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This is my final post on this blog as a Columbia employee. Taking a cue from our not-so-lame-duck prez (see: #obamajama), I’ll indulge in the conceit of reflecting on my legacy at Columbia with a wink to my successor.

I started working at the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) in May 2004. While I’ve probably shared the story of how I landed at Columbia hundreds of times, I’ve never captured it fully in writing. I’ve written extensively about the circumstances of my departure from my previous employer for a course on the Political Economy of Media at the New School back in 2007 Fabricating Freedom: Free Software Developers at Work and Play, but that essay focused more on an analysis of free software and labor, and neglected to explore the connections between open source communities and education.

As I wrote in Fabricating Freedom, at the beginning of the millennium I found myself backpacking across Eastern Europe as a software developer, participating in coding hackathons held in Viennese castles and Norwegian fjords. Intermingling with artists and social theorists was an essential component of these gatherings. I wasn’t particularly politically conscious as an undergrad, and my experiences within a vibrant open source community awakened my interest in what some might call politics — governance, decision making and conflict resolution. I also came to understand the Plone community as a self-organized knowledge community, one that continually promotes active learning among all participants. I would not read Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms until years later, but looking back it is easy to recognize how this open source community began to fulfill Papert’s vision of schools without walls or classrooms. I also experienced the lessons of Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster first-hand as the Python community collectively embarked on intellectual emancipation.

I decided to plot a course to the academy, unsure how I would make the transition. I applied to the Instructional Technology masters program at Teachers College and while my application was under review I was hired as a developer at CCNMTL; and the rest is history. The job came with free tuition, and my original plans flipped as I began working full-time at CCNMTL and studying part-time. CCNMTL’s executive director, Frank Moretti, was also on the faculty of Teachers College and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s doctoral program in communication. He soon became my mentor, boss, teacher and friend.

People often wondered how I held down a full-time job while working on a Ph.D. I responded that students of the natural sciences often book 40+ hours per week in a lab, and working for Frank was about as close as I could imagine to a communications laboratory as there existed. My coursework and publications were often inspired and drawn directly from our work at CCNMTL:

• Bossewitch, Jonah, John Frankfurt, Alexander Sherman with Robin D.G. Kelley. “Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaborations.” Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom, eds. Robert E. Cummings and Matt Barton Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.: 2008. (link)
• Bossewitch, Jonah. “Multiplicity and Social Coding.” Collaborative Futures: A Book About the Future of Collaboration, Written Collaboratively. Lowercase Press: 2010. (excerpted from Versioning Dissonance)
• Bossewitch, Jonah, Michael Preston. “Teaching and Learning with Video Annotations Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.” Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy, eds. R. Trebor Scholtz, 175-184 New York: The Institute for Distributed Creativity: 2011. (link)

I soon learned that I tolerated meetings and office politics better than my fellow developers, and was dragged, kicking and screaming, into management . Most of the time I really enjoyed liaising with other groups within our Center and across the university. I especially enjoyed making a systematic case for free culture and critical pedagogy. The bulk of the software our team developed is published on Github openly under GPL licenses. We didn’t have as much success (yet) in openly licensing educational content, or convincing central IT to commit to open source solutions. Some of our projects are now part of the commons and I’ve helped educate and persuade numerous faculty on the value of transparency, collaborative production and open licensing.

My biggest disappointment around Intellectual Property at Columbia concerns our administration’s failure to follow through its stated mission to the public. It always seemed like Columbia was perfectly positioned to take the lead on meaningful, progressive copyright reform, but we often got the opposite. Our former university librarian, Jim Neal, is a strong proponent for copyright reform, and would regularly host conferences such as Correcting Course. Under Jim, CCNMTL worked on various projects which involved strong assertion of Fair Use. The Center demonstrated clearly in practice what might become impossible if copyright law becomes even more draconian. President Bollinger is a First Amendment scholar who also took the University of Michigan to the Supreme Court fighting for affirmative action. Unfortunately, Bollinger neglects to connect his free speech advocacy to the copyright wars, and Columbia continues to lag behind our peers on advocacy and policy, instead of leading the charge.

I tried to take my job title of “Technical Architect” pretty seriously, and enrolled in a few architecture courses at Columbia GSAPP. I wrote about ways that software architecture has begun to resemble increasingly traditional architecture as a leading art, and characterized Yochai Benkler as an architectural theorist (Possibility Spaces: Architecture and the Builders of Information Societies). I directly applied the ideas as described on CTL’s Project Development page to educational environments, which then lead to the question: what sorts of values do we intend to infuse in our applications? If software is our medium, and the medium is the message, what sorts of messages do our applications communicate?

My team’s job begins where commodity software solutions leave off, leaving us to grapple with problems at the cutting edge of teaching, learning, research and publishing. We regularly innovate ways to improve networked critical analysis with a portfolio of projects that help students collaborate around the production and critical analysis of new media. Student-centric workflows and dashboards that enable faculty to easily assess student work are often missing from consumer tools. We worked hard to preserve the core scholarly values like citation and reference, and encouraged students to show their work and reflect on their process. Some of my favorite projects helped faculty translate their research software from the lab bench to the classroom, introducing the ability for students to save, address and compare different runs of their work. We challenged students to question algorithmic black boxes and pushed them to explain their work in ways that were replicable. Throughout these design iterations we attempted to satisfy Frank’s incessant demand to answer the (seemingly) simple question — “So what?”

Our best projects in my tenure have emerged from deep relationships with faculty, and have connected their research to their classroom and to the world. At our best, our educational interventions were exploratory salvos, with the lessons learned shared in posts, presentations, papers and code. We operated like a think tank that’s always experimenting and learning. Part of what made this work was our original mandate, stipulating that if we never failed, it meant we weren’t taking enough risks. Many of the patterns we developed were reused, either by being backed into libraries, or through iteration and refinement. The developers at CTL practice Design Research across projects, perpetually applying the knowledge gained from one project to the next.

Lorena Barba recently delivered the Keynote at PyCon ‘16 where she argued that teaching people to collaborate effectively is more important, and harder, than teaching them to code. She thinks that the style of collaboration found in most open source projects is a model for educators to build upon:

The dream of collaboration remains an intriguing and often elusive promise of networked technologies. For my swan song at Columbia, Mark Phillipson and I co-presented on digital collaboration at the graduate student orientation:

We recounted many ways that we’ve collaborated over the years, around documents authoring, wikis, and project management tools. The talk made me realize how far we’ve come, as many of the tools that were esoteric and rare a decade ago are now commonplace. Yet, we are still mostly stuck with course-centric learning management platforms instead of student-centric ones, and collaborative, distributed research remains a stumbling block in most disciplines. Many of the challenges are socio-cultural, as egos and competition continue to drive the academy. If we remember to focus on teaching students and not subjects, the pedagogies we promote need to prioritize values over competencies. And, the software we develop needs to embody those values.

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