AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Like Old Times

It’s not that I’m a cantankerous soul who revels in polemics — I just appreciate the benefit of having smart people look over what I say and press me to think better and harder. So when (quite to my surprise) Mark Goodacre, Stephen Carlson, and Torrey Seland (along with Jim West and Wieland Willker, in Mark’s comments) jumped in with criticisms of my presentation at the Theology and Pedagogy Conference, I felt a rush of delight, somewhat offsetting my chagrin at having missed the valuable points they call to my attention. The discussion reminds of me good old days in Blogaria, when we used to have rollicking arguments about postmodern thought, digital identity, Clay Shirky, and matters of less consequence.

Let me answer Mark’s terminological complaint first. He protests that “links page” doesn’t adequately describe the sort of resource he and his peers produce; he proposes as alternatives “gateways,” “mega sites,” and “super sites.” I don’feel wedded to the term “links pages, so if those who compile pages of links that point to other resources prefer that I use a different term, I’m happy to oblige. Of the improvements that Mark offers, “gateway” sounds like a very agreeable choice (I was looking for a term that characterized the function of the collection, so that “mega site” and “super site” lack the specificity for which I aimed). “Gateway” works well also because gateways admit some and exclude others, and that role harmonizes with my appreciation and criticism of these pages.

Although Mark demurs at my assessment of the bother that goes into maintaining a gateway, I’ll repeat my praise and thanks for his time and effort. Torrey (as he notes) brought the question of labor-intensiveness to the fore, and I resolutely decline to take for granted either the work others have done, or the prospect of what that task will entail for the future. Not all sites update and backcheck their links as admirably as does Mark, though, so that some once-upon-a-time gateways suffer from linkrot and overlook recent additions to the web’s pool of resources. As Mark says, “when I stop enjoying developing the NT Gateway is when I will stop doing it” — but I fear that’s my point, too, since I find the New Testament Gateway quite convenient and valuable, and I recognize that my convenience depends on Mark’s diligence.

Mark enjoys blogging, and sees ways in which blogging contributes to his maintenance of the Gateway; again, quite so! On the other hand, he asks, “Who is to say that in another five years time there will not be a similar boon to the managers of gateway resources, and which we will also think seriously about utilising?” I certainly don’t know enough about the future to rule out the sort of improvement that Mark points to, but neither do I see anything particular on the horizon — other than, perhaps, the developments I describe in search utilities, which would constitute a significant advance in a variety of ways (and not only to scholars). It doesn’t sound as if Mark has something particular in mind, so I’ll concede to him the possibility of a change that neither of us anticipates, but I’ll continue pointing out the benefits of specific changes already in the works.

Mark notes that blogging adds metadata to the pool of information about particular links; I enthusiastically assent, and I suppose that I should have made clearer in the original draft of my presentation that the changes whose advantages I tout derive much of their value from blogging (and much also from gateway pages) — so we have no argument there.

He disputes my point, however, that a gateway page “vests problematic authority in the maintainer of the links page. At this point, I want to hark back to the occasion and purpose of my presentation: a conference on pedagogy. My complaint about authority and gateway pages derives from that particular rhetorical situation. My concern about pedagogy, the emphasis of the paper as a whole, addresses helping students use technology effectively for research. If I simply point students to the New Testament Gateway or Felix Just’s Johannine Literature Guide (and I do specify these resources term after term, without any hesitation relative to the wisdom of the sites’ maintainers), I haven’t advanced my students’ research skills, I haven’t engaged them in the productive work of participating in weighing the merits of different works. Some students have been known to look at a list of “authorized” resources and simply assumed that all were of equal merit, that a source listed on a web page I name must therefore represent an unimpeachably reliable perspective.

A gateway might fairly, I think, be compared to a reserve desk at the library, where someone has selected a subsection of the library’s full collection to provide students with a smaller array of choices, all of them presumably sound. Using works from that reserve shelf involves a lower degree of discernment than does exploring the library’s full collection — it perpetuates the learners’ self-imposed tutelage, from which higher education might be hoped to emancipate them. Moreover, although I can and do rely on Mark and Felix, they aren’t the only people who maintain gateway pages, and not everyone might regard them with as much trust as do I. Add to these limitations the fact that not every gatekeeper’s judgment will harmonize with that of all information-seekers, and I think that the claim that the gatekeeper’s authority is “problematic” (not “bad” or “unreliable,” but problematic) is justified.

I’m getting sidetracked here, though, because my main argument is not that there’s a deep intrinsic flaw in gateway pages so much as that the Web, in its very Webbiness, involves characteristics that make another approach more appropriate and productive. The “link votes-seeded search” proposal I float stands to function quite apart from the bibliographic model that a gateway page instantiates. A search-based model draws on the strength of the Web, and opens the door to discoveries that may have hitherto escaped the attention, or the updating capacities, or the scholarly-ideological net of the gateway maintainer. It displays to a student searcher an open-ended list of possible resources, sorted by the likelihood that their content has earned the respectful attention of commendable scholars. And I emphasize that this resource would indeed be “open” in the sense of “open to non-academics.”

The heart of my proposal, then, is not to deprecate others’ wonderful work, but to point to a way that technologies are developing that adds capacities and benefits beyond those offered by gateway pages. I’ve argued with Felix about this before, and I suppose that I’m now in an ongoing argument with Mark; on this point, though, the future looks to me a great deal more like “refined searching” than “gateway pages.”

Posted by AKMA at June 11, 2004 02:27 PM | TrackBack