My re-reading/re-viewing of Gardner Campbell‘s “Personal Cyberinfrastructure” and “No More Digital Facelifts” is juxtaposed against another activity on my calendar this week: attending a series of vendor demonstrations to determine the University’s new course management sytem.
Yesterday, I attended a 90 minute presentation by one of the most well-known CMS vendors. Here are some random thoughts I had during the presentation and afterwards (while reflecting on the experience):
- When up against a wall, commercial vendors will co-opt the language of the open Web and citizen-created media with absolutely no concern about whether they actually understand the language. Witness, the “mashup tool.” Quote from the video behind that link: “Mashups provide a simple way to add multimedia to course without having to create it yourself.” Here’s another definition.
- When a product has been around long enough and patterns of use have been (corporately) defined enough times, a huge chasm can grow between the perhaps initial, intended (advertised) purpose of the product and what the product actually does.
- The “partnering” of a course management system vendor with “the global leader in interactive markting services” in order to deliver “AFFORDABLE STUDENT IDENTITY VERIFICATION” may signify the greatest, most-frightening ethical leap that higher education can take. To suggest that “the global leader in interactive marketing services” is providing this service because they simply want to do something for higher education (out of the goodness of their corporate heart) is naive, at best, and equally, frighteningly unethical, at worst. Every school that is capitalizing on this partnership should take a long, hard look at what exactly they are paying for — and what they, ultimately, are perhaps selling.
- Every time you use the phrase “delivering content” to describe the art of teaching, a small, exceedingly cute marsupial dies.
- Faculty who attend these presentations can’t be blamed when their questions reflect a greater concern with the “efficiencies” provided (or promised but not delivered) rather than the way in which technology can/should/will alter the practices of teaching, learning, knowing, and thinking.They have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to how we consider technology within the ecosystem of higher education. For a decade and a half, we have let companies tell us what technology can do for us rather than demanding that our larger communities engage the deeper, messier, far more profound questions about how technology can/should/will alter the practices of teaching, learning, knowing, and thinking.
- Once you have begun to grapple with these messy and essential questions, sitting through presentations aimed at describing content delivery and administrative efficiences sucks a little more of your soul out of your being.
- Once again, louder please: Our job is not to manage students. It is to teach them. Our job is not to manage learning. It is to build communities and spaces in which learning happens.
- I am not an idiot. I GET that to run a University you have to figure out some way to manage the administration of a University’s practices. And I GET that technology is going to play a role in this. But can we PLEASE not pretend/suggest/pronounce that the these needs come before an investigation and engagement with the deeper, messier, far more profound questions about how technology can/should/will alter the practices of teaching, learning, knowing, and thinking.
- The technologies you choose to frame the experience of teaching, learning, knowing, and thinking MATTER. The actual code behind these vendor solutions is forged in a corporate mindset founded on finding efficiences, delivering content, and defining patterns of practice that are, fundamentally, limiting. That code breathes itself into every corner of the system. We have to stop fooling ourselves into believing that within these coded spaces we can build something that is other than the fundamental nature of the code.
- I am drawn to open-source technologies for my practice because I believe that the code inside these systems is forged in finding alternatives, creating experiences, and defining new patterns of practice that, recursively, turn the code into something new. I believe these values are breathed into the corners of the systems I use, too. My spaces are coded as well, but my spaces are fundamentally flexible, communal, and, yes, sometimes they are messy.
- Ultimately, then, our conversations about technologies must grapple with our larger community’s values — and what code we think enacts these values.
- (Neatness has no place in education.)
Meanwhile, I’m reading/viewing Gardner, and thinking about the notion of a cyberinfrastructure — and I’m asking my own students in Digital Storytelling to attempt to build this for themselves. And I realize that my desire for them to grapple with these spaces is directly related to my reflections to CMS vendors. I want them to understand the meaning of these coded spaces. I want them to realize that there are corporate, political, and social forces that inhabit this code. I want them to understand that they are not Google’s customers — they are its products. I want them to recognize that all digital systems are composed of patterns that someone has identified and codified. I want them to question those patterns and consider their own patterns — and then I want them to attempt to codify those, too. Perhaps not forever, but at least for a semester. I would like to think that they will walk away from this course with a deeper understanding of the digital spaces they inhabit, but, more importantly, I would like them to walk away with a messy set of questions that will plague them as they continue to grapple with these spaces.
Exactly. This quote kills: “For a decade and a half, we have let companies tell us what technology can do for us rather than demanding that our larger communities engage the deeper, messier, far more profound questions about how technology can/should/will alter the practices of teaching, learning, knowing, and thinking.”
I feel like a broken record in my district, constantly bristling against the insidious way in which LMS/CMS has become synonymous for “online education.” As though LMS is the only or the best way to conduct everything that isn’t f2f… Much to think about here.
Martha you wrote a wonderful piece. It feels enraging, all this manipulation. Once upon a time it was called revisionism. Go, edu Bolsheviks!
[New Post] (Neatness has no place in education.): https://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2011/01…
RT @mburtis: [New Post] (Neatness has no place in education.): https://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2011/01…
I feel your pain. I have been at conferences where almost all sessions focused on more efficient ways to deliver content. There are a lot of people that have not taken delivery.
I think that as teachers we always want our students to walk away with, ” a deeper understanding of _______________ and to walk away with a messy set of questions that will plague them as they continue to grapple with __________.”
Nicely said. I look forward to learning with you as this course evolves.
I’ve read this post about ten times since it first appeared. I plan to read it frequently, over the rest of my life. For me, this blog post burns with a hard, gemlike flame that illuminates the shabbiness cowering in the corners of what we so casually call “education” or (even more casually) “Higher Education.”
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame…. I’d call that a learning outcome, and I am always grateful to Martha, one of my most challenging and interesting teachers, for these marvelous lessons. I would call this post, indeed, a work of art, and while Pater can be criticized, he is after all right about many things. Manage a life? To what end? Kindness to others, faithful stewardship, and perhaps this as well, a gift to those who live among us and trust us with their minds and hearts:
[W]e are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve –les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passion, the wisest, at least among “the children of the world”, in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion –that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
thank you, Martha (and Gardner, always).
Re: “Once again, louder please: Our job is not to manage students. It is to teach them. Our job is not to manage learning. It is to build communities and spaces in which learning happens.”
Yes indeed. At EDUCAUSE 2011, Seth Godin made the painful point that our educational systems and institutions are designed for commodity-scale production of diplomas, credentials, and yes, “knowledge workers.” This brings to mind “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, 1962. Suburban sprawl makes perfect sense if you accept the premise that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country” and that our environments must therefore be designed, scaled, and organized to accommodate the personal automobile.
What would our educational communities and environments look like if we (re)designed them for engagement and empowerment, using patterns generated by students and teachers, a la Christopher Alexander? If it really worked, we might come up with the institutional equivalent of a textured, messy, diverse, walk-and-bike friendly neighborhood that holds its property value through good times and bad.
(BTW I found my way here via Jim Groom, who shared the amazing Gardner Campbell+Bb-tutorial mashup with this year’s NWACC-IT Roundtable).
Dear Martha,
The life of a blog is really a meta presence: I read your “gemlike flame” of a post (to quote Gardner Campbell’s remark) a long time ago, and posted an enthusiastic comment in January. I mean, your post is really a gem, but the situation you describe in it is pretty sad.
In August, Campbell posted his beautiful remark, and a few days ago, the post suddenly burst to life again when Andrew B added his comment.
So I re-read your post, and found, as expected, that I still agree 100% with you. But this is not all: I discovered also another gem in your post, which I subscribe completely with, and which is also part of my study into the myths of teaching and learning (and technology). I love the way you put the number-1 myth:
“Every time you use the phrase “delivering content” to describe the art of teaching, a small, exceedingly cute marsupial dies.”
No one can possibly say it better, or with more irony.
@Antonio — what’s really funny about this is that until Andrew left the comment, I had not re-read the post in quite some time, and had completely missed Gardner’s comment! I’m glad you enjoyed the re-read. That small marsupial is very dear to me. 🙂
@Andrew — I’m a big fan of Alexander. Pattern Recognition was a required text in my graduate program, and I find the basic philosophies of pattern building and recognition seep into my work all the time. I’m working on another project right now (on online learning) that I’m hoping to build a kind of “pattern repository” for. I don’t care about a repository of “learning objects” (blech) but I DO care about a place where I can peruse the patterns of practice that people have used to teach. I’m hoping that our project can start to build something like that.
@Gardner — I can’t believe I missed your comment. Thank you. I take it as a huge compliment that you would consider re-reading this. I must say that as I re-read it, I could feel the rage again. That rage is empowering and, I find, often allows me to find (whtat I *think* is) my real voice. But it is hard to live with on a day-to-day basis. In fact, the other post that I recently wrote about our ePortfolio project feels like the flip side to this one — a measured and careful description of a (challenging and frustrating) project. I suppose it has it’s place, but reading them in concert, I feel as though they came from two different people.
I’ve just re-read the post. I stand by my 2011 comment. 🙂