A shift in the MOOCmentum: coverage of and conversations around our open letter to Michael Sandel (part 3).

This is a further continuation of my (futile) efforts to round up responses to the SJSU Philosophy Department’s open letter to Michael Sandel (which you can see in full here). Part 1 collected links mostly from old media-affiliated sites. Part 2 started digging into some of the discussion in the blogosphere.

This post picks up with some more of the blogospheric discussion. There will be more because there are so many posts worth reading out there right now (and dagnabbit, people keep writing more of them).

SR Education Group, Fixing What Is Not Broken:

Since the large-scale launch of MOOCs last year, much of the excitement around them has been driven by their potential to revolutionize education and thereby solve many of the challenges facing higher ed, namely the perceived diminution of the value of a degree in today’s economy and the increased cost of getting a degree. While no one can say for sure exactly how MOOCs will evolve or what role they will play, Michael Horn and Clayton Christensen recently described the potential in a Wired op-ed as follows:

… over time, an approach where users exchange information from each other similar to Facebook or telecommunications (a ‘facilitated network model’) will come to dominate online learning. This evolution is especially likely to happen if the traditional degree becomes irrelevant and, as many predict, learning becomes a continuous, on-the-job learning process. Then the need for customization will drive us toward just-in-time mini-courses.”

Faculty at a number of schools don’t necessarily see it that way, nor do administrators. …

It might be easy to dismiss such concerns as conservatism in the face of a new model, or as faculty trying to protect their role in the existing academic model — the model Christensen and Horn feel may become “irrelevant.” But Inside Higher Ed recently released survey data that showed that even college administrators are not convinced that MOOCs will lower costs or improve the educational experience for students. The one area where administrators seemed more optimistic about the value of MOOCs was in their ability to generate creativity in pedagogical strategies (although even on this point, a minority of total responses was positive).

In the meantime, there has been a steady stream of reminders that the factors putting pressure on the traditional academic model are not emerging because that model stopped working. More to the point, the traditional degree has not become at all irrelevant. The first such reminder came late last year with the release of a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts on the protection a college education affords against economic downturns.

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Scapegoats and Panaceas, MOOCs, Part II: This Time It’s Personal.:

MOOCs are symptomatic of greater tensions within higher education and not a core problem in themselves. Preventing their use, while good, doesn’t get at any of the reasons that administrations like San Jose State’s are eager to adopt them. That’s why Daniel Porterfield’s insistence that this become the “Year of the Seminar” is admirable in its spirit but questionable in its reasoning. Porterfield wants to “challenge the notion that MOOCs are the future of American higher education.” But seminars were becoming an endangered species on university campuses years and decades before the first MOOC popped up. Getting rid of MOOCs has little to do with providing seminars. That’s a matter of public education budgets, university spending, an overemphasis on economic utility, and an underemphasis on teaching.

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Historiann, Guest post on the Lords of MOOC Creation: who’s really for change, and who in fact is standing athwart history yelling STOP?:

Why in spite of the hype do MOOCs appear to be merely a digitalized version of the “sage on the stage” style of lecturing familiar to those of us in the United States and Commonwealth countries 100 (and more) years ago?  Why do MOOC-world advocates appear totally ignorant of feminist pedagogy, which disrupted this model of education going on 50 years ago?  What does it say about MOOC-world’s vision of the future of higher education that the Lords of MOOC Creation are overwhelmingly white, male,  and U.S. American professors at highly exclusive universities? …

MOOCs have also created new excitement among the mostly male presenters about the possibilities of the flipped classroom. Of course, there is no pedagogical innovation happening here; feminist scholars have flipped the classroom for years. What is flipped is usually the use of class time, not authority.  After all, a MOOC is centered on lectures, which are now given in front of a camera with no students present, thus denying any opportunity for response or interaction from the listener. The instructor remains the sole purveyor of information and the students remain the passive consumers; with pre-recorded lectures, the instructor controls the content even more than is usually case, and it is more difficult to adapt to individual student needs. Ostensibly, the time previously devoted to classroom lectures was now used for greater interaction with the students both in his classroom and around the world; however, such reallocation of time does not, in and of itself, alter the class hierarchy or the passive reception of knowledge by students.  Ironically, it may even re-inscribe that hierarchy: most teachers, even when lecturing, engage with their students and will stop, go back, or re-examine an issue to ensure comprehension and to respond to student questions and challenges.

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More or Less Bunk, “Would you like to shoot me now or wait ’til you get home?”:

Has a backlash formed against MOOCs? Well, yes and know. Certainly non-stop MOOC-mania has started to become peppered with bad publicity for the first time. However, it’s important to remember an important distinction: There are universities that produce MOOCs now and universities that will consume MOOCs (mostly) later. If schools like Amherst reject being MOOC producers, that’s not a backlash. That’s Amherst being Amherst. If schools like Duke reject giving credit for MOOCs, that does not prevent them from continuing as MOOC producers.

Really, the only sure sign that I’ve seen of any institutional backlash from a potential MOOC consumer is that eloquent letter from the San Jose State Philosophy Department. Perhaps this explains why Michael Feldstein decided to attack it:

The collective effect of these rhetorical moves is to absolve the department of all responsibility for addressing the real problems the university is facing. By ignoring the scholarship of teaching, the department missed an opportunity to engage the MOOC question in a different way. Rather than thinking of MOOCs as products to be bought or rejected, they could have approached them as experiments in teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community.

Seriously, you can’t learn more about education technology anywhere than you can over at Michael’s blog, e-Literate. However, that post is probably the clearest indiction that I have ever seen that faculty have to look out for their own interests rather than depend on friends in any other part of higher education to fight for them. After all, it’s not the San Jose State Philosophy Department’s fault that the California legislature won’t raise taxes. More importantly, it’s not Feldstein’s job that’s under threat of being unbundled. I’ll call this the “Wait ’til you get home” option because we all know what the outcome of this kind of dialogue will be: unbundling and unemployment.

On the other hand, there’s the “Shoot him now! Shoot him now!” option, which I warned about in my first Inside Higher Education piece almost a year ago. …

Luckily, a third way of thinking about MOOCs is coalescing. I’ll call it the “End Duck Season altogether” option.

Do read the whole thing to see some of the sensible options for avoiding a beak full of buckshot!

A shift in the MOOCmentum: coverage of and conversations around our open letter to Michael Sandel (part 1).

In response to the SJSU Philosophy Department’s open letter to Michael Sandel (which you can see in full here), at least two important things have happened.

First, all the top-down pressure on our department to pilot the edX packaged version of Sandel’s “Justice” MOOC as a “flipped” course (despite the fact that our existing PHIL 122 “Social Justice” has been serving our students well) has magically disappeared.

Second, a lot of really good discussion about MOOCs and related issues in higher education has broken out all over the place. It seems like we’ve gotten to the point where people want to look beyond the hype and think about how new educational initiatives (and the role of private entities in driving them) could actually play out when the pedagogical rubber hits the road.

There is so much conversation out there that I cannot give you an accurate digest of all of it (especially during final exams — things get busy here!). But I want to give you a round-up of some of what I’ve been reading, probably in at least three parts.

The Tech, Amherst College faculty vote against joining edX:

On April 16, 2013, Amherst College faculty voted 70-36 against a motion to join the edX consortium. …

According to the Amherst Student, debate at the deciding faculty meeting centered around the suitability of the edX platform and massive open online courses (MOOCs) to Amherst’s educational mission. …

At the end of the meeting, the faculty voted to approve a second motion that would explore alternatives to edX. The motion claimed that Amherst’s mission is “best served by having the College itself, rather than an outside organization that offers so-called massive open online courses, develop and offer these online courses and course materials.”

Chronicle of Higher Education, As MOOC Debate Simmers at San Jose State, American U. Calls a Halt:

The California faculty union, which represents more than 2,000 professors on the San Jose State campus, has written a memorandum sharply criticizing the university’s president, Mohammad H. Qayoumi, for what the union sees as a preference for “private rather than public solutions” when it comes to online tools and content. …

Meanwhile, at American University, the provost sent a memo on Wednesday to the entire faculty and staff reiterating a “moratorium on MOOCs” while the university, in Washington, D.C., continues to draft a policy on how the massive courses would operate there.

The university is taking its time in deciding whether it wants to pursue institutional partnerships with edX or Coursera, another MOOC provider; or whether it wants to allow professors to teach MOOCs on their own, through Udacity or some other platform.

Contrary to institutions that have eagerly embraced MOOCs, American is purposely avoiding experimentation before it decides exactly how it wants to relate to the new breed of online courses. “I need a policy before we jump into something,” said Scott A. Bass, the provost, in an interview.

The Harvard Crimson, San Jose State Professors Criticize edX as ‘Social Injustice’:

In addition to citing concerns that JusticeX would replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities, many SJSU philosophy professors said they were unsettled by the implicit message of having SJSU students watch the course as homework and then discuss it in class.

“The message is that students at Harvard deserve to have a live professor lecturing in front of them. They can make comments, ask questions, and have discussions with that professor, but San Jose students don’t,” said S. D. Noam Cook, an SJSU philosophy professor. “That seems to be quite inappropriate for any department in any university.”

The Guardian “Comment is Free”, Will ‘Moocs’ be the scourge or saviour of higher education?:

With no clear business models in place – and a reliance at this stage on volunteer labour – it is not clear how the returns on investment will materialise. Will Moocs be a new form of social media? Marketing tasters for established, paying courses? An alternative form of continuing education or outreach? An alternative to textbooks or course materials?

Efforts to monetise Moocs come as politicians wrestle with public disinvestment from mass higher education. According to the US commentator Christopher Newfield: “The distinctive feature of Mooc marketing in 2013 is the shift from being an intriguing experiment to being pushed as a workable solution to budgetary and access crises.” …

In California, Senate bill 520 would force universities in the state system to recognise Coursera courses recommended by the American Council for Education. The San Jose State University philosophy faculty complained recently about a decision taken by its senior management to force the use in class of Michael Sandel’s edX Mooc on justice.

These academics argue that Moocs, far from taking learning to new vistas, are just “prepackaged materials from outside vendors” (Harvard and edX are private institutions) and being used to re-engineer public education. They see Moocs as the start of an “efficiency” drive to get rid of qualified staff or replace them with teaching assistants.

So, what of the UK? The government is keen to promote “efficiency and diversity” in higher education and has already commissioned a report into Moocs and other forms of online distance learning. The British University Finance Directors Group has indicated that FutureLearn “could well promise a low fixed-cost future”. …

As a cheap alternative to degrees, Moocs do not yet pass muster. But as an alternative to public investment, technological solutions with private backing may sway policymakers. In straitened times, will broadcasting the videoed byproducts of elite institutions be seen as good enough for the masses? It would be nice to hope that our commitment to equity and equality in education would resist such temptations.

The Boston Globe “Braniac”, San Jose State to Michael Sandle: Keep your MOOC off our campus:

MOOCs are almost certainly here to stay, but the exchange between SJSU and Sandel demonstrates that after several years of feverish adoption, there are still a lot of issues to work out.

NPR Blogs, “13.7 cosmos & culture”, Is Massively Open Online Education A Threat Or A Blessing?:

Colleges and universities are communities with their own local cultures, values and ways of doing things. In the face of budgetary pressure, how will these communities withstand the temptation to give up the hard work of making knowledge and, instead, just subscribe to courses being produced and packaged elsewhere?

One might object that MOOCs are no different from textbooks. What is a textbook, really, but a programmed course template, a whole course in a box? Have popular textbooks destroyed local learning communities and entrenched established hierarchies? No.

This is an important point and it brings out how complicated the issues are. So often with new technology we simply reenact old battles.

But maybe the comparison with textbooks breaks down. Textbooks are limited in ambition. They don’t replace the whole curriculum; they give it a grounding. Good teachers use textbooks.

Will they come to use MOOCs the same way?

Or will administrators appeal to the existence of MOOCs as justification to make some of those good teachers redundant?

The New Yorker, Is College Moving Online?:

In his office that afternoon, overlooking a small quadrangle and the back of the Swedenborg Chapel, King told me that he didn’t think MOOCS were quite ready to replace the classroom. “At the moment, there’s a very big difference between an online experience and an in-person experience,” he said.

Just how much is lost has lately been a subject of debate. At Harvard, as elsewhere, MOOC designers acknowledge that the humanities pose special difficulties. When David J. Malan, who teaches Harvard’s popular and demanding introduction to programming, “Computer Science 50,” turned the course into a MOOC, student assessment wasn’t especially difficult: the assignments are programs, and their success can be graded automatically. Not so in courses like Nagy’s, which traditionally turned on essay-writing and discussion. Nagy and Michael Sandel are deploying online discussion boards to simulate classroom conversation, yet the results aren’t always encouraging. “You have a group who are—they talk about Christ,” Kevin McGrath, one of the coördinators of CB22x, told me soon after the discussions started up. “Or about pride. They haven’t really engaged with what’s going on.”

“Humanities have always been cheap and sciences expensive,” Ian M. Miller, a graduate student who’s in charge of technical production for a history MOOC intended to go live in the fall, explained. “You give humanists a little cubbyhole to put their books in, and that’s basically what they need. Scientists need labs, equipment, and computers. For MOOCS, I don’t want to say it’s the opposite, but science courses are relatively easier to design and implement. From a computational perspective, the types of question we are asking in the humanities are orders of magnitude more complex.” When three great scholars teach a poem in three ways, it isn’t inefficiency. It is the premise on which all humanistic inquiry is based.

The next round-up will focus on some of the commentary I’ve been seeing on blogs. Stay tuned!

I don’t know and I don’t care: ignorance, apathy, and reactions to exposure of bad behavior.

I’ve already shared some thoughts (here and here) on the Adria Richards/PyCon jokers case, and have gotten the sense that a lot of people want to have a detailed conversation about naming-and-shaming (or calling attention to a problematic behavior in the hopes that it will be addressed — the lack of a rhyme obviously makes this more careful description of what I have in mind less catchy) as a tactic.

In this post, I want to consider how ignorance or apathy might influence how we (as individuals or communities) evaluate an instance of someone calling public attention to a microaggression like a particular instance of sexual joking in a professional environment.

It has become quite clear in discussions of Adria Richards and the PyCon jokers that, for any particular joke X, there are people who will disagree about whether it is a sexual joke. (Note that in the actual circumstances, there was agreement between Adria Richards, the PyCon jokers, and the PyCon staff that the jokes in question were inappropriate — and also significant, if not total, agreement from “mr-hank,” who claims to be the PyCon joker who was fired, that some of the jokes in question were sexual.) Let’s posit, for the purposes of this discussion, a case where there is no disagreement that the joking in question is sexual.

So, you’re with others in a work environment (like audience seating for a presentation at a professional conference). You are in earshot of a sexual joke — maybe as part of the intended audience of the joke teller, maybe not, but certainly close enough that the joke teller has a reasonable expectation that you may hear the joke correctly (which you do). Do you call the attention of the community to the sexual joking and the people engaging in it?

One reason to point out the microaggression is to address ignorance.

The people engaged in the sexual joking may not realize that they are doing something inappropriate in a professional environment. This lack of knowledge may require a serious commitment — for example, not to read conference codes of conduct, not to absorb any workplace anti-harassment training — but I suppose it’s not impossible. So, pointing out to individual jokers, “Dude, that’s inappropriate!” might reduce the ignorance of those individuals. It might also reduce the ignorance of the silent bystanders also in earshot of the sexual joking.

Drawing attention of the larger community to the particular instance of sexual joking may help dispel the ignorance of that larger community (and of its individual members, including those not in earshot of the joking), establishing the existence of such microaggressions within the community. If members of the community make a habit of pointing out each such microaggression they observe, it can also help the community and its members get good information about the frequency of behavior like sexual joking within the professional environment of the community.

Pointing out the microaggression, in other words, can help the community to know that microaggressions are happening, how frequently they’re happening, and who is committing them. The hope is that having good knowledge here is more likely to lead to an effective response to the problem than ignorance would be.

There are other dimensions of ignorance you might want to address — for example, whether people within the community experience discomfort or harm because of such microaggressions, or what empirical studies show about whether sexual joking in the workplace is harmful regardless of whether members of the community report that they enjoy such joking. Still, the thought here is that identifying facts is the key to fixing the problem.

However, you might not think that ignorance is the problem.

It might be the case that the people telling the sexual jokes are fully aware that sexual joking is inappropriate in a professional environment — that what they’re doing is wrong.

It might be the case that the larger community is fully aware of the existence of microaggressions like sexual joking in their professional environments — and even fully aware of the frequency of these microaggressions.

In these circumstances, where ignorance is not the problem, is there any good reason to point out the microaggression?

Here, the relevant problem would seem to be apathy.

If the community and its members have good information about the existence of microaggressions like sexual joking in their professional environments, good information about the frequency of such microaggressions, even good information about which of its members are committing these microaggressions and still cannot manage to address the problem of eliminating or at least reducing the microaggressions, you might be pessimistic about the value of pointing out another instance when it happens. Reluctance to use good information as the basis for action suggests that the community doesn’t actually care about the well-being of the members of the community who are most hurt by the microaggressions, or doesn’t care enough about the harm caused by the microaggressions to put the effort in to doing something about them.

(Those silent bystanders also in earshot of the microaggressions? If they aren’t ignorant about what’s happening, its inappropriateness, and the harms it can do, they are letting it happen without making any effort to intervene. That’s apathy in action.)

But perhaps it is possible, at least some of the time, to shake a community out of its apathy.

Sometimes bringing a microaggression to the community’s attention is a way to remind the community that it is not living up to its professed values, or that it is allowing some of its members to be harmed because it won’t ask other members to take a bit more effort not to harm them.

Sometimes reporting the microaggressions forces members of a community to reconcile what they say they are committed to with how they actually behave.

Sometimes exposing microaggressions to the view of those outside the community brings external pressure upon the community to reconcile its walk with its talk.

It’s looking to me like calling attention to a microaggression — sometimes attention of individuals committing it, sometimes attention of the community as a whole, sometimes the attention of those outside the community who might put pressure on the community and its members — has promise as a tactic to dispel ignorance, or apathy, or both.

In the case that microaggressions are recognized as actually harmful, what’s the positive argument against exposing them?

Naming, shaming, victim-blaming: thoughts on Adria Richards and PyCon.

By now many of you will have heard the news about Adria Richards attending PyCon, notifying the conference staff about attendees behind her telling jokes during a conference presentation (about, among other things, making the coding community more welcoming for women and girls). Richards felt the jokes were sexualized enough to harm the environment of the conference. PyCon had a Code of Conduct for the conference that encompassed this kind of issue. In a room with hundreds of attendees, in a context where she hoped this harm to the conference community would be dealt with rather than let go (which gives it tacit approval) but where she also didn’t want to disrupt the presentations underway, Richards took a picture of the men telling the sexualized jokes and tweeted it with the conference hashtag to get the conference staff to deal with the situation.

The conference staff addressed the issue with the men telling the jokes. Subsequently, one of them was fired by his employer, although it’s in no way clear that he was fired on account of this incident (or even if this incident had anything to do with the firing); Adria Richards started receiving an avalanche of threats (death threats, rape threats, we-know-where-you-live threats, you-should-kill-yourself threats); Adria Richards’ employer fired her; and PyCon started tweaking its Code of Conduct (although as far as I can tell, the tweaking may still be ongoing) to explicitly identify “public shaming” as harmful to the PyCon community and thus not allowed.

So, as you might imagine, I have some thoughts on this situation.

My big-picture thoughts on naming and shaming are posted at my other blog. This post focuses on issues more specific to this particular incident. In no particular order:

1. There is NOTHING a person could do that deserves to be met with death threats, rape threats, or encouragement to kill oneself — not even issuing death threats, rape threats, or encouragement to kill oneself. Let’s not even pretend that there are circumstances that could mitigate such threats. The worst person you know doesn’t deserve such threats. Making such threats is a horrible thing to do.

2. People disagree about whether the joking Adria Richards identified as running afoul of the PyCon Code of Conduct was actually sexual/sexist/inappropriate/creating a climate that could be hostile or unwelcoming to women. (A person claiming to be the joker who was subsequently fired seems to be ambivalent himself about the appropriateness of the joking he was doing.) But it’s worth remembering that you are a good authority on what kind of conduct makes you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome; you are not automatically a good authority on what makes others feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. If you’re a social scientist who has mounted a careful empirical study of the matter, or if you’re up on the literature describing the research that has been done on what makes people comfortable or uncomfortable in different environments, maybe you have something useful to add to the conversation. In the absence of a careful empirical study, however, it’s probably a good idea to listen to people when they explain what makes them feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, rather than trying to argue that they don’t actually feel that way, or that they’re wrong to feel that way.

In other words, that certain jokes would not have been a big deal to you doesn’t mean that they could not have had a significant negative impact on others — including others you take to be members of your community who, at least officially, matter as much as you do.

3. So, if Adria Richards was bothered by the joking, if she thought it was doing harm and needed to be nipped in the bud, why couldn’t she have turned around and politely asked the men doing the joking to knock it off? This question assumes that asking nicely is a reliably effective strategy. If this is your default assumption, please [I just noticed myself typing it as a polite request, which says something about my socialization as a female human, so I’m going to let it stand] cast your eyes upon the #Iaskedpolitely hashtag and this post (including the comments) to get some insight about how experience has informed us that asking politely is a pretty unreliable strategy. Sometimes it works; sometimes, buying a lottery ticket wins you some money. On a good day, politely asking to be treated fairly (or to be recognized as a full human being) may just get you ignored. On a not as good day, it gets you called a bitch, followed for blocks by people who want to make you feel physically threatened, or much, much worse.

Recognize that the response that you expect will automatically follow from politely asking someone to stop engaging in a particular behavior may not be the response other people have gotten when they have tried the approach you take as obviously one that would work.

Recognize that, especially if you’re a man, you may not know the lived history women are using to update their Bayesian priors. Maybe also recognize, following up on #2 above, that you may not know that lived history on account of having told women who might otherwise have shared it with you that they were wrong to feel the way they told you they felt about particular situations, or that they couldn’t possibly feel that way because you never felt that way in analogous situations. In other words, you may have gappy information because of how your past behavior has influenced how the women you know update their priors about you.

I try to recognize that, as a white woman, I probably don’t really grasp the history that Adria Richards (as a woman of color) has used to update her priors, either. I imagine the societal pressure not to be an “uppity woman” falls with much, much more force on an African American woman. Your data points matter as you plot effective strategies with which to try to get things done.

3.5. An aside: About a month ago, my elder offspring was parked in front of her laptop, headset on, engaged in an online multiplayer game of some sort. As the game was underway, one of the other players, someone with whom she had no acquaintance before this particular gaming session, put something pornographic on the screen. Promptly, she said into her headset mic, “Hey, that’s not cool. Take the porn down. We’re not doing that.” And lo, the other player took the pornographic image off the screen.

I was pretty impressed that my 13-year-old daughter was so matter-of-fact in establishing boundaries with online gamers she had just met.

I thought about this in the context of #Iaskedpolitely. Then I realized that I maybe didn’t have all the relevant information, so today I asked.

Me: That time you were online gaming and you told the other player to take down the porn? Is it possible the other player didn’t know you were a girl?

Her: Not just possible.

My daughter has a gender-neutral username. Her voice is in a low enough register that on the basis of her voice alone you might take her for a 13-year-old boy. This may have something to do with the success of her request to the other player to take the porn off the screen in the game.

Also, she didn’t bother with the word “please”.

In the three-dimensional world, where it’s less likely she’ll be assumed to be male, her experiences to date have not departed nearly as much from what you can find in #Iaskedpolitely as a mother would like them to.

4. Some of the responses to the Adria Richards story have been along the lines of “A convention or professional conference or trade show is totally not the same thing as a workplace, and it’s a Bad Thing that organizers are trying to impose professional-environment expectations on attendees, who want to hang out with their friends and have fun.” I’ll allow that even a professional conference is different from work (unless, I guess, your entire job is to coordinate or do stuff at professional conferences), but in many cases such a conference or convention or trade show is also still connected to work. One of the big connections is usually the community of people with which you interact at a conference or convention or trade show.

Here’s a good operational test: Can you totally opt out of the conferences or conventions or trade shows with no resulting impact on your professional life (including your opportunities for advancement, networking, etc.)? If not, the conferences or conventions or trade shows are connected to your work, and thus it’s appropriate to expect some level of professionalism.

None of which is to say that conventions one goes to off the clock, for fun, should necessarily be anarchic events, red in tooth and claw. Unless that’s how the community at that particular con decides it wants to have fun, I suppose.

Also, this is not to say that companies should necessarily fire their employees for any and every infraction of a conference Code of Conduct. Depending on what kind of violation (and what kind of ongoing pattern of problematic behavior and failed attempts at remediation an employee might have displayed) firing might be the right call. I have seen none of the personnel files of the persons directly involved in this case — and you probably haven’t, either — so the best I could do is speculate about whether particular firings were warranted, and if so, by what. I’m in no mood for such speculation.

5. On the matter of tweeting a photo of the PyCon attendees who were telling the jokes Adria Richards felt were inappropriate in the circumstances: Lots of people have decried this as a Very Bad Way for Richards to have communicated to the conference staff about bad-behavior-in-progress with which she felt they should intervene. Instead, they say, she should have had a sense of humor (but see #2 above). Or, she should have turned around and politely asked them to cut it out (but see #3 above). Or, that she should have done something else. (Email conference staff and hope someone was monitoring the inbox closely enough to get promptly to the location ten rows back from the stage so that Richards could point the jokers out in a room with hundreds of people? Use a Jedi mind trick to get them to stop quietly?)

She alerted the conference staff to the problem via Twitter. She made the call, given the available options, the fact that she didn’t want to generate noise that would disrupt what was happening on the stage, and probably her judgments of what was likely to be effective based on her prior experiences (see #2 above).

Maybe that’s not the call you’d make. Maybe the strategy you would have tried would totally have worked. I trust you’re prepared to deploy it next time you’re at a conference or convention or trade show and in earshot of someone behaving in a way likely to make members of the community feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. I hope it’s just as effective as you imagine it will be.

Even if Adria Richards was wrong to tweet the picture of the jokers, that doesn’t mean that their joking was appropriate in the circumstances in which they were doing it at PyCon. It wouldn’t mean that the conference staff would be wrong to investigate the joking and shut it down (and deal with the jokers accordingly) if they judged it in violation of the Code of Conduct.

Also, one of the big complaints I’ve seen about the tweeted photo of the PyCon jokers is that using Twitter as a tool to report the problem removes the confidentiality that ought to accompany allegations of violations of the Code of Conduct, investigations of those allegations, penalties visited on violators, etc.

There’s a couple things I want to say to that. First, dealing with bad behavior “privately” (rather than transparently) doesn’t always inspire confidence in the community that the bad behavior is being taken seriously, or that it’s being addressed consistently (as opposed to, say, being addressed except when someone we really like does it too), or that it’s being addressed at all. Especially when the bad behavior in question is happening in a publicly observable way, taking the response completely private may be nearly as harmful to the community as the bad behavior itself.

Second, shouldn’t the people who want us to trust that the PyCon staff would have dealt with the PyCon jokers fairly and appropriately in private themselves trust that the PyCon staff had addressed any violation of the conference Code of Conduct Adria Richards might have committed by tweeting the picture of the PyCon jokers (rather than emailing it or whatever) — and that they’d dealt with such a violation on Richards’ part, if they judged it a violation, in private?

There’s just a whiff of a double standard in this.

6. On the post-conference update to the PyCon Code of Conduct to to explicitly identify “public shaming” as harmful to the PyCon community and thus not allowed: I’m hopeful that PyCon organizers take account of the effects on the community they have (and on the community they are trying to build) of opacity in dealing with bad behavior versus transparency in dealing with bad behavior.

It’s not like there isn’t already reason to believe that sometimes conference organizers minimize the impact of instances of harassment reported to them, or deny that any harassment has been reported at all, or back off from applying their own explicit rules to people they judge as valuable to the community.

These kinds of actions may harm their community just as much as public shaming. They communicate that some harassers are more valuable to the community than the people they harass (so maybe a bit of harassment is OK), or that people are lying about their actual experiences of bad behavior.

7. There has been the predictable dissection of Adria Richards’ every blog post, tweet, and professional utterance prior to this event, with the apparent intention of demonstrating that she has engaged in jokes about sex organs herself, or that she has a history of looking for things to get mad about, or she’s just mean, and who is she to be calling other people out for bad behavior?

This has to be the least persuasive tu quoque I’ve seen all year.

If identifying problematic behavior in a community is something that can only be done by perfect people — people who have never sinned themselves, who have never pissed anyone off, who emerged from the womb incapable of engaging in bad behavior themselves — then we are screwed.

People mess up. The hope is that by calling attention to the bad behavior, and to the harm it does, we can help each other do better. Focusing on problematic behavior (especially if that behavior is ongoing and needs to be addressed to stop the harm) needn’t brand the bad actor as irredeemable, and it shouldn’t require that there’s a saint on duty to file the complaint.

8. Some people have opined that it was bad for Adria Richards to call out the PyCon jokers (or to call them out in the particular way she did) on account of the bad consequences that might befall them if they were known to have violated the PyCon Code of Conduct. But the maxim, “Don’t call out bad behavior because doing so could have negative consequences for the person behaving badly” just serves to protect the bad behavior and the bad actors. Being caught plagiarizing can be harmful to a scientist’s career, so for heaven’s sake don’t report it! Being convicted of rape can end your future as a football player, so your victim ought to refrain from reporting it, and the authorities ought to make sure you’re not prosecuted!

Bad behavior has bad consequences, too.

The potential bad consequences of being caught behaving badly should, perhaps, help motivate people not to behave badly, especially in cases where the harms of that bad behavior to individuals or the community are not themselves sufficiently motivating to prevent the behavior.

9. Finally, some people have been expressing that it makes them feel uncomfortable and unwelcome when they are not allowed to act they way they want to, tell the jokes they feel like telling, and so forth.

I don’t doubt this for a minute.

However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. In the end, it comes down to a question of who you want in your community and who you want out of it. Personally, I don’t want my professional communities to be comfortable places for racists or sexists, for rapists, plagiarists, or jerks. Other people, I imagine, would prefer a professional community that’s a comfortable place for racists or sexists, for rapists, plagiarists, or jerks to a professional community that’s a comfortable place for me.

But here’s the thing: if you say you want your community to be welcoming to and inclusive of people who aren’t yet represented in great numbers, it might require really listening to what they say about what’s holding them back. It might require making changes on account of what they tell you.

It’s still possible that you’ll decide in the end to prioritize the comfort of the people already in your community over the comfort of the people you thought you wanted to welcome into your community. But in that case, at least have the decency to be honest that this is what you’re doing.

* * * * *

Also, pretty much everything Stephanie says here.

* * * * *

UPDATE: So, there are people who seem very eager to share their take on this situation (especially, for some odd reason, their autopsies of every wrong thing Adria Richards did) in the comments, but without engaging with anything I’ve written in the 3000 words here — including the things I’ve written here that directly address the points they’re trying to make.

There are many, many places on the internet where these not-really-engaging-with-the-conversation-we’re-having-here contributions would be welcome. But it’s probably worth updating some prior probabilities about whether those comments will make it out of moderation here.

An ad in the sidebar that kind of bugs me.

Just now, on this blog, I noticed an ad for an “online reputation management service”. There are ads for services like these all over the place (including on the airwaves of the big San Francisco public radio station, although they don’t call them “ads” because public radio isn’t supposed to have ads).

Anyway, I hadn’t really given much thought to these businesses. I figured it was mostly for restaurants or similar kinds of clients trying to “accentuate” their good online reviews (while eliminating the negative ones, or at least pushing them down in the search results). Kind of slimy, but in a way I’ve come to expect from companies trying to attract me as a customer.

But I have come to learn lately that cheating scientists sanctioned by the ORI have been hiring online reputation managers to try to push the cyber-trails of their cheating out of sight. It’s even possible (although not conclusively established by any means) that especially vigorous online reputation managers for hire might be engaging in shenanigans to use false DMCA claims to literally eliminate negative information that the scientific community (and indeed, the larger public) has an interest in being able to access.

So, yeah. Everyone has bills to pay — people who work in online reputation management, people who had to leave science because they got caught cheating, blog networks like Scientopia. Commerce marches on. But that doesn’t mean I have to like all of what happens in the service of paying those bills.

Dispatch from #scio13: Tweet me maybe?

So, last night at ScienceOnline there was an Open Mic Night, masterfully MC’d by Jacquelyn Gill and David Schiffman. There was a lot of talent on display, but also initial issues with the sound at the venue. (Scott Huler and Brian Malow were the committed empiricists who figured the issue out … it turned out something was plugged into the wrong hole. (Insert gratuitous punchline here.)) The evening culminated with a inspiring dance lesson from John Rennie, who is without a doubt the science journalist you want to teach you how to dance.

Anyway, as conveyed on the Twitters, I made the (almost surely ill-advised) decision to get up and sing at Open Mic Night. While I am pleased (and relieved) to report that I didn’t end up in the Shatner zone in the chorus, a sound engineering issue meant that I lost half of my first verse. So, here are the lyrics to my song about social media, set to a possibly recognizable tune. (If you don’t mind, imagine me singing it in tune.)

I threw a post on my wall,
Only been blogging since Fall,
Your “like” pleased me most of all,
And now you’re in my feed

I’d trade my soul for a link,
I’d kill to hear what you think,
I’d even write you with ink
‘Cause now you’re who I read

FriendFeed was slogging,
Tumblrs were reblogging,
G+ hangouts, I’m no quitter,
Mention me on Twitter, baby?

Hey, I just met you,
And this is crazy,
But here’s my handle,
So tweet me, maybe?

It’s hard to match your
Traffic baby,
But here’s my hashtag,
Retweet me, maybe?

Hey, I just met you,
And this is crazy,
But here’s my handle,
So tweet, maybe?

And all the other blogs,
Try to shake me,
But here’s my hashtag,
Retweet me, maybe?

My comment got voted down,
Emoticon was a frown :-(
You took my logic to town,
But still, you’re in my feed

I didn’t give up the ghost,
Redeemed myself the next post,
Got linklove, I shouldn’t boast,
But it’s what I need.

Bora Z retweeted,
Ed Yong said to read it,
SiteMeter ebb and flowing,
Holy crap I’m linked on BoingBoing!

Hey, I just met you,
And this is crazy,
But here’s my handle,
So tweet me, maybe?

It’s hard to match your
Traffic baby,
But here’s my hashtag,
Retweet me, maybe?

Hey, I just met you,
And this is crazy,
But here’s my handle,
So tweet, maybe?

And all the other blogs,
Try to shake me,
But here’s my hashtag,
Retweet me, maybe?

Before this ScienceOnline
My stats were so bad
My stats were so bad
My stats were so, so bad

Before this ScienceOnline
My stats were so bad
And you should know that
My stats were so, so bad

It’s hard to match your
Traffic baby,
But here’s my hashtag,
Retweet me, maybe?

Hey, I just met you,
And this is crazy,
But here’s my handle,
So tweet, maybe?

And all the other blogs,
Try to shake me,
But here’s my hashtag,
Retweet me, maybe?

Before this ScienceOnline
My stats were so bad
My stats were so bad
My stats were so, so bad

Before this ScienceOnline
My stats were so bad
And you should know that

So tweet me, maybe?

What I gleaned from the start of the semester faculty meetings.

Note that “gleaned” might suggest more in the way justified true belief than I actually acquired; at least some of these bullet points have all the tannins you’d expect from tea leaves. Also, there’s maybe a little sarcasm, but I’m trying to get most of it out of my system before my first class meeting tomorrow. You have been warned.

Anyway, in no particular order:

  • Our university president and the governor of our state are super-excited about MOOCs. They’re the wave of the higher ed future, y’all! And that excitement extends to entering a partnership wherein faculty at our university will develop MOOCs and the university will pocket a whopping 51% of the proceeds! The other 49% of the proceeds will go to a private company that will do … something to add value to what our faculty build. No reason at all for California taxpayers to worry that this amounts to converting public funds to private profits!
  • Also, no need to worry that the University of California’s bold initiatives MOOCward in UC Online have been much less successful than hoped. Because the California State University system will be able to figure it out!
  • Some faculty with an awareness of history pointed noted that, in the 1950s, precisely the same bold future of revolutionizing college education and broadening access to it was predicted, only with television as the delivery method. Remember how classroom instruction at colleges and universities had totally disappeared by the end of that decade? And this is why history departments must be phased out immediately!
  • So, our campus is phasing in its fourth “Learning Management System” (with which we develop and deliver content and interaction with students online) in 10 years. Faculty are scrambling to work out kludges to get the functionality with the new system that they had (but will be losing) with the old system. It combines all the hassle of a new prep with none of the intellectual thrill of a new prep. Bonus: Owing to the partnership with Udacity to develop and deliver MOOCs, there is absolutely no guarantee that the campus won’t end up ditching this new LMS in favor of a (proprietary) LMS that Udacity prefers (and could yank out from under us in the event that the partnership founders). This is awesome incentive for those who have never used online tools in their pedagogy to start!
  • Faculty can reach a stage where they are so battered by directives from administrative levels beyond their department that they will hear their chair’s proclamation “We will be doing [X] over my dead body” and ask “When must we implement [X]?” (I assure you, these are faculty who sincerely desire their chair’s continued health and well-being.)
  • Administrators who think that they can appease disgruntled factions of the administrative units they oversee by making sure those factions are heavily represented on key committees and then listening to their concerns sometimes discover that listening to those concerns is not sufficient to appease the disgruntled factions.
  • Indeed, sometimes the disgruntled factions will make and distribute hundreds of fliers trying to rally the support of the less-disgruntled factions of their administrative units, including agitating for what could maybe shape up to be a coup against the administrators who listened to grievances but did not acquiesce to demands.
  • Such attempts to rally support from colleagues might be more successful if they showed awareness of the real challenges those less-disgruntled factions of the administrative units face, and especially of ways giving the disgruntled faction everything it wants might impact the resources and effective functioning of the less-disgruntled factions.
  • I have what feels like a memory that at least one of the first few start-of-semester faculty meetings early in my career here saw faculty generally gruntled. It’s possible that this is baseless nostalgia, though.
  • You know what we hear that area employers are looking for in recent graduates? Good critical thinking skills. You know what core component of our General Education package the powers that be are seriously considering eliminating? Critical thinking! Of course, the proposal on the table is to fold the existing critical thinking requirement into another required course (the second semester freshman composition class), but some of us are fairly certain that student papers with solid mechanics but lacking critical thinking are going to end up being a horror show to grade.

I hope the rest of you in academia are experiencing a smooth start (or continuation, as the cas may be) to your term.

To tweet or not to tweet the professional conference? (Some thoughts in 140-character chunks.)

There’s a lot of discussion kicking around the tubes at the moment about whether it is appropriate to live-tweet a session at a professional conference. The recent round of discussion looks to have originated among English faculty. At the blog Planned Obsolescence, The Modern Language Association’s Director of Scholarly Communication, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, offers sensible advice on tweeting or not at meetings. Meanwhile Prof-like Substance is quizzical about the request to keep private what a scholar is presenting in the public space provided by a professional meeting (while recognizing, of course, that there are venues like Gordon Research Conference that have explicit rules about not publicizing what is presented beyond the bounds of the conference).

It’s no secret that I’ve tweeted a meeting or two in my time. I’ve even mused at some length about the pros and cons of tweeting a meeting, although mostly from the point of view of the meeting attendee (me) absorbing and interacting with what is being presented, compared to taking notes in my notebook instead.

If pressed for a blanket statement on whether tweeting a conference presentation is OK or not OK, I would say: it depends. There are complexities here, many linked to the peculiar disciplinary norms of particular professional communities, and given that those norms are themselves moving targets (changing in response to the will of active members of those communities, among other things), any ruling that somehow got it right at this moment would be bound for obsolescence before very long.

In other words, I don’t have a grand argument covering all the relevant contexts. Instead of trying to frame such an argument, I’m going to give you my thoughts on this, in tweet-sized bites:

  • Tweeting a meeting is a way to include members of the professional community who didn’t have the funds or flexibility to be there IRL.
  • Tweeting a meeting is a way to include interested people beyond the professional community in the audience and the discussion.
  • Since Twitter is interactive, tweeting a meeting is a way to promote discussion of what’s being presented RIGHT AWAY, for better or worse.
  • For worse: discussion may start before relevant facts, ideas are on the table, assuming things speaker isn’t claiming as speaker’s point.
  • For better: speaker can get rapid feedback on which points are persuasive, which seem iffy, as well as on fruitful tangents and connections.
  • Worry: conference tweeters distracted from engaging with speakers, people in room, & asking questions there. Some folks are not on Twitter!
  • Worry: conference tweeters may give inaccurate account of speaker’s claims, fail to distinguish their commentary from reporting of talk.
  • But, if multiple attendees tweet session, more basis to tease out which thoughts are from speaker, which from tweeters responding to talk.
  • Worry: live-tweeting sessions opens speakers to having results/ideas/arguments swiped by someone not at the meeting. Might get scooped.
  • Of course, others in the room could swipe speaker’s results/ideas/arguments. Why assume you couldn’t already get scooped?
  • Is community pressure stronger on people in the room (not to scoop speaker) than on members of the community following tweets? If so, why?
  • Live-tweeting meeting w/proper attribution of speaker could serve as record of results/ideas/arguments and who presented them. Protection!
  • Challenge to proper tweetribution of talk contents: getting speakers’ Twitter handles right. These could be listed in conference program.
  • Could be issues including speakers’ Twitter handles in tweets of their talks if their use of Twitter is primarily personal, not profesisonal
  • Some speakers freaked out by people tweeting their talks (especially in workshop-y/preliminary results scenarios). Should that be respected?
  • Are they also freaked out by people taking notes at their talks? Is worry sharing-beyond-room or rapid amplification potential?
  • Big Q: Does community view its professional meetings as public venues or something more limited? If latter, what is rationale for limits?
  • When meeting tweets help scholars figure something out, will they cite tweets? Easier than citing chat at hotel bar & easier to recall later
  • Expectations different in different disciplines; tweeting interdisciplinary conferences likely to expose differences in norms.
  • Never a bad idea to ask if speakers are OK with having their talks tweeted. If not, talking about why afterwards could be informative.
  • Things not to tweet (identifiably) from a talk: how bored you are, commentary on speaker’s looks. Save that for your notebook.
  • If tweeting conferences becomes a standard thing, might be tensions between “official” tweeters and independent attendee tweets.
  • Mass tweeting might also make serious bandwidth at conference venue a requirement. Expect that would increase registration fees!
  • Some fields likely to have harder time with 140 char limit than others. Push to be concise might be a positive influence on them.

I welcome your thoughts in the comments (and you can use more than 140 characters if you need to).

Sunday ponderable: Does who’s following you on Twitter influence how you tweet?

I know that some of you have been very good at resisting the siren song of The Twitters. I have pretty much turned right into the rocks.

Not that I’m tweeting 24/7 or anything. My tweets are primarily:

(1) Links to my new blog posts, when I manage to get it together to write new blog posts.

(2) Retweets of good stuff others have tweeted, especially links to pieces that I want to reread more carefully later.

(3) Passing thoughts about my job, my kids, my commute, or whatever.

(4) Occasionally, live-notes from a conference session I’m attending.

(5) Playing along with hashtag games (e.g., the recent #ReplaceLoveWithSoup).

My tweets, generally speaking, involve much less time and thought than my blog posts, and they are frequently more silly and/or smart alecky.

But here’s the thing:

I’ve been picking up Twitter followers, as one does. Some of them are actually pretty famous and well-respected people in fields upon which my work (not just my blogging-work, but my actual professorial research/teaching/service-work) touch. Some of them are pretty famous and well-respected people in my home discipline. Also, not that it necessarily matters (but I can’t rule out the possibility that it might), some of these famous-folks are a generation or two older than me.

… and now there’s something like the possibility of meeting some of these famous-folk in real life (say, at a professional meeting) and having their primary information about me at that moment come from my tweets. And it’s hard to anticipate how famous scientists and philosophers feel about replacing love with soup.

Or to know whether it should matter to me.

Are any of you in a similar situation? Does it influence how you tweet? Have you decided that your Twitter followers deserve what they get from your tweet-stream?

Quoted for truth.

Anil Dash, writing about the (old) media gnashing-of-teeth about “cyberbullying” in the aftermath of the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi:

It’s important to note that blaming technology for horrendous, violent displays of homophobia or racism or simple meanness lets adults like parents and teachers absolve themselves of the responsibility to raise kids free from these evils. By creating language like “cyberbullying”, they abdicate their own role in the hateful actions, and blame the (presumably mysterious and unknowable) new technologies that their kids use for these awful situations.