Matt Hampel | matth.org

A post on the University of Michigan’s Community Information Corps (CIC) website announces the launch of Open.Michigan.

The CIC is a place for School of Information folks that “provides students with readings, lectures, practical engagement service opportunities, research projects and social and professional networking connections to launch them into careers as public interest information professionals”

Here is the Open.Michigan homepage. From this screenshot, what is the purpose of the site?

Heaven knows.

Design lesson: explain the purpose of the site on the homepage. “Connecting the global learning community” is not a sufficient explanation.

Ostensibly, it:

represents the diverse collection of Open initiatives on campus – from open access publishing and open archives to open source software and open standards. The site provides greater visibility to the various projects and attempts to expand the dialogue between campus participants and external collaborators.

That is not really a global learning community. It’s an internal site for the people who are already in the system. Cf. the text of the about page, which (unlike the homepage) actually says what the project is about:

Open.Michigan provides a clear view of the many places and ways U-M contributes to our world’s knowledge

…

the U-M Health Sciences Global Access project and the dScribe project; in open source software, the Sakai and SiteMaker projects; in open archives and publishing, Deep Blue, digitalculturebooks, MBooks, and OAIster projects; and in open standards, the IMS Global Learning Consortium work and conferences.

Do you know what any of that stuff is? Browse further, and woah, you’ll actually learn! I’m not quite sure that the site is so much a “part of an emerging paradigm for participatory education on a global scale” as it is a static collection of project abstracts, but it’s a start. A first prod at some sort of aggregation at Michigan, and a laudable one.

Some of the descriptions need a buzzword pruning, though:

This new program will combine continuous, formative and summative assessment of higher order educational outcomes with flexible learning paths for achievement in nine defined competency domains.

One thing interesting from the introductory post on the CIC is a link to a Wiki on some bizzaro Med School server that has lots of training documents. Of note: we learn that rich presentations are converted into (get this) JPEGs for dissemination through Open Courseware. Beautiful, and very Michigan.

I was sent a link to an older UM School of Information project today, and I just had to share it with you. It’s called Community Lab, and here is its abstract:

Despite extensive experience, eliciting contributions in an on-line community is still largely a matter of trial and error. This project will develop theory to predict contribution behavior in on-line communities and will help transfer that theory into practice by using it to develop a set of on-line community design guidelines. The project brings together three teams of researchers (from the University of Michigan, Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Minnesota) with diverse areas of expertise (including economics, social psychology, and on-line recommender systems).

The research team will start with existing theories of voluntary contribution to collective efforts, conduct a set of experiments to test the validity of these theories in the domain of on-line communities, and develop a new, synthesized theory. The experiments will be conducted in the MovieLens community with thousands of active users and an average of 30 new users joining each day. The key scientific significance of this work lies in using Social Science theory to guide design. An interesting broader impact of that approach is the development of a cadre of graduate students with interdisciplinary research experience who will be ready to guide the next generation of on-line community research.

I think this is the sort of project that’s emblematic of the way the School of Information often chooses to approach problems.

The first sentence (“eliciting contributions in an on-line community is still largely a matter of trial and error”) is pretty true in my experience. Of course, we don’t yet know what kind of contributions the study is talking about — monetary, content, time, civic engagement…

But things get bad pretty quickly. The project intends to:

… develop theory to predict contribution behavior in on-line communities and will help transfer that theory into practice by using it to develop a set of on-line community design guidelines.

Which is both a noble and a futile goal. The field of sociology is pretty much past the phase of making general covering laws to apply to underspecified objects. It’s just ridiculous to assume that actors among groups (a) act the same, even if the statistics suggest that they are similar, (b) have similar motivations, and (c) that forms of interaction will be generally appropriate for different groups.

I highly doubt there are significant high-level parallels between the action of the Arabic bloggers Juan Cole reads, the commenters on ArborUpdate, and product reviewers on amazon.com. It might be useful to identify a shared repertoire of actions (I’ll be working on that issue in a more focused form this summer). But we certainly won’t get that from this study, because they are “testing” their (ostensibly generally applicable) theory on one community devoted to…. movie recommendations.

I don’t doubt, though, that they’ll have a good idea of how that one movie recommendation site works when they’re done.

On literature review and theory background, the abstract says:

The research team will start with existing theories of voluntary contribution to collective efforts…

Which is fairly well borne out. Out of 120 or so citations, a couple are for genuine social action research. And throw in a bit of the Tragedy of the Commons and Bowling Alone for good measure. Also cited is … a study of the efficiency of on-campus housing. I’m printing that one now, will report back on how it’s relevant. (perhaps because one of the authors was on the project?)

It seems that the real intent of the project is in the last line:

…the development of a cadre of graduate students with interdisciplinary research experience…

(The 1.2 million continuing NSF grant through UMN that is funding this project is apparently tied to several other initiatives. I’m curious what came out of it)

The University of Michigan Administrative Information Services (MAIS) seeks a creative IT professional with strong business systems analyst experience in security administration and access management.  The selected candidate will join a team of customer service-focused BSAs to support multiple software products and functional areas.  They will be involved in a variety of projects with exposure to new technologies and process improvement.

Translation:

AARGH MAIS CRUSH DESTROY SOUL CRUSH

The UROP program at the UM helps place students with professors in great research settings. I’ve gained a lot from my project.

Unfortunately, they also feel compelled to run a mandatory side program for all participants. It’s an insulting waste of time. Here’s an email I got yesterday:

Hey Scholars-

On Wednesday, we will be having the annual UROP Career Fair. The social sciences portion of the career fair will be held in the Dennison Building. There will be two session: 6-6:45 and 6:45-7:30. You are required to attend AND SIGN-INTO both. I have attached an Excel file with each of your names and the two rooms you are required to report to. Please let me know if you have any questions.

IMPORTANT: please write down the two room numbers of where you’re required to go b/c there will be a lot of people there. If you don’t sign-into both, you will not receive credit for attending. Sorry.

-Doug

Hampel, Matthew: 413 Denn    232 Denn

What will happen in those two rooms is a mystery. Good bye, 90 more minutes of my time.

for oh is the wind up today.

Here are the rubrics for the day.

NUMBER ONE:

East Quad: A living space, full of living souls

Number TWO:

Exercise as a servant of the mind and of the body

Number three:

The horror and the pull of the natural sciences, or, the irrationality of rationalism

Number four:

Food, eternal balm, healer of all wounds

Number FIVE:

Fond farewells, the expansive lure of orientalism, and fighting the entropy of the personal

The new Palmer Commons / Life Science grounds on central campus are cold, uninterrupted, a flat passageway and a windtunnel, and that’s a shame:

Every few yards is another blue emergency light — it’s not safe to be here.

The green areas are raised, off limits, not for you. The ground has no texture. There are benches, hard, fixed, pushed to the side. Nothing is outside. There’s no reason to stop, to meet someone, to talk with colleagues or other students.

There’s a little stage area:

But no power plugs, or lights, or seating.

Compare to a similar intersection of major buildings on Central Campus:

Crowds of people walk here at all hours of the day. When it’s warm, a cafe sets up chairs outside, a hotdog vendor is open for business, political activists and panhandlers accost you. Benches and bike parking are everywhere. Artifacts: historical placks, posting boards teach you the past and the future. Ahead is the arch of West Quad, a transition to the Diag. It’s warm, even thought the temperature isn’t.

Why do we think that big, glass-fronted buildings with lots of flat space

will be pleasing?

They won’t, and they never will be.

The building is built, but there’s nothing stopping us from breaking up the flat:

Make the ground textured. Give it an end, and a narrower path:

Put in big objects, and small objects, and water, and wood:

Change the texture, change the color:

Who is planning North Quad?

The benefit of living in U of M Student Housing is being around people I know and like. But there comes a point when we all want the responsibility and humanity of being in a home — a place where the rooms aren’t always locked, where you can cook dinner, paint your room, and where you don’t get “written up” for playing your music. University Housing doesn’t offer that — and that’s why we all leave.

At the end of year 1, nearly everyone who doesn’t become a Resident Adviser moves out. University of Michigan Housing wonders why — and wants to encourage students to stay.

Well, here’s why we’re leaving:

• The building feels like a hotel. Like an Econolodge, I have to insert my card and type a PIN number into my door, which then automatically locks after five seconds. Unlike an Econolodge, I pay $9,770 a year, not including laundry and other extras. And a “year” isn’t 12 months — it’s eight.
• No or inconvenient common spaces. Some residence halls have tiny, locked rooms. Others have big, empty rooms that require the keycard and a four-digit PIN number. Neither have entertainment systems of any kind.
• Rooms and common spaces do not have wireless internet, so we can’t go work with our friends. Only the Halfass (the cafe, downstairs) and the Benzinger library has wireless — the first is always filled with loud, the second generally so quiet you can’t work well with others. Not even the computer lab has wireless.
• The RC recently held its 40th anniversary, and hundreds of alumni returned. Housing administration refused to unlock the doors, citing “security reasons” (see the next point). The RC ended up hiring a private guard for the entire weekend.
• Building security is a joke. We have to swipe cards to get into the building, the library, the computer lab, and “our” rooms. But one door to the building was unlocked for over a month, allowing anyone free access. Repeated requests for maintenance were ignored. And if someone is waiting at any door, any student will let them in. It’s common courtesy — a facet of civilization that Housing Security wants us to refuse. (The four-digit PIN we need to key into our rooms is not actually secure. It is stored on the card — so if you have someone’s card, you have their PIN.)
• Having Housing Security patrol your “home” is alienating — especially when it’s a different armed officer every night. The officer never attempts to introduce him or herself, either. And how could they, when over 900 people live in the same building?
• No public kitchen space. Cooking is a bonding activity, entertaining, and a learning experience. But Housing purposefully removed the community kitchens from East Quad.
• Students who work in the Cafeteria are not allowed to cook. Actually, they are, if putting frozen vegetables in the steamer counts as cooking.
• The Halfass (our student-run burger joint) once had a unique, alternative menu. Now it has been standardized to have the same institutional fare as the other dorms.
• You can’t take your food from the cafeteria outside to eat. It used to be possible. I tried — even offered to give my MCard as collateral. No go.
• No running water in rooms. Some rooms have sinks left — but when they break, Housing removes them, instead of fixing them.
• Housing staff would rather deny than allow, and administration fights with the programs it is intended to serve. Desk staff and building administrators are generally kind, caring, and compassionate. But the next level up — Housing administration — defaults to denying any request.
• Bathrooms are locked 24-7 (the access card and 4-digit pin are needed to enter). What home has locked bathrooms?
• The facilities reflect their military origins (East Quad, for example, was once a military dormitory). Stall toilets, stall showers.
• All areas are poorly lit. The bathrooms especially — and you can see the patch holes in the wall were lights once existed.
• Prohibited items, a partial list: (how many of these do you have in your home?)
  • wireless networks and wireless network hardware
  • routers
  • hardware firewall
  • candles, incense, oil lamps—lit or unlit
  • coffeemakers without an automatic shutoff
  • halogen lamps or bulbs (all types, including clip-on, torchiere and desk styles)
  • hot plates or any cooking appliance with exposed elements
  • natural, cut trees, branches and/or greens (such as holiday trees, wreaths and garlands)
  • pets, except some fish
  • space heaters
  • toaster ovens
  • toasters
• Residents are not involved in any real administrative functions. The student “government” only hosts parties. Real involvement would mean a seat — and a vote — on the Housing board.
• We are told to “eat healthy” — but the standard meal plan doesn’t even include a simple breakfast.
• Residents used to be able to paint their rooms, creating memories and a connection to the space. No longer. (other colleges allow this, provided that the student either finds someone to accept the room next year, repaints the room themselves, or pays for the repaint)

Many of the complaints I have are against policies that are quite reasonable for a massive, profitable hotel operation. They are not, however, the values of a home. And that’s where the fundamental difference between Housing and the Real World of Living exists.

(historical photos: Kitchen space: John Knox, used under a Creative Commons license; Old Halfass menu: my photo)

The RC Forums Committee decided, without input from the forums, to implement new rules for next semester. The rules were prepared for distribution to all forum members Friday 30 November. Forum leaders were not given time to discuss revisions. I reprint the new guidelines below, discussion is forthcoming.

RC Forums Credit for Winter 2008
Definitions:
Meetings:
Meetings are held on weekly basis and are to be used for planning events,
discussion and education about the forum topic, and community building among the
forum members. Meetings and events are not interchangeable, i.e. an event that
takes place during a meeting time will not be considered a meeting, an extra meeting will not be considered an event.
Events:
Events are gatherings of forum members outside of the regular meetings. Examples
of events: discussions (i.e. book/article/film discussions), guest speakers,
sales/fundraisers, field trips, film screenings, community work, retreats/team
building, or any other event which engages people outside of the forum.

Member Requirements:
•    Members must attend at least:
o    8 weekly meetings
o    2 events
o    1 forum gathering
Note: these requirements only apply to members who elect credit.

Leader Requirements:
•    Leaders must fill all regular member requirements.
•    Leaders must ensure that their forum holds at least:
o    11 weekly meetings
o    4 events
•    Leaders must take attendance at all meetings and events, or have a proxy do so. Leaders must update this attendance on Ctools so that all Fellows can access it.
•    Leaders must attend monthly meetings with the Fellows, as well as accomplish any tasks assigned at those meetings.
•    Leaders must post a short description of each event on Ctools so that the Forum Fellows can approve the events. Leaders will only be notified if their event is not approved for credit purposes, otherwise it will be understood that it counts as an event.
•    Leaders must represent their forum at recruitment and fundraising events or have a proxy do so.
These requirements apply to all Leaders whether or not credit is elected. It is recommended that each forum have 2 Leaders to share these responsibilities.

More on requirements:
Members who receive credit are expected to help the Forum Leaders in the following
ways: running meetings, planning events, taking attendance, acting as a proxy, etc. Leaders are not expected to do these things on their own. Leaders may also seek assistance from members in filling their requirements if necessary. Each Forum will have at most 10 members (excluding Leaders) who receive credit. Whether or not credit is awarded will be decided by the Forum Fellows based on attendance taken by the Forum
Leaders. All other members (including faculty, alumni and staff) may participate as much or as little as they please.

Credit/Leaders Timeline:
December 7th: Mass meeting
January 11th: Deadline for Leader decisions
January 20th: Deadline for electing credit for RC Forums
January 23rd: Drop/Add Deadline
February 15th: Deadline for leadership changes.

By January 11th each forum must have made a decision as to whom their leaders are. If a leader must step down for some reason, another leader must be chosen to replace them. The Forum Fellows are to be notified immediately. Leadership changes are not recommended and will be not accepted after February 15th.

If a member elects credit he/she will receive an override and then must register for RCCORE 309 on Wolverine Access. It should be kept in mind that January 23rd is the Drop/Add deadline. After this date, if he/she decides to drop the Forums, he/she will receive a withdrawal. For each person who elects credit, the Forum Fellows will decide at the end of the semester whether he/she receives Credit or No Credit, based on attendance kept by the Forum Leaders. Before a decision of No Credit is given, a meeting will be arranged with the member, their Forum Leader, and the Forum Fellows to make sure the member has not met requirements.

The Cornell Redesign Blog, a valuable resource for anyone in academic digital development, is back as View Source. The writing retains its unified, entertaining voice and its plethora of embedded hints and strategy. Nice to once again hear from such a talented group of confirmed humans.

The latest in a string of little UROP technology incompetencies: a page of links to internships is actually… a Word document?

(See: Additional Links, bottom of the page, http://www.lsa.umich.edu/urop/summer_fellowships/srid/)

Why do I care so much about these details?