cac.ophony.org

The tag cloud above was generated by participants at CUNY WordCampEd, which took place last week at the Macaulay Honors College (click to enlarge).  Mikhail and I co-organized the event with Joe Ugoretz of Macaulay and Matt Gold of New York City Tech, and we were astounded that we had to close registration a week ahead of time.  When we started planning, we thought we might get 50 registrants, bringing together the folks like ourselves who’ve experimented with WordPress throughout CUNY and who believe deeply in the core components of our mission on Blogs@Baruch.  Instead, we had well over 100 folks who wanted to come, and though we had an overflow room with audio/video connections to accommodate the hordes during morning and afternoon keynote sessions, we still had to turn some away.

The desire to take part in this event — and, even more, the energy palpable at Macaulay throughout the day — are testament that something is happening at CUNY.  This feeling was present in December at the CUNY I(nformation) T(echnology) Conference, which paid more attention to instructional technology than it ever has before.  I think some of the same spirit and energy infused the 9th Annual Symposium, which for the first time, in my opinion, captured the richness and opportunity embedded in our shifting modes of communication.  At all three events, the Twitter backchannel produced what Boone Gorges has called a “catalytic effect” on the proceedings: collective reflection on the presentations by those on Twitter filtered back into the participation of the audience, which found its way back into the tweets, and so on.  I felt very little passivity at these meetings. (Here you can see Tweets for the Symposium and CUNY WordCampEd).

But Twitter only deserves a splash of credit for the sea of enthusiasm present at Macaulay last Friday.  CUNY’s BlackBoard disaster this semester (which you can read about in this piece from The Clarion) no doubt shifted some energy our way as committed teachers and administrators look for alternative edtech solutions.

We welcomed that sort of attention.

In the morning presentations, Jane Wells, from Automattic, pitched WordPress (a bit tongue-in-cheekly) as a “BlackBoard Killer” and emphasized the openness of the WordPress community to input from its users.  Her presentation captured all that we like about experimenting with WordPress: embrace of perpetual beta, humility, the celebration of collectivist approaches to problem solving, and the constant striving to improve. Dave Lester, from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, presented ScholarPress, a suite of WordPress plugins that map course management functionality onto WordPress blogs (doing what BlackBoard does, but much more elegantly and affordably), and also talked about integrating Zotero’s research tools into WordPress.  Baruch’s own Zoe Sheehan Zaldana then wowed the audience with her wonderfully imaginative use of WordPress in photography and digital animation courses, embraced the potential of “shame” on the open web as a pedagogical tool, and emphasized the useful energy created when students participate in a unique space whose aesthetic reflects the work of their course.

Our good friend Jim Groom returned to CUNY like a prodigal son to give the afternoon keynote (“Open By Design”), and spoke eloquently and powerfully about how the role of the instructional technologist should be refined in today’s university, the centrality of “openness” to the mission of CUNY and how that should be reflected in our approach to supporting teaching with technology, and the opportunities self-publishing offer universities to train their students for the future.  He also threw a few good shots at BlackBoard, and raised the very important and underexamined question of why CUNY pours millions– that’s right, millions– of dollars into this clunker of a software instead of investing in the people who build the relationships and the models that inject such powerful energy into events like the IT Conference, the Symposium, and CUNY WordCampEd.  Thanks to Dave Lester, Jim’s talk is archived here.

This was a generative event, and it represented the congealing of a community around the shared idea that our institutions’ weight should be behind a scaling approach to support for educational technology that necessarily goes well beyond BlackBoard.  That box is simply not enough.  Rather than helping us explore knowledge and identity, nurture community, and pass on to our students critical approaches to engaging with information  — core components of a liberal arts education –  BlackBoard argues that education is a marketplace.  Here’s my money.  Give me my single sign on and my learning.

Clearly, the participants at CUNY WordCampEd have had just about enough of this, and are looking to Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaualay, the CUNY Academic Commons, and each other for alternatives. With that in mind, I’d suggest that the next stage of edtech at CUNY hold the following core principles.

Instructional Technology is not Information Technology
For too long, instructional technology has been enveloped within the broader notion of information technology.  We need to drive a permanent wedge between those two areas of university life in the understandings of our communities.  Information technology makes our phones and networks and computers and smart boards work, and collects and protects student, staff, and faculty data so that we can get credits and get paid. This is crucial stuff.  But it’s not about teaching and learning.

Instructional technology is about pedagogy, about building community, about collaboration and helping each other imagine and realize teaching and learning goals with the assistance of technology.

There must be a close working relationship between CUNY’s information technology shops and instructional technologists, and they must respect each others’ concerns and interests.  But they must be separate.  When information technologists choose instructional technology solutions, you may get something like BlackBoard, and a community that feels as though the only relationship to technology should be a client-service one.   When instructional technologists administer servers, you may get something like less-than-ideal load times, plugins that expose vulnerabilities, and a system that bursts at the seams when you scale.

We need to acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses, to work with and learn from one another, and also to complicate our community’s understanding of technology.  Some components — like phones and networks — should be, above all, reliable.  Some others — like blended courses, or the integration of made multimedia into a course — require more thought, investment, and understanding from students and faculty.  Making clear the separation between information and instructional technology can help nurture this understanding.

But we must remember… the central mission of a university revolves around teaching, learning, and scholarship.

The Community is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
The most exciting component of CUNY WordCamp Ed was the connection and sharing that took place at the event, a feeling that’s also present on the Academic Commons.  There was the implicit recognition that we have much to learn from each other, that there are many interesting projects popping up around CUNY, and that we can only benefit from making public and sharing our work.  The Commons can provide a canvas for this, but it will not run on its own… it requires, above all, a commitment to sharing, to both taking and giving.  We also should harness and seek to reproduce the generative energy of events such as WordCamp Ed, not only with end-of-the-year conferences and symposia, but with meet ups and sharecases throughout the academic year that disperse that energy.

EdTech Solutions Should Grow from the Bottom Up and then Transplant
Experimentation with WordPress at CUNY has been a bottom-up process, which serves as a counterpoint to the imposition of BlackBoard, a top-down solution.  Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaulay, and the Commons each began small and grew as they integrated more users and diversified their functionality in response to the needs of the communities they serve.  As such, they each reflect those communities in certain visible ways.  Blogs@Baruch provides public space for Baruch’s strong journalism, writing, and arts programs, and is making inroads into the Zicklin School of Business and the Freshman Seminar; ePortfolios foreground the unique experiences of the Macaulay student; and the Commons is a vibrant and evolving location for all of CUNY to meet and organize.

A new edtech model for CUNY should acknowledge this progression from the bottom up, and imagine ways to project it outwards throughout the university.  One of the arguments for centralizing administration of BlackBoard was that the community colleges had fewer resources than senior colleges, and centralization of course management software was assumed to make resources more equitably distributed.  Of course, now every school has an equally bad solution.  But the notion that those of us with resources should share the wealth with the colleges who have less is an important one.  I can see a model where senior colleges host WPMu installations for community colleges (using domain mapping), and share support– though, the community colleges– many of which have as many instructional technologists as does Baruch– must pony up support and resources when they can.

Grow from the bottom up and then transplant.

End Users Need to Take Ownership of Online Teaching and Learning Tools
Let’s not be shy about reminding our users of their responsibilities, and our users shouldn’t be shy about asking for help, clarification, or if something is possible.  WPMu and other open source solutions not only benefit from a “do it yourself“ ethos, they require such an approach.  They can’t function and grow without the investment of the community.

A course management system — BlackBoard (at a fraction of the current price), or, preferably, Moodle — could be one component of a tiered support sytem for instructional technology.  Users should have access to an easy way to post documents, access class rosters, and keep a gradebook.  But this is not teaching and learning.  A second tier could exist via distribtued canvases like WPMu or Mediawiki or cloud applications like Flickr and YouTube, where faculty and students can maintain their own spaces and depend on asynchronous support– with a solid server and documentation, such a process can run itself.  A third tier would offer customized solutions for more advances users– Zoe’s rotating flash headers on Blogs@Baruch, or customized spaces to show off class projects or for special departments or programs.  A fourth tier would be a research tier, and entail the imagination and realization of native solutions (such as the Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool) or the exploration of the next wave of innovations (semantic web comes to mind).  You could cover all of the edtech needs of your community with such an approach; all that’s needed, as Jim said, are the instructional technologists and community understanding to shape it and make it operate.

Integrate Digital and Media Literacy into General Education
Universities are constantly updating their general education programs. If they’re not, they should be.  Far too few clear out space for coursework that focuses on exploring how the ways that information is produced and consumed are changing in the digital age.  Such work is often outsourced to librarians, who are generally on the leading edge of a campus’s understanding of these trends, and do yeoman’s (and, often under appreciated) work.  Or students get trickling components of digital literacy spread haphazardly through their work in the disciplines.

Why not, at a place like CUNY, have 1st year seminars devoted to nurturing critical research skills, understanding online information and identity, learning to look and listen, and mastering how to negotiate the digital life of the campus and the city?  Set students up with eportfolios, and teach them how to cultivate their spaces.  Introduce them to scholarly uses of tools with which they are already familiar, but which they perhaps haven’t learned to use critically or with rigor.  Make them write; help them connect, share, and explore the visual, the textual, and the aural experience of the web.  This is something that will be useful to them throughout college and beyond.

As Jim has eloquently argued, CUNY is so well-positioned to harness the energy of the participants in CUNY WordCamp Ed, and to put it to good use.  Let’s keep working.

(IMAGE CREDITS: Thanks to Joe Ugoretz for conceiving, compiling, and sharing the CUNY WordCampEd Tag Cloud.  The other images are from Flickr, in order of appearance: Pip, D’arcy Norman, Ohad, and the Seattle Municipal Archives).

Here’s Jeff Jarvis’s keynote address and Q&A session at the Schwartz Institute’s 9th Annual Symposium. He explains the argument that lay behind What Would Google Do?, explores the changing role of audience in the Web 2.0 world, and suggests some core components of establishing one’s professional presence on the web.

Keynote

Q&A

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

In another of our series of videos from the 9th Annual Symposium, David Birdsell, Dean of Baruch’s School of Public Affairs, offers an incisive and cascading summation of the day’s conversation about “audience.”

In this final segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at the “Mother of the All Funk Chords,” a Youtube mashup by the Israeli musician Kutiman, they discuss the implications of the notion that “you choose a channel; your audience will choose the channels after that.”

This video is 12 minutes long.

In this third segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at an advertisement from Kaplan University (featuring Uncle Phil) and explore the nature of authenticity and credibility in a Web 2.0 world, the implications of tools that empower the audience on “for-profit” higher education, and the challenges producers of information have in maintaining control over their intended messages once they get out.

This video is 10 minutes long.

In this second segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants explore the concept of speaker and audience in the Emily Dickinson poem “This is My Letter to the World,” unpack the meditation on connectedness in the segment “Truck Stop” from the film 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (the Youtube version of this film is embedded below workshop video for more easy viewing), and discuss some core defining principles of the Web 2.0 world.

In response to a question about how these tools have altered or challenged our sense of time, Gardner offers this wise nugget, which just about sums up his approach to thinking about all of this stuff:

Thinking at that meta level as much as we can without driving ourselves bananas is the only kind of thinking that persists through whatever the next tool is going to be.

This clip is about 25 minutes.

“Truck Stop,” from 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.

This is the first in a series of posts presenting video from our 9th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction.

We’re going to start off with four videos (we’ll publish them over the next four days) from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World.”

What I love about this particular workshop is the generous balance in Gardner’s approach to Web 2.0: he talks with equal interest about the inanity present in much online conversation and the new implications for connectedness offered by the Web 2.0 world. Unlike many thinkers who’ve chimed in on communication in a Web 2.0 world, he sees it as neither a panacea or a harbinger of doom. His interest is in exploring the broad, rich ideas generated by these new methods of communication, and in generating more questions than answers.

We were so fortunate to have Gardner play such a significant role in our Symposium for the second straight year. His enthusiasm was infectious, and his social note taking was prodigious.

In this first segment, Gardner and the attendees of his workshop explore Twistori and Twittervision, two Twitter apps that offer provocative examples of how “connectedness” is changing in the Web 2.0 world. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to catch the beginning of this workshop; we pick things up a few minutes in, and this first video is a shade under 20 minutes long.

Not sure if it was @Oprah joining, #amazonfail, #pman (Moldova), or the tipping point on a meme, but the world is atwitter about Twitter.

I thought I’d share a few thoughts about how I use and perceive the service, which I joined about a year ago.

I’m not a Twitter evangelist; I don’t think it’s for everyone. If you’re using it and you don’t know why, maybe you shouldn’t be using it?

Twitter is not a platform, it’s an application that allows you to construct and dip in and out of conversations. You should @ often.

Anyone analyzing tweets only as stand alone statements will see self-absorption and “innate incoherence.” They miss the point.

Yet it’s easy to be misled by how Twitter works, because most answers to the question “What are you doing?” aren’t interesting.

But that’s not how the people I follow or I use it. Most of the people I follow instead answer the question “what are you thinking?”

If you follow interesting people who think interesting things, then it follows to think that their tweets might be interesting.

Over time your mind’s eye will learn to identify tweeters who have something relevant to say and to find yet others. Read critically.

The people I follow on Twitter aren’t necessarily my “friends.” Some people are comfortable with 100% virtual friendships. I’m not.

(I’m not raining on online friendships, I’m just saying they’re not for me).

The people who aren’t my friends whom I follow on Twitter I consider “acquaintances.” I think that’s a fairer name for what we share.

I’m willing to bore friends, but I try not to bore acquaintances, because some day, I might want them to be my friends.

I don’t — or try not to — complain about traffic or the academic #jobmarket, because, really, who’s interested in my bitching?

I bitch about traffic and the #jobmarket to my friends, and rarely think twice about confronting them when we’re hanging out.

I always think twice about confronting someone on Twitter. It’s not polite to disagree with acquaintances, though sometimes it must be done.

Mostly, though, I avoid confronting others because arguments in Twitter are unsatisfying. Neither party gets sufficiently into it.

So when I disagree with a tweet, I resolve the disagreement by reading and thinking more, writing a blog post, or talking with friends.

As a result, my tweetline offers a path into my life, reading, and thinking that’s perhaps a tad more upbeat than the real thing.

Ultimately, Twitter works for me because through it I am exposed to people that push and prod me to think and read more deeply and broadly.

I follow links from educators & historians & journalists & technologists whose judgments I respect. I learn. Hopefully, I also contribute.

“Blog to reflect, tweet to connect.” @bgblogging Claim anything more for Twitter, you’re either selling something or setting up a straw man.

As such, Twitter is not for people who have uttered the following statements:

“Twitter won’t work because it’s not profitable.” “Twitter can’t save journalism.” “Twitter encourages our worst impulses.”

Those statements are usually uttered by people with closed worldviews, with minds already made up.

Twitter, like everything else, is purposeful only if you use it with a purpose.

We had a bit of an incident last week with a course that’s using Blogs@Baruch. In this course, every student was to keep a blog, which was then republished in an aggregator blog so that every participant in the class could easily access and comment upon everything published by the other participants.

Last week the class abandoned its use of Blogs@Baruch to instead use a group on Facebook called “Baruch Blogs Down!”

photo credit: Squid P. Quo

The name of the group is a reference to server problems we had at the beginning of the term, which were resolved almost two months ago; we’ve been up without interruption for almost 60 days. In fact, members of the class were posting to their blogs without problem for a good six weeks before they switched to Facebook.

The faculty member apologized when it was pointed out to him that the name of the Facebook group was insulting and mocked the work that had gone into building our system and supporting his course, last semester and this. He noted that the switch wasn’t planned, that his students suggested the move and the group name, and that they were more comfortable using Facebook to exchange thoughts about course material. So he went with it.

I have problems with this on a few levels, even beyond the insulting group name. First, the only argument to go to Facebook — which I accept is completely the faculty member’s prerogative — seems to be that the students “felt more comfortable” with the application than they did Blogs@Baruch. Comfort with a medium has pedagogical value, for sure; but you’d like to think that more than students’ comfort would determine the choosing of a technological solution.  I’m not sure that it did.

Second, there’s the implications of using Facebook in an instructional setting given the recent conflicts over their Terms of Service and assertions of ownership over user content. I don’t think the class discussed what was to be gained and lost from switching platforms; the students just lobbied the professor to use something “easier,” not better.  These points are both problematic in no small part because this is an Internet Marketing class!

Finally, there’s the inaccurate implication embedded in the group’s name, which appeared in a public forum. I’ve thought a bit about this, since I, too, have been guilty of snarking a piece of software. Blogs@Baruch was down periodically early in the semester, and that had a negative impact on some courses’ use of the system. We DO deserve to get called out for failing to deliver what we promised to deliver.

Yet, there’s a difference between mocking us and mocking a behemoth corporation with a closed source product.   The difference embodies one of the core issues in instructional technology, which is often seen as a subset of information technology rather than as its own unique area of university life that requires the establishment of relationships and understanding across the disciplines.

If Blackboard goes down, users of the system are helpless, and can only wait for word that the system is back up.  They can call someone, but that person can only tell them that a ticket has been submitted.  Users of Blogs@Baruch have a name, and a number, and someone who can explain to them what the problem is and how it is being addressed. If something on the system isn’t working the way they want it to work, they can speak with someone about hacking it, adapting it, fixing it, strengthening it. Blackboard is a closed box without a face, whereas Blogs@Baruch is an open sandbox that gives back in proportion to what you put in. Blackboard is primarily an administrative system that allows the delivery of information. Blogs@Baruch is primarily a tool for the creative use of technology in instruction.

The faculty member (who has graciously apologized and changed the Facebook’s group’s name) should have realized this; he had benefited from our close support in the past and had been told to contact us if and as problems arose. He never did.  Instead, he treated Blogs@Baruch as information technology, as a data delivery service, and wasn’t really interested in bringing the system and its flexibility to his pedagogy. He and his students saw no difference between Blogs@Baruch and Blackboard or the escalators in the Vertical Campus.

So, I’ve learned a couple things from this episode. First: snark is fine, but if you’re gonna snark, do it in an informed way or in a hidden place, or you going to be called out.  Second: we need to do a better job of explaining to members of our community what Blogs@Baruch is and what it isn’t. If you can’t see any difference between what this system potentially provides and what Blackboard or Facebook provide, then those systems will probably work just fine for you.

At the Harman Writer-in-Residence lecture at Baruch College on March 24, George Packer, who became well known through his reporting for the New Yorker on the invasion of Iraq, spoke of turning his focus to this country. We’re living through a period of remarkable change, he said — political change, economic change, cultural change — and he doesn’t want to miss the story.

Everywhere I look, and, it seems, in everything I read, folks are trying to understand, articulate, or make their mark upon these changes. The “change” we’re living through is much deeper than the promises put forth by Barack Obama in the construction of a positive message for his campaign. Packer spoke of a “tectonic shift” that’s impacting every area of American life.

Journalism is transforming before our eyes. Newspaper after newspaper is folding, altering its processes, or drastically reducing its staff and, as a result, the depth and quality of its coverage.  Newsrooms everywhere are being forced by executives and bean counters to do “more with less.”  Yet as David Simon and others have noted, the notion that you can possibly do “more with less” is, for want of a better term, bullshit.  You do “less with less.”

Unused newspaper racks clutter a storage yard in San Francisco, California. From Boston.com; image taken March 13, 2009. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

As stark and clear as that point may seem, some legitimately see opportunity in the restructuring of American newsrooms. “Crowd-sourcing” and “citizen journalism” seek to take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to tap into existing pools of knowledge to generate and disseminate information. Journalists — those still in the business — break into camps that are either horrified or energized by the prospect of outsourcing society’s news gathering responsibilities. The most serious of them struggle through the implications of such a direction, asking what will be lost, what will be gained, and what professionalization means in an era that empowers the voice of the amateur.

Clay Shirky recently published a much-discussed blog post about the state of newspapers, comparing our moment to the moment when the printing press was invented, and focusing on the chaotic nature of the transition from one world to another.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…

Shirky concludes that we don’t know, and won’t know for some time, what the future of journalism is going to look like.  The most important thing is that “we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’.”  Then, “the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’”  What we need is lots of spaghetti against the wall, for “any experiment designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.”  He acknowledges what’s lost by the death of newspapers, allows us space to mourn, but ultimately settles on the point that what matters most is journalism, not the form that it takes.  He also lays the lie to those who, in the name of entrepreneurship, self-servingly claim that they have a crystal ball rather than a handful of wet spaghetti.

Journalism is not the only realm in American life that’s standing upon shifting ground; higher education is also in the midst of a wrenching transition.  In The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Frank Donoghue argues that the humanities professor many readers of this blog aspire to become is going the way of the newspaper, swept into the dustbin of history by the market forces and corporatization that increasingly restrict the choices available to well-meaning university administrators. He argues that the humanities aren’t in crisis; this would imply some future return to normalcy. Rather, a liberal arts education as a requisite component in the formation of an informed citizen, and the celebration of the university as the location where that process takes place, with the professor as a central figure, is dead.  A liberal arts education will increasingly become a luxury rather than the norm, replaced by vocational training and the transfer of skills that have only direct and measurable correlations to bottom lines.

Stanley Fish posted a reaction to Donaghue’s book in January, highlighing the rising percentages of undergraduate courses taught by part-time labor and the ascendancy of the “for profit” university, where information delivery is all that matters.  An earlier blog post from Fish glibly dismissed the value of studying the humanities altogether.  Doing so is its own argument, he says, providing or needing no external justification.  If the study of the humanities instilled in one the desire to learn the great moral lessons of the ages, Fish lamely argues, “the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts… as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.”

Fish finishes his meditation on The Last Professor with the observation that, thank goodness, he was born at the right time.  “Just lucky, I guess.”  Fish’s landing ultimately on his own good fortune contains none of the perspective evident in Shirky’s post. The possibility never dawns upon him that he might actually be in a position, from his lofty perch nestled just off the front page of the New York Times website and his influential provenance at two universities, to highlight or even demand an alternative trajectory in higher education.  He doesn’t seem to want one or think one is necessary.  He accepts the notion that the humanities has little “value added,” and returns to his study, satisfied by his ability to find support for his arguments in the schmuck-like behavior of some of his colleagues.

Does the sea change pinpointed by Packer and Shirky have relevance to the university of the future?  If Donaghue and Fish are correct, that future has been written, and those of us who’ve chosen to make our life studying and helping others study the humanities are just plain out of luck.

There’s ample evidence however that something similar to the revolution in journalism is happening in academia, though perhaps not so publicly and at a pace that’s less compressed.  This week the University of Michigan Press announced that it was going digital, a move that has consequences for the intense and troubled world of academic publishing.  Also, Mark Bauerlein, whose work on “kids these days” I have significant problems with, wrote a provocative paper about the future of higher education in which he argues “the coverage project is complete,” and that graduate schools and P&T committees should be putting more of an emphasis on good teaching.  I disagree with the first argument (admittedly, his statement was about literature and not history, which is my field, and which hasn’t been “covered”); but I concur wholeheartedly with the second.  Donaghue argues something similar when he notes that the culture of the professoriate, to its own detriment, has integrated an emphasis on competitive achievement and productivity that internalizes the values of the very market forces external to the university that find no use for the liberal arts.  Ultimately, Fish’s “I got mine” conclusions are frustrating because this is a moment when humanists should be reasserting the value of their disciplines to the intellectual life of the nation and, like Bauerlein attempts, proposing directions for the university of the future.

Implicit in the distributed community of educational technologists that I’m a part of — some have called us “edupunks,” but I no longer think that term is big or sufficient enough — is the sense that we are all together involved in shaping the best model of the future university.  I’ve long felt that the most compelling aspect of the 1960s — for all the positive and negative legacies that decade has bequeathed us — was the broadly dispersed sense that the future was up for grabs, and that one’s actions could help shape that future.

Each of the above examples is student-centered, yet also allows space for the researcher to grapple with and reflect upon large questions. They benefit from supportive administrations that recognize the importance of giving scholars the opportunity to explore and develop new ways of thinking, learning, teaching, and connecting. They don’t necessarily attack the university of the past, but rather imagine a future where participants break out of restrictive silos of departmental politics and disciplines and the campus as we knew it to explore relationships with the world that are, at their core, humanistic.  These, it seems, must be core components of any vision of the future of the humanities.

Then again, maybe Fish and Donaghue are spot on, and those of us creating new courses, constructing new modes of learning in and across our disciplines, and digging through archives are punchlines in some cosmic joke.  I acknowledge that these examples offer no direct answer to Fish and Donaghue’s argument that the humanities won’t be valued and funded because they don’t contribute in obvious ways to the creation of wealth and, like it or leave it, our society prioritizes that question.  Yet the continued broad exploration of the humanities, like  journalism, is absolutely crucial if our society is going to strive towards a better version of itself.

Shirky’s articulation of our moment as a transitional and perhaps revolutionary one reminds us that the future is yet to be written. We all have a profound stake in working towards our vision.  We all need to pick up some wet spaghetti.