So I’ve exported everything here to engatiki.wordpress.com, and I’ll be picking up from there. We’ll see how it goes.

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I really think that’s true. Part of the project of digital humanities has to be thinking about how electronic content is produced. I don’t mean just thinking critically about authority, or even about what “New Media” might mean. That’s part of it. But we need also to approach digital material with the same eye toward history and accountability with which approach material texts and the material world in general. 

I started out thinking about the idea of “human-powered search,” and that set off a train of free association that ended with Google’s old “PigeonRank” April Fool’s prank. What makes PigeonRank funny is that no one outside of a few mathematicians really understands how search works. Unless you hang out with cryptographers and AI hackers (or programmers under NDA with Google), even the most tech-savvy person you know only kind of understands how it all works. As far as most people are concerned, it may as well be a flock of pigeons in a warehouse. When we throw people into that equation, it starts to get scary.

Google, of course, has their famous “don’t be evil” policy, and the pioneers of human-powered search over at Mahalo are good people. I used to be lead blogger at one of Jason Calacanis’ other properties, and Mahalo’s ex-Editorial Director is going to be my best man. I’ll vouch for them.  The history of technology, though, tells us that good ideas end up moving offshore for production, and that greed eventually trumps all other production concerns. In the inevitable cycle of merger and acquisition, how long before some adolescent in China is answering questions about trivia in between sewing shoes and gold farming for the Warcraft black market? When will the algorithm stop finding Jesus and start finding sweatshops in Guam?

What then?

Of course, I’m being a little hyperbolic, here, but a successful digital humanities will eventually require a fusion of critical theory and canny consumerism.

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The first has to do with administrator mindset: The network exists for the users, and you should be protecting it for them, not from them. If your users are in your threat model, the problem is probably you, not them (of course, we’re talking about sysadmins, not webmasters of public sites, here). If you’re suspicious and go looking for trouble, though, you’ll probably find it. We’ve all worked with admins like that–and at some point, some of us have probably fallen into the trap of being admins like that–so most of us can recognize why that attitude isn’t productive.

The second idea is potentially transformative: policy and attitude influence user behaviors as much as they respond to them. Part of it has to do with the path of least resistance. If the policy makes it difficult for regular users to do their jobs because of fear that some users will abuse their privileges, then even normal users will start looking for ways to circumvent the system. This is why the RIAA approach to copyright fails so miserably. But part of it also has to do with fostering an general spirit of trust, and with the way technocultural knowledge is disseminated. Users look to policy to establish norms. If the policy implies that most users are devious hackers attempting to subvert the system to their own uses, then that is what users will assume they should be. If, on the other hand, the cues point toward a norm of responsible use, the majority of users will pick on that, too.

This is why CYA is a horrible guiding principle for any organization, and why one of the worst things policy makers can do is write policy for corner cases. There will always be bad apples, but write the policy for the general case–for how to use the system, not for how not to use the system–and deal with the exceptions as exceptions.

This insight, of course, has a much wider application than computing systems. It applies in almost any social setting. It is closely related, for instance, to the problems we see throughout the academy with “helicopter parents” and the resurrection of in loco parentis on campus: if you treat students like they’re not adults, they’ll never start to act like adults.

We talk about people “rising to the challenge,” but we never stop to realize that the reverse is also true. Thus, Savage’s Theorem:

People will generally meet your expectations of them.

It’s been a busy, international week for me and my staff. As I was getting back from San Salvador, one of my technologists was heading off to Puerto Rico to accompany one of our biology classes on a field trip to study tropical ecology. Trying to wrap up the details from a continent away was a bit of a logistical challenge, especially since equipment problems and arcane airline regulations (who knew you needed media credentials to travel with more than 100 lbs. of A/V equipment?) caused some last-minute panic; I really don’t know how we functioned before Skype. In the end, though, we got everything and everyone we needed down there in working order.

The goal was to do daily video podcasts starting last Sunday, but a hectic production schedule and unreliable network have meant we didn’t get the first episode up until today. It’s up now though, and the rest should be following soon, so you can follow the adventure at home at http://itac.edublogs.org/category/podcast/tropical_ecology/.

I just finished organizing the photos from the San Salvador trip, and that seems as good an excuse as any to finally talk a little bit bit about the conference itself. The problem, of course, is that I really don’t have a lot to say about it, mostly because I spent the bulk of the weekend completely out of my depth.

I was expecting it to be heavily focused on professional development, best practices, and other practical aspects of distance learning, and that turned out not to be the case. Instead, it was really three conferences in one, all focused on how to leverage communication infrastructures to to improve the quality of life and education for students throughout the Americas. The discussion centered on things like the development of an international course on Central American poverty, opportunities for student and faculty exchange, and delivering education to remote an impoverished communities using radio and television. One session featured a coordinator from Australian Catholic university making a plea for faculty from the Americas to get involved with delivering a certificate in business to students in Burmese refugee camps in Thailand. The Friday afternoon schedule was essentially scrapped in favor of extending that discussion about organizing a social network to foster coordination of Social Justice initiatives among the organizations represented, and the Jesuit community at large. The entire conference left me dumbfounded, in a good way. It was a far cry from the discussions of Blackboard administration tricks and other shop talk I was expecting, and it really would have taken longer than the few days we had to wrap my head around it.

Attending the conference, though, was a tremendous experience. I met some amazing people who I won’t soon forget, and with whom I hope to work more closely in the future. Simply being around so many people actively dedicated to making the world a better place was inspiring and, I’d like to hope, motivating. And in the end, there were some good practical pedagogy chats, too.

(*The picture is from dinner the last night. It is the second half of a ham and cheese sandwich that came out of the kitchen as an unexpectedly battered, deep fried, and absolutely massive ham and cheese sandwich. In the hands of two of my fellow conference goers, it became first a piece of dorm furniture, then a volcano–that’s cole slaw spewing out the top–and then, with the addition of some strategically-placed sugar, a ski slope, and left be literally laughing so hard I was in tears. That so much was accomplished with so little material is, I think, a fitting metaphor for the entire weekend.)

Volcano Movie

Not quite sure what happened, but YouTube only took :15 of video before. The full movie is above.

Last round of pics from San Salvador are up over at . We visited the volcano and the Mayan Ruins at Joyas de Cerén and San Andrés–as well as the chapel where Óscar Romero was killed, and his home–yesterday. The Volcano was stunning, the ruins were fantastic, and the Romero’s home was very moving, particularly the wall of plaques sent by people from all over the world thanking him for miracles.I also shot some video, below, of the volcano, which was absolutely breathtaking. It includes some shot of the small (farms? orchards? I’m not really sure what a small collection of coffee trees is) we passed on the way up where people grow coffee on the side of the volcano. The camera didn’t really capture what were were seeing–the street was too narrow and the lans angle wasn’t wide enough, but all I can say is this: the next time you’re in Startbucks, think about the people who grew that latte.