Do universities lead, or do they follow? Well, clearly, the answer is “both.” When it comes to weblogs, universities have been gradually climbing on the bandwagon over the past few years. By now, blogging is no longer “hot,” in the way that things “here to stay” cool down as they become ingrained into a society. Blogging has clearly made its biggest splash in the realm of journalism, mostly via partisan news blogs and the attempts of the more staid media institutions to acclimate themselves to the new ways that readers have learned to read and to look. Of course, there are important implications for the Fourth Estate (hands wrung about it here).
What’s yet to be determined, though, is the range of directions blogging will go (Vlogging is one definite; integration with social networking sites is another). As is normally the case, colleges and universities will lead– it’s up to them to really think about and experiment around this question, and we may be reaching a “tipping point” in that process. More and more universities are making blogging services available to their communities of faculty, staff, and students. These blogs are being used in a variety of ways, from the instructional to the communal to the entreprenuerial to the personal. This process has not yet been studied or reported upon in any great detail, as far as I know (well, there’s this). Universities will be doing that, too.
Locally, Baruch College will be rolling out its own blogging service using Movable Type this Fall, and the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute is currently supporting faculty who are interested in learning a little or a lot about the medium.
The promise of blogging for teaching is, of course, in the ease and variety of communication the medium allows. Given the scalability of weblogs and their speed of information exchange, their implications for teaching are profound. In an era where students seem to be doing less and less writing in their classes, course weblogs are a potential curative. They offer faculty a way to extend their classrooms and diversify their interactions with students. If used well, blogs can aid the transfer of textual, visual, and technological literacy, and also provide students with regular outlets for expression. Such tools, if used with discipline, can only bolster liberal education.
Weblogging in higher education has already been discussed on CAC.OPHONY in great detail, thanks to efforts of Kate, Deborah, Jill, and Mikhail. Let’s bring it back up to the top, and see what type of conversation we can generate. What, then, are productive weblog projects for courses, beyond what have already been discussed? What can universities do to get the most out of the weblogs they support? The Institute will be thinking about and reporting on these questions over the coming academic year. We’d be interested in hearing from any visitors who have strong thoughts, examples to share, or probing questions on the matter.
I am intrigued by:
‘Do universities lead, or do they follow? Well, clearly, the answer is “both.”’
In a very broad context this may be true. But what about the context in which the BLSCI operates?
In June of 2005 I posted a blog entry called The Gap Hypothesis.
The Gap Hypothesis emerges from a fair amount of experience in standing astride the gap between business and higher education, trying to help people ross from one side to the other. Some of my BLSCI colleagues will tell you I have argued that this gap needs to be understood in terms of cause, impact, and resolution. This understanding needs to be by both sides.
I have at other times posted to this blog with the intent of enticing those business people who are known “lurkers” to jump into these discussions. Diane EOC was brave enough to do that. Where are the others?
Business has a deep, deep interest in the product being turned out by higher education. The stand that they take must be more than standing on the edges of the educational process lamenting the outcome.
Higher education has a deep, deep interest in where its product goes. Higher education likewise needs to get out of its comfort zone.
I’m not as actively involved with the BLSCI and other Baruch organizations as I once was. Things may be developing nicely in resolving The Gap Hypothesis. If so, terrific. Advertise the fact. If not, then I’ll likely again rant.
Hey Luke,
Blogs, as you astutely note, are one way to keep a class discussion going beyond the confines of the classroom. When I think of a wordpress blog installation for example (and I think of such a thing often), I am struck by its ability to engage the web in a dialogic style that invites exploration, inquiry, and critique.
What has been even more illuminating for me when it comes to a blog, is this technology’s ability to quickly morph into much, much more. The term blog carries a lot of baggage that, at times, obfuscates the power of such a tool, namely that blogs are, above all, a powerful web-publishing engine that quickly and easily opens up the virtual space of conversation amongst all kinds of intellects. Such a tool by no means replaces the importance of serious and responsible scholarship, but it certainly offers an interesting space to re-imagine the logic of peer review..
Scholars online will most likely gravitate towards intellectual communities that cultivate and foster particular schools of thought. Technological tools will never replace a rigorous examination of how ideas establish their value to assert particular meanings, yet a tool like the blog and the wiki will provide a space not only to voice the conversation but simultaneously shaping the conversation. Like the printing press, the movie camera, or the television, the blog popularizes the space of discourse to a point where the distance and interaction between the expert and amateur is potentially erased. Now how we value the adjective “popularizes” is a larger conversation, but the ideas of experts, while not inappropriate, might be giving way to a more amorphous construction of knowledge that both incorporates and transcends the objectified mind of the expert.
Such a design is potentially problematic and some folks, like Larry Sanger think the answer may be to return knowledge to the experts. Sanger may very well have a point, but it seems to me that the collaboration of brains from around the globe with the immediacy of a conversation suggests a Bahktinian dialogic. Such a heterogeneous space for discourse may force us to pause over the idea of the individual expert, not to eliminate him/her, but perhaps re-contextualize their understanding within a larger spectrum of competing ideas that are all, in some way, struggling for authority.
Hey Jim… good to see you here. Because it’s worth as many plugs as it gets, I’ll post a link to your winning instructional technology site. Jimmy’s still blazing trails with this stuff, and we’re just trying to keep up.
I’d like to ask explicitly how your statement about blogs and authority applies to teaching at the college level, particularly because we who are in the business of instructional design inevitably have to address the concerns of faculty who may be attracted to new teaching tools, but who are uneasy with the prospect of meeting their students on foreign terrain. The reason, usually unstated, is that they feel their authority will be diminished by the medium, which removes their phsycial presence, and democratically gives students as much potential to hold court as the professor has. Not to mention most students these days click in their sleep, while most faculty members call their children often for free tech support.
How then do we entice talented teachers with Luddite proclivities, or even just reticence to teaching through new mediums, to take advantage of the possibilitis offered by a blog? We must get them comfortable by helping them master the administrative elements of a blog, and show them the ease and flexibility with which they can transfer information to their students. We also must make clear to them methods for retaining their authority–which is an important element in the college classroom. For all the talk of the democratic impact of a blog, one CAN be as autocratic as the stuffy, wood-paneled lecture halls of yore. Controlling user levels, prompting, requiring, and monitoring discussions, and (as Andrew Tomasello is showing this semester in his BLSCI-supported blog– contact me to arrange a temporary password) dropping insane amounts of knowledge in the class’s virtual space all can help faculty hold on to the authority they often feel they need to do their job effectively.
So, I think blogging in higher education raises issues similar to the what we see in other fields vis a vis authority, but also has its own particular paths of exploration. The openness and potential for students to write more frequently and linkedly holds tremendous promise; but that doesn’t mean that faculty can’t be in charge and shouldn’t own the space.
In an attempt not to speak too generally on what are certainly important and necessarily complex issues such as authority, expertise, and knowledge, I’ll try and be a bit more specific. When working with faculty the biggest issue I come across is exactly what you suggested, a comfort zone with the actual tools. I have been pushing WordPress so hard as of later because I can easily make the argument that if you are familiar with a CMS like BlackBoard, WordPress is a quick study that gives you the possibility of flexibility (particularly with multimedia) and an open space for discussion that moves outside of any one intellectual community. This last point is often a slippery one, but my logic is, and I hope will remain, that tools like wikis, blogs, podcasting, etc. are designed as both an interactive space to allow a discussion to cultivate both inside and outside the classroom as well as an experiment with the boundaries of how we understand a classroom. If we are going to close down a class site, which I have done begrudgingly on several occasions, the differences between WordPress, MediaWiki, and BlackBoard become less significant.
The openness of these Web 2.0 tools is what defines their importance above and beyond any fetishized feature they have. Their potential as a way for universities to actively document the process of teaching and learning and share it between institutions, departments, classrooms and individuals is the real payoff -not to mention archiving this work for the future. The collective approach to education is what excites me when I enter a faculty member’s office, and I know that some don’t share my enthusiasm. This by no means concerns me, for they often have good reasons for foregoing such tools and usually makes for an interesting discussion about pedagogy more specifically.
Making the obstacle of usability and comfort a non-existent issue for faculty whom are intrigued by the potential, yet uncertain about the time and energy commitment, is the real challenge. Tools like WordPress, to use one example, have allowed me to minimize the onus of technology in order to concentrate on how these web-based applications might make a difference in their course. The fact being that they in many ways control the conversation online as much as they do in the classroom through the design, planning and expectation they bring to this element of the class. The anarchy of technology is by and large a myth in this context, the possibility of extending a discussion, showcasing exciting projects (like the quilt project you worked on, for example), or organizing a class portal that engages and aggregates online resources for a particular discipline of study is the real meat and potatoes of recent developments in technology “enhanced” classrooms.
And while at times it may appear as if I am arguing that technology is an unbiased medium through which knowledge can be augmented and diversified, etc. I am keenly aware that these technologies employ particular ways of reading, seeing, and experiencing, making what we do and how we manipulate it that much more important to the mission of higher education. Academics who engage this technology are beholden to also demand it work in particular ways for particular reasons. Such an investment in the argument this technology is presenting through its interface and interaction helps shape the medium -making the conceptualization and implementation of technology design for a particular course or even an entire university community a project that requires both a solid grounding in the world of scholarship and pedagogy.
Making faculty not only “users,” but in some real way practicing visionaries for how this technology can be best utilized within an academic setting. Their investment must go well beyond the somewhat empty argument of technological “luddite vs. digital native” to conceptualize how these virtual “structures of feeling” can be effectively integrated into realm of teaching, learning and research. When a faculty member decides to integrate technology into their classroom, demanding that the medium be shaped and harnessed to meet their pedagogical goals is their charge whether this is communicated explicitly or not.