Social reading

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Friday last week I did something I seldom do. I went to listen to a master's thesis presentation where I was neither the advisor nor the examiner. I just saw the title of the thesis/presentation and thought it sounded interesting, and as it fit my schedule neatly I went to listen to Johannes Koch (previous student in a course of mine) present his master's thesis; "Social reading: A study of computer-supported literature-discussions". I haven't read the thesis, so this blog post is exclusively based on his presentation and the topic is the assumptions and ideas behind the thesis.

The history of e-books can be said to have started 1971, when Project Gutenberg kicked off. Many different devices and document formats (.pdf, .epub) have come (and some have gone), but the breakthrough came with the Amazon Kindle in 2007.

Johannes has worked at/for a small Danish company, riidr, and his task was to design a "social e-book reader" What he actually did was to design and build a prototype (pre-study of user needs --> design --> build prototype --> evaluate). I don't know if he has built a "social e-book reader" as much as a tool to share text annotations within a group. I have used a shared annotation tool myself (Diigo) for the specific purpose of sharing comments on evolving thesis drafts with a group of students.

Johannes reasoning went something like this; today everything moves to the web and becomes "social", so why not build a social e-book reader? Many activities that we formerly did alone, have now moved to the web and have become activities that we do together, so why not read books "socially"? It could be construed that while the act of reading is something we do in private, reading has at the same time always been a social activity; we have always discussed the books we read with our friends, so it is only natural to build a computer system that supports such an activity. What is great now (with e-books and e-book readers) is that both the text/book itself as well as the comments can inhabit the same space. We don't need to refer to things that are elsewhere in cumbersome ways (see page 293), but can link to them directly - "you can share your thoughts on the book as you read it" (Johannes). Johannes referred to Readmill - started by some of our (KTH/Media technology) students - but I don't enough to be able to tell how Johannes' ideas and Readmill's differ from each other.

In practice, Johannes had had his share of problems. He found informants at the site bokcirklar.se [book circles], but most people there were a little older and not necessarily very technologically sophisticated. He apparently had to spend a lot of time initially performing tech support for his informants... Up until this point in the presentation, I had wondered who is supposed to use this software tool and for what purposes and in what context. Only at this (late) point did I understand that the genre he had worked on was fiction. It would have been better had he clearly stated what specific problem he was trying to solve earlier in his presentation. Instead we got information about how a specific technical feature had been implemented (highlighting a sentence of text in an e-book) - a not uninteresting, but still rather minor detail in the larger whole.

I had the opportunity to ask questions after the presentation and they mostly concerned who was supposed to use the tool, in what context and how it's use was imagined. Is the idea that you will comments "whenever" - just after you've read a sentence of a paragraph, or is commenting something you are "supposed" to do after you have read a chapter?). I very much tried to understand the context of use as I think that reading and discussing a book/text differs a lot depending on what kind of text you read (course literature or fiction?), where and why you read it (to pass an exam or for your own pleasure?) and who you read it together with (people with which you have stable relationships or "anyone" on the Internet)? These issues were not very clear in the presentations, at least not initially, and had to be inferred.

My initial reaction when I heard the presentation was that my willingness to leave comments and the effort I would invest in these comments is not independent of, but rather embedded in the kind of relationship I have with those who will read the comments and my expectations of they reciprocating by providing comments of their own (and my belief in the first place that these are interesting people who will leave interesting comments that will "extend" my experience of the book in question - i.e. that there will be a net benefit for me to participate in this activity). Can it be satisfactory (or how satisfactory is it) to discuss a book independently of the social relations you have with those you discuss the book with?

If I was part of a tight-knit group that met once per month and we felt a "social e-book reader" was a good way to exchange comments in-between our meetings or to "extend" our conversations to an online space, I would probably have a go at it. But if the social e-book reader was rather a way to comment books and share these comments with "everyone", I probably would not bother. This is also the reason why I "tormented" Johannes with these kinds of questions several times. In the first kind of group, half the benefit of discussing books would be the heightened understanding of the text itself, and the other half would be the emerging common understanding not only of particular books, but also of (those specific) particular persons. Discussing books together, we might grow together in more than one sense. My concern is that decontextualized discussions about books on the Internet might turn into war-like arguments (not initially, but some time after the usage of such a tool would take off).

Another concern I have is that the possibility of leaving comments at any single moment might detract the reader from the process of reading itself. You need to concentrate and shut out the world when you read a text. But what will you concentrate on? The text, or, the comments you might write about the text you are reading right now? If you concentrate on the latter, won't that detract you from your reading experience, and won't your understanding of the book be impacted negatively - as well as the quality of your comments (like with any kind of multitasking)? This is a question that of course merits a study of its own of the actual habits of people who do social reading. But perhaps I worry too much, or even think to much.

Another related question has to do with the quality of the comments. I would presume that the more time, care and effort that goes into any endeavor, the better the resulting quality. So would hastily jotted down comments lack quality? I would presume so, but you could argue that it's better to have more comments from more people (albeit of a lower average quality) than to have fewer comments (or reviews only from bona fide literature critics). I would on the other hand not read 100 comments if only a handful would add something at all to my understanding of the text in question. For me it's a straightforward matter of comparing costs (time) and benefits (deepened understanding). Sometimes there's something to be said for exclusivity. KTH wouldn't be KTH if positively anyone could come here, rather than only the better-than-average students.

These musings make me think of the fact that everything that is technically possible is not necessarily desirable, and sometimes the simplest solutions (i.e. make reading "social" in the old-fashioned pre-computerized way) might the best. Johannes did however know from reading the log files that people didn't really interrupt their reading to leave a comment, but rather seemed to wait until they finished reading (perhaps waiting for the chapter or their reading session to end).

In the end I can think of different types of books (fiction - non-fiction - textbooks) and I can imagine that a social e-book reader would be more suitable for some types of texts and some contexts than for others. I think non-fiction, for example self-help books of different kinds would be a good genre to start with. No matter if you read a book about child upbringing, how to deal with you cocaine-snorting spouse, how to successfully negotiate a better salary or how to survive a psychopathic boss, the option to discuss these books and add your own comments and stories could truly extend the value of the book and heighten the (collective) reading experience.

The thesis itself seems to be solid but I haven't read it and this is not a text about the thesis, but rather about the very ideas behind the thesis. After the thesis has been published on the web, I will link to it.

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What is radio?

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I've already written about the course "Future of Media" and this year's theme which is "The future of radio / Radio of the future" in earlier blog posts (here and here). This is a note about some thought-provoking ideas presented by one of our guest lecturers, Daniel Johansson.

Daniel was a guest of ours already last year when the theme was "The future of music / Music of the future". His message then was powerful as he stated that we are undergoing a shift where we to a lesser extent are paying for a recording of music (a CD or an Itunes song) and to a larger extent are paying for the performance of music (a live concert, or a service like Spotify).

On Spotify, you pay a flat fee (100 SEK/month) and your money is divided and sent in different directions depending what you have listened to during that month. If you listen to 1000 different songs, your 100 SEK is divided into 1000 parts and sent in 1000 different directions. If 100 of those 1000 songs are Lady Gaga songs, Lady Gaga gets 10 of your 100 SEK. In reality, most of the money stays with the record company and all the Lady Gagas out there usually get a pittance (same is true for the composers), but let's call that an "accident" rather than the "essence" of this new way of distributing and paying for the music you actually listen to (rather than the music you own and can choose to listen to or not). We are thus moving from a copy paradigm to a streaming paradigm where music will work just like water or electricity. In some way and in some form, you pay for your usage.

Where revenue from analog distribution of music has fallen steeply in the last decade, revenue from digital distribution has risen steeply, but what had been gained by way of digital distribution does not make up for the losses in analog distribution, so there is less money in the music industries right now than what there was 10 years ago.

Daniel has since then consulted for Swedish Radio and could thus come back also this year and talk about music and radio. He had several different suggestions for what radio has been and what it is:

- Radio as a gadget, a radio set

- Radio as a companion, as comfort and a habit (turning on the radio each morning or in the car)

- Radio as availability, as a playlist or a feed that is always there for you

- Radio as a filtering mechanism (with editors doing the filtering/recommendation service)

- Radio as brands (radio stations)

What is radio? What is the "essence" of radio - rather than a historical "accident"? We may have believed that the essence of radio was the radio set 50 year ago, but the radio set has since been phased out/integrated into iPods and cell phones without radio-as-content disappearing, so what radio is (once-and-for-all) is debatable, or up for grabs.

Daniel's provocative suggestion is that the essence of radio in the age of Internet convergence and abundance is 1) a filtering mechanism that 2) is published (broadcasted in an earlier age). The essence of radio has for him thus become the function of someone making choices of what song to play next, and making those songs (or choices) available to others. According to this definition, a single individual can become a "radio station" and the title of his talk was actually "When everyone becomes a radio channel". His definition does presumably also answer the questions he himself posed before his lecture:

- Is "listening to a Spotify playlist recieved from the Sveriges Radio P3 API on Radiofy.se" radio or something else?

- Is "a video recording from the studio during a live show at Mix Megapol that is published on YouTube" radio or something else?

I'm not really finished thinking about this yet, but I did have a question for him. At an earlier lecture, we were presented with information about the music "output" from different Swedish radio stations. In last year (2010):

- Swedish Radio public service channel P3 played 13848 songs a total of 63549 times.

- Commercial radio channel Mix Megapol played 1461 songs a total of 100945 times.

- Commercial radio channel Rix played 559 songs a total of 114019 times.

As can be seen, Rix plays the same songs over and over again (the average song was played over 200 times!), while P3 plays the average song less than 5 times. Statistics such as these are right now the basis of reimbursing artists and composers (and the record companies and publishing houses that own the rights). In order to be able to reimburse artists and composers in a streaming radio paradigm, someone would have to have the same kind of detailed information not just about commercial radio stations, but about all radio stations and/or all listeners. The information about what is transmitted on "radio" (remember that everyone is/can be a radio channel), or what everyone listens to would have to exist somewhere. I asked about this as I found the concept slightly worrisome and creepy. Daniel's answer is that this information already exists - Spotify has the information about what every single person listens to and it is the basis of reimbursing musicians and composers (and everyone else who wants a piece of the action).

Daniel's lecture raised a lot of questions that are unanswered right now. Perhaps some of them will be explored by my students in the course? Who takes "responsibility" for the content? In a world of active listeners, every listener puts a lot of time into selecting what song to listen to next, or what playlist or radio channel to listen to. But can everyone be an active listener? If everyone is busy making choices and being a radio channel, who are the listeners? Does not a "radio channel" imply that it has listeners (plural), and that some listeners will continue to be rather passive? Don't some people want to hand over the responsibility to filter/edit to someone else? I mean, not everyone can have as a hobby to spend time and make choices about what song to listen to next, right?

I made a connection to my RSS reader that collects "news" from lots of blogs and other sources on the Internet. Is this a newspaper? "Yes" says Daniel, but only if I make this "newspaper" available to others. If I "publish" it ("Daniel's selection of news"), then it becomes a newspaper. One could (again) ask if it is a newspaper even if it has no "subscribers"? This all makes my head spin. While the ideas are intriguing, it feels like they raise as many (or more) questions than they answer... I guess that's where we're at right now. Hopefully I will have a better grip on things after the course and the students' projects are finished at Christmas.

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Books I've read lately

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"Books I've read recently" is a recurring topic and here is the previous blog post (same topic, different books). I actually read most of the books below before the summer, but I like to gather some books together in these blog posts and for some reason it took a couple of months to read the last 25 pages of one of the books below. All three books below are books that I have owned for some time, but for one or another reason have not come around to read until now.

T. L. Taylor is an acquaintance of mine, I think we met at a conference in Australia in 2003 for the first time. She present results that has afterwards been incorporated into her ethnography of the massively multiplayer online game Everquest, "Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture" (2006). Five years is a long time and the position of the one-time king-of-the-hill Everquest has long ago been usurped by World of Warcraft and other more modern games. Fortunately, that doesn't matter much as the book focuses on people (players, gamers) and their behaviors, rather than on the technology itself. It is right up my alley and I very much like the perspectives she presents in her book, including how she attends an Everquest convention, the description of networks of relationships spanning and tying together both the online (game) and the offline (real-life) worlds, on the instrumental play of power gamers and raiding/uber guilds, on women gamers and on combining the dual roles of being a player as well as a researcher.

Malcolm Gladwell's "The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference" (2000) is one of those popular science/pop culture books that you just have to have read (much like Levitt and Dubner's "Freakonomics" or Anderson's "The long tail"). I had high hopes, but feel that the book didn't live up to these. Trying to transfer characteristics of medical epidemics into the world of trends and ideas, the book is supposed to explain how small changes (can) have big effects, but to me it just didn't come together, but rather came out as a muddle of half-baked ideas, bloomy language and not-very-stringent chains of reasoning. The book tried to bite off too much, trying to explain too many phenomena with a long string of interesting, perhaps even captivating stories (anecdotes), but without enough backing. Or perhaps there were just too many ideas, making it difficult to see a red thread or discern what ideas are more and what ideas are less important to Malcolm's line off reasoning. While the book was entertaining (lots of examples), it just didn't come together for me.

I bought Albert Hirschman's "Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states" (1970) quite some time ago but can't remember exactly why. I do however think the title says it all - who hasn't worked or interacted with an organization or a company where their products or services were less than perfect? The book is mostly about the tradeoff between "exit" and "voice" strategies - when should you complain in order to try to change things (voice - a political choice) and when should you just move on (exit - an economic choice)? Voice covers the whole gamut from faint grumblings to violent protests, and exit includes everything from switching to another brand/product/service to quitting your job (or deserting from the army). Albert for example asks questions about what difference a monopoly does, and under what conditions will one option prevail over the other:

"When the consumer has been dissatisfied with an inexpensive, nondurable good, he will most probably go over to a different variety without making a fuss. But if he is stuck with an expensive durable good such as an automobile which disappoints him day-in and day-out, he is much less likely to remain silent."

"the role of voice would increase as the opportunities for exit decline, up to the point where, with exit fully unavailable, voice must carry the entire burden of altering management to its failings"

"Latin American powerholders have long encouraged their political enemies and potential critics to remove themselves from the scene through voluntary exile. The right of asylum [...] could almost be considered as a 'conspiracy in restraint of voice'."

Have you read any of these books (or would you like to)? What is your opinion about them?

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Green Futures

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I went to a two-day workshop/conference, "Green futures: From utopian grand schemes to micro-practices" in Norrköping this week. It was single-track event with a dozen speakers of which 2/3 were Swedes and the rest were international guests. The program stated that:

"The symposium analyses alternative socio-environmental futures on the basis of the following areas:

- Analysis of contemporary and/or historical utopias/ecotopias/ideas on alternative futures presented in for example architectural visions, politics, or popular culture

- Analysis of existing utopian/alternative practices. How to go beyond current categories, hegemonies, centers, normalities - queer, post-capitalist ecofeminst etc. strategies?

- Theoretical reflections on the tension between what may be described as mainstream and alternative images of the future - alternative in what sense and in comparison to what?

- Reflections on how "utopian" visions and ideas turn "real", processes that enable institutional change, how radical initiative travel or spread and how they change during the process of going from the marginal to the mainstream."

There is nothing in the program itself what would seem to point in any specific disciplinary direction, and so it would not be unfeasible to imagine the people from sociology and psychology, literature and engineering to be represented at the event. For some reason though, people from a few specific backgrounds where overwhelmingly represented both as speakers and as audience at this event; architects, city planners and geographers. My hunch was that this had to do with 1) disciplinary background of the organizers and 2) a perceived responsibility, prerogative or mandate of people in these disciplines to think and to talk about the future (in relationship to and in terms of the build environment) and of formulating and discussion visions of what society could be or become. My hunch was confirmed by one of the two organizers, my friend/acquaintance Karin Bradley.

While many of the presentation were interesting to me in an abstract sense, I think I will have any practical use for only a few of them, and none had much to do with information technology. The highlight for me was hearing (and meeting) Alf Hornborg, a professor in human ecology, who gave a talk about technological utopianism called "Why solar panels doesn't grow in trees". He started by showing a map with a legend I've never seen before, namely GDP per square kilometer. This map is congruent with a world map of nighttime electricity usage, leading to the observation that money and technology and ecology are intimately intertwined, but that we seldom see this connection being emphasized. We usually instead see and treat these three areas separately. Where in the world is advanced technologies happening? Look for the money (GDP/km2). Hornborg's view on technology is so radical that it is way beyond this blog post to discuss it here beyond saying that to him, technology is not so much about progress, as it is about globally redistributing wealth, (embodied labor) time, energy and (the fruits of) productive land use. See further his book "The power of the machine: Global inequalities of economy, technology, and environment" (2001).

I also liked Karin Bradley's talk about commons, commoning and peer production in both software/online phenomena as well as in commons-based housing, agriculture and energy provisioning. How can certain principles that are embodied in online/peer produced social media phenomena be generalized to also encompass (certain aspects of) physical goods - taking into account the difference of non-rival vs scarce resources? Surplus resources can be commoned, but where everything is infinitely reproducible online, many real-world/offline resources can not be seen as "surplus". What are the implication for commoning virtual vs physical resources? Me and Karin have common interests in the commons from differing-but-complimentary perspectives, and this is a great starting point for possible future collaborations. To be continued...

A third who gave an interesting presentation was Catherine Gibson. She hastened through a number of different things, but what I really liked was a table where she had summarized a lot of different phenomena and divided them into 1) market, alternative market and non-market transactions, 2) wage, alternatively paid and unpaid labor, and 3) capitalist, alternative capitalist and non-capitalist enterprises. Alternative market transactions are for example fair trade, alternative currencies, underground market and barter, while non-market transactions are for example household sharing, gift giving, hunting, fishing, gleaning, poaching and theft. The table did unfortunately not come from a specific text/publication, but she instead directed me towards the research project "diverse economics" and the website communityeconomies.org.

Other things I want to keep track of and remember from the conference were:

• I had a great conversation with Martin Hultman. He suggested I get in contact with two of his colleagues at Umeå University; Finn-Arne Jörgensen who is interested in the intersection between technology and environmental concerns, and, Astrid Mager who is interested in the norms, values and ideas that are built into search engines.
• "Hackitectura" is a cool name for (Spanish) architects being inspired by hacker principles!
• Some participants (notably Alf Hornborg) suggested that it might actually be desirable for society to slow down the pace of technological innovation. This made me think of a podcast I recently heard on This American Life called "When patents attack". So-called "patent trolls" are a pain in the ass and create uncertainty in the tech business. The fact that there might be a broad-but-fuzzy patent somewhere that sort of covers what you do in your startup company acts as a wet blanket on innovation, and as a tax on more established companies (and their products that we all love to buy). When I heard the radio show, patent trolls sounded like the biggest waste in history. But as a way of slowing down the pace of technological innovation, what they do is pure brilliance, especially taking into account that it makes stuff not happen or become more expensive without using any natural resources at all. It might very well be that the patent trolls are so much more effective than the Luddites ever where...!
• Something I wondered was if there would have been a difference if the conference was called "from dystopian grand schemes to micro-practices"? Would we end up in the same place and with the same suggestions? There are a couple of movements with a dystopian bend, most notably the Dark Mountain project/movement. How do their ideas and proposals for going forward differ from more utopian schemes? Or don't they in the end?
• This made me think of my master's thesis proposal on "social media and sustainability". It would be great writing up a similar proposal but focusing not on the "utopian" Transition Town movement, but rather on the "dystopian" survivalists and their use of social media.
• Recent readings also made me think about adding a normative dimension to this master's thesis proposal and to my thinking about computer use in general. Some use of computers is truly a boon to humanity, but we can't disregard the fact that much is a waste of time. Inspired by Clay Shirky, I think we can make a difference between lean-back (TV-like use) and lean-forward (active) use of computers. But even the active, creative use of computers can be further divided up and Shirky makes a difference between personal, communal, public and civic use of computers and (social) media.

I met NPR Planet Money!

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This past week my course, "Future of media" - this year featuring "Radio of the future/future of radio" started (see the previous blog post). I was extremely happy to have bagged a guest from my no. 1 favorite radio show (podcast), NPR Planet Money.

I think the guys doing that show are brilliant, turning "boring" economics into great radio. I'm actually amazed that they manage to churn out two 25 minutes long radio shows twice per week, week after week, and that these radio shows are riveting. I've been glued to the program ever since I listened to it the first time a year ago. As a service to my students, I listed a dozen or so of my favorite shows from the past year for the to listen to. I'm sure there is something for everyone there.

Our guest from Planet Money was Adam Davidson, co-founder and co-host of the show. This is who he is and what he talked about. It was great having this voice, and this agile mind that I have heard week after week right there, in our classroom. Ah, I "forgot" to mention that Adam was in New York, visiting our class through Skype. We chose a late afternoon time slot in Stockholm so that Adam, six time zones behind us, could connect to us in what was to him morning in NY.

I was of course a little nervous and worried a lot beforehand about different things that could go wrong; what if there was a problem with the connections, or with the sound, or if Adam wouldn't answer when we called him up? But despite having to do it over a wireless network connection, it worked like a charm for the most part, with only the sound failing us slightly now and then. It's the first time a have a remote guest appearing through Skype, but the overall successful execution made an impact on me personally - with some added preparations, it really is possible to invite anyone anywhere in the world to give a guest lecture!

Well, there were of course a couple of things that were a little difficult. We connected my computer, with the Skype window open, to a projector that projected the image of Adam on to a big screen. He started by giving a talk, and I turned the computer around so that he could see the class through my computer's camera. When his talk came to an end, I turned the computer around again so that he faced me instead. That meant I had to mediate between the students and Adam, repeating questions from the audience to him. I also had a battery of back-up questions that I had prepared (sort of like an interview).

Some curious things that I noticed in my own behavior was for example that I felt compelled to look at Adam and into the computer/camera all the time. I really did need to glance at my prepared notes and questions now and then (to figure out which question to choose next), or at the audience to see if there were any questions out there, but it for some reason felt rude to look away from the screen since Adam one and only on thing to look at - and that was me.

I also felt that when he talked to the class and the computer faced the auditorium, he would probably not see the eyes and perhaps neither slight movements (nods etc.) from the students (feedback through backchannels). After I while I felt that I needed to do him the service of standing beside the computer and humming my approval (or understanding or something) now and then just so as to provide him with feedback. That felt a little strange and silly though since he couldn't see me (I was besides, not in front of the computer). I still felt that I needed to provide him with that service, since it must otherwise be difficult for someone to "speak into the air" to a for the most part unseen audience. On second thought though, that's what he does for a living; recording a radio program and talking "directly" to people as if they were right next to him... I didn't think of that at the time. In fact, I only thought about it right now as I write this text.

My dual (or triple) role of talking/interviewing Adam, mediating between him and the students, and just generally thinking about how to mediate between the characteristics (limitations) of the technology left me totally exhausted. The effort was much large and it was much tougher on me that giving an "ordinary" lecture - mostly probably because of lack of experience and having to think so much about content, delivery and format. I had at the time absolutely no feeling for if the lecture was successful or not because all my brain cycles went towards just making it all work while at the same time thinking about how to make it work better (again overcoming the limitations of the technology). After the lecture, my co-teacher said it worked like a charm though and I believe him. Not the least since Adam got a loooooooooong applause from the audience - so I think the whole thing really was a success with them.

I too was happy. I got to know a lot more about public radio in general and Planet Money in particular, and I got to ask and get a lot of questions answered by one of the Planet Money founders/hosts. Awesome. The course will (among other things) produce a book(let) about the future of radio, and I promised to send a thank-you copy to Adam when it was printed, at the end of the year.

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The future of radio / Radio of the future

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My single largest commitment during the academic year is a large project course that our final year students take. The course is now given for the 9th year, and I have been the main teacher on that course all of those years but two.

You would be excused if you thought that I was beginning to get bored by the course, but as the course changes its theme every year, it is basically a new course for me every year. This year's theme is radio, where last year's theme was music (the future of music / music of the future). The year before that it was something else. And so on.

The course starts next week and there have been three big changes since the last year it was given:

- As we have restructured our education, the course has been moved from the spring to the autumn term.

- The course were earlier exclusive and compulsory for our Swedish engineering students. Not it is open also for our international students at the media management program. So the group that takes the course will now be more diverse, and, the language of the course has been switched from Swedish to English.

- The course is now graded (A-F) instead of just having a pass/fail grade scale.

The second change in the list above is obviously the big change. It (for example) means that we have to ask our incoming guests (we have many of them in this course) to give their talks in English.

The point I wanted to make here, and the fruit of this week's (intensive) labor, is that it is surprisingly easy to find guest lecturers for our course. We try to cover the whole range of radio; technical aspects, economic, content, reception, history etc. and we invite both academics and people in industry. What always surprises me is how easy it is to get them to agree to come. We do have a very smooth sales pitch, and it can be followed up by shooting of a mail with all relevant information, and the initial reaction of more than 90% of the people I call is interest in the course, and interest in coming to KTH to give a guest lecture. It might not always work out, but that's at least not a matter of lack of interest.

If I may venture to guess why that is the case, after having thought about some this week, I have a couple of hypotheses:

- KTH has a strong brand name. Who doesn't want to give a talk there (if they haven't before)? Royal Institute of Technology sounds impressive to foreigners.

- The future of X, where X is the area where the person we invite work with, is an interesting angle. Who works in, or with radio who isn't interest in, and doesn't have something to say about the future?

- We make sure our guests don't step on each other's toes topically, but after having profiled them, we pretty much give them free reins to structure the talk whatever way they want to. It's not that difficult to talk about X if that is what you work with and have worked with for 5 - 10 - 20 years or more.

Anyway, the results of our (numerous) telephone calls is always a top-notch lecture series with cutting-edge lectures given by experts and it is always a pleasure to listen and learn so much about new areas. This year I'm especially happy to have bagged the multi-award-winning journalist Adam Davidson from my favorite radio program/podcast NPR Planet Money.

I'll probably write a few more posts this autumn about the future of radio.

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Thesis crash

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I will discuss a delicate matter in this blog post and I will therefore pick my words quite carefully and perhaps not tell exactly all there is to tell so as to soften and "anonymize" the issue and protect the specific persons involved. Here is the cast of characters in (order of importance to) the story to be told:

- X: student at our international masters education in media management.

- B: his thesis advisor/supervisor at Stockholm School of Economics (SSE).

- H: his thesis co-advisor/co-supervisor at SSE - the guy who actually did the work of supervising the thesis.

- J: the examiner at KTH/Media technology.

- D: the stand-in examiner at KTH/Media technology who actually read and queried the student at his master's thesis oral presentation/defense. -- This is me.

- T: the thesis administrator at our department who handles practical-administrative questions and routines around the master's theses.

- N: the examiner at KTH/Media technology until the end of 2010.

- BH, A, K, O, CL, CR: Miscellaneous persons who have been involved in trying to give advice and figure out what to do.

Act 1 - Prelude

- J is supposed to be the examiner of a master's thesis, but J is pressed for time as he has gotten tasks from the prefect that urgently needs to be handled. J sends a mail to D and two other persons, asking if someone else can take on the job of being the examiner of two master's theses during the coming week.

- D concurs and accepts the task. The two master's theses unfortunately arrive only on Monday, the day before the oral presentation, and the theses are hefty - around 150 pages to read altogether. D reads one thesis on Monday night and the other on Tuesday morning.

- The oral presentations are ok. The first thesis is ok, but the second thesis seems to have little to do with media technology and the master's degree program in media management in which the student X is enrolled.

- D goes home and ponders the thesis and its contents. The more he thinks about it, the more strange it seems to be presenting a thesis on such an odd (from a media technology perspective) topic. D feels he can not judge the quality of the thesis. Worse, there is no other person that he can hand the thesis over to, because we don't really know anything about the particular subject of the thesis as it has nothing to do with what we do at our department. Both the supervisor and the co-supervisor come from the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), department of marketing and strategy, and the thesis has a very SSE-feel to it. What to do?

∑ What is going on here???

Act 2 - confusion

- D realizes that there are two questions that need to be answered:

- How could this happen, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again?

- What do we do now - right here and right now with this master's thesis?

- D initiates a facts-finding mission and calls people left and right over the following week, discusses the matter with colleagues at the department and sends mail to others. A degree of partial understanding leads to a number of flawed hypotheses and misunderstandings:

- Supervisor B at SSE stated that "I don't know if we understood that this [was a thesis that] was to be presented at the KTH [Royal Institute of Technology]". Furthermore, even though B is the formal supervisor, it turns out the co-supervisor H has been the de-facto supervisor of the thesis. X has done his thesis in a project that H manages and where several other students have been involved. H is unreachable, away on a trip (relating to the project in question).

- D sends mail to former examiner N who retired during the spring. N would have been the person who saw and approved (?) of X's thesis specification sometime during the autumn. N can unfortunately not find any specification in his computer. Could it have been handed in on paper and got lost in the hustle and bustle of N cleaning out decades' worth of papers during the spring?

- D's hypothesis is that N either had approved of a specification, but that X then had done something that differed markedly from what examiner N approved of, or, that N in an episode of temporary confusion (?) had approved of a specification that actually was in line with the thesis later submitted.

- D talks to the thesis administrator T - who of course has no recollection of this specific student. Furthermore, T was pretty new to his job at the time as he took over the responsibility for these tasks last summer, a few months before student X turned up.

∑ We don't yet know what has happened but it's a mess.

Act 3 - Comprehension

- After having talked to all involved parties at least once and sometimes twice (including student X twice), D now knows what has happened:

- Student X studies for a master's degree in media management -- as part of that degree, all students take a compulsory course in media management at SSE -- students also have the possibility to take other courses at SSE and X studied a course on "Purchasing" -- X got hold of the thesis topic through that course and pursued it.

- While each step follows from the previous step, the whole process is short-circuited when X takes his thesis back to KTH. In this old-new context, the thesis is evaluated and judged as a thesis about media technology/media management and judged based on criteria from that area. It might (or might not) be a great thesis about purchasing and outsourcing but that is unfortunately besides the point at this point...

- It turns out that student X has actually never gotten his proposal accepted by examiner N or anyone else at KTH. No-one at KTH has seen his proposal and no-one at KTH has had any idea about what X has been up to during the previous 6 months. For all we knew, he might have been on vacation or something.

∑ This is a mess.

Act 4 - The innocent

- These are the cast of persons that have been involved but are in no way to blame for this royal screw-up:

- Formally co-, but de-facto main supervisor H has had no idea at any time during the process that student X is not an ordinary SSE student, but rather a student at KTH studying for a master's degree in media management.

- Examiner N has never seen and never approved of a thesis specification and neither has examiners J & D.

∑ Innocent by-standers

Act 4 - The blameworthy

- I know our webpages aren't very easy to find your way around, but here is the webpage where it states how the process of starting to write a thesis should look like.

- It is difficult to know what information thesis administrator T gave to student X back in October but it is clear that it wasn't sufficient. At that time T actually saw (and wrote down) the proposed title of the thesis (already then a strange title from a media technology/media management perspective). He could have reacted, but it's not really up to him to judge the suitability of a proposed thesis title - that is done by the examiner when the student sends in the specification.

- Thesis supervisor B at Handels claims to not know that it was a KTH thesis (see above), but he has willingly signed a paper with a large KTH logotype on it, stating that "he approves" of the thesis specification. However, not being a teacher at KTH, it seems strange that he willingly and without any questions signs important papers from another university...? Furthermore, any supervisor from "elsewhere" (for example from SSE) need to themselves be approved by us at KTH (together with the thesis specification) before they are allowed to supervise our students!

- Student X claims to believe that the thesis administrator's signature that he fulfilled the prerequisites, together with the SSE supervisor's signature that he approved of the specification made him believe that everything was ok with his thesis. Student X has obviously worked very hard with his thesis, but has unfortunately at no point stopped and asked himself if his thesis topic is suitable for fulfilling the requirements for his degree in media management. He has not read official information about the thesis course he is taking or about writing theses in general at CSC/Media technology. He has furthermore not compared or talked (enough) with friends of his who also study for a masters in media management etc. but rather (probably unknowingly) gone out on a limb.

∑ These persons need to get their act together

That's about it, or at least the main events. We now know what has happened and some about how to improve the chances of preventing this from ever happening again. What we don't know is what to do about this thesis right here and right now. Since I (examiner D) am not a regular examiner in the course, I have handed over the matter to someone else who has more authority to take a decision (but who is probably equally confused about what to do at this point). I'm thankful it's not on my table any longer, but I am still very interested in how this all will turn out in the end.

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Program-integrating course 2010/2011 summary

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This will be a relatively long and rambling post and I might go back and edit it later. It is equally much a blog post that might be of interest for students who take the course (and who would like to hear the teacher's perspective) or for the nine teachers in the course as it is a summary of the course that I might go back to later and review.

Formal information & basic structure of the course

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The program-integrating course [DM1578, programintegrerande kurs i medieteknik] is a 7-credit course. There are 250 or so students who take the course - all students who study for a degree in Media Technology are required to take it. The course runs for three years and we meet four times per year and discuss a pre-specified theme as well as student courses and experiences during the previous quarter. The students are divided into 36 groups with half a dozen of students in each group and we try to mix first-, second- and third-year students. Each teacher in the course lead four groups of students each and the teachers report back to me. Students get 3 credits after the first year and 2 credits after each of the following two years.

Development of the course over time

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This course sounded wonderful on paper when the whole program started, but quickly ran into problems and the program filled up with students. How do you fill a course such as this with content? How do you run it practically? I gave the course for a few years before my colleague Björn took it over three years ago. He changed the structure of the course (most probably for the better) according to what I wrote above. As he was away, I took over the course during the 2010/2011 semester.

Basic challenges of the course

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The huge challenge here is to practically administer the course. It is difficult, to say the least, to keep track of 250 students that meet four times in a year. On top of that we have students that are on leave, that study abroad for a semester or two, that miss one out of four seminars (or two) for reasons that are sometimes better and sometimes worse (forgot, overslept, trip abroad etc.). One of the problems when I took over the course was that many students had, for some reason, not gotten last year's credit for the course. It is difficult for both me and for the students to know exactly why the didn't get their credits. There is probably a reason (besides administrative SNAFUs), but no-one remembers and these things are probably not documented in a way that easy to find and understand. It is detective work to find out why someone didn't get their credits. It is another task to gauge the seriousness of the lapse and to think of what kind of extra task needs to be done in order to get the credits. It takes time and it is boring.

The main contributions on my behalf during this year

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- Better administrative routines for the teachers to document and report on students' performance throughout the academic year and the seminars.

- We had a lunch for the teachers in the course during the autumn and another one during the spring. This gave us the chance to discuss the course, routines and how to improve it and was great. Course development on the cheap (the only cost was the lunch itself).

- Better routines and rules for what happens when students miss smaller or larger parts of the course. Students collect "bad karma" when they fail to do what they are supposed to. Bad karma accrue and results in larger or smaller tasks to be completed at the end of the year. Better documentation of status of students who don't complete this year's course so as to better track them later.

The main things that I have a bad conscience for not having done (yet)

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- There are students who completed this year's course, but now get in touch and tell me they didn't complete last year's course. It is a hassle to deal with the these students (takes time and requires boring detective work) and I have a backlog of cases that I have not fixed yet.

The main thing that will change in next year's course are:

- A theme will be chosen and the four tasks for the whole academic year should be formulated already at the beginning of the term (August/September) so that they can be portioned out later rather than hang above me as a dark cloud. It happened that the students got instructions for a seminar relatively late this year and that is unnecessary and could be fixed relatively easy.

- Even better administrative routines and instructions for the teachers. Students will not be allowed to jump to another teacher's group because the allotted time for a seminar did not fit the student. It so often happens that this information is lost and this results in an added administrative burden for me and the teachers (and the students) in an already hard-to-administer-course.

This is the course where students evaluate (discuss) all other course they take, but we don't spread around a course evaluation of this course itself.

Books I've read lately

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I wrote pretty recently about my reading habits in general and I have also previously written about the work-related books I read during the autumn. I more or less read two non-fiction books per month of which one is work-related. Here is a summary of the books I've read during the spring:

The Swedish-language 2010 anthology "After the Pirate Bay" ["Efter the Pirate Bay"] contained no less than 19 contributions of which a bunch were written by persons I happen know (one contributor sits in the room next to mine). The contributors have a variety of backgrounds and while most are researchers (from a variety of disciplines), some have other backgrounds (for example a few journalists, a member of the parliament, an entrepreneur). Almost half of the researchers are ph.d. students (i.e. junior researchers probably in the 20's or perhaps early 30's). They write about a variety of issues and the book is divided into the three different parts; "technology", "pirates" and "politics". The book was naturally a little uneven, but it was in general a good read and one of the texts in fact gave me an idea I hope to be able to develop in a shorter text of my own. My main take-away from the book is how totally out of synch current copyright/IP laws are with the technology of our times, and, with common sense! (Not that I didn't know it before...) Although the book (of course) is available for free online, it is inexpensive enough (69 SEK) for anyone who wants to read it to order the paper version.

Several in-your-face examples of just how out of touch and absurd our laws for regulating Intellectual Property (IP) are were glaringly obvious while reading Lawrence Lessig's "Free culture: The nature and future of creativity" (2003). I notice that the more recent edition of the book has another subtitle: "How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity". That just about summarizes it all. Lessig (whose earlier book "Code: And other laws of cyberspace" impressed me a lot) sounds like a lonely sane voice in a desert of lobbyist-fed propaganda from industry dinosaur-titans trying their best to obstacles in the way of of "creative destruction" making the process short with their previous-century industrial age business models. By looking backwards and clinging to the past, organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) squarely stand in the way of new, better business models that are more appropriate for the time we live in. Unfortunately these previous-century dinosaurs command hefty purses and thus do their best to strangle common-sense attempts to free the positively vast amounts of culture that has little or no economic value in the marketplace (because it is old or of interest to the few rather than to many etc.), but that in the age of affordable networked computers is of vast value to of our societies and to our culture. Even though Lessig is not alone, he is one of the best in formulating his critique against the current state of affairs. Lessig is an astute observer and a great writer - but I can't keep up with him as he has written a new book every second year during the previous decade.

Paul Edwards book "The closed world: Computers and the politics of discourse in cold war America" (1996) is a book I have owned for more than a decade and I have in fact started to read it once before but got stuck 30 or so pages into the book. Although the book is a little on the heavy side to read it is extremely well-researched and manages to convey a picture of pioneering work in the computer sciences that is radically different from most of what I have read before/elsewhere. Edwards ties the development of digital computers (and cognitive sciences) tightly to American cold war goals and mindsets and military dreams of creating cyborg human-machine interfaces and war machines - or even getting rid of the slow, unreliable human in that loop! There are many things in the book that "rewire" the standard history of computers, software, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive sciences, for example the vast (often non-directed) support from the military for basic research in computer science in general and AI i particular during its first 20 years as an academic field. The final - almost 50 pages long - chapter analyzes the computer in popular culture (with an emphasis on films) from the 1960's to the 90's (Dr. Strangelove, 2001, Tron, Star Trek, War Games, Star Wars, Terminator etc.). The analysis livens up and ties back to and applies Edward's previous analysis of the much "heavier" and "drier" material, and it is brilliant!

The last book I read during the spring was Richard Sennett's "Flesh and stone: The body and the city in western civilization" (1994). This is another book that I have owned for quite some time and while I have read other, later books by Sennett with pleasure I have to say that this book was both a little heavier as well as a little further away from my academic/research interests that I thought before I started to read it. The book treats the relationship between the human body and the city in a variety of ways; how humans move, adapt to and conduct their affairs in relation to the design of the city and city life, as well as how the city itself is a product of culturally bound conceptions about humans, their relationship to others as well as their religion, cosmology and world view. The featured cities are (primarily) the ancient greek city-state Athens, Rome, medieval Paris and Venice, industrial-age Paris and London and modern New York. While I found the book moderately interesting, it was not the easiest read and it is doubtful I will have any practical use for it in terms of my (wide-but-finite) research interests.

Have you read any of these books (or would you like to)? What is your opinion about them?

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On the fallible nature of tests and testing

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My previous blog posts/rants about top-down vs bottom-up approaches to improve education and the paradox of planning is here complemented with some thought-provoking quotes about tests from Gerald Weinberg's 1971 book "The psychology of computer programming". I have the 1998 Silver Anniversary edition, the quotes below are harvested from pages 154-155. I have commented these quotes so as to make the connections to issues raised in the preceding blog posts more explicit.

"A number of firms have used the Strong test for selecting programmers [...] making a judgement that a programmer is "like" a mathematician, engineer, writer, or what have you. Since the basis for these judgements is pure speculation, such selection procedures could have been equaled by throwing dice. Throwing dice, however, does not have the right sound to it. A personnel manager can say, "We use the Strong Vocational Interest Blank to help us select programmers." This will certainly impress his manger more than saying, "We throw dice to help us select programmers."

If you don't really really know what you are looking for or what you are measuring, throwing dice might produce comparable results. Investment advice by monkeys throwing darts have been proved to often (around 50% of the time) be just as good as the advice of the average "qualified" investment managers. If you really really don't know what you are evaluating (or more generally, doing), throwing dice might be an attractive low-effort low-cost alternative). :-)

"Even assuming that the profiles are available [...] do they really reflect what we want? After all, these profiles are obtained by testing people already in the profession, not the people we would necessarily want to be in it if we knew what we wanted [my emphasis]. In old, established, and stable professions, it may be valid to assume that people in the profession are, by and large, the ones who should be in it - even though they might have been steered there by [...] a self-fulfilling prophecy"

Think less of "people" and "professions" and more about "educational programs" and you notice the conserving power inherent in the preoccupation of evaluating what is, and what has been. How do you develop a world-class innovative university education? By evaluating what has worked fine before/elsewhere/up to now, or by taking stock of the future and setting out in a new direction - even, or especially if that turns out to be in another direction compared to merely extrapolating from the past? I presume "best standards" approaches are fine if you have your goals set for mediocracy or slightly-above-average, but in order to do better than that you really do need to think for yourself (yourselves) and look forward more often than you (anxiously) look backwards over your shoulder.

"Essentially all psychological tests [...] assume that the psychologists who made the tests are smarter than the people who take them. Indeed [...] people who are attracted to psychological testing as a profession [...probably...] hold themselves to be smarter than other people. Perhaps it could not be otherwise, for how would they get evidence to the contrary? [...] In a way, a personality test is an intelligence test - a matching of wits with the person who made the test."

If a monkey in the jungle stumbled upon an iPad or or some such high-tech gadget, he would probably think it is a very stupid, or silly object - and how could it be otherwise? Do the people who create a "test" such as the Education Assessment Exercise, as well as those who buy in and carry it out, as well as the those who analyze the results and those who act on these results "by necessity" think that they are smarter than the people who "get the short end of the stick" and whose only role is to merely provide them with information? (Yep! It is an unequal relationship.) Will they "by necessity" think that their conclusions about "what is to be done" is of a higher caliber than the opinions of the flesh-and-blood university teachers who by filling out these tedious forms provide them with truthful (?) information on which they are to act?

Instead of filling out forms and providing others with information (and putting our hope in wise decisions made by some nebulous "them" residing elsewhere), a better way to improve an education might be to create the space-time for those who actually teach to regularly meet and discuss issues that they find necessary, interesting or problematic in their day-to-day, month-to-month or year-to-year activities! To "create time" means (for example) to protect the time of the faculty at a university from incursions by others - including centrally initiated requests for this-and-that or (some) students' extravagant expectations of getting personal answers by email within a day to any and every question they might pose (even though the answers might already have been provided at the introductory lecture and even though many of their friends might know the answer). Perhaps a central person (a process leader or mediator) would need to do no more than to put his ear to the ground and listen to the concerns of those who are enmeshed in the day-to-day operations and then raise some of these issues into points that are to be discussed among colleagues?

"As we know, applicants for programming jobs are likely to be a rather clever bunch, so we can assume that a great deal of "cheating" will take place if they are giveen [personality] tests. But that should not worry us, for if they cheat successfully, they are probably going to have a number of he critical personality traits we desire - adaptability to sense the direction of the test, ability to tolerate the stress of being examined by someone they don't know under assumptions they cannot challenge, assertiveness to do something about it, and sense of humor enough to enjoy the challenge."

Perhaps I (and other teachers) filled out the Education Assessment Exercise not with the goal of providing "accurate" and "truthful" information, but rather with the intention of making my own courses sound as good a possible, and in doing so attempting to aggrandize myself as a teacher...(job security, salary, image and social standing)? Perhaps I did not set out to do that, but it might still be difficult for me to provide information about the courses I teach without implicitly/unconsciously promoting myself...? (...How do I want to come across to my superiors and to other (unknown) people reading what I produce? ...What should I write in order to convey these impressions?)

Perhaps I (and other teachers) did fill out the Education Assessment Exercise with the goal of providing "accurate" and "truthful" information - but that information might still turn out to be of questionable value to someone who has no knowledge of the underlaying reality behind the information provided (all those beautifully formulations lovingly crafted to reveal some some facts and conditions and to sweep other under the carpet...)? Distant decision makers have the map, but relationship between the map and the underlaying reality is shaky. To the person with a hammer everything will look like a nail, and to the person with a map, every obstacle will seem easily skirted from the comfort of his armchair...

My conclusion is that the value of tests and testing in general is greatly exaggerated! The implications of this statement for what students do at universities are fundamental and far-reaching. It might become the topic of a future blog post.

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