A blog about digital rhetoric that asks the burning questions about electronic bureaucracy and institutional subversion on the Internet.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Three-Ring Circus
As I go back to the lecture hall this quarter, it is interesting to think about all of the different experiments taking place right now in the connected courses movement, which encourages faculty and students to use new technologies for online social networks to experiment with access and collaboration in new pedagogical ways.
Last week the FemTechNet DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) hosted its first Open Office Hour for the year, which I moderated with the help of Melissa Gregg, a renowned researcher on ubiquitous technologies, affective labor, and the quantified self movement. Students were encouraged to watch a video dialogue themed around "Labor" with Judy Wajcman and Anne Balsamo before coming to the office hour and to read a set of open access readings on the subject. Although we had faculty members rather than students show up for the office hour, it was still a lively discussion, which pointed to the possibilities for more kinds of synchronous exchanges in connected courses, as Gregg spoke from her own office in Intel.
As usual, I have also set up the video podcasts for my big Media Seductions course, so that even my regular university teaching will continue to have an open component.
Okay, so I'm a rhetorician who specializes in digital media. In my case, that means that I'm interested in both rhetoric in digital media and rhetoric about digital media.
The "Tell-All Generation" has already inspired groans from some of my colleagues. First of all, even though it is topping the list of the most e-mailed stories this morning, it's like many most e-mailed stories, old news. The article deals with a study of Berkeley students that we were talking about here on Virtualpolitik last month, just a few days after it was published online. Second, it repeats certain commonplaces about their being a "digital generation" that inspires skepticism from those who study histories of media adoption and rebuttals from researchers like Sonia Livingstone. As Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it on his Twitter stream: "Another profoundly stupid @nytimes trend story about the 'digital generation.' This time, it CARES about privacy."
The "Preaching Jihad" story is one of a number of stories that have appeared recently about Anwar al-Awlaki a charismatic US-born preacher, explicator of Islam, and advocate of jihad who has used the Internet to disseminate his message to the English-speaking public worldwide and has been linked to inspiring attacks planned for Fort Hood, Detroit, and Times Square. He is described as a creator of "prolific online lectures" who brings radical Islam to the disaffected through a perverse form of distance learning. Anwar al-Awlaki has also been featured in a number of other news stories in recent months about the possibility that he might be assassinated for his views in items from Al Jazeera, The Christian Science Monitor, and Newsweek. Having opened the Virtualpolitik book with an account of a misguided congressional intelligence hearing on "Terrorist Use of the Internet," I tend to be wary of the ways that new technologies get associated with criminality in our popular culture, and I wonder if the Times is pandering to that stereotype with lines about how this man has supposedly "harnessed the Internet for the goals of Al Qaeda" while not presenting any counterarguments to regulating his religious and political speech. For example, it discusses al-Awlaki's "now-defunct Web site anwar-alawlaki.com" without any exploration of what might be an interesting story about why his Free Web Hosting account might have been pulled down last November. I'm certainly not arguing that there are no limits to online speech, particularly when it incites violence, but it might be interesting to have at least some discussion of how hosting services decide about what constitutes banned "hate speech" on the site.
Finally, there was the story about Internet voting that was buried on page seventeen. It doesn't have a prurient interest in teen sexuality or an telegenic Osama Bin Laden replacement boogie man to make it worth more attention. It also is typical in framing the issue of Internet voting primarily in terms of protecting the security of the polling place rather than imagining politics differently with some new algorithmic possibilities and more opportunities for political participation, as Chris Kelty has argued.
As the UC system contemplates founding an "11th campus," a "virtual campus," and the UC Commission on the Future explores outsourcing more of its teaching to distance education, potentially of foundational courses, the history of the difference between "distance learning" and "hybrid learning" can be painful to recall. At one time, in the pre-Yudof era, the UC Office of the President was interested in hybrid approaches, on the assumption that they offered the best of both words, but now the logic is of substitution not supplementation. Mid-decade the now defunct Center for Teaching, Learning & technology championed uses that were meant to encourage faculty creativity and a range of collaborative approaches engaging different campuses rather than the false efficiencies proposed by IT "experts" promising efficiency through centralization in which faculty would easily port-in "content" without much pedagogical reflection.
The typical college lecture class frequently gathers many students together in a large room to be ‘fed’ knowledge, believes Brown. But studies show that “learning itself is socially constructed,” and is most effective when students interact with and teach each other in manageable groups. Brown wants to open up “niche learning experiences” that draw on classic course material, but deepen it to be maximally enriching.
In basketball and opera master classes, and in architecture labs, he has seen how individuals become acculturated in a “community of practice,” learning to “be” rather than simply to “do.” Whether performing, creating, or experimenting, students are critiqued, respond, offer their own criticism, and glean rich wisdom from a cyclical group experience. Brown says something “mysterious” may be taking place: “In deeply collective engagement in processes...you start to marinate in a problem space.” Through communities of practice, students’ minds “begin to gel up,” even in the face of abstraction and unfamiliarity, and “all of a sudden, (the subject) starts to make sense.”
What the UC system seems to be contemplating is very different from this communities of interest model.
A recent report on "Redesigning Large Lecture Courses" may sound familiar to those who remember the Pew Program in Course Redesign from the nineties, which I wrote about in this paper several years ago. Now the emphasis is on the so-called "hybrid learning" that I was an advocate for rather than abandoning lecture courses or turning them into vehicles for distance learning, which some Pew acolytes were advocates for. The Pew Redesign project has left many dead educational websites behind like this one. Let us hope that this decade's redesigners won't leave so much abandoned virtual real estate behind.
At the Digital Media and Learning Conference, I was pleased to have assembled the cast of "Last Bastions: The Promise and Problems of Digital Learning in Higher Education" which showcased the work being done in California in connection with a nascent Digital Higher Ed initiative to bring new pedagogical philosophies along with new instructional technologies to college campuses in the region.
We opened our potentially controversial session with Diane Harley, who leads the Center for Studies in Higher Education and who has recently authored an exhaustive report on "Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication," which I have summarized here. Harley's Mellon-funded report paints a very different picture from the more optimistic MacArthur vision of young scholars transforming institutions as they take up digital tools by cataloging all the ways that universities continue to value professional privacy, print publication, intellectual property, and traditional methods.
Harley argued that it was important to remember that there were "many kinds of students" involved in higher education and many degree and certificate granting sites of learning. Even in the context of the kind of research university where the DML conference was being held, the "big, competitive world of science" dictated cultural conservatism when it came to digital media and learning. She also thought that it was important for DML attendees to acknowledge that digital media and learning too often was translated into distance education. With discussion taking place about the possibility of the University of California system offering an entirely online BA degree, the debate about "what parts can be done online" might lead to what could be "a second class degree."
Holly Willis of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California talked about how Harley's findings presented a "grave disappointment" to her group, but she argued that there were promising trends in the field that merited attention from institutional stakeholders. In particular, Willis's emphasis was on pedagogical theory rather than on new gadgets, which included work done by the New London Group that focused on "rhetoric, design, and ethics" in its work on "multiliteracies." For inspiration, Willis pointed audience members to the October 2009 AIGA conference Make/Think for a way to think about the "new liberal arts" curriculum. (I have to add that our current theme in the Humanities Core Course, which was launched in 2007, is "Thinking Making Doing.)
In the age of pervasive computing, information visualization, and somatic literacies, Willis argued that it was important not to merely generate a "longer and longer list of literacies. Instead, she suggested that Alex Galloway's metaphor of the algorithm or Noah Wardrip-Fruin's conception of expression that linked authoring to analyzing advanced the scholarly conversation much more than naive assertions about the "power of gaming" had a few years ago. She also pointed to the work of Jeff Watson with ARGs or alternate reality games as being about pedagogy not gadgetry or faddism. Although time was short, Willis also squeezed in time to show a few student projects, which included R-Shief by Leila Sakr and Jen Stein's Million Story Building. She also discussed how students at the IML were also developing promising iPhone apps to support sophisticated forms of digital media and learning. She also argued that in helping students develop their "readily and rich virtual lives" in "new writing spaces," she argued that a number of the most interesting initiatives were writing oriented and that groups like the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Computers and Writing, and the American Library Association had often led the way.
Todd Presner then explained how what had started as a "flash-based textbook to understand the city of Berlin," Hypermedia Berlin, evolved into the multi-campus interdisciplinary Hypercities project. According to Presner, Hypercities connects "cultural history with cultural georgraphy" by animating, modeling, and mapping historical layers of the record of urban environments. This has involved intensive collaboration with architects and urban historians and the incorporation of GIS technologies that have fostered further collaborations all over the world. Presner is also expanding some of the conventions of academic by thinking about possibilities for publishing peer-reviewed KML files keyed to Google mapping software, which have been submitted to UC Press. As Presner explained, these are much more than "Wikipedia pages," because they are "sophisticated geo-temporal arguments."
Presner also showed projects from the group's featured collections, including a mobile project involving Historic Filipinotown, which was installed on Nokia tablets and deployed in an actual jeepney that was designed to raise "consciousness of a landscape that had been erased." Presner described the "hypercity" as being like Ted Nelson’s hypertext, so that many connections could be made between dates, places, and cultural objects. As an example he pointed out how the 11th of February in Iran, which was also the date of the 1979 protests against the Ayatollah, had particular kinds of cultural resonance. He noted how one of the featured collections, Election Protests in Iran, created by Xarene Eskandar now included 1100 objects. Such projects expand the notion of what digital curation is and invite cross-disciplinary analysis in a symbology not bound by polygons, because these geotemporal creations are more than research papers, because they can actually be exported in fully developed digital environments. Presner claimed that this project offers new ways for "thinking about the staging of an argument" and the criteria for judging it. As an exemplary case, he showcased the work of Phil Ethington and his 13,000 year history of Los Angeles that included many regional regimes and an 18 ft map in his "Ghost Metropolis."
Lev Manovich finished out the session by explaining the importance of teaching students "to read and write in the medium," as new interfaces are created post-Alan Kay. We live, Manovich asserted, in "a data society," not just an "information society," in which scholars must ask "what does it mean to be literate?" Especially when "teaching, researching, and writing about visual culture" in is important to go beyond existing tools for visualization, such as Many Eyes, which in many ways date to the late 18th century as "vector primitives." He explained how tools now available for medical imaging and brain imagery could be turned on cultural texts like the film Man with a Movie Camera. In his example of TIME magazine covers he showed how oppositions between photograph/drawing, person/idea, whites/people of color, and men/women could be depicted in a system in which 400,000 pixels proved to be not enough, so the classes were able to use the largest visualization system of 315,000,000 mega-pixels, 80 monitors, and 20 PCs to explore relationships very quickly. He closed with a video of Ph.D. candidate William Huber demonstrating how 100 hours of game play could be visualized. You can check out information about Cultural Analytics, see some of their visualizations, watch a demo, or browse their papers and presentations.
Slides from my talk, in which I explain what I see as ten trends in digital learning in higher education are here, and I have listed the trends as follows:
Playable Simulations Procedural Literacy Object-Oriented Ontology Database Mash-Ups Network Epistemologies Information Aesthetics Tactical Media Software Studies Critical Information Studies Digital Rhetorics
This evening, merely an hour after I landed at the annual MLA convention, where jobseekers with Ph.D.s in literature or foreign languages congregate and which was probably best immortalized by the poet John Berryman, I went in search of digital humanities sessions at what is supposed to be the "worst MLA ever." After all, the Chronicle of Higher Education has apparently identified the field that I actually belong to as one of the few sites of hope at the convention.
Amid all the doom and gloom of the 2009 MLA Convention, one field seems to be alive and well: the digital humanities. More than that: Among all the contending subfields, the digital humanities seem like the first "next big thing" in a long time, because the implications of digital technology affect every field.
Unfortunately, because of family obligations, I already knew that I had missed the session jam-packed with Virtualpolitik friends and fellow bloggers: Kathleen Fitzpatrick (chair), Dave Parry, Chuck Tryon, and Jeremy Douglass. (Luckily, some of their material is posted here.)
Luckily there were still some night owls at the evening session about Looking for Whitman, an ambitious NEH-funded multi-campus pedagogical/archival experiment involving the three cities in which the famed poet lived and worked: New York City, Washington D.C., and Camden, New Jersey. As Matthew Gold explained in his introduction, this project brought together a range of students -- from undergraduate nonmajors in a technical education program to literature graduate students who planned to be professionals in the academy -- at several institutions: Rutgers, CUNY, and University of Mary Washington. Thanks to NYU professor Karen Karbiener, it even ultimately included students across the Atlantic in Novi Sad, who translated Whitman into Serbian.
Gold described a project with many parts. Like Alan Liu, he realized that having students create profile pages would be an important part, which they did under the rubric of "Frotispieces." They also responded to assignments structured around the concept of the "image gloss," the "cinepoem," and the "vault." In keeping with the curatorial metaphor that has become an important part of the digital humanities, students also created text for a "material culture museum" and a physical museum where they created a script for a visitor's center. Using free and open source technologies and a WordPress platform, he described an initiative intended to be "porous," "feed-conscious," "decentered," "networked," "flexible," "mashed," and "open." Fundamental pedagogical principles included connecting "poetry to place," working with existing institutions, encouraging serendipitous exchanges between students, increasing the visibility of local archives, and urging students to write for more public audiences.
During the question and answer period, there were hard questions about copyright, plagiarism, assessment, and the evaluation of student work. In response, some defended Cathy Davidson's controversial call for the "crowd sourcing" of grades.
Update: There's another great piece on MLA gloom from the Chroniclehere.
Students on the real campus get to chat with their advisers face to face. Now online students who never set foot there can do the “exact same thing,” says Shannon Ritter, social-networks adviser for the Penn State World Campus.
Almost the same thing, anyway. Second Life requires users to choose avatars, or graphical representations of themselves. So students who want to meet with Rachel Zimmerman will find themselves chatting with a character called RachelM Snoodle. Looking for Karen Lesch? The adviser goes by KarenM Magic. All advisers are required to cover at least two hours a week.
Given how often support staff deal with tears from frustrated students, I'm not sure that the "exact same thing" is possible in an environment in which there is such limited paralinguistic contact.
Yesterday the Teaching, Learning & Technology Center at UC Irvine presented a session devoted to "Online Learning: Myths & Realities." In the age of severely limited budgets, online learning in higher education looks very attractive to campus administrators and educational researchers have long said that the traditional lecture format is poorly suited for many types of learners who need to be better engaged with subject matter. The discussion took off with the first mention of the May 2009 Department of Education report on "Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies." Several faculty members contested the conclusion that "classes with online learning…on average produce stronger student learning outcomes than do classes with solely face-to-face instruction," since they actually argued that the data showed equivalent rather than better pedagogical works. However, many present were pleased with the report's praise for blended or hybrid learning as preferable to online alone instruction.
Unlike many such presentations, there was a serious attempt to offer more than boosterism. Organizers admitted that such courses may not save time, given expectations for frequent student feedback and updated materials, and that they might not always be cheaper either, since quality video and online design don't come cheap, even if the University of Phoenix boasts about its bottom line. Talk about higher attrition rates and a persistent digital divide, even among supposedly "tech-savvy" students also dampened enthusiasm. As a writing person, I would have liked to see more discussion of the limitations of so-called "self-grading exercises" to teach written composition, such as the Calibrated Peer Review system, which I have criticized in print.
Three faculty members from UCI taught these courses over the summer and shared their experiences with the group. Cell biology professor Diane O'Dowd argued that her teaching demonstrations were unlikely to be easily appropriated by other pedagogues and that good online courses were by definition non-generic, and that adopting the online courses of others was as ludicrous as being handed a syllabus and all the slides from a course with the expectation of an exact pedagogical replica. Her prior experiences in her large enrollment course Bio 93: DNA to Organisms were applied to the online version of the course, which was offered through the campus Distance Learning Center. She produced twenty-nine lessons, with professionally shot video of her talking behind a blue-screen backdrop, as well as an elaborate series of intros, wrap-ups, and other ways to develop activities, such as having students report their own experiences with long distance running before beginning a unit on hypernatremia. Although learning outcomes seemed to be good, she complained that students developed few peer relationships in the class and expressed her reservation that she was "not sure we are keeping them in the biology major."
In contrast, Michael Dennin has made his Physics 21: Science from Superheroes to Global Warming, which he had never taught before, available under a Creative Commons license that encouraged sharing. He also chose low tech webcam shooting for his video portions and creative forum moderation, where students grappled with issues like analyzing the California state budget, to develop their numerical literacy and to create lively in-class interaction.
Outside UCI classicist Maria Pantelia is probably best known for her work with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, but on campus she teaches the popular course Classics 45A: Classical Mythology: The Gods, which she described as a frequently "x-rated course" in the antics of the Greco-Roman deities. Her original lecture slides were masterfully converted to richly illustrated Flash pages about the classical world, while she provided audio voice-over.
Note that all three faculty members worried about cheating and relied on on-site midterms and finals for much of the course grading.
Last year at back-to-school night, I complained about how PowerPoint software had become such an important part of my son's teachers' presentations to the public that I was concerned that one-to-many forms of corporatized communication might also be stifling interactions in the classroom. This year, only one teacher used PowerPoint slides, and it was a modest sequence of just four rectangles of information rather than a pecha kucha style barrage of text and images. Instead, most of her presentation came in the form of a dazzling display of three flares representing different placeholders in the chemical spectrum while the music from 2001 boomed in the background. Other teachers directed their parents to personal websites or to their Twitter feeds, although some contingents of teachers still use delivery points with highly standardized features like new.schoolnotes.com or schoolfusion.com that are more depersonalized than DIY solutions. As a parent I was concerned to see at least one teacher at Lincoln Middle School directing students to an online textbook site for skill-and-drill quizzes and distant learning videos. California students may be soon getting far too much of that, so we wouldn't want to start the automation of education any earlier.
A recent article in the Washington Post, "A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges," which opines that universities must embrace the methods of the distance learning movement, was written by Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout, who was once best known for Internet organizing for the Howard Dean presidential campaign and has also served as national director for the Sunlight Foundation. Like many Teachout is making the analogy between newspapers and universities, as institutions of knowledge and credible sources that must adapt to an online culture oriented around new information practices.
Despite her liberal political credentials, Teachout is making an argument for radical efficiency that assumes that students don't need the context of an academic community. She praises product-oriented community colleges and for-profit institutions as early adapters who may be best fit to survive.
Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors. Every major paper once had a bureau in, say, Sarajevo -- now, a few foreign correspondents' pieces are used in dozens of papers. Similarly, at noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States.
When this happens -- be it in 10 years or 20 -- we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.
The idea that universities don't need more than one scholarly opinion in the country or that having only three news bureaus in Iraq has improved our understanding of that country's political dynamics seems ludicrous to me, and I'm surprised that she pushes the newspaper analogy even when it strains the logic of what could be a compelling argument.
Lately there has been considerable discussion of the metaphor of the "creepy treehouse" to describe online learning initiatives that are doomed to failure because their rhetorical appeal to young people is so profoundly wrong in its address.
Of course, there have been many other metaphors from vernacular architecture to describe the location of Internet practices in relationship to the conventional spheres of home and work. For example, technology researcher Genevieve Bell has argued that ubiquitous computing plans tend to enshrine certain ideas about domesticity that ignore the functions of liminal places more tangentially associated with the home environment, such as the shed, which functions as a site for tinkering and repair. I suppose that in the United States, the garage often serves that function.
The treehouse is creepy and off-putting to children partly because it is so obviously constructed by an adult to attract non-adults to a given site, much as a gingerbread house built by a witch should attract suspicion.
A blog posting on "Defining 'Creepy Treehouse'" suggests some other ways beyond the straightforward definition of a "place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids" that the term could be meaningful to experience designers. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.
Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.
A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.
Many of these definitions have to do with the institutional power behind much educational technology and the uncomfortable relationships that many institutions and the Internet maintain.
You can see the reactions on TechRhet to the question "Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?" to see how it also generates discomfort among e-learning advocates.
An article in today's New York Times, "Facing Deficits, Some States Cut Summer School," portrays a grim picture of how many school districts are cutting summer school programs despite federal monies designed to keep the K-12 educational system running for full-year sessions.
I am on the advisory board of SOS Classroom, which attempts to ameliorate the crisis. You can also follow their Twitter feed to learn about how they offer tools for tagging and organizing free educational content on the web that addresses state content standards.
When Summer School was canceled for LAUSD in the summer of 2009, there was an outpouring of concern for students in the country’s largest school district.
At the same time, we realized that the Internet was making available an unprecedented number of free educational resources. They just needed to be collected in one place.
Our goal is to collect and organize the very best of these resources by enlisting the help of educators, parents, and students online. We offer these resources as a life preserver to students who might otherwise spend their summers sinking.
The students of Mark Marino at USC hope that they have reached critical mass and that parents and educators will soon be active content-creators to the site.
My teenage son, who was recently studying for his Japanese final, introduced me to StudyStack, a website that combines a traditional source for flashcards and tutorials with the social network Facebook and cell phone technology. Built with freely available tools from the Apache Group and MySQL, web developer John Weidner has tried to make skill-and-drill distance learning more socially engaged.
With the California state budget continuing to be buffeted by a series of cascading crises, public schools in many districts are being forced to cancel summer school programs that are critical to prepare low-income and historically disadvantaged populations of students for college, retain them in the school system and get them back on track for graduation, or just provide a constructive way to spend time socially off of potentially mean streets. Given the prospects for canceled classes, Virtualpolitik friend Mark Marino has put out a call for participation in the Save Our Summer (SOS) Project 2009 as a stopgap measure to encourage teachers and students to share videos, websites, and archival sources of information that meet the objectives of state curricula that run the gamut from enrichment to remediation. Although Marino remains an advocate for live pedagogical experiences, he also notes the usefulness of Teacher Tube and scientific demonstrations for subjects like chemisty on the YouTube site itself. He's hoping that people will tag content for grade-appropriateness and subject matter on content standards or at least engage with the social dimension of online tools. I know that when my own son was in 6th grade, he found the Math Train site helpful.
I'm the kind of friend who will tell you if you have something stuck in your teeth or if a zipper or bra strap is noticeably amiss. I expect that my friends will do the same for me, whenever I'm in a similar situation. In contrast, there are others to whom I would say nothing. For example, 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.
I consider myself to be a friend to the New Media Literacies project at MIT, which held its second annual conference today, and not just a superficial Facebook friend kind of a friend. My brother is a veteran public school teacher always hustling for technology and media support, and -- as I explain in the opening of my new book -- I got my start in the teaching profession in an after-school lab for K-12 students.
Certainly, the NML is one of the few groups in the country taking young people's information literacy seriously with a big-picture approach that entails doing real work about the value of critical thinking and creative production in the digital age, work that should have been done by government and the educational establishment if only federal, state, and local policymakers could avoid being distracted by panics about cyberstalking or cyberbullying from what should be their core mission.
NML director Henry Jenkins has been at the forefront of a number of advocacy efforts for digital rights in the classroom that emphasize well-documented evidence from large-scale research about the benefits of access to online social networks that sustain knowledge communities and the harm of arbitrary filtering and blocking technologies in schools and libraries.
The NML also supports talented young scholars like Talieh Rohani, who pursue educational initiatives while also maintaining their artistic careers. Based on my eavesdropping on participating schoolteachers' conversations, it seemed clear that the supportive environment of the NML encouraged them to try new learning techniques as well as new software.
This is why I find myself overcoming my hesitation to ask if certain kinds of remixing, recontextualizing, and mash-up might be problematic for multicultural classrooms, based on what I heard from the group's introductory overview for the day. For example, quoting Henry Jenkins' line that "by being conservative in content, we can be radical in approach" 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." (To be fair, in the same list the group also said that they were updating "close reading" with attention to "annotation" and "ornamentation," "allusion" with a focus on "appropriation" as an umbrella practice that included "meaningful remixing," and "structural analysis" with a cocentration on "finding & filling in gaps.")
Furthermore, 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.
This brings me to what I call "the Vanilla Ice problem." 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. "Nerdcore" may not be as uniformly terrible as the output of Robert Matthew Van Winkle, and there are the occasional nerdcore lyrics that make me chuckle, but when the genre is further sanitized for classroom purposes by taking out the four-letter words of the kind that might be aimed at the MPAA and RIAA or the racial self-consciousness of "White Kids Aren't Hyphy" and "White Kids Love Hip Hop," I begin to wonder how much edu-rap has to offer, given its limited musical and poetic repertoire.
A case in point might be MC Lars treatment of the Ahab story of Moby Dick. I'm not saying a Moby Dick remix offends my sensibilities as a literary purist. A decade ago I saw the Laurie Anderson adaptation of Melville's classic text, and NMC researchers are right to point out, based on their collaborations with MIT literature instructor Wyn Kelley, that Moby Dick itself remixes stories and vocabulary from the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale, from Paradise Lost, accounts of the fate of The Essex, and other whaling lore. But the comments on the MC Lars YouTube video for the Ahab song show many irritated listeners and indicate how derivative many consider his derivative work to be.
There are two more potential criticisms that I found myself having as the conference got underway.
1) 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.
2) 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.
In other words, in appealing to philanthropic funders and school administrators, perhaps the group has done too much to de-emphasize the subversive character of Internet culture.
And if I'm wrong about this criticism, I'll look forward to the NML telling me that I have spinach in my teeth.
Update: Henry Jenkins responds here, and Jenna McWilliams responds here. Both postings are well worth reading for those interested in these debates.
As Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course, I'm a little worried about being depicted as dismissing texts that are written by "dead white male" authors, which Jenkins' scare quotes around the words may unintentionally imply. Nonetheless, these are thoughtful and respectful rebuttals that indicate serious engagement with this important cultural conversation about race, class, appropriation, and technology. I regret not knowing more about the critical race studies reading of Moby Dick that the NML was apparently promoting; perhaps they could do more to highlight a more nuanced approach to multiculturalism in their next conference.
"Universities will be 'irrelevant' by 2020, Y. professor says" might be a headline that David Wiley regrets right now. Of course, Wiley is becoming known for making predictions and for staking out some of the more extreme positions in the Open CourseWare movement, as I argue in this recent talk, so these fighting words might not come as much of a surprise to those who know his public pronouncements.
What I find interesting is reading the hundred-plus comments and the kinds of metaphors that online writers draw upon to describe the educational system. For example, this one makes an analogy of education to physical health, which is difficult to commodify and package.
Wiley is an ignoramus. He assumes that "knowledge" and "education" are things – commodities that can be stored on a hard drive, downloaded onto an iPod, and transferred into the passive brain of a “student”. That is equivalent to thinking that “health” can be packaged, stored, downloaded, and ingested in a pill form. Wrong. Education, like physical health, is an dynamic, active, living, changing experience in relation with other people, at least one of whom has demonstrated him/her-self as having achieved a higher level of “education” (intellectual health). It cannot be packaged and ingested no matter how amazing technology becomes! Education and knowledge are organic, social, and experiential. Wiley doesn’t get it, which is why he reveals himself to have a substandard education and a lack of knowledge. He should be dismissed as nothing more than a peer wacko with Steven E Jones, formerly of BYU.
This comment makes a comparison of universities to newspapers, which not only need to change with the times to adapt to digital delivery systems but also to consider their supposedly unpopular partisan political positions as well.
Sounds like universities have the same problem that newspapers do, they don't like the truth, are left-leaning, and are institutions where socialist collude.
At the same time, there are different kinds of attention-getting calls for educational reform in higher education that are coming from Zeno Franco, who I've written about before in connection with his work on risk communication and who has also done some interesting work with Philip Zimbardo of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. Now Franco is putting forward his own interdisciplinary manifesto and group project at his Metaversity Project site. Those who know Clark Kerr's work on how the "university" is really a "multiversity" may find Franco's definitional work particularly interesting.
This is my talk from a campus forum on electronic educational environments and hybrid learning in which I talk about teaching with teleconferencing, online video, and Second Life. The entire forum is here.
This wrap up of educational ventures in Second Life was spotted by Patrick Coppock. It has some interesting rhetorical features in that it uses the trope of the "digital generation," which many now question, to make its argument for distance learning.
