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Sep 16

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Badges! (with Special Reference to Public Folklore) #dmlbadges

As if the worlds that I try to keep up with were not overflowing already, more and more stuff to keep track of keeps coming. For several months I have wanted to take a few hours to get up to speed on the basics relating to the newer life-long-learning/educational reform/online meaning of badges. I had not quite done this, although I had read a few small online accounts and grasped the concept. I still had not taken time to do this background reading when today the phenomena took on a bigger life today.

The MacArthur Foundation awarded a two million dollar grant to HASTAC and the Mozilla Foundation (the Firefox people) for the purpose of funding a Digital Media and Learning Competition centered on the building of badge projects and the associated open technical infrastructure to make it all work. Here is how the MacArthur release begins:

Learning happens everywhere and at every age. Traditional measures of achievement, like high school diplomas, GEDs and college degrees, cannot convey the full range of knowledge and skills that students and workers master. To address this issue, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC and Mozilla today announced a $2 million Digital Media and Learning Competition for leading organizations, learning and assessment specialists, designers and technologists to create and test badges and badge systems. The competition will explore ways digital badges can be used to help people learn; demonstrate their skills and knowledge; unlock job, educational and civic opportunities; and open new pipelines to talent.

There is a great deal of discussion of this new program going on online and the conversation suggests that many folks have already invested a lot of brain power into working out the norms, forms, and aims of the emergent badge-based education and credentialing landscape. I am interested and sympathetic but too new to have any deeply informed opinions (beyond my support for the open source software/open standards aspects, my overall belief in the importance of life long learning, and my recognition of plural educational pathways and diverse learning styles/goals).

As I begin to make sense of the badges approach, I can immediately see some ways that the approach would particularly serve some sectors of the world in which I work. Public folklorists have long pursued for themselves and built for their colleagues robust continuing education opportunities of diverse sorts. Public folklorists are very good at continuing to study and master a range of practical skills of a general sort that can apply to their work–video production, GIS systems, database development, etc. They are also good at providing to their professional community field-specific training events outside of the walls of formal higher education. Workshops and similar events are a staple activity whenever public folklorists gather. While these could be seen as standard continuing education activities typical of any profession, they go along with another dimension that is not so uniformly present in professional life, and that is mentoring and collegial support of a real and meaningful sort. Public folklorists to a high degree help, lookout for, coach, and support one another. Resource scarcity could have produced high levels of competition, but in my estimation it has instead fostered a strong communitarian ethos among U.S. public folklorists. (Its not an absolute quality but a relative one.)

It seems to me that this is an ideal kind of environment for badges to strengthen the the workings of what is present already. Public folklorists in particular learn by doing–in internships and in their jobs (something central to the badge scheme), learn through informal channels and in continuing education formats, and learn within a supportive community of practice. As a very clear way of gaining formal recognition for one’s ever growing skill set and as a way of conveying these skills in online and offline ways to employers, granting agencies, community partners, etc. badges seem very promising to me as a framework for strengthening public sector folklore work. Many of these same points could be made in connection to other areas to which I have ties–museum work and applied anthropology. The digital humanities people are of course already very aware of the badges discussion.

One of the best things about badge programs is that they can be organized by a diversity of groups and agencies (unlike formal higher education, which is built around colleges and universities and their slow moving practices).

In addition to the MacArthur release, see also the Mozilla announcement and their “About Open Badges” page, the competition announcement at HASTAC, and these these posts [1] [2] by Audrey Watters at Hack Education.

I know that the badge business will seem crazy based only on my post (what is it? are they patches?). It will make more sense if one goes to these core sources and check it out firsthand.

Want the downside? Want the “What is totally wrong with all of this?” assessment? For a compelling account of the dystopic potential of badges, check out Alex Ried at Digital Digs.

Sep 15

On “Visualizing the Uneven Geographies of Knowledge Production and Circulation”

Last night I had a chance to attend the Richard Bauman Lecture, a wonderful annual event in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University that honors one of my teachers-turned-colleagues Richard Bauman. This year’s lecture was delivered by anthropologist (and friend of folklore studies) Don Brenneis of the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. I hope to reflect more on his lecture soon, but some visualization graphics published in today’s issue of Inside Higher Education relate closely to his talk, which dealt broadly (and critically) with current transformations in knowledge work and higher education. He had come critical things to say about the growing hegemony of such processes  (recently discussed here, on Savage Minds, and elsewhere) as Impact Factor analysis, journal rankings, etc. Subject to the kind of critique that Brenneis was offering in his talk, the three images published today in IHE also speak to the transformations that he was describing.

Most relevant here is the way that the third graph (shown above) pictures the scale and centrality of the big five commercial publishers that I also discussed in the recent post that has gotten so much attention from readers (thanks all). Everyone should look at the original images in IHE, but the one shown in a small format above is the third of the three. The five largest rectangles represent Elsevier (upper left corner), Springer (to Elsevier’s right), Wiley (middle left), Taylor and Francis (bottom left) and Sage (on the inner corner adjacent to Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley). These are the same five who between them control just under half of the anthropology journals tracked and ranked by Thompson Reuters for such metrics as Impact Factor and Half-Life. I point to the image here because it speaks to the dominance of these large firms over all of scholarly publishing. Burying the lead again, I’ll just say that I resist rather than stand with these publishers.

Visualizing the uneven geographies of knowledge production and circulation – Inside Higher Ed.

PS: I should have noted that the IHE gleaning comes originally from a full report:

Graham, M., Hale, S. A., and Stephens, M. (2011) Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, London, Convoco! Edition.

I consulted the original version of the image shown above to see who some of the smaller publishers shown are. Not-for-profits who are large enough to be labeled include Annual Reviews and the University of Chicago Press (about the same size) and slightly smaller, MIT Press and Johns Hopkins University Press. Chicago, MIT, and JHU are among the largest of the university press journal publishers. It is in the nature of the visualization that the many smaller publishers are represented with squares/rectangles that are too small to label.

Sep 13

How to Hack Academic Book Publishing in Two (Not So) Easy Steps – IHE #hackacad

A wonderfully engaged, positive review of Hacking the Academy by Barbara Fister is in today’s issue of Inside Higher Education. Thank you Barbara.

How to Hack Academic Book Publishing in Two (Not So) Easy Steps – Inside Higher Ed.

Sep 13

Authors Guild Sues HathiTrust and 5 Universities Over Digitized Books

Boo. Authors Guild and others are suing HathiTrust, U Michigan, Indiana U, etc.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/authors-guild-sues-hathitrust-5-universities-over-digitized-books/36178

Sep 12

Folklore Studies and Anthropology Journals included in JSTOR Early Journal Content Program

Among the folklore and anthropology journals included in the JSTOR Early Journal Content Program are the following key titles. Journal of American Folklore (1888-1922), American Anthropologist (1879-1922),  The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1848-1869) and the International Journal of American Linguistics (1917-1922),  Today JSTOR released an announcement indicating that the release of content was complete and providing an announcement that included lists by discipline and title.

Numerous other titles of relevance in archaeology, history, geography, etc. are also included, of course.

Sep 12

On Duke University Press’ Partnership with HathiTrust

News of Duke University Press’ new partnership with HathiTrust Digital Library is discussed [behind a paywall] in a new story by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education. When an openly accessible press release is issued by HathiTrust or by Duke University Press, I will add a link to it.

This agreement is very promising, as it indicates that a significant body of in-copyright Duke titles are going to be made freely available via HathiTrust.

Sep 12

When Ads Attack

Sometime last week I happened to see what my website looks like when I am not logged in and I discovered the new [or new to me] feature in which wordpress.com serves up ads to [not-logged-in] wordpress.com visitors. As the WP folks note: “At WordPress.com, we sometimes display discreet AdSense advertisements on your blog to help pay the bills. This keeps free features free!”

I appreciate the service that wordpress provides to me but I also do not wish to have ads on my website, thus happily I discovered today that I can pay a yearly fee to remove the ads from the site. I have done this and hopefully this step will keep the ads away going forward. I apologize for the ads that have been present in recent weeks (months?). I did not see them on my side or I would have taken care of this sooner.

While it was already newly arrived on my radar, thanks go to Adam Fish for noticing this phenomena and highlighting the discordance of the ads in the context of my website given the kinds of open access, open source, public-interest topics that I often reflect on here. As a specialist in the cultures of media and media production, Adam would be better prepared than I am to reflect on the wider implications of the “discreet AdSense advertisements” (to use WP’s language) that are now a part of the wordpress ecology.

I value many services that are supported through underwriting and advertisements so I am not against ads in a wholesale way. Its just not what I want here and I am very glad that I have the option of paying to make them disappear.

WP.com users can learn more here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/no-ads/

Sep 12

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews [A discussion of her current museum project in the online journal Habitus.]

Sep 11

3 Comments

Where There Is No Vision, We Publish and Perish – Inside Higher Ed

Barbara Fister thoughtfully reflects on the limits of the recent JSTOR announcement and imagines the better world that so many are working to lay the foundations for.

Where There Is No Vision, We Publish and Perish – Inside Higher Ed.

Sep 11

On Museum Anthropology Review

I am very happy to report that the final material for Museum Anthropology Review 5(1-2) was published today, bringing the 2011 volume/issues to a close.

This was the first time that an issue was published with an initial bundle of content and then added to as the year progressed. This represents a kind of transitional strategy bridging older journal publishing norms, in which an issue is prepared and then released into the world as a fully prepared bundle, and the newer pattern in which content is prepared and released into the world as soon as it is ready, item by item. The older pattern has certain hallmarks that many are still fond of, including sequentially paginated pages (in paper-like PDF format) and a table of contents in which articles appear at the top and reviews appear at the bottom. For authors, this format makes for objects that look familiar (to custom-minded observers) on such things as C.V. and annual reports. The cost, of course, is delay in publication, as works pile up in preparation for being bundled up as issues.

The newer approaches leverages the advantages of digital publication platforms and get information in circulation as quickly as possible, something that helps the research community in many ways.

MAR is moving from the older to the newer framework and will probably use the approach adopted for volume 5 again at least for volume 6 next year. This means that volume 6(1) will appear as soon as possible and will initially contain a group of materials from the “top” of the table of contents. Additional reviews will be added to the issue’s table of contents up until the point that additional articles or other content from the top of the table of contents are ready. At that point the effort will switch over to issue 6(2).

Publishing a combined “1-2” issue for 2011 was a valuable step for me personally–beyond these considerations. It allowed me a bit more time this summer to work on other projects, something that I have sorely needed to do. While I had the help of a wonderful graduate student/editorial assistant through the middle of 2010, last academic year (2010-2011) was the first in which I handled the day to day editorial tasks on my own. This was fun and informative, of course, but there is only so much time in the day and it was nice to be able to focus this past summer on other obligations. The combined issue helped make that possible.

From a substantive point of view, 5(1-2) is full of interesting stuff and I am very thankful to the many authors, peer-reviewers, librarians, editorial board members, publishers, and other friends of MAR who have made it possible.

At 154 pages volume 5 is only #4 of 5 in terms of page length, but with 42 discrete contributions it covers a lot of interesting territory, from Captain Cook to the alternative globalization movement; from the history of shoes to the material realities of the current economic crisis. As has been true throughout the MAR experiment, contributions cover a wide diversity of world regions and theoretical, topical, and disciplinary concerns. I am especially proud of the ways that the journal continues to showcase work by the most distinguished senior scholars–generous colleagues such as Richard Bauman, Keith Hart, Marsha MacDowell, Edward T. Linenthal, and Aldona Jonaitis–alongside leading younger scholars, including folks like Karin Zitzewitz, Beth A. Buggenhagen, Elizabeth Hutchinson and so many others. I am also happy that the journal brings together, in what I think is a healthy way, the twinned and entwined concerns that are its focus—museum studies and material culture studies. Rooted in anthropology and folklore studies, MAR has been an effective meeting ground for scholars working in a great many fields. Alongside its folklorists and anthropologists, 5(1-2) features scholars representing the fields of comparative literature, history, art history, fashion studies, architecture, design, communications studies, and religious studies. This diversity is a great strength.

Also speaking to the journal’s diversity aspirations, 5(1-2) was the second issue to feature content in a language other than English. MAR 4(1) had included both French and English versions of Christian Bromberger’s commentrary on the Musée du Quai Branly and now, with 5(1-2) MAR has published a book review concurrently in Portuguese and English. Thanks go to author Lori Hall-Araujo and translator Roberta Crelier for the work on Lori’s review of Mestre Vitalino e artistas pernambucanos.

In conclusion, I wish to especially thank the authors of the issue’s peer-reviewed articles. Richard Bauman’s “Better than any monument”: Envisioning Museums of the Spoken Word is a great contribution to the history of the field, exploring the intersections of linguistic anthropology and museum anthropology. The paper continues his vital research work on the social history of early recording technologies and their intellectual and cultural ramifications. Thanks go to Carrie Hertz’ for her Costuming Potential: Accommodating Unworn Clothes. The article is a rich contribution to contemporary material culture studies, particularly relating to questions of consumption, circulation, reuse, and disposal.

The submission mailbox is always open. Please consider Museum Anthropology Review as a robust not-for-profit, gold open access publishing option for your work in museum and material culture studies.

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