digital digs

the database and the narrative

Reading Collin's post on his course and his efforts to develop a way to represent and investigate rhet/comp scholarship. As he asks "what are our options if we want to be able to take the next step with respect to an aggregated database? How do we take that accumulated body of information, and perform meaningful work with it?" Collin's particular interest in this post lies in tag clouds and the challenge of finding (or building) an application that will output the kind of tag clouds he's looking for. I've been reading Ulmer this semester for class and was reminded of this passage from Heuretics:

The user of a database, that is, encounters in principle the full paradigm of possibilities, through which a multitude of paths may be traced. Argument provided one path and suppressed everything else (even if the oppositional position was presented in a show of objectivity, the goal of the enthymeme was to convince the reader that the solution offered to the problem was the only possible). In hypermedia the composer constructs an information environment, and the user chooses the path or line through the place provided. The chorographer, then, writes with paradigms (sets) not arguments. One of the profound changes of a hyperrhetoric designed for organizing audiovisuals as well as print practices will be the necessary return of delivery and memory and their adaptation to a new social machine. (38)

Yes, this is old news in some ways. Prescient in 1994 maybe but familiar now. When Collin speaks of narrative, he's speaking particularly here of a story of discipline, "field narratives" as he calls them. They are arguments in the general sense of which Ulmer is speaking here. Both take us down particular paths, whereas databases might be maps on which paths can be drawn, though that analogy isn't quite right either b/c a map might also be an extrapolation of data just as a narrative is.  All three--database, narrative, and map--are certainly rhetorical as well.

This is a conversation I've had with Derek several times. What is the epistemological status of mining a database or "distant reading" as Moretti terms it? How does it compare with the status of conventional humanistic knowledge drawn from close reading? More or less "true"? More or less convincing? Ulmer suggests the database composer writes with sets/paradigms. With databases we make decisions about inclusion and fields within records. I just got an email from academia.edu where they want to condense the number of top-level research interests (currently over 3000). The information environment composers create obviously shapes the paths users take and carries an implicit rhetoric--a sense of purpose, audience, and genre. E.g., condensing research interests reflects assumptions about the purpose those interests serve on the site, how users want/will want to make use of those interests, and an understanding of how academic disciplines are elsewhere organized.

So here's a thought experiment. Let's say we could create a massive full-text database of nearly every rhet/comp scholarly text in the last 50 years. Of course we would face difficulties trying to figure out what should or shouldn't be included, but let's bracket that problem and say that we create a database that we can agree is "good enough." Now we are going to perform a variety of analyses on these texts:

• word/phrase frequencies
• citation frequency, numbers of citations, citational networks, etc.
• author institutional affiliations

We can arguably see the rise and fall of certain issues. Who reads who and why. Where ideas come from and how they spread. In short, one could write new stories/arguments, but would the rhetorical reception of those stories be different from ones we have told in the past? Obviously they would have a different epistemological status, but would they carry more weight? Would they be more "objective"? Or do they simply add another layer of informational complexity? Do they solve the "reading problem" or do they just add to it?

I don't ask these questions to suggest that this isn't work worth doing. I think it is. In fact, I'm somewhat fascinated by it and its prospects. I'm just also interested in how we investigate the techno-material contexts of such information.

When Collin asks how do we create meaningful work, I see a question that is in part a programming-technological question but I also see a rhetorical-philosophical question, as I'm sure he does as well. How do our conceptions about databases shape our ideas of the epistemology of the information they offer? Do databases suggest that we would offer different kinds of arguments? Or do we end up conducting close, critical readings of database output?

I guess this will all come to the test if/when someone conducts an analysis of this type and discovers something that is significantly divergent from the familiar stories we tell about ourselves.

thoughts on EduComm

I've been contacted a couple times about the EduComm 2009 conference coming up in June. A quick random perusal of the schedule would indicate that the presenters are university admins, IT specialists, and EdTech industry people, though there are a few faculty as well. I wonder if faculty attend the conference, and if so, in what numbers? Of course it is entirely reasonable for industry folks to get together for conferences, just as faculty do, with little or no participation from beyond faculty ranks. But wouldn't it be interesting to put these people in the same room now and then? Some of the panels sound intriguing to me such as on on the "science of social networking" and another on developing an interactive media major.

I wonder if r/c or computers/writing people go to this conference. Panels such as one about ePortfolios would probably be of general interest for first-year writing. And I think one of the things that can be most frustrating in the area of computers and writing is the real disconnect between what faculty are doing and thinking and what EdTech industry people are doing and thinking. I mean I am not being deliberately obtuse when I say that I don't get what Blackboard is thinking when they design their products. Sure I could attribute some cynical or negative explanations, but I'm willing to imagine they have reasons beyond market domination for their designs, that some theory of pedagogy and best practices is informing what they do. But what it is I couldn't tell you. Maybe a conference like this would give some insight into such thinking.

mapping play

From Johndan I picked up on this interesting model of "play" (PDF) from the Dubberly Design Office. I'd stick the image up here but it is quite intricate and you'd really need to download the PDF to read it. We can think of maps in several ways. Conventionally, in the humanities, we might be suspicious of such conceptual mapping as over-simplification or rationally over-determined. Reasonable skepticism. And the easiest response might be to critique or simply to ignore. But I am more interested in how to turn this into something productive.

The questions, then, are what we do with this model and how we take up mapping practices in relation to it? Deleuze and Guattari write about maps and tracings: "What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real... The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification." Meanwhile the tracing "injects redundancies and propogates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or the rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration."

So what do we see when we look at this model?  We might begin with the spine of Context --> Play --> Act --> Conversation --> Shared World --> Engagement --> End (pause). The Derridean in us might begin by noticing how "Play" appears within the model, a mise en abyme I suppose. The model has an arboreal appearance, even as it includes several interlocking, recursive loops. However these loops turn out to be linked modular machines that can be removed. The "cycle of learning" for example, takes a turn at the end/pause mark and moves through a process of Benefit/Harm --> Experience --> Goals --> Assess --> Plan --> Act (where we reconnect with the spine). Interestingly here, the "learning cycle" routes us around "play."

How might we put play back on the map? First, we map this tracing as a fractal process, always between dimensions and never quite closing it's loop. The end/pause is more of a gap than a completion of a circuit or shape. Activity bifurcates here, heading both down the spine and through learning. Meanwhile we might insert this model in each point, just as play is inserted as a point with the model itself. That is, if we were to zoom in on any of the named impasses, might we not find the same model of play within it?

The cycle of continuous play: Act --> Observe --> Assess--> Plan

The cycle of fun: Act --> Conversation --> Shared World --> Engagement --> Fun --> Goals --> Assess --> Plan

More curious matters here. Again "Fun" occurs within the cycle of fun, but "Play" does not appear in the cycle of continuous play. Perhaps one might inclined to critique this as poor design. However I see these matters as fortuitous, if not intentional. Play continues iteratively, even as the other segments process play activity, but even then play persists (playfully?) beyond its own iterations. What is at stake here, and what undoes this tracing, throwing it back into the real, is the problem  of, what might iteratively be termed, "intention," "origin," or "the individual."

The individual appears on the model. The model notes

Play is a conversation, and conversations require participants—at least two individuals. An individual can be:

• a single person
• a group of people (a team)
• one of many perspectives within a single person
• a virtual person

Indeed. So an "individual" can be either/both a partial person, a "single" person, more than a "single" person, or not a person at all but rather something that is "virtually" a person. A curious but not disagreeable definition. These individuals are displayed as two icons of half-people or so. Their appendages point toward action. They have talking bubbles overlapping, Venn diagram-like, as conversation. And, most interestingly, overlapping thought bubbles of a "shared world." Is this ideology?

So again we have another curious mise en abyme. The entire "model of play" occurs in the interaction between two (or more or less) "individuals," while the individual also appears as a point in the model. As such it would appear to me that the model is less a tracing than it would appear at first. Though the diagram overdetermines certain patterns, underneath fractal connections keep frothing up.

Not sure what to do with it. Something to play with, I guess.

reading is dead; long live reading

Steven Johnson writes for the Wall Street Journal on "How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write." Nick Carbone posts about this to the WPA list and a brief but instructive discussion ensues, particularly over this passage from Johnson about putting books online.

Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

What is seemingly lost here is that familiar, media-ideological experience of "intimacy" between the author and the reader. It is an intimacy that Kittler describes when observes that before the development of mechanical media, "handwriting alone could guarantee the perfect securing of traces... And what applied to writing also applied to reading. Even if the alphabetized individual known as the 'author' finally had to fall from the private exteriority of handwriting into the anonymous exteriority of print in order to secure 'all that's left of him, as well as his self-propagation'--alphabetized individuals known as 'readers' were able to reverse this exteriorization."

Perhaps it is too much to say, as Johnson does, that "Nobody will read alone anymore," except in the sense that no one has ever read alone, that reading has always been a social/cultural activity, that in order "to be a reader" one must enter into an ideological relationship with a text. At the same time, I think Johnson has a good point in suggesting that the user experience of the book has been forever changed by one's encounter with networks. Even if the words on a page are not literally linked, we can turn them into points of conduction with the flick of a Google search. In six months maybe you will be reading Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. You will read the passage I quoted above. Perhaps it will spark a brief flicker in your memory, leading you to type the phrase into Google. And maybe this post comes up. Who knows? But something will come up.

But of course no one really worries about such things for theory or scholarship or even most nonfiction. We all seem to realize that such texts are about community conversations. But somehow with novels, and maybe creative nonfiction, we fantisize a more intimate relationship. In some respects the novel is founded on this fantasy. We imagine intimate relationships with the author's mind, with the fictional minds of the characters. Is this something we will no longer imagine? Perhaps it will be as Ulmer suggests when he writes that "the ethical dilemma of self/other will not be solved in an electronic apparatus but simply that it will become irrelevant, just as 'appeasing' the gods, which was the problem addressed by ritual, became irrelevant in literacy, even if ritual form--in theater--continued within literacy."

So we will continue to read (of course!) but for different reasons. Just as we do not lament the loss of the desire to appease the gods, we will (eventually) not lament the loss of the desire for this intimate encounter with the author.

In the end it is certainly more complicated than all of that (as it always is). Perhaps we read novels for an intimate experience, but we also read them to be part of a literate club, to reaffirm some social/intellectual identity. Sometimes the latter desire may be more in force than the former. But if we come to see ourselves as part of a network then perhaps we cease to worry so much about the self/other boundary and the desire for the intimate experience with an other fades.

from immaterial labor to immaterial profits

Slate reports on the continuing troubles with monetizing even the most successful social media apps like YouTube and Facebook. Basically, these sites have banked their profitability on the possibility of ad revenue. But even though many people visit YouTube, for instance, advertisers are reluctant to associate their brands with random. low-budget, often poor taste content. Or so Slate reports. Meanwhile the costs associated with maintaining all that user-generated content continue to rise. The article reports a Credit Suisse estimate that YouTube lost $470M last year. At the same time, new sites like Hulu.com are matching YouTube ad revenues with far less traffic because the television and old movie content is more acceptable to advertisers.

I am somewhat skeptical of this explanation. Have you seen some of the crappy reality programming on cable TV? Advertisers seem to line up for drunken, half-naked, mud-wrestling cat fights that wind their way from VH-1 to Oxygen and back. I don't think it's poor taste or low budget that's at issue here. However, it might be predictablity. If your buying an ad during Rock of Love, you know what you're getting. You never know where YouTube eyeballs are going to go. You can be fairly sure it's the lowest common denominator, but maybe you need more control than that. Or think that you do anyway.

Maybe advertisers will lighten up. Or maybe they have a legitimate concern.

As much as people seem to enjoy YouTube, would they pay for it the way they pay for some other content online? Then you get into a very different model. Either I pay as a user to access content or I pay as a creator to upload and store content. Or potentially both. I pay for Typepad. I could be using a different free service, but I'm here b/c I've been here for years, I've never had any complaints, and I can do everything I need to do. So I don't think paying to upload is so unreasonable, provided that you maintain complete control over your content and how it is presented (including the option of sharing it openly through CC). I'm sure having to pay would alter the content being uploaded to YouTube.

So what does this do to the argument about immaterial labor? If, in the end, no one makes any money from user-generated content, can we really say that UGC is labor? In some ways it's moot. Some people have already made tons of money from others willing to speculate on the potential value of social media. Similarly, GM loses money like crazy but no one would suggest that the activities of auto workers are not a form of labor. And yet maybe "labor" is not entirely the right category for this activity. Am I laboring now? If I am, the profits are as immaterial as the labor, maybe more so.

Perhaps what is going on here is a new kind of crisis/tragedy of the commons. Unlike the old commons that gets fished-out or over-grazed, the digital commons appears to be this endless supply of storage and bandwidth. However obviously those things do cost money to someone, and while both have gotten cheaper, in the volume being used by YouTube or Facebook, it adds up quickly. That said, there isn't just cost there. There's also value, or at least potential value. Almost all UGC has some value to someone. Some % of UGC has value to both a broad audience and advertisers. Maybe that % is large enough to pay the freight for the rest of the media. The problem is finding the valuable media among the resit, which is ostensibly media litter or noise. It would appear that the "wisdom of the crowds" model doesn't work here. The crowds don't lead us to the valuable media; they're seemingly rubber-neckers leading us to the car crashes.

As such perhaps we need some changing ethos that helps us to identify valuable media, not just for the advertisers. In fact, not "for them" at all, but for the rest of us. I'm certainly not on a crusade to "save" YouTube or Facebook or any other entrepeneurial enterprise. However I do think that it would be valuable for us, culturally, to have a digital commons but we won't if we just use it for a digital media dumping ground.

to the future editors of CCC online

As you might know CCCC is looking for two new online editors, one who will serve as the online editor for CCC and the other who will have the more nebulous role (if that is possible) of "MemberWeb" Editor (despite the title I don't believe this is a porn site). Joking aside, I really do wish the best of luck to whomever takes up this challenge. I'm starting a new job next year at the University of Buffalo and will be taking on the job of directing the composition program shortly after, so I know I won't be applying.

Readers of this blog are likely aware of Collin Brooke's experiences as CCC online editor and have probably read Steve Krause's excellent analysis of the jobs as they have been described by NCTE/CCCC. As Steve notes:

First, I would suggest that the reason why NCTE was not able before to get someone to take on on the web editing job and why they are unlikely to have success with these latest calls is that anyone who is qualified to do this work knows that these would be problematic positions.

Second, I’m increasingly worried that NCTE doesn’t seem to “get it” when it comes to an online presence. These ads would be understandable and excusable if they were posted 10 or 12 years ago; that CCC and the NCTE are running them now is scary.

So under the category of unsolicited advice, I provide the following suggestions. First, in terms of CCC's online presence:

• What's your plan to move from print to fully online? And please don't tell me you don't have one. Do we really need to keep discussing this? You don't have to become Kairos. You don't have to publish video or Flash or whatever. You can even keep with PDF, though I wish you wouldn't, at least not exclusively.
• When you do go online make the texts findable and not just on the local website. Participate in bringing rhet/comp online journals into compliance with emerging standards for findability. Go type "college composition and communication" into Google Scholar and see what you get. I get hits out of jstor.org for the journal, but they aren't even the first hits. If CCC is our flagship journal, shouldn't it show up first when you type in the title of the journal!?! Type in "rhetoric and composition" and you have to dig through several pages before a single CCC article shows up.
• I should be able to have an RSS feed on my Netvibes page with an updated list of CCC article titles, authors, and abstracts, with links to the articles.
• I don't know what economics make the archives available only by subscription, but I wish it would change. For an organization that is always pining about having more influence, it would seem that making the journal openly available would be a no-brainer. Exactly what would you losing by making articles a year or two old freely available? 
• Getting more to "wish list" type items... It would be great if registered users/members could tag and/or comment on articles. If you publish an article and I write about it here, wouldn't it be useful to trackback from the CCCC site?

Second, regarding the "MemberWeb" (n.b. first task: change name). Essentially, I consider myself fairly savvy about social media, and I am somewhat flummoxed by the immodest task described here. So let me just through out this question:

If you're an NCTE/CCCC member, as I am, your motivation is maybe so that you can get a copy of the journal, but you can probably get access to the journal through your library. So your primary motive is probably that you go the CCCC conference, right? So why would you go to this website? What kind of community would you be looking for here?

Look at Kairosnews or the Writing Program Administrators websites. Here you can see two online communities that at least have some elements of what CCCC seems to imagine. Both have Facebook groups, as does CCCC and NCTE and a dozen other rhetoric-related groups. Plus, of course, all the email listservs soldier on.

What are we going to do at the CCCC MemberWeb? Superpoke members? Exchange cat pictures? Leave behind email discussions and move to web-based discussion (not that I'd object to that)? Aggregate CCCC member blogs? As I see it, for these purposes there are two kinds of CCCC members. There are a small group who have incorporated social media into their academic work, and for those people I'm not sure what the MemberWeb would add. Then there's a larger group of r/c scholars who don't really do social media. Maybe they recently added facebook profiles to search out their HS buddies. But that's it. That's your audience, I think. But how do you convince those people to take up the social media habit? Do these folks desire a MemberWeb?

I really don't want to be negative about this, b/c I do appreciate NCTE/CCCC trying to catch up, trying to figure out what to do with emerging technologies. In terms of the MemberWeb, I think you need to begin by recognizing that there is already an extensive r/c online community. You're standing on one small node of it right now. Begin by aggregating the existing r/c content: blogs, journals with rss feeds, podcasts, anything that you can find. Then offer users ways to add their own content. See what happens, I guess.

Oh, and promote like hell, but please change the name first.

pedagogy in space

I'm thinking about the future of humanities classroom design. Wired magazine offers a short piece on the "evolution of office spaces," where it is obvious that they typical classroom follows a Taylorist design model: desks in rows. No one is surprised by this. The familiar tactic of moving desks into a circle or small groups would seem to be reflected by office design innovations of the sixties like the "office landscape" and the "action office" (see the Wired article). Really though, office design doesn't have too much to tell us about university classroom design, simply b/c the office workspace represents a kind of personal space where one sits repeatedly day after day. It is your desk... and certainly classrooms don't work that way.

And yet there are some similarities, and fundamentally the design of the classroom or office is intended to promote certain behaviors and interactions over others.

So we know (or I think we know) that the future of the classroom as lecture space is fairly limited. Secondly, while you can bring students together to have them work independently (e.g. working on individual writing assignments), that doesn't seem to make much sense either. The classroom, like the office, can be an opportunity for surveillance, but in my view that's not a particularly productive use of time/space. It seems to me that if we are going to bring people together in a room we are going to do so in order to accomplish goals not easily achieved without real-time, face-to-face interaction.

So what might those goals (and related activities) be? And more germane to my topic, how would one design a space for them?

• Small group or classwide discussion
• Presentations--while I think lecture as a primary mode is out. Presentations that build in audience participation would be a sensible purpose for gathering in a classroom.
• Project collaboration--an opportunity for students to meet with one another and faculty

If I thought that way, I guess I'd have to say my current classroom is not a bad space: computers along the outer wall, large table in the center, projection system and whiteboard. Students can turn away from the computers for class discussion or to watch a presentation. They can work in groups either at the computers or at the center table. It's a cramped room though if one has the full 20 students in their. It's probably optimal at 15. One could accomplish the same design with larger numbers in a larger room; there would probably just be several tables in the center rather than one large one.

But maybe I'm not thinking big enough here. Tell me again why we are meeting MWF for 50 minutes? It's not so I can stand there and talk. Is it so I can stand over the students and make sure they do their work? Is it because the students lack maturity or self-responsibility? Is this MWF business baby-sitting twenty-somethings? Because really the students don't need to come to class to work on a group project or workshop drafts, do they?

The classroom ends up being a fairly particular space where students gather to interact with faculty. Other traditional classroom activities like listening to lectures or working collaboratively might be better accomplished elsewhere, online or ftf. If I were to worm my way back to the office space metaphor, then the classroom would be like a meeting room and I suppose faculty would be more like project managers.

Now I don't really want to go very far with the office analogy. The pedagogical relationship is quite different from the managerial one. However as we begin to think about hybrid courses, telecommuting and so on, I think we need to recognize how work gets done differently. If the classroom becomes an important place to build relations among students and faculty, then perhaps it ought to be designed with that specifically in mind.

on cost control and learning from newspapers

In the Chronicle a piece on "What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers' Decline." And yes, I addressed that here recently. In short, I think the comparison is somewhat useful. If colleges think of themselves primarily as content providers then they are in trouble. Long ago, in an age of information scarcity that might have been the case. Also I think journalists and faculty share in common a preference to not think too much about how the budget sausage gets made. That's also something we might want to change.

But I think there's a deeper issue. And I will not claim any expertise on this topic (as opposed to all other topics I address on my blog, ahem), but it would appear that it is quite difficult to actually understand the accounting of higher education institutions... to the point where there is fierce debate over why college costs have risen so much, though part of the debate/uncertainty is because there are complex factors involved here.

So you'll have to excuse my oversimplification here, but tell me what you think of this chart.

Institution	Yearly, full-time tuition cost
NYS Community College	$3392
SUNY Comprehensive College	$4995
SUNY Research University	$4970
Online For-Profit	$15450

Well, I was going to add average class size but I couldn't find it for each institution. Also I should note that the online school just offered a per credit cost for bachelor's programs ($515) so I multiplied that by 30. A couple other things to note here. First, no one pays this price. It's like that sticker price of an automobile. Second, this doesn't reflect fees. The fees at the comprehensive college and university are higher, but they provide a fuller range of services. (In turn the university has higher fees than the college for much the same reason.) Third, these are in-state tuition costs for the first three.

So, anyway, the first thing I think you can note here is that as an in-state student you will pay around $20K for the tuition part of your higher education. There's nowhere else you are going to put that money that will be a better investment. The second thing you might notice is that there is really no cost difference between the comprehensive college and the research university. The community college is less but doesn't offer the same degrees. The point is that the research focus of the university does not cost the student more money. The student:faculty ratio is the same at both schools (though the univ has a larger avg. class size). The comprehensive college has a higher proportion of part-time faculty.

It's important to note that tuition only represents a fraction of the cost of college. It's about 1/4 of the cost. Room and board, personal expenses, and transportation add up to about $12K. However I would think that those costs would have to reflect the general costs of living in the area of the university, or at least wouldn't be more than that. That is, you wouldn't think this would be the site of college cost outpacing inflation. 

The remaining $2-3K is college fees and books, for a total of $20K/yr for a 4-yr public SUNY degree.

I wonder about the fees part. Maybe one could opt out of some of these costs. I don't want to use your gym. I don't need your health services. I don't want to be involved in your athletic/recreation programs. That's a tough call as it would obviously raise the cost for those who wanted/needed those services. But you could be talking $700/yr. And then there are book costs (*cough* open access online textbooks *cough*).

However the point I really want to make, going back to the newspaper analogy, is the lion's share of the cost of college has nothing to do with instruction and even less to do with the content delivery element of instruction which might be analogized with newspapers. My way of thinking about it is that you've gotta live somewhere and you gotta eat. You're going to drive around and have "personal expenses" regardless of whether you're a student or not.

So I say fine. Strip it all down. Live in your parents' house. Cut out most of the fees except library and technology fees, which you need for curriculum. Use open access textbooks wherever possible. Cut the cost to $6K a year,  $600 per course. And that's the sticker price that no one actually pays. You still have the same faculty teaching the same load and the same size courses. You haven't impacted that portion of the budget at all. Teach them on campus or online.

See what the students and parents want to do. I'm guessing that they will elect to live on campus and pay those extra service fees. But maybe not. Either way it shouldn't necessarily affect the educational/research mission of the institution.

Does that seem like such an unreasonable price for an education? Meanwhile you give away all the course content for free. Open access textbooks and lectures are free on demand. You ask students to pay for interaction with faculty--for evaluation, for mentoring, for seminar discussion, for partnering in research, etc. It's not like newspapers at all, and when you start to think about it in those terms it gets difficult to do entirely online, at least with current technologies.

It's in vogue to bash higher education, but it's probably all too common for a student to commute or even live on campus and end up paying more for his/her new car during the four years on campus than s/he pays for tuition.

out-teaching the automated network

If you want to build an online FYC program that would work for the 18-20 yo college student, there are a couple of hurdles that need to be crossed.

1. Online education, as it is largely designed now, requires a high degree of self-motivation and self-discipline. It's sort of the opposite of online porn, which thrives on titillation and idleness. Your online course needs to be the kind of place students habitually surf to, like checking their Facebook pages.

2. Online education requires the development of a new set of pedagogic behaviors. Students have 12 years of learning how to behave in the classroom: i.e. sit in the back and avoid eye contact with the teacher while still managing to look like you're paying attention. Ok, maybe that's a snarky but there is a learned passivity that students have acquired through schooling. Games probably give us the best potential insight into teaching participants how to behave using a kind of built-in reward system. Play the game as it asks to be played and gain access to various rewards and improved reputation.

These are not trivial problems. In addition, you'd have to consider how you'd deliver a writing curriculum that you actually valued.

Now here's what I would do if I were a big university or even better a state university system. I would create a program like this and offer it as a kind of freemium model. There would be plenty you could do for free but if you wanted access to the college instructors then you would pay some relatively small fee. Really the purpose of the fee would be more to ensure that the students who were involved had some level of buy-in and commitment to the program.

Alternately you could have a freemium model where students could choose between having advertisements or paying for an ad-free version. That's probably more questionable in terms of typical university ethos, but that's b/c you are forgetting about the money Coke or Pepsi pays for exclusive pouring rights on your campus and a variety of other marketing tie-ins we have learned to overlook.

Then I would offer credit for the course to anyone who enrolled in the university system for some minimum amount of credits. You would essentially be offering low-cost AP credit courses. Why not? You're accepting those credits for free anyway and offering a course like this might drive system-wide enrollment.

Of course you'd have to look at how you pay for the delivery of the course. You might consider looking at how social media applications make their money, including ad money. You could also consider the marketing advantage of offering such a course. In addition you could offer special programs for military personnel and others who really needed online course credit.

My point is that if you are worried about the "threat" of private companies offering low-cost online college courses, then as an industry you can crush them the way that Microsoft crushed Netscape by bundling their web browser for free with each pc.