for a few minutes about Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, agreeing that the AV annotations offering Bach's score and Gould's early performance has been helpful, especially given the richness of the links to Hofstadter's work. They really must get the three life sciences people in the group to lead them through the genomics connotations of the novel.
• The afternoon's class goes well.  The students are all familiar with the main lines of argument in the reading, and several of them have been in animated discussion on the blog intermittently during the night.  She lets them continue this discussion, reflecting that these face-to-face discussions (without a computer in sight) are still where some of the best ideas develop.
• She drops by the technology center on her way home for a chat with the colleague who is planning the comparative literature conference in the spring.  Since this will involve both simultaneous translation and fully hypertextual annotation across four languages it's important to be sure that the support people at the participating institutions have all the software tools needed, and that each participant has been offered a full range of training and practice resources and a blog in which to comment on them.
• She treats herself to a slow supper with an archived "Prairie Home Companion" playing on the kitchen speakers, spends half an hour with personal e-mail and another half responding to student entries in the blog, then catches up with the last two episodes of "The Mezzo-Sopranos," the crime drama to which she is unaccountably addicted.  She sets a few reminders for tomorrow morning's calendar, dozes reading another chapter of Powers on the tablet, and falls asleep with the Goldberg playing softly.

The student

• rises to a chirp from the coffee maker and scans the late-night and early-morning away messages on the various chat windows still open on the wall monitor.  He echoes this to his tablet, chuckles as he reads the messages, and settles for a minute with his own "Good morning, Haverford!" chatbot, adding a witty comment on last night's plenary and a mock-soulful prediction that "The Code shall pass."  He drags the (as yet unread) readings for his various classes from his blog's to-do panel to his PDA, pauses to record a witty wake-up message for his roommate, and heads off to the D.C., where he is still able to get breakfast and to find a deserted corner in which he can start reading this afternoon's assignment. He's inferred from their away message that __ will show up before he has to head to the library, and sure enough, they have time for a few words about last weekend.
• He spends an hour in the library, finding two books relevant to the topic he proposes to discuss with the prof as a term project and scanning several passages to which he wants to draw the class blog's attention.  His tablet feeds him a prioritized list of resources on his project topic, and he passes this on to his semantic indexing agent for retrieval this weekend.  He realizes he's unclear about incorporating classmates' RSS feeds into his indexer again, and he gets a librarian to walk him though the next several steps, as he logs the relevant URLs to his PDA. He really should set Saturday afternoon aside to think through the relationship between Freud's dream theory and “Mulholland Drive,” the film on which he is to lead next week's discussion in the Trico film club blog.  Since he'll be home, maybe he could suggest that he and __ could watch it at the same time on their laptops, with an open chat window.
• Back at the room, he discovers several surprises left by his roommate:

o a pop-up window springing from his away message, in which his roommate has combined a bit of patter from the original Robin Williams film with “Apocalypse Now”'s attacking helicopters.  (Maybe it was a mistake to agree to let each other hack their chat windows, so that group over at HCA never knows with whom they're speaking.)
o A screen shot of the new high-level Druid character the roommate's been playing on the MMORPG, with an easy-to-figure-out clue about where he'll be hiding in Fangorn forest later this evening.  There should be time to spend half an hour getting his Marrakesh-market trickster primed to rap with the Druid on the little stage in the side room at the "Entwash," if only those so-called "posthumans" haven't taken over the whole bar…
o An actual yellow post-it note stuck to his tablet's charger, saying that __ had stopped by on the way to class and suggested he come over after dinner to talk about the weekend. 

• He closes or suspends most of the windows on his PC, selects some classic rock from his media player (to get him in touch with his prof's retro perspective on things), and settles down to blog.

Comments

[Vicky]

How technology can enhance and support the Haverford Experience that sets the college apart from others: [envision an onion- like Shrek???]

At the core of the Haverford experience is the faculty-student and intra-class relationships. If we envision this as a solid sphere in the center, then the work the faculty and students must do to prepare for this face-to-face encounter is the next layer out. This preparation encompasses many different types of activities and communications, such as Doug presents in his ‘day in the life…’ The ideal environment is one in which there are many options; everyone is equally familiar and comfortable with using any or all of these options; one can take advantage of them from anywhere on campus or at home; it is easy to make “connections” between different resources (including people); communication can take any form (speaking, typing, scribbling, photographing, linking, taping, etc.); remote functions serve not to replace but to enhance and continue the face-to-face experience; and everyone will have their own ‘gizmo’ to serve up all these functions when needed. Within the classroom, activities are expanded as well, emphasizing active learning, visual simulations, and virtual worlds.

Surrounding, and forming the outer layers of our “onion,” is the transparent cloud called Infrastructure. Used seemingly unconsciously, this layer has two important functions: preparing students and faculty to be comfortable working in this environment, and silently performing the underlying actions that support the preparations for the face-to-face encounters. The campus community must be able to rely on, and even take for granted, the technology underlying this vision so it becomes as invisible as electricity is for your toaster. The flip side of this invisibility contains a robust program for student and faculty fluency in IT that goes beyond tech skills, and beyond information/research skills, to an understanding of the basic principles of IT, and to the ability to learn new applications and apply them in complex and unexpected situations. Also on this flip side is a balance of security needs and functionality.

Also included in this anywhere/anytime environment are still some physical focal points: the TLC is where faculty go when ready to proceed to the next level – there you will find colleagues (faculty, staff, and students) to discuss current and future work, get advice and new ideas, experiment with the next generation of IT applications. Student lab spaces provide beyond the norm facilities: group spaces, presentation practice areas, get-away-from-your-roommate space, international TV, coffee, ultra high speed connections, and more! Staff and support spaces are easily accessible for that rare need for upgrades or repairs.

Extra bits:
- remote learning to keep students abroad connected to the campus community
- community building and support is core function for IT
- connections within and beyond the campus are selected for optimum fit with the college culture
- the personal and the professional merge, and the gizmo of the future has yet to develop and become mainstream
- hypertext becomes ‘hypermedia’; the visual supplements the textual; the multi-dimensional replaces the linear

[Bryan]

A delightful post! I find myself wrenching my attention away from the examples ("Mezzo-Sopranos! Posthumans!") to address your model...
1. Excellent idea to focus not on gadgets (I do need that coffeemaker) but on *fluencies*.
2. Why assume email will be that significant? Between RSS, IM, Web sites, most of our work is now covered (cf posts to Infocult)
3. I'm still thinking through what ubicomp will look like. Phone-centric?
Multi-devices? One big notebook, a la Greg Egan?

I started to compose an alternative, where DRM is everywhere. That's too damned depressing to do right now, as the sun just broke through clouds. Maybe later?

I need to get to that Powers, you fiend...

[bk]

I'd be curious to see a third section for someone who is neither prof nor student.

Because Jefferson coined the term, UVA is big on the idea of the "citizen scholar" -- or at least big on the rhetoric.

Have you seen this piece?

THREE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AN ACADEMIC AND AN INTELLECTUAL: WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LIBERAL ARTS WHEN THEY ARE KICKED OFF CAMPUS?
by Jack Miles

www.crosscurrents.org/miles.htm

A summary of the differences:

(1) An academic has and wants an audience disproportionately made up of teachers and students, while an intellectual has and wants teachers and students in his audience only in proportion to their place in the general educated public.

(2) An academic is a specialist who has disciplined his curiosity to operate largely within a designated area, while an intellectual is a generalist who deliberately does otherwise.

(3) An academic is concerned with substance and suspicious of style, while an intellectual is suspicious of any substance that purports to transcend or defy style.

By this description, I'm an intellectual for criteria #1 and #2, and undecided on criterion #3.

[bw]

Your blog post illustrates a particularly intriguing vision of an academic techno-utopia, and it pleases me greatly that Haverford has a faculty member who sees, appreciates, and urges the future as vividly as you do.

One could wax endlessly about the specific gadgets and fluencies needed to realize your vision, and your post excels at de-emphasizing the specificities while underscoring the mindset. I've caught glimpses of the rather numinous vision myself -- of a pervasive network facilitating a seamless (or nearly seamless) exchange with the sum body of available information and people.

Once convinced of the virtues of such an environment, my next question is, "how do we get there?" I believe that the world at large is on the right track. Technology-oriented companies are making great strides by their ongoing quest for the killer app. Vendor lock-in, largely the antithesis of network pervasion, is under consumer scrutiny like never before. Technological barriers fall as R&D budgets rise, and advances in both engineering and theory pave the way to a society that is both freer and safer than we've ever experienced. Your own reference to smart mobs illustrates the point nicely. I think it's all but inevitable that we'll get there.

The proposal we reviewed at this past EPC meeting was somewhat confused -- it ultimately asks "Do we want to start a dialogue?" when I think it's trying to ask "How can we accelerate Haverford toward better technological integration?"

Beyond that, we heard arguments for two types of proficiency.

The first is that students should be expected/enabled to master a discrete list of technological procedures, such as publishing web sites, using footnotes in MS Office, or entering mathematical expressions into TeX. The justification is that these are necessary or advantageous prerequisites for the other aspects of education. One can't write an effective research paper without footnotes, and one cannot publish a mathematical proof in today's world without the ability to share it electronically. No one disputes that these are admirable goals, and the consensus seemed to be that they can be fulfilled with an integrated approach: the writing professor ensures that his students knows how to footnote; the mathematics professor coaches her students in TeX. This sort of ad-hoc approach is the one currently favored, and I question if there is any evidence of existing deficiency.

The other is both more intriguing and more amorphous. Being fluent at technology -- "grokking" it, as the techs adopt from Heinlein -- entails a basic understanding of the entirety of technology. It's a holistic grasp of the way everything interconnects rather than a discrete view of individual points. It's an ability to see not only a new technology, but the IMPLICATIONS of it: "wireless access in the classroom" ought to conjure visions of simultaneous meta-discussions during a lecture, real-time critiques, student interaction -- combining the best elements of discussion and lecture orientations into a single interconnected, asymmetrical pedagogical mode.

This sort of holistic fluency is difficult to quantify, teach, or even define. Though I cannot present unassailable arguments justifying this, I believe that holistic proficiency is self-emergent when the technology is in place and socially accepted. It cannot be taught -- it is the kind of familiarity that can come only through exploration.

If I were drafting a roadmap for realizing your vision at Haverford, I would concern myself more with effecting the prerequisites for pervasive networking and less with forcing so-called FITness on students. First on my list would be unencumbered WiFi in every classroom and the strong suggestion that incoming freshmen opt for a lightweight WiFi-enabled laptop computer. Next would be educating professors about how to improve their pedagogics with intra-classroom networks. Perhaps the college should officially recognize instant messaging like it has recognized email. As it has standardized on a central Haverford service for email addresses, so should it erect a central instant messenger service. One such product is Jabber -- it is a secure open-source instant messaging solution, free from the bonds of AOL, platform-independent, and capable of working on a central server run by the college.

Haverford students will mobilize around technology regardless of the administration's actions -- for evidence of this, one needs only look to FIG. Funded and run entirely by students, the server that runs GO and the services it offers are far superior to any the administration has implemented. The administration has an interest in standardizing the technology, however, to keep it secure, funded, and accepted by faculty. Message boards will be added to Go; a "shadow directory" for students to volunteer fully searchable contact information is ostensibly also in the works. If the administration showed interest, I'm sure it could be configured to allow such niceties as a private message board for every course (moderated by the professor), easily accessed class email lists with other contact information displayed in-line, and so forth.

You and I are in agreement that Haverford could benefit immensely from greater technological integration, but I think the first step is in laying the infrastructure and educating the faculty to accept the technology beyond going through the motions. When the technology is in place and the faculty is comfortable with it, I believe that proficiency among students will follow.

Naturally, none of the above is intended to represent the views of EPC.

[d2]

If "blog" is not part of your vocabulary, I suggest you start with the fine introduction (and browse the linked treasures in the bibliography) in the NITLE News's Weblogs in Education: Bringing the World to the Liberal Arts Classroom, by Sarah Lohnes (NITLE News, v. 2, #1, Winter, 2003).