[iDC] Re(2): REFRESH! conference,
some impressions (panelism + powerpoint)
john sobol
john at johnsobol.com
Mon Oct 24 21:34:05 EDT 2005
Hi Jon, (warning moderately long post ahead)
I recently entered grad school (McGill, Ph.D program in Communications
Studies) after 20+ years working as an artist, journalist, curator and
entrepreneur in digital and analogue media. I couldn't agree more with
your assessment of the quality of knowledge-sharing in academia.
Although my professors are smart, knowledgeable and committed to
educating their students, the structure of that education feels
remarkably limited given the wide range of knowledge-sharing strategies
employed today by businesses and NGOs, let alone teenagers with cell
phones, broadband and cable TV. In class I often find myself thinking
back to an observation that Bill Buxton has made – pointing out that
the design of operating rooms, boiler rooms and almost every other kind
of room has changed drastically over the past few centuries, whereas
classrooms have remained basically the same for hundreds of years.
IMHO, the core problem is academia's fetishization of texts at the
expense of all non-textual forms of knowledge. Academic culture is
literate culture, and like all bastions of literate hegemony it is
highly dismissive of – and antagonistic towards – non-literate values
and cultures. Digital and oral cultures share pedagogical imperatives
such as peer-to-peer teaching, collaborative and experiential learning,
iterative and fluid knowledge grids, and a validation of the
epistemological validity of subjective experience. Academic pedagogy in
the social sciences explicitly rejects each of these, instead insisting
on strict hierarchies of knowledge, a passionate engagement with theory
combined with a disinterest in praxis, a refusal to validate any
knowledge claim that does not express itself specifically in relation
to a fixed historical canon, and a deeply entrenched suspicion of
'anecdotal' articulations of knowledge.
Additionally, many professors espouse post-modern epistemological
theories (all knowledge is contingent and socially constructed, all
knowledge systems false and ideological, all authoritative linear
narratives must be interrogated) and yet adhere to an antique model of
academic scholarship in which authoritative linear narratives (academic
essays) are certified as knowledge by a hierarchy of
knowledge-validators (i.e. Ph.D examining commitees, peer reviewers)
when they adequately situate themselves within an unassailable
canonical discourse and conform to strictly regulated formal rules.
Depending on the size of the chip on one's shoulder this is either
obvious hypocrisy or a simple fact of academic life (or both), but it
can hardly be seen as a promising path forward.
I believe that it is going to become increasingly difficult for
universities to maintain their status as society's knowledge-validators
in the digital age. Universities were able to successfully leverage
their position as centers of literacy in a literate culture in order to
establish their status and economies. But with the emergence of a
potent and popular epistemological (and economic) challenge rooted in
digital culture that status is very much in jeopardy. Blogs vs. Big
Media are playing out the same dynamics. (The difference is Big Media
is mobile and because it is profit-driven has a reason to adjust to new
technologies. Academia is neither flexible nor motivated to make
radical changes.)
I think universities are no different from other organizations that are
closely aligned to literate values and enmeshed in literate power
structures. They can either adapt to the new dynamics that are being
imposed by the activities of a billion people online, battle those
dynamics aggressively in an attempt to maintain their status, or hide
their heads in the sand until they're buried. At present it looks like
academia is going to follow the third route. I expect to be one of the
scholar/activists attempting to rewire it.
The last point you raised, about awakening students to the broader
political implications and potentials of everyday technologies, is, I
think, extremely important. The danger that reactionaries see when they
look out at the surging flow of digital data – that in the ocean of
code all fixed meanings, all historic reference points, all the
infrastructure of knowledge will be lost – is I think, a valid concern.
Kids can't just be handed the keys to the future and be invited to
write off the past. The Lord of the Flies scenario becomes a real
danger if that happens. But neither do any of us welcome the looming
corporate copyright clampdown. What is above all necessary from
educators (official and non) is a commitment to bridging these
increasingly antagonistic knowledge cultures (literate and digital) in
a way that enables each to learn from the other. Members of oral
cultures need to be part of this process as well. And there are very
practical ways of doing this, but they require a willingness to be
humble, and to admit the world is much more complex and rich than can
be ascertained by means of any one technology (speech, text or digital
network) or pedagogy (oral, literate or digital). Because as you
suggest, it's less about what we are learning than about how we are
learning. In education too, the medium is message...
My 2 (or more) cents...
John Sobol
--
www.johnsobol.com
bluesology • printopolis • digitopia
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