digital digs

tipping the intellectual climate

I keep returning to this issue, intellectual climate, as it is closely related to pragmatic professional concerns or at least premises: that a successful professional writing program may rely upon generating a campus culture more open to, and interested in, writing. And, as the post title suggests, I've been thinking about Gladwell's "tipping point" concept.

Generally, I think we, as academics, look at problems like "intellectual climate" or WAC as caused by systemic conditions (i.e. the way certain types of crime are a product of poverty, racism, etc.). The tipping point theory does not deny this but elaborates upon it, suggesting that while large scale environmental conditions, as well as genetic predispositions, certainly shape our behavior, sometimes seemingly minor details can make the difference between having a predisposition toward a certain behavior and actually acting out that behavior.

So let's say that one wanted to improved the intellectual/writing culture on a campus. That's a very vague goal (kind of like "winning the war in Iraq"). It's certainly an issue of attitude toward, and engagement in, the intellectual opportunities available on campus, both in and out of the curriculum. You would have to think about how you would want to measure the success of any activities. If there's one thing Gladwell asserts, its that one needs to test and measure one's hypotheses b/c the answer is rarely what one imagines it will be. That said, here are some guesses based on the principles in his text.

1. "Law of the few" suggests that certain people in any community are more important for spreading messages than others. Gladwell terms these people Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. I won't go into that, but basically it means that if you want to spread a message and change behaviors among students, then you need to identify key students who will spread the message for you. Fortunately, these people are usually not too hard to find. There are already popular activites on campus and these folks are likely to be in the midst of these spreading information.

Even more generally though...if you want to change the culture of students on campus, then students obviously need to be full partners in that.

2. "Power of Context:" there are two points here. The first is that changes in seemingly minor environmental things can quickly change peoples' attitudes. The second is the importance of working with relatively small groups of people. On our campus, here's a couple minor changes we could make.

a. Really focus on the newspaper and literary magazine. If the College poured some resources into these organs for student publication, it might send a message that the institution was really serious about student writing. (again these are just hypotheses; they'd have to be tested.)
b. Redesign the College home page to announce events and link to featured pieces of student (and faculty) writing (every lab computer has the home page set up as the default when the browser opens).
c. Rather than trying to motivate the entire campus, break the student body down into groups of 100-150 (Gladwell provides evidence as to why groups larger than 150 cannot cohere). This could be done through the dorms, but those associations seem arbitrary to me. What makes a little more sense is working through departments and first-year learning communities (the latter b/c first-year students may not have majors and are likely to not be taking major-specific courses even if they do). Many departments at Cortland fall into this number range. Some departments would have to be grouped together. A few would have to find some internal division. However, the idea would be to try to work on building intellectual communities within these groups rather than trying to do it across the campus.

3. "Sticky Messages:" here is where testing your message is paramount. So let's say I take up point c. above and focus just on undergrads majoring in English. There are around 150 active students in our three majors. I'm going to assume they share some common characteristics, such as some interest and facility in reading and writing. Of course they are also quite diverse, but perhaps no more diverse than a plant with 150 employees working in manufacturing, R&D, sales, marketing, etc.

My general goal is to improve intellectual climate, and I've decided that one tangible way I can do that, especially among English majors, is to get them writing, publishing and performing their works, and responding to one another's texts. My hypothesis is that if I can change the "writing context," then I can perhaps tip our students into new writing practices, which will in turn contribute to shifting the intellectual climate of the campus.

A modest budget is necessary here, but part of Gladwell's point is that these strategies do not require a tremendous amount of money to carry out. So for example, let's say I was producing

• a monthly literary magazine produced both in print and online
• a modest monthly writing prize related to the magazine
• a link on the home page to the winner's piece
• a monthly reading

While all the College students could participate, my idea would be to focus on the 150 English majors. My goal would be to have each student submit something every semester. While we couldn't afford to put it all in print, we could publish online everything we found acceptable.

Now, the thing is, aside from the home page link, we already do these things...sort of. We have an annual literary magazine. We usually have one reading each semester. We have a writing prize, each semester I think. I suppose my thinking here is that these practices haven't tipped our community because a)they are too infrequent and b)they seek to address a campus-wide community.

If we focus in on (non Gen-Ed) English classes and English majors in particular, then presumably everyone will know most of the people involved. Writing for the magazine, publishing the magazine, and going to readings become intellectual, community-building activities among a group of people who basically know one another, at least as acquaintances.

We would build some of the writing, editing, and publishing activities into coursework, but part of it would also come out of student group activity, as it already does with our Cortland Writers Assoc.

Well, anyway, this post has gone on long enough.

goodness me, could this be industrial disease?

A recent story on

A couple of months ago, I was writing about the geospatial web and the potential shift toward a localized, topographical web rhetoric. Underlying the powerful experience of powerful geospatial applications, like Google Maps is an approach to web design termed AJAX (asynchronous javascript +XML). Basically, AJAX allows for a smoother user experience by not requiring the user to wait while a server handles each user request and refreshes the page. It's not new technology, but rather a new way of combining existing technologies.

Undoubtedly there are other ways of making this happen, Flash, for example, or desktop applications. So what makes AJAX interesting? Primarily that it works now and that it works well across browsers. However, as designer Jesse James Garrett (who coined the term) writes,

Proprietary solutions are never as compelling for Web designers as open standards are. Web designers are passionate about the Web as a medium, and that medium doesn’t belong to any technology provider.
It’s something that all of us, working together, are helping to build. For many Web designers and developers, crafting a new medium is what attracted them to the Web, and what keeps them engaged with the Web regardless of the ebb and flow of stock markets. Technologies that don’t work on a Web-wide scale are, by definition, not participants in this process.

Perhaps. And if so, it is an interesting example of how cultural values shape and are shaped by technological developments. As the Open Source argument goes, if we want a web that supports an open and free culture, then the technological mechanisms that support the web will need to be open and "free." I put "free" under quotes here because, as Lessig points out, it's not free as in "free beer." We're not talking about the abolition of property here.

However, even more than that, I am interested in understanding the rhetorical impact of a technopractice like AJAX, including its associated cultural values. Clearly, the purpose of this strategy is to create a more seamless user experience that is still interwoven with standard web functions (unlike Flash, which just sits on/in a web page, even when it does call upon an external database). All that's great, but at the same time I worry if this increasing level of sophistication will make it harder or easier for the average end user to participate as a producer of new media. In a way, I can see how it should make things easier--how AJAX might assist building sites like Blogger or Flickr. On the other hand, it might also lead to making the web more of a menu driven/multiple choice experience.

 

Karen has asked me to talk a little about RSS with her class today, so I'm going to put down a few links to that end.

Wikipedia on RSS

Some individuals you might be interested in related to RSS:

Aaron Swartz
Dave Winer

Some applications of RSS

Flickr.com
del.icio.us
FeedBurner

RSS search engines

Technorati
Google Blogsearch (Beta)

Two cool blogs

Boing-boing
Rocket Boom

Two other things to note:

Creative Commons
Google Current

The mysterious and frustrating neovox continues to motor along. Last year we published some 400 articles, so that's an accomplishment. However, it seems to me that the idea has a tremendous amount of potential (this is like a curse word around these parts). Student-citizen journalism. All the tools are there for students to write, design, podcast, vlog, whatever.

I see neovox as a site where we "should" easily be able to produce a daily podcast, including a weekly vlog, along with multiple informal daily posts. Then we can also produce some more polished work, some more complex multimedia and so forth.

I feel like I've been waiting for students to just take up the tools and claim a voice for themselves. But it just seems like they are collectively lost. Now this relates to my last post about intellectual climate. I think this type of activity is the pedagogical/cultural answer. I don't want to shape what neovox is going to become in terms of content. I just hope its interesting. I know that it can be. Obviously though, it is not enough to hold the door open.

And this is not about blaming students. Thinking creatively and taking risks are probably not habits that have been nurtured in their education. On the contrary, most students have been adequately rewarded for playing it safe and putting forth minimal effort. Arguably these are the cultural habits that are desirable in a compliant corporate professional (despite all the hype to the contrary).

So perhaps I will give some shape to our these activities. For example

• Daily podcasts (M-F) with recurring themes. Mon: students read creative work. Tues: local music scene. Wed: pop culture (sports/movies/tv). Thurs: "serious" news/issue student roundtable. Fri: video (question of the week/"man on the street" interviews).
• Daily blogs: three blog posts every day. One on our monthly theme, one on a top news event of the day, and one on one of our other sections (rotating through the week). It's primarily a matter of sifting through the news and blog sites and reporting back (of course with some style thrown in).
• Monthly magazine: with more complex multimedia and more in-depth articles and creative work. The idea is that the daily work will feed into the more sustained pieces.

How many students do you need to make it run assuming that each student is getting three credits for participating (about 9 hours of work/week)? Well, you need 3-4 students doing the podcasting, assuming the podcasts are in the 3-5 minute range. Another 3-4 students doing the daily blogs. And just to keep it symmetrical, 3-4 students concentrating on the multimedia for the monthly magazine.

In addition to this, we've got around 50-60 students writing 2-3 articles each in various courses that will be contributed in the various sections and in the monthly magazine. We also have contributors from our international partners. We can add 2-3 student editors to coordinate that business, including our lead designer.

All told, the core staff of the magazine would be 10-15. I think if it got much beyond 20 it would be too large. That said, many students could potentially submit work for publication. We could start to extend beyond this format, but right now this is ambitious enough.

Seymour Hersh was on Cortland's campus on Tuesday. The day's events were well-attended, and Hersh provided his audience with a unique and powerful perspective on Iraq and other matters, as you might expect. The talk was part of a college-wide effort to improve "intellectual climate" (a topic I think I've written on here before).

No doubt improving intellectual climate is an unenviable task. I'm really not sure how you do it as I'm not really sure how to define the problem. Basically, there is a perception, on the part of faculty and administrators, that students are not engaged in important political and cultural issues. At least for faculty, I imagine that most of this perception is based upon observation in the classroom. I'm not pointing this out to suggest that the perception is wrong; it's just interesting to connect disengagement in the classroom with intellectual disengagement.

I think about this in terms of my own experience. I was bored probably 95% of the time I spent in a classroom as a student K-Grad school. Maybe more. Grad school the boredom ratio was probably 70%, so that brought the overall score down a little. I was never much of a joiner; I'm still not. One of the most appealing things for me about being an academic is that generally I'm working on my own. I don't think I'm alone in higher education in feeling that way. So I didn't much care for school; I didn't attend class very often, and when I did I wasn't "engaged;" I didn't join student groups or "get involved." Maybe I missed out...who knows. That's not the point. I'm not holding myself out as a model either. My point is that my lack of engagement in the institutional practices that are meant to stimulate (or is that simulate?) intellectual behavior did not mean that I wasn't intellectual.

Then I think about that internet-thing. There's more intellectual activity going on there that interests me, more interesting folks for me to interact with if I wish, than I could ever find on campus. Obviously there was a time when the campus was a necessary physical location for intellectual behavior. The books and journals were there. All the intellectuals that you might have daily contact with worked there.

In short, the campus is no longer necessary as a physical site for intellectual behavior and increasingly cannot compete with the broader, distributed resources of virtual communities. When you factor in the corporate-administrative-bureaucratic shape of higher education, the campus does become more plainly what it always fundamentally was: a housing and processing center for the production of professional workers. And who would want to spend any more time at such a place than one absolutely had to?

Now some will tell you that face-to-face experience still counts for something. And I am one of those people. It's not a matter of better or worse, just materially different. The campus cannot compete with the net, but it can be otherwise. That is, it can offer what the web cannot in its immediacy of experience.

In my view, while singular events like the Hersh talk are useful, fundamentally what you need to do to improve intellectual climate is have students practice intellectual behavior on a regular basis. That is, we need them to write and talk to one another every day about cultural issues that concern them, and approach these topics drawing on the intellectual practices they learn in school.

If only there were a way that we could get students together in relatively small groups (say 20 or 30 or so) and meet a couple times a week to discuss intellectual issues....

Yes, so the point is that it is a failure of pedagogy and curriculum, which is not to place the blame solely on myself or my colleagues. We clearly live in a society that does not value intellectual habits. Broadly speaking, most Americans, including college students, have little interest in being intellectual. Given that situation, academics need to meet students where they are. Unfortunately, I think, as a group, academics are too focused on content/information and the curriculum is overly structured. The result is that students play a very small role in their own education.

No answers today. I've gone on long enough. The bottomline, IMHO, is that while the "problem" of intellectual climate may be endemic to the culture at large, a college's best answer to this challenge lies in a careful examination of its core practices and institutional structures.

One of my new colleagues, Karen Stearns, has asked me to address her class of English Education majors on the topic of blogging, specifically on some of the things I do with blogs here and in my courses. In thinking about that, I thought I would write a little about my own perspective on what the upcoming English high school teacher should know about new media.

A couple of caveats, though... I'm not trying to be comprehensive; I'm just throwing out some ideas. NCATE and all those other state agencies have the job of being comprehensive. Nor am I suggesting our program should necessarily be doing these things or that they aren't doing these things or anything like that. These teacher preparation programs have to keep a lot of balls in the air, and I'm glad its not my job to make sure it happens.

So with all that in mind, here are my thoughts:

1. First, a little reality check. We are in the midst of a tremendous economic and cultural revolution regarding information. Computers are everywhere. They will continue to expand in their use as we approach ubiquitous computing, though paradoxically this expansion occurs while the digital divide grows more severe (it's getting harder to catch up and stay current). In this context, it is, in my view, undeniable that over the next 20-30 years high school teachers' jobs will be completely redefined by information technology, just as public education was largely defined by industrial culture and technology in the 20th century. That said, I don't see technology as deterministic; our fates are not sealed. However, in order to play a role in shaping the teaching profession and its technology over the coming decades, one will need a thorough understanding of technology, confidence in using and teaching with technology, and a critical insight into the role of technology in culture.
   
   A teacher preparation program cannot provide that, but it cannot open the door by graduating teachers who are prepared to enter into such a project.
2. How is such a task acheived? Two primary ways. First, through a technology intensive course or series of courses. Though many academics view students today as technologically savvy, that's really not the case, at least not in my experience. Many students are skilled consumers of new media (e.g. cell phones, mp3 players, video games, internet, etc.) but they know little of producing  with new media or really using a computer. An intensive course (or courses) introduces students to producing web pages, video, images, sound, and using computers and networks to communicate.
   
   Second, there must be an infusion of technology. That means that all of the faculty need to be at least as well-trained with technology as their students (n.b. actually its kind of strange, can you see this happening in literary studies...the students are required to take Chaucer; there's a Chaucer expert to teach the course; but none of the othe faculty had ever studied Chaucer--that's rought analogous to the situation in many English departments regarding new media). Infusion means that (nearly) all the courses in the program include new media. Faculty have websites, create new media objects for instructional purposes, use online discussions, assign new media projects for their students to complete, etc. I'm not suggesting that new media need to completely supplant traditional teaching methods (though that will likely happen over the next few decades). I'm just suggesting that some portion of the course needs to function through new media. This has two key effects. First, it gives students an opportunity to make use of the new media skills they learn in their intensive course. Second, they get to see how faculty make use of technology in teaching English.
3. Third and finally, new media needs to become a visible part of an intellectual life. Students need to see their professors considering technology, experimenting and evaluating technology, and ultimately making choices about what technologies to incorporate into their professional lives. It is a difficult choice for faculty to make. If one has been teaching 10 or 20 years without technology, doing one's research and fulfilling one's other professional duties without much technology (besides maybe word processing, e-mail, and a litte web browsing), then it becomes hard to make a choice to do otherwise. I sometimes find it frustrating myself to try to keep up with this blog (see the dearth of posts over the summer) and remain current with all this other business. I guess partly this blog is making visible my work with new media--philosophically, pedagogically, and technically.

In any case, next Friday, when I'm speaking with these students about this topic, I'm going to mention these three points as challenges for them in their professional careers. Having taught and advised these English Education students, I know many of them enter into the profession out of a "love of literature" (not unlike many literary studies professions). It is not a passion I share (I have an intellectual curiosity for some literature but not a love). And yet, the job of the high school English teacher is more about literacy than literature and increasingly that literacy will be a technological literacy.

Prepaing students to work in that environmnet, to carry forward the best attributes of our disciplinary past into our disciplinary future (if there is to be one)--that is our task.

Four years on, another September tragedy. This month our NeoVox student writers are addressing the theme of "the war on/of/in/about terror." Next month's theme is "mother nature as Medea," which originally came about in relation to the tsunami disaster, but now will obviously also include Katrina. Though clearly very different events, 9/11 and Katrina have drawn some comparisons. One such comparison notes that following 9/11 there was a united sense of purpose in the US, whereas Katrina seems to have generated partisan opinions. As Jon Stewart noted in his regular montage of neo-con rhetoric, the President has accused his critics of playing the "blame game" at a time when we need to be focused on relief efforts.

Perhaps...though quite obviously the events of 9/11 were immediately followed by the "blame game" (which was not difficult since bin Laden took responsibilty). Our sense of unity--which I don't believe was as complete as it was made out to be by government and media--was grounded on our ability to identify a scapegoat (albeit a culpable scapegoat), an outsider on whom we could direct our grief and anger. The hurricane offers us no such convenient figures. As such, we are forced to look at ourselves. And though the Washington neocons might downplay their critics as playing a game, they have not been reluctant to pass the blame and responsibility onto local and state officials. As such, not surprisingly, their protestations regarding the "blame game" are undone by their own spin.

It seems to me that the bottom line is that thousands of people have died. Many of those deaths, while unfortunate, were likely unavoidable. We are not gods, despite our technological hubris, and it was a storm unlike any we have seen before in this area. That said, those who died from the failure of the levees and those who died because relief efforts came to late, those deaths we must mourn as a result of social failures.

The point, at least from my perspective, is not so much to blame but to analyze these social failures. Much as with 9/11, we will be happy to identify a guilty party and punish that party without recognizing our own roles in the way these catastrophes unfolded. This isn't an issue of blaming the victims, of holding the dead of 9/11 responsible for their own deaths or of blaming the dead in New Orleans for not heeding evacuation calls or whatever. When I write our roles, I mean the rest of us.

How many of these, mostly poor, victims of Katrina were already drowning in our society? How many more will drown in their struggles as refugees, as the evacuees are now being called? How many others around our country are drowning under similar circumstances? How many other people in America live under such risky conditions with limited resources with similar vulnerabilities? Certainly category four hurricances that kill thousands are (hopefully) a once in a generation experience, but there are smaller, metaphorical storms that destroy hundreds of lives everyday across this nation.

This is the point I think many are trying to make in what is being called the blame game. Sure some are trying to take political advantage, just as the neocon's made political advantage out of the tragedy of 9/11. That's partisan politics in this country; both sides do it. But if we can set aside this gesturing for a moment, perhaps we can see what this event tells us about the underlying structure of our society and the way our priorities and ideologies shape the unfolding of lived, material experience.

ajax and the shifting rhetoric of user interaction

A couple of months ago, I was writing about the geospatial web and the potential shift toward a localized, topographical web rhetoric. Underlying the powerful experience of powerful geospatial applications, like Google Maps is an approach to web design termed AJAX (asynchronous javascript +XML). Basically, AJAX allows for a smoother user experience by not requiring the user to wait while a server handles each user request and refreshes the page. It's not new technology, but rather a new way of combining existing technologies.

Undoubtedly there are other ways of making this happen, Flash, for example, or desktop applications. So what makes AJAX interesting? Primarily that it works now and that it works well across browsers. However, as designer Jesse James Garrett (who coined the term) writes,

Proprietary solutions are never as compelling for Web designers as open standards are. Web designers are passionate about the Web as a medium, and that medium doesn’t belong to any technology provider.
It’s something that all of us, working together, are helping to build. For many Web designers and developers, crafting a new medium is what attracted them to the Web, and what keeps them engaged with the Web regardless of the ebb and flow of stock markets. Technologies that don’t work on a Web-wide scale are, by definition, not participants in this process.

Perhaps. And if so, it is an interesting example of how cultural values shape and are shaped by technological developments. As the Open Source argument goes, if we want a web that supports an open and free culture, then the technological mechanisms that support the web will need to be open and "free." I put "free" under quotes here because, as Lessig points out, it's not free as in "free beer." We're not talking about the abolition of property here.

However, even more than that, I am interested in understanding the rhetorical impact of a technopractice like AJAX, including its associated cultural values. Clearly, the purpose of this strategy is to create a more seamless user experience that is still interwoven with standard web functions (unlike Flash, which just sits on/in a web page, even when it does call upon an external database). All that's great, but at the same time I worry if this increasing level of sophistication will make it harder or easier for the average end user to participate as a producer of new media. In a way, I can see how it should make things easier--how AJAX might assist building sites like Blogger or Flickr. On the other hand, it might also lead to making the web more of a menu driven/multiple choice experience.

 

Some notes for ENG 307

Karen has asked me to talk a little about RSS with her class today, so I'm going to put down a few links to that end.

Wikipedia on RSS

Some individuals you might be interested in related to RSS:

Aaron Swartz
Dave Winer

Some applications of RSS

Flickr.com
del.icio.us
FeedBurner

RSS search engines

Technorati
Google Blogsearch (Beta)

Two cool blogs

Boing-boing
Rocket Boom

Two other things to note:

Creative Commons
Google Current

plans for neovox

The mysterious and frustrating neovox continues to motor along. Last year we published some 400 articles, so that's an accomplishment. However, it seems to me that the idea has a tremendous amount of potential (this is like a curse word around these parts). Student-citizen journalism. All the tools are there for students to write, design, podcast, vlog, whatever.

I see neovox as a site where we "should" easily be able to produce a daily podcast, including a weekly vlog, along with multiple informal daily posts. Then we can also produce some more polished work, some more complex multimedia and so forth.

I feel like I've been waiting for students to just take up the tools and claim a voice for themselves. But it just seems like they are collectively lost. Now this relates to my last post about intellectual climate. I think this type of activity is the pedagogical/cultural answer. I don't want to shape what neovox is going to become in terms of content. I just hope its interesting. I know that it can be. Obviously though, it is not enough to hold the door open.

And this is not about blaming students. Thinking creatively and taking risks are probably not habits that have been nurtured in their education. On the contrary, most students have been adequately rewarded for playing it safe and putting forth minimal effort. Arguably these are the cultural habits that are desirable in a compliant corporate professional (despite all the hype to the contrary).

So perhaps I will give some shape to our these activities. For example

• Daily podcasts (M-F) with recurring themes. Mon: students read creative work. Tues: local music scene. Wed: pop culture (sports/movies/tv). Thurs: "serious" news/issue student roundtable. Fri: video (question of the week/"man on the street" interviews).
• Daily blogs: three blog posts every day. One on our monthly theme, one on a top news event of the day, and one on one of our other sections (rotating through the week). It's primarily a matter of sifting through the news and blog sites and reporting back (of course with some style thrown in).
• Monthly magazine: with more complex multimedia and more in-depth articles and creative work. The idea is that the daily work will feed into the more sustained pieces.

How many students do you need to make it run assuming that each student is getting three credits for participating (about 9 hours of work/week)? Well, you need 3-4 students doing the podcasting, assuming the podcasts are in the 3-5 minute range. Another 3-4 students doing the daily blogs. And just to keep it symmetrical, 3-4 students concentrating on the multimedia for the monthly magazine.

In addition to this, we've got around 50-60 students writing 2-3 articles each in various courses that will be contributed in the various sections and in the monthly magazine. We also have contributors from our international partners. We can add 2-3 student editors to coordinate that business, including our lead designer.

All told, the core staff of the magazine would be 10-15. I think if it got much beyond 20 it would be too large. That said, many students could potentially submit work for publication. We could start to extend beyond this format, but right now this is ambitious enough.

Intellectual Climate

Seymour Hersh was on Cortland's campus on Tuesday. The day's events were well-attended, and Hersh provided his audience with a unique and powerful perspective on Iraq and other matters, as you might expect. The talk was part of a college-wide effort to improve "intellectual climate" (a topic I think I've written on here before).

No doubt improving intellectual climate is an unenviable task. I'm really not sure how you do it as I'm not really sure how to define the problem. Basically, there is a perception, on the part of faculty and administrators, that students are not engaged in important political and cultural issues. At least for faculty, I imagine that most of this perception is based upon observation in the classroom. I'm not pointing this out to suggest that the perception is wrong; it's just interesting to connect disengagement in the classroom with intellectual disengagement.

I think about this in terms of my own experience. I was bored probably 95% of the time I spent in a classroom as a student K-Grad school. Maybe more. Grad school the boredom ratio was probably 70%, so that brought the overall score down a little. I was never much of a joiner; I'm still not. One of the most appealing things for me about being an academic is that generally I'm working on my own. I don't think I'm alone in higher education in feeling that way. So I didn't much care for school; I didn't attend class very often, and when I did I wasn't "engaged;" I didn't join student groups or "get involved." Maybe I missed out...who knows. That's not the point. I'm not holding myself out as a model either. My point is that my lack of engagement in the institutional practices that are meant to stimulate (or is that simulate?) intellectual behavior did not mean that I wasn't intellectual.

Then I think about that internet-thing. There's more intellectual activity going on there that interests me, more interesting folks for me to interact with if I wish, than I could ever find on campus. Obviously there was a time when the campus was a necessary physical location for intellectual behavior. The books and journals were there. All the intellectuals that you might have daily contact with worked there.

In short, the campus is no longer necessary as a physical site for intellectual behavior and increasingly cannot compete with the broader, distributed resources of virtual communities. When you factor in the corporate-administrative-bureaucratic shape of higher education, the campus does become more plainly what it always fundamentally was: a housing and processing center for the production of professional workers. And who would want to spend any more time at such a place than one absolutely had to?

Now some will tell you that face-to-face experience still counts for something. And I am one of those people. It's not a matter of better or worse, just materially different. The campus cannot compete with the net, but it can be otherwise. That is, it can offer what the web cannot in its immediacy of experience.

In my view, while singular events like the Hersh talk are useful, fundamentally what you need to do to improve intellectual climate is have students practice intellectual behavior on a regular basis. That is, we need them to write and talk to one another every day about cultural issues that concern them, and approach these topics drawing on the intellectual practices they learn in school.

If only there were a way that we could get students together in relatively small groups (say 20 or 30 or so) and meet a couple times a week to discuss intellectual issues....

Yes, so the point is that it is a failure of pedagogy and curriculum, which is not to place the blame solely on myself or my colleagues. We clearly live in a society that does not value intellectual habits. Broadly speaking, most Americans, including college students, have little interest in being intellectual. Given that situation, academics need to meet students where they are. Unfortunately, I think, as a group, academics are too focused on content/information and the curriculum is overly structured. The result is that students play a very small role in their own education.

No answers today. I've gone on long enough. The bottomline, IMHO, is that while the "problem" of intellectual climate may be endemic to the culture at large, a college's best answer to this challenge lies in a careful examination of its core practices and institutional structures.

new media in English education

One of my new colleagues, Karen Stearns, has asked me to address her class of English Education majors on the topic of blogging, specifically on some of the things I do with blogs here and in my courses. In thinking about that, I thought I would write a little about my own perspective on what the upcoming English high school teacher should know about new media.

A couple of caveats, though... I'm not trying to be comprehensive; I'm just throwing out some ideas. NCATE and all those other state agencies have the job of being comprehensive. Nor am I suggesting our program should necessarily be doing these things or that they aren't doing these things or anything like that. These teacher preparation programs have to keep a lot of balls in the air, and I'm glad its not my job to make sure it happens.

So with all that in mind, here are my thoughts:

1. First, a little reality check. We are in the midst of a tremendous economic and cultural revolution regarding information. Computers are everywhere. They will continue to expand in their use as we approach ubiquitous computing, though paradoxically this expansion occurs while the digital divide grows more severe (it's getting harder to catch up and stay current). In this context, it is, in my view, undeniable that over the next 20-30 years high school teachers' jobs will be completely redefined by information technology, just as public education was largely defined by industrial culture and technology in the 20th century. That said, I don't see technology as deterministic; our fates are not sealed. However, in order to play a role in shaping the teaching profession and its technology over the coming decades, one will need a thorough understanding of technology, confidence in using and teaching with technology, and a critical insight into the role of technology in culture.
   
   A teacher preparation program cannot provide that, but it cannot open the door by graduating teachers who are prepared to enter into such a project.
2. How is such a task acheived? Two primary ways. First, through a technology intensive course or series of courses. Though many academics view students today as technologically savvy, that's really not the case, at least not in my experience. Many students are skilled consumers of new media (e.g. cell phones, mp3 players, video games, internet, etc.) but they know little of producing  with new media or really using a computer. An intensive course (or courses) introduces students to producing web pages, video, images, sound, and using computers and networks to communicate.
   
   Second, there must be an infusion of technology. That means that all of the faculty need to be at least as well-trained with technology as their students (n.b. actually its kind of strange, can you see this happening in literary studies...the students are required to take Chaucer; there's a Chaucer expert to teach the course; but none of the othe faculty had ever studied Chaucer--that's rought analogous to the situation in many English departments regarding new media). Infusion means that (nearly) all the courses in the program include new media. Faculty have websites, create new media objects for instructional purposes, use online discussions, assign new media projects for their students to complete, etc. I'm not suggesting that new media need to completely supplant traditional teaching methods (though that will likely happen over the next few decades). I'm just suggesting that some portion of the course needs to function through new media. This has two key effects. First, it gives students an opportunity to make use of the new media skills they learn in their intensive course. Second, they get to see how faculty make use of technology in teaching English.
3. Third and finally, new media needs to become a visible part of an intellectual life. Students need to see their professors considering technology, experimenting and evaluating technology, and ultimately making choices about what technologies to incorporate into their professional lives. It is a difficult choice for faculty to make. If one has been teaching 10 or 20 years without technology, doing one's research and fulfilling one's other professional duties without much technology (besides maybe word processing, e-mail, and a litte web browsing), then it becomes hard to make a choice to do otherwise. I sometimes find it frustrating myself to try to keep up with this blog (see the dearth of posts over the summer) and remain current with all this other business. I guess partly this blog is making visible my work with new media--philosophically, pedagogically, and technically.

In any case, next Friday, when I'm speaking with these students about this topic, I'm going to mention these three points as challenges for them in their professional careers. Having taught and advised these English Education students, I know many of them enter into the profession out of a "love of literature" (not unlike many literary studies professions). It is not a passion I share (I have an intellectual curiosity for some literature but not a love). And yet, the job of the high school English teacher is more about literacy than literature and increasingly that literacy will be a technological literacy.

Prepaing students to work in that environmnet, to carry forward the best attributes of our disciplinary past into our disciplinary future (if there is to be one)--that is our task.

the "blame game"

Four years on, another September tragedy. This month our NeoVox student writers are addressing the theme of "the war on/of/in/about terror." Next month's theme is "mother nature as Medea," which originally came about in relation to the tsunami disaster, but now will obviously also include Katrina. Though clearly very different events, 9/11 and Katrina have drawn some comparisons. One such comparison notes that following 9/11 there was a united sense of purpose in the US, whereas Katrina seems to have generated partisan opinions. As Jon Stewart noted in his regular montage of neo-con rhetoric, the President has accused his critics of playing the "blame game" at a time when we need to be focused on relief efforts.

Perhaps...though quite obviously the events of 9/11 were immediately followed by the "blame game" (which was not difficult since bin Laden took responsibilty). Our sense of unity--which I don't believe was as complete as it was made out to be by government and media--was grounded on our ability to identify a scapegoat (albeit a culpable scapegoat), an outsider on whom we could direct our grief and anger. The hurricane offers us no such convenient figures. As such, we are forced to look at ourselves. And though the Washington neocons might downplay their critics as playing a game, they have not been reluctant to pass the blame and responsibility onto local and state officials. As such, not surprisingly, their protestations regarding the "blame game" are undone by their own spin.

It seems to me that the bottom line is that thousands of people have died. Many of those deaths, while unfortunate, were likely unavoidable. We are not gods, despite our technological hubris, and it was a storm unlike any we have seen before in this area. That said, those who died from the failure of the levees and those who died because relief efforts came to late, those deaths we must mourn as a result of social failures.

The point, at least from my perspective, is not so much to blame but to analyze these social failures. Much as with 9/11, we will be happy to identify a guilty party and punish that party without recognizing our own roles in the way these catastrophes unfolded. This isn't an issue of blaming the victims, of holding the dead of 9/11 responsible for their own deaths or of blaming the dead in New Orleans for not heeding evacuation calls or whatever. When I write our roles, I mean the rest of us.

How many of these, mostly poor, victims of Katrina were already drowning in our society? How many more will drown in their struggles as refugees, as the evacuees are now being called? How many others around our country are drowning under similar circumstances? How many other people in America live under such risky conditions with limited resources with similar vulnerabilities? Certainly category four hurricances that kill thousands are (hopefully) a once in a generation experience, but there are smaller, metaphorical storms that destroy hundreds of lives everyday across this nation.

This is the point I think many are trying to make in what is being called the blame game. Sure some are trying to take political advantage, just as the neocon's made political advantage out of the tragedy of 9/11. That's partisan politics in this country; both sides do it. But if we can set aside this gesturing for a moment, perhaps we can see what this event tells us about the underlying structure of our society and the way our priorities and ideologies shape the unfolding of lived, material experience.