[Note: this is a post from a now defunct blog. I'm republishing it because of this recent article about Google, "Google designer leaves, blaming data-centrism". It is not a defense of what appears to be Google's data fetishism (but who can blame them?); it just got me thinkin' ...]
I want to say that the usual practice of beginning with the user interface, as the artifact that guides the conversation between clients and developers, is wrong. It looks good and sounds right: The client will be using the interface, right? The code is a black box that ought to be subject to intense refactoring, right?
True all, but we also know that the stack of application development rests on the database layer, moves into the various layers of code and so-called business logic, and ends with the user interface. The layer that has the most effect on what is possible to code or display downstream is the database layer. That is, what you choose as a database format and model will constrain what you can do on the presentation end, whereas presentation technologies rarely have effects in the opposite direction (a possible exception is Flash before Flex). This stack holds even if you’re not using MVC; it’s more or less encoded in the way our current software tools work. For example, even if you code in pure JavaScript, your stack is going to begin with JSON or XML or the DOM, and end with CSS.
Call this view “data determinism.” As such, it probably suffers from the same criticisms that have been leveled at other forms of determinism, such as historical materialism, which holds that infrastructre (work behaviors, technologies, etc.) determine superstructire (religious beliefs, laws, etc.). I’ll accept that, if you (the critic) accept that the data level at least constrains the other levels, and that the other levels, to have an effect, must be able to modify the data level. Well, then, there’s the rub: once the data model is written, it doesn’t get changed a whole lot. The web designers don’t have a lot to talk to the DBAs about, and the two groups rarely know how to have a conversation. In fact, with enterprise databases, you get the tail-wagging-the-dog effect: “We can’t do that because the database only accepts this kind of data.” So there.
Anyway, I believe that the conversation with clients should begin with the data model, using perhaps simplified E-R diagrams, but ultimately getting at a kind of ontology. What are the salient categories and relations and processes that describe the domain in question? This is a conversation that clients can have with developers, and usually it is a great conversation, and not constrained by an arbitrary visual artifact that can direct conversation along a false groove.
A couple of principles follow from data determinism:
The requirements process should be preceded (replaced?) by an ontology-discovery process. And the proper method to use here is ethnography.
The database should be designed with flexibility in mind. I prefer very simple semantic web structures (triples, graphs, etc.) that can be filtered by more specific ontology layers. This process I want to discuss in another post or two.
After this is in place, then the discussion should move to the level of visual artifacts, such as interfaces. Both the client and developer will have a better idea of what is possible.
This is essentially a codification of the application development process I’ve developed with clients in academia, where I have developed several web-based applications for humanities computing projects.
Looking back at this post, I see that it has significance for two things that currently occupy my mind: Edpunk and the RAW DATA NOW movement (both, interestingly, represented by folks at UMW …)
1. Data determinism provides an under-the-hood rationale for Edupunk: Enterprise apps tend to hide data and the database, reifying it into a natural, immutable condition that interfaces and behaviors have to conform to. Think of Blackboard. Also consider that it was over the data model that they took Desire2learn to court.
2. Data deteminism also helps explain why data, among all the things we call “information,” needs to be free (in spite of the fact that it apparently does not want to be). RAW DATA NOW, as Tim Berners-Lee recently exhorted the auidence at TED. Because if it determines everything, we need to have access to it — raw, and without undue mediation by nice-looking interfaces or toothy EULAs.
Looking at this bit of the SXSW panel on Edupunk, I have this to say:
It seems that Edupunk really has become about anarchy, just as Gardner feared, at least in the minds of many. Downes’ social club theory of education is just the sort of pointless populist angst that punk exploited, and which differs, I would argue, from the more authentic (in quotes) Clash-like music, where one gets a sense of hope. I’m not sure where it comes from, but it’s there, and it’s also not calling for destruction. I think it’s this: the Clash knew the limits of the medium — rouse but do not prescribe, but also do not proscribe. After all, we’re just a band. Leave social change for others.
I am afraid that Downes comes off as a typical representative of a now commonplace millenarianism among instructional technologists, at least at conferences — where the Las Vegas principle seems to apply (“What happens at ELI stays at ELI”). It’s a cargo cult.
Jim Groom is no millenarian. For him, the essence of Edupunk is not in its anarchism, but in its communitarinism, if I may impose that word upon him — the relocation of decision-making and creativity in the hands of faculty, students, and technologists, and not in the hands of corporate business models that may appear to be logical and necessary from an administrative point of view, but which are in fact neither. This does not at all mean Kill the University, as Downes very clearly argues. It means, Let’s not go down this slippery slope that certain kinds of software seem to be pushing us. That’s pretty much it (which is a lot).
Ironically, Downes’ approach puts education much more in the hands of anonymous centralization, for without the residential campus, there is no mediating institution between Google or the Canadian government and the individual. Downes commits the classic fallacy of radically individualistic political thought — the destruction of supposedly oppressive institutions like colleges, families, etc. only creates the social conditions of anomie and totalitarianism. Good luck with that.
Edupunk, for me, is really all about what Gardner and Jim, like McCartney and Lennon, had going at the very beginning. A discussion about what sort of leadership is appropriate to academic technology, given this new millieux of technology. What do we teach our students and faculty, both critically and practically? We need to recover this thread; from what I can see, the SXSW panel did not achieve this.
I want to give my two cents on Edupunk, a wildy successful term coined by Jim Groom (Mary Washington) to describe a style of academic technology support that (1) eschews Central IT and its dependency on scalable but clunky and ultimately boring and possibly evil applications, such as Blackboard, and (2) instead favors helping faculty use more open, flexible, elegant, interesting, and available technologies from the open source and Web 2.0 spaces, such as WordPress. In coining the term, Jim gave meaning and focus to a real trend and tension that has been with us for some time, but which remained uncatalyzed for being unnamed. Naming is powerful magic and we would do well to pay attention to it when it succeeds as well as it has in this case.
A lot has already been said about Edupunk and the range of ideas it connotes. In addition to the press that followed the coining of the term (including the New York Times), Jim has produced a playful but serious Battle Royale video series in which Jim and his former colleague Gardner Campbell (now at Baylor) debate the appropriateness and effectiveness of the term to advance goals they both share. (The topic was also the subject of a recent panel at SXSW 2009, but I have not listened to that yet.) After listening to these clips, though, I can’t help but think that the core idea has been weighed down by the considerable semantic load of the term “punk,” for better and for worse. So I thought I would take a stab at rescuing the idea from the word, if that’s at all possible. (I have no idea if this is cool with Jim.) Not that the debate between Gardner and Jim is reducible to mere semantics; they do have important differences of opinion on educational technology that go beyond the debate in question.
So, the core meaning of the term Edupunk derives from a rather straighforward analogy Jim draws between this style of academic technology and the late 1970s punk movement in music associated with groups like the Clash (his example). Just as the Clash had a raw freshness and energy in contrast to the bloated, formulaic, and empty music of Billboard 100 bands at the time, apps like WordPress and Drupal stand in contrast to the bloated and mind-numbing software that we often (but not always) get from the corporate sector, at least in the case of educational technology. The analogy works at a literal level since the success of bands like the Clash had a lot to do with their avoidance of Big Music production studios and producers in favor of cheaper technologies in available spaces like garages and basements. [Update: garage music is an example of the long tail of production being enabled by the commodification of the means of music production that took place in the 1970s.]
When you look at the analogy in this way, the term garage band, or some variant of it, turns out to be a better analogy than punk proper for what Jim is getting at. As a Clash song goes, they were a “garage band” from “garage land.” The image of a garage band — and think of early Devo or the Modern Lovers here — evokes the DIY ethos Jim refers to while avoiding analogies to bands like the Sex Pistols, who were cynically manufactured and marketed from the start. I have a hard time thinking of Drupal, for example, in the same space as the Sex Pistols. I have a less hard time comparing the software to the sound of, say, Joy Division. There is an elegant simplicity to both that, presumably, derives from their being developed without the encumbrances of a beauracracy and Big Leadership.
The analogy to the garage band music rather than punk per se avoids Gardner Campbell’s apt criticism about punk in the strict sense, that it was a divisive and cyncial movement without any real concern for change (one thinks of the Ramone’s I’m Against It or Richard Hell and the Voidoid’s Blank Generation), and therefore serves as a bad model for the hard work of crafting a transformational academic technology practice. But I suppose the norman “garage” does not lend itself to phrase coining the way the saxon-sounding “punk” does.
And the word “punk” does have an important connection to the open source software culture that Jim valorizes: there is a direct bloodline of descent that goes from punk (music) to cyberpunk (literature) to the hackerdom (technology) that produced Perl, Linux, and PHP. It’s a connection that is evident from the aesthetics of open source software before it became successful and co-opted (not necessarily for worse) by the web-inflated software industry. Just look at the covers ot 2600 and The Perl Journal from 1990s.
So, although I think Gardner is correct about not wanting to salute this particular flag because of its guilt by association with the Johnny Rotten school of anti-leadership, I think Jim was (is) onto something very important that needs further unpacking, even after the hype curve subsides. Ironically, I think the set of issues he catalyzed with the term have precisely to do with leadership and its connection to teaching and technology, where Gardner rightly shifts the debate. But more on that later.
