Post Category → education

A *Brief* History of Reading and Culture

Normally, on this blog, I write my way towards what some idea of what it means to participate in digital media culture; what it means in terms of identity and relationship to the world to live on social media.

But this coming month, I’m trying on a new hat. Or an old hat. One I’ve left unworn for awhile.

I’m developing and teaching a short, intensive Masters in Education course for UPEI called “Building a Culture for Reading in a Digital Age”.

Which is exciting (hi students! Meet my Internet!). And also a little daunting: this course is about reading, as an educational and cultural activity. And reading hasn’t been my primary focus in over a decade.

I was once, actually, a high school English teacher. And a literacies specialist. I have a Certificate in Special Education focused around working with children facing challenges in learning to read.

It’s funny. I think and write a lot about identity, but not necessarily about the aspects of my own professional identity that pre-date my digital life. My career and life trajectories haven’t been especially linear, and so whole parts of who I once was never fully made it over the threshold of my transition to the life I live now, both online and off.

But preparing for this course has sent me back to a very particular space, an in-between space where I had one foot still balanced in my English degree/reading teacher world and one foot testing new waters of academia and digital selves: the year I spent exploring ideas of reading and culture and what it might mean to know in a digital age. It was late 1999 and early 2000 and I lived in Halifax in a two-story upstairs apartment in a falling-down house, and I wrote a hundred page M.A.Ed thesis in a tiny attic room on a Hewlett-Packard desktop that had less computing power than any telephone you can buy, these days.

That thesis later got published by European Graduate School‘s New York Studies in Media Philosophy and I am eminently grateful to them as, six computers and three countries and full circle back around the world later, I’d otherwise have long since lost any digital trace of it. Sure, its earnestness makes me cringe and the neologism of “techknowledge” was, um, kinda undertheorized…but what I learned in the long, meandering process of writing my solitary way to those ideas on knowledge and digital culture laid the groundwork for my forays into social media and digital identities and everything that’s come since.

And, with this course, some of that groundwork may actually come in handy.

If we’re talking about building a culture for reading in a digital age, we need first to explore what a culture for reading means to people; what kinds of images and practices it calls up. Before we leap into exploring the digital, I want to throw a bit of what Foucault might call a genealogical light on reading, to think about the ways in which traditional reading culture reflected certain kinds of power structures within society.

What was the pre-digital culture of reading into which most of us were inducted in late 20th century schools and homes?

Well, conveniently, I wrote about a lot of that and where it came from in my thesis. Basically, the pre-digital culture into which most of us were born was a culture descended from the concept of The Book as sacred artifact, a culture based in the veneration of writing, and a culture in which reading was deeply tied up with knowing. For a few thousand years, at least in the European historical tradition, status as a knowledgeable person has been tied to capacity to read.

Funnily, though, it didn’t start that way. Back in the time of Socrates, writing – and by extension reading – weren’t very popular.

And because I wouldn’t be very popular either if I made my students read my entire M.A.Ed thesis, I have kindly condensed the forty or so pages of that tome exploring the history of reading, culture, and knowledge into what follows below. You’re welcome. ;)

(Relevant excerpts from the 2000 thesis are in quotations. Helpful commentary from the 2012 version of me is interspersed.)

The Greeks and Writing and Truth
“Socrates was an avowed dialectician who considered the written word mute,
inflexible, and unable to distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers
(O’Donnell, 1998, p. 21). In ancient Greece — or the ancient Greece knowable
today — Socrates, and, after him, Plato, were vehement and passionate
defenders of the dialectic method of speech and argumentation, which was
based in dialogue, logic, and rationalism, and believed to be the path to truth
(Pirsig, 1974, p. 331). This systematic process of cross-examination in pursuit of
truth represented both a technology, in the sense of a tool aimed at a specific end,
and a culturally specific intersection through which meaning and status — in this
case not only of truth but perhaps of Socrates himself — were created and
supported. He railed passionately against “[M]aking truth the helpless object of
men’s ill-will by committing it to writing” (O’Donnell, 1998, p. 21); against
abandoning the dialectic process of face-to-face communication and the
resulting illumination of that rubbing together of minds. Socrates appears
to have been a scathing critic of all other technologies of communication in
his era: his primary focus of attack was actually not writing, but rather rhetoric,
which he positioned in a dualistic relationship with dialectic and rent apart from
there. Some of his most powerful critiques of rhetoric, though — that it
constituted manipulation and a pandering appeal to emotion rather than truth —
he likewise applied to writing, positioning both systems of communication as
inferior to dialectic because of the “muteness” of their audiences (O’Donnell,
1998, p. 20).”

You will notice I am quoting Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a source for my appreciation of Greek culture. Take everything I say, therefore, with a grain of salt. Or two.

So Socrates was against writing because it wasn’t dialectic. Here’s the interesting part about that. Dialectic was, for Socrates and much of the ensuing…oh…two thousand+ years of European scholarship, tied to a belief in the possibility of objective, external truth. And while Socrates lost the battle against writing – which is, of course, ironically the only reason we have record of his railing against it, since Plato conveniently wrote it all down in the Socratic dialogues – his concept of truth stuck around as an ideal.

Dialectic as Truth
“For Socrates, dialectic was truth, and truth as absolute, independent of
interpretation. “Early Greek philosophy represented the first conscious search
for what was imperishable in the affairs of men (sic). Up to then that was within
the domain of the Gods, the myths” (Pirsig, 1974, p. 336). This notion of
truth as the immortal principle, made tangible through dialectic, was still a
fragile entity in Socrates’ day, part of a tense political struggle for ideological
dominance. Dialectic truth was set, in proper dialectic dualism, against
rhetoric and the Sophists’ prevailing concept of arete, or good: a more relativist
position whose maxim ran along the lines of “humanity is the measure of all
things.” Although the politics of the struggle took Socrates’ life, within
generations his concept of objective truth as the ultimate goal had prevailed,
subsuming “the good” as a mere fixed idea, and granting Socrates and his
dialectic a semblance of immortality.”

Since Plato had written Socrates into hero status, basically, and Western culture’s earliest philosophical texts and heroes have long been those of Greece, the truth that Socrates argued for got cemented into our mindset, conflated – ironically – with the writing he railed against. Add to that the co-mingling of the Abrahamic religions of The Book and Greco-Roman classical culture in the structures of the early European Church – for a thousand years the guardian of what counted as “knowledge” in the West – and you have a whole lot of power that gets invested in reading and writing.

How Dialectic as Truth Became Writing as Truth, and Truth as Dogma
“When later societies looked back to this perceived Socratic
Golden Age for wisdom, the wisdom they were able to access was bound
up in the intersection of authorial writing and absolute truth: in the
conventional wisdom, literally, of a community whose ideology was based in the
“common knowledge” of truth as external and discoverable. Thus the literate
practices that developed around writing led to it being taken up, powerfully, as
a tool of truth, to texts being read as paths to truth, with meaning contained
inherently in them, rather than in transaction between reader, author, and
culture. This was reinforced in the Roman and early Christian cultures by the
relative scarcity of texts, and by the religious nature or the high cultural status
of many that did exist. As Purves points out, “[T]he position relating the text to
the world was most vociferously held in those periods when there were
relatively few texts as compared to the present time when the number of texts
in the world probably matches the number of molecules of water in a good-sized
lake” (Purves, 1990, p. 46). The sanctioned writings of the “peoples of the book”
— Jews, and then Christians and Muslims — were taken up within those
communities as the Word of God, and the surviving writings of the Greek
ancients were seized upon by the Grecophilic Romans as equally singular
truths, if not of Gods, then of honoured chosen ancestors, knowers of truth.

By the eighth century C.E., the concept of external truth had become ensconced
in the form of deity. As an increasingly powerful Catholic church gained control
over large segments of the feudal economy and its governance structures,
writing — which had likewise become a medium of the church — came to
represent knowledge itself, in the form of Roman Catholic doctrine and ritual.
A monoculture of power based on the Word of God held sway across Western
Europe.

In Nattering on the Net: Women, Power, and Cyberspace (1995), Dale Spender
details a Europe of 1450 wherein the church essentially controlled knowledge: theirs
was the key to what was known, both literally, because most documents were housed
in the scriptoria of monasteries, and figuratively, because the church represented
God. This independent, absolute God actually fit easily with the classical conception
of truth as Immortal Principle. What was written, and in a monastic world,
sanctioned by church process and protocol, was taken up as truth, independent
of human bias or interference.”

Then, of course, everything changed, power-wise. Except for the truth part. We held onto that sacred cow for another five hundred years or so. You could argue we are still grappling, culturally, with whether to let it go, or not. In a sense, that’s what this course is about: this watershed period of the digital doesn’t just usher in new ways of reading but far broader ways of knowing.

But long before our contemporary digital communications revolution came the print communications revolution.

The Gutenberg Revolution
“In approximately 1453 C.E., a German named Johannes Gutenberg
transformed a wine press into a functional printing press equipped with
movable type, and the print era was effectively brought into being. The concept
of print had not been inconceivable before Gutenberg, and his use of movable
type was an adaptation on a much older Chinese system, but his press is
thought to have been the first in Europe to function effectively and make
printing a reasonable enterprise. It was certainly a successful enterprise, and
within a very short period of time, printers and presses were springing up all
over Europe (Spender, 1995, p. 4). These printers were, for the most part,
entrepreneurial folk who would have had more in common with mechanics and
businesspeople than with clerics, and though the content of almost all known
early print texts was religious, it was not all as pious in its nature as the
church might have hoped.

While Gutenberg’s press was used to publish his famous edition of the Bible,
it was also used from its earliest days to print indulgences, or tickets that
absolved the purchaser from punishment for sins. The existence of
printing presses and printing businesses whose goal was economic rather than
spiritual soon had an impact on the types of texts in circulation: for the first
time in centuries, secular tracts, pamphlets, and books came into being and
into the hands of citizens. The church’s monopoly on information
dissemination — on knowledge — was broken: other ways of “[E]xplaining the
world, apart from the religious version which represented the church as
all-knowing and all-powerful” (Spender, 1995, p. 3) had begun to take hold.

How the Printing Press Ended God’s Monopoly on Truth
The church’s monopoly on education was undermined by the secular
information and institutions made possible by the printing press, and as a
result, its power over the literate practices used to create knowledge also began
to slip. Texts began to be published in the “vulgar” spoken languages of Europe
rather than in Latin, thereby undermining the doctrine-based education system
of the church and enabling people who wanted to challenge the status quo to
spread their ideas. A German monk named Martin Luther harnessed the
capacity of the printing press to spread information quickly and in common
language so effectively that his “Ninety-five Theses” fractured the church itself,
commencing the Reformation movement and even drawing the church into use
of the printing press to defend itself. As Spender succinctly explains: “The
Church was caught in a bind. It could ignore at its peril the leaflets and
posters which were circulating so widely and which were so critical of its8
practices. Or it could descend to the same vulgar level…so began the first
poster war in history. The Church’s critics leafleted the masses; and the
Church tried to defend itself in a medium that it despised and condemned. The
winner was the printing press” (Spender, 1995, p. 4).

The printing press also changed what it meant to create text, taking it out of
the monastic confines of individual scholarship and placing it within a new
structure of power grounded in economic principles. This redesignation of text
impacted the societal image of knowledge, since the two had been so thoroughly
intertwined, and made it something it had never overtly been before: a
commodity, a product with exchange value. Removed from the hallowed
domain of God, words and ideas and various wisdoms became articles of trade.
As Paul Levinson puts it: “Knowledge has always been power, as witness the
role that monopolies of knowledge among priests and others have played
throughout the millennia. But knowledge first became a commodity in mass
culture, to be bought, sold, traded, and otherwise exchanged, in the aftermath
of the printing press. Today, computers have quickened, expanded, and
otherwise amplified this process into the ‘information society’ that we now
inhabit” (Levinson, 1997, p. 34). Such commodification laid the foundation for
many of the principles that inform societal operations today, with our memoirs
and our educational packages and our digital information systems all for sale.
This departure from the medieval conception of the knower as the instrument of
God opened the door for the eventual development of familiar concepts such as
intellectual property, patents, and copyright.

How The Church Responded
The book, then, symbolized an end to church hegemony over knowledge,
but it was not the political danger to the dominance of the
church that was addressed in its resistance to this change. Rather
the church emphasized the purported dangers of embracing the new and
unholy technology, positioning its opposition in moral terms.
Like the modern critics, the Church did not state its grievances in
terms of self-interest. Religious dignitaries did not go about
complaining that the book was challenging their power, reducing
their influence, and marginalising their professional skills. Rather
the objections were all about the damage that was being done to the
individual and the community…discipline would disappear, brains
would go soft, honour and uprightness would be sapped by all this
salacious, violent, permissive literature. (Spender, 1995, p. 48)”

Recognize any parallels yet between these claims and contemporary pearl-clutching concerns over digital media? Not that many of the concerns aren’t legitimate, on the terms by which we were raised to understand life and knowledge and education and ourselves. But there are power interests involved and invested in these understandings.

One of the key threads of my M.A.Ed thesis traced these previous cultural shifts in power and knowledge that occurred when past communications revolutions took place. Socrates lamented the loss of memory to writing. The monastic culture – and the all-encompassing authority – of the Catholic Church suffered irrevocably when the printing press made not just hand-copying but the whole idea of knowledge AS copying obsolete.

And all the hand-wringing about the terrible things happening to our children because of digital practices? They read a lot like Don Quixote, published in two volumes in 1605 and 1615, wherein the protagonist buries himself in his books so deeply – individual, independent reading was a new practice in European culture at this point – that, from so little sleep and so much reading, loses his wits and his capacity to distinguish real from imaginary. He then, of course, became an icon for all the generations after who saw in his story the possibilities of literary imagination and format.

That doesn’t mean the losses for those invested in monastic culture in 1500 or so weren’t real. It doesn’t mean Socrates wasn’t right about memory. It just means that when we talk about reading in a digital age, we need to think carefully about what is being protected in the lamentations and critiques.

Truth: from God to Gatekeepers
The gatekeeping of knowledge practiced by the church became gatekeeping
practiced by publishers and scholarly institutions, based in the class values
and practices of those who owned the technology and those who controlled
what knowledge meant. The democratization of knowledge was minimized
by these gatekeeping entities, and by access to reading itself. Schooling in
alphabetic literacy remained the province of relatively privileged social
elites — or more particularly, of the males of those elites — in most European
countries until the nineteenth century (Spender, 1995, p. 52). Thus the
majority of people who lived in the Europe so dramatically affected by the
printing press likely never had the opportunity to read a book, let alone write
one.

Eventually, alphabetic literacy spread, and reading and literate
practice became societal goals by the nineteenth century (Spender,
1995, p. 46). Still, this did not represent democratic access to the status of
knowledge-creation, as the gatekeeping surrounding publishing and
the culture’s texts of truth, canonized by academia, remained intense.

The concept of absolute truth did shift in its embodiment from God to
science, eventually, in relation to the changes initiated by the printing press,
but there was no transformation of the absolutism itself, only its qualities.
Likewise, outside science, the authority that had been invested in God became
invested, instead, in writing itself — and the writing of Western culture came to
be understood as representative of that culture and its truths.

Thus the technology which so impacted the conventions of writing, the
conditions of its production, and the issue of access to it, still had little effect
on the cultural attachment to an overriding concept of external, Socratian truth.
Literate practices of the manuscript era and the print era shared the common
bond of faith in a universal principle, however differently conceived, and the
familiar concept of authorship is still grounded in, and etymologically linked to,
a notion of truth beyond human interpretation.

Where Truth in the Print Era Might Have Turned Out Differently
There were moments — in hindsight these are always readily available — when
things might have gone another way. As Janet Murray explains in Hamlet on
the Holodeck, early novels, including the sequel to Don Quixote, played with the
conventions of linear narrative and monologic voice, emphasizing borders and
constructions rather than the seamless representations, apparently whole and
received, which came to dominate the forms and conventions of print. Murray
points out that “[I]n the eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne wrote a self-
deconstructing memoir called Tristram Shandy in which the narrator inserts
black pages, numbers chapters as if they had been rearranged, claims to have
torn out certain pages, and sends us back to reread certain chapters. In short,
he does everything he can to remind us of the physical form of the book we are
reading” (Murray, 1997, p. 104). There were opportunities, then, for multiple
perspectives to emerge, but things did not take shape in that way. Print, in the
maturity of its high modernist form, was predominantly a technology of linear
narrative and hidden construction: a technology whose usage tended to
reinforce the culture’s dearly held beliefs in order, classification, and the
immortal principle of truth.

James O’Donnell suggests that the forms of authorship and narrative that constituted
the hegemony of the printing press era are now being subsumed in a new age:

The author is already an endangered species, and rightly so.
The notion that authoritative discourse comes with a single
monologic voice thrives on the written artifact. Both oral
discourse (before and beyond the written word) and the
networked conversations that already surround us suggest
that in the dialogue of conflicting voices, a fuller representation
of the world may be found. The notion that reality itself can
be reduced to a single model universally shared is at best a
useful fiction, at worst a hallucination that will turn out to
have been dependent on the written word for its ubiquity and
power. (O’Donnell, 1998, p. 41)”

So. There you go. The reading most of us grew up with was deeply tied to cultural concepts of knowledge, status, linearity, and a single version of truth. Thus endeth today’s reading from Stewart, B. (2000). Literate Practice and Digital Worlds.

See, students? Don’t let anybody ever tell you you’ll never use your Master’s thesis again! Ahem.

In the interim, tell me. How do you think digital technologies and digital practices change our relationship to the concept of truth?

***
Works Cited
Levinson, Paul. (1997). The soft edge: a natural history and future of the information revolution. New York/London: Routledge.

Murray, Janet H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: the future of narrative in
cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

O’Donnell, James J. (1998). Avatars of the word: From papyrus to cyberspace.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Pirsig, Robert M. (1974). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. New York:
William Morrow.

Spender, Dale. (1995). Nattering on the net: Women, power, and cyberspace.
North Melbourne: Spinifex Press.

 

 

the problem with EdX: a MOOC by any other name?

Since it started last fall, I’ve heard the 36-week experimental #change11 course referred to – half tongue-in-cheek – as “the Mother of All MOOCs.”

Back when the course started in September, it seemed like a reasonable description. #change11 was designed and run by Massive Open Online Course pioneers George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, and had 36 separate facilitators lined up to cover everything from soup to nuts in the grand scheme of instructional technologies and 21st century learning.

Apparently, however, George and Dave should have kept the crystal ball from their Edfutures MOOC a few years back.

Because in thinking about the Mother of All MOOCs, it seems none of us in #change11 were thinking big enough.

Today, the New York Times announced that Harvard has paired up with MIT in a new non-profit partnership called EdX, which will offer free online courses from both universities, following the MITx model begun over the winter.

The New York Times called EdX a MOOC.

#change11, I think you’re gonna have to give that “Mother of All MOOCs” tshirt back.
***

It’s too early to say what EdX is going to mean for higher education in North America. That two of the most prestigious universities in North America, however, have seen fit to join forces to go down this road of free and open online courses means the rush to figure that meaning out? Is on.

And the stakes – in a time when universities & colleges are already struggling with smaller demographics and tightened pursestrings – are high.

For awhile now, MOOCs have been hailed as “the Great Disruption” in education.

EdX is staking out serious ground in this new model of course delivery, framing itself as a clearinghouse platform on which other institutions can offer their own courses under the EdX brand. It’ll be open source, enabling other institutions to host their own courses if they wish, without having to pay for or license for-profit software. This challenges not only the traditional pay-for-learning model of academia, but the growing encroachment of startup edupreneur-style companies into the territory of higher ed.

EdX is clearly setting out to be the mothership.

And it may well succeed: reputation has always carried a lot of weight in education. When you combine two of the biggest names in academia with unlimited access to courses, you get interest. People want to affiliate themselves with what carries cache: in network theory, this tendency to connect to hubs that are already well-connected is called “preferential attachment.” If EdX turns out to be good at what it does, it will have the potential to take over the market in terms of massive open online courses.

It doesn’t stop there. EdX also has designs on research, not just teaching and learning. Its stated intent, according to today’s press release, is to “research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online. The EdX platform will enable the study of which teaching methods and tools are most successful.”

And this is where I begin to itch.

It’s not that I don’t think free learning is a great idea. Or that I don’t welcome Harvard & MIT’s interest in the enormous and interesting task of researching effective online learning.

We live in a time when frictionless sharing of information makes massive open courses possible. And when learning analytics make massive amounts of data available from any online venture. These things are going to affect academia, make no mistake, and our current institutional models – our business models, our learning models, and our research models – are all going to have to adapt in response.

Until this sudden explosion of major institutional interest in the idea of Massive Open Online Courses, I’d thought the adaptation might actually move in the direction of – gasp – complexity.

The original MOOCs – the connectivist MOOCs a la Siemens & Downes, and the work of David Wiley and Alec Couros and others – have been, for the most part, about harnessing the capacity of participatory media to connect people and ideas. They’ve been built around lateral, distributed structures, encouraging blog posts and extensive peer-to-peer discussion formats. Even in live sessions showcasing facilitator’s expertise, these ur-MOOCs have tended towards lively backchannel chats, exploring participants’ knowledge and experiences and ideas.

They’ve been, in short, actively modelled on the Internet itself. They’ve been experiential and user-driven. Their openness hasn’t stopped at registration capacity, but extended to curricular tangents and participatory contributions and above all, to connections: they’ve given learners not just access to information but to networks.

They’ve been messy, sometimes, but they have definitely not been business as usual.

The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions.

Those who complete the courses will get a certificate of mastery, and a grade. Their data will be harvested to determine what learning methods help them succeed.

I see value in this, and suspect that for many it will open doors. But.

If you want to deliver mass courses to enormous numbers of people, and mastery and measurable, extrinsic success are your aims, you will be inclined to keep your offerings to the concrete and the certain. Some types of knowledge are privileged in this kind of decision-making climate. Experimental, experiential knowledge tends not to be.

Particularly when the course delivery is itself an experimental undertaking to which sizable reputations – in this case, the good names of Harvard and MIT – have been attached.

Big reputations make careful, strategic changes, not great disruptive ones that go against self-interest. And thus the courses that EdX will offer and the research that EdX will produce are not likely to be modelled at all on the messy, distributed, peer-to-peer versions of knowledge production that the internet and the original MOOCs encouraged.

Words change with usage, of course. And “MOOC” certainly fits the EdX model, perhaps better than it did the original connectivist offerings: EdX will be more massive and far more a traditional course than the originals.

It’s ironic, though: this brand-new Mother of All MOOCs is, in the end, likely to do as much preserving of the traditional structures of education – especially in terms of learning – than it is to disrupt them.

 

 

 

the unbearable lightness of being…digital

The other afternoon, I’d hoped to hang out in George Siemens‘ #change11 live session on sensemaking and wayfinding in digital environments, but taxes and dinner and all the other demands of living got in the way. As ever. So I caught up this morning.

Which is fitting, since sensemaking and wayfinding as a construct deals in part with the challenges of engaging with live, participatory media when one can’t always be present in the firehose of information onslaught that it generates.

Sometimes this digital identity stuff gets overwhelming.

Not the thinking and the research. The living it.

The Learning Curve: Digital Identity & Sociality Mean Constant Sensemaking & Wayfinding
Connect, filter, engage, share, participate, curate, perform, strategize, relate, produce, add value: these are some of the verbs and phrases affiliated with identity in the age of social media.

I think “locate and tether” need to be added to the list.

I don’t think of my digital life or self as particularly separate from my so-called “real” one. I’m interested in the phenomenon of enmeshed, augmented identity: how our digital practices shape and are shaped by the multiple other aspects of our lives. Most of us today live in atoms & bytes, both. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the online world is both the stage and repository of central aspects of my self and life.

But the particulars that distinguish my digital identity and existence from how I operate when the laptop is shut?

In two weeks’ time, I’m leading the second-last of the change11 MOOC topics, on digital identities and subjectivities. In short, exploring who we are when we’re online. I’m also in the middle of writing the methodologies chapter for my thesis proposal, explaining the ethnographic study I’ll be doing next year on digital identity.

I think of these kinds of adventures as exploratory learning curves: I’ve never facilitated a MOOC, nor outlined a methods and methodologies plan. I’m learning, cobbling together ideas as I go.

Dealing with constantly making sense of semi-contextualized information is a part of navigating anything new. It can be stressful, but also exhilarating and rewarding.

But when digital identity isn’t just your field but a huge part of your so-called “real life” – the way you interact with vast swaths of your personal and professional world – then the constant sensemaking and wayfinding and learning?

I wonder if it isn’t the hardest part of social media practice.

Digital Identity Means Farewell, Linearity?
See, I’m not much of a morning person. Every day, far too shortly after dawn, I half-open one eye. I croak with forced cheer at the children as I exhort them to dress and make their beds and eat. The coffee gets made, and then the world gradually shifts into focus and lunches get packed and off we all go.

What makes mornings doable for me is that my fridge stays in the same place every day. There are few variables for me to navigate in my blurry, unresilient state. Sure, the kids have moods and some days I need to actually shower or remember to write a cheque. But overall, there’s a routine I can stumble through in linear fashion.

Minimal sense-making and wayfinding are required.

HEY! Who Moved the Damn Fridge?
Online, my digital identity enters a new and multiple and constantly-shifting world everyday.

The architecture does tend to remain the same – though it is occasionally altered at random, leaving me wondering where the bloody fridge got to or why my Direct Messages have disappeared – but instead of four people trundling through the relative routine of getting dressed, fed, and out the door, there are thousands of people going every which way.

It’s like waking up in a brand new train station every single day. Some good friends and interesting acquaintances are usually there with you, passing through, but you can’t be sure any of them will actually be present. And, rather like my offspring, there’s no predicting or accounting for what kind of knot people’s knickers will be in on any given morning.

Digital Sociality: The Stress of Waking Up in a New Train Station Everyday
This is all part of what makes social media interesting. It also adds the stress and pressure of constant, public navigation of non-linearity to what are basically daily, mundane interactions.

Digital sociality means constantly trying to ascertain if you’ve understood the context of a conversation enough to enter it.

Digital sociality means having to re-orient yourself in space and time and relationality each time the context changes, which can be minute-to-minute.

Digital sociality means patching together disjointed fragments in order to frame a present in which to be.

Digital sociality means the effort to communicate intent and tone and personality with economy and concision, without necessarily being sure who’s listening or how they will hear what you say.

Digital sociality means pressure to maintain enough of a traceable public identity, via blog and social media platforms, that people can build the trust necessary to engage with you as an actual entity and not an anonymous troll (I waxed didactic on this one in Dave’s comments section this morning).

Now, these are – boiled down – simply a part of human interaction.  Other than the final point, which is specific to dis-embodied and distributed engagements in environments where people may not necessarily have pre-existing social ties, they’re part of social life in all arenas. Humans are semi-predictable creatures, at best.

But the architecture of our daily lives – our homes, our streets and offices, our built environments in general – are pretty static.

Online, this tends to be less true. Law & LaTour’s work in – and beyond – Actor Network Theory goes so far as to posit that technologies can be actors and agents in relational interactions. My own dissertation focus will be on practices, thus foregrounding the human, but from the assumption that human practices are shaped by technological affordances: I am wordier on Facebook than on Twitter, simply because I can be.

And where we interact via platforms that we have no ownership of or control over, like Facebook and Twitter, we can truly wake up in the morning and find the fridge gone. Or in the basement. Change can happen very quickly, in a way not paralleled in embodied spaces.

The challenge of digital sociality is it’s all a constant, repeating learning curve.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Digital
In social media, the sensemaking and wayfinding processes that George foregrounds – how we make meaning, how we know what we know, how we understand others – have to be on overdrive all the time, trying to orient me to relationships, contexts, and goals all at once. It’s a tall order.

And when they fail to operate optimally – these untaught, gradually-acquired habits of navigation and constant re-orientation – I find myself accidentally floating away.

I follow a random link to cupcakes or world peace or the latest news in post-structural feminism, it matters not, and half an hour and sixteen links later, I surface, bewildered, wondering what in Jesus’ name just happened.

My digital self may not be especially different from my embodied person, but it sure has a hell of a harder time finding the fridge in the mornings. It has to work harder to stay focused on why it went to the fridge for in the first place. As a digital being, I have to work constantly to orient and re-orient myself to where I am and what I’m doing; to why and with whom I’m engaging.

This will be part of what we take up in my #change11 week starting May 7th. If you want to join in, even if you’ve fallen away from the MOOC or haven’t been part of it til now, you’re very welcome.

And in anticipation, I’ve started a Mendeley group on digital identities. After a week or two of initial neglect because I floated away from it and forgot to go back, my plan is now to start populating it with papers – and hopefully discussion – on the topic. Feel free to join in, and if you’ve happened on anything related to the idea of digital identity – please contribute. Crowdsourcing is one of the great benefits of digital sociality, after all.

Just don’t float away on your way on over. ;)

all i want for Christmas is a nice fresh myth: on class and education reform

The New York Times yesterday featured an op-ed on education entitled “Class Matters: Why Won’t We Admit It?”

The authors, Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske, noted “New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.”

That statement covers most of the problems with education. And it reinforces at least half of them, including the persistent notion that complex societal outcomes fall pretty much squarely under the purview – and responsibility – of the educational system.

This notion comes to us straight from myth. By myth, I don’t mean anything false, necessarily: a myth is a guiding narrative, a story that both directs and justifies a culture’s ways of being.

Humans need stories. And we get most of our stories from culture: from our homes, from our ethnic origins, perhaps, if they haven’t been fully absorbed into the dominant, from media, from school and peers, and from cultural narratives about how the world works.

But when our myths are no longer resonant with or equal to the circumstances we find ourselves, the decisions we make on the basis of their guidance become destructive.

Our educational narratives are some of the most outdated myths still in popular circulation.

Myth #1: Education Creates an Equal Playing Field
Our contemporary education system was founded and built on the cultural narrative that public education can and does “level the playing field” of opportunity. This myth provides the shock value for the NYT piece: if it is newsworthy that children from low-income families do not achieve the school success of children from high-income families, then there must be an expectation that schools CAN do that.

I don’t think they can, not in the way we expect. At least not anymore.

There was a time, I think, when the myth may have had some validity. In an early industrial England in which children were frequently put to work in sweatshops, the idea of mandatory public school was relatively emancipatory. Trade twelve-hour-days in soot for learning to read! Definitely a move in the direction of increased equity for the least privileged.

And a few generations later, when Americans married this narrative of public school as the great equalizer to their personal pet myth of a classless society, it created a powerful juggernaut of cultural narrative that has been passed down through the generations as a precious truth.

But schools never actually bore responsibility for making everybody highly educated: to fulfill the myth all they had to do was open doors for the most talented and well-suited among the poor. For a few generations, they did. Now, that promise rings more and more hollow.

Myth #2: Education = Opportunity
We no longer live in a time when an education – even a university education – guarantees a good job. This is less about any particular failure of the education system than it is about demographics and the nature of work in a post-industrial globalized economy.

For the early Baby Boomers, the paths were relatively clear and open, particularly for males: if you did well in school, you could go to university cheaply and largely be guaranteed employment at the end. No matter what you studied. My father, born in 1947 to a working-class auto-mechanic and a homemaker, was the first in his family to go to university: his parents had upwardly-mobile aspirations and he was a quick learner. He studied biology, and paid for his studies by working through the summers. Tuition was minimal. He got a degree in 1968, and was immediately hired by a local school board as a teacher, despite having absolutely zero teaching credentials. He was a Director of Education for his district before he was 40.

Not all families in the era before social welfare programs like Medicare and Employment Insurance had the luxury of making upward mobility a priority. My father-in-law, born a few years before my father, had equal aptitude but very different financial responsibilities at a young age. He joined the military at seventeen, did a stint in Cyprus, and returned to his small hometown when a smelter opened. He worked hard, was responsible. He was a senior Manager before he was 40.

My own school cohort – my high school and college friends – turned 40 this past year. A huge proportion of us have multiple degrees. Some are still paying for them. Some of us are still in school. Many are freelancers, business-owners, or working in retail. Almost zero are in directorships or senior management positions. The Baby Boomers are for the most part still IN those damn jobs.

School taught both my father and my father-in-law some basic principles for success: get there on time. Do what you’re told. Stay on task. This is a lot of what the education was – and still is – structured to teach. It didn’t EVER actually equal the playing field, per se, but did absolutely help to condition children to take up hierarchical roles within a hierarchical society. Family circumstances and structure still shaped the trajectories available: my father’s opportunities were far more open than those of my father-in-law’s. But paths to success were available to both.

Those paths and principles haven’t been a guarantee of much for a generation or more. Increasingly, the passivity that schooling can inculcate can be a liability in a freelancer’s job market. But the generation for whom they succeeded still control a great deal of the narrative around success, because they are still in the positions of institutional power within our culture.

The reality is that success in school today isn’t worth much, job-wise, without real-world business and institutional contacts and strategies, and preferably the economic freedom to take unpaid internships, etc. These are precisely the things that kids from families without experience or success in these realms DON’T have. Good grades mean very little if you don’t know how to leverage them.

Myth #3: Class Is About Money
I know this statement isn’t popular in many circles, but class? Is not solely or even primarily about money. Nor does talking about class reinforce hierarchies. In fact, pretending it doesn’t exist reinforces class prejudices by presenting classed practices as mere individual choice. If “those people” just did things like we do, goes the complex mythology that pretends class is merely monetary difference, all would be well and the deserving poor would get their due. Everybody else? Consigned to Jerry Springer or Real Housewives of New Jersey, depending on income.

Bourdieu talks about habitus, or practices that determine belonging to a group. I see class as far more related to habitus than it is to mere money. The types of behaviours skewered by sites like People of Walmart, for instance? Aren’t actually about full-on poverty, as people AT Walmart spend significant amounts of money. They’re about class as habitus (Bourdieu also has some nice stuff on how we get our sense of ourselves through distinction, or identifying what we are NOT, aesthetically. Hello, People of Walmart. Hello, hate for hipsters.)

For a lot of us who work in education, the idea that class has links to educational outcomes and opportunities is…um…not new. As in, it has formed at least part of the backbone of the reading list of most of the B.Ed, M.Ed, and Ph.D in Ed courses I’ve taken – and taught – over the past, oh, eighteen years.

Kids who come to school with the values and literacies that school rewards do well. By literacies I don’t necessarily mean formal literacy: nobody has to teach their child to read at home in order for the child to succeed in school. That IS one of the jobs of school. But a child who comes from a home where books and text and information are part of the habitus valued and modelled by adults? Who has experience focusing on task A in order to get to result B? Will have a far easier time in most classroom situations.

And the disparity in the way homes value and practice these skills and literacies with children tends to fall along class lines, not purely in terms of economics, but in terms of habitus.

So, we have an educational system built on reinforcing already outdated industrial-model work behaviours, and we expect it to provide truly equal-opportunity learning to children who come from vastly different family circumstances and values, while making them ALL highly-educated citizens because our culture no longer has any real place for those who are not highly-educated (and even then, security’s a whole other myth these days). And, we’d like to do this all without talking overtly about class and the advantages and disadvantages it confers, because in doing so we would undermine our cultural justification for having the education system we do in the first place?

We don’t admit class matters, New York Times, because for generations we have grown up not knowing how to talk about class at all. And because most of us who work in education have bought into the idea that we are here to level the playing field, and we don’t know how to imagine our way out of the tangle of narratives and myth that we’ve built our system on because they’re still passed around like truth.

I want to believe we can revision the concept of public education so that it remains true to its principles and goals of increasing equity and opportunity in a disparate, pluralistic society. I think the first step in getting there might be admitting, once and for all, that it is not currently succeeding on that front at all. Not because the system or the teachers or even the parents are failing, but because the task and the society no longer fit the narratives driving our policies and our practices and our purposes for learning.

What education needs for Christmas is a new myth; a new vision. Maybe a whole stocking full of them. Any ideas?

 

 

the rhizomatic learning lens & what rhizomes are good for

Confession: I’m not entirely sure what week it is in #change11.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are tricky creatures, their possibilities and to-do lists inclined to slip away from you and multiply like rabbits the minute you look in another direction. Especially this “mother of all MOOCs,” with its 36 consecutive facilitators and topics.

For a lot of us in education, staying afloat in such a sea of participatory learning opportunities is difficult, overwhelming, contrary to a life’s practice of taking what Liz Renshaw so aptly called “the helicopter view” of any learning experience and trying to overview it. MOOCs are big and distributed and decentralized: conversations are happening all over, there are ostensibly over 2000 participants (even if a lot mostly lurk), and basically, there’s almost no way to keep a finger on the pulse of it all.

It’s rhizomatic, meaning that just like weeding your damn garden, what you see and pull up is only a fraction of what’s there.

This is apt, since while I may not know whether it’s week 7 or 8 of 36 in #change11, I do know it’s Dave’s week, and that the theme is rhizomatic learning.

I may as well dive in.

(Caveat here: I am Dave’s partner and while I have thoughts and opinions on rhizomatic learning I do not actually pay nearly such close attention to his work as I, uh, could? Ought to? So this post does not reflect a particularly privileged or informed perspective on Dave’s ideas, but more where they – and the conversation taking place this week in #Change11 – send me.)

As Dave frames it in his introductory post to the week’s course, rhizomatic learning is:

 “…a way of thinking about learning based on ideas described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. A rhizome, sometimes called a creeping rootstalk, is a stem of a plant that sends out roots and shoots as it spreads. It is an image used by D&G to describe the way that ideas are multiple, interconnected and self-replicating. A rhizome has no beginning or end… like the learning process.”

Sometimes Dave’s work gets taken up either as educational theory or as educational technique. For my part, I don’t think it’s either.

I see rhizomatics as a potent metaphor for conceptualizing the process of learning, and for approaching how we go about learning and working with learning. The value in the idea of the rhizome, for me, is the way in which it foregrounds the unpredictability, the messiness, the connectedness, and the multi-directionality of learning, knowledge, and educational research. I see rhizomatic learning almost as a lens, a pair of glasses one learns to put on in order to view the educational landscape.

These rhizomatic learning lenses are not intended to make you see more clearly, per se, though you may or may not come to that conclusion about their effects. Rather they are intended to make you see differently.

We live in a culture and time where our minds are colonized by education. Most particularly, by education as a system. We go to school, almost all of us, and are taught from an extraordinarily young age that school equates with learning. Our cultural concepts of education and learning are intrinsically interwoven with notions of schooling.

And when we try to grapple with the ways in which the discourses of learning and schooling have changed – drastically – in the past generation or so, as we are trying to do with the #change11 MOOC, that colonization often takes over.

Colonization is a harsh word. Education, after all, is a good. Most of us who tend to succeed in it have been taught that from our mothers’ knees. Even those of us who haven’t succeeded – or had the opportunity to succeed – within systematized education have traditionally been made acutely aware of our lack.

I do genuinely believe there can be great value in an education. To paraphrase Churchill on democracy, I see education as the worst system…except for all the other ones that have been tried. I place particular import on systems of public education, to the extent to which they help mitigate inequities and create opportunities. Alas, that extent is often profoundly underwhelming.

It is also where technologies and networks and the possibilities of open education really begin to excite me. Because we get the opportunity to rethink or think outside the systemic constraints of traditional education and learning, and to consider what learning and “an education” could mean.

Except then we don’t, all too often. Because we’re colonized.

We conflate learning and schooling. We are subjects of the idea of education as a system, an institution, and so we rely on and replicate this idea in our conceptions of learning: we assume factors like goals and grading and – increasingly – market viability as real parts of what learning involves. They can be, of course. But they do not need to be unless that learning is taking place within the contingencies of mass-delivery and crowd control and normativizing of classed behaviours and literacies that we absorbed with our school milk programs. These practical components of systemic schooling processes are the base map or lens on learning which we, culturally, have inherited.

This idea of systemic education as we in the West know it is not a particularly ancient one. As Dave pointed out in the first post of the week, one of the purposes of mass public education was to train workers. It was also to inculcate what were deemed to be productive civic values in citizens, including a healthy respect for institutional, hierarchical power.

For the last fifty years or so, the idea of that institutional, hierarchical power as natural and good has been broadly challenged- see 1968, deconstruction, Free to Be You & Me, constructivism, and, uh, MOOCs, among other things – but also buoyed up by the rise of neoliberalism and the increasing public acceptance of discourses of corporatism and managerialism in public enterprises such as government and education. It’s a site of fascinating societal struggle. It’s also profoundly self-replicating: we become subjects of the system in school, and then subject others to the operations of the system we’ve come to see as natural and right.

So long as our lenses on learning are actually focused on schooling, we replicate the same colonizing systems. Even where we try not to. Even online, where we don’t have to.

Which is where rhizomatic learning and the new pair of glasses come in.

The rhizome is non-binary, non-hierarchical, and non-linear: it’s also aggressive and chaotic and resists the tree-like arboreal model of knowledge. For Deleuze & Guattari, it is a cultural process that emphasizes “ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” Yeh. That.

I don’t think rhizomatic learning can be used particularly effectively to address grading, or curriculum, or most of the structures of systemic education. The rhizome is not a way of tweaking the systems we have.

The idea of rhizomatic learning emphasizes how ideas spread, popping out roots and shoots. Some of these take on whole lives of their own. Others abort at the bud stage. As a visual image for how learning operates, it enables us to – maybe – break down or see beyond some of the colonized perceptions we’ve been trained to, like the one that makes me feel slightly anxious when I realize I’ve missed an entire week of what’s gone on in the MOOC, say. That’s a perspective trained to assume that a) what’s on offer is what I should learn, b) that a view of the “whole” is possible and desirable and that partiality is less, and c) that missing things in a learning experience is abnormal.

Yet when I think back to my high school or undergraduate “learning experiences,” I begin to wonder if the process of popping out little roots and shoots in relatively unpredictable response to whatever I happened to tune into isn’t what I’ve been doing all along, however much the curriculum and my nice, tidy grades from those days might like to tell another story.

I try to wear my rhizomatic learning glasses when I think about this MOOC. I focus on the connections that occur, the relations between ideas and people and platforms, and the ones that seem to abort. I always think of whatever I might happen to think about the MOOC as if it were a picture of a tiny part of our very-rhizome-infested garden, partial and limited and chaotic and heading off in a tangle of directions.

Slowly, very slowly, this perspective on my own learning and participation and subject position begins to help me alter the way I conceive of education.

And that, my friends, is what rhizomes are good for.