MOOC Participation: Diversity and Assumptions of Development

Continuing my series of posts about MOOCs. Today’s is about a type of open/development rhetoric I keep hearing associated with MOOCs. It’s well meant I am quite sure, but I’ve heard the following sentiment: MOOCs will allow anyone from any continent to access content. And that in turn leads to increased education, skills for all.

I have a number of problems with this argument.

Starting with the obvious, this sentiment makes important assumptions about access. That access to the Internet and its content is uniform across the world. But it’s not. The Internet is a very different experience if you have a smartphone as your only means of access, versus if you have a laptop. Behind the hardware, there are questions of corporate policies and pricing mechanisms that influence access. Bandwidth caps, bandwidth pricing can influence how people use their phones, and in many parts of the world also how they use the wired network.

Behind these crucial practical questions of access lurk other assumptions, which warrant questioning. Is the content we create relevant or useful for everyone? What assumptions do the producers of content make about, say, what has been previously taught? What assumptions are made about the types of hardware and software the students have access too? And most critically, what assumptions get made about why the person is taking the course and whether that content will ultimately be most useful?

Although its not used too much, I have heard the word “Africa” used to describe diversity. I do think its well meant but it has the danger to collapse all of these questions into a stereotype of a person. Africa is not a person, nor is it a country, it’s a continent of great diversity in all senses. A person from Africa may well contribute to diversity in a MOOC setting, but so might a person from America.

Like others, I see this as being part of understanding the participation divide that shapes the Internet today. Some of that divide is the question of access, its costs, modalities, and so forth. But that’s not all that shapes the participation divide. When we overly simplify an entire continent we close down the question of what shapes participation in very problematic ways. If we are really committed to understanding how online education might help more people learn, the participation divide is precisely the question we ought to open up, to really take account of the highly diverse population of people that have some reach to the Internet. Because it’s only when we actually take diversity seriously that we have any shot at getting to something better than more education for the already well educated.

Romney’s binders

Something curious is going on on Amazon.com

In the wake of Mitt Romney’s comment on Tuesday night

“I said, ‘Well, gosh, can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified? I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”

People have taken to Amazon to write reviews of binders. Ones that take up the question of whether you can fit women into binders, whether binders come with women, whether they appeal to the 47% and so forth. It was first picked about a day ago, a story retweeted on Twitter, which I wonder led to more people writing the reviews.

These reviews are a vehicle to express the reviewer’s dislike of Mitt Romney. But what an interesting place to do it. The night of the debate I watched my Facebook stream (mostly left-leaning people, but not exclusively) and Mitt’s comments about binders came up there. Indeed, its come up over and over again in the last few days. I am sure that Facebook and Twitter are being used by supporters of both candidates, and that doesn’t surprise me.

So what to make of Amazon reviews as being a site of political expression? It’s certainly not the first time that Amazon.com reviews have been used for purposes beyond a recommendation. The Wolf t-shirt is a famous example. You could say that the binder reviews have elements of the same humour (at least those of a non-Republican or non-Romney persuasion). But you see other turns there, expressions of anger about the status of women… other types of expression. And at least to me that is what makes these reviews fascinating.

Sharing Instruments: SMS Logging

This is a second post sharing instruments to help others with their empirical research.

One of my most cited papers is “y do tngrs luv 2 txt msg?” which was a study that I did with Marge Eldridge when we both worked at EuroPARC in Cambridge, UK. What interested us both was how rapidly text messaging had been adopted by teens. What were they using it for? Why?

In the spirit of making more of my materials available I wanted to share the diaries that we asked the teens to keep. There are short excerpts in the paper, but here they are in full. I should say that we were trying to balance portability and privacy against collecting the type of data that would allow us to gain insight into how the technology was being used. This is why the diaries look the way they do.

We asked them to log all the messages that they sent and received, and provided instructions for how to use both the sent and received forms.

Irene, Turks and Caicos and Google Search

A few weeks ago Hurricane Irene hit Turks and Caicos. I wanted to know how bad it had been because I went there a couple of years ago and thought it was beautiful.

So, I did what I often do, I typed in Irene and Turks and Caicos. Back came all these reports about the fact that it had passed through the country, reported by American newspapers and media outlets who mentioned that in passing on their lengthy stories about how it was going to impact the United States. There was one exception on the second page, a report from Cuba. This focused on how Irene had hit Turks and Caicos as part of reporting on its general track and that it was not headed to Cuba. One damage report did eventually surface, from the Bahamas.

I was reminded once again how search is not equal. Type in those three words and what you dominantly get is reports from the United States about the United States. I use Google each day for a variety of information needs. This was an important opportunity to calibrate once again on the importance of reflecting on the generation of information and its implications for what gets known.

Twitter before Shockwaves

About 30 minutes ago I felt, here in Atlanta GA, the shockwaves from the earthquake that happened in Virginia. Since Earthquakes are rare on the Eastern Seaboard, when I felt them I actually wondered whether I was having a mild dizzy spell. I logged on to the US Geological Survey website to find out whether I had actually experienced an earthquake.

My first clue that I was right was that the website was temporarily unavailable and then it took a long time to load. My working hypothesis is that a lot of other people were checking it also. Then of course i went to twitter.

In Atlanta it’s Will and Jada (Smith & Pinkett, who’ve announced that they are separating) that is trending on twitter. A first for me to use twitter as a resource and not know what hashtag to look for. But after a bit of searching I found something even more intriguing. Several people in New York City reporting that they learnt about the earthquake in Virginia before they felt the aftershocks.

I guess twitter beat the shockwaves for some people. I would love to know more about how that works. Did they happen to have active twitter friends from Virginia who they were following (I suppose most likely), or was it breaking news services, or even retweets?

And in the oddest announcement, the University of Toronto Press has announced a 20% discount on their books today. Code: Earthquake20.

Ah, so partial answer. Some people saw it trending on twitter before they felt the shockwaves. Not true for me as I said. And another, some people in New York were following people in DC and saw the tweets coming in from there (I’ve seen that multiple times now). Someone in South Carolina read a tweet from DC and then felt it. Its a fascinating way to build up a map of the spread.

An Update from My Scales: Why I Won’t Tweet My Weight and Persuasive Computing

I’ve just read the fabulous Fit4Life paper from this year’s CHI, which presents a fictional system called Fit4Life designed following Persuasive Computing and then uses it to critically reflect on persuasion in design. I think it’s important to say from the outset that one fairly common critique of Persuasive Computing is that the interaction is typically framed as being between a tool and the user it is trying to persuade. But, when you use terms like tool so the agency embedded in the machine gets divorced from the person who put it there. It’s designed in.

And now I have a real example.

I recently purchased a wi-fi scale. I like technology and this scale not only computes my weight, but also my BMI and the amount of fat versus muscle I have and then sends that information to a web app (it also has an iPhone and iPad app). Each morning I step on and learn my fate. I believe that scales can compute weight relatively accurately. I think I even understand how BMI is computed, although I note that on webpages that describe BMI they also describe other variables and uncertainties with the measure. My scale does not come with range. It’s definitive. It’s also definitive about my fat and lean ratios. I have no idea how those are computed, how accurate they are, and what variability may exist in making these computations.

On the web I can review my data. And there someone has made some fascinating design decisions. First, I can chose to tweet my weight. It will be a cold day in hell the first time I decide to do that. What were the designers thinking? Then I wondered whether it was meant as social encouragement. I’ve noticed people’s FitBits letting the Facebook world know of their step activity for the week. Is the idea that I could get encouragement from others if I posted my weight? What would I do on days it went up (immediately tweet that it’s due to muscle gain, admit that the Carbonara was good last night) or just be ashamed? I find myself thinking that step activity is a bit different from weight, there’s a relationship but also an ambiguity. I also understand that WeightWatchers groups share their weights for good or bad. But that’s among a group who are sharing together, and that seems different than simply broadcasting it on Twitter.

Second, visualizations of weight and the fat-lean ratios also come with ideals or “objectives”. It tells you how much you have to lose and gain in order to be ideal. Since I don’t understand how my fat-lean ratios were computed, or how the fat, lean and weight ideals were computed, or what the variables not taken into account might be, I’m left with a message about my body that consists of three numbers. There’s nothing I can manipulate except of course my weight (and also my fat and lean within that–and I’m not even quite sure how to manipulate those, strength training, avoiding fatty foods would be my guesses).

These are problems of over-quantification and rationalization of body, of being told by a tool what is wrong or right that doesn’t account for its measures and the weaknesses that they might have, and provides the user relatively little control over their own data. And they are all things discussed by the Fit4Life paper. And thanks to Fit4Life, I’ve been reminded to keep an eye on my responses to my scale. Thanks of course to media pressure, I’m hardly immune to body ideals though.

Email Charter

I just saw this email charter which is an attempt to encourage the reduction of email. We’ve known for a long time that email is overloaded and also riddled with spam. Recently though I’ve seen more attempts to do something about this. The email charter is one, a social code. A colleague of mine, Eric Gilbert, designed another which is courteous.ly, a system that allows you to reflect your email volume. It’s a really nice example of social translucence balancing providing insight with maintaining privacy. Mine is here, although I don’t use gmail Finally, I also recently wrote about a Professor who has abandoned email.

All of this is making me wonder about an experiment I’ve been wanting to try, which is to have one email free day a week. I’ve been thinking Sunday as starters. No, it’s not that I am Christian (I am not even Christened) but it is a day that still has some degree of practices around it that separate it from the others. That’s especially true in Georgia where they still prevent us from buying alcohol on Sunday, and quite a few things open later on Sundays, and the crowds are often smaller at various places while many Georgians are at church. So I’ve been wondering whether I should go email free for at least one day a week.

But, what has been stopping me, other than my own curiousity about what’s in my inbox is also commitments I’ve made. For example, if I hadn’t read my email last weekend I think it would have been unfair to my co-Papers Chairs. I guess in the end that’s why I like the charter and Eric’s system more than just quitting. Both of those seem to account for the dependencies that email reflects, commitments made, responsibilities that we have to each other. But I still want a way to spend less time in my email.

Are You Your Advisor

This great post, asking the question are you your advisor?

I was given the advice not to try to emulate any one particular person, but to do what seems right to you. It’s turned out to be very good advice. I think I can say that I am not entirely like my advisor, but that I have borrowed things that I liked about his advising style.

For students reading this, I would really encourage you to try to believe that sometimes there are very good reasons for what seem like very frustrating situations. Money is always a good reason. Not just having it, but there are so many different accounts. I’ve written about this before, but if you are someone that doesn’t like looking at your checking account statement, you’ll find the almost weekly need to look at your accounts, decide which one of them a request for something needed should go on, prepare the justification so that the University knows that you’re buying something reasonable and not a yacht.

But to answer the question. I send long emails, am interested in the history of Computing and it’s disciplinary devolution, have a passion for groupware, have studied software development, so in these ways yes. But, I think I’m also different…

Writing Blog Posts

Recently I was asked about writing blog posts. I’ve written about some aspects of this before here and here. But I was asked for some more of the mechanics, so here they are…

I have approximately 30 draft posts that are in various states of draft. Some of them are almost finished and waiting to be published. And I am not alone in this. For example, I noticed somewhat recently, that Mark Guzdial is going away on a trip and has written some blog posts that he will, Internet connection permitting, publish while he’s traveling. I presume his reason is to maintain a consistency while he is unable to write a lot of posts. My reasons are less clear. I think I ought to be more regular in publishing content, but I am not. I am actually trying to batch some up to be published while I am in the UK. We’ll see if that happens though. (It did, but curiously this post was not among them…).

My drafts include a variety of materials. Some are extremely short, perhaps even just a link to an article that I want to write about when I have time. Some are based on an email I have sent, say to a student, and I think that perhaps the email might be useful for others. This type of draft involves taking the email and making it less wordy. I write very wordy emails. Actually, a lot of editing my drafts is de-wording them. I am a wordy person apparently.

The person who asked me saw me writing a post while I was at HCIC (the Human Computer Interaction Consortium). I actually find that writing posts related to ideas that come up at conferences to be very helpful in focusing my thoughts. This person may also have noticed that some remarks I made at HCIC were based on some blog posts I’ve previously written. I find the blog very useful for that. In fact, I checked my blog before making those remarks (I was invited to comment on a panel while at the conference so there was not a lot of time to prepare, luckily my blog helped me with that).

Conferences and academic meetings can be very inspirational. I have a series of posts that I wrote based on my attendance at Snowbird, and CHI gave me the idea for several posts too. And potentially a new blog theme, focused on sharing research instruments (a draft on that awaits publication). But I can’t usually get the piece into publishable form at the conference, so I tend to open a new draft and jot down my ideas. So, that’s the drafting process I use.

Professor Quits Email

Wow, my hero, was my first thought about the announcement that a professor had quit email.

Then I thought how can he remain connected to his students and also his professional research community. It’s asking a lot for all of them to shift their patterns of interaction to accommodate this, I would think.

But then I started to think about my office telephone. I have thought about having the line disconnected. Like many of my colleagues my voice mail message says that I don’t respond to voice mail. But when the phone in my office rings I will answer it. And sometimes its been people from the state of Georgia calling me to ask me advice.

And that’s why I keep it. I feel responsible to be connected to the taxpayer. They pay for some portion of me. And I feel I ought to be available, at least some of the time, to them. And yes, I suppose I could insist that they send me email instead, but while Internet access is a proposed human right, there’s a gulf between that as a vision and that as a reality. Georgia is, sadly, a place where some people remain unconnected, especially in economic times that force hard choices about what to pay for.

And of course, I also get emails from people in the state of Georgia. And that’s another reason why I’ll be keeping my email.