digital digs

Chronicle Article on the Internet and Student Writing

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Josh Keller reports on the research and debate over the impact of the Internet on student writing. Not surprisingly, there are differences of opinion to be found. While there is a general sense that more time spent writing is a good thing, the article also reports on concerns that the informal writing of social media leads to poor academic writing and sloppy thinking. Really, the more I think about it, the more this seems a "dog bites man" kind of story. The report focuses on several longitudinal studies undertaken at Stanford, Michigan State, and elsewhere with the idea that such studies might resolve these debates.

Yeah, right.

Why ask whether writing on the Internet makes you a better academic writer? Why not ask whether academic writing makes you a better user of social media? I suppose it is understandable that academics might want to value a particular kind of academic writing, but in the end that valuation is a demonstration of thinking that is no less sloppy than the poor thinking habits of which they accuse students.

I wonder where one might find the longitudinal studies and extensive research that demonstrates that academic writing (if such a thing actually exists and can be quantitatively defined) is the best possible genre for developing "critical thinking" or producing and disseminating disciplinary knowledge. Of course such studies and research do no exist. The value of academic writing is purely tautological. Academic writing is the best academic writing because academic writing is what academic writing is. 

If we give even a few minutes thought to the issue, we can recognize that academic writing practices emerge from historical-cultural-material-technological-ideological conditions. Whatever skepticism one wishes to turn toward social media discourses should be turned doubly so upon academic discourses.

When we talk about academic discourse we are really talking about two unrelated things.

1. The constellation of largely unrelated discourses employed in faculty research. These discourses are mostly untranslatable from one discipline to the next and often from one sub-specialty to the next. Generally, only a few thousand people worldwide could read any one of these given discourses. And whatever value these discourses may have in these small communities, they have no direct relation to the writing practices of undergraduates, who do not write in these discourses and rarely read them.
2. Another constellation of largely unrelated discourse practices undertaken by undergraduates in their coursework, which include everything from literary interpretation to lab reports to pseudo-professional genres preparing students for workplace writing in any one of hundreds of careers and majors.

The real problem with this whole debate is the continuing mythology that there exists some generalizable academic discourse. In the Chronicle article, Keller notes that skeptics believe social media genres "have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands." Really? and what "kind" would that be? Can you describe the "kind of sustained, focused argument" that is displayed in literary criticism and a lab report and a poli-sci analysis of public policy and a review of a marketing campaign and an environmental impact report and so on?

The truth is there is no "kind of sustained, focused argument." Now, if the purpose of college writing instruction is to prepare students to write 5-10 page, research, literary interpretation essays, then clearly that would be what you would assign students in a first-year writing course. But I imagine that even for undergraduate English majors, the goal is to prepare students to write in a broader range of genres than this. The goal, as I think most of us envision it, at least in liberal arts majors, is to prepare students to write in a general and flexible way for a range of civic and professional discursive contexts. And if one takes a look at what those contexts currently are and where they might be headed... well, an examination of social media discursive practices would seem a reasonable part of such a curriculum.

So, no, I don't think tweeting or keeping a blog diary will provide much help to a student writing a literary critical paper. And I've seen little evidence that writing a literary critical paper will help a student write a job letter or a marketing brochure or a grant for a non-profit agency. And just as the habits of tweeting may even be detrimental to composing academic prose, academic writing habits can be detrimental to composing successful business prose.

The best I think we can say is what should be fairly obvious. The more we write and the greater variety of genres in which we write, the better prepared we will be to write in a variety of genres in the future.

In short, this article indicates that we continue to ask the wrong question. And maybe I should have just written that, but I'm an academic writer by trade and my habit is to elaborate (typically beyond almost an audience's level of interest). Hmm... maybe I should be relying more on my habits of tweeting discourse.

Digital Scholarship and Tenure

This subject has come up again on Inside Higher Ed with some good comments from rhet/comp digital media scholars--Cheryl Ball, Will Hochman, and Heidi McKee. I think there are several ways to look at this issue.

If you are a graduate student or assistant professor specializing in digital rhetoric, you clearly have a great deal at stake personally in arguing for the validity of the work you are doing. Actually this is a challenge every grad student or asst. prof faces, regardless of specialization, but with digital media the rhetorical situation is notably different because one is doing work that is substantively different, in both form and content, from the work of the faculty hiring, tenuring, and/or promoting you. The IHE article reports on efforts by MLA and HASTAC to educate such faculty so that they are better able to make these evaluations.

This is how I look at digital scholarship. In the short term and for individuals, the arguments that we make today about the validity of digital scholarship are important. And for those reasons, they are worth making. But in the broader view, the success, failure, and general form digital humanities scholarship will take will have little to do with these arguments.

Digital scholarship will succeed for the same reason that we no longer share our research by writing letters to other members of our disciplinary societies (as would have been common in the 17th century). We will teach digital literacy (or electracy or whatever you want to call it) because it will be culturally necessary, and the shape of that digital literacy will no more be determined by academics than print literacy was. Certainly there will be specific disciplinary discursive practices within digital media, just as there are such practices within print literacy. But the book, the page, the paragraph, the linear argument--the fundamental features of print literacy--emerge from broader material, technological conditions. And while I think there's great digital scholarship out there and I admire the work done by my digital rhetoric colleagues, I believe we are still very much in the horseless carriage era.

What do I mean by this? Right now I think we are in a kind of make-work situation in English Studies scholarship and perhaps beyond that as well (though I am less familiar beyond our discipline). I write a 6000 word article. A relatively small number of editors and reviewers read it. Eventually it gets published somewhere, where it probably gets read by a few people, probably has little impact on them (since there are dozens of other articles out there to read), and probably doesn't get cited. It's not that much different from digging a hole, having someone certify I dug it to approved specifications, and the filling it in.

Now that article represents more thorough scholarly work than what appears on this blog, and it has been vetted by experts, but what difference does that make if few people read it? We don't write things to be read; we tend to write them to be published. Publishing is the end result, which if you think about it makes almost no sense. On the flip side, publishing here is worthless in itself. If no one reads this, then I'm largely wasting my time. Many blog detractors would say that's exactly what I'm doing.

But I say we have to answer this question:

Is the point of humanities scholarship to participate in the production and communication of humanistic knowledge, or is it to demonstrate a certain level of mastery or academic reputation?

Certainly one could say the answer is "both," and to an extent the two goals could be complementary, but I think our current situation demonstrates the limits of their complementarity. Digital scholarship doesn't solve this problem. Technology isn't a solution here. In fact, the spread of digital journals might even exacerbate the condition of make-work scholarship. As such, I believe we will find the answer to how digital scholarship ought to work in our discipline when we can re-balance this equation.

There is no going backward. Print publication makes less sense everyday. Online PDF or web journals with articles that look like print essays are, at best, short term solutions, and at worst, failures of intellect, imagination, and guts. We will move forward when we can recapture the lost exigency of humanities research through digital media by using networks to increase access, encourage collaboration, and foster conversations. When we discover the genre of digital humanistic scholarship it will likely no longer be necessary to have these conversations with tenure committees.

the future of work + the future of higher education = ???

On the cover of Time this week, a series of articles on the future of work. If you've read folks like Dan Pink or Richard Florida or even Thomas Friedman, then there isn't much new here: changing nature of the workplace, desires for flexible working conditions and career paths, changing values of Gen Y/Millennials, baby boomers not retiring, green jobs. Still there are a few good lines in there.

Rob Carter, chief information officer at FedEx, thinks the best training for anyone who wants to succeed in 10 years is the online game World of Warcraft. Carter says WoW, as its 10 million devotees worldwide call it, offers a peek into the workplace of the future. Each team faces a fast-paced, complicated series of obstacles called quests, and each player, via his online avatar, must contribute to resolving them or else lose his place on the team. The player who contributes most gets to lead the team — until someone else contributes more. The game, which many Gen Yers learned as teens, is intensely collaborative, constantly demanding and often surprising. "It takes exactly the same skill set people will need more of in the future to collaborate on work projects," says Carter. "The kids are already doing it."

And this from a piece contributed by Seth Godin:

Internet technology makes working as a team, synchronized to a shared goal, easier and more productive than ever. But as in a three-legged-race, you'll instantly know when a teammate is struggling, because that will slow you down as well. Some people will embrace this new high-stress, high-speed, high-flexibility way of work. We'll go from a few days alone at home, maintaining the status quo, to urgent team sessions, sometimes in person, often online. It will make some people yearn for jobs like those in the old days, when we fought traffic, sat in a cube, typed memos, took a long lunch and then sat in traffic again.

The only reason to go to work, I think, is to do work. It's too expensive a trip if all you want to do is hang out. Work will mean managing a tribe, creating a movement and operating in teams to change the world. Anything less is going to be outsourced to someone a lot cheaper and a lot less privileged than you or me.

Part of the argument seems to be that there will be increasing jobs in green and high-tech manufacturing in the US. These careers will require training beyond a high school degree, but it is likely not the kind of education that traditional higher education is equipped to provide. I'm not exactly sure who counts among the privileged class that Godin addresses here, but the rest of this quote resonates with Carter's position above. However, the general trend of these predictions is that a college education would point graduates toward these kinds of "high-stress, high speed, high-flexibility" careers.

Of course this begs the question of what is (or ought to be) the relationship between a college education and preparation for a career. In the minds of most students I meet, the answer seems fairly obvious that these two things should be the same. However those of us who are in this business know that it's not that simple. First, most students don't know what they want to do. Second, even if they do know, they are likely to change careers in short order. Third, even if they don't change careers, their careers are likely to transform beneath their feet.

That said, we are familiar with how traditional schooling prepared students to become factory workers. And we might even see how an educational culture of high-stakes testing prepared students as atomized knowledge workers in the hierarchical corporate bureaucracies of the last century. So while specific career preparation, for most careers, may make even less sense now than ever before (at least at the baccalaureate level), it is likely that educational spaces and practices will mutate to reflect emerging workplaces. Online and hybrid courses certainly reflect this, as does increasing amounts of collaborative work.

Still that's not all that higher education is or wishes to be. There's an interesting article on trying to introduce professional ethics into business management programs. It's actually somewhat sad how difficult a challenge that turns out to be (at least as it is reported here). Inasmuch as higher education is about teaching ethics and citizenship, we face challenges in figuring out how those things work in this new, networked social order. In any case, this is where I think some of the more interesting work in the humanities will take place over the next decade. Starting with what is most closely under our own purview--the ways we teach and the ways we do our research and service--the humanities ought to participate in shaping the foundation of higher education's role in this future.

That's rather general, I know, so here are a few specific points from what I am thinking for myself:

1. Undergrad courses where students collaborate FTF and online, hopefully with students at a distance and internationally, on digital compositions that they can share with a larger audience.
2. A first-year writing program that gives students experience with networks and digital composition, that asks them to think about rhetorical issues and compositional practices as they are shaped by techno-material contexts, and that explores ethical and socio-political concerns raised by those contexts and networked communities.
3. Graduate courses that give students the opportunity to explore the role of networks, computing, and digitial media in their teaching and scholarship, regardless of the particular area of specialization they pursue, an exploration that would necessarily include both practical and theoretical-critical dimensions.
4. Developing scholarly networks with colleagues interested in pursuing emerging research and publication practices.
5. Participating in university discussions shaping the future role of digital networks not only in the classroom (i.e. trying to move away from the Bb solution in a box) but also in rethinking the way faculty organize and collaborate on campus.

the black angel rises

If you follow such news, it is likely that you've already heard that Blackboard has acquired Angel. If not, you can read about it in Inside Higher Ed or at Blackboard. There are also some early blogs at eLiterate and EdTechPodcast. There is also a running discussion on Twitter #bbplusangel.

My current institution, Cortland, moved from WebCT to Blackboard after that merger. My new institution, UBuffalo, uses Blackboard. For purposes as an individual faculty member, an institutional CMS is just an overinflated grade book. I don't use it for anything else. I find it difficult to imagine that I would. Instead, I use a constellation of free or cheap social media applications--twitter, ning, pbworks (aka pbwiki) and so on. My basic thought on the matter is this: no one company is going to out innovate the web.

However at UB I will not just be an individual faculty member. Eventually I'll be taking on the role of directing the composition program, and one of the things we will certainly be doing is addressing the use of technology across the program. As I see it, there are two primary reasons for a CMS.

1. Faculty lack the knowledge, skills, time, and/or interest to kludge together their own online learning environment (not that it takes much of the first three as long as you have the interest, imho).
2. Institutions like uniformity for any number of reasons (e.g. support, assessment, accreditation, marketing).

Because of reason #2 we will not soon see a time when a university does not have a CMS of some kind. For reason #1, it may be some time before a critical mass of faculty become concerned about the choices the institution makes. But faculty in general are not well-enough educated about technology to understand what is at stake. Imagine a university trying one of the following analogous policies.

• From now on, faculty can only order textbooks from Pearson.
• The campus will be redesigned so every classroom looks the same, and all the desks will be bolted to the floor.

Now, one might complain that Blackboard offers more flexibility than either of these scenarios, but relative to the potential flexibiity out there, I would contend this is a fair analogy. In fact, I would suggest that one of the features of a CMS that attracts institutions is that they do reduce faculty choice and flexibilty by creating standardization.

But it's only academic freedom, right? Why would anyone care about that?

While that may seem like a key issue, there's really a more important lesson to be learned from this merger. The uniform story about this merger is that Angel was great with customer support and Blackboard is horrible with it. Clearly though the market dictates the limits of Anglel's commitment to its customers. Any Ed Tech corporation is ultimately going to do what it imagines/hopes will be most profitable. Now maybe you want to also imagine/hope that Blackboard's interests in profit, our students' interests, faculty interests, and university interests run the same course... yeah, right. Clearly that was not the case with today's news. I don't think anyone outside these corporations' PR departments really believes that having fewer CMS options will make online learning better.

So the lesson for universities (and faculty) ought to be a cautionary tale about relying on a dwindling number of corporations to provide an increasingly indispensable feature of higher education.

My dream resolution to all this is a proliferation of standards-driven, interoperable  new media applications produced by a mixture of corporate, academic, and open source communities... and a savvy university and faculty committed to maintaing a flexible virtual space that extends from the classroom through university service to scholarship. I don't know how we get there but I'm pretty sure it begins with significant faculty development, starting with graduate education, and that we don't get there by putting all our resources into a single corporation whether that's Blackboard or anyone else.

thoughts on EduComm

I've been contacted a couple times about the EduComm 2009 conference coming up in June. A quick random perusal of the schedule would indicate that the presenters are university admins, IT specialists, and EdTech industry people, though there are a few faculty as well. I wonder if faculty attend the conference, and if so, in what numbers? Of course it is entirely reasonable for industry folks to get together for conferences, just as faculty do, with little or no participation from beyond faculty ranks. But wouldn't it be interesting to put these people in the same room now and then? Some of the panels sound intriguing to me such as on on the "science of social networking" and another on developing an interactive media major.

I wonder if r/c or computers/writing people go to this conference. Panels such as one about ePortfolios would probably be of general interest for first-year writing. And I think one of the things that can be most frustrating in the area of computers and writing is the real disconnect between what faculty are doing and thinking and what EdTech industry people are doing and thinking. I mean I am not being deliberately obtuse when I say that I don't get what Blackboard is thinking when they design their products. Sure I could attribute some cynical or negative explanations, but I'm willing to imagine they have reasons beyond market domination for their designs, that some theory of pedagogy and best practices is informing what they do. But what it is I couldn't tell you. Maybe a conference like this would give some insight into such thinking.

on cost control and learning from newspapers

In the Chronicle a piece on "What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers' Decline." And yes, I addressed that here recently. In short, I think the comparison is somewhat useful. If colleges think of themselves primarily as content providers then they are in trouble. Long ago, in an age of information scarcity that might have been the case. Also I think journalists and faculty share in common a preference to not think too much about how the budget sausage gets made. That's also something we might want to change.

But I think there's a deeper issue. And I will not claim any expertise on this topic (as opposed to all other topics I address on my blog, ahem), but it would appear that it is quite difficult to actually understand the accounting of higher education institutions... to the point where there is fierce debate over why college costs have risen so much, though part of the debate/uncertainty is because there are complex factors involved here.

So you'll have to excuse my oversimplification here, but tell me what you think of this chart.

Institution	Yearly, full-time tuition cost
NYS Community College	$3392
SUNY Comprehensive College	$4995
SUNY Research University	$4970
Online For-Profit	$15450

Well, I was going to add average class size but I couldn't find it for each institution. Also I should note that the online school just offered a per credit cost for bachelor's programs ($515) so I multiplied that by 30. A couple other things to note here. First, no one pays this price. It's like that sticker price of an automobile. Second, this doesn't reflect fees. The fees at the comprehensive college and university are higher, but they provide a fuller range of services. (In turn the university has higher fees than the college for much the same reason.) Third, these are in-state tuition costs for the first three.

So, anyway, the first thing I think you can note here is that as an in-state student you will pay around $20K for the tuition part of your higher education. There's nowhere else you are going to put that money that will be a better investment. The second thing you might notice is that there is really no cost difference between the comprehensive college and the research university. The community college is less but doesn't offer the same degrees. The point is that the research focus of the university does not cost the student more money. The student:faculty ratio is the same at both schools (though the univ has a larger avg. class size). The comprehensive college has a higher proportion of part-time faculty.

It's important to note that tuition only represents a fraction of the cost of college. It's about 1/4 of the cost. Room and board, personal expenses, and transportation add up to about $12K. However I would think that those costs would have to reflect the general costs of living in the area of the university, or at least wouldn't be more than that. That is, you wouldn't think this would be the site of college cost outpacing inflation. 

The remaining $2-3K is college fees and books, for a total of $20K/yr for a 4-yr public SUNY degree.

I wonder about the fees part. Maybe one could opt out of some of these costs. I don't want to use your gym. I don't need your health services. I don't want to be involved in your athletic/recreation programs. That's a tough call as it would obviously raise the cost for those who wanted/needed those services. But you could be talking $700/yr. And then there are book costs (*cough* open access online textbooks *cough*).

However the point I really want to make, going back to the newspaper analogy, is the lion's share of the cost of college has nothing to do with instruction and even less to do with the content delivery element of instruction which might be analogized with newspapers. My way of thinking about it is that you've gotta live somewhere and you gotta eat. You're going to drive around and have "personal expenses" regardless of whether you're a student or not.

So I say fine. Strip it all down. Live in your parents' house. Cut out most of the fees except library and technology fees, which you need for curriculum. Use open access textbooks wherever possible. Cut the cost to $6K a year,  $600 per course. And that's the sticker price that no one actually pays. You still have the same faculty teaching the same load and the same size courses. You haven't impacted that portion of the budget at all. Teach them on campus or online.

See what the students and parents want to do. I'm guessing that they will elect to live on campus and pay those extra service fees. But maybe not. Either way it shouldn't necessarily affect the educational/research mission of the institution.

Does that seem like such an unreasonable price for an education? Meanwhile you give away all the course content for free. Open access textbooks and lectures are free on demand. You ask students to pay for interaction with faculty--for evaluation, for mentoring, for seminar discussion, for partnering in research, etc. It's not like newspapers at all, and when you start to think about it in those terms it gets difficult to do entirely online, at least with current technologies.

It's in vogue to bash higher education, but it's probably all too common for a student to commute or even live on campus and end up paying more for his/her new car during the four years on campus than s/he pays for tuition.

out-teaching the automated network

If you want to build an online FYC program that would work for the 18-20 yo college student, there are a couple of hurdles that need to be crossed.

1. Online education, as it is largely designed now, requires a high degree of self-motivation and self-discipline. It's sort of the opposite of online porn, which thrives on titillation and idleness. Your online course needs to be the kind of place students habitually surf to, like checking their Facebook pages.

2. Online education requires the development of a new set of pedagogic behaviors. Students have 12 years of learning how to behave in the classroom: i.e. sit in the back and avoid eye contact with the teacher while still managing to look like you're paying attention. Ok, maybe that's a snarky but there is a learned passivity that students have acquired through schooling. Games probably give us the best potential insight into teaching participants how to behave using a kind of built-in reward system. Play the game as it asks to be played and gain access to various rewards and improved reputation.

These are not trivial problems. In addition, you'd have to consider how you'd deliver a writing curriculum that you actually valued.

Now here's what I would do if I were a big university or even better a state university system. I would create a program like this and offer it as a kind of freemium model. There would be plenty you could do for free but if you wanted access to the college instructors then you would pay some relatively small fee. Really the purpose of the fee would be more to ensure that the students who were involved had some level of buy-in and commitment to the program.

Alternately you could have a freemium model where students could choose between having advertisements or paying for an ad-free version. That's probably more questionable in terms of typical university ethos, but that's b/c you are forgetting about the money Coke or Pepsi pays for exclusive pouring rights on your campus and a variety of other marketing tie-ins we have learned to overlook.

Then I would offer credit for the course to anyone who enrolled in the university system for some minimum amount of credits. You would essentially be offering low-cost AP credit courses. Why not? You're accepting those credits for free anyway and offering a course like this might drive system-wide enrollment.

Of course you'd have to look at how you pay for the delivery of the course. You might consider looking at how social media applications make their money, including ad money. You could also consider the marketing advantage of offering such a course. In addition you could offer special programs for military personnel and others who really needed online course credit.

My point is that if you are worried about the "threat" of private companies offering low-cost online college courses, then as an industry you can crush them the way that Microsoft crushed Netscape by bundling their web browser for free with each pc.

a straighterline to higher education hell

Both IHE and Kairosnews offer reports on the on-demand online services from StraighterLine. I first wrote on this about a year ago in response to an article in the Chronicle.  Of course it is just one instantiation of the general threat of information networks to institutions that operate on the premise of information scarcity and economies of scale that no longer apply.

Universities have taught FYC and general education courses on the cheap in order to cover the costs of more expensive parts of the university. Arguably, students benefit from those more expensive parts when they enter their majors and/or go to grad school. As such, potentially you could see a variable pricing schedule in higher education where universities price general education courses in competition with the rest of the marketplace and then charge more for upper-division courses. The net costs might remain the same. However, I'm not sure that higher education really wants to get into that kind of pricing war.

And I don't think that FYC catches the worst of this by the way. I mean, I don't see the lecture model of education surviving the next decade. It makes no sense to pay someone to give the same lecture over and over when you can pay someone once to do it on video. And since most lecture courses are introductory, the videos will not need to be refreshed that often (depending on the discipline, I guess).

Even when one gets beyond the general education lecture hall, lectures will still become unnecessary. True, an upper-division undergrad or grad course may call upon faculty specialized knowledge, but it is not the knowledge alone that make faculty valuable. It is the opportunity students have to interact with faculty. It is human interaction, whether FTF or online, that is labor intensive. The opportunity to work individually or in small groups with faculty or participate in a class small enough to allow for discussion: this is where the value lies in higher education.

I think we all know this, but it is a difficult value to capture in quantitative assessment.

It is our tendency to look at traditional higher education and imagine it as a near-optimal system (don't ask me why). But really you could look at it as a highly inefficient attempt to address technological-communication and information-management hurdles.

• We have to drag you all here and lecture to you b/c we don't have a more efficient means of distributing information.
• We have to create courses with preset meeting times and credits b/c the management costs of a more variable system are too high.
• We need standardized curricula so that we can reduce costs.

So if you were to build a higher education system from the ground up, keeping for the moment disciplinary specializations (the question of discipline is a different matter), the one thing you'd want to retain from the current system is the opportunity for students to interact with faculty-scholars. You can dump the rest of it. The rest is really just there for accounting and management purposes. From that perspective you can see that an enterprise like StraighterLIne gets it completely backwards. They dump the one thing of value.

For example, one could imagine an English undergraduate program where one could find a repository of educational media dealing with subjects across the discipline which would serve as points of reference for the curriculum. Then you would have faculty who would announce various projects, perhaps developed in collaboration with interested students. Students would enlist in the project, work with faculty, and produce work. There could be student publications and conferences. Eventually there could be a portfolio review, culminating exam, and so on. Obviously the system would need to be a little more complex than that. There would be some introductory projects that would need to be taught that would serve as pre-reqs. Some projects that might serve the purpose of general education. And one would look to faculty to provide a certain level of interaction for students.

The point is that it is not difficult to imagine this level of mass customization and social networking today. And it is exactly the kind of thing that a university faculty can provide that cannot be automated. Are such ventures costly? Maybe. But I think this is where we must make our argument.

Mark Bauerlein asks the "so what" question

I have read with some interest Mark Bauerlein's working paper for the American Enterprise Institute titled "Professors on the Production Line, Students on Their Own." Bauerlein makes some important observations about the current climate of scholarly production. He then looks to make an argument that connects the pressure to publish with perceived issues in undergraduate teaching. It's an argument that is at least worth further consideration.

But first there's the problem in scholarly production. I won't cite all the numbers in the report, but the basic problem is obvious. Over the last 30 years there has been a rise in undergraduate population and a rise in the number of faculty. During the same period, there has been inflation in publishing expectations (real or perceived) in terms of the job market and tenure. In short, more and more articles and books have been published each year. And since humanities research has a long half-life, those articles you didn't read 10-15 years ago are still relevant. It just keeps piling up. Meanwhile, in the field of literary studies, which is Bauerlein's chief focus here, the body of work to be analyzed remains fairly stable. As he writes,

yes, novel and provocative themes enter literary studies every few years—deconstruction, race theory, postcolonialism, gay and lesbian studies, etc.—but notwithstanding their notoriety they don’t change the raw empirical existence of the texts, only the topical or theoretical angle one takes toward them (including, we should note, the angle that the text has no raw empirical existence).

Certainly, we have expanded the field of literary investigation but Bauerlein's point would seem to hold that for the most part that most scholarship remains focused on the same "empirical existence," i.e., the same set of texts. All of this leads him to observe that

professors simply can’t read all of the works published each year in their fields, as the numbers cited above make clear.  An expert in Herman Melville can’t cover the 11 books (2,684 pages in total), 56 articles, and 12 dissertations devoted all or in part to the novelist that appeared in 2007. And underlying those explanations lurks a disturbing possibility, that is, that literature professors feel no urge or need to monitor publications in the discipline in order to keep up with research in the area.

In short, Bauerlein is asking the "so what" question: why are we publishing all this stuff?

The cynical, though maybe not unreasonable, explanation for this looks at tenure. But in my view, there have got to be other motives. I would think that if you are spending years writing a book on Melville, you must have a rhetorical reason for doing it, right? There's got to be something in you that says this is important, that you have something to share, that needs to be said. Maybe you have misread your audience. Maybe, in the end, others won't share in your perception of exigency. But it still has to be inside of you, or so I would imagine. I don't think I could have finished my book without that sense for myself.

Bauerlein then basically makes the following argument. Because faculty put their efforts into scholarship that they feel pressured to publish (even though no one reads it), they have less time to devote to teaching undergrads, who really need their attention. I think there is a degree of truth to this. It certainly makes sense on the surface. Actually though, I think these issues are less directly related. I think the challenge we face with undergraduate teaching has to do with larger cultural issues regarding attitudes toward education and intellectual life.

I worked my way through college. Many of my students do the same. If you look at something like Wesch's "Vision of Students Today," you see that students feel very crunched for time. And maybe this is just a value statement. That is, if they valued education more, they could find the time, but I don't know. If students are working 20-25 hours a week and we recognize that having a social life is an important part of being 20, then is it so surprising that students find less than 15-20 hours a week to do schoolwork outside class? In other words, I'm not sure the issue here is that faculty aren't available enough for students.

If there's any problem here that one might put at the feet of faculty, it's that students can struggle to understand the relevance of the curriculum they are taking. And I think students today, moreso than in the past, expect their work to be meaningful. But as I tell my students, in the end, I can't make their education meaningful to them, b/c that meaning ultimately has to unfold inside their heads. And I'm not going in there!

That said, I think the scholarship inflation issue is an important problem unto itself. I think that if we can begin at least to open the question of how we value scholarly work, we can begin to see how digital, collaborative enterprises might create more scholarly value.

the hacker and the (educational) institution

As I see it, the hacker exists in a symbiotic relationship with institutions. No institutions, nothing to hack. In some people's views (and perhaps with some hackers) the relationship is more parasitical. No doubt there is a balancing act. If the institution views you as a parasite, it will attempt to stamp you out, as we have seen with hackers in the past. On the other hand, the hacker desires a degree of freedom and is unwilling to articulate his/her activities strictly within the dictates of institutional interests.

An educational hacker would exist in a symbiotic relationship with educational institutions: remixing and reusing institutional content, methods, technologies, expertise, etc. Perhaps such hackers act out of some ethical or political imperative, offering their products freely. Perhaps they are participating in a reputation or gift economy. Either way institutions will exist to recapture that labor and draw it back toward the capitalist marketplace. One can see this, for example, in the way commercial enterprises build up around Linux. Certainly one of the purposes of the conference I mentioned in my last post is imagining commercial enterprises that might build around social-mediated education.

But these are not extra-institutional relations. Pedagogy is an institutional function. It starts with the institution of the family, right? Parents are the first teachers. Then they are the ones who take you to school. How do parents know what to teach? Do they develop a pedagogy in a vacuum? Of course not.

Later, you decide that you will self-educate. What will you learn? English? history? economics? biology? computer science? Will you give a name to your educational path? Are you not then immediately entering into an institutional relationship? Is there a body of knowledge for which no profession and institution exists? If you will learn history, will you not learn it as a historian or from a historian? If you do not, how will you be able to say what you have learned is "history"?

No, you will enter into an institutional relationship. Perhaps you will hack history in the same way that one might say that Deleuze hacked philosophy. But does one hack a computer without first becoming a  computer scientist? Without first entering into an institutional relationship with the professional discourse community of computer science? No. And one does not, cannot, hack history without being a historian. Needless to say, Deleuze was a philosopher.

"Self-education" is only possible through a relationship with educational institutions. Perhaps a different one from that of the conventional student, but a relationship nonetheless.

I agree that participatory media networks will require educational institutions to change. But when we imagine "bottom up" educational forces, we should not imagine that those forces are not also institutional. Think Foucault here.

As I mentioned in an unrelated post, the degree zero of pedagogy might be sticking someone in a library with a reading list. That's the pre-internet version of self education, but even that requires extensive institutional enterprises. How will one develop the expertise to write the book? How will we vett it? Who will create the reading list? The questions go on and on. The network of institutional forces acting on an particular pedagogic event is extensive. The social media version of self-education involves, if possible, even a wider array of institutional forces at work in the delivery of the technological network. Social media may get you out of the physical classroom, but it doesn't get you out of the institution: the institution of the browser, the keyboard, the screen, etc., etc.

The printing press might make the profession and institutions of scribes obselete, but only by creating new institutions. Social media, in turn, creates its own institutions. Of course there will be learning outside institutions. As humans we maybe cannot help to learn from day to day, moment to moment. But we need to distinguish between these moments of learning and the sustained project of education, which is an institutional mechanism. There will be those who will hack the institution, but the hackers, in their own way, are as reliant on the health of the institution as those who operate more conventionally within institutional bounds.