Matt Hampel | matth.org

Lots of great courses in the Residential Courses for Winter ‘09. I’ll be in Detroit, so I won’t be able to take any of these, but here’s an abbreviated list:

Writing in the Real World: Best Practices of Journalism with Susan Rosegrant.

This intensive writing course is designed to give students a solid grounding in the tools and principles of journalism. Students will complete a variety of reporting assignments, ranging from short news pieces to in-depth articles to opinion pieces. Throughout, the emphasis will be on research- and interview-based writing that adheres to the journalistic principles of brevity, clarity, and objectivity. The course will also examine ethical issues, including the responsibilities inherent in being a rigorous reporter and writer.

Political Struggles in Mexico: Seminar and Field Study with Ian Robinson. Neoliberal transformations and popular responses to the same, including a field study in Chiapas or Oaxaca.

History of Computers and the Internet with Paul Edwards. Development, use, and impact of computers from the ancient world to the present.

3D Studio Course Exploring the Art of Burning Man with Jason Wright.

Students will learn accessible methods of forming materials through a series of projects, culminating in the design and material development of a work of public art that responds to the principles and challenges of the annual arts festival known as Burning Man. This class will explore the following concepts and challenges: building sustainable communities, radical free expression, self-reliance, art as a public and non-commercial activity, and the concept of a gift economy.

Found Instruments-Building, Design and Performance with Mike Gould.

Found instruments are everyday objects that are utilized or repurposed as musical instruments. This class identifies not only these everyday objects with which to perform and reconstruct, but also seeks hybrid instruments that combine found objects with instruments of old. The semester will commence with an overview of instrument categories, tunings, and some of the guiding physics behind instruments. This includes important composers and artists from the early 20th century to current artists and emerging technologies (such as using the iPhone as an instrument). The class goes as a group (and individually) to seek materials for designing and building instruments. The class also covers the basics of musicianship, composition, form, improvisation and playing as an ensemble.

Quantitatively Speaking with David Burkam

We begin with a discussion of what is typically meant by “quantitative reasoning,” and then focus on how such reasoning is implemented (sometimes appropriately, sometimes not). One of the main goals of the course is to learn “basic survival skills” for today’s number-intensive world. Using Best’s Damned Lies and Statistics and Huff’s How To Lie With Statistics, we learn how to critique conclusions drawn from a survey, a graph, or a table of numbers. We explore how statistics can reveal underlying linguistic patterns in prose and poetry, explore some of the vast research literature on gender and race differences (including gender differences in attitudes toward love), and read books like Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics.

Pills, Politics and the Public Good and Research Seminar on Ethics, Politics, and the Pharmaceutical Industry with Hank Greenspan

Major topics include: A perceived “ethics problem” within the pharmaceutical industry, critiques of industry’s relationship with the FDA, post-Vioxx concerns about drug safety, statutes shielding drug companies from civil liability (lawsuits), direct-to consumer advertising, direct-to-physician advertising (e.g., “drug reps,” etc.), industry-funded research and medical journals, the role of consumer and patient advocacy as responses to perceived problems.

Food, Land, and Society with Catherine Badgley

The course is an introduction to the modern food system at a time when many of its major trends are in flux. Course topics include the ecology of agricultural ecosystems, the cultural and environmental history of food production, and the current ecological and economic crises in agriculture, especially as they affect native species and ecosystems, climate change, rural communities, and the interconnections between food and agriculture in rich countries and rural livelihoods in the global south. The course integrates scientific, economic, and historical dimensions of modern food production, consumption, and food policies.

Michigan Marketing and Design responded fast to Jacob Nielsen’s post on all-caps, right-justified navigation (the RC hasn’t, yet…)

I’m surprised he didn’t mention the 50 pixels of wasted space on either side of the navigation (highlighted green in the image below). Whitespace is necessary, I understand, but in this case it could be well used to increase the font size (and therefore readability) significantly.

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.

Breaking news:  CTools does not have an HIG document.

(raise your hand if you actually were surprised)

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?

Books new on the shelf in the last month-ish, categorized by approximate primary use:

Philosophy of Sociology, SOC 508

Actually a pretty awesome course on the nature of research methods and the formation of discipline. Professor curates changingsociety.org, does interesting video interviews with top sociologists.

• Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences / Jon Elster
• Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory / Green & Shaprio
• Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences / Mahoney & Rueschemeyer
• Social Mechanisms / Hedström & Swedberg
• Department and Discipline / Abbott

UROP research

• The Rational Guide to Building SharePoint Web Parts / Darin Bishop. While you’d expect this to contain only the repeated phrase “danger — run”, it does not, so it fails to fulfill the promise implicit in its title. That, or it sets up some sort of paradox that will destroy us all.
• (two other books related books, whose titles will sour this post, but are central to the success of my project)

General Awesomeness

• The Media Lab / Stewart Brand
• Finally: A Pattern Language /Alexander et al, thanks to a well-timed Borders gift card.
• Imagined Communities / Anderson, my first real book that BookMooch allowed me to take.

Christmas Sociology

• Structural Holes / Burt, reviewed and recommended on Vacuum some time ago.
• Orality and Literacy / Ong, which, as the title suggests, links oral and literary cultures;
• Emergence / Steven Johnson, on emergence theory and group power;
• Turf Wars / Gabriella Gahlia Modan, on linguistics and the formation of conceptions of place in neighborhoods.

And, finally:

How to Marry the Man of Your Choice (imagine the o in choice is a gold band) / Margaret Kent. Required reading for anyone entering a serious relationship. Sample chapter available.

College students are connected, diverse, and social. We have friends across the world, and they enjoy visiting us. In the dorms, though, their options are limited: all access is controlled by swipe cards and key codes. Rooms, especially single-occupancy rooms, are small. Cafeteria meals are expensive.

So, create a communal space where several travelers and their hosts can stay for a sensible amount of time. Offer beds, tables, chairs, and warmth. Encourage the socialization, not isolation.

Lend the guests restricted access cards, so they can use the bathrooms or enter the building. Provide reduced-cost meals for visiting and prospective students — more than the deficient three per semester currently offered in the standard meal plan. Create a set of reasonable guest rules, and enforce them well.

See also: Why upperclassmen do not return to the dorms (21 Dec. 2007)