digital digs

redesigning fyc and instructor motives

I was reading Elizabeth Wardle's article "Can Cross-Disciplinary Links Help Us Teach 'Academic Discourse' in FYC?" in Across the Disciplines. I won't seek to summarize the article here, but one of the things that struck me reading it regarded the way that instructor beliefs about writing, education, and discipline inform the delivery of an FYC program.

Ostensibly, FYC is a "program" with agreed-upon goals and perhaps even methods. However the program is often delivered by instructors with a wide variety of education and teaching experience. There's little or no disciplinary identity there. Compare this with our literary studies general education courses--Intro to Lit, Intro to Fiction, Intro to Poetry, etc: there's never any discussion about how to teach these courses or how the courses should meet their goals. Why? I suspect it's because our instructors have a strong sense of disciplinary identity when it comes literature, even though they don't necessarily agree with one another.

teaching networks

As Latour and others remind us, social networks predate the concept of computer networks--the two should not be confused or conflated. And yet, there does seem to be something about computer networks that has made our encounters with networks more palpable or visible.

For example, the typical professor delivering lectures, assigning print readings, writing on a chalkboard, grading student essays, etc: this person's work and actions emerge from a complex network. Still, we managed to conceive of this work in terms of academic freedom. While we might wrangle over what this means in terms of "sensitive" or "political" subjects, generally this has meant at least a wide latitude in terms of course design: the readings, the assignments, the grading, and so on.

However, with emerging technologies all of this has shifted somewhat.

Karios PraxisWiki and the dilemma of collaborative scholarship

Starting with the recently published issue, I am officially co-editing the Praxis section of Kairos with Envera Dukaj. One of the things we need to think about is the PraxisWiki. In some respects the dilemma of the PraxisWiki is a familiar one in discussions of Web 2.0 scholarship.

As I've written about here in the past, one of the necessary components of scholarly work is that it has to be exchangeable for some kind of academic currency. Put bluntly, I need to be able to put it on my vita and use it to get a job or tenure or a raise or promotion or something. I at least need to get some reputation boost from it. This may seem rather mercenary, but that's the way it goes.

So when you look at contributions to PraxisWiki, one of the first things an academic wants to know is what does it count for? Traditional research uses review as a pre-filter. Collaboration occurs prior to publication and is largely invisible, even though everyone knows that an author receives feedback from editors and reviewers and so on. With a conventional wiki, review and collaboration occurs after publication, or more accurately publication is an iterative process. Also collaboration is more intensive and visible.

All this we already know, right? And the question that follows we also likely know: how does one construct a wiki in such a way as to make it "scholarly work"?

liberal facism

Been on vacation a good long while. Felt good. I'm starting my sabbatical, so I need to get my brain turning again. So here I am.

I read the Salon interview with Jonah Goldberg about his book Liberal Fascism. I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on it. Maybe it is the partisan hatchet job people on the left seem to suggest it is. It does seem that we have gone well past the point where any serious political dialog can be had in this country. Maybe that's the clearest signal of fascism one could ever need...

Anyway, I am quite familiar with the idea of liberal fascism. Not surprisingly, my notions of fascism are heavily informed by Deleuze and Guattari, but a good succinct definition comes from Benjamin in his observation that fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics, as in life becomes lifestyle becomes lifestyle politics. Having spent my adult life on college campuses, having lived in Ithaca NY and spent time in New Age enclaves in the Southwest, I am quite familiar with lefty lifestyle politics and its micropolitical fascism. However, having grown up in suburban NJ and lived most of my life surrounded by churches, malls, and box stores, I am as familiar as most of us with the micropolitical fascism of the everyday American religious right.

By this definition of fascism, we are all inescapably fascist. In fact, we would look at WWII as the defeat of a nationalistic, eugenic, socialist form of fascism by a globalizing, technological, capitalistic form of fascism.