Shawn Graham, Carleton U, @electricarchaeo
Follow along at http://bit.ly/glorious-fail
Note: I am dissatisfied with the standard model of assessing university work. how we've trained students to expect essay (regurgitate), midterm (regurgitate), final, (regurgitate). Rinse. Repeat. This system is not one that encourages risk-taking. it does not encourage swinging for the bleachers. It does not encourage serendipity, or growth, or the ability to learn. It does encourage careful conformity to expectations.
Note: This is especially the case when we teach digital archaeology: not, computation in the service of archaeological goals, but: computation as a deformation, as a creative pursuit, as a way of seeing the past differently. as a pivot away from existing systems of hierarchy and power: of making code and data available, for remixing & re-examination. Of open science. Open data. Open access.
Note: We all have stories where we learned from something that went horribly wrong. or from projects we did that we had to get special permission to do. things that didn't quite fit the syllabus as received. serendipity. maybe we can design for that? This is what I call 'Failing Gloriously' if we design for glorious failure from the outset, I think we will have more effective teaching of digital archaeology, which will lead to a) better archaeology b) better public understanding of our work c) students better equipped to live in this world. There are no such thing as 'digital natives', o odious phrase!
- plan:
- talk about why digital stuff makes students nervous
- some teaching fails of mine
- taxonomy of productive fail
- the consequences for our discipline by not having a good theory of productive fail
- the parable of the Open Context / Carleton prize
- lessons learned & the design of the Open Digital Archaeology Textbook
- O Glorious Failure!
Note: I hide in a history department these days, so I try to teach these things to my undergrads. First lesson I’ve learned is to never underestimate the social context of whom you’re trying to teach. Anxiety – my digital history students, if I can coax them through the door, are not in any way shape or form ‘naturally conversant’ with any of this. “If I wanted to do computers, I wouldn’t have taken history” said a student in one of my (officially non-dh) courses. “What if it breaks? What if it doesn’t work? How do I get an ‘a’?” Fear of Failure – we have not taught students how to fail productively. we have created systems where the risks of trying something different are usually catastrophic. Digital work requires the ‘screwmeneutical imperative’, as Ramsay famously put it.
Tech tutorials are awful and I’m guilty of this as anyone: see http://workbook.craftingdigitalhistory.ca
Note: Tech changes too rapidly, and the kinds of machines that students are sold are not necessarily the kind that can be usefully employed in this work. I’ve had students turn up to my dataviz DH course with nothing more than an iPad mini. I also end up spending two or three weeks solid getting everyone’s machine properly configured.
- My mom thinks I mostly do tech support. She’s mostly right.
So how do we make fails productive?
1 - Technological Failure
2 - Human Failure
3 - Failure as Artifact
4 - Failure as Epistemology
5 - Failing to Tell Anyone
Note: fail taxonomy - croxall & warnick consider the ways tech teaching in particular can fail; use this taxonomy to understand AND THEN have productive fail (types 3 and 4)
Note: imagine if more of our teaching was built around the idea of iterative failures towards understanding?
Note: We would not see so many weasel words in our actual publications we see those weasel words b/c academic culture does not reward 'fail'. it's zero-sum.
Fail in the archaeological literature?
Note: Do we ever talk about research that doesn’t confirm an hypothesis? Do we ever try to replicate someone else’s study?
- 20 000 articles topic model
- No topic that explicitly deals with something not working
- This, despite the processual turn, where you might’ve expected such a beast!
- really don't see much data reuse. conclusion reuse, sure
- one aspect of the digital humanities that i think could be potentially transformative is the way it enables reproducibility, data sharing, code sharing: open science. maybe we didn't reuse in the past because it was just so damned hard. 'reproducibility' involves failing - it's iterative in type 4 style!
- But maybe, In our heart of hearts, we don’t want other people looking at our data. You see this in embryo when you try to force students to work together on a project. Re-using data is a group project where your group members live in the future, and you just know they’re going to be angry with you.
- excavate only once: ok, so let's take 'data reuse' to be an indicator of whether or not we're succeeding. maybe we need some coaxing
Note: another fail the carleton prizes. Incentives!, we thought, the good neoliberal dh-tools that we are. We offered real money – up to a $1000 in prizes. We promoted the hang out of it. We made films, we wrote tutorials, we contacted professors across the anglosphere.
Note: We had very little uptake.
Note: Money is not enough. But I wonder if part of the problem is that we’re dealing with a sunk-cost effect. So much of our computational archaeological infrastructure is proprietary software. Software, and databases, for which we’ve paid licensing fees. We’ve paid so much money, we damn well make sure that there is someone in our department, in our company, who can use Arcgis. Because this department, this company, uses ArcGis, it makes sense to teach that. But all this open source stuff? All these new formats? Who uses it? It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Two other problems: there is no culture of undergraduate teaching with actual datasets ready to take advantage of the opportunity. Two, working with digital data still requires a level of digital literacy that we haven’t yet reached.
Take a look at what the digital historians are doing: in particular, people like Lincoln Mullen.
Mullen's work builds capacity in others.
Mullen's work is shared, and it’s explicitly about teaching how to use the materials he’s pulling together in his research
Mullen addresses how to get your materials online in a format that others can then use
Note: We turn our teaching inside out. We do it in public. I’m not talking about MOOCs, though I suppose they have a role here, as educational tourism. No, I mean, we literally put all of our teaching out there and invite the public to take part alongside our formal students
teach inside out.
teach your actual research
fail gloriously
Note: we share with our students (and public) what has worked for us, and what hasn’t. we publish studies where the hypothesis didn’t work out. we replicate (with our students, and our public) someone else’s study.
This can be dangerous.
The advice of a white male who works on the internet should often be ignored.
Push your own particular context.
Note: this will be dangerous. you’re a white male? put that to use. get out there and take risks, and make it safe for others to do so too.
Steampunk, by Robert Björkén https://www.flickr.com/photos/robertbjork/23984493743/
Note: And it will require special tools. I’m building one right now with Neha Gupta, Michael Carter, and Beth Compton.
Built on top of DHbox.org
Funded by eCampusOntario: thanks!
☞ see it in action at http://j.mp/odate-in-action
Note: By building this, we're trying to shift the infrastructure cost of learning to do digital archaeology from the student, from the individual, to ourselves. Build once, deploy everywhere as they used to say. To do digital archaeology should require only a browser. mitigate sunk costs Taking our cue from OpenContext, we will include recipes for different kinds of tasks alongside the more formal learning activities. We are writing exercises that encourage screwing around. That encourage serendipity We've taken care of fails of type 1 and type 2. Which means that your teaching can focus on types 3 and 4.
Note: you can't break it. You don't have to do tech support to get students using it. It's got Glorious Failure baked in from the start.
