Worst Professor Ever

I survived SXSW. Just to be clear, my tired thirty-something ass is no longer up for standing in line to hear the latest band (the only one I’d really heard of was the Vaccines, who are admittedly dreamy) or to see whether Conan really was going to show up  at the Nikon party to promote his documentary (yes he did, and I hear Ashton and Demi did too and they were lovely but she was shorter than anyone expected). So what I’m talking about is SXSW Interactive (IA), the  exhausting, party-based juggernaut of well-paying Ideas That Matter — sort of like TED’s brilliant but troubled Southern cousin Jed.

As I mentioned in the original post I was volunteering, not presenting, so using my introvert superpowers of observation, I can give you the skinny on the main points of interest.

In the first place, I must mention that there was a whole separate conference for eduation, SXSW edu, which took place right before SXSW IA. I have no idea why they’d separate people invested in ed tech from the rest of the technology-lovers, but there it was. The edu crowd was older, and seemed to be made up of mostly administrators, probably because they could afford the badge.

The crowd at SXSW IA was far more diverse in age and occupation. In the green room I worked, we had  a crazy mix of respected journalists, tech people, marketing gurus, and anything else you can think of: imagine listening to Tucker Max quote the latest Mother Jones article, then meeting a Mother Jones editor the next moment, all with a steady buzz of programmers designing Twitterbots for public television  in the background.

Several of the panelists brought booze into the greenroom, and one panel had the awesome idea of using tequila for some non-traditional pedagogy: they would take a shot every time an audience member stumped them. Many panel titles had four-letter-words in them, which was a welcome difference from any conference I’d ever been to. Style-wise, elaborate sleeve tattoos (or at least bold graphic designs) peeking discreetly out from under prim, button-down suits were all the rage. If you want to re-create the experience, just pop in Trent Reznor’s Social Network soundtrack while drinking a margarita, listening to some of the podcasts and reading several respected pieces of ‘legacy’ media, all at once.

But my guess is, you’d like to know what it takes to make your field provide ‘positive value’ for the money. So here’s a list of phrases you can use to prove to your local governor or school board that education is too part of the monetarily-respectable world of business:

API is the new ‘App’: Applied programming interfaces are powering Skynet, or at  least the the expanding web of mobile devices that will obviously form Skynet when it happens. People from NPR, the NYT, and PBS are using this phrase, and actually designing APIs, which means you have no excuse not to care about them.

Content Curation: You’re already doing this when you choose sources and put them in a  list for other people to look at — kind of like a reading list on the syllabus, right? But call it ‘content curation’ and you’re cutting edge. Cf. YouTube, which is now featuring ‘celebrity-curated content’. And several respected  non-celebrities spoke about ‘content strategies’, which means that yes, there are alternate careers out there for people who just love research…er, I mean data.

Data: A running theme was that ‘we all know what data is for’ namely, doing something with. Hence the emphasis on data visualization and telling stories — so academic peeps, please avoid quizzing anyone on the facts; start asking them for interpretive dances of the Civil War or assignments via GraphJam.

Information Architecture: Controlling how users experience/deal with large amounts of info. You’re already doing this in class.

The Paywall/Subscription Problem: Paywall meaning what sites put up when they refuse to give away their information for free; subscription meaning giving bundles of services for pay so people don’t feel gypped because they simply don’t want to pay for content anymore. So, in an educational scheme, you might consider tuition a paywall and the college experience as the bundle of services. Oh, and fyi: no one’s figured out how to make money from unbiased information and/or quality writing, so apparently we may as well give up on that and let the news aggregators pay advertisers to write ‘news’.

UD/UX: User design/experience (also called ‘experience/interaction design’), at first a web design term, now generally applied to any living, breathing experience in life or in Second Life. You’re already doing this when you teach a class or give a lecture.

Please listen to this last one, even if you don’t listen to anything else, because it’s the most relevant to teaching. I heard a lecture on UX for behavior modification, and it suggested that trying to get people to change more than three specific behaviors at once was futile  – what does this say about how we teach writing?  Also, I heard several people suggest online schools were better than real education because the students could use self-assessment to construct their own narrative from the data rather than relying on those pesky ‘value judgments’ that teachers are always imposing.

Now, I heard some pretty good stuff at the conference, no doubt; but a lot of what I heard was stuff I’d heard before, while discussing, say, cultural history with other scholars. So really, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be in on this conversation; not everyone there is a techie, by any means. Anyone can apply to SXSW and there were a few professors there, usually from media or communications departments. Why not apply for next year? Consider that this conference, unlike your usual conferences, allows beer-drinking in the audience and gets media coverage — the kind, I mean, that doesn’t involve words like ’overpaid’, ‘lazy’, ‘useless’, or ‘part-time.’

Just a thought.

Tags: content, curation, edu, ia, interactive, SXSW, technology in education