Not One for PDA (Public Displays of Academia)

“If you would not say it in an academic review, or in the questions following a public lecture, don’t say it on Twitter.”

This line about three-quarters of the way through Tim Hitchcock’s piece stuck out to me as something I thought I might discuss in a blog post, even though I was ready to be on board with him before that, about halfway through this sentence: “Twitter and blogs, and embarrassingly enthusiastic drunken conversations at parties, are not add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion that underpins it.”

As one who rarely tweets (or as one whose tweets tend to meander slowly alongside a course during an academic semester) I was interested in reading another perspective on the usefulness of social media for higher education. Because I agree with the idea that the role of an academic is in many ways a public one, it’s somewhat hard for me to admit the truth:

…This grad student is wary of PDA (Public Displays of Academics) when that public exists in the digital realm of social media.

There. I said it. Conference proposals? Class lectures? I’m all in. But the second you ask me to Tweet about it, I’m done.

Hitchcock’s idea that a blog can end in an academic output with an audience ready to cite it seems (in some ways) a bit ambitious, but I know there’s some truth to this. Sharing the information provides that opportunity, and it’s something I aim to work on myself this semester.

Networked Learning – a new challenge for introverts?

I have read all the articles and have been a part of the dialogue around the importance of blogging and its impact on higher education. The more I read others’ thoughts and comments about it, the more I agree with all the positive outcomes that can from it. Yet as a shy, introverted, empathic person, I sometimes find it difficult to engage in public discourse even when it is done digitally. As an exercise in getting out of my comfort zone and facing my own fears, these are often times the same reasons I use to put myself in situations that force me to engage with others (whether it is by attending large social gatherings or by taking courses that require blogging and active participation). I do it also because I see the importance in learning how to control my emotions and be able to comfortably engage with others. I want to get better at this so I can incorporate it into my teaching and be able to pass on advice from experience to others who might relate to this.

I particularly enjoyed the post by Tim Hitchcock in which he emphasizes sticking to your own voice and staying true to your identity while blogging. I wonder how that would translate for students in different age groups and from diverse backgrounds, and how this increased connectedness and almost constant engagement affects their definition or awareness of their true identity.

In this digital age of social media and information overload, it is also imperative that we equip students with the critical thinking needed to adequately parse and filter information. I believe this will become the main task of educators, it will no longer be the unidirectional transfer of information since the information is ready available to everyone, but rather developing their students’ critical thinking skills by encouraging them to pose questions and engaging in an open dialogue. The article by Gardner Campbell discusses some of this where scholars in education have been arguing for a shift in teaching techniques for a long time with little or very slow response into actual implementation of new methods.

Musings on learning in today’s world

The learning experience – especially in the context of formal education – has certainly evolved over the years. While I cannot directly quote literature right now, I have certainly heard stories from the “yesteryears,” stories shared by my parents, grandparents, and others in their respective generations, about the relationship between teacher and students. Nay, I would say that my early memories of education is that of being talked at by my teacher, and I attribute whatever knowledge that I eventually possess as things that I passively received from that sage-on-stage.

Advances in technology and telecommunications have made a lot of things possible. There is a wealth of information “out there” that is now more readily accessible. What I think this has meant for the learning process and the learner is that there is more opportunity to explore and independently embark on a quest for truth, in order to actively construct knowledge.

What this also means is that teaching has consequently evolved from delivering information and course content to facilitating the process where learners build knowledge for themselves. It is an interesting paradigm, one that may not necessarily be the norm for everybody at this time, but is certainly gaining traction in both basic and higher education. It is also certainly aligned with the “high-impact practices” promulgated by Kuh and referenced in Gardner Campbell’s article.

What I have come to realize is that when knowledge is actively constructed, through a variety of resources and media, it becomes a more engaging activity, a more holistic experience. And when the concept of learning moves from the rather uninvolved process of receiving and regurgitating information to that of living an experience and making memories, the knowledge that is built leaves a more lasting impact and is more meaningful. Nowadays, this can be done in a wide variety of ways; and with the internet bringing down barriers related to distance and time, there is no limit to the knowledge that one can build. There is also a great opportunity to share one’s intellectual work, and engage in discourse, even with people halfway across the world.

I guess the next question may be: as an educator, what can I do to maximize the opportunities that are made available to me? How can I make a difference?

To Blog or Not To Blog

During my time as a PhD student, professors have shared mixed comments about blogging.  Some professors have encouraged me to blog and others have deemed the practice as a waste of time.

What I noticed about those who were from the pro-blog camp is that they are either assistant professors or senior professors who happen to be tech savvy.

The anti-blog camp are typically older and committed to the traditional expectations of academia.

Even those from the pro-blog camp struggle with the act.  One professor asked me to chime in on a potential post.  The content was soooooo thick [wordy].  For some, making the transition from hefty manuscripts to brief and succinct commentary is a major challenge.  Here are a few other troubling comments that I have heard from students and professors:

  • I’m long-winded, and there’s no way I can cram all of what I have to say in that box.
  • Blogging will call into question my status as a serious scholar.
  • Who actually reads that %!#&?

Maybe it is time for universities to offer training on contemporary sharing platforms. Reboot?

A Mixed Bag: Academic Capitalism, Social Media and the Public Intellectual

Published in 2016, “Networked Learning as Experiential Learning” begins by noting the shifting role of higher education in the United States and globally. The trends noticed by numerous researchers of higher education have lead to disagreements concerning the role of professors within the changing environment of the university conditioned by external demands and expectations of policy makers and society writ large. The shift in higher education suppressed the old understanding of the pursuit of knowledge as its own good and lauded ideas of higher education as the key to career and monetary gain. Reimagining higher education as a content delivery platform that imbues students with practical skills immediately applicable to the workplace necessitates new relationships between: university and faculty; university and student; and faculty and student. In short, expectations external to the university conditioned the relationships within to meet market demands.

The above shift is part of a larger process termed by some as the neoliberalization, or the corporatization of the university. Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades in Academic Capitalism and the New Economy identify the changes in higher education as enabled by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 which extended intellectual property rights to inventions made with federal money including research conducted at public universities. Bayh-Dole anticipated the advent of an information-age economy in which intellectual property would replace industrial products as primary economic drivers. Universities scrambled to get a piece of the action and massive expansions of intellectual property offices, government relations staff, and research centers followed from an internal envisioning of turning places of higher learning into places of higher profit. Facing state funding cuts and the expansion of federal grants programs, faculty at state universities were transformed into entrepreneurs seeking external revenue for both research and university. Administrators became more concerned with the proper management of monetary streams deemed essential to university expansion rather than the university as a public or community service. The role of faculty as intellectual was dispensed with and replaced by faculty-as-entrepreneur.

Tim Hichcock, like many others, discusses the “crisis of the humanities” as resulting from the insular conversations had by academics. He recognizes both governmental bench-marking of British academics and the demands of big publishing as conditioning an environment hostile to academics concerned with their modular specializations understandable only to those who specialized for the sake of academic pursuit. Those in the humanities must not only recognize their disciplines as threatened by larger developments within the university – notably, the marketability of those disciplines – but also by an insularity endemic to academics of different stripes. Recognizing the passion one must posses to devote ones life to something that few people care about, he turns to social media as a possible solution for breaking the non-publicity in the life of the intellectual. Blogging, for Hichcock, not only forces the intellectual into a public space – the World Wide Web – but also links together other interested parties outside the academic world. His writing reflects sentiments felt across communities concerning the transformative potential of the internet within the information age economy. This attitude, however, perpetuates the idea of the academic as entrepreneur or, as Tom Peters commented concerning blogging “It’s the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude that I’ve ever had.” Is this an appropriate response to the call for an entrepreneurial faculty? Will the publicity of the internet allow for a new age in public intellectualism? I won’t answer these questions here but if blogging is a new medium for the public intellectual, then they must understand the needs of their audiences.

Michael Wesch believes that the maturation of the internet and the ascendance of the generation who grew up with it means that education and pedagogical praxis have the potential to change. Praxis, for Wesch, must change from the professor-centric model of lecturing to newer inclusive and interactive models of classroom design to foster student engagement. The internet now holds a treasure-trove of information accessible by fingertips at speeds unmatched by previous information networks such as your local library.  Media have the potential to change human relationships and Wesch recognizes that social media and the information they carry, are distinct from the one-sided conversations had between television and viewer. They are more interactive, more networked, and more public. The powers of the spectator have changed from influencing broad general opinion polls, or viewer ratings, to commenting on real-time debates or feeling a closer connection to disembodied personae of individuals or AI.  Persons and their identities have been augmented by the internet to now include digital identities that manufacture digital artifacts subject to intellectual property rights regimes. The Internet itself offers nearly limitless potential for linking individuals together through the use of social media. The classroom, for Wesch, is not insulated from the broader social environment of the internet. Pedagogical practice should incorporate the collaborative potential of the internet and allow for a more participatory classroom.

Our learning potential from social media, however, is overstated by Wesch, Cambell, and Hichcock. They are grandly optimistic that our new social network will spread diverse viewpoints by a natural curiosity on the part of users and the nearly limitless amount of information thrown at them through the internet. Barack Obama – one of the first presidents to understand the power of internet social media – warned of the growing insularity in online communities during his farewell address. His sentiment concerning our digital selves is echoed in Adam Curtis’s “Hypernormalization” that points out that complex algorithms determine the advertisements, websites and products shown to us through the new medium. Our growing isolation from “real” interactions and the historical determinism of digital identities may keep us in an informational stasis because of larger market forces. We may continue to have the same insular conversations in pockets of the internet isolated from the larger public stage merely based on the interest of others. The transformative effects of the internet should not be mistaken for a technodeterministic view of enlightenment. It is hard, after all, for any liberal democracy to call white nationalists, such as the alt-right, enlightened but their insular conversations and global reach have allowed them to become a political phenomenon efficacious inside and out of the Web. As we come to understand the blurred environment formed by the fusion of the digital and, I’ll call it, analogue realities we must pay attention to the structural forces that drive it. Utopian visions need not apply.

Retrofuturist Twitter: A Ghost of the Present

Imagine the following: the Twitter accounts for the National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and other government entities belonging to the Interior Department suddenly stop tweeting and go silent. While, in this alternative present, we still know about some of their historical tweets, tweet battles (should they have had any), and other things that had been documented outside of Twitter itself, their Twitter accounts no longer tweet things about bobcats or bears. There is just the memory of what, historically, they had said.

While this is not, currently, the actual state of affairs, I think we can engage in retrofuturist [retropresentist?] thought and critically ask questions about what such closures would mean. We can also take it a step further and ask the following:

If these Twitter accounts had been for community organizers, anarchists, or folks engaged in anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-____ist work, what would their closure have meant? What would it have meant for pedagogy intended to raise awareness about anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-_____ist work?

With the changeover in US leadership on Janurary 20th 2016, various websites and sources of information have been indexed or, in more polemic language, deleted and replaced with sites that, to some, are quite questionable not only in the content they have on the site, but, and in my view more importantly, for what is missing. I say all of this not to get into a manichnistic argument about the specific events noted above. Rather, the intention here is to ground a discussion about the role of the web as it relates to, and allows relations between, peoples who otherwise may never see, read, or have access to narratives outside of a certain circle and what implication this has for pedagogy and praxis.

In his 2014 article “Working openly on the web: a manifesto” Doug Belshaw makes a point about what, in their phrasing, is “control” over a section of the web. For those who are partial to “control” language, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. I, however, am hesitant to accept this language as I think that linguistically we should be skeptical of language that delineates control over, ownership of, something since, structurally, I think this plays into an “achievement” and individualistic mindset as opposed to a more malleable and open mindset of improvement and communal effort (labor?) in creating and discovering. As such, I wish to understand and parse the events (e.g., the retrofuturist twitter debacle and the indexing of various websites) not through the lens of “control of” but rather as a type of “freedom from control of”. In philosophical terms as a type of negative right as opposed to a positive one. But as I said earlier, those who are partial to “control” language can use it to understand the gist of my points below.

As Belshaw says “services change their privacy settings, close down, and are taken over by megacorps”. The events that transpired in retrofuturist twitter certainly represent a type of limitation, and for some folks perhaps censorship, on what is allowed to be shared on the web and with whom. For these reasons, Belshaw centers their recommendation to “control” part of the web to, at least in part, avoid sudden discontinuations of access. For me, this and other elements of his blog post, specifically as they relate to notions of collaboration, relate to notions found in Campbell’s and Hitchcock’s pieces. Specifically, they relate to notions of connection, collaboration, and mutual labor.

Campbell, in their 2016 piece “Networked Learning as Experiential Learning“, pulls from Kuh to construct an educational praxis informed by  improvement, as opposed to achievement, based learning. In doing so I, at least, see this an emphasis that pushes against individualistic goals and, instead, turns to focus on working with others as opposed to being in opposition, and competing against, them. To relate this back to Belshaw, a community of folks involved in collaborative work would benefit from the negative right mentioned earlier both due to I) being able to make connections and exchange ideas and II) having I without the threat of censorship or passive power limitations on conversations.

For both, the actors or agents are not limited to those with certain degrees or professions; they can be professors, students, or anyone else with access to the internet and a blogging platform. As such, to me at least, these all serve to fight back against myths of scarcity and intrinsic inability, to pull from work by Pharr. A person does not need to be an authority in their field, does not need to have access to legitimized and often corporatized lines of formal publication, to share narratives and/or to be involved in collaborative work.

To speak to the latter notion, for a number of folks, such as for trans folks as explained by Janet Mock, blogs have been an integral way to share narratives and make connections. In fact, blogs and open lines of communication have allowed for capacity building and for folks to recognize and locate others who are invested in the same types of liberatory (or other) work.

As to the former, I want to prompt with a question: What must we believe about someone to consider them to be void of meaningful contribution? While I don’t want to answer this question here, I do want to point to Eric Rofes and the collaborative work he did with school children in the creation of books on death, divorce, and parents written by and for children. What must he have believed to see the school children as creators and authors in their own right and what might this indicate about the structure of our pedagogical praxis?

This brings me back to my initial questions about the implications for social movements and pedagogy. In this blog post, in many ways I haven’t tried to answer my initial question directly and that is very intentional. While I think that pedagogy, especially that which is geared towards informing liberatory praxis, will probably include elements of collaborative learning, the negative right, a shift away from individualistic and achievement oriented goals, and ultimately connections that span both current temporal and spatial limitations, I want to leave it an open question that ultimately may include some of these elements or even none of them. I don’t think that it is a question I, or anyone alone, can answer. Rather, it is a question I think we must work together to answer or, more likely than not, continuously rework an answer to.

Networked learning…is it useful?

If you had asked me about this idea a couple of years ago when I was in undergrad I would have probably laughed at you and thought that it was a crazy idea. I only say that because for me everything was done ‘offline’. Homework assignments were done on paper and turned in at the beginning of class and any reports where typed in Word, printed out and turned in.

Fast forward a couple of years to today. Now…I’m starting to come around to the idea of networked learning. When used in the right context networked learning can be extremely useful. It gives students the opportunity to collaborate with others (not just others in the class, but possibly others around the world) and use it as a two-way discussion to improve their ideas and reasoning. Also,  as pointed out repeatedly throughout the readings, the more blogging that a person does usually the better a person becomes at writing. They become better at getting their desired point across in a well-mannered and interesting way. I’m a mechanical engineer and even I cannot stress how important this idea is. Regardless of what a student does with their degree being able to clearly convey their ideas to an audience is such a useful quality.

I would like to change gears slightly and look at ‘networked learning for graduate students’. I use the quotes there because I feel like for graduate students ‘networked learning’ is different than ‘networked learning’ for undergrads. Instead of using blogging to collaborate on assignments and improve writing skills, graduate students can use blogging to express their ideas on the research they are working on and use blogging to collaborate with other likeminded individuals to construct a stronger research claim.

As a graduate student, I don’t like wasting time. Therefore, I don’t like doing things that won’t benefit me or others in my lab. I’m not going to lie…I use to think blogging was useless and the biggest waste of time (please don’t hate, I have changed) and didn’t want to take the time to do it. Anyhow, when I was reading through the article written by Tim Hitchcock I saw a sentence that really stuck out to me, for simplicity I’ve included the sentence below.

“The most impressive thing about these blogs (and the academic careers that generate them), is that there is no waste – what starts as a blog, ends as an academic output, and an output with a ready-made audience, eager to cite it.” [1]

This sentence just really stuck out to me because it got me thinking about how blogging could be useful. It could be used for brainstorming and getting ideas flowing between others in your respective field. It can be used for getting ideas out to an audience before ever going to a conference or publishing a paper.

Thus, it is easy to see that assuming the information does not have to be kept confidential blogging can be useful when used properly and can help add another level to a person’s research/writing.

[1] Hitchcock, T. (2014, July 28). Twitter and blogs are not just add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion underpinning it. Retrieved January 20, 2017, from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/07/28/twitter-and-blogs-academic-public-sphere/

Education: The Forest and the Tree

Campbell cites Kuh’s [1] premise as follows:

“Education was becoming more about careers and “competencies” (a word Kuh himself used, although in a larger sense than others have) and less about inquiry, meaning-making, and a broadly humane view of human capacity.”

In order to understand the role of education, its significance and goal we need to take step back and explore how humanity has evolved. We will then see that education has always put emphasis on these skills. What has been changing is its manifestation. Human history has developed gradually through what is known as the “division of labor”. From the early days of the Ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, we can already see the creation of stratified hierarchical societies, where each caste or group of people had a different role to play (i.e. priests, artisans, farmers, soldiers, royalty). [2]

With the emergence of the industrial revolution, the rapid urbanization around areas where the factories were located, the need for more skilled labor became imperative. Subsequently, the main purpose of the educational system was to provide skilled labor to support production. The educational system once again adapted a few decades ago to structural changes that shifted the economy from manufacturing to services (tertiary sector).

What we observe now in the age of internet is an equivalent paradigm shift. However, the underlying mechanism is the same; education does not exist outside of our technological limitations and the underlying goals of the economic system. Networked learning is another way of achieving this goal.

Having clarified that, networked learning can facilitate and help to improve learning experience, rendering it more interactive. Most importantly, it might be a toolset to help people learn tacit knowledge more effectively. [3]

References

1  George D. Kuh (2008), High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities)

2 Diamond, J. M. (1999). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: Norton.

3 Klein, Gary A (2009). Streetlights and Shadows : Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press


Old-Fashioned Network Learning

I agree that individuals are more connected today compared to 25 years ago. Advancements in communications technology have brought us closer together by making it easier to communicate with each other, while at the same time they have increased the number of individuals that are within our network. The current generation of college students has always known the Internet and has had access to information at their fingertips in the blink of an eye.

However, I am of a different generation. I am neither Generation X nor am I a Millennial. I am a bridge between both of them or as was proposed at one time, Generation Y. I was born in an age where there was a boom in home computer ownership. My first home computer was a T/I-99 – basically a keyboard that connected to your television. My television came in through a cable box that had a dial that you clicked to change the channel, the movies of my childhood were on VHS and rented at a local video store or Blockbuster, my music was on cassettes. The Internet wasn’t around, and by the time it was in any way that meant something, someone picking up a phone somewhere else in the house could disconnect you. I am well versed in most things digital, but only because I grew up in tandem with the Internet. I will make the claim that my generation was highly effected by the Reagan years, saw the Berlin Wall crumble, woke up during the new American heyday of the Clinton presidency, and struck out on our own under George W. Bush. We watched the OJ Simpson trial and the LA riots, Waco and Columbine, and the first truly televised war in Iraq, all live. We watched MTV when it still aired more music videos than it did scripted shows like Beavis and Butthead, Liquid Television, and Ren and Stimpy. My friends and I got our first cellphones when we were adults. We actually spoke to our friends in person or on the telephone, not through texting or messaging systems. I had social anxiety because I used to stutter when I spoke. I had to face actual consequences for the things I said and did. There was no sense of anonymity or hiding like we have on social media nowadays.

This semester I decided to enact a no electronic devices policy in my classroom. Why? Because I want my students to truly engage the material I am teaching. I want discussions that they lead and I prompt along with questions. I don’t want the computer screen to be a barrier between them and me. It would not be a barrier between each of them because they typically communicate via electronic devices. I want my classroom to be a place where my students can practice how to formulate ideas, present them to their peers, and get feedback in person before they get into the working world. I am not totally against using social media and technology in my class. I have used an online simulation to help teach the concepts of world politics in previous courses I have taught. My goal is to be a bridge in the classroom like I am a generational bridge…to bring together face-to-face interaction and technology. We shall see how it goes.

What is Contemporary Pedagogy and why am I taking this class?

Confession #1:

I am one of the few people who raised their hands when we were asked “who does not enjoy blogging?” Maybe it’s because I don’t really have much experience (I’ve only ever blogged as a requirement for other classes) or it could be the fact that I’m not a fan of writing and sharing my thoughts. But this semester I am going to have to blog for two of the three course I’m in (I am also taking GRAD-5104 Preparing the Future Professoriate). I think this semester can go one of two ways; I will either learn to love blogging and really find my voice or I will determine that blogging is just not the way that I can best express myself. I think reflection is an important part of success in anything, really. If you’re not taking the time to think through why and how you’re doing things, you’re closing yourself off to opportunities for improvement and progress. In this class, we have the opportunity not only to reflect for ourselves in our posts, but also get feedback from classmates with different perspectives, so I’m going to really try to embrace this experience and try to get the most out of blogging.

Confession #2:

I had no idea what this class was going to be about until I showed up on the first day. I signed up for this class because I am planning to become a professor and wanted to get the Future Professoriate certificate and this class was a required course to take.

 

After just one class, I understand why this course is included in the Future Professoriate certificate. Technology and social media have become an important part of how we communicate, learn and interact with one another and it is important that field of education embrace and adapt to these changes, rather than attempt to work in spite of them.

I found the TEDxKC talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeaAHv4UTI8&feature=youtu.be) we watched in class to be very thought-provoking. It really highlighted the need for networked learning and integration of new media techniques to engage students in conversations about what they are learning and how they can apply their knowledge to real world situations. I can see how these practices can be implemented into classrooms that focus on events and thought-provoking ideas; however, in my field (Engineering), many introductory courses focus on facts and equations without much room for discussion, so I am interested to see how networked learning can be integrated into these type of courses.


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