digital digs

working hard or hardly working: labor day thoughts on the professoriate

A recent NY Times article causing reaction on the WPA-list takes up the subject of the public bashing of professors. It's really a fairly dated complaint. At least I can't recall a time in my professional life when professors weren't being bashed, even though this piece wants to suggest this is some kind of recent turn of events. The common response on the WPA list is to react with a list of the hard work one is doing.

I have several reactions to this, but that response is not one of them (even if I do think I work hard).

1. Most highly-educated professions are disliked as professions--lawyers, bankers, doctors, politicians, teachers--so why not professors? Can you name a profession that requires graduate education that isn't disliked? Maybe there are some, but only because their cultural profile is not very high. Americans as a whole distrust education and educated people (remember less than 10% of Americans have graduate degrees). That's life. 

2. Related to point one, the average American doesn't understand (or value) the work we do, especially in the humanities. Certainly we could do more to reach out to the public. However in doing so we compete with a pro-corporate mass media. I have little doubt that if humanists' political views were more in line with those of the mainstream media, we'd be represented in a far better light. 

It's a little odd these days to try to argue that professors are only working a couple of hours per week comprised of the time they are teaching classes or holding office hours. How many people cybercommute these days? Watch those house hunting shows and everyone is talking about needing a home office. I assume that's because they are working at home. The nature of labor across many professions is tending more toward the shape of academia than away from it.

3. The article suggests professors make a lot of money (really?) and throws around 6-figure numbers. According the bureau of labor statistics, the national median for post-secondary English teachers is $58K. Yes, some other professors earn more (e.g. median for engineering is $86K, but that has something to do with the non-academic market for engineers), but I haven't noted a dramatic overall increase in the salaries of English professors in the last decade. That is, looking at the BLS stats and those on Monster.com, I doubt an incoming asst prof at SUNY Cortland, where I started in 2001, is making more than I did (after you factor inflation, etc.). The uproar is over the increasing cost of higher education, but until someone shows me some evidence to the contrary, it doesn't seem to me that the increase is a reflection of increased costs for faculty. In fact, given the shift toward adjunct faculty, I would find it hard to believe that faculty costs overall can have gone up in real dollars. Certainly not in the humanities.

4. If one wants to be unhappy with the cost of higher education, join the club. I've got two kids too who will want to go to college in the next decade. But I think part of the unhappiness is the sense that one is required to go to college to get a decent job. Let me point out that this fact is not the responsibility of higher education. Universities don't write job ads for corporations. I still say that people happily pay for a nice car the same amount they might pay for in-state public university tuition. But they want the car and they don't want the education. They just want the job that requires the education (actually they don't want the job either; they want the stuff they can buy with the pay from the job).

5. The other thing people seem to dislike is tenure. And I think they place themselves in that position and say "if I had tenure then I'd sit around and do nothing all day." Well, maybe that's why you don't have tenure. To get to tenure, a person has to exhaust a tremendous amount of labor. Seven years of graduate school (on average), working as a TA or adjunct, borrowing a lot of money all for the chance to just compete for a tenure-track job. Most people wouldn't take that risk (probably because they are sane or something). Then one has to negotiate the job market and tenure process. Really you can only get to tenure if you have a tremendous amount of intrinsic motivation for doing the work required. Now others might not value that work (see above), but doing it for the extrinsic reward of tenure protection isn't going to be sufficient. 

Now that's not to say that there aren't lazy professors. I'm guessing there are lazy people where you work too. That's not to say that some years one is more productive than others. Anyone is sales has this same experience. We are all familiar with this trend among professional athletes. The point though is that overall professors have plenty of motivations for continuing to work after tenure, including material rewards like better pay and perks but also reputation and improved working conditions. In turn universities benefit from the reputations of their faculty. 

In the end, tenure is one of the benefits of being an academic. Any pro-business, free-market advocate should appreciate that. If University A offered you $75K and tenure and University B offered you $80K and a 3-yr contract, which would you take? Yes, there are plenty of job-seeking phds out there, but if you want proven faculty with national reputations, there's a competitive market for such folks. How much more would a university have to offer you to compensate for not offering you tenure? Then, thinking of this from the university perspective, which approach is more cost-effective?

Maybe as a university you do tenure a few duds. Every large corporation has employees that somehow manage to hide under the radar. And yes it probably is harder to get rid of those folks. But compare that to the cost of not offering tenure. Sure, hypothetically every university in the world could decided simultaneously to stop offering tenure. Hypothetically every business that employees people in any profession might simultaneously decide to start paying those folks half what they currently pay them.

Or not.

The fact of the matter is that when you factor in the years of education and the precarious nature of the job market and tenure process, that academia is not a good profession to enter for making money.

I mean, isn't that obvious. Just to hit the point home. The median salary for writers is $53K and for nurses its $63K. And I don't want to denigrate nurses in any way. My mother is a nurse. But no one thinks nurses make "a lot" of money, do they? Well, English professors make less, only a little more than "writers."

ethics, professionalism, and standardized testing

As reported in the NY Times, there seems to be a "slight" error in the standardized testing measures in which it first appeared that 86% of students were at "grade level" in math, when in fact only 61% were. In the article, Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the state’s Education Department, is quoted as saying “Now that we are facing the hard truth that not all of the gains were as advertised, we have to take a look at what we can do differently. These results will finally provide real unimpeachable evidence about to be used for accountability.”

But I especially like this paragraph:

New York City officials said that if the passing rates since 2006 were adjusted to match the new scoring standards, the city had shown substantial progress over all. But that explanation is likely to offer little consolation to teachers and parents who must now face the reality that just more than half of city students in the third through eighth grades are proficient in math, not four out of every five, as they were led to believe last year.

To which I believe the only suitable response is to say, "But these go to 11."

Of course the entire system of assessment here is comically arbitrary. First you establish some fantastical notion of what qualifies as math or ELA knowledge that says first you must learn X and then Y and that you must learn them by a certain point in time. Second, you make up some test that purports to evaluate whether or not students have learned this knowledge in the way you have insisted that they should. Third you drink the assessment kool-aid so that you can believe the results of some test can tell you the Truth about what students actually know.

Testing does not and cannot improve education. It cannot even give you a real sense of the classroom. I love Tisch's unrepentant delusion where, even when faced with the gross imprecision of testing, she continues to have faith in future assessments. Why would any sane person believe that future results would be any less impeachable than last year's?

The fundamental problem is that we do not trust teachers' professional ethics. This begins with imposing standardized curriculum (where we don't trust them to create their own) and extends through the reward system attached to high-stakes testing. But this is completely wrong-headed. Certainly, younger, less-experienced teachers need to be mentored and guided, but at some point we either have to trust these people to educate our kids or stop sending them into the classroom.

Of course there are problems with the way that we structure these jobs. If teachers are professionals (which of course they must be), they need to be involved in discussions and research regarding teaching methods as well as the subject matter they teach. They need to be part of a community which affords the professional courtesy of making one's own decisions but also ultimately holds one ethically accountable to research, best practices, and so on. And those things do exist, but they need to be a more integral part of every teachers' work. Then there is also the pay issue. As I've discussed in past posts about motivation and creative jobs, the first thing you need is fair pay. Once you have fair pay then you don't need to incentivize work with more pay. In fact, more money can dis-incentivize. This is perhaps what happens when we tie test results to more money.

Really though I think there are deeper questions about why we mistrust educational institutions. And perhaps even more perplexing to me why we trust testing and government instead.

diy u and the slow-moving curriculum

DeanDad's review of Kamenetz's DIY U raises a number of good issues that brings me back to this topic again today, as does this NY Times op ed, which essentially argues for more summer teaching to compress the 4-year degree into 3 years. As the old saying goes, time=money, and so, we get this sense that college is perhaps a waste of both.

DeanDad's review echoes more general concerns I have raised about the DIY movement and the presumption that a significant percentage of potential college students could essentially educate themselves. For instance, not only do I imagine that very, VERY few college students could figure out how to improve their writing without close, ongoing support from a teacher, most would not even elect to do that kind of work, and I'm not sure how one would encourage DIY students to do difficult work of any kind. In short, any student with the discipline and motivation to make DIY education work is also the kind of student who could get their money's worth from a college environment.

This actually brings me to the waste of time/money issue. I appreciate this on a personal level. I bang my head against my kid's K-12 education on a weekly basis. Their schooling has only one gear: slow. Actually, that's not true. There's a second gear: reverse. As far as my kids are concerned, the curriculum could move 5-10 times faster than it does, no sweat. Of course, there are plenty of kids who struggle with the workload as it is right now. 

The real issue here is that the educational system (in the US anyway) is not meant to teach individual students. It's a democratizing process that is designed to try to bring everyone to some minimal standard. Anyone who thinks that completing the curriculum to get some degree (any degree I don't care how advanced) means that s/he has become "educated" obviously was not paying attention in class. The educational system certainly is at odds with our notion of college degrees as an investment in individual human capital and with our fantasy about our own specialness that results in kids getting handed medals and awards for participation.

It wouldn't be too difficult to imagine a different kind of educational system that is more meritocratic than democratic. In fact there are plenty of models of such around the world. Our educational system, in its own localized ways, tends to focus on the lower third of any student population. Not the lower-third nationally mind you, but the lower-third in each school district: getting them to pass state tests, stay in school, etc.

The DIY approach is clearly more sink or swim. Maybe some of those lower performing students would find a passion and succeed but I think many more would choose the do-not option that is implicit in DIY. Meanwhile the best-performing students would likely be able to take off. In short, you'd have a different educational system. It would be less democratic but it would be better for some. Maybe it would be better for "us" nationally in cultural or economic terms. I guess that would depend on what one meant by "better."

[Now I should point out, as an aside, that DIY on a global scale is more complicated; what I'm talking about here is restricted to an American context.]

Perhaps it is instructive to think of these things in energetic terms. In a complex, dynamic system like our society, democratic equality or equilibrium is costly to try to maintain. If socio-economic equality is not your goal then expenditures to maintain it would seem highly inefficient. Unfortunately, equality is at odds with excellence unless one includes equality as a marker of excellence (which I think it an entirely viable argument). Once upon a time, higher education was a mechanism for maximizing excellence, but for at least 40 years it has increasingly been a mechanism for equality. That is, we have come to see college educating a large percentage of citizens as a measure of equality.

The problem is that the equality higher ed is expected to provide is not a social equality but a kind of quixotic individual equality, where everyone has above-average incomes. That is, in our fantasy of specialness we want everyone to receive a higher ed degree as a mark of excellence. Well... duh. As long as we aim to get 40% of Americans 4-yr degrees (up from the low 30s% it is right now), we are going to be in a system of inefficiency. I think a university system that was more in line with a DIY philosophy could do a good job with 10-15% of the population and maybe serve them better than it does now. But then it wouldn't be an engine of equality. 

exposure and facebook as public utility

danah boyd makes this argument in a recent post, suggesting

Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You’re wrong. People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago. Facebook may not be at the scale of the Internet (or the Internet at the scale of electricity), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not angling to be a utility or quickly becoming one. Don’t forget: we spent how many years being told that the Internet wasn’t a utility, wasn’t a necessity… now we’re spending what kind of money trying to get universal broadband out there without pissing off the monopolistic beasts because we like to pretend that choice and utility can sit easily together. And because we’re afraid to regulate.

All of this comes out of the reaction to Fb's continuing push to make user information public. I understand boyd's point, but I suppose I wonder what it is exactly that "we" want Fb to be. I've been on Fb for a number of years, but not as long as I've been blogging here. I guess I've always thought of the web as a public space. On facebook I do post things of a more quotidian and personal nature than I tend to on Twitter. And here I don't really post personal things at all. But none of it is really personal. My Fb "friends" include something like 25% people I have never met but are in my field, 50% professional colleagues who I've met at conferences, 20% people I haven't seen in 15 years, and 5% other. Basically I wouldn't share anything on Facebook that I wouldn't share with students in a class. Indeed, I have students who have friended me. So in my Fb account there really isn't anything that isn't otherwise accessible on the web; it just offers one more way for people to find me.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that everyone needs to be like me! I can understand that some people want to use Fb to communicate in a semi-private way with a narrow group of friends.

That said, the privacy issue is really just a slice of the problem. What is more annoying here is the way that Fb wants to monetize users' immaterial labor by selling information to commercial interests. If Fb wants to use my status updates about jogging to sell me exercise gear or my age and education to target me demographically then that starts to get on my nerves. As long as it's just on my Fb page, like ads in gmail, I can live with it. But if it starts to get pervasive, following me around the web, then my inclination would be to shut up.

Personally I am skeptical of the utility metaphor. Maybe people are dependent on Fb, but that dependency reads more like an addiction or habit. If Fb is as indispensable as boyd suggests, then why can't they get users to pay for the service? People are willing to pay for electricity, cable, internet service, etc. If users aren't willing to pay for Fb then how important can it really be?

Underlying this all is the problematic concept of "private communication." To begin with, privacy is a legal fiction. Among bees, as I remember reading in Kittler, one bee can communicate via its dance the location of a flower to another bee, but that second bee is not able to pass the message along. Only that first bee can communicate the message. That's essentially private communication. It can only be shared by its author.

But human communication doesn't work that way. Anything that you communicate can be recommunicated. In fact, anything that you can know about yourself, even if you keep it in your head and never speak of it, can be known by others and recommunicated. Communication is not private, but it is not public either. Public is just the other side of the legal fictional coin here. Now when I say legal fiction I don't mean to suggest that it is unimportant but only that we shouldn't mistake the social mechanisms we create to try to manage communication with the actual mechanisms of communication.

As I often discuss here, if thought and communication fundamentally occur through exposure to others, then any methods to limit exposure, from encryption to contracts, operate only by limiting the value and potential of thought. When Zuckerberg argues that our values regarding privacy are changing, he's probably right. After all, they are always changing. That doesn't mean we want radical transparency today though. Exposure is critical to our cultural development, but at the same time over-exposure can be crippling. In some sense, this is what Fb is already facing as it deals with the exorbitant costs of maintaining all this user data.

exposure and facebook as public utility

danah boyd makes this argument in a recent post, suggesting

Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You’re wrong. People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago. Facebook may not be at the scale of the Internet (or the Internet at the scale of electricity), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not angling to be a utility or quickly becoming one. Don’t forget: we spent how many years being told that the Internet wasn’t a utility, wasn’t a necessity… now we’re spending what kind of money trying to get universal broadband out there without pissing off the monopolistic beasts because we like to pretend that choice and utility can sit easily together. And because we’re afraid to regulate.

All of this comes out of the reaction to Fb's continuing push to make user information public. I understand boyd's point, but I suppose I wonder what it is exactly that "we" want Fb to be. I've been on Fb for a number of years, but not as long as I've been blogging here. I guess I've always thought of the web as a public space. On facebook I do post things of a more quotidian and personal nature than I tend to on Twitter. And here I don't really post personal things at all. But none of it is really personal. My Fb "friends" include something like 25% people I have never met but are in my field, 50% professional colleagues who I've met at conferences, 20% people I haven't seen in 15 years, and 5% other. Basically I wouldn't share anything on Facebook that I wouldn't share with students in a class. Indeed, I have students who have friended me. So in my Fb account there really isn't anything that isn't otherwise accessible on the web; it just offers one more way for people to find me.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that everyone needs to be like me! I can understand that some people want to use Fb to communicate in a semi-private way with a narrow group of friends.

That said, the privacy issue is really just a slice of the problem. What is more annoying here is the way that Fb wants to monetize users' immaterial labor by selling information to commercial interests. If Fb wants to use my status updates about jogging to sell me exercise gear or my age and education to target me demographically then that starts to get on my nerves. As long as it's just on my Fb page, like ads in gmail, I can live with it. But if it starts to get pervasive, following me around the web, then my inclination would be to shut up.

Personally I am skeptical of the utility metaphor. Maybe people are dependent on Fb, but that dependency reads more like an addiction or habit. If Fb is as indispensable as boyd suggests, then why can't they get users to pay for the service? People are willing to pay for electricity, cable, internet service, etc. If users aren't willing to pay for Fb then how important can it really be?

Underlying this all is the problematic concept of "private communication." To begin with, privacy is a legal fiction. Among bees, as I remember reading in Kittler, one bee can communicate via its dance the location of a flower to another bee, but that second bee is not able to pass the message along. Only that first bee can communicate the message. That's essentially private communication. It can only be shared by its author.

But human communication doesn't work that way. Anything that you communicate can be recommunicated. In fact, anything that you can know about yourself, even if you keep it in your head and never speak of it, can be known by others and recommunicated. Communication is not private, but it is not public either. Public is just the other side of the legal fictional coin here. Now when I say legal fiction I don't mean to suggest that it is unimportant but only that we shouldn't mistake the social mechanisms we create to try to manage communication with the actual mechanisms of communication.

As I often discuss here, if thought and communication fundamentally occur through exposure to others, then any methods to limit exposure, from encryption to contracts, operate only by limiting the value and potential of thought. When Zuckerberg argues that our values regarding privacy are changing, he's probably right. After all, they are always changing. That doesn't mean we want radical transparency today though. Exposure is critical to our cultural development, but at the same time over-exposure can be crippling. In some sense, this is what Fb is already facing as it deals with the exorbitant costs of maintaining all this user data.

Will Richardson and the new high school, Clay Shirky and the new college

I wrote a few days ago about a conversation initiated by Clay Shirky on the idea of reimagining college from the ground up. Will Richardson started a similar conversation on his blog a few days later about eliminating or reimagining high schools. Obviously these are just the most recent instantiations of what is an ongoing conversation.

So here are a few points I think we should consider before we roll out the dynamite.

1. Education is a significant $100Bs industry, if not more. US higher education revenue itself is $400B. Add into that all the industries that provide services to educational institutions from cleaning supplies to textbooks.
2. Think of the impact on local economies of closing down colleges and significant parts of school districts: both of which represent major employers in many, many communities. One could turn a 1000 college towns into mini-Detroits (sorry Detroit). 
3. Add into that the economic contributions of universities, not only as spenders, but as developers of technology and attractors of talented professionals into economic regions. 

My point is that "people" like to complain about the expense of education because they read the big number in the state budget and they see the school tax bill and the money coming out of their paychecks. Generally though, people have little sense of the economic value resulting from that investment. Maybe we need better PR, but that's a matter for a different post.

One of the issues that arose on Will's blog has to do with maturity. Are we ready to leave our 14-17 year-old kids at home when we go off to work and say "make sure you get on the computer and do your lessons"? Because we can't afford to say home, right? And most of our neighbors can't afford to stay home. And I don't think we are just going to expect the retirees or the stay-at-home parent down the street to watch our kids? And if they did, do we think it would be any cheaper than our school tax bill? And would they learn anything as a result?

No, if we were going to eliminate the principle of gathering up the local teens and having them be supervised (i.e. job #1 of high school), it would have to be because we had a massive cultural shift wherein we determined these individuals were legally adults. That is, if your 15-year old burned down my house, I couldn't hold you any more accountable than I could if your 18-year old did it. In a way this is going back in time, because a century ago these teens were in the work force. 

And I think that's what would happen to the vast majority of teens today if we eliminated compulsory attendance at a HS. They would seek to enter the workforce, which would only further damage the economic viability of a community already reeling from the massive layoffs in the school district. Of course none of that is necessary. But we would have to significantly restructure the operation of market capitalism and the government to create conditions where these individuals were considered mature enough to not require supervision but were not considered as employable.

Meanwhile, though we can certainly contest the questions of the qualifications/characteristics of good teachers, best pedagogic practices, and the shape of curriculum, I think we would, again, have to seriously reshape society to imagine conditions where education would not be undertaken by individuals who are specialized in these activities.

Would you allow someone without specialized training to cut your hair? fix your car? clean your teeth? do your taxes? But you think it's a good idea to entrust your child's education to someone without specific education in doing that job? If we don't need professional educators then there are probably very few professions that we do need. And so there is a segment of our society that cuts their own hair, fixes their own cars, doesn't visit dentists, and doesn't pay taxes. Maybe they homeschool too. 

Is that the future America that we are in search of?

Now, I've been to high school, and it sucked. I was nominated "class bookworm" for chrissakes. It wasn't fun, and the education was mediocre. I've basically spent the rest of my life attending classes and working on college campuses. So I am aware of their limitations too. I've been known to spend a fair amount of time studying digital social media (which is often identified as a primary tool for whatever will supplant education). I have argued and will continue to argue that digital media should and will be further integrated into education. However, I will also continue to argue that for the foreseeable future and for the majority of learners, a primarily socially-mediated education will not work, not without supervision for minors and specialized educators to interact with.

So if you want to know my positive contributions to these questions of the future of schooling, very briefly, here you go:

• stop using age as the primary means to organize students: let them learn and move through the curriculum at their own speeds.
• use social media to create greater curricular customization (e.g. maybe you don't have enough kids in your school to study Italian but I bet there are enough in the county).
• focus more on doing, on creativity and experimentation
• stop stigmatizing failure through this debilitating test culture
• sometimes one makes philosophical realizations while jogging
• sometimes one realizes something about history while painting
• a mathematical concept might make sense while practicing violin 
• in other words, don't be so certain we understand how learning happens or what we need to learn

Anyway, that's probably enough griping for today.

avatar: exposure, immersion, becoming

So to dispense with the critique of dismissal, yes, you could say Avatar is Dances with Wolves in 3-D, or any other narrative of the imperialist-gone-native with the beautiful native informant love interest. In face, one can go back to the Crusades to find Knights Templar "going native." More interestingly though, one can situate that familiar narrative in a deeper mythic tradition regarding the outside or stranger. In these ways, Avatar is a story we've heard before. What is maybe more interesting is that the movie is a story we haven't seen before...

My thoughts on Avatar resonate with some of my writing about the Matrix trilogy in my book. The Matrix, too, was a familiar story told through a revolution in digital cinema. And there are some sci-fi similarities as well in terms of plugging in and shifting consciousness. The resonance for me is in the connections across the film's production, the content of the film, and its reception/consumption as a viewer. That's how I looked at The Matrix and it is how I am seeing Avatar.

Within the movie, there are two obvious forms of plugging in. The humans plug into their Na'vi avatars. The Na'vi in turn are plugged into symbiotic relations with other creatures on Pandora, as well as with the broad network of the planet itself. Plugging in, one might say, is a matter of exposure and immersion. It is perhaps an error to think of it, instead, as penetration. Penetration into what? Think instead of diving into water. We could say that is penetration, but hopefully the water doesn't get inside you and you are not really inside the water either. I mean, where would inside be? Between the molecular bonds of oxygen and hydrogen? No, you are exposed to the water and immersed with the water. Similarly, with the narrative's plugging-in there is exposure between human and avatar, between Na'vi and Pandoran creature. There is even immersion. And finally, here is the ongoing process of becoming, through the exposure and immersion of thresholds.

Meanwhile, one can see related activity in the fim's production. Using motion capture technology, the actors' movements and facial expressions are mapped onto the virtual Na'Vi characters. Cameron employs a virtual camera that allows him to fly through the virtual, 3-d landscape. The actors and director are also plugged in. The interact with the film through relations of exposure and immersion. The surface of the actors' bodies touch the surfaces of motion detectors and through these exposures, virtual characters come to life. Just as the film's avatars are genetically coded to match up with specific human users, the Na'Vi faces map onto specific actors' faces to pass along facial expressions. 

And what of us, the gentle viewers? Well, we are clearly exposed and immersed. Such is the case with all movies, after all. But Avatar does offer something different, What is interesting about it is that after the first few minutes, for most of the movie, one forgets that one is watching "3-D." That is, generally the 3-D doesn't call attention to itself too much. At least it didn't for me. However that doesn't mean that it simply reverted to being the same as the conventional film either. It is instead the depth of vision in the film that gives the sense of immersion. 

Making new work in digital English studies

I'm bringing together a couple things I've been reading. First here's a couple dog bites man stories:

• in Inside Higher Ed a report regarding the sharp decline of tenure-line jobs in English, 
• an article in the NY Times on new education programs to draw students into digital jobs,
• an interview in Edutopia with Alvin Toffler on radically reforming the education system.

And then I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's interesting novel Makers about a downtrodden, near future America, the potential of DIY networked technologies, and, ultimately, the suffocating weight of corporate inertia. In short, as we should already know, change is inevitable (and these days comes upon us faster and faster) but it is rarely what we think it will, let alone should, be.

We can wring our professional hands over the job market. There's reason to be concerned. Mark Bauerlein counts a mere 55 tenure-track jobs in traditional Brit Lit fields. And we can concern ourselves with the plight of graduate students in those fields. We can concern ourselves with the long term viability of continuing scholarship and teaching in those areas. No jobs; no grad students in those fields; eventually no one doing research or teaching in those areas, or so Bauerlein's argument goes, roughly. Of course there are already few students taking the courses, which is the underlying problem.

So we can jump to the kind of reporting we see in the Times about trying to excite more students about computer science and bringing it into the mainstream curriculum. This might remind one of Samuel Papert and Mindstorms 30 years ago: computational thinking is critical thinking. Then perhaps one could enter into some discussion of how English Studies ought to try to find its way toward computer science and digital media. Or perhaps we might follow Toffler and go with the more general recommendation that we "shut down the public education system."

In my view, it doesn't matter if one shares Bauerlein's love and valuation of the traditional English curriculum, agrees with Toffler's radical propositions, or believes in bending English to meet a new economy. 

In the end, English lives or dies on its ability to convince students that we have something valuable to teach them. If you don't think this is the case then spin me a scenario of a thriving English department sans majors. 

Makers is not a great literary achievement by disciplinary standards, but I found it a compelling novel of ideas. It's not a celebration of technology; it's not an "engineers to the rescue" sci-fi novel. The novel maps the complex relations among technology, labor, markets, the legal system, journalism, local and national cultures while mostly being a story about people. But it echoed with me in a weird way with the very core of the earliest notions of the liberal arts, as the skills a "free man" required.  

The liberal arts have changed in many ways since then, and we now have vexing notions of agency. And yet there remains something compelling about the promise of an education that will give you the skills to create agency. Yes I realize the theoretical issues there, but I'm thinking about how I would speak to a prospective student or parent here. Sure, maybe other colleges at a university would like to promise students the security of job preparation. But in 2010 (almost) we know that's snake oil. The liberal arts take up the risk/reward proposition in a different way. When job market risks start to rise, maybe the answer is to look for a different value out of your education. 

Doctorow's novel focuses on two geeks with the computing and engineering skills to build cool things immersed in a networked culture that allows them to collaborate in radical new ways, creating "new work" as it is termed in the novel. Maybe the liberal arts will never be that technical, but it is certainly that geeky. And in the novel, the two geeks are joined by an ex-journalist-turned-blogger who turns the world on to their inventions through her writing. But I'm not hunting for role models in the novel. Instead I am interested in the spirit of the DIY culture and the innovative communities that build up around it. Much of the novel revolves around the duo's invention of an interactive amusement-ride-cum-museum. And that's my model, such as it is. 

In my vision, the liberal arts ought to be a place where students can manipulate cultural objects and build new, interesting objects from them. It ought to be a site of creativity and innovative community. The liberal arts major ought to graduate with a portfolio of creative projects, a broader and more nuanced cultural literacy, and the communication skills to help others see the value/get excited about their work. Digital media rhet/comp plays a role in each of those areas. But perhaps it's most basic and essential role is in helping students develop the networked media skills to collaborate, create, and share. I'm not talking computer science or engineering here, but simply the digital literacy version of what writing papers once was (or purported to be).

Of course, as mentioned above, these things rarely work out as we imagine them. Who would have thought that reading English literature would become a cornerstone in the managerial literacy of 20th century industrial culture? And yet it did. And who would have thought that all that would be disappearing as quickly as it is? Strange times.

"New work" is based on our capacity to do "it" ourselves, with the tools that are available to us as students and faculty: to create exciting things, build communities around them, and share their value with the world. The liberal arts must be about what we are doing now, not some deferred value in a distant future. It's not the promise that today's learning will create future value/earnings after graduation. It's the promise that we will create value today with the hope that today's creation will lead to better future creations. 

Howard Rheingold and the narratives of participation

Another video from the Internet as Playground and Factory conference: this time, Howard Rheingold. Rheingold's perspective is always interesting to me for because he's been at this a long time, so he has a depth, and he's on the periphery of academic discourse, so he connects in a different way. The first half of the video talks about the importance of students/youth developing what we would call a critical literacy regarding the web or what he terms "crap detection" here. That's fine. However I was more interested in the second part where he begins to talk about studying and telling "narratives of participation."

In this latter section, he picks up the conference thread regarding "playbor" and emphasizes the importance of "informed consent." That is, that end users should have an understanding (perhaps a return to critical literacy) about the ways in which their social media activities might be commodified. In short, are the services provided by Google or Facebook or YouTube worth the activity/labor we put into them? And I would think there are two ways to evaluate that. First, are they worth it to me as I would value my time/labor? Second, am I getting a fair return vis-a-vis the market value of the social media labor I am providing to these corporations? In terms of the first question, I imagine that either one would say "yes" or stop using that social media service. The second question is more difficult as it is hard to determine what the market value of my participation on Gmail (for example) might be.

So I can get on board with all this regarding social media (i.e. I'm happy to have this conversation), just as I might get on board with it in terms of print literacy and print media. Becoming a traditional reader/writer isn't some simple form of liberation or empowerment. It's also (perhaps mainly) about being plugged into a technological circuit that allows for new forms of labor extraction and ideological suasion. No doubt we can (and ought) to see social media in the same way. And obviously not just in terms of the content but in terms of the media themselves, which involve us in particular (though not "deterministic") mechanisms of subjectification. After all, this is what it means to be a subject, to be linked to a cognitive network of symbolic behavior and action.

I look at "narratives of participation" in a different way though. Conventionally, I think, participation begins with imagining the production of an immanent, self-present identity (the citizen, the author, the user, etc.) who must then protect hir interests (property/labor) and should participate ethically in relation to the commons and community. To participate means to have something in common with others. This is the problem that Nancy elucidates in the contradiction between immanence and community. To be immanent means not to participate. Agamben suggests a different notion of community that does not hinge on sharing characteristics. Deleuze offers a different philosophy of immanence where one is not immanent to the self but there is instead a plane of immanence (consistency) which maybe would offer up a kind of immanent community (though I don't think Deleuze would put it that way) and it wouldn't be one in which a subject would "participate." I have always liked Guattari's concept (which I first encountered in Chaosmosis) that ethics are micropolitical and machinic, a recognition of interconnectivity and interdependence on the plane of consistency.

Of course all of this is straying from Rheingold's audience and discourse. I'm not trying to suggest that in order to address the kinds of socio-political issues Rheingold (or this conference) raises that we need to deliver to FYC students (for example) a Deleuzian critical literacy or something. However, if we are going to tell stories about social media I think we need to rethink the actors on the network stage.

The Internet as Playground and Factory - Howard Rheingold from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo.

change.gov and the social media citizen

Stories right now on Huffington Post and Salon.com about the backlash over Obama's selection of Rick Warren to speak at the inauguration. Thousands of posts on the change.gov site the Obama team has created are just the tip of the furor. Of course the idea of the change.gov site was/is to bring Obama's supporters, and other Americans, into the conversation about reform and thus to capitalize on the advantages of social media during the election for Obama.

Will it work? Who knows.

I'm pretty sure about this however. I think Obama is a moderate, particularly on the kinds of social issues that really get people angry: gay rights, abortion, etc. However, I also think that we may have reached a historical moment where it is no longer possible to have it two ways. It is appropriate that Obama is always quoting Lincoln. And it may be true that Lincoln had a cabinet of rivals and was open to hearing the voices of those who differed from him, but Lincoln obviously presided over a civil war. Assuming that the outcome of the war was not certain (which of course it couldn't have been), Lincoln was willing to risk the destruction of the US rather than allow the status quo to continue. For Lincoln it was a matter of declaring that certain practices and values, certain ways of life, would no longer be acceptable as part of American culture. And Americans killed each other over the matter, and in many ways, we remain divided.

So Obama is happy to say that change is necessary. But at what cost? What will he be willing to risk? What you can see on change.gov is what you can see on 1000s of other sites, which is that Americans who could be bothered to write anything at all have very strong disagreements. They have absolutely nothing to gain by trying to come to an agreement, and if anything, there interaction on sites like these seems only to harden their respective resolves. Maybe at some future point we will achieve some ethos that compels us to try to get along online, but I doubt it. Would we ask the 19th-century abolitionist to get along with the plantation owner?  I don't think so. At some point, something has got to give.

If Obama is going to be a president of the network, who listens to the network, he is not going to discover his mythical "united" states. If he looks closely enough, he might see the post-human, dissensual state of America and the many apparatuses of capture working to map dissensus onto an ideological map. What one does with such knowledge as a president I have no idea.

UPDATE: David Weinberger has an interesting take on this on the NPR site defending Obama's choice.