TechIntersect

I’ve been on a similar rant as this guy this semester…

Sherry Turkle, Author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” noticed this “cyborg effect” watching young video game players become one with the machines they were playing. It is getting to where I feel like I’m speaking to a roomful of cyborgs when everyone is clicking away at the computer in my classes.

I teach a lot of my courses to the back sides of flat screen computer monitors. We’ve implemented a new ritual that I unveiled the first day of class. When I want to connect with my students, I ask them to go to “human mode” which means they must turn the screen 90 degrees and slide it over so I can see their faces. When I need them to do something on the computer, they can then go back into “cyborg mode” which is the normal, face-obscuring position of their monitor. Hopefully this small change will help us stay connected at the human level.

Today’s Daily Create over at the DS106 site is to video record an object in motion. I’m looking around. I’m thinking to myself, what do I have nearby that moves? Oh, yeah, my phonograph moves. I’ll record whatever record is on it. So here you go…

Tags: ds106, tdc018

Jack Kilby, co-inventor of the microchip, pauses to have a Big Mac and Fries.

This is my first attempt at a ds106 assignment, Patty Pioneers.

Tags: ds106, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments320

Well, Wikipedia is going offline to protest stupid internet legislation that is currently being considered.

I’m joining in this conversation by offering you a look at my first video to suffer a take-down on YouTube:

Rebecca Black Gets the Last Laugh

Looking at it, I think the video suffers from some pacing issues. I could cut some more out of it to make it flow better, but it was quickly done as a montage of the Rebecca Black – Friday meme for educational purposes. I wanted to show how a kid could be the object of derision, but still hit the big-time in the digital world. Did you realize she was actually the top internet search of 2011?

So what’s the story on the video take-down? It includes around a minute of Rebecca’s famous “Friday, Friday” song before moving into the parodies & spoofs and the YouTube copyright algorithms tagged it as infringing. I filed a counter-claim that it was an educational fair-use, it doesn’t use the entire video, and provides a commentary on the work. Ultimately, they restored my video online.

In the digital world, you are already presumed guilty until proven innocent. With these new laws being considered, fair use works like this will continue to be harder and harder to create, and free speech will continue to be trampled.

During the break, I took my first ever intersession course. I have often wondered how much can actually be accomplished in only a couple of weeks. Let me assure you, quite a lot can be accomplished in that short of a time with the right instructor and the right motivated students.

I had been talking with Sally Bailey, a Kansas State University professor in theatre and drama therapy about possibilities of incorporating elements of drama into my technology courses. She suggested I try the Playback Theatre course, a drama therapy course that emphasizes improv storytelling, so I signed up to audit the course. I also encouraged my digital media students to take the class since it would count as a humanities elective towards their degree. Playback Theatre was offered in Manhattan, Kansas and our campus is 70 miles away in Salina, Kansas so I didn’t expect many takers. However, one of my students actually did take it with me and it was a wonderful experience.

It didn’t occur to me right away that I had some prior experience with improv theatre in high school. I completely forgot that I went to the Kansas state forensics tournament in “Improvised Duet Acting” as a high schooler, but that was many years ago. In recent years I have also participated in three improv murder mysteries, but when I showed up in the course that first day the tension was palpable. I really felt out of my element.

Most of the students were theatre majors, and most had little experience with improvisation. Improv is really quite different from working with a script. I did see many similarities between what is required of an improv actor and being a classroom teacher. We always have to think on our feet, and respond to the unexpected.

We had four days of preparation before our first performance, not including the readings we did as a class in advance in online meetings. I should say the other students had four days; I had to miss a day which really hurt my understanding of how things were going to work. But I just followed along, and my classmates were really good about getting me up to speed.

There were three basic forms our improvisations took, the fluid sculpture, the narrative “V” and a long form story. The day I missed, they covered the details of the long form story and it took me a while to catch on. The fluid sculpture is basically a sculpture in motion, as a group, each actor responds to a word or phrase given from the audience. Here is a video example of a fluid sculpture. The narrative “V” is where the actors stand in a “V” shape (think geese flying in a “V”) and the lead actor does some expressive movements, along with some narration, while those upstage actors follow along with the leader. Here is an example of narrative “V”.

Forms of Playback.

The long form story is the most complex. After working through the shorter versions of improv storytelling, the audience is ready for a longer story. The “conductor,” in our case it is our professor Randy Mulder of  The Village Playback Theatre in New York,  does the interview and draws the story out from the story teller, helping to cast the actors into the story and giving the narrative some structure. The long form can also require a larger group of performers needed onstage.

Improv really takes a lot of focus and concentration to get it right. Living in our digital world, these are traits I believe we need now more than ever. In the beginning, I continually felt myself drifting away as a storyteller would tell their tale. Not good. You won’t be able to play this back if you don’t get the details down right, I would tell myself. As time went on, I found that I could concentrate longer and not be distracted as easily. I suspect if I continue practicing and performing with the playback theatre troupe, my concentration will continue to improve.

A Student’s Perspective

During our break between performances, we were running through what went poorly, what we could fix, etc. The changes were beginning to overwhelm me. What do you think about dropping the planned form, fluid or narrative V, and just going with your gut? asks the professor. I start grumbling, these changes are too much. Randy sternly says, Bill, stay positive. It’s overwhelming, I say. Here is why I am suggesting this change, he says, and he explains his rationale. I start to breathe again, that won’t be so bad, I think.

I’ve just had another student experience, instead of my usual teacher perspective. That’s one of the benefits of taking a class every now and then, so you don’t forget what it’s like to be a student. I really enjoyed watching Randy teach. The lesson I learned here is when a student is resisting, it might be because they don’t understand what you are trying to accomplish and you need to explain further to re-establish trust.

Taking a risk, doing something a little outside of my nomal comfort zone is what taking this class was all about. Of course, I wanted to learn more about storytelling and I did, but mostly it was about stretching, improving, and learning some new things to help me be a better teacher. Hopefully, my efforts in this class will pay off in spades and we’ll see the benefits in the classes I teach.

Here is one other example of the “out of the box thinking” I experienced through working with this class. I noticed the folding tables of the classroom we were meeting in. We folded them up and created a large acting space we could use. I commented that my classrooms would never give this much space as we had non-folding tables. Randy said he would just flip one table onto another table and slide everything to the side. That’s brilliant, I thought. I never would have considered doing that. I have a computer class with plenty of active learning. In one review exercise, I have them milling around the room, with printed cards of terms & definitions they must know. Our space in the room is tight because of all of the tables, and it doesn’t work very well. Now I’m going to have them do the “flip and slide maneuver” and give us a lot more space. It will create a big spectacle, and send home the message we are about to do something very important, and very fun. I can’t wait to try it!

 Exploring the Room Exercise

In one exercise, we were invited to explore, communicate and interact with our classroom environment. It was a lot of fun, almost like Kindergarten. People were talking to the walls, the floor, the whiteboard, the chairs, even the air. We played on the musical instruments we found. People were crawling on the floor, it was chaotic but fascinating. However, I had just learned I was going to have to drop out of the class, so I just walked around the room sort of in a daze. I later wrote these paragraphs about the exercise on the class message board:

At the time, I didn’t really know why I did it, it just happened. I came to class yesterday with the knowledge that it would likely be my last day with you all and it made me very sad. I was, and still am in a situation that I have almost no control over. Unconsciously, I said a lot in that room exercise about how I was feeling.

I started out wandering aimlessly, but soon found myself scratching the blackboard with my fingernails. I don’t remember ever doing that in my life before. I knew the sound is obnoxious, but I don’t think I ever made that sound myself. Finally, I was regaining some control, unpleasant as it was, as I watched the group’s negative reaction to the sound. Pretty infantile, really. Definitely a reversion to childhood tactics of gaining attention when I was hurting.

Then I looked for and found a place to hide. I explored the acoustics under the table. I used to do this as a kid too. Hide in a closet. Under a bed. In the toolshed when the babysitter wasn’t aware. She’d spend hours looking for me. It was another way to gain some control in a life out of my control.

But I didn’t want to waste the day. I thought about quitting the class after coming home Thursday and learning I would likely not be able to continue with the performances. What’s the point of continuing? But I decided to come back and make the best of it. I’m not a quitter. I couldn’t stay hidden under the table. I had to press on, stay involved.

Shortly after my re-emergence, I noticed those chairs that had been halphazardly placed were now neatly aligned. That would never do. Someone had taken pains to put them like that. I could make some noise by flinging them into the center of the room. At first, it was like the chalkboard noise. Annoy, get some control. I even purposefully dropped people’s belongings off of chairs that I wanted, to see if there would be a reaction.

But then I realized that I could make a really cool sculpture out of these chairs. I could show the “order” people that chaos can also be beautiful. I wanted to pile them up to the ceiling, making them jut out in odd juxtaposition. The artist in me was kicking in. I wanted to do something over the top and amazing. Something that said: I enjoyed my brief time with you so much; please don’t forget about me.

I wish I had made a picture of what happened next. I did pile up around 15-20 chairs in a “sculpture form.” Several people were really surprised by my sculpture. One student walked around it muttering, “this is against the rules… this is against the rules…” Another decorated it with brightly colored fabric. When it was all over, people were curious about why it was made, but I wasn’t ready to talk about it. It took me a day to come up with the written explanation that continues:

I loved the post-discussion and everyone’s reaction to the chairs. How Sarah had to “become one” with the sculpture to tolerate it’s presence. How Trecena was at first unsettled by how her neatly aligned chairs were moved and repurposed, but she grew to accept it and even added a dash of color to it. How Ross (wasn’t it Ross?) was so involved in other things that one moment the floor was empty and the next moment – boom- it was there!

This is why we are all artists and performers, isn’t it? To both offer an expression of ourself, and to take in the response of others?

As it worked out, the family emergency that would force me to drop out of the class was being resolved differently so I was able to return to the class for the performance days. And what wonderful experiences those would prove to be.

The Prison

Our first actual performance was at a women’s prison in Topeka. First we took a really long tour of the facility that included minimum, medium, and maximum security areas. Since most of the class had not ever been inside of a prison before, it was pretty fascinating. I remarked to Randy that the minimum security area reminded me more of a school than a prison. He said they even refer to the area as a campus, and the housing as dormitories.

My only other experience of being inside of a jail was when I was temporarily assigned as a guard in my ship’s brig back when I was in the Navy. It is an unsettling experience, even for a guard, knowing that you can’t come and go as you please. I also felt that being on a ship deployed at sea was something like being in a prison, in that you couldn’t leave even if you wanted to. There were times during the 1991 Gulf War when I might go for days without seeing daylight. I wasn’t sure that my analogy was even close to their experience until one of our early short-form stories, when an inmate shared her happiness at receiving two letters from home. I knew that feeling! I was a sailor before the days of e-mail. One of the greatest delights were those delicious words – “Mail Call!” I shouted them out, dancing around in our fluid sculpture, and the audience roared their approval. We connected! I knew how they felt, and they knew it!

The thing that I was most struck by in the prison was the genuine empathy and concern shown by the mental health professionals working there. You could tell that they really cared.

The High School

Our second day of performing was at a local high school, for three drama classes. The most dramatic & powerful experience of any acting performance I’ve ever given happened in this unforgettable long-form story:

Kyle (not his real name), an 11th grader, described developing friendships in Tennessee over a six year period of time and how difficult it was to move. He was in his current school in Kansas for four years, and became distraught as he revealed to us and his classmates that this would be his last year at this school. He talked about being a military dependent, always moving every few years, and how difficult it was to make friends. As he told us a bit about his personality, it was just as described in our textbook; I knew he would pick me to play him because I had also moved a great deal and found it difficult to make friends on each new move. I didn’t particularly want a lead role, I was content to be a supporting character, but as he told his story, I knew I was the person for the job. How he was able to choose me for the role, I don’t know, but it was almost telepathic. Randy says it always happens when actors listen with empathy to the teller’s story. Somehow, some way, the teller knows who will be the best person for the part. It felt like a scene from the Twilight Zone when it happened to me. It was surreal and almost eerie.

When the play began, I could have begun instantly as I already knew how to play the role. However, I simply waited for a time to allow the other performers to think and prepare. I walked on the stage, and began my monologue, and the other actors just played off of me. I described my feelings of unfairness at the situation, how hard it was to make friends, how everyone thought I was weird, how just as I started to fit in, I would be uprooted once again. Now, as an 11th grader, I was going to be asked to move again, to finish my last year of high school in a strange new place. I completely knew how to play the role, because I had lived it. The only thing I didn’t personally experience was moving in my 12th grade year. At least I was permitted to attend all four years of high school in the same school. bu I knew how crushing of a blow it must have been for this young man.

The other students were shocked when he revealed that he would be leaving. Most were unaware that this was weighing heavily on his heart. Some of the students had been treating him badly. I even heard some digs and disparaging comments from classmates while he was telling his story. You could tell that while he was mostly accepted, he wasn’t terribly popular or well-regarded.

So while I’m telling the story, I’m feeling his anguish myself and I have to fight back real tears. Looking back now, I probably should have just let them loose. When I was 17, I would have undoubtedly cried and it was only my hardened, 40-something self that was able to contain them. There was nothing fake or disingenuous in my performance, because I wasn’t really playing a role, I had already lived it and was just playing it back. I felt so badly for him, and I know I felt what he felt. By this time, the audience, and many of the cast members are also in tears. It was easily the best acting performance of my life.

I left the stage emotionally drained, relieved that my group’s set was finished. I couldn’t believe what had just happened and was grateful to have some time to process & recuperate. Our post-performance comments kept returning to this particular story. I don’t tell you all of this to boast or to try to convince you that I’m some kind of wonderful performing artist, but merely to drive home the point of how powerful the medium of playback theatre is, and also so I never forget the lessons myself.

Lessons learned

Here are some things I learned about improv that I think I can use in my teaching:

1. Don’t second guess yourself. If you’re feeling it’s right, just go with it!
2. Exude confidence. Lack of confidence ruins the story and the audience’s faith in your ability to do the job.
3. When you screw up, don’t let on that you’ve screwed up. Think Pee Wee Herman’s bicycle crash- “I meant to do that!
4. Asking questions implies there is a right & wrong answer. Making statements and affirmations gives them a chance to confirm or deny that you are understanding what they are saying.
5. Be an intense listener and really care about what they are saying.
6. There is nothing more powerful than a story.

Can you imagine a computer technology professor putting this sort of knowledge to use in technology classes? How strange, how wonderful! That’s why I do it. A few years ago, I made a decision that life is too short to be too uptight about what others think of me. Of course, as a kid, I struggled with having few friends and behaving in ways that nobody appreciated. There has to be a healthy balance between going your own way without regard for others, and between conforming yourself to social norms that might make you fit in better, but also inhibit you from being yourself. So I began to sing more and to get involved in things like theatre more because those were things I enjoyed as a kid and knew I would enjoy them as an adult. I went two decades without those things in my life, but I’m glad I’ve brought them back into the mix. I’m happier, and I believe a little better now for doing it.

P.S. – For an entire book about how the attributes that make you an oddball as a youth will become the very attributes that make you sought after as an adult, please read The Geeks Will Inherit the Earth by Alexandra Robbins. The book really resonated with me, and I hope Kyle will get the chance to read it someday as well.

Watch this segment from the O’Reilly Factor on Cyberbaiting Teachers and let’s discuss…

While I’m glad to see main stream media giving the subject attention, it probably goes without saying that Bill O’Reilly is confused on this issue of “cyberbaiting”. He thinks that banning cameras and cell phones from the classroom will solve the problem. That’s a band-aid solution, treating the symptom instead of the disease.

Most people are simply not aware that digital media technologies are the new tools of literacy and self-expression. Banning digital tools forces kids to learn to negotiate using those tools on their own, and that is wrong. It is ignoring the main issue, which is about empathy and respect for other human beings.

I think cyberbaiting is a form of cyberbullying, only aimed at the teacher. Most schools have anti-bullying policies that could effectively deal with this situation when it occurs.

One thing that O’Reilly gets right in this piece is that we always need to consider the context. The first thing I ask myself when I see a teacher in a video going berserk is “what happened in that room before the recording began?” I’ve been writing and giving talks on this issue for a couple of years now. Teachers really need to know what is possible, and what is already being done. A good place to start is my documentary of YouTube in the Classroom, seen below:

Teachers need to know whenever students are acting out and provoking a response, there is a good chance it is all being recorded, and if it is interesting enough it will wind up being published on the internet, with or without the teacher’s knowledge or consent. If we included more digital media in our various curriculums, the issues around surreptitious recording, privacy, respect, and so forth could be addressed.

As it stands for most students, they are simply told to put the camera/phones away and don’t use them. Phones are viewed a distraction to getting an education. In my opinion, they should be at the center of getting an education because they touch on the very relevant issues of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century.

My ten year old, Science Girl Em is happily studying physical science in her 4th grade class. Recently, they were studying the subject “matter” and it’s forms.

Here is a recent e-mail I got from Em:

Dad,

What would be a good website to find out … ” If there is anything on earth that is NOT made of matter? ”  … Wikipedia does not have it there is just a page on matter!   

 Thanks!      Love Em

I read the Wikipedia page on matter that she mentions. It reminded me of the time Captain Kirk explained the rules of “Fizzbin.”

Matter is commonly said to exist in four states (or phases): solid, liquid, gas and plasma. However, advances in experimental techniques have realized other phases, previously only theoretical constructs, such as Bose–Einstein condensates and fermionic condensates. A focus on an elementary-particle view of matter also leads to new phases of matter, such as the quark–gluon plasma.

It’s a great question though. Here is my reply:

Dear Emily,

Of course there are things on Earth that are not made of matter. If you want to look at just the science, energy is a thing on Earth that is not made of matter. Here are some examples:

Light comes from the sun, and electric lights, and glow-in-the-dark plankton. Light is not made of matter, but we have it on Earth. Gravity pulls a ball down a hill. Gravity is not made of matter, but it is real.

If it is a solid, liquid or gas, it is definitely matter. Gasses might be the most confusing, because most are invisible. You can’t see the wind, but you can feel it blowing on you. It is a gas. It is definitely made of matter.

But your question has a non-science answer too. Science can tell us many things, but it can’t tell us everything. There are other ways of knowing things besides just science.

I love you more than I can explain in words. My love for you is very real, but it is not made up of matter. Some scientists try to argue that the love people have for one another is nothing more than complex chemical reactions in the brain, but I don’t believe that’s true. Do you? They believe in a philosophy called “Materialism” which says that everything is either matter or energy.

In our family, we believe in God. Science doesn’t say anything about God because God is outside of nature. He created the natural universe. It is his invention. We also believe that humans are creatures that are part matter (our bodies) and part spirit (our souls). Science doesn’t say much about our spirit part either, but some kinds of science, especially when when trying to heal people who are ill consider the human spirit.

I love that you are thinking about this question about matter. It shows you are thinking hard and trying to understand the world we live in.

Love,

Dad

We had a talk about it. One of her classmates suggested that a soul doesn’t have matter, but that discussion was shot down.Emily says her teacher doesn’t allow discussions of “belief.” Dad, public school kids can’t talk about God at school, she says.

Interesting, I thought. Where does this idea that students can’t mention God in school come from? One possibility is that it was simply off topic. In the neat categories we call “subjects” maybe a discussion on God and spirituality in “science” class isn’t appropriate. But is it always inappropriate in a public school?

I think kids in our school still say the flag salute in the morning, which includes the words “One nation, under God…” but I think this practice is being used less and less around the USA. When I was a primary school student, it was part of every American school kid’s morning ritual. When my parents and grandparents were kids attending one-room country schools, their morning ritual included the flag salute and the Lord’s prayer, a definite no-no these days.

I do remember as a third grader, when discussing evolution, one brave student brought a picture bible to class to offer an alternative point of view and was immediately and abruptly shot down. Oh, no, we’re not going there, the teacher said. I remember feeling sad for the student that they didn’t even get a chance to be heard. I think she was right in that the student’s bible didn’t belong in a science discussion, but perhaps another day, another lesson there was an appropriate place? We never found out.

It’s a touchy subject, and I do believe we need to be sensitive to every point of view. However if we are now to the point where we can’t even acknowledge or discuss the possibility of a human spirit in our schools, it’s no wonder there is so much despair and purposelessness out there if we are all just collections of molecules and our thoughts are merely chemical reactions in our brains.

In this photo we see Deborah, a middle aged woman, peering into a microscope at a cell culture in a university laboratory with her younger brother Zakariyya looking on beside her. This scene is rather remarkable to me not because of what Deborah is doing, but rather because of who she is and how unlikely that a person like her would ever be found inside of a laboratory.

Deborah had a tumultuous childhood. Her mother died when she was still a toddler and her little brother was an infant. After her mother’s death, the children were abused by their care-givers. As a young teenager, Deborah wanted to drop out of high school after she became pregnant, but an aunt who rescued her from the abuse was insistent, and sent her to a special school for girls in her predicament. More children would come, as would more abuse in her first marriage.

Why on earth would a grandmother like Deborah be at all interested in learning about science, biology, cell cultures, and cancer research?

That her brother Zakariyya is even present in the lab is even more incredible. The abuse in his life unleashed uncontrollable anger within him. As a young man, Zakariyya killed a neighborhood troublemaker and served time in prison. Talk about an unlikely student of biology.

There has been a lot of recent talk about the need for people to study science and technology. As a technology professor, I can attest that it can be a challenge to draw people into these fields. While the importance and relevance of this kind of work is obvious to me and others who work in these fields, many people do not see a connection or relevance to their lives.

To give explanation for these unusual students of science, as Paul Harvey famously said, you need “The Rest of the Story.”

Deborah and Zakariyya are the children of Henrietta Lacks, the subject of the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

It is a book being considered for the K-State Book Network common read next year. It is the book I really hope will be selected. What an incredible story; one that almost wasn’t told. It deals with issues of race, poverty, privacy, healthcare/patient rights, bioethics, and a whole host of things that impact us all.

Wikipedia gives a summary of her life, but you really need to read the book for the full account. The gist of the tale is that Henrietta Lacks unknowingly donated a tissue sample without her consent in the 1950′s, which was successfully cultured and shared in research laboratories around the world. Her cells, known as “HeLa” are very resilient, still living and useful more than 50 years after her death. These cells have been used in everything from developing common vaccines to pioneering techniques used for in-vitro fertilization. Everyone with any access to modern medicine has likely benefitted from Henrietta’s amazing but involuntary gift to science.

An incredible part of this story is that Henrietta’s children only learned of her contribution to science by accident through news reports that included their mother’s name. Can you imagine how you might feel if you discovered that a multi-million dollar bio-tech industry was built around something your mother unknowingly gave, while the family languished in poverty and need?

That is the “Rest of the Story” behind Deborah’s intense desire to learn about the scientific uses of HeLa cells. Deborah was a highly motivated student in the area of biotechnology. In her lifetime, Deborah learned far more than the average layperson learns in this field, because it was of the utmost relevance and significance to her in her life and circumstances. This is the key to capturing the imagination of any student in any subject. How does this topic at hand relate to me? Why is it significant for me to learn this? If we can answer these questions for our students, our job becomes so much simpler because our students are open to what we are trying to share with them. But it’s easier said than done.

Deborah and Zakaryya were naturally interested in learning more about the mother that they lost as young children, and her cells that still living to this day. If we were wise, we would all pay attention to this story because it potentially affects us all. Should tissue donors of cells with commercial value be compensated for their donation? Informed consent is required by law these days; in Henrietta’s time that wasn’t the case. Should informed consent include information about the potential commercial value of the donation? Should a tissue donor have a say in how their bodily tissues are used for research? For example, what if you are morally opposed to human cloning, should you have the right to prohibit the use of your donated cells in such research?

As technology and medicine advances, these issues are becoming more and more critical as they will impact all of our lives. But the scientific education of the average person falls far short of what is needed to readily see the relevance and significance of these issues in our everyday lives. We need to find ways to make the connections between these human dramas and the science that drives them. I believe there are plenty of young people out there who would make wonderful research scientists, engineers and technologists, but they don’t know how to see the connections between these fields, their interests and the contributions that they would like to make in the world.

I’ve been teaching a digital photography course for a few semesters now. My hope is that the class will teach something fun as well as be useful throughout my students’ lives. The course is part of our new digital media technology degree curriculum, but it has been popular with non-majors as well. Our aviation students are also starting to discover the class as a fun way to meet the computing requirement in their degree program.

One of my professional pilot students was telling me about a computer crash at Thanksgiving that put them behind on getting assignments turned in. Actually, this particular student was behind before the computer crashed, but this technological catastrophe made it even more difficult to catch up. And then it occurred to me, this student is probably getting a better education due to this experience than the other, more fortunate students.

There is a reason that aviation requires a computer course in the curriculum, and it has much less to do with taking good digital photographs than it does about learning to manage a life lived digitally. Computer crashes are an unfortunate reality in our digital world. I’ve experienced many of them over the years. They are always painful and time consuming. But anticipating them and planning for them can go a long way towards recovering from disaster.

If you have ever talked to anyone who has survived a fire in the home, the first non-living thing they try to rescue is the family photo album, and it is always a sad thing if they do lose all of their family photos. For most people, these digital memories are far more likely to disappear into the ether than are printed photos likely to be lost in a house fire. In reflecting on my digital photography course, I don’t think I address file backup and recovery nearly as well as I should. In the coming years, people will have decades of digital photos documenting their lives stored on electronic storage devices.

I’ve considered a number of backup approaches. Online services like Flickr or Facebook are one way to store photos off-site. I know there are back-up services like Carbonite that can help as well. Of course you can back-up to CD or DVD, but unless you put them in a safe deposit box, those are susceptible to physical disasters. Those aren’t the most reliable backup media in the world either. Over time they will degrade and become unreadable. I have even considered developing a partitioned photo repository where each of my family members located in different communities could store the Genereux family photos on our computers and they would replicate on all of our computers across the Internet. Maybe such a system already exists. How do you protect your digital photographs?

What is literacy in a digital world? This is a question I’ve been thinking about for several years now. Reading and writing alone are not enough. To be truly literate in the 21st century, we need to know about digital image-making, we need to know how to publish information online, and surprisingly to some, we need to know how to program.

The first time I encountered the notion that software programming might be a new form of literacy was when I read Marc Prensky’s 2008 Edutopia article Programming Is the New Literacy. Prensky notes that reading and writing were once the domain of elite scribes, skills not held by ordinary folks, and that programming literacy is currently in that same situation. When I was a high school student in the 1980′s, if you wanted to learn about computers, it meant learning how to program. There simply wasn’t a large assortment of off-the-shelf software back then, so the only option was a course in BASIC programming using our school’s four TRS-80 computers. You might imagine that it was not exactly a high-demand course in the curriculum.

Nowadays, any programming course in secondary education is a rare thing. Most high school graduates haven’t even been introduced to basic programming logic. Our college level introduction to computer programming course is an intimidating thing to many of our students because it is completely foreign to them. When we developed the curriculum for our new digital media technology degree program, we included that course because even if a student isn’t particularly interested in programming as a career, it will likely be a part of their work experience if they are working in digital media and information technology fields.

I think Prensky is right. Programming is a new literacy and you can’t understand life in a digital world without it. I was hoping to attend the HASTAC conference in Michigan this month, but had to settle for following the twitter hashtag #hastac2011. I noticed this quote from Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything, who was speaking there:

“An algorithm is a set of value choices.”

I tweeted how that truth is a pretty strong argument for programming literacy and he agreed with me. Our lives are so dependent on the software written by others, rarely do we consider the value choices that were made by those who did the programming. Much of our information is retrieved from Google, but rarely do we consider what and how the information we find there is presented to us. It all comes down to understanding algorithms and programming.

Perhaps programming literacy is the ideal, at the highest level of digital literacy. There are other forms of digital literacy that people can learn before software design. The rise of the digital camera represents a great place to start on our journey towards digital literacy. People have long been creating images with cameras, but now they are doing it with computer hardware and binary files. I think people should understand how to manipulate these images. Web 2.0 has brought us a long way towards digital literacy with images using sites like Flickr and Facebook. However, merely uploading a file directly created by a digital camera is hardly media literate. What if you need to publish an image to another website such as a blog or a news site? What if you want to publish a product brochure for your home-based business? Knowing about file formats and resolutions required for various end uses is a must if you hope to have good results.

But resizing and resampling is only the beginning of digital image literacy. Digital photo manipulation, once scandalous when National Geographic did it for a cover image in 1982, is now easily and regularly accomplished with software like Adobe Photoshop. The “value choices” of algorithms applies to the creation and editing of visual images as much as it applies to programming. Those who are unaware or unfamiliar with how it is achieved are more susceptible to the influences of digitally altered imagery. The video The Photoshop Effect powerfully explains how easily images can be changed and how people who compare themselves to images they see in magazines are comparing themselves to a digital creation instead of reality.

I have used Photoshop for years, and I enjoy it when others are introduced to the process. Scott Andrews, a professor of literature at Cal State Northridge, has been learning to manipulate photographs as a response to the Pepper Spray Cop meme that started after the incident at UC Davis last month. I think it is really fascinating how this professor is open to expanding his concept of literacy in this area. Although I was able to offer him a few Photoshop pointers through Facebook conversations, I gained far more than I’ve given as I read his Seeing Things blog offering commentary and analysis about the cop meme. I have always been interested in creating images, but my understanding is greatly expanded when people like Scott offer thoughtful critique and analysis of images.

I started thinking about how image manipulation is a form of digital literacy, and how programming is also a form of digital literacy. What would it look like if these two forms of literacy were combined? I spent a few hours experimenting with Flash and came up with this programmed, manipulated digital image. You can move Lt. Pike’s arm by moving your mouse, and you can operate his spray canister by clicking.

The background images and sounds are randomly chosen at random intervals and it takes a bit of trigonometry to make the arm follow the mouse position around.

Although blogs and Facebook are not typically considered to be scholarship in higher education, I think they are extremely valuable forms of professional development and dissemination of knowledge. Digital scholarship is a related topic I hope to explore at another time. My Flash piece is still in a rough form, but what are your thoughts on a polished version of something like this as a scholarly work? If I were an art professor, could such an argument be made? Would it need to be published and peer reviewed somewhere besides my blog? How is digital media affecting what is considered scholarship?

As Marc Prensky mentioned in the Programming is the New Literacy article, I think it would be fun to collaborate with my kids in creating some games they could contribute to and play. Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is a great model for a father/child game collaboration. Maybe over the holiday break, my kids and I can whip something up together.