[00:00.000 --> 00:01.100]  Good morning.
[00:02.360 --> 00:03.760]  Welcome to HOPE Number Nine.
[00:05.020 --> 00:09.040]  For those of you who just got up, some of you were here in the previous talk, which was pretty interesting.
[00:09.920 --> 00:12.060]  But, wow, full house.
[00:12.300 --> 00:13.220]  This is great.
[00:13.460 --> 00:14.600]  Good morning, Sassaman.
[00:14.760 --> 00:15.240]  Holy shit.
[00:17.020 --> 00:26.000]  So, I can't believe we've been doing this for 18 years, but so much, hundreds and hundreds of talks and panels conveying really interesting information.
[00:26.000 --> 00:29.740]  How many people here think technology has changed society?
[00:31.600 --> 00:32.160]  Okay.
[00:32.720 --> 00:37.280]  How many people think some of that is for good, and some of it hasn't worked out so well?
[00:38.180 --> 00:38.880]  All right.
[00:39.060 --> 00:48.660]  Well, we're all, or most of us here are hackers, or consider ourselves hackers, and we're all in a position to help shape how that turns out.
[00:49.520 --> 01:02.680]  Technology is a double-edged sword, and we all have an opportunity to direct things, so that the technology is used in ways that will be beneficial to society, as opposed to not good.
[01:03.100 --> 01:08.320]  So, these folks are going to talk about that, and what the opportunities are, and what we can do with that.
[01:08.380 --> 01:20.120]  I want to introduce Chris Anderson, Gus Andrews, Matt Curinga, and Christina Dunbar-Hester, who are all really up on this topic.
[01:21.420 --> 01:24.420]  And I want to wish them luck and take it away.
[01:25.180 --> 01:26.700]  Shall I just give one word first?
[01:27.160 --> 01:30.600]  We're going to probably, everybody's going to give their talk, and we'll sum it all up afterwards.
[01:30.920 --> 01:44.420]  It's the U-Damn Kids Get Offer Lawn Panel, because we were realizing that a handful of us have been wanting to use technology to change society for the longest time, and have gathered some experience and have been yelled at by even older people, so we are sharing all the yelling at we've had with you.
[01:44.420 --> 01:45.540]  So, good morning.
[01:46.060 --> 01:47.000]  Christine is up first.
[01:47.820 --> 01:48.480]  Thanks, everybody.
[01:48.940 --> 01:50.000]  Thank you, Gus.
[01:51.180 --> 01:53.040]  Actually, I think I'll take the slide down for a minute.
[01:53.740 --> 01:54.940]  Hello, good morning.
[01:56.800 --> 02:14.940]  I don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to speak pretty informally and move from very sort of philosophical to more practical ends of a spectrum, and also specific and generalities are all in here.
[02:15.960 --> 02:19.020]  And unfortunately, because of time, I'm sacrificing some of the specific.
[02:19.220 --> 02:33.200]  But basically, what I wanted us to think about with the topic of how to use technology to change society is the topic of failure, and also its corollary success.
[02:33.200 --> 02:40.900]  And basically, what I'm arguing is that both of these are more complicated than they might look.
[02:41.400 --> 02:50.640]  And what we have to think about specifically is whether or not the technology itself works is definitely not the only question that we have to think about.
[02:50.640 --> 03:06.660]  And I'm going to give a couple of examples in brief, which happened to both be technology projects that were imported into East Africa by Western activists and designers.
[03:07.300 --> 03:16.640]  But neither of them, the lessons I'm going to impart from them, are specific to a context like East Africa or even a Global South, Global North transfer.
[03:17.300 --> 03:19.180]  So one was a radio station.
[03:19.460 --> 03:25.060]  This was actually Philadelphia-based activists who built a radio station in Tanzania.
[03:25.220 --> 03:34.120]  And they built it in partnership with a community center led by former expat Black Panthers who had been based in the U.S.
[03:34.140 --> 03:38.320]  and have been living in Tanzania for over 30 years and have a community center.
[03:38.320 --> 03:42.140]  And so the U.S.-based activists went to Tanzania.
[03:42.420 --> 03:58.280]  They spent a month hanging out, having all these workshops about programming your station and governance of your station and also very nitty-gritty, you know, how to operate a transmitter, where to put your antenna, all this stuff.
[03:58.280 --> 04:05.680]  And then they left fully confident that the Tanzanian folks had what they needed to run the radio station.
[04:07.980 --> 04:14.500]  But long story short, basically the radio station wanted to be run as a not-for-profit community station.
[04:14.680 --> 04:30.260]  This was in a state context that was sifting out of basically state-controlled socialist media and starting to open up to a more market-based model, but really didn't have a template for understanding community radio and didn't have a system in place for licensing.
[04:30.840 --> 04:34.280]  And so this community group went to the government and said, how do we get a license?
[04:34.320 --> 04:35.300]  We want to broadcast.
[04:35.620 --> 04:36.980]  We don't want to be breaking laws.
[04:37.240 --> 04:40.300]  But there sort of isn't a legal framework for us to fit into.
[04:40.540 --> 04:41.900]  And it kind of stalled.
[04:42.340 --> 04:48.480]  And so for years, in fact, later, the station wasn't... it worked.
[04:48.520 --> 04:49.500]  It was operational.
[04:49.500 --> 04:52.780]  They'd broadcast on a test basis for a while, but it wasn't working.
[04:52.920 --> 04:53.560]  It wasn't running.
[04:54.600 --> 04:56.760]  And so my second example is in Rwanda.
[04:56.920 --> 05:12.160]  This is, again, Western UK and U.S.-based designers who were in Rwanda and were talking to some local folks about what would be a sort of lightweight, useful, technical tool that would be useful over here.
[05:12.320 --> 05:15.940]  And what they settled on was something called an oral wiki.
[05:16.660 --> 05:17.920]  And this is really great.
[05:17.920 --> 05:23.840]  If you Google oral wiki, you can find the prototype and some slides that explain it in more detail than I'll be able to get into.
[05:24.160 --> 05:34.320]  But basically what this is, is it was moving a traditional form of mediation that had existed in the society for a long time.
[05:34.420 --> 05:50.280]  This role of people called ubunzi who were, if you were having a dispute with your neighbor, maybe over land use, instead of, if you didn't get anywhere trying to work it out with your neighbor, like, you know, I've been farming this piece of land, I should get the profits from it,
[05:50.340 --> 05:54.140]  and your neighbor's like, well, no, actually this piece of land is mine, and you don't have a clear way to work this out.
[05:54.340 --> 05:57.820]  You go to this person whose role in the community is to mediate these disputes.
[05:57.820 --> 06:23.060]  But the ubunzi who worked informally and didn't really mess with the formal governance and laws of Rwanda, although there was beginning to be a move towards incorporating those two systems, something that they told these designers was hard for them in their work was that they were keeping all their records by hand and they weren't able to travel very often and meet with ubunzi and other
[06:23.060 --> 06:23.500]  communities.
[06:23.500 --> 06:37.460]  So there was concern that any decision was highly local and that the local folks making these adjudications didn't have the benefit of the sort of wealth of the other people in essentially this role to compare with.
[06:37.560 --> 06:42.520]  And so the designers wound up building a mobile phone-based oral wiki.
[06:42.520 --> 07:08.040]  So you could call in, you could record a decision that you had made, both citizens and other ubunzi could call in and listen to it, and the idea was that this would sort of distribute and crowdsource, if you will, wisdom over the basically adjudication of some of these disputes and make it more transparent and also maybe more equitable so that you knew that the same sorts of decisions in the
[07:08.040 --> 07:15.680]  northeastern part of the country and the central part of the country, that there was some parallel or symmetry between how these things were being handled.
[07:15.680 --> 07:19.420]  But lo and behold, they build a working prototype.
[07:19.660 --> 07:20.840]  Ubunzi are excited about it.
[07:21.560 --> 07:24.700]  Local regulatory, you know, government officials are excited about it.
[07:25.180 --> 07:31.480]  But they're trying to ramp it up and actually go beyond the prototype stage, and it's really hard to get approval.
[07:32.440 --> 07:37.540]  And so again, it's this working technical artifact, but it kind of languishes.
[07:37.780 --> 07:41.640]  And I won't say that it completely failed, but it did fail to advance to the next stage.
[07:41.640 --> 07:56.220]  And so I think what these examples can tell us is that while both of these projects were successful technically, they were also failures in the sense that they weren't implemented in the way that the designers and users intended them to be.
[07:56.420 --> 08:08.640]  And so I want to point out that this is kind of different than some cases where activists or designers have an idea, or hackers have an idea like, ooh, this tool would be really great.
[08:08.840 --> 08:13.460]  And you sort of build it and think, oh, you know, build it and they will come and nobody does.
[08:13.640 --> 08:20.840]  In this case, actually, the people who were the intended users were highly involved in collaborating to design the tool.
[08:21.120 --> 08:28.200]  And so it wasn't just a case of a mismatch between the builders and the users.
[08:29.020 --> 08:36.560]  And in fact, even certain NGO and regulatory people were on board with these, and yet they still kind of languish.
[08:38.060 --> 08:46.120]  So in thinking about how to make sense of this, what I want to argue is that we want to think a bit more expansively about what the technology itself is.
[08:48.280 --> 08:58.140]  And basically, whether or not a technology works in a given setting is not restricted to the narrowly bounded artifact and its material properties.
[08:58.340 --> 09:00.560]  Like, does, you know, can we plug this in?
[09:00.700 --> 09:05.260]  Can we work out the bugs in the software so that the wiki works the way that we hope it does?
[09:05.380 --> 09:07.120]  Because all of that totally worked.
[09:07.620 --> 09:23.400]  So what I want to point out is that when we think about a technology working, what we're actually also assuming is that it's successfully enmeshed, basically, in a set of social relations that also account for its working, not just the technical properties.
[09:24.000 --> 09:29.960]  And really crucially, this is really invisible to us with technologies that work.
[09:30.500 --> 09:38.980]  When everything's in working order, it's a lot easier to bracket out all the forces that go into them working, right?
[09:38.980 --> 09:42.560]  This is a sort of classic problem where you don't notice.
[09:42.760 --> 09:44.840]  Like this elevator, I came up to the 18th floor.
[09:45.620 --> 09:49.740]  I would really only pay attention to it if it weren't working and I was taking 18 flights of stairs, right?
[09:51.860 --> 10:04.900]  And so, often when we talk about what the technology is, we wind up kind of enfolding all these points of contact with the social world into, you know, the radio station works, right?
[10:05.940 --> 10:21.300]  So, I just sort of want to make basically an intervention in how we think about what a technology is and offer critique here and say that we need to take a more expansive view of what artifacts are.
[10:21.640 --> 10:35.680]  And specifically, when we're thinking about if a project might work, we have to think about where it touches all these places, including users, including institutions, including legal frameworks and regulatory frameworks.
[10:36.640 --> 10:44.460]  And if it's going to touch those, it doesn't mean you have to necessarily build something that will completely and seamlessly mesh with them.
[10:44.460 --> 10:55.820]  In fact, you might be wanting to build something that is going to disrupt or, in other ways, sort of mess with the system that's out there.
[10:55.940 --> 10:57.660]  But you have to be thinking about it, right?
[10:57.980 --> 11:09.440]  And in particular, if you're going to be building something that doesn't necessarily seem like it's going to work at the place where it touches, just a very, very practical idea is be prepared to talk about this.
[11:09.540 --> 11:10.920]  Be prepared to explain the project.
[11:10.920 --> 11:15.720]  Maybe be prepared to explain it in different ways to different audiences and sort of translate.
[11:16.180 --> 11:22.660]  I'm not going to say lie, but say what you need to say to the people who need to hear it.
[11:22.780 --> 11:25.420]  And I don't mean that in a sort of patronizing way.
[11:25.580 --> 11:45.180]  But if we're thinking of, you know, greasing the skids to get a project to work instead of fail, basically we need to think about what would constitute success at a whole bunch of different levels, not just the sort of micro of whether or not the sort of artifact itself is in working order and has the bugs worked out.
[11:45.380 --> 11:53.360]  And not even, again, a sort of micro of whether or not the artifact works and the people who want to use it, you know, want to use it the way you built it.
[11:53.480 --> 11:58.880]  Because, again, in these cases, all that worked fine, and yet these projects kind of died on the vine.
[11:58.880 --> 12:01.160]  So with that, cautionary tale.
[12:01.340 --> 12:02.080]  I don't know how much time I took.
[12:02.120 --> 12:02.900]  No, I think that's about it.
[12:03.040 --> 12:03.360]  Perfect.
[12:03.620 --> 12:04.260]  Okay, great.
[12:04.480 --> 12:05.000]  Thank you.
[12:05.520 --> 12:05.940]  Onwards.
[12:14.150 --> 12:14.560]  Hello.
[12:15.720 --> 12:16.140]  Right.
[12:18.000 --> 12:26.420]  So this talk is going to be a reflection on my own experience in a project that tried to use technology to change the world.
[12:26.600 --> 12:33.900]  And the memories of my experience with that project have sort of been filtered through academic research that I did after I was done.
[12:34.300 --> 12:41.960]  So it's sort of a meshing of the personal and stuff I've thought about as a researcher and as a grad student and now as a professor.
[12:42.920 --> 12:49.880]  The organization I want to talk about was called the Independent Media Center, also called Indymedia or the IMC.
[12:49.980 --> 12:52.540]  How many people here have ever heard of Independent Media Center?
[12:52.880 --> 12:53.240]  All right.
[12:53.360 --> 12:53.420]  Okay.
[12:53.640 --> 12:54.380]  So some of you have.
[12:54.740 --> 12:58.520]  Although less than I would maybe have thought at a conference like this.
[12:58.520 --> 13:01.980]  So this is actually good and ties into what I'm going to talk about.
[13:03.300 --> 13:04.720]  The title of this panel...
[13:04.720 --> 13:08.040]  So what Indymedia was, for those of you who don't know, or what Indymedia is.
[13:08.140 --> 13:15.020]  It's a complicated thing because it's actually still around, but not really operating in the way that it used to.
[13:16.020 --> 13:19.670]  What Indymedia was, very quickly, was that it served as one of the world's...
[13:20.220 --> 13:22.980]  And I say world because it really was a global thing.
[13:23.300 --> 13:28.100]  One of the world's first citizen journalism organizations, although we didn't call it that at the time.
[13:28.100 --> 13:29.080]  There was no concept.
[13:29.240 --> 13:32.440]  No one had coined that stupid phrase yet, citizen journalism.
[13:33.800 --> 13:43.020]  What we said we did was, we said we allowed ordinary people to provide their own media coverage of protest events and political things they were trying to do.
[13:43.220 --> 13:47.560]  And actually cover themselves because the mainstream media wouldn't cover them properly.
[13:47.860 --> 13:50.100]  This is something we now call citizen journalism.
[13:51.160 --> 13:54.560]  And this was very important, particularly during protests.
[13:55.960 --> 14:04.500]  Prior to Occupy Wall Street, the sort of previous wave of kind of radical protests in the United States was centered around something called the...
[14:05.520 --> 14:10.720]  I don't want to say anti-globalization movement, but the anti-corporate globalization movement, whatever you want to call it.
[14:11.160 --> 14:13.060]  And Indymedia grew out of that movement.
[14:13.060 --> 14:18.460]  It then tied into a lot of the anti-war protests that were going on in 2003 and 2004.
[14:19.670 --> 14:20.940]  Okay, so...
[14:22.440 --> 14:26.480]  This talk I want to give is a story of failure through success.
[14:27.020 --> 14:36.420]  And what I mean by failure through success is that the technology and the technological methods that Indymedia pioneered actually went mainstream.
[14:38.480 --> 14:43.680]  Things like text updates from protests that were now treated as journalism.
[14:43.940 --> 14:51.260]  Ordinary people sending their thoughts and their feelings in ways that are aggregated and collected by traditional mainstream news organizations.
[14:51.620 --> 14:53.200]  Pop-up newsrooms, right?
[14:53.320 --> 14:57.180]  Newsrooms that appear and then disappear around particular events.
[14:58.320 --> 15:02.700]  Decentralized coverage of events filtered through the aggregation of different perspectives.
[15:03.700 --> 15:10.660]  Blogging, sort of people taking this idea that, you know, I'm going to reflect on, you know, kind of my own participation in this event.
[15:11.220 --> 15:17.900]  All of these have become absorbed into the general population, but particularly into the mainstream media ecosystem.
[15:18.540 --> 15:23.120]  If you listen to what the traditional media is talking about now, this is all they are talking about.
[15:23.520 --> 15:30.740]  This sort of thing dominates what news organizations in 2012 think they have to do in order to be relevant and survive.
[15:31.880 --> 15:45.520]  And I don't think it's hubristic and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that when it comes to the forces currently shaking the world of journalism, each of them was grappled with by an activist media organization in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
[15:46.420 --> 15:59.100]  So real briefly, I want to talk about what Indymedia did in a particular moment, 2003 to 2004, when journalists were working on building a media center that could cover the Republican National Convention in New York.
[15:59.100 --> 16:02.240]  Folks remember that fun time, Republican National Convention here?
[16:02.440 --> 16:03.000]  Yes.
[16:03.400 --> 16:04.420]  Those were the days.
[16:06.150 --> 16:13.060]  So in the early days of Indymedia coverage, protest coverage, the citizen journalism methods were actually pretty simple.
[16:13.420 --> 16:24.880]  Someone told me, and this is a quote, I'm pretty sure we distributed a high volume of paper cards to would-be protesters saying, call this phone number if you have information about something that happened in the protest.
[16:24.880 --> 16:33.140]  And then we had people sitting by our phone, typing up reports that would come in over the phone, and then we would actually enter that into the breaking newswire on our website.
[16:34.390 --> 16:36.020]  And this was a new thing then.
[16:36.200 --> 16:39.320]  This was not traditionally done.
[16:40.000 --> 16:52.000]  So the way the Indymedia website was set up was that you had a right-hand column, which was sort of called an open newswire, which was individual submissions from anybody who had something to report, a photo to upload, a story to share.
[16:52.220 --> 16:58.820]  You then had a breaking news box at the top, which would be sort of short little blurb updates of what was going on.
[16:58.940 --> 17:08.320]  And then you had something called a center column, which was sort of an aggregation of everything that had been going on on the rest of the website.
[17:08.560 --> 17:10.080]  Please let me know about time, too.
[17:10.200 --> 17:11.380]  Give me like a two minute or...
[17:11.380 --> 17:11.660]  Five minutes.
[17:11.720 --> 17:11.860]  Okay.
[17:13.530 --> 17:14.920]  So that was sort of the basic setup.
[17:15.140 --> 17:18.620]  And if I wanted to go through the whole hassle of putting up slides, I would show you a slide.
[17:18.620 --> 17:26.080]  But you basically had this three column architecture where you had stories move from low verifiability to high verifiability.
[17:26.280 --> 17:26.360]  Right?
[17:26.600 --> 17:28.540]  So you had these sort of...
[17:28.540 --> 17:35.080]  The stories were increasingly verified and filtered out as they moved towards the center column.
[17:35.260 --> 17:35.400]  Right?
[17:35.480 --> 17:41.640]  And the idea was you get all these perspectives, you get all these things flowing in, sort of generated in a dispersed way.
[17:41.880 --> 17:45.640]  You bring it into the center and that's sort of your most verified and accurate information.
[17:47.860 --> 17:54.760]  So during the Republican National Convention, though, there was also an additional source of information, something called text mobs.
[17:55.200 --> 17:57.740]  Has anyone here ever heard of text mobs?
[17:57.880 --> 17:58.100]  Okay.
[17:58.400 --> 17:59.620]  One, two, three...
[17:59.620 --> 18:00.100]  Couple people.
[18:00.260 --> 18:00.380]  Alright.
[18:00.500 --> 18:00.780]  Good.
[18:02.680 --> 18:03.800]  Text mobs...
[18:03.800 --> 18:07.800]  This was sort of what they said about text mobs in a press release.
[18:07.800 --> 18:14.880]  Uh, they said that text mobs were, um, a, uh, were equipped with a wireless...
[18:14.880 --> 18:27.640]  Protesters were equipped with a wireless tactical communications device connected to a distributed information service that provided detailed and nearly instantaneous updates about route changes, street closures, and what police were doing.
[18:27.880 --> 18:29.960]  The communications device was a cell phone.
[18:30.120 --> 18:38.120]  Uh, and the information service, uh, collection of open source web-based programming scripts running on a Linux server in someone's closet was called text mob.
[18:38.420 --> 18:49.720]  Um, text mob was basically an elaboration of previous flash mob technology that had been used to coordinate loosely structured, relatively autonomous political and social events even before the IMC.
[18:50.220 --> 19:02.560]  Um, so basically what it did was the service allowed you just... users to register with various protest-oriented message groups, um, and receive and send mass text messages to members of that group via their cell phone.
[19:02.560 --> 19:02.880]  Right?
[19:03.000 --> 19:03.920]  So you'd sign up for a group.
[19:03.920 --> 19:08.660]  If you wanted to send an anonymous message, you could send it out over your cell phone.
[19:08.780 --> 19:10.560]  It would then be received by that group, right?
[19:10.740 --> 19:13.980]  Very useful for things like, hey, the cops are closing off Broadway.
[19:14.240 --> 19:15.800]  Let's go to Sixth Avenue instead.
[19:16.260 --> 19:16.580]  Right?
[19:17.120 --> 19:27.080]  Um, at the same time, um, journalists with Indian media monitored text mobs as an information source that they would use to produce journalism.
[19:27.080 --> 19:31.480]  And they used their own text mobs group as an additional way to distribute news.
[19:31.480 --> 19:41.820]  And a supplemental service launched just before the Republican National Convention even translated these text updates into human speech that you could listen to by calling a telephone number.
[19:41.920 --> 19:43.100]  This was a great hack.
[19:43.740 --> 19:44.220]  Um, okay.
[19:44.820 --> 19:45.800]  Wrapping up quickly.
[19:46.000 --> 19:51.000]  Now, um, you may be thinking this sounds a lot like a technology that people currently use around protests.
[19:51.080 --> 19:52.560]  Any guesses on what that is?
[19:53.100 --> 19:53.860]  Twitter, right?
[19:54.020 --> 19:54.760]  Yes, Twitter.
[19:55.400 --> 19:57.960]  Um, a lot of you might be thinking, hey, that sounds like Twitter.
[19:57.960 --> 20:01.720]  And a lot of you might also be thinking, wow, that's, what a remarkable coincidence.
[20:02.060 --> 20:03.800]  And the thing is, it's not a coincidence.
[20:04.000 --> 20:17.920]  Um, text mob was actually one of many, not, not the only one, um, it's important to say, but one of several open source projects that the founders of Twitter were hacking on when they invented Twitter while working in a company called Odeo.
[20:18.360 --> 20:27.080]  Uh, in short, not only does Twitter appear similar to SMS protest systems developed nearly a decade ago, is actually a descendant of that very same software.
[20:27.380 --> 20:28.580]  So here's the basic gist.
[20:28.740 --> 20:37.560]  In some ways, the DNA of a small, marginalized text project that no one else in the world has ever heard of now sits within the body of one of the most powerful social messaging systems in the world.
[20:37.700 --> 20:39.960]  Okay, Chris, how is this a story of failure, right?
[20:40.000 --> 20:41.220]  This sounds like a story of success.
[20:41.700 --> 20:50.480]  The way this is a story of failure, I think, is that if you define your success on technological terms, you might be successful in technological terms only.
[20:50.840 --> 21:03.960]  In other words, Indymedia and the people using text mobs had incredibly ambitious and important social, political, economic goals that they saw technology being in service to, right?
[21:04.180 --> 21:05.880]  Twitter does not have those goals.
[21:06.320 --> 21:10.180]  Twitter does not care about social justice in the way that the people who invented text mobs did.
[21:10.340 --> 21:15.620]  They did not care about economic equality in the same way that the people who invented text mobs did.
[21:15.620 --> 21:22.900]  And my argument here is that you can be incredibly successful technologically and incredibly unsuccessful in various all sorts of other ways.
[21:23.340 --> 21:36.480]  And I think also, just this is the last thing, I think that those of you who have worked on free software for many years, who have seen free software become open source software, become this thing that everybody does, right?
[21:36.580 --> 21:43.100]  I think you guys know more about this than anyone, because I think that you see this conflict in your day-to-day working life, right?
[21:43.100 --> 21:52.820]  What happens when this social movement based around technology becomes mainstream in ways that maybe have lost some of the original social goals that the technology was meant to serve?
[21:53.200 --> 21:54.040]  All right, so that was quick.
[21:54.140 --> 21:57.560]  I hope it was coherent, and happy to talk about it more at the end.
[21:57.700 --> 21:57.860]  Thanks.
[22:06.650 --> 22:08.810]  We've got ten minutes each, not eight, ten.
[22:09.310 --> 22:10.650]  Yeah, we're totally fine with ten.
[22:11.730 --> 22:12.930]  You do the time, Gus.
[22:13.150 --> 22:13.810]  Yep, I'm in time.
[22:14.190 --> 22:15.130]  Take your ass.
[22:16.550 --> 22:17.190]  No, I will.
[22:20.880 --> 22:22.000]  Good morning, hackers.
[22:22.840 --> 22:24.200]  My name is Matt Curinga.
[22:24.380 --> 22:32.840]  I just finished my second year as a professor at Adelphi University here in New York, where I've been developing a new program in educational technology.
[22:33.260 --> 22:40.080]  So I kind of have this idea that we can use technology to change society, especially when we coupled it with education.
[22:40.360 --> 22:42.740]  And I've been working on this, and it's an ongoing project.
[22:42.740 --> 22:49.440]  So I'm not sure what it says when Gus invited me to this panel about how technology fails to change society.
[22:49.700 --> 22:57.240]  It's not a real vote of confidence, but I'm going to tell you about what I've been doing, what's worked, what hasn't worked, and some of the things I've been thinking about as we go.
[23:00.500 --> 23:09.680]  So I think this is relevant to hope, because eventually I want this program to kind of be a school for hackers and to be some type of impetus.
[23:09.680 --> 23:10.960]  I'll get your site up.
[23:11.460 --> 23:11.620]  Eh.
[23:12.180 --> 23:12.380]  Eh?
[23:12.580 --> 23:13.700]  Which link do you want?
[23:15.640 --> 23:17.120]  Edt.curinga.com.
[23:17.180 --> 23:17.400]  Okay.
[23:18.200 --> 23:19.720]  This is a battle I lost.
[23:20.280 --> 23:22.100]  They wouldn't let me set up my own website.
[23:22.800 --> 23:25.520]  And I'm reopening that front.
[23:25.680 --> 23:26.880]  I gave up on it last year.
[23:27.620 --> 23:34.480]  See, this is more interesting than the corporate site that they're shoehorning me into.
[23:36.560 --> 23:44.420]  Anyway, so if we go back a couple years, I was just finishing my dissertation, and I was very happy to have a job offer in New York.
[23:44.680 --> 23:51.220]  I was particularly happy because I was given this opportunity to start a new master's program kind of from scratch.
[23:51.220 --> 23:52.540]  I was the only one working on it.
[23:52.700 --> 23:54.260]  I had met with the faculty there.
[23:54.380 --> 23:55.680]  They were happy to have me come in.
[23:55.840 --> 23:57.220]  They knew the kind of stuff I did.
[23:57.400 --> 23:58.440]  So it seemed great.
[23:58.440 --> 24:11.100]  And what I was about to say is that I think it's relevant to hope because I kind of want this idea of hacking education and of creating education hackers as an organizing principle for the program.
[24:11.380 --> 24:17.640]  So when I say that hacking education, I want to pose it to maybe this idea of education reform.
[24:17.640 --> 24:27.800]  If you think of reform, it's getting schools back on track or even like radical reform would be getting back to the first principles of a school.
[24:28.060 --> 24:40.320]  Whereas when I say hacking education, what I want us to do is try to make schools do something that they were never intended to do or something that most people never imagined that they could be.
[24:40.320 --> 24:51.360]  So I don't think that there's like one big hack for this, but we kind of need to start or Adelphi could be part of a movement to get people to start thinking this way.
[24:53.880 --> 24:56.040]  I don't want to talk about education too much.
[24:56.140 --> 24:57.540]  I want this to be a short presentation.
[24:58.020 --> 25:09.860]  Basically, I think that schools, even when they are excellent and succeed by their own internal standards, that they can still be harmful to society and to education considered broadly.
[25:09.860 --> 25:11.280]  So this is where I'm coming from.
[25:12.180 --> 25:14.100]  And I started at Adelphi.
[25:14.280 --> 25:19.760]  And I laid out my guiding principles for what I wanted my students to be able to do.
[25:19.880 --> 25:23.200]  So these are people interested in education, interested in technology.
[25:24.520 --> 25:33.940]  The first thing was that I wanted to be all hands-on in project-based learning, that they'd be building things that they'd produce for the world in some meaningful way.
[25:34.960 --> 25:37.920]  Second, I wanted them to have hands-on skills with technology.
[25:37.920 --> 25:40.020]  I want everyone to learn to write software.
[25:40.360 --> 25:44.220]  I want everyone to learn to be able to set up a network, to edit video.
[25:44.400 --> 25:47.540]  To, at least when they were students here, that they'd have these skills.
[25:47.700 --> 25:52.220]  So that when they left, they wouldn't be afraid of technology and they'd be confident that they could learn things on their own.
[25:52.800 --> 25:58.900]  Now, the third thing that was important to me was that they had some background in theory and philosophy.
[25:58.900 --> 26:05.720]  So that they wouldn't fall into some of these traps, that they have a perspective beyond just the technology or beyond just education.
[26:06.480 --> 26:11.060]  And then my idea for this would be that the whole program would be run around a lab.
[26:11.640 --> 26:13.800]  And this lab is kind of my vision of paradise.
[26:15.080 --> 26:18.040]  You would come into a lab and faculty and students would work together.
[26:18.280 --> 26:20.480]  They'd write free software for education.
[26:20.680 --> 26:21.960]  They'd contribute to other projects.
[26:22.080 --> 26:23.280]  They might build some multimedia.
[26:24.000 --> 26:27.380]  They'd kind of set their own agenda and they'd work together and study as they went.
[26:27.380 --> 26:29.240]  And it would be kind of a hub.
[26:29.360 --> 26:31.340]  They'd go out to the community, spread their ideas.
[26:31.600 --> 26:36.240]  And then along with the lab, we would have seminar, where as a group we would decide what we wanted to read.
[26:36.500 --> 26:37.140]  We'd read it.
[26:37.280 --> 26:38.300]  We'd talk about it.
[26:38.440 --> 26:39.320]  We'd write about it.
[26:39.320 --> 26:43.320]  And again, this focus on getting ideas out into the world.
[26:44.720 --> 26:47.880]  So when I first started, I floated this idea briefly.
[26:48.180 --> 26:53.600]  I even had a recursive acronym for the lab, but clearly it wasn't going to fly.
[26:54.640 --> 26:57.880]  So I broke up lab and seminar into 15 courses.
[26:58.780 --> 27:00.620]  And I created 15 new syllabi.
[27:00.880 --> 27:05.660]  I roped in all the smart people I knew to help me, including Gus, on these courses.
[27:05.820 --> 27:07.900]  And I finished this in about two months.
[27:07.900 --> 27:08.560]  I worked hard.
[27:08.820 --> 27:11.960]  And then this is where I hit bureaucracy.
[27:13.740 --> 27:20.000]  So I was going to make a flow chart outlining the process of how to get a new program approved.
[27:20.300 --> 27:23.420]  But it was pretty much the most tedious thing I could possibly think of doing yesterday.
[27:25.400 --> 27:28.440]  So I'm just going to tell you how I remember it best.
[27:29.200 --> 27:30.440]  It's about ten steps.
[27:30.640 --> 27:37.000]  And first, you need approval from your department chair, the school of education dean, and the provost office to begin working on it.
[27:37.000 --> 27:39.700]  Then your department faculty votes on it.
[27:39.840 --> 27:43.720]  So I'm in a department called curriculum and instruction.
[27:44.120 --> 27:44.760]  All right.
[27:47.260 --> 27:51.940]  Next, the school of education has a committee that reviews it.
[27:52.020 --> 27:55.920]  And this is about a 150 page document that these different groups are working with.
[27:56.120 --> 27:59.400]  So the committee looks at it, and they approve you or not.
[27:59.540 --> 28:06.400]  Once they approve you, the whole school of education votes as a faculty, and you need, I think, a simple majority to move forward.
[28:06.400 --> 28:13.840]  Next, it goes on to the university-wide academic affairs committee that does the same thing that the school of ed academic affairs committee just did.
[28:14.560 --> 28:18.340]  And then there's a faculty senate that represents the university that votes on it.
[28:18.720 --> 28:20.720]  From there, the dean of the libraries approves it.
[28:21.680 --> 28:24.340]  Or maybe he approves it before the senate.
[28:24.500 --> 28:24.820]  I'm not sure.
[28:25.500 --> 28:27.540]  Next, it goes to the board of trustees.
[28:28.300 --> 28:30.840]  And at that point, you're allowed to send it to New York State.
[28:31.180 --> 28:33.220]  And then they approve it in...
[28:33.660 --> 28:34.820]  I don't know what they do.
[28:35.760 --> 28:39.160]  I was told it was an unknown amount of time and an unknown process.
[28:39.440 --> 28:41.320]  And we would just send it to them and see what happened.
[28:41.700 --> 28:44.820]  So the problem, it doesn't seem too bad.
[28:44.960 --> 28:46.820]  Like, I wanted to finish it in this year.
[28:46.820 --> 28:49.140]  And it was only the end of October when I started.
[28:49.460 --> 28:51.800]  Except that most of these groups only meet once a month.
[28:52.320 --> 28:54.100]  The board of trustees meets quarterly.
[28:56.100 --> 28:59.140]  So, if I didn't get approved at any meeting, the whole thing would fail.
[28:59.500 --> 29:03.240]  And basically, I'd be back doing the same thing again the next year.
[29:03.240 --> 29:06.420]  Which seemed like I might quit and go back to writing code.
[29:09.740 --> 29:14.300]  So, basically, along the way, I ran into some problems.
[29:14.620 --> 29:15.900]  Oh, I skipped a skip.
[29:16.040 --> 29:20.020]  I had to meet with any other units at the university that might overlap with me.
[29:20.120 --> 29:23.200]  And in this case, I met with computer science and with communications.
[29:23.840 --> 29:25.040]  Communications were totally cool.
[29:25.160 --> 29:27.300]  They just said, you can't use any of our equipment.
[29:27.520 --> 29:28.880]  Stay out of our labs.
[29:30.420 --> 29:31.360]  That was okay.
[29:31.960 --> 29:36.100]  Computer science, I wanted to steal three of my courses and list them as computer science courses.
[29:37.920 --> 29:39.400]  Which, I didn't really care.
[29:39.740 --> 29:42.400]  But then I was told that then they would get to decide who teaches them.
[29:42.520 --> 29:44.900]  And they would be able to hire new faculty for computer science.
[29:45.060 --> 29:49.340]  Which would help to leave me alone as the only faculty member in my program.
[29:49.700 --> 29:51.260]  In the end, I settled with them.
[29:51.440 --> 29:52.260]  Gave them one course.
[29:52.380 --> 29:53.160]  And I was able to keep two.
[29:53.260 --> 29:54.200]  And I'm teaching that course.
[29:54.360 --> 29:55.720]  So, it's not too bad.
[29:57.280 --> 29:58.240]  Another one.
[29:58.600 --> 30:04.660]  My academic affairs of School of Ed made me add five paragraphs to each of the 15 courses.
[30:05.320 --> 30:08.220]  About these distribution requirements the university has.
[30:08.380 --> 30:11.880]  I had to do this basically overnight before I met with the university-wide committee.
[30:12.400 --> 30:15.000]  And then that committee made me remove them all.
[30:15.400 --> 30:20.260]  Because they didn't want undergraduate students taking graduate courses to fulfill these requirements.
[30:20.280 --> 30:22.160]  They wanted to protect their enrollment.
[30:23.600 --> 30:27.940]  In the end, New York State approved two masters degrees.
[30:28.400 --> 30:31.420]  One in educational technology that leads to a teaching certificate.
[30:32.020 --> 30:34.340]  And one that's more educational design.
[30:34.700 --> 30:39.360]  And they approved a graduate level certificate in technologies for open education.
[30:40.900 --> 30:41.160]  So...
[30:41.160 --> 30:41.680]  Join him.
[30:41.920 --> 30:42.040]  Enroll him.
[30:42.100 --> 30:42.260]  Yeah.
[30:44.440 --> 30:46.180]  Don't make all this beef or not.
[30:46.880 --> 30:57.860]  Well, what happened though is that at the end, it looked like a good but pretty much any other graduate degree in this area in the country.
[30:58.180 --> 31:00.860]  And it really wasn't what I had set out to do.
[31:00.960 --> 31:04.380]  It's not my vision of what higher education should look like.
[31:04.380 --> 31:09.320]  It's not really my vision of what we should be of the best way to educate these teachers.
[31:09.320 --> 31:17.740]  So, take a step back and kind of look at where... how things worked out, where it succeeded, where things got knocked off track a little bit.
[31:18.800 --> 31:19.240]  One?
[31:19.860 --> 31:20.300]  Two?
[31:20.540 --> 31:20.760]  Maybe.
[31:20.980 --> 31:21.220]  Okay.
[31:22.520 --> 31:30.300]  So, basically everything that happens depends on how many allies you have with you, whether you're able to succeed or not.
[31:30.300 --> 31:34.760]  And really, the opposition that I faced was geared around two things.
[31:35.020 --> 31:36.320]  Procedures and standards.
[31:36.680 --> 31:40.880]  Nobody at the university said, I think this is a bad idea at any point.
[31:41.240 --> 31:46.520]  They would say instead, you didn't have the quorum for this vote.
[31:46.580 --> 31:50.200]  Or this wasn't presented in enough time for us to review it.
[31:50.420 --> 31:54.400]  So, every time I ran into opposition, it was on procedural grounds.
[31:54.400 --> 32:00.560]  And mostly, I was able to overcome this by having allies of my own.
[32:02.740 --> 32:07.400]  Basically, I did work for people for free and they became my allies.
[32:07.640 --> 32:15.760]  So, I worked with anyone that needed a website or needed, you know, that kind of stuff that I had good skills.
[32:15.760 --> 32:17.840]  And I was able to bring that to garner allies.
[32:18.080 --> 32:20.000]  And mostly, I overcame the procedural grounds.
[32:20.260 --> 32:23.460]  The second though, the standards were something that actually stymied me.
[32:25.500 --> 32:31.260]  There are two main groups that actually mandate what needs to be taught for this degree to be approved.
[32:31.600 --> 32:33.440]  New York State has its own set of standards.
[32:33.740 --> 32:43.020]  And then, there's this quasi-governmental group that oversees teacher education programs called NCATE.
[32:43.520 --> 32:50.680]  And you can't grant degrees in a school of education that lead to certification if NCATE doesn't approve it.
[32:50.680 --> 33:00.780]  So, anytime I tried to do something that my enemies didn't like, they would say, I'm afraid that you're not adhering to the standards here.
[33:01.440 --> 33:03.680]  And that was kind of like the commandment of God.
[33:04.020 --> 33:07.080]  If you don't... the standards were something that were beyond us.
[33:07.080 --> 33:13.100]  And I had very little success gaining allies to oppose the standards.
[33:14.200 --> 33:14.940]  And...
[33:16.340 --> 33:16.710]  Sorry.
[33:17.700 --> 33:18.440]  Now...
[33:19.240 --> 33:22.980]  I'm happy to be welcoming my first class in the fall.
[33:23.600 --> 33:26.040]  I'm going to try to launch this website this summer.
[33:27.340 --> 33:39.100]  And I've taken on one of my new goals is trying to get support from outside of Adelphi to build a movement to kind of overthrow these standards or subvert them as much as I can.
[33:47.680 --> 33:48.160]  Thanks.
[33:48.160 --> 33:48.280]  Thanks.
[33:48.520 --> 33:51.120]  I really am so pleased to be presenting with this gang.
[33:51.300 --> 33:53.280]  These are some of my best colleagues and...
[33:53.280 --> 33:54.500]  My best colleagues.
[33:55.400 --> 33:55.880]  And...
[33:55.880 --> 33:56.580]  Oh, I didn't slip.
[33:59.840 --> 34:05.520]  So, I want to sort of summarize and put this in a broader context of technology and social change.
[34:06.660 --> 34:09.740]  Because there is literature out there that is just about social change.
[34:09.880 --> 34:12.360]  I thought for a little while that I would be doing stuff specifically about schools.
[34:12.640 --> 34:18.600]  But I think just because of what Matt was telling us there, you all have a sense that school stuff is really thorny.
[34:18.760 --> 34:21.280]  And I think a lot of us just glaze over when we think about it.
[34:21.500 --> 34:21.820]  So...
[34:22.360 --> 34:26.620]  I know a lot of us immediately try to make the end run of going to something like, oh, LPC.
[34:26.940 --> 34:38.480]  And the reason I actually put this panel together was at some point online earlier this year, I ran into yet another young person going, we're going to give laptops to the poor and it's going to change everything.
[34:38.840 --> 34:40.260]  And I was like, we've done that.
[34:41.380 --> 34:43.440]  So, previously in talks that I've given...
[34:44.120 --> 34:44.700]  Let's see, you know what?
[34:44.700 --> 34:45.480]  I'm going to skip a couple of these.
[34:45.600 --> 34:50.140]  I did have a previous talk where I was like, you're supposed to say sin, sin, act, not sin, f*ck you, act.
[34:50.260 --> 34:52.700]  So there's protocols socially that you have to go through.
[34:54.160 --> 34:58.420]  And you're right, so the LPC has been done.
[34:58.520 --> 35:02.500]  Nicholas Negroponte there, one of my previous talks I was supposed to do with Yvonne Kirstick.
[35:02.540 --> 35:04.080]  He got sick in 2008.
[35:04.940 --> 35:11.760]  But Yvonne points out as the former OLPC security officer that Nicholas Negroponte has done OLPC a number of times before.
[35:11.960 --> 35:12.920]  He did it in Senegal.
[35:13.160 --> 35:18.120]  He did it in a school in Boston, the JW Hennigan School, which you can see their webpage is still under construction.
[35:18.120 --> 35:19.400]  So how are they doing with the technology?
[35:19.740 --> 35:21.300]  He did something like it in Cambodia.
[35:22.520 --> 35:23.860]  The results are still out on that.
[35:24.000 --> 35:24.820]  And then there's OLPC.
[35:25.620 --> 35:29.500]  You know, and so ultimately the question is, you know, does this happen in social good?
[35:29.600 --> 35:30.540]  You know, in a lot of hand-waving?
[35:31.480 --> 35:33.800]  So I think there's some assumptions that we need to question.
[35:34.160 --> 35:46.500]  Mako Hill, who still works on OLPC and is a big evangelist, says, you know, we know that laptop recipients will benefit from being able to fix, improve, and translate the software, to which Yvonne replied, no, it's not backed by fact.
[35:46.500 --> 35:50.340]  We do not know that laptop recipients will benefit from fixing software.
[35:52.900 --> 35:55.100]  So there's... we actually haven't figured that out.
[35:55.260 --> 36:03.640]  So I think these... the reason that I brought everybody here is to sort of go, there are things that we know about how technology enacts social change.
[36:03.740 --> 36:05.580]  And one of the things that we know is it's not just the technology.
[36:06.380 --> 36:11.260]  I want to refer all of you to a book that I'm going to cite heavily here, Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations.
[36:11.300 --> 36:19.660]  If you've read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, it's basically stolen whole cloth from Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations, which is just as readable a book, actually.
[36:19.820 --> 36:21.560]  It's well worth going and taking a look at it.
[36:21.600 --> 36:24.580]  It's also much more detailed and has a lot of really entertaining case studies.
[36:26.040 --> 36:28.860]  So, I'm sorry, my notes are kind of giving me trouble here.
[36:29.080 --> 36:30.600]  I'm trying to figure out how... no, there we go.
[36:30.600 --> 36:37.360]  So, Rogers' elements... the things that Everett Rogers puts forward in Diffusion of Innovations are a complex system.
[36:38.000 --> 36:40.240]  And I want to emphasize that you can understand this system.
[36:40.540 --> 36:42.060]  And try to understand it as a system.
[36:42.220 --> 36:43.960]  Don't just say, oh, it's the social side of things.
[36:44.820 --> 36:51.060]  Because I think as technologists, a lot of the time we sort of go, you know, there's technology and that's what we're going to focus on.
[36:52.560 --> 36:55.380]  Everett Rogers' elements, there's five of them, I think.
[36:55.380 --> 36:58.600]  And the technology itself, the innovation, is only one of them.
[37:00.020 --> 37:03.800]  And... but the thing he says also is that a technology is not just a technology.
[37:04.420 --> 37:07.540]  A technology may be almost entirely composed of information.
[37:08.300 --> 37:15.600]  So, examples are political philosophy such as Marxism, a religious idea such as Christianity, a news event, or a policy.
[37:15.740 --> 37:18.300]  Does anybody... does this sound like another concept that anybody's familiar with?
[37:18.620 --> 37:19.100]  Shout it out.
[37:20.300 --> 37:21.580]  Memes, basically.
[37:21.800 --> 37:24.720]  So, Everett Rogers' idea of a technology is also a meme.
[37:24.720 --> 37:25.780]  So, a technology is a meme.
[37:25.860 --> 37:26.660]  A meme is a technology.
[37:27.900 --> 37:29.000]  And that's sort of the thing.
[37:29.140 --> 37:32.580]  So, when we get into that territory, you know, we're not just talking about the things that we can actually hack on.
[37:35.420 --> 37:38.280]  So, a lot of what you have to communicate is about how to use the technology.
[37:39.040 --> 37:43.880]  So, the second element is the innovation is communicated through channels.
[37:45.060 --> 37:48.140]  So, this is the point at which many of us as hackers go, that's PR and marketing!
[37:48.300 --> 37:49.060]  Screw those guys!
[37:49.280 --> 37:49.960]  You know, so...
[37:50.560 --> 37:52.280]  But, you know, this means dealing with TV.
[37:52.280 --> 37:55.940]  It means being on point, having talking points for working with the press.
[37:56.780 --> 37:58.520]  You know, going through Facebook and things like that as well.
[37:59.080 --> 38:00.140]  Third element of the system.
[38:01.200 --> 38:02.980]  The innovation diffuses over time.
[38:04.880 --> 38:07.160]  And that's where we also sort of go, history is beyond our control!
[38:07.320 --> 38:08.360]  We don't really know what we can do with this.
[38:08.440 --> 38:11.100]  We might get slashed at it, and then nobody will pay attention to us ever again.
[38:12.100 --> 38:16.820]  And then, the fourth element is that's diffused among members of a social system.
[38:16.960 --> 38:17.660]  And so, oh, God!
[38:17.800 --> 38:18.940]  Suddenly, it's a social situation.
[38:19.100 --> 38:19.820]  How did I get here?
[38:19.900 --> 38:21.240]  I'm not good at the social dance.
[38:21.840 --> 38:23.200]  This is not my beautiful life.
[38:23.320 --> 38:24.400]  This is not my beautiful house.
[38:24.880 --> 38:29.160]  So, this is where we hit Matt's horrible flowchart, unfortunately.
[38:29.360 --> 38:30.220]  And this is something that, unfortunately...
[38:30.660 --> 38:36.340]  This is the point at which many innovations just founder and fail.
[38:36.340 --> 38:41.640]  And it behooves us to understand, you know, as Matt said, who your allies are.
[38:43.040 --> 38:43.940]  And, yeah.
[38:44.160 --> 38:51.820]  So, another thing to remember, if you've read the tipping point, is that not every adopter of technology is the same.
[38:51.940 --> 38:53.200]  You have your early innovators.
[38:53.200 --> 38:54.240]  You have your early adopters.
[38:54.680 --> 38:58.420]  And they are the ones who end up spreading it to the early majority.
[38:58.640 --> 39:01.340]  The late majority waits and watches to see what other people are doing.
[39:01.380 --> 39:02.220]  And then you have your laggards.
[39:02.860 --> 39:04.780]  So, you have to talk to people in different ways.
[39:04.780 --> 39:06.980]  You can't just go and talk to all of them the same way.
[39:07.080 --> 39:10.080]  So, it also behooves you to know who you're talking to at a given time.
[39:11.920 --> 39:17.900]  And the other person to think about here is Bruno Latour, who I know Cristina works with a lot of his work.
[39:18.120 --> 39:20.780]  Latour does a sort of sociology of technology.
[39:21.900 --> 39:24.160]  And he says, what we have is an actor network system.
[39:24.340 --> 39:28.140]  So, the technology is in amongst a whole bunch of other technologies.
[39:28.540 --> 39:30.740]  And technologies tend to be adopted in clusters.
[39:31.040 --> 39:33.460]  So, you have to know about the other technologies that are out there.
[39:34.200 --> 39:36.700]  This is, of course, if everybody remembers the history of the Betamax.
[39:36.780 --> 39:37.720]  This is one of the main reasons.
[39:37.860 --> 39:39.860]  It's like, you know, you have to have the tapes and the VCR.
[39:40.060 --> 39:46.720]  And, you know, there will be elements of the TV broadcast system as well that you have to think about.
[39:47.840 --> 39:50.660]  Another thing to think about, the printing press is a great one.
[39:50.720 --> 39:53.720]  We often go back to that as scholars of technology and communication.
[39:55.280 --> 39:58.800]  You can't really say that the printing press caused the spread of Protestantism.
[39:58.940 --> 40:00.160]  They were very much symbiotic.
[40:00.360 --> 40:05.640]  So, you know, the Protestant church depended on the printing press to get the word out there about the Bible.
[40:06.420 --> 40:08.720]  And, you know, the Bible depended on...
[40:09.240 --> 40:13.500]  Or the printing press depended on the Protestant church to help spread its use as well.
[40:14.060 --> 40:17.400]  So, basically, the takeaway here is beware of research as well.
[40:17.600 --> 40:25.200]  Not just research, but also articles in the press that treat technology as the only agent of change in a situation.
[40:25.380 --> 40:26.940]  Because there are many, many agents at work.
[40:27.740 --> 40:31.860]  And another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of innovation research has a pro-diffusion bias.
[40:32.260 --> 40:37.100]  So, if you're reading something that says, yeah, this diffused really well, remember, they've probably gone looking for that diffusion.
[40:37.280 --> 40:39.600]  So, look at the methods of the particular study and figure out whether that happened.
[40:39.760 --> 40:40.540]  How am I doing on time?
[40:41.060 --> 40:41.740]  I'm not timing.
[40:41.860 --> 40:42.400]  No, nobody's timing.
[40:42.580 --> 40:42.740]  Woo!
[40:43.000 --> 40:43.320]  Whatever.
[40:44.080 --> 40:44.960]  I'll just keep going.
[40:45.140 --> 40:48.180]  And then we'll have a little question and answer center afterwards.
[40:48.600 --> 40:50.760]  So, some more...
[40:50.760 --> 40:50.940]  Two minutes.
[40:51.160 --> 40:51.460]  Two minutes?
[40:51.580 --> 40:51.680]  Okay.
[40:51.780 --> 40:52.080]  Cool.
[40:52.160 --> 40:52.680]  I think I can do that.
[40:53.820 --> 40:59.380]  Rogers also points out that it's not just the technology, but it's perceived attributes that matter.
[40:59.380 --> 41:02.480]  And these are these things that I have up on the screen here.
[41:02.920 --> 41:05.700]  Relative advantage over other technology, I think we all understand pretty well.
[41:06.100 --> 41:09.160]  But compatibility is a huge, huge issue.
[41:09.300 --> 41:12.380]  It is with people's existing values as well as with the technology.
[41:12.680 --> 41:17.980]  There was a very, very good study done about early diffusion of Apple computers to classrooms.
[41:18.140 --> 41:20.760]  Apple followed that closely and researched it.
[41:21.260 --> 41:24.120]  And there were a couple of things that teachers didn't get.
[41:24.260 --> 41:26.700]  And one of them was that, you know, kids can teach themselves.
[41:27.360 --> 41:29.040]  So, even teachers...
[41:30.060 --> 41:31.120]  The kids can teach themselves.
[41:31.240 --> 41:33.500]  So, it's less of a sort of a sage on the stage model of teaching.
[41:33.640 --> 41:35.440]  It's a guide on the side where this computer...
[41:35.440 --> 41:38.620]  The teacher's standing next to you and helping you, you know, work through technology.
[41:39.820 --> 41:51.020]  Even teachers who preferred the guide on the side model, though, sometimes did not adopt that model with the technology in their classroom because they were so busy learning the new technology that they simply didn't have time.
[41:51.180 --> 41:55.420]  So, they ended up doing a lot of, you know, they ended up doing a lot of training for themselves.
[41:57.000 --> 41:59.880]  So, that is... that's another part of compatibility.
[42:00.060 --> 42:01.620]  You have to think about the compatibility in the school.
[42:04.260 --> 42:05.780]  Complexity in schools especially.
[42:06.120 --> 42:09.220]  There's another book, The New Meaning of Educational Change by Michael Fullan.
[42:09.220 --> 42:16.900]  He points out schools suffer from Christmas tree syndrome where everybody's trying to add more programs onto the school.
[42:17.360 --> 42:22.960]  So, the more programs there are, the less likely things are to take because teachers start burning out and sort of going, why are you doing this?
[42:23.000 --> 42:23.700]  I don't see the point.
[42:25.280 --> 42:26.360]  Trial ability is important.
[42:26.900 --> 42:31.080]  The Dvorak keyboard, many of you may be familiar with that and say, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
[42:31.080 --> 42:36.720]  But the problem is, it takes a week's worth of training to get somebody who has been trained on QWERTY up to speed.
[42:37.320 --> 42:46.100]  So, trial ability is not really good with Dvorak for people who need to, you know, not slow down their work process any in order to adopt it.
[42:47.000 --> 42:55.940]  Observability also is really important in classrooms and hard to handle in classrooms because teachers generally can't observe each other and how they're using technology in their classrooms because they just don't have time.
[42:56.060 --> 42:56.640]  It's not in the schedule.
[42:56.640 --> 43:02.640]  So, all of these things will shape how you end up, how technology ends up getting adopted.
[43:03.640 --> 43:04.840]  A couple of takeaways really quickly.
[43:05.980 --> 43:14.100]  Technology has meaning beyond our meaning of, you know, the Linux kernel as a kind of freedom, you know, free software as free.
[43:14.340 --> 43:15.440]  That's not the only kind of meaning.
[43:15.640 --> 43:23.600]  I have this particular slide because if you remember the hole in the wall project in India, they just had computers where kids could interact with them with no guidance whatsoever.
[43:23.980 --> 43:32.260]  And the kids ended up calling the hourglass a drum and the pointer a needle because that was what they looked like to them in their culture.
[43:32.660 --> 43:35.980]  So, you know, people will assign their own meanings to it.
[43:36.060 --> 43:43.760]  And if you are not helping work with them on what the meaning of the technology is, the meaning, you know, you are going to be the guide on the side and not the sage on the stage.
[43:43.860 --> 43:45.480]  And that's what we want you to do with technology.
[43:45.600 --> 43:48.820]  Unless you do that, people are not necessarily going to pick that up from the technology itself.
[43:49.280 --> 44:01.480]  This is a non-trivial problem, but if you know how to understand it, you know, there is room to work with this complex system, but this does take, you know, understanding and reading of social science work.
[44:01.740 --> 44:12.040]  I know many of you think that's very squishy and very much down on the social ladder from, you know, physics and math, but frankly, physics and math are not studies of human beings, and unfortunately, human beings are complex.
[44:12.180 --> 44:13.260]  You can't apply that science there.
[44:13.400 --> 44:14.760]  You have to look at social sciences.
[44:14.900 --> 44:15.920]  And may I suggest anthropology?
[44:16.480 --> 44:17.100]  Anthropology's great.
[44:17.520 --> 44:18.800]  I'm not so fond of social science.
[44:18.820 --> 44:20.120]  Or sociology, proper.
[44:20.300 --> 44:21.260]  Anyway, that's just me.
[44:22.000 --> 44:26.860]  But, yeah, so, I mean, we've seen these in a couple of cases, this idea that belief is important.
[44:27.060 --> 44:32.380]  With Christina's, you know, the group that didn't have a template for understanding community radio.
[44:32.500 --> 44:34.480]  They just did not have a concept.
[44:34.680 --> 44:38.340]  So, the concept has to be taught along with the actual teaching of technology itself.
[44:38.620 --> 44:46.600]  Otherwise, you end up with users doing things that you don't really want or expect, like using the CD tray as a cup holder or the CD itself as a mirror.
[44:48.340 --> 44:53.140]  So, users have to agree with you on what the technology means and what it's meant to do if it's to make the intended change.
[44:54.400 --> 45:03.200]  As Christine says, when everything's in working order, we don't see any of the social forces, but we have to work on them if we want anything to actually be adopted.
[45:03.980 --> 45:04.740]  That's all I have to say.
[45:04.820 --> 45:08.780]  And if we can bring the lights up, we can have a little bit of Q&A, because I know everybody likes to do Q&A on these.
[45:14.280 --> 45:16.000]  I think we have... How much time do we have for these?
[45:16.260 --> 45:16.580]  Ten.
[45:16.980 --> 45:17.540]  Ten minutes?
[45:17.740 --> 45:17.980]  Okay.
[45:18.600 --> 45:18.860]  Yes.
[45:19.460 --> 45:19.860]  Hi.
[45:19.960 --> 45:24.800]  I'm really glad to have someone identify that Malcolm Gladwell ripped off Everett Rogers without...
[45:24.800 --> 45:24.960]  Sweet!
[45:25.340 --> 45:27.380]  ...without admitting it, without acknowledging him at all.
[45:27.460 --> 45:29.220]  That was frustrating to me when I saw that.
[45:29.300 --> 45:31.440]  And I have found this very useful.
[45:31.540 --> 45:32.140]  I'm a scientist.
[45:32.160 --> 45:33.700]  I work for a federal agency.
[45:33.700 --> 45:34.120]  Cool.
[45:34.340 --> 45:39.060]  And so I work in a big... I work in a big bureaucracy, and I have to deal... I have to live in a complicated system.
[45:39.340 --> 45:46.820]  And so I am working... I work with a... kind of invisibly within my agency using an approach called the...
[45:46.820 --> 45:52.080]  There's a theory of living human systems developed by Ivana Gazarian, who is a...
[45:52.080 --> 45:57.480]  Started out, it's a synthesis of individual dynamic group... psychology and group dynamics.
[45:57.480 --> 46:03.900]  But it's been... it's been grabbed onto by a lot of people who are interested in science because it offers some very practical...
[46:05.680 --> 46:10.240]  Operationally defined theoretical ideas and practical approaches.
[46:10.440 --> 46:12.360]  And so, for example, one thing is the...
[46:12.360 --> 46:15.560]  The idea that if you're... is to look at the hierarchy of systems...
[46:16.040 --> 46:16.080]  Mm-hmm.
[46:16.080 --> 46:17.940]  ...of human systems that you're operating in...
[46:18.040 --> 46:20.580]  ...and target your intervention to the middle system...
[46:20.580 --> 46:20.700]  Mm-hmm.
[46:20.760 --> 46:21.820]  ...that you're looking at.
[46:21.880 --> 46:26.540]  So not the... not the managers and not the people who are just going to implement whatever they have to...
[46:26.540 --> 46:27.080]  Yeah, middle managers.
[46:27.080 --> 46:28.700]  ...because they're the ones who are interacting.
[46:28.760 --> 46:31.700]  If you can get them to change, then they can influence both systems.
[46:32.040 --> 46:32.120]  Mm-hmm.
[46:32.240 --> 46:39.000]  Another idea is to, in any kind of discussion in a group, to focus on decoding the yes buts.
[46:39.300 --> 46:48.520]  That if you can explore the yes and explore the but, then you have an opportunity to identify and integrate some of the differences that are in that... in that particular group.
[46:48.620 --> 46:50.160]  So there are a lot of very practical tools.
[46:50.600 --> 46:52.300]  Talk to me if you want to learn a bit more about it.
[46:52.300 --> 47:03.300]  But it's something that's really growing and sort of traveling and disfusing out of the psychology, group dynamics, organizational development world into some other worlds.
[47:03.480 --> 47:03.900]  Cool.
[47:03.900 --> 47:05.420]  I want to follow up on that a little.
[47:05.500 --> 47:06.720]  That's a really wonderful point.
[47:06.760 --> 47:08.120]  And I'm glad you brought up that particular author.
[47:08.160 --> 47:08.860]  I've never heard of her.
[47:09.160 --> 47:22.140]  But I have an acquaintance who went off to Africa in Peace Corps and ended up teaching technology in a school and was frustrated and kept saying, I just want these people to see logic and reason.
[47:22.260 --> 47:23.400]  That's all I want out of this.
[47:23.600 --> 47:28.220]  And, you know, I was like, thanks, Christopher Columbus, for being a colonialist.
[47:28.320 --> 47:33.520]  But, so, and I kept saying to him, you know, people have different takes on these things.
[47:33.560 --> 47:37.480]  And I don't think science is even... I mean, I was talking to him about the social constructed nature of science.
[47:37.680 --> 47:38.840]  Science is socially constructed.
[47:39.000 --> 47:41.560]  Everybody in here is going to tell me it's an abstract truth, but no.
[47:42.340 --> 47:45.060]  The thing to keep in mind is that... Thank you.
[47:45.720 --> 47:50.680]  Science, as we understand it, as people who have been through...
[47:51.160 --> 48:00.000]  up through undergraduate education or high school, is not the same as what somebody who writes NSF grants constantly...
[48:00.000 --> 48:03.500]  The people who write NSF grants constantly understand that it's a very different process.
[48:03.640 --> 48:06.780]  What we do in school is memorize science, unless you've had a really good curriculum.
[48:07.500 --> 48:09.920]  We are not actually engaging in scientific inquiry.
[48:09.920 --> 48:10.660]  We are not actually...
[48:12.920 --> 48:20.580]  you know, writing the grants and negotiating with the other scientists who are doing similar research and positioning ourselves versus them.
[48:20.980 --> 48:27.280]  So, we forget sometimes that there are these social factors, even in the things that we are memorizing as abstract truth.
[48:27.800 --> 48:31.560]  And it's worth sort of working on our own beliefs about what is true that way.
[48:31.680 --> 48:34.760]  And I was going to emphasize that in another talk, but I'll shut up about it now.
[48:35.200 --> 48:36.160]  But it's something to keep in mind.
[48:36.380 --> 48:37.660]  Anyway, there's somebody else at a microphone.
[48:44.240 --> 48:48.820]  I totally agree that people working in technology should read some social science.
[48:49.480 --> 49:05.820]  I was wondering if... I mean, this is a tough question, but I was wondering, like, if you can make recommendations, or even better, though, if there are a set of recommendations that you know of for people working in technology to get their feet wet in social science.
[49:05.820 --> 49:06.320]  Cool.
[49:06.520 --> 49:07.060]  That's a great question.
[49:07.660 --> 49:09.420]  So, that was Yvonne Nagazarian was the name?
[49:09.940 --> 49:10.400]  What?
[49:10.880 --> 49:11.340]  Agazarian.
[49:11.560 --> 49:12.020]  Agazarian.
[49:12.120 --> 49:14.060]  Yvonne Agazarian in social organizational psych.
[49:16.420 --> 49:19.900]  I've been posting all my course syllabi on GitHub, and...
[49:20.740 --> 49:21.600]  We've been forking courses.
[49:22.160 --> 49:23.820]  ...so that we could collaborate on them.
[49:24.060 --> 49:26.880]  And some of them, I would recommend the reading list.
[49:26.880 --> 49:33.680]  I've got a philosophy of technology course and a course in digital literacies that probably have some good things.
[49:33.860 --> 49:36.720]  Some think... these guys are all kind of Latourian.
[49:36.900 --> 49:38.640]  Yeah, I'm big on Bruno Latour.
[49:38.800 --> 49:40.020]  He's also a fun read, so...
[49:40.660 --> 49:42.780]  Depends on your version of fun read.
[49:43.960 --> 49:46.060]  Some of them are rougher sledding than others, but yeah.
[49:47.120 --> 49:53.300]  I would recommend a pretty classic essay by Langdon Winner called Do Artifacts Have Politics?
[49:53.720 --> 49:54.640]  He's a philosopher.
[49:55.060 --> 49:57.560]  It is a very clear read.
[49:58.000 --> 49:59.240]  That would be one.
[49:59.560 --> 50:08.300]  There's also a classic essay called The Social Construction of Technology, I think, by Trevor Pinch.
[50:08.300 --> 50:16.300]  And that is... yeah, it's about the development of the bicycle in the 19th century.
[50:16.480 --> 50:24.900]  But it lays out a framework for understanding how sort of artifactual and social processes touch and affect each other.
[50:25.280 --> 50:28.600]  If anybody wants these, you can see me afterwards, and I'll write them down.
[50:28.920 --> 50:42.640]  I'm gonna embarrass Christina by also saying that if you Google her name in Atlantic Technology, she's got a great blog post from a couple years ago, which was sort of a blogified version of a class of teachers at Rutgers.
[50:43.460 --> 50:48.380]  So that's a great reading list, and it's also more than... it's sort of a narrativized reading list, so...
[50:49.200 --> 50:50.340]  And read Chris's stuff, too.
[50:50.480 --> 50:54.320]  Actually, Chris's last talk that he gave at HOPE, as well, was sort of a neat picture of...
[50:55.040 --> 50:57.280]  specifically of content farms.
[50:58.160 --> 50:59.260]  Finn Brunton, my friend.
[50:59.400 --> 51:00.180]  Is Finn here?
[51:00.540 --> 51:01.240]  Finn's not here yet.
[51:01.620 --> 51:02.100]  Oh, there he is.
[51:02.180 --> 51:02.540]  He's way in the back.
[51:02.620 --> 51:03.020]  Hi, Finn!
[51:03.020 --> 51:05.260]  Finn's working on a fabulous book about spam.
[51:05.420 --> 51:06.060]  I read it in draft.
[51:06.640 --> 51:11.460]  It is a really beautiful picture of the arms race between technology.
[51:11.580 --> 51:17.460]  And he has a wonderful metaphor about websites that are readable by human eyes and websites that are readable by robot eyes.
[51:17.580 --> 51:21.520]  But theory-wise, like I said, the Everett Rogers...
[51:22.180 --> 51:25.180]  If you really have to, you can read Malcolm Gladwell.
[51:28.040 --> 51:32.820]  Even Chris Dick's article on OLPC, his post-mortem on OLPC, was really, really good.
[51:32.980 --> 51:34.680]  And the other person he's working with...
[51:34.680 --> 51:43.020]  I forget the name of the guy he's working with, but there's another guy at OLPC who he links to, who's continuing to do a lot of good work with OLPC on the social side of things.
[51:43.920 --> 51:44.460]  We what?
[51:44.620 --> 51:45.780]  One more question.
[51:46.260 --> 51:46.400]  Yes.
[51:47.200 --> 51:47.720]  Yes.
[51:48.260 --> 51:53.380]  I sort of wanted to call you out on why do you think that Twitter is sort of a failure?
[51:54.520 --> 51:57.180]  Because it sort of lost its cost?
[51:57.800 --> 52:00.440]  Why do I... I don't think Twitter is a failure.
[52:00.800 --> 52:05.200]  No, no, but in the sense of the move from text mobs to Twitter.
[52:05.460 --> 52:05.560]  Right, right.
[52:05.640 --> 52:10.100]  I think Twitter has actually been a remarkably successful hack of text mob.
[52:10.100 --> 52:21.420]  But I don't think it comes... just because it's the same technology doesn't mean that it comes embedded with the same social beliefs that the technology was meant to foster when it was text mob.
[52:21.460 --> 52:26.540]  But the social beliefs are still... you can embed them into the platform.
[52:27.060 --> 52:37.100]  The thing is that I believe that just because you can set up a Twitter account to follow KenUS, and then you can bump into things that you would have never bumped into if you were like...
[52:38.400 --> 52:39.320]  Yeah, I mean...
[52:39.320 --> 52:41.320]  I think actually... the thing that I... sorry, I'll keep talking.
[52:41.560 --> 52:45.260]  The things that I keep thinking about is actually I feel like Twitter is doing remarkably better than Facebook.
[52:46.380 --> 52:50.400]  And does continue to have that in that they... the company continues to make good decisions...
[52:50.400 --> 52:51.740]  better decisions about privacy than Facebook.
[52:51.960 --> 52:54.160]  Not fabulous ones, but better for the most part.
[52:54.280 --> 52:56.300]  They've gone to bat for privacy every once in a while.
[52:56.500 --> 52:57.920]  Here's what I would say, quickly.
[52:58.180 --> 53:07.660]  I think that there's a... the question is, is Twitter good at serving certain activist causes because it has this sort of text-mobby DNA built into it, right?
[53:07.740 --> 53:13.900]  Is there something about the... the affordances of the platform that allow it to do certain things really well?
[53:16.360 --> 53:19.680]  For sake of time, I will simply say the answer is yes, but...
[53:19.680 --> 53:22.420]  And I don't entirely disagree with you, actually.
[53:22.940 --> 53:29.780]  But I do think for the purposes of this talk, it's important to keep in mind that the two things are not automatic.
[53:29.780 --> 53:31.420]  I don't think.
[53:31.580 --> 53:38.840]  I think even embedded affordances don't make certain social behaviors and don't make certain social beliefs automatic.
[53:39.140 --> 53:47.780]  But primarily, I just think that the relationship between text-mobby and Twitter is a great way to have a conversation about this, right?
[53:47.860 --> 53:56.960]  It's a great way to have an argument about, you know, to what degree are social and technological affordances embedded within technology, because you can see the relationship.
[53:56.960 --> 53:58.140]  The relationship is not hidden.
[53:58.280 --> 54:01.760]  There is an actual genealogical relationship between these technologies.
[54:02.040 --> 54:04.620]  And I think another thing to remember is that human beings have free will.
[54:04.980 --> 54:05.760]  Don't forget that.
[54:05.900 --> 54:09.380]  They will do things like they'll put a cup in the CD drive.
[54:09.500 --> 54:19.280]  I mean, it's just we come up with inventive ways to do things, and to believe that things are ineluctably coded into the technology is to deny free will.
[54:19.340 --> 54:24.980]  And I think we need to just continue to engage with that as we're thinking about this, lest we believe that no longer exists.
[54:25.820 --> 54:26.220]  So...
[54:26.220 --> 54:27.300]  One more question.
[54:27.460 --> 54:27.820]  One more?
[54:28.200 --> 54:28.980]  No, we have stopped.
[54:29.260 --> 54:29.800]  Thanks on our sign.
[54:29.940 --> 54:30.560]  Thank you so much.
[54:30.660 --> 54:32.620]  This is an amazing crowd for 11 a.m.
[54:32.620 --> 54:33.220]  on a Friday.
[54:33.700 --> 54:34.220]  Look at you.
[54:36.100 --> 54:36.820]  I kiss you.
[54:36.820 --> 54:37.060]  I kiss you.