///...After travelling, and by now hopelessly behind the thread. //
The thread on new media education was inspiring: from problematizing the
terms intellectual and new media to visions of an ideal educational setting,
the difference between education and professional development and the
divided knowledge economy. From Keith Hardt quoting Noel Annan who aims to
produce out of the chaos of human experience some grain of order won by the
intellect to Dan Wang's statement on the dramatic rise of tuition costs and
the American university experience being reformulated as a largely
predictable exercise in job and career preparation as opposed to education.
Reading the posts and related mails that I received there was a division
between those writing about teaching and those with the human experience of
the complex relational dynamics of the classroom. The reality of an
educational practice to me is something that may be best addressed with
somewhat pragmatic proposals.
Throughout many posts there was the demand for less structure or even chaos
within educational settings instead of the placid order too often
experienced. There is too much structure, too much predictable social
behavior, too much institutionalization of knowledge, too much efficiency,
too much accountability. From my experience the most unpredictable and
interesting learning situations are based on experimental approaches of
skill and knowledge exchange.
Brian Thomas Carroll dreams of education as a networked experience,
commerce-free, interdisciplinary, collaborative. I found an example for
this type of technology-enabled educational networking in an essay by Sher
Doruff in Making Art of Databases She describes the class Collaborative
Cultures at DEAF03 of March 2003 (technologically enabled by KeyWorx of
Waag Society). Doruff describes the class as an attempt to provoke both
critical and playful investigation into tools and techniques that
incorporate social networks, live mediation, synchronous co-creation,
real-time access to and transformation of databases and living archives.
For 2 days a broadband audio/video stream was set up between a
Rotterdam-based class and the A'na*tomic group based at Waag Society in
Amsterdam. a file-transfer protocol in KeyWorx enables the sharing of media
between players who share a space with a common patcher interface and
output. Participants communicated with each other via text, video, sound,
image, movies, webcams, and a web image crawler. Eight layers of visual
imagery were synchronously modulated and processed by the players. Thinking
about cooperation Doruff draws from the experience of multi-user games in
which rules of cooperation such as trust determine success.
Having set up distributed learning environments similar to DEAF03 I found
that they have lots of potential for inter-authorial expression and
positive networking but I don't think that these settings should or will
replace face to face learning.
In his post Francis Wang writes that what matters is to be surrounded by
others who will reinforce his sneaking suspicion that knowledge matters
and that this may as well take place on a WIKI, list or weblog as it could
be located in a classroom. I agree with Francis that these forums are places
for meaningful communication, especially in a context in which doing rather
than thinking has become the norm and is what is most valued as Michael H.
Goldhaber points out.
Another problem in new media education, as pointed out by Brian Thomas
Carroll is the tendency to forcefully create a false canon that bulldozes
questions and debate, creating false fiction (ie. history of web-based art).
It takes constant questioning and shifting of discourses, texts to read,
works to study and I look forward to a large number of courses that put this
spirit into action.
Many posts rightly claimed a disconnect between the university and the rest
of culture. In the best-case scenario the university can be a media-rich
platform in which links are made with groups, links to ideas, links to
tools, links to information, links to questions, to doubts, and to the
outside. This is quite different from the top-down deposition of facts into
passive students. Students are educated to a certain literacy that,
according to Douglas Kellner, will equip people to participate in the local,
national and global economy, culture and polity.
The classroom becomes a network, or a meeting place for outside university
networks. In smaller departments these things are easier to accomplish
because structures can be more fluid. Jon Cates in his post also demands
flexibility and fluidity.
(And in response to Jon: I designed my own courses and in my original text I
did name some universities at which I taught in Europe and the US.)
Francis Hwang asks: What do academics do? and Do we really need more ideas?
So what do these creatures do in the university?
Brian Thomas Carroll aka Human Being refers to David Brooks saying that the
intellectuals
