10 Questions to Ask about Technology

Here is a post from my two course blogs this semester, for Approaches to Visual Culture & Digital Narrative: Theory and Practice. Both classes are now focusing on new media (Digital Narrative always has), and I worked up these questions more for the Art History class, to help us get our minds around how a new cultural form changes everything. Of course, as we've seen in our exploration of 20th century visual culture, this is nothing new, and as each medium was new, and then not, it was a lightning rod for cultural discourse. In order to understand the virtual art we'll be exploring and making next week, we have to dig into the opposition between "reality" and "artifice" that we've seen questioned all semester--in I Love Lucy even! (sly plug for my new book, available April 15 everywhere!) It is fascinating to think about SL in reading through these questions . . . and I'll be asking my students to do that in the coming weeks.

Here are Ten Questions (ok, there are more, because some questions are kind of nested) to ask about a new technology tool that help us think about it in its wider cultural context. I am working off of, as usual, Cultural Studies founder Stuart Hall's idea of the circuit of culture, in which production, consumption, regulation, representation, and identity are all mutually informing. When we combine this with the historical trajectory perspective I am always harping on--which puts any given cultural text (game, device, app, film, dvd menu, etc) in a lineage of antecedents, looks for its peak if it has had it yet, and then speculates wildly on what might come next--we will always have a lot to talk about when we talk about any new aspect of technology, beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down reaction from which we might start and then come back to at the end, perhaps more thoughtfully.

Ten questions to ask about a new technology:

1) What is its purpose?

2) What was its analog, if there was one? How does a mediated, digital, or networked version of the tool or technique change it?

3) Who uses it? How? When? Where? Why? Does the use change over time? Do different users use it differently?

4) How does a user learn how to use it?

5) Who makes it? Who profits? How?

6) How is it regulated?

7) How does it spread?

8) Does it create or fill a need?

9) What is the interface? Is it also an object? Or a practice? Both? (think cell phone)

10) How does the user change the technology as he or she uses it? (mods and hacks and appropriations) How does the technology change the user? How does it become part of a person's sense of self?

CCK08: Click (finally), as it all makes sense

The clicking sound you hear is the CCK08 material aligning with some work I'm involved in at Berklee, where we're developing a new course for first semester students.  I've been working on versions of this course for 5 years now, from various approaches; now as part of a broad curriculum review and revision, it is moving along.  

As I was cutting and pasting a lovely quotation about how a First Semester Seminar could be taught from an older concept document into a shiny new course proposal (see below), I realized many of the ideas and themes overlapped with our CCK08 conversation, especially echoing the discussions about teaching we had in the past couple of weeks in Elluminate with Howard Rheingold and others.  It has to do with separating out the functions of the teacher as content expert on the one hand and facilitator on the other, so that process, thinking, and learning become central, not content delivery.

This is how Jerry Slezak, who blogs about his experiences teaching a Freshman Seminar at the University of Mary Washington, sees the unique purpose and method of FYE seminars:

Teaching a seminar-style course to first year students, where the emphasis in the course is on inquiry, rather than presentation or even exploration of a settled body of knowledge is quite different from either an upper-level seminar or a traditionally introductory course which enrolls first year students. The fundamental purpose of the FSEMs [freshman seminars] is not to teach content, but rather to introduce students to the life of the mind. At one level this has developed as an emphasis on teaching skills, but what we’re really [trying] to  articulate is something more holistic, not skills per se, but rather a model of the process of intellectual inquiry, the art or culture of the intellectual life.
Jerry Slezak, http://jerryslezak.net/pedablogy/?p=442

For our students, our approach to the “life of the mind” must include creativity and the development of the individual voice. 

I guess the insight I have to add after my "click" moment is that the technology is secondary, not primary.  In the very beginning of CCK08, the sheer volume of people arguing over the definition of connectivism in a flurry of posts and blogs was overwhelming, and it was hard to hear past it.  The technology can help make connections, or it can distract and divide us.   How we use it is what matters, and I'm glad I stuck with it until the din died down enough to really hear the ideas.  

When Howard Rheingold talked about having his social media students watch a video of him commenting/lecturing on Goffman instead of delivering that to them in class, that was really interesting.  In class, he is the facilitator, inviting them (actually, it seems, requiring them) to take on the responsibility to teaching the course.   I get a lot of resistance when I talk about making video resources like Howard is using, but I think there is a lot of value in separating the expert and facilitator functions of the teacher.  I think he is also using his video commentary as a reading, or a reading supplement, but that is a different topic (shift from text to video).  

All of this makes me realize that if we replace course content with the technological tools, we haven't gained enough, and it is an easy temptation to do that with all these fun, new toys. More importantly, we have to make sure our students know that we are not doing that.  I'm sure that Steven and George never intended for the technology to overtake the ideas, but it is how it felt to me for a while at the beginning.  Unless the learning and thinking, the life of the mind and the processes of creation, remain at the center and everything else we do is in its service, then its all a bunch of noise.  Click click. 

Best Practices for Teaching with Media: Fair Use

The Center for Social Media at American University has posted a fantastic Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education.  Taking the lead from how documentary filmmakers have interpreted fair use in their field, leaders in media education have staked out a useful set of 5 principles that guide their practices and they are based on what teachers and students need for teaching and learning.  Awesome.

Power, Control, Authority: CCK08, Brave New Classrooms, & Cruises

I was reading around in this week's CCK08 material--undaunted by Stephen's e-mail stunt of introducing the week's topic of Power, Control and Authority by mandatorily subscribing everyone to the moodle forum so we all had nice, full mailboxes, brimming with quips and complaints--and came across Michael Wesch's blog post "Revisiting 'A Vision of Students Today'" which was originally part of a blog forum on "Brave New Classroom" at Britannica Blog.  It is an excellent post, and reminds me of what most traditional education is like: lecture halls, multiple choice exams, etc.

In that context, connectivism has a lot to offer.  If you're talking about a 400-person class, there are possibilities offered by networked learning and a massively open (or even just a little more open) that can rock the lecture hall's world.  If the students are sitting in the lecture IM-ing each other and updating their facebook page, anyway, why not encourage them to tweet about the class?  It's meeting them at least half way.

The lecture hall that Wesch's TA's describe, with most of the students listening to blaring iPods (and their neighbors having to listen to it, too) or doing other tasks during class is a different experience from my 15-person maximum visual culture class, for example, where I can imagine intensifying what we do by meeting in Second Life and interacting with avatars, or using non-synchronous new media tools, like the VisCult blog.  

Also intriguing is the post about banning laptops in the classroom.  All our students at Berklee are required to have laptops and there have been times I've asked students to see their notes, or walked behind them to look at their screens.  Sometimes they are genuinely googling things related to the discussion, and sometimes they also uses their iPhones that way, too (I recall someone accessing the details of an etching technique when we were at the Museum of Fine Arts one time, for example, which was a much better learning moment than my usual I'll-look-it-up-and-tell-you-later approach).

About Power, Authority, and Control: as long as there are grades, there will be power, authority and control.  Period.  On top of that, as long as someone knows something that someone else doesn't and the one who doesn't know it thinks the other one can teach them, or help them learn it on their own, or set up a series of tasks that will reveal the knowledge, technique, or skill, there is authority, and there should be.  Authority is not necessarily the same thing as power, or as control.  And let us not forget our Foucault: power produces, it creates, it makes.  And if there is no control, what remains?  

I remember someone in a faculty meeting at a previous institution claiming that every college or university is like a themed cruise--students and their parents expect that theme, say the Disney cruise, and would be mightily disappointed and understandably pissed off if they got the swingers cruise instead.  Know your theme and deliver was the message my colleague espoused, and I have often reflected on the element of truth there (and the great hilarity of the metaphor).   If there isn't an appropriate exertion of power, control, and authority, it is hard to craft the cruise, and pick whatever part of the metaphor you want for a course: a day trip, a part of the ship, an activity (I've never been on a cruise, so I'm working off of the tv show The Love Boat here).   People can do what they want on a cruise, as long as the structure and infrastructure are working invisibly in the background, so that all they have to do is think, "I'd like to go to a midnight buffet!" and there it is, waiting for them (that one isn't from The Love Boat, but from my parents, circa 1978).  

So, if faced with a choice between a completely decentralized, diffused, anarchic and random educational experience, or one that is a bit more like a well-structured ride (to mix my transportation metaphors), I'm taking the ride.  I don't only want to sit in the 400-person lecture hall, straining to hear the undoubtedly interesting things Prof Wesch has to say over the kid next me's iPod blasting his or her hearing into premature oblivion, forced to take multiple choice exam after multiple choice exam.  But I want a teacher who is a teacher, who knows something I don't and will, uh, teach it to me.  I value that.  I can cede a little bit of my own power in the short term in order to gain some in the long term (and if that sounds familiar, folks, that's because that describes grad school.)

Maybe It's the Google

I've been away from the blog for a few weeks: first vacation since the twins were born, relatives visiting from the UK, too much rain.  Or, I could jump on the bandwagon and wonder, along with this Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"  It is of course too easy to blame google, or anything else isolated, for the massive shift in the way we interact with information in the digital age, and it is much too easy to say it is a shift to "stupidity."  As my provost pointed out in an e-mail exchange about the article, innovations always change the ways we think and create.  

But what I like about the Atlantic article is the way it connects reading to thinking, and with the HAL reference, wraps them in our growing realization that we humans are not adapting technology to our needs, but that we humans are adapting to technology.  That process of becoming ever more machine-like in our cognitive styles may only be countered by deep thinking, contemplation, poetry, abstraction, and listening to the long forms, not only the loops.  

On the other hand, as my provost also pointed out, there is something to be said for the new pace, for speed, and our students have far less qualms about it than we do.  The resources at our fingertips with google do not make us stupid, and do not provide only shallow information.  Indeed, the NY Times article on reading, which referred to the Atlantic piece, explored the question of information literacy, appropriately separating it from and linking it to traditional reading skills.   For thinking about speed, there is no one better than Paul Virilio, and here is a short and swift piece from CTheory 1995 that shows how fast some things change.

The big question is how to foster a critical awareness of technology, whether it be staggeringly useful google or the compelling yet frustrating Second Life.  How do we hold onto the best of the old--the deep reading, the contemplation--and wrap our eager fingers around the wii of the new--quick, current, reflex, move on to the next youtube phenomenon because the last one wasn't worth thinking about for too long, anyway?  I think that becoming aware of the idea of cognitive style, of how the different technologies, software, and hardware we use shape the questions we ask, the processes on which we embark, and the solutions and creative work we produce, is at least a place to start. 

People always say "technology is neutral," but it isn't.  Perhaps the smartest quotation I've read about technology's influence is by Donald Norman, in a book whose title holds out hope against the Atlantic's google-phobia: 

Technology is not neutral.  Technology has properties--affordances--that make it easier to do some activities, harder to do others: The easier ones get done, the harder ones neglected.  Each has its constraints, preconditions, and side effects that impose requirements and changes on the things with which it interacts, be they other technology, people, or human society at large.  Finalyy, each technology poses a mind-set, a way of thinking about it and the activities to which it is relevant, a mind-set that soon pervades those touched by it, often unwittingly, often unwillingly.  The more successful and widespread the technology, the greater its impact upon all of society.  Technology is not neutral, it dominates.

Donald A. Norman.  Things that Make Us Smart.  Perseus Books, 1993, p. 243.

As we become aware of the non-neutrality, and that is what was truly shocking about HAL, then we can begin to understand and interact with technology in an enlightened way.