Marc Parry

Can the Wikipedia model of open participation change humanities scholarship?

My latest Chronicle article explores that question through the story of an innovative historical crowdsourcing project at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media.

Here’s an excerpt:

On November 8, 1800, fire ravaged the federal War Office, in Washington. The agency’s files went up in smoke, leaving a gaping hole in the nation’s historical rec­ord.

“The most important window into the early republic had basically been boarded up,” says Christopher H. Hamner, a military historian at George Mason University.

Not anymore. Through years of shoe-leather detective work, scholars have recreated much of the archive by tracking down copies of nearly 45,000 documents. But now they face another challenge: transcribing them from digital images.

Their solution is to enlist the public to help, free. The experiment, run by George Mason’s Center for History and New Media, tests an increasingly important question: How will the Wikipedia model of open participation change humanities scholarship?

Many people have taken part in crowdsourced science research, volunteering to classify galaxies, fold proteins, or transcribe old weather information from wartime ship logs for use in climate modeling. These days humanists are increasingly throwing open the digital gates, too. Civil War-era diaries, historical menus, the papers of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham—all have been made available to volunteer transcribers in recent years. In January the National Archives released its own cache of documents to the crowd via its Citizen Archivist Dashboard, a collection that includes letters to a Civil War spy, suffrage petitions, and fugitive-slave case files.

The crowdsourcing boom is opening the ivory tower to people like Jaré Cardinal. Ms. Cardinal runs the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, in western New York. Working in her home office overlooking the Allegheny River, she joins the 760 volunteers who have answered the call to transcribe War Office records. Their only official training is a short set of guidelines.

College life, quantified: My latest story looks at how data mining is reshaping the student experience. The article is a collaboration between The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here’s an excerpt:

CAMPUSES are places of intuition and serendipity: a professor senses confusion on a student’s face and repeats his point; a student majors in psychology after a roommate takes a course; two freshmen meet on the quad and eventually become husband and wife. Now imagine hard data substituting for happenstance.

As Katye Allisone, a freshman at Arizona State University, hunkers down in a computer lab for an 8:35 a.m. math class, the Web-based course watches her back. Answers, scores, pace, click paths — it hoovers up information, like Google. But rather than personalizing search results, data shape Ms. Allisone’s class according to her understanding of the material.

With 72,000 students, A.S.U. is both the country’s largest public university and a hotbed of data-driven experiments. One core effort is a degree-monitoring system that keeps tabs on how students are doing in their majors. Stray off-course and a student may have to switch fields.

And while not exactly matchmaking, Arizona State takes an interest in students’ social lives, too. Its Facebook app mines profiles to suggest friends. One classmate shares eight things in common with Ms. Allisone, who “likes” education, photography and tattoos. Researchers are even trying to figure out social ties based on anonymized data culled from swipes of ID cards around the Tempe campus.

This is college life, quantified.

Data mining hinges on one reality about life on the Web: what you do there leaves behind a trail of digital breadcrumbs. Companies scoop those up to tailor services, like the matchmaking of eHarmony or the book recommendations of Amazon. Now colleges, eager to get students out the door more efficiently, are awakening to the opportunities of so-called Big Data.

The new breed of software can predict how well students will do before they even set foot in the classroom. It recommends courses, Netflix-style, based on students’ academic records.

Data diggers hope to improve an education system in which professors often fly blind. That’s a particular problem in introductory-level courses, says Carol A. Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. “The typical class, the professor rattles on in front of the class,” she says. “They give a midterm exam. Half the kids fail. Half the kids drop out. And they have no idea what’s going on with their students.”

As more of this technology comes online, it raises new tensions. What role does a professor play when an algorithm recommends the next lesson? If colleges can predict failure, should they steer students away from challenges? When paths are so tailored, do campuses cease to be places of exploration?

“We don’t want to turn into just eHarmony,” says Michael Zimmer, assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he studies ethical dimensions of new technology. “I’m worried that we’re taking both the richness and the serendipitous aspect of courses and professors and majors — and all the things that are supposed to be university life — and instead translating it into 18 variables that spit out, ‘This is your best fit. So go over here.’ ”

In October, Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, got a quirky request on YouTube. A hyperactive instructor in a plaid jacket posted a video inviting her to do a Skype interview with his “World Regions” geography class at Virginia Tech.

Ms. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate often compared to Nelson Mandela, might have ignored this plea were it not for how the video ended. The camera pivoted from the instructor, John Boyer, to an auditorium filled with some 3,000 students. They leapt from their seats, blew noisemakers, and chanted her name as if the Hokies had scored a touchdown.

It worked. On December 5, Ms. Suu Kyi, who last month won election to Parliament after spending much of the past two decades in detention, took questions from Mr. Boyer’s students via Skype. “I cried a little bit,” says Alex Depew, a senior. “I’m not gonna lie.”

The moment marked the biggest coup yet in Mr. Boyer’s experiment with supersizing the classroom. Conventional wisdom deems smaller classes superior. Mr. Boyer, a self-described “Podunk instructor,” calls that “poppycock.” He’s exploring how technology can help engage students in face-to-face courses that enroll from 600 to nearly 3,000 students.

(Read the rest of this story at www.chronicle.com.)

For years, some analysts have argued that ready access to Pell Grants and federal loans actually props up colleges prices. That’s because institutions have little incentive to charge anything beneath the floor set by available financial aid. A recently launched for-profit institution, New Charter University, is trying to change that equation, by offering online courses so cheap that students shouldn’t need to borrow. Read my story about the school here.

Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change—among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion. Read the Q&A here.

The Chronicle profiles a dozen people doing some of the most innovative work at the intersection of technology and higher education. Articles by Jeff Young, Jennifer Howard, Nick DeSantis, and myself. I tell the stories of Carnegie Mellon’s Candace Thille (Treating Higher Ed’s ‘Cost Disease’ With Supersize Online Courses) and George Mason’s Dan Cohen (A Digital Humanist Puts New Tools in the Hands of Scholars).