 Let's get started and let me welcome you to the spring 2014 CNI member meeting and to St. Louis. I hope that your travels here were not too onerous and I'm delighted that so many of you have been able to join us for this meeting. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI for those I've not had an opportunity to meet yet and I'll be part of the plenary more on that in just a minute. I do have just a few housekeeping sorts of announcements that I want to begin with. First, as I say, I want to welcome everybody here. I want to particularly welcome our international participants. Some of them have come a very long way to be here. We're glad you're here and we're particularly appreciative of those of you who are presenting here, both from the States and from abroad. It's great to have you all here. I would like to welcome three new members since our last meeting, the University of Ottawa, Carly, the consortium of academic and research libraries in Illinois, and a rejoining member of the National Institutes of Health Library. Welcome all. I also want to welcome some folks who are here primarily for some satellite events on Wednesday, the Digital Preservation Network meeting, and the Digital Scholarship Workshop that CNI is putting on. We're glad that you were able to join us for those. A couple words on the hotel. You should have information on wireless in your packet. If you have any questions on that, the registration desk can help you out. You should also be getting free wireless in your room. Those of you who are staying here as part of the CNI block. Other than this room, which will host both the opening and closing plenaries and several breakout sessions, and the room immediately next to us, which is going to house our reception tonight and our breakfast and lunch tomorrow, all of the other meeting rooms here are on the second floor. The second floor can be reached either by the stairs in the lobby, that kind of grand staircase off the center of the first floor lobby, or by elevators. It's just numbered as the second floor. We will have our afternoon break today down here, however. So if you're feeling, excuse me, the need for cookies later, you will need to come back downstairs to the pre-function area here for them. So far, I am delighted to say we've had no scheduled changes. I think overall, the weather's been a little less exciting than December, although not without its occasional thrill. If we do have scheduled changes, they will be posted on the board that is by the registration desk. So keep your eye on that. And now, with those announcements done, I want to move on to the main part of the session, which is a plenary. And we've decided to try something a little different today. Brian Alexander, the man with the boot, is going to be doing our plenary this afternoon, but he's going to do it in the form of a conversation with me. And I'll kibitz a little bit here and there as well, rather than just standing here and doing a talk. Brian, I think, is well known to many of you. He's a person with a lot of dimensions. He's been a professor of English. He's been deeply involved in instructional technology and things that kind of the intersection of teaching learning and technology for many years. He's been a both an active adopter and an insightful observer of what's been going on with the evolution of social media and how that ties into teaching and learning. Brian and I, it turns out, have a lot of common interests, although we also are enormously different in various aspects of the way we approach things. So I'm hoping this will be kind of a fun conversation. I will also say that when we chatted a little bit a few weeks ago to not really to prepare this so much as just to map out a few milestone topics we didn't want to miss, we realized that we really had a lot to talk about, I think. And so what we've done is we, after this plenary, we are going to have a follow-on session in the four to five slot, I'm sorry, the five to six slot, the end of the day slot just before the reception. It's listed in your book as one of the breakouts and that will be primarily an opportunity for us to field questions and observations and perhaps even pushback from members of the audience who want to continue that. We'll try and get at least maybe one or two questions from the audience in this plenary, but I'm not optimistic we'll get more than that just because of the number of interesting things that I think we want to hear Brian's thinking on. So I won't bore you with the details of his biography, that's all in the program book or on our web page or link to it, but instead I'm going to go sit down and launch the conversation. While I do that, please welcome Brian. Thank you very much. I appreciate the very kind introduction and I appreciate the chance to look out at you. You look like about eight people with two giant blurs of light over your heads. So if I can't make full eye contact with you, it's because I haven't gone blind. I think this is a lot of fun, especially because Cliff, you have this habit of doing these wonderful opening speeches that have no notes, no PowerPoint, and contain awful lot of information. So if somebody spends a lot of time with Prezi in PowerPoint, this is a bit of a thrill. I do have 19th century technology here. I've got some paper and a pen which I will be used to make notes. 19th century technology has its place indeed. It does. I think maybe a good place to start would be with the broad area of online learning. I mean, I know that so much of your work, particularly in recent years, has been deeply involved in online learning and we've had so much activity there and so many boom and bust kind of ideas. Remember just a year or so ago, MOOCs were going to conquer the world and reconfigure higher education. I think there were things in there that were important, but there's also a lot of hype going on. I think that in a way they were particularly unfortunate because they aggregated a bunch of ideas, some of which were really about how we teach and some of which were much more about economics and access to education broadly and things like that. It really confused the conversation in a number of ways. So let me ask you just to start out. Where do you think we are and think in terms of the broader tapestry of online learning, not purely MOOCs? Well, I think I knew that the MOOC bubble had burst when Tom Friedman announced that they were the next big thing. I thought that told the whole world how it's doomed if the mustache guy says it must be over. The MOOCs are in what Gartner calls now, I think, in between the trough of disillusionment and the plateau of productivity. There was a very, very high-profile loss in Sebastian Thrun backed out of the academic world of move-in-state and corporate learning. For many people, that seems to have represented MOOCs on the downhill slide, that they're now shrinking. The opposite is true. Coursera, EDX, all these other MOOC providers are still busily offering more and more courses and rolling more and more students. So we can study that and see how big it is, and there are a few facets that I want to pull out. One is that we're seeing a very, very deep two cultures divide in the MOOC sphere or in the world of MOOCs. That is, if you go with C.P. Snow's formulation, we're seeing a huge presence of STEM fields in sciences, math, and technology, and we're seeing relatively little in the humanities, as well as in the social sciences that are not so quantitatively demanding. So that skew is pretty interesting. I mean, there's some great humanities, MOOCs out there, but not many represented. The second thing that we're seeing that I think is a real success is that MOOCs are definitely a global phenomenon. I mean, they tend to, within each nation, track rapidly for age, education, and income. But if you're an American citizen taking a MOOC, you are usually in the minority. I mean, no one nation outdoes the U.S. and its MOOC desire. Some come close, India, Brazil, China. But that wonderful global nature, I think, is something to be celebrated. They're running into bad problems. There's no economic sustainability pattern that we have, unless you think institutional subvention is sustainable, which it really is. Now, Yale's recently former president just headed out to take over one of the MOOC platforms. And I think one, I don't know for sure, but I suspect one of the reasons he did this as an economist was to crack the nut of sustainability to see if he could make these actually pay for themselves. We'll see. Another problem which may impact some of you at a more visceral level is that we're not seeing a lot of incorporation of MOOCs within academia. We're not seeing a lot of credits being granted. And in fact, one of the O's in MOOCs, in open, we're not seeing that open content being remobilized and incorporated inside of curriculum or inside of classes. That's partly because a lot of these MOOCs aren't really open. They're open for a time and they go away or they're limited in some other fashion, but these are these are pretty big challenges. I think we can take a look at MOOCs alongside the distance learning offerings coming from many other campuses. So I mean about Penn State, World University, or you think about Southern New Hampshire University doing an awful lot of online teaching and learning that we used to call distance learning. And now we simply call online learning, perhaps in 10 years we'll simply call teaching. But those guys are beavering along with an interesting business model that's largely based on part-time staff, kind of like the American Professor saw it, and based on a really interesting technology basis. So they are going. But when we have that combination of MOOCs which are all shiny and media-busy with distance learning, we're seeing kind of dialectical opposition where a lot of campuses are saying, no, we're not going to do that. We're not going to offer distance learning. We're not going to jump on the MOOC boat. Instead, we're going to blend. We're going to do some form of hybrid learning or even flipping the classrooms. So we're going to take the best of online learning, the best of the digital world, and incorporate it into the best of our face-to-face learning, which we, as every institution says, do better than anyone. And then to have that hybrid be a kind of response to distance learning. I mean that's, I think in many ways, the big picture, and you watch these two push against each other. So one could easily imagine taking one of the MOOC platforms, software platforms, building content into it that's really intended for a reasonable size blended class that you're teaching within the context of today's economics and credit structures and courses in a university. And the content items, the quizzes, the handouts, the PowerPoint presentations, the video clips should really be dual purpose. And I think if you look at some of the, sorry, a bit of terminology, how many of you are familiar with the X MOOC versus C MOOC distinction? It hasn't caught on. It hasn't caught on. So these are prefixes lower case. So when you hear X MOOC, the X refers to EDX. It refers to the MOOCs that you usually think of. The ones that are very large, hundreds of thousands of learners, predominantly video content. There's a social layer, but it's kind of awkward. It's either in discussion boards or nothing at all. And those are usually the ones that you think of from Coursera, EDX, Udemy, Udacity, that kind of thing. C MOOC, C stands for either Canadian or connectivist, because that was where the first MOOCs came from, both Canada and for classic connectivism. These tend to be smaller, merely 10,000 learners. And they tend to be really predicated on social media and to adopt a constructivist pedagogy. And they tend to be much more militant about being open. So the open content there really is dual purpose. I think you're right to bring up the media cycle for this, that we have such a hype cycle when MOOCs are going to transform everything, destroy higher education. I think Sebastian Thrun said there are going to be 10 universities left. And then I think that made sense for a lot of media. They wanted to run with that story. And I think it's unfortunate that some of the great ideas are there. Jim Groom from the University of Mary Washington, the creator of the DS106 MOOC, has this interesting observation. He argues that MOOCs, both C MOOCs and X MOOCs, are the first web native form of distance learning and online learning. That every other form to that point had been a porting of offline learning into the online world. You think about the virtual classroom with all the assumptions of that. And that MOOCs are the first to say, well, you know, our scale is huge. To take the web seriously is a delivery platform and a social platform. So I think that idea is one that we really want to hold onto even if MOOCs are in a dark stage right now. Actually, that's a that's a very striking kind of metaphor to me. And it's one that I'd not heard before. It certainly brings up, you know, echoes of what's happened as we've tried to move various forms of scholarly communication to the web. But done it sometimes in an enormously superficial kind of a way without rethinking any of the affordances or opportunities. We're going the exact opposite way. You think of not the scholarly communication but overdrive for public libraries where that's you know you can only check out one copy because they only have one available. I mean deliberately it's it's a it's a squeamore. I mean really trying to you know have a steam powered database or something. So let me let me try out another thought on you know I'm realizing that there's a kind of a language abuse here because one wants to talk about the software platforms that are used for MOOCs separately from the idea of a MOOC itself. Because I think we're going to see those software platforms used in lots of different ways. Indeed we already are in the case we talked about with the blended classrooms. But you know one of the striking to me evident fallacies we've seen is this equivalencing of MOOC platform with something to deliver a course on as opposed to ways of providing training on topics or methodologies or things that don't merit a full you know semester course. But you want to provide this to a lot of people. I'm surprised that they're not being used as you know another way of flexibly delivering education or knowledge about specific topics that ought to be part of say a you know a graduate program in business or something like that but doesn't fit in one of the courses. That's true it recalls the old learning object idea. Just in a slightly bigger scale. Well you think if you're offering a MOOC and you are not automatically part of a campus schedule if the registrar isn't dictating the size and shape of your class then in theory there's no restriction there's no even guidance on the size of of your MOOC. I mean you think about podcasts which can be one minute long or two hours long a MOOC can be one week or could be a whole year long. And you see that with C MOOCs where once they go and they finish their cycle the participants will keep MOOCing along they'll keep talking and sharing thoughts and using hashtags. I mean there's a sense where you can just kind of break out of the the course structure the class unit maybe even get out we'll get away from the Carnegie C classification too. So maybe maybe ultimately we see some of these C MOOCs evolving into communities of study and interest that have a have a sort of a strong social aspect and could persist for very long times. I think that's quite possible we're already seeing part of this with the DS106 digital storytelling class which is now probably the world's most visible digital storytelling community online. There's also a British digital photography C MOOC called THONAR which has a lot of digital photography enthusiasts and they tend to participate past that. It'd be interesting to see how much energy these have going forward and can they really use the grounding in social media or would the software platform be the place for them to continue? Can you imagine a future where we see cultural heritage institutions picking up these sorts of things you know trying to mobilize a community of people who share a common interest around I don't know what you know opera of some sort or of you know Roman antiquities or something. Absolutely I mean there's no reason there's there's no institutional requirement for offering a MOOC for example and if the platforms are available anyone can make use of them. So if I wanted to make a MOOC about baking bread I mean I don't have a degree in culinary arts I've had experience in baking no reason for me not to start doing that right now much like web publishing as a whole but I think for libraries and museums this kind of web venue is very very powerful to show off and exhibit a unique collection or an approach and the question is can a library or museum make the case internally for sustainability can they say that this may garner us no cash flow at all but it's terrific publicity I mean I think thinking through this is a good first step of thinking about 3d printing for libraries and for museums where they're beginning to wonder on the one hand will 3d printing be a good way to advertise what we have if people can download and print a 3d copy of a sculpture that we have or a tapestry or is it a dire threat or people will print that and never come to the museum or library and they all die I mean so that I mean thinking through that that web channel will give us a good venue going forward I think. So slipping over briefly to to social media to maybe close out some of the conversations on online learning one of the things that really strikes me is there's a challenge especially in these areas like cultural heritage institutions where you would position a MOOC versus various other kinds of web or social media you know do you put your resources there do you put it in into a Facebook page instead or do you go with a blog or you know do you do all of them and try and tie them together which starts getting expensive in terms of staff time. Well in many ways it's a it's a question of audience and what we can do now is rely on a lot of studies of how people are using social media I'm just looking at the audience here quick show of hands how many of you are on Twitter wow okay how many of you are on Twitter right now we've got to catch up on how many of you are on Google Plus wow very nerdy audience excellent how many of you are on Pinterest how many of you are male and on Pinterest very good very good and just just I have to ask this how many of you are on Facebook oh it looks almost like more on Twitter than on Facebook that's interesting well I'm asking in part because then I don't have to explain all these different platforms to you but if you take a look at studies like say the Pew Internet and American Life Study of how people are using these different media you can see some interesting patterns I mean one is that people do seek news more on Twitter than on any other platform people tend to do shopping more on Pinterest than any other platform et cetera you can break these down bit by bit and you can think about demographics of the ages that are using these if you're ever worried for example about being generation gap by teenagers tell them about LinkedIn because the average age of a LinkedIn user is roughly 50 so it's that you know it's the geyser net right we're the ones who use it but then but you think about your your audience I mean in all seriousness if I were talking to a classical symphony I would think about asking them to look at LinkedIn because their demographics skew older if I was trying to do a lot of online marketing oh sorry a lot of online commerce for museum I would definitely set the Pinterest board right away and see where that goes if I wanted to push something that was more newsy if I had a library collection on something like say bioinformatics thing I wanted to show then maybe you know Twitter would be the place to go a MOOC would be a very very different place you'd want to evoke the class and course paradigm so people wouldn't dive in to learn informally they dive in to learn formally they wouldn't be there to shop or to get a quick dose of information to be there for the long haul and in that case you know you'd want to see who would be willing to do that I've just finished the MOOC that's being run by the University of Virginia on the age of Thomas Jefferson and part of that was showing off Monticello which is a lot of fun just to see that and to have a lecture on Jefferson being given in Monticello that's pretty exciting so you can imagine among other things a lot of the lecturers talked about UVA as Jefferson's dream child that's a kind of advertising for their physical site as well as for the institutional site you'd wonder where a library would actually see that so I think there's no one answer right down there is a question of strategy and choice and as you say of resources some of these can be expensive in terms of time yeah yeah I appreciate your mention of the Pew Internet and American Life studies those really have become a wonderful resource in trying to understand how people are using various services on the web today well they're very meticulous very data-driven and also longitudinal so you can track when the majority of Americans finally had smartphones because they were tracking that for years and they're also very they're open they're easily accessible for everybody yeah let's let's turn not away from online education but delve into a couple of other areas because I'm mindful of our time so another thing that's clearly you know shaking up everything is the proliferation of mobile devices of various kinds which now has gone you know beyond the individual devices to the establishment of you know what are really genuinely device ecosystems you know some devices play good with other devices and services and others don't play nice and there's a certain amount of effort I think to wall people into various attractive bits of you know nicely groomed ecosystem and making it hard to get outside where do you see that headed at this point I think we're in a giant battle of architectures between roughly speaking open and closed we have many many mobile devices that as you say are very attractive walled gardens I'm a serious kindle addict and all I buy are kindle books I mean I can port over pdfs or mobi files but it's tedious and the kindle is simply very convenient and I recognize that and that it gnaws at my open source heart iOS is something similar you know you've got your iPhone your an iPad then you have this beautiful world of multitude of apps and very expensive slash sexy hardware and you're in good shape you're very comfortable there Microsoft is trying this no one's using it but they're trying it and then Android is weirdly caught in between or they have a kind of open kind of not platform all this is in many ways warring against the open web which keeps growing we keep using it but as Sir Tim Berners-Lee tells us it's not a web that we should count on being open without our without our fighting word I mean overall of this I mean these are the consumer faces we have the enormous revelations of of Snowden and of global surveillance and we now have this phenomenon surveillance fatigue I mean about three years ago we had financial crisis fatigue whereas every week there'd be another library is being rigged this bank is guilty we just got used to it and now it's the NSA is spying on my children of course they are we're just kind of accustomed to this the German press this week is very excited about more surveillance on German companies not internet companies not digital companies but simply ordinary enterprises done by British and American intelligence and now we're accustomed to this it's simply part of part of life which is extraordinary I mean we've skid 1984 headed right into brave new world and embraced the open arms so when we think about using mobile devices that's beginning to come up I mean to what extent is my really excellent phablet you know my galaxy phablet a tracking device well it's a terrific tracking device people can find me very easily and if I don't tweet at all I think in academia we have to reflect on this more broadly we have to think about the engagement with surveillance but also when it comes to open and closed it's important for faculty and for deans and presidents not to mention boards to think about to what extent should institution be to university a library a college participate in one of these major architectures should is it up to the university to embrace and push open should they have an open access mandate for scholarly publication should they try and encourage faculty to publish outside of LMS and into the open web in for certain purposes you know to contribute to the common wheel or should they strategically think well these walled gardens work we like gardens and they really succeed for us in various ways we're not having enough of a conversation outside of this room you know outside of the realm of instructional technology and libraries we need to have the conversation here at large and you know this was a an issue that higher ed particularly engaged very deeply with desktop ecosystems oh yes a decade ago and then ultimately more than a decade ago now and then ultimately kind of settled on the browser as a key part of a strategy to open things up and you know the the ecosystem thing for traditional computers as opposed to these smaller mobile devices seems to have largely dissipated but we don't seem to be having the same intensity of conversation now around the mobile ecosystems even though if anything what's going on there may be more insidious it is it is more insidious in part because the devices are so much more intimate and personal exactly and and content is coming into play here too you know I ran across a number that just left my jaw hanging the other the other week so amazon a company that is notably unhelpful in providing statistics about its various activities beyond those that have to go in the financial reports actually put out a little press release of sort of highlights of 2013 I believe it was in which they stated that they had 200,000 exclusive exclusively licensed to amazon licensed for sale through amazon ebooks 200,000 that's 200,000 books into in one year that are basically exclusive to that channel and ecosystem I wonder how many are in the similar position in iBooks in the iBook store I would guess it's very small I mean in terms of sort of just sheer diversity of content it looks to me like although the numbers are very elusive but it my sense is amazon has won that one in books and in music although you know Apple has played different things for example they've done a lot with getting exclusives of popular music you know extra tracks or exclusive pre-release sorts of things the Beatles that play very well to their demographic and installed base so you know in terms of just absolute size of catalog I think amazon's probably far ahead I think right in terms of profitability it may be another matter but the principle they embody is just so ruthless and we've seen this in other hardware I mean it tends to be on gaming platforms if you use the xbox that software won't play on a game cube or anything else but I'm curious if I look out of the audience raise your arm if you have a fitbit huh that's interesting raise your other arm if you don't know what a fitbit is that's okay the reason I'm asking a fitbit is a little little tiny piece of technology that sits on your body and you can clip it to a piece of clothing that rest against your skin or against your throat or on your wrist and it monitors the kinds you guys have right now monitors your your sleep and your feet right your your footsteps walking right and then you can take that fitbit and it monitors gives you a little bit of feedback and then you can plug it into a device it'll give you charts and data so you get that whole quantified self-experience but we think about that that fitbit doesn't play with the jawbone up it doesn't play with other tools it's totally a slick very small walled garden part of the ecosystem in fact I mean right now we're beginning to add more and more devices it used to be if I go back to the 90s that if you want to have an icon of computing you have a desktop picture the desktop stood for computing and then in the first decade of the 21st century you'd be a laptop that kind of worked and now we have no idea and we have piles of devices because we have e-readers we have portable game players we still have tablets we have all these different devices and they kind of smear themselves around our personal space at different levels and most of them run these narrow ecosystems that we have to depend on which is really many ways frightening the browser stands kind of as the sole popular channel for access to open which is interesting that MOOCs rely so heavily on it that we don't have a lot of MOOC apps then instead that oh for open has that little echo in the use of browsers speaking of browsers I wonder if you have a read on these what to me would look like really disturbing developments around html5 and the ability to effectively put drm back into the browser I think these are very disturbing I think it's a sign that the copyright wars have been waging for some time and they're not going away in fact my laptop over there and otherwise very nice Lenovo I don't know if any of you have experienced this it will not let me record audio played by the laptop itself see if I speak into it with an attached mic it'll record just fine but if I play a youtube video in one tab and then I open audacity to record it nothing appears and this was obviously an innovation sparked by the creative geniuses of the recording industry association of America who wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be recording the next lady gaga or whatever and these people are very very persistent and I think for html5 this is a disaster just personally we need to stop this right away but we we see the battle for this for the which ip model we have going forward reaching huge areas and you're familiar with the trans-pacific partnership agreements which are largely in secret and have huge ip thickening agreements where it makes it easier for businesses to go after other countries for ip violations I mean I I I hesitate to tell room full of information library professionals that copyright is a problem obviously um but it we keep as we develop new technologies the major ip industries keep figuring out new ways to to control them it goes back to less observation that this is not really about money this is about power and control the desire to keep you from doing these things yeah I mean the DRM thing just seems like you know it's this zombie that won't stay down you know things were going pretty well for a while the the music people kind of got over it and started selling unencumbered digital music and you know people who acquired that started having a much better experience with it than before um the the e-book people continue in large part to be obsessed with it um yeah but uh the video folks seem to be the you know most obsessed of all with it and they just keep trying to slide it back in um it's really remarkable video and film hasn't people talk about music being nabsterized and it really wasn't I mean nabster died and what happened was that it drove them into iTunes so you could say music was itunized and that made it successful again they don't like to say successful they don't want to admit to that too much but it's been very successful movies haven't had that similar move I mean they've got deals with Hulu deals with Netflix deals with amazon but they're constantly being renegotiated they're not that successful in many ways mean well the theater productions going face to face into a movie theater have not been as lucrative they've been declining a bit and after they invested a ton in 3d that hasn't paid off very well I don't know one out of 50 3d movies actually turned a profit that it wouldn't other was and then you have the underlying pattern of you know try to make every movie an expensive blockbuster exactly exactly which is which is interesting because they see this may be a christians of disruptive innovation moment because while you have that happening in the box office you have so much in a web video in youtube and blip and vimeo that is so creative and as with podcasts as mooks there's no limit on size people are shooting two hour four hour three minute movies and distributing them I mean and that's really I don't know to what extent Hollywood fears this right now when they do will know they'll start suing people and they'll start changing technology right away I do want to come back to one more part about the device ecosystem if I could oh that's how many of you at your institutions have available at least one 3d printer good excellent that's that's good yeah how many of you that don't are thinking about it in this calendar year good good any 3d printing is one of these innovations that simply slid into view and it's begun to shake up a lot of economics a lot of art a lot of creativity and there's already talk that we may be seeing a manufacturing mini revolution there is a possibility that if consumers can print products that used to be shipped through container ships that we may see a decline international shipping or even a twist to globalization I mean if you don't have to buy a shirt or a pair of shoes or a book that's printed in South Korea or Mexico or Thailand but you can print it from your own living room that's an interesting change in globalization economics and we're just picking a look into IP issues I mean I just love the idea of printing Mickey Mouse hats for example keep doing this until the commander is to stand on my house but we we're not to mention we're looking at the implications of 3d printing in multiple areas some of you may have seen 3d printing in science I don't mean in theory but in printing in Holland a team of surgeons printed two-thirds of a woman's skull in plastic she had a terrible brain disease and they basically had to replace chunks of her skull so they're able to print out with incredible precision the skull pieces and reinsert them and she's healthier I mean thinking about printing oh yeah these are being used routinely now for what I understand for joint replacements and some which I may look forward to at some point I mean we're just beginning to see this transform things I mean what I'm waiting to hear happen and you guys will hear this in the language changes we now say camera and we kind of assume it means video you know to have a camera only take pictures is a special kind of camera I'm waiting for printer to mean 3d printer and if it only prints paper you have to give it a name oh that's a paper printer it's kind of retro we bought that before the Hillary Clinton presidency you know it was back in the day I mean the other technology to think about is is to think about I love being able to say this is to think about the possibility of virtual reality I mean at the meta level when we look at technology some of them blow up up here and just leap forward you know thinking about Twitter you think I mean some of these have very very short curves and some of these have long adoption curves I mean think of ebooks which date but has anyone here worked on project Gutenberg all right yes I was a volunteer in the in the 80s in the 80s and ebooks didn't go mainstream until just about six years ago I think virtual reality famously was a big deal in the 90s it's total collapse propelled Gerard Lanier to a career as a cranky old man of the internet and then Facebook just spent two billion yes to say maybe virtual reality could go someplace there's a lot of 90s nostalgia in this but it might be that we see more people do this I mean the technology ecosystem keeps throwing up more and more pieces of hardware and more ecosystems as we go forward and those are UNIT know that very rarely do they withdraw one of these very rarely do they say stop supporting this one thing stop using that one thing word perfect come on you can still use it I mean the the the earlier example you brought out of 3d printing is what I've been watching as well and it shows all the signs of connecting up with a whole complicated ecosystem of its own because you've got the whole capture side of it too you know how do you image an opt a 3d object so that you can print it out later and then things are advancing very fast in that area there's actually a I'm forgetting the name of it but there's a device that has two chambers scanner and printer so you can put something into have it scanned and then get it printed in the other it's kind of like to me reminds me of say the transporter deck of the Star Trek enterprise you know where you can you can produce this but that just happened right we're producing more and more of this yeah and and you know you I've seen some very interesting capture devices in the last few years people are for example building these laser based things that if you're interested in medieval churches it is drag it in run it for a few hours and you've got a image of the interior of the church in three dimensions down to a real high degree of resolution and then if you want to make yourself a miniature medieval church there was a great cni presentation from the scholar just let's just let's just carry this little forward into the far future say august or september and think as if all the trend lines keep going if capturing technology gets easier and easier to use it gets less less expensive it comes more and more available then when will we start seeing people walk into your museum scan something and walk out then printed at home when will they go to your campus and scan a beautiful building and printed at home when will they come into your office and do the same thing I mean it's it we're not really ready to start talking about this you could see it with the hysteria around google glass which is 95 percent hysteria I mean I I love that you people say oh no he has google glass he can record me what do you think we're carrying around I mean this is this isn't new I mean this is I mean you know really if you can get any sense of perspective on it the marriage of cameras and you know portable phones incredible disruptive technology you know the you speak of the museums and yes people are doing this now for two dimensional things somebody sees a citation they're interested in a you know a little bit of something snaps a picture or whiteboards yeah whiteboards I was just at the St. Louis City Museum but if you haven't gone I really recommend it's an extraordinary extraordinary museum it's uh I don't think there's anything like it in the US museum people here can help me out but what they've done is they've just taken an old shoe factory turned into a museum and all the content is ruins and remnants of St. Louis that they've captured and curated and represented in different ways some as bonafide museum historical spots some as children's exhibits I mean it's a lot of fun but walking through there with my camera I had to go back to the front desk and say do you mind if I take pictures what's your policy and do whatever you want go ahead and thanks for asking but I don't think we've caught up with this I mean you think about if you go into a changing room or bathroom sometimes there'll be a policy to not use your cell phone which isn't about the problem people using cell phones when they're on the toilet I love that problem I mean that seems to be universal you know there's someone you call and it's always raining right but but the it's about it's about privacy of taking pictures when people are in the bathroom we haven't gotten to this if you go to a medical hospital or a clinic I just love looking at the permissions when I can use cell phones or not because they never have anything to do with the actual technology it has to do with malpractice and how paranoid the people running it are and they'll have these weird little demarcations on the first floor you can use the technology but on the second floor until the blue line and they're just making it up really where we haven't yet begun the part oh well you and I we're talking here and we didn't tell everybody don't record this or if you do get Brian's good side or anyway we we just we haven't really assumed this yet and we have to because the technology is rapidly outpacing our mores oh yeah and I think you know we underestimate how rapidly it is one of the things I've been following and it's going to tie back into this 3d business again is the rise of what I guess I'd call sort of computational photography these things where you can you know image something and then decide where the focal point is later computationally can you do with two focal points or just one you can move it around or these assemblers things like what was it photosynth that microsoft did yeah you know these are remarkable extensions of our traditional ideas about photography that among other things take us into something that's much more like 3d yes you know space capture and representation maybe Oculus Rift is the way forward maybe I mean we can experience that we already do this in gaming you know which is the world's probably second biggest culture industry we love diving into that we love having incredibly rich worlds that are 2d 3d you know we experience three-dimensional television let me see does anybody here own a 3d tv and you don't regret it very very few hands went up 3d tv hasn't hasn't taken off but but we love the 2d 3d immersion of worlds if you think about it there was a ted castranova a common sense games of this great equations all right I can take my kids go to a movie theater for two hours spend $50 entertainment or I can go home spend $50 on a first run a rated game and have 60 hours of entertainment it's really not a fair comparison at all isn't I I think maybe you're onto something with computational three-dimensional photography well I am realizing that we have 10 minutes left and did they get to talk I think what we're going to do is I'm going to ask you two more questions sure and we're going to save most of the questions from them maybe we'll get one in for our breakout session because I these are both sort of open-ended questions so we talked a little bit about some of the technology areas that you're tracking like 3d printing and related issues what give me two or three other things that are sort of on your you know I'm tracking this because it may be a serious game changer kind of technology and they don't have to be ones you're sure are going to happen but could the biggest one isn't the technology really it's a conflict of demographics and economics can I take a whack at that sure we're we're witnessing just by the way please don't use the phrase perfect storm I just want to outlaw that for at least a year I mean people use it to mean coincidence or something that happened on earth no perfect or I'm on that yeah it's it's overblown but but we're watching is a conflict of factors that are beginning to change higher education in ways that are enormously enormously dangerous in some ways you probably know that most of the US is experiencing a demographic shortfall in the population aged one to 18 when you look at the northeast you look at the midwest especially the population is shrinking those regions are being looked more more like japan demographically in the south most of the southeast mostly american south is seeing a similar decline with the exception of texas and florida and the west were barely seeing growth at all this has huge huge impacts on k through 12 as some of you know already and it's beginning to hit traditional age undergraduate education meanwhile the total number of students enrolled in american higher education graduate and undergraduate went down for the past two years I mean not as a proportion but the total number went down on top of that the amount of money that americans spent on higher education also went down not just because few of us were going in various reasons I don't have to tell you about the economy and also but it's worth thinking about people in their 20s who are facing an ever more frightening world with the specter of debt I use the word specter advisedly because it really isn't part partly hype and partly fear but also a very bad job market I mean it's possible some economists say this may be the first generation to be less well educated than their parents and to have less of lifetime earning I mean all of that all of that is placing enormous pressure on public institutions public institutions that have been seen their state support cut so far that they are in many ways almost de facto private institutions all of this combined with policy pressure where you know we have the democratic party leading the charge to bring higher ed to heal right you know by imposing a rating system on us and by trying to get us to reduce prices I mean this combination is a really really scary mix and it's already beginning to show forth in some disturbing situations you know for example we're seeing mid-rank public institutions cutting departments like classics or math or american studies and laying off tenured faculty or tenured track faculty as a result simply because they're facing terrible terrible numbers crunches we're hearing talk about colleges merging campuses in order to save money and achieve economies of scale I mean this is something that I'm tracking closely especially when I talk to trustees and presidents because this is the kind of maybe it is a perfect storm this is the kind of tremendous pressure that that is really hammering all of us very hard and when we look at technology the responses are weird sometimes institution decides well technology can save us mooks are a cost-effective way to deliver education they really aren't but they'll look that way or the reverse maybe we should go back to our core mission of faculty and staff but with less money spent on IT or less money in academic computing I mean I was tracking gaming and education and one of the reasons why that moves so slowly is because it doesn't look like it's very cost-effective it doesn't look like a really good use of money a good core use of money I mean you know when I look around at all of your faces I mean no one's smiling what I'm saying in part because you recognize this many of you are facing this depending on where you are geographically institutionally so that you can call this the higher education bubble as some call it I have a piece coming out inside higher ed called peak higher education question mark thinking about the possibility that maybe America has reached a kind of maximum carrying capacity of Americans that we can put in colleges and universities and then we have to figure out what to do on the downhill side of that those are major trends I'm looking at yeah and certainly I mean you see ramifications of that in amazing places I mean one of the really genuinely hard to get your head around stories at least for me that I've been following is the Detroit Art Institute where they're basically the city's bankrupt and they're trying to decide whether they can or should more legally are required to have a fire sale of all of the goodies in the Detroit Art Institute this is tremendous who would have imagined that 10 years ago well it kind of echoes back to our discussion about museums expanding into social media because the majority of users the majority of patrons of the DIA are people from out of town you know that's one angle of the discussion but to think about this I mean this is it's a good thing we're in economic recovery or else things would be really bad right I think the other the other thing that I've been looking really carefully at is the real move into social media by academics which is really astonishing because it doesn't get a lot of press doesn't show many places but right now it's hard your hard press to find an academic discipline that doesn't have massive representation of faculty and grad students in the blogosphere I mean you look at some disciplines like economics and the furious discussions happening at a scholarly level are actually changing the discipline right now and partly it's because the price point of social media is so awesome that zero is pretty good but also because it's a way that kind of as Dan Cohen says to rebuild the community of scholars you know where people can then try out ideas they can blog up a concept or a discovery and that's something which we really need to celebrate and pay a lot more attention to yeah it's really a tremendous development and again one that you really have to look over like sort of a five to ten year time horizon to recognize the scale of the impact you know all right last question for you and this is one we didn't talk about before but might be an easy one and I'll I'll give you a little preface for it I have I believe you are a science fiction reader yes I believe this is one of the ailments that we share and this is of course people who are interested in the future and thinking about the future tend to be drawn here and to find science fiction books that you know have given them a new perspective on the future from time to time yes I was trying to think of one that I'd read recently that did that and actually had to go trawling back a couple of years believe it or not so I don't know whether that means I'm reading the wrong things or they're just not talking to me or science fiction is going to the dogs or what but have you read one lately that has changed um you're thinking about the future a bit there's there's there's several there's one I was going to recommend in particular but just to preface it it's especially if you have teenage children you'll know that we're going through a massive love affair with dystopia that we we are joyously destroying the world and relishing it you know we have zombies we have meteors we're very fond of this and and hollywood has figured this out and they're showering us with the ends of the world where you know everything looks just horrible and we love it we love the pieces which is fascinating I mean it says something about our times but we're also seeing a pushback there's actually a movement to have optimistic science fiction which is very small but how many of you have read rainbow's end by verner vinge oh good good I mean that's one that I would I would strongly recommend the plot cons this is an award-winning science fiction novelist who's also a scientist and a fascinating guy the plot concede is interesting that uh in the near future we have managed to cure for alzheimer's and a man the protagonist a poet has his Alzheimer's cured unfortunately while his brain functioning is the same he's lost a lot of content he's lost love what he's learned so he has to go back to high school I think this is the only example of a modern science fiction novel about what schooling looks like in the near future and if I describe it for you in the abstract you would recognize much of it project-based learning distributed collaboration the use of social media even the use of drones for building class projects the book also has a really funny I thought parody of google book scanning which I won't describe here along with a parody of harry potter but that's one that I would strongly recommend to anyone in academia that's the one I would I would throw out there for now that's a that's a wonderful book and I actually have heard him speak about that a few times be delightful on it I just put as a footnote though I think that's 2010 or so that's that's older than you think this is what surprised me was you know I I could come up with ones like that that you know within recent time period but not in the last year or so last year so no I'd be hard pressed to see when that really affected my understanding of the future that's most again we we we are very much enthralled with destroying the present and building a nice future is harder and harder I had not thought about the offsetting you know theme of apocalypse and deterioration and of course zombies well there is a positive there is a positive way out there's some of you may know this an australian science fiction classic written by Sean McMullen called eyes the calculator and when you remember this it was based on the idea that the apocalypse has come the world has been destroyed but in australia who rebuilds librarians organized into futile orders you know the reference group serialist group and they're armed to the teeth and they fight duels of honor with each other and I remember the one that's hit the ala people like this is awesome you know so there is a way forward there is a way it's violent but there is a way forward love it that title again eyes of the calculator all right you heard it here um I think we should bring this to a close and let you have a short break and get to your next session great um those who have questions or comments that they want to get into the mix please um join us at five and we'll pick it up from there and uh join me now in thanking brian for uh really stimulating uh conversation that was fun