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March 3, 2008

I Broke Henry Jenkins's Collectible Wax Cylinder From the 1920s

For Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies Program, who is emerging as a well-known public intellectual on topics of media and society, the medium is not the message. He is far less interested in the specific medium than he is in how people interact with the popular culture they consume. Which is lucky for me, since I recently managed to accidentally break a collector’s item in his personal media collection.

I got to know Mr. Jenkins while I was researching a profile of the scholar for The Chronicle. He’s a housemaster in a dormitory at MIT, which means that he and his wife, Cynthia, live in a spacious suite right on the campus.

Their living room is packed with media, with shelves full of books, video games, CD’s, and comic books, and some old examples of pop culture Mr. Jenkins has collected over the years. At one point he showed me an artifact from the 1920s — an Edison wax cylinder. Before flat phonograph records, this is how music was packaged and sold, though it seems hard to imagine that a four-inch-long hollow tube lined with wax can hold musical data. Mr. Jenkins’s wife had given it to him as a Christmas present.

Mr. Jenkins seemed excited to show me the cylinder, and he handed it to me so I could give it a closer look. Somehow — for reasons I still can’t explain — the instant I got my hands on the historic object, it shattered into dozens of pieces. I broke Henry Jenkins’s collectible wax cylinder from the 1920s.

Obviously I apologized profusely. His reaction: Rather than getting upset, he said something to the effect of “‘Cool, now we get to see what one of these looks like in cross-section.” Perhaps he was just being polite, but he said not to worry about it.

As I sat down to write my article, I realized that Mr. Jenkins’s argument is that the model of media consumption from the analog era has shattered. Canned media, like that wax cylinder, is less important than it used to be, he says. Now fans watch a blockbuster movie, play a video game that continues the plot, download the unrated version to watch again on their iPods, and make their own short video spoofing the film’s characters.

That last part, the part where fans remix culture, particularly excites Mr. Jenkins. He sees it as a return to folk traditions that fell out of favor when people started sitting around a phonograph player instead of performing songs for their friends. With the help of the Internet, fans are now sharing their own stories, songs, and short films, often using mainstream media as a jumping-off point. All you have to do is spend a few minutes on MySpace or other social-networking sites to find garage rock bands inspired by Harry Potter, or a video series called “Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager,” in which the Star Wars character Darth Vader is portrayed as a frustrated grocery-store employee.

I still felt horrible about breaking the cylinder, so I scoured eBay looking for a replacement. I eventually found one, and I gave it to Mr. Jenkins at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum last week, where Mr. Jenkins was a keynote speaker.

“It’s great to see the wax cylinder back,” he said. —Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Monday March 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [5]

February 27, 2008

Chronicle Tech Forum: Community Colleges Grapple With Diverse Learners

When asked about the most powerful trend affecting community colleges, Mark David Milliron didn’t hesitate yesterday. “The biggest trend is that we’re really swimming in a world of learning swirl,” Milliron, a technology specialist and president of Catalyze Learning International, told a crowd on the last day of The Chronicle‘s technology conference in Tampa.

It sounded dizzying. And Milliron meant it that way. Community colleges are taking in students from three generations at once, each one with a different approach to technology and learning. Colleges have to account for all of them, as well as different degrees of tolerance for new technology among faculty and staff.

The three generations are baby boomers, Generation X, and the newest one, the so-called “Net Gen.” Baby boomers grew up with technology such as the telephone and television. Gen X was part of the personal computer age, and knows about things such as email. The Net Gen, however, lives on the Web. They spend an average of 22 hours a week using the Internet for buying things, social networking, entertaining themselves, and learning.

All of these people mix in a community college classroom or online education environment, Milliron said. So it is up to the college to find a happy medium, a way of serving all comers.

To do this, he is a big fan of people helping people. He mentioned “near-peer” programs, in which students more familiar with a particular kind of software or gadget can help students who are less comfortable. Milliron also talked about colleges that use student technology assistance programs. In those, IT students help older faculty gain experience with new technology.

There is a cost for colleges that don’t integrate technology into learning: they drive students away. Milliron noted that some faculty want wireless access blocked in their classrooms. Some colleges don’t provide it in common areas. So students, instead of staying on campus, will head off to coffee shops with wireless hot spots to get on the Internet.—Josh Fischman

Posted on Wednesday February 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comment

Chronicle Tech Forum: Colleges' Experiences With Emergency-Notification Systems

Tampa, Fla. – College leaders are struggling to find the best ways to set up campus emergency-notification systems. Which of the dozens of service providers best fits the campus’s needs? How do you get students to sign up? Who should have access to the send button?

Technology officials, provosts, and presidents shared their experiences with emergency-notification tools on Tuesday during the closing session of The Chronicle’s Technology Forum. A recent string of campus shootings, including those at Virginia Tech last spring, and weather calamities, like Hurricane Katrina, have led campus officials to look for ways to blast out information to students, faculty, and staff members during a crisis.

Michael L. Dame, director of university Web communications of Virginia Tech, says 54 different companies selling emergency-notification systems contacted the institute after the shootings. He says Virginia Tech officials looked for a product that showed strong protection of student data and that was reliable. And they immediately ruled out the companies that offered a free service in exchange for the right to send advertising to participants. (The institute ended up using a product from 3n.)

Only five people at Virginia Tech have the ability to send an alert via the new system, said Mr. Dame. Two of them are in the campus police department, and the other three are in the communications office. “The president’s office and provost’s office didn’t want that responsibility,” he said. And, officials decided, “the fewer people authorized to send messages, probably the better” so that there would be fewer temptations to use the system in situations in which it was not absolutely necessary.

Getting people to sign up for the services can be the biggest challenge, officials said.

Brian T. Nichols, chief IT security and policy officer at Louisiana State University, said that 15,000 students, professors, and staff members have signed up so far, but that’s a relatively small percentage of the university’s overall population.

Why not just make sign-up mandatory? Mr. Dame said that in the past when students have been required to give private information, “students gave us bogus data in large numbers — so why do that?” — Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Wednesday February 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]

February 26, 2008

Chronicle Tech Forum: Ohio U. President Talks About Network Breaches and Their Aftermath

Tampa, Fla. — No one envied Roderick J. McDavis’s uncomfortable position. Mr. McDavis got on stage to describe how he and his university had responded to a series of network-security breaches, which made headlines across the country in 2006.

“I know that the majority of you are saying I’m glad it’s him up there and not me,” Mr. McDavis told the crowd at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum today.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted the university in late April 2006 to tell administrators that their networks had been hacked. The FBI found out about the breach, Mr. McDavis said, because undercover agents on chat rooms had seen hackers bragging about breaking into Ohio University’s systems.

A series of breaches followed, which could have led to exposure of thousands of private alumni data and other records. Mr. McDavis said that Ohio University had a very decentralized IT organization and no permanent fire wall.

“We didn’t take IT seriously,” Mr. McDavis said.

With the help of consultants, the university responded by hiring a chief information officer, creating a plan of action, and establishing a committee to oversee IT on the campus. The CIO became part of the president’s cabinet.

Gartner, the consulting firm hired by the university after the breach, said that the university needed $7-million to $10-million to make the IT services at the institution stable and secure. The university has spent $2-million so far, and will spend $8-million over the next few years. Mr. McDavis said the university has had to delay a fund-raising campaign a year to focus on the crisis.

Technologists in the audience commended Mr. McDavis for having the courage to come forward and talk about the breaches. But many of them wondered whether university leadership would listen to technologists and devote money to security and training only after a crisis. An article in The Chronicle in 2006 revealed that Ohio University had received several warnings from consultants and others about lax security and disorganized technology before the breaches. (Episodes of the podcast Tech Therapy — like this one and this one — have discussed college presidents’ dangerous lack of interest in technology.)

“Technology is something everybody wants but nobody wants to pay for it,” an audience member said.

Mr. McDavis said he has learned to pay attention to technology — and stressed that other college presidents should learn to, as well. The university is always vigilant now, he said. “We never want to get to a point again where we are comfortable.” —Scott Carlson

Posted on Tuesday February 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comment

Chronicle Tech Forum: 'Where Did I Leave That Student Data?'

Tampa, Fla. — It seems like every time Beth Cate walks into a classroom to teach at Indiana University, she finds a thumb drive that has been accidentally left behind by an absent-minded colleague. She wonders whether there might be any private student data on that drive — like graded papers — which could mean an illegal leak of personal student information by the university.

Keeping student data on physical devices like those USB drives is one of the newest legal land mines for campus administrators, said Ms. Cate, who is the university’s associate general counsel, during a panel at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum here. “I really worry about mobile devices,” she said.

Tracy Mitrano, director of information-technology policy and of computer policy and law at Cornell University, agreed that physical security of storage drives and computers is a growing problem. “Human error often lies at the bottom of a lot of data breaches,” she said. “It’s not necessarily the sophisticated hacking incidents.” —Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Tuesday February 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]

February 25, 2008

Chronicle Tech Forum: The Very Public Professor

Tampa, Fla. — When Henry Jenkins was growing up, he wanted to be an expert in many things. His models? The Disney cartoon duck Ludwig von Drake (who bragged in his signature song about knowing everything about science and art), and the professor from Gilligan’s Island on TV. “He knew everything,” Mr. Jenkins told a luncheon crowd at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum in Tampa, Fla., “except how to get off the island.”

Mr. Jenkins, director of the comparative media-studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did have a weightier theme than cartoon birds and televised castaways. How does technology enable a professor to project expertise beyond the private classroom and into a public space, he asked?

His ideas on this are complex, but one could gloss them this way: Just throw it out there.

He did that a few years ago with an essay about violence that was intended as Congressional testimony, but when he put it up on the Web it went viral and was published all over the place. And published not in the form he originally intended. But that didn’t really corrupt his ideas, Mr. Jenkins said. “The ideas gained greater power as I lost control over them.” —Josh Fischman

Posted on Monday February 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]

Chronicle Tech Forum: Campus Rights vs. Copyrights

Tampa, Fla. — Campus officials don’t want to be cops. They made that point loud and clear today in Tampa, Fla., in a panel discussion about the digital piracy of music and videos by college students. But a law professor and a representative of the movie industry told them that, in certain circumstances, colleges didn’t have much choice.

Stewart McLaurin, executive vice president for education affairs at the Motion Picture Association of America, seeks education before enforcement. College students are some of the movie industy’s best customers, he said, and his group doesn’t want to sue them. But the multibillion-dollar industry has to protect itself from theft, he went on. He would prefer to do that by educating students that getting a copy of a movie free, with no compensation to the copyright owners, is wrong.

No one disagreed. But Tracy Mitrano, director of information-technology policy at Cornell University, asked how committed the MPAA was to education. She, along with members of the audience of more than 200 people, objected to language in Congressional proposals during the past 12 months to promote the use of technology to catch copyright crooks—technology that doesn’t really work well. If education is the goal, college officials ask, why try to push an ineffective technical fix?

James Gibson, a law professor at the University of Richmond, pointed out that colleges were compelled to play cop only if they were aware of repeated instances of wrongdoing. But he had a question for those in the audience: If there was no legal pressure at all, and students were still grabbing movies and songs using a campus network, “what would you do?” —Josh Fischman

Posted on Monday February 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]

Chronicle Tech Forum: Top Trends in Campus Technology

Tampa, Fla. — The age of technology hype in higher education might be over, and that’s a good thing. That was one theme of the opening session of The Chronicle’s Technology Forum, taking place here this week.

For many years, technology at colleges was in a Cro-Magnon period, said Mark David Milliron, president of Catalyze Learning International. Any decision about technology was simply greeted with a cave-man-like grunt of “Technology, good!”

“People have realized now it’s a lot more difficult than that,” Mr. Milliron said. “Conversations are becoming much less hyperbolic and are happening much more slowly.”

But that doesn’t mean that the age of innovation is over, even if the “velocity” might slow down a bit, he argued. “We’ve got 15 or 20 years of really dynamic time before us.”

Among the top trends in college technology identified here:

  • Analytics: Colleges are starting to better analyze the real costs and benefits of technology by using hard numbers on whether better outcomes are being reached. That’s part of the trend of asking harder questions about the benefits of technology, said Mr. Milliron.
  • Customer service: Technology on campuses is starting to borrow customer-service techniques from Amazon and other online businesses. Or at least it needs to in order to meet the growing demands for such services from students, argued Richard A. DeMillo, dean and professor of computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
  • Outsourcing: Colleges are starting to outsource technology services like e-mail. Institutions are also looking to collaborate with businesses or other colleges to tackle portions of IT infrastructure. Richard Garrett, program director and senior research analyst at Eduventures, said colleges needed to continually ask the question, “What is core business, and what should we outsource?”

The session ended with a quote from a poet, J.G. Holland. “That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, endures.”

“Since we move at a glacial pace, we should be OK,” said Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant who moderated the session. —Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Monday February 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]
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