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.

Being a Student--CCK08

And not a stellar one.  My participation in the CCK08 Connectivism course has been patchy at best.  In fact, it reminds me of that Sex and the City episode that I saw in reruns recently: I'm just not that into it.  There's no soul-searching to be done here, nothing wrong with the course, or with me, but I signed up for it without really knowing what it was and was sort of along for the ride and although it is a little interesting, it doesn't grab my attention enough to compete with the other things I have going on.  

This offers me, however, insight into students.  Some of my students might not be into all of their classes, and maybe not mine!!!!! What a concept. So this is how it feels.  Nothing against the prof, or the structure of the course, or the material.  Just not that into it. 

I haven't taken a course that I wasn't really really into for a very long time.  I liked just about everything in grad school, and truth be told, that was a while ago.  I was very interested in the material in the two NEH Summer Seminars I did, which are the closest things to courses I've been in since grad school, although the pace was intense and maybe I didn't read every single word of every assigned reading (just like grad school!)  The Creativity in Second Life course through MassArt was fantastic and I am enjoying the Relaxation Response course I am taking now in Second Life, and although it took me a couple of weeks to get into the rhythm of doing the assigned readings, now I have the book near my bed and I'm up to date.  All of this is to say that, really, there isn't anything wrong with me as a student/sabbatical researcher.

And CCK08 is an amazing thing.  I wish the course were about something else!  Or had started off about something else, because I have the sense from reading the snippets of Moodle discussions in the Daily e-mails that the focus has now shifted away from 'what is connectivism?' to less-specialized topics that I do know something about.   

Is it possible that if we were meeting in real life, I could become more interested, could have enough of a human connection that my interest would be sparked, that I could ask just the right question and get the right answers so that it would begin to make sense and be relevant, and then I would be into it?  Who knows?  The teacher in me wants to think so, although it is also slightly liberating in a lazy way to think that it is not.  Just not that into it.   

And there may be something wrong with me, after all.  There was one blog posting or moodle post or something that I will never be able to track down again that suggested that the only way to participate in CCK08's massively open environment is to figure it all out yourself, that no one is going to show you how the various tools work (although I suspect there are plenty of helpful folks who would give help if one asked), that no one is going to baby you and make it easy for you to participate.  You have to jump in!  Well, there is a part of me that doesn't like that in a course, that misses the people, and doesn't find the online, mostly text-based, very fragmentary-feeling and superficial interaction to have enough, uh, connection.  I tried the Elluminate, and also the Friday discussion, and was interested in the tools, but maybe just as not everyone likes the large lecture (or the small discussion), the massively open experience is not for everyone, either.  There is no doubt I am in over my head in terms of the material (more in the first 2 weeks than since), but that has been my m.o. throughout my interdisciplinary intellectual life--to jump into the unfamiliar discipline, albeit as a reader of traditional published scholarship, not the variety of discourses that comprise CCK08.  Maybe having both the content and the methods be new is too much at one time.  

It may also be a function of sabbatical life, me and my computer, that I focus on the solitary and alienating aspects of everything these days.  I think I miss teaching, and being one out of 2000+ in a massively open class is not the same as being the professor in a class of my beloved Berklee students.  I know, cry me a river.   Still, the insight makes me want to finally buy some land in SL and set up a nice space where I can interview some people about what's new in new media, as well as conduct some interviews in real life.  Connect with people. 

What IS L1Aura up to these days, you wonder?  Meditating daily in SL, doing some yoga there, too (where she is unsurprisingly more flexible than I am, could do the tree pose for all eternity, or at least until the laptop battery runs out), and spending some quality time under water.