Your Rubble is My Rubble: Humanitarian Computing

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I was inspired, some months ago, when reading about a group of students at the Fletcher School of Tufts University who worked around the clock with ordinary laptop computers to save lives in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.  Calling it operation Thunderclap, the students combed through Twitter posts, email messages, news bulletins, and other internet communications (much of which had to be translated from the Haitian creole into English) to locate victims and assess their statuses.  The students were able, in many cases, to assist on-the-ground SAR teams by providing GPS coordinates and details of injuries.  In one case, a student was responsible for the rescue of several children in a collapsed building.  In all, new humanitarian computing technologies were used by non-experts from across geographic and cultural boundaries to lend a compassionate hand.

For those of us who dream big about helping our students see the connections between the work they do in communications classrooms and the big, wide world, this was big win.  We all sense that our work is important, of course–that it has application to things beyond the classroom, changes lives, enhances critical thinking, makes us better citizens, and so on–but when student writing has a direct, personal stake in the survival of another human being, it burns with a whole new vitality and urgency.

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So I’ve been researching crowd-sourcing crisis response technologies because I hope that my own students might be able to use them in the writing classes I teach.  We don’t need (and I hope never to have to see) another mega-disaster like the Haiti earthquake.  Far less damaging and dramatic incidents may be equally good at helping us to promote the humanitarian flower at the end of the education vine.  The important thing is that new, free technologies are available that have the power to reinvigorate our raison d’être.  Tools like Ushahidi; various Humanitarian FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) project tools like Sahana; Reuters AlertNet; and virtual “datascapes” available in Second Life’s Daden Prime sim to name just a few, are lenses through which our students may more immediately see their unquestionable connection to every other person on the planet.

Age and experience is more likely to understand why the bell tolls for all of us, but humanitarian computing technologies are obsoleting the familiar question But what does (insert the name of any “far away” country here) have to do with me? The question we might more likely ask now is What doesn’t it have to do with you and me? A Tufts student puts it more eloquently than I:

It’s because of that empathy, because we care about people we’ll never meet, that this effort [to rescue the Haiti earthquake victims] is taking place at all. It’s because that empathy, too, that I feel almost traumatized by proxy. I’m much less overwhelmed than I was at first, but as I told a friend on the phone the other day, I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. I want to use my life for helping people, but I swear I remember every message I’ve read. They’re imprinted on my brain. The Haiti earthquake is not a remote disaster anymore, not just another charity cause I’ll forget in six months or a year. It’s a stream of individual voices. I lie in bed at night wondering if the family that just had a new baby on Wednesday has found anything to eat.

These humanitarian technologies, excelling at data fusion and visualization, provide an immediate sense of connectedness that overrides geographic distance–and complacency.  If you think you are interested in assessing these technologies for yourself, please check out my Delicious bookmark feed. 

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The Semantic Web: Ain’t No Goin’ Back Now

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I’m slated to deliver a presentation on the semantic web at the League for Innovation’s annual Conference on Information Technology. As a sneak peek at my focus, I’m sharing what I take to be the central questions that educators need to start considering if they expect to be able to adapt to semantic web advancements.  Some of these questions are very difficult to answer; answers swiftly come for others, but at the price of a certain discomfort.  My hope is that these questions force us to examine our assumptions and cherished opinions about how we educate and whether our roles as educators are as enduring as we like to think.

I would really appreciate comments on these questions, especially if you think there are other, or better questions for us to think about.   Of course, knowing something about the semantic web will help contextualize these questions which otherwise may seem a little obtuse.  If you’re an educator, you may want to join the Web 3 Learning Network to discover what you’re missing.

1) The industrial model of pedagogy seems fairly expedient. If it were manageable and assessable, however, would you prefer individualized, personally customized learning paths for your students? Whether you would prefer it or not, do you think your students would prefer it?
2) What do you think a person’s limitations are for self-learning?
3) Do you think that today’s college curricula are suited to prepare students for continuous and accelerating technological advancements? Are you prepared for continuous and accelerating technological advancements? Do you suffer from information overload?
4) Do you believe that, on the whole, college curricula (college programs, majors, courses) encourage the silo-ing of discipline-specific educational content? If so, how would you propose opening content to its fullest scope and power?
5) If content were “un-silo-ed” via personalized learning paths, what would be the basis for establishing an educator’s qualifications? What would be the basis for establishing the value of regional and national accreditation?
6) We normally assume that technology is “just a tool,” one means to our educational ends. If means and end became essentially one thing (i.e., inter-twined, but not causally related), what would your role as an educator be? What would a student’s role be?

semantic web

Fountain of Thought

Image by Lynoure via Flickr

From my journal:

I don’t understand it really, but I seem always to think about fountain pens.  I just love that they work by “breathing” air and ink; that they have visual and tactile beauty (some are truly works of art); that they are symbols of an activity that makes us human and civilized; and, of course, that they allow each person a measure of power, the ability to simultaneously discover and express the self in words.

Fountain pens are better than ball point pens because they not wasteful–one does not throw away an Aurora or a Visconti or an Omas when it runs out of ink.  One tosses out a million Bics for every fountain pen that is lost to the non-negotiable demands of aging.

Also, there is no doubt that a variety of inks, which can only be enjoyed by fountain pen users, is a tremendous aestehtic advantage over the dulling realities of the sticky blue and black glop available in most cheap ballpoints.  Whoever heard of a ballpoint pen serving its master’s page “Ottoman Azure” or “Buttercup”?

There is also the virtue of commitment in a fountain pen’s ink, for, unlike ballpoints whose inks can be erased, fountain pens use dyes that are not easily removed.  Some inks, notably Noodler’s, are absolutely indelible because they chemcially bond with the cellulose in paper.  Thus, when writing with a fountain pen, we cannot squirm away from the words that embarrass us or which are politically incorrect or offend those we otherwise care about.  We commit to who we are at the moment the pen touches the paper.  The computer, which I love (truly, I do), seems to have taught us that we write to revise our writing.  But no. We write to revise the mind, and nothing but indelible ink makes that more clear.  There is no going back.  Every line is a one’s newest home.  We take up residence in our words, sometimes startled by the walls we have built.

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People think I’m nuts to spend the kind of money I do on fountain pens, but, in my own defense, doing so subtly and postively affects me.  When I write with an expensive pen that I must take care of, that I must nurse, that I must look after as I would a child, I derive a certain spiritual benefit that in turn affects how I write.  I must respect the pen.  It pulls at me, demanding my constant effort, discipline, and faith, and above all, a willingness to live into the unknown, to go into my darknesses, just as paleolithic humans entered their black Lascauxs with ocher-damp sticks and revelled in the thick actuality of their lives.

If you want to write, do it with a fountain pen.

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technology spirituality

The Force that Through the Computer Drives the Flower

Image by *MizzEl*~Elly*-on cloud 9, hope I can catch up! via Flickr

Someone recently repeated to me the old saw that “technology is just a tool, not an end in itself.”  I’ve been hearing this blanched adage for over a decade, and my response has always been the same: at first I feel a vague, nameless disappointment; a moment later I find it difficult to argue with its respectable sobriety.  In the third moment it washes out of my mind as a thing I just don’t believe, and I go on about my business until the next time it distracts me with its puritan charm.

But today I suppose I have something to say about it.  This little proverb, coined no doubt in the bowling alley in Pleasantville, has been parroted so often that we just nod in agreement without thinking about it.  This bothers me.  I think when we repeat the superficial logic of “technology is just a tool,” we’re missing the source of energy and inspiration, of creativity and innovation, that has begun to shape our world.  I have no room in my life for this thrill-killing poison.  I demand a new view.  It is not the need of the house that dreams up the hammer.  The hammer dreams of the house.

Image by traveler54 via Flickr

There are parallels to what I’m talking about in the world of the fine arts.  It is commonplace to say that art imitates life, for example, but it is very clear that it is life that imitates art, as Oscar Wilde once pointed out.  We follow the trail of our creativity into utilitarian discovery.  Sometimes we build just to build.  Sometimes we paint just to paint.  But when we’re done, we seem always to find a way to make our efforts perform some admirable duty in our lives.  A few hundred years ago, for example, a woman asked Ben Franklin what good hot-air balloons were.  He was at the time leading an experiment in their use as transportation devices.  He said (a close paraphrase)

“Madame, I will answer your question with another question: What good is a new-born baby?”

The point is just this: When we play with technology–and I mean “play” in the sense of having only a vague idea, or even no idea where it’s all going to end up but we’re captivated by the process–we are satisfying our humanity in a way that, without conscious effort, corresponds with a need that has not yet arisen in consciousness.  In the commercial world, we create things–and then we create their markets.  (Think Pet Rocks.)  Where technology and education are concerned, we tend to think that the former is the means and the latter is the end.  But that’s not how it is at all.  The hammer dreams the house.  The pet rock dreams of a compassionate owner.

Oh, these twining vines!
technology spirituality

Rejected in This Life (And the Second One)

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I am continuing to find the exercises that I require of my students in Second Life to evoke real pangs of suffering and empathy.  (You’ll notice in that first sentence that I am not specifying whether it is I or my students who feel those pangs.)   This summer, one of my students wrote of SL, “I was rejected in that life just as I am rejected in this one.”  The statement came at the very end of the term when my relationship with my students should be coming to an end, but because I rarely see this kind of disclosure, I found myself wanting to somehow give reassurance.   There was no other detail offered, no explanation, no ameliorating anecdote, nothing.  Her statement floated like an immovable smog over the city of the heart.  It’s hard knowing that the power of writing to help us discover ourselves and to provide us with a foundation for exploring our potential had not rescued this person from her loneliness.  Had I known how she thought of herself at the beginning of the term, we might have been able to do something about it.  In any case, I had an urge to try to intervene, to help, but I fought that urge a bit too.  I can’t rescue everyone–a very hard lesson to learn.  She did mention that she is painfully shy, and I wonder now if Second Life could help people who find it hard to make friends in real life.  It might help them to get some anonymous practice in SL.  Put sunglasses on shyness and you slip into cool.

Another student, whom I have had in previous classes and knew to be a responsible adult dedicated to her education, dropped out of sight in the middle of the summer semester.  I emailed her and asked her what had happened to her.  She is a wife and mother.  She is also fairly traditional by her own estimation; her husband is even more so.  In the home, she is responsible for all the cooking, all the child-rearing, and all the house-work; and she holds a job–and somehow has managed to find time for online classes.  A mouse lifts the elephant of life.  But then her “husband’s family came . . . for the summer and [she] had to cater to them.”  The real kicker, however, came at the end of her distressed email.  Erroneously thinking that because the course was over she had to unplug from SL, she wrote, “I have a question: Do I have to get rid of my [Second Life] account? I sometimes feel my world is falling apart and being someone no one knows is sometimes good, if I get the time.”  If my experiences with students in SL tell me anything it’s that we are all people “no one knows.”  And yet we feel like we are knowable, structured around an enduring self-nature that must, at times, hide under the blanket of a digital world.

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technology education

A Site for Sore Eyes!

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I return, in this post, to the ongoing saga of my students’ Second Life exercise, which I called “Metamorphosis” (with apologies to Franz Kafka).  If you haven’t read the previous posts, read The Bad Girls Club and Adult Ed Vs. Adult Content.

This final part of the exercise required the students to re-adopt their good-looking avatars, but then to wear a specially prepared texture file on their faces that simulated oozing sores.   They were then assigned to return to their stomping grounds and meet up with old friends.

It’s one thing to know intellectually that people shun those who are not normal, the “lepers” in our collective colony of humanity; it’s another to live shunned.  One of the nice things about Second Life is that the rapid identification of person and avatar means that we can get connected with an experience that would be impossible (or unethical) to create in real life.

Here is sample report from one of my students:

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I found the third SL paper to be very funny due to the swine flu epidemic going on. I went into change my avatar, and was mortified to see her new appearance. The open sores on her face were enough to scare me. I was pretty sure I knew how others in SL were going to respond to the new Haley.
My assumptions were correct. Even though I was back to the good-looking Haley, many wanted

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nothing to do with me.  I told my friend in SL that I was back to the old Haley and he was so excited. As I teleported to the area he was in, I thought to myself this should be good. Of course, he was making his comments about the re-transformation into hot Haley as I approached. As I got clearer and he could see my face all he could say was,

You Know Who You Are

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Commencement Address

Delivered May 8, 2009

West Shore Community College

Scottville, Michigan

Thank you, President Dillon.  And greetings graduates, parents, families, friends, faculty, staff, and members of the Board of Trustees.

It is an honor to speak to you tonight and share a few thoughts that I hope will stimulate your thinking, not only about your individual futures and occupations, but about the future of life-long learning for all of us. It is something we need to consider because, as educated men and women, we have a responsibility to sustain the tradition of inquiry that all of us have inherited.  Life-long learning today is not just something we do for the sake of our own development, but—we might be bold enough to say—is an aspect of the way we will connect in the future with everyone else on the planet.

Indeed, I think no one can doubt that we are entering an age of profound global interconnectedness.  It may have begun with Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876—this was, in my view, the single most influential moment in the modern history of human interaction.  And today, few people in the world live without phones, and no one lives in ignorance of their existence. The ubiquity of cell phones in many places in the world has changed our daily behavior is significant ways.  Think about it: How many of us here have stopped a face-to-face conversation to take a cell phone call?  You know who you are.  How many of us talk on the cell phone while driving?  You know who you are.  Did you know that studies show that talking on the cell phone impairs your ability to drive to the same degree as would be the case if you were drunk?  And how has the popularity of text messaging changed our behavior and altered how we think about communication?

The Bad Girls Club–Or–Being and Non-Being in Second Life

Second chances at life do not come very often. People make wrong choices and then end up living the rest of their lives regretting these choices.These people usually live in an environment where these choices are just below the surface and are ready to bring back haunting memories. Glimpses of certain people bring back bad memories, too. Second Life gives people the chance to create an avatar that would be the person they only wish they could be. Unfortunately, this avatar is not a real person. The controlling force is still the person that is living with the memories.

This is how one of my students began a short report on her first experience in the virtual reality sim, Second Life. What I love about it is that she so quickly noticed the cognative dissonance which we all encounter in Second Life (SL).

The thought pattern runs something like Am I the avatar? No. Do my relationships in SL make me feel the way they do in Real life (RL)? Well, yes. I guess I am not my avatar, but I am not different from my avatar either.

The assignment, written out as Volume 1 of a book I wrote that guides students through a semester-long SL exercise, was to spend a considerable bit of time developing a great avatar. I didn’t specify that it had to be beautiful, but none of my students (all female in this case) chose to make an “ugly” avatar. I knew they wouldn’t. They were also required to make as many friends as possible, talking, dancing at clubs, going to art galleries together, and so on. I will write about what happened after the students completed Volume 2 of the exercise in another post, but the spiritual riches that developed out of the first one really pleased me.

What I noticed among all my students reports was that more attention was paid to appearance and behavior than to the technology.  I think, that if properly managed, a SL exercise can really help students become more self-aware.  To that end, I want to quote from several of the reports I received.

On grooming and RL spouses:

The Vision of Total Personality Unfoldment in Web 3.0

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The vision of Web 3.0, better known as the Semantic Web, is one in which humanity’s search for meaning (not just information) is governed by machine intelligences—and these machines—intelligent agents—not only locate relevant information, but coordinate and unify it according to our individual needs.

At the time of this writing, a number of preliminary technologies have already appeared, harbingers of the third decade of the web to come. (See the Web3 Learning Network for examples.) Educators had better pay attention to this. If technologists succeed in reframing the utility of the web so that “search” is resolved to near-instantaneous “answer,” the roles of the teacher and student in our planetary educational culture will undergo the most dramatic shift since the extinction of the Neanderthals. This shift will be both disruptive and liberating. It will be a shift that we can, and should, prepare for.

One way we can prepare ourselves is by deeply reflecting on the meaning of words like “student” and “teacher.” Understanding the psychological and cultural underpinnings of this essential dualism will help us accept the eventual obsolescence of these terms in the face of a fully functioning semantic web. This is easier to see if we relinquish our sense of the web as a resource and instead view it simply as an infinite extension of our own body-minds. As Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly explains,

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we are the web.

In the future, cluster analytics, already in use by some higher ed institutions, will show us immediately where we need to develop ourselves and the best way of going about it—and the web will be there, instantly, to fill our gaps and enhance our individual gifts. In that world, there really will truly be neither any students nor any teachers, but instead only a steady process of self-generating self-fulfillment that is identical to universal fulfillment.

This may sound like it is coming from the extreme, paranoia-driven spectrum of science fiction, a dark Borg-ian fantasy of assimilation in which “resistance is futile.”

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But I don’t look at it that way. The nightmare scenarios of sci-fi depend on computer-antagonists that are somehow controlled by a singular, calculating malevolence; the semantic web, on the other hand, is as diverse, as uncontrollable, as vigorously voluble as humanity itself.

Our learning in the future will be based on who we are, not curricula, not the agendas of faculty, however well meaning.  And who we are at any given moment will suggest who we will become in the next. The amazing thing about this vision of the semantic web, however, is the notion that we will become what we already know—or somehow knew–from the beginning. It will be as though learning were the process of simply remembering that, from the beginning, each of us is perfect, whole, and complete just the way we are. Fulfillment, in this view of the semantic web, will mean the unfolding of our individual personalities into an infinite, ever-changing consciousness.  I can’t wait.

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Digital Silence

I heard about a new browsing applet the other day. Known as Readability, it sucks the main text out of “noisy” web pages and leaves a nice clean sheet of text for you to read, with margins and text sizes you can control.

I bring it up here on Twining Vines, not so much because it is a great tool (and it is indeed very promising), but because of the idea of “noise,” which it is intended to filter out. There is no doubt that some websites, especially those that behave as portals, with everything on the front page within a single click’s reach, are indeed incredibly “noisy” places. They are like the McDonald’s playgrounds of the internet, replete with irrelevant mayhem and adorable distractions everywhere you look.

A moderately noisy web page.

Noise, in this sense, anyway, is the direct result of trying to make the web easily navigable. It’s a bit like the American “no man’s lands” that ribbon out from city centers into adjacent suburbs. They are cluttered, certainly, but for a reason: all those fast food joints, car lots, home building supply stores, traffic signs, signals, guard rails, lane paint, arrows, railroad crossings, pedestrian crosswalks, fences, concrete barriers, and all the rest of it give us what we want (or what we think we want). The problem is that driving through one of these without prior experience can be bewildering and dangerous to both mind and body.

In the age of the semantic web, however, we will be able to travel web roads of our own building. No longer keyword jockeys subject to every web node that vies for our attention, we will travel noiseless, frictionless avenues.

The same page "quieted" by Readability

Our boulevards will be where we may “merge” with our students and travel along together for as long as seems worthwhile. These will be quiet journeys, ones in which it will be easier to reflect, to remain concentrated. They will be journeys in which a seamless interoperability of personal robotics and desire carry us to the one destination that we can never find without sufficient periods of quiet: ourselves.