digital digs

why do we write to each other?

I was thinking about this question when I came across this post from Kathleen Fitzpatrick about her next planned scholarly project on the challenges of academic publication. Her project sounds important and interesting. It's clearly a major question facing all academics. It's also, in my view, integral to composition, since, in the end, "academic discourse" is some distilled version of the writing we do as scholars.

My question is maybe less serious and certainly less thought out. But I'm thinking about the hundreds of articles and dozens of books written each year. I wish I could recall where I saw this statistic, but less than 10% of articles in the humanities are ever cited. It begs the question of who reads them and why.

I know why we write them--for jobs, tenure, promotion, etc.--but what is the point? To maybe write that one article or book that will get you noticed and lift you into the community of read (and cited) academic authors?

30 short years ago, maybe even 20 or 15 years ago, the article made some sense. In 1993, what was the best way I had of discovering the thoughts and works of my colleagues? I could go to conferences, but you can only absorb a little bit in a few days. I had to read articles, books, and such. It was really the best means available.

Now that is so far from the truth, and it has happened overnight in academic terms. I can work as easily with a dozen colleagues at a dozen institutions as I can with colleagues on my campus. We could actually do something, not just collaborate on an article (again), but go beyond that and put our research into action, connect with our forgotten audience of mainstream culture, and so on.

I am all for making digital, electronic, networked scholarship count. But I see this as a half-measure. We need to recognize that scholarship existed as a way to share knowledge at a distance when the best you could hope for was someone to respond in six months or a year or longer. It was the best way we had to work together.

If we can realize the potential for networked collaboration we can thoughtfully address real problems quickly enough for our response to matter, and we can build things that people will actually use. I'm not suggesting abandoning scholarship. Of course not. I suggesting expanding it into new realms of possibility.

the beginning and ending of knowledge... 50 minutes at a time?

Can we really be having this conversation? In the Chronicle an article on the shortening of lectures for online delivery. One of the first points we're going to try to make in teaching networked communication is that different media require different rhetorical strategies.

Does this seem like a concept that is too difficult for professors to grasp? Apparently so.

Obviously there are historical forces that resulted in the 50-minute lecture. I assure you it wasn't the result of extensive research into the most effective length of presentation. So let's be clear.

• 150 minutes a week: arbitrary
• 14-week semester: arbitrary
• 124-credit bachelor's degree: arbitrary
• 36-credit major: arbitrary

Arbitrary here means these divisions of time bear no relationship to the learning experience. Moving to online courses creates a situation that is no less arbitrary, but no more either. Also there's no requirement that online video lectures be shorter. In fact, you can make them longer, a lot longer, if you believe that's what would be effective.

The point, as I see it, is that you have more choice over the length of lectures.

If you think that giving long, difficult, informationally-dense lectures is the best pedagogy then go for it. As always, many faculty remain sternly opposed to any notion of being rhetorical. They see trying to communicate as an intellectual betrayal of some kind.

The real problem I see here is the serious lack of pedagogic professional development for professors. Sure, there are great professors in every discipline. But I think that teaching is largely naturalized. You learn from watching professors as a student, then teaching with professors as a TA. Teaching in most disciplines follows the same practices at every campus across the country. These practices are not offered as a choice since there aren't really any alternatives.

Then along comes online courses and blended courses and suddenly there is a very significant alternative for every professor in every discipline. But there are few tools in most disciplines for making an informed choice. The result is this declaration of shock to the notion that there may be some choice in how to teach: that 50-minute lectures are not some god-given standard.

packs roaming distributed learning environments

Read Gardner Campbell's recent post on Company Sense, by which he means a theatrical company or troupe and the type of relationships that can be built there. I've never been in a theater company, but I've been in a band and so I think I can understand the idea here of the kinds of connections and understandings that build between individuals through practice.

Also thinking about David Weinberger's thoughts about Anne Balsamo talking about her forthcoming book. All thinking in similar directions about "community," how we come together as producers and consumers of knowledge/media, as teachers and learners, as designers and users, etc: all of these dichotomies blending. There some particular binaries at work in these texts:

• Campbell critiques the distinction between hi-tech and hi-touch
• Balsamo calls upon C.P. Snow's two cultures and the use of collaboratories to move beyond them

Campbell speaks on how our notions of community rely upon direct communication, that the "hi-touch" relationship cannot survive the mediation by "hi-tech." This notion extends into learning communities. It is why we object to students with laptops in the classroom. It is what so many find difficult about the online course: building rapport with the students. This seems to run analogously to Snow's two cultures or at least as we have often characterized them. So if Balsamo calls for collaboration as a way of addressing technological challenges, Campbell remarks on the importance of developing particular affective relationships.

It's an old joke, but you could say that bands have their own version of Snow's two cultures: musicians and drummers. The point is that people with different perspectives, talents, and values elect to come together for a purpose... that's collaboration. And that they develop this "company sense" over time, through practice. Or they don't and they break up.

I approach this not in terms of companies or collaboratories but packs.

Two Virtuals tag cloud

Inspired by Collin, I made this Wordle tag cloud of Two Virtuals.

googled brains

As Jeff notes, many will write about Nick Carr's Atlantic Monthly piece. The article's title suggested more trolling than actually goes on, which is good (that said, it's a little sad that so many "respectable" publications feel like they need to troll to get attention). Then again, maybe I'm missing something.

Carr makes some cogent observations: "We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works." He also notes, "Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure."

So, yes, I agree the network shapes our cognition. I share Carr's concern that we ought to be mindful of our thoughts. However, I don't think the need for mindfulness comes from the development of internet technologies. I view mindfulness as a more basic virtue. Maybe it is harder to be mindful today, maybe not. I'm not sure how to measure the task of mindfulness.

I would say that as significant as the effect of networks might be on our brains, there has also been a significant impact on how we understand our brains. Carr mentions this, speaking about the shifting metaphors we apply to the brain. I suppose one might say all understandings are metaphors, inasmuch as one is willing to state "my love is a red rose" and "the speed of light is 180,000 miles per second" are both metaphorical statements. I don't think that's super-useful most of the time. So let's say that we understand our brains in a new way as well.

As I'm writing this, I came across Jon Udell's response to Carr as well. I think we are coming from largely the same perspective. We are seeing change. Yes, we should give thought to that change. No, we should not simply assume that change is bad (nor do I think Carr means to suggest that). Finally we can remember that when we think about "our brains on books" or "on writing," we can recall that those were not natural states either. We know all this business from Ong and so on.

In the end, the Atlantic piece is some typical mainstream magazine writing with a slightly provocative and misleading title that reminds us that we need to continue to be mindful of how we spend our time and our thoughts.

Yep.

ethics, politics, and pedagogics

I've come to the end of our 3-day ethics institute at Cortland. There was much interesting conversation. I think however that we skirted the rather difficult issue of how ethics and politics interested, particularly (in our case) in making decisions about pedagogy.

So for example, as a professor (or generally as a thoughtful human being) one is likely to hold strong beliefs about what we should do about any number of social problems. One likely also has strong beliefs about how we should act toward one another as individuals, groups, and nations. You could call these ethical positions. They are also clearly political positions. Usually the distinction is just semantic. But in school we say it's OK to teach students to be ethical but certainly not OK to try to convince students to hold a particular political position. This can result in a situation where faculty seek to articulate the teaching of their beliefs as the teaching of ethics.

The institute was helpful for me because it helped to recall some fundamental issues that differentiate ideology, politics, and ethics.

summer ethics institute day one

I have to say that it's always a pleasure to meet with colleagues and have the opportunity to discuss something other than bureaucratic college matters. The ethics institute in particular offers a chance to hang out with the philosophy department, and they are interesting people. There's a good mix of other faculty as well from across the college, most of whom I met for the first time today.

I have some underlying concerns with ethical philosophy as it is conventionally articulated. Basically, it is founded upon a humanist worldview (and a Western, masculinist one at that). Of course there are other ethics, but I'm talking about conventional ethical discourses here. These ethics presuppose individuals making free-willed, rational choices. As such, they have very little to say about ideology or the unconscious.

And for me, ideology and the unconscious are only step one: the Marx, Nietzsche, Freud effect. Then there is what has been called "the French crisis in German thought." And then there is postmodernism's after party, which I suppose is where I find myself. Here I attend to two states.

presidential economics: the irrational lure of rationality

Picked up on John Cassidy's NY Review of Books article from Richard Florida discussing the foundations of Obama's economic thinking as an attempt at a third way separate from classic liberal and conservative positions. Specifically the article reviews Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein and describes a move to incorporate the insights of contemporary psychology into economics, including conducting psychology-inspired experiments:

the experiments confirmed something most people outside of economics hadn't doubted for a moment: rational economic man, the all-seeing, all-knowing figure on whose shoulders much of contemporary economics had been constructed, was a purely fictional character. Faced with even simple sets of options to pick from, human beings make decisions that are inconsistent, suboptimal, and, sometimes, plain stupid. Rather than thinking things through logically, they rely on misleading rules of thumb and they leap to inappropriate conclusions. Moreover, they are heavily influenced by how the choices are presented to them and, sometimes, by completely irrelevant information.

No kidding.

Rational thought is impossible because it doesn't exist. Rationality is a concept that has attempted to explain, or more often judge, thoughts according to an ideological standard of how thinking should occur. In many ways rationality is like prescriptive grammar. That isn't to suggest that the practices and values associated with rationality are bad. I often strive to be rational, don't you?

The point is that rationality is not, and never really was, an attempt to understand how humans actually thought, made decisions, or acted upon decisions. I'd say we were never meant to function as "independent thinkers." We aren't lemmings, but we aren't shards of divine wisdom being led astray by our flesh either.

What do you use jott? (edited)

What do you use jott for? I'm not really sure what the answer is to this question yet. I was wondering if anyone out there is using Jott and can tell me what they use it for. It seems to me that you would use it to send a message when you have very little time or if you want to send something brief and you were away from your computer. You know, I don't know why you would use Jott to send a message to Twitter rather than just sending a text message; it would seem to make more sense that you  would do that. But I guess there could be instances where you would not be able to text and would be able to call into Jott instead. I guess that's a possibility; I'll have to think about that one. The other possibility here with blogging I guess again is if you were going to send more informal.. listen

Powered by Jott

How 'bout that? (edited)

How about that? So I'm not sure exactly how much time that was before it decided that it was going to cut me off. Yeah, so I guess I'll have to look online and see what the length it is in terms of how long a Jott can be. [Turns out to be 30 seconds I believe.] But that broke me off in mid sentence of what I was going to say.  If you're using this for blogging, you'd obviously want to send a fairly short message. I'm not sure how that will work for me, because I always write longer things, even if they're not necessarily all that well revised or anything like that. So okay, and I guess we'll see what I want to do with this. And keep trying it, and find out what happens. listen

Powered by Jott

Afterword: so from my perspective I certainly wouldn't use Jott to do the kinds of blogging I normally do. That shouldn't be surprising: different technology, different compositional context/practice, different result. The Jott blog post will need to be short. Even these start to get fairly garbled. Usually a short blog post would include link. I'm not sure how I'd do that in Jott. If I figure it out, I'll post about it.

Assuming I won't be linking in a short Jott blog post, I'll need to figure out a new genre for myself. Some witty aphorisms perhaps... maybe not.