“UC Online Courses Seen as Inevitable,” blurts the title of an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.  Flanked by Governor Jerry Brown and “three rising stars in the world of classroom-free courses” (more about that quartet later), UC President Mark Yudof predicted at yesterday’s Regents meeting that future UC students will take 10 to 15 percent of their courses online.  Calling the shift to online education “inevitable,” Yudof declared: “It’s no secret that UC has hit a wall with regard to traditional education.  The finances no longer exist to support the old model of instruction.  It’s not the time to be timid.”

And so it shall be remembered generations hence: Wednesday, January 16, 2013, will forever mark the passage from O.M. I. (old model of instruction) to N.M.I. (new model of instruction)!

This week, California has been trying really hard to launch the age of the N.M.I.  On Tuesday, Brown presided over a press conference to announce a deal between San Jose State University and Udacity, a for-profit MOOC mill.  (Also present at the announcement were Tim White, CSU’s new chancellor, and Sebastian Thrun, Udacity’s co-founder).  The week before, Governor Brown’s proposed 2013 budget included $125 million dollar increases each for the UC and CSU systems, along with an extra $10 million for each system to develop online courses.  And, around the same time, the UCLA campus hosted a conference, titled “Rebooting California Higher Education,” that featured among others: Daphne Koller, one of the founders Coursera (another for-profit MOOC mill), Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, and (yet again) Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun.

Obviously, it’s MOOC madness month in California.  But, I’ll save the discussion of MOOC’s themselves for a later date.

For now, I want to take a closer look at UC President Yudof’s declaration of inevitability.   The cluster of recent Brown-inspired and -sponsored higher ed events certainly feels like a SuperStorm T.I.N.A. (“There Is No Alternative” – - Maggie Thatcher’s famous rhetorical pandybat).  Indeed, a TechCrunch piece on the San Jose State-Udacity deal was modestly titled: “How California’s Online Education Pilot Will End College as We Know It.”  Faculty here in California – - and perhaps elsewhere – - are right to feel uneasy about this fatal attraction among State, Silicon Valley capital, and university administration.

For reassurance sake, let me introduce a couple of possibly helpful principles.

First, the inverse law of institutional dis/order.  In other words, the further you are from the experiential reality of institutions, the more order you perceive within institutions. The greater the distance, usually measured vertically, the more legible (and hence manipulable) institutions appear.  (I’m cribbing this principle, more or less, from anthropologist James Scott’s magisterial, Seeing Like a State.)

Let me illustrate this law by counter-example.  Living deep within institutions, nothing ever seems inevitable.  Sure, technology surrounds us.  New tools for collecting, ordering, and analyzing texts offer powerful new insights.  Social media can powerfully reshape teaching and learning.  But, have you ever tried to get a digital humanities course into a department’s major curriculum?  Technology may (or may not) be) inevitable but getting things done within institutions requires lots of labor, negotiation, tacit understanding, personal relations, timing, schmoozing, local knowledge, and patience.

Change can only appear inevitable to those who dwell far away from this complicated, dynamic, messy reality.  In fact, a recognition of this reality encourages a corollary to the inverse law of institutional dis/order: rather than elucidating the fate of institutions, declarations of inevitability more usually publicize a  disconnect from the inner life of those very institutions.

Second possibly helpful principle, the ironic law of technological revolution. (At the risk of immodesty, I’m cribbing this principle from my own blog!)  The gist of this principle is pretty simple: always suspect the opposite of rulers bearing revolution.  Our cultural myths surrounding technology associate it with change, disruption, and novelty.  Technology “disrupts” and, typically, disrupts utterly.  As cultural historians like David Nye and Vincent Mosco have suggested, our infatuation with the millenial powers of technology reconnects us, perhaps, with a deep, rich mythos of American exceptionalism, opportunity, and freedom.

In any case, technology’s cataclysmic powers, it’s ability for instance to separate the epoch of O.M.I. from N.M.I., are indeed mythic.  Technology may transmogrify business to the “speed of thought,” but it’s still business.  Technology disrupts in order to sustain continuity, especially the continuity of profit, power, and status.  In fact, as Harry Braverman argued long before the dawning of the era of N.M.I., capital depends on technology and technological innovation to sustain itself.  This ironic law, whereby institutions or systems are saved through destruction, prompts us to formulate a corollary hypothesis: those who most loudly trumpet the inevitability of change through technology are often those most committed to the status quo, when that status quo is defined in terms of power and hierarchy.

Thus, a further, more daring hypothesis: technological “revolutions” most often preserve power by increasing powerlessness.  (In relation to MOOC’s, this hypothesis has been explored from various angles, and more and less explicitly, by folks like Ian Bogost, Keith Hampson, and Cathy Davidson.)

A simple question offers a more concise way of illustrating this second principle: online education may herald a New Model of Instruction, but how come it hardly ever heralds a New Model of Administration, or a New Model of Governance?

Finally, the really important thing is this: inevitability is never a fact, it is always an argument.   The goals of this argument can be various, but they almost always cluster around issues of power.

And, the most important fact about online education and educational technology is simply this: thousands and tens of thousands of faculty are already, and have been for more than two decades, experimenting, testing, remaking, and variously tinkering with technology to reshape teaching and learning.  Faculty have been anything but timid in these efforts.  And, inevitably or not, this hot mess of creativity and innovation is where the future of education lies.

 

 

Since its inception, I’ve reserved this blog for “paranormal” phenomena in teaching, learning, and higher education.  Today, however, I’m going off-reservation.

By now, most of you have read Liza Long’s gut-wrenching essay about living with and loving her emotionally volatile, thirteen year-old son.  (You may have also read some of the “controversy” surrounding her widely-circulated blog post.) Long’s essay was inspired – - if that’s the right word – - by the obscene events at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Despite its title, the blog post is really a plea for help for parents with “mentally ill” children: “This problem is too big for me to handle on my own,” she writes of her son, who has been variously diagnosed with ADHD, autism spectrum, oppositional defiance or intermittent explosive disorder.

Without a doubt, parents like Liza Long need help, and kids like her son, Michael, need help.

However, as the father of a sixteen-year old son diagnosed with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), I have to tell you that Long’s essay delivers an outrageous disservice to kids like mine, to parents of non-neurotypical kids, to the enormous energy and labor of those in the ASD “community,” and ultimately even to the non-ASD, neurotypical world.

Here’s why.

First, some basics.  We don’t know that Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, was ever diagnosed with ASD (or the more particular variant of ASD called Asperger Syndrome).  We do know that the media has reported the rumor that Lanza had Asperger Syndrome.  We also know that the media has spent more time misinforming us about the events in Newtown than reporting actual facts.  In the absence of facts, Long’s blog post only helps to sensationalize, and so to mystify, the very meagre connections among ASD, mental illness, and violence.  The more than 2 million Americans directly affected by ASD deserve better than to be fed into the media’s relentless echo chamber.

Second, even if Lanza had been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, autism is not a mental illness.  I need to repeat that: autism is not a mental illness.  Autism, or the more recently-termed ASD, is a word used to describe ”a range of complex neurodevelopment disorders, characterized by social impairments, communication difficulties, and restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior.” In other words, ASD belongs to a broad family of disorders that includes: Alzheimer’s, carpal tunnel syndrome, dyslexia, Guilllain-Barre syndrome, and Parkinson’s.  ASD is not the same as or intrinsically-related to mental illnesses like depression, schizophrenia, PTSD, etc.

Why is this distinction important?  First, it matters to ASD’ers.  Imagine that you were affected by dyslexia but were viewed as mentally ill.  Imagine how that would change the way you were treated by friends, colleagues, medical professionals, and institutions.  Second, once you understand this difference, you might understand some ASD behaviors – - repetitive movements, social difficulties, conversational fixations, etc. – -  a little more clearly and humanely.  And, you might understand that, although their brains work differently than yours, kids and adults on the spectrum are no more prone to violence, crime, delusion, or sociopathy than you are.

From my non-clinically trained perspective, serial and spree murderers must suffer some horrible condition.  However, to use “mental illness,” as Long does in her piece, to connect ASD with homicidal violence is – - putting it as lightly and politely as I can – - abysmally stupid, irresponsible, and injurious.  In fact, if my son’s experience is at all typical, ASD kids and adults are much, much more likely to be the victims of violence – - in the schoolyard, on the street, and even in the home – - than the perpetrators of violence.

So, Long’s declaration of solidarity and identity (“I am Adam Lanza’s mother”) rests on a whole series of shady, wrong, insulting and  - – given the heated rhetoric developing around Sand Hook – - potentially very damaging illogical leaps and turns.

But, putting aside all of these problems, let’s take a look at the declaration of solidarity itself.

“I am sharing this story because,” Long writes, “I am Adam Lanza’s mother.  I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother.  I am James Holmes’ mother.  I am Jared Laughner’s mother.  I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother.”  Even as a symbolic statement, I have to say that this is just utter bullshit.  Why?  Because neither Liza Long, nor you, nor I can ever begin to imagine the guilt, shame, and remorse experienced by these parents in the aftermath of their respective tragedies.  Because this kind of conflation demeans and diminishes the pain each of these parents experienced, and continue to experience, in the wake of their childrens’ actions.  And, because the only solidarity this statement proposes is the empty but infinitely elastic status of victimage.  Pity me, the now famous “I am Adam Lanza’s mother” epithet declares, because my son done me wrong!

Here’s how I answer Liza Long’s cry for help: “I am not Adam Lanza’s mother (or father)! And . . .to hell with pity!”  I don’t need help because I’m the parent of a potential spree killer.  Parents of ASD kids and adults need help because their children must live in a world that constantly misunderstands them (often by equating ASD with mental illness) and consistently punishes them – - via peers, schools, bloggers, etc. – - for their differences.

In fact, I refuse to ask for help, divine or otherwise; my son and I refuse to be victims.  We simply demand the legal and human right to equality.  And, that “we” is important, because we (and not just the talking heads of the media-entertainment complex) are already talking.  More importantly, that “we” includes all of those autonomous communities of solidarity that are organizing, mobilizing, and struggling against pity and fear – - and for self-understanding and equality.   This is no small task, and it harbors its own, particular amalgam of disappointment, hope, anger, joy and all those other emotions familiar to every parent.

Let me ask you this: given the work ahead, who has time to pretend to be somebody else’s mother?

 

 

 

A couple of ongoing problems and fascinations – - discerning the post-fordist working-classes, reckoning with Occupy, the possibilities of digital syndicalism, the captivating power of the zombie – -  have led me over the past few months to an intensive wrestling match with Antonio Negri.  And, working back and forth from Multitude to The Labor of Dionysus to operaismo, has proven very useful.  Still, there comes a time when you grow tired of reading and scribbling in your chair at home or on the airplane or on BART or at the office.    There comes a time when you know that to really master a set of texts, ideas, ways of thinking, you have to start discussing, arguing, and listening with others.  And so, I’m now trying to organize an online seminar/reading group on Negri and Hardt’s latest installment of the Empire trilogy – - Commonwealth. (A reading group that will probably include Patrick Cuninghame, from UAM-Xochimilco, one of the most interesting autonomistas around.  If you care to join the seminar/reading group – - drop me an email.)

Setting up an online seminar that spans a continent has, however, proven a bit frustrating.  The internet connects, allows for new forms of mediated interaction, and preserves.  However, finding the right platform for an online seminar – - especially a platform that encourages both focus and fluidity – - is no easy thing.  Despite hacking together various draft mashups of WordPress, BuddyPress, and BBPress – - I still haven’t crafted the right kind of thing.

Why?  The difficulty is in part related to the mimetic fallacy.  We use terms like “discussion board” or “web forum” to describe various text-based, interactive sites.  But these are just metaphors.  ”Discussion boards” and “forums” aren’t really discussions or forums; they are allusive representations of the social, performative, oral experiences that we enjoy in non-internet life – - say in a classroom, around the water cooler, or with that annoying row of Detroit fans in the row behind us at the Oakland Coliseum.  The medium is the message, but while “discussion boards” belong to the medium of the internet, they fundamentally inhabit the medium of the written page.

For years, ironically, we’ve seen the difference between “electronic writing” and print as a source of problems.  To summarize: new media forms of writing reinstate orality over literacy; they replace the linearity of print documents with connectivity or parataxis;  the fixity of the printed page gives way to the fluidity of the web page; the “passivity” of print reading is replaced by the “interactivity” of electronic textuality; criteria of quality are replaced by measures of value.  In short, the web or new media opens up disruptive gaps between print and electronic textuality and within modes of reading.  In large part, these gaps have fueled both the battle cries of digital revolutionaries and the elegies of book-bound reactionaries.  Unfortunately for both camps, the written or printed page isn’t dead.  It’s just been re-mediated – -  reincarnated in new forms that modify but repeat basic features of the old.  Indeed, it’s not difference that’s the problem – - it’s similarity. History is a nightmare or daydream from which we can’t quite awake.

I’m pretty devoted to the book and printed document.  (Just ask my co-conspirator – - who renews her annual plea to cull the overstuffed bookshelves that seriously compromise our earthquake-preparedness plans.)  But, to get a sense of how the muddled mimesis between “discussion forum” and printed page does a disservice to both media, let’s take a look at a pretty typical web forum post.

A user of Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum – - probably the most popular online travel forum – - asks for feedback: as a South Asian-American traveling to Colombia, will he be discriminated against based on his skin color?  The entire thread includes about 40 posts.  Most of the first post-responders are reassuring about Colombia’s “rainbow” society and about Colombians’ friendliness.  Then, the twelfth post begins: “kindcup [the previous poster], Let me disagree with you (my humble brazilian opinion) when you say [there] ‘are people dark skinned like in Mexico.’”  Once this fork has been created, the thread begins digressing, regressing, and generally straying all over the place – - race in Guyana, skin colors in India, the existence of Myanmar.  Close to the end of the thread, one responder writes: “Wow.  What I CAN say is that you need to get out and travel more.  Or jeez, at least read a little.”

At one point, about a tenth of the way through the thread, a contributor writes reassuringly: “As another OP said, be confident. You’ll be fine.”  The invocation of the OP [original poster] is a subtle recognition that the thread is poised for forking.  Indeed, many long forum threads, after a period of forking, soon begin to make furious, insistent references to the OP, trying to bring the thread back to its beginning question or comment.  Thus our first “discussion forum” algorithm: OP = f (∆p).  That is, references to the original poster are a function of the number of posts; the longer the thread, the more references to the OP will begin to appear.

Forking and OP references occur, of course, because as threads grow longer, thread contributors begin to respond to more or less immediately preceding contributors.  They tend to get caught up in the onward flow of the posting.  In the case of our Colombia thread, the OP appears at the end of a post in which the contributor begins to digress into more commentary on how “[t]here will always be people who equate how you look with who you are.”  Recognizing, perhaps, the digressive, generalizing pull of his/her own comment, the poster tries to check his/her meandering by citing the OP.

Obviously, a thread in an open forum is always open to forking and hijacking.  However, this is not usually intentional.  In fact,  the OP effect and forking are pressures inherent in the web page’s remediation of the print page.  Like the print page, the web page is organized vertically, and this organization imposes a temporal logic onto the space of the “page.”  The use of the metaphor, “scrolling,” underscores this subordination of space to time.  As with the print page, this temporal succession organizes reading time into an irreversible, linear narrative.  Our eyes start at the top and work their way to the bottom.  We can scroll backwards or forwards, but these terms only signify within a fixed chronological succession.

Of course, all web “pages” are organized temporally (and spatially) – - our attention is always also duration.  Another way of thinking about the distinction I’m getting at is this: the “space” of the web forum is subordinated to syntax rather than semantics.  A semantically organized page would emphasize relations of meaning rather than a priori structure.  One could argue that the source of so much creativity on the web has to do specifically with this supercession of syntax by semantics; mashups, remixes, maps, graphs, and trees all express the “collage” logic of the read/write web, a logic defined more by association, metaphor, and parataxis.  The creative power of the web as medium seems to lie in its affordances for defamiliarizing linear, syntagmatic forms.

Embracing this disruptive logic underscores just how much the mimeses between print and web page betray the experience of a real forum or discussion.  To borrow an analogy from Kenneth Burke, imagine that you attend a cocktail party.  (Do people still have cocktail parties?)  You and your fellow partiers start talking about Justin Bieber as an icon of cognitive capitalism.   (Yes, we are well into the cheaper rotgut at this point.)  But at this cocktail party, each participant is allowed to make only one comment in a pre-assigned order of speakers, like taking a number at the fish counter – - a cocktail party organized around the principles of the old “telephone” game.  Sure, lots of funny things start happening – - but we certainly wouldn’t remember the cocktail party as a sparkling gem of conversation, nor would we remember this cocktail party as marked by lively “discussion.”  Those qualities would be reserved for the kind of cocktail party where people jump in and out of the conversation, where themes are developed collaboratively, where we draw on the full range of our communication talents – - listening, timing, intonation, etc. – - to explore and enjoy a topic or absurdity.  In the authentic “discussion,” we blithely forget all about the OP exactly because we remember the conversation.  In other words, a semantically organized web page resembles a great cocktail party; a syntactically organized web page makes for a potentially novel, but much less scintillating booze-up.

Of course, in the end, I guess I’m really arguing for a better, more accurate mimesis between life and web, one where web “forums” and “discussion” boards more closely resemble the experience of lived communication and confabulation.  In terms of hacking the best platform for a seminar or reading group, a first step would thus have to break with the subordination of “page” space to time and so disrupt the similitudes between web and printed page.  Instead of “scrolling” through comments and so becoming syntactic subjects, each comment would become a semantic node and we would become polymorphously converse.  As in a great cocktail conversation, space would neutralize time – - or, alternatively, time would be spatialized.

[Update: Thanks to the help and wizadry of comrade Christian Wach - - we're experimenting with some of this disruption of linearity and the print page at the Multitude website, the magnificently mashed-up Comment/Buddy/Wordplatform for the transcontinental Negri reading group.]