Given my interest in collaboration, I often enjoy hearing people's stories about their workplace. My friend Ann was telling me about a clever colleague who is concerned about making the best use of meeting time. Much like the Dave Chapelle comedy skit in which he has an Oscar award-like "wrap it up" box that plays music to signal time is up, her colleague distributed signs to the meeting participants. (Also reminding me of buzzword bingo.) The signs, with Ann's annotations, are as follows:
Sold ("You've convinced us, let's move on.")
Out of Scope ("No way will we get to work on this, so let's not talk about it.")
Too Much Detail ("You're in the weeds.")
Off Topic ("Shut up.")
I expect this also has the potential to offend, but when I asked, Ann said that the signs were well received. When I worked at the W3C we used the IRC channel in a similar way sometimes. However, given that I am somewhat suspect of laptops at meetings, I am quite intrigued by this meat-space protocol.
Why, do you ask, am I suspect of laptops at meetings? I am sympathetic to the philosophy that if you are going to give your time to something, give it your full attention, or do something else. I know this is quite counter to the multi-tasking culture we are enmeshed in now, but I think it is effective. At the W3C, I don't think computer usage was an issue because we made effective use of our technological tools, and there is a culture, and set of personalities, that permitted people to say, quite brashly, is this discussion the best use of our time, what is the next agenda item, etc.?
Similarly, on the BBC version of The Office, when the petty and officious Gareth Keenan insists that Tim cannot raise an issue because it was not placed on the agenda, I was sympathetic -- evidence of what I jokingly refer to as my fascist-like tendencies in group dynamics. I have found a good way to encourage a useful meeting is to ensure that people are somewhat prepared and that the facilitator has a good sense of the issues at hand and how much time they will likely take to resolve.
What other interesting, funny, or effective folk meeting protocols are out there?
Reagle, J. M. (2010). “Be Nice”: Wikipedia norms for supportive communication. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 16(1), 161-180. doi:10.1080/13614568.2010.498528
Wikipedia is acknowledged to have been home to “some bitter disputes.” Indeed, conflict at Wikipedia is said to be “as addictive as cocaine.” Yet, such observations are not cynical commentary but motivation for a collection of social norms. These norms speak to the intentional stance and communicative behaviors Wikipedians should adopt when interacting with one another. In the following pages, I provide a survey of these norms on the English Wikipedia and argue that they can be characterized as supportive based on Jack Gibb's classic communication article “Defensive Communication.”
It is with much excitement and gratitude that I again have the good fortune to be a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I have been getting myself acclimated in the past week, and by the end of this week should be happily settled, with the gracious help of the staff, in room 201. Leaving Brooklyn and NYU was a big step after seven years, but I already feel at home. As the beginning of the semester approaches I anticipate reconnecting with old colleagues and friends, meeting lots of new people, and participating in the research group on cooperation.
A two-month trial of the Pending Changes feature on the English Wikipedia is scheduled to begin on June 14. This will mean that for a small subset of problematic pages (i.e., biographies) edits by unregistered or newly-registered users will first have to be reviewed by an experienced editor to be seen by the "public" (i.e., those not logged in to Wikipedia).
I fully expect this will prompt much attention on whether Wikipedia is now more closed, open, or has even "failed."
With the end of the semester comes the opportunity to review what students think of my teaching. As a (relatively) new teacher I take the reviews seriously. However, with four years of practice and data I do struggle with how to interpret the reviews and use them as constructive feedback that yields measurable improvements in subsequent evaluations.
This is not to say that I have not attempted to improve my teaching. For example, I believe I'm much more consistent in reviewing the concepts encountered in a session at its end -- and the students seem to appreciate this. However, when I plot the trend for the overall ratings from those four years I hoped there'd be a strong uptick with time, but there's no consistent trend.
Also, confoundingly, there is the disparity of opinion. For some things people naturally have different preferences: more or less outside readings, lecturing, student discussion, etc. (Students do seem to universally love watching video clips.) However on other things, like the completeness of the syllabus or the clarity of the grading system, I am confused.
As a follow-up to my experiment to quiz the students on the content of the syllabus at the beginning of the semester, students did surprisingly poorly. So I know some of them are not paying attention to the syllabus while rating the syllabus as less than complete. I feel similarly about the grading system as it is clearly described in the syllabus and I do four detailed grade reports throughout the semester, each time saying I would be happy to discuss their performance so far, but some students still occasionally fill-in the bubble suggesting that their grade is an opaque mystery. Also, while one evaluation rated me as a poor instructor overall, the vast majority rate me as very good or better. In fact two wrote in the comments that this was the best class they've taken at Steinhardt and NYU respectively. How to reconcile these disparate evaluations?
I conclude that there will be a student or two that, for whatever reason, doesn't like me or the class. (Most characterize me as nice, friendly, and sometimes even funny, but one noted I was intimidating...?) Yet, since my school finally provided departmental wide statistics last semester, I know I am right in the middle of the distribution. I rate higher than half of the faculty, but also lower than the other half. So I know there is room for improvement. However, given it only takes one disenchanted student to skew the averages and that I've not yet been able to implement changes that clearly manifest in the evaluations, I'm not sure how, or if I should be overly concerned? But I am very curious as to how the instructors in the top quartile manage it.
As a PhD student, one of the first bibliographic annoyances I encountered was when I had to format a paper using the APA system, which requires titles to be in sentence-case. This means only the first word of a phrase and proper nouns are capitalized. Previously, I had kept the titles of my citations in title-case. The consequence of having to use the APA format was the need to then go in and manually lower case all words that were not proper-nouns in my bibliographic database. However, once this work was done, I realized keeping my data in sentence-case was preferable, as title-case essentially loses information. Yet, this still requires me to manually lowercase some words for automatically captured sources. I am not aware of any bibliographic software that handles this issue well, and the good folks at Zotero have an interesting bug ticket open on the issue.
On Friday, while I was doing my weekly fixes to the automatically captured sources in my field notes/mindmap/bibliography, I thought to myself that there are plenty of word lists around, such as those used by spellcheckers, and couldn't I finally automate this menial task? However, I knew that I use lots of proper nouns that probably do not appear in common dictionaries. Therefore, I applied Python's Natural Language Toolkit tokenizer and parts of speech tagger to the text of my dissertation to create a custom word list of proper-nouns that I use. These are used with the dictionary found on my system at /usr/share/dict/american-english to transform a title-cased sentence into a sentence-cased sentence. Basically, if the word is in my custom list, is in the word list only as a capitalized word, or not in the word list at all, it merits capitalization, else lower-case it. The code is available as a module to the Busy Sponge component of the Thunderdell bibliographic tools. It works fairly well and will certainly make that end of the week menial task all the more easier.
I recently read Jaron Lanier's manifesto: You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier's critique of Wikipedia and digital Maoism plays an important role in my discussion of Wikipedia's reception. Hence, I was surprised to find the tone of Lanier's book to be more muted than I expected. While he does make an argument against "cybernetic totalism," it reads like learned musings that lead to intriguing pet-theories rather than a diatribe about Web 2.0. Jon Dron has written an informative review.
I did specifically wish to comment on something that makes me uncomfortable with a lot of cultural criticism: the critic's POV. (I use Wikipedia's acronym for "point of view" tongue-in-cheek in that critique is quite contrary to Neutral Point of View (NPOV).) In my exposure to cultural criticism, including Theodor Adorno's seminal 1936 critique On Jazz, I've had the uncomfortable sense that much of this is simply the subjective, disenchanted complaints of a grouch who attempts to convince us that his or her opinions are anything more than his or her opinions. Actually, it's not even that they are trying to convince us, but that anyone who does not agree with their subjective opinion is obviously part of the problem that they are railing against in the first place. I think it is important to be skeptical, to be critical, and to have personal opinions. (Despite the provocative title, Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future is an excellent example of persuasive criticism beyond opinion.) But sometimes the critic's statements seem over "totalizing." In Lanier's case, consider his distinction between first- and second-order expression -- using terms that have an authoritative mathematical/logical sort of feel:
First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression. A movie like Blade Runner is first-order expression, as was the novel that inspired it, but a mashup in which a scene from the movie is accompanied by the anonymous masher's favorite song is not in the same league. (p. 122)
Now, I love Blade Runner; I think it is genius. And of course, a YouTube mashup is not in the same league as the complete film. But, it is something, and maybe something people value, even if lightly. I laughed at some of the recent Hitler parodies from Downfall and was sad to see them removed. But video mashups in no way diminish the value of the original film. And in the case of Blade Runner, it is a second-order expression of a written book, and one that is famous for its cyber-noir aesthetic that so famously synthesized so many existing elements of visual culture. Later, Lanier writes without qualification or caveat: "The web should have developed along the ThinkQuest model instead of the wiki model -- and would have, were it not for hive ideology" (p. 146). Well, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and the subjectivity and ahistorical conceit in such a statement simply boggles the mind.
The way in which Wikipedia is collaboratively produced has caught the attention of the world. Discourse about the efficacy and legitimacy of such a work abound, from the news pages of the New York Times to the satire of the Onion. Building on the literature around controversies surrounding other reference works, such as Harvey Einbinder’s The Myth of the Britannica and Herbert Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third, Joseph Reagle makes a broader argument that reference works can serve as a flashpoint for larger social anxieties about technological and social change. With this understanding in hand, he tries to make sense of the social unease embodied in and prompted by Wikipedia relative to technological inspiration in knowledge projects.
One of the last significant steps for an author is to compile an index, unless they opt to have someone else do it. Publishers often recommend authors create the index as they know the material best. However, while professionals have sophisticated -- but proprietary -- tools to help them, authors are offered only the techniques of using index cards or spreadsheets. Neither of these options is appealing to me.
I thought it would be nice to simply compile a list of entries in the form of topic (page#|see) (sub)topic and let a script do the rest. It's a bit of a hack but it does the job and can collapse all subentries below a particular threshold. I like having specified subentries, even if there is only one or two of them for a particular entry:
Apology
and leadership, 124
"Sorry but...," 54
But if the publisher says they want those collapsed, it is easy enough:
I just finished an excellent biography of Ayn Rand and her philosophy in the context of American political culture. While reading, I couldn't help think of Wales' expressed interest in Objectivism and the next to the last page actually comments on this issue:
One of the many ironies of Rand's career is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of community. Among her high-profile fans as Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seemed to both embody and defy Rand's beliefs. The website's emphasis on individual empowerment, the value of knowledge, and its own risky organizational model reflects Rand's sensibility. But its trust in the wisdom of crowds, celebration of the social nature of knowledge, and faith that many working together will produce something of enduring value contradict Rand's adage "all creation is individual." (Burns 2009, p. 284)
