Despite what you may have heard, I'm not really all that into new technologies.
Typically, I find out about new technologies long after they're already old news. This is a constant source of shame for me. ('Hey,' I said in late 2009, 'this cloud computing thing sounds interesting. What is it?') As much as I would like to join the ranks of early adopters, I simply lack the constitution. ('Now, what's this DROID thing I've been hearing so much about this year? Oh, it's been around since 2007? Well, who makes the Droid? Oh, it's a mobile operating system and not actually a phone? Can you tell me again what a mobile operating system is?') My buddy Steve, who likes to find out about new technologies when they're still in prototype form, regularly subjects me to conversations I don't really understand about technologies that don't make sense to me. (Here I would insert a sample conversation if any single representative discussion had made enough sense to me to stick in my memory.)
Though I don't care about how things are made, I am interested in finding out how things work. This is a subtle but important distinction. I want to learn how lean, mean websites are built, and I want to build some of my own, even though I have absolutely no idea how my computer is able to translate hypertext markup language (html) into artifacts that humans can interpret. I don't know what a "3G network" is or how my new Droid phone uses it to give me constant access to its features, but I do want to know how to set up my phone so I can quickly access contact information for the people I communicate with the most. I would also like to know how to set up my calendar for weekly views instead of daily views.
It's not the technology that interests me, but its uses. And as long as I'm thinking about uses for a technology, I might as well think about how to manipulate its features to support practices that meet my needs.
Clay Shirky, despite his recent unfortunate foray into gender politics, is actually pretty smart when he's talking about things he's qualified to discuss. In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, he wrote that "communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring." And he's absolutely correct: For socially interesting things to happen, widespread adoption of a technology is the first requirement, complemented by widespread use of the technology. The automobile has led to a reshaping of our roads, our communities, our attitudes toward travel--has, in short, become socially interesting--because its novelty has long since worn off as car ownership has inched toward universal. Cellphones have supported uprisings, protests, revolutions, because we've had them around long enough to know how to leverage them for purposes for which they were not originally intended.
In general, I've made uneasy peace with my apathy toward new technologies, with one caveat: It's early adopters who get the earliest, if not the most, say in how technologies are taken up as they become more widespread. And early adopters tend to be young, white, male, college-educated, and affluent. Which is fantastic for them but not so great for people whose needs and interests don't align with the needs and interests of the rich-young-educated-white-guy demographic.
Still, you just can't do things your body wasn't meant to. I don't guess I'll ever be able to force myself to care about 3G networks, but it's easy enough to start thinking about the social implications of a tool that's 3G-network enabled and pocketsized. Now we're talking about the possibility of near-limitless access to information and communication: the building blocks for fostering and supporting civic engagement, community participation, and the chance to dance up alongside those early adopters, join them for a while, and modify the music to make a tune that's easier to dance to.
Now we just need to figure out a way to get everyone dancing. We start by lowering the actual cost of admission (this is one way that early adopters help support the social revolution: They pay $499 so you don't have to!), then we start pounding down the perceived cost of admission:
technological Woody Allen-ism, the fear of trying a new tool for fear of looking stupid and / or causing irreparable harm to oneself or others;
technological Pangloss Syndrome, the perception that the uses built into the tool are the best possible uses for that tool; and
technological Morpheus Syndrome, the sense that uses for a tool have already been predetermined anyway, so even if there might be better uses we might as well just stick with destiny.
And--hey!--I think I just gave myself fodder for my next three blog posts.
You may have read Clay Shirky's recent post, "a rant about women." You may also have read, heard, or participated in the chaos and conversation that sprung up around it. And rightly so, given this representative chunk of Shirky's post:
Remember David Hampton, the con artist immortalized in “Six Degrees of Separation”, who pretended he was Sydney Poitier’s son? He lied his way into restaurants and clubs, managed to borrow money, and crashed in celebrity guest rooms. He didn’t miss the fact that he was taking a risk, or that he might suffer. He just didn’t care.
It’s not that women will be better off being con artists; a lot of con artists aren’t better off being con artists either. It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.
There is no upper limit to the risks men are willing to take in order to succeed, and if there is an upper limit for women, they will succeed less. They will also end up in jail less, but I don’t think we get the rewards without the risks....
And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.
There are enough smart people out there responding to this piece that I don't need to add more noise to the cacophony. But I do want to speak up as a dues-paying member of Women Who Run With The Arrogant Self-Aggrandizing Jerks And Sometimes Behave Like Arrogant Self-Aggrandizing Jerks Themselves.
Did I mention I'm a dues-paying member?
Because it's not easy to self-promote. It's not easy to stand up and say things that might be seen as stupid--or worse, dismissed because they come from a woman. It's not easy to announce to people "You should listen to me because I am awesome and the work I do is also awesome." It's not easy, in part because it takes extreme confidence (or at least something that looks to other people like confidence) to stand up and ask for attention, respect, recognition; and it's also not easy because the backlash is often so great, and simultaneously so subtle, that it sometimes feels like a one-step-forward, two-steps-back kind of deal.
My experience, in academia anyway, is that the tradeoff is this: If you want respect, authority, and platforms for broadcasting your ideas to a wider public, you have to self-promote; and if you succeed in gaining respect, authority, and platforms for speaking it's often at the cost of personal and professional relationships.
Let me say it more clearly: If you're a woman and you want to be heard, especially in academia, you have to knock on every door, announce your presence to everyone, and holler your qualifications at everyone in earshot. And if you do it right, people will hate you.
It will be harder to get daily work accomplished, because your colleagues will be stiff and formal with you. Male colleagues will challenge your knowledge and authority, and if that fails they will simply demean you in front of others. Female colleagues--and this is the really painful part--will shrink from you because in speaking so loudly, you've drowned out their voices. Some women, in an attempt to ally themselves with the people in charge, will also attempt to challenge and demean you.
(Another way to gain respect and authority, by the way, is to ally yourself with the people in charge, who in this case are primarily white guys. The backlash that comes out of this type of effort, though, is that you risk losing your place at the table the minute you misbehave. Then you have to come grovelling back, apologizing with downcast eyes, and take what scraps you can.)
Sure, men who self-promote risk hostility and resentment--but it's a different kind of hostility and resentment than what women experience. As members of the dominant cultural group, men who self-promote may be seen as a threat to specific people, but they certainly don't represent a threat to the established social order.
Women who are aware of the social positioning of women as a non-dominant group (and not all women are aware of this positioning, which is fine but sort of sad) develop a complex relationship to the decisions they make in crafting their public personae. They may engage in the kind of "arrogant, stupid" behavior that Shirky says is the best way to get ahead, but they do so knowing that some people (including, apparently, Shirky) will see this as "behaving more like men." They may choose to self-promote far less aggressively than Shirky would probably find useful, and to either accept that they will have trouble getting heard or find platforms for speaking where less self-promotion, less arrogance, is perfectly okay.
Or--and this is what lots of women, including me, do--they may adopt multiple identities, more identities, with more complicated politics, than those that men choose or are forced to adopt, in order to manage the competing demands on their behavior. This is not, lest I be misunderstood, the kind of identity cultivation that allows people to say "I have multiple identities! I'm an academic, and I'm also a mother, and I'm also a sister, and I'm also a friend." This is something much more complicated: It's "I'm this sort of academic-mother-sister-friend in this type of context, and I'm this sort of academic-mother-sister-friend in that type of context, and I'm this sort of academic-mother-sister-friend in that type of context with this person removed" and so on.
I don't quite know how to end this post, except to say that lots of people I like and respect think that Shirky is right on the money. And to add that my opinions are mine alone and not necessarily representative of all women, and that--and this is really important--I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege, since I'm a white, well-educated woman. I'm also thin, young, and not in any way physically disabled. I can't imagine how much more complicated this gets for someone who's even one step further removed from the dominant group than I am.
He explains that despite his commitment to civic participation--which, for him, includes casting a ballot in primary elections--he has struggled to keep up with electoral news. He writes:
While I’m motivated to vote in these elections, realize that my vote will make a real difference in deciding who gets into office, and understand that these politicians have probably the most impact on the issues immediate to my city ranging from education and real estate development to local environmental laws and criminal justice, I just can’t seem to get motivated enough to actually follow these races.
His solution: Whip out his laptop, plug in to his polling station's free Wi-Fi, and search for details on the candidates before casting a vote. In doing this, Rafi writes, he engaged in "just in time" learning, which he contrasts against
“just in case” learning, where the learner learns something on the chance that they might need to know it at a later point, but the situation in which they might apply it is certainly not present, and may never be. For a great example of just in case learning, think back to a good bit of your high school experience. I swear I have never used trigonometry.
Given the historically low voter turnout in primary elections, Rafi argues that it's not that people are too busy or don't care but that "they don’t want to waste their time with something they know nothing about." He suggests we leverage our capacity for supporting "just in time" learning by offering research terminals at polling stations so people can gather the information they need, when they need it.
I find this to be one of the most sound and cost- and time-effective ideas I've heard for fostering greater participation in the electoral process. Though clearly significant issues of equity and fraud could emerge (would certain sites be blocked? could hackers crash the system? what if some polling places lost their internet connections? would activists use the terminals to spread electoral results or other [mis]information?), the payout is potentially enormous. After all, more democracy is generally better than less democracy, and dealing with the fallout is therefore worth the investment.
Not only is Rafi's idea an important one to consider, but it also pushes us to rethink our definition of "civic engagement." Voting, after all, is not exactly the tippy-top of the civic engagement mountain--though we do like to believe it is, since it's fairly easy to measure and stands in nicely for everything that civic engagement means to our culture. But it's not the casting of the ballot that matters, but the symbolic drive behind the vote. Culturally, we carry in our head this icon of the Engaged Voting Citizen who stands up when the times call for it; who stands up in earnest and urgency to make herself heard on the matters at hand.
The days of the Engaged Voting Citizen, if those days truly ever existed, are long past. When it comes to voting for POTUS, it's almost a no-brainer for most of us, and the results are generally decided long before Election Day by pro-am journalists and media outlets whose reportage dictate not only what choices we will have, but upon what criteria we will make our decision. They fill our space up with information, just in case, and we try our best to remember as much as possible in case the time comes to act upon it.
Compare that to what we might call "just in time" civic engagement: It often emerges organically, from inside of an online or offline community that forms or unites around a perceived injustice, problem, or challenge. One example: The thousands of people who united to save the TV show Jericho for one more season were, for all intents and purposes, as engaged as the most energized campaign organizers. They didn't need to be heckled or cajoled into participating; they understood the need and, just in time, gathered and circulated the necessary information on how to react effectively and efficiently.
In Here Comes Everybody, technology guru Clay Shirky considers why so much collective action focuses largely on "relatively short-term and negative goals." He points to political protests in the Philippines, flash mobs, and protests against corporate policies as examplars of this, then writes:
Despite the number of stories about collective action, though, they have one thing in common: they all rely on "stop energy," on an attempt to get some other organization or group to capitulate to the demands of the collected group.... Everywhere we look, social media makes creativity not just possible but desirable enough that these examples and millions of others are all out there, with more added every day. Everywhere, that is, except collective action.
Perhaps collective action is more focused on protesting than creating because collective action is simply harder than sharing or collaborating.
Perhaps Shirky's right; but then again, I'd be hard pressed to think of a powerful example of civic engagement, either online or offline, that didn't emerge out of a need for "stop energy." I suppose voting is our best example of "go energy" engagement, coming around as it does like clockwork; but when do we get the largest voter turnout? When it's time to kick someone out, of course.
It's time to move past the lamentation that young people don't vote; they're used to models of civic engagement that feel more powerful, more effective, and more directly relevant to their everyday interests and desires. If we want (and I agree that we do) to get young people engaged in local and national politics, then we need to find ways to leverage this new ad hoc, "just in time" model for a range of civic needs, both large and small. Bringing in research stations and offering (hack-proof) online voting are two interesting strategies for doing this; and as we continue to rethink what we mean by the terms "civic engagement," "community" and "participation" we need to continue to develop and shift our long-established notions of what it means to be a good citizen in an increasingly participatory culture.
Alert blogtrollers may have seen multiple posts recently with titles identical to the one accompanying this post--that's because we've been asked by learning scientist and new media researcher Kylie Peppler to address this very concern. The question--what is learning in new media?--is too broad for anyone to address within the context of a single blogpost, but if we all set to work, we might get that turkey stripped down to its bones by the end of the night.
My chunk of the turkey is time.
When I joined Twitter, I lurked for months and months without tweeting a thing. When I finally did join the community as a good, earnest citizen, I started out slowly and picked up speed as I learned to negotiate the community's norms and embrace the valued practices of the space. Now, a year and a half later, I can communicate fairly clearly the spoken and tacit norms of the Twitterspace.
I did the same thing with Facebook, Wikipedia, and blogging--looking around for months before joining the community. By doing so, by taking the time to consider the space I was entering, I was able to reflect on others' practices before offering up my own. I read thousands of blogs before starting my own. I worked with friends to learn how to edit Wikipedia. And I was coerced by another friend to join Facebook; the rest was up to me.
I recently spent some time working with Scratch, a simple visual programming language designed for young learners. As the site explains,
Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.
I've designed exactly two projects in Scratch; the first was about a year ago, when a colleague spent the morning helping me work up a little thing I call Jimmy Eats World.
I'm annoyed with myself that I didn't make the flying hippo actually disappear at the end of the project, and if I wanted to I could open up the program and make it so. Or I could turn the main sprite, the walking cat, into a hammerhead shark announcing my blog's url.
I could do that if I wanted to, because I am a highly resourceful independent learner who has the passion and the time to devote to projects like this. I find them personally and epistemologically meaningful--I feel enriched, and I feel that the time I devote to these kinds of projects makes me a better, more useful and proficient blogger and educational researcher.
Time, the friend of the highly resourceful learner, is the enemy of teaching. Time: There's never enough and even if there were, it couldn't be spent on tinkering. There's content to cover, and not just in the name of high stakes tests. A teacher's job--one made ever more challenging by the social revolution--is to equip learners with the knowledge, proficiencies, and dispositions that will suit them well for future learning. There comes a time when the teacher must say, It's time to stop with Scratch and start on something else.
Which is a deep shame, because it's the tinkering, the ability to immerse oneself in participatory media or a learning platform, that fosters a real fluency with the space.
This is a key feature of what it means to learn in new media: the choice to engage with certain tools, to join up with certain affinity spaces, beyond the time required by schools. Clay Shirky writes that the days are gone when we could expect to do things only for money; we're in an era when the greatest innovations emerge not for money but for love.
If learning in new media takes time, passion, and some combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, then on its surface school seems to run anathema to a new media education. In fact, it may be that engagement with participatory practices is exactly what schools need at a time when they are struggling to remain relevant to the real world needs, experiences, and expertises into which learners will ultimately emerge.
"But," said my buddy Dan, with a look of pure glee, "you say ATM Machine like everyone else, right?"
"I do not," I answered. And I don't.
"That's a dilemma," Dan said, still gleeful. "The English major part of you conflicting with the participatory culture theorist, who says that whatever the people decide is right."
He was ribbing me, but in truth it's a fair enough critique. After all, some of the most influential books on participatory culture and the social revolution include the following titles, all of which intentionally fly in the face of common attitudes toward morality, ethics, and human progress:
Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky) The World is Flat (Thomas Friedman) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Don Tapscott) Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (Seth Godin)
And, I'll just admit it, my blog is absolutely peppered with sweeping declarations: Print journalism isn't viable. Young people are leading the social revolution. The question isn't 'is it moral?', but 'is it popular?'
Why, after all, isn't the question 'is it moral?' Simply put, most of the time when people ask that question about aspects of the social revolution, what they're actually asking is more along the lines of 'is this better or worse than the experiences and culture I'm used to?' This is a matter of personal preference, and there's no accounting for taste.
Some of my friends think wearing a wristwatch makes it easier for them to make it to their meetings on time; some of my friends think watches just make them more time-conscious and anxious. If suddenly a critical mass of people started wearing watches and pressuring the rest of their culture to wear watches too, some of my friends would be thrilled (everybody will have to be on time now!), some would be upset (we're all going to start caring more about the time than about each other!), and some wouldn't care at all (*shrug* it's just another tool to help me get through my day.).
Some people think online social networks signal the decline of community. Some people think new, valuable community structures have emerged around these networks. And some people just think online Scrabble is a fun way to spice up a boring work day. All of these people are right, but arguing about whether we're better or worse off (or the same) is pointless, because is a wristwatch-bearing culture better than one that uses sundials? Your answer depends on a lot of things, like: whether you make your living off of sundial manufacturing; whether you can personally afford a watch; whether you were someone who cared a lot about keeping track of the time in the first place; and whether you think a watch looks good on your wrist.
Please don't accuse me of absolute moral relativism, though; even participatory culture theorists have their limits. It's wrong to force everyone to wear wristwatches, for example, just as it's wrong to ban sundials. If democracy, freedom of the press, or free speech falter when print journalism hits its death throes, I will be among the throngs calling for social change. Participatory media platforms tend, as all previous platforms have, to silence certain groups (nonwhites, nonstraights, older participants, less educated [formally or informally] participants); this is painful and wrong.
And RAS syndrome will always be wrong, no matter what percentage of the population adopts the phrase "ATM machine."
Footnote upon the construction of the masses: some people are young and nothing else and some people are old and nothing else and some people are in between and just in between.
and if the flies wore clothes on their backs and all the buildings burned in golden fire, if heaven shook like a belly dancer and all the atom bombs began to cry, some people would be young and nothing else and some people old and nothing else, and the rest would be the same the rest would be the same.
the few who are different are eliminated quickly enough by the police, by their mothers, their brothers, others; by themselves.
all that's left is what you see.
it's hard.
(Charles Bukowski, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills, 1969)
The piece, by novelist Lucina Rosenfeld, describes Rosenfeld's attempt at joining the Twitter revolution. She joins but doesn't know what to tweet, despite her editor's advice:
Imagine you’re at a cocktail party, she said. The things you’d say to people you met there — those are the kinds of things you should tweet. Also, people like links.
I kinda thought we were past the "I don't know how to tweet!" confessional fad. Apparently not. We're apparently not past the "social media is ruining our ability to connect with others" fad, either: Rosenfeld goes on to identify what she suspects is our dirty secret:
that no one actually wants to see anybody anymore. It’s too much work. You have to dress nicely. And make actual conversation. And there’s a recession. It’s cheaper to stay home — and e-mail old friends about how “it’s been so long it’s criminal,” and “we really have to get together.”
Except we never do anymore. Which is kind of sad when you start to think about it. It’s hard to pour your heart out in 150 characters. It’s hard to have a great time, too, when the most you can hope for from a friend is LOL (note to Mom: that’s e-mail shorthand for “laughing out loud”) vs., say, being bent double over your bar stools while comparing notes on a mutual ex.
Last week, my friend Katie took me sailing for the first time ever. Afterward, over drinks, a young sailor named Aurelian turned to me and said "Why do you Twitter?" I paused, taken aback. Katie knew exactly what to say, though: "That question suggests twittering needs justification."
What she meant was that people don't ask "why do you go sailing on Thursday nights?" or "why do you take taxidermy classes?" or "why do you go to singles night at Kevin's Pub?" They're all just excuses for making a connection with others, just some basic scaffolding to hang our social impulses on. Rosenfeld's caution, her resistance to engaging with participatory media for social purposes, is a throwback to the days when we still thought people got online to feed an addiction and not because of the deep social connection they felt by engaging with others across deeply personal, deeply social affinity spaces.
Twitter is one of those sites--like Facebook, which Rosenfeld acknowledges that she both understands and enjoys--that provides a platform for users to manage their friends across multiple affinity spaces. On Twitter, I follow Clay Shirky and John Seely Brown, two people who I'm sure do not yet know I exist; I follow (and am followed by) Henry Jenkins , Lance Speelmon and Mark Notess, colleagues who do know I exist; and I follow (and am followed by) Katie, my friends Clement and Stephanie, and my sister Laura.
Rosenfeld struggles with figuring out anything worth tweeting about. She couldn't, she writes, figure out anything interesting to say or any link worth posting. That's because she's following the letter of Twitter and not the spirit. Posting updates and links isn't a simple matter of finding interesting things that others might care about or figuring out what your followers might be interested in hearing; it's a complicated dance both with and against the established norms of the space. Any twitterer worth her salt is both creating and constantly tinkering with her identity. Each link, each post, becomes part of a public persona both more simplistic and more complicated than the one we present in the physical world to the people we interact with in face to face encounters.
This is not, despite Rosenfeld's implications to the contrary, a lesser social experience than those that call for face to face interactions. It's actually not a greater experience, either. It's simply different.
When faced with different, we have a couple of choices: We can react with caution and angst, as Rosenfeld does in her piece. We can embrace without caveat or trepidation the trappings of different, as many believe I do here. Or we can embrace different with intelligence, enthusiasm, and an analytic eye toward both its affordances and its constraints. When the NYTimes starts heading for that final category, I'll start extolling its innovative approach to participatory media.
I also feel a nagging impulse to notify Rosenfeld that tweets are limited to 140 characters, not 150.
Shirky compares journalism to driving: the ability to drive spread from people who were paid to drive to the general public. "We still pay people to drive," Shirky writes,
from buses to race cars, and there are more paid drivers today than there were in the days of the chauffeur. Paid drivers are, however, no longer the majority of all drivers.
Like driving, journalism is not a profession — no degree or certification is required to practice it, and training often comes after hiring — and it is increasingly being transformed into an activity, open to all, sometimes done well, sometimes badly, but at a volume that simply cannot be supported by a small group of full-time workers. The journalistic models that will excel in the next few years will rely on new forms of creation, some of which will be done by professionals, some by amateurs, some by crowds, and some by machines.
We're not headed for a journalistic upgrade, Shirky explains; "[t]he change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained."
This is precisely why Matt Jones' recent provocatively titled article "Why I Hate Social Media", is not only dangerously misguided, it's also painfully short-sighted. Jones' justification is fairly simple: media just isn't that interesting.
People are interesting. Ideas are interesting. Stories are interesting. Real stuff is interesting. Brands are interesting (or, at least, some of them are). Even ads can be interesting. But media? Media just connects those things. It's a conduit. Media is not interesting. Not even the "social" kind.
I reject the very premise of Jones' argument and did so publicly in the comments section beneath his article. But in fact, I learned more about why Jones is so short-sighted by tracking readers' comments. Here's a gem from a reader calling himself Wildebees:
There's a well known media theorist called Marshall McLuhan. Heard of him? He said "the medium is the message". It's not just the content of media that's important. The way the content is transmitted itself significantly impacts how our world works. If you don't get the medium, you are going to make the wrong suggestions to your clients....
Get this. All media is social. From the printing press, to the telephone, all the way to Twitter. But the process of becoming social have dramatically accelerated with the convergence of the telco and computer industry. Social media is not a trend, but a fundamental human urge to communicate. And now we have the media do do so.
Wildebees was fairly easy to track, and I'm now following him on Twitter. He is, in fact, the one who linked me to the Shirky piece in the first place. And this points to a big piece of why Jones is so very, very wrong about social media: new platforms offer us new ways to connect with like-minded people--to join a vast series of what network theorist Yrjo Engestrom calls "knotworks": dynamically changing and distributed collaborative networks structured around participation in projects or tasks. The emergence of new media platforms means I can rely on a group of like-minded people--who are also relying on their own sets of like-minded people--to track, filter, and identify information that I might find useful. They do it for me, I do it for them, everybody gets smarter in the process.
I can't imagine being the kind of person who finds this phenomenon "uninteresting."
For all my bluster about how traditional media outlets are no longer economically viable, I was still taken a bit aback when the Guardian, which pays me to contribute to CIF America, sent out notifications that budget cuts would result in a decrease in payments to commissioned bloggers. The decrease amounts to about a 30 percent pay cut per piece.
My first thought was: This is exactly what I deserve for mouthing off to Big Media. My second thought was: I wonder what I should write about next.
You see, I'm still so surprised--stunned, flattened, overwhelmed, overjoyed--by the prospect of somebody actually wanting to pay me on top of giving me what I wanted anyway (an international platform to broadcast my ideas) that even after the pay cut I still feel like I'm getting away with highway robbery. I've been a writer for most of my adult life, beginning as a beat reporter for a local newspaper (you get paid, but not very much, and nobody really cares too much what you think as long as you tell them how the school board voted last Thursday), then drifting toward creative writing (poetry; and no, you don't get paid) before landing in the world of online reportage. I'm young enough to be electrified by the seemingly limitless potential of a good blogpost to draw in traffic and responses, yet old enough to not completely accept that blogging is a real, authentic form of journalism (and many of the commenters to CIF, as I'm sure they will point out, agree with me on this).
Technology guru Clay Shirky writes that "the future belongs to those who take the present for granted." He argues that young people are better poised than any previous generation to take advantage of new media platforms "not because they know more useful things than we do, but because they know fewer useless things than we do." I'm old enough, for example, to know for sure that the privilege of broadcasting your opinions to thousands of readers is the sacred domain of the elite few. I'm old enough to believe in the scarcity model of knowledge: The right to speak is reserved for the privileged few, because if we all had the right and resources to speak then nothing would be worth saying at all.
And now I'm unlearning all of these things, because they're less true with every new blog that gets tossed up, with every new online forum, with every drop in price of video editing software and word processing technologies. It's not, after all, knowledge that's the scarce commodity anymore; everybody with Internet access has a passkey to approximately the same information as everybody else, regardless of credentials, experience, or IQ. Now, the commodity is the ability to filter that knowledge, to identify key ideas and spin them in an interesting way for an information-laden audience that's waiting to hear something new.
When we do it well, we become the touchstones for hundreds of others to weigh in and have their voices broadcast to the thousands. That's what the Guardian commissions its writers to do. That's why it pays. It may not feel like work to me, but then again, I suppose the best jobs never do.
Closing the Deal: Seeing Sakai Adopting as a Sales Process Sarah "Intellagirl" Smith-Robbins, Senior Director of Emerging Technologies, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University Roger Henry, Instructional Technology Consultant, Indiana University
Roger and a Back Story Roger is, first of all, awesome. He started his presentation by trying to figure out what kinds of support people at IU would need to adopt OnCourse, which is what Sakai is called at IU. He met with faculty, administrators, deans, and staff to try to find strategies for encouraging adoption; and he also reached out to Kelley Executives affiliated with IU's Kelley School of Business. He explained that he presented some of his ideas about the results of this at last year's Sakai Conference in Paris.
Also, Roger added that there's more backstory to last year's Sakai presentation in Paris--he was trapped there for three weeks.
"But don't worry," he added, "I consoled myself." Sarah's Presentation: The difference between higher ed and executive ed First of all, Sarah is awesome. She points out key aspects that differentiate traditional higher ed from executive education. Here are her key points about the differences:
The "students" are different (for one thing, they don't want to be called "students").
The learning goals are different. in a traditional classroom, the instructor defines the learning goals; in executive education, students come to the program with needs.
The courses are different. The topics are usually very narrow and specialized to a specific business issue. They also bring their own culture, instead of integrating into the IU culture that's already established.
The expectations for Return on Investment (ROI) are different. If you have students who are working adults and paying for their own education, they have different expectations than the typical undergrads. In executive education, the transaction is linked to economic value. "I think we're going to see more of this kind of expectation among students, as well," she added. "We're already seeing students push bak and say 'This isn't directly related to the job I want, so I'm not going to take it.'"
The Circumstances
Exec ed clients aren't students in the university system.
Most companies are looking for online learning solutions and have failed. (Sarah explains: People find software, then try to solve a problem instead of identifying the problem first and finding software to solve it.)
Exec Ed courses are short and constructed on short notice.
University faculty aren't typically able to build unique settings for Exec Ed
OnCourse: The Solution
Supported by a large university system
Available globally 24/7 (and also scalable)
Familiar to faculty
Flexible enough to accommodate a range of learning experiences
One significant shift, Sarah said, was offering a new kind of learning experience. Typical corporate approaches align with the "death by PowerPoint" approach--everybody sits in a room while somebody talks at them and everybody just tries to get through the day. "So the first question people ask," she said, "Is 'Can I upload my PowerPoints to it?'" This is one of the key issues they address on a regular basis.
Sarah tosses up Here Comes Everybody and I swoon with joy. Seriously, you guys, read this book.
Sarah points out the promise of OnCourse, and Roger stands up to talk about the tool. He is, he explains, a choral conductor by training, and his research focuses on how the tools we use shape our practice.
"Most of the problems I hear at IU," he said, "are tied to using the tool." A lot of questions, he said, are also about what will happen when things go wrong.
He points out that a big part of offering the tool is linked to ensuring people that when problems arise, they will be resolved as quickly as possible (and gives the example of a flurry of emails that went out last night at 11:30 about a problem somebody was having; it was solved by the morning).
Another key, Roger said, is managing expectations: "We're not selling a perfect tool." It will break, it will slow down, it will go down for maintenance, and the key is to be as responsive and communicative about these things as possible.
The Bargain Sarah speaks to the bargain: "Faculty have to engage with learning the tool in a new learning paradigm. They can't use a lecture format and expect it to be as good as or better than a classroom.
"Using a tool that is so transparently requiring participation can cause some issues with the expectations, both of faculty and exec ed students."
Another part of the bargain, she said, is being honest about the weaknesses and problems with the tool as well.
Sarah said she uses the "promise, tool, bargain" paradigm to approach faculty issues. Example: When faculty says "my students are not participating" Sarah asks where did the bargain break down.
Did you not promise they would be evaluated on their participation? Are you giving them lame questions? Are you using the wrong tool to facilitate the discussion? Have you explained to them the requirements and the energy required to put in in order to get a good conversation out of it?
Another example: If a CEO says he talked to someone on the phone and got an unprofessional interaction, she asks: Did we promise to offer professionalism at all times?
***my thoughts*** Of course I'm thrilled to hear Clay Shirky mentioned--and, especially, the "promise, tool, bargain" paradigm that I love so well. Though Sarah and Roger pointed to the value of this framework for engaging executive clients, this approach has tons of potential for bringing people in to the open education movement that Vijay Kumar pointed to in his opening keynote this morning.
My sensei Dan Hickey's recent post on seeding, feeding, and weeding educators' networks got me thinking, for lots of reasons--not least of which being that I will most likely be one of the research assistants he explains will “work with lead educators to identify interesting and engaging online activities for their students.”
This got me a-planning. I started thinking about how I would seed, feed, and weed a social network if (when) given the chance to do so. As David Armano, the author of "Debunking Social Media Myths, the article that suggests the seeding, feeding, and weeding metaphor, points out, building a social media network is more difficult than people think—this is not a “if we build it, they will come” sort of thing. Designing, promoting, and growing a community takes a lot of work. People will, given the right motives, participate in the community for love and for free, but you have to start out on the right foot. This means offering them the right motivations for giving up time they would otherwise be spending on something else.
A caveat First, know that I am a True Believer. I have deep faith in the transformative potential of participatory media, not because I see it as a panacea to all of our problems but because participatory media supports disruption of the status quo. A public that primarily consumes media primarily gets the world the media producers decide they want to offer. A public that produces and circulates media expressions gets to help decide what world it wants.
Social media, because of its disruptive and transformative potential, is both essential and nigh on impossible to get into the classroom. This is precisely why it needs to happen, and the sooner it happens, the better.
But integrating participatory media and the participatory practices they support into the field of education is not a simple matter. Too often people push for introduction of new technologies or practices (blogging, wikis, chatrooms and forums) without considering the dispositions required to use them in participatory ways. A blog can easily be used as an online paper submission tool; leveraging its neatest affordances--access to a broad, engaged public, joining a web of interconnected arguments and ideas, offering entrance into a community of bloggers--takes more effort and different, often more time-consuming, approaches.
Additionally, while social networks for educators hold a great deal of promise for supporting the spread of educational practices, designing, building, and supporting a vibrant community of educators requires thinking beyond the chosen technology itself. Five Tips for Seeding and Feeding your Community With these points in mind, I offer my first shot at strategies for seeding and beginning to feed a participatory educational community. (Weeding, the best part of the endeavor, comes later, once my tactics have proven to work.)
1. Think beyond the classroom setting. In the recently published National Writing Project book, Teaching the New Writing, the editors point out that for teachers to integrate new media technologies into their classrooms, they "need to be given time to investigate and use technology themselves, personally and professionally, so that they can themselves assess the ways that these tools can enhance a given curricular unit."
The emerging new media landscape offers more than just teaching tools--it offers a new way of thinking about communication, expression, and circulation of ideas. We would do well to remember this as we devise strategies for getting teachers involved in educational communities online. After all, asking a teacher who's never engaged with social media to use it in the classroom is like asking a teacher who's never used the quadratic equation to teach Algebra.
Anyone who knows me knows what a fan of blogging I am. I proselytize, prod, and shame people into blogging--though, again, not because I think blogging is the best new practice or even necessarily the most enjoyable one. Blogging is just one type of practice among a constellation of tools and practices being adopted by cutting edge educators, scholars, and Big Thinkers across all disciplines. Blogging was, for me, a way in to these practices and tools, and I do think blogging is one of the most accessible new practice for teacherly / writerly types. The immediacy and publicness of a blogpost is a nice preparation for increased engagement with what Clay Shirky calls the “publish, then filter” model of participatory media. This is a chaotic, disconcerting, and confusing model in comparison to the traditional “filter, then publish” model, but getting in synch with this key element of participatory culture is absolutely essential for engaging with features like hyperlinking, directing traffic, and identifying and writing for a public. In a larger sense, connecting with the publish, then filter approach prepares participants to join the larger social networking community.
2. Cover all your bases--and stop thinking locally One of the neatest things about an increasingly networked global community is that we're no longer limited to the experts or expertises of the people who are within our physical reach. Increasingly, we can tap into the knowledge and interests of like-minded folks as we work to seed a new community.
Backing up a step: It helps, in the beginning for sure but even more so as a tiny community grows into a small, then medium-sized, group, to consider all of the knowledge, experience, and expertises you would like to see represented in your educational community. This may include expertise with a variety of social media platforms, experience in subject areas or in fields outside of teaching, and various amounts of experience within the field of education.
3. In covering your bases, make sure there's something for everyone to do. Especially in the beginning, people participate when they feel like they a.) have something they think is worth saying, b.) feel that their contributions matter to others, and c.) can easily see how and where to contribute. I have been a member of forums where everybody has basically the same background and areas of expertise; these forums usually start out vibrant, then descend into one or two heavily populated discussion groups (usually complaining or commiserating about one issue that gets up in everyone's craw) before petering out.
Now imagine you have two teachers who have decided to introduce a Wikipedia-editing exercise into their classrooms by focusing on the Wikipedia entry for Moby-Dick. Imagine you have a couple of Wikipedians in your network who have extensive experience working with the formatting code required for editing; and you have a scholar who has published a book on Moby-Dick. This community has the potential for a rich dialogue that supports increasing the expertise of everybody involved. Everybody feels valued, everybody feels enriched, and everybody feels interested in contributing and learning.
4. Use the tool yourself, and interact with absolutely everybody. Caterina Fake, the founder of Flickr, says that she decided to greet the first ten thousand Flickr users personally. Assuming ten thousand users is several thousand more than you want in your community, you might have the time to imitate Fake's example. It also helps to join in on forums and other discussions, especially if one emerges from the users themselves. Students are not the only people who respond well to feeling like someone's listening.
Use the tool. Use the tool. Use the tool. I can't emphasize enough how important this is. You should use it for at least one purpose other than seeding and feeding your community. You should be familiar enough with it to be able to answer most questions and do some troubleshooting when necessary. You should be able to integrate new features when they become available and relevant, and you should offer a means for other users to do the same.
5. Pick a tool that supports the needs of your intended community, and then use the technology's features as they were designed to be used. Though I put this point last, it's the most important of all. You can't--you cannot--build a community with the wrong tools. Too often, community designers hone in on a tool they have some familiarity with or, even worse, a tool that they've heard a lot about. If you want your community to refine an already-established set of definitions, approaches, or pedagogical tenets, then what you're looking for is a wiki. If you want the community to discuss key issues that come up in the classroom, you want a forum or chat function. If you want them to share and comment on lesson plans, you need a blog or similar text editing function.
Once you've decided on the functions you want, you need to stick with using them as god intended. Do not use a wiki to post information that doesn't need community input. Don't use a forum as a calendar. And don't use a blog for forum discussions.
It's not easy to start and build a community, offline or online. It takes time and energy and a high resistance to disappointment and exhaustion. But as anybody who's ever tried and failed (or succeeded) to start up a community knows, we wouldn't bother if we didn't think it was worth the effort.
I've been thinking some lately about the odd and confusing practice of comparing undergraduate and graduate programs at American colleges and universities and producing a set of rankings that show how the programs stack up against each other.
One of the most widely cited set of rankings comes from U.S. News and World Report, which offers rankings in dozens of categories, for both undergraduate and graduate-level programs. Here, the magazine offers its altruistic rationale behind producing these rankings:
A college education is one of the most important—and one of the most costly—investments that prospective students will ever make. For this reason, the editors of U.S. News believe that students and their families should have as much information as possible about the comparative merits of the educational programs at America's colleges and universities. The data we gather on America's colleges—and the rankings of the schools that arise from these data—serve as an objective guide by which students and their parents can compare the academic quality of schools. When consumers purchase a car or a computer, this sort of information is readily available. We think it's even more important that comparative data help people make informed decisions about an education that at some private universities is now approaching a total cost of more than $200,000 including tuition, room, board, required fees, books, transportation, and other personal expenses.
(To access the entire rankings, developed and produced selflessly by U.S. News and World Report, you need to pay. Click here to purchase the Premium Online Edition, which is the only way to get complete rankings, for $14.95.)
The 2009 rankings, released in April, are in the news lately because of questions related to how the magazine gathers data from colleges. As Carl Bialik points out in a recent post at the Wall Street Journal, concerns over how Clemson University set about increasing its rank point to deeper questions about the influence of rankings numbers on university operations. Clemson President James F. Barker reportedly shot for cracking the top 20 (it was ranked 38th nationally in 2001) by targeting all of the ranking indicators used by U.S. News. Bialik writes:
While the truth about Clemson’s approach to the rankings remains elusive, the episode does call into question the utility of a ranking that schools can seek to manipulate. “Colleges have been ‘rank-steering,’ — driving under the influence of the rankings,” Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education Conservancy and a critic of rankings, told the Associated Press. “We’ve seen over the years a shifting of resources to influence ranks.”
Setting aside questions of the rankings' influence on university operations and on recruiting (both for prospective students and prospective faculty), and setting aside too the question of how accurate any numbers collected from university officials themselves could possibly be when the stakes are so high, one wonders how these rankings limit schools' ability to embrace what appear to be key tenets emerging out of the social revolution. A key feature of some of the most vibrant, energetic, and active online communities is what Clay Shirky labels the "failure for free" model. As I explained in a previous post on the open source movement, the open source software (OSS) movement embraces this tenet:
It's not, after all, that most open source projects present a legitimate threat to the corporate status quo; that's not what scares companies like Microsoft. What scares Microsoft is the fact that OSS can afford a thousand GNOME Bulgarias on the way to its Linux. Microsoft certainly can't afford that rate of failure, but the OSS movement can, because, as Shirky explains,
open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.
Anyone who's worked for a company of reasonable size understands the push to keep the risk of failure low. "More people," Shirky writes, "will remember you saying yes to a failure than saying no to a radical but promising idea." The higher up the organizational chart you go, the harder the push will be for safe choices. Innovation, it seems, is both a product of and oppositional to the social contract.
The U.S. News rankings, and the methodology behind them, runs completely anathema to the notion of innovation. Indeed, a full 25 percent of the ranking system is based on what U.S. News calls "peer assessment," which comes from "the top academics we consult--presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions" and, ostensibly, at least, allows these consultants
to account for intangibles such as faculty dedication to teaching. Each individual is asked to rate peer schools' academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Those who don't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly are asked to mark "don't know." Synovate, an opinion-research firm based near Chicago, in spring 2008 collected the data; of the 4,272 people who were sent questionnaires, 46 percent responded.
Who becomes "distinguished" in the ivory-tower world of academia? Those who play by the long-established rules of tradition, polity, and networking, of course. The people who most want to effect change at the institutional level are often the most outraged, the most unwilling to play by the rules established by administrators and rankings systems, and therefore the least likely to make it into the top echelons of academia. Indeed, failure is rarely free in the high-stakes world of academics; it's safer to say no to "a radical but promising idea" than to say yes to any number of boring but safe ideas.
So what do you do if you are, say, a prospective doctoral student who wants to tear wide the gates of academic institutions? What do you do if you want to go as far in your chosen field as your little legs will carry you, leaving a swath of destruction in your wake? What do you do if you want to bring the social revolution to the ivory tower, instead of waiting for the ivory tower to come to the social revolution?
You rely on the U.S. News rankings, of course. It's what I did when I made decisions about which schools to apply to (the University of Wisconsin-Madison [ranked 7th overall in graduate education programs, first in Curriculum & Instruction, first in Educational Psychology] the University of Texas-Austin [tied at 7th overall, 10th in Curriculum & Instruction], the University of Washington [12th overall, 9th in Curriculum & Instruction], the University of Michigan [14th overall, 7th in Curriculum & Instruction, and 3rd in Educational Psychology] the University of Indiana [19th overall, out of the top 10 in individual categories], and Arizona State University [24th overall, out of the top 10 in individual categories]). Interestingly, though, the decision to turn down offers from schools ranked higher than Indiana (go hoosiers) wasn't all that difficult. I knew that I belonged at IU (go hoosiers) almost before I visited, and a recruitment weekend sealed the deal.
But I had an inside track to information about IU (go hoosiers) via my work with Dan Hickey and Michelle Honeyford. I also happen to be a highly resourceful learner with a relatively clear sense of what I want to study, and with whom, and why. Other learners--especially undergraduates--aren't necessarily in such a cushy position. They are likely to rely heavily on rankings in making decisions about where to apply and which offer to accept. This not only serves to reify the arbitrary and esoteric rankings system (highest ranked schools get highest ranked students), but also serves to stunt the social revolution in an institution that needs revolution, and desperately.
In this matter, it's turtles all the way down. High-stakes standardized testing practices and teacher evaluations based on achievement on these tests limits innovation--from teachers as well as from students--at the secondary and, increasingly, the elementary level. But the world that surrounds schools is increasingly ruled by those who know how to innovate, how to say yes to a radical but promising idea, how to work within a "failure for free" model. If schools can't learn how to embrace the increasingly valued and valuable mindsets afforded by participatory practices, it's failing to prepare its student body for the world at large. The rankings system is just another set of hobbles added on to a system of clamps, tethers, and chains already set up to fail the very people it purports to serve.
An engagement with some interesting critiques of Project New Media Literacies
I’m the kind of person who’s paranoid about having something stuck in her teeth or toilet paper trailing from her shoe, so I always appreciate friends who are willing to point these things out to me. As a member of Project New Media Literacies, then, I’m grateful for the impetus of blogger and author Liz Losh in pointing out places where our hem appears to be showing.
Liz, a self-described friend of NML who attended our recent conference, Learning in a Participatory Culture, admits to "hesitation" when it comes to criticizing NML. But, she explains, pointing out a faux pas is the responsibility of a good friend. She writes:
On the plane flying over to the Boston area, I saw a woman whose blouse had come open to expose her undergarments and a man who was trailing toilet paper on his shoe. I didn't say anything. These people were not my friends. We had no reciprocal understanding.
It's her duty, then, she argues (and I agree), to offer up her critique of NML's conference. "And if I'm wrong about this criticism,” she writes, “I'll look forward to the NML telling me that I have spinach in my teeth.”
I’ll go this far: Liz, I think you’re wrong about this criticism, but not wrong in the critique. Your arguments point to significant weak spots in the new media literacies movement in general, spots that will need fortification as NML and projects like it move forward. In other words, we need friends like you to keep us honest.
But before I get to that, please permit me a moment of self-defense.
On NML’s stance with re: schools Reflecting on the conference, Liz writes that:
In defining the scope of their work, the group was careful to emphasize their engagement with "learning" rather than "education," which they defined as being about "institutions." Yet it might be worth asking why institution should be a dirty word? I might agree that "generativity," "participatory design," "flexible and multiple uses," and "open content" may be worthwhile, but I also think that institutions provide structures of civic permanence that foster ongoing and stable citizen participation in communities. As Geert Lovink has observed, the pyrrhic organization of many artist and activist groups based in the Internet often makes them difficult to maintain.
This criticism seems unfair, and I say that as a core member of the NML team that spent two years designing and piloting a teachers' strategy guide for use in the formal ELA classroom. Liz perhaps misinterpreted my opening presentation, in which I used this quote from Clay Shirky as a launch point to argue for the value--indeed, the very necessity--of working in schools to support innovative teachers:
“[W]e are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.”
As I explained in my presentation, we work from the assumption that this quote is not only inaccurate but also unfair to the role of good educators throughout history. “We work from the assumption,” I said, “that it’s not true that all innovative practices are happening outside of traditional institutions.”
Indeed, we know that historically, teachers have always been on the cutting edge of identifying and engaging with innovative resources and practices, and this is no less true with the emergence of new media. What often stands in the way is not teacher intransigence but the whims of administrators and politicians, which means our job is to find ways to not only support innovative teachers but to work for change at the policy level as well.
Far from refusing to engage with institutions, I believe that schools--as the only compulsory learning environment we have--offer an essential venue for working to narrow the participation gap that prevents many young people from engaging with participatory practices and cultures in authentic, productive ways.
Here was my slide on this from the presentation:
Liz is absolutely correct to point out that "institutions provide structures of civic permanence that foster ongoing and stable citizen participation in communities." In my view, however--and please note that I speak only for myself and not for NML as a whole--the type of ongoing and stable citizen participation that's fostered by schools, at least schools as they currently exist, is in some ways almost worse than no structure of civic permanence at all. Schools are designed to socialize (inculcate) learners into a value system that benefits our culture's dominant social group: Middle- and upper-class whites.
Educational researcher Lisa Delpit, whose work has focused on how schools undermine and devalue the abilities of cultural minorities (mainly black children), identifies five aspects of what she calls "the culture of power":
Issues of power are enacted in classrooms.
There are codes or rules for participating in power; that is, there is a "culture of power."
The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power.
If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier.
Those with power are frequently least aware of--or least willing to acknowledge--its existence. Those with less power are often more aware of its existence.
(These principles come from Delpit's book Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. It's a scathing critique of the school system's role in furthering the interests of the dominant culture and oppressing those who do not agree or do not know how to play by its rules.)
I believe, deeply and honestly, that integrating new media literacy practices into the classroom is a matter of social justice. In a culture that increasingly values the kinds of practices enabled by computers and connectivity, we fail our learners and our culture if we resist offering these experiences to students who don’t have access to and support for engaging in participatory practices via technologies in their homes. Indeed, I think I carry even more of a social justice agenda than almost any of my coworkers at NML. Just today I was mocked at a staff meeting for using the word “hegemony” one too many times. So any time I’m accused of supporting the status quo, I automatically get my hackles up.
Yes, it's true that school provides cultural stability. But it's not necessarily true that the stability school offers is what we need. In my view (and again, I'm speaking for myself and not for NML as a whole), it's high time we threw the institution of school into disarray. There is a deep, deep need to work within institutions, is what I'm saying--we're in agreement there--but not in support of the institution as it currently exists.
On racism and classism In fact, Liz herself points to exactly this issue in her critique of our decision to work with traditional curricular content (Herman Melville's Moby-Dick). In doing so, we're heeding Henry Jenkins's call to be "conservative in content so we can be radical in approach." Liz's concern is that focusing on traditional materials
could be read as a defense of the conservative canon that has excluded many from literary recognition and their place in the historical record. This impression might be further supported by the group's assertion that they were emphasizing "multidisciplinarity" rather than "muliculturalism."
If this is how we have presented ourselves, then we have failed utterly to communicate our rationale. Working with conservative content, at least in this case, allowed us to get a foot in the door of the traditional classroom. Working with culturally valued materials gives us space to offer, at our best, revolutionary approaches to the material in question. It gives us space to help learners develop metacognition about what they’re required to read, how they’re supposed to read it, and why the powers that be might like it that way.
I'm worried that we have also failed to adequately convey the impetus behind working with that word "multidisciplinarity." In our view, a participatory culture enables--indeed, necessitates--communication across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and we need to equip learners to find ways to communicate with people across multiple disciplines, instead of simply focusing on "what good literary scholars do." This in no way negates the need for a multicultural approach; in fact, it serves to complicate the issue further by adding a new layer to the definition. It's not "multidisciplinarity rather than multiculturalism"; it's "multidisciplinarity as another part of multiculturalism."
Where the Spinach is If I disagree with Liz's criticisms of the message Project NML has attempted to convey, this is not to say that I think she's precisely wrong in the critique she brings to our work. As she points out (and as Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, a playwright and collaborator on NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide--over there on the right--also asserted at the conference), appropriation has often been used as a tool by the more powerful to steal from the less powerful.
This is what Liz calls the 'Vanilla Ice Problem':
although appropriation may be celebrated in remix culture, there may be some forms of appropriation that represent and potentially reify the exploitation of people of color and the repression of their calls for social justice. After all, even the most racist minstrel shows claimed to be appropriating aspects of black culture that white performers had observed. When Elvis and other white singers popularized material from the "colored" entertainment spectrum, the lack of compensation to the original creators of that music stung many black musicians badly.... I believe that rap music presents a powerful form of social critique that often engages with controversial issues about police abuse, urban abandonment, narco-economics, and family disintegration. Rap music has also been appropriated by vacuous white performers, such as Vanilla Ice, who chant inane, innocuous lines to pap melodies in chart-topping hits.
Liz offers up a performance by a white nerdcore rap artist, MC Lars, as an example; Lars himself has addressed this issue in various ways, both in his music and in interviews (including this interview with Henry), so I won't address it more here except to acknowledge that this particular issue is complicated, fraught, and thorny.
The larger point, though, is well taken. Our goal in focusing on appropriation and remix practices is to get at the heart of what makes the social revolution so possible and so exciting: new media affords new opportunities to transform a canonical work; new opportunities to transform and to participate in a cultural conversation about what’s meaningful; new opportunities to speak and to be heard. In glorifying the remix practices made possible by new media technologies, our project (and media literacy projects in general) can overlook the dark side of this social practice, and thereby fail to equip learners with strategies for addressing this issue.
A second critique, and in my view by far Liz's most important point, is this:
In giving examples of their work with young people, the group showcased examples of what Ian Bogost has called "the rhetoric of failure": Darfur is Dying and Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Yet I might argue that this pessimistic rhetoric is fundamentally different from what the NML panel called "creating challenges" by creating a "fail and fail often" educational model that is designed to strengthen the individual rather than critique the system.
If I read this right (and I'm not a hundred percent positive I am), the critique is that we're not putting our money where our mouth is. We say we align with the "fail and fail often approach" that's intended to foster creative, potentially subversive thinking but in practice we present "challenges" that are easily conquered. In other words, we offer the "rhetoric of success" but mask it with the language of approved failure.
There is a struggle, I think, within the hearts and minds of many who work at the intersection of media and education. We want all learners to see how much "fun" participation can be (and by "fun," I mean how kids describe a tough game of tag that leaves them sweating, panting, and drop-dead exhausted: fun), and we want participation to foster a healthy sense of outrage, an interest in and desire for taking down the status quo. I wonder if both are always possible; if both are ever possible simultaneously. Perhaps greater minds than I have worked this out; I don't know. I do know, though, that it's something that we struggle with every day, in designing and presenting materials that we hope will be both fun and educational, in the revolutionary sense of both terms.
As readers of this blog know, I'm a huge fan of the social revolution. Clay Shirky writes that "it's not a revolution if nobody loses"; he adds that it's not a revolution if everybody loses, either. In my view, everybody loses if we fail to get the tools, mindsets, and skillsets of the revolution in the hands of every learner; everybody loses if we give up on the spaces where we can provide access to these things; everybody loses if this revolution, like so many revolutions before it, is won by the members of the dominant Discourse that has guided so much of our thinking, our action, our will and reason to act.
(hint: because I will entertain your guests with talk of the social revolution)
I was at a party last week when someone asked me what I do for a living. I used the opportunity to engage in what, in retrospect, may have been an ill-timed impromptu pronouncement about the status of the social revolution.
It turns out I'll need to rethink how I use that phrase "social revolution," at least in mixed company, because a tubby drunk man wearing a confusing hat walked up to me and tried to steer the conversation toward war atrocities.
"You can't tell me," he bellowed, "that the atrocities that are happening during the Iraq War are any different from the ones that happened during World War II. It's just that we have more media coverage now."
As I wrote in an earlier post, this is what I've decided to call the Space Odyssey mistake. This particular kind of error is explained by Clay Shirky, who describes a scene from 2001 in which
space stewardesses in pink miniskirts welcome the arriving passenger. This is the perfect, media-ready version of the future--the technology changes, hemlines remain the same, and life goes on much as today, except faster, higher, and shinier.
A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.
More to the point, a recursive public is a group of people who exist outside of traditional institutions (governments, churches, schools, corporations) and, when necessary, use this outsider status to hold these entities in check. The engagement of these publics goes far beyond simply protesting decisions or stating their opinions. Kelty, writing about geek culture as a recursive public, explains it thus:
Recursive publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a constantly “self-leveling” level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the playing field self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and control that seek to level it to the advantage of one or another large constituency: state, government, corporation, profession. It is important to understand that geeks do not simply want to level the playing field to their advantage—they have no affinity or identity as such. Instead, they wish to devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind of agency, effected through the agency of many different humans, but checked by its technical and legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that they can compete fairly. It is an ethic of justice shot through with an aesthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness.
This is precisely the difference between 1945 and 2009. It's not just that we have more media coverage but that, as Shirky proclaims, everybody is a potential media outlet--everyone has the potential to join a recursive public, whether impromptu or planned.
In fact, the notion that we can all engage in reportage is perhaps a bit too simplistic, at least until we can adjust what we mean by "journalism." When Facebook users joined up in opposition to a change in Facebook's terms of service and successfully pressed administrators to rethink and reword the terms of service agreement, that was the work of a recursive public, loosely banded and easily disbanded once their purpose had been achieved (if necessary, they will quickly gather again in their virtual space and just as quickly disband). We don't recognize this as journalism, often don't even recognize it as civic engagement--but for those who joined this Facebook knotwork, it's certainly some kind of engagement. And what could be more civic-minded than fighting to define the uses of a public space?
The atrocities of war are approximately the same (though, as always, new technologies mean new modes of torture and murder). What's different is the following:
Citizens without access to a wide range of new media technologies can still have their experiences broadcast to the world by other members of their recursive public. A cellphone picture of a soldier torturing a civilian, for example, can be quickly distributed for maximum effect.
All in all, it was a good party. Near the end, someone produced a Donald Rumsfeld piñata. We were going to hoist it up and smash it, but it seemed kind of...irrelevant.
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