Rich Reflection for Gardner Campbell’s article, A Personal Cyberinfrastructure, and his youtube video, A Personal Cyberinfrastructure Revisited.
Despite the initial definition from the American Council of Learned Societies, I began reading Campbell’s article uncertain about the topic. It soon became clear that he was discussing first how schools began using learning management systems (LMS) due to the difficulty in learning HTML to create their own web content. Many of the digital literacies we’ve discussed are not encouraged within the LMS because it is so structured and does not provide the opportunities for creativity that students need.
Campbell says, “The medium is the message. Higher education almost completely ignored Marshall McLuhan’s central insight: new modes of communication change what can be imagined and expressed.”
Campbell presents the idea of students purchasing web space from a commercial server and each student creating his or her own digital presence on that site and expanding upon it throughout their college career. It is immediately apparent that our own ED F654 class has a similar model. Campbell says, “Students would frame curate, share, and direct their own “engagement streams” throughout the learning environment.”
In addition, Campbell states, “Pointing students to data buckets and conduits we’ve already made for them won’t do. Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances.” As he continues, “Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity.”
From what I can see and have experienced in our class, I think there is a lot of truth to his ideas. The barrier is in educating and training the faculty so that they can appropriately model the example with their own personal cyberinfrastructures. I hope that over time faculty will become increasingly open to this approach. The second barrier to leaving the LMS is the lack of ease in grading. I cannot imagine the nightmare our own instructor goes through trying to track each student’s varied assignments in differing places and submitted at differing times. If he has a logical system for managing that, I would like to know it!
It will probably be a major hurdle to shake off our Blackboard LMS at UAF. The various LMS have become big business and will not lose their lucrative customers without a fight. If the LMS is used simply as a place to aggregate grades, perhaps something cheaper and simpler could be used. Getting faculty to agree would be a major difficulty, just because in my experience, that is the way of faculty.
I particularly liked the end of Campbell’s article: “Those of us who work with students must guide them to build their own personal cyberinfrastructures, to embark on their own web odysseys. And yes, we must be ready to receive their guidance as well.” The recognition that we as faculty are constantly learning from our students as well is important.
In the video portion, Campbell discusses cyberinfrastructure as being a network as an artifact. The cyberinfrastructure itself becomes interesting because it reveals something about the way one finds meaning in the world.
Campbell takes his original cyberinfrastructure ideas even further and advocates operating your own server. Although most people think they cannot run a server, it’s no more complicated than running a computer, according to Dave Winer at http://ec2.forpoets.org/He argues that we should do this at some level because you can build a better artifact by running the server yourself as well as have a better level of understanding of how the internet works.
I think this is a great idea for political reasons as well. If individuals learn to set up and operate their own servers, voices cannot be silenced.
In Campbell’s discussion of Dave Winer, whose blog is at http://scripting.com he also quotes him as saying, “What we want is a distributed publishing system operated by its users. This is the holy grail of the internet, the goal we’re all moving towards.”
Campbell ends with”‘Communication is publishing; it is a distributed means of having a voice that can address the public. The ideal is a distributed publishing system operated by its users. This is more important now than ever.”
Note–I may not have the video quotes verbatim, but made my best attempt to capture them accurately.
