In other words, privacy is over and it’s awesome. Google and Yahoo and Amazon and Facebook, with help from the NSA, have won. They have removed any shred of hope we could retain our privacy. But I don’t worry. In fact, I find the occasion joyous.
Continue reading “Big Data Me”
There are no atheists in foxholes, and every expectant parent prays for the wellbeing of the life growing inside the mother. So first, I assume you’re here because you or someone you know is pregnant. Good luck and bless you.
The Jews have ancient wisdom for what to pray for when you’re pregnant. In fact, the Talmud prescribes different prayers for different stages in the pregnancy that incredibly correspond to biological facts that science wouldn’t know about for fifteen hundred years. Continue reading “What to Pray for When You’re Pregnant”
Imagine a professor. Let’s call her S. She is retiring from her university after a distinguished 35 years. She has just come from the wine and cheese party in her honor at the department. On the way to the real after-party at a colleague’s house in the quainter section of town, she decides to make one last stop at her old office, telling herself she’d just check to see if she’s left anything behind.
S. slides the key into the lock and opens the door in one practiced, unconscious motion. As she surveys the empty office, she notices the light fade from the day through the dusty window overlooking the academic quad. But she’s beyond all wistfulness and sentiment now. She opens the drawer to her desk one last time, decides she won’t be embarrassed at leaving behind a few paper clips and stray pennies, closes the drawer, stands up resolutely, and for the last time, leaves her office.
As she leaves, though, another kind of regret steals over her. What has S. left behind besides the paper clips, stray pennies, and the fading light in her office? The unwritten papers. The research that couldn’t be conducted because the grant never came through. The thousands of classes, meetings with students hopeful or tearful, hours in committees, millions of papers graded, books that lined the shelves, the drafts of journal articles written and manuscripts reviewed, a gazillion memos – and then since the 1980s emails – answered or ignored: all the detritus of a long life in academia.
Now think of the non-obvious stuff that’s been left behind: the things she’s learned but never got to say. The accumulated wisdom, some of it never expressed or captured for posterity. The personal knowledge she just is carrying with her out the door, the stuff that’s not quite institutional not quite academic that didn’t quite fit into the discipline or the profession and for which there was no real outlet, both the gold and the dust: How to pause at just the right moment during a lecture about mushrooms edible, inedible, and … hallucinogenic. How to handle the tenured colleague who never grew up. How to get student teams to work together. How to persuade a colleague to join you on a grant proposal. How to give a troubled student a break without breaking the rules. How to influence a committee without taking charge. How to conduct an interview for a job candidate. How to deal with the discouragement of waiting two years for a paper to be published.
More hidden treasures from wild mushrooms
WILD KNOWLEDGE
And then there’s all that other wild stuff for which there aren’t even categories because it’s all crossover wisdom and quasi-conscious influence between different continents of her inner world: How her professional research in genetics informed her choice to volunteer leading teen tours of nature. How raising her children gave her tools to deal with difficult colleagues and eventually, serve as Chair (for those horrible and glorious five years!). How what she knows about preserving species genetics could be a multi-million dollar business, if only she could find the time and the folks with business savvy to make it happen. How much of her field knowledge of botany is not worthy of publication but is worthy of dissemination beyond a small circle of grad students. The network of friends and former students and colleagues that crop up with increasing frequency in those small world events, where they’re least expected, and her fantasy of connecting them together. What she learned working with troubled teens about the healing power of focusing on the small intricate things in nature during a walk in the woods in the rain. Ah, the desire she has just to express that stuff that falls between the cracks and outside the boxes.
Where does that universe of things worth knowing go when S retires? What happens to its value? What can a large university, or any institution for that matter, do to preserve this most precious resource, this PK?
And this is not just a challenge – and an opportunity – for universities. I know from working in the corporate world, even a fairly open and enlightened company, how damnably difficult it is to express the stuff that your boss isn’t ready to hear and that isn’t in your job description and for which there are no journals or classes or room in the workday. The cliche about not thinking out of the box is not just true, when you find you’re unable to even express it, it’s a form of pain.
A cover piece in the magazine INC. (May 2007) highlighted the problem: “Find It. Use It. It’s a good bet your company possesses intellectual property it isn’t exploiting.” The article goes on to discuss the intellectual property left on the table (or behind the closed door or in the drawer or in your silent preserve behind your eyes) by many corporations and strategies to find those hidden assets. In the corporate world, as for all enterprises, it begins with a definition of what is valuable.
“Baruch Lev, a professor of accounting and finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, who once calculated that approximately 85 percent of a company’s value resides in such intangibles. Unfortunately, many of those assets go unexploited because they are hard to inventory, manage, or even recognize. ‘What drives me nuts personally and professionally is to think about all that good stuff being wasted,’ says Sherman [an IP lawyer featured in the article], shaking his shaggy head. ‘All that innovation. All that intellectual capital. It’s just sitting there collecting strategic dust.’ ”
– ““Find It. Use It.” Leigh Buchanan, INC 5/1/2007
Gills of the mushroom
What’s the solution? Well, to start I’d suggest two things:
Recognition: A broader definition of – and recognition for – what is valuable from within the institution and for the people who have the blooming in their heads, potential to be harvested. Beyond the syllabi and disciplines and journals there’s personal and wild knowledge that never gets expressed or recognized… wild mushrooms.
The Means: The tools to extract and entice the people in our institutions to express what they know, to share and broadcast it simply and without too many restrictions. A platform that gives people an invitation, the permission, and the simple but robust means to show all that they know, whatever they know, and find their audience.
Obviously, the Web, and especially Web 2.0 has shown us the pent-up world-wide desire for self-expression is there, and it has shown us some of the tools. Wikipedia and YouTube and Facebook suggest people are content to have their stuff projected in a public space even if it whizzes by anonymously, like elaborate graffiti on a NYC train. Whoah! I’m famous! Oh, I’m not.
Why not unleash these Web 2.0 lessons and technologies in the academic space to both treasure – and uncover the buried treasure – of wild personal knowledge that we leave behind like spare change in the folds of a couch or the hidden but wondrous underbellies of wild mushrooms?
We would all benefit from the harvest, providers and seekers alike.
The loaded question of the day is one right out of The Dating Game (or match.com): What do the World Wide Web and SUNY have in common, and what can they do for each other? (OK, that’s two questions.)
SUNY’s own website makes our first cut at an answer obvious: SUNY is already a Web.
SUNY’s 64 geographically dispersed campuses bring educational opportunity within commuting distance of virtually all New Yorkers and comprise the nation’s largest comprehensive system of public higher education.
What “largest” means is that even though the California system — University of California, California State University, and Community Colleges — is larger, they do not act as a comprehensive system. SUNY puts together community colleges, four-year colleges and universities under one umbrella.
What “system” means is a little harder to pin down. SUNY is definitely a system because it is funded by the NYS legislature and organized and administered by a single entity here in our castle-like home. All the money flows along one course, more or less. And as they say, follow the money.
SUNY System Administration occupies the old D&H Railroad HQ building in Albany overlooking the Hudson. It’s a stunning Gothic-style castle, completed in 1918, often the feature of postcards and pictorials showing Albany’s landmarks.
An old postcard of the D&H Castle (1918), now SUNY System Administration’s building
Castles are strongholds — and symbols — of feudal hierarchies. But SUNY, despite its integrated budgetary systems, not to mention the symbolism of its headquarters, is also something of a confederacy. Thirty campuses are community colleges, one for most of the counties in New York, and they are additionally funded with allocations from their counties. This arrangement gives them both another master to serve – their counties — and a degree of freedom from complete oversight by SUNY System Administration.
The four-year colleges and universities are bound together by the SUNY allocation from the state legislature, but they each have their own colorful histories and personality. Many began as private institutions or teachers colleges with legacies dating back long before SUNY was consolidated in 1948.
Institutions generally have deep genetic codes that survive despite environmental changes, and this may be especially so for universities. If you’ve ever spent time working in the academia game, you know adminstrations and students come and go but tenured faculty, the guardians of core values, are forever.
This creative tension between hierarchy and confederacy makes SUNY boisterous, wonderful, and strange. Meetings of all the presidents or provosts from the campuses convened by SUNY System seem like conventions of feudal lords, though none are likely to swear an Oath of Salisbury. System makes demands on them, they make demands on System. Consensus emerges. I wake up every day with a keen sense of the untapped potential that could be unleashed if we could find a way to forge cross-campus collaborations, without demanding that the campuses sacrifice their individuality.
Even among a confederacy, everyone’s gotta get on the same page about certain basics. Like what language you’ll use at your parlays. And some things ought to be networked and interoperable just for the sake of civilization. Like standards – if not systems – for highways and money and energy grids and telephony. Sixty years after SUNY was founded, we still have a long way to go.
From the campus perspective, having individual fiefdoms with incompatible standards, redundant operations, and duplicate investments — every campus its own moat and pile of stones — isn’t very painful. Each campus has its own flavor, its own distinctive mission, its own local climate and culture, its own ratings on US News & World Report. But the price of such independence – I wouldn’t call it real freedom – is expensive.
I encapsulated this principal about 10 years ago, for better or worse as a corollary of Porush’s Law (a minor one, to be sure):
The natural state of everyone’s communication device is on, listed, and connected.
Like an inverse MasterCard commercial, the price is incaculably high of remaining off, unlisted and disconnected.
If the university is about finding and circulating knowledge in order to make the most good of that knowledge, then some common means of communication is necessary. Campuses should be on, listed and connected to each other. The cost from basic friction at the interface — call it the translation overhead — is just too high.
To its credit, System tries to do reduce the translation overhead and has had some successes in integrating the 64 campuses over the Web. The IT group here in Albany along with the ITEC technology farm in Buffalo have us riding on the same network backbone. There are System initiatives to create a single integrated e-mail system for all students and employees across SUNY. We’re making headway in getting all campuses on a single Student Information Service for registration functions and the like. We have wrangled SUNY onto one magnificent online libary system, SUNYConnect, giving access to the catalogs of all 64 libraries. We’re trying to get as many of the campuses as we can on the same learning management system, the SUNY Learning Network.
But there’s a whole other enterprise whose surface we’ve just skimmed, and it goes to the heart of what the university is about in the first place. For simplicity, let’s call it “knowledge sharing.” If you want to put it as a business proposition, put it this way: knowledge, the most precious property of the university, is one of those commodities that grow more valuable the more you share them.
The beauty of Web is that this is exactly what it does best. Furthermore, it unleashes the power of multiple individuals without necessarily creating a command and control hierarchy that demolishes their individuality. They only need to agree to be connected, on and listed … and of course, to contribute. There are by some estimates 55 million bloggers on the Web. Millions of users create videos and animations and photos and other content. 99% of this user-generated content is provided freely and for free and by private citizens, acting outside institutions of education. I often reflect on it as the single most breathtaking world wide example of generosity and optimism, unprecedented in human history.
It is up to us who are caretakers of the university as a system to embrace this vision of connecting the castles. It is up to us to harness this generosity. It is up to us to sponsor and coordinate the deployment of the best web tools for contributing knowledge and collaborating u-wide. This is not just desireable, it’s a necessity if SUNY is going to survive and evolve as a system. One might conclude that because SUNY already has a special balance of hierarchy and robust, noisy independence, we can exploit this opportunity with special vigor.
[To come: SUNY and Web 2.0]
Today I read in a Wired news story posted by Aaron Rowe that two young scientists at NASA are launching an open-source project this month called CosmosCode. Its goal is to get volunteers in the public sector – world wide? – to write code for live space missions.
I was immediately stung by a flash of boyhood nostalgia. Remember all the space operas which just assumed that the world would unite to explore space together and of course do battle against evil aliens and make friends with friendly ones? This soaring galactic vision still persists in our Star Wars and Star Trek mythologies.
Well, it seems to me that NASA has put us on the road to achieving this vision, leapfrogging any UN decree or international parlay or official collaboration among nations. Now, anyone in the world with the good will and the talent might help launch, navigate, and explore space, not as agents of their governments but as citizens of Spaceship Earth.
That’s the fond dream, anyway. Chalk it up to nostalgia for an oft-imagined future by an aging SF junkie, a future that – with the help of NASA and an open source global collaboration — we may be able to resuscitate.
Anyone who has followed the adventures of SUNY Learning Environments over the last four years knows we’ve been advocates for open source collaborations in large, diverse environments. They seem especially promising for SUNY because of the way they can unleash the “intelligence of networks” — the wisdom of the crowd — if they are managed wisely. I hope NASA’s project will help demonstrate the virtues of such an approach, even when undertaken by a government agency.
Today I had a conference call with leaders from the Levin Institute, SUNY’s newest school in New York City. Organized by Lynne Rosansky, Vice-Provost, her goal was to introduce Levin to Second Life, see if there was potential .
The Levin Institute was created by a bequest of the family of Neil D. Levin, Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York, who was slain in the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Levin has no campus of its own (yet), and their mission is globalization: “International Relations and Commerce.” So it’s natural for them to consider opening a virtual campus to reach the world, leapfrogging the cost of a huge traditional campus and its cumbersome infrastructure. Second Life is a good place to start, since it has already been colonized by over 100 campuses.
Garrick Utley, Levin’s President and a former CNN news correspondent, cut right to the chase during our discussion. “Is there anything you can show us with a ‘Wow’ factor?” he asked. So we looked at some videos (machinima! – more about that new video genre in a later post) of Second Life, including the New Media Consortium’s “Seriously Engaging” demo, which is one of the best promos for what is possible for learning in the metaverse. Thomson Learning’s NetG campus gave us another glimpse of how a virtual campus can be arranged, with video viewing rooms, bulletin boards to post and exchange text files and assignments, and control booths behind a lecture hall.
The Levin team quickly grasped the possibilities for their mission. They imagined “negotiation rooms” where students could visit spaces dedicated to practicing different cultural styles – French, Middle Eastern, Asian, American… They asked how much artificial intelligence could be built into SL, so that simulations could run themselves. They wondered whether anyone had already studied learning behaviors in SL formally. It was a great, lively discussion. We’ll be looking at next steps. Stay tuned.
On a personal note, I have to say it’s fulfilling to see the sheerly academic exercises I followed in the 80s and 90s — when I was writing about cyberpunk, VR, and Neal Stephenson’s metaverse as sacral space — blossom into technical reality… and to be in a position to encourage the real world exploration of what once were just edgy postmodern ruminations.
You must be logged in to post a comment.