Technology is transforming our nation’s youth into zombies! Technology is preparing our students for their glorious Tron future! Inspired by Matt Richtel’s NY Times article last month, the blogosphere has been twitching back and forth between euphoric and dysphoric takes on teenagers’ tech-induced “attention” deficit disorder. Cathy Davidson over at HASTAC agrees: our kids’ brains are being rewired, but that’s great job training for the “digital future”! Over at The American Scholar, William Zinsser laments the crisis of civility fomented by distracting technology. And so it goes . . .
Yesterday, however, I read an AP article that seemed to me to reframe the whole debate. A big-time game publisher, Capcom, has added a warning screen to “Smurfs’ Village,” one of the most popular iPad game apps (more popular even than “Angry Birds”).
Evidently, kids who play the game can, with two simple taps of the touchscreen, buy virtual commodities – – like “wheelbarrows” and “wagons” – – for real world prices as high as $99.99. These built-in, real money purchases are fairly common in game apps. Capcom claims the big ticket items are intended for adult “power players” of Smurfs Village. (Is Babylon burning? Look no further than the image of adult “power players” cultivating their Smurf villages late into the night.)
Disagree or agree, almost all of the debate about Richtel’s argument has focused on the cognitive effects of mobile technology. (Richtel’s piece belongs to a more extensive Times’ series – – “Your Brain on Computers“.) But the Smurf City incident reveals a deeper and more dangerous dynamic behind today’s explosion of mobile technology: we’re being wired for profit.
For companies like Capcom or Twitter or Facebook, brains are just an inconvenient means to bucks.
Whatever sacred or profane effects technology might have on our neurons, corporate capitalism sees mobile devices as, first and foremost, super-sized profit centers. Capital has a hungry heart. Capital is restless, always looking for new sites of accumulation and surplus – – from New England’s pristine forested shores to the humble adjustable-rate-mortgaged abode to the iPhone’s tiny screen. Historically, technology has been a primary component of this search – – rails and roads opening up new markets, motors and computers intensifying production. And, over the past century, human consciousness itself has become the new factory, mine, and field of surplus value.
Maybe technology is driving kids to distraction. But, focusing the debate on our tender gray matter, and its sophisticated architecture, shifts attention away from the only question that matters to Capcom, Apple, Facebook, and all the rest: how is capital reshaping our consciousness to maximize profit? How is technology, in its dominant form, integrating our kids into whole new regimes of accumulation, consumption, and consciousness? Understanding your brain on computers demands a politics, not just a crash course in cognitive science.
Digital storytelling is by definition a mashup – -a bricolage of images, music, words, memes, and other cultural flotsam to tell a story. And, as I tried to point out in a previous post, digital storytelling can really change relationships between students and texts, learning and teaching, and even classroom and extra-mural student identities. But a big issue posed to teachers by digital storytelling is the question of evaluation.
Most digital storytelling is descriptive – – either documenting personal or (sometimes) public experience.
When I started out using digital storytelling in my lit. classes, my purpose was similar: document your experience of a poem. However, the more my classes explored multimedia textuality, the more I began to wonder if digital storytelling couldn’t also be used as an analytical medium. That is, could students explicitly “present” an interpretation of literary texts through multimedia textuality?
To attempt this, a few basic shifts were in order. I’d already tried “crowd-sourcing” rubrics for evaluating student-authored multimedia texts. In this semester’s version of digital storytelling, I created a rubric that tried to nudge students away from the illustrative or descriptive. While keeping them focused on crafting a good video, I emphasized the idea that the mashup was an interpretation, an interpretation that began with the way their voices interpreted the poem through oral performance. I especially tried to wave students away from simple res et verba efforts: e.g. a Phil Levine poem uses the word “fire,” hence insert a visual image of fire. I changed the name of the assignment, from “YouTubing Poetry” to “Digital Commentary,” to emphasize the shift from description to criticism.
Still, how was I to evaluate the critical and interpretive dimensions of the digital commentary? And, how could I demonstrate to the students that a mashup doesn’t just illustrate a poem but also, like good criticism, shifts the ways we understand that poem?
And so, in my Literature of Labor class, my students picked their favorite poems from Philip Levine’s fantastic 1991 collection, What Work Is. I set them loose with iMovie and some cheerleading. And, they produced some outstanding mashups.
To think about the critical purpose and effect of digital media, I tried an experiment a few days into our mashing-up of Levine. First, I chose a couple of the very first posted commentaries. One of these was a mashup of Levine’s poem, “Gin.” In class, I first read “Gin” and, after, asked the students to write down: the key words or images that struck them; and, second, to write a paragraph or two explaining the meaning of the poem — – e.g. their snap interpretation. Then, I showed them their comrade’s digital commentary/mashup version of the poem and repeated my instructions: what key words or images did they recall; write a paragraph or two explaining the meaning of the poem. Then, we had a discussion about the differences between these two paragraphs, e.g. how the digital commentary had altered their understanding of the poem.
Here’s the mashup we looked at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUjcQb1tTQo
Obviously, there’s a lot to talk about in this mashup, especially about how the students have interpreted some themes common to Levine’s collection – – nostalgia, working-class manhood, irony. But, I want to focus on how the students understood the changes that the digital commentary made to their interpretation of the poem.
First, very few students – – maybe 3 or 4 out of a class of 45 – – said that the mashup hadn’t changed anything.
Many of the students noted how the digital commentary underscored Levine’s sense of humor.
The use of masks in the video elicited a lot of commentary: one student explained how the masks hooked up with Levine’s play on the word “spirits”; another student noted how the use of the masks emphasized Levine’s idea of drinking as a way of “diluting or hiding from oneself”; a student described how the masks seemed to make the digital commentators into “outlaws” and how this worked with Levine’s irony about the ways rebellion, e.g. underage drinking, can be just another way of conforming.
Many students in the class reported that the digital commentary revealed a new, collective dimension to the poem and Levine’s collection. In other words, the digital commentary shifted the poem from a bittersweet paean to youthful innocence to an exploration of how adolescence is a “communal” experience. The way the three masked gin-swillers chorused key lines underscored the poem’s real focus; as one student wrote, “Gin” is “not about the gin itself, but the collective experience” of growing up, about how the experiences that shape our individual identities are really “transformations shared among friends.”
Finally, the student responses to the mashup cautioned me to retreat a bit from a simple juxtaposition of the critical and the illustrative. Quite a few students commented on the images of Eisenhower and Nixon spliced into the end of the mashup. The overall gist of this commentary was that the “future” so abstractly signified in cliches about “coming-of-age” actually had a much more particular and fatal reference for Levine’s generation: Vietnam. The invocation of that context – – via images of Eisenhower and Nixon – – cast the speaker’s experience into a much broader national and historical frame.
In comparing their “before and after digital commentary” understandings of the poem, students were evaluating the effectiveness of the digital commentary. This evaluation helped to clarify the purpose of their own digital commentaries – – to change the way viewers understood the poem. The process – – of before and after – – also helped me to clarify my expectations and to start forming a more concrete and helpful language for these expectations.
Ultimately, the digital commentary had multiple payoffs. Students engaged with Levine’s poems, they applied their creativity to a literary text, they shared their efforts, they felt “ownership” of What Work Is, etc. Something extra I learned: the digital commentaries don’t have to be viewed as final and complete “products,” ready to be evaluated and graded. Reintroducing the digital commentaries into the class – – as texts themselves – – also nurtured more and better critical discussion about Levine’s poetry, allowing us to explore motifs like the “mask” and make connections across the collection and across contexts. The digital commentaries didn’t close off reading and interpretation, they unleashed yet more, and more productive, reading and interpretation.
This semester, instead of submitting the usual, five-page final reflection essay I ask for at the end of the term, one of my students emailed me a link to a Prezi. This was very surprising, as I had used Prezi once in the class to accompany a discussion on Jacob Lawrence’s magnificent “Migration Series.” The act of creating and sharing a Prezi instead of producing the usual five-page essay implied a bunch of very provocative assumptions about me, about teachers and teaching, about learning, and about representation. The Prezi was great and more about this particular student’s audacity later . . .
Finding the link to a multimedia representation of student learning in my gmail got me thinking.
The standard medium for evaluating student learning in my discipline is the five-page essay – – usually assigned at the mid-term, at the end of the semester, and often at arbitrary points along the way. (It’s true – – sometimes lit. professors flay their students with midterm and final exams. And, often, I bump into students studying for “multiple choice” final exams in a literature class – – proving that teachers have been practicing “culturomics,” e.g. treating “culture as data,” long before Google scanned 500 billion words).
If you’ve got a college degree, you know the five-page essay: late nights fueled by coffee, tea, cigarettes, or other stimulants of choice; the frantic re-reading and re-annotating of poems or novels; the desperate search for an argument or topic; the adrenaline rush of writing-as-you-think; the existential crisis of the concluding paragraph; and, by dawn’s early light, the frenetic scramble to make the printer work.
The educational test here was not writing five pages of analytical prose; the real ordeal was writing five pages of coherent prose under extreme conditions of panic, sleep deprivation, and various forms of material scarcity (from running out of cigarettes at 3 a.m. to the empty printer cartridge at 6 a.m.). Still, unlike many rites of passage, the five-page ordeal was ultimately benign: after turning in your five stapled pages (if you had managed to rustle up a stapler on the way to class!), you could forget all about Keats’ “Ode to Autumn,” or Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or any other pearls on the syllabus. Game over, back to bed to catch up on your sleep!
Even though the five-page essay is the dominant genre for representing student learning, based on my experience (as a student, a recovering assigner of midterm essays, and a brutally scarred reader of these efforts), the five-page essay is a limited, flawed, and potentially deceptive medium to evaluate student learning. What the five-page essay actually evaluates is something altogether different: how well do students handle stress? In other words, when students write their five-page essays, what they are really representing is their ability to manage fairly complex tasks within extremely challenging environments. Sadly, this may in fact be excellent training for the flexible, precarious, and increasingly anxious workplace. Sadder still, it is certainly not an authentic representation of student learning.
I.e. the five-page essay may demonstrate a limited range of student skills and abilities, including the ability to generate grammatical sentences. However, in terms of evaluating student learning, the five-page essay most frequently mis-represents how well students understand, engage with, and relate to texts and ideas.
So why does this artificial exercise in mis-representation persist as our dominant genre of evaluation?
Probably because it reflects and shapes some very important important assumptions about teaching, learning, and the institutions designated for these activities.
First, in terms of academic labor, the five-page essay appears to be more efficient: in classes of 25 or more students, the five-page essay segregates and reduces evaluation work-time into discrete, repetitive routines. In the conventional arrangement, the five-page essay allows us to spend most of our time “teaching” – – that is, downloading our knowledge and wisdom to more or, more frequently, less receptive students. Corollary: the five-page essay can also help to maintain very traditional and hierarchal relations in the classroom – – teacher as reservoir and ultimate adjudicator of knowledge, student as receptacle and parodist of knowledge.
Second, the five-page essay is highly portable: representations of student learning can be simplified and formalized so that english, history, philosophy, and most other writing-based disciplines – – despite their wide variety in ways-of-making and representing knowledge – – can share the same medium of evaluation. Corollary: the commonality of the form generates a real but “bad faith” image of academic community. English, history, anthropology, business, etc. professors mistake a conversation about the conventions of a very particular genre, the five-page essay, for a conversation about student learning. Typically, students’ refusal or inability to master these conventions lubricates a sense of collegiality with perversely satisfying squirts of ressentiment.
Third, the five-page essay shrouds the “black box” of learning. “We” provide the inputs (readings, lectures, assignments), and “they” (students) produce the output (the five-page essay); whatever messy, complicated business happens in-between is no concern of ours and no part of our already over-taxed work lives. In other words, the five-page essay nurtures a particular “occupational psychosis” which, as Kenneth Burke described it, is a “way of seeing [that] is also a way of not seeing.” Making learning less visible makes teaching less complicated.
Finally, from a student perspective, the typical deployment of the five-page essay underwrites a bulimic model of schooling. Long periods of lecturing and some discussion are periodically interrupted by short, often existentially turbulent periods of disgorgement, expulsion, and regurgitation – – e.g. the creation of the five-page essay within a high-stress environment. For students, this isn’t always a bad thing. There’s pleasure in kicking back and letting the professor do his thing; and, sometimes, there’s a necessity – – as work, social life, political activism, recreation, and other demands take center stage. After the purge, things can get back to normal.
For these reasons and more, the five-page essay must die. The first step in that glorious regicide is to rethink the temporality of teaching and learning. More about these assassin’s techniques and the surprising Prezi in another post . . .
Whatever sacred or profane effects technology might have on our neurons, corporate capitalism sees mobile devices as, first and foremost, super-sized profit centers. Capital has a hungry heart. Capital is restless, always looking for new sites of accumulation and surplus – – from New England’s pristine forested shores to the humble adjustable-rate-mortgaged abode to the iPhone’s tiny screen. Historically, technology has been a primary component of this search – – rails and roads opening up new markets, motors and computers intensifying production. And, over the past century, human consciousness itself has become the new factory, mine, and field of surplus value.
