Dr. Mitra, Chief Scientist Emeritus at NIIT and Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England, was constantly struck by the notion that the children living in the nearby slum may never have the opportunity to experience technology-based learning. At the same time, Mitra was being constantly approached by wealthy families making interesting claims. He stated that:

[I] had…lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, “You know, my son, I think he’s gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter — oh, surely she is extra-intelligent.” And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? What did the poor do wrong?” [3]

For his own curiosity, Mitra made a hole in the boundary wall separating his office from the slum, and put an English-based computer through it in the hopes of attracting nearby children.

Sure enough, kids flocked to the device, eager to learn more about it. They asked Mitra what it was, and how to use it—questions which he shrugged off before leaving the children to their own devices. After eight hours, Mitra returned to find the children browsing the internet and teaching their peers how to do the same. However, Mitra and his team were skeptical; perhaps a passerby had shown the kids little tips and tricks. Instead of discounting the findings, Mitra traveled to a remote village approximately 300 miles from New Delhi, where he put another computer and returned home. He came back a few months later to find children from all around the village playing games. Mitra laughed:

When they saw me, they said, “We want a faster processor and a better mouse.” So I said, “How on Earth do you know all this?” And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice, they said, “You’ve given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it.” That’s the first time, as a teacher, that I had heard the word[s] ‘teach ourselves’ said so casually. [3]

Mitra has since repeated the experiment over 20 times in India, and has implemented over 100 permanent setups in Cambodia, Egypt, and South Africa. The experiments, called the Hole in the Wall experiments, are backed by such organizations as NIIT, the International Finance Corporation, and the Ministry of External Affairs from the Government of India. [4] His goal of providing access to education through individual manipulation and exploration of technology has been echoed in each unique setup, all garnering some form of positive feedback.

With the vast amount of resources and technology available today, Mitra—along with many others—believes that the education system focuses too much on what esteemed educational philosopher Paulo Freire considers the “banking model;” teachers are the almighty depositors, whose purpose is to fill the children, or the depositories, with information. [5] The most valuable lessons we learn generally come from things we do ourselves through a process of trial and error, but by “teaching” our kids that the most socially accepted form of education happens because of someone else’s intelligence, we are doing them an immense disservice. The Hole in the Wall model seeks to allow children to study both individually or in large groups, and learn of their own accord despite their location or socioeconomic status. The November 2006 issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology points out that “[i]t enables contact and exposure to a large number of school children, particularly to those who are unable to attend regular school.” [6]

The philosopher Plato famously wrote in Book VII of the Republic,` “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement.” This is exactly the philosophy Mitra considers throughout his ongoing Hole in The Wall trials. By giving children the means to advance their learning, but not necessarily the constructs, they are free to explore boundaries in a safe, healthy environment. A follow-up article in the British Journal of Educational Technology commends this belief; “A child is curious by nature; he or she has a natural instinct to make sense of the world around him. The need to explore on their own is a strong motivating aspect that provides the necessary impetus to go ahead with learning.” [7] Because the technology itself has so much potential, children find themselves propelled to explore countless new concepts besides the basic click and browse techniques we typically see. For example, during the Hole in the Wall experiment in Madantusi, both boys and girls were exposed to a computer without internet access; they not only learned how to manipulate and utilize the keyboard and CD-ROM drive, but also managed to acquire the English language—the children were observed using over 200 words to describe their interactions with the technology, and their methods of teaching one another. [9] Creating an interactive environment to foster development of new linguistic skills is incredibly beneficial to a child’s overall educational success. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, advantages for bilingual children include a better ability to learn new words, the ability to use information in new ways, good listening skills, and improved problem-solving skills. [8] Overall, the potential for children to develop different pathways of learning is nearly infinite.

In one example, Mitra visited the South Indian, Tamil-speaking village of Kallikuppam to install a computer with complex articles about DNA replication written entirely in English. As with previous experiments, Mitra assembled the system, told any approaching children that he was unaware of how to use the machine, before leaving for months at a time. Upon his return, he assumed that the childrens’ literacy rates couldn’t have improved, and that he’d finally thwarted his own research. However, though the children first admitted to learning nothing, their definition of “nothing” differs very much from ours; Mitra recalls “a little girl…she raised her hand, and she says…in broken Tamil and English, she said, ‘Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we haven’t understood anything else.’” [3]

This statement gives a sliver of truth to what French journalist and Nobel Prize winner Anatole France once said: “[t]he whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.” The children were so driven and motivated to continue learning that they overshot their anticipated levels of education, and surpassed all expectations.

This raises a crucial question for education today: what are we doing wrong? Why aren’t schools producing this sort of excitement or enthusiasm for learning? Mitra himself answers this question carefully;

Schools as we know them now, they’re obsolete. I’m not saying they’re broken. It’s quite fashionable to say that the education system’s broken. It’s not broken. It’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated. [3]

In fact, Mitra’s experiments have spawned a new spectrum of educational theory, called “minimally invasive education,” or MIE. Indeed, one of the hypotheses from the original experiments sought to prove that “[i]f given appropriate access, connectivity and content, groups of children can learn to operate and use computers and the Internet to achieve a specified set of the objectives of primary education, with none or minimal intervention from adults.” [9] Perhaps with the growth of this minimally invasive school of thought, schools could produce the same eager-to-learn results.

Though the concept seems almost overly radical, many other nontraditional forms of education exist that provide excellent alternatives for a child’s educational well-being. For example, the K-12 Summerhill boarding school in England seeks to challenge the concept of forcing a child to absorb information in what could easily be called minimally invasive education. Here, the small population of pupils sleep in age-arranged housing units and are allowed to clean, dress, and play as they please; “lessons are optional…children can go to them or stay away from them—for years if they want to. There is a timetable—but only for the teachers.” [10] Though many critics frown on this new form of learning, the founders of the school show little concern for their opposition. “When my first wife and I began the school [in 1921], we had one main idea: to make the school fit the child—instead of making the child fit the school,” recalls founder A.S. Neill in his book Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood. [10] Even in the 1920’s, educational advocates realized that a child’s love of independent thinking and learning would be a key factor in their overall educational success.

Mitra’s revolutionary Hole in the Wall project has catalyzed a reconsideration of not only technology’s role in education, but also of the way our children learn in standard school settings today. By giving kids access to information, but not forcing it upon them—essentially leading our horses to water, but not demanding they drink it—an innate curiosity and overwhelming desire for self-betterment begins to flourish. Though the concept seems highly unusual, it begs a necessary question: how are our schools truly preparing our children to learn? By putting children through a schooling system, we are giving them information through a medium—a teacher—and expecting them to absorb it; however, there seems to be something to be said about the sheer power of letting children explore and absorb at their own rate. Just ask Arun Chavan, who experienced the Hole in the Wall at age 12 and is now is now on track for a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from Yale University. “Sugata Mitra’s Hole if the Wall idea is quite radical, I think,” he explains in an interview with TED. “But it’s too important to be ignored. I like how he dares to imagine (and also hopes for) a completely different future of education than most of us do.” [11]

References

[1] “About US.” TED. Web. 10 May 2013. <http://www.ted.com/pages/about>.

[2] “TED Prize Winners: Sugata Mitra.” TED. 2013. Web. 27 Apr. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/pages/prize_winners>.

[3] Mitra, Sugata. “Build a School in the Cloud.” TED Talks. Feb. 2013. Web. 20 Apr. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html#349794>.

[4] Hole in the Wall Education & Learning. HiWEL, Inc., 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2013. <http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/>.

[5] Freire, Paulo. “The Banking Concept of Education.” Continuum International Publishing Group 1973. Rpt. in Educational Foundations: An Anthology of Critical Readings. Ed. Alan S. Canestrani. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2012. 103-116. Print.

[6] Dangwal, Ritu, Jha Swati, and Kapur Preeti. “Impact of Minimally Invasive Education on children: an Indian perspective.” British Journal of Educational Technology 37.2 (2006): 295-298. Wiley Online Library. Web. 15 Apr. 2013. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2005.00514.x/full>.

[7] Dangwal, Ritu, and Kapur Preeti. “Learning through teaching: Peer-mediated instruction in minimally invasive education.” British Journal of Educational Technology 40.1 (2009): 5-22. Wiley Online Library. Web. 22 Apr. 2013. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00863.x/full>.

[8] “The Advantages of Being Bilingual .” American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2013. <http://www.asha.org/about/news/tipsheets/bilingual.htm>.

[9] Mitra, Sugata. “Minimally invasive education: a progress report on the “hole-in-the-wall” experiments.” British Journal of Educational Technology 34.3 (2003): 367-371. Wiley Online Library. Web. 14 Apr. 2013. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8535.00333/full>.

[10] Neil, A. S. “The Idea of Summerhill.” Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood. Ed. Albert Lamb. St. Martin’s Press, LLC., 1995. . Rpt. in Educational Foundations: An Anthology of Critical Readings. Ed. Alan S. Canestrani. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2012. 133-138. Print.

[11] “From the Hole in the Wall to Yale: A Q&A with Arun Chavan.” Blog. TEDPrize.com. TED Conferences, LLC., 11 Mar. 2013. Web. 10 Apr. 2013. <http://blog.tedprize.com/from-the-hole-in-the-wall-to-yale-a-qa-with-arun-chavan/>.

October 2012

Landscape 3: The technology behind the journey

There are a number of online tools and technologies that were combined in the making of the Dotted Landscape project. The planning of the rides themselves relied on a Web service known as Map My Ride. [1] Map My Ride allows cyclists to create and search for cycling routes all over the world. The site provides a wealth of information about cycling routes and produces printable guides. Relying on an innovative modification to Google’s mapping system, riders can plot routes based on location, distance, terrain type, and difficulty. I used Map My Ride to create the ten routes that I would cover on my bike for the purposes of this project. You can go to Map My Ride and search on “Dotted Landscape” or “Michael Geraci” to find my collection.

figure 5: a screen shot of a cycling route on Map My Ride

Map My Ride was just the beginning of the useful tools I came to use and appreciate in the making of this project. Another tool that I did not intend to use, but found invaluable, was an online conversion tool for the geographical data produced by my camera. When I started implementing my own mapping system to plot the location of the trash I learned, much to my chagrin, that Google’s system relied on the WGS 84 format, which expresses geographical location in decimal format (e.g., 45.50983, -122.991 [1] for latitude and longitude, respectively). My camera, along with many other GPS devices, records location in the more conventional degrees, minutes, and seconds (e.g., 45,30.59N, 122,59.46W ). This difference required that every geo-location that I had recorded had to be converted to Google’s standard. Luckily, I was able to find numerous online sources for the conversion of this information. I employed a student research assistant to help me in running the conversions, which had to be done one at a time. We used two sites for this task: Computer Support Group, Inc.’s “GPS Latitude and Longitude Converter” [2] and iTouchMap.com’s “Latitude and Longitude of a Point” service. [3]

With the data in the correct format, I set about learning how to embed Google maps on a Web page, set their initial view properties, and plot locations within them. The inclusion of Google maps on a site or page is a fairly common and well-documented practice in Web development, but the placement of multiple markers with embedded information that would be included in the markers’ info windows necessitated my first in-depth study of JavaScript programming. I had used JavaScript in small amounts throughout my tenure as a Web developer, but this usage was for fairly common practices such as building rollover effects for buttons, and drop-down menus for site navigation. This new endeavor required that I learn to create code “objects” for each marker that contained all of the data used to create the map points for each piece of litter. Early versions of this meant writing code like:

var r4i1Marker = {title:”object title”,id:49,ride:4,date: “September 27, 2011”,location:{lat:45.509833,lng:122.991}, thumbnail:”imgs/thumb/r4i1.jpg”,full:”imgs/full/r4i1.jpg”, caption:”image caption”,url:”item49.html”}

This format for encapsulating multiple properties for a single object enabled me (via JavaScript) to not only place markers in the interface, but aso for all aspects of their presentation to be self-contained in a single, portable code element that could be accessed by the browser. After successfully generating all the marker data for the first ride in the project, I felt that this system, while technically appropriate, was not the most efficient way to store and access the information about the 133 trash items I would be featuring on the site. Further research was needed to find a more flexible and scalable system of structuring data. The research quickly yielded the use of AJAX, [4] Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, as the way to write a single function that would serve as the technological backbone of the entire project. But a move towards this efficiency meant more study.

AJAX is a common technology that drives many popular Web sites such as Facebook, Netflix, and just about all major Google services like maps, Gmail, and Google Drive. In a nutshell, it is a system of passing data back and forth between the user’s browser and the Web server in real time, thereby eliminating the need for constant page loading. AJAX is not a language, but a mode of JavaScript programming that relies on an external data source written in XML, [5] or other standard data structures like JSON. [6]

I was no stranger to XML, as it is a common format for storing information that needs to be accessed by any application or device that can read it. My first use of XML was in the creation of RSS “feed” files that I created in 2006, when I began exploring the world of Podcasting [7] as an earlier bit of professional development as an educator. I set about stripping all of the object notation (as shown above) out of my JavaScript and converting it to standard XML. The object shown above soon became just a fraction of a growing XML library that I wrote for the project using the free text editing application, TextWrangler [8], which looked like this:

<item>

<title>Car Front Bumper</title>

<id>49</id>

<ride>4</ride>

<number>1</number>

<marker>r4i1Marker</marker>

<date>September 27, 2011</date>

<location>

<lat>45.509833</lat>

<lng>-122.991</lng>

<road>Hwy 219 South of Hillsboro</road>

</location>

<category>automotive</category>

<info>

<full>imgs/full/r4i1.jpg</full>

<thumb>imgs/thumb/r4i1.jpg</thumb>

<caption>

A silver bumper from the front of a small car

</caption>

</info>

<nar>

<url>item49.html</url>

<media>imgs/full/xl/r4i1.jpg</media>

</nar>

</item>

Storing the information for the site in this format allowed me to abstract my “back end” data from the site’s code and access some or all of it by any number of JavaScript functions.

JavaScript is not a new language; it has been around since 1995. One of the main reasons why it has become so popular in recent years is because a coding eco-system has grown up around it that has made it easier to tap into the vast functionality without having to fully master all aspects of the language. The free jQuery code library [9] sits on top of the JavaScript behemoth and lets developers implement large-scale functionality on their websites in a few short lines of code. JQuery’s own motto is “write less, do more” and, faced with the task of writing the engine for Dotted Landscape, this was appealing to me. Similar to my previous experiences with XML, I was no stranger to jQuery as it is the tool of choice for creating slick online photo galleries, animations, and other Web 2.0 experiences. However, in all of these cases, jQuery is easily plugged into a webpage and a few simple additions to HTML markup results in browser “magic” that do not necessarily require an in-depth understanding of what was going on behind the scenes. For the first time, I was faced with using jQuery to simplify the creation of custom site behavior that was not just plugged in. Luckily, jQuery is well documented online [10] and there are numerous sources for writing AJAX that drives functionality in Google maps. [11]

After a few weeks, the AJAX functionality was running and now a single jQuery function (all 132 lines and 3300 characters of it) was bringing my ten maps and their associated pieces of trash to life. Enthused by the successful implementation of this system, I decided to expand the site’s core functionality to include the dynamic generation of the sidebar menus on the site that listed all the trash for the current ride (see figure 6). Extracting the titles from the XML file and building a listing of them was a simple matter. However, I wanted the user to be able to click an item in the menu and have the corresponding marker in the map interface open its info window. This small feat required learning how events (like mouse clicks) in one part of the page could be passed from one object to another. This is made slightly more complex by the fact that the map’s functionality is being driven by Google’s back end programming interface and my menu was driven by its own code library. Adding to this complexity was the fact that everything in the site was now being generated dynamically in code and nothing had a hard-coded existence that would make this a simple task. The solution came down to about ten lines of code that were the result of about four weeks of research and trial and error. It may seem like an exorbitant amount of time to invest in such a simple piece of functionality, but I was pleased by the idea that the site had the potential to scale infinitely. In effect, I could add 10, 100, or 1000 more pages of routes (or pieces of trash) to the site and everything would continue to work without any changes to the underlying technology.

figure 6: a screen shot of the sidebar menu

from www.dottedlandscape.org

 Seeing the code behind the site work so well motivated me to think about a new addition to the site: the thumbnail view of the trash for each route sans the map interface. My students would be the first to accuse me of the sin of adding to my project’s scope so late in its development — something I heavily discourage in my upper division courses — and they would be right in this critique. However, I was so encouraged by the technical developments of the project that I had to take my newfound abilities out for a spin in the name of adding a new angle to the display of the garbage. After all, the mapping functionality was the hard part. Adding a thumbnail gallery to the site would be easier to implement and, for the most part, it was.

I began building the thumbnail gallery interface by duplicating all of the site’s current files and building a parallel set that simply had no maps in the main content element (an HTML 5 <article> element, in case you’re wondering). I then made a copy of the JavaScript/jQuery engine that rendered the maps, markers, and sidebar menu and rewrote it to populate the now empty map area with the thumbnails of all the images that were used in the info windows. This is a good example of how moving to the XML format allowed all the ‘guts’ of the site to be used in different ways with no alterations or additions to the pool of data.

Once the thumbnails were appearing, I took things one step further and added a “lightbox” effect that allows the user to call up an enlargement of the image in an overlay that floats above the page. There are dozens of code libraries that allow for this effect. However, my jQuery research led me to another add-on: the free Overlay library from jquerytools.org [12]. This particular bit of code has some nice options for styling the presentation of the overlays, including animated fade-ins, drop shadows, and embedded captions. The only downside is that all the assets for the overlay, including the enlarged images, get loaded with the page rather than when requested by the user, so the download time of the thumbnail galleries is noticeably longer than it is for the maps. The last hurdle was adapting the overlay code to the thumbnails that (like the sidebar menu) were generated dynamically in code rather than written right into the HTML, which would have been simple. Since my code engine was writing the HTML on the fly, it just took a few extra lines to embed the overlay functionality into each thumbnail. All in all, this little bit of scope creep took less than four hours to implement and, most importantly, will scale with the rest of the site if ever there is a need to add or subtract any amount of content.

In addition to the overlay plug-in, I chose to pursue another pre-built add-on for my project. The free jQuery library infobubble.js [13] can be added to a site with a Google map and lets you create highly customized info windows that can include a tabbed interface so they contain any number of extra bits of information that is easy to navigate. I used this feature to include a larger photo of each piece of trash inside of the small bit of real estate available in the pop up info window.

figure 7: a screen shot of the tabbed info windows and custom map marker used on www.dottedlandscape.com

Beyond the customized info windows, I also decided to create my own map markers to replace Google’s default red “pin” markers. My intent was to enhance the overall quality of the site’s presentation while learning even more about what was possible with Google’s mapping tools. I found an online guide to creating custom markers at www.x2tutorials.com and learned how to create the markers and their separate semi-transparent shadows in a graphics editor like Photoshop. Adding these two images to the site and appending the required lines of code to the site’s main code engine was a relatively simple procedure that delivered the results I was looking for.

When I set out to do this project, I knew that the technological aspects would challenge and introduce me to a new set of tools that I would have ample use for in my personal and professional pursuits. The combined use of Google’s mapping programming interface, JavaScript, jQuery, and all the code libraries that complement and enhance the possibilities was indeed a valuable experience that I will continue to learn and use well into the future. With a small amount of development yet to go in the completion of the project, I anticipate even more technical challenges that I look forward to tackling.

[1] http://www.mapmyride.com

[2] http://www.csgnetwork.com/gpscoordconv.html

[3] http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html

[4]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting

[8] http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler

[9] http://jquery.com

[10] http://docs.jquery.com

[11] http://code.google.com/edu/ajax/tutorials/ajax-tutorial.html

[12] http://jquerytools.org/demos/overlay

[13] http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/infobubble

October 2012

Landscape 1: Middle life on the roads of rural Oregon

Two things have been consistent throughout my life: cycling and technology. I received my first bike at the age of five. It was a purple, single-speed affair complete with a banana seat. It took me a year to grow comfortable enough to ride off, a young explorer along the residential streets of Northeast Portland. As years passed, I traded up bikes and eventually transported myself around the city within a 25-mile area of my home. Cycling was not just an expression of youthful freedom, but the gateway to employment and a social life. Even after learning to drive and gaining access to a car, I rode bikes. Typically accompanied by a small pack of friends, I rode as a means of recreation, exercise, and exploration in the city and its surrounding areas. It was commonplace to head out on a Saturday morning and ride 10-12 miles to fishing holes along the Columbia River, or to the peaks of Portland’s Rocky Butte and Mount Tabor Park. Pedaling a bike wasn’t just something I did, it was a part of me, both as I was then and as I am today.

I got my first computer at the age of 15. It was a Commodore 64, which I connected to a 13” black and white television. I began teaching myself the Basic programming language, mainly for the purpose of creating simple text-based adventure games. Working on the computer connected with some visceral part of my brain. Even within the limited confines of the Commodore’s operating system and programming language, the simple logic structures and modularized functionality just made sense at a fundamental level. Never quite a stereotypical “computer geek,” I relished the computer’s ability to create new expressions of creativity and storytelling.

My affinity for technology grew in college where I learned to use the earliest models of the Macintosh computer, with its novel, graphical user interface and mouse. In the years following my undergraduate college experience, I launched a career creating educational multimedia titles using Apple’s innovative HyperCard application. I was at the right place at the right time as computers became the center of media convergence. First I watched the widespread adoption of the CD-ROM for media storage and distribution and then the arrival of the Internet and World Wide Web as a platform for sharing information in an increasingly rich and engaging format. In 1995, I began creating websites with a text editor and the earliest versions of Photoshop, Adobe’s flagship software.

figure 3: a screen shot from Lernexpress, an early project created by the author in HyperCard

 While my use of computers and technology continued to grow, I found myself living in Western Washington County, raising a family, and always cycling. As middle age approached, I took to my bike in the early morning hours as a form of exercise and meditation. Riding alone or with a friend, the sunrise ritual of pedaling along the roads of the county that bisected farms and logging communities, I began to understand, and appreciate, how much this place meant to me. While I never really sought the opportunity to leave the Pacific Northwest, it became very clear to me as I pedaled over the years that I probably could not bear to ever leave this truly amazing part of the country.

Juxtaposed with my growing acknowledgement of place as a fundamental part of who I am, was the omnipresent garbage. The roadways that were becoming the passages of my life were dotted with the refuse of others, cast out of car windows and left to decompose, however slowly, in the natural environment. I remember asking myself over and over during my rides “how do we live in such a beautiful place yet treat it so poorly?” Thus a seed was planted. I had found a subject for some future endeavor that would allow me to craft my own response and reconciliation for the conflict I witnessed along those miles of pavement.

In 2009, a budding relationship with an accomplished experimental filmmaker opened my eyes to experimental film as a new genre in art and expression. It was a new way to see the world and build a narrative around it with the layered complexity of poetry, image, sound, and personal reflection. I gained an appreciation and affection for the many non-traditional ways we have to share our experiences and bring to life the things that occupy our minds and souls. I didn’t want to explore a new form of filmmaking, I wanted to see how the Web, now just a teenager, could become more than a platform for news and information. I wanted to delve into the ways that the Web could become the next platform for experimental storytelling and the conveyance of all aspects of our collective experiences as humans in an interconnected world.

My early inquiries in this realm turned up an interesting site hosted by Penguin Books in the United Kingdom at http://www.wetellstories.co.uk. The We Tell Stories project sought to re-envision and re-tell the stories of six classic texts in a format that leveraged modern day technologies as more than just a vessel to hold the story but as a way to tell the story. The six stories on the site are told in ways that are unique to our digital lives. For example, the Charles Dickens classic, Hard Times [1] is told through infographics, a type of data visualization that has been around for hundreds of years, but has experienced a renaissance on the Web since 2008. Then there is Slice [2] an adaptation of M. R. James’ The Haunted Dolls’ House told through a series of blog posts and tweets posted to the Web in 2008 by the story’s characters. The one story that captured my attention and contributed to this germinating idea of mine was The 21 Steps, an adaptation of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, by Charles Cummings. [3] This story about an innocent bystander being swallowed up in an international mystery is told as a connected series of renderings and animations played out on a live Google Map of the United Kingdom and surrounding environs. With each segment of the story the viewer watches as the map changes position, zooms in and out of locations and plots the movement of the protagonist as his adventure unfolds (Note: recent changes to Google’s mapping technology has rendered some or all of this story unusable. Such is the impact of change on the Web — a reality I am all too familiar with). All this was made possible through the growing availability of open source technologies on the Internet such as Google’s powerhouse mapping platform. The 21 Steps represented how place — the setting for our stories — can be represented online and used as the digital text in today’s modern form of storytelling.

Experiencing The 21 Steps was just the start of my Dotted Landscape project. It was not until I saw The Wilderness Downtown [4], a Web-based music video experience based on the Arcade Fire song We Used to Wait and a vision for how the modern Web could be transformed into a truly dynamic and personal storytelling platform. In The Wilderness Downtown, the user is asked to enter the address of his or her childhood home. What happens after that is a mesmerizing combination of filmmaking, animation, and programming played out in a geographical context that makes our own personal history the location of this compelling and inspirational story. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that this site changed my life and my understanding of what the Web represented as a platform for all of humanity to share its stories. It was the dawn of a new era in my personal life.

 Landscape 2: A media educator shifts gears

In 1999, I started my career as an educator, teaching undergraduate courses in multimedia design, website development, and digital media production. This was still early on in the development of Internet technologies, so much of the curriculum I taught centered upon the creation of static Web-based presentations of content connected via traditional hyperlinked navigational systems. It was not until Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash started to find its way into mainstream websites that I was awakened to the idea that this platform was just getting started. I had not yet begun to appreciate what was possible with the technology I was teaching to students while feverishly attempting to stay current in my own knowledge and abilities.

Flash is a commercial application that quickly grew into a one-stop shop for interactivity, animation, and rich media experiences on the Web. I found myself pouring over books and online tutorials for hours before going into classes where I was educating students in the use of Flash. The curriculum focused on the creation and implementation of digital assets in Flash’s timeline based user interface and ActionScript programming language. The Shockwave-Flash browser plug-in gave all Web surfers the capability to explore the rich environments that could be built in this format. In fact, the Shockwave-Flash plug-in found its way into the vast majority of all Web browsers and Internet connected devices and continues to be a viable technology for rich Internet applications (RIAs). [5] Flash provided a much-needed platform of development in many of my classes. I used it to teach animation, programming and website development for the first ten years of my career as a multimedia educator.

By 2009, Flash began to slowly fall out of favor as THE platform for rich media development. Technical advances on the Web and in modern browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox combined with a growing lack of support for Flash content by major players like Apple and Google pointed to a new future of Web development. It would be based upon freely available technologies like the now mature and robust JavaScript programming language and its myriad code libraries that enhance functionality such as jQuery [6] and Prototype [7]. In 2010, Steve Jobs himself released an open letter on Apple’s website saying it was time to move beyond Flash. [8] My world as an educator was changing before my eyes. My students were keenly aware that learning Flash was not the best use of their time, and they were right.

figure 4: a photo of some of the many books on Flash that are no longer relevant

With nowhere to go but forward, in 2011 I shelved my dozens of Flash texts and started exploring the depths of a new toolset that would find its way into most of my classes. My gradual command of technologies, from HyperCard and HTML in the 1990’s on through Flash in the 2000’s, always came through the creation of my own projects. The act of imagining an end product and actualizing it via trial and error with a set of tools and techniques is by far the best way for me to learn the finer points of media design and development.

In the spring of 2011 I made the decision to create the project that would use the new technologies I had started learning to make my personal reflections about life in Washington County and all of its litter the centerpiece of a scholarly investigation of the Web as a storytelling platform. This was the true genesis of Dotted Landscape and the start of a new chapter in my life as a media creator and educator.

The Berglund Center for Internet Studies at Pacific University put out its call for faculty fellowship proposals, and I jumped at the opportunity to gain some level of support for my new undertaking. My proposal (LINK THIS TO Proposal http://www.dottedlandscape.org/pdf/geraci_fellowship_proposal.pdf) outlining the ideas and the motivation for the project was accepted. Beyond benefiting from the general support of the center, the fellowship allowed me to receive a course release during the fall semester of 2011, essentially freeing up 8-9 hours per week for the 14-week term. Rather than walking into my Tuesday/Thursday course on intermediate Web design, I was riding along the rural roads of Washington County with my Canon Powershot SX230HS point-and-shoot camera snapping images of trash. Data collection had begun. After each ride I would return to my home and download the 20-30 images into Apple’s iPhoto application, where I weeded out duplicates, made simple edits, and labeled each photo in such a way that it could be easily integrated into the larger project that had yet to take shape.

The Powershot camera uses global positioning technology to embed geographical data into each photo, including its longitude, latitude and altitude. iPhoto has a “locations” feature that taps into Google’s mapping technology and plots the geographical position of photos. Seeing my images appear on iPhoto’s map-based user interface was proof that I could eventually build my own system for displaying the trash images on a Google map. After the ten rides were complete and the 133 documented items were ready for production, I immersed myself in the world of Google Maps and JavaScript programming.

As I write this, I am halfway through my first class in Web programming that relies entirely on JavaScript and its associated code libraries. The class moves much slower than its Flash/ActionScript predecessors, but it’s clear to me and the students that the skills gained will serve them for well for many years. When a new language or technology does come along to supplant JavaScript, as is more than likely, I feel confident that the students will be more adaptable because of having worked within an open source environment directly in the browser.

Also at this moment, Dotted Landscape is online, but is not quite complete. The bedrock coding is done, the user interface is designed and built on HTML 5 and CSS 3, and the mapping functionality is solid. What remains is the final collection of content that will serve as the first few “stories” or “histories” for selected pieces of garbage. When I set out on this project, I knew that I would not be the primary creator of the trash stories. My hope was, and still is, to engage members of the community to “adopt” a piece of trash and submit to me a piece of content that gives the selected item life and, in doing so, make it just a little more beautiful. I look forward to the day that I can share the site without hesitation. In the meantime I am already benefitting from the knowledge gained in the project’s design and implementation.

Notes

[1] http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week5/#cover

[2] http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week2/

[3] http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1/

[4]  http://thewildernessdowntown.com

[5] http://www.adobe.com/products/flashruntimes/statistics.html

[6] http://jquery.com

[7] http://prototypejs.org

[8] http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash

1. INTRODUCTION

“The Internet gives millions access to the truth that many didn’t even know existed. Never in the history of man can powerful information travel so fast and so far. I believe that the Internet will begin a chain reaction of racial enlightenment that will shake the world by the speed of its intellectual conquest” said former member of the Louisiana State Representative and former Klu Klux Klan Member, David Duke. [1] The Internet and its uses have grown exponentially since its inception. Through websites, social media, blogs, wiki, and streaming video sites, Internet users are able to use images, text, and audio to create and develop both insightful and outrageous depictions of our culture. The things that people put on the Internet follow trends and include patterns, styles, and characters based on common ideas that people share and propagate. Internet users have assigned these products the same name that Richard Dawkins used in his analogy to genes – memes. Though Dawkins’s work revolves around genes, the memes on the Internet have very similar characteristics. In the online environment memes can be spread incredibly fast and far on massive scales, regardless of content. They may educate, entertain or potentially discriminate.

2. THE ORIGINS AND FUNCTUALITY OF A MEME

Richard Dawkins first adopted the term meme in his book, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976. Dawkins described memes as “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” which evolved into trends that many people follow. Memes are units of information that are transferred from one person to another. [2] The example Dawkins included was “if a scientist hears, or reads about a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate its self, spreading from brain to brain.” [2] With the creation of the Internet, and especially with the tools of Web 2.0, the meme has a new outlet in which people are able to spread their ideas from brain to brain. Cultural ideas are represented in images, text, audio, and film. These different formats of memes can now be emailed, tweeted, shared, blogged, YouTubed, and spread among other formats.

Through computers, cell phones, and tablets people can connect to the Internet 24/7. A meme is no longer restricted to word of mouth, or another form of communication that may take a long time to gain traction and popularity. The world now has millions of people spreading many different memes about their culture, politics, and opinions through the Internet. Memes that represents our culture and our values now have the possibility of being viewed by millions upon millions of people of all ages and nationalities, rather than a single classroom of young adults.

Memes have three main characteristics that give them value and sustain their popularity. These characteristics are as applicable in regards to the Internet as they were in the original definition. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins theorized that memes had to have “fidelity, fecundity, and longevity” to stay alive (194). Fidelity referred to a meme’s ability to be copied and transferred from person to person. [3] Since everything on the Internet is digital information, memes can be accurately transferred from person to person through audio, video, images, and text without altering their original form. Various websites allow for the easy creation of memes where stock images are prepared and customized text is easily incorporated. Examples of these websites include MemeGenerator, MemeMaker, and QuickMeme. Through the use of social networks, the transferring of memes is as easy as a click of the mouse. In addition to the ease of sharing memes, the rate at which they spread is another defining characteristic. [3] This rate is called fecundity. The more a meme is shared, the longer it can survive and promote its messages or cultural values to viewers. Websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are popular social networks where users have the ability to easily post images and links to memes. The more a meme is posted and shared, the more people will view it, and the longer it will be alive on the Internet. [3] This contributes to longevity, which refers to the length of time that a meme is applicable. The topics of memes vary widely from foods, to advice, to current popular trends. These types of memes tend to have a longer life.

Other memes are very specific to a particular point in time. If a meme is only applicable to a certain point in time, then the meme will only last as long as that point of time is relevant to the viewer. [3] An example of this is the JibJab “This Land Is Our Land” video. The video is a 2004 flash animation that includes then U.S. President George W. Bush exchanging insults with Senator John Kerry in the form of a music video. This meme was only applicable to the 2004 election. The political candidates would be different for every election after that. [4] Politics are a common topic for memes, but once an election has passed, the humor of that particular meme has lost its effect.

Memes are a prime example of creative reproduction and collaboration that exists on the Internet. Unlike music, movies, and software piracy, meme creation is an art form that was created by the users for the users. Memes are a source of intellectual art created by people who have based the art on a part of popular culture. One of the older and most popular forms of memes is the cat-meme commonly known as LOL Cats (Laugh Out Loud Cats). Images will usually show cats in various positions and text will act as titles for the content of the image. A popular website for these images is icanhas.cheezburger.com. [5] I can has Cheezburger evolved over time itself.  Originally the title was spelled as “I can haz cheezburger.” [5]  Websites like “I Can Has” are places where the reproduction of images are not only allowed, but also encouraged. Another popular collaboration meme was “All Your Base Are Belong To Us.” “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” is a term from a video sequence in a 1989 Japanese video game known for its poor Japanese to English translation (Duds, 2008).

The popularity of this meme, like I Can Has’s cat images, used real footage from the video game to spark a collaborative process. Internet users are able to systematically download editable materials from the Internet where each person is able to recreate their own meme that complies with their own ideas and opinions.  The “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” was a popular meme that evolved through Photoshop manipulation.  People would upload their own images with the phrase, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” imprinted in some way into the image, such as on a newspaper, or billboard, or a piece of nature. [6] These digitally altered images were then uploaded to collection sites online such as SomethingAweful.com forums. [6] The term “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” evolved enough to become a piece of Internet history and made an appearance in Disney’s Wreck It Ralph (2012) where the term was spray painted as graffiti on a wall. [7] The popularity also provided inspiration for a Kansas City musical artist to create his own dance song that was based off of the meme. [8] The meme “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” was a highly recognizable trend that prompted others to create additional media to continue the life of that meme.

4. HUMORS AND COMMENTARY

Memes can be sorted broadly into two categories, either “absurdist humor” or “social commentary.” [3] A study of memes in 2007 found that out of nineteen mainstream memes that were published up until that year, seventeen had humor as their key component. [3] There are millions of comedic memes online that poke fun at many different aspects of culture. Memes will take a common image or person of notability, such as Gene Wilder’s character, Willy Wonka, from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971), together with the topic of college graduates (http://goo.gl/TZpTq). The condescending look that Gene Wilder is giving in the photo can play to many different captions. The captions are satirical of college graduates who finish college with a degree but end up getting a minimum wage job such as working at a coffee shop. [9]

On the other hand, “social commentary” can usually depict issues that are currently going on in the world and present viewers with a different perspective. One such example would be the “Pepper Spraying Cop” meme. [10] In November 2011, when Lieutenant John Pike casually pepper sprayed students who were peacefully protesting at University California Davis, the image went viral on the Internet. Immediately after the incident photoshopped images were published and appeared everywhere on the Internet. [10] A common commentary of this incident is the “Modern Warfare 2 Pepper Spraying Cop.” [11] The combination of this incident with the cover of the graphically violent video game, Modern Warfare 2, illustrates the militaristic tactics that some United States police forces may employ, even against peaceful protesters. [11] The ability to place the image of Pike in a number of other images illustrates the way Western ideologies can be presented. Normal citizens have the ability to mock Pike, as well as anyone else, through the visual power of a meme.

5.  TOXIC-MEMES

Memes are not only funny cat photos; they are the way people think about their culture. Memes are a product of the culture that people live in. These depictions of our culture can clash with the ideologies of other cultures in dangerous ways. In 2002, Dan Dennett spoke at a TED conference about memes that he termed as “toxic-memes.” [12] “Toxic-memes” are memes that are ideas that do not mesh with other ideas and are be dangerous to other cultures. [12] Dennet pointed out Sayyid Qutb as a propagator of fanatical Islamic ideas. Through Sayyid Qutb and his Qutbist followers, Dennet stated that they were able to spread Qutb’s fanatical ideologies through their “press films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting station.” [12] Qutb’s ideas later on influenced fanatical groups such as Al-Qaeda and other followers of Osama bin-Laden. The memes, or ideas, created by the fanatical Islamic organizations were spread out in the world through newspapers, radio, television, and eventually the Internet is a convenient mode of communication for “toxic-memes.” While Qutb’s fanatical ideas were spreading, Westernized memes, or ideas, were also spreading through radio, television, and the Internet. As Western memes spread exponentially around the world, they come in contact with other cultures unfamiliar, unimpressed, or even angered with the memes of the Western Culture. As western memes “spread our education and our technology, [...] we’re the vectors of memes that are currently viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favorite memes. The memes that they are prepared to die for.” [12] The fundamental ideas spread by Qutb is no longer limited as it was during his lifetime.

As the Internet became one of the fastest growing forms of communication is human history, people with all different types of opinion make use of its capabilities.  With the terrorism becoming a rampant activity in many parts of the world, groups such as the Taliban, Lebanese Hezbollah, Afghani Taliban, Palestinian Hamas and the Pakistani Tanzeem-e-Islami all have functional web pages that connect people over large distances and culture barriers. [13]  Not only are fundamental websites spread ideology and propaganda to support each organizations cause, web sites such as alneda.com were used as “donation” platform which was used to purchase “weapons to be used against [citizens of the U.S.], while there were also “volumes upon volumes of zipped documents outlining specific ways to kill [U.S. citizens].” [14]

Not only Islamic fundamentalism is expanding through the use of the Internet, but White Supremacy has also started created followings.  Through long distances, the Internet connects people with similar interests.  Jesse Daniels points out in her book, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on civil Rights, that there are three main point why people should be concerned about white supremacy online.  First, she points out the “easy access and global linkages” that the Internet is capable of having with people around the world.  Secondly, she figures that the hatred present on the Internet may create harm in real life.  Finally, Daniels assumes that racism on the Internet will present a challenge “to honoring cultural values such as racial equality.” [15]  Anybody who has a computer can access the Internet and propagate their own ideas and opinions of discrimination if they wish.

Introduction

My grandpa, Tom, had a fun childhood, and so do I, but they are far from alike. He was outside every second he could get, and that is one of the things that I appreciate most about him because he didn’t have all the fancy gadgets we have now. I think it was cool to see that my own grandfather did all these things and wasn’t focused on electronics. Because we have these things, it has affected the face to face communication between friends and family because when you are looking at a screen, you can’t share moments or feel emotion with the people that you love. I think it is sad in some ways that people would rather type ‘lol’ on a screen than make physical contact with friends and family. As the time whizzes by in what seems like seconds, we should try to grasp the moment and appreciated all of the things we have.

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The Forest Grove Library: Past and Present

By Lewis Beckett What’s the best way to spend an afternoon? Why of course it’s to go to the Forest Grove Library! It has state-of-the-art gaming rooms. Thanks to the new technology, you can safely place a chip on your forehead, which allows you to play video games with your mind.  If you want to read or research, you can check out books with the iPad 64. All you have to do to check out is scan your finger on the iPad dispensing machine screen.  Then an iPad will pop out of the machine.  There are the brand new, 2062 version of robot librarians here to answer your questions.  You can grab a jetpack and explode like a rocket up 50 floors to have a snack at McDonalds. My favorite place in the library is the gaming room, so I went to play NBA 2k62. I decided to be the my favorite team, Portland Trail Blazers.  I was playing against my least favorite team, the Miami Heat, in the finals.  When I had reached the fourth quarter, I noticed some commotion outside of the window.  I knew they were going to tear down the old library across the street, but most of the people did not look like construction workers.  I paused my game to see what was going on.  I took the teleporter over to the old library.  It turned out that the construction crew found books, but with “paper,” that is unusual!   I put on my archaeologist badge to check out what else was there.

Things have definitely changed between 1951 and now. My Nana had a wonderful childhood. Now, she lives near the Oregon Coast, and enjoys being a grandmother.

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Archaeologist Prompt

By Stephanie Fachiol

 Ivy’s climbed up the side of the building by now, giving it an antique feel. It fits it, really, since it’s one of the oldest buildings in Forest Grove now. Most buildings built before 2013 have been demolished and updated to fit the 2062 safety standards, but the city decided to leave the library up because the building reflects what’s inside of it: knowledge. Old knowledge must be contained in an old building. I like to do my reports inside, sipping some clandestine hot chocolate when the librarian isn’t looking. Practically everything in the building is the same as it was forty years ago, before I was born. The sections have remained unchanged; there’s the study section, with only one or two college students cramming for that test they should have studied for earlier; the nonfiction section with the Dewey Decimal system that I have trouble with even now is still crammed with the musings of the centuries­. The only difference there are the new additions about all the discoveries made since it opened; just past it, there’s the fiction, packed with the imagination of long-dead writers and those still living, their voices collectively screaming in ink. The computers are nearby, the newest model. Somehow, last year, the library got a huge budget compared to that of the surrounding area, and the staff used it to update the computers. I like those computers. The touch-screen is easier to use than the clunky set I have at home, and the Internet’s faster. Lastly, at the back, there’s the database, the newest addition. That’s where most people go nowadays, straight to the database. They just plug in their USB drive, download the information, and leave. What do they care about the rest of the library? It’s retro. Besides, it’s not updated to the safety standards. It isn’t safe to hang around, so why bother? Why, indeed. Going to a database completely defeats the purpose of a library in the first place. Sure, it still has the same information and the same words, albeit on a screen, and it’s even easier to get to. But doesn’t this defeat the purpose? One must really dig through the mire of false writings and sift through opinions to gain true, actual knowledge, forming their own opinions and coming to their own conclusions. As an archaeologist, I can totally agree with the “digging” part. Imagine reading about the splendor of an ancient civilization and seeing a picture of the ruins. Now compare that to actually standing there, beneath towering arches that somehow have stood the test of time, and discovering that civilization’s grandeur for yourself. It’s the same with words and knowledge. It may be easier to get to with technology, but it’s seeing it for yourself and finding it that’s the important part, the key. Maybe that’s why this whole building hasn’t been completely replaced. There’s a reason traditions are honored, and a reason that libraries are even now, in this digital age, still so irreplaceable.

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2062-Forest Grove Library

By Noah Drewrey

 It is 2062 and the Forest Grove Library has been found. The real library was destroyed years ago, but with technology these days, we were able to create a virtual one. A holographic device that can capture fragments of time, normally used in crime investigations, was used to “resurrect” the library. Down to the last detail, this imaging device has created an exact replica of what used to be the Forest Grove Library.

Forest Grove is located in Oregon in the northeastern section of the United States of America. Oregon is a very green state that receives a lot of rainfall. The current population of Oregon is over 5,000,000 persons. Back in the year 2030 the library was burned down to be replaced with a DLB store, like every other library in the United States. DLB stores (DownLoadable Book) were created in the late 2020′s and later became very popular in 2030. In the early second decade of the twenty-first century, buying books on tablets and phones became popular. Over the years, more and more people switched to the lighter and less expensive version of books. From Bibles to magazines, the screen books displayed everything, and didn’t take up any room. With less and less people reading books, libraries weren’t doing too well. In 2025, scientist created the DownLoadable Book, which is a pill containing a full book. When the pill was swallowed, the information made its way into your brain. With a simple thought you could access any book with you have downloaded. At first they were really expensive, and few were made, but over time more and more and been developed and made. With the value of the dollar going down and the number of U.S. currency going up, people were shocked to hear that a single DLB would only cost one dollar. At the time, in 2030, all libraries were demolished and DLB stores replaced them. Later they made more and more versions of the DLB. From DownLoadable Video Games to DLB and diet pills combined. DL pills became the next best thing, and sent many companies out of business. We have determined that many people used to study at this library. With a large amount of actual books, this place was great to prepare for something. There were many outdated computers used to locate books and research topics online. Time has done a lot to libraries. As successful as this one seemed to be, it is hard to imagine it would be completely demolished and replaced with a pill store. Comparing the Forest Grove Library to the DLB’s we have today, I’m really appreciative to science for what it has done. I would hate to actually check out a book and bring it back later. It is just wasted energy.

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Rachel Martins Interview: Communication Before the 1980s

By Rachel Martins Rachel: Hi I’m Rachel and I’m here to interview my mom about how life was before the 1980s. So mom, how did you interact with your friends and your family before the 1980s? Rachel’s Mom: Before the 1980s we interacted by a phone, and the phone… was attached to a chord that was attached to… a phone base that in our home was on a wall. And that’s how we would call our friends…. [M]aybe, if we were lucky, they’d have answering machines, but not usually…. so if we called, and nobody answered, we would just keep trying to call, until we reached them. We didn’t have any computers, we didn’t have any email, we didn’t have any cellphones yet, or anything like that, so if I wanted to call one of my friends and get together to hangout…. I had to call them over and over, until I reached them. Then, we could make our plans and go from there…. [T]he other thing that we didn’t have is—let’s say I called my friend and they were already on the phone, then the phone line would be busy, until they hung-up—… we didn’t have call waiting, where it would let us know that somebody else is trying to reach you, so we would just have to keep trying until they hung-up and would answer our call. The other thing we had back then was a party line,… when more than one house shared a phone line…, when that happened sometimes you would pick-up the phone to call somebody and… another house would be using the phone, and you would have to wait until they hung-up, so… you could use the phone and call the person, so we shared a line with two or three other households. Rachel: Is life now way different than it was back then? Rachel’s mom: It’s totally different, and what’s changed it so much is computers, cellphones, texting,…. voicemail, we just didn’t have any of that… so it’s totally different. Rachel: So, what do you miss, from before the 1980s? Rachel’s Mom: …[W]hat I miss from back then is that we didn’t have all the distractions of the computers and cellphones and Internet and email and all of that kind of thing…. [W]e didn’t have cable either, so we would play games and we would go outside… and it just seems like we did… a lot of other activities that just didn’t involve electronics at all, so it was totally different. I kind of miss writing on paper because nowadays everything’s done, like you don’t mail letters as much and things like that because of email, so I kind of miss writing letters and you know getting letters in the mail and things like that too. Rachel: So what is your favorite electronic now? Rachel’s Mom: My favorite electronic now—I really like my iPhone, a lot. And one thing I like about it, is that I can use it for so many things, but if I am running around town, or shopping, or something like that, and there’s some information I want to look-up quickly. Maybe, it’s like if I’m shopping and I want to compare prices or if I’m out and about and I want to see what time a movies playing and things like that. I can just find out that information in just an instant. So I really like my iPhone. Rachel: That’s good. So, do you think it’s much faster than back then? Rachel’s Mom: Things are way faster than back then…  just people moving more quickly. You know, there’s so much going on all the time and yeah, I think it’s way faster now than back then. Rachel: Do you think that texting instead of calling is better? Rachel’s Mom: Sometimes I think it’s better. If you just… have a quick question or want to send somebody a quick message that maybe… doesn’t even need a response. Like if I want to text you, my daughter, “hey Rachel I love you and I just want to let you know.” I think texting can be really cool about that and if you have more time to talk or if you want to actually have a conversation, you can make a phone call. Rachel: That’s nice, thank you. Thank you for giving me this great opportunity, because I really enjoyed learning about all the electronics back then, and my mom had a great time too.

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Suddenly, the wind thrust its icy searching fingers toward me, tearing the book from my hold. Paper thrashed in the air, beaten by the wind. No. Not just paper, words. Words, shaped and molded. Words that were not just words. Words that could be mine. Words that were mine. Words I would not destroy. The library was full of these words, and I would not destroy them. I, like the words, was determined. I would not demolish this library. I would resurrect this library. These piles and heaps that existed in the past as a library would remain a library. I strode, with purpose, off of the building foundation. I would be the voice for the words confined in this crumbling building. I would shout and scream and stand my ground until these words echoed from every wall.

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© Leonard D. DuBoff 2013

The World Wide Web has provided incredible communication opportunities. By merely posting an item on a computer in your home or office, you can have it transmitted around the globe. There are, however, numerous challenges presented by this modern process.

Many creative people feel that anything found on the Web is available for them to use and exploit in any way they desire. Indeed, a prominent law professor, Lawrence Lessig, cofounder of Creative Commons, espouses the theory that free use of others’ materials fosters creativity. [1] Unfortunately, this belief is not consistent with the law in many countries. It presents a clash of rights between the creators of a work and those who wish to freely use it.

One of the ways in which this collision of rights may occur is when a scholar finds an interesting article written by somebody else, reproduces that article on his or her own website and provides hyperlinks for particular portions of that article. For example, if a teaching technique is discussed, a link may be inserted so as to showcase an example of that teaching technique by directing the reader to another website when the name of the technique is clicked. Similarly, a link may be used to provide a more expanded explanation of a particular concept. Links may also be used for the purpose of having pictorial illustrations of materials discussed.

This situation, in which hyperlinks are added to somebody else’s article, should be distinguished from the common practice of adding links to one’s own work. Just as scholars legally add footnotes referencing the works of other scholars to books or articles they themselves have written, in most instances, adding a hyperlink directing the reader to another’s website for purposes of citation or providing a more detailed explanation is not a problem according to case law.

The situation discussed here is different. A scholar copying someone else’s article to his or her own website and then adding hyperlinks to that article appears more analogous to a person republishing another author’s book after adding footnotes to it.

Is this use of another’s article without permission legal? Is the addition of hyperlinks for the purpose of explanation or illustration legal? These are the kind of questions that are now being presented by the expanded opportunities available in cyberspace.

Focusing on the law of the United States, since that is the jurisdiction in which the
Berglund Center is located, we begin the analysis by reviewing US copyright law. Section 106 of that statute sets forth “the bundle of rights” that are provided to the copyright owner in this country. Among those rights are the right to make reproductions of the copyrighted work and the right to create derivative works. When the researcher reproduces an article found on the web without first obtaining permission from the copyright owner, the researcher may be creating an unauthorized copy of the protected work in violation of one of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights. Unless there is some exception available for this unauthorized reproduction, the copying would be an unlawful infringement.

One of the most common exceptions available, the “fair use doctrine,” is found in section 118 of the statute. This section of the law provides that a use that might otherwise be deemed infringing and unlawful will be a permitted “fair use” in certain circumstances. The law provides that at least four factors must be considered in order to determine whether the use is “fair.”

First, the nature of the use must be evaluated. If the use is “productive,” such as writing a book review using quotes from the book, the use is likely to be fair. If, on the other hand, the work is merely reproduced in order to satisfy a need for that work, it is likely not. Second, the character of the work must be considered. Using a quotation from a reference book of quotable quotations would likely be permitted while reproducing a workbook, which is a consumable, would probably not.  Third, the extent of copying should be evaluated. Copying a little bit is likely permissible, while reproducing the entire work, or the most important part of a work, is probably not. Finally, the effect that the copying has on the copyright owner’s market must be considered. If the creator of the work is deprived of a sale, then there is likely an infringement.

In addition to the problem presented by an unauthorized reproduction, the researcher must determine whether adding hyperlinks for purposes of explanation or illumination is legal.

Since the copyright law provides the copyright owner with the exclusive right to create derivative works, it is important to consider how the law defines “derivative work.”

The copyright law defines a “derivative work” as follows:

A work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.

17 USC § 101.

It is, therefore, apparent that the addition of hyperlinks to add definitions, examples, illustrations, and the like would be the creation of a derivative work and likely an infringement.

Thus, the creative scholar who finds an interesting article on the Web and decides to adopt that work without first obtaining permission is likely infringing the rights of the work’s copyright owner in two ways. Even if the copy were considered “fair use,” the researcher would still have to overcome another obstacle, since the addition of hyperlinks to the article is likely to be considered the creation of a derivative work, thus compounding the infringing activity. The scholar would be well advised to seek permission before engaging in these activities since the consequences of infringing another’s copyright-protected work can be serious.

While the World Wide Web provides a great many opportunities, it also presents a host of challenges. Balancing the rights of those who create copyrightable work with the rights of those who desire to exploit materials they find online is a modern challenge. Scholars are now responsible not only for developing innovative projects, but also for determining whether their innovations are legal in order to protect themselves from liability.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rudolph Lopez III, clerk with The DuBoff Law Group, LLC, for his assistance with this article.

References

[1] Lessig, Lawrence. (2004) Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press. http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf

Introduction

While the initial article relating to this experience (found here) was truly an experiential discussion on the endeavor, this second part is meant to examine the design of the program, as well as the various styles for teaching language virtually. 

Cultural Explorations

In addition to the primary focus of language education built into the curriculum, the topics of each unit related directly to culture or life in West Africa, providing students with a broader understanding beyond language skills. Student projects, as they were not locked to the topic of the unit, could explore significant aspects of West African culture. While the amount of project freedom was difficult for some to handle, both because of a lack of known vocabulary and the challenge of choosing from so vast an array of topics, it did provide interesting opportunities for student research. This was conducted through interviews, search engines, media sites, and news outlets. The students used most technological resources at their disposal to complete their projects with plenty of relevant information.

Furthermore, students visited a leading fair trade wholesaler called Swahili Importers [1], located in Eugene, Oregon. The visit presented culture from a business perspective and also showed the impact of technology on trade. The Internet is a great example because it is a major part of the wholesaler’s business. When the program is fully online, there may not be the opportunity for those same explorations outside of the regular classroom and coursework as there were in Eugene.

Technical Impressions [2]

The Swahili program and curriculum are unique in that they genuinely wish for extensive student feedback and criticism. Students are expected to be in charge of their learning. Deborah Cooke, head of the technology on the program, said very clearly to all students the first week of class, “You have power here. You have control over your learning journey. You have freedom. You have the creative options to explore your own learning path.” [3] The Hermes [4] site was designed to be a guide for independent, self-directed learners. It provides clear instructions and expects a person to follow them; for the most part, the assignments are easily navigable. However, there are a few drawbacks with the design program used. Tables are difficult to code in the program, making it impossible to copy and paste tables from the assignment page into the program where they are to be posted because most of them are screenshots. Those tables that are not tend to have formatting issues and extend the unit chapter down quite far, especially when there are photos that are supposed to be matched with vocabulary words. The program also will not allow you to set links to open in a new window, which is very convenient for a student who needs to explore a link but doesn’t want to have to find their way back to their course page. All links need to be opened with a right click to avoid this. The only other issues related to the learning management system were simple edits needed – misnumbered or mislabeled items, duplicate titles, etc. It is a very well crafted, detailed system.

The discussion board is generic and very easy to use. It does have a few issues with relation to duplicate titles from the same poster, so if a discussion board topic has the same title twice in a unit, there may be a problem posting it. Otherwise, posting and responding are extremely simple in the discussion board section. Also to be used for interaction was Blogger.[5] Assignments for Blogger disappeared about halfway through the curriculum in Swahili 1. While Blogger is more visually appealing—formatting-wise—than the discussion board, the interactions between students, conductors, and guides were just as easily completed on the discussion board. Blogger appears to be an extraneous item in the curriculum.

Wikispaces [6] was used for assignments that did not need student interaction, unlike the discussion board and Blogger. It also had assigned tasks throughout the course. Students complained they did not understand how to use Wikispaces and so did not do the assignments. However, I had never used the site myself and found it fairly simple to pick up in a matter of minutes. This could be my familiarity with technology, but most high school students today are as tech savvy, if not more so, than I have observed. Blogger received similar feedback. Unless a section is added to the site where each student could post assignments, or submit them to a shared folder Dropbox [7] style, or the conductor chooses to view all assignments on the discussion boards, Wikispaces needs to stay. It has purpose and functionality different than the Hermes site, so it is not a duplicate to the discussion board in the same way as Blogger.

Another new account for students to set up is a Google+ account [8]. For the hybrid pilot course, this was completely unused and rather useless, as students are not going to participate in a Hangout when they’re living two doors apart. With full online course implementation, the Hangout feature on Google+, which is essentially free Skype for big groups, has the potential to be very useful in connecting families with conductors, guides, coaches, and other families.

I mentioned LinguaFolio [9] more than once. It is a fascinating program.  Students may add whatever languages they’ve studied and upload evidence to support their claims to various proficiency levels. Evaluators may confirm that the evidence is sufficient and the person meets that level. This program will not expire in the near future; students may continue to have access to it now that they have an account, and could potentially use it to show employers where their language proficiencies lie. This particular technological aspect introduced in the Swahili program – an online language portfolio – is fabulous and has a lot of potential. I would like to see it used at a university level. The only problem I saw with it was the actual uploading or creation of evidence. It is possible the condensed time made it more difficult for students to focus on selecting or creating evidence for specific Can Do statements. It remains to be seen if there are steadier updates during the regular online program.

Online coursework isn’t for everyone, though, there are, as of this writing, no norms for evaluating a person’s readiness for an online course. Some colleges are using controls to determine who would be successful in an online course, with the different workload and responsibilities that go with it. [10] A language-focused online course would be even more difficult. Such an evaluation of  student success possibilities is likely in the hands of the contracting school, but would still be a recommended consideration for student success and retention. The goal of CASLS in this emerging activity of providing online language instruction is to make such instruction easier, so that anyone could potentially benefit from an online course, whether in language or in another subject area.

Curriculum Impressions

The subject matter of the curriculum was culturally relevant, while still remaining interesting and relatable  to students. However, the format put the students into conversations with little understanding of how the language worked. The idea was for students to push themselves to learn and to be in charge of their own learning – they were the ones to make it work. However, all of the students, myself included, felt that we needed at least some structure. My general suggestion is to start the first unit with basic grammar and verbs, then end the first chapter of the unit with the dialogue using what was introduced, rather than beginning with it. I would add new verb tenses and perhaps noun classes through the other chapters in Unit 1, ending each chapter with a dialogue that expanded on what had been learned. By Unit 2, with some kind of a basis already established, I would go ahead and start the dialogue at the beginning and have students look up words they did not understand. From then on, students would have a basis from which to build, and would not feel lost and confused from the first conversation.

There were also strange gaps that, to me, seemed like basic information learned early on in most language programs. This could be my mind coming at it from a traditional language platform, but colors, animals, and foods, are usually learned early on in comparison to medicine, illnesses, and travel. I did discuss this with Director Falsgraf and commented on it earlier in this evaluation. I want to reiterate his point that “Whenever possible vocabulary should be learned for a purpose.” [11] I do not disagree with this and even see its importance, but I also want to be able to have a general conversation. Knowing cat, dog, red, blue, and green can help in a very generic sense. The coursework followed two characters – Asante and Sarah – on their respective journeys in Tanzania and Kenya. Through them, we explored language and culture. While some students did not care for the story-based curriculum, I did not mind at all – I felt we could relate to the characters and build an image of the event through their activities.

I would still like to see some more common phrasing in the curriculum. I also feel the need to point out that we skipped sections in their entirety due to the time constraints of the hybrid intensive pilot course. Given more time, it is possible that during those sections we would have covered some of the items that felt strangely absent. When reviewing my ideas with Director Falsgraf, he commented that what I was pushing for was too comfortable a scenario. “Learning another language is not comfortable. Whether you are learning naturally in country or in a classroom, when confronting another culture and language you have to be uncomfortable. Giving lists of ‘expected’ vocab and testing students on exactly what they have been taught is comfortable, especially after 10+ years of being enculturated into this system.” He did go on to clarify, though, that it doesn’t work to frighten people too greatly with something different, and the unfamiliarity combined with a few of the other items discussed about the program may have contributed to some of the points discussed in this article. There is perhaps a middle ground to be found for what I see as an improvement still in keeping with the ideas of the program and its unique, challenging learning style. I did agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Falsgraf when he ended with, “We’ll get better.” [12]

The downside to the hybrid intensive that I feel may be corrected in the fully online course is a need for reinforcement. I mentioned it previously in the article, but it bears mentioning again. Immediately after the course, I could exchange polite conversation on a very basic level and perhaps throw in a few descriptions and sentences about familiar topics. Months later, I can still handle the greetings because we used them so often. I may remember several of the numbers, but we didn’t count very high. I cannot tell time. For a year’s worth of Swahili, my retention is very low with the effort everyone put in. This can be addressed for future intensives by repetition and reinforcement of material every day in the classroom, and also by adjusting the course schedule. I consider a year of high school language as equal to approximately one semester of lower division college language, which is four credits at Pacific. [13] Doing four university credits in three weeks is quite an undertaking. However, when doing 10 units of upper division university credit in eight weeks, I still had more free time than in the Swahili course and did not experience the same level of burnout. Students need more free time to absorb and unwind during the course.

In an online environment, it will be especially important for the Swahili families to support and reinforce each other, as there will be no instructor there in front of them. My other concern with the fully online course is Swahili conversation. Students will meet with the conductor, guides, and coaches to work on their conversation. The Fall 2012 course was designed to include several one-on-one appointments with coaches to work on conversation skills in an individualized fashion, and students were to be encouraged to utilize those abilities with other participants in the program. I do feel that observing the students as a group conversing with each other and the conductor would be beneficial as a way to see group dynamics and encourage comfort among family members with communication. [14] Focusing on the currently studied unit would be very helpful with both reinforcement and pronunciation improvement. Students may also retain more from the simple fact that most will be doing it on school computers in a semi-proctored environment, with less ability to distract themselves on other internet sites. The results of the fully online fall pilot will be presented by Director Falsgraf in a Berglund Center Roundtable in May 2013.

Online Language Learning Comparison

Over 152 million results appear when one searches Google for “online language learning.” On the first page are familiar faces – Rosetta Stone, Live Mocha, etc. [15] It is curious that online education is so integrated into society, especially in an upper education echelon , when studies show the national average success rate is only about 50%.  An online course is typically more difficult for students, not easier, as they require greater levels of self-discipline, not to mention strong academics and tech savvy. [16] Some researchers assert that “retention rates are 20% lower in online courses than in traditional face-to-face courses” [17] and that “retention may be improved by including face-to-face orientations or other face-to-face elements in online courses.” [18]

I briefly touched on successful online learners, but wish to reiterate here that they are “motivated, independent, [and] self-directed.” These students also “enjoy technology, have strong language skills, and are visual learners… They have positive attitudes and are willing to ask for help. Extroverted students are often more successful in socially interactive courses, while more introverted students tend to succeed in self-paced courses.” The success of these students is also affected by the instructional method, such as frequent and timely instructor feedback,. Additionally, the use of various tools to support group activity, individual coaching, and speaking practice can make up for the lack of consistent instructor interaction inherent in an online course. “A combination of flexibility, independence, and experience with online tools has been associated with improved critical thinking, research, and computer skills.” [19]

With this framework in mind of how a person is successful as an online language learner, let us consider a few comparisons to the new CASLS Swahili program.

Portal Zweite Chance (Portal Second Chance) [20]

This site is free and available in German only. Of special interest aside from the typical vocabulary and grammar exercises, it provides a self-evaluation and diagnostic testing to place students at different levels. It then automatically builds a learning plan based on level, curriculum, and the student’s availability, which can be adjusted. Each week is evaluated and then the next is provided, individualized for the student. This provides quite a bit of independence and self-pacing as well as an automatic ability to advance when a level changes. [21] In comparison, the Swahili program does not provide a pre-evaluation as it is unnecessary for first year beginning students, but it does provide continual updating on progress through LinguaFolio. It also provides direct interaction through the conductor/guide/person-who-interacts setup. Currently, there are no grammar exercises particularly designed for the Swahili program, though it is heavy on the vocabulary.

Rosetta Stone [22]

You practice, you drill, and you listen quite a bit with Rosetta Stone. It is not structured in a particular context and you are not required to follow a set progression. There is no interaction with other people on this program in its usual form and it is best used in conjunction with other coursework or language practice, rather than by itself. It is generally easy to use and usage can be tracked by instructors. [23] It now offers an option called Totale, ringing in at approximately $1000, that includes RosettaCourse (basic Rosetta Stone), RosettaStudio (video chat with native speakers for interaction), and RosettaWorld (online language-related games community). [24] With Totale, Rosetta Stone upgrades from basic software that supports language but does not teach it to a fairly comprehensive program with a hefty price tag. CASLS provides a contextual story-based learning environment, guaranteed interaction with various individuals, language production and usage through projects, and peer interaction. Although it does not provide language-related gaming, the CASLS program does many of the same things with a more student focused approach.

Tell Me More[25]

A major competitor of Rosetta Stone, this program teaches words and phrases but also “includes a speech recognition component that analyzes pronunciation, presents a graph of speech, and suggests how to perfect it.” There are also videos displaying how to physically make the sounds. [26] At $390 a year for six languages, it is a much better price point than Rosetta Stone, but it does not offer as much as Totale. The speech recognition is an interesting feature, but face to face with a native speaker, such as with the CASLS program, surpasses the computer based evaluation.

Livemocha [27]

New to Pacific University this year, Livemocha offers free basic lessons in any of its 30 languages with monthly or bi-annual subscriptions providing additional content and levels. For monthly users, eight recordings may be submitted for native speaker evaluation and recommendations, and for bi-annual users, two language examples per lesson may be submitted. All users have access to social networking groups and VoIP native speakers who in turn wish to learn English.[28] There is no set instructor for this program, as there is with CASLS.

Perhaps the most glaringly obvious issue with many online language learning tools is the lack of consistent contact with a native speaker (unless there is a high price to go with it). “The quality of feedback is important,” according to Mike Levy, head of the School of Languages and Linguistics at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. “Sites with human contact work best,” he said. “This shows the advantage of humans compared to computers. A computer is never as subtle or intelligent.” [29]

Furthermore, in today’s learning community, social networks and the theory of social constructivism are key to successful online learning communities, such as the families, clans, and tribes in the CASLS structure. Other programs have similar communities, but not to the structured, integrated level the Swahili program entails. Students create relationships and deal with real-world problems and projects, evidenced in the unit topics and the continuing stories of Asante and Sarah. “The ideal way to learn language in any situation or for any student has not been found. But one thing technology based language instruction must respect is the need for a cultural dimension to language learning….Any separation between language and the cultural context within which it functions is artificial. Language can’t be separated from culture. Culture is language.” [30]

But the question remains: how successful was the Swahili course in its pilot intensive phase? In order to be considered successful, the new system from CASLS needs to equal or exceed traditional language education results. Creating a solid basis of familiarity in East African culture was also a goal of the program. The success is mixed. While the students did learn much about East African culture in depth, including through numerous self-guided projects, they did not meet the proficiency goal of the program (Novice High) when examined by the CAP test.

Conclusion

If student interest is the key, then the program was successful; student surveys show 14 of 15 students feel motivated to continue studying Swahili, 14 plan to take Swahili 2, and 12 would take another Swahili summer course. 13 out of 15 felt the Hermes site was easy to use, as was the discussion board (10 out of 15), and the instructions for assignments were understandable (14 of 15). It is clear that students felt they did not have enough free time, as they disagreed with the statement “There was enough free time to prepare my project and explore campus” (13 of 15). 11 of 15 felt the class was too fast.

That being said, the more interesting results come from the Swahili exam taken by the students in Week Three. Scores 1-3 are novice levels, with 4 and up transitioning into the intermediate level. The test was multiple-choice reading comprehension, with the number and complexity of questions varying based on the students’ scores as they progressed through the exam, followed by writing and speaking exercises to be graded by instructors. Due to time constraints, those portions of the exam were not graded, but the results of the multiple choice section are very interesting. Below is a raw data table on the overall scores. My own score is highlighted in yellow, showing me very much at Level 1 (beginning novice) with many of the other students. Highlighted in blue are some interestingly high results. To protect the identity of minors in the course, no identifying information such as year in school or Swahili in the home is included below.

For a year’s worth of Swahili, my expectation was to see students in the Beginning Intermediate to Beginning High range (2 or 3) but that was clearly not the result. Most of us did not retain the information and were frustrated by an inability to handle the proficiency exam. In no way were the instructors “teaching to the test.” On the one hand, teaching to the test is an oft lamented style, but on the other hand, taking a test with no reference to the material is frustrating for the learner. 75% of us scored as true novices after the intensive, without consideration for writing and speaking exercises. I know my own writing and speaking exercises on the test were hardly high quality. Considering the two 3’s and the two 4’s, I conclude that those particular students either thrive in the style of learning environment around the course, utilized outside sources effectively as the program is designed to supplement their learning, or had prior knowledge of the language (i.e. heritage speakers). I am unable to confirm the impact of possible heritage speaking on the scores due to student privacy. Ultimately, I find myself disappointed with the scores after the course, but still hopeful that the program has the potential to bring more of those 3’s and 4’s to the other students with a little work.

October 2012

A Digital Narrative Project

It’s difficult to describe my Dotted Landscape project as anything other than a “web site about trash”. In fact, when asked about this endeavor by friends and colleagues, there is a consistent, awkward pause, while I try to formulate a response that is worthy of everything that this Web site represents to me without overwhelming them with the entire back story and the thinking that rests below its surface. Before going into the myriad details about what this project really is, I will describe it in its simplest form in hopes that you will continue reading so that you will gain a certain appreciation for the degree to which this project plumbed the strata of my life since its inception.

The project website uses a display based on Google Maps as its primary interface. On this series of maps, I have plotted the location of actual garbage that I found along the roadsides of rural Washington County, Oregon — the county in which I have lived and worked since 1991. I set out to document the litter during the fall of 2011 over the course of ten bike rides, performed alone, that skirted the Western edges of the county. The rides covered 175 miles of public roadways. I snapped nearly 140 images of unique garbage lying in plain site and on public land with the aid of a GPS-enabled digital camera. By “unique” I mean that once a certain type of garbage, say a fast-food drink container, was documented, say a fast-food drink container, further encounters with that type were ignored.

The “unique” rule was not part of my original plan, but a mile or so into my first ride, around the cities of Banks and Roy, I came to the conclusion that documenting every piece of trash encountered during a 10-15 mile bike ride was going to be next to impossible. The amount of litter in our environment is simply overwhelming when you are aware of it. The alcohol containers alone, on the routes that I surveyed, would have numbered in the thousands, and, in my estimation, if spread out along the entire 175 miles travelled, would have punctuated every 300-400 feet of road. The pervasiveness of alcohol containers along roadways was a sobering realization that I was not prepared for. Assuming that they found their way to the roadside from the windows of vehicles, they tell a kind of story that has deeper implications for residents and travellers in rural areas.

With each of the ten bike rides comprising one page (or context) of the Dotted Landscape site, a Google map in “terrain” mode shows the general area of the ride. The garbage encountered on the ride is plotted on the map with custom designed map markers. Clicking one of the markers opens a modified version of the “info window” that users of Google’s mapping service are familiar with. Styled with Google’s default “word bubble” shape, the pop-up windows provide summary information and a photograph of the actual item as it was found. Eventually a link will be included to a page telling the item’s “story.” This “back story” concept is central to the idea behind the project. It’s not just a site about garbage but a platform for the community to address their garbage and give it some life other than the one it has decomposing along the roadside. I want my fellow citizens to join me, in a virtual way, in making something slightly more interesting out of our detritus and this project is my attempt at enabling that conversation.

figure 1: a screen shot of a map from http://www.dottedlandscape.org

I located and implemented some open source tools for modifying the maps’ info windows so that I could add a tabbed interface to them and style them in the overall aesthetic of the site, which eschews ‘clean’ lines and well-positioned elements in favor of the rough-edged and gritty nature of the subject matter I was featuring on the pages. That said, the graphic designer in me could not resist the need to select colors and set type in ways that enhance the experience and give it the slightest feeling of being intentionally crafted. Next to the map window on every page is a menu of all of the items plotted on the map in the order in which they were found during the ride. This is an interface element that affords users an alternate means of browsing the garbage found along that particular route. Clicking any of the listed items triggers the display of its info window in the map interface. This menu’s generation and included functionality proved to be one of the project’s first sizeable technical challenges for me. This will be addressed in section three of this document when I discuss the technical aspects of the project.

figure 2: a screen shot of the info windows used on http://www.dottedlandscape.org

Review By Jenn Ngo

Duane, Diane (2010). Omnitopia Dawn. New York, NY: DAW Books, Inc.

The Berglund Center always offered me great opportunities to learn more about the Internet around me, so when they suggested Diane Duane’s Omnitopia Dawn, I only had to read the synopsis to be once again enchanted. I was not familiar with Duane’s many science fiction and fantasy novels, but my interest in the Internet and related technology’s impact on the way we conduct our 21st century lives made Omnitopia seem like something I’d be very interested in reading about.

One passage in particular stood out to me as an apt summary of the Omnitopia experience: “Any kind of game you could think of was here somewhere, either as a Macrocosm built by the game company’s in-house staff, or as Microcosms built by favored gamers. Endless possibilities, endless challenges were here.…” [1]

Omnitopia is an online gaming experience, much akin to our world’s World of Warcraft [2] or Second Life [3], in which players can assume an identity and choose an in-game world to play in. Omnitopia is a truly “massively multiplayer” experience containing 121 worlds, or Macrocosms, for players to travel throughout and explore. There are also countless Microcosms, smaller-scale worlds designed and maintained by an elite group of users, which is where we meet one of our players, Rik Maliani, or Arnulf the Manyfaced, as he is known in-game.

First, we are led through a sneak peek of Omnitopia from the perspective of an average-Joe player, Rik Miliani. He takes the reader through Telekil, the singular original game world of Omnitopia, to the Ring of Elich, the gateway to new worlds—“the discovery of this gigantic game within a game…had turned the massively multiplayer online gaming world on its ear. No one had ever dreamed that such a number of gaming worlds, or such complexity and magnitude, could or would ever be staged inside the same platform.” [4] Throughout Omnitopia Dawn, Duane takes the opportunity to paint a picture of a place of infinite possibilities, literally from the ground up.

A particularly interesting concept in Omnitopia is the coveted opportunity some players receive to create their own Microcosms. Duane’s descriptions of what goes into a Microcosm (starting, of course, with a dark empty space and an illuminated neon “FOR RENT” sign) are intriguing: “bright wirelike outlines of light…described where everything—table, trees, flowers, upside-down pterodactyl—had been…a visual expression of the framework that the virtual textures and other sensory information are hung on.” [5] I also appreciated Duane’s descriptions of various areas of Omnitopia which characters travel through, whether for business or pleasure. Her attention to detail, building fantastic worlds, is where Omnitopia shines.

Moving on to the story, most of the focus is placed on the conflict between Omnitopia’s First Player, Creator, and CEO, Dev Logan, and his rival and former business partner, Phil Sorenson. Other side characters’ stories support the main conflict between the two, as Phil sets in motion a plan to bring the Omnitopia’s expansion rollout to a screeching halt, and his former business partner to his knees.

My one issue with Omnitopia is that the story moves much too slowly, roving between too many points of view, sometimes to the point of incoherence. While I appreciate that it may have been a stylistic choice to mirror the experience of a more adventurous player spending time travelling through various Omnitopian Macrocosms, I tend to prefer a more straight-and-to-the-point narrative. I found it easy to not really care what was happening in the insignificant tales of the magazine reporter or the hacker, until they began to join into what I thought was the most exciting event of the story: about a day before the rollout. Then it wasn’t until a surprising twist in the plot was revealed about a quarter from the end of the book, that things got really interesting.

Upon finishing the book, I was a little disappointed, because I felt that the storyline with the most intrigue and potential only began to be revealed in the last quarter. After finding out that Omnitopia Dawn is the first in a series, however, I felt better about the way the book ends. That said, I am looking forward to this story’s further development, now that the groundwork for the story has been laid.

References

[1] Duane, Diane (2010). Omnitopia Dawn. New York, NY: DAW Books, Inc. Page 9.

[2] http://us.battle.net/wow/en/

[3] http://secondlife.com/

[4] Duane, Page 13.

[5] Duane, Page 53.

Ph.D., Associate Professor of Mathematics & Computer Science, Pacific University

Abstract

Getting students to read the textbook is one of the major hurdles I face in teaching undergraduate mathematics. Students who do read the new material before hearing a lecture on it tell me that it is a tremendous help in understanding the lecture. Yet so few students do this.

Directed Reading offers students little choice but to read the book before coming to class. The students like it because it guides them through the reading and they follow the lecture more easily. Moreover, it saves precious class time on routine problems, and we can concentrate on subtleties and intricacies in the material.

1. Learning to Read

I have a problem getting my students to read their mathematics book. For years I would tell them to read the section before the lecture on that section. Occasionally a student would tell me that he or she had done this and that “it really helped.” But for the most part the students admitted that they had not. I thought that maybe they did not wantto read the book, or maybe they did not like to read it. Many of them were struggling with mathematics. If reading the book really helped, why wouldn’t they do it? Then it dawned on me—they didn’t know how to read a mathematics book.

I thought back to how I had learned to read. Not back to sounding out the words and reading “See spot run. See Jane watch spot run,” but rather to how I had learned to read for content. I remembered a long time ago—in second grade or fourth grade—reading a chapter in a social studies book and at the same time filling out a worksheet. The worksheet would have lines such as

_____________ is the capital of Spain.
The major exports of Spain are _____________ and _____________.
Most of the people of Spain speak _____________.

As I read, I would pick out pieces of information and fill in the blanks. At this point I was reading more than just words; I was expected to get some information out of what I was reading. The worksheet helped guide me, or direct me, in my reading.

2. Learning to read mathematics

Maybe I was right about the capital of Spain idea. But it seemed that 12 years after filling in Madrid we should be capable of a bit more than filling in blanks. And perhaps even more importantly, this was not exactly the type of content I wanted students to read for in a mathematics class. It wasn’t that the students could not read, but that they could not read mathematics.

What exactly dowe want the students to glean from this reading? When they read a section before the lecture, whatwill help them to understand the lecture?

I was confronted with one more problem that helped me answer those questions: my lectures were each 65 minutes. I had been accustomed to teaching 50 minute lectures, and had even then thought the students’ attention spans for new material were 35 or 40 minutes at best. Now with a 65 minute lecture I was worried I would be wasting too much of the time without the full attention of the class.

I could almost watch the students drift off. If at the board lecturing in calculus, for example, I would first introduce a new idea. The students would perk up a bit as I did some very simple examples. I would proceed to do some more complicated examples and would start to lose their attention. And just as I got to the subtleties—the really good stuff that maybe they really did need me for and could not just get from the book—they would drift off completely. I thought that if I could just get to that subtle stuff earlier—in the first 30 minutes—then maybe I could hold their attention long enough.

So this was my goal—to get to the more difficult, subtle problems in the first 30 minutes of lecture. I began to think about which material the students could learn from the book on their own. Students had complained from time to time that I didn’t assign problems that were like the examples in the section. From precisely here came my idea: I would assign problems that were exactly like the examples, but I would assign them before I lectured on that material. That, I realized, was the sort of reading that the students could do, and in fact that they craved. Maybe at first they would not be reading all the words—but they would be absorbing some of the content. If I had lectured on section 2.3, an assignment might look like this:

Section 2.3 # 8, 10, 14, 15, 19, 22, 35, 36, 41

Section 2.4 # 1, 3, 4

where the Section 2.4 problems are mimics of the example problems in the text. I have had the opportunity to use Directed Reading in both upper- and lower-level courses, in courses for both mathematics majors and non-majors. The following are a few examples of how I have used it.

3. Directed Reading in Calculus

Directed Reading in Calculus proved to be much more effective than I had anticipated. Where I had done several elementary examples in the past, I decided I would cut back to one, then move on to more complex ones. One day, for example, I was introducing integration by parts. I wrote  ∫xcosx dx on the board. A student spoke up and said, “We’ve already done that.” I pointed out that they had done , and he said, “It’s the same thing.” I then suggested that we try ∫tx^-tdt. Another student pointed out that they had done ∫we^-xdx. A third student said, “Can’t we work on some harder ones, since that’s what we’ll have to do in the homework and on the test?”

As a result, I find that I can save 20 minutes of lecture time, the students have all at least attempted the more basic problems on their own and at their own pace, and they are able to follow the lecture better as we discuss the subtleties. And the students have what they want—homework problems that are exactly like the examples in the text. Occasionally, such as after an exam, I will not include a directed reading portion on the next assignment. The students will ask for it, arguing, “How can they be expected to follow the lecture if they haven’t even looked at the material.”

The types of problems that work well as directed reading problems are either a homework problem that closely mimics an example in the text or problems the students have done before but may need to review. With the former, the students carefully work through the example problem. With the latter, students are able to review at their own pace. For instance, in calculus I have found that students often do not remember very well absolute values, logarithms, solving systems of linear equations, and inequalities. Yet when I have spent a little time reviewing these in class, the students who remember them feel like I am wasting class time, while the students who do not remember think that I am going too fast. I find a pace that pleases no student. In working these problems before the lecture, the students are able to choose an appropriate speed until they feel comfortable with this review material.

Directed Reading serves another role here: In addition to saving lecture time, Directed Reading helps to bridge a gap between students of different abilities and with different backgrounds. Having students work problems before class, whether new problems or review problems, gets them all on the same page at the beginning of the lecture. Further, it allows the students to get there at their own pace.

4. Directed Reading in Abstract Algebra

Directed Reading in Abstract Algebra seemed to be a more challenging endeavor at first than it was in calculus. I was struck by the amount of material I needed to cover in this course, so I thought about what sorts of problems were more routine. Primarily I wanted to grade the students’ proofs, but I also realized that to do the proofs the students would need to understand the structure as well. I found many straightforward and computational problems at the beginning of each section that required manipulating group elements, multiplying permutations, constructing group tables, etc.

I assigned these problems before lecturing on each section. Instead of collecting these computational problems, I would select some at the beginning of the lecture. Each student would write on a piece of paper which of those he or she could do. I would call on students to put their solution on the board. The students would receive one point for each problem they said they could do, but would lose 20 points if unable to do a problem when called on. The students received immediate feedback on their work instead of waiting for it to be graded, and they also had answers to their questions before the lecture had begun. I thought the negative points would keep the students honest and that the students would only claim to be able to do problems they actually could do, but students had different confidence in their answers, and some are risk takers. If I find this is not working well with a particular class, I change to giving points for students who volunteer to put a problem on the board. I teach abstract algebra differently from how I was taught it, and I have learned from Fraleigh’s article Happy Abstract Algebra Classes [4].

In comparison with previous times I had taught abstract algebra, there were noticeable differences. I used to work through many specific examples, covering every detail. Now I am able to cover deeper topics. Instead of presenting a lot of examples, I can mention them and the students will recall them as they have more familiarity with them due to working this all out on their own.

5. Implementation Difficulties

I have found the major stumbling block in the implementation of Directed Reading is the collection of the daily assignments and the quick turnaround necessary to incorporate the responses in that day’s lecture. Turning in problems at the beginning of class does not allow me time to read them and modify the class to address questions raised or to skip material that is already clear to the students. Since the students are turning in a Directed Reading assignment on each class day, it becomes a paper-management and grading nightmare. Even if you can return the assignment at the next class, this rate of feedback may be inadequate for this method. We can circumvent the class preparation issue by having students e-mail the professor the day before; this allows time to modify the lecture to meet students’ questions and understanding. This helps with lecture preparation but does not provide the quick feedback to the student that some of the newer online mathematics systems would. It also works better when the answers are in words rather than equations or mathematical notation. Some books have reading questions built in, like Beezer’s First Course in Linear Algebra.[2] Others have computational problems that align well with examples in the section. A web forum can encourage online discussion of the topics before the class period, but this might not perfectly fit this model. With the huge number of new internet and online resources available, I believe that some combination of them will provide an appropriate forum to collect, assess, give feedback, and employ student understanding of new material. Ideally, the correct combination of these resources will help students to read better for content, thus not only providing the instructor and student feedback, but helping to develop their mathematical reading skills.

Many of the references on teaching students to read mathematics are targeted toward K-12 teachers [1] or pre-date internet current resources [3, 7], and are not widely employed. Recently, a nice overview called How to Read Mathematics appeared that will provide a great introduction to students (or faculty!) using Directed Reading in a course.[5]

Last year, to try to address some of the implementation and feedback issues with Directed Reading, I used WeBWorK for the Directed Reading questions. What is WeBWork? According to the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) website,

WeBWorK is a well-tested homework system for delivering individualized problems over the web. By providing students with immediate feedback as to the correctness of their answers, students can be encouraged to make multiple attempts until they succeed. With individualized problem sets, students can work together but will have to enter their own work to receive credit.

The instructors are provided with real-time statistics, resulting in lesson plans that can be customized to better serve students. [6]

We have a WeBWorK installation on our server, so students are given local accounts. WeBWorK gives them immediate feedback on their response, and instructors can choose to give them more than one chance to get a correct answer.

There were several advantages to WebWork. Students did receive immediate feedback to the Directed Reading questions and could then try again, potentially immediately correcting misconceptions. Students did not need to try to fit mathematical notation into an e-mail—some questions were multiple choice, but even for ones that were not, students commented that WeBWorK was easier for them than other online homework systems they had used. There were also some limitations. For example, problems from the existing library did not always align well to the book we were using. Instructors can write their own problems, but this can be a lot of work, and even modifying existing questions does not always go smoothly. Moeover, some of the existing questions had unexpected answers. Finally I was not able to find suitable questions for each section or lecture.

I had planned to only use WeBWorK for Directed Reading questions, but quite unexpectedly I started using it for sets of review questions between exams and to check student understanding of routine computational exercises. Students liked these questions; if they had a good understanding of the material, it was an instant reward, and if they did not, they could practice and try again immediately. Also, these problems tended to be shorter and more straightforward than the text’s homework problems. The increase of student understanding was measurable from this practice. However, there was still frustration and resistance. Glitches in the system and unexpected answers frustrated both students and myself. Some students felt like this was an additional requirement on top of their regular homework. When I implement this again, I will be sure to reduce the amount of other work commensurate with the time spent on WeBWorK assignments.

6. Other student reactions

Another obstacle in employing Directed Reading was a notion the students had that it was unfair to expect them to do a problem before I had “taught” them how to do it. Pointing out that they might have to read Romeo and Juliet before it was discussed in class, or to read a philosophy paper or a psychology chapter, did not shed any light. In fact, when I gave a talk about directed reading, I got the same reaction from some of the mathematics faculty in the audience. They asked how I could expect the students to do a problem that I had not yet discussed.

To combat this, the second semester I employed Directed Reading, I talked with the students about it in class, explaining what I thought the benefits were, and asking for their feedback. In subsequent semesters I have also put in the syllabus the following:

Read each section before I discuss it in class. Once we have gone over a section, reread it, and work through the examples. Sometimes it is difficult to read a mathematics book before coming to class. To guide you in this, each homework assignment will have a Directed Reading component. A few problems from the coming section with constitute this portion of the assignment. The problems will not be complex, but instead will mimic the examples in the text or will follow directly from the reading.

I have a Directed Reading component to each assignment. Now that the students expect it, their reactions are primarily positive, but it still remains a challenge in some classes. Students who like it feel that they are better prepared for the lecture, and often point out that the problems from the upcoming section are easy. And they are, in comparison with the challenging problems in the section I have lectured on, which are not just like the examples in the text.

There are benefits to using Directed Reading in both upper- and lower-level courses, in courses for both mathematics majors and non-majors. Non-majors benefit because they develop their mathematical reading skills, which they can bring to other technical reading they might have in future classes, and in their careers. The hope is that this will make them stronger independent learners, which is the transformation of students that we really hope to see in the undergraduate experience. Since we expect mathematics majors to read difficult and advanced mathematics independently for their capstone projects, developing these skills early and throughout their mathematics courses can better prepare them. Research mathematics presents unique difficulties for undergraduate students. It is unlike other sciences in that students cannot be put in a lab working on a hands-on experiment as part of a larger effort. It demands instead that they work conceptually with a high degree of independence on an abstract, unsolved problem. Even if a student simply wants to read some articles on new mathematics, finding an article an undergraduate can read is difficult. Once an appropriate article is found, having experience reading mathematics will be an asset. I hope that in learning to read mathematics in the earlier years of college, students will be more prepared to take on their own research projects in their later years.

References

[1] Barton, M. L., Heidema, C. (2002). Teaching reading in mathematics: A supplement to Teaching Reading in the Content Areas: If Not Me, Then Who? 2nd Edition (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

[2] Beezer, R.A., A First Course in Linear Algebra, http://linear.pugetsound.edu

[3] Borasi, R., Siegel, M. (1990). Reading to learn mathematics: New connections, new questions, new challenges. For the Learning of Mathematics, 10, 9-16.

[4] Fraleigh, J.B. (2001). Happy Abstract Algebra Classes. MAA Focus, Volume 21, Number 8, p. 13.

[5] Gouvea, F., Simonson, S. , (2011). How to Read Mathematics. In S. Simonson, Rediscovering Mathematics (pp. xvii-xxix). Mathematical Association of America.

[6] WeBWorK, Mathematical Association of America, http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/

[7] Raphael, T. E., Gavelek, J. R., (1988). Question-related activities and their relationship to reading comprehension: Some instructional implications. In G. Duffy & L. Roehler (Eds.), Comprehension instruction: Perspectives and suggestions(pp. 234-250). New York: Longman.