AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Clear the Streets

This morning, Margaret got up at 6:00 to drive with Josiah to the Drivers’ Services Office in Niles; and they came back with one more licensed driver in the car. It’s unnerving, and my stomach lurches at the thought of letting him out to drive on his own in the family’s single car — but he’s a careful guy, conscientious, and only occasionally spaced out. Still, keep your eyes open for him; I’m thinking about installing a caution light on top of the car that’ll flash purple when Si’s driving, or something like that.

Hi, Mom!

Today’s New York Times article about Lawrence Lessig (sorry, registration required) and Free Culture mentions the audiobook project from last month (imprecisely identifying my part in the enterprise as providing “streaming audio” instead of the downloadable files). I hope NYTimes readers are web-aware enough to add “http://” to the front end of the web address.

On that note, Ethan wrote in to ask where to find Chapter 10; that’s available through my site, here, or here (read by Scott Fiddelke, from Scott Matthews’s Free Culture popup audiobook).

And another version of Chapter 12 is available from Ed Champion, here.

Having a Lovely Break

Glad nobody is here except Margaret.

Love the Shoes

When the alarm went off a moment ago, I was dreaming that I had slipped away from a conference somewhere to go bowling with David Weinberger. . . .

Speaking of whom, if you can stand RealPlayer, go watch him address DC conferees on C-Span (on the link titled, obscurely, “Technology Politics Summit on Politics & the Internet” — David’s part begins about 55 minutes in, after a couple of liberal radio guys). I reiterate my proposal that this moment is propitious for reissuing Chris Locke’s Gonzo Marketing, with a star-power foreword. . .

Desperate Measures

I should have admitted that one activity that’s taken up my time over the last week has been my quixotic effort to get the Disseminary’s cartoon history of the early church off the ground. I’ve contacted a variety of gifted comics artists of my acquaintance; all love the idea, all have agreed (in a general way) to offer me some designs, but none has come up with any yet.

So I summon all my graphical gifts, which are not comprehensive, especially not in the sphere of representing the human figure, and put hours of time into producing a single mediocre frame of the Life of Polycarp, instead of more urgent pursuits. I’ve tried editing public-domain etchings; I’ve tried very-stylized shapes; I’ve tried several different tracks toward semi-representational blobs in ancient robes; none of them is worth a hill of beans. I think I can envision a way to produce some boilerplate figures — as in Tom Tomorrow, for instance, or Get Your War On — maybe that’ll suffice after a while. I’m actually making progress toward some stylized, vectorized figures, as a make-do.

But yesterday, I asked Pippa for some help, so we’ll have the requisite elements for a life of Origen as soon as I scan her work and write up the HTML templates. If anyone were willing to pitch in, with either boilerplate figures or (joy of joys) actual frames, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Inured to Deception

Last night I stopped at Jewel-Osco after dropping Josiah and his friend Ben off to see another friend perform in the ETHS production of Ragtime. I picked up the odds and ends of grocerosity and as I headed out of the store, my eye lit on the sign that they’d posted about a year ago.

The signs read, “For Your Convenience/Para Su Comodidad,” and go on to explain that the grocery carts have been equipped with special devices that will prevent the wheels from functioning if they pass the boundaries of the parking lot.

Now at no point in the pondering, planning, implementation, or publicizing processes did anybody think that Jewel was doing this “for my convenience.” No one had complained to them, “It’s so inconvenient that, when I parked on the street instead of the lot, my grocery cart can roll right up to the car!” No one even vaguely imagined that we would find this arrangement more convenient. The closest one could say would be that this device helps Osco keep their prices down, but anyone who’s pushed an oversensitive cart too close to (but not “over”) the faded yellow warning line, only to find herself with an immobile mountain of groceries, will have known that “convenience” was not what Jewel was after.

Jewel lies to its customers with impunity, and everyone knows they’re lying, and I’m not aware of any groundswell of outrage at this transparent deception. It reminds me of the Bush administration (and, to be fair, of what Spinsanity indicates about the Democratic presidential campaign as well).

Good Example

Dorothea’s going to a doctor about her hand; it’s time for me to go to a doctor about my right thumb. The pain diminished a little last summer, but it returned over the fall and winter. I hardly use my thumb at all, now, except in circumstances where I need to differentiate myself from other primates: opening bottles, lifting pans, and so on. But I publicly resolve to call my doctor this week to look into what’s wrong (Dorothea was directed to megadoses of ibuprofen; I was offered naproxen, which was ultimately of no more help). Will report in when I learn what’s what.

Hurdles

I’ve been alternating between getting difficult things done (amended taxes (tssssss!), paper-marking, vocational stock-taking, a get-together with friends who still attend St. Luke’s, with FAFSAs and several other obligations left to complete) and periods of brain-dead inertia. Getting difficult stuff out of the way is good, but draining; my attention span diminishes, I tend to retreat into solitude and quiet.

But then (Margaret doesn’t call me “Half-Full Man” for no reason) I had a lovely walk with Pippa yesterday, down to the Art Store where I practically begged my frugal daughter to permit me to buy her the larger assortment of colored pencils and some paper, then to the library where she proudly took out a couple of children’s videos (“you don’t have to pay anything for these”), and then strolled back home with the wind in Pip’s gorgeous long hair and her cheeks pink in the slight chill, her laughing and pretending to be a train. Si’s growing into a thoroughly admirable young man, making his stability and kindness and sweet disposition evident at a variety of social occasions. And I’m so delighted that Margaret’s set for Duke next fall, already having leased an apartment, anticipating her course work (and fine-tuning a paper she’ll give in November at the annual SBL meeting). I love her more every day, and am thankful that she and I have ended up with so extraordinarily wonderful a family, and that we’re encouraged and supported by so many great friends — a fair number of whom I’d never have known apart from the internet. Margaret and I get one of our mini-vacations next week, and by then we will absolutely be in a position to benefit from one.

Oh, and while I’m busy being thankful — a good-looking, well-nourished insect such as I just can’t avoid reproduction — so I am still in a position to offer some of my abundant eggs to readers interested in exploring Breedster. [Correction: No more eggs; sorry. . . .]

How Things Are Going

A few more papers away. Sorry for the fallow period (assuming this really is a fallow period, and not just a drought). It’s not that there were so many papers, but that so many other things intervened.

Say, . . .

“Why the light blogging, AKMA?”

Well, I spent the morning at Peet’s with my dear, who bought me a couple of cups of their ultra-high-intensity coffee, such that I was wired to an extent that I can’t remember having felt for years. When I settled down a little after mass (havinng successfully avoided vibrating out of my seat and hop-scotching up and down the aisle) it took a while before I could attain much focus, and that focus I dedicated to writing careful responses to some questions from an interested party.

Si, meanwhile, was busy keeping silent all day. That was good (not the silence, but the participation).

When I finished writing up my materials, I went to mark some papers, but partway in encountered a pastoral crisis that demanded concentrated attention.

So no big-deal bloggery, which frustrates me, because there's a blog in me waiting to come out, about faith, doubt, knowledge, and uncertainty — but I have other tasks that keep intruding. I want to know how it comes out in the end, but I haven’t had time to begin. And I still want to put my oar in on the digital identity discussion, now including Phil Windley. If I don’t get in soon, there won’t be anything left worth saying.

But to prove that Arete grossly overestimates my housekeeping virtuosity, I left the dishes in the sink tonight.

Oh, and AKMA the hexapedal Casanova still has plenty of eggs.

Too Much FreeHand

You know you’ve been spending too much time working in your vector graphics editing program when you look at your shaving-cream-laden face in the mirror and wonder where the bezier handles are for adjusting the curve of your beard line. . . .

Between Two Smart Places

Over the weekend, David posted a wonderful essay on digital identity, and Jon pushed back over at InfoWorld, and I gave a presentation and hid. Well, I didn’t hide, I just hunkered down and played with AudioScrobbler, which is even cooler than I thought at first.

I don’t feel smart enough to intervene (faculty meeting this morning dulled my edge) but I’m thinking about it. If my brain clears a little, I’ll try to puzzle out some space in the conversation.

Dave Rogers Music Alert Update

I haven’t been listing DRMA updates often lately, because I tend to blog either late in the evening or early in the morning, before the family’s day begins. I’ve missed that; part of my writing lies in the soundtrack, either actually playing or simply running around the neurons that would more productively be employed at writing books that editors have almost given up dunning me for.

Over at Tom’s plastic bag (in “Linkloggery,” so I don’t think there’s a permalink), though, I noticed a terrific alternative: AudioScrobbler, an Open Source app that integrates with your MP3 player to aggregate the selections you play, display them on a page at AudioScrobbler. Eventually, when their database includes enough information about your taste, it suggests music from the playlists of other listeners with listening patterns like yours. It combines four or more of my hobbyhorses (music, open source software, general gadgetiness, and social software are the ones that come to mind right away) — so I downloaded it to check it out and so far it seems to perform as advertised: transparently, inconspicuously, and neatly.

Updates the database only periodically, I notice. And by the way, I still have plenty of eggs.

Eggs On Offer

This will sound weird to those of you who don’t already know about Breedster; please don’t get worried, just ignore what I’m about to say.

While Central-Time-Zone bugs are sleeping, their Netherlandish colleagues are awake and on the prowl; as a result of several unforeseen encounters (I have a very studly insect image), I have a number of eggs with which to invite would-be participants to join this peculiar entomological social network. Just let me know.

Went Well

The presentation tonight went very well, I think. George gave a nice introduction for me, and everyone was very patient through the talk, and in the end I think it worked well. And loads of people were very excited in the confluence of Kevin’s Vote Links and my Seeded Search ideas. Then in the Q-and-A, people asked about librarians, searches, Lessig, and the Disseminary.

I’ll put my version of the talk in the extended comments section below. There’s some risk that the papers from this conference will be published in print eventually, so if you see a mistake or an imprecise argument, please be kind enough to protect me from looking utterly foolish, and let me know what to change.

Back at the first iteration of this conference, I proposed a way of thinking along with technology that took its cues from what was then the exemplary killer app of the internet: Napster. This evening I propose a technology lesson from another web application, the über-search engine Google, as a way of evaluating pedagogical practice in a technologically-saturated learning environment.

A long time ago, back when I was in seminary — before I even had a computer to type on — I discovered some fascinating secrets of academic research. These were the days when every book was checked in or out of the Yale Divinity School library by signing and filing a 3 × 5 card rather like this one.

My discovery was that I could read the circulation cards in the books I saw, to see whether my professors had taken these books out. If I was uncertain of the value of the book at which I was looking, I could see whether (or how many) any of my professors had taken the book out. If all three of the active professors in my field had bothered to take the book out, it suggested that the book really was worth my attention. If one had renewed it for several terms, it probably played a role in his on-going research. Not only that, I deduced that books that were located in the Union Seminary Classification section, down in the third level of basement under the Institute of Sacred Music must not have circulated for the many years it had been since YDS Library switched to Library of Congress classification — obviously, these were not hot books on my subject. These and various other tricks helped me learn to recognize the academic sources that my teachers would also recognize, and to distinguish them from vernacular treatments.

I introduce this exercise in nostalgia not simply to impress upon my younger colleagues that once upon a time we used such primitive devices to regulate library collections, but more importantly to point to the tremendous value of metadata — contextual and para-textual information — in research. I was making decisions about the scholarly weight of particular viewpoints based not on the intrinsic quality of the arguments — not solely so, anyway — but on extrinsic markers that suggested that other people thought the book important (or unimportant). The classic instance of the value of metadata comes from The Social Life of Information:

I was working in an archive of a 250-year-old business, reading correspondence from about the time of the American Revolution. Incoming letters were stored inwooden boxes about the size of standard Styrofoam picnic cooler, each containing a fair portion of dust as old as the letters. As opening a letter triggered a brief asthmatic attack, I wore a scarf tied over my mouth an nose. Despite my bandit?s attire, my nose ran, my eyes wept, and I coughed, wheezed, and snorted. I longed for a digital system that would hold the information from the letters and leave paper and dust behind.

One afternoon, another historian came to work on a similar box. He read barely a word. Instead, he picked out bundles of letters and, in a move that sent my sinuses into shock, ran each letter beneath his nose and took a deep breath, at time almost inhaling the letter itself, but always getting a good dose of dust. Sometimes, after a particularly profound sniff, he would open the letter, glance at it briefly, make a note and move on.

Choking behind my mask, I asked him what he was doing. He was, he told me, a medical historian. . . . He was documenting outbreaks of cholera. When that disease occurred in a town in the eighteenth century, all letters from that town were disinfected with vinegar to prevent the disease from spreading. By sniffing for the faint traces of vinegar that survived 250 years and noting the date and source of the letters, he was able to chart the progress of cholera outbreaks.*1*

In a similar vein, Austin Henderson of Xerox/PARC said, “one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin” — the margin, by which metadata annotations can amplify the data in the text proper, thus making the text’s data more useful. The more data available relative to a bit of information, the more valuable that information becomes; the less metadata, the less valuable the information.*2*

At a point in my academic years when I was not yet equipped to know the difference between Rudolf Bultmann and Joe Shlabotnik, such pertinent metadata as the condition of the book, the stature of those who had taken it out before me, and the physical location of the book all provided me clues to help me weigh what I should think of the work in question. These useful tidbits of metadata were readily available in the pre-electronic library. In the up-to-date library, not only do I not know who has taken a book out before me, but it’s widely considered a matter of the borrower’s privacy rights that I not be permitted to know.*3*

Some sorts of metadata persist in the modern library — right here at the United Library, some books are catalogued in the online system, whereas others can be retrieved only through using the card catalogue — but other sorts of metadata have disappeared, impoverishing the repertoire of information on which researchers can draw. In the modern library, metadata begins to disappear into inaccessible reserves — but in the online library, metadata pulls an even more dramatic disappearing act. In online research, relatively few manifest signals of metadata appear to an untrained eye; instead of providing a helpful circumstantial clue to work’s standing to a beginning scholar, a researcher now needs expertise to get at the metadata. To a great extent, if you’re clever enough to get at the metadata, you’re clever enough to not need it.

This represents an acute turning point particularly for those institutions whose mission includes reaching out to learners whose main interest is less academic than pious and pastoral. Whereas a student in the 1980’s could count on abundant circumstantial data to help guide his research, in the 2000’s a student will find precious few breadcrumbs leading out of the forest. Yet more and more students rely more and more heavily on that [online] forest as a base for research. Just three years ago, at the previous Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace conference, I had occasion to sigh once or twice because I feared that my students would never get the hang of using the internet for research; now many of them are reluctant ever to look into the physical library collection.

Now, I’m not by any means the first one to notice this problem; numerous colleagues (Mark Goodacre, Felix Just, Torrey Seland , and Sheila McGinn) have devoted tremendous effort to compiling collections of more-or-less annotated links as a guide to their students, and I admire the diligence and charity that have gone into that work. The Wabash Center likewise has assembled a valuable guide to research on the internet. Pages of links offer researchers some of the metadata that online compendia strip away, and sometimes offer even more metadata.

The links page, however, entails certain definite pitfalls. The best of these provide annotations, but that’s hard and time-consuming, so useful annotations are uncommon. Moreover, several mechanical problems arise from links pages. First, they’re back-breakingly labor-intensive; only a researcher with good judgment and a troop of indentured student servants, or an independently wealthy researcher with no social life, can do a plausible job of keeping a links page quite up-to-date. Even then, new resources appear, contents of sites change, and the links page falls behind the inexorable forces of innovation and linkrot. Indeed, several of the above scholars reflected online about the burden of maintaining links pages, to which Seland (maintainer of the Philo of Alexandria links and the Resource Pages for Biblical Studies) observed, “I can foresee that it will be a more and more demanding task as a one-man work. . . The relevant material on the Internet is growing so rapidly, that it is hard to imagine what even the next year will bring.”*4* Without calling into question the generous and illuminating support of willing cataloguers and institutions, I suspect that links-pages will in a short while have to give way to the sheer brute accumulation of information.

Give way to what, however? Seland suggests developing specialized sites that concentrate on ever smaller bits of the online literature (thus replicating the specifically modern gesture of dividing up knowledge into smaller and smaller areas of authoritative expertise ? to which we might well apply Ray Ozzie’s cautionary words: “We should distrust any elaborately planned, centrally deployed, and carefully developed business system or process. Successful systems and processes will be agile and dynamically adaptive; they'll grow and evolve as needed over time.”*5*). The response of gerneating ever-narrower links pages too, however, is fated to fall by the wayside as the avalanche of online information sweeps across the academic landscape. For example: in 2000, Ian Balfour reported on the explosion of information about Tertullian online.*6* He noted 2000 scholarly publications in the 500 years since the printing of Tertullian’s Apologeticum; since the inauguration of the Web, he counted 921 Tertullian-oriented sites online.This morning, Google found more than 104,000 sites with a connection to Tertullian. Even allowing for extensive duplication, we may guess that Dr. Balfour no longer has time to keep an up-to-date Tertullian bibliography.

The besetting problem with links pages, however, lies more deeply in the ways technology and knowledge work than in the mere practicality of maintaining such endeavors. A links page functions as a throttle to knowledge; even as it promotes awareness of responsible research on its topic, its job is to restrict the flow of attention. That runs diametrically against both the path of information technology and the course that human inquiry ought to take. Although knowledge constitutes much more than the mere accumulation of information, one essential ingredient in durable, flexible learning involves distinguishing sound from unsound information — a capacity that one can’t develop if one always encounters information that’s already been filtered. Further, if one never departs from the academic pastures that one’s mentors have fenced in, one will never experience the provocation and possible inspiration that come from an encounter with undomesticated thinkers.

Further, a filtered-links approach vests a problematic authority in the links-page maintainer. Even the fairest, most astute filterers will assess particular pages differently, and though they may agree on obviously reliable or unreliable sources, at the exact spot where they would be most useful — the soundness of sources whose brilliance or inanity isn’t obvious — they will diverge. And not every filterer shows the full degree of fairness and astuteness. Perhaps the links-page maintainer concerns herself primarily with the New Testament, but ventures out from that specialization to offer some pointers on patristics; should a researcher trust the patristic links as much? When a library establishes a links page to guide researchers, which librarian, with what degree of familiarity with the field, determines which pages should be linked and which should not? Is there metadata on the links page to indicate the degree of confidence with which the linker promulgates those links, and the degree of confidence that other scholars have in linker’s judgment? (Yes, there is, in a way; but we’ll get to that in a few minutes.)

Filtered links not only hobble our students’ intellectual growth — they also militate against the trajectory of technological development, which tends toward the proliferation of information and alternatives. Filtering tries to build a bulwark against information flow — but at the cost of denial, of inflexibility, and of an antithetical approach to technological possibilities. Rather than devoting our energies to holding back the flood of information, we and our students need to learn from the technology how best to navigate, to negotiate, to discern among the myriad alternatives for research.

What would be a more appropriate response to the dilemma of online research? In order to approach the problem of information abundance in a way accordant with the best characteristics of learning and of technology, our research practices should not constrict the scope of inquiry, but rather take advantage of the very plenitude of online information. Though individual pages may lack the familiar physical clues of metadata — the explicit clues to which we adapted under the conditions of research in physical libraries — the online reservoir has developed other, different metadata that can offer us different clues toward more refined research, if we look for the clues indigenous to online communication rather than bemoan the transition from the good old days.

The first generation of web search engines, for example, relied on the the content of web pages for cataloguing and retrieving information in response to searches. We were taught, once upon a time, to put relevant keywords into tags specifically named for metadata, so that search engines might more rapidly find our pages even when we don’t specifically mention those keywords. That didn’t last long; in relatively short order, the attention merchants realized that by pumping every possible word into their metadata, they could thrust themselves before the gaze of reluctant researchers. Moreover, the search results weren’t ordered by a particularly useful principle; as John Milton said of patristic exegesis, so might we say of search engine results, that “Whatsoever time or the heedless hand of blind chance hath drawn from of old to this present in her huge Dragnet, whether Fish or Seaweed, Shells or Shrubbs, unpicked, unchosen, those are the Fathers” (or, “early search engine results”).*7*

Enter the second generation of search engines, what we may call the Google era. What Sergei Brin and Larry Page realized was that they could produce more useful search results if they didn’t simply spider the contents of web pages, but analyzed the relative prominence of the pages they were spidering. They devised an algorithm that generated a recursive measure of the importance of each page based on the number of other pages that linked to it. The more pages that link to your page, the higher your page will appear in the list of results for a given search term.

All that Google does is contextualize the content of your page with the metadata of how many other pages think that your page is worth attention. They take pains to emphasize that theirs is a mathematical ranking, so that when undesirable outcomes arise — as when an anti-Semitic site wrests its way to the top spot in for the search term “Jew” — they refuse to jigger the rankings. On their account, if they tailor the results for one search, they’ll open the door to endless fiddling to promote one site or demote another.*8*

Google’s refinement of search-engine engineering makes all the difference in the world. Whereas once searches returned results based on how early in the document your search term appeared, or what percent of the content your search constituted, or some other characteristic, now searches return results that usually show the pages other users have identified as worth attention — all on the basis of existing metadata. Unfortunately, the democratic character of Google search results somewhat vitiates Google’s value as a research tool; for my students’ research purposes, one link from N. T. Wright or Dominic Crossan should outweigh hundreds of votes from St. Wilgefortis Episcopal Church Bible Study Group. Google improves the researcher’s odds, but still leaves much to be desired as a do-it-all tool.

Google itself has recognized that its one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t suit all web searches equally, and its advertisers have realized that their ad dollars would be targeted even more precisely. Google has recently begun offering a personalized web search service, with which a user can select particular topic areas of interest, which subsequent Google searches then emphasize (“religion,” “sports,” “American Literature,” and so on). The search results still follow Google’s PageRank algorithm, but the engine shifts the weights to emphasize religiously-oriented sites. You can see right away a number of weaknesses to this plan: Who decides what counts as a “religious” site? How much emphasis should the search engine assign to which sites? What if a religiously-active baseball-loving American Lit professor just wants to find information about Golden Retrievers? But the premise is on target. Google’s personalized searches move beyond a model wherein all searches are the same, to a model where different searches anticipate different kinds of results.*9*

Now, let’s imagine a function that doesn’t exist yet. Let’s imagine that before you run a search, you could stipulate one or more URIs that should serve as touchstones for weighting subsequent links. The further a result is from one of these touchstone sites, the lower the search engine will rank that site. If the touchstone site(s) link directly to a relevant site, that site would appear first in the results; if a relevant site had only a tenuous connection to the touchstone site, it would appear late in the results.

With this sort of seeded search, I could enter the URIs for Mark Goodacre, Jim Davila, and Sheila McGinn (for instance) as the touchstones — and then search for terms pertinent to the Gospel of Mark, confident that sites that my reference authorities deem worthy of attention would rise to the surface. Such a facility — though as I say, it is not yet available — would not be difficult to construct; the idea has generated positive reception online, and has been the subject of several conversations with developers at Technorati, the web search engine that focuses on volatile information (news pages, weblogs, and so on). Seeded-search capability would lend a clear focus to the weighting that Google’s personalized searches try to do with vague topical headings, and would add a great deal of value to the search results. While an academic searcher might want to check results against leading scholars in her field, a more casual searcher might want to find out what films Roger Ebert, Elvis Mitchell, and Kenneth Turan all agree are good.

That possibility, in turn, points to another weakness in the Google algorithm — that all links count as positive indicators in Google’s system. There’s no way to distinguish my linking (for ease of reference) to an essay I think gravely misguided, from my linking (as an encouragement to visit the site) to a page I think illuminating. To that end, Technorati’s Director of Engineering Kevin Marks has proposed including in anchor links a simple rel attribute value stating "vote-for" or "vote-against," to indicate approval or disapproval of the site linked to.*10* Search engines could then readily weight their results to reflect the difference between a site that many people disdain, a site that many applaud, and a site that’s generating a lot of discussion pro- and con. Since the rel attribute already exists (though it’s underused), such a change would not require action by a standards bureau; you could begin writing vote links into your HTML tonight.

By combining Vote Links with seeded search, a third generation of search engine usefulness could leapfrog beyond Google’s bare link-counting. Such an implementation of searching would serve many of the purposes of filtered links pages; it would amplify the likelihood that a researcher would find a positively-regarded source, without requiring that anyone maintain a vast (growing, aging) links hierarchy. It would flex depending on the seed sites named in the initial search, so that various theological and academic factions would not need to generate and maintain sites customized to their particular interests and commitments. The Vote Links-Seeded Search combination provides a technologically-appropriate response to the convergence of information avalanche and the loss of metadata.

But I’m not talking to you tonight to sell a particular plan for installing and extracting metadata. The point of describing this potential hack for improving search functionality lies not in seeking your endorsement, but in calling attention to the central issue for electronically-informed pedagogy — and that is, in the end, essentially the same issue as for print-based pedagogy, blackboard-based pedagogy (remembering that the blackboard constituted a revolutionary innovation in educational technology when introduced in 1809), and peripatetic philosophical conversation. One of the leading lessons in teaching technological learners is that people can be credulous and uncritical in any information medium. In person, in print, on TV, at movies, online, wherever, people do not attain critical judgment just from being exposed to more information, or to information in a different shape and texture. The best teachers, those who most truly teach, help students make their way through confusing thickets of unfamiliar information. We help students discover how to exercise the faculty of judgment, so that eventually they would ideally be able to reckon for themselves how sound a web page, an article, or the other side of a casual conversation might be.

We teachers have been wrestling with that daunting challenge from Socrates onward. The challenge changes somewhat when we pursue it in the context of digitally-mediated information, but if we communicate to our students a fixation on the peculiarity of digital mediation, we will almost certainly miss the many elements of critical assessment that depend less on how we encounter information than upon the questions we ask of it, the connections we make with it, the uses to which we put it. If we never sniff an envelope, we’ll never learn about the spread of cholera in colonial America; if we never examine the names of those who’ve borrowed library books before us, we won’t derive the benefit of a rough-and-ready system of faculty endorsement. And if we conduct research only by retrieving references off an approved list of possible sources, it will take us that much longer to learn what makes those sources more or less reliable than others.

Which is another reason that a more technologically-apt search process serves us all better than does a filtered links page. The blessing and the bane of Google is its open-ended quest for more; if we train learners to expect a limited range of acceptable sources, we re-impose an intellectual subordination from which higher education, we might hope, would deliver students. How will they handle their inquiry on the day our links page fails them, or inquiries that involve topics that our links don’t cover? The approach to searching that I commend tonight — or one like it — offers a degree of guidance to an inquiring learner, without foreclosing the range of possible answers.*11* So the pedagogy lesson that theological educators stand to learn from Google, the lesson that I propose tonight, is that we best serve the core obligation of our teaching by tackling head-on the challenge of cultivating our students’ critical sensibility in order to help them employ digital technology in their own learning as discriminating, critical users.

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*1* John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), 173f.
*2* Quoted by Jon Udell in his column for InfoWorld, http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/09/15OPstrategic_1.html, visited April 15, 2004.
*3* This provides an accidental example of Lawrence Lessig?s point that changes in technology effect changes in the law, whether that change be deliberate or unintentional. Had the FBI wanted to know whether I was taking out terroristic books from the Yale Divinity Library, they would only have needed to go to a suspicious book in the stacks and look at its circulation card. Once that record becomes a matter of bits stored in an inaccessible database, however, my library borrowing pattern is no longer a public, but a private matter.
*4* http://philoblogger.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_philoblogger_archive.html#107398000949672067, last visited April 15, 2004.
*5* Ray Ozzie, from a pamphlet written in 2000, cited by Richard Eckel at http://www.groove.net/blog/?month=03&year=2004#3EB75869-B4E2-4EB4-B272-E17D3B3D6882.
*6* Ian L. S. Balfour, “Tertullian On and Off the Internet.” Journal of Early Christian Studies. 8:4 (2000): 579.
*7* Cited in F. W. Farrar, History of Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1886).
*8* See http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/21783/format/html/displaystory.html
*9* Actually, Google has already been doing this for a while. If you search for a phone number, Google will return the name and address for a listed number. If you search for a quantity in one unit of measurements and name another system of measurement (“15 miles in kilometers”), Google will calculate the quantity in the second units.
*10* See discussions at http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/02/14/vote_links.php, http://epeus.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_epeus_archive.html#107693111184685862, and
http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/VoteLinks.
*11* A theory that doesn’t appear on my links page will never come to a compliant student’s attention, after all, whereas a seeded search simply assigns that unwelcome result a place below more conventional citations.

Rubbing and Buffing

I do think it’s good; I wish you were here to see it. . . .

But I’ll post a version of it here when I’m set. As always, I benefit greatly from feedback posted here and in email. Many thanks for helping me make this a better presentation than it could have been based merely on my own faint insights.

Tell ’Em Dorothea

I don’t quite know whether to be more irked or tickled that Dorothea and I are thinking along similar lines, but her remarks on Authority, the Web, and Print state exactly, exactly, mind you, what I was planning to say tomorrow evening as part three of the presentation to the Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace opening session:

One thing struck me, though, and I thought I’d share. We ought to be grateful to the web—for making evident problems that people have had all along evaluating source authority. The web didn’t create these problems; the web is only making them far more visible (and in some cases risible).

I mean, really, turn people loose on a large enough collection of books, and will they have any better luck separating out the ludicrous and the outdated? Doubt it. These are the same people who believe whatever gets said on TV, you know? But if you ask them if they can evaluate sources, they’ll tell you yes.

The problem isn’t the web. The problem is evaluating authority, and that’s a far larger and more complex problem.

One of the leading lessons in teaching technological learners is that people can be credulous and uncritical in any information medium. In person, in print, on TV, at movies, online, wherever, people do not attain critical judgment just from being exposed to more information, or to information in a different shape and texture. (And, although Steve may not be wrong to suppose that “there are more checks likely to halt production on the way from conceptual work to physical document for printed materials than for web materials,” I find that sufficient printed-and-bound drivel populates library shelves that there’s no percentage in treating print as effectively insulated from the propagation of garbage.)

The single greatest opportunity for people to cultivate critical judgment comes by way of interactions that involve questioning, modeling, cooperative inquiry. Technology inevitably plays a role in those interactions. But if we don’t succeed in helping students develop a sense for sizing up information, our sophisticated technological pedagogy will little benefit the cause of raising up critical, articulate, thoughtful, deliberative students.

Representing Hinduism

Getting back to Amardeep Singh’s question to me — what do I think of the Doniger controversy (registration required, sorry)? — I’m ambivalent.

First, let me state unambiguously that I am not a scholar of comparative religion, nor am I an expert on Doniger’s work. Acquainted with both the field and Doniger; not an expert.

I’ve never been partial to Doniger’s theories of Hindusim; they seem to draw more heavily than I approve of on a psychological foundation for religion. That’s not to banish psychological elements from the study of religions; that would be foolish. But (without invoking the boogie-word “reductionism”), I sensed her to account for religious phenomena more resolutely in terms of psychology than I would.

So as far as dissenting from her scholarly position, I would sympathize. And I am not unsympathetic to complaints that she represents a Hinduism that Hindus wouldn’t recognize. Arguments that she “loves Hinduism” miss the point; I’ve known people to love Buddhism, for instance, on the basis of a tendentious and (to my mind) very misguided construal of what Buddhism is all about. Prof. Doniger — a very brilliant scholar — may well have fallen in love with her own sense of what Hinduism must be about, which Hinduism may well not gibe with the real devotion of real Hindus. I understand; I often feel that way about people’s representations of Christian faith.

As far as attacking her or Prof. Courtright of Emory, of course, that’s intolerable. If Doniger and Courtright are wrong, they should be rebutted, not attacked.

Losing My Religion

No, not that kind.

I think, though, that I’ve come to the end of my tether when it comes to academic tenure. I’m a pro-labor guy, no hesitation, so I’ve resisted thinking about changes in (or dispensing with) the tenure system on the principle that it represents the kind of benefit that, once released, will never come again. It manifestly protects professors who propose uncongenial ways of looking at sensitive topics — no small matter, at a moment when the public arena admits an increasingly constricted range of views. Still, I think I’ve reached the point of counting the side effects worse than the disease that the prescription presumably remedies. Specifically, after a year or so of reading and thinking along with the circle that grew around Invisible Adjunct, I’ve been convinced that this “benefit” for academic labor really does serve the interests of the established professoriate to the disproportionate detriment of the least privileged academic workers.

I hate to say this, especially at a time when numerous parties assail academic freedom without embarrassment (Amardeep Singh just called my attention to this controversy involving my neighbor to the south, Wendy Doniger; but there are the various versions of the Academic Bill of Rights, the controversies involving profs who take unpopular stands on Ashcroftian and Cheneian government). When the tide is running against free expression of critical views, tenure provides an obvious bulwark for venturesome intellectuals.

But. . . . But I just don’t see it any more. Partly because I’m still wincing from IA’s departure from academia, partly because the pattern of benefits and harms has come clearer and clearer to me, partly because I’m not sure that the academy in the US is so very homogeneous that Prof. Radical who gets fired from the University of Xiphius won’t be snatched right up by Righton College (if she’s an attractive candidate).

Mostly, though — the ultimate particular, in my Aristotelian ethical reasoning — I doubt that there’s an equitable way to administer so intensely valuable/costly a benefit. I gather that tenure decisions are typically made after six or seven years of service — but when the decision involves consequences for another thirty years (often more), that seems an unreasonably small sample on which to base so momentous a decision. Too often a candidate can knock himself out earn tenure, then (lacking so potent a motivator) drift for years afterward. Too often decisions turn on circumstances that ought not bear such great significance. The standards vary too unreliably between one institution and another, sometimes between one department and another, often between one committee and another.

If a benefit can’t be administered fairly, it ought not be perpetuated just because it would be a great thing if it were administered well.

I’m not sure what would ensue if the academic labor market were released from the gilt prison of the tenure system, but I’e been persuaded that it’s worth trying.

To get personal for a moment, and in response to ReverendRef’s pointed question of a couple days ago, I’m looking around for another job, several of which are not directly academic. Of course, I’d like to live near Margaret for the next two years; the nearer, the better. It’s no secret that the whole family misses the east coast. And it’s not much of a secret that I don’t fit in well at Seabury — and I wish both for Seabury and for myself the possibility of an unhindered exercise of their/my particular gifts in the pursuit of their/my calling. It doesn’t look as though we complement one another well enough to make this a productive long-term arrangement, very much to my regret. So I’m ready to walk away from tenure myself (although my most preferred outcome would be a position at an institution that wanted me on their faculty, to do there what I do best). Factor that into whatever you make of my view of tenure as a system; I’m sure my perspective on tenure has been affected by my experience of the process and its results.

Fools’ Errand

Gary alerted me to the Ship of Fools team’s plans to launch congregational worship in a 3D virtual space — and to inevitable comparisons to the Diocese of Oxford’s very different plans to plant an “i-parish.”

Of the two, I find the Oxonian proposal the more interesting, but I’m glad to see that either way, people are girding themselves to take chances, to find out what actually will happen when the church and the internet begin really finding out about one another.

(Be sure to wish Gary and Fiona a happy fourth wedding anniversary
, , , ,)

Thinking Things Over

I’m giving the opening talk at this week’s “Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace II” conference at Garrett Seminary across the street from Seabury, and the topic will be the role of metadata in learning research skills, with a special emphasis on theological learners. In the first portion of the presentation, I talk through ways that metadata helped me learn which books my professors regarded as interesting and reliable — tangible, circumstantial metadata offered me important clues as a beginning researcher.

Of course, as libraries locate more and more of their metadata (card catalogs, circulation records) online behind more-or-less secure firewalls, beginning researchers have that many fewer clues to go on. When it comes to online resources — which many of our colleagues know only superficially, and which comes with much less [accessible] metadata — beginning theological researchers have significantly fewer breadcrumbs to follow.

The prevalent response to this problem has been the links page; the best of these provide annotations, but that’s hard and time-consuming, so useful annotations are uncommon. Several problems arise from links pages. First, they’re back-breakingly labor-intensive; only a researcher with good judgment and a troop of indentured student servants, or an independently wealthy researcher with no social life, can do a plausible job of keeping a links page up-to-date. Even then, new resources appear, contents of sites change, and the links page falls behind the forces of innovation and linkrot.

In the second phase of the presentation, I’ll introduce the theory behind Google’s PageRank algorithms, and Technorati’s indexing. Then I’ll describe steps such as Google’s new personalized search options and the seeded-search about which talked to Kevin Marks. The point here is that ingenuity in searching design will garner more interesting and (quite likely) more useful results with less labor than maintaining vast compendia of links pages.

I’ll add in stuff from a number of posts I’ve noticed on others’ sites recently — and if you make some useful comments, I’ll be sure to improve the presentation by incorporating the insight you offer (or provoke!).

Even Freer Culture

I’d noticed the somewhat whimsical character of the preparation and distribution of the Free Culture Audiobook (see Aaron’s wiki for a most convenient set of links). Sometimes it bothered me, sometimes it charmed me as an artifact of distributed production.

But Noa Resare actually did something about it. Noa reworked the separate sections so that the tracks number up correctly, compiled them for BitTorrent, and set up a distribution site. I haven’t stepped into the BitTorrent waters yet, so I’ll still rely on Scott’s pop-up audiobook, but this looks terrific. If I understand correctly, the whole system works better if as many people as possible download a BitTorrent file — so help yourselves, and many thanks to Noa for this contribution!

Spywear

David Weinberger evidently has something against dressing up PCs in trench coats, sunglasses, and attache cases; he’s trying to remove “spywear” from his computer. It must be an Intel/Microsoft thing.

Which reminds me that I’ve been told that the grammar quiz toward which I pointed last week has been implicated in infecting visitors with loads of malignant spyware. I’m sorry if you followed my link and caught the code — I had no idea there was a problem, since I use the kind of computer that doesn’t have all those super-advanced, high-power gigahertz, industry-standard security holes. I struggle to get along as best I can with my more primitive device, but sometimes — such as last week — my more nearly impervious OS prevents me from due caution in linking.

Easter Greeting

I received this in a message from Eric David, and having read it and admired that distinctive Victorian alloy of sentimentality and theological earnestness, I expected that it would be all over the web when I searched this morning. As it seems not to be — that is, there are lots of places you can find it, but not on blogs, not specifically for Easter — I thought I’d post it here.

An Easter Greeting to Every Child Who Loves “Alice”

Dear Child,

Please to fancy, if you can, that you are reading a real letter, from a real friend whom you have seen, and whose voice you can seem to yourself to hear, wishing you, as I do now with all my heart, a happy Easter.

Do you know that delicious dreamy feeling, when one first wakes on a summer morning, with the twitter of birds in the air, and the fresh breeze coming in at the open window—when, lying lazily with eyes half shut, one sees as in a dream green boughs waving, or waters rippling in a golden light? It is a pleasure very near to sadness, bringing tears to one’s eyes like a beautiful picture or poem. And is not that a Mother’s gentle hand that undraws your curtains, and a Mother’s sweet voice that summons you to rise? To rise and forget, in the bright sunlight, the ugly dreams that frightened you so when all was dark—to rise and enjoy another happy day, first kneeling to thank that unseen Friend who sends you the beautiful sun?

Are these strange words from a writer of such tales as “Alice”? And is this a strange letter to find in a book of nonsense? It may be so. Some perhaps may blame me for thus mixing together things grave and gay; others may smile and think it odd that any one should speak of solemn things at all, except in Church and on a Sunday: but I think—nay, I am sure—that some children will read this gently and lovingly, and in the spirit in which I have written it.

For I do not believe God means us thus to divide life into two halves—to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much as to mention Him on a week-day. Do you think He cares to see only kneeling figures and to hear only tones of prayer—and that He does not also love to see the lambs leaping in the sunlight, and to hear the merry voices of the children, as they roll among the hay? Surely their innocent laughter is as sweet in his ears as the grandest anthem that ever rolled up from the “dim religious light” of some solemn cathedral?

And if I have written anything to add to those stores of innocent and healthy amusement that are laid up in books for the children I love so well, it is surely something I may hope to look back upon without shame and sorrow (as how much of life must then be recalled!) when my turn comes to walk through the valley of shadows.

This Easter sun will rise on you, dear child, “feeling your life in every limb,” and eager to rush out into the fresh morning air—and many an Easter-day will come and go, before it finds you feeble and grey-headed, creeping wearily out to bask once more in the sunlight—but it is good, even now, to think sometimes of that great morning when “the Sun of righteousness” shall “arise with healing in his wings.”

Surely your gladness need not be the less for the thought that you will one day see a brighter dawn than this—when lovelier sights will meet your eyes than any waving trees or rippling waters—when angel-hands shall undraw your curtains, and sweeter tones than ever loving Mother breathed shall wake you to a new a glorious day—and when all the sadness, and the sin, that darkened life on this little earth, shall be forgotten like the dreams of a night that is past!

Your affectionate Friend,

Lewis Carroll
Easter 1876

Χριστος Ανεστη! (Christ Is Risen!)

Αληθως Ανεστη! (Truly, He Is Risen!)

(I know; I got up at five o’clock to be on time for this morning’s Easter Vigil.)

It Is Finished

No, nothing to do with Holy Week, but the last two portions of the Lessig audiobook project are now available. David Akins made me finish it, as I said I would.

Chapter 10 a (from Giles Hoover)

A different slice of the first portion of Chapter 10 from Raph Levien

Giles went a little bit further than Raph, I think, so I picked up where Raph left off. Someday it would be great to record a link-piece from Raph’s section to my two, but the I.R.S. wants me to do something else first.

Chapter 10 b (from me, tonight)

Chapter 10 c (from me, tonight)

Now, I need to crash so as to get sleep of the five hours between now and my wake-up alarm for tomorrow morning’s Easter service. . . .

[Later: I went back to Scott Matthews’s Free Culture popup audiobook, and he’s fleshed it out, finished the whole book (as far as I could see) and there was already a Chapter 10 there. Well, now there are varying choices. Maybe someone will remix the audio files for a choir reading in unison.]

Last-Minute Lenten Homilies

I can’t really post the last week’s three Holy Week homilies once Easter comes, so I’ll smoosh them together in a last-minute Lenten homiletical triple-header.

I append (in the “extended” window) homilies from the Palm Sunday service for Northwestern University’s Canterbury House (the Episcopal chaplaincy at NU), a homily preached at Seabury on Monday in Holy Week, and a “meditation” at the Fourteenth Station of the Cross from Friday’s “Way of the Cross” service.

If you don’t read them tonight, I suppose you shouldn’t read them till Ash Wednesday next year. Hmmmm. . . .

Anderson Chapel of St. John the Divine, Seabury-Western

Palm Sunday
April 4, 2004

When we teach our seminarians and confirmation classes that there are 40 days to Lent, often someone will get all mathematical on us and point out that Ash Wednesday is six-and-a-half weeks before Easter, so where’s the forty? What’s with the extra days?

I have heard two answers to this question. The first is that Holy Week is itself not really part of Lent, that Lent comprises only the period up to Palm Sunday: hence forty days from Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday, and the rest is Holy Week. The other answer says that Sundays don’t count as part of Lent, since every Sunday is a feast day to the Lord. We call them “Sundays in Lent,” not “Sundays of Lent,” because they subsist as islands of joy and celebration in the midst of lakes of penitence and fasting.

If that be true, if today is a feast of the Lord, it must be the weirdest, most haunted day of joy in the liturgical calendar. We gather this evening in the full awareness of what is coming, of the searing desolation to which we are about to send our Savior. We take part in the readings, we sing “Hosanna!”, we wish one another the peace of the Lord, as though we were not about to betray him, to desert him, to deny him, to crucify him. If this be a feast, it is a feast with a double exposure, wherein we look ahead through the superficial Sunday-ness of our worship this evening to the discomfiting bleakness of Good Friday.

In that double exposure, the crowds who cheer and praise Jesus are ancient pilgrims who have come to Jerusalem to celebrate the greatest feast day of the holy year — and they are we, who have come for this anticipatory feast. In that double exposure, the crowds hail Jesus as their King, as their Deliverer, as the one who was to redeem Israel — and they, we, demand the Roman punishment appropriate for a rebellious anarchist, someone who sets himself up as a rival to Caesar. In that double exposure, Jesus rides into Jerusalem in victory, in a triumph for which we have set him up — and he rides to Jerusalem to experience the cruelest, loneliest, most painful defeat that ancient humanity could devise.

What holds those two images together in that double exposure is God’s power of imagination. We get a glimpse of that imagination in our mixed feelings about celebrating the beginning of Holy Week as though this were an unambiguous feast. That imagination catches us up into the resonances, the harmonies, the patterns and coincidences and rhymes, and then that providential imagination surpasses our capacity to comprehend, spiraling outward in a self-giving compassion that extends beyond all time, in a grace that superabounds for reconciliation and healing, in a love that outlasts resentment and suspicion, in a life that will not die. God’s imagination of us and of what we can be not only conceives of a humanity at peace, in concord, with joy and gratitude and true-heartedness — God’s imagination makes it so, in a scintillating spontaneous reconfiguration of all our notions of what has to be