ALM Thesis Forum recap

The ALM Thesis Forum wrapped up this week. I spoke on the second night (social sciences), but I also attended the first night, which featured the creative writing and literature concentrators. I was unfortunately unable to attend the third night of the forum (IT concentrators).

What was so special about the forum? For everyone in the audience, the thesis forum was a chance to see results of the candidates' research and learn about the different methodologies, processes, obstacles, and special opportunities that came into play. For me, it was the opportunity to share my research with a new audience and meet the other students who have been going through the same challenges I have over the past two years. The fact that three other social sciences theses were China-focused also made it special (but I am kind of biased on that point!)

For those readers who are in the early stages of their thesis research, consider registering for next year's forum when the notice goes out. The format is casual -- it's really up to the individual speakers to decide what they want to present and how they want to present it. Some people read from a script, while others talked from memory or used powerpoint slides as a reference. Many people had visuals to share, such as charts and photographs. Most presentations were about 15-20 minutes long, with an additional five-minute question and answer session. The audience was receptive, and not too large -- I'd say about 50 people showed up on the first two nights.

For students who have recently started the ALM program, and haven't really planned their theses, the forum is a great opportunity to learn about some of the research possibilities and various ways to approach your research questions.

Many thanks to HESA and the Harvard Extension School for putting this together!

College imposters, part II: Azia Kim exposed at Stanford

Coming on the heels of the Godelia affair, comes news from Stanford about a similar case. The Stanford community is abuzz over the story of Azia Kim, an 18-year-old who passed herself off as a Stanford undergraduate for nearly a year, even going so far to illicitly inhabit several Stanford dormitories for months at a time without anyone uncovering her true status. The Stanford Daily's Daniel Novinson picks up the story:

Azia Kim was like any other Stanford freshman. She graduated from one of California’s most competitive high schools last June, moved into the dorms during New Student Orientation, talked about upcoming tests and spent her free time with friends.

Azia Kim allegedly climbed through this first-floor window in Okada to sleep during spring quarter. The 18-year-old was evicted after her ruse was uncovered Monday night.

The only problem is that Azia Kim was never a Stanford student.

Kim, an 18-year-old from Orange County who graduated from Fullerton’s Troy High School, lived in Kimball throughout fall and winter quarter. She lived in Okada, the Asian-American theme dorm, until Monday night, when University staff finally caught onto her ruse.

Friends aren’t sure of her motive for sneaking onto campus and living a lie, but many speculate that she felt pressure from overbearing parents to attend Stanford — regardless of whether she was admitted.

The comment thread under the article references the Godelia case at Harvard earlier this year. There are certainly some similarities: Both Kim and Godelia wanted to be regarded as students at the country's most exclusive colleges. Both were successful at doing so for long periods of time. Both gained access to restricted facilities including undergraduate dormitories and dining halls.

But there are some notable differences as well. Godelia was more than 10 years older than a typical College undergraduate, while Kim fit in in terms of her age relative to other Stanford freshmen. Godelia had a Harvard affiliation -- he had once been an Extension School student, while Kim did not have any current or previous Stanford academic or employment record. Godelia had a criminal past. While attending Baylor in the 1990s, he had been arrested by Baylor police for trespassing, sexual assault, and burglary. Kim apparently had no criminal record. Godelia was also very public with his attempts to associate himself with the Harvard College undergraduate community by taking part in various College-oriented activities, hanging out at undergraduate dormitories, and crashing classes, as described in this Harvard Crimson article. Kim tried to keep a low profile -- the Stanford Daily article does not mention her taking part in any clubs, although she did make friends in the Stanford dormitories and pretended to study for exams.

There is also the issue of motive: While both wanted to be regarded as undergraduates at these two elite programs, the Stanford Daily article suggests Kim was motivated by family pressure. Godelia seemed to seek recognition or validation from the Harvard community itself.

Other top-ranked colleges and universities have uncovered similar frauds. In the mid-1990s, Yale accepted into a graduate program a student named Tonica Tonise Jenkins who had forged a transcript from an Ohio community college. Serial con man James Hogue pulled a similar trick at Princeton in the 1980s, gaining entrance as "Alexi Indris Santana" after claiming to an orphan from Utah (he also has an interesting Harvard connection, as described in the answers.com page). Both Jenkins and Hogue are serving time for far more serious crimes committed after they were expelled from their respective programs.

One thing that's worth mentioning about these cases is that they all involve people who were caught. How many others have never been caught, or have even received degrees, job offers, or status after forging academic documents and lying about their pasts?

Note: Comments have been disabled on this post. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about this post.

Counterfactual reasoning, gaming, and Niall Ferguson

In 2003, during my ALM proseminar at the Harvard Extension School, the instructors (Doug and Joe Bond, of Harvard's Weatherhead Center) introduced the class to a fascinating research technique: Counterfactual reasoning.

How does it work? Simply put, using "counterfactuals" to study history or government policy entails applying an alternate reality scenario to a real-world situation. Then, using logic or knowledge of other issues, researchers can evaluate what factors were most important to the real-world situation.

For instance, counterfactual reasoning based on the following scenario allows scholars to evaluate President Kennedy's role in determining U.S. policy in Vietnam in the 1960s:

"Had Kennedy not been assassinated, would the United States have escalated its military involvement in Vietnam in the mid-1960s?"

Authors and scriptwriters have had a field day with counterfactuals, often in the form of "alternate world" fiction, such as Robert Harris' Fatherland (what if Germany had defeated Britain, and Hitler had lived?).

Some strategy-based videogames also incorporate counterfactual scenarios. And it turns out there is academic interest in such games. Wired's Clive Thompson that Harvard historian and counterfactual researcher Niall Ferguson was so fascinated by Making History, "a game where players run World War II scenarios based on exhaustively researched economic realities of the period" that he is helping advise its creator, game studio Muzzy Lane, on a new game series that will let players "model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran."

Counterfactual games also tie in with the "Serious Games" movement, as reported by Serious Games Source.

Interview: Harvard's Rebecca Nesson discusses teaching in Second Life

Last Friday, as part of my guest author activities for Terra Nova, I interviewed Harvard Extension School instructor Rebecca Nesson. Last year, Nesson was one of the instructors for CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, a joint Harvard Law School/Harvard Extension School course that was mostly held (for Extension School students, at least) in an Internet-connected 3D world called Second Life. This Fall, she will be leading a new Extension School course, Virtual Worlds. In the interview, she talked about her experiences using Second Life as a platform for distance education, and also described how students used the virtual world to interact with the CyberOne instructors and each other.

Following is the complete, unedited transcript of the May 11, 2007 telephone interview with Nesson (excerpts will be published on Terra Nova). The full transcript is quite long -- more than 3,500 words -- but it will hopefully provide some useful insights to educators and students who are considering classwork in virtual reality environments. Such activities should not be seen as fringe educational experiments -- other users on Terra Nova (a blog network devoted to the discussion of virtual worlds) have pointed me to a long list of colleges and universities that use Second Life for instruction. As we shall see in the transcript, there are some advantages to using virtual worlds as educational platforms, and virtual world-based instruction may soon begin to outpace traditional distance education offerings using Internet video streams, static websites, and text-based discussion forums.

Without further ado, here is the full transcript of the interview with Nesson.

Ian Lamont: At the beginning of the [CyberOne] class, there were 40 people registered. Does that include everybody, including [students from] the Harvard Law School, or just the Harvard Extension School students who were taking it online?

Rebecca Nesson: That's just the Extension School students. We had a little bit of attrition, mostly right at the beginning — for people who didn't really realize how demanding the program was going to be on their computers, so we probably ended up with about 30 people.

Lamont: When you say the program was demanding on their computers, were they using systems that weren't up for it in terms of processing power, or were there network constraints?

Nesson: I don't know. For some of them, there may have been firewalls and they were trying to do it from work, or Internet connection issues. It was a little unclear what was the problem people were having. It was not very widespread, actually. As is sort of typical wit h the Extension School classes, there were a few people who signed up, but weren't able to make the time commitment that the course [required] so for them I wasn't sure whether it was a technical issue or not.

Lamont: Aside from these issues, what was the feedback [you heard] from people about the Second Life interface?

Nesson: Overall it was very positive. I would say that there was a definite arc to it. At the beginning, there was a certain amount of Second Life culture shock, where people try to get acclimated about how to use the interface. The first impression that a lot of people had about it was that it was a very chaotic environment in which to have a class discussion because everyone talks at once and there's no threading in the discussions. When you read the transcripts of the discussions, they can seem fairly disjointed and that felt a little disorienting to people right at the beginning.

We all got used to it over the course of the semester, and also got much better at it. One of the things that we brought to the class with us are years of built-up experience of how one is supposed to act in a class as a student and an instructor. And a lot of those norms — like, raising your hand and waiting for someone to stop speaking before you begin speaking — they just dont make sense in the Second Life environment because it would just take way too long to have a discussion.

And as a result we were basically faced with the challenge of having to develop a whole new set of classroom norms that worked in this environment. Once we got that going, everyone got much more comfortable with the environment. By the end of the semester, people were really enjoying it.

There were some people who had a much easier time expressing themselves in the Second Life environment, than in the more formal writing [assignments] and turning it in on our courseware website. So for those people, it really opened up the distance education experience to have this other method of being able to express themselves and interact with the instructor and other students.

And there were some students on the other side of things who were very comfortable writing traditional response papers and had a harder time in the spontaneous, more interactive discussions that we were having in the classroom environment in Second Life. So all in all, that's a major improvement. I would prefer for my classes to be available to a wider range of learning and styles of expression.

Lamont: You just said that some people found it easier to interact in Second Life. Why do you suppose that is? Does it relate to their personalities, or the fact that they're used to typing IMs?

Nesson: Let me be clear. I don't necessarily mean it would be easier for them than acting in real life. This is just opposed to them acting in their normal way in a distance education class, interacting mainly through a website and through email with their instructors.

I think that the Second Life had quite a lot of advantages for people. One of the main things is that Second Life really allowed us to create a sense of class community — something that develops fairly naturally in a face-to-face class. So students appeared at class and had that chance to meet each other, something that rarely, if ever, happens in distance education classes [using] previous technologies. And that helped keep students engaged in the class.

And having a physical representation of their "selves" through their avatars, whether it looked like them or looked like something completely different, was quite important in having them establish relationships with each other. Because it gave people a way to express something of their personality that wasn't necessarily directly related to what we were doing in the class. And it just was the icebreaker for people beginning to relate to each other and make comments about somebody's cool dress or something like that and get a little conversation going.

So having the class have a sense of a community, and being a little bit social for most students really adds to the experience. It certainly added to the experience for me. I think that probably helped to draw in some students.

Also, we tend to think of Second Life as a less expressive environment than face-to-face environments because at the moment we don't have the ability to easily do gestures and facial expressions or even to really direct our gaze really well.

It does in other senses offer people a wider range of ways that they can express themselves, and that was something I was excited about. Early on, when I was writing on the blog, just finding that some students just really seemed to take to the creative aspects of the environment and really try to use the unrestrained environment and really try to violate the laws of physics as part of their way of existing in the world, and it just gave them a range of expression that doesn't really exist when you are typing out a response paper and turning it in.

Lamont: What surprised you in terms of the creative aspects and the things that they did in the classroom sessions?

Nesson: I guess what surprised me was that I had sort of a typical narrow view of what Second Life was going to be like. I was thinking of it as a big improvement over a chatroom but I hadn't really considered as something that had potentials that really went beyond what I had experienced with other technologies. I think that it's not until you spend some time in there that you start to get a sense of the way in which it's different, because it's kind of hard to pinpoint, to put into words, what exactly is making the difference.

So I would say the biggest surprise for me wasn't the way that some people were expressing themselves, but the experience of all of us running our classes in a text-based environment. I expected that to be only a hindrance, and at the beginning it did seem like a hindrance, it seemed a little chaotic, and it was something that we had to get used to. But as we progressed in the class, it became clear that running the class in a text-based environment has a whole lot of advantages over the face-to-face environment that I just hadn't anticipated.

The first one that was really striking, was that in all my years of teaching classes, there are always some students in the class who are very hard to get to speak up. You can ask them a direct question, but basically, unless they are put on the spot, these students will not volunteer their own opinions in class, and I think that there are various reasons why people are reticent and don't want to do that. Sometimes I think people are shy and don't want to be put on the spot — all the conversation stops, and everyone turns to look at them. In some cases, students for whom English is not their first language, it really can be an intimidating thing to have to extemporaneously put together English sentences like that in a classroom environment.

In Second Life, that problem of students not participating in class discussions just totally disappeared. And when I thought about it, these reasons, these challenges of speaking up in a regular class went away in this environment. In Second Life, when you want to contribute something to the class discussion, you just go ahead and start typing it in your chat box, and nobody turns to look at you, even if they do notice that your avatar is doing the typing motions, they are not actually looking at you, it's just your avatar, and your avatar is not doing anything embarrassing. When you are ready to enter your comment into the conversation, you just hit enter. And it doesn't have that moment where everybody stops and looks at you. Your comment just goes right into the conversation, along with everybody else's. So i think a lot of the anxiety that goes along with the public-speaking aspect of participating in class discussions, is just removed in this environment.

On the flip side, we didn't have any trouble with students who dominate the discussion. There's always been the phenomenon of the student who ends every sentence with a conjunction in order to not stop their comment, and you can do that as much as you like in Second Life, and it doesn't stop anybody else from participating in the discussions. What's nice about that is very frequently people who usually speak a lot in class have a lot of very good things to contribute, and it's hard as a teacher to shut somebody down in order to make space for other students, especially if you do feel that you want to be encouraging of their interest and enthusiasm. And this just takes away that problem as well.

So for me the idea that I would actually end up almost preferring to run a class in a text-based environment to a voice-based environment, that was a huge surprise.

Lamont: In Second Life, or a virtual world, or any chat environment, don't you have students who are really stepping over each other, and it's impossible to sort out all the questions that really need to be answered?

Nesson: Well, it turns out that that was not a problem, and I think there are a few reasons for this. First of all, over the course of the semester, I developed some skill at moderating this type of group discussion in this type of environment. Basically, what happens is you have a few different threads of discussion that start, and the job of a teacher or discussion moderator becomes continually trying to weave the threads together, so that you don't end up with a discussion that's too fragmented. Because if it's too fragmented, it's as you described — it's just a bunch of disconnected things going on.

But you also have some help as a moderator, from just the natural effect of trying to participate in one of these discussions. If there's a lot going on, you have to put a fair amount of energy into reading the discussions and sorting out what's happening. So even if there are a lot of people, it's not that easy for everyone to be adding some totally different thing all at once. People sort of tend to stay on one topic or another, especially if the moderator is doing her job well.

But that said, we definitely did break the class up into smaller groups for discussions fairly frequently for exactly this reason — just like with any discussion, it's just much more effective if you have it with smaller groups.

Now that Linden Lab has open sourced the viewer for Second Life, there are quite a few possibilities open to make this management task easier. Right now when you chat in Second Life, everything just goes into an undifferentiated chat history. But it would be possible to add some simple threading technology to help identify different threads in the discussion and make it easier to follow. Perhaps even some moderation tools that would let the moderator modify what was going on in the discussion in some reasonable way. I am not exactly sure what that would look like.

Lamont: What's going to happen when voice chat is added to virtual worlds like Second Life? Will that kind of lead to the problems that you've had in the real world educating and getting people to speak up?

Nesson: I am not sure I am able to predict what's going to happen. I do think that there are some potential serious problems because it's going to be harder for people to access it and participate and get good sound quality at first. It will be difficult, because there are some people who don't have the ability to listen to sound when they come into a discussion that's mostly happening in voice. That could be problematic.

But assuming that everything works just fine technically, then I think the biggest challenge will be seeing if everyone can integrate text and voice. If everyone can speak and type at the same time, will anybody bother typing anymore? And I'm not sure. I just don't know whether people will do that. What I imagine is that Linden Lab is going to make it possible to have areas in which voice is not permitted and areas in which voice is permitted.

We're at the moment considering building a campus for the Extension School in Second Life, and one part of our design is to have some classrooms that are text based classrooms, and some that are voice-based classrooms.

I do think the voice is going to be very, very tempting for people, and it's also going to be very useful in some situations and for some purposes. And I certainly wouldn't want to say, “no it shouldn't be used.” I do think that as soon as you have voice, you get back to these regular problems of having to wait, and speak one at a time, and people can monopolize the mike and that kind of thing.

Lamont: In virtual reality classroom environments, what's your perspective on grading and evaluating students?

Nesson: It's really no different than in a regular face-to-face class. For CyberOne, we obviously had to know the real-life identities of the students who were in our class, in order to grade them. For some people, who wanted to keep their other avatars anoymous, they created a new avatar to take our class. From my perspective, I expect that it is the actual student who is operating their own avatar, and I grade them just as I would in another environment.

Lamont: What types of tools would help you be a better educator? If you could magically create or program some tools or objects or something in Second Life that would help you teach, what would they be?

Nesson: I'll tell you what we used that were really great. We had a video screen which was wonderful and also streaming audio, which was great. If you want to use any lecture-type material in Second Life, those are total must-haves.

Then we aslso used a basic slide projector, which is similar to having PowerPoint, and that obviously can be useful. I didn't use it all that much.

One thing were using right now in the Internet and Society course which I am not teaching, but other people at the Berkman Center are teaching, is something called the Question Tool, which is a great tool that the Berkman Center has developed. How their class works is that it's webcast live into our classroom in Second Life. So students who are taking the class from a distance can attend the class in real time and watch it and they can sit with the other students in Second Life.

And the way that they can participate in the class is through the Question Tool. How it works is that anybody who wants to can post a question on the Question Tool, or they can vote on somebody else's question. And the Question Tool organizes the questions from the top of the page to the bottom of the page, in order of popularity [depending on] how many votes they've gotten, so the professor then has access to this list of questions or comments coming from the student audience that's sorted in a way that's actually meaningful in terms of their level of relevance and interest to the students in the class.

One of the things that's really cool about it for the Internet and Society class is that students who are physically in the classroom at Harvard Law School and the students who are in Second Life are using the same instances of the Question Tool so that they're interacting directly with each other through that. So that is one great tool, and it's not actually in Second Life, in the sense that you do everyithing in Second Life. Right now, we just have it set up so that there's an object you click in Second Life and it takes you to the Web page, which is the interface for the Question Tool.

The main thing that doesn't exist in Second Life and I can't for the life of me figure out how one could program, is something that's more like a blackboard. A free-form writing tool is something that I would really love to have. As a person who studies Computer Science, I am frequently wanting to draw all kinds of diagrams on a board if I am teaching students about Computer Science, and there's really no way to do that in Second Life. So you have to simulate doing everything you want to do like that, using slides, and the problem with that is when a question comes up, and you need to give an example that isn't already on your slides, there's not really any good way to do that in Second Life right now.

Lamont: Based on your experience with CyberOne, and your observation with the ongoing Internet and Society class, and the upcoming Virtual Worlds class, do you think that virtual world activities and classes are here to stay at Harvard, or it's still in the experimental stage, and you don't really know how it's going to end up?

Nesson: I think it's still in the experimental stage definitely, but I also think that it's here to stay. I am not sure that Second Life is the thing that's going to stay, but virtual worlds technology in general is just a giant leap forward ahead of any of the previous education technologies that we were using for distance education. And at least in distance education, I can't see moving backwards from that, especially once we get better abilities to represent people using gestures, facial expressions, voice maybe, various different things that actually make the experience even richer than it is now.

It's a real challenge to figure out how to best use technology like this in conjunction with face-to-face classes. What we did in the fall that was I think pretty exciting and definitely an innovating thing to do was to incorporate Second Life as a way to invite people that were part of the public at large to participate in the class, and actually provide something of use to the students who were enrolled in the class in exchange for having free access to the materials. So for them, we held some office hours in Second Life where they could come and they could discuss the lectures and issues that were going on in class. They had full access to all the lecture videos and the materials for the class.

And as the semester progressed we started to realize that it was important for that group of people to contribute something back to the students in the class, so the students in the class wouldn't feel that they were having the experience that they had paid for diluted by sharing it for free with other people.

I think that there are just so many ways that this could be done. This is just one tiny example and only really the tip of the iceberg, as far as this is concerned. We came up with the idea of having a "trial" in which the [Harvard Law School] students could practice their lawyering skills and actually go through the whole experience of a trial, and we were able to recruit people from our at-large participant group to participate as jurors in the trial. So they sat and listened to all the arguments and deliberated, and returned a verdict.

This was a pretty good use of Second Life because it was a great way for us to bring together a group of volunteers. it would have been extremely difficult to recruit and get them together at the Law School for a real mock trial. And also because for Law School students, who are trying to learn how to actually raise the appropriate objection at the appropriate time in a trial, in a real-life mock trial, often those moments go by too fast, and it's just extremely difficult to practice it. So in Second Life, in the text-based environment, things go a little bit more slowly, and additionally you can have a whole team of Law students operating a single avatar. So you can have a bunch of minds working together and discussing together — without actually talking out loud in the courtroom — and helping to direct their avatars to do the right thing. So that turned out to be a great experiment.

We've now done two trials in Second Life, and they haven't been perfect, but they've certainly been big successes and very interesting.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Nesson is the instructor for Virtual Worlds, scheduled for the Fall 2007 semester at the Harvard Extension School. She is currently a candidate for a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she studies computational linguistics and conducts research in the area of synchronous grammar formalisms and applications to computational semantics and machine translation. Nesson is also a 2001 graduate of the Harvard Law School and an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Harvard Extended interviews the creator of the Extension Student online community

Previous interviews on Harvard Extended have explored academics at the Harvard Extension School, but for this installment, we will be exploring community -- specifically, the new online community, Extension Student, which launched late last month. Already Extension Student boasts a small but active group of undergraduate and graduate students who want to talk about issues ranging from distance education to whether the Extension School should set up a PhD program.

Setting up an online community for Extension School students is not a new idea. HESA has made noise about building an online forum before, but nothing ever got done. Finally, an ALM candidate who is about to graduate decided to create a forum on his own. I know him from a class we took in 2005, but online he's asked not to be identified by name. A transcript of the email interview follows:

Ian Lamont, Harvard Extended: Why are you creating this online forum?

Extension Student: First of all, thank you for having me on your blog. We all know that Harvard Extension Students complain of the lack of interaction among themselves. But what few of us realize is that this is a problem elsewhere at Harvard too. Students at the College write Crimson articles bemoaning the lack of social space outside of exclusive finals clubs, graduate students in GSAS feel too competitive to hang out with fellow graduate students, and too far removed from undergraduates, those at the Medical School are altogether away from Cambridge, and so on. Most people feel at once part of, but separate from, that elusive place called Harvard, then graduate, and move on. At the Extension School, there are hundreds of students commuting to class each day. Those in the degree programs have the most at stake, and have the greatest need to feel that they are part of the institution. Right now, some graduate without getting to know a single fellow student in the same program. That is really not good for anyone, including Harvard when it comes looking for alumni to help out. There is also a lot of misunderstanding out there of what the Extension School is, what it means to be a degree candidate at the school, and what the degree means on your resume or CV. We need to know about and discuss these issues frankly, and in private. Being Extension School students, we have a vested interest in enhancing the prestige of our own school, of making it work for us, and it is really up to us. I've looked at the way different social organizations work and come to the conclusion that the most benefit is derived when alumni form informal networks with current students. I wanted to create such an informal network.

Ian: How long did it take to build it, and what tools did you use?

ES: About 48 hours, and then a week of fine tuning. I'm using all open-source tools, with a lot of customization of the look and feel. It looks really simple, but simple tools are best. I'm not a fan of overdone sites. It has to work fast, and get the job done.

Ian: Why didn't you ask HESA or HES for help with this project?

ES: I was involved in student government for several years at my undergrad school, and I just don't want to go that way. I think it is better to build a project all by yourself and then if it takes off, slowly give up control of it to those interested rather than have a committee decide to do something as a team. Student government leaders tend to be an ambitious and motivated group, but they change all the time, out for the next big thing in their career. So projects are often neglected as people move on. Plus, I wanted this to be an informal networking opportunity and not have all the restrictions that being Harvard affiliated would involve.

Ian: What are the costs involved, in terms of hosting and your personal time?

ES: I'm not keeping track of costs. It is just something that I'm doing, and plan on keeping up as long as it remains relevant.

Ian: Do you plan on using advertisements to support it?

ES: I hate online advertisements, they really shouldn't be there for those who are regularly posting and reading the forum, and they won't be. But as a practical matter, ads will be integrated in non-intrusive ways for guest visitors, and you're welcome to buy your Harvard T shirt or book through the Extension Student Shop too.

Ian: Can students discuss or rate teachers and classes?

ES: The forum is designed so that posting can be anonymous, if you so wish. At the same time, you can be assured that the only ones with access are those with some kind of Harvard affiliation, since a harvard.edu address is required to register. Some people dislike anonymous posts, but I think they allow a certain level of critique that can be beneficial. I'm posting as Catamount, an old English word for a wildcat, with the pun that a cat sees at night, much like we are obliged to do in the Yard going to classes. So yes, you can rate classes and instructors all you wish.

Ian: How will you moderate the forum for spam, flames, and trolls?

The biggest annoyance of online forums today is automated or semi-automated commercial spam. As soon as a forum opens up, operation spam kicks in. Someone, somewhere, is paying less than minimum wage for a guy sitting in an internet cafe in the middle of nowhere to plug a product on hundreds of forums, guest books, and blogs a day. Since those kinds of visitors are unlikely to have a Harvard email account, I think we are safe from that annoyance. And I do like freedom of speech.

Parts of the Extension Student site can be browsed by the public, but to post a topic, respond to a thread, or see the other sections that deal specifically with the undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs, you'll need to register with a Harvard email address.

If you are a Harvard Extension School student, and would like to take part in the Harvard Extended interview series, please email me at ilamont@fas.harvard.edu.

Related resources:

Harvard Extended Interview Series: An ALM management concentrator

Harvard Extended Interview Series: Cynthia Iris, ALM government concentrator

Investigative journalists for hire in China

Edward Cody of the Washington Post has once again dug up a fascinating story about the new rules of journalism in China: Professional journalists who hire themselves out to interested parties to uncover and report -- via the Web -- on scandals or perceived injustices. From the article:

Xu [Xiang] and Li Xinde, another Web reporter for hire, said they take fees from those who can afford to pay but also investigate for free if victims cannot raise any money. Often they ask only for their expenses, such as plane fare and hotel costs, they said.

"It's not strange for the self-supported Web-site reporters to ask someone to cover transportation expenses," Li said, "and usually the reporters clearly state that on their Web sites or in e-mails."

Party censorship also extends to the Internet, which is policed by an elaborate computer system and an army of snoops who monitor what Chinese people read and say online. But that censorship comes after the fact; it can only monitor what has been posted. Web condottieri such as Xu and Li may get bounced off the Internet, but only after their articles reach the public and get passed around. If one site is blocked, they quickly start up another.

Xu, who has been sued for defamation by one group of officials, said he takes care in his articles to attack only the misdeeds of corrupt local officials and not the government in general. He has studied law, he said, to avoid getting into trouble with the police in the cat-and-mouse game he is forced to play.

What's also interesting about this trend is that it extends to rural areas, where a new class of Internet-savvy users are bypassing local media and local officials to air their grievances, potentially to a national audience. One example cited by Cody involves a property-related dispute in a small village in Sichuan. A young man from the village used the 'Net to research and contact about 30 journalists-for-hire. It's hard to imagine something like this happening five years ago, but the fact of the matter is a huge number of people across China -- including people living in rural areas -- are getting online and using the 'Net to communicate and gather information. This has huge implications for the government, which until recently had much stronger controls over information transfer.

Guest Author on Terra Nova

For the month of May, I have been invited to be a guest author on Terra Nova. Terra Nova is an online community that discusses issues relating to virtual worlds -- a topic that I have frequently covered on Harvard Extended, I, Lamont, and my Computerworld blog. During my monthly tenure on Terra Nova, I intend to address infrastructure-related issues as well as the impact of 3D technologies on new media formats. There's already one active discussion, "Second Life's infrastructure issues prompt an open letter to Linden Lab."