digital digs

artilects and the new human

So I'm showing this video to my Cyberpunk Literature summer class. It's a BBC show dealing with cognitive science and developments of artificial intelligence. It looks at some particular activities and explores some of the ethical and political concerns around them.

It's an interesting video, and I think it will spur some good conversation with students. In particular I think it will connect well with Neuromancer and some of the other novels we're reading that address the idea of artificial intelligence. If anything, it's a good reminder that the questions explored by cyberpunk are still with us and are perhaps closer than ever.

CSA week 2

OK, maybe this is more for me than for you, but I want to keep track of what we get each week.

• Baby lettuce
• Mustard Greens
• Bunched Spinach
• Sugar Snap Peas
• Garlic Scapes
• Cilantro
• Popcorn

Yes, popcorn, dried corn, still on the cob. Stick it in a brown lunch bag and put in the microwave for approx 2.5 minutes. Popcorn results. Kinda fun.

Should the web be nationalized?

On TechCrunch today the question of whether or not to nationalize the internet. Some debate over there but mostly your typical web-geek, libertarian knee-jerk response. No government regulation of anything for those folks! I think they'd abolish traffic signals if they could. But the point is that this position is fundamentally deluded.

There are not modern markets without government regulation. Let me throw some "P" words at you: private property, police, prisons. The market without governments is the one where I don't pay my mortgage and I walk into the supermarket and take whatever I want. A sizable chunk of our economy is founded on copyright and patents. Try doing that without a government. I believe the libertarian mental error lies in the belief in certain "natural rights" that governments might restrict but by definition cannot provide. Somehow they imagine private property is a natural right I think.

But private property can't be a natural right. Clubbing any sucker who steps into territory you think is yours might be a "natural prerogative," but since the concept of ownership doesn't even extend to ever culture... but I digress. The point is that modern markets, at least, function on rights of ownership. Those are defined by the government, and they are secured by govt institutions. So what can be owned and what rights an owner may have are issues regulated by the government. The bottom line is that the issue can never be whether or not to have government regulation, but rather what kind of regulation you want.

Of course in the global economy, national governments are only players. Even within the national economy the government is turned inside-out and made part of the market by giant corporations, industries, and other deep-pocket interests. I totally understand complaints about bureaucracy and inefficiency but part of it is the mockery the market has made of the government.

Personally, I would like to see web access be fast, cheap/free, and broadly accessible. I also want to have as much freedom as possible in my use of that access. Now it's hardly the most important social issue in the world, but it's not unimportant either. Sadly though everyone pretty much agrees on these goals, we enter an ideological debate over how to get there. And the debate has nothing to do with the internet. Those who are opposed to govt regulation are opposed to it in virtually every instance.

Why can't we frame the debate in a different way? Why not start by talking about what actually needs to be done and then start figuring out who might be best to do those things? Maybe some things might be better done by the govt and others by private interests.

Here's my strictly personal perspective. What would it take for all my students to have high-speed internet access for their online courses? Most do, but not all. Some don't have access where they live. Clearly there's little or no commercial incentive to reach them. But if the govt is going to go out and lay that wire (or pay for it to be laid in some way--tax breaks, grants, whatever) so that those folks can become paying customers of TimeWarner or Verizon or whoever will provide them access, as a citizen I want something in return from those corporate interests.

creativity and teaching

Listened to Sir Ken Robinson (mp3) at RSA last week (speech was last week, listened last night). You could call it an extended dance mix of his TED talk, but I found the elaborations useful and interesting. Usually when I write about teaching, I'm talking about technology or networks, but this is something different. Not wholly unrelated, at least in my mind, but different.

Robinson's point is that school systems are really headed in the wrong direction. If you think about it, that this is not shocking and disturbing ought to be disturbing in itself. Educational reform has generally meant trying to get better at doing the things we have always done. It has generally meant raising standards and pretty much more standardizing any way we can get it. The premise seems to be that schools require greater levels of centralized control and better quality control.

As everyone knows, it's a factory model.

Robinson is quick to note that the initial premise is really amazing. The notion of a public education, free at the point of service, is one of the great innovations of industrialization. Many have benefited from public education. Socially we have certainly benefited from public education. But millions more have not benefited, and socially we can no longer afford to ignore the potential of our children. And this is really Robinson's point, schools just drum out the creative potential in children and generally fail to see the value in the many, many kids who just don't fit the mold.

I certainly think about this in terms of my kids. They are both excellent performers in school, and they are both totally unchallenged. In each of their classes there are two kids repeating the grade. That seems like an awfully high percentage. There's no solution here except that we need to start thinking differently about education and addressing these problems on a more local level.

As such, it's a matter of going back to square one. If you're going to take my kids, and all the other kids in the neighborhood, for six hours a day and encourage them to learn and develop their interests, how would you do it?

Would you separate them by age, sit them at desks, and give them a series of formulaic assignments? Probably not.

If you tossed out all the learning goals and the standards that tell teachers what they have to do, what would they choose to do? Freed from institutional restrictions, how would they act? What kinds of teacherly communities would they form? What relationships would they build with parents and the local community?

I think first you'd have to let them go crazy for a while. You'd have to embrace chaos. You'd have to be incredibly patient. It would be like pedagogical detox for the whole community. Then I think you'd have to listen to the students and give them many ways to express themselves. You'd need to figure out who these kids were, what their interests and strengths might be. The grown-ups would need to have ongoing conversations as well.

Then the hard work would begin as you'd have to figure out plans for every student and map connections between them.

But my premise is simple here. How could we make elementary teacher into a creative and intellectually challenging job? B/c of course it should be that kind of job, teaching a community of children should demand such things. And that's not to say that many current teachers wouldn't be up to the challenge but only that the current system places little trust in them in terms of these things.

Sadly that's where we are. Of course Robinson puts this all in a very compelling way.

action media pedagogy

AMP. How's that for an acronym? Just kidding. I was reading Will Richardson and his reference to a Clay Shirky video. The Shirky video is mostly a discussion of the themes of his book, but Will picks up on this one little phrase about the move from "media for knowledge" to "media for action," meaning that now the organizational tools of networks allow us not only to share knowledge but to participate in collective action in powerful new ways. Shirky gives several examples from the book and one new example regarding the mafia in Palermo.

As we know, Shirky's main theme is that contemporary networks make it so much easier for everyday people to organize for any number of purposes that social networking is altering traditional relationships between people and the institutions upon which they used to rely for organizational infrastructure.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this in terms of our dear ol' institutions. The first (and ongoing) crisis of social networking was sharing media content. This didn't affect colleges directly, even though media content production is an integral part of our work. Obviously, no one really cares much about the pedagogic media content we produce; that is, students don't pay for access to content.

Much to our chagrin, they pay for the degree. But what does that certification represent? Well, expert testimony: I'll get back to that one. The other part is organization/coordination, e.g., curriculum. Here is where we can start to see changes if Shirky is right. What happens when you can freely coordinate content with easy and free/cheap organization? How hard would it be for a couple of English MAs or BAs to put together an undergrad lit studies curriculum just with freely available content? All the prof lectures you need are available here or there. All the pre-20th century literary texts are freely available. There's plenty of full-text databases available through public libraries if you need that. Even if you have to buy some material, the cost is very small compared to tuition. Then you set up a syllabus and a discussion board and just go. You can already see this in Facebook with an app like Supercool School.

Now you could say that you're going without the feedback from professors, but I went through my English BA with huge classes graded by TAs and occasional, research-free papers graded by professors who offered little more than a few check marks, a comment like "very good" and a grade. That's not optimal, but I don't believe you can argue that "feedback" is a necessary or integral part of an undergrad education

Of course you do need "expert testimony," someone who is qualified to say you've accomplished something. It seems to me though that you could accomplish this with some examinations and a portfolio review. So you could replace many colleges with an extended ETS-like service. Basically you could get rid of all the colleges in the middle. All those average colleges and all the students who attend them and graduate with sub 3.0 GPAs. You'd keep the top colleges for the top students and you'd keep the open admissions colleges for students who wouldn't have the literacy or educational habits to get a degree in this way.

Obviously I'm not recommending that future, but I could see how we could end up there. The other possibility is perhaps action media pedagogy.

agency and apprehension

One of my continuing favorite intellectual moves is to consider the history of concepts through etymology. Perhaps this seems pedantic, but to me it is a reminder of the materiality of language. The nexus of apprehend, apprehension, and apprehensive send me off in this regard. As we know apprehend references both physically and mentally grasping something (the physical came first, btw). It has a particular legal suggestion (e.g. "criminals were apprehended today"). As we move toward apprehension and apprehensive we get an increasing sense of a third definition that has to do with anticipation, particularly anticipating with fear or dread (though that meaning also appears for apprehend). There's a suggestion of a kind of reaching out perhaps, but certainly a cautious reaching.

I've often thought of the word apprehension in the relationship between distributed cognitive processes, our experience of consciousness, and the subjectivities we inhabit. This was something that came up in a conversation I had with Gardner Campbell the other day. So all this is an attempt to get some better language around what I was trying to communicate about agency.

There's a networked flow of cognitive processes. Some of it is technological in the conventional sense: flows of binary data along fiber optics, CPUs, magnetic storage, wireless access, and so on. There's the larger cultural-material network, physical spaces embedded with information, ideology, and so on. There are other people and groups of people. And there are our own bodies, which interface with these networks, sending information coursing through us.

Out of this continual state, a thought emerges into consciousness. We generally apprehend that thought in language, though sometimes words fail us. However thoughts also strike us affectively, with force. This is also apprehension, to varying degrees, as we grasp the aporia, the ineffability, of thought.

Consciousness can be abstractly separated from the network of distributed cognition, but it is better understood as part of the cognitive network. Every actor in the network performs its mediations. If we find information, force, and will as different aspects of the same process, the these mediations are also mechanisms that shape force.

In short, agency lies everywhere, with every actor. Of course that's what makes it agency, right? If we couldn't pass along our agency to others in the network then it wouldn't amount to much. Practice zazen meditation and you'll quickly realize your thoughts are not you. Still there is an eye/I that is watching thoughts.

So I suppose you could imagine consciousness strictly as a theater, but that wouldn't make much sense to me. It makes more sense to me that consciousness performs cognitive functions, pertaining to symbolic behavior I would imagine. As such, it has its role in the network of agency. So does our subjectivity, which apprehends our thoughts, pinning them against a cultural-ideological grid, and communicates apprehension to the conscious about the things we think. Again, this is only a partial apprehension.

In the end, the process of apprehension, with its partiality and affective excesses, both communicates the force of agency and opens the possibility for new agencies, new dimensions of force, at every node along the network.

Perhaps post-humanist descriptions of agency cause apprehension (or stronger negative emotions) for you. I have always figured that no one's description of agency or free will can alter whatever my consciousness is. It might alter my understanding of my consciousness, but no philosophical argument can take away agency if it exists or give it to me if it does not. So all we're really after is a good description of agency that, if possible, improves our ability to act individually and collectively.

on demand composition instruction

Chronicle post on a new online, on-demand course service, StraigtherLine. Of course they offer Composition. Here's the syllabus. The question isn't whether you can offer something better. The question is whether your institution can offer something better programmatically. The course is your typical rhet/comp crap, the worst imaginable, and hence just what you'd generally find in a random FYC course. StraighterLine didn't lick it off the grass ya know!

In a way it's an old story. Plenty of first-years come in with credit for FYC achieved somehow. It's so common now, I wouldn't be surprised if a black market for these credits didn't start developing. But the academic marketplace is such that colleges can't afford to not recognize the credit (much like the guy checking IDs at the college dive bar downtown).The difference here is that the course is On Demand! You can start today if you like. That means there is no instructor per se, and there are no classmates. You follow the course, and if you need help there are tutors (i.e. customer service reps) to assist you. I think you get 10 hours free when you sign up. I'm guessing they've got another department that just grades the writing.

It's sweet! It's just what rhet/comp has earned. Our field has very smart people and very sophisticated ideas about writing and composition, but they generally cannot be found in the FYC classroom. The FYC classroom remains a place that

• focuses on mechanics and correctness
• views "the" writing process as a lock-step assembly line
• creates private writing tasks between student and teacher

None of these things are supportable in rhet/comp research, and yet we continue to produce textbooks that engender these activities, and we continue to oversee faculty in programs that engage in these practices. The result is a curriculum that is mechanized. We mechanized it so that we could deliver it 50-100 times a semester on our campuses. But now it will be mechanized on demand, online thousands of times each day.

Congratulations on that one.

e-Literate on the horizon

Michael Feldstein is editing a special edition of the journal On the Horizon and his contributors are publishing extended discussions of their forthcoming pieces at e-Literate. My post will be appearing next week, and I've been reading with interest about the other articles. Scott Wilson and Kamala Velayutham have posted on their article, "Repositioning institutional approaches to technology in the context of Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments and Utility Computing: A cybernetic approach."

We are familiar with the story of how students are interested in web 2.0 apps, social networking, and such, and with how some faculty pursue the integration of such into teaching. We also know that these practices raise issues for colleges and institutions, particulary in the long term. The special issue addresses this general situation.

Wilson and Velayutham point out, off-handedly, that similar issues are appearing in the workplace, citing an accenture study and this blog. The blog and study essentially say that employees find their employers falling behind in technology and that they have access to better applications outside the workplace and want to make use of web 2.0 apps to be more productive. So yes, much like the university. It is also interesting that the response to that blog is quite intense and negative. The responders cite the security problems web 2.0 apps raise for businesses. They also strongly question the idea that they make workers more productive.

Again, much like the university.

It is interesting that in the workplace situation, the argument comes down to something like this. You are an employee. You are obligated to follow your employer's rules. Your employer owns the technology you use and has the right to determine how it shall be used. Blah, blah, blah. All true. I imagine that the university and its faculty might want to make a similar claim about the classroom and the campus. And yet it's tricky since the students are not employees but rather customers.

CSA Report, week one

Yesterday was our first share from our community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm, Stone's Throw. This week is

• Salad greens
• Mustard greens
• Wild greens
• French breakfast radishes (really, radishes, for breakfast?)
• Snow peas
• Cayenne peppers
• Sage
• Cilantro

I've already tried the salad, radishes, and peas. Excellent. Such a difference!

PraxisWiki and you... yes, you!

We are looking to relaunch Kairos' PraxisWiki. Here's the idea. If you are teaching a graduate course addressing computers and writing, or if you are a grad student in such a course, then PraxisWiki is for you. The idea is to open accounts for faculty and graduate students in our field to compose the wiki as part of curriculum.

This is a solution for getting around the problem that wiki collaboration doesn't really work as a model of scholarly work right now, making it hard to attract users to do this work as scholarship.

Of course we view participation in the PraxisWiki as valuable, intellectual work. Not only could it be a useful contribution of knowledge for the tens of thousands of writing instructors who increasingly must incorporate technology into their teaching, it is also a contribution to the important intellectual work of opening our understanding of what counts as scholarship. Right now I could see the wiki including things like

• reviews of articles/books
• reviews of technology and applications
• key terms/concepts
• syllabi, assignments, rubrics, and other pedagogy material
• history of computers and writing

But what do I know? It's your wiki (or could be), you figure out what belongs there! Leave a comment or drop me an e-mail if you're curious.