You can keep your Robert Pattinsons and Miley Cyruses and whichever other beautiful prepubescent sexy people you young people idolize these days. My idols are people like these folks:
That guy in the lower lefthand corner is Howard Rheingold, who is by just about all accounts one of the kindest, happiest, most curious, most fascinating, most colorful, and most thought-provoking media theorists around. (If you want proof, take a look at this little gem of his writing.)
Because Howard is kind and supportive of other aspiring intellectuals, I've had email conversations and twitter conversations and blog conversations with Howard. There's this interesting feature of the new technologies that swell around us, see: They efface the distance--perceived and real--between our idols and our selves. If you're patient enough and quick enough, you can use these new technologies to climb right up on the pedestals your heroes are standing on and tap them on the shoulder.
And today in a webchat I got to talk to Howard--with my voice--about crap detection, participatory culture, and pedagogy. It. Was. Awesome.
It may soon enough be the case that the structures and norms that allowed us to toss up celebrities and intellectuals as cultural heroes--well, it may soon enough be the case that those structures crumble, leaving our heroes in the rubble at our feet. I'm young enough to hope it'll happen in my lifetime but old enough that I may not be able to fully shake the notion of the celebrity as icon. After all, I grew up alongside this:
And yes, I know that a huge chunk of Americans have never even heard of Howard Rheingold (or Lisa Delpit or Paulo Freire or Jim Gee or Henry Jenkins or Yasmin Kafai) and that these people don't count as 'celebrities,' as least not in the "zomg the paparazzi are everywhere" sense. I don't care. As Intel explains, our rock stars aren't like your rock stars.
file under: just about the hardest blogpost I've written to date
I just spent a good few hours catching up on the Web 2.0 Expo / danah boyd debacle. You know the one I'm talking about (and if you don't, you can read about it here,here, and here).
As a quick reminder, boyd gave a keynote at the event last week and by all accounts failed fairly resoundingly, especially given her renown for fantastic presentation style. According to all in attendance (including boyd herself), she spoke too quickly, read from her notes, and struggled to get her points across. If you weren't in attendance, a video of her presentation is below.
Issues of ethics, good behavior, and bullying aside, I'm most interested in boyd's response to the event. On her blog, she published a reflection on the event, which alternated between clear-headed analysis of her mistakes and a resentful self-defense.
Now bear with me for a second, because I stand here in absolute defense of boyd against her critics. But I also, because as a young female academic myself I cannot afford not to, want to offer a reflection on boyd's reflection, which to me felt somewhat overly defensive.
boyd admits that her delivery was fairly bad, but she defends herself with a host of excuses, including the following (all emphases, to highlight points of self-defense, are mine):
Because of the high profile nature of Web2.0 Expo, I decided to write a brand new talk. Personally, I love the challenge and I get bored of giving the same talk over and over and over again. Of course, the stump speech is much more fluid, much more guaranteed. But new talks force folks to think differently and guarantee that I target those who hear me talk often and those who have never seen me talk before.
A week before the conference, I received word from the organizers that I was not going to have my laptop on stage with me. The dirty secret is that I actually read a lot of my talks but the audience doesn't actually realize this because scanning between my computer and the audience is usually pretty easy. So it doesn't look like I'm reading. But without a laptop on stage, I have to rely on paper. I pushed back, asked to get my notes on the screen in front of me, but was told that this wasn't going to be possible. I was told that I was going to have a podium. So I resigned to having a podium. Again, as an academic, I've learned to read from podiums without folks fully realizing that I am reading.
When I showed up at the conference, I realized that the setup was different than I imagined. The podium was not angled, meaning that the paper would lie flat, making it harder to read and get away with it. Not good. But I figured that I knew the talk well enough to not sweat it.
I only learned about the Twitter feed shortly before my talk. I didn't know whether or not it was filtered. I also didn't get to see the talks by the previous speakers so I didn't know anything about what was going up on the screen.
When I walked out on stage, I was also in for a new shock: the lights were painfully bright. The only person I could see in the "audience" was James Duncan Davidson who was taking photographs. Otherwise, it was complete white-out. Taken aback by this, my talk started out rough.
Now, normally, I get into a flow with my talks after about 2 minutes. The first two minutes are usually painfully rushed and have no rhythm as I work out my nerves, but then I start to flow. I've adjusted to this over the years by giving myself 2 minutes of fluff text to begin with, content that sets the stage but can be ignored. And then once I'm into a talk, I gel with the audience. But this assumes one critical thing: that I can see the audience. I'm used to audiences who are staring at their laptops, but I'm not used to being completely blinded.
All of the above points are undoubtedly true but obscure a crucial point: that even the most stellar academics just sometimes have bad days. This was a bad presentation from a stellar academic, and it should be enough to leave it at that.
The audience should have left it at that, but did not. They treated boyd's struggle with glee, with an evil, hysterical schadenfreude. So instead of defending herself by explaining how the cards were stacked against her, boyd should have spent her time reviling the spectacularly bad behavior of the keynote audience. This behavior is exemplified through the following tweets, which were broadcast on a screen behind the podium, out of boyd's range of vision:
This guy, whose profile names him as Doug V, was one of boyd's most active hecklers. Other chunks of the twitter stream, in which @dugwork was a regular and active participant, included this:
and this:
Then, when the twitter feed was apparently taken off the screen by conference moderators, this:
In her blog reflection, boyd expressed anger and frustration, and rightfully so: this was bullying at its most despicable.
There's also, as boyd herself points out, a gender dynamic to this kind of bullying. She refers to the hecklers as the tech version of 12-year-old boys with whiteboards. She asks:
what's with the folks who think it's cool to objectify speakers and talk about them as sexual objects? The worst part of backchannels for me is being forced to remember that there are always guys out there who simply see me as a fuckable object. Sure, writing crass crap on public whiteboards is funny... if you're 12. But why why why spend thousands of dollars to publicly objectify women just because you can? This is the part that makes me angry.
I parsed the archived twitter stream, tweet by tweet, and didn't find anything in there that suggested the audience saw or was trying to treat her as a sex object, though I don't doubt she felt completely objectified. Let me reiterate: I do not doubt that she experienced this bullying as objectifying, possibly terrifying, definitely absolutely demoralizing. I don't doubt that I would feel exactly the same way. In fact, isn't that the point? It didn't even take an outright sexual comment for boyd to feel objectified, sexualized, and treated like a "fuckable object."That's what the best hecklers can do to even the most capable female speakers.
And here's the part where I start to feel incredibly torn, because a huge piece of me wants to leave it at that, to stand up and start swinging at boyd's bullies. They rose up en masse against her, in a public, cruel, and mean-spirited way. I have deep suspicions, just as boyd does, that gender played a significant role in helping the steam to build: We (us smartypantses in audiences filled with other smartypantses) are more likely to want to undermine women, especially when they dare to speak with authority, especially when they dare to present themselves as confident, competent, and infallible, especially when they dare to also seem in any way vulnerable. Seriously, you guys, stop being such enormous assholes. Stop using your misogyny as an excuse to be cruel. I'm so effing tired of you effers.
I also struggle with boyd's blogged response to the heckling, because I worry that it plays into the very weaknesses that so many of the hecklers (and techies and academics and so on) suspect smart, confident, brash women harbor. Women are overly emotional. We whine when things don't go our way. If people don't play by our rules, we pick up our toys and go home.
Now, I don't mind being critiqued," boyd writes;
I think that being a public figure automatically involves that. I've developed a pretty thick skin over the years, but there are still things that get to me. And the situation at Web2.0 Expo was one of those. Part of the problem for me is that, as a speaker, I work hard to try to create a conversation with the audience. When it's not possible or when I do a poor job, it sucks. But it also really sucks to just be the talking head as everyone else is having a conversation literally behind your back. It makes you feel like a marionette. And frankly, if that's what public speaking is going to be like, I'm out.
So I have a favor to ask... I am going to be giving a bunch of public speaking performances at web conferences in the next couple of months: Supernova and Le Web in December, SXSW in March, WWW in April. I will do my darndest to give new, thought-provoking talks that will leave your brain buzzing. I will try really really hard to speak slowly. But in return, please come with some respect. Please treat me like a person, not an object. Come to talk with me, not about me. I'm ready and willing to listen, but I need you to be as well. And if you don't want to listen, fine, don't. But please don't distract your neighbors with crude remarks. Let's make public speaking and public listening an art form. Maybe that's too much to ask for, but really, I need to feel like it's worth it again.
It's not fair, it's not right, and it's not defensible that female intellectuals are held to a different standard than male intellectuals are. It's abominable how the audience treated boyd during her keynote. And not having ever been subjected to the kind of public bullying boyd was subjected to, I don't know how I would react given the same situation: probably with the same rage, resentment, and abject pain that boyd expresses in her post.
But the solution is not to plead to the audience to be nicer next time. The solution is to come out swinging, to come out with both barrels smoking, to storm the audience with righteous indignation, to stand up and say yes, I screwed up, and fuck you all because I'll be back up here next year (or next month, or next week) and you'll still be sitting down there in the audience watching me shine. Good luck with your puny little attempt at twitter fame.
boyd and I are approximately the same age, and I look to her as one model of female academic. I believe that those of us who are strong enough to take it (and early evidence suggests that boyd is indeed strong enough) have a responsibility--an ethical duty--to stand in scrappy, defiant, unapologetic opposition to the stupid, ignorant, misogynistic, did I mention ignorant?--ignorant theories about how women should act and how to take them down if they get too presumptuous, too arrogant, too cocky to fit their preconceptions.
Here's what you say in response: not Can you please be nicer next time? but Fuck you.
Here's what you say: Fuck you. I'll see you next year.
writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it's easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday's moves in a conversation.
Far from challenging either the notion that "writing meant to last" is not "just reactive" or that blogposts are somehow just reactive and not meant to last, Quesada agrees with Lanier's stance and adds that
[a]ll academics are painfully aware that writing well takes time, and some know that writing well is not a prerequisite for having a successful blog.
So, basically, it doesn’t pay off to painfully slowly distill ideas for a blog post. In a sense, consuming blog posts –let alone microblogging 140-character blurbs- warrants you a so-so level of refinement.... Playing to the crowd –what bloggers must do, according to Lanier- does not require incredibly solid thinking; it’s a completely different skill.
Truly, I've had enough of this outdated stance with respect to blogs. It's worth pointing out that Lanier's essay dates back to 2006--eons ago, from the perspective of the social revolution. Here in 2009, blogs have come into their own as spaces for serious engagement with serious ideas. (Author update 9/27/09, 11:18 PM: Not to press too hard on this issue, but Lanier's essay is so outdated that it refers to Wikipedia as "the Wikipedia"--not once, not twice, but twenty-one times. Just imagine the alternate universe where we talk about looking up information on the Wikipedia--akin to tweeting on the Twitter or posting a new status update on the Facebook. That would make for a very different the America, that's for sure.)
Academics have embraced the platform in a variety of ways. Media scholar Henry Jenkins uses his blog for presentation and exchange of serious ideas. Over at the Tiger Beatdown, Sady Doyle takes on the outrages of a deeply sexist society with a playful tone (she explains her blog is about "ladybusiness") that only heightens her deeply effective expression of rage. HASTAC co-founder and Duke University professor Cathy Davidson uses her blog to work through key issues (social media, literacy practices, academia) in an informal, inviting, colloquial tone. Though I've only offered three examples, academics are in fact embracing the weblog in their own interesting ways by the dozens--by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands.
Quesada argues that "blogging will do nothing in an academic CV." I couldn't disagree more. While it may be true that blogposts don't yet count as "serious" academic discourse on par with publication in peer reviewed journals, not having a blog is increasingly a glaring omission, especially for academics who are or should be focused on the role of social media within their discipline (which is to say just about every academic).
Career advancement issues aside, Quesada seems to be arguing that producing thoughtful, intellectually challenging blogposts is not a productive enterprise for academics--that if they choose to blog, they should use it to reach a popular audience instead of using it to present deeper intellectual work. "What I think could work," he writes,
is a hybrid between a focused paper (that nobody would read other than a close circle of scientists) and a blog post that ‘plays to the masses’ and tries hard to capture attention at the cost of rigor and polish.
(Shut up! the blogger in me wants to holler. At the cost of rigor and polish? Do you even read any academic blogs? *cough* *sputter* ::regains composure::)
One of the most significant obstacles to intellectual progress is the difficulty of getting interesting but new or untested ideas circulated among other thinkers--academics and non-academics alike. This is especially true for young academics (like me!) who have an awful lot to say but neither the credentials nor the years of research to back up their ideas. My work in maintaining a blog--and using it to present ideas that I think are both rigorous and fairly well polished--allows me to not only offer up my thoughts for examination by thinkers whose opinions matter to me, but also to refine, build on, or dismiss ideas based on input from others. (I got Ted Castronova to comment on my blog!) Further, when other academics whose work I admire keep a blog, I have the opportunity to weigh in on and perhaps contribute to their ideas. (I get to comment on Henry Jenkins' blog!)
In short, academic blogs drop the barriers to participation in productive, valuable and meaningful ways--and the more seriously academics take this platform, the more likely it is that blogs will increase in significance (and, incidentally, upping the odds that blogging will come to mean something on an academic CV).
We would do well to remember that academic productivity is about much more than finding ways to get your work done efficiently. It's also about being a productive member of a larger community of thinkers and researchers, all of whom benefit from the wider circulation of more ideas, from more people, in more participatory ways.
Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, H. William Rice has posted a thoughtful opinion piece titled "Don't Shrug Off Student Evaluations." (The piece is locked to nonsubscribers; because I'm all about open access, I will helpfully link you to a free version here.)
Rice, a long time higher education faculty member, describes a pair of colleagues who took distinctly negative approaches to the notion of students evaluating their professors: One, whom Rice describes as "an elderly faculty member," explained to Rice that he saw student evaluations as
“an absolute violation of academic freedom,” while jabbing a trembling, crooked finger in my face with a swordlike flourish. “No one has the right to come in my classroom,” he said. (I assume he allowed the students in.)
The other colleague, whom Rice calls "Professor X," confided in Rice that he read his students' evaluations before submitting final grades. Professor X had received nearly universally negative reviews and wanted Rice's advice on whether he should lower students' grades "to show 'those little bastards'."
Rice, of course, takes the more contemplative path by arguing that student evaluations have an important place in academia because they offer educators insight into how well they're doing their job, where they can improve, and in what areas they continue to succeed. He writes:
Sure, student evaluations have their limits. They should never be the only means of evaluating faculty members, and they should never be used to snoop on professors who deal with controversial subjects in their classes. Yes, administrators have been guilty of misusing them. But the benefits far outweigh the risks, and faculty members who actually want to become better teachers—and who believe that good teaching skills are not bequeathed to them in perpetuity with the awarding of a Ph.D.—should read them over and over again.
Professor X’s great objection to student evaluations was one I frequently hear: “The student does not know the subject, so how can he or she judge my teaching?”
True, students’ perspectives are limited. But so are professors’. A professor cannot know what it is like to be 20 in an age of text messages, Facebook, and YouTube, and to be forced to endure lectures from someone who does not inhabit their socially networked world. I’m not suggesting that faculty members necessarily use that technology in their teaching, only that the point of view of those who do use it might be valuable.
As a former college instructor, I can attest to the deep value of student evaluations, though the danger of misinterpretation is always present. Often, we think about student ratings as a kind of popularity contest for educators--in some ways, I think, rightly so. After all, it's fairly easy to get high marks from lots of students: Just be friendly, funny, and a soft grader. It helps to make interesting use of new media resources.
Because so much of the student evaluation process hinges on faculty popularity, it's easy to overlook the much more important questions that only students can answer: Did the professor change the way you thought about the subject? Did you leave the class a better thinker than when you went in? Can you apply what you've learned to real-world contexts?
Here I draw from Ken Bain's excellent text, "what the best college teachers do." He writes about an experiment conducted by Arizona State University physicists in the early 1980s. They examined whether introductory physics courses changed the way students thought about motion. Most students came in with an intuitive set of theories about how the world works; most of these theories aligned with what the physicists called "a cross between Aristotelian and 24th-century impetus ideas." The goal of the course was to introduce students to Newtonian physics, which was in many ways directly oppositional to the Aristotelian approach. Given that most undergraduates went in "thinking like Aristotle," did they leave "thinking like Newton"?
Bain writes:
Did the course change student thinking? Not really. After the term was over, the two physicists...discovered that the course had made comparatively small changes in the way students thought. Even many "A" students continued to think like Aristotle rather than like Newton. They had memorized formulae and learned to plug the right numbers into them, but they did not change their basic conceptions. Instead, they interpreted everything they heard about motion in terms of the intuitive framework they had brought with them to the course.
....Researchers have found that...some people make A's by learning to "plug and chug" memorizing formulae, sticking numbers in the right equation or the right vocabulary into a paper, but understanding little. When the class is over, they quickly forget much fo what they have "learned."...Even when learners have acquired some conceptual understanding of a discipline or field, they are often unable to link that knowledge to real-world situations or problem-solving contexts.
Of course, there's no way to use end-of-semester student evaluations to gauge what kind of long-term impact on learning an instructor has had. Aside from the too-short time scale, there are the real pressures on students to perform, achieve, succeed--and, strange as it may seem, the only way they can definitively prove they've done this is through their grade point average. This means that evaluations are nearly inextricably linked to students' perceived achievement in the class; linked, that is, to what they think will be their final grade.
This isn't to say that student evaluations don't have a place in higher education: I firmly believe that they do, if for no other reason than to boot the universally bad instructors who either don't care about or aren't capable of teaching effectively and to toss the best instructors a little closer to the tenure finish line.
Most of us fall somewhere in the middle of the good-teacher continuum, which means that if we want to find out whether we've had an impact on students' thinking, we may need to supplement student evaluations with some evaluations of our own.
Here's one thing we might try: A set of surveys, administered at the beginning of the class and again at the end, that zero in on the key conceptual frameworks of the course's domain. While in introductory physics the key issue may be "how students think about motion," in geometry it may be "how students think about shapes." In English, my field of choice, it may be something like "how students think about effective written communications." You start there, think about the key issues that shape your conceptual framework, and design a set of questions that can gauge students' intuitive answers (at the beginning of the course) and informed answers (at the end of the course). The nice added benefit of doing this sort of thing is that it forces you to think about and articulate your foundational approach to the subject matter--useful for any educator, no matter how expert.
Indeed, the goal for all educators, no matter what discipline, no matter what the age of their students, should be to help all learners move, even a little, toward how real practitioners in the subject area engage with the world.
And let's try to put a little more faith in our students: "Those little bastards" may care more about grades than we'd like, but they also tend to recognize real, effective teaching when they encounter it. They may not, as one of Rice's straw men explained, be expert enough about the subject area to teach the class, but they're certainly experts in learning--they've been doing it their whole lives. Let's trust that, given the right questions, they'll offer up the answers we need in order to improve our teaching practices.
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.
I'm fascinated by danah boyd's recent post intended for the New Media Consortium's upcoming Symposium for the Future. In her post, she cautions new media theorists to avoid what she labels "technological determinism." She explains:
Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations. It's really easy to get in the habit of seeing a new shiny piece of technology and just assume that we can dump it into an educational setting and !voila! miracles will happen. Yet, we also know that the field of dreams is merely that, a dream. Dumping laptops into a classroom does no good if a teacher doesn't know how to leverage the technology for educational purposes. Building virtual worlds serves no educational purpose without curricula that connects a lesson plan with the affordances of the technology. Without educators, technology in the classroom is useless.
boyd's point is well taken, though I'd be hard pressed to find a single new media scholar who embraces the kind of technological determinism she describes in the above passage. There may have been a time when the "if we build it, they will come" mindset was commonplace, but virtually no serious thinker I have encountered, either in person or in text, actually believes that new media technologies can or should offer quick fixes to society's ills.
The problem, as I see it, is a two-part one. The first issue is one of terminology: Increasingly, we talk about "technology" as this set of tools, platforms, and communication devices that have emerged from the rise of the internet. This is useful insofar as it allows new media thinkers to converge as members of a field (typically labeled something like digital media and learning or the like), but it does so at the expense of the deep, complicated and deeply intertwined history of technologies and what we call "human progress." In truth, social media platforms are an extension of communications technologies that reach back to the beginning of human development--before computers, television, motion pictures, radio, before word processing equipment, to telegraphs, typewriters, Morse code, pencils, paper, the printing press...all the way back to the very first communication technology, language itself.
"Technology" is not a monolith, and there is a distinct danger in presenting it as such, as boyd does in her final paragraph:
As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense.
The second problem is a rhetorical one. New media theorists have found themselves engaged in a mutually antagonistic dance with those who prefer to focus on what they see as the negative cultural effects of digital technologies. For better or worse, people engaged directly in this dance find themselves coming down more firmly than they might otherwise in one of these camps and, because the best defense is a good offense, staking out a more strident position than they might take in private or among more like-minded thinkers. Thus, those who dislike Twitter feign disdain, repulsion, or fear and are labeled (or label themselves) luddites; and those who like Twitter find themselves arguing for its astronomical revolutionary potential and are labeled (or label themselves) uncritical utopianists.
In fact, media theorists have been targets of the "technological determinism" accusation for so long that they refuse to acknowledge that technologies actually can and often do determine practice. Homeric verse took the structure it did because the cadences were easy for pre-literate poets and orators to remember. The sentences of Hemingway, Faulkner, and many of their literary contemporaries shortened up because they needed to be sent by telegraph--leading to a key characteristic of the Modernist movement. The emergence of wikis (especially, let's face it, Wikipedia) has led to a change in how we think about information, encyclopedias, knowledge, and expertise.
A more accurate--but more complex and therefore more fraught--way to think about the relationship between humans and their technologies is that each acts on the other: We design technologies that help us to communicate, which in turn impact how we communicate, and when, and why, and with whom. Then we design new technologies to meet our changing communications needs.
Again, virtually no media theorist that I know of would really disagree with this characterization of our relationship to technologies--yet say it too loudly in mixed company, and you're likely to get slapped with the technological determinism label. I say this as someone who has been accused more than once, and in my view wrongly, of technological determinism.
Overly deterministic or not, however, I agree with boyd that technologies do not offer a panacea. More importantly, she argues against the use of terms like "digital natives" and, presumably, its complement, "digital immigrants." These are easy terms that let us off the hook: people under 30 get something that people over 30 will never understand, and there's nothing you can do about this divide. As boyd explains,
Just because many of today's youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don't. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There's an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it's also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like "digital natives" obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.
The key question on the minds of researchers in digital media and learning is not (or should not be) how we can get computers in the hands of every student but how we can support participation in the valued practices, mindsets, and skillsets that go along with a networked, digital society. To get this question answered right requires an ability to engage in the complex, thorny, and socially charged issues that boyd and others have identified in their research and writings. It requires development of a common language within the broad digital media and learning community and an ability to communicate that language to the vast range of stakeholders who are paying attention to what we say and how we say it.
I remember learning about the higher education credentialing system for the first time from my mom. I was pretty young--maybe five or six--and she was trying to explain what the phrases "bachelor's degree" and "master's degree" meant.
...and if they're really smart, she added, some people even become doctors.
"But to get their doctorate, they have to write a paper that's about something that nobody's ever written about."
I wondered: How do they know that they have a topic that nobody's ever written about?
Her answer: "There's a book with the titles of all the dissertations ever written. When it's time to pick a paper topic, they look through the book to make sure they have a title that nobody's ever used before."
I remember thinking at that time how boring and time-consuming it would be to have to read every single title of every paper ever written. Now I think, if only it were that easy.
I do hope they're working on putting that book online, and that it gets uploaded in time for my dissertation proposal. I'd hate to have to walk into an actual library--they smell funny and the graphics aren't that good.
why academic research and open exchange of ideas are like that bottle of raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing you've had in the back of your fridge since last summer
The articles are actually a series of interviews with creative types in a variety of fields who share one characteristic: they believe that sharing of ideas and content is valuable and important. The edited interviews are being posted by Eric Steuer, the Creative Director of Creative Commons--a project which, though I admittedly don't fully understand it, I find deeply ethical and innovative with respect to offering new approaches to sharing and community.
So far, two posts have gone up, the first with Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and the former online strategist for the Obama presidential campaign, and the second with Flickr founder Caterina Fake. Talking about how much we've changed in our attitudes toward sharing, Fake explains that
[i]f you go online today you will see stories about Obama sharing his private Flickr photos. So this is how far the world has come: our president is sharing photos of his life and experiences with the rest of the world, online. Our acceptance of public sharing has evolved a lot over the course of the past 15 years. And as people became increasingly comfortable sharing with each other—and the world—that lead to things that we didn’t even anticipate: the smart mob phenomenon, people cracking crimes, participatory media, subverting oppressive governments. We didn’t know these things were going to happen when we created the website, but that one decision—to make things public and sharable—had significant consequences.
Hughes' interview is less overtly about sharing as we typically think of the term, but he points out that the Obama campaign was successful because it focused on offering useful communications tools that lowered barriers to access and then
getting out of the way of the grassroots supporters and organizers who were already out there making technology the most efficient vehicle possible for them to be able to organize. That was a huge emphasis of our program: with people all over the place online—Facebook, MySpace, and a lot of other different networks—we worked hard to make sure anyone who was energized by the campaign and inspired by Barack Obama could share that enthusiasm with their friends, get involved, and do tangible things to help us get closer to victory. The Obama campaign was in many ways a good end to the grassroots energy that was out there.
Both interviews, for as far as they go, offer interesting insights into how sharing is approached by innovators within their respective spheres. But though these posts present their subjects as bold in their embrace of sharing and community, their ideas about what sharing means and how it matters are woefully...limited. Fake uses the Obama example to point out how far we've come; but really, does Obama's decision to make public photos of his adorable family mean much more than that he knows how to maintain his image as the handsome, open President who loves his family almost to a fault? I don't imagine we'd be very surprised to learn that Obama's advisors counseled him to make these photos widely available.
Indeed, the Flickr approach, in general, is this: These photos are mine and I will let you see them, but you have to give them back when you're done. It's a version of sharing, yes, but only along the lines of the sharing we learned to do as children.
The same is true of the picture Hughes paints of a campaign that successfully leveraged social networking technologies. The Obama campaign's decision to use participatory technologies was a calculated move: Everybody knows that a.) More young, wired and tech-savvy people supported Obama than McCain; and b.) those supporters required a little extra outreach in order to line up at the polls on election day. You can bet that if Republicans outnumbered Democrats on Facebook, you can bet Obama's managers would have been a little less quick to embrace these barrier-dropping communication tools.
What we're not seeing so far among these innovators is an innovative approach to sharing--one that opens up copyright-able and patent-able and, therefore, economically valuable ideas and content to the larger community.
I've been thinking about this lately because of my obsession with open education and open access. In particular, educational researchers--even those who embrace open educational resources--struggle with the prospect of making their work available to other interested researchers.
This makes sense to anyone who's undertaken ed research--prestige, funding, and plum faculty positions (what little there is of any of these things) are secured through the generation of innovative, unique scholarship and ideas, and ideas made readily available are ideas made readily stealable. As a fairly new addition to the field, even I have been a victim of intellectual property theft. It's enough to give a person pause, even if, like me, you're on open education like Joss Whedon on strong, feminist-type leading ladies.
[t]here are many reasons to share scholarship, and very few reasons to keep it secret. Scholarship that is not shared has very little value, and the default position for scholars at all levels ought to be as much openness as is possible. There are a few situations in which it is appropriate to withhold scholarship from public view, but they should be carefully defined and circumscribed. After all, the point of our institutions is to increase public knowledge and to put learning at the service of society. And there are several ways in which scholars benefit personally by sharing their work widely.
Smith is right, of course, and the only real issue is figuring out strategies for getting everybody on board with the pro-sharing approach to scholarship. The "I made this and you can see it but you have to give it back when you're done" model is nice in theory but, in practice, limits innovation and progress in educational research. A more useful approach might be along the lines of: "I made this and you can feel free to appropriate the parts that are valuable to you, but please make sure you credit my work as your source material." This is a key principle at the core of the open education approach and of what media scholar Henry Jenkins calls "spreadability."
The problem is that there are enough academics who subscribe to the "share your toys but take them back when you're done playing" approach to research that anybody who embraces the free-appropriation model of scholarship ends up getting every toy stolen and has to go home with an empty bag. This is why the open education movement holds so much promise for all of academia: Adherents to the core values of open education agree that while we may not have a common vocabulary for the practice of sharing scholarship, we absolutely need to work to develop one. For all my criticisms of the OpenCourseWare projects at MIT and elsewhere, one essential aspect of this work is that it opens up a space to talk about how to share materials, and why, and when, and in what context. The content of these projects may be conservative, but the approach is wildly radical.
Imagine if networked computers and other devices could unleash full democratic real-time participation in official decisions by all stakeholders. To date, member-led debate and decision-making has always been subject to physical limits in space, time and numbers of participants. Current technologies and business practices can allow architects and planners to break through the traditional constraints to member involvement in the agoras of our public and private institutions. The implications for corporate transparency and accountability, as well as for more responsive government are provocative.
In this seminar, students will design and perfect a digital environment to house the activities of large-scale organizations of people making bottom-up decisions, such as with citizen-government affairs, voting corporate shareholders or voting members of global non-profits and labor unions. A working Open Source prototype created last semester will be used as the starting point, featuring collaborative filtering and electronic agent technology pioneered at the Media Lab. This course focuses on development of online spaces as part of an interdependent human environment, including physical architectures, mapped work processes and social/political dimensions.
Perfect, right? And not only that, but I keep going back to the noble origins of OCW and wanting the tool to live up to its promise. As the site proclaims,
In 1999, MIT Faculty considered how to use the Internet in pursuit of MIT's mission—to advance knowledge and educate students—and in 2000 proposed OCW. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, containing 50 courses. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines. Going forward, the OCW team is updating existing courses and adding new content and services to the site.
It's an expensive--according to the site, it costs between $10,000 and $15,000 to upload materials from a single course--but laudable effort, ideally suited to highly resourceful learners looking for ways to supplement their formal or informal learning.
Again and again I return to OCW. Again and again I'm disappointed by how hostile OCW materials are to even the most dedicated, passionate learner. The materials are easy to download and unzip but difficult to unpack: They're so dense, and so decontextualized in their current format, that they're nearly nonsensical.
The architecture course is a case in point. While I'd be hard-pressed to find a more perfect class for the likes of me, the materials, though organized according to the course schedule and packaged with lecture notes, handouts, and supplemental readings, are simply too much to make head or tail of. Here, for example, are the class notes from week 1, "slashdot as example":
Slackdot – takes time to penetrate – no ‘design’ (‘blurb’ upon ‘blurb’)
Legibility should be more important
Hard to read – squint eyes
Only get ‘tip of the iceberg’
Graphic way of searching for info – rhizome.org (starry night)
The Brain EKP – Enterprise Knowledge Platform
Spider Map – Irish PM interface – drag and drop
How things get ‘about the iceberg’ – organized on screen – very different
Slashdot – every user is not equal – ‘superusers’ have more input – antidemocratic
Mediation – 3rd party neutral – resolution among themselves.
Arbitration – 3rd party neutral – arbitrator rules based on evidence.
EBay- used same technology to resolve dispute
High reputation, good feedback – typically did nothing wrong – past performance
Filters – like minded people (ie ACLU) or only hi-karma people
Maybe have user-defined (voted for things you also want)
To what extent are user comments and actions transparent?
Is real identity necessary?
Next Week:
How to preserve minority rights – mediation – therapeutic circles!
Debate Notes: #2 What do you mean by project based experience? Really there is 2 proposals – eliminate GRE, use project-based evaluation Other criteria still valid.
I'm sure this makes perfect sense to the student who was able to sit in on that week's lecture, but it's all but useless without that guidance. Though I'm sure the readings and other assignments clarify nicely, it's up to me to locate the texts, read them alone, and figure out the link to the key ideas of the course. This is only slightly better, and perhaps a good deal more time-consuming, than if I were to simply email the instructor with a request for reading recommendations.
The resources aren't completely useless, of course; the reading list saves me the time and energy of having to locate, contact, and wait to hear back from the instructor. I imagine, too, that OCW is an invaluable resource for higher ed faculty and administrators as they approach course planning. Used right, this kind of resource could help us make enormous strides toward leveling the higher education playing field.
But I'm not sure what using it right might look like. Should all universities compare their course offerings and reading materials to that offered by MIT faculty? Should all students pick an accompanying OCW course to complement their chosen field of study? Or should we ignore the content and emulate the approach: Making all course materials at all universities available to anybody who wants to access them?
Perhaps, as a colleague pointed out, it's not fair to use a course from 2002 as proof of OCW's failings. After all, as she explained, 2002 was too early to judge anything by today's criteria: "In 2002," she said, "the New York Times was still charging for content."
Fair enough. But more recent courses appear similarly information-dense and context-sparse. All I'm saying (and I've said it before, here on this blog) is that while the impetus behind OCW is grand and noble, it doesn't seem like anybody's getting their $10,000 to $15,000 worth. It seems much more valuable--not to mention cheaper and more readily accessible--to capture one or two key lectures per semester, surround those lectures with related readings designed by the lecturer for the OCW context, and link learners to a cluster of resources available through other open educational resources, online networks, and offline texts. This seems much more closely aligned to the spirit of the open educational movement, an effort that hopes to break down archaic and arbitrary geological, achievement-oriented, and class-defined gaps in participation.
One of my favorite young media scholars is Hillary Kolos, a graduate student in MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. Because I have had the great, great luck to get to work with her over the last year as part of my day job, I've had the joy of watching her blossom as a thinker, writer, and media scholar.
Recently, Hillary had a personal essay posted to Henry Jenkins's blog. The piece, "Bouncing Off the Walls: Playing with Teen Identity", focuses on her experience with gender and identity play through a consideration of how she decorated the walls of her bedroom as an adolescent. The piece is a gem. One tantalizing snippet:
As a teen, I used many resources to play with new identities. Fashion ads served as inspiration. My walls were a place to exhibit them. I did also, on occasion, leave my room where I had other experiences that helped shape the woman I am today. But having a space of my own to play and then reflect was very important to my process of identity formation. What seemed like goofing off at the time was actually a process of exploring who I thought I was at the time, as well as who I thought I should be.
My experience in my room is one of countless examples of how teens use their available resources to explore potential identities through play. This kind of play can happen in private, but often young people use media to capture their experiments and share them with others. In this way, they can gauge reactions and refine their performances. I used my walls to reach a limited audience, but today teens can easily reach millions of people online and receive feedback instantly on how they represent themselves. It will be interesting to see the new possibilities, as well as the new concerns, that emerge as teens use new resources to play with their identities online.
You can find the rest on Henry's blog here. As I mention in the title of this post, the piece is filled with awesome and well worth the read.
It turns out that my employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not only has varsity sports teams, it has 41 of them. Well, it used to have 41, until pressure to cut spending across the institute led to the elimination of eight different sports teams. The eliminated sports are: Alpine skiing, golf, men's and women's gymnastics, men's and women's ice hockey, pistol, and wrestling.
In a letter to the MIT community, Costantino Colombo, the Dean for Student Life, writes: "We make this decision with sadness and with great awareness of how painful it will be to many members of the MIT community." Colombo also explains, however, that the financial burden of supporting so many teams has weighed heavily on the Institute since before the economic downturn--mainly because sponsoring 41 sports is simply extremely expensive. According to Colombo, even after the cuts MIT still offers twice as many varsity sports as the average Division III university and will sponsor more sports than any Division III university in the nation.
Cutting sports teams is completely lame, of course, especially for the participating students. That doesn't mean I'm going to just ignore this from Will Hart, MIT's pistol coach:
“We’ve been a varsity club since 1937, so this is something entirely new for us,” Mr. Hart said of the pistol program, one of the top-ranked in the country and one of the institute’s most popular physical education classes.
“M.I.T. has a certain culture,” he added. “The students need release. I hope they find something else that was as close to enjoyable as their sport was.”
This sounds ominous. Do you think it was intentional?
I just caught the last several minutes (I was going to say "the tail end" and thought better of it) of the 2008 film "Zombie Strippers!" starring Jenna Jameson and Robert Englund. If you haven't figured out the plot yet, then there's no point explaining it to you. I only want to focus on a scene late in the movie where the Army commandos have shot the heads off of the zombie strippers and walk into a room where two people are clutching each other in the corner. It's not clear to the commandos whether these guys are humans or zombie strippers, so one of the muscleheads walks up to the pair and says "Say something human--and it better be ontological."
I'm officially claiming this quote as the motto of my reading group, the Fireside Moonbats.
Two key members of the Cambridge, Massachusetts,-based reading group, the Fireside Moonbats
You know how Art Garfunkel keeps a running list of every book he has read since the 1960's? I think I may start doing that for the Moonbats, too--especially since, if our motto is public, our reading list should be as well. Below, I've included the beginnings of that list. I hope to continue to build this for anybody who wants to follow along.
The Fireside Moonbats Reading List: First Draft
Shirky,Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Press, 2008. Introduction and chapters 10 & 11.
Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson (with Sonja Baumer, Rachel Cody, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Martínez, Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, and Lisa Tripp.) Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, November 2008.
Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction. David Barton and Karin Tusting (eds.) Beyond Communities Of Practice: Language, Power And Social Context. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Clarke, Julia. A new kind of symmetry: Actor–network theories and the new literacy studies. Studies in the Education of Adults Vol. 34, No.2, October 2002
Leander, Kevin M., and Deborah Wells Rowe. Mapping Literacy Spaces in Motion: A Rhizomatic Analysis of a Classroom Literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 2006), pp. 428-460
Francis, Russell. The Predicament of the Learner in the New Media Age (2009). Dissertation being prepared for publication.
Wertsch, James V. Mediation. The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky, Daniels, Harry, Michael Cole, & James V. Wertsch, Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Nardi, Bonnie, Steve Whittaker, & Heinrich Schwarz. NetWORKERS and their Activity in Intensional Networks. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 11: 205–242, 2002.
Nardi, Bonnie A., Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht, and Luke Swartz. Why We Blog. December 2004/Vol. 47, No. 12 Communications of the ACM.
Nardi, Bonnie A., Stella Ly, & Justin Harris. Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2007.
Davydov, Vasily V., and Stephen T. Kerr. The Influence of L. S. Vygotsky on Education Theory, Research, and Practice. Educational Researcher, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Apr., 1995).
Edwards, Anne. Let’s get beyond community and practice: the many meanings of learning by participating. The Curriculum Journal Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 49 – 65
Engestrom, Yrjo. Knotworking to Create Collaborative Intentionality Capital in Fluid Organizational Fields. Collaborative Capital: Creating Intangible Value Advances in Interdisciplinary Studies of Work Teams, Volume 11, 307–336 (2005)
Gee, James Paul. A 21st Century Assessment Project for Situated and Sociocultural Approaches to Learning. Grant Proposal for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.
Gee, James Paul. Human Action and Social Groups as the Natural Home of Assessment:Thoughts on 21st Century Learning and Assessment. Draft paper for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.
This is just the beginning of the list, and I'm going to summon the Fireside Moonbats to help me build on it. Stay posted for an longer and more detailed list.
In a recent post, I reviewed parts of an important new book called Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (2008, Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, eds.). In that review, I focused mainly on a broad overview of the book and on the final chapter, which considered the future of the open knowledge movement. Today I want to focus on a chapter in "Open Educational Technology," the first section of the book. This section, the first of three (technology, content, and knowledge), offers a consideration of various approaches to designing open learning environments. In the introduction to the section, Owen McGrath writes that "the term 'open educational technology' has broad meaning that extends well beyond any lowest-common-denominator definition such as 'open source software for education'." Key thematic questions McGrath presents include the following:
How should open educational technology be built, extended, and maintained in the large cross-institutional and international efforts?
How can the teaching and learning activities supported by the technology be evaluated in an open way?
How do the perspectives of teachers and learners inform these projects?
In "A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance," Trent Bastson, Neeru Paharia, and M.S. Vijay Kumar consider potential applications of open knowledge to higher education, emphasizing the value of sharing and remixing of pedagogical content, which they argue will dissolve the silos that traditionally separate content areas in higher education. They work from an assumption that open knowledge does not feel to all like a panacea; they readily acknowledge that it will feel deeply threatening to many members of our society. They offer the example of baby boomers coming of age under the shadow of parents grew up during the Great Depression. For these "Dionysian offspring," the authors explain, their parents' "poverty assumptions--lie low, hide your wealth lest it be stolen, do not display emotions, life is full of danger--" were more than silly or nonsensical; they directly opposed the youths' approach to life. As the authors of this chapter write,
We now appear to be facing the same cultural fissure 40 years later: Open educational resources (OER) are so abundant that the scarcity-based assumptions of educators are challenged.... In short, we are moving toward a knowledge ecology characterized by unfettered access to educational resources, choice, and change in the context and clientele of higher education.
Interestingly, the authors see learners themselves as presenting a significant obstacle in the progress toward open education--perhaps even more so than faculty. As they explain:
[W]hile some faculty members may boldly go where open education leads them, some students, despite their expertise in some uses of the Internet and IT tools, can be very conservative in their expectations in the classroom. They may come to college expecting that regardless of the IT toys on campus, in the classroom itself, their teachers will still tell them what to know and then test them on what they have been told.
This is only one of many potential and existing barriers, of course; and the authors briefly consider many obstacles. They imagine "a vibrant Web community of learners at something called Peer-To-Peer University, or 'P2PU.' P2PU would not be a 'real' university, but rather, a group of self-learners and tutors who work together to emulate some of the functions an academic institution would carry out, in a peer-to-peer fashion." They then consider the obstacles to realizing this dream: How can a "vibrant" eLearning community be fostered when passive learning is so much more likely? How will people react to the decentralized authority of an open knowledge learning system? And, perhaps most importantly for them, "[I]f the remixing process is speeded up and a million eyes replace 'gatekeepers,' then is knowledge enriched or watered down?"
It's an interesting thought exercise to imagine this Peer-To-Peer University--and it brings to mind an important issue that's only glanced at in this chapter: An ongoing shift in how we both think about credibility, both in assessing others' and establishing our own in a variety of online, offline, and hybrid social spaces. I wrote about this some in a recent blogpost on the online university phenomenon, where I argued that
While web 2.0 technologies increasingly allow us to offer expertise in a variety of areas, with or without educational credentials, the desire for evidence of expertise lingers in our collective psyches. Ultimately, we still believe that when our cat's kidneys start to fail, the single veterinarian who spent 8 years in school followed by years of field experience can provide better advice than the two thousand cat owners on a devoted forum.
And we're not necessarily wrong to think this way, at least in some situations--after all, as I explained in that post, if my cat needs surgery, I'm taking him to the board-certified veterinarian, rabid pet owners be damned.
But at the same time, those rabid pet owners may provide valuable advice that helps me decide when it's appropriate to go to the credentialed veterinarian. And here's where educational technology people like the authors of this chapter could learn a thing or two from people who participate, in various ways, in a participatory culture: They exist, happily and without too much turmoil, in the space between online and offline cultures, easily crossing the membrane and increasingly failing to agree to consider that there even is a membrane. Many people--and most young people--would agree that there's little functional distinction between friends they make in face-to-face interactions and those who communicate primarily or solely via virtual tools.
A visualization of the network of authors in the ccMixter community
The authors seem willing to bestow this gift on virtual communities that extend their reach into the physical world; but when considering physical learning environments, they seem less eager to consider a blurred line between classroom and engaged learning community. Take a look at how they describe the "typical lecture hall":
the teacher is up front and the students sit in chairs that are fixed to the floor. Such physical inflexibility restricts (italics mine) how the teacher can interact with students and students can interact with each other. Software design has followed a similar pattern, favoring tools that support faculty, rather than student, management in digital space.
It's that word "restricts" that hits a sour note. We might just as easily consider affordances of a typical lecture hall: It affords a certain kind of learning which has value in certain context, and it only becomes "restrictive" when people try to use it to achieve some purpose for which it was not intended or to which it cannot be applied. Even then, it's not the fault of the physical space that people are trying to bend it to their will. As Clay Shirky writes, "There is no such thing as a generically good tool; there are only tools good for particular jobs."
Followers of this blog know that I'm no fan of traditional or conservative approaches to schooling, but I do also see the value of considering what is afforded by a traditional learning space like the lecture hall or, more broadly, the brick-and-mortar university. And the authors of this chapter aren't necessarily averse to this approach; indeed, they grant that
existing academic institutions do help to navigate through the human sea of knowledge. They organize it into majors and requirements to make the decision process much easier and more goal oriented. They provide a teacher and classmates to both guide and motivate. They provide a structure and a social context to help bridge students from beginning stages of learning toward maturity. They help students address issues of finalizing work by providing a schedule of "deliverables" (assignment sets), of matching the learner with the job market, of certifying the value of students' learning, and the general issues of being a young person at home.
If it's true that the traditional university has served and continues, and will continue, to serve important cultural purposes, then we would do well to consider what types of learning experiences it can afford learners who are preparing for careers that may not even exist yet. Given that P2PU is a kind of pipe dream, and a more hybrid learning environment much more realistic, we need to think of ways to not only consider what purposes the university is good for but also how to speak to key stakeholders. In times of cultural revolution, those who believe most ardently in the need for it are also often the ones whose language is the most shrill, the most strident, and most difficult to hear.
This is not to say, of course, that the affordances of traditional universities should or could not also be considered constraints. In the end, though, the constraints are more on our ability to envision new words and worlds wherein authentic learning experiences can happen and less on our ability to leverage traditional learning spaces to make these visions real.
On the (misguided) attempt to reduce social media to a series of complex interactions
Do you guys know Bruno Latour?
I'm new to Latour, having been only recently introduced to his work by my friend and colleague, Katie Clinton. A few weeks back we read and discussed a canonical Latour piece, "On Interobjectivity," for our weekly reading group, the Fireside Moonbats.
I'm not going to pretend I understand most of what's going on in this piece. Any attempt to summarize it would just reveal my hem, so I'll leave that to someone better equipped. It's one key idea from that piece that interests me for the purpose of this post: The distinction Latour makes between complexity and complication. He writes:
'Complex' will signify the simultaneous presence in all interactions of a great number of variables, which cannot be treated discretely. 'Complicated' will mean the successive presence of discrete variables, which can be treated one by one, and folded into one another in the form of a black box. Complicated is just as different from complex as simple is.
Latour uses groups of monkeys (complex) in contrast to human societies (complicated). For Latour, "complex" describes a social society wherein interactions between members are intricate and informed by multiple dynamics and variables--but all of these variables are present in the interaction. A society is "complicated" when its moments and interactions are colored by a limitless number of discrete variables, layered throughout history, hidden beneath the surface and spreading out in every cultural direction. As Latour explains,
We say, without giving the matter too much thought, that we engage in 'face to face' interactions. Indeed we do, but the clothing that we are wearing comes from elsewhere and was manufactured a long time ago; the words we use were not formed for this occasion; the walls we have been leaning on were designed by an architect for a client, and constructed by workers - people who are absent today, although their action continues to make itself felt. The very person we are addressing is a product of a history that goes far beyond the framework of our relationship. If one attempted to draw a spatio-temporal map of what is present in the interaction, and to draw up a list of everyone who in one form or another were present, one would not sketch out a well-demarcated frame, but a convoluted network with a multiplicity of highly diverse dates, places and people. Those who believe in social structures often make the same criticism of interactionists, but they draw quite another lesson from it. They suggest that nothing happens in interactions that is not an activation or materialization of what is already completely contained elsewhere in the structure - give or take a few minor adjustments. But interaction does more than adjust, it constructs - we learned this from the monkeys as well as from Goffman and from the ethnomethodologists. However, it displays contradictory forms: it is a framework (which permits circumscription) and a network (which dislocates simultaneity, proximity and personality). Where can those contradictory qualities in humans come from, and why are they so different from interaction as understood by primatologists with respect to naked, co-present monkeys?
If it seems confusing and heady, it is. I suspect it's even more confusing, even headier, than it seems. But the distinction Latour makes--these terms "complex" and "complicated"--have some use for us in considering how to talk about the values and norms of social media. I'm increasingly encountering people who view Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks as as high-tech versions of Foucault's panopticon. For them, too much social media is a bad thing: It means you're always on, it means someone is always watching you.
Add to this a critical mass of media analysts (especially marketers and PR people, who are doing their best to find a way in to a world that seems cultured and maintained by and for the young) seem to work from a general assumption that social media work by leveraging our narcissism. PR guy Brett Borders identifies an entire category of self-absorbed social media users: "Social Media Narcissists." What is a social media narcissist? Borders writes:
There are plenty of people online who have managed to create a sizable audience without much in the way of skills or selfless community contributions. These social media narcissists participate heavily in the online conversation, but if you look closely you will see that most of it is just chatter about themselves, their opinions and their friends.
Some of my friends agree. "It's so weird," said one friend, an academic who's approximately my age, about the phenomenon of the constantly updated Facebook status. "Everybody can see what you're doing, all the time. It's why I've never posted a status update, and why I never will."
My sense of it, though, is that people who think a "close look" at the "chatter" on Facebook, Twitter, and similar networks amounts to self-centered self-promotion either aren't looking as closely as they think they are or are confusing the Latourian notions of complication and complexity. Facebook may seem like a flat social environment in which every monkey is watching every other monkey to figure out where the tribe is going, but in fact, every interaction is the product of an infinite number of variables that exist outside of that moment, that update, and that social environment. In this way, social media is complicated, not simply complex.
Presumably, calling most of what happens in social media "just chatter" is a way to relegate it to meaningless drivel: Picture yourself sitting on the train after a hard day at work. Picture a smiling, absurdly cheerful woman sitting next to you and telling you all about herself, her day, what's on her mind right now. Picture this happening incessantly, consistently, every single day, eventually driving you away from public transportation altogether. Picture yourself buying a nice, sensible SUV.
Nobody likes chatter, after all (even though we all engage in it from time to time). We're a culture that thrives on complication, that doesn't really know what to do with mere complexity. If all that happened within social media sites was chatter, engagement with and use of these tools wouldn't be rising so dramatically.
The game of social media is, after all, figuring out the rules, working through the layers of what seems at first like complexity. We are never exactly the words we type into the "what's on your mind?" box (formerly "What are you doing right now?"), just as we are never just the words we say to the person sitting next to us on the train.
Quick personal example: Recently, I had a friendly argument with a Facebook friend when I posted a link to my blog on her wall. Here's how the interaction went, with names and pics blurred out to protect those not directly affiliated with sleeping alone and starting out early:
Did I violate an unspoken Facebook norm? Oh, probably. What's more interesting to me, though, is the public scolding and my reaction to it. First, if I had violated a similar norm in a "face to face" interaction, this person might have taken me aside to let me know--but she might not have said anything at all, since she wouldn't necessarily have had the authority to do so. She's a friend, but not a close friend; a colleague, but not a coworker. It's not that the social hierarchies that govern our offline existences disappear in online social networks; it's that new hierarchies, new norms for engagement not linked to traditional cultural markers, emerge and get negotiated.
Which is why I reacted so strongly to what amounted to a public scolding. My friend chose to respond to my comment with a scolding instead of simply removing the post, which Facebook makes it pretty easy to do. I had posted something to her wall; she found it inappropriate and assumed the authority to tell me so; and my reaction? I was mad. What right does anybody have to tell me what I can or can't do on Facebook? I thought, outraged and annoyed. That was me questioning whether she really had the authority to chastise me out in the public square, where everybody could see.
If this moment were nothing more than idle chatter, my friend and I would not have reacted as we did. She would have, perhaps, seen my posting as a violation of norms, but she would have chosen to ignore it instead of responding. And I could have ignored her response, but I didn't.
As a complicated society, we are more than Latour's mass of monkeys whose choice of direction for travel arises anew each morning, from "an order that no one member has given, and that none can claim as their own." And Facebook, and other types of social media, provide new words and worlds for intricate, infinite, and complicated relationships, given the users' capacity to make it so.
All content on this blog has been relocated to my new website, making edible playdough is hegemonic. Please visit http://jennamcwilliams.com and update your bookmarks!
.jpg)
Posts
