Cornel West and the Socioeconomics of Music

I recently had the good fortune of attending a lecture by Cornel West at Calvin College in which he spoke, almost in passing, about the impact of one's economic circumstances on the art they create (specifically in this example, the music). He explained, in part:

"But Hip hop from below, coming out of high schools where the art programs have been systematically eliminated so they can' t learn how to play the instruments in which the way the Ohio Players or Lakeside or Con Funk Shun or the Bar-Kays do. Those negroes can play their instruments. [...] but if you come in a context where the shift from poor people to the well-to-do has been so systematic, where the drug invasion has come in as the only source of you sustaining you sustaining yourself as your families become so weak, your community so feeble and market values begin to permeate every nook and cranny of your life ... then what do you do; well you get some old equipment around and have sampling. Okay we can't play instruments but Sly sure sounds good ... and James Brown sounds very good ... work it Grandmaster Flash, bring your Furious Five with you."

It had never before occurred to me that looking down on musicians who sampled could be not only snobbery but a form of racism given that it was economics that made a tape deck the only instrument some people had access to (while meanwhile in suburbia I had access to strings, percussion, winds and brass and the private lessons to master them). In that context, the esteem and awe with which people like Michael Eric Dyson speak of Hip hop becomes perfectly clear.

One of the phrases that kept ringing in my head from the lecture was the idea of "...bouncing off tradition in order to promote innovation." Anyone who has studied music knows that you become acutely aware of the fact that every musician stands on the shoulders of previous musicians; whether you're sampling or playing an instrument.

There are some interesting manifestations of the mashup of musical influences and available instruments going on in the digital world nowadays:

• There's a whole generation of artists whose work is influenced by the accessibility of immersive 3D video game environments that have been remixed and used like a brush and palette to create original works. They work particularly well for music videos; Jonathan Coulton fans like Spiffworld (who favors World of Warcraft) have created them for songs like "Tom Cruise Crazy," "Re: Your Brains," and "Mr. Fancy Pants."
  
• An Israeli artist named "Kutiman" has created an entire album remixing YouTube videos. I can't even describe how amazing it is; you have to check it out for yourself.
• The DIY crowd has started hacking the plastic controllers that come with games like Guitar Hero to create *real* instruments.
  

It makes one excited to see what the future will bring (or not, depending on which age demographic you fall into).

[Listen to the full Cornel West Lecture: "Hope on a Tightrope"].

The Relentless March of Radical Transparency: Polar Rose

Flickr's about to get more interesting.

Polar Rose, a new web application, can recognize faces in Flickr photos and tag them. I was wondering when this was finally going to happen (now I wonder how quickly it will be rolled out to other social media platforms like Facebook/MySpace). Now you can find all of those photos of you holding a corndog with your gut hanging out, unaware that you're standing behind a family taking a group photo at a the local street fair.

It's going to get a whole lot harder for people to lie about where they were in an era when a stray photo someone took from across the street that happened to catch you in the frame is suddenly part of the accessible permanent evidentiary record. Good or bad, it's the new reality of radical transparency.

Turnitin.com Vindicated by Court Decision on Fair Use

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck a blow to students who were attempting to shut down the website/service Turnitin.com (which allows faculty to compare the work submitted by their students to other established works as well as the works submitted by other faculty) with a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement.

The decision is a good one, because services like Turnitin.com are valuable for faculty who are increasingly pressed for time and cannot interrogate every student they suspect of lifting material without attributing it. The phenomena is disappointingly-common (as I've found in my own personal experience) - usually as a result of naivete about the need to properly attribute cited material, but also too often as a result of graft on the part of services that buy and sell papers previously submitted by other students.

Services like Turnitin.com have been successful enough that the services selling papers to lazy students have moved to specializing in custom-written papers that would elude detection (having not previously been submitted for a grade).

The students' concern about Turnitin.com holding on to their work isn't completely without merit, however; one could envision a future incident where Turnitin.com might try to profit from those papers if it were ever strapped for cash (say, by publishing them for other students as "study aids") - so it would be good to see the courts articulate some sort of provision that narrowly restricts the interpretation of this decision to the limited use of the archived papers to comparing them for plagiarism.

Domino's Pizza and the Life Cycle of Public Opinion

In the democratized, media-saturated era we live in incidents like the one that just happened to Domino's Pizza (where two employees, Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setzer, videotaped themselves doing a variety of unsanitary things to customer's orders) are inevitable. In fact, I can't believe that this hasn't happened more frequently.

The PR industry is wringing its hands over how to respond given how seemingly powerless large organizations are to stop these sorts of events. The solution is (as with many problems in the age of social media) transparency.

Here's a couple free suggestions for Domino's:

• Install webcams in all of your 8,500 kitchens and broadcast them in real time on your website so that customers can go peek in on the happenings at their local pizzeria to assuage their fears that some douchenozzle is snorting the shredded cheese into their Chicken Bacon Ranch Oven-Baked Sandwich.
• If you really want to do a good job of it - crowdsource enforcement: empower your customers by giving them the option to flag a section of video for further scrutiny (and possible criminal charges).

Given how cheap digital technology and cloud computing are, it likely won't cost that much and you can simultaneously 1) recover from the negative perception, 2) build credibility by following up a promise with concrete action, 3) get a hot, cheesy promotional slice of earned media for being the first major fast food chain to adopt this safety measure.

The best part is that there's really nothing startlingly-new about this approach; it's the same principle as putting the kitchen in a restaurant within view of the customers.

Even if Domino's did nothing but make sure the two miscreants end up on the business end of a lawsuit and criminal charges - that's likely enough to restore their bruised image. That's the way of the wired world: yes, it casts a spotlight on an organization's negatives - but people are more open-minded and forgiving than we give them credit for when it comes to considering the context of bad PR (especially if an organization has built up credit by operating above-board and generally doing the right thing on a daily basis).

YouTube .EDU Hints at Possible Future of "Open Source Education"

YouTube's recent release of its ".EDU" site which features channels and content from educational institutions hints at a possible "open source" future for education (particularly higher education). Grand Rapids Community College has a thriving YouTube channel as a result of the excellent work done by our Media Technologies department (which produces content for the Grand Rapids Public Schools as well as a number of local colleges and universities).

In fact, GRCC is one of the heavyweights in the new YouTube EDU site (as others have noticed, including Time Magazine in a recent article titled "Logging on to the Ivy League"); it has more content up than Harvard and almost as much as MIT. Many of the four-year universities in Michigan don't even have YouTube channels.

Watching the potential of online courses leads me to this question: what is the difference between an online course and a traditional course? This question is important, because as online course content from top-tier universities is increasingly available for free through the web - they're going to offer some serious competition to other education institutions.

One of the things the web does best is to free people from the geographic bonds that hold them; you're no longer limited to the offerings at your local mall, dating pool, or social circles. The same is true of education.

I see a possible future where students from across the US (and around the world) take online courses from the best faculty at the best schools, and the role of regional higher education becomes to provide the necessary support services, lab space, proctoring and resources for those students to become credentialed.

That is to say, your semester (assuming there's still a need to keep rigidly-defined calendars, which is less and less likely) looks something like this:

• You fill your class schedule this semester with an online Chemistry class from M.I.T., an online English class from Yale, an online Social Science class from U.C. Berkley, and an online Ethics class from Oxford.
  
• You watch podcasted lectures, participate in collaborative group exercises with Google Apps, and interact with the faculty (or their graduate assistants) in immersive virtual environments.
  
• Then, when it comes time for tutoring, lab experiments or testing/assessment - you head to Grand Rapids Community College for the one-on-one instructional support and hands-on learning (which is GRCC's true core competence as a "teaching" institution).

One particular aspect of that scenerio that is particularly promising in terms of creating a dramatic opportunity for regional education institutions is assessment. Currently the means we use to measure comprehension (standardized tests) are woefully-inadequate; they're inherently biased with respect to culture and learning styles - yet they're necessary in order to keep class sizes manageable while still being cost-effective.

If we're free of some of those time constraints - suddenly a dramatic window opens up for personalized, one-on-one interview-style assessments of one's ability to comprehend, master and think critically about course material.

The reasons this can't be the near future are rapidly eroding away - which means that it's an increasingly likely future. Something to consider.

Related:

• If you haven't seen Sir Ken Robinson's TED lecture, do yourself a favor and check it out.
• Professor David Wiley at BYU was recently interviewed about the idea of "Open Source Education."