I was going to leave all this as a comment on Techfoot’s latest blog entry, but the comment got so long that I figured it’d be better to house it here. For best results, please do read Gene’s entry first, then come back to this long and winding post.
Perhaps given the terms of the discussion at Gene’s meetings, “collaborative” and “communal” are not really the same. I keep thinking we need to put the products of individual reflection and creation in a conversation that, as it augments each individual contribution (conversation is an augmentative process, though I confess that meetings often seem like conclusive proof that that’s not true), becomes a truly collaborative environment that stimulates more individual creation and reflection.
The Mythical Man-Month talks a good deal about conceptual integrity as a sine qua non, and perhaps the humanities will always get after that goal differently from the sciences, since so much of our work in the humanities does consist of fact-finding (or evidence-finding) mingled with deeply considered and informed reflection that strongly represents an individual mind’s perspectives and sensibilities. The capacity to articulate strongly individuated and informed reflection is, I think, one of the primary goals of education in the humanities. But even so, we need to do much, much more to foster deep, serendipitous, multi-voiced connections among those individual creations.
The blogosphere is one model of individual voices collaborating, not on each piece of writing, but within an environment that fosters the kinds of connections I’m describing. The blogosphere is inherently collaborative–we are laboring together–but my blog is my blog and my voice carries my utterances even as my utterances are shaped through my agency and filtered through my sensibilities but created out of the other utterances that surround and inform me. “Utterance” is a term from Bakhtin’s linguistic philosophy. For a fine brief overview of Bakhtin’s thought, see this Wikipedia article. (Thought: perhaps the Wikipedia’s greatest value as a reference work is as a detailed glossary for the blogosphere.) For me, Bakhtin’s thought offers an essential way out of the connection vs. content debate–but more on that below.
I think our classrooms can also foster silence and speech, individual reflection and intellectual community, personal agency and authority as well as strong examples of the way culture potentially augments every human voice, allowing it to carry far beyond its immediate sphere of utterance.
I guess for me the bottom line is that the design of “real school” can and should foster both individual agency and cultural ferment. In my mind’s eye I see the spaces in which this happens. The classroom starts to look more like the campus, and the campus starts to feel more like a giant classroom. The classroom can very naturally support both massed attention to single compelling prompts and scattered, even serendipitous meetings, group work, project-based “pods,” etc. And the campus is not a set of purpose-built buildings so much as it is a giant learning commons that supports discovery and creation in multiple ways, some of them quite surprising.
It’s much easier not to do this, of course. We would never make our own living rooms, or studies, or rec rooms, or bedrooms into large closets with bare walls and anchored seats. But classrooms, like hospital rooms and prison cells, tend to be designed around principles of replication, interchangeability, and ease of maintenance. Those are not bad goals in and of themselves, and they do contribute to economies of scale, but I think they also interfere with the notion of compelling experiences shaped out of communal or collaborative intellectual experience.
Heresy time: I’m not against the sage on the stage, as long as she or he is genuinely sagacious and the stage is genuinely interesting, provocative, compelling, or enchanted. A great sage on a great stage can become an internalized “guide at the side,” and the reverse is also true. But now I’m onto another dichotomy–perhaps not unrelated. The key, it seems to me, is to have a city of learning with all sorts of spaces. Perhaps that’s the ecology John Seely Brown is describing. Perhaps it’s something like a giant movie set that supports reconfiguration as well as a rich infrastructure. (Seems to me wireless makes that circle more square-able.)
(It’s material for another post, really, but I’ve been meaning to blog for some time about the connection vs. content debate that’s been going on at George Siemen’s “Connectivism” blog. It’s a real dilemma, and perhaps it’s a real dichotomy (I remain skeptical here), but it’s also an instance of how difficult it is to keep one nail from driving out another.)
Well, as my sainted husband would say, Woooooofff. The point that you’re making here, it seems to me, is extremely valuable, but I also think it begs the ethical question that perhaps drives those with sincere concerns about how to use technology in the classroom and on the larger campus responsibly. I agree with the Techfoot blog that jamming web connectivity so that students can listen to lectures isn’t a good way to exert authority, and I agree (strongly) with Gardner’s defense of the lecture.
But how do we actually get students to understand the ethical responsibility that they share in creating any learning community when so much of the ‘technology’ that they are familiar with is all about distraction, gaming, and disconnectivity? My son, Joseph, who is wonderfully bright student, one who tries hard to be responsible, spent all night outside of a Best Buy in the rain to get the new X Box. He doesn’t differentiate between that technology and pedagogical potential. He, like many of my students, understands the use of technology as a consistent ‘short cut’ to learning, and I find this deeply problematic. How do we construct an environment that allows students to appreciate the discipline of the humanities?
Gardner, your point about silence is striking. Look at how silent our students are, especially in their resistance to blogging or list serve discussions for class. Their being silenced in lecture disturbs me far less than their refusal to engage with difficult topics in a serious way in the silence of their psyches; they are, in fact, silencing themselves. And, I don’t think this silence is only (although certainly somewhat) about being afraid of being wrong. They are silent because they have nothing to say. And they don’t understand that they have an ethical responsibility to the aesthetic, to continue with your Bakhtin theme, and to focus my interest in the humanities.
We are, I suppose, paying the price of post-modernism’s refusal to perceive the intellectual consequences of its ironic mode. When we try and use technology to reunify what postmodernism has fragmented we present students with another paradox–there is, I suppose, an aesthetic to the web that is neglected by its very fragmentation. Collaboration without ethical commitment seems problematic. Hence my fundamental distrust of some of the models of group work that I have seen touted as our next pedagogical salvation.
So, in my long preamble of a tale, how do we realize the ideal student that so many describe?
Best,
Ter
Teresa,
I think you raise a key point that many of us in the technology world are skirting. The questions about lecture vs. group work, or the effectiveness of PowerPoint or what students should or should not do with their laptops are all questions of engineering. It’s a more serious philosophical question as to why students who have worked so hard to get to our institutions don’t feel the commitment to become more engaged. Can it really be that they are silent because they have nothing to say? is their silence a result of not understanding the disciplines and aesthetic of the humanities, or is it generalized to include other realms of the academic life?
Hi Gene,
Well, I don’t know if I am willing to generalize this to include other aspects of academic life. Assuming the old-fashioned definition of the liberal arts as an encyclopedia of the epistemologies that allow us to understand the world according to different structures or disciplines of knowledge, I would suggest (though I am by no means sure) that it’s the very notion of epistemological discipline that this generation of students either cannot or chooses not to engage in productively. Of course, I’m not talking about all my students, but a disturbing majority. Gardner and I were talking the other day about how it is troubling that some students can structure an entire English major by simply avoiding poetry (and therefore poetics) from their curriculum, and that they do this in a self-conscious way. The reason? They don’t immediately understand it so, and are uncomfortable with focusing their minds on a difficult subject. So it is possible that they have no intellectual work ethic, but this seems to me to represent an earlier pedagogical failure. Certainly, it would be easy to blame the secondary system for this, but I think that we in higher education fail our students at the lower level as well.
There are two consequences here, I think. The first is the very nature of how college teaching in the humanities, for the purposes of this discussion in aethetics, without regard to an understanding of the epistemology: practical criticism. Rather, the discipline of the text is sacrificed to political ideology. This elides or jumps over what students need to know about how to read poetic texts. I have colleagues who are proud of the fact that they can’t read poetry either, and who suggest that this knowledge is not important. Paul de Man (a controversial critic, but a brilliant reader) wrote ironically that we think that we have practical criticism “well-policed” and now we can turn to the really important stuff, politics. (This is a gross paraphrase of the first few paragraphs of his essay on Semiology and Rhetoric. The result is, as I like to kid with my students, that they become English majors because they don’t think that there is any real structure to the content, and so they can say anything, and don’t really have to know anything.
The second, and more important consequence, is that I have had, for the first time in almost 25 years of teaching, complaints from employers to whom I recommended students about their work ethic, their inability to understand the boundaries between working and instant messaging their friends, sloppiness in rhetorical composition, unprofessional behavior, and (frankly) stupidity about the most basic office practices. For example, one student sent an e-mail riddled with typographical errors, instant messaging abbreviations, etc. because she didn’t realize that e-mail is a formal form of communication for businesses. This might be a small thing, but to me it is indicative of a consistent refusal to think about what they are doing. In a certain sense, to behave professionally is to understand one kind of discipline, one that parallels educational discipline. I am concerned that so many now do not perceive that professionalism makes a difference, first in school, and then in the workplace. They don’t understand it’s a point of ethics.
Does technology create this situation? No, of course not. I am going to try something next semester: forbid them the use of the web to do research for the first half of the semester. They will have to use real books, look up things, record them properly, cite them properly, etc. Then in the second half they will be allowed to use the web to show them that the web is a tool, not “the answer.” Maybe it will work. We might be making the same kind of leap by analogy to the de Man idea above, skipping over the process that fosters care and attention, in order to get ahead faster. Speed might be our temporary enemy here.
Thanks for answering my comment, it’s a tough negotiation, and too easy to get into the habit of rolling one’s eyes at our students’ failings and not perceiving them as our own. The professoriate needs to confront our own laziness here as well.
Best,
Teresa
I have been reading your threads with great interest because I do wonder if some of the technology tools as well as some of its accepted practices are influencing the way students (including myself) write and read.
To quote Ms. Kennedy:
“…complaints from employers to whom I recommended students about their work ethic, their inability to understand the boundaries between working and instant messaging their friends, sloppiness in rhetorical composition, unprofessional behavior, and (frankly) stupidity about the most basic office practices. For example, one student sent an e-mail riddled with typographical errors, instant messaging abbreviations, etc. because she didn’t realize that e-mail is a formal form of communication for businesses. This might be a small thing, but to me it is indicative of a consistent refusal to think about what they are doing.” Could this be the social autism that just George F. Will described in his commentary a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post. Will stated we are in an “…age of lazy moral relativism combined with aggressive social insolence.”
In my Educational Technology Planning class with Dr. Roche, one of my colleagues did describe an identical situation at her work with the new, young so called professoinals that have entered the court system just as Kennedy illustrated.
Today, I picked up a book entitled The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts. I think Ms. Kennedy would approve of Birkerts’ conclusions that we are in “an age of intellectual emergency”. Birkerts contends that the book page and the Internet page are not kindred but are opposites. He states “Talk to anyone engaged in editing, publishing, or teaching the written word. Although significant works still get written, it is harder than ever for them to get published; or, once published, distributed; or once distributed, sold; or once sold, read.” In the movie, National Treasure, protagonist Benjamin Gates reads the Declaration of Independence that he has just stolen and says no one writes that way anymore; Gates is right for the majority of people do not write at all; instead, they write in a new form of shorthand. I have just started The Gutenberg Elegies so maybe the answer of how when the written word was abbreviated will be answered.
I am going out on a limb with Ms. Kennedy though. Technology may indeed be a contributing factor to the new form of writing that is over taking the Internet: One one side the codes that are written, the various languages used, and the use of icons create the unintentional use of an abbreviated language while those that use the technology like in the form of word processing, simply their written expression as well because of multi-tasking.
Marc Prensky in “Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives” talks about how the brain has changed in young people citing shorter attention spans and multi-tasking. Many people would claim that multi-tasking is a benefit; however, I wonder if it really is when the multi-tasking takes the forms of shortcuts and abbreviated works created by its originators.
I applauded Ms. Kennedy for going non-technology for a while with her students in the next semester. I am sure it will be like having no power due to an electrical storm for them; I am sure there will be resistance. It is going to challenge them just as I do with my sixth graders on their science fair projects who are not allowed to use the Internet for the beginning of their project. We spend four days in the library looking at nothing but books for their project. My students must write on notecards in the old fashion way. Only when the book search is done, do I allow my students to get on the Internet. I am the only one in the department that does this approach and I have the highest number of winners at the fair. I cannot help but think that I am somehow enabling my students to become better writers and readers with my non-technological approach.