March 17th, 2009 ontoligent
I want to give my two cents on Edupunk, a wildy successful term coined by Jim Groom (Mary Washington) to describe a style of academic technology support that (1) eschews Central IT and its dependency on scalable but clunky and ultimately boring and possibly evil applications, such as Blackboard, and (2) instead favors helping faculty use more open, flexible, elegant, interesting, and available technologies from the open source and Web 2.0 spaces, such as WordPress. In coining the term, Jim gave meaning and focus to a real trend and tension that has been with us for some time, but which remained uncatalyzed for being unnamed. Naming is powerful magic and we would do well to pay attention to it when it succeeds as well as it has in this case.
A lot has already been said about Edupunk and the range of ideas it connotes. In addition to the press that followed the coining of the term (including the New York Times), Jim has produced a playful but serious Battle Royale video series in which Jim and his former colleague Gardner Campbell (now at Baylor) debate the appropriateness and effectiveness of the term to advance goals they both share. (The topic was also the subject of a recent panel at SXSW 2009, but I have not listened to that yet.) After listening to these clips, though, I can’t help but think that the core idea has been weighed down by the considerable semantic load of the term “punk,” for better and for worse. So I thought I would take a stab at rescuing the idea from the word, if that’s at all possible. (I have no idea if this is cool with Jim.) Not that the debate between Gardner and Jim is reducible to mere semantics; they do have important differences of opinion on educational technology that go beyond the debate in question.
So, the core meaning of the term Edupunk derives from a rather straighforward analogy Jim draws between this style of academic technology and the late 1970s punk movement in music associated with groups like the Clash (his example). Just as the Clash had a raw freshness and energy in contrast to the bloated, formulaic, and empty music of Billboard 100 bands at the time, apps like WordPress and Drupal stand in contrast to the bloated and mind-numbing software that we often (but not always) get from the corporate sector, at least in the case of educational technology. The analogy works at a literal level since the success of bands like the Clash had a lot to do with their avoidance of Big Music production studios and producers in favor of cheaper technologies in available spaces like garages and basements. [Update: garage music is an example of the long tail of production being enabled by the commodification of the means of music production that took place in the 1970s.]
When you look at the analogy in this way, the term garage band, or some variant of it, turns out to be a better analogy than punk proper for what Jim is getting at. As a Clash song goes, they were a “garage band” from “garage land.” The image of a garage band — and think of early Devo or the Modern Lovers here — evokes the DIY ethos Jim refers to while avoiding analogies to bands like the Sex Pistols, who were cynically manufactured and marketed from the start. I have a hard time thinking of Drupal, for example, in the same space as the Sex Pistols. I have a less hard time comparing the software to the sound of, say, Joy Division. There is an elegant simplicity to both that, presumably, derives from their being developed without the encumbrances of a beauracracy and Big Leadership.
The analogy to the garage band music rather than punk per se avoids Gardner Campbell’s apt criticism about punk in the strict sense, that it was a divisive and cyncial movement without any real concern for change (one thinks of the Ramone’s I’m Against It or Richard Hell and the Voidoid’s Blank Generation), and therefore serves as a bad model for the hard work of crafting a transformational academic technology practice. But I suppose the norman “garage” does not lend itself to phrase coining the way the saxon-sounding “punk” does.
And the word “punk” does have an important connection to the open source software culture that Jim valorizes: there is a direct bloodline of descent that goes from punk (music) to cyberpunk (literature) to the hackerdom (technology) that produced Perl, Linux, and PHP. It’s a connection that is evident from the aesthetics of open source software before it became successful and co-opted (not necessarily for worse) by the web-inflated software industry. Just look at the covers ot 2600 and The Perl Journal from 1990s.
So, although I think Gardner is correct about not wanting to salute this particular flag because of its guilt by association with the Johnny Rotten school of anti-leadership, I think Jim was (is) onto something very important that needs further unpacking, even after the hype curve subsides. Ironically, I think the set of issues he catalyzed with the term have precisely to do with leadership and its connection to teaching and technology, where Gardner rightly shifts the debate. But more on that later.
Posted in Edupunk Reading Group, Uncategorized, teching and learning, theory | 6 Comments »
January 18th, 2009 ontoligent
It came to me recently how completely and diametrically opposed Aristotle and McLuhan really are. By which I mean the ancient academic sensibility that still pervades academia and the (post)modern, new media one that wants to break free from the old forms associated with literacy.
In the Poetics Aristotle specifies two distinguishing features of tragic poetry: (1) the paramount importance of the plot, or sequencing of events in the play, and (2) the downgrading of the “spectacle” of the play — the scenery, special effects, etc. Here’s how he puts it (emphases mine):
Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.
The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.
So, the plot is the soul of tragedy while spectacle is the least artistic part of it. Spectacle is so low in Aristotle’s reckoning that he even suggests that drama doesn’t need actors and stages! Apparently, the script by itself will do fine to achieve the sublime effects of the art. (Here it is clear that what Aristotle means by poetry is writing, and that he strongly values the stand-alone written work of art with this hierarchy. Although the form of the novel emerges much later, it is hard not to notice a genealogical connection here.)
Notice how opposite this is of the new media. On the one hand, as McLuhan states over and over, the medium is the message — i.e. that spectacle is the most important dimension of art and communication. And, regarding plot, consider Lev Manovich’s idea that the database is the symbolic form of our time: the sortable, selectable, random-access, paradigmatic, and non-linear form of the database, broadly defined, is the precise opposite of writing, although both involve text. For writing is, above all, the construction of a specific and unique sequence of sentences into a work that has, the more artistic it is, what Frank Kermode called the sense of an ending. Writing, in the sense of literary or philosophical or historical representation, is distinguished by the presense of an argument, a narrative, an unfolding of events and ideas in time, where the progression itself is as important as the content. Not so with databases, where content is decomposed into elemental units (records and fields) and then subject to endless growth and manipulation.
Posted in Edupunk Reading Group, Uncategorized, classics, theory | 3 Comments »
December 16th, 2008 ontoligent
Why is Faraday in McLuhan’s text (The Medium is the Massage)? Because McLuhan finds a happy juxtaposition of form and content in him: it is fitting that one of the discoverers of electricity also embodies the values of electric culture that McLuhan espouses-playful, participatory, aliterate. Faraday becomes an ancestral progenitor of the spontaneous participation his medium produces. Although never as foregrounded as Gutenberg, he becomes the cultural fountainhead of the electric in McLuhan’s mythology.
Posted in Edupunk Reading Group, Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 31st, 2008 ontoligent
At the suggestion of my colleague, Ed Webb, I’ve just read bavatuesday’s post, “What is an instructional technologist?“ It is brilliant. It gets to the heart of the matter about what is wrong with how instructional (and academic) technology is often framed by administrations who insist on modelling it on the ERP paradigm of central IT. I would only add that the problem is not central IT per se, or its mindset, or its institutional imperatives. The desire to model academic technology after ERP — essentially the Blackboard model, in which the enterprise application becomes the focus — makes a great deal of sense coming from a world in which business processes are well-understood, the risks are high, the costs are very high, and the rewards are relatively low. In that world, system failure can be catastrophic, whereas success is often measured in terms of absence — as with email, success is silence. When things work, no one thinks about it.
In the world of academic technology, the risks and rewards associated with disruption are often what we are looking for. Instructional technologists don’t just deliver prepared solutions to the classroom context, they experiment every time they help a professor develop a course with new media. It is tempting to think of this constant experimentation as the result of the rapidly changing nature of technology, or as the result of the relative youth of instructional technology (compared with enterprise IT, which goes back to the 1950s). However, I think that the difference is, as bavatuesday suggests, structural. Education is not a business process. Teaching and learning are different than working and executing a business process because the former is an inherently liminal process.
I am reminded of a series of post-structuralist oppositions from my anthropological background — Victor Turner’s concept of liminality vs. structure, Lucy Suchman’s contrast between planning and situated action, Marshall Sahlin’s idea of the “structure of the conjuncture” between structure and event, Bourdieu’s concept of improvization and the messy, quasi-structural dialectic between objectification and embodiment.
As academic technologists, we occupy the liminoid space between formal structures — encoded in org charts, assessment rubrics, enterprise software design (see Lessig’s principle that code = law), etc. — and the “event” of learning, which is always partly green (William Carlos Williams) and which is why those who teach are attracted to the classroom. That is why we favor open source software. Not becuase it is free — we know it isn’t — but because it is flexible, agile, and adaptive to the situation of teaching and learning, which not only changes over time, but from professor to professor. It may be messier than proprietary solutions, but then, we herd cats, not dogs.
To borrow another anthropological trope, perhaps instructional technology is to enterprise computing as celeritas is to gravitas:
Celertas refers to the youthful, active, disorderly, creative violence of conquering princes; gravitas to the venerable, staid, judicious, priestly, peaceful, and productive dispositions of an established people.
Marshall Sahlins, “The Stranger-King,” in Islands of History.
Reference to conquering princes may sound a bit extreme. But that’s not too far from the concept of a change agent, which is what we are. And maybe it’s not too bad of a model for the kind of leadership we seek to have.
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
February 9th, 2008 ontoligent
I attended the EDUCAUSE Learning Intitiative (ELI) Annual Meeting in San Antonio a couple of weeks ago (Jan 28-30, 2008). It was my first such conference, and I was representing Dickinson College as a new member of the organization. (ELI itself is not new to me — I have been part of member institutions in the past — but this was my first conference.) My overall impression of the conference itself was very high, especially compared to my experiences with the gargantuan EDUCAUSE conferences, which have become too big to be useful in my opinion. ELI seems just right, although I understand that it too is growing very fast. One sign of the appropriate scale of the conference was the ubiquitous presence and approachability of Diana Oblinger, the new president of EDUCAUSE. Basically, if you wanted to speak with her you could.
ELI is great for a number of other reasons. First, it focuses specifically on academic technology and how it is actually used in real contexts of teaching and learning. Second, it brings together technologists, librarians, faculty, students, and administrators in one space. (Next time, I will want to bring more librarians as well as my technology team.) Third, it really does make an effort to focus on the student perspective, which is all too often forgotten or undervalued.
This was the first conference I attended with its own Twitter feed, running on a wall-mounted plasma screen for all to monitor. Gardner Campbell, one of the designated Citizen Bloggers for the conference, wrote about his morning-after experience with Twitter, in which he and fellow Twitterers got all snippy about the last speaker (of which more below). They all felt bad about their behavior later, but stuck to their opinions, and rightly so. Anyway … below is my my account of some of the talks I attended, impressions based on the notes I took.
Henry Jenkins, “What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies”
This was a very good talk, but I can’t say I really learned anything new, nor did I come away with any really good arguments for Wikipedia to present to faculty that I haven’t already tried. Jenkins is a good speaker and a good academic, but he, like any other advocates I know, loses people, when he uncritically makes claims like “Nobody is smarter than everybody.” Many of my faculty colleagues would regard such claims with bemused suspicion, responding with a simple “Unpack that, please.” Talks like this should focus entirely on such propositions rather than using them as evidence for what they are trying to prove, for this is really what is at stake here — a new kind of epistemology. (See themes below.)
Gardner Campbell, “Information Fluency as Curricular Innovation: New Media Studies in General Education”
A very good talk on Gardner’s experience with a general ed course on New Media Studies. Two of his students presented their work, which I felt was a great idea. However, I am not sure they would have made an effective case to a board of trustees that new media literacy is a “have to have” item in the curriculum. (Which of course was not their goal.) The conversation afterward focused on the importance of this effort and the need for an interdisciplinary field of media studies. I understand but strongly disagree with that view. Interdisciplinarity is the Shangri La of academics — a place where lambs rest with lions and all that. It never happens in any long-term, stable way. Instead, interdisciplinary programs end up being their own departments, with their own credentials, history, canonical literature, modes of thinking, etc. Interdisciplinarity works best as a side effect — or emergent property — of good faith interaction among members of established disciplines. Anyway, I discussed with Gardner afterwards my idea for targeting methods courses within disciplines, using a digital scholarship model.
Jude Higdon and Karen Howell, “Comaprative Political Media 2.0: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting, YouTube, and More”
A good war story talk on a great idea — teaching a course on political media that takes on the new media not just in content — “you need to read Daily Kos” — but in process — “you need to blog too.” Frank discussion of what worked (blogging) and did not work (wikis) in this case. I see this as an example of digital scholarship because the digital is used at the level of course content, and not simply as a delivery or organizational mechanism.
Michael Wesch, “Human Futures for Technology and Education”
Without doubt, the high point of the conference. We all know Mike from his incredibly viral “The Machine is Us/Using Us“; in this talk, he used PowerPoint as an almost cinematic medium to make the case for a new pedagogy based on (1) the new media, in which information is not scarce but incredibly cheap, and (2) anthropology, which has always taught that meaning is tightly related to context and the social. You can see the talk on-line here. My take on his pedagogy is “use with caution.” I can’t imagine many Dickinson faculty embracing it anytime soon, but there are important lessons to be learned from his perspective , which actually has very close parallels to the ethos of the small, liberal arts campus that we strive to cultivate at DC. In addition, whatever one thinks of Wesch’s pedagogy, there is no denying he is a great film maker.
Gardner Campbell, “Innovation in Faculty Development”
An excellent round table discussion on how various colleges and universities approach the issue of bridging the gap between faculty and technology developers (like me). Because the room had literally what seemed to be over 100 folks, it was a bit tedious, but once we broke up into four groups to propose and discuss solutions to one of four problems, we had a lot of traction. Among the things that emerged for me was (1) everyone has this problem, (2) no one has a good answer to it, although there are lots of fairly good partial solutions, and (3) no one has really tried the digital scholarship approach that I am trying to accomplish here (at Dickinson).
The problem itself was cast primarily as a credibility gap: faculty don’t really respect us peers, they see us a technicians to solve specific, technical problems such as getting a projector in a classroom or teaching students to edit video. They often do not realize that technology is a craft with its own logic and pedagogical implications, and that we — academic technologists and librarians — have a lot to offer at this level.
Among the solutions offered were the following:
- Create Faculty Learning Communities of Practice.
- Don’t call workshops workshops.
- Build your credibility by teaching courses yourself.
- Let faculty teach faculty. Faculty trust other faculty.
My own perspective on the issue, which I expressed, is that a major driver in this divide is ideology: we tend to accept the Great Transformation Thesis (see below), which holds that technology is changing everything, and that the old models and even goals of teaching and learning have got to change, whereas faculty (in my mind for the most part rightly) are critical of all this. Faculty have a “show me” attitude, can see through the shallow if flashy pseudo-sociology of technology advocates, and don’t want to throw babies out with the bathwater. (This is where digital scholarship comes in …)
Bob Young, “Educational Publishing: Moving from the 18th to the 21st Century in One Step”
“… and, in the process, skipping over all of you educational technology bureaucrats who are getting in the way of progress and who, but the way, ruined my education growing up.” Which was essentially the man’s message. He did not really talk about LuLu, his latest business venture, beyond describing the obvious long-tail, get-rid-of-the-middle-man-publisher business model. This was the talk that got so many of the Twitterers on edge.
THEMES
Literacy, fluency and genre
If I were to capture what I learned in this conference, it is that under the sign of the overused, over-hyped label “2.0″ is an emerging consensus on how to think of the such things as Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, World of Warcraft, SecondLife, the Blogosphere, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and other quintessential Web 2.0 phenomena. That consensus is captured by the semantic cluster of terms like literacy, fluency, and genre. So, for example, Wikipedia represents a genre within a new kind of literacy which is, by implication, just as useful and important as the older, print literacy in which education is currently so heavily invested. Although careful not to argue that the new literacy will displace the old, a number of very strong claims are made in the name of the new literacy which amount to a kind of manifesto of epistemology (see below.) I like this turn, even if it is only at the level of vocabulary, because I think it is the right way to think about how the new media and Web 2.0 practices potentially fit into an academic curriculum such as what we have at DC. I think faculty will have a better understanding of the implications of things like Flickr and Wikipedia and blogging if we describe them as new genres with their own potentials and pitfalls for academic use.
Cognition 2.o
Beyond the linguistic turn, as it were, is a more or less explicit cognitive turn that is much more pronounced than I have seen in the past. The new literacies, although presented cautiously as augmentive to the old, were in fact repeatedly represented as harbingers of an an entirely new way of thinking (literally) that will at some point displace the old. Specifically, there was constant reference to “collective intelligence,” “distributed cognition,” and “participatory cognition.” The import of these terms is actually pretty revolutionary when put in the light of how teaching and learning happen now. For example, whereas the old epistemology (often referred to by the unfortunate gloss “Cartestian” … anyone for Newtonian too?) is individualist and focuses on a decontextualized notion of content, the new epistemology is collectivist and contextually sensitive. The argument is that, since “nobody is smarter than everybody,” the new literacy is, well, better than the old. We are beyond critiquing bolt-on uses of technology and way into a kind of revolutionary mentality.
The Great Transformation
Finally, another theme that ran through the conference was that we all need is a metanarrative to link our pursuits together, even though, in good postmodern fashion, we are skeptical of metanarratives (like Marxism or Enlightenment progressivism). This idea was ignited by Wesch, who proposed a “Spaceship Earth” story. But all of this surprised me, since the obvious metanarrative, at least among academic technologists for the past 10 years or so, goes somethng like this:
We are in the midst of a Great Transformation caused by digital technologies, which is like Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press but orders of magnitude more profound. Everything is changing, a fact that our students instinctively understand but which our faculty do not. Our mission is to ride the wave of this profound historical upheaval and get our faculty to come along and enjoy the new information prosperity that awaits us.
Based on my experience with this conference, the narrative has been refined: Because all learning is social, and Web 2.o is social, and traditional learning models are not, therefore web 2.o will save us.
That may be an exaggeration, but it really isn’t that far from the truth.
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