digital digs

Manifest Technologies, Humanists and the "if only"

Cathy Davidson has an interesting post on HASTAC in which she begins to lay out "A Manifesto for Technology in the Age of the Humanities (if only Humanisits will claim our Age)." Yes, it's a big IF. But here she lays out something I think is important:

First, the goal of the humanities is to think through what it means to be human. That is a "universal" question with many specific local and ontological meanings and applications that need to be thought through in all ways, from the philosophical, aesthetic, spiritual, linguistic, political, and cultural to the neuroscientific, biological,demographic, and environmental. THAT is Big Picture Humanities.

And then later in her post,

Our HASTAC mission is to understand what it means to be human in the present moment and to work collaboratively with others who share this goal to come up with the most complex and interesting and engaged answers (hardly stable or final ones) that help make our students more informed and astute students of a complex world.

Where does technology fit in? Not to sound like a broken record, but it is the HASTAC credo to be prosumers, consumers and producers. Customizers (all hail, Web 2.0).   To develop and apply new technologies to education, life and society, while also thinking critically, culturally, and historically about the meaning of new technologies in learning, life, and society.

Looking at this big picture, obviously what it means to be human is changing in significant ways. We are accountable for our actions on a global scale in a way we have never realized before. That demands a shift in ethos that is difficult to wrap one's mind about. We also have access to media through a global network and significant computational power, unthinkable even a generation ago, sitting here right under the keys on my laptop. It's not that all humanists should be "technology experts," but if we recognize books as technologies then perhaps we are. Humanists have always been prosumers when it came to books: consumers and producers, customizers.

I would say that there is more uncertainty about what it means to be human than there was a quarter century ago, and as such, this should be an "Age of the Humanities." Davidson notes that our job is "to come up with the most complex and interesting and engaged answers (hardly stable or final ones)." The question, for me, is can we do that? Are we willing to give up the largely stable answers to the question of what it means to be human that define the disciplinary paradigms of the humanities?

Davidson is off to speak to the NEH about this. I might ask the NEH the same question. I wouldn't even bother looking to the NEH to support the kind of work I do with technology. I don't think they could manage to see what I am doing as being "humanistic." In my view, the Humanities can either die with the outmoded notion of humanity from which it emerged or it can be reborn with renewed currency by opening itself to the mutations which humanity is undergoing.

Second Thoughts on Second Life?

As chic as it can be to jump on the bandwagon of a new technology, there is an equal and opposite chic reaction for skepticism. So what's a boy to do?

From Smart Mobs, I picked up this Forbes article in which the consulting firm Gartner, Inc offers advice to companies about how to proceed with caution. Here is the gist of it:

By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a "second life," but not necessarily in Second Life, according to Gartner, Inc.

The second part certainly makes a lot of sense. All one has to do is think back to the birth of the 2-D web. Tim Berners-Lee essentially gave away his invention of the web. The web is the way it is today largely b/c of open source and common standards in HTML, protocols, and all that business that goes on under the hood of the Internet. One of the coolest things about Second Life is that everything that is there has been built by users, so it shares that with the web. But it seems to me that if SL were to expand to meet the point where 80% of users interacted in virtual worlds, it could only happen by opening up the system.

This is the really tricky part within our marketplace logic. Let's say you're Ford Motor Co. Sure you could have dealerships in SL where people could get a virtual look at new models and so on, just like you have a 2-D website now. But you don't want to have a dozen or hundred different sites in different virtual worlds with different standards etc, etc.  You could almost imagine a crippled web like that, right? One where each net community had proprietary standards.

How useless would that be?

On the other hand, no one is going to hand over the whole business to Linden Labs either, not anymore than one would hand over the browser business to Microsoft. So I suppose we'll see what happens.

Now that said, the basic concept of virtual worlds is very hot. Part of it is the 3-D, immersive experience I guess and all the activities from prosaic to kinky to kinky and prosaic that are possible there. However, what really interests me (and I don't think this is a stunning revelation here) is the potential of communication, collaboration, and networking.

An example? OK. In my class this semester, I might post a video or podcast or write something for my students to read. Though they are all interacting on the course sites, they have no real sense of interaction. So let's say that instead of watching a video on a browser on their desktop, now they are in SL, watching the same video on a screen in the environment. Yes, they are watching the same video, but now they are in a virtual room with the avatars of a couple classmates, watching it together. They can converse while watching the video. They can do nearly everything they might have done in the physical classroom.

Yes, this activity require real-time interaction. So the question might be, why not do it in a physical classroom? Why go to SL? Well, this post is getting long, so some of these questions will have to wait for another time. However, one obvious answer is the possibility of collaboration at a distance. Another answer is that we can broaden the times when synchronous collaboration might be possible. And a third possible answer is the SL might allow us to undertake activities not possible in RL. But that I really will have to address at another time.

SUNY Council on Writing Conference: Assessing Writing in an Age of Convergent Media Networks

Last week I presented at the SUNY Conference on Writing. What follows is roughly what you would have heard had you been there. I was very happy to the conversation that followed from our panel's presentations. Though I think my arguments raise some cause for worry or concern for most writing faculty, the response was thoughtful and interesting. Thanks to everyone who came.

co-learning and higher education

On Smart Mobs, Gerrit Visser employs the terms co-learning to describe a practice being articluated by James Corbett and Teemu Arina, which Corbett describes in the following way:

the kind of learning that takes place outside of educational institutions, outside of the campus, outside of the constraints of textbook and syllabus, where learning is achieved not for the purpose of grades or social standing, but because people want to learn something, together. Just like you and I are hoping to learn something about coworking, about the future of work, about working together as equals. Informal learning is learning together as equals.

Of course this is the kind of thing that Will Richardson and others in education have been talking about for a long time. Arguably it is an idealized version of basic constructivist learning principles. That said, few, if any, would argue practices such as this have been widely applied in classrooms. What's a little strange is that academics themselves often practice a kind of co-learning through the sharing of research. But that's about as close as it gets.

So doesn't/won't co-learning work on a campus. The answers suggested above are both structural and social: structural in the sense that the institution insists on certain practices that shut learners out of shaping their own education. For example, I'm supposed to order my books for next semester before students enroll. What if I wanted to wait and offer students the opportunity to have some input in the book order? Well that would upset some folks, but I guess tenure means never having to say you care, right? And that's just a minor example.

The other part is more interesting and maybe less obvious. Co-learners "want to learn something" and something in particular that brings them all together. Do college students want to learn something? Maybe... sure... why not? Can they name what it is they want to learn? In my experience, usually only in the most general sense: e.g., I want to learn to be a teacher. This isn't meant as a knock on college students, not really. In order to be able to name what you want/need to learn, you have to be out there doing something that creates an exigency for learning.

So this is why my colleagues and I often talk about curriculum in which students need to define their own learning goals and share those goals with others. Our job as both students and faculty is to develop a public community where we say "This is what we are doing and why we are doing it. If you think you might be interested in joining us, then come on in." Though I would never require my students to read my blog, I know some of them have on occassion, and I don't think it's a bad thing for them to see what I am working on and thinking about.

I do think this notion of learning without "social standing," learning "as equals" is somewhat curious and perhaps naive. Equality may work as a juridical concept, but in any social interaction someone always has the upper hand. Get a group of people together, online or FTF, and some will emerge as more expert, some will be more comfortable following other people's initiative, and so on. In a college setting, students are obviously paying to receive some guidance (even though, somewhat paradoxically, they sometimes reject or resent that guidance). I believe you could have an effective co-learning environment where some participants are leading the way and providing some direction for the community. In fact, it's hard to imagine preventing such structures from emerging.

The cost of Gen Ed and the long tail of course enrollment

I admit that the skeptical part of me wants to the think of general education as an atavism, as something that is more of a mechanism for managing registration than anything else. But let's say for a moment that we really thought general education was valuable or could be valuable.

Well, first off, the value would be relative to the cost. This is the point I was making in a post a few days back. Given the rising price of higher ed, at some point we begin to question whether or not general education is worth it. I mean at some point you'd ask whether or not the degree itself is worth it, but I'm assuming the price point for Gen Ed. is lower.

I'm not going to venture into the many limitations of general education today. Instead I want to consider a way to keep its costs low and maintain or increase its value. In Gen. Ed. one faces a curious kind of either/or situation. The basic premise of Gen Ed is that all students need a baseline education. You've got nearly 400,000 undergrads in the SUNY system all taking the same SUNY wide general education requirements.

For example, we have a "Humanities" requirement. One would assume there is something particular that students need to learn here that we require all our students to take a Humanities GE course. Hypothetically, 80,000 students could be taking the same Humanities course every year across SUNY. But that's not what happens. Humanities GE courses range from Art History to Theater to Philosophy to Literary Studies to Rhetoric and so on. I sincerely doubt these courses have much in common. They certainly do not have enough common that taking one course in the GE category would preclude a student from getting elective credit for taking another course in the category later. So whatever common material they share must be quite minimal.

So a general education is not really "general" at all. It's more like a taste or a slice of a bigger picture. I doubt that you could find much commonality between two SUNY students GE experiences. You would likely find the same degree of commonality between their purely elective courses.

But my point here is not to criticize GE, but instead to argue this potential "bug" is really a feature. What it means is that that we can identify a long tail of general education in which we can serve niche markets of students interests and make GE more relevant, if we assume that the point of GE is not to provide yet another layer of generic education. What's the difference between generic and general? Well, today I'm saying the difference is that generic education is offered without a sense of purpose or audience whereas a more niche-driven, general education can teach students how different disciplinary perspectives might be brought to bear productively upon issues that concern them.

The obvious example of this is Writing in the Disciplines, at least as it might be ideally conceived.  I actually prefer the idea of "writing in disciplinary professions," the difference being that you are learning about the genres in professions typically tied to a discipline rather than the highly specialized discourses of researchers in that discipline (which the vast majority of undergrads will never be).

But I digress. The long tail of general education would thus not focus on trying to cram all the students into a few GE sections. In some instances this might be made possible through online courses. For example, with nearly 400,000 SUNY students meeting the same GE requirements across the state, one could offer a GE of interest to only one in a thousand students and still have plenty of students interested in the course.

In short it's possible to be both general and customized. In doing so, you might make GE more relevant to rest of a student's education, which is what we are already trying to do with learning communities and so on. The question is really just about maximizing that. If we are going to continue to require GE and continue to raise the cost of GE, we're going to have to raise its value somehow.

contexts for independent media and other buskers

On Blogora Jim Brown discusses this story from the Washington Post about reknown violinist Joshua Bell being largely ignored during an experiment in which he busks in a DC metro station. The story tries to make sense of the results. As it explains, on one level we have this belief that truly beautiful art is universal and self-evident, that Bell's performance should have "soothed the savage breast" of morning commuters and the fact that it didn't is just evidence of our growing barbarism: pearls before swine and all that. On the other hand, as the Post article continues, the experiment forces us to recognize the importance of context for the way we understand and value aesthetic experiences. On Blogora, Jim points to a connection with Lanham's Economics of Attention, and I must agree: this is a fine example of how art is not simply an aesthetic experience but also a rhetorical one. The rhetorical situation in which one encounters media/art affects shapes that encounter.

This got me thinking about this in terms of independent media. Generally speaking, bloggers and such have much in common with everyday buskers. Do we imagine that a well-known author writing under a pseduonym on a free blogger account would fare any better than Joshua Bell? Maybe, over time. And maybe if Joshua Bell played anonymously in the same place every day for a couple months, a few people would recognize his talent, and word would get around. This is what independent media producers hope for: that their work goes viral.

On the one hand there's a pragmatic, rhetorical lesson to be learned here. To rephrase the old saying from real estate, the three most important things about media production are (rhetorical) situation, situation, and situation. It's really classical tactics that crosses every possible tactical situation from warfare to business to sports to polemics and so on. You want to choose your battlefield.

On the other hand, in the analysis of compositional practices, this is another reminder of the importance of the material contexts of any media practice. If Bell's aesthetic virtuosity is overdetermined by the context of the metro station, what chance does a student writer have in the overdetermined context of the classroom? And when I say this, I don't mean to leap immediately to ideology, but rather to suggest that an examination of the network of social-material-technological conditions that produce the rhetorical situation must be analyzed to understand that compositional practice. It is impossible for us to "just read the student's paper," just as it is impossible for DC commuters to just hear Bell's performance.

The high cost of general education

Yes, it's one of those recurring themes here. I was talking with a colleague yesterday; his daughter has gone through $92K at Yale in two years. I'm not sure if that's the whole thing or what they had to fork over after financial aid. Not exactly a surprise, but... ouch! At Cortland, I'd say you're looking at $15-16K/yr (approx $5,400 tuition, $5700 room, $3300 board, plus books and other fees), assuming your paying the whole load. Of course, nowadays they say the printed costs for a college are like the price sticker on a car lot: no one pays that.

I don't know. My kids are 6 and 7. And god knows what this will costs in a decade. But that's not exactly my point.

The Cortland GE program, basically like all the other SUNY schools and most other US colleges, is somewhere between 14-17 courses, depending on how much foreign language you need. So let's say it's easily three semesters of full time study. At Cortland, that's a comparatively reasonable $22-24K. You can probably pay less at a community college, but we're a good buy for a comprehensive college. In short, it's only going up from there (and for those that are keeping track, I can expect to pay double that when my kids go unless something changes).

Like most faculty of my ilk, I teach my fair share of GE. I understand the value of GE in theory.

It's just way too expensive! You could are that GE threatens the tenure system (doesn't everything?). Because we can't afford to have faculty deliver all this GE, we hire contingent faculty to do so. Even then, it's still to expensive and getting more expensive all the time.

If you're an academic parent with an elementary school kid, think about the following. You know your salary. Would you rather spend $120K to send your kid to the state university and have your kid spend three semesters sitting in classes with 50 or 100 or more peers listening to lectures, filling out test sheets or blue books (you know the drill.)? Or would you rather spend $75K and another $10-15K for your kid to take those GE classes online from home, maybe while still in HS?

Here's the thing. We sent our daughter for one year to a Montessori school. Yes, it was better than the public school, but not $9K better. Is GE in a lecture hall going to be $30K better? You want to be able to pay for three semesters of GE or a year of grad school?

Yes, I'm assuming online courses will be cheaper. I'm assuming that by teaching students by the 1000s you'll reduce costs. Faculty are giving lectures three hours a week. You've got prerecorded lectures and then a help desk with grad students or something. It's honestly not that much different from sitting in a lecture hall.

Show me a different solution. No really. I'd like to hear one.

A Second Education

Yes, I know. There's been a lot of hype about Second Life. I am skeptical as well. I know there are some folks who never metaverse they didn't like (cue rim shot). I find myself in a situation much like I did (and still somewhat do) with podcasting and video. That is, what does it mean for me? How does it relate to the teaching of professional writing and/or my own research in new media (mobile) convergent media networked rhetoric and composition?

The answer to the latter may seem fairly obvious, or at least easier to justify than the former. But to answer you need to decide whether you think SL is the "next big thing" or a "fad" or "an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment." Or maybe you don't. Maybe you can just study it and see what happens. That's the position I'm taking. It's also the position I'm taking in regard to my teaching.

There seems to be a sense, one that I encounter on discussions lists, that we need to make judgments in advance of study. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, youtube, second life: it's all just hype (or not); it's just amateurish drivel (or not); it's corporate consumerism (or not) and so on. Perhaps some day we might ask such questions about the "academic discourse" we commonly teach in writing courses: how valuable is that stuff? to whom? At least we'd have some experience and knowledge on which to found our judgment (as if it were even conceivable in our discipline that we could reach the conclusion that such writing shouldn't be taught).

But I digress.

One thing I have realized in working with iTunes U is that I have discovered answers to many questions about the value of audio and video to my work. I regularly find worthwhile media on the web to share with my class. I realize now that I would not want to teach a solely text-based online course. I've also realized that in many instances I can discover existing media content that makes more sense to use than creating my own. Just as I don't write my own textbooks, there's not a whole lot of sense to creating my own media, except in some specific instances. Those specific instances are mostly cases where I am responding directly to student concerns or course issues rather than speaking generally about a concept or course topic.

I'm sure, in the future, I will create some of my own media to share with others and use in my class, but I don't foresee a future where the course media are primarily created by me.

I'm guessing a similar thing will be true in SL. Yes, I can have virtual office hours and meet with students. Yes I suppose I could give a virtual lecture and then discuss the matter with the audience (the discussion being the valuable part and the reason you'd do it in SL). Yes, my students could meet and collaborate there. And yes, SL offers one way of presenting a media installation of student work (btw, the cool thing about doing it this way rather than the standard web page portfolio is that you hold an opening and everyone comes and looks at stuff and discusses it).

But the thing I'm thinking is really of value is the opportunity the SL might offer for my students to work, in public, with others: on projects for SL, on projects for the web, and/or on other projects for the real world. It's also another place where students can encounter knowledge. For example, let's say I want to discuss Henry Jenkin's theories of convergent media. We can read Jenkins' book or other essays. We can read his blog. We can listen to an audio podcast or watch a video. But we can also maybe go and see him speak in Second Life.

Anyway, I'm guessing I'll be finding out what works and what doesn't.

qualifications for writing instruction

I think next semester I'll teach exercise science, sociology, and maybe physics. I think I know a little bit about these subjects. I exercise on a regular basis. I've read some sociology texts, and I do live in a society. I took physics in high school...
What's that?
I'm not qualified you say?
Hmmm.... OK, how about this. I'm going to teach a writing course next semester. I think I know a little bit about writing. I write sometimes. I took a composition course or two when I was an undergrad twenty years.
Sure no problem. Go ahead. Good luck with your class.
And you wonder why students' writing performance coming out of such courses is roughly analogous to the understanding of exercise science they would get from watching me strech?

I've blogged a couple times recently about a writing survey and summit taking place on campus. To reiterate, I think it's great that we can have a conversation about this important issue. The results of the campus survey were recently made public here. Nothing surprising. Students write poorly. They don't use proper grammar. They don't make effective arguments. They need to read more. They need to be assigned more academic writing.

Yes, we need to keep doing what we're doing but more so b/c the results we are getting so far are so great. That's Ben Franklin's definition of insanity, right?

It's not that I can't explain why this perception of student writing exists on campus. Nor is it that I can't offer a range of tactices to help students improve their writing practices (after all we can all improve as writers, right?). It's just that I can't tell you how to do it in five minutes or five hours or five days or even five months.

It would take more like five years. And, not coincidently, that would be the amount of time I spent in graduate school earning my doctorate in writing. Curiously, the study of writing and the teaching of this subject are part of an actual academic discipline with courses, degrees, faculty positions, journals, conferences, and all that neat stuff. You could actually dedicate your professional life to the study of such matters.

Now some may say that it's not realistic to hire writing PhD's to teach all this writing. In fact, I've probably said that here before. Maybe, maybe not. But why is it realistic to hire chemists to teach chemistry and mathematicians to teach math and historians to teach history but not rhetoricians to teach writing?

Call me when you're serious about improving writing instruction.

student career paths

Understandably, students in professional writing really expect/hope that their coursework will lead to a career in writing. What kind of career? Lot's of different kinds: editors, journalists, novelists, writing teachers (on to grad school), new media content development, public relations, etc. So I guess I'm thinking all the time about the changing workplace. Not because I want to "serve the needs of corporate America or global capitalism" or whatever, but because a big part of the reason students come to my college and major in my program is that they want an interesting and creative career as a writer. Obviously I can guarantee such things, but I can at least think about them and try to be responsive.

So that's why I've been talking with others about an interdisciplinary Digital Media Studies MA degree. I already work closely with new media faculty and students in Art and Communications. This would be an extension of that collaboration.

Here's my thinking. Increasingly many of the more basic technical functions of media production--editing text, editing audio and video, basic graphic design, basic web design and desktop publishing--will be outshored. Our students need more than technical expertise, though they certainly need technical expertise as well. Our writers obviously need to be able to compose and edit text for a range of media, but they also need a technical understanding of composition in other media.

It's not that every editor or technical writer or graphic designer or videographer is going to have hir job outshored, but nearly everyone might be at risk. The best of chance of minimizing that risk, in my view, is to develop creative, critical, and rhetorical skills across media, to be an effective communicator in the nexus of convergent media networks. To a degree this is our goal in our undergraduate program but it's not really possible for most students to get there, given where they are starting when they arrive.

The master's program we have in mind is just another three semesters; you could get it done in two semesters plus a summer. But it would be an intensive experience with a range of media. While you can't every really be an expert in all media, our graduates would have a specialization in one media area and a good understanding of other areas. If I could deliver this education on the undergrad level I would. If the majority of our students came in with some experience with new media composition with web design, podcasting, video production, graphic design, then maybe we could. But that's not the reality.

In any case, as this outshoring thing picks up speed, a lot of college careers will be affected. The traditional entry-level jobs will be harder to find, I think, as those will be the first jobs to go abroad. Students will need to compete at the next rung up on the ladder, which already means greater demands for literacy and professionalism. At the same time, the demands of literacy are expanding as I often write about. So that's two kinds of pressures working together.

Right now, it's a race toward 2010. Can we get students up to speed when we are running hard to keep pace ourselves? I'm hoping the collaboration of this graduate program will make this easier.