Last week I publicly (via Twitter—really what other venue is there?) mentioned that I might be leaving Dropbox. What ensued was a rather lengthy conversation between me and others as to why I would do such a thing. Soon after the conversation started, the folks at @Dropbox noticed and joined the discussion. Why would I think about leaving Dropbox, a service which I often cite as one of the most useful around for educators? One word answer: Privacy. Based on some recent reports, I now have reason to be concerned about the degree to which Dropbox can keep files secure and private. When I expressed these concerns via Twitter the folks at Dropbox responded with some helpful information, and an invitation to write their legal department with any concerns I might have (140 characters being insufficient for adequately addressing the matter. And as I said on Twitter, credit to Dropbox for listening and engaging in a conversation.) I started to write such an email, and then changed my mind, why not publicly layout my concerns, and let other educators see what the issues are, after all I feel somewhat responsible since I have spent so much time praising Dropbox. Rather than have a private dialogue with Dropbox it would be better to make it public, yes? So here goes. The Background: For those that don’t use Dropbox, think of it as an automatically syncing flash drive in the cloud, an excellent way to keep files synced across multiple computers and have them available on whatever device you have in front of you at the time. (Here is the official explanation.) Because of Dropbox I never need to carry assignments, syllabi, or journal articles that I want to read with me, or on a flash drive. These are just stored in the cloud and I can access them anytime the need arises. And this is just the tip of the ridiculously useful iceberg that is Dropbox. If you want more, just look at all the times it is mentioned on Profhacker (or just Google Dropbox uses and see what I mean). Dropbox has become one of the most important services in my media/computing ecosystem. On a scale of one to ten for usefulness and ease of use Dropbox is an 11. The Problem: About a month ago I started to see reports that expressed concern over Dropbox security, questions about the encryption being used, and who has access to the files you store on there servers. Basically there are to two sets of concerns. The first is that by design Dropbox is insecure. You can read the whole article, which is mildly technical but amounts to a concern that it would be fairly trivial for a nefarious party to steal one file and thus gain access to all your files without you necessarily knowing. The second is that Dropbox updated their Terms of Service to reflect the fact that they have access to your files if needed. In other words if the government subpoenas Dropbox, Dropbox has the ability to turn over your files in unencrypted form to the officials. (I know what some of you are thinking: Who cares, I am not doing anything illegal? . . . but wait I promise you should.) Both of these issues boil down to the fact that the encryption of your files takes place on the Dropbox servers, not on your own computer. In other words the question is who has the keys to your file(s) and where are those keys stored. One way to think about this concern is to imagine your files are being stored in a lock box. One way to do it would be to put the files in a lockbox keep the key and send the whole box to Dropbox. In this way Dropbox has no way to unlock the files. But rather than this method what Dropbox employs is a technique whereby you send them your files they place them in a lockbox and give you the key, but have another copy of the key that lets them look in your box anytime they want. Why would they do it the second way instead of the first? Several reasons but I think there are probably two main ones: 1. Ease of use for Dropbox customers. A system where they (the server) handle the encryption rather than one where you manage (the client) has several advantages including a "lighter" Dropbox program on your device since it doesn’t have to handle encryption and the ability to retrieve files for you, even if you forget or lose your password. 2. Dropbox doesn’t want to cross the government. Dropbox has responded to these concerns with a lengthy FAQ, which I encourage everyone to read. But, honestly the FAQ troubles me, and makes it even more likely that I will seek an alternative cloud service as it leaves many questions unanswered. My Concerns: Lets start with the transparency of this issue. What Dropbox is claiming, or appears to be claiming is that this change in the TOS does not reflect a policy shift, but merely an attempt to clarify what has been the policy all along. I’ll take Dropbox at their word on this, but I still have concerns about their wording. "That said, like all U.S. companies, we must follow U.S. law. That means that the government sometimes requests us (as it does similar companies like Apple, Google, Skype, and Twitter) to turn over user information in response to requests for which the law requires that we comply." What Dropbox seems to be implying here is that they are required by US Law to have what is known as a backdoor key (the ability to unlock any file) and give it over to the government when served with a subpoena. But this is not actually the case. If Dropbox has the ability to unlock the files yes they have to give that over if they receive a request. But that doesn’t mean that they have to build a system that would allow them to do this. In other words if they didn’t have the ability to unlock your files the government couldn’t ask for that key, because Dropbox wouldn’t have the ability to unlock said files, they could only give over the encrypted versions of the files to the government, rather than the actual files themselves. This is what is essentially the issue in this article, about the government wanting to be able to WireTap the Internet. My understanding though, and I have asked a few lawyers about this, and their opinion was that the current state of the law does not require companies to serve up plaintext files. Okay, at this point I hear many of you saying that you want this feature, that you want the government to be able to access the files of "the badies," and since you have nothing to hide from the government you are not concerned. Let’s table that for a moment, and I’ll explain in a second why this is a dangerous view, but for now, irrespective of this issue there is a more significant one, which affects every user, regardless of whether or not you feel that you have something to hide from the government: A system which by design enables a third party to decrypt your files, is by design not secure. Or, a secret between two people can only be kept if one of them is dead. A system which by design has a backdoor to enable third party access is vulnerable to a security breach. As a way of thinking about this consider the relatively recent case where a Google Employee was accessing user email and chats. Yes, Google is concerned about user privacy, but any system, no matter how good the engineers has holes unless the user is the only one with the keys. So here is the rub, by trusting Dropbox and their current system you are not just trusting Dropbox but a host of employees. Any system designed like this will have a security breach at some point. It might not be a large one, it might not affect many users, but it will happen, you are just rolling the dice, gambling that you are not going to be the one effected (a fair gamble in most cases). Its not just software that you are trusting, but people, and people are usually the weakest link in any system. Now just as importantly for me is the type of atmosphere this private-government partnership entails. I realize many of you might not agree with this, and I don’t want to turn this into a big discussion here (a discussion I am more than willing to have in other places), but I prefer to play corporate interests against the government, keep those two forces working against each other, rather than siding against the public. One of the particularly damaging developments we have seen in the web over the last 5 years is the ability of governments to control what happens online thru extra-judicial means, collaboration with companies to curtail our privacy. For me at least it isn’t a matter of having something to hide from the government, but rather knowing that I maintain control. Control of my own data, and the data of others who have entrusted it to me seems to be an essential component of dignity. But What Do I Care? You don’t have to imagine that the government would want your information to see some problems here. Let’s imagine that through an engineering problem (a problem with the code), an employee problem (see Google case above), or a deliberate hacking attack, Dropbox files suddenly become available. I actually have a good deal of student work, evaluations, letters of recommendation etc. stored there at any given time. Aside from my own paranoia about data and privacy there is a good bit of data that students and others with whom I work are entrusting me to keep private. Lets imagine that your grade roster is stored on Dropbox and that gets compromised. Once that file is unlocked and passed around there would be no getting it back. Leaving aside what kind of FERPA violation this may or may not be, I can imagine many students who might be harmed by this type of info. Have you stored judicial letters (for plagiarism cases) on Dropbox? I can think of a lot of information that I wouldn’t want out there even if it wouldn’t directly harm me. Now about 80% of the stuff I store on Dropbox has no privacy issue associated with it, things like journal articles or chapters I want to read, or syllabi & assignments, or my running schedule, or stuff that is publicly available elsewhere like my CV. But there is enough there that I am concerned and looking for other options. I will also note here that given the recent FOIA filings by conservative groups going after professors that being paranoid about data isn’t a bad thing, removing the option from others to share my data (this is why I use my own email more than I use the University provided one). It’s true I have become somewhat paranoid here, using a VPN when on campus to ensure that the University can’t monitor my internet use, but I don’t think you have to be too paranoid to see this as an issue. Questions for Dropbox Having said all of this I think there are probably several things Dropbox could make clear that would help. 1. How many employees have access to user files? Is there a dual control system (do two employees have to sign off on access, or are there are a certain number of employees who can do so on their own)? Are records kept anytime users files are accessed this way, so that the company creates a clear audit trail? Do employees (and or any contractors they deal with) have background checks? 2. Under what conditions do they give the government data? The FAQ suggests that they would fight these requests if they found them to be lacking in merit. Have they done so? Can they make transparent this process? Hard data on this? 3. What is being done to fix the architecture issues? (Here Dropbox runs into a problem as the more it says about its security the more susceptible it is to vulnerabilities, but the less it says the less trustworthy it seems. Security thru obscurity really isn’t a good idea.) 4. Does Dropbox think it is their legal responsiblity, ethical responsiblity, or both to share information with the US government? Would they do so without a warrant? The policy says "request" what constituents a request? The Other Options 1. As the Dropbox FAQ suggests the first option is to encrypt your file before it syncs with Dropbox. If you encrypt your files before syncing them with Dropbox, using something like TrueCrypt, nobody else will be able to access them. The disadvantage to this is it makes it such that your files are not accessible on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. In other words a not so useful option. 2. Use Dropbox only to store public, or pseudo-public information. Again 80% of what I store on Dropbox I am not concerned about so maybe I just only store that type of stuff on Dropbox. 3. Go back to using a flash drive. (Uhh, no thanks.) This also doesn’t let me use it across other platforms (iPad, phone, etc.) 4. Create a partition on my phone that would store these files. They would always be with me, and I could run something like Samba File sharing and Root Explorer. This would make it more than trivial though to access the files. Really I like cloud features. 5. Switch to a different service. Both SpiderOak and Wuala seem to offer services similar to Dropbox which encrypt the files on the user side. Both of these have applications for all the devices I use (iPad, Linux Computer, Android Phone). 6. Set up my own Dropbox type service on my home computer. Sure this can be done, or I can just run a VNC back to my computer and fetch the files I want, but this is less than optimal. There is also an open source Dropbox being developed, called Sparkleshare. 7. Pogoplug. Pogoplug works by creating your own cloudserver at home. There is one meta-issue here. As the leader in this type of service, many other applications rely on, and provide support for syncing with Dropbox, for example iAnnotate or GoodReader—usability that would be sacrificed by switching services. And as the easiest and most frequently used, Dropbox is the easy one for me to recommend to faculty members who are less than computer savvy. Right now I am investigating SpiderOak, Wuala, and PogoPlug. I will let you all know what I discover. My preferred option though would be for Dropbox to address the current issues, cause you know I really do like their service. 

This weekend The Chronicle of Higher Education published an opinion piece by Michael Morris arguing that in the name of campus security campuses should start data mining all student internet traffic. Or as the not so subtle, fear mongering, almost fit for Fox News title says, "Mining Student Data Could Save Lives." Morris’s article to put the matter bluntly is a phenomenally bad idea. Indeed his argument so ill conceived that it is difficult to know where to begin in exposing the problems. I even question The Chronicle’s choice to publish this piece. Yes, opinions are helpful for generating discussion, but a certain amount of competency should have to be cleared before The Chronicle is willing to co-sign your piece, even if done under the commentary section. Let’s start by being clear on what Morris is calling for. You have to read through to the fifth paragraph to understand exactly what Morris wants: "If university officials were to learn that a student had conducted extensive online research about the personal life and daily activities of a particular faculty member, posted angry and threatening comments on his Facebook wall about that professor, shopped online for high-powered firearms and ammunition, and saved a draft version of a suicide note on his personal network drive, would those officials want to have a conversation with that student, even though he hadn’t engaged in any significant outward behavior? Certainly." In other words Morris is calling not for data mining, as his title suggests, but rather for total surveillance of all student internet activity with an eye towards mining that data. What Morris is suggesting is not only that Universities monitor student email and conversations on University servers and equipment (student email addresses, Blackboard conversations), but all student internet activity. He is talking about monitoring internet search traffic, i.e. what students search for on Google, what students post on any site, i.e. Facebook Wall, blog comments, etc., what students shop for online, i.e. any purchase you make or any purchase you look at making, and even open up and look at any files you have stored (his suggestion that the University would mine a suicide note written and saved on a computer would involve opening and analyzing said file). And I assume, even though he doesn’t mention it Morris would like to monitor and then mine all IM traffic, and Skype calls. Calling this data mining hides the fact that the first step is actually surveillance, collecting the data, where the end goal is then mining what has been collected. Technologically Morris doesn’t know what he is talking about and ethically he equates himself with some of the world’s most oppressive governments. In short this proposal reads as if it is written by a despotic leader who has spent too many hours watching poorly conceived science fiction. In the first iteration of this post I wrote several lengthy paragraphs explaining how the surveillance Morris outlines here is not as technically trivial as he seems to make it, and it is obvious from this piece that Morris has little to no sense of how this technology works (someone please explain to him the difference between http and https cause he seems to think that all internet traffic is the same). Morris’s piece argues that technology is a "crystal ball" (his word not mine) that would allow us to predict and control the future. The technology he describes here is neither as trivial nor accurate as he suggests. But ultimately I decided to cut out all of the technical bits which demonstrated Morris’s ignorance (perhaps he has been watching too much Minority Report or Person of Interest) and instead focus on the more important issue: the ethical one. Morris is arguing that the government should monitor, without cause, all the internet traffic of some of its citizens. (Maybe I’ll write the technical stuff later.) Let’s put it in no uncertain terms: Morris wants total surveillance of all student traffic on the internet all the time. In other words he is calling for the wiretapping of all private digital communications. Since in this particular circumstance, and in many he outlines the students attend a public school, and the police would be the ones doing the monitoring (or at least involved), what is being suggested here is that private citizens have the entirety of their online communications surveilled by the government. And this monitoring would happen regardless of the student, everyone, all students, no probable cause, no reason for suspicion, just surveil everyone 100% of the time. Total state surveillance. Perhaps Morris has a different measure of what is reasonable, but in my America the government is limited in the degree to which it can monitor its populace without a subpoena (I know, FISA, but we can save that for later). Morris’s logic goes something like this. In rare circumstances a student will commit an act of violence, in order to prevent this we should curtail the civil liberties of all students. What’s worse though is the bizarre logic deployed to justify this type of surveillance. Morris notes that companies already engage in this kind of monitoring (Credit Card companies, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, etc.) Let’s take these "justifications" one at a time. Effectively in the first instance Morris is arguing because a small percentage (an extremely small percentage) of individuals might commit a crime we should extensively violate the rights of all citizens. Now Morris lines the argument up by beginning his piece with a colorful fictional scenario: imagine a student "his sweating hands firmly clutched the grips of the twin Glock 22 pistols." These sort of hypothetical, the world is really dangerous scenarios, are often used to justify curtailing liberties, after all who wouldn’t want to prevent the kid with twin Glock 22 pistols. But, in reality it doesn’t work this way. Sure we could limit all sorts of social ills through restricting citizen behavior (let’s start with curfews) but we don’t. Or put perhaps in terms that would directly apply to Morris. We know from research that police officers are more likely to commit spousal abuse than the average individual. Thus we should in order to prevent the scenario of a cop with twin Glock pistols killing his wife institute a policy of monitoring all cops all the time. All internet activity by all cops should be monitored. We should know if they visit any sites that might indicate violent tendencies. Also we should put cameras in their homes which record how they act at home so that in case they raise their voice, engage in behavior that indicates violence, we could intervene. I am sure Morris would not be for this scenario, but it is the equivalent of what he suggests, the only difference is who is monitored and who is doing the monitoring. His second justification is that companies do it anyway, so why shouldn’t Universities. I find it odd that we would want to look to these companies for guidance on respecting student privacy, at precisely the moment when their is a large public conversation developing around the degree to which they don’t respect privacy, and that the government should intervene to establish guidelines. Just because students willingly share information online is hardly a justification for violating their privacy, monitoring all of their internet communication. Furthermore the scale at which Morris suggests students should be monitored in no way equates with what is being shared (mostly publicly) in particular online venues. In the first case students chose to share particular pieces of information on Facebook, making them (again mostly) public for others to view, and remain empowered to not share other aspects of their online communication. Private online communication is still possible. Second in the case of corporations students (at least theoretically) willingly enter these relationships with corporate entities, trading privacy for some other benefit. With government monitoring there is no opt out, use the internet to communicate and you will be monitored. Finally the response by these corporations is in no way comparable to what happens with these private companies. A credit card company calls you to verify that you indeed did purchase a $800 dollar pink stuffed elephant, a minor inconvenience, but the government detaining you for hours of questioning because you called your professor an asshole on a Facebook wall, hardly constitutes the same level of inconvenience. Imagine the depth of invasion this constitutes. Emails about private family matters. Monitored. Concerned about a medical condition, searching the internet. Monitored. Have a drug or alcohol problem, reaching out to a support group. Monitored. Organizing a political protest. Monitored. You name it. Monitored. This is why we have restrictions on what type of surveillance our government can conduct. We should find it a little more than disturbing that Morris’s position aligns him with the STASI, or if you prefer, more contemporary situations despotic regimes: "In order to preserve the safety of our citizens we must monitor all of their communications." Perhaps people are lulled into believing that this type of surveillance constitutes a minor inconvenience, because one would only be monitoring online communication. But imagine the outrage that would ensue if Morris was suggesting that police begin routinely searching all dorm rooms in order to insure that no illegal items are on campus. Ultimately I would argue that monitoring my online communication is far more invasive then searching my physical property. Heck just knowing what someone has searched for on Google in the last month can often tell you a lot more about them than looking through their apartment. Morris’s argument is the classic, but severally flawed one, that we should give up privacy to maintain security. As Daniel Solove has argued this is a fundamentally misinformed approach. In the first case, because one rarely achieves security, and in the second because this type of ubiquitous surveillance itself constitutes a serious harm to the community. As Solove points out, privacy is not just an individual good, it is a public one as well. A community without privacy is an unhealthy one. Individuals need control over what type of information is made public (even if they don’t always exercise said right), and what types of information monitoring bodies can collect about them, not only for individual health but for public health as well. A community with no sense of privacy is a dysfunctional one. Imagine a community where all communications are monitored by the government (again this is either very directly what Morris is calling for, in the case of the public university, or by proxy in the case of the private where the institution de facto serves as the local governing body). One doesn’t have to have read Foucault to understand the degree to which severe government monitoring adversely effects the population, 1984 or Brazil will work just fine for this. Let’s take even the best case scenario that Morris offers here, that we are going to use this technology to monitor all students, looking for ones who might have mental issues. How is this data going to be used? Are the flagged students going to be expelled? are students who the predictive algorithm decides are risks going to have mandated counseling? Will this be permanently attached to their file? Will there be a no-class list equivalent to the no-fly list? And given the issue of liability institutions are liable to err on the "conservative" side questioning any and all students that might pose the slightest risk, for fear that if they don’t they would be liable in the future? (And again, keep in mind the technology doesn’t work this way, looking for "mentally unstable" people is not nearly the simple analysis Morris implies it is.) Even if this surveillance would work the way Morris thinks it does, it is not even the best way to accomplish what he wants. Rather than actually try and address the larger issues, or develop a more reasonable plan, Morris purposes the "magical" technological fix. Which of course is neither magic nor a fix. Compare this to a plan which would call for increased funding of mental health clinics, building a positive relationship between Residence staff and students so that those with concerns would speak to someone. Sure staffing a mental health clinic is costly, but it is more effective, and what Morris doesn’t want to tell you cheaper than the solution he purposes. As Morris himself admits, "In the aftermath of nearly every large-scale act of campus violence in the United States, investigation has revealed that early-warning signs had been present but not recognized or acted upon." If these early warning signs exist why do we need more monitoring? But lets be clear, Morris isn’t after safety or mental health. This is about something far more nefarious, this is about control. And to understand this argument it is important to situate this claim within the context of higher education in California where Morris works. The mental health angle here is just a ruse, a rhetorical strategy to convince people that students need to be monitored for community safety. This is something those with power have been wanting to do for a long time, wholesale monitoring of the population, and given the recent tense situations between students and the California system, situations often mediated by the police, certainly part of the story here is a feeling on the part of police that all students must be monitored and controlled all the time. If you doubt my reading here all you have to do is turn to his paragraph on FERPA. Morris argues that yes FERPA might be a concern, you would be monitoring student’s private conversations, but "luckily" for those who want to monitor there is an exception to the rule that would allow this type of monitoring. In other words Morris treats FERPA as a technical/legal hurdle that can be circumvented not something that expresses a legitimate concern about protecting student privacy. Morris deals with the letter of the law ("look it’s easy to get around") without addressing the reason the law is there in the first place ("protecting student privacy is a philosophically and ethically important community principle"). Notice nowhere in the essay does he recognize that this type of surveillance might constitute a privacy concern (the only mention of a limit is in taking care to make sure that students maintain a right to due process). Student privacy is treated as a hurdle to be overcome not a value to be respected. I am an educator because I believe college can be an incredibly important step in individuals becoming productive members of their community. At philosophical times when people ask me what I do I respond, "I work with students to help them become the people they want to be." I find it loathsome, and counterproductive to suggest the best way to help students become citizens is to monitor their behavior all the time. What types of individuals would be produced from such a community, a community under constant surveillance?   

Five years ago I wrote, what for some reason, was the first post for my blog that got any sort of attention. Basically it was a run down of the "Top Ten" software tools I use as an educator. At the time I was consistently asked by colleauges what computer "stuff" I used, so I decided to narrow it down to one post and include publish it. Indeed when I first started blogging I thought my entire website would be about tech tools and tips for academics. That roll is now fulfilled in a far better way by so many other sites that I hardly use this site for that anymore, or at least not directly.  But I did think the more than five year anniversary was worth revisiting and taking a look at how my media environment has changed. I actually think these sorts of posts can be pretty useful, as the how of our computer use is often obscured, despite the fact that it is so varied. In my classes I often like to have students talk about what programs, apps, techniques they use as a way to show a diversity of approaches. The most substantial change I have made is moving away from Apple. Once an avid promoter of their products at this point I am so concerned about the computing environment they are building that it is worth my time to look for something else. I have moved from my main computer running Mac OS to one which runs Ubuntu. Indeed although I still have a Mac laptop I rarely use it for anything I can’t do on Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/), and am looking to purchase a new laptop soon, one I suspect will not be made by Apple (or if it is, Macbook Air?, I will use it to run Ubuntu). I no longer use an iPhone, which has been replaced by a Nexus S (which I tell people is so much more powerful than an iPhone). The only Apple product I consistently use, and find to be ridiculously useful (more on that later), is the iPad, but with the substantial number of impressive Android tablets coming out, I suspect it is only a matter of time until I migrate away from this product as well. There is a decided shift here to platform independent services, and services which offer greater control, even sometimes at the cost of ease of use. As such this list has changed substantially. So here, in some sort of rough order is my list of essential pieces to my computing environment. -SpiderOak I replaced Dropbox with SpiderOak because of security concerns. And haven’t looked back since. Sure SpiderOak is a tad more difficult to set up, but the fact that the files are encrypted on my end and thus SpiderOak has no access to my files makes it more than worth it. I still use Dropbox to share articles or readings with students and store some files, but SpiderOak is my main system. SpiderOak works across all my devices (phone, laptop, desktop, tablet). -WordPress. Oddly this didn’t even make the list back in 2006, even though my blog was running of WordPress. But now I use it for managing not only my blog, but my main site, and sites for the classes I am teaching (screw BlackBoard), as well as a separate one for my current research project. The ability to quickly roll out a good looking website, that is easy to update, and highly customizable is invaluable. I am always recommending to people that they build an online precense they control to display their scholarly work, and WordPress is the easiest, and one of the most powerful ways to do this. -iAnnotate PDF. First tablet app on the list. This one is ridiculously useful. I use it to read and mark up PDFs. I use this to both comment on student work (especially grad students and drafts of papers), and to read journal articles. This lets me "carry with me" all the papers I need to read in digital format and still mark them up as if they were paper. Seriously, probably half the time I use the iPad its with this app. -Instapaper. Throughout the day, I come across various articles that I want to read, but don’t have the time to read right then. Instapaper lets me save these pages for reading later. I actually have a habit of carving out an hour or two to read thru everything I have saved. This also has the bonus effect of not being distracted by articles which may seem like a good idea at the time, but a couple of days later seem irrelevant or only interesting as a distraction. I also use IFTT so that by favoriting Tweets in any Twitter client I am using they automatically get saved to Instapaper. After iAnnotate, Instapaper is probably the app I used most. (Although you can access Instapaper on any computing device.) -Astrid. I played around a lot (way too much perhaps) with various todo list organizers. But this is the one I settled on. Mainly it came down to interface and cross platform use, coupled with the ability to connect to other services I use. I am still trying to figure out a way to integrate a todo list with voice commands effectively. I might hook Astrid to Prodcteev just to accomplish this. -WiTopia. This is a paid VPN service. When connecting to the net via an untrusted connection a VPN service is critical. Our University I am sure has one they provide, but I prefer to control my own. A serious advanatage of WiTopia is that I can pick from an elaborate range of locations enabling me to connect to the net with an IP from anyone of a number of countries and getting outside of the "American" centric net (not to mention for watching the BBC). Even on campus I will use the VPN if I want to hide my traffic for anyone of a number of reasons. WiTopia is safe, easy to install, and works across all my devices. -AutoHotKey  or TextExpander. These programs are ridiculously useful. I specify a series of characters and they are then instally replaced another. For example I type "aadd" anytime I want to add my mailing address to something and "aadd" is replaced by my full snail mail address. I use this for titles of books I have to type a lot, or code shortcuts: I never actually type ""<a href=""></a>"." You can also set up these programs to automatically drop in the most recently copied text, or insert today’s date etc. -gedit. I used to use word processors or Scrivener to write. Now I just use a simple text editing program. Forget making the text look good, that’s for later. Now when I write I work it a very simple text only environment. On the Mac I had switched over to TextMate, on my home computer I use gedit. Seriously 80% of what I write starts off as basic text. -A Good Hosting Service. The cloud and free services are one thing, but the ability to host your own site and control your own data etc., for me is crucial. Get your own hosting service for your website, set up your own email and stop counting on someone to do this for you. I prefer HostGator. But there are lots of good ones out there.

  "Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." -Paulo Freire "This is a great discovery, education is politics!"- Paulo Freire Q:How do you know you are succeeding as a program? A: When you are up at 4:00am watching a project your students and faculty built spread around the globe, being discussed in languages you can’t even identify. By now, most of my followers and readers are no doubt aware that a project built here at our Emerging Media and Communications program has been receiving a great deal of attention. Actually a great deal of attention rather understates the case. This, all more or less started on Monday when The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story written by Jeff Young about this project: EnemyGraph. (The actual story was "published" on Sunday but really did not get noticed until Monday morning.) More on the project in a moment, but for now a brief explanation of how this story spread. By late Monday morning the story was featured on Slashdot, from where it jumped to numerous other tech blogs and ultimately to more mainstream news organizations. By Monday evening EnemyGraph was spreading internationally. And so it was partly due to insomnia, partly due to a rather full schedule that I found myself awake at 4:00am on Tuesday opening up a web browser to run searches on the story, and opening up a separate tab in Tweetdeck to peek at the Twitter conversation. It’s at this point things got a bit unwieldily, EnemyGraph was spreading to so many places around the globe that I couldn’t follow the conversation. When I first tuned in there was a slew of tweets in Russian, followed by a collection in Hindi, then Thai (for some reason it was moving Eastward). I lost count at 20 different languages. This is how I measure success as an educator. It has been covered on ABC, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, The Huffington Post, NPR . . . well look for yourself. I am not writing this to just brag about EnemyGraph, I have a much larger motivation for writing this post. And let me be clear up front, this isn’t even my project. EnemyGraph is a project built by Dean Terry (faculty here in EMAC) and two students Bradley Griffith and Harrison Massey. My role in all of this has been really, really, really, minor; just support, talking with the team about it, sharing my thoughts. But regardless of this the last week has been one of my most enjoyable as an educator, and herein lies one of the big takeaways of EnemyGraph and ultimately the motivation for this post: EnemyGraph is an excellent example of education done right. I’ll take it a step further, EnemyGraph is one of the best examples of education in the age of the digital network I can think of. EnemyGraph. What? You Want People to Make Enemies? To understand my claim it’s important to contextualize EnemyGraph a bit here, and explain why I think it is a fabulous project. Again let me stress that this isn’t my work, Dean and the students are the driving force, "the artists" here, I am just playing the roll of cultural critic, analyzing and critiquing the project, albeit from an insider’s perspective. Indeed, I think some of my thoughts on this might even disagree with what the team says about EnemyGraph. (For those who want to read in Dean’s own words what he thinks the project is about, his artist statement of sorts, you can check out his own post about EnemyGraph.) Let’s face it, there is a serious problem with Facebook, okay actually there are lots of problems with Facebook, but for understanding EnemyGraph there is one serious problem worth focusing on: Facebook has become a private corporate space which dominates our public and civic lives. The privatization of the public sphere, of our civic interactions is a serious concern to me, and other scholars. Let us set aside the issue of data mining or Facebook’s motivations, we don’t have to imagine Facebook as an intentionally nefarious actor to recognize that to many Facebook has become "the internet", having a monopoly on communications the likes of which has never before existed, to recognize there are serious concerns here. More and more our social lives are being played out in privately owned spaces—the implications of this are still being worked out. We need, I would argue, to be concerned about this, focused on critiquing and understanding the ways in which our public sphere is being radically transformed. To be sure Facebook isn’t the only actor here, it’s just the most prominent, and for now the one which concerns me the most. Privatizing the commons of public discourse strikes me as a serioulsy dangerous civic development. Understand this is a particularly layered problem, one I am always trying to get my students to "see." Students today, as Siva Vaidhyanathan first put it to me, are swimming in an ocean of media, our obligation is to get them to step outside the ocean and "see" what they are swimming in. It is in this regard that I have students in my intro to the major class quit Facebook. I want them to see how Facebook is quite literally engineering social relations, and doing so in ways that students are not totally aware. And this will get us to EnemyGraph. Consider how Facebook allows you to "friend" things, companies, and corporations, to "like" things, companies, and corporations but not to dislike them. Facebook doesn’t want a dislike button because it would both undermine the pleasant (sterile) community they want to have, and because it would undermine the business model, businesses don’t want a dislike button. Or consider how Facebook has altered the very meaning of the word "friend," where "friend" now connotes a different social relation than it did just 5 years ago. Facebook is coding, engineering, setting the rules for what types of relations we can have, with little to no input from us. Yes and the creators of this app are not idiots, the use of the word "enemy" here is intentional. Facebook abuses the word Friend, EnemyGraph just points this out. Now as an academic I could write about this, try to get people to pay attention to this problem, as I have, and as others have. Of course there is another option which is to stage a project, a piece of art, to perform the critique. There is a long history of this, and I would argue it is one of the most important roles of art (and humanities in general), to produce objects which perform a cultural critique, and more importantly get the larger culture to engage in a conversation about the issues at hand. Indeed many of the projects I admire most adopt this tactic. One could point here to graffiti art (Banksy is one of my favorite artists), street performances (such as "Operation First Casualty"), or groups such as the Yes Men and Critical Art Ensemble, or even specific projects such as Cow Clicker. It is true that I have a particular affinity for the "stir shit up" approach, one that Dean shares, and this is not to discount other approaches, but I find this tactical one particularly effective. This is how I interpret Dean’s quote about social media needing a shot of Johnny Rotten. This isn’t simply a matter of poking a finger at Facebook, the stakes are much, much larger. It is against this background that I find the reactions of some academics at times puzzling, and at other times downright disturbing. The idea that this was built just to foster negativity or bullying is a shallow reading, one born out of a total lack of engagement with EnemyGraph. But more importantly the idea that academics shouldn’t be working on projects which actively engage in the world around us, that produce and foster conversations about the roll of technology in our lives comes from an academic community I have no interest in being a part of. And lest you think I am being to critical of academia here, it has been interesting to note how the conversations in "non-academic" communities in my opinion have been far more nuanced and in depth, engaging both the object and what it is after. Not to get too detailed here about EnemyGraph, but this is a project long in the making, not something whimsically produced over night to encourage bullying or trolling online (it has been at least a year in development). This is a carefully thought out, well planned critical performance, an engagement with the cultural of the privatized public space of Facebook. Part art project, part performance, part critique, part technical object, part critique of technology, part network exploit, part strategic operation, EnemyGraph is teh awesome. I couldn’t be happier for their success, they have 20,000 users, have overwhelmed their servers, and produced so much press coverage I can’t keep track of it all. But that’s not what is the most exciting. The thing that makes me most proud here is what this project says about what type of learning environment we are building here in EMAC at UTDallas. Conversing About EnemyGraph. The Educational Model. I won’t go into detail here about what I think EMAC is, or the design of the major, you can read my longer reflection on that if you are interested. But I will short cut and say that the program has two components, critical and creative. That is, we want students to be critically engaged with the networked digital media environment and to be creators of media content, to repurpose social media for their own aims. I think of Howard Rheingold’s insistence that we need to teach students to be "Net Smart." And that’s where this story gets really important to me. As EnemyGraph took off, started to gain traction as a media event, you could see the story reflected in a general energy of our students. Other EMAC students were excited about the media coverage the project was receiving, excited about the attention EMAC was generating, but here is the important part, they were also talking about the project online across all the various networked platforms. Numerous times I would scan a news story, skip to the comments, to discover that our students were commenting on the story, explaining EnemyGraph, critiquing Facebook, even critiquing EnemyGraph. The students in our program were demonstrating a network literacy, this wasn’t just a classroom education, it was engaging the world through the digital network. Just one brief example. One of our students is from Brazil, and she was explaining to me the conversation she has been having (in Portuguese with the networked spaces in Brazil) about EnemyGraph, how it is received there, and how placing it in a different cultural context changes the dialogue. This is education at its best. And it is not just the conversation online that I see students participating in, in the hall ways, in classes, our students are engaging in a very thoughtful dialogue about this project and more importantly the problem of Facebook. I can only assume that our students are having this conversation all over, both on and off campus now. And so this strikes me as one of the serious lessons to take away from EnemyGraph: the digital network changes the landscape of educational possibilities. This is something Bradley Griffith pointed out both in his interview with Jeff and in the comment section of The Chronicle Article. Certainly in the past education has not been merely confined to the classroom, but the network changes the scale and pace of what is possible. The more we can encourage students to collaborate, to see the world as their audience I think the more successful we can be. Gone are the days when we must restrict students to small audiences and performing for us as instructors, now the network makes possible projects and learning environments with massively expanded audiences. Forget the classroom, the local community, or even the nation, EnemyGraph has turned into an international lesson. Sure we can keep asking our students to write papers for us interpreting some 18th century text, analyze some obscure symbolism, and give them an audience of one, or at most an audience of 20 at some conference. But give me one EnemyGraph as a learning project over 1,000 antiquated research papers any day. Or put another way who needs another boring marketing or business plan, go have the students make something. This isn’t to say that professors ought to adopt the "stir shit up" model that Dean and I both prefer, or even that it is appropriate for every class, but certainly there is a pedagogical advantage to having students actively critique and create media objects that exist beyond the classroom. I am not interested in developing passive consumers, or students who are interested in figuring out "how to make people click ads." I want to help students critique this world, imagine a different one, and help to produce a better one. It is in this vein that I so value and appreciate what the EnemyGraph team accomplished here. But I also teach a class where students are working on civic media projects, one group is attempting to collect coming out stories to help LGBT youth, another working to help animal adoption, and another is boldly trying to raise enough money to send a kid to college. And, these are the things that inspire me as an instructor, that make me feel good about our program, and keep me up late at night thinking, "what’s the next thing we could do?" So many people who commented on this project claimed this was somehow irresponsible asking "how could a program support this?" or "what kind of professor does this, builds EnemyGraph?" But I have a better question to ask of educators: "Why aren’t you trying to build the next EnemyGraph?"

10 (Mostly) Simple Steps. Last month I had the privilege of speaking to the annual Computers in Writing Conference. The organizers were interested in hearing my perspective on open scholarship and the university. I am not going to recast my entire presentation here, I actually might write it up as an article for something else, but the keynote is a different genre from a blog post and different from a formal essay so just making the written version of my talk available is probably not so useful. But to briefly summarize I made the claim that increasingly academic interests are running counter to that of the publishing industry. And that while I find recent calls to move towards open scholarship such as the Harvard Letter important, I think that economic justification is not the primary reason we ought to pursue open scholarship. In short I think this is a moral issue. Knowledge Cartels are increasingly controlling, and restricting knowledge production and dissemination. This is happening broadly across our culture but the universities complicity in this, from drug patents to for profit publishing is troubling. I am not going to rehash the long argument here, if you want you can watch the video. Instead, building on the idea that this is the moment to move to open access, I want to highlight the how-to portion of my talk, the ten steps to breaking up the knowledge cartels. To me it is simple, we have a bizarre situation where we give away our product for free to these cartels who then turn around and sell it back to us. We give away our knowledge for free the only question is do we want to give it away to the public or to the cartels. Overcoming the knowledge cartels in the academy is simply a collective action problem. That is all we have to do is act together. Acting alone has costs, but if we collectively resist the cartels we solve the problem. To be sure there are complex solutions needed to replace the cartels, but the first step is overcoming them—which is shockingly simple. I offer 10 steps to take to achieve this goal. 1. Creative Commons License Everything. I said at the talk, and I would re-iterate here, this is the most important step, in fact this one simple act of licensing everything we do under creative commons would go a long way to undermining the cartels that profit from controlling our knowledge. Creative Commons essentially bequeaths your work to the commons, insuring that it cannot be locked down. There is a degree of control here where the originator of the work can decide whether or not someone can re-use for commercial purposes or non-commericial purposes only, or whether to allow remixes, or only those who maintain the entiritery of the original. But importantly it insures that the knowledge will enter the commons. We should license everything we do—syllabi, talks, books, journal articles—under creative commons. 2. Publish only via Open Access Sources. This is pretty simple we already give our work away for free, the question is to whom should we give it away. Giving it away to the public produces a better knowledge commons, as serves the public not the corporations. Knowledge which isn’t public, isn’t knowledge. 3. Refuse to Work for the Gated Publishers. In addition to our writing labor which we are giving away for free, academics are providing other labor to these publishers, for free. Stop it. Stop serving on the boards for these journals, stop peer reviewing them. No more sharing with them our free labor. If you get an email asking you to serve one of these rolls, your first response should be, "under what license will this publication be made available." If the answer does not entail some method of open access turn them down and tell them why you are doing it. Recently I received two emails, one requesting that I review an article for a journal and another asking that I serve as a reader for a book. My first question in both cases was, is this open access. In the case of the article the journal issue was, I happily agreed. The book however was not. I turned them down, and made it very clear to them why I was doing it. 4.Actively Support Open Access. The corollary to the prior point is to actively seek out and work for Open Access distribution models. One of the myths about open access is that the work is not peer reviewed, that the quality is less. Of course this is absurd nothing about an open model indicates diminished quality, or suggests that an article cannot be peer reviewed. Indeed there are many models out there (I’ll just recommend Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book for an in depth discussion of this). So at this crucial moment, when these initiatives are developing they can use the support of faculty, both to lend them intellectual gravitas and simply as a show of support. Serve as editors, readers, peer reviewers, board members. 5. Do this regardless of rank. I think this is the point which during my keynote received some of the strongest push back. I used to think that the best path was to call on full and associate professors to lead the way, moving to open access being too great a risk for the contigent labor, the grad students, and junior faculty. But a few things changed my mind on this. First since this is a collective action problem the greater the numbers the greater the shift, and a sudden move by untenured faculty would signal a subtantial shift. Second the urgency of pressing our case means that waiting for a slow change isn’t really the best option. And finally, I am not sure we can count on the tenured faculty. Faculty who don’t do something before tenure aren’t likely to change after. I am up for tenure this year, we will see how this goes, but as a colleague of mine Jon Becker says this is "a hill worth dying on." 6. Make Open Access Part of A Criteria in Institutional Decisions. If you are on a hiring committee, ask the candidate if they are published in any open access sources. If they are not ask them why not, hire people who are committed to open access, make this part of your hiring criteria. Same for tenure committees and tenure review. For those with this kind of influence get open access mentioned in tenure guidelines, and again reward it during tenure and promotion evaluations. By doing so you will make it easier for junior colleagues to take the risks I outlined above. 7. Make these Choice Public. Part of the way that we overcome the collective action problem here is to publicly commit to Open Access, to not only make the moral choice, but to testify to this choice, making it easier for others to do the same. Sign Petitions such as "the cost of knowledge," or the WhiteHouse.gov petition demanding open access to taxpayer funded research. Write in whatever venue available to you that you are making the move to open access, explain why, encourage others to join. When a knowledge cartel asks you to work for them, as an editor a reviewer or article writer, explain to them why you won’t do it, and then make that refusal public. So when Routledge asks you to review a book (as they recently did with me) tell them no, and then tell everyone that you told them no. This has the double advantage of communicating to the original author that if they want their submission reviewed they should agree to open access up front. 8. Extend this Principle to All Institutional Choices. I realize much of the focus about open access centers around our scholarship, but syllabi, lesson plans, teaching techniques are equally as valuable to the commons. There is no reason things like textbooks need to be expensive. These should be free and open, available to all. The textbook market is perhaps one of the biggest rackets in the academic publishing industry. And for the love of all that is holy stop using proprietary software and other systems in our classrooms that encourage these Knowledge Cartels. Even if this software were well built (which it isn’t) pedagogically and ethically using them is wrong. Ideologically systems like BlackBoard are just another piece of this problem. Go open source with our learning tools, stop letting these knowledge cartels profit from education. 9. Exert pressure on professional institutions. MLA, ASA, CCCC whatever professional organizations you are part of, whatever conferences you are part of, make them aware of your demand for open access, and get them to tak in that direction. Because pressuring these institutions works. 10. Pirate. Stop respecting the rights of the knowledge cartels. The knowledge they have locked down is ours, not theirs, do not recognize their right to it. If someone wants something that is locked down behind a paywall, share it with them, copy, distribute, don’t respect the copyright of these cartels. Again this is simply a collective action problem, all it takes is for us as academics to stand up and say enough. Indeed any other choice not only harms our collective interest, but more importantly the interests of public which we serve. Open Access is the only ethical choice.       

(First a brief disclaimer. Generally speaking I like the MLA, I think its core mission, to advocate for languages and literacy education is an important one. And for those who don’t know my PhD is actually in English, so I feel a certain affinity for the scholars there. And recently the MLA has made a turn to promote what I feel are important issues to in the field, like open access journals. Indeed, I think Rosemary Feal and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (new head of scholarly communications) deserve a lot of credit for taking the MLA in the right direction, but . . . .) Open-Washing The Modern Language Association released the Job Information List last week (known as the JIL) , but it is probably more accurate to say they released the database. The term list here refers to the bygone era of analog job lists and publications; now job seekers log onto a website, and view jobs posted by the MLA. Except they didn’t really open up access to the database, what they did was allow those with MLA membership to access the database. In other words if you have a membership or a member of an institution which has a membership you can see the list, and if not, well no job database for you. Just to be clear this isn’t to post jobs, this is merely to see the jobs. In other words the database is paid access. Last year the MLA claimed that the job list would be open access, as in available to anyone, so to some the fact that accessing the database still required a subscription seemed problematic. Later Rosemary Feal, the executive director, explained that the database was still restricted access, but that anyone could receive access to the .pdf copies of the list, published twice this semester (once in Oct, once in Dec.) So, in short the database is closed, but a published version of the database is available to the public. The MLA website says, "printable PDF files of the JIL are available free of charge on the website." What that section doesn’t mention is that those are not updated as frequently nor available at the same date as the online list. And given the current competitive job market, the ability to access this list in a timely manner is crucial. What ensued was a heated discussion between myself (and many others who I will let add themselves to this list if they want) on Twitter and Facebook about this policy. To us it seemed an unfair policy (why lock down the list) and a disingenuous claim to state that the list was open (when in fact only a limited version is being made available to the public)-this in my mind is know as "open washing." So, I am going to call bullshit on this one. This list is not open and MLA’s policy of maintaining a restricted access to the database is unethical (and they know it). Why? Let me explain. All About the Benjamins The MLA claims that access to the database is a service which it provides its members. If you join, or your host institution joins you will be given access. In the analog days of job hunting this somewhat makes sense. There was a cost to distributing the list, to printing it an mailing it and getting it in the hands of anyone who wanted it, jobseeker, curious academic, member of the press, faculty members etc. But now given the affordances of the digital network the cost of distribution is trivial, and while not zero is pretty darn close (bandwidth does cost). So why does the MLA still restrict access. The answer is pretty simple: money. One has to pay both to get a job listed and to access the list. Why? The rational seems pretty clear to me. If the MLA opened up the list, i.e. didn’t require one to be a member to access the list, the number of member institutions would go down. Presumably there are a lot of institutions which would cancel their membership if the list were free. The subscription rates here are confusing, and a bit complicated as the relationship to the ADE and the ADFL make it even messier. But on the about the JIL page you can read about the policies. Looking at the recent 990 though it is pretty clear that membership and subscription to the JIL is a pretty large chunk of income for the MLA. (It’s not clear to me how much of the income is subscription and how much membership. I am not a forensic accountant and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but the numbers are large see 4a-4c.) Clearly the motivation here is for the MLA to make money both by insuring that those who use the list to post a job, and that graduate programs that use the list to help students get placed pay for access. But it also is pretty clear to me that they make more money off the list than it costs them to run it. In other words they are using the list to leverage institutional buy-in. The list serves as a motivation for an institution to join the MLA and support its efforts. Before we go any further let me say again that I support the MLA. I think it has a worthy mission, that it does a lot of good work as an advocacy group on behalf of professors (see the role it played it resisting Foreign Language Cut Backs). And indeed in the job market the MLA probably plays a good regulatory role, setting norms of behavior that are in the best interests of the candidates (for example institutions have to agree to a certain set of standards and behaviors to use the MLA). So the MLA clearly provides a service to the community. But that doesn’t mean that the ability to access the list is a service that job seekers ought to pay for. The MLA wants to claim that the list is a service provided to members, join the MLA and this is one of the benefits. But that’s not at all what is going on here. Instead the MLA has set itself up as the primary knowledge broker in the trafficking of information about jobs. What the MLA has is the place that job listers post because it is the place that job seekers (at least in MLA fields) go to find jobs. And because it has this important informational resource of the job list it is able to use it to leverage institutional support (AKA make graduate institutes who want to help students find jobs pay for access and/or membership). This isn’t a service, this is holding information hostage. To see how this is the case imagine the MLA job list went poof tomorrow, as in completely disappeared, as in wipe the site off the internet, burn all the print editions, the JIL is no more. What long term effect would this have on job seekers? None. Why? Because the jobs listings would move elsewhere, The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, HigherEdJobs, heck even Monster.com. All places where job listers have to pay but job seekers would have free access. In other words to a large degree job seekers would be better off if the list just disappeared. Consider also how other professional organizations such as the American Historical Association and the American Mathematical Association provide free access to the list for job seekers, only charging to list a job. Why then is the MLA locking down this knowledge? Indeed the MLA recently has made moves to open access knowledge, giving authors open access rights over articles published in the MLA. So it is odd then that the MLA would chose to lock down information they didn’t even produce. In this case the job ads are all authored by institutions, the MLA merely curates the database. What is particularly vexing about this situation is as the cost of distribution has gone down the price of access has gone up. Clearly the MLA makes more money than it spends on this list, it is using the list to fund operations, using its position and control over the list to force other institutions to pay the rates it dictates both to list jobs(fine with me) and to access (a far more spurious endeavor). I get it, the MLA is invested in preserving the current job ecosystem where it serves as the broker, and collects on both sides, being a knowledge cartel is a good racket. But that doesn’t make it ethical or justifiable. So when you raise this, what is the response of the MLA? Well they will claim that everyone who needs access has access. But as many have pointed out, there are hosts of contingent faculty, faculty who have been away from the market, who aren’t fresh out of grad school, who might not have such easy access. It isn’t precisely clear from the MLAs site that one is supposed to be able to access the job list via one’s graduate institution into perpetuity. Or the MLA will say that they will get access to anyone who needs it. But this also isn’t clear. Why not display a button, icon, or text that says "don’t have access, click here." That would let job seekers without access fill out a form and gain access, sponsored by the MLA. The MLA is counting on the idea that graduate institutions will provide access to everyone, which is clearly not happening. For years there has been a sort of informal trading among individuals, where those with access share with those who don’t have it. But more to the point is it is ridiculous to on the one hand require paid registration, and then on the other hand say everyone has access. Paid access is by definition a gate keeping function meant to restrict access. The logical fallacy here is large enough to drive a truck full of rhetoric professors through. Either everyone has access, or the MLA gatekeepers the list. Right now they are acting as gatekeepers even if they want to claim that everyone has access. (P.S. Doesn’t the fact that the MLA describes the .pdf list published in Oct & Dec as "open" serve as an admission that they recognize that the online database is not open?) I realize the MLA’s business model is based (in part) on profiting from this list, but revenue is not an excuse to act unethically. But even more the MLA is missing an opportunity here. A list which is open to all job seekers is far more valuable in the long run than one that is closed. If you are a job lister you want your job to be published to the widest possible audience. An open list with a larger viewership is more valuable to those listing positions, and as they realize this they are likely to move to posting the jobs in places that aren’t locked. If you were a department and only had the financial means to post the job in one place, would it be in a list with limited viewership or one with open access? And increasingly job openings are becoming open by proxy, as places like the AcademicJobWiki or social media are used to share jobs, nearly all jobs are listed on the home institutions website. So, what the MLA does is curate these jobs, and if someone else can do this for better, for cheaper, and provide access to more jobseekers the MLA is rapidly going to be obsolesced. And if the MLA ceases to be the place where job seekers go, and hence job listers go they will lose leverage over recommended hiring practices etc. (a place they are providing a service). A Better Way Forward From a strategic point of view it makes more sense to play the long game here and open up the list, serving as the aggregator for all English jobs. Charge job listers, not seekers to have the job listed. Open up the database, heck even make an API so others can use the data. Imagine what could be done, what job seekers could do: Create a mash-up of the data with google maps so you could see ads by geographic location, or someone could write a program that would allow you to look for jobs as an academic couple (jobs in nearby geographic areas), something Inside Higher Education already does. Let me re-iterate, a business model is not justification for closing access, not merely because this is an outmoded model likely to lose purchase in the coming years, but because it is a model that often hurts the most marginalized of our community. Academic knowledge exchange is changing, and with it should change our professional practices, and advocacy institutions. No one understood this better than the MLA when they hired Kathleen Fitzpatrick to be the director of scholarly communications. Kathleen is most famous for a call to perform digital scholarship to leverage the digital to alter our institutional practices lest we face obsolescence. Which I think many would agree is what is going on here with the job list. (Copied from a Facebook Discussion on Scott Eric Kaufman’s Page): Note: Subsequent to this discussion, a group of english academics launched mlajobleaks.com, which makes the job list available to anyone. Let me say that although I have been accused of being the mastermind behind this project I am not. While I might know the parties involved, and might even have provided "material support." I shouldn’t be given credit (or blame) for this. However I encourage all the parties involved there, and hope that the list continues to be publicly available.  

(I probably don’t have time to fully develop this point, but here goes . . .) It should come as no secret to people that I am an advocate of open access, that was, after all, the focus of my talk at Computers in Writing, and a frequent subject on this blog. Indeed many have accused me of being militant about open access, a moniker I’ll gladly wear. Not to get to far off topic here, but I think this is one of the defining issues of our time, the ability to which we recognize knowledge rights as human rights, and resist the current trend to comodifying and restricting knowledge access. Which brings me to the article in The Chronicle, covering my previous post, and MLAJobleaks. Which has kicked off more discussion about the Job Information List (JIL), especially on Twitter. Let me be clear, once again, I like the MLA and as many have pointed out the last five years the MLA has made many positive steps towards recognizing the changes the digital both affords and demands of institutions like the MLA. But let’s consider the long game here, 10 years from now what is the future of the JIL, I am going to predict one of two things. Either the JIL is open (as in really open not pseudo occasionally pdf open, but the database is just free for anyone to look at) or the JIL disappears. Why disappears? Because other options that are free (to access) and present the information in a more useable format are going to replace it. I can even imagine a whole new multi-disciplinary job list separate from The Chronicle, InsideHigher Ed, or Higher Ed Jobs popping up. There is probably even a way something like Interfolio could host one of these that would put all the others out of business . . . So, knowing this the real question is what is the future of the list. That is how does the MLA avoid being obsolesced in this transition. And here’s the thing, I think the people at the MLA know this, know that transition is coming and they have to do something about it. But they are caught, as the article points out, in a rather difficult position, where the organizations revenue stream is tied to this obsolete business model. They have to transition, but doing so is difficult. The question then becomes how to do this. And again Rosemary knows this when on Twitter she pleads for patience. But you see this isn’t just about the future, rather it is also about the present. It’s easy perhaps for me to have patience, I have a tenure track job, I am not on the market. But the people who are currently on the market don’t have that luxury. Saying change is coming, is nice, but that doesn’t help the people who need it now. So the question becomes two fold 1. How to transition effectively. 2. How to do so in a way that implements stop gap measures in the meantime. For what it is worth and so I don’t seem like someone who is just needlessly critiquing, here are some suggestions (recognizing that I don’t have all the information and nuances of how the JIL operates internally at the MLA and who gets to make those decisions). 1. Start by being honest, recognize that the list is currently not open, and that there are people who do not have access. Claiming it is open is just open washing. Explain that the reason it is closed is a business decision and that the MLA is committed to in the future making a correction to this and making it open. 2. Provide a time line. Be concrete, give people a sense of how long till the list will actually be open. One Year? Two Years? Saying that it will be open in the future doesn’t help. 3. Provide a stop gap measure for those who currently don’t have access. On the login screen and on the about JIL page, prominently display the above information, along with the ability to get access if you currently do not. For example, let users without access fill out a form with name, email, institutional affiliation, and request access. Have those requests moderated and approved. Giving everyone access to the database within 24 hours of request. This doubles as providing info to the MLA about the people who currently don’t have access. Provide the above info on this page, and this page. And doing a press release about this would help as well.

In conjunction with the keynote that I gave at the Computers in Writing Conference this year, I wrote an article for Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. For those who are interested this piece articulates, in a slightly different manner, why I think that Open Access issues are fundamental to the work we do in the academy. In this piece I argue that the conversation about Open Access is just a small part of the larger discourse surrounding knowledge rights and the current effort by a few parties to restrict the flow of culture and knowledge.  

This semester I have been doing a lot more administrative work for the EMAC degree. As the program is growing, both in terms of faculty and students we have to have more conversations about sequencing the courses, course content, and overall examining the pedagogical experience of our students. As one can imagine this rather easily leads to a discussion about how many students we can put in our classes, how we can cover more sections of the same class, faculty resources, etc. So partly because of this, and partly because of the recent discussion about MOOCs I started wondering, what is the ideal student to instructor ratio for a semester. What is the Dunbar number for teaching? The Dunbar number (rather famously used in internet and network studies) is the sorta of limit of the number of people one can maintain social ties with, the number of people your brain can hold and still remain close with. Often sociologist reference this number at 150 (and yes I am aware that this is a contested idea, but we can save that debate for another time). So you can have roughly 150 close ties with people but as you start to meet more people and develop more close ties some of those other 150 start to fade away. A human brain can only handle the cognitive load of maintaining tight social bonds with so many people. Its worth mentioning that there is probably variance within a population, some individuals having higher Dunbar numbers than others. And its probably also worth noting that one reason this comes up in social media research is because people often ask if social media can extend a Dunbar number, making it possible to maintain a higher cognitive social load. But this got me to wondering what is the Dunbar number for instruction. That is at any one time what is the number of students I can interact with, what is the cognitive limit of the number of students I can maintain and have a consistent interaction with. I think we can all agree that the fewer the students the more time I have to spend with each, and versa visa, the more students the less time I can spend with each. But I am hypothesizing about something slightly different here. What is the educational cognitive load? What is the Dunbar number for instruction? At what point do the edges start to fray and do I lose track of the students I am interacting with over the course of a semester? So here’s my guess, and this is just a starting point. I think my Dunbar number for instruction is about 45-60. That is over the course of a semester I can handle about 45-60 in classes and still interact with them, become invested in them, and try to treat each (as much as possible) as an individual who is having an educational experience in which I play a role. Keep that number under 60 and I pretty much "know" all of my students. If someone walks into my office and says "How is Steven doing this semester?" I know about his semester. How he is doing. How he is engaging the material, and probably some additional material about where he is at with in the program and what interests him. Keep that number under 60 and I think that is true of all of my students. But as that number rises over 60 I start to lose the ability to "keep all the students in my head." That is I start to lose track of some, they disappear, fade into the background. I can keep tabs on most but I end up focusing on the ones who need challenging, or the ones who are struggling, and some in the middle get lost under the weight of too many students. I think that this is somewhat independent of class size. That is I could handle one 50-60 person class, two 25-30 person classes, or three 15-20 (or heck even 5-6 classes of ten each). Yes ideally the smaller classes would be better, but I think if I were teaching just one large class I could use some of the non class time to spend extra time looking at student work, engaging with them outside of class etc. . . I also think this is somewhat independent of graduate students’ whose committees I am working on. I think that since I already have an established relation with them they are probably already in my real Dunbar number. Also I think the load is different depending on what types of students I have that semester. If I have a lot of first years that number trends down closer to 45, and if I have a chunk of students I have already had in prior classes I can push that number to the higher end. Note I am not directly talking about time commitments here. Obviously doing my own research, handling committee assignments, and a personal life all "cost" time, I am really just talking here about "cognitive load." What is the "cognitive load" of students I can handle in any given semester? Hypothesizing about this, I just put this question on Twitter last night, and really to my surprise most people agreed, placing their number at the 50 range. Sure this is a biased sample, and people are probably influenced by past teaching experiences. But its a rough guess and a good starting point for a conversation. Why This Matters There has been a great deal of discussion about MOOCs lately, expanding the number of students in a classroom, or in a related discussion classroom size, or faculty workload. If we distill down to the core what it is I do as an instructor/teacher I can only handle so many students doing that job. Sure I can lecture to hundreds if not thousands a week. Heck the tech would make it possible for me to lecture to millions (just record a lecture), but that really isn’t what I see as teaching, that’s just broadcasting content, the same as writing a book and letting someone read it. So, it seems to me that MOOCs or blended learning, or whatever, are precisely the wrong way to go. Increasing the cognitive load of teachers isn’t the answer. Our value add isn’t in broadcasting content, but rather in working closely with students. The institutions we work for have an interest in efficiency how can you maximize the number of students who learn with a given professor. But if there is a cognitive load max there is a point at which there are diminishing returns, where by adding in more students the institution is undermining the very value it seeks to add. And by big fear here, we end up creating a tiered education system whereby a certain class of people get the in classroom, close work with professors, and another get the discount $10,000 for four years model that doesn’t involve being closely valued and attended to by an instructor. Okay, so here is my question is there any research on this? What is the cognitive load max for you for a given semester? All else being equal what is your Dunbar number for instruction? Leave a comment, interested in hearing from folks.

I have accepted a job at Saint Joseph’s University, to be chair of a new department focusing on digital media. So in the fall I will be an Associate Professor and Chair of the Communications Department at Saint Joseph’s University. I am really excited about this job opportunity, as the "next thing I want to do." SJU is building a Communications major focused on digital media and social engagement. For me this hits the intersection of two of the things that I am professionally most interested in, coupled with the chance to help build and develop this program this job turns out to be an exciting next move. In many respects I just feel honored that the existing faculty at SJU thought I was the right person for the job. Although making a move to something new can be a bit intimidating, I am really excited to work in this program. When I was considering taking the job a few people I talked to thought I was crazy, asking why I would want the responsibilities of a chair, why I would want to leave a TT track job at a research institution (where I was just getting tenure) for a smaller institution. Maybe they are right, but I think there is a lot of upside to taking the job as a chair, especially at a liberal arts school that values teaching. More importantly though I really like helping to build things. And while I was weighing whether or not to take this job I looked at academics that I really admire, like Kathleen Fitzpatrick or Dan Cohen, folks who gave up secure tenure track jobs to pursue doing something new and I realized this wasn’t an opportunity I wanted to pass up (to be sure I am not giving up tenure this job comes with tenure). This is a chance to do something new, and focus down on what I really value about higher education: working with students, and empowering them to build a better world. And so as much as I appreciate the chances and opportunities I had here in EMAC, and as much as I will miss working with the students, in the fall I will be moving to Philly . . . P.S. That’s actually a photo of the building where my office will be (I think).