curinga: social software

the hope of free software

2006-11-22T16:17:00.000-05:00

My friend Jonah recently posted a blog entry titled Free Energy, discussing how the principles of free software can be brought to bear on the looming environmental crisis. And more abstractly, he wonders about "how technology and new media could play a role in saving the world."

How can new media and social software save the world? I think that Jonah is in the right place with the environmental question. With the energy crisis, global warming, alarming natural disasters et al, I think that the word's citizens are ready for change and action.

He suggests environmental labeling as part of a potential solution to the problem. The labeling scheme would certainly be poised to take advantage of the core forces powering free content and free software:
- free information that can be used to provide greater freedom and agency to individuals
- discrete individual actions (as simple as choosing a different brand of soap, or whatever) that contribute to the overarching, complex goal
- loose coordination of large numbers of people
- opportunity to contribute to a meaningful cause (and to make life a little less vacuous)

I think that labeling needs to be the second step, though. It seems that the labelling would either come about due to government regulation or a massive outcry on the part of consumers. Both rely on the traditional political action, whih Jonah correctly worries may not be adequate to solve the problem. Is there some way that the principles of free software can be used to overcome the stranglehold that the manufacturers have on the relevant information, and, in a sense, free it? I.e. is there an open content technogical solution that can put this info into consumer's hands effortlessly? I'm not sure that we're quite there yet, but maybe a mobile barcode scanner for phones that looks up the product in an open content DB that anyone can contribute to. Such a solution would alleviate the need for new legislation or voluntary industry regulation.

I'd like to propose an alternative solution, too. Briefly, here's something that I've been thinking about lately. Do we need to directly attack the (environmental or other) problem? When we're talking about 'solving' seemingly intractable problems like poverty or environmental degredation, what we're really talking about is a massive change in consciousness. I agree wholey with Jonah when he writes that the copyleft movement is about "empowering individuals, not states [or corporations], with the ability to choose to subvert".

My question, is this: can we so empower individuals simply by providing ourselves the opportunity to participate in the free software and free content movement? If I choose to write for Wikipedia and contribute bug fixes to Apache, can this be empowering enough for me to change the way I think about even larger problems like racism, war, or the environment? Can it provide me the perspective I need to watch Gore's movie and say to myself, "I can change this". Rather than, "this sucks, but what can I do?". I think that the real hope that free software offers us is its ability to provide an outlet for meaningful actions on the part of individual agents. It's possible that this type of action and the real empowerment that accompanies it can be contagious enough to spread beyond the meager goals of writing a great operating system and into the broader realm of improving humanity.

Issue Entrepreneurship: Making Bilingual-NYC

2005-12-18T22:40:00.000-05:00

Ready to Launch

Even though it's the end of the semester, I feel it's just the beginning of my issue entrepreneurship project. It makes sense (to me), though that only after putting some time and thought into studying how social software works, that I would be ready to use it effectively to pursue my issue. This post will trace the history of my project to its current state, and explain the process behind my actions. To see the current state of the project, please see bilingual-nyc.

Choosing an Issue

For me, this was the most difficult part. I was searching for an issue that seemed suitable according to Philip Agre's guidelines for issue entrepreneurship:

You need an issue that the profession as a whole is not really thinking about, but which is going to be the center of attention in five years. The issue could be technical, strategic, managerial, policy-related, or all of the above. It could be a problem or an opportunity or both. It could be a new method or a whole new area of practice. It should be fairly specific, though, and should directly address the day-to-day work of people in some segment of the profession.

I modified Agre's general ideas of leadership with Mejias's addition of social issue entrepreneurship; using social software as a catalyst for social change.

After tossing a few issues around, I settled in the issue of bilingual education in New York City. Immigrant students, especially Spanish speaking students, suffer chronically high drop-out rates and low academic achievement. New York sports a high immigrant, multi-lingual population. My goal for the issue is to strengthen and improve bilingual education, and to defend it from the types of anti-immigrant attacks that have successfully dismantled bilingual ed. in California and other states. Furthermore, I wanted to choose an issue that I could support and coordinate with my other goals. My first two issues, while important to me, would have been pure side hobbies, unrelated to my work, academic history, and in large part my background and expertise. Bilingual education, on the other hand, is central to both my research and personal experience.

Making it Happen

Once the topic was settled, I considered the possibilities of using social software to pursue the issue. I decided to set up a blog, bilingual-nyc. Briefly, I've begun using my research into social software and Web 2.0 to make it more effective. Most importantly, I need to make it accessible -- if it's an island on the web, no matter how brilliant the content, it will have zero effect. I am searching for related web logs to link to and to post on, in hopes that I will be able to garner reciprocal links. To make the blog more participatory, I've included del.icio.us links that anybody can post to, under the tag "bilingual-nyc". I added a sitemeter link with public traffic data. This should help users gauge the vitality of the site. Finally, through my own social network, I've recruited my sister to also write for the blog. She is a researcher in linguistics and has experience in the field. She'll be able to provide a different voice, and be able to attract viewers through her overlapping, but still distinct, social network.

Closing Thoughts

Although it's only starting to come to fruition late in the semester, I am pleased with the shape of the project. I think that I will be able to sustain my energy and excitement to continue the blog, and hope that it can instigate tangible improvements in the state of bilingual education in New York.

Closing Thoughts on Social Software Affordances Course

2005-12-18T16:52:00.000-05:00

Closing Thoughts on Social Software Affordances Course

Ulises Mejias' has posed several questions to help us reflect on our semester long study of social software. While I'm not going to attempt the Haiku (I think I would spend the rest of the day working on the meter and not the content). I am going to write each sentence one time, no edits. Here goes:

* What is 'social' about social software?
Social software is software used in a context that supports human collaboration.

* How is the notion of community being redefined by social software?
New forms of expression and less hierarchical structures are changing the power relationships within and among communities.

* What aspects of our humanity stand to gain or suffer as a result of our use of and reliance on social software?
The potential gains, many already coming to fruition, include an expanded and more inclusive sense of self and society, as well as new forums for people to work in communion towards common goals. My fear, though, is that technology in general, and social software in particular, will be a new and powerful tool used to protect existing wealth and privilege at the exclusion of others.

* How is social agency shared between humans and (computer) code in social software?
Successful social software should actively support human agency by making new opportunities available, while remaining in the background.

* What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software?
Technological classes will extend and strengthen their social (and cultural) capital, thereby gathering greater wealth and power.

* What are the pedagogical implications of social software for education?
The proven success of less hierarchical and more inclusive methods in social software stand in opposition to top-down pedagogical methods, both for traditional teaching as well as instructional technology (such as CAI).

* Can social software be an effective tool for individual and social change?
Individual and social change are linked; social software will only be able to be effective if it can reach beyond the virtual and into the physical world.

The Anti-Social Mechanical Turk

2005-12-07T02:00:00.000-05:00

These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Marx and Engels, 1847 ¹

Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk has been heralded as a triumph of the web 2.0/business 2.0 paradigm. Amazon's web services group managed to use their technology, Amazon's prestigious brand, and large user base to coordinate the small efforts of many thousands (potentially hundreds of thousands) of workers.

From a business perspective, Amazon astutely capitalized on web 2.0 concepts like "wisdom of crowds" and "the long tail". When I first heard of the service, I was intrigued by Mechanical Turk. It realizes one of my interests in social software: how to aggregate the small efforts of many people to solve difficult problems.

Investigating the new software in context, though, I am not nearly as optimistic about Amazon's accomplishment. I share blogger David Flanagan's unease with Amazon's commodification of human intelligence. Flanagan writes,

I don't know if I'm more disturbed by the philosophical implications of this Matrix-like inversion of control, by the commodification of intelligence it represents, or by the implications for workers rights.

Although Flanagan doesn't provide further analysis of the service, I think that his distress is justified. The Mechanical Turk presents a new face on an old problem: the worker as commodity.

The Mechanical Turk deftly exploits the power of the Internet to commoditize its workers. By definition, HITs are tasks that most humans can easily complete. Couple this with the global nature of the Net and the low cost of access to Amazon's website, and it is all but guaranteed that, in the near future, HITs will be completed by workers in developing nations, at poverty wages ². This is a great boon for businesses using the Turk, because they will consistently pay the lowest possible rate in the world to have their HITs completed. The workers, who might manage to eek out a livable existence in the short term, are still subject to the whims of the market; finding themselves out of work when even more desperate competitors can complete the HITs for less.

Amazon can take precautions to prevent these dismal economics from unfolding, but the Mechanical Turk will still fail to meet the requirements of social software. Underpinning the technical implementations of social software, lies a set of social principles. Social software empowers users, fosters connections between people, allows users to work towards common and mutually beneficial goals. Social software magnifies users' efforts and returns their efforts back to them.

The Mechanical Turk employs the techniques of social software without exhibiting its basic principles. Its users are alienated from their work and isolated from the end product. If they encounter the fruits of their labor, it is not as something they produced and own, but rather as objects that can be sold back to them as the consumer. Social software must be more than a collection of techniques for computing, but rather software deployed in a social context.

Notes:

1. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1847). Manifesto of the Communist Party. [Electronic Version]

2. "Digital sweatshops" are already well established for massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs or MMORPGs). The cost of entry for using Mechanical Turk will be lower than it is for games because the Turk does not require a monthly subscription, as powerful computers, or as much bandwidth as needed to play MMOGs. Also, the digital literacy skills required to navigate Mechanical Turk are considerably less than, say, those to mine gold in Everquest, not to mention that the Turk pays real cash -- eliminating the complexities of selling virtual goods in secondary markets.
This 1up.com article offers one of the most complete looks at "farming" in MMOGs, but a quick google search for "video game sweatshops" will turn up many others.

What is Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk?

2005-12-05T12:13:00.000-05:00

Mechanical Turk is a new product/service launched by Amazon. The service allows companies to farm out small, routine tasks that are difficult for computers to solve through pure AI or other computational techniques, but relatively simple for humans to complete. Technically, you can think of it as a large, distributed workflow system with a potentially vast pool of workers.

The system consists of three main components. The requester is the company/entity that wants a task completed. The task itself, called a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) in Amazon's parlance. And the worker, i.e. the individual who completes the task. The relationships are fairly straightforward as well. The requester uses Amazon's web services API to register HITs. Workers use Amazon's website to complete HITs. The requester gives the worker a small payment (somewhere between $0.02 and $0.75 right now) for each HIT they successfuly complete. Amazon charges the requester a 10% fee (with a miniumum of $0.005) on top of the payment to the worker. Obviously there are interesting details around quality control, fraud protection, payment methods, etc., but the concept is fairly simple to understand.

The available tasks to date have been mostly work for Amazon itself and include classifying photos ($.04/HIT), editing product descriptions (not sure of rate), or finding the artist name from a JPEG of an album cover ($.02/HIT). Other non-amazon HITs offered ask users to translate English/French ($.20 - $.30/HIT) and transcribe audio recordings (Podcasts) ($.75/HIT). Since the beta version of the service was made public on November 2, 2005, a surprisingly vibrant community has sprung up, including dedicated blogs and community sites. From my research on the various blogs and discussion boards it looks like people have earned up to $15/hr (partially automating the tasks with scripts), and that most people are probably making between $5 and $7 an hour.

Some of the interesting links I've seen:

In my next post I want to look at some of the implications of the Mechanical Turk in terms of social and community software.

Issue Entrepreneurship: A change of course

2005-11-16T16:28:00.000-05:00

At this late stage I am going to change paths on my issue entrepreneurship project. So far, I have been working on the issue of metro card hacking and juvenile arrests. While this topic is still interesting to me, it has proven sufficiently difficult just to ascertain the scope of the problem, that I am having a hard time justifying the considerable time it would take to gather the necessary data (from unpublished sources) to move forward.

Furthermore, as many of our colleagues have noted, the issues we choose to redress do not end with the semester. I am hoping that my new topic is aligned closely enough with my research that I will be able to maintain my enthusiasm for it after our course ends.

My new issue surrounds the politics of bilingual education/native language instruction in light of the strong English Only movement that has emerged in recent years. To briefly state my position, I believe that bilingual education is important for three reasons: 1) it is a very effective way to achieve long-term, English language academic achievement, 2) multilingual/bilingual skills are increasingly important for all citizens/students, 3) schools have a responsibility to respect the home culture of their students.

Now, there are already powerful and able scholars/activists involved in this issue (see the National Association of Bilingual Education), so what do I propose to contribute? I will specifically look at the issues on a local, New York City level; gathering information, participating in the community, and advocating where possible.

Here is my initial plan of action. I welcome comments/suggestions.

identify relevant sources of information: scholarly institutions, political organizations, state agencies, blogs/community sites
report on some of the main/most interesting findings
participate in the conversation where possible
find new topics that are specific to NYC, and try to shed more light on them

The Dark Side of Social Capital

2005-10-25T03:09:00.000-04:00

Both Agre (2004) and Johnson and Bimber (2004) cite the potential of social capital to improve society in Community in the Digital Age. For these authors, they see strong promise in community software that can manage to foster social capital.

Traditionally, social capital stems from participation in community and civic activities that help individuals build connections beyond family and work. Diverse organizations from social clubs to sports teams afford the opportunity to develop social capital (Putnam, 1995). This capital leads to greater participation in local and national government, and increased trust between individuals. Lin (1999) shows the power of social capital: bringing greater information, influence, credentials, and political reinforcement to members of dense social networks. Policy analysts looking to reduce poverty and empower struggling communities have been drawn to the tangible promise of social capital: stimulate personal connections and high levels of trust in a community and thereby affect the long-term positive change. Agre, in his adoption of social capital theory for online community software adds a new component to the traditional pillars of Trust and Connections. He argues that developing the personal skills necessary garner greater trust and connections is an important first step in efforts to increase social capital for an individual or a community. Clearly social capital plays a powerful role in society and cannot be ignored when considering social and community software.

At the same time, there is something unsettling about Putnam's reasoning (as described in Agre 2004) that lack of social capital, and specifically lack of proper social capital building skills, is the cause of poor economic development in Southern Italy (and I think it's more than my Southern Italian roots that leads me to feel this way). I've decided to use this blog entry to look a little bit more into the potential downsides of social capital.

I fear that social capital, like classical capital**, can lead to greater disparity between the "haves" and "have nots". The digital divide provides an easy example of how this might play out. Wealthier citizens have greater access to electronic media and the Internet. Well implemented social software affords these prosperous citizens even larger networks of trust and connections. Poorer citizens, on the other hand, miss out on these opportunities. The digital divide thereby becomes a force for greater social capital and, therefore, economic disparity. Acting in this capacity, social capital becomes an important gatekeeper to maintaining the status quo; the opposite of its touted potential as a force for greater equality.

There is already concern in the literature that an uncritical acceptance of the positive effects of social capital has crippled its use for formulating strong community building policy.

The "dark side" of social capital, the possibilities of association leading to exclusion of people of particular identities, or of building trust and capacity amongst networks of people with inherently antisocial norms and activities is well presented ... but rather skated over in policy. (Cleaver, 2005, p. 894)

Cleaver further illustrates three main challenges poor people have in accessing social capital:

reliance on, and inability to maintain, their physical ability
inability to utilize kinship and social relationships due to: small, fragile families; unstable marital status; widespread derogatory perception of poor
inability to articulate concerns in public forums, and (when heard) low weight given to their voices in these forums

These constraints highlight the need for poverty elimination as a precursor to building social capital in low income communities.

Davies (2003) cautions that social software should try to avoid some of the downsides of social capital, as manifested in the non-digital communities. Namely, he cites the insular nature of cliques, and intentionally opaque power structures as particular dangers.

It is not my intention to downplay or dismiss the importance of social capital in building effective community software. Rather I want to raise my own awareness of the potential pitfalls of social capital in order to investigate the ways it can be used most effectively. Hopefully, this more critical view will help us conceptualize social software systems that can combat the traditional social power structures that lead to inequitable societies.

** Lin describes Marx's classical capital as surplus wealth accumulated by the owners of the means of production. The wealth is created by a discrepancy in the cost of production and the cost of sale for the commodity. This new wealth cyclically leads to even greater wealth for the owners of the means of production as it is re-invested into the production process.

References

Agre, P. (2004). The Practical Republic: Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship. In A. Feenberg & D. Barney (Eds.), Community in the Digital Age (pp. 201-223). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Cleaver, F. (2005). The inequality of social capital and the reproduction of chronic poverty. World Development, 33(6), 893-906. electronic version

Davies, W. (2003). You Don't Know Me, but...Social Capital & Social Software [Electronic Version]. Retrieved October 25, 2005 from http://www.theworkfoundation.com/pdf/1843730103.pdf

Johnson, D., & Bimber, B. (2004). The Internet and Political Transformation Revisited. In A. Feenberg & D. Barney (Eds.), Community in the Digital Age (pp. 239-261). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Lin, N. (1999). Building a Network Theory of Social Capital. Connections, 22(1), 28-51. electronic version

Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65-78. electronic version

saludos desde buenos aires

2005-10-18T18:13:00.000-04:00

Hello all. Just a brief note to say that I'm in Argentina until Sunday (and since last Thursday Oct 13). This is my first time in front of a computer. Internet cafe is only about US$.35/hr, but I haven't had much time to write. Looking forward to catching up on wiki happenings and reading delicious links. Luckily, the time away from the computer has allowed me to spend more time reading our books. I'm particularly enjoying Where the Action Is ciao.

Issue Entrepeneurship

2005-10-10T18:27:00.000-04:00

I have been postponing this blog because I am having trouble choosing what to work on. I will present two ideas that I've been toying with and will consider comments to help choose which one to pursue.

Since this blog has turned out to be quite long, I'm providing a summary of the ideas here:

Idea 1: use mobile phones (SMS) and user-input to provide a subway tracking system that can provide information about wait-times for trains and service disruptions.
Idea 2: try to get the MTA to fix a bug in their metrocard system that contributes to hundreds of kids being arrested each year.

Idea 1: MTA Communications

background
In some ways I love the NYC Subway -- it runs 24 hours and goes all over the city. In other ways, though, it is a huge disappointment. Here are some of my complaints:

communications in general are terrible
late night and weekend travel, especially outside of Manhattan, can be a nightmare (due to changes/trackwork)
overcrowded trains
poor condition of stations (extreme heat/cold, filthy, no restrooms, little seating)

Moreover, it irks me that the MTA continues to raise fares without improving service in any significant way. It appears that the long-term affect of the Metrocard is that the MTA can raise fares with very little barriers.

Johnathan Kozol's honest and scathing description of segregation in our urban schools cites a steady decline in urban education, through up and down economies, which correlates to White residents moving out of city limits. Looking at the MTA's history in NY, there appears to be a similar pattern of neglect. A brief review of the history of the subway on nycsubway.org shows that almost the entirety of the subway system was built before 1950, with almost no major improvements from the 1960s to the present.

the idea
So, I was thinking that I would like to see what I can do to improve the subway. I have been entertaining the idea that social software can be used to track the subway trains, and to provide information about wait times and potential outages for riders. The system would be relatively low-tech, and would require a critical mass of subway riders to maintain accurate information.

Here's how it might work.

Contributing data:
When you get out of a subway station, you send an 
SMS from your cell phone to an
email (let's say mta-info@gmail.com).
Example:
A. 34st
You get no reward for doing this, you do it 
because you are a user of the system
and it won't work without your input (and you 
can write the message while on the
train and all you have to do is press send
-- less than a minute's work total).

Recieving data:
There will be two modes of requesting data. 
You can "watch" one or more stations,
or you can request the latest "status" 
on train lines.
When you send a "watch" request, you will get 
info on when trains pass the 
station you are watching (probably for the 
next hour, or a configurable time period).
When you send a "status" request, you will get 
the status of one or more train lines.
Examples:
#sets a watch request on the 14st stations
w[atch]. 14st

#requests the status on the A,C,E 2, and 3 trains
s[tatus]. A C E 2 3

The server software will need to aggregate the data input it receives and will also have to calculate confidence intervals on the accuracy of the data. All things considered, it is fairly straightforward technically. The real trick is getting enough people to use it -- it's a bit of a Catch 22 -- nobody will want to submit data at first, because the system will not be useful, but it won't be useful until many, many people make it a habit to submit their train locations.

Idea 2: The Metrocard Exploit Honey Pot

This idea is only tangentially related to improving the subway, but it relates to something that always frustrates me when I hear about it. My wife is an attorney with the Legal Aid Society Juvenile Rights Division. Within the last year or so, she has informed me of an alarming rise in prosecutions for subway fare evasion by using altered metrocards. Basically, kids (and others) exploit a known bug in the metrocard system. Some of the kids arrested are selling swipes, while others are just swiping themselves through.

Now, this would not be a big deal if it weren't for the numbers of kids getting arrested and if it weren't COMPLETELY AVOIDABLE. Rather than arresting hundreds of kids a year, trying them, and in many instances taking them from their homes, I would rather that the MTA closed the loophole with a more sophisticated solution.

If I pursue this project, I would need to look into a few issues. First, to really find some data about the extent of the problem and determine if it warrants further action. Next, see if the MTA already has plans to solve the problem. Last, see if a technical solution is feasible. If all three criteria are met, I would use this blog, and other social software, to advocate for change within the MTA.

electronic civil disobedience

2005-09-20T23:55:00.000-04:00

Considering one of the goals for the course is to explore social software and its ability to foster social change, I was interested in the idea of online direct action, electronic civil disobedience, hacktivism, or whatever you want to call it. Ulises posted an article about hacktivism to our del.icio.us tag, so I started there.

After reading the article, I was a little bit disappointed with the main group discussed: Hacktivismo. While their work on privacy software is laudible, I don't see them doing anything interesting in terms of either civil disobedience or hacking.

The more lively and interesting site was www.thehacktivist.com. There are active threads on their discussion boards and they provide links to several internet resources as well as essays surrounding political hacking.

From my cursory look at the field, I see 5 main types of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD):

denial of service attacks: have been coordinated with real-life protests in order to raise awareness for their cause. can be considered social software because they coordinated the voluntary help of many users to download a Java applet to run a portion of the attacks from their local machine.
website defacements: hackers take control of a political website and post their own message on the home page or other important pages in order to gain awareness and publicity for their cause.
social engineering: I didn't see this mentioned in any of the articles, but the type of spoofs that The Yes Men do can be considered a social engineering hack. They call their method "Identity Correction". In their words:
Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.
They use social engineering to spread their agenda and gain publicity for their causes. I can see how the same technique could be used to gain confidential information from the targets.
cracking: what most people of think of as hacking, breaking into a secure system to commandare it for your own purposes. I did not read of any political cracking outsdie of the website defacement, but more sophisticated political hacks could be used to cause disruption or to publicize confidential documents (maybe some of the many the White House routinely classifies).
google bombing: while I don't consider this civil disobedience, it is still digital direct action and it certainly makes use of social software. basically, a motivated group of bloggers and other web publishers alter google's rankings by creating an abundance of links from certain frases.Example: failure on google brings up The Biography of GW Bush as number one, and MichaelMoore.com at number two (at the time of this writing).

What do you guys think about the ethics of political hacking? how about the efficacy of it? Are there other hacks that are in use or could be used easily for political purposes?

Anybody interested in some political hacking for their social entrepeneur project? :)

zork: a techno-biography

2005-09-16T16:12:00.000-04:00

I start with Zork, because Zork inspired my first attempts at programming. Zork is a text-based adventure game where you wander around in a lonely, forgotten world, mostly solving puzzles and occasionally fighting the thief or troll.When I was about 10 or 11 years old, I played it (and eventually other text-based Infocom games) relentlessly on my family's Commodore 64. I also spent many afternoons at the computer, programming my own adventure game. Although I didn't create the masterpiece I hoped for, I learned enough BASIC to get a taste for programming.

Unfortunately, my schools had basically no computers for students to use and no computer science courses at any level. Further, my distaste for math prevented me from pursuing computer science as an undergrad. Instead, I completed a BA in English from Colby College in Maine. I never lost my enthusiasm for computers and new technology, and spent plenty of time in the lab in college playing around with cool Internet technologies like MUDs & MOOs and using Gopher for both research and pleasure.

After graduation, I moved to Grady, Arkansas to teach public school as part of the Teach for America organization. I spent two years living and teaching in Arkansas, teaching ESL and bilingual ed (math & lang. arts). My students were primarily the children of Mexican immigrants working as migrant workers on local cotton and rice farms. Again, our school had little (read no) access to technology, but I would lug my mac, scanner and printer into the classroom so that my class could write stories and publish their work.

I moved back to NYC and in 1996 got a job as a technology consultant for the Computer Curriculum Corporation; full-time dedicated to old District 32 in Bushwick, Brooklyn. That was my first professional technology job. I was part IT support, project manager, curriculum consultant, and technology trainer. At the same time I began studying for my masters in Computing and Education at Teachers College.

At TC I finally got back into programming, especially for the Web which was getting ready to take off. I left my job in Bushwick to work for CCTE/ILT alum Bob Matsuoka as a programmer for his company, SohoNet. Working 60+ hrs a week (and loving it), we were building an early web content management system. I finished my masters while working at SohoNet, turning in a paper and web-application about community building and end-user publishing for the web.

A few years later, I left Soho with 2 other programmers to start our own company. At the new business, Crisp Wireless I was the lead developer of our software system: an application called mLogic which made it easy to create and deploy content for Java enabled mobile phones. Working at Crisp was an incredible experience for me, learning about the mobile world and programming for constrained devices. The company is still thriving here in NY, but after 3 years there I was ready for a change, burned out, and interested in getting back into education.

I applied to the doctoral program in CCTE and took a job as the lead web developer at a television market research company: IAG Research. I've been working there part-time and going to school part-time for the past 2+ years or so. IAG was my first opportunity to work in a truly high-traffic, high-uptime environment. We gather daily information about television viewing habits through online surveys, from tens of thousands of users each day. I've also been able to develop my knowledge of data-mining and data-warehousing.

Finally, I'm getting close to ending this rant. I'm back at TC now, trying to focus more on the theory of technology and how it can be used to promote educational equity, true democracy, and social change. As for my dissertation, I hope to propose it in the Spring and am looking to combine my interests in bilingual education, mobile computing, and user-generated content.

I'm looking forward to working with each of you, and have already begun enjoying your delicious posts.