May we be exclusive?

A few weeks ago, our friends M&D had us over for dinner. After an amazing meal, I wandered into the living room and discovered, for the first time McSweeney’s. Their Panorama publication was sitting on the sofa and compelled me to read it. In its pages, I found a book review like no other. Before I knew it, I was lost in its pages. I looked up and my husband and M were reading, too. I’m usually not anti-social, but when I skimmed the bottom of the page and didn’t see a URL, I knew I wouldn’t find the articles again. I kept reading…we all did.

To be honest, I haven’t felt this excited about reading in a long time. Cradling the Panorama Book Review, I felt like I’d discovered something…and it was all mine. I felt that old sense of urgency I used to feel as a kid in the library when I’d find a new book. Or in college, in the reference section, when I’d find something I couldn’t check out. Back then, the text felt sacred, important, in fact, it would often be the most important thing in that moment. I had a sense that if I didn’t devour it right then, I wouldn’t have another chance.

Now, I take text for granted. I’ll get to it later, it will be there. In fact, it will be wherever I am. Since the supply exceeds my demand, sometimes I don’t even bother to tag or bookmark it…sure, it’s a laissez-faire attitude toward reading, but usually I’m able to find it again.

That moment at M&D’s, though, felt sacred. It was just me and the Panorama. Each page felt like something no one had ever read before. Sacred. Have I already used that word? Probably. In reflecting on that reading experience, I realize that the Internet is so communal that I rarely really feel an individual connection to anything. Everything is shared, ordinary. We’ve bought that that’s a good thing, but is it always? Isn’t there something magical about experiencing something alone?

Today, I read more of Panorama (I ordered my own copy and anxiously waited for delivery). The magic happened again. I felt like a Reader, not a consumer. No links to click, no backbutton, no comments, no delicious tagging, no digging. Just me and the text. I like the exclusivity of print. Sometimes it’s nice to feel like you may be the only one reading something. Sure, community is important and the collective is definitely contributing to our knowledge about everything from the everyday to the esoteric. But it’s also important for us, I think, to believe that we have original ideas, that we’re not one in 10 million reading about or thinking about the same thing. Now, as the kernel of an idea comes –

you instantly wonder…
has it already been?
…so you Google it…
as the staggering list of link results appear, you think, yes, someone has already thought of it…

I’m very much a proponent of digital texts, but their very strengths, access, speed, on-demand, sometimes make them a weak thinking partner. I hope we don’t lose the luxury of deep thought, of thoroughly losing ourselves in a text–rather than hyper searching, chasing knowledge instead of sitting with it.

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Does anything work in the U.S. education system?

When I was in high school in the late 80′s — early 90′s, it seemed that the U.S. education system was an abysmal failure — after all, weren’t the Soviets and the Chinese students scoring higher in math? Today, headlines still decry our education system as a failure. In a recent op-ed piece published in the New York Times, “One Classroom, From Sea to Shining Sea,” Susan Jacoby advocates for a national system with a standardized curriculum, standardized teacher training, and standardized funding. She states that our system has outgrown its antiquated independent heritage.

Funding. It’s difficult to discuss problems with our educational system without discussing funding. As a California resident, I’ve watched funding drastically diminish with, among other things, the passage of Proposition 13, the Enron scandal, and our latest recession. Education is not a funding priority. Regardless of curricular referendums, standardized testing, and increased accountability for teachers, without consistent and ample funding, our schools will continue to degrade. Without realistic budgets for classrooms, teachers, and materials, we are expecting the impossible from our schools. Even as a university teacher, I have often purchased supplies for my students and classroom. Under the best conditions, teachers labor with limited support. Imagine spending 6 hours in a classroom with thirty 12 year olds (those of you with pre-teens understand the challenge of an hour with just one), five days a week. While competing for their attention and attempting to manage the classroom chatter, now imagine that class days are longer due to budget cuts, or you’ve had a wasp’s nest near the outside classroom door for six months, despite several requests to have it with removed, so you need to keep the door and outside windows shut. Now imagine that most of the toilets don’t work because the district has had to cut a majority of its maintenance staff (I’m describing a colleague’s actual experience in a Southern California school district). These externalities are rarely part of discussions about our education system. Instead, let’s talk about standardized testing and holding teachers more accountable.

Education isn’t simply something to criticize. We all have a stake in its success. We choose. We choose to prioritize other issues, vote against bond measures, argue the intricacies of esoteric tax rules, and then blame our teachers, their training, or some other indefinable scapegoat for our failure to adequately educate our future. Let’s put our energy into figuring out an ample funding scheme for our schools, giving teachers and students the resources they need, create a climate of success and then re-visit questions of standardized tests, national curricula, and teacher accountability.

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To blog or not?

I recently attended a truly fascinating workshop, but I’m not going to blog about it…yet. I’m studying how a particular user group conducts research online, so if I discuss preliminary observations, I risk biasing my sample.

To blog or not to blog seems to be a conundrum facing many researchers. Some choose to blog immediately to spread their idea. Others choose not to blog at all and wait until their peer-reviewed publication. Many of us are caught in the middle, attempting to balance information sharing with respect for our study participants or patience with the process. The immediacy pervading the Internet seems to pressure researchers to engage in flag planting, rather than wait a year or two to publish their results in a peer-reviewed publication.

So, what’s the problem? On the one hand, I find it exciting to be able to immediately comment on topics of interest as well as learn from other’s perspectives. Waiting until the data is in takes a while and often, other technologies have already replaced the ones under study.

Why wait? As researchers, we have a responsibility to get our facts straight. Often, experts’ hunches about a practice or theory are correct or approximately so, but we have a responsibility to the public who trust us to label hunches as hunches and findings as findings…the two are not the same.

I’m interested to hear from my colleagues how they approach information sharing. I think it’s important to engage in scholarly conversation, while at the same time conduct quality research and I do not find these pursuits to be exclusive. At the same time, I do not post to my blog preliminary hunches or observations while I am in the midst of collecting or analyzing data. I expect research I read to have been carefully vetted, and in turn attempt to do the same.

Since blogs do serve as academic discussions, I think it’s completely acceptable to noodle over new topics, as long as we label this exercise as opinion, or noodling, and not claim it as fact.

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Affinity-based browsing, follow-up

Affinity-based browsing, the way I envision it, goes beyond the shallow targeting of Netflix, Amazon, or, from what I can tell, Glue. These programs base recommendations on, for example, people who viewed Ice Age also viewed Cars, so the system recommends Cars. Stumbleupon seems to address general similarities, but doesn’t approach the type of targeting I’m suggesting, because its “classification” and “clustering” engines are primarily based on subject matter and lifestyle interests, which is a start, but isn’t enough to truly serve targeted information. Stumbleupon also collects sex and age information, but it doesn’t know other demographic information, such as where I live or my education level. Thus, the groups I’ll be placed in will be very broad, even though organized around a particular interest.

I’d like more variables in the formula. Advertisers seem to know a lot about us, since ads often seem to be well-targeted (feel free to test this claim by entering any well-advertised pharmaceutical product into your search engine, or use “diet” as a keyword and then pay attention to the ads you’re served). Google Adwords, for example, definitely picks up text from Gmail to serve ads, as does Facebook Connect. Both have deep demographic information about us. So, instead of the Amazon/Netflix model, where recommendations are based on a single selection (e.g., users who purchased the APA Style Guide also bought a similarly boring book titled “x”) or the Stumbleupon example, where recommendations do combine variables, but still remain relatively broad (e.g., 27 year old males interested in entertainment and philosophy found these websites interesting), I’m picturing a formula like the following:

A person who (1) drives a Volkswagen + (2) owns a Mac + (3) shops at Trader Joe’s will like the following sites based on users with similar sociographic patterns. But wait, this person’s browsing behaviors indicate she spends time on teaching websites and downloads educational research articles…so, now the affinity group gets smaller and likely better defined. Combined with demographic information Google and others collect, when this person conducts a search on laptops & classrooms, the results could be better tailored to individual interest (e.g., instead of showing results for laptops for sale, Edutopia and other relevant educational sites would appear in the top 5). If a menu were provided where the user could further define their interests (Stumbleupon has the beginnings of this, but we need more than subject/lifestyle preferences), we could really select how our information is served.

[Special thanks to Christine M. for the VW example.]

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