Though we know information work is highly technical, it seems most library and information science programs are not — even when the faculty are involved in cutting edge technical research.  The programs are relatively short, culminating after just 1-2 years — not much time, especially considering that, unlike most other graduate programs, LIS students are generally starting from scratch with degrees in unrelated fields.  As such, the curriculum is broad but mostly shallow, save for some specialized tracks and doctoral programs. The following is my shortlist of abbreviations and acronyms that I’ve come to view as important to my work in public/digital history, digital humanities, and educational technology.  I don’t work in a library exactly, but I know firsthand that many of these are also important in that setting as well.

API
Application Programming Interface
APIs connect different platforms and programs, most often via established functions and methods.  Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google and many other web services provide open APIs that allow you to embed, feed, and connect with their services on your own site or application.  Operating systems, content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, dSpace, etc.), game engines, and programming languages (Ruby on Rails, jQuery, etc.) all have APIs that allow programmers to tap into, customize and extend functionality.

• API @ Wikipedia

XML
eXtensible Markup Language
XML is the core of several languages, tool, and protocols used in digital archives, digital humanities, and general web development.  In my experience, it is kind of a bear to work with, but is nonetheless worth investigating as it is the basis of RSS, EAD, and TEI, among others familiar to M.L.I.S.s.

• XML @ Wikipedia
• XSLT @ Wikipedia
• TEI @ Wikipedia
• EAD @ Wikipedia
• RSS @ Wikipedia

JSON
JavaScript Object Notation
JSON is a lightweight, language-independent data interchange format, billed as “The Fat Free Alternative to XML.” I’ve never worked with it, but probably will at some point.

• JSON @ Wikipedia

OOP
Object Oriented Programming
Okay, well, I’m listing OOP here as a placeholder for various programming languages, some of which are not, strictly speaking, object-oriented by definition. The point is that, while I was introduced to HTML and CSS for the first time in an elective grad school workshop, there’s really not that much you can do with those tools alone. Static webpages have limited use these days. Most libraries, archives, and digital humanities projects need someone who understands – or better, can do – programming/scripting on some level. The languages listed below are probably the most commonly used in the field, though as more projects start to involve mobile app development, Objective-C (iPhone) and Java (Android) will also be in demand.

• OOP @ Wikipedia
• PHP @ Wikipedia
• Javascript @ Wikipedia
• Ruby on Rails @ Wikipedia
• Python @ Wikipedia

LAMP
Linux Apache MySQL Perl/PHP/Python
Basically, a LAMP server is composed of several open source components, including MySQL for database service, Apache as the HTTP server, and pre-installed “P” programming languages (Perl/PHP/Python) running on some variety of Linux operating system. This LAMP “stack” is the basis of most sites on the web today.

• LAMP @ Wikipedia

SQL
Structured Query Language
SQL, and particularly MySQL, is one of the most common relational database platforms in use on the web today. As part of the open source LAMP stack, it is available on nearly all web servers by default and forms the underlying data structure for most open source content management systems.  In recent years, a variety of alternative platforms have emerged under the banner of NoSQL, sparking some amusing yet mostly incomprehensible (to me) debate.

• SQL @ Wikipedia
• MySQL @ Wikipedia
• PostgreSQL @ Wikipedia
• NoSQL @ Wikipedia

DCMI
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
A metadata schema for describing “physical resources such as books, digital materials such as video, sound, image, or text files, and composite media like web pages.” It is often said that Dublin Core is “capable of describing anything, though not particularly well.” Still, a good place to start.  Like the two metadata standards that follow, it is often used in conjunction with some type of XML. I’m listing just a few here but there are many others one might add to this list.

• DCMI @ Wikipedia

METS
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard
Another metadata standard “for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library” using XML.

• METS @ Wikipedia

DACS
Describing Archives: A Content Standards
And another metadata standard “for describing archives, personal papers, and manuscript collections.”

• DACS @ Wikipedia

DMCA
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Understanding copyright legislation is essential for many projects in libraries, archives, education and digital publishing.  I name DMCA here mainly because it’s an abbreviation and thus fits into the scope of this post. It is difficult to imagine a web consisting only of the publisher’s own original content. Today we share, link, quote, and remix content created by others as part of our daily routines. Scholars post research material for students; archivists post manuscripts for researchers; librarians share book reviews; students and other user communities contribute to projects by uploading content. While most institutions have a copyright policy, it’s important that it be kept up to date, both for the organization’s protection, but also for the protection of our collective legal rights. If we take a casual view of copyright, we risk legal action on one end and the forfeiture of our power on the other. A large part of DMCA applies specifically to Digital Rights Management software (DRM) and the legality of circumventing it. Archivists of film, videogames, music and other commonly DRM’ed material obviously have something at stake here.

• DMCA @ Wikipedia
• Copyright @ ALA
• DMCA @ EFF

General Resources

• W3 Schools
• Mozilla School of Web Craft @ P2PU

This list may seem overwhelming.  I wrote it and it overwhelms me, even two years out of grad school. And it’s not even comprehensive. But you have to start somewhere.

My progression from HTML newb only a couple years ago to, well, a newb of several additional, more difficult things, came by way of hacking WordPress.  I’m sure this is quite common. There are plenty of other ways to learn a programming language, but from what I can tell the key factors are always going to be necessity and specificity. If your motivation is to complete a specific project (regardless of languages involved), you will be far more likely to succeed and learn something than if you are simply trying to grasp the language itself in an abstract, academic way. I have a book on Objective C sitting on my shelf, but until I need to complete a real life project with Objective C, I probably won’t get much further than “Hello World!.” Find an actual need to develop these skills and you will probably make some progress. If nothing else, you will discover along the way all the things you don’t know, which is also helpful.

Another important thing to remember is that you will almost never be working from scratch. When you plan out a project, find something to serve as a solid foundation.  It may be a document to use as an example, a description of an existing project, an open source code base, or  some other fundamental element that almost fits your needs perfectly, and then figure out what needs to change to make it your own. As you go deeper and begin to produce your own content, this will seem less like copying and more like learning from and contributing to a community of practice.

Just to be clear, I want to close in defense of my education and alma mater (to which I will always be true or whatever). I was taught of these things (well, some of them), but not in any great detail; something that would be near impossible in the context of a broad-based 1-2 year LIS program.  It’s worth noting that I was in a generic public library track and may have learned more about these issues in a more specialized setting.  I also should clarify that I’m hardly an expert in most if any of these topics and languages; there may be some better resources and explanations out there so please share in the comments and/or via twitter.

What was/has been your experience with your MLIS program?  Did/do you feel prepared for a professional position coming out of grad school?  What would you add to this list?

Deco is a free theme for Omeka. Though I started working on an Omeka theme for use by a more general audience and without any particular motivation beyond having a lame sense of fun, as I got going, I realized it might be really useful for the group of social studies teachers with whom I’ve been working this past week. As part of a grant-funded workshop, the teachers needed to start their own WordPress- and Omeka-based websites (for use in their classrooms). As you might expect, none of the teachers had experience with such things. After an arduous 4 hour workshop in which the group got all of their hosting plans purchased and sites installed and configured, we kind of slowly came to a realization that there was still foundational work to be done. Though Omeka is quite user friendly, it’s still best managed (in a self-hosted environment that is), by users having at least some experience with and understanding of web publishing. (omeka.net is a great hosted alternative by the way, and works much like wordpress.com, but for various reasons was not right for our project). And so the scope of this little side project grew as I tried to anticipate some of the problems novice users might encounter.

For one, Omeka’s publicly available themes sometimes seem lacking when combined with certain plugins. Each of the available themes is quite nice on its own terms and perfect for building out by experienced users (in fact, this theme is built on the very excellent Berlin theme by Jeremy Boggs and Ken Albers), but even for those with a moderate amount of design and coding knowledge, changing things up can be daunting, requiring a lot of time querying the forums, and browsing the documentation. I knew that most of the teachers would be using a set of plugins that require additional styling and code insertion and so I tried to prepare the theme with as much plugin-specific styling and conditional templating I could so that they would not have to fool around too much. The most common needs should hopefully be addressed by the core templates and through the many configurable theme options

This is my first public theme and it’s been quite an experience thinking through all the possible use cases. I think I have accounted for the most common possibilities, but it’s possible something could still come up and present a problem: there could be errors to debug, display problems in older browsers, poorly formed functions, etc.. Thus, I’m calling this version 0.9, just to be safe, but I think it is certainly usable at this point. Nevertheless, the usual “no warranty” caveat applies.

Deco theme for Omeka

Designed for: Omeka Version: 1.3

Browser tested in: Internet Explorer 8+, and current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera

License: GPL

Changelog:

• Dec 06 2010 — v. 0.9: initial release
• Jan 15 2011 — v. 0.9.5: updated for compatibility with Omeka 1.3 and new plugin releases, various bug fixes
• March 06 2011 — v. 0.9.6: added html5/flash video support, improved image gallery on homepage (now uses any featured item that has an image attached, randomized display), started cleaning up ugly code, various bug fixes and layout tweaks
• April 27 2011 — v. 0.9.6.1: added deco_display_rss() function to custom.php, fixed bug in Featured Exhibit function on homepage to detect if Exhibit Builder plugin was installed/activated, minor layout tweaks
• June 26 2011 — v. 0.9.6.2: removed show_untitled_items() function due to incompatibility with Omeka 1.4
• August 30, 2011 — v. 0.9.6.3: fixed minor bug in config.ini that was affecting some users

Unique Features:

• Featured Item slideshow on homepage (jQuery, Awkward Showcase)
• Lightbox effect for images on items/show (jQuery, FancyBox)
• Built in support for HTML 5 Video with Flash fallback (VideoJS, Flowplayer)
• “Edit this Item” button on items/show
• Add an RSS feed anywhere on your site using the deco_display_rss($feedUrl,$num) function (uses Zend RSS, note that using this function may lead to slower load times)
• Configurable theme options
  • stylesheet-switching with 4 designs in the initial version (plus a custom.css option for advanced users)
  • user-defined tagline
  • user-defined “About” text on the homepage
  • user-defined number of recent items to display on the homepage
  • toggle lightbox on items/show
  • toggle slideshow on homepage
  • toggle “Random Featured Collection” on homepage
  • toggle images with “Random Featured Collection” on homepage
  • toggle “Related Exhibits” on items/show
  • toggle theme credits in footer
• Built in support for common plugins
  • MyOmeka (user status in footer, CSS styles)
  • Exhibit Builder (CSS styles)
  • DocsViewer (ideal placement in items/show if user does not choose the default embed on items/show option)

Known Issues and Planned Improvements

• ISSUE: Conflict with Image Annotation plugin breaks the gallery and fancybox scripts.
• PLANNED IMPROVEMENT: Additional stylesheet choices (better, more varied)
• PLANNED IMPROVEMENT: Let users configure or at least turn off HTML5 video options in theme settings.

Download Deco, version 0.9.6.4 [GitHub]

Given that one of my primary occupational roles is providing tech support, I offer the following question in part as preemption in my own self-interest but also in the interest of exploring the scope of instruction in the digital humanities (or the “digital” anything for that matter): Should Your Syllabus Include a Note on Web Browsers? If you teach an online class or a class with a significant online component, the answer might be yes.

Whether you are using BlackBoard, a blog platform, or a “proper” CMS, if your course site is doing anything remotely interesting, one of your students is probably using a browser that is not up to the task.

I get questions all the time about browser-related issues and even when I do instructional sessions and warn against using certain old browsers, the questions still roll in. My first troubleshooting question is invariably “what browser are you using?” If the answer is Internet Explorer, that’s usually the last question, followed by many “informative” statements of (arguably) questionable relevance and utility. If nothing else, my mini-rants leave a student with — if not a full understanding of the problem — at least a sense that the “blue e” on their desktop is called a browser, that it’s used to “open the Internet,” and that there apparently are multiple options from which to choose. For many this is a revelation of no small impact.

While not the higher order stuff we (think we) should need to teach at a college level, understanding browsers can still be an opening to understanding lots of “entry level” issues in new media and web publishing. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more all rely on the surprisingly fragile ecosystem created by both the browser and the coder (even when the coder is a giant billion dollar company like Google, who themselves have given up on supporting old browser tech). If you plan to even broach the topic of web development and design, the browser is the natural place to start. Even if you just want your students to be able to use and evaluate web sources and digital projects, using an old browser is going to work against your sanity and their success.

Browsers are also an obvious choice for opening up discussions about open source technologies. Firefox, Chrome/Webkit, and Opera are great examples of a movement by which users have become creators/participants, and technology can — through small but scaled contributions — be bent to our will, rather than the other way around. If you are using Drupal, WordPress, Omeka or some other open source web publishing platform in your class, or if your students use open source desktop software like Audacity or GIMP, this is a natural connection. Open source is the key to so much recent innovation in education, academe and on the web more broadly, that if you don’t think being an open source advocate is part of your job, perhaps you should ask yourself why not.

Savvy students and instructors may intuitively understand that they can improve their online experiences by seeking out new approaches and alternatives when problems and questions arise, and that recency and novelty are actually important in technology, but this is by no means a norm in any non-tech sector of our culture. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you pretty much stick with what you do know — even if it sucks. I recently questioned a colleague for requiring that assignments be “prepared in MS Word”; if the end product is in the right format (.doc in their case), why require a specific software that comes with specific costs and benefits. Let students choose what software to use and note that there actually is a choice to be made (yes, OpenOffice, iWork, GoogleDocs, and more all export into Microsoft formats if desired), instead of hiding a broader question (what software to use) inside of an unnecessarily absolute decree (buy and use Word) that addresses a specific problem (students turning in papers in unreadable formats) but ignores the bigger context. This is not Microsoft hate (I like Office and, surprisingly, even Windows7), but a serious question about how we prepare students for careers that will invariably involve software and hardware choices (if not by them, than for them). So maybe your students won’t be designers, programmers, IT specialists, or whatever, but they will be consumers of technology and perhaps digital creators of another kind. Scholars and writers (not to mention managers, etc) still need to be versed in the basics of technology so they can understand the options at their disposal, the forces that shape their world, and the language with which to convey their needs and ideas (try asking an 80 year old to describe the usability and effectiveness of a piece of software or a website; these are learned skills). Connoisseurship has its utility.

Security is another issue that needs little description here. Basically, keeping your browser, your OS, and all of your other software updated will go a long way in preventing spyware, viruses and generally poor performance.

A “note on browsers” doesn’t directly address all of the issues above, but it’s potentially a start and it probably can’t hurt.

Even if you are not interested in any larger questions about digital literacy or open source advocacy, or it simply does not fall into the purview of your course, you still might want to include some kind of note on browsers, if only to reduce time spent troubleshooting and haggling with tech-averse students. So with that in mind, I offer the following:

Prefab “Note on Browsers”

This course requires extensive use of the Internet, including websites and other online resources that may require the use of a up-to-date, standards-compliant web browser. Web browsers are free to download and may be installed on any computer in a matter of minutes. Acceptable browsers include the most recent versions of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. To ensure that your browser is updated to the most recent version, open your browser and go to Tools >> Options (PC) or Help >> Check for Updates (Mac), or download the latest version of your browser choice at http://www.browserchoice.eu

A randomized list of browser choices:

www.browserchoice.eu
This is actually the same interface that is shown to new computer buyers in the EU, where it was decided that Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows was anti-competitive and potentially harmful to innovation.

IE6 No More

www.ie6nomore.com
A nice little script you can drop into the header of your site so that users of IE6 and IE7 will get a warning reading “For a better experience using this site, please upgrade to a modern web browser” with links to upgrade to the latest version of IE or download an alternative. Don’t forget to update the code when IE9 comes out in late 2010/early 2011 to be sure your students/users are taking advantage of Microsoft’s promise of greater support for existing and emerging HTML/CSS standards.

Browser-Update.org

www.browser-update.org
I haven’t used this script yet; it looks similar to IE6 No More but apparently checks for outdated versions of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. Billed as an “an initiative by web designers, webmasters and bloggers who want to bring the web further and help their visitors.”

NOTE: The images above are from the very awesome looking Harmonia Pastelis Icon Pack by Teekatas

Today I think I’ll share a few email excerpts to illustrate some of the more annoying aspects of my job, each of which involves public school district IT Departments acting in ways that are (in my very partial and partially-informed estimation) either a) lazy, b) incompetent, c) draconian or d) all of the above. If I come across as a curmudgeon in the process, it’s because I am. Still, it’s important to note at the outset that I understand the challenges faced by the well-meaning folks charged with managing school (and perhaps also business/enterprise) IT. They do so with many skills I do not come close to possessing and under tremendous pressure to meet legislative and policy directives, but are often lacking in the money, staff, and training required to keep up to date with the demands of acting as local gatekeeper and eternal overlord of the internets. Nevertheless, in my brief experience thus far as a member of the ed. tech community, I have yet to meet a school IT coordinator (in public primary and secondary schools, that is, and not in higher ed where the environment is a bit more competitive) who was what I would call “in touch” with the latest goings-on in education/technology/educational technology. In any case, I hope this comes across as constructive. That is my sole intention, to save the fucking children.

Issue number one: filtering. CIPA basically requires that school districts filter their internet access as a means of protecting children from pornography and other sundry objectionables across this big bad internet. I actually do not generally disagree with this, though I do make some obvious qualifications. For one, filtering should not be any broader than what is actually needed. Unfortunately, this is a tall order. Google Safe Search might provide some indication of how this works and doesn’t. Safe Search is essentially the same kind of filtering algorithm that a school might employ through purchasing a third party application. Try googling “firefighter” with safe search turned off and see what kind of image results you get. Firefighter is a pretty innocuous term and one that a kid is pretty likely to be interested in at some point. But without some kind of filter, even Google cannot avoid returning some questionable material on the first page. But turn safe search turned back on (set to moderate or even strict) and the results are generally more wholesome, right? Actually, no, they’re pretty much the same. Take a look yourself. This is not a jab at Google, just a quick way to point out that algorithms – even the best of them – are not infallible. They make mistakes. So instead of endlessly refining their algorithms, third party filtering apps take a hammer to the web, locking down students’ web experience and blocking content on the broadest of terms in an effort to overcome their own inherent limitations.

Which brings me to my second qualification, that filters should be locally configurable. If a teacher or student needs access to a site that is blocked, there needs to be a mechanism for whitelisting it and/or adjusting the parameters of the filter. This seems not to be the case for many districts. For example, as discussed in the email below, on several occasions lately, I’ve been told by teachers and other education professionals that some of the educational and professional development sites I’ve created and/or maintain for work are actually not accessible by educators in their classrooms or in the school building. One teacher was told by their IT department that it’s because “the site is a blog and blogs are blocked.” Sometimes that is true (the site is a blog), and sometimes not. I’ve never looked into the blackbox that is an internet filter but my assumption is that to determine if a site is a blog (whatever that actually means these days), this school’s filter detected that the site in question used WordPress (we use it a lot as a CMS and for course blogs) and thus came to the conclusion that it =blog and is therefore somehow unsafe or inappropriate for minors. Don”t believe it? Check out this “tutorial” about protecting children from blogs from a filtering software company.

So, anyway, on with the email excerpts.

…By the way, it’s pretty unsatisfactory that a district would block any of our sites. Presumably they do this automatically (i.e. they use 3rd party “child protection” software without retaining any control of their own) by deciphering which platform is being used (WordPress, Omeka, etc.). We’ve had similar issues with the [OMITTED] site. Frankly, I think it’s time that teachers forced their districts to adapt to current web publishing models rather than letting some outdated software make decisions for them. Considering that we use the same kinds of software that the NYTimes and other major sites use, this is clearly an injustice for students and teachers alike (if not for small “publishers” like ourselves) and also gives school IT admins an unearned sense that they’ve done their job. But I digress…

And another (regarding the blocking of a Google Docs data collection tool)…

[OMITTED] may have some responses recorded on paper that she will send me if/when she gets them (one of the teachers had Google blocked in their district for some inexplicable reason so they did them on paper).

That’s right. Google is blocked. The problems with this are so glaringly obvious that I will move on.

On to the next problem, not one that is unique to school IT, but nevertheless a problem at schools and far beyond. Yes, I’m going to do it. I’m going to write (part of) a blog post about how I hate Internet Explorer. And yes, particularly the 6th version of it, which I’m required by Internet Law to mention was released about a decade ago. And so on. So… Issue number two: IE6.

The following was to be a public response to a very polite and well-meaning message from a user who, judging by his email address, works in government and academia, informing me that a particular site is broken in IE6. I’ve gotten similar messages for sites we manage that are created both in house and by well-regarded professional designers (i.e. it’s not just my sloppy design). In the end, my response was not posted, owing to the better judgment of a colleague to whom I sent the message first. They decided it was not necessary and, I think, maybe it sounds a little defensive. Nevertheless, I think it’s an important issue and one that should not be taken lightly.

Thanks for the feedback. We get such messages from time to time, so please allow me to explain what we are thinking about this issue, which is somewhat more complicated than it may seem to some folks.

I cannot speak for [OMITTED], but our view [...] is that we can realistically only expect to support modern browsers in our smaller projects. Internet Explorer is not a modern browser, though the latest version (8) has made significant strides and is fully capable of rendering the new site visually and functionally. We serve a message to users of older browsers that they need to upgrade. If they choose not to, they will at least be aware of the source of their frustration. It is ours as well.

We make this compromise for a couple of reasons that I think are well-considered. For one, it is extremely time-consuming to debug for old versions of Internet Explorer and we value lower-cost projects. Second, if we “dumb down” our work to be 100% backwards compatible, we are cheating those visitors who use modern software and want a more modern experience. We cannot provide that service at our usual (very low) cost of publishing. Third, we believe that the time has come to give up on outdated browsers. Google and other major publishers and service providers have already made the decision to drop support for IE6. Microsoft does not even stand behind it’s older software in this regard and has expressed regret that it is still in use.

Finally, we trust that users are fully capable of taking responsibility for their web experience. Browsers are free. They are easy to install. New ones work better, look better, do more and provide greater protection against malware. The best browsers include auto-update features so you never have to worry about getting left behind. We understand that many work environments lock their employees into using the outdated software required to access their older enterprise systems. This is an unfortunate reality but one that we cannot control, trusting that market and research needs, as well as increasingly vocal employee dissatisfaction will take care of this over time. In the meantime, we always design for the latest version of IE, as well as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. This covers the great majority of users, including those that we track on our own analytics.

This is not to say that we do not continually look at this policy. We always appreciate feedback of any kind and if we are shown over time that we have erred in this approach, we will certainly do our best to adapt.

The question to my mind is, do we need to support every piece of hardware and software ever released (a decade is a long time for a piece of software, especially one that is freely replaceable), or should we focus our energies more wisely on following web standards and providing a better experience for users who employ appropriate software. You can’t open an iWork .pages file with Electric Pencil (or so I assume). You can’t play Modern Warfare 2 on an Atari 6400. If a site requires Flash, you either install Flash or you don’t use the site (or wait until you get home and use a laptop instead of your iPhone). I am okay with these limitations. How did Adobe and it’s publisher-users get consumers to agree to the Flash arrangement at a 90+ percent rate of adoption. I don’t know but it wasn’t by creating alternate, crippled, backward compatible versions of every Flash site (though as an iPhone user, sometimes I wish that were the case).

But these are essentially questions for designers and content creators, not for IT professionals. The questions for IT are different. The goal of IT, at schools or elsewhere, is to serve their communities’ needs while maintaining the security of both the users and the broader infrastructure. So why in the hell do many schools insist on continuing to run outdated browsers like IE6? If the answer is that they keep running IE6 because they need it to access other outdated enterprise systems, then they have doubly failed in their mission.

If the transition away from outmoded tech has been neglected due to financial constraints, then I don’t want to see that school running MS Office or BlackBoard or maybe even Windows. If money is that tight, I want to see OpenOffice.org. I want to see Linux Ubuntu. I want to see Moodle (or something better, but equally free). But I have not seen that happening. At a recent ed. tech conference I attended, the same teachers who were locked into shitty IT environments were all atwitter about tablets and clickers and robots and so on. The tech coordinators and district admins I met were most interested in gimmicky proprietary gadgets and LMSs that provide no justifiable value proposition. And meanwhile, the students can’t even access Google? The modern, connected, social web is off limits. The sites that get through are broken and dysfunctional due to outdated hardware and software. Where is the creativity?

I’m not trying to trash anyone, really (especially not an entire profession), but there is a cultural problem that is so readily apparent in how our schools deal with technology that I find it hard to be polite. Ditching IE6 is not going to change that culture, nor is better monitoring of filtering systems, nor new iMacs or clickers, nor anything else you can buy. And this doesn’t even begin to address the question of how/when/if we actually give students real tech instruction and who is qualified to do so. It’s not me. For the most part, at this moment, I’m just an onlooker to this mess. I don’t work in a public school district and I’m not a teacher and I’m not really in IT. I work in a university and deal in the (digital) humanities. I have autonomy (sometimes) and access to money (sometimes) and people that can help me (sometimes). But mostly, I try to be creative, I try to keep up to date, and I try to always be learning something new and useful so I can always be doing something new and useful. Take that for what it’s worth.

My experimentation with these concepts and methodologies has been occasional up until this year.  I’ve used primary source documents in class before and typically in a constructivist fashion.  Combining web 2.0 would allow students to publish their final products on a public medium.  I decided to start a Myspace page to serve this purpose. I know, I know, Rupert Murdoch has already purchased my soul and sold it to Bernard Madoff who in turn sold it to some Mormons in a bizarre pyramid scandal.  I’d estimate that about 60-70% of my students have Myspace pages and about half of those use Myspace seem to use Myspace as their primary internet activity.  In fact, about two years ago, a community center up the street from the high school had a computer lab where Myspace use was so rampant the center had to make certain times “Myspace free.”  In other words, the site seems extremely popular amongst my student population.  Regardless, I figured Myspace would be an easy way to trick kids into thinking I was playing in their world in hopes of greater participation.  And it worked…. kind of.

We had been studying the Civil Rights movement, and I really wanted students to figure out, using primary sources, how de-centralized the movement was.  I wanted them to grasp how normal folks, including students in high school like them, were moved to courageous action.  Young people are increasingly aware of leaders beyond Martin Luther King Jr. but knowledge of groups like SNCC is sparse.  I wanted to encourage my students to see beyond the master narrative of “I have a dream” speeches to understand just how involved folks their age were in this push for freedom.

Students were divided up into groups of three to four and given six front pages from 1957 editions of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.  They had to use articles from these newspaper front pages to write a three paragraph blog entry on the Little Rock Nine and post it alongside their peers’ on my Myspace page. The results were an interesting mix from fairly terrible to pretty interesting.  None were shockingly brilliant, however.  This is not surprising though.  My guess is that few, if any, history teachers in these students’ classrooms have encouraged them to look at primary documents, decode them, and then “publish” a written recreation of their contents.  Take a look at your old college essay on the Vietnam before you’re too critical of these kids.

Nonetheless, there were some apparent obstacles that need to be considered for future activities of a similar nature.  First, the use of the articles as not just primary sources but the only sources they could use proved difficult and problematic at times.  Some groups really struggled to put together a coherent narrative beyond essentially cutting and pasting interesting facts from the newspaper.  Some failed to even do this chronologically.  One group stated, “After 8 Africans [sic] entered the school across the street. They tried to call other students to join them but they were pushed back by guards.”  This was after they already mentioned the students entering the building and members of the 101^st helping them.  While this might be intellectual Viagra for a few choice grad students looking to deconstruct the Western obsession with chronology as history, any educator would see it for what it is: an inability to properly read the articles together rather than as separate documents.

Additionally, several groups included sentences like, “As six negros tried to enter NLR high white students pushed them back because they did not want them at there school.” Frustrating grammar and spelling errors aside, I’m hoping you noticed the antiquated term “negro” in that depiction of the Little Rock Nine.  Seeing as how the kids in this group are all Puerto Rican and not rednecks, they were clearly just adopting the language of the 1957 Arkansas Gazette journalists.  While most groups did not make this mistake, it’s clear that more work needs to be done on the interpretation side of using primary sources.  Thinking historically does not necessitate using outdated language.

Another component that troubled me was the discussion of violence within the narratives.  Clearly, anyone with even a basic understanding of the Little Rock Nine case is aware of the intense mob violence that accompanied the desegregation of Central High School in 1957.  Some students failed to grasp the level of violence through these primary sources though.  “That caused a big chaos because at lest 100 parents of the students and other adults lined up on the side walk in front of the high school an hour before classes recessed for the noon hours.” [sic] There is no mention as to what these students and parents did once they lined up in front of the school and this is where the blog entry abruptly ends.  Lacking detail is to be expected, to a degree, in an assignment like this, but this clearly lacked understanding.  Did this group really go away thinking this racist family picnic mob was there to simply “be heard?”

The issue of responsibility also arose in the blog entries.  One group placed the white riots squarely on the Little Rock Nine’s boldness. “Due to court orders Faubus removed the National guard. After they were removed, the African Americans tried to enter the school causing the white young students to form a riot.” [sic]  Perhaps this is splitting hairs, but there is no discussion of white racism being the source of these riots in this entry.  I doubt the group of students, a racial mixture of whites, Puerto Ricans, and Arabs, meant for it to read this way.  The difficulty comes into getting students to grasp that how they phrase things is perhaps more important than what their intentions are.  This is an integral part of thinking and being able to write historically.  When others read your interpretation of the past they do so with their own understanding, not yours.  Getting students to convey their analysis of something as complex as the Little Rock Nine case is difficult but they should be encouraged to do so as clearly and thoroughly as possible.

One group attempted to retell the tale through the modern civil rights narrative which goes something like: “Black Americans worked hard to be recognized for their contributions and are now allowed the same opportunities as whites today.”  It’d be interesting to see if this was sparked by group members comparing their experiences today to that of the Little Rock Nine but alas, this was not the assignment.  The group concluded that “the students were allowed to go to the school with problems but at the same time they wre getting an oportuinty in life because some people dream of an opportunity while orthers wake up and work hard for it,” [sic].  I read this as an attempt to fit African-Americans into the American ethos of “hard work = success”, which is essentially what many watered down versions of the Civil Rights movement have become.  This view lacks a historical understanding of the barriers of white supremacy and the struggles of grassroots organizing.

Clearly there is much work to be done here.  Students need to engage and investigate primary sources much earlier on in order to be more comfortable and familiar with interpreting them.  Perhaps they also need a little more scaffolding to get to the point where they can take on similarly styled projects.  Nonetheless, the students did work with primary sources and did produce a piece of historical work on the topic.  Like getting President Obama to publicly condemn Cambridge police officers for acting “stupidly,” it’s a relatively small victory but an important one.  In doing so the participating students gained a greater understanding of the importance of historical interpretation, grassroots organizing during the Civil Rights movement, and their role in deciding what matters from the past.

Like any zealot, I spend weekends, evenings, social engagements, and holidays ranting about the things that really get on my nerves.  Today, July 4th, a day commemorating the birth of our glorious nation, I spent the early afternoon orating on the relative merits of the LMS in hopes of fomenting revolution.  I am currently taking an Information Architecture course, ironically offered only through BlackBoard, the arch-nemesis of all that is righteous and enlightened in higher education, a blithely tyrannical George III to Web 2.0′s promise of digital democracy, a naval blockade on usability and information seeking behavior, an unjust tax levied on the collective sanity of the student body.

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously, you say?  Well, what did you do to celebrate America today? Eat some hotdogs?  Listen to some Lee Greenwood tunes?  I think it’s clear who the real patriot is.  Hit the break for the full thread.  Names have been changed to protect the innocent, the neutral, and the obsequiously monarchical.

Click on the image for the full size view or scroll down for the transcript…

Click image for full size view

1. ME: Can we discuss the IA of Blackboard?  I’m not trying to complain.  I understand why it is useful for instructors, but it is pretty rough on student users (poor organization, poor labeling, poor navigation, seemingly no interest in student information needs/behaviors, etc.).   I think it might actually be an interesting case study.  Then again, I’ve been reading a lot of Jim Groom lately
2. STUDENT:I couldn’t agree with you more. Clunky and awkward at best isn’t it?
3. STUDENT:I agree, it could use a little better organization. Sometimes there are 2 left-hand navigation menus, that’s unusual.
4. STUDENT: Very good observation, because I was thinking about that when I first used the site. So context is covered, and content is covered, but it could be more USER friendly. This site is built for knot-item seeking. Once you learn the system, you can get to where you need to be and use the system.
5. INSTRUCTOR: It’s interesting to see what both student and faculty users have to say about Blackboard. I’ve yet to meet anyone who is thrilled with it. Here are a couple of items that might shed some light on why Blackboard is designed and arranged the way it is:1) The students don’t get to see this, but there are actually three sets of users who can interface with Blackboard: Course Designers, Instructors and Students. Depending upon roles to which you’ve been designated, there are three different “tabs” one could access: Build, Teach, and Student. Students don’t see these tabs because they only have one role — Student. All three roles/tabs have access to the same “Course Tools” (the first set of left-hand navigational choices). However, the next set of tools change depending upon the roles to which you have access. If you access the class as a designer, the bottom navigation is labeled “Designer Tools” and has a set of links unique to that role, if as an instructor, then “Instructor Tools”, if as a student then I believe it’s “My Tools.” Without knowing about the different roles, I can see how two, separate sets of global navigation would make no sense.2) Another part of Blackboard I think most users struggle with is the idea that the Course Tools don’t offer much other than a *completely* different way to access the content than offered through the Course Content home page. In building a class, the designer chooses the tools on the left, builds the assets, and then sets links to these assets in other places. Learning modules are sets of topical, sequential links to assets created using the other tools. Sound counter-intuitive? It is if you approach the course design and layout with a web/hyperlink mentality. And there’s the problem. This is elearning. We use the internet to access the training and we, as users, expect it to follow modicums similar to that of sites on the World Wide Web. And this is a fair expectation. However, Blackboard is instead arranged to give users access to the same material in a number of different ways, which is a good idea but read on.So based upon what we’ve been reading, why might users get frustrated with Blackboard. The first one is that even though it is a good idea to offer multiple roads to the same content, there is *no predominate organizational scheme*. Should I primarily use the global tools on the left because they never change? Should I navigate the course like a web site simply from the Course Content page? What is the main road? What if I’m serendipitous? How lost and confused could I become? Also the labels, while familiar, English words, may not be self-evident in their meaning. What is a “Learning module?” Where will that take me? I imagine that assignments will be part of the course content, but I’ve got this other button labeled “Course Content”, why should I choose one over the other?The good news is that the next iteration of Blackboard is seeking to address a number of these issues. Which is a good thing considering over 70% of all universities in the United States use Blackboard as their learning management system.
6. ME: There are many reasons why BlackBoard works for instructors and those listed are all relevant. I have designed courses, modules, and quizzes, and tracked student submissions, etc. in BlackBoard during my time as a graduate assistant for a professor who taught some “elearning” type courses.Aside from automating some administrative tasks (gradebooks, adding/tracking users, etc), I don’t see anything in BBs repertoire that justifies it’s poor usabiity and it’s high subscription cost to universities. For something so costly, you would think they would have invested in some user studies and maybe a post-1998 design upgrade. As far as I can tell, 95% of BBs functionality could be duplicated in WordPress (with a few plug-ins and maybe some creative use of GoogleDocs) or some other free/open source system. Of course, the university would have to support this with staff (maybe one guy and a server) and some minimal training for admins (probably less than what it takes to learn BB) and they would come out ahead over time (if not monetarily, then in staff development). Likewise, I’m not sure any LMS can devise a “learning environment” that suits real learning needs when they necessarily design around the generic admin/user. Plus, anecdotal evidence suggests that students are actually more engaged and interactive when they know they are working in the “open web” and not inside the BlackBoard blackbox.So I clearly have issues with BB that go beyond IA, but considering that I’m typing right now in a very tiny text box (maybe 80px high) with a broken editor (at least, using Firefox) inside a pop-up window, dreading the occasional BB-induced browser crash, etc.; the poor design just amplifies all the other issues I have with this system.I work in part as an educational technologist for the History Dept. (or at least for a few courses and workshops), so I know how hard it is to support unique projects and design around technological deficits (in software, user/admin ability, etc.), but I think we can do better than this.And again, I am not directing this at CSU (where I happily work) or the professor (who has limited, if any, choices when it comes to online course platforms). For anyone who is interested in exploring this topic, you can find some good debates online, many of which center around this guy:Jim Groom, Ed-Tech at Univ of Mary Washington, and inventor of “edupunk” movement. See his blog (http://bavatuesdays.com/) as well as interviews and stories in NYT and Chronicle of Higher Ed, among others. He of course is not the only person to voice dissatisfaction with BB, but he is by far the most visible.Sorry if I got carried away on this little side-topic, but I have seen many bright young minds crack under the weight of BlackBoard Happy 4th!