Running in my Father's Footsteps

Note: This obviously has nothing to do with EdTech but I recently found this essay that I wrote in July 2008 and it still feels timely for me so I thought I'd offer it up as a Father's Day (and Independence Day) offering for you all.

My Dad at Will Rogers State Park, approximately 1964

Running in my Father's Footsteps

Unlike me, my dad was a pretty good athlete. When he was young, his favorite sport was basketball. He was the point guard in a competitive amateur league that even played in a tournament in the old Sports Arena. He loved playing softball too, and I spent many Saturdays in the summer tagging along, watching the Times reporters team play against other offices like the District Attorney, or split into Kiddies vs. Codgers.

My dad always encouraged my interest in sports, and if he ever felt disappointed that I was completely lacking in talent, speed, and coordination, he never let it show around me. We spent endless hours tossing the baseball, or the frisbee, or shooting baskets. He was a strong swimmer too, and I loved being in the ocean with him. I wanted badly to be good at baseball; two years in Little League taught me that except for throwing, catching, running, and hitting, I could have been a decent ballplayer.

Like most men devoted to his work and his family, he found it harder and harder to get out and play sports, and he started to get a little paunchy and out-of-shape. I guess it was sometime in his late thirties that he started running, or as we called it then, jogging. He would put on his shorts and head down the to high school track and run a mile, or two, or three. It seemed to be just enough exercise to help him feel like he was keeping in the game. A few times, I tried to run with him but it really had no appeal at all for me. I associated running with P.E. class, and P.E. class with humiliation. But I always admired his consistent effort.

In 1978, a local group started a 10K race in his town, Pacific Palisades. By then I was off starting my own life on the opposite coast, so I didn't pay much attention, but at some point my dad decided to start running the Will Rogers 10K. I guess he ran it about 10 times over the years, and while I have no idea what kind of times he ran I don't think that mattered to him. He was proud that he was taking care of his health and proud to be out there putting in his effort in the race.

The Will Rogers race gets its name from Will Rogers State Park. The first half of the race starts downhill and then climbs, but overall it's fairly flat. The second half, however, turns down the hill on Sunset Boulevard from Chautauqua, until it reaches a wide sweeping curve at the bottom of a hill. Then it climbs a series of steep switchbacks to the park. After passing through the park the course runs down a steep hill and then back up Sunset to reach the Palisades. It's not an easy 10K.

Will Rogers Park was the home of the famous writer and humorist who built a beautiful ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains so he could have a little piece of Oklahoma but still get to Hollywood for his career. When I was very young, my parents started taking me to the park. We'd visit the polo ponies, hike up the hills, and occasionally tour the rambling ranch home of Will Rogers. I was always fascinated by Will Rogers - he seemed so clever and witty, and I loved his home. There was something about his humor and his good nature that I always associated with my father, and when I found out that Rogers had died in an airplane crash the day before my father was born, the connection became even stronger. Will Rogers most famous quote, "I never met a man I didn't like", seemed to me almost as if it was something my father had said.

Despite my father's good nature and his strength and his exercise, cancer proved to be even stronger and he died more than 10 years ago, a young man by any standard. This was a sad recapitulation of his father's even earlier death from lung cancer. It's still hard for me to believe he's not around, and I miss him all the time.

I started running about two years ago. It didn't really have anything to do with my father at the time. I was getting close to 50 and for some reason decided that I ought to complete a marathon. My original idea was just to walk it. As I got stronger in my training, I decided that I'd get there faster if I ran at least part of the time, so that's what I do now - walk some, run some. I'm very slow, but to my great surprise, I love it. After years of frustration and humiliation related to sports, I've found something I really like to do, and the fact that I'm slow doesn't bother me, at least most of the time. I completed that marathon (another story) and since then have run a half-marathon, a 21-mile race, and maybe a dozen 5K and 10K races.

Last week I ran the Will Rogers 10K for the first time, but the earlier part of the week was marked by another event I had promised myself I would complete around my fiftieth birthday - a colonoscopy. I was about a year late, but I got it done, and they even removed a polyp. In theory, a polyp left in is a potential cancer, so removing it might have saved my life - who knows? Just before I went in for the "procedure", the doctor asked if I had any questions; I told him no, but that I wanted him to know that colon cancer killed my father, so I was counting on him to take his time and look around carefully. He wrote this information on the chart with the solemnity it deserved.

Three days later I was out on the course with my oldest good friend Robert. His father hung in longer but died in the last year. We had both run the 5K version of the Will Rogers race, but we were tackling the 10K for the first time. Robert told me he'd run with me, but frankly I'm a lot slower than he is and I didn't want to hold him back. I told him I'd be glad to see him at the finish line.

I hadn't trained for the race very well and by the time I made the turn down Sunset away from the 5K course I was getting pretty tired. It was a hot day too. But it was exhilarating running down the middle of Sunset Boulevard, a beautiful day, a beautiful road and no cars. I began to think of my dad and all the times he had run this route before me. This was the road he'd run, he'd seen the same eucalyptus trees and guard rails and street signs. He was here before me, and now it's my turn.

I'm not one of those people who imagines the dead looking down upon the living and watching them. My cosmology doesn't really permit that kind of sentiment -- my dad was here, and now he's gone, and that's how it is to me. But as I was running down Sunset, and especially as I turned up the narrow driveway that marks the entrance to the park, I had the feeling that my father knew what I was doing and he was proud of me. It may not have made me run any faster, but it did buoy my spirits and I had one of the most enjoyable runs I've ever had.

It was a long way back up Sunset and I was glad to see the end of the race, but I did manage to run through the finish with my arms up and a smile on my face. So what if I was the 932nd runner out of 986? Robert and Lucy and her sisters were there to cheer me on, and like my dad, they encourage me no matter how slow I am. I ran my race, and I'm proud of it. Despite adversity and pain and doubt, my dad ran through the finish line every time, including at the end of his life, and that's one of the lessons I learned from him. Nobody but me knows what it feels like to put out my best effort, nobody will necessarily reward me for it or think much of it, but I can do it Dad, I can do it. I know what my best is and I won't be satisfied with less. He knows that, and he's proud of me.

Michael Berman

July 6, 2008

Postscript: Yes, I still run when I can. Right now walking is what my body wants to do but I will run again as soon as I'm ready.

Humanized Learning: Utopia versus Dystopia

As part of the recent ShapingEDU gathering I was invited to develop a brief utopian/dystopian vision for education in the year 2039. I chose to imagine what Humanized Learning could become, if we stay true to human values (utopia) or use it as a commercial buzzword (dystopia). I'm happy to share these scenarios here & interested in your response.

Students reacting to news from their instructor (courtesy @hlcdance)

Utopian: Institutional and political leaders understand and support the essential role of meaningful human interaction in the learning process. Artificial intelligence and other algorithmic strategies are used thoughtfully and carefully scrutinized for bias, with constant oversight and shaping by human hands. Students never feel that they are learning from machines because there are thoughtful, sympathetic, well-trained experts (teachers!) with whom they maintain constant communication and connection. In addition, student to student interaction and connection is incorporated into the learning journey. An ethic of humanized learning ensures that every student has the opportunity to achieve their potential, especially those who start with the greatest disadvantages. As institutions, teachers, and students get progressively more adept with learning in the online space, a greater proportion of learning is online, at a distance, technology mediated, but always with the right balance of computer and human interaction and caring teachers present throughout the journey. Over time, the student becomes a learner and the learner becomes a teacher, with each human maintaining agency in their educational journey of a lifetime.

"Machine learning" (from the Netflix mini-series Maniac)

Dystopian: Humanized learning continues to be a buzz-word, but is anything but human. The default learning interaction for students is based on a shallow conception of artificial intelligence, typically touted as "personalized" but reinforcing social, cultural, and economic boundaries. The shrinking class of those who can afford it opt-out of the teaching machine for themselves and their children, choosing to use instead highly-trained, human teachers and mentors. Everyone else is shunted to a dull machine-delivered curriculum focused mostly on the short-term needs of employers and the profit motives of the providers. Human interaction, when available, is typically provided by poorly-paid "customer service representatives" who are trained primarily in how to get students to sign up and continue to pay for instruction, regardless of quality. Students who fail to thrive in this system are blamed for their failure, attributed to a lack of intelligence, grit, or character.

Thanks to Samantha Becker (@sambeckertweets) and Lev Gonick (@levgonick) and everyone who helped organize and participated for a very interesting conversation at ShapingEDU. Also big thanks to Michelle Pacansky-Brock (@brocansky) and Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) whose writing and presentations have deeply influenced my thinking on this issue. And special thanks to the shameless & fearless Heather Castillo (@hlcdance) and her students for giving us a glimpse of what humanized learning utopia can look like.

How Academic Pricing Works: A Fantasy Dialog

I recently engaged in a Twitter conversation with respected colleagues about institutions that charge an extra fee for online courses. They were arguing that this fee was arbitrary and unfair and I agree totally. However, some of their comments suggested that they don't have the experience that I do with the (often arbitrary) fees that get charged. I immediately imagined how the conversation might have gone, Let me emphasize - this is imaginary, but based on my experience is a completely plausible scenario.

Date: 2010
Place: Provost's Office, Major State Unversity
Present: Dean, Provost

Dean: I think it's time we expanded our distance-ed courses. The students really want the option.
Provost: That's great! How much extra revenue can we pull in? We could really use it after the state cuts.
Dean: Well... it's not really going to bring in anything other than the tuition. And we have some expenses - we really need to hire an instructional designer, and we're going to need to license a better LMS. I was hoping you could find a way to provide some extra resources. I figure we need $250,000
Provost: That's a nice idea, but I got nothing. You need to figure out how to fund it. What if you charged a fee for the online courses?
Dean: That doesn't seem right - I mean, we charge the same for all our in-person courses no matter what they cost. These students aren't even going to take up classroom space.
Provost: Yeah, I hear you, but we need the money. How many students do you think you'll have online?
Dean: We'll easily have 2,500 in a year.
Provost: So, we can charge them $100 each and that should do it. I'll talk to the CFO And if this works out we can try to figure out another way to fund it in a year or two when the budget recovers.

Date: 2014
Place: Provost's Office
Present: Dean, New Provost (2013)

Dean: I wanted to talk about the fee for online courses.
Provost: Oh, OK. What about it? Do you want to raise it?
Dean: Well, we did it to start up our program, but the old Provost agreed it wasn't really fair and it was a stopgap. We should drop it.
Provost: How much does it bring in?
Dean: It's actually up to about $750,000 a year
Provost: Well, if you drop it, how are you going to make up the $750,000?
Dean: Don't you think we could get a baseline increase to cover it?
Provost: Not really. You want to hire new faculty don't you? And then there's the cost of the settlement for that tenure dispute, that's going to be at least $250,000. Revenue is revenue. If we can that, YOU have to make it up. I don't have that kind of money sitting around, despite what the Senate Budget Committee says.
Dean: Well, OK, they never complain about it so I guess it's not that big a deal.

Date: 2018
Place: Provost's Office
Present: New Dean (2015), New Provost (2017)
Provost: I want to talk to you about the online course fee
Dean: Yeah, I can't find anyone who even remembers why we have it
Provost: Well it's a good thing we do. The President has asked me to come up with a million we can give back to go into Advancement to support the Capital Campaign. I figure we can use $500,000 of that fee revenue. And I'm going to need $250,000 to support the consultant for our assessment project.
Dean: So I can keep $250,000? We really need that to pay the instructional designer. We could use another one but I'll hold that position open.
Provost: Thanks for helping out. And let's think about going to $150, it's not really that much and it's been $100 for a long time.

FADE TO BLACK

Lessons from Protesting

photo CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 www.foundsf.org

As I watch the activity on campuses around the US on #NationalWalkoutDay, I'm vividly reminded of my own experience as a student growing up in the last great era of student protest.

In 1968 I was in sixth grade at Mar Vista Elementary in Los Angeles. 1968 was a remarkable, violent, turbulent, divided year, not just in the US but notably in Mexico and much of Europe. I'm the oldest in my family, but I had friends with brothers and sisters at UCLA, Venice High, and other centers of protest - as well as friends with siblings, cousins, and neighbors in the middle of the violence that was the US intervention in Vietnam.

At some point, a group of us at Mar Vista decided we needed to protest. I honestly can't remember what the issue was, but we decided we would occupy the flagpole in front of the school and prevent the flag from being pulled down at the end of the day. As class ended for the day, we assembled in a ring around the flag pole, sat down, and waited.

As I recall, at some point the campus custodian came to furl the flag and found a small group of 10 and 11 year old kids surrounding it and informing him (politely) that they were protesting and that the flag could not be taken down. He probably scratched his head a couple of times and headed to principal's office to get advice and counsel.

Next, our principal Lorna Round came out to talk to us. She asked us calmly what we were doing and we explained the issue and our actions. She listened patiently and respectfully to her students, who were probably confused both about the meaning and means we had chosen to protest. She was not patronizing, but did inform us that the custodian couldn't go home until the flag was down, so she was hopeful that we could wrap up the protest before too long.

So we sat and maybe sang a song or chanted something, then got up and headed home.

You could say that this was just an act of entitled children (which we mostly were) playing at protest, and you'd be right. But it also taught us that if we spoke up, there were people who would listen. I was also taught by Mrs. Round that respect is the cornerstone of civil society, and that children have ideas and rights, and deserve to be heard. I remember this action more vividly than any civics lessons or lecture on the First Amendment.

The Undead Factoid: Who Decided 65% of the Jobs of the Near Future Don't Exist Today?

An article published this week on singularityhub.com leads with the following breathless description of the future of work:

We live in a world of accelerating change. New industries are constantly being born and old ones are becoming obsolete. A report by the World Economic Forum reveals that almost 65 percent of the jobs elementary school students will be doing in the future do not even exist yet. Both the workforce and our knowledge base are rapidly evolving.

Amid the questionable - do we really live in a world of accelerating change? - and the obvious - things are evolving - we find the very specific claim: 65 percent of the jobs our elementary school students will do don't exist today. Supposedly this startling fact has now been revealed by the World Economic Forum, and thus we should do... something. As if we thought everything was great about education, but now that we have this 65 percent figure, it's a call to action and we need to start changing education right now! Think of the children and their futures!

What follows in the article is a set of mostly non-controversial recommendations - like, teach students to think critically, and communicate well, which sound like excellent suggestions. But I (and others) bristled at the 65% - how could you reveal such a thing? I mean, you could predict it, but why 65% and not 55% or 72%? It just feels arbitrary and made-up. And I knew I'd seen this number before, so I decided to do a bit of digging. 

First of all, the World Economic Forum didn't "reveal" it - they refer to it as a "popular estimate" and attribute it as follows: 

McLeod, Scott and Karl Fisch, "Shift Happens", https://shifthappens.wikispaces.com

This is a YouTube video that you've probably seen that's loaded with facts and figures of various levels of reliability, designed to convince you that the world you know is changing rapidly, to generate gasps and chuckles from audience, and perhaps, to lead to some good conversation. I admit, I enjoyed it the first 20 times I saw it and even showed it a couple of times. I did have trouble with the statement that "We Live in Exponential Times" - what the heck does that even mean? But it does have a gee-whiz quality that's entertaining if not particularly enlightening.

Anyway, this version from 2006 has more than 5 million hits on YouTube, and there have been subsequent versions and it even seems to have launched a cottage industry for the creators - but I couldn't find any reference to the 65% statistic, neither in the presentation nor on the website. The website referenced by the World Economic Forum report has links to sources but most of them are broken (that exponential change at it again, I guess.) I suppose it may have appeared in one of versions, but I couldn't find it - so the trail seemed to end at "possibly invented for a YouTube video". 

But - Google to the rescue! - I found this article from the Atlantic in 2011, an interview with Cathy Davidson about her then-new book Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century.  The interviewer starts with:

One of the foundational facts of your book comes early on. "By one estimate," you write, "65 percent of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven't even been invented yet." 

The Atlantic article doesn't mention a source, but googling the title & author brought me to a blog post by Davidson from just over a month ago, responding to a BBC piece that aired on a program called More or Less about statistics. Apparently the 65% stat came up recently in a town hall with a British politician, prompting the BBC journalist (who had a reaction similar to mine) to try to track it down. Go listen to the BBC program, it's fascinating. Davidson says she encountered the stat in a book by Jim Carroll (disappointingly, not this Jim Carroll)  and that it may have come originally from an Australian jobs report - which nobody can find. Furthermore, the BBC examines information on changes in the job market over the last 15 years and finds that - a most - a third of jobs today didn't exist 15 years ago, making the claim highly unlikely. (And, given that the original Jim Carroll book is 10 years old, nearly provably false.)

But just six weeks after the BBC debunked - and Cathy Davidson largely walked away from - the 65% claim, it becomes the lead of a brand new article, attributed to the World Economic Forum. It will no doubt be the reference for a presentation in the future, be cited in strategic plans, and quoted at school board meetings. Some factoids live on as zombies, like bits of urban legend, and I'm sure that this blog will do nothing to kill this one off.

By the way, thank you to the many K-12 public school teachers, and the liberal arts faculty members, who educated me pretty well for the job I do, which didn't exist when I was in Kindergarten. 

The Edtech Curmudgeon's Top Predictions for 2017

photo credit: Viewminder @ Flickr

Well, it's that time again. Time to look back at all the wonder that was the year 2016, and to look forward with excitement and trepidation to 2017.

They say that Alan Kay said that "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." They say that, although I once spent a day with Alan Kay and not once did he say it. He did tell an interesting parable about Buddhist monks and a basket of croissants however.

So without further ado (if indeed that WAS "ado") here are my predictions.

1. Microsoft buys Prezi and creates HoloLens Prezi, supporting exciting presentations. Their motto is "It's PowerPoint, but it's 3D!" (In a related story, edtech budgets struggle to keep up with the demand for vomit bags.)
2. The march of data continues, as universities across the country find new and better ways to help their stakeholders find, analyze, and visualize incorrect and incomplete information.
3. A major company in the education space introduces a new LMS intended to disrupt and revolutionize the LMS market. Meanwhile, Canvas continues to sop up what's left of the market like a piece of bread on a gravy plate.
4. A new concept, the Flipped Flipped class, dominates 2017 edtech press coverage. The Flipped Flipped class, inspired by Uber's experiments with driverless cars, eliminates the need for hiring expensive and noisy contingent faculty, as students can watch videos IN CLASS without an instructor present.
5. A panel on diversity in ed tech carries on valiantly even after the one woman invited to join the panel can't attend because her travel funding is pulled at the last minute. 

I had more predictions, but I lost them when I cancelled my Evernote account.

Have a wonderful 2017, and remember, the future is always just up around the bend, past the signpost. If you look carefully, you can see it from here, just like Russia.

Three Laws of Bureaucracy

As I executed one of my important job functions as a senior administrator - scrawling my name in ink on pieces of paper - #2 below came to mind. For completeness, I figured I needed three. Not terribly original I know, but it made me feel a little better...

The Three Laws of Bureaucracy

1. An institution at rest tends to stay at rest.
2. For every action, there's an equal and opposite pile of paper.
3. The life of any initiative is inversely proportional to its impact.

Got any more?

Photo credit: Don DeBold @flickr CC-BY 2.0

What Happens When Everyone Gets Their Own Logos

One of the hats I wear on campus is oversight of Marketing & Communications. Like most campuses we have a style guide and a set of web standards, which discourages you from creating your own logo and putting it on the web along with the campus logo.

Creating a logo is fun, and no matter what your campus logo is, there are some who will hate it and want to use something different. (Usually people want to use the old logo, which of course was once the new logo and was hated, often by the same people.) I get it, I really do, but if you want to see what a web page looks like when everyone gets their own logo, take a look:

Welcome to https://goes-app.cbp.dhs.gov - wait, where am I?

This is not just ugly.... it's confusing! Where am I, and what am I supposed to do here? How do the SEVEN DIFFERENT LOGOs relate to one another? What's the different between GOES and FAST? What the heck is FLUX? Sentri? (And how did Homeland Security, the parent agency of Customs and Border Protection, miss a chance to get in on the fun?)

You can't build an interface from the inside out, and you can't build a coherent brand from the bottom up. Letting everyone choose their own visual identity results in an ineffective and unappealing mismash, despite good intentions.

How Broken is Email?

Email, which started as a transformation in the history of communication, seems to be close to a complete breakdown. Do any of you not struggle to find the nuggets of important information amidst the noise? How often do you send an important message via email and have to follow up via text or phone to find out if it got through? I don't know what will come next, but it's depressing to see where we are now.

Just to illustrate - this is ONE DAY'S WORTH of the spam collected for my campus email account. True, the spam filter caught all these messages, but a) occasionally there's a false positive, so I miss something important b) dozens of crap messages get through every day and c) my campus spends A LOT OF MONEY for the hardware and software that does the filtering.

So when our students tell us that they don't read email or read it only under duress because we tell them we have to - maybe they have already figured out something we don't seem to know yet.

Using Technology Alone Doesn't Guarantee Better Outcomes - So Why Reward It?

For 25 years, my colleague Casey Green has surveyed campuses about the use and impact of technology in his Campus Computing survey. I'm a big fan of the survey because it's the largest body of longitudinal data we have on the topic. Just last week, Casey released a summary of the 2015 data, and as usual, there's lots of interesting stuff to chew on. I want to focus here on one particular question, which deals with the incentives campuses use to encourage faculty to use technology. 

The particular question in the survey is worded as follows:

Does your campus/institution have a formal program to recognize and reward the use of information technology as part of the routine faculty review and promotion process?

Now, the whole issue of how faculty are reviewed for promotion (and tenure) is fraught and complex and related to controversies around tenure, the appropriate relationship between research and teaching, the rising role of contingent faculty, and indeed the very value and purpose of faculty. But even asking the question suggests that this is something our institutions should be doing.  As Casey puts it, 

For example, even as instructional integration is the top institutional IT priority again this fall, less than a fifth of campuses (17 percent) recognize instructional IT efforts as part of the faculty review and promotion process.

If it's a top priority, why wouldn't we tie it to the way we review and provide incentives for faculty?

Here's Bryan Alexander responding to Casey's findings:

How do colleges and universities support faculty in using technology?  Badly, it turns out, according to one critical measure. A look back at decades of campus computing strategy finds that the majority of American campuses neither recognize nor reward professors who integrate tech in their teaching and research. 

To use Bryan's word from the title of the posting (and I know he chooses words carefully) our institutions "refuse" to recognize the use of technology by not using it as part of the criteria for faculty recognition. 

I'm an advocate of providing technology to faculty and providing the best possible training and support that my institution's resources can muster, but ultimately technology is a means, not an end. Technology has the potential to transform instruction, improve engagement, and expand access to learning. Technology constantly opens new avenues for research and enables new exploration and discovery. But faculty should be rewarded for excellent teaching and research. If my campus had a practice of providing some kind of weighting or quota for the use of technology that was used in a review process, I'd be concerned that this would become a check box, detached from the meaningful goals at the center of the faculty role. 

There's a lot to critique about the way that faculty are reviewed and rewarded, but I don't believe that adding "did you use technology" or "how much technology did you use" to the review process will provide the outcomes we want. Those of us who provide technology need to listen carefully to our faculty colleagues, work in partnership with them to incorporate the right technologies (and ditch the wrong ones) and keep the focus on the goal: student learning. That's the outcome that concerns me, not how much technology we use. So it doesn't concern me at all that 17% (and holding) of institutions refuse to "recognize and reward" the use of technology - except that 17% might be higher than I would like.

Virtualizing the Right Part of the Conference

(Note: The posting originally appeared as a guest post at Virtually Connecting - thanks to Rebecca Hogue and Maha Bali for encouraging me to write it.)

I'm so pleased to see the interest and attention that the Virtually Connecting project is getting. Our traditional models of conference attendance are not only dated, they exclude many people - those who can't travel to attend in person because of health, location, family, and most often finances. We need to figure out how to offer new options, but how?

We already know how not to do it. About 10 years ago I got a chance to experience HP's "Halo" telepresence system. The promise of Halo, and Cisco Telepresence and other systems was that low-latency, high resolution video and audio, combined with careful design of lighting and furniture, could allow widely separated teams or individuals to meet remotely while creating the illusion that they were in the same room. The tech was impressive, but there were big problems with the model - the equipment and connections were prohibitively expensive for all but those with the deepest pockets, and you needed to schedule a time and a place for a formal conference. HP got out of the business a few years later, and while others including Cisco still push expensive teleconferencing systems, I haven't found them to be particularly effective for most uses in education.

One insight into the limitations of expensive, fixed telepresence systems came to me about a week after I visited HP's Halo. I was speaking with a colleague who was describing corporate meetings in Japan. He told me about a culture where meetings were a tightly orchestrated and constrained form of communication, in which very little authentic feedback was given. Instead, the real meeting occurred later with alcohol and karaoke - an environment where the individuals were freed to discuss what they REALLY thought. It occurred to me that most models of remote meeting virtualize the least useful portion of the communication.

Now translate this to virtual conferences. What works well? Consider keynotes. Personally, I find that watching an 18 minute TED talk without distraction only happens when I really care about the topic, and it's a really excellent presentation. I've seen a few wonderful conference keynotes, but it stretches my attention to sit through the average 60 or 70 minute keynote when I'm in person. On line? Not likely to happen. Besides, so many keynoters give the same talk over and over and you can find a version of it on Vimeo or youTube anyway.

How about conference sessions? The best sessions are interactive and involve the audience. Set up a camera in the back of the room pointed at the front and broadcast the PowerPoint - that's a recipe for faithfully recreating the virtual experience of a boring lecture. To me, the whole notion of "lecture capture" is so deadly that I like to refer to it as "lecture capture and release - capture the lecture and take it far away to release it where it can do no harm."

I go to a conference for the interactions, the buzz, the sense of what (and who) is new and different, the trends, the issues. A typical virtual conference, a camera in the back of the room and a PowerPoint feed, gets you little of that. Maybe if there's a good Q&A session AND the people in the room manage to remember to use the microphones, you might get something, if you can wait through the talk to get to the Q&A. The best sense I get is usually the Twitter feed - sometimes you can get a lot, and other times it's just confusing without the context of the conference.

And that brings us to experiments like Virtually Connecting. It's personal - the connection is usually, literally, in someone's hand, rather than mounted in the back of the room. An iPad is not the world's greatest teleconferencing tool, but it's relatively cheap, it's portable, and it's personal. Google Hangouts is free and it's mostly pretty good, and it works fine with the bandwidth at many locations, even overseas. I've also used Zoom (my personal favorite) as well as watching a session via Periscope which works surprisingly well. There's a big psychological difference between watching a feed from the back of the room - clean, cold, impersonal - versus a tablet or a phone propped on a desk with someone's backpack - warm and  human-scaled. The audio and video might not be as good, but the immediacy and the sense of connection is heightened. You feel like you're in the midst of the action rather than watching from afar.

I've been on both sides of the conversation and it's a qualitatively different experience. When you're physically present at the conference sharing with someone remote, you're trying to figure out what that person wants to know and what they've already heard. When you're remote, you're trying to decide what would be a good question to ask to get a sense of what's happening there. It's a somewhat different kind of social interaction and I think it will take most people a little bit of time to get used to it.

But the chance to ask a few questions and see the response is just marvelous. It's deeper and richer and more personal, and the slightly underground feeling adds an authenticity and appeal that draws you in. This is worth so much more than high def video with perfect lighting. People can speak naturally, and it's more like the karaoke bar than the Halo room.

The beauty of Virtually Connecting is that Rebecca and Maha have figured out how the virtualize the right part of the conference - the personal interaction. I'm thrilled by their experiments and I'm sure they will be widely imitated. I'm glad I've had opportunities to experience Virtually Connecting and look forward to more chances to try it out and build connections from afar.

CI Keys: Defending the pilot, questioning the adoption curve

It was just over a year ago that Chris Mattia and I heard Jim Groom at the 2014 ET4Online conference speak about the Domain of One's Own project at University of Mary Washington. His effective evocation of the early days of the "tilde space" struck a chord with me, and suggested that making it easy for faculty and students to have an online space that was fully under their control might be a solution to the frustration that some faculty on my campus have had using the LMS and similar tools. By the time we were halfway out of the room we said "hey, we should do this, we can do this!" and then found Gerry Hanley from the Cal State Chancellor's Office who promised to support us with seed money.

Just a few months later we had created and launched CIKeys as a "laboratory" for CSU Channel Islands. It was truly a "Field of Dreams" project - build it, and believe that someone will come. And it was definitely a pilot - we tried to make it clear to everyone who is involved that this was an experiment, a laboratory to try something out, with no long term commitment that it would continue. Sometimes you do the research and the planning and build a service with the confidence that the campus wants and needs it and will use it - and sometimes you just have a hunch that it will work for someone, so you try it out. (The first project I did like that was connecting my campus to the Internet in 1990...)

Well, come they did. A dozen faculty and hundreds of students have created 400 sites. (This is on a campus with just over 100 full-time faculty and 5000 students, so these numbers are significant.) A dozen more faculty spent 2 days in our faculty space learning about CI Keys so they could incorporate it into their Fall courses. And now, we're committed to supporting it and taking it as far as we can. You can learn a lot about what people are actually doing with CI Keys, and how it impacts faculty and students, from Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Jill Leafstedt, and Jamie Hoffman. We agreed we'd each publish a blog post about CI Keys simultaneously and see what we come up with.

Here's a few things I've learned (or relearned):

1. Follow your heart. Sometimes it's worth trying something just because it seems like a good idea, even if you don't know how it will work.
2. Pilots can be a good idea. If you don't really know whether or how something will be used, trying it out a low cost and low scale CAN be useful, despite some doubts. Some pilots fail because they are bad ideas - nice to find that out quickly and cheaply rather than launching a complete campus-wide service and then finding out. Worse, if your expensive campus-wide service is a failure, there's a strong temptation to claim it's a success and try to force it down people's throats. After all, you made that investment, it's too big to fail! Yes, scaling up can be hard, but there's still a place for pilots and organic evolution of services. (And see 4 & 5 below- scaling up can be a whole lot easier than it used to be!)
3. Question the curve. I am coming to question the usefulness of the innovation diffusion curve in Ed Tech. First of all there's an implicit value judgment that early adopters are better than late adopters - not to mention the infamous laggards. Not all technology adoption is useful, to say the least, and some is downright harmful. Second, why is success measured as universal adoption? If 20% of the faculty at my campus find CI Keys to be a useful and even transformational tool for encouraging student learning, does that necessarily mean that the other 80% are missing something by not using it? Perhaps, but I'm not so sure. It's nice to think that we can provide a single tool for everyone to use but we can see where that's gotten us. Instead, some will use institutional tools, some will use open source, some will use commercial tools, and faculty and students will use different tools (really, media) to accomplish different things. Is that hard from an ed tech support position? No doubt! But I think that's the world we live in, not one where we always think in terms of scale-up and universal adoption - that ship has sailed.
4. Use the cloud. Cloud computing can make innovation a lot cheaper and faster! It was very easy for us to work with Reclaim Hosting to launch this environment - thanks Jim & Timmy! There was almost no "IT" work involved, except for...
5. Single-Sign On always wins. By tying CI Keys to our Shibboleth environment, there's no need to create new ID's or provision service on CI Keys - a new user just uses their campus login and they can launch or access their CI Keys space. Instant scale-up! So that was the main IT investment - and it was just a few hours to set it up and test it. 

That's my perspective from the second floor. Be sure to read what Michelle, Jill, and Jaimie have to say about the impact on teaching and learning - that's what really matters. (I promised I would post my reflections before reading theirs - I can't wait to see what they have to say!) I'm just glad that a hunch and a little support from the CSU Chancellor's Office has paid off big-time. Thanks to the entire team, including my partner-in-crime Chris Mattia who has moved on to other ventures but was instrumental in creating CI Keys, and who came up with the name.

Photo Credit: OldOnliner@Flickr (cc by-nc-nd 2.0)

Open Design

I've been thrilled to watch what's happening at Next/Thing Co, not only because their latest project, the $9 computer, has been a huge Kickstarter "hit" (closing in on $1.8 million), but also because I'm a proud uncle - my nephew Thomas is an industrial designer who's part of the founding team. Perhaps the biggest long-term impact of Next/Thing is their commitment to openness - not just open source software, but open sourcing the hardware. All the schematics will be online, and their message is - buy it, hack it, mod it, build your own. They have truly taken the hacker ethic to heart and it's great to see the impact that they are making.

They've just released a video on the design of their handheld "Pocket C.H.I.P.", a $49 portable - take a look at the video to see what I'm talking about.


Designing PocketC.H.I.P. from next thing co on Vimeo.

I love this video, because it demystifies the process of design. It says to me not that design is easy (becoming a GOOD designer takes a lot of training and a lot of hard work) but that it's ACCESSIBLE - see, this is fun and interesting and if you want, you can do it too.

Let's contrast this to the most famous design-driven company, Apple. Apple is famous for its secret design studio, to which only the specially anointed are allow admittance. For example, here's how it's described in a recent New Yorker profile of Apple design guru Johnny Ive:

An invitation to visit Apple’s studio is rare, and is withheld even from most employees. Inside the door, a ten-foot-long internal vestibule, in stainless steel, serves as a visual air lock.

The Apple mythology is that these are special people performing an arcane and priestlike process that yields magnificent design. And no doubt, Apple has build some beautiful and amazing stuff. But Next/Thing Co presents a different vision, a sort of Protestant Reformation of the design church. Design for the people! How cool is that! I hope they continue to be successful and that from their work a 1000 new designers are born.

Tools of Empowerment, Enlightenment, and Excitement

In the latest post in his wonderful blog More or Less Bunk, Jonathan Rees quotes from the book Clio Wired edited by Roy Rosenzweig:

“Although a Luddite resistance to technological change may seem appealing at times, we would argue instead that it is worth engaging with these new technologies in an effort to try to insure that they indeed become badly needed tools of empowerment, enlightenment and excitement.” - Roy Rosenzweig & Steve Brier, 1994

This summarizes an argument that I've been trying to make in recent years in presentations and discussions with faculty and others. Change is here - technological, demographic, political, and economic. If the educators that care about students don't find a way to respond, the future of education will belong to those who stand to profit economically or politically or both. Who will build the universities and colleges of the future - those who understand the history and share the values of the educational enterprise, or those who simply want to make a buck?

The Great MOOC Scare of 2012 has resided and the rise of well-funded ed tech startups with (largely) goofy or ill-considered products may be near the bubble peak - at least, we can hope. But the fundamental forces that act upon our institutions are not going to disappear. I salute Jonathan and others who have the courage to explore new ways of reaching their students and learning to navigate of the technology sea we find ourselves sailing on. These are the innovations that can set the course for the future while valuing the past and keeping the focus where it belongs, on our students and our communities. They are building tools of empowerment, enlightenment, and excitement.

Finding Sharla Boehm

When I first researched the story of Sharla P. Boehm and published it in March, I hoped very much that it would be widely distributed and that in a small way I could show my appreciation for the brilliant but sometimes forgotten people, many of them women, that built the foundation of the technology world where I've spent my career. The posting built slowly, and only a few saw it in the first days of publication, but it's slowly taken off to where it's on the verge of being the most popular blog post I've written. Interest in the blog picked up considerably when geekfeminism.org included it in their Linkspam Agenda for April 24, leading to an entry in the Geek Feminism Wiki for Sharla. But the real breakthrough came in the form of an email on Mothers Day from Barry Boehm, Sharla's husband of 54 years.

Everybody — It’s a bit of a stretch to call Sharla the Grandmother of the Internet, but I was recently pleasantly surprised to receive a link to a blog that celebrated Sharla’s lead authorship of the first computer program to demonstrate the feasibility of packet-switched networks: the organizing principle of the Internet.  Here’s the blog’s Internet address; I hope you enjoy it... P.S. to Michael Berman: Thank you for brightening Sharla’s life.  She had a stroke and has limited speech and mobility, but her spirit is still strong.

The message, sent to Sharla and Barry's friends and family all over the world, generated messages of appreciation and support, many from people who had known them both for years but had never heard of Sharla's important contribution to the pre-history of the Internet. I also received the beautiful photo above from Tenley Burke, Sharla and Barry's daughter.

It's wonderful to know that she has had a chance to see that her significant achievement has been celebrated and will be remembered henceforth. It's also a pleasure to know a bit more of her personal story, filled in by a brief bio that Barry sent. Sharla Perrine was born in Seattle in 1929 and moved to Santa Monica in 1932 where she has been since. She received a degree in Mathematics from UCLA and became a math and science teacher in Santa Monica middle and high schools. In 1959, she started a brief stint at Rand Corporation. She and Barry met at Rand while they were waiting for their security clearances to come through! In 1961 she returned to teaching but continued to work for Rand part-time, including her seminal work with Paul Baran.

Sharla and Barry had two daughers, Romney and Tenley, and became a full-time mother and homemaker in the mid-sixties. She was active in her community through Girl Scouts, youth sports, and as a member of the board for her local library. (Tenley mentioned that when she posted a link to my blog on her Facebook page, it elicited responses from many women who knew Sharla as their scout leader.) They continue to live in Santa Monica in the house they moved to in 1966.

Here's a salute to Sharla and Barry and all the people that they've touched in their lives and through their teaching, and as parents and grandparents. Everyone has a story, and everyone can make a contribution. Sharla had the skill and the focus to make a significant contribution to the early days of the conceptualization of the Internet, and I'm sure she made a huge difference in the lives of many students she taught in school and encountered later in her community, and of course for her family. I am so very glad that I was able to find the real person behind the name on the Rand publication. The tools that Sharla and Barry helped create through their careers made it possible. Thank you Sharla, Barry, and Tenley.

Real-time Intercontinental Collaboration via Twitter, Periscope, and PollEverywhere - sometimes this stuff actually works!

Last October at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Orlando, Raechelle Clemmons ("CIOs Sound Off: To Be, or Not To Be, Social". The idea originally was to present a sort of debate about the advantages and disadvantages or participating in social media, particularly Twitter. The session was Rae's idea, and we brought in Dee and Jack to present the "anti-Social" side, but most of the audience were already involved in using Twitter as a professional resource and were largely interested in discussing how to do so effectively.
@rclemmons) and I, along with Dee Childs & Jack Suess, presented

One of the participants, David Gunsberg (@dgunsberg) liked the concept so much that he recruited Kim Tairi (@kimtairi) to present a similar session at THETA 2015, being held this week at Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. For their session, they decided to take things to a new level by inviting me & Raechelle to watch & participate via Twitter from California.

The first challenge of course was figuring out when 1415 Australian East on Tuesday would equate to for me & Raechelle. With the help of a handy time calculator I determined it would be 9:15PM on Monday for me, and a couple of hours later for Rae in Wisconsin. Then the schedule got shifted 30 minutes later, not so bad for me but too late in the evening for Rae.

The choice of Periscope to present the audio/video was the most unusual part of the experience. Periscope is a personal video-streaming tool for iOS devices, which they had running on Kim's iPad Mini in the room. Periscope is essentially one-way (you can respond with text comments) and has a very simple and clean interface. It worked extremely well for me - I could see the slides and the presenters (they walked in and out of view) and hear everything. It did freeze briefly a couple of times, but not enough to break my concentration. It also had a remarkably intimate feeling to it - I was getting the view from a table near the front of the room rather than the typical conference streaming from the back. I could see David and Kim when they set it up and finished, talking directly to me. It was a remarkably engaging experience, much more so than the typical "virtual conference" environment.

In addition to tweeting, I was able to participate in the poll questions which they offered via PollEverywhere. It was fun to be able to compare my answers in real-time to the people in the room. At first I was a bit stumped about how to respond - my phone was tied up using Periscope and I was busy tweeting on my laptop - but then I realized I could tweet my poll responses to @poll and it worked like a charm.

This was my second encounter with immersive international participation in a conference, but from the "other side" - I interacted multiple times Maha Bali (@Bali_Maha) who describes her experience here. We've been talking about the potential for technology to eradicate the boundaries of distance for a long time, but I think we're just starting to see what we can really do and we have barely begun to comprehend what it means.

Light My Fire

Walking home today I encountered this endearing scene on campus - students outside, under a tree, on the quad, paining. As I got closer, I could hear a familiar song - they were listening to The Doors' Light My Fire.

Part of me was pleased - oh, they like music that I grew up with - and part of me was annoyed - hey kids, go get your own music. But the scene was also timeless - my Cal State Channel Islands campus, built on the grounds of an old state hospital, looks a lot like my undergraduate campus Pomona College, built around the same time. Trees, quads, tile roofs, grass. Even a young woman with long hair sitting cross-legged and wearing a headband. And I thought about Light My Fire.

Of course the song is timeless because it's about sex and it's got a distinctive sound. But when The Doors recorded it in the summer of 1966, it was just a year after the 1965 Watts Riot in Los Angeles. I was just eight years old then, but I remember it well, because my father was the "re-write man" at the Los Angeles Times, and every day his name appeared as the byline on horrifying stories like "Eight Men Slain; Guard Moves In". Another article on the page reads "Burn Baby Burn Chant Crowds". Consciously or unconsciously, that mantra "Burn Baby Burn" leads right into "C'mon Baby Light My Fire" and carries forward into the killing fields of Vietnam where our young soldiers marched into firefights with The Doors in their ears

My father was proud and embarrassed by the Los Angeles Times and their coverage of the Watts Riots. Proud because those stories he wrote led to a Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in journalism; and embarrassed, because the Los Angeles Times newsroom didn't have a single reporter of color on its staff. It took an African-American man named Robert Richardson who had the guts to walk into the newsroom and say "Hey, I live there, I can call in stories for you" - because the white reporters were driven out by the mobs - or they would have had no first-person accounts from the street. Diversifying the newsroom became a passion for my father and a major goal of his next 35 years at the paper.

So much has changed, and yet justice still eludes us. The Watts Riots started when the police beat a man in front of his mother, enraging a crowd. I thought we'd do better in 50 years, but it still takes violence to get us to pay attention to the suffering and injustice that's right in front of us. My sanctimonious generation has failed to make this right, and we've handed it on to our students to figure out. They listen to The Doors on their phones now instead of on a transistor radio, but as I stood there I felt like time had stopped. And I didn't feel that idyllic or nostalgic. Instead I felt a little sick and sad, and not very proud.

On liminality, not yetness and the pain of waiting

I was on a Twitter binge this morning when as response from Kristen Eshleman (@kresleman) prompted me to look up the definition of "liminal space" - you can find quite a bit of detail in the liminality Wikipedia article. Go read it now or at least skim it (it's pretty long and detailed) - I'll wait while you do that.....

As the article notes: "The term has also passed into popular usage, where it is applied much more broadly, undermining its significance to some extent." Wow, there's an academic lament. Anyway, it's not only a fascinating anthropological concept but a wonderful metaphor, so permit me to contribute to undermining its significance.

I have several friends that are metaphorically in this state of uncertainty, becoming, passage, change, transition - whatever you want to call it. In fact, living in this state seems to be more the norm than the exception - think how we value "ability to tolerate ambiguity" or "quick adaptability to change" as qualities we look for, both in our friends and in our coworkers. Furthermore, the "liminal space" is clearly a state of great creativity - I'm reminded of those moments between sleep and awakeness where the line between fantasy and reality is so blurred - it's a creative space, and a scary one, a moment of possibility and fear.

Kristen reminded me of the wonderful blog post by Amy Collier (@amcollier) on not yetness - and how this space of uncertainty and "mess" and becoming is where so much learning - maybe all learning - takes place. We have to pass through these liminal spaces to grow and learn and to transition to what we can become - and sometimes it's exciting but it's also disorienting and frustrating. We can be in the liminal space and thrilled by the possibilities, or we can just want to get through and get to the answer. That's when the liminal space feels more like the waiting room, or being on hold, and that feels more like pain than opportunity. 

"Waiting for Godot" might be viewed as an extended riff on living in a liminal space; the Wikipedia article relates liminality to the trickster figure in folk culture. Is the trickster having a good time? It seems like a lonely road to be on. If it seems like this blog posting is stuck in the middle and going nowhere, you're probably right.

PowerPoint Zombies

A few days ago, I was asking a friend how the workshop for faculty was going at her school, and heard, once again, the Lament of Bad PowerPoint. "She's a good speaker, energetic, engaging, but her slides! Lots of tiny text, impossible to read."

At conference after conference, we sit silently and tolerate illegible slides, silly graphics, and speakers who read bullet points out loud. While it's frustrating to see a typical conference presentation like this, it's infuriating when it's a keynote speaker who has typically been paid many thousands of dollars and who somehow can't make the time and effort to present useful images.

Here are some phrases that I never want to hear again:

1. "I know you can't read this, but..." Then why are you showing it to us?
2. "I usually have more time when I give this talk, so I might have to rush through some of it." Wait, this is the only time that I'm going to hear your talk. You've never given this talk to me, and you're never going to do it again, so there's no "usual." Please have the courtesy to plan the talk for the time allocated and customize it for the audience.
3. "Oh, well, you can read that, I won't read it to you," usually after reading the first two or three bullet points. Why not just put up a URL and we can read the whole thing and go home?
4. "Let me show you this YouTube, if I can get the WiFi to work." Really, you're going to make me sit and watch you fiddle with your computer and wait for the video to load, and "oh, sorry for the ad, hold on a second...?" You brought a laptop, bring a copy of the video with you and don't depend on the conference network.

How about this - if you have no graphics that will enhance your talk, just turn off the projector. You can make a list of your bullet points and put them online later if you think I will find them useful. Your audience will thank you!

As disappointed I get at so many presentations, I had an even more horrifying realization - if this is what we see at a conference, what do our students see in their classes? I mean, presumably giving a conference presentation is a special occasion, and we're seeing the best of what people can do. Most of the people at the conferences I attend are educators; more frighteningly, some of them TRAIN educators. What are they teaching each other, and their students, about how to communicate effectively? It's scary to contemplate.

Just to end on a positive note... there are so many people who do wonderful presentations. One of my favorites is Michelle Pacansky-Brock - you can find her at http://www.teachingwithoutwalls.com/. Here's one example from SlideShare of the kind of slides she creates: http://www.slideshare.net/brocansky/emerge3. Not everyone has the talent and taste of a Michelle, but I know we can all do better. Let's all of us, myself included, vow to end Zombie PowerPoint presentations.

Who is Sharla P. Boehm?

Last November I had the pleasure of attending the Museum Computing Network conference – which I highly recommend. It was at a session there that I watched Rosanna Flouty as she presented the diagram below in her slides, illustrating different models for organizing communication.

Some of you will recognize the source – it comes from the work of Paul Baran in the early 1960’s, when he was part of a small group of people thinking deeply about how to build networks of communication between computers. Baran’s work, completed at Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, was foundational in the creation of what would become the Arpanet and, eventually, the Internet.

The core of Baran’s contribution was what we now know as packet switching – the idea that in order for computer A to send a message to computer B, you don’t need a fixed electronic “pipe” between them. Instead, you can break the message up into small pieces, called packets, and pass them from one computer to another, heading in the direction from A to B. This strategy has tremendous advantages – for example, messages can be rerouted in the event one computer fails or becomes overloaded –  but this wasn’t apparent at the time. In fact, many people questioned whether or not Baran’s idea could work at all.

I’m moderately familiar with Baran’s ideas, at least at a high level, but when Jennifer displayed the cover of one of Baran’s reports on the screen, I was quite astonished by what I saw. Here’s the cover:

This was part of the 11-part series that established the effectiveness of packet switching, or, in the more colorful terminology used here, “hot-potato routing”. As I mentioned, there was far from universal acceptance of Baran’s proposal, and this paper was important because it contained a detailed description of a simulation, written in the programming language Fortran, that demonstrated not only that packet switching could work, but exactly how it could work. And look at the authors of the paper: Sharla P. Boehm and Paul Baran.

Who the heck was Sharla P. Boehm? Paul Baran is generally considered one of the four or five most important “Fathers of the Internet”, but who is Sharla Boehm? I can’t remember ever seeing the name before, and I was determined to try to do some research to find out. Her name is the first on this paper, so obviously she made an important contribution, but one that seems to have been largely forgotten.

It took a bit of Google sleuthing, but I was able to find at least a partial answer. Sharla Boehm was a programmer at Rand in the early 60’s,  married to Barry Boehm, who became a well-known computer science professor. Barry Boehm taught for many years at the University of Southern California, and was an important theorist in the development of the field of Software Engineering. (In fact, the name Boehm seemed familiar to me, and that’s because I had encountered Barry Boehm’s work in my time as a CS professor.)

In 1996, Barry Boehm wrote an interesting memoir about his early days in the software industry, entitled “An Early Application Generator and Other Recollections”.  He mentions, in passing:

Coincidentally, my wife Sharla had developed the original packet-switched network simulation with Paul Baran [Baran-Boehm, 1964]).

So there it is – Sharla Boehm wrote the code that demonstrated the feasibility of packed-switched networks. You can look up the original paper that she and Baran wrote, and read every line of code that she wrote and see the actual output from her program.

I couldn’t find any other references online to the work of Sharla Boehm. Perhaps she went on to write more software, or perhaps she gave that up and moved on to other things. It would not be realistic to equate her contribution to that of Paul Baran, but she was there at an important time doing important, difficult, complex work and apparently doing it well enough that Paul Baran put her name first on the document. (Ironically, even Barry Boehm puts Baran’s name first on the reference, and some references to the article don’t even include Boehm at all.)

So I salute Sharla Boehm and thank her for her contribution. She helped create the online world we live in today, and it’s wrong to overlook or forget what she accomplished.

Once I had found the connection between Barry and Sharla Boehm I searched to see what else I could find. It appears that they are both alive and well and living in Santa Monica, not far from Rand Corporation where they apparently met.  I did find one more thing – I searched Flickr to see if I could find a picture of Sharla, and found the photo below from a retirement party for Barry Boehm. There’s Sharla & Barry in front.  I am glad to have a chance to “put a face” to the name on some 50 year old code that helped to change the world.

(Addendum, 5/12/2015: more on Sharla's story...)