digital digs

Chomsky, universal grammar, and the cognisphere

In this Google Talk, Chomsky addresses a range of issues as he responds to questions. My interest here is in his discussion of the first question regarding his changing perspective on the concept of universal grammar. Chomsky explains that the current theory is that language developed 50K-100K years ago and that as such, whatever genetic mutation took place must have been fairly small. Specifically, he theorizes that something external to evolution, a principal of nature or "computational efficiency" allowed this small evolutionary change to have this dramatic effect. That small change, he says, was probably the capacity to carry out recursive enumeration, which basically means the ability to take two already constructed items, make a third item out of them, and continual that process iteratively.

In other words, the capacity to compose.

Now this is something I talk about at the beginning of The Two Virtuals as I think it is integral to understanding the role contemporary media networks play in cognition and subjectivity. Looking at anthropology and evolutionary psychology, it seems to me that the key is the recognition of the role of external conditions in the formation of language/symbolic behavior (and hence consciousness/subjectivity as we experience them). There's a cognitive-informational crisis that results from an increasingly complicated set of social and technological contexts in which humans are operating. As I discuss in my book, this can be seen in the archaeological record.

What emerges from this crisis is termed a "creative explosion." However we might also think about it as the entry of humans into the cognisphere.   

disposable video comments

What do SUNY budget woes say about the future of higher ed?

The honest answer is that it's a hard to say. If you live in NY then you probably know about the state's budget issues with SUNY being one of the main targets for cutting. All types of bad stuff might happen. Despite the fact that there are well over 400K students at SUNY's 64 campuses, the state has always been better know for its private institutions. So what is one to do? I'm not only SUNY faculty but also a SUNY grad. There's a lot of good here, but the situation now is not good.

Anyway, there's a larger issue here. The cost of higher ed has well outpaced inflation for decades. My step-father earned his tuition money in the 70s working a summer job. Little chance of that now. On top of that, a larger percentage of HS grads go to college now. That means less prepared students and it also means more students with less economic ability to afford college. In short, the costs keep rising, and the students' ability to pay keeps declining. It doesn't take a genius, right?

While it's true that European universities go back to the 11th century or something like that, higher education as we know it is pretty much an industrial age phenomenon. They're the prototypical bourgeois institution, the gateway into the managerial-professional class. I'm trying to imagine appropriate analogs from previous eras. Would you say that the monastery was the university of the middle ages? that guilds were the colleges of the early modern era? Obviously colleges existed at those times but they were for such a small % of the population that they couldn't have served the same purpose.

I'm not sure how well those analogies hold up, but the point I would like to make is that during those historical periods it was probably difficult to imagine society functioning and transmitting its cultural knowledge without those institutions. That's the way we think about higher ed today. I mean, if anything higher ed seems more necessary than ever, right?

seesmic disqus video comments work now!

OK with Daniel Ha's help at Disqus the problem was fixed. The problem was a seesmic widget I had in my sidebar, which I have now deleted. Hopefully they'll work that out and I'll be able to have both again soon. So, merry video commenting to all!

The potential of video commenting (when I get it working)

OK still not working, but I'll figure it out eventually.

Now here's the thing. There's a recent post in Mashable about this--do people really want to make video comments? I'm not sure. It's a new thing, so maybe it will take some getting used to no doubt.

There's a good point about how its more efficient to read text comments, though obviously video comments have the potential to create a better sense of personal connection. As such, it depends somewhat on the kind of blog you have. If it's a personal blog with mostly friends as an audience (e.g. Live Journal), maybe video comments will be really popular. But a more impersonal, business-like blog will remain mostly text driven.

Maybe, maybe not.

I think you also have to factor in the mobile device. I imagine in the future I'll be able to post to seesmic or something like it directly from my mobile phone. I'll be able to watch/listen to video and respond in kind. That'd be a lot easier than trying to type out something substantive, right? Similarly, it might be easier to listen to/view comments than try to read them.

Of course I'm always thinking first and foremost of the educational application. I think video commenting will be great for my online courses. They will help to establish community among the participants and also engender a more conversational tone. It's also a way of responding to different learning styles and strengths. Not everyone is comfortable with writing off the cuff like this. While I am teaching professional writing and would like students to develop these skills, I also want to give them other modes of communication. Like this one.

disqus and seesmic

So I am trying an experiment right now making use of these two applications. It should now be possible for y'all to leave video comments on this blog. Now I don't know if you want to, but I thought it might be cool. If it works I'll probably try to integrate this into my online course in the fall.

Please don't read my thesis!

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and in it's Wired Campus Blog, there is an apparent controversy between colleges that want to publish student theses freely on the web and students and faculty, particularly in creative writing, that want to keep their theses private. The primary reason is that these students want to be able to publish their creative works and believe that having their work freely available online will hamper that.

I especially liked this quote from Jeanne Leiby, editor of Southern Review at LSU:

“I don’t necessarily want people to go back and read my thesis,” says Ms. Leiby, who earned a graduate degree in writing from the University of Alabama. “I’d like to think that in 15 years I’ve become more of a writer. I don’t necessarily want those early attempts associated with my name.”

Hmmm... and what do you plan for the next 15 years? To get better? Worse? Sure I wrote a creative writing thesis 15 years ago before I switched to rhet/comp. Are the poems in that thesis great? No, not really. Some are OK. I don't think there's much danger of anyone reading them, even if they were online.

Of course this leads to a curious contradiction. Which one is it? Do we want to keep the poems private b/c they aren't good? Or do we want to keep them private b/c they are good and we want to be able to exchange them for something rather than giving them away? I suppose it could be both, depending on the author.

Educomm and the ed tech market

You probably know about Educomm. It's an annual conference put on by University Business Magazine coming up in June in Las Vegas. It's one of these conferences where you get industry, administrators, IT professionals, and faculty all in relative proximity to one another.

To me, conferences like this are of interest for a couple of reasons:

• you get to find out where industry people seem to be going
• you can tap into the national-institutional discourse of educational IT
• and most importantly you get a sense of how this market intersects with your campus.

This conference actually looks pretty interesting. If I had the money and my wife wouldn't totally kill me for running off to yet another conference, I might consider going. Of course I'm interested in these institutional narratives about how technology practices are developed.

Most academics object on principle to the way in which curriculum, pedagogy, and general college policy seems to get driven by larger market forces. It's one thing is college's evolve over a generation to address the shift toward an information economy. It's another thing if classroom pedagogy is directly shaped by the way a company like Blackboard tries to shut out competitors with patents or if a particular piece of enterprise software dictates how curriculum might be constructed or if we have our courses turn tricks for a particular product line b/c they provide us with free stuff.

It's often in our nature to imagine the worst of others, but if you go to a conference like this one you have a chance to see some aspects of how these things actually work. Obviously not everyone is a saint, but it's also misleading to be wholly cynical about such matters.

The real task here is to get an understanding of educational technology so that you can be an informed participant in decision-making in a department or campus or whatever. Because one thing is certain: "decisions will be made" by some absent invisible hand/actor.

seesmic and civic volunteerism

Teaching in our proposed composition program

I'm preparing for a meeting with our writing faculty to discuss our proposed model. As I mentioned in a previous post, I don't think that it's anything revolutionary, nor do I imagine it will "solve" the problems of writing instruction on our campus. The purpose is primarily to dislodge the program from its bureaucratic and calcified state. I think I used the same adjectives last time, so I'm sticking on message ;o

Anyway, I thought it might be helpful to provide some examples of how these 200-level courses might be developed. I didn't want to do entire syllabi (too much work!) but the following provide enough details. Again, I'm not trying to be radical here and if I were to teach these courses I might not do what I describe here. Instead I'm really just trying to communicate how these courses are "doable."