Relevant History

Another line on my c.v.: Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School, Oxford University

I don't think this was a very well-kept secret, but now it's official: in addition to my day job, and my work on the end of cyberspace book, I'm now officially an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. It's a two-year appointment, which runs through the spring of 2010 (through Hilary Term, for those of you keeping track across the pond). I don't teach any courses, but I do work with students, and am on call to do things with SBS groups visiting Silicon Valley.

via flickr

The appointment was initially approved in March, but they only got me up on the Web site this week. Such is the pace of things there. (And as one friend said, "My god, your picture on the SBS website is so Californian!" It was taken in the garden of Howard Rheingold's house. You don't get more California than that.)

I've still got my affiliation with Stanford, and thank heavens for that: having access to the Stanford library has been critical to my continued viability as a thinker. But I've got a couple executive MBAs I'm working with at Oxford, and have had a good time collaborating with people at the James Martin Institute. And in the last few years I've been to more conferences there than Stanford.

Strange to have closer intellectual ties to a university in England than to one three miles away, but such is life these days. Or my life, anyway.

Needless to say, this is a real thrill. Not because it represents some prospective return to academia, but because it's an interesting hybrid position. SBS is one of several business schools that are real intellectual hot-houses these days. Some of the best B-schools are no longer places that just train people to crank out exotic formulas or spout jargon, but are seriously thinking about what it will mean to do business in this century. Oxford the added virtue of having the James Martin Institute, which in the next few years will-- if it has any sense at all-- become the global epicenter for serious futures work. So this is a good time to get connected to this little world.

I've already promised several people that I won't start speaking like a character out of P. G. Wodehouse, as tempting as that would be.

[To the tune of Drew Barrymore & Hugh Grant, "Way Back Into Love [Demo Version]," from the album "Music & Lyrics".]

Technorati Tags: academia, Oxford University, postacademic

Something to remember when I go to Germany this summer

Using the title "Dr." if you have a doctorate from the U.S. can get you into trouble:

Americans with PhDs beware: Telling people in Germany that you're a doctor could land you in jail.

At least seven U.S. citizens working as researchers in Germany have faced criminal probes in recent months for using the title "Dr." on their business cards, Web sites and resumes. They all hold doctoral degrees from elite universities back home.

Under a little-known Nazi-era law, only people who earn PhDs or medical degrees in Germany are allowed to use "Dr." as a courtesy title.

The law was modified in 2001 to extend the privilege to degree-holders from any country in the European Union. But docs from the United States and anywhere else outside Europe are still forbidden to use the honorific. Violators can face a year behind bars.

[To the tune of Blue Öyster Cult, "Godzilla," from the album "Don't Fear the Reaper: The Best of Blue Öyster Cult".]

Technorati Tags: academia, Germany

At Kinokuniya Bookstore this evening

Taken during my walk down Orchard Road, where I was joined by every other person in Singapore.

via flickr

[To the tune of Mono, "Lost Snow," from the album "Ex Plex, Los Angeles, September 24, 2005".]

Technorati Tags: books, Singapore

Reconnect

I've gotten a slew of Facebook and LinkedIn requests these last few days, from people I've not been in touch with for a while. These come now and then, but what's unusual right now is how many of them are from people I haven't been in touch with for a long time.

This past weekend I got a friend request on Facebook from a high school classmate who I haven't seen since graduation, more than 25 years ago. He's now a pastor, and from what I hear a pretty good one.

I also reconnected with one of my high school music teachers. This is someone I haven't spoken to in a couple decades, but she was one of my favorite teachers. It turns out that she was also of the most influential. I've not sung in any organized venue since college, but I think singing gave me a valuable familiarity with public performance and an awareness (in a good way) of the craft and artifice of self-presentation.

This is not an impact either of us could have predicted, and it illustrates two things.

The first is that education is rarely wasted... but its doesn't always pay off where you expect. When my children were babies and waking up in the middle of the night, I was getting very little sustained sleep, and often thought to myself, this is like studying for my orals. I didn't read all that Joseph Ben-David, Margaret Rossiter and Andy Pickering in order to be more effective at baby-wrangling; but it turns out that the experience of having to plow through vast amounts of stuff, and not having enough hours to both read and sleep, paid off in unexpected ways. Nor did I study STS to become a futurist; but the value of STS as a conceptual toolkit and way of thinking is pretty self-evident to my colleagues.

The second is that if it's hard for us to predict how what we learn will pay off, it's almost impossible for our teachers to know. For me, one of the hardest things about teaching was the sense that I didn't know-- indeed, couldn't know-- what kind of impact I was having on my students, or would have on them. It might be that the enthusiastic ones would never find a use for anything I taught them, or that the smart but slightly jaded one would have a career-defining moment that turned on something she learned in class. All of that was unknowable to me, and I would have to take on faith that, after all was said and done, my impact would be more positive than negative (or maybe neutral was the worst you could reasonably expect-- a history teacher is going to have a hard time ruining anyone's life).

Of course, there are a few students you hear about, and if you're old enough you might merit some kind of formal recognition, which is an occasion for people to come and say nice things about you. But those kinds of events are pretty scripted, and come pretty late in one's professional life.

I wonder, though, if in the future teachers will find it a little easier to know how their former students are doing, and what kind of effect they might have had on them. My wife, who teaches eighth graders, is connected to some of her former students through Facebook; and while they may not talk regularly, those weak ties are easier to maintain than my connections to my teachers, and it's probably a little harder for them to decay to the point of being useless. (After a couple moves, I found that not only had I shed myself of things I wanted to get rid of, I'd also inadvertently thrown out things like address books, old letters, and the like. So much for going home again.) I suspect that in the future these links may make it easier for teachers to have a sense of how they've affected students. Which would be nice for everyone.

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "March of Gibbles Army," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: education, henrico, memory

Quote of the day: on academic promotion

From Structured Procrastination:

[Upon] promotion to Full Professor... the golden era begins.... The various committees that agreed to tenure and promotion, probably grudgingly, have ceased to remember the details. People just know you are a Full Professor and have been for a while. By this time, with a little luck, your hair is grey and you look distinguished or at least old. At this point, everyone assumes that you must have done something quite important, although they can't quite remember what. Once you realize that you will never again have your work crawled over by various committees charged with evaluating your basic worth as a human being, it becomes more fun. Bliss.

The trick, then, is to get a job based on work you haven't done, and stick around until the details of what you did are forgotten. That's when the true rewards of academia set in.

[To the tune of Elton John, "Bennie and the Jets," from the album "Greatest Hits".]

Technorati Tags: academia, humor, postacademic

Reprints!

Got a pleasant surprise today: a package of reprints for my latest article, a piece on "The Industrialization of Vision in Victorian Astronomy" in Bildwelten des Wissens. It's always nice to get these. I'll have to send them off to various academic friends, for whom the ritual of receiving reprints holds some cultural meaning.

The article is one I wrote a while ago, but never quite got around to publishing; so when the chance came last year to contribute to this issue, I figured, why not make good use of it? I'm not doing much work on Victorian science now, but still it's a subject that never ceases to be interesting.

And in an ironic twist, last night I was up late answering queries from an editor who's working on a piece of mine on mobility and the end of cyberspace. My old and new intellectual lives overlapping.... Though actually I think that's not quite correct: you don't really have old and new intellectual lives, unless you completely change fields and go from, say, string theory to eschatology; you just mobilize your interests and intellectual skills around different subjects.

[To the tune of Ben Folds & William Shatner, "In Love," from the album "Fear of Pop, Vol. 1".]

Technorati Tags: academia, history of science, postacademic

Academic productivity

Lifehacker points to a blog with a title that seems more oxymornic than "relevant history:" Academic Productivity. It's really pretty good.

[To the tune of Johann Sebastian Bach, "Toccata & Fugue in D minor BMV 565," from the album "Bach: Famous Works".]

Technorati Tags: academia, productivity, work

Finished the Budapest paper

Late last night I finished up an article for an edited volume of proceedings based on the Budapest conference I attended in October. Now it's on to an article on media technology, materiality, and meeting facilitation. Though I'm going to consciously avoid using too many "M"s in any sentence.

More on solitude and scholarship

Geeky Mom recently gave a talk about blogging her dissertation. Go check out her presentation:

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Elsewhere, she writes about the problems of isolation in scholarship that echo things I noticed at AHA:

Although I consider part of what I do scholarship, I don't think many others would consider me a scholar. I'm not sure I want to be a scholar, at least not as it's currently conceived--the isolated individual hunched over books (or maybe more contemporarily, the screen)....

Here's what I learned, or what I'm chewing on right now. The real work of scholarship takes place in isolation and through individual work. From that isolated position, isolated works get created and those works are read only a few people. There are exceptions to this, of course, and the sciences are much more collaborative than other disciplines, although they also are at greater risk of being scooped than humanities faculty, for example. In my work field, instructional technology, much of the thinking and work that looks like scholarship happens online, via blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. And that's one of the things that draws me to the field. I like thinking out loud with others. I feel more comfortable moving the thinking and scholarship that happens online within the ed tech community into formal publication than I would going from online to formal within rhetoric and composition field.

Partly, of course, it's because I've lost touch with that scholarly community and what I know of it from reading and contact I've had with people in the field, it's both going in directions that interest me and in directions that really don't interest me. Honestly, I think to some extent, I'm skeptical of scholarship in many (most) fields. I find some of it very valuable, but the way that scholarship is produced and the reasons it's produced (for the sake of getting tenure and promotion, maybe to forward the field, maybe to say something new) tend to make it less valuable to me personally.

The assumption that "the real work of scholarship takes place in isolation and through individual work" is one that many humanists, and a fair number of social scientists would recognize; certainly for historians it's the default. We may have colloquia and seminars and dissertation reading groups, but the core of historical work-- the work in the archives, and especially the work of writing-- is done alone.

In contrast, my work at the Institute is, at its best, effervescently collaborative. One of our most important research tools is the expert workshop, which is what it sounds like, but is actually more fun. We write just about all our important stuff using Google Docs, sitting around in a space, talking through suggested revisions in real time, batting opening lines and transitions back and forth. (For someone who spends so much time reading, the opportunity to do it in a fundamentally new way is really refreshing.)

Today, working on things like the end of cyberspace book is pleasant a break from that ultra-social routine, a chance to step inside the venerable courts for a few hours. (Not that we should completely abandon older ways of working. The ability to make creative use of solitude is something that psychologists have recognized is quite valuable; and good work often requires moving between collaborative and contemplative modes.)

I'm not sure I'd be happy going back to a life in which I was mainly working by myself. But I'm also curious how long a life like that-- one lived, in its most essential parts, alone-- will be available to professors of history and literature and the like. Already they're mild anachronisms on campus: for most departments, I'm willing to bet, collaboration-- or at least joint authorship, and a lot of work in which your research projects plug clearly into someone else's research agenda-- is the rule rather than the exception. (It would be interesting to compare the number of jointly-authored articles in leading history journals to the number in, say, economics and sociology.) The infrastructure for more intimately collaborative forms of historical research and writing are emerging, at least for a few specialties. Will it be very long before the students in first-year methods classes all have to work together on joint projects, and before people who become accustomed to working with others don't feel that that capability makes them different from scholars?

Technorati Tags: academia, blogging, collaboration, postacademic, university

The utility of STS demonstrated yet again

Thomas Van der Waal has a great post about "the elements in the social software stack." In addition to having some great advice, and offering a nice clear way to think about social software, the following bit jumped out at me:

It was through reading Jyri Engeström's blog post about "Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality" that I came to have familiarity with Karin Knorr Cetina's object-centered sociality. It was through the repeated mentioning of this Knorr Cetina concept by Rashmi Sinha in her presentations and from personal conversations with Rashmi that the ideas deep value sunk in (it is a concept central to Rashmi and Jon Boutelle's product SlideShare).

Interaction designers have long been reading anthropology-- Chris Espinoza once told me that when they were designing the first Mac interface, he and the other designers had copies of George Lakoff's work on metaphor in the office-- and I've been aware for a while of more academic interface design types being familiar with STS and history of technology. But it's good to see that people who are actually doing serious products-- Jaiku, SlideShare, etc.-- are using it, too.

[To the tune of Cocteau Twins, "Pur," from the album "Four-Calendar Cafe".]

Technorati Tags: postacademic, social software, STS