Accidental Pedagogy

Best Practices in Ethnography of Technology

I got this from Flora McMartin as an example of best practices to follow when doing ethnographic research in technology. Enjoy.

Lev Gonick on Leadership for Web 2.0

There is a nice short piece in the new Educause review by Lev Gonick. He talks about the need for a change in how we run technology infrastructure on campus and the need for a more nimble response to new technologies and how faculty and students might use them.

Gonick argues that there is a

"need for a new kind of IT leadership, one that must surrender a modicum of control. Call it "open-source leadership." IT leaders must accommodate the contributions of the community rather than control them. They must learn to be supporters and enablers, not obstructionists. They must learn to cede some authority in this evolving world."

Unfortunately the article is short and he doesn't really discuss how we can do what he says we should. I think he is absolutely right we need to find a way to accommodate innovation without first running it through endless processes and committees and RFPs and pilot groups. But at the same time we also need to provide support for people using the new innovations and providing that support can be tough, even in small numbers. Training support people to have the flexibility and the ability to support something new every semester is difficult as well. But we do need to find those models.

How to Write Consistently Boring Academic Technology Articles

I got a link from Alan Wolf to an article giving advice about how to write consistently boring scientific literature. The author advises that you follow ten simple steps to guarantee a vibrant publication record and career success. At the very least you will likely avoid reviewers making statements such as "I was alarmed that the authors believed this to be a final draft" or "although purporting to be about Subject X, I feel like this article is a subtle and indirect criticism of my pet Project Y, which is Beyond Reproach and against which I can brook no criticism so I will grind this article into the dust and make it disappear into the void." Not that I have ever received comments like that, but maybe the uninformed members of the hoi polloi amongst you have.

The advice is the following:
1. Avoid focus
2. Avoid originality and personality
3. Write l  o  n  g   contributions
4. Remove most implications and every speculation
5. Leave out illustrations, particularly good ones
6. Omit necessary steps of reasoning
7. Use many abbreviations and technical terms
8. Suppress humor and flowery language
9. Degrade species and biology to statistical elements
10. Quote numerous papers for self-evident statements

Many of these obviously transfer directly to writing about academic technology so we can immediately put them into practice and go forth writing more unfocused, non-original and logic-leaping screeds. But in the spirit of the exercise, I feel obliged to write my own Top 10 list (why be original, repeat!). And besides there are some ways in which we in academic technology are peculiar unto ourselves. Here goes

Top 10 Ways to Write Boring Academic Technology Articles

1. Write only about the hot topics of the moment. Right now you have to write about MMOGs or gaming. Even if you don't know and have nothing new to say about either.
2. Write only in a breathless sort of style.
3. Use the word neo-millenial as often as you possibly can.
4. Write from the first-person perspective of an undergraduate student at an R1 university in the US. then extrapolate madly from that in the final section to cover all students at all universities, everywhere.
5. Bury the fact that your study was based on a small n of interviews and a survey with 4 faculty members deep in a footnote late in the article. Certainly don't mention that in the title, the introduction or your discussion of the limitations of your study.
6. Wherever possible write about studies you did where you compared learning in one class with learning in another class. The classes were taught by the same professor who loved using a particular technology in the one class and hated not using it in another.
7. Frequently make statements about how faculty are bad at using technology which enrages students who are all neo-millenial tech savvy neo-millenials.
8. Use brand names when talking about technologies. That is not a course management system that you're analyzing, its Blackboard!
9. If you must insist on writing a solid, engaging article, preferably try to publish it in a venue where they will print your 15 pages of text over 75 advertisement interspersed pages such that any reasonable reader needs to take Ritalin in order to get through it.
10. The more obscure and irrelevant the little aphorism at the top of each section the better.
11. Write excruciatingly detailed reports for example about how faculty use course management systems.

Stephen Snarks on Standards

Stephen Downes had a great little piece of snark yesterday about the latest activity in the world of metadata standards. Money quote

all is the same in the world of standards. IMS is working on something in secret. OASIS has a web services approach. The open source OAI is taking something simple and making it complicated. UKOLN has a JISC-funded project to create something from scratch (with an acronym - SWORD - that ensures nobody will ever find it using Google).

Funny.

The day the Music Died

Well only on this particular blog. Thanks to Colleen Carmean's incessant complaints (well ok, she mentioned it once, but I am sensitive), I wont be posting about music here but rather at my other blog, singing like a girl. I will see you there.