Further proof as this election season revs up that there’s more than the future of humanity at stake this November.
Writing teachers everywhere: this is not change you can believe in.
(kudos to TPM)
Archive for the 'Politics' Category
My feeling is that this would make a fine satirical cartoon inside the New Yorker. But to give it the cover? Not so sure about that.
Understandably, the Obamas ain’t pleased, finding it tasteless and degrading. The fear is that this image, widely distributed, may give credence to the misinformation going around about the couple. As someone put it to me, “this plays into the suspicions of the morons who ‘don’t do nuance.’” To which I replied: “Since when has the New Yorker cared about those folks?”
People will be talking about this cover, and though it may not reach the level attained by Saul Steinberg’s “New Yorker’s View of the World” or Maira Kalman’s “New Yorkistan,” it will be getting the magazine some attention. So, perhaps as far as the magazine is concerned, it’s effective communication… but it’s also requiring the reader/listener to bring a lot of context to the table.
* Late update: in the interest of “Equal Time,” Edge of the American West offers this:
A while ago, I made my first trip to Comerica Park, the stadium where my beloved Detroit Tigers play their home games. I say “play their home games” because to me, Tiger Stadium will always be their true home, even if in the future it’s left only partially standing. I grew up about an hour from the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and my trips to that grimy cathedral were always something special. The place was beautifully disgusting, crusted with the cheers (and spit) of generations of faithful. Above all, it had character so palpable that it didn’t matter if half your view of the field was obstructed.
Tiger Stadium 
photo credit: hassgocubs
I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.
So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.
Comerica Park photo credit: kw111786
As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.
Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.
Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.
The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.
Comerica Park Scoreboard photo credit: McPhloyd
One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.
At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.
Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.
At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.
The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.
Cacophony’s good friend Jim Groom (right) has recently coined a term that has the edublogosphere all atwitter: edupunk. It probably runs counter to the meaning behind the word to note, impressed, that The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog, “Wired Campus,” picked up Jim’s phrase. Punks probably don’t care much what the Chronicle’s got to say.
Edupunk (here are musings and run downs by Mike Caulfield, Stephen Downes, and D’Arcy Norman) is a new name for ideas that have been bouncing around the progressive edublogosphere for some time, namely, that higher education humanity needs an alternative to proprietary course management systems and the philosophy of teaching and learning that they implicitly promote. At the core of edupunk are older pedagogical stances unrelated to technology: an ethic of self-reliance, the valuation of student-centered experiential learning, and the rejection of the “banking concept of education.” Edupunk seeks to update and adapt these ideas within the rapidly evolving realm of edutech.
I’m coming a little late to this particular conversation (last week I was DIYing the walls of my house with a wallpaper steamer and buckets of paint– domesticpunk), and hope I can add something to the celebration/elaboration. Seems to me that “edupunk” is a useful term, though, like all metaphors, it breaks down in the end. It has successfully congealed and branded the thinking that’s at the core of the unease many of us working in this field have with the way things are done at most schools. It’s good that it’s been picked up by the Chronicle, and it’s fantastic that more people are finding their way to Jim’s blog these days.
I fear, however, that the attention to the phrase may distract from the work that produced it. For instance, I’ve been been trying to square the circle of my dislike for punk music and culture with my love and appreciation for the work of the cats who’ve rallied to this term. I see a rejectionist ethos and cliquish sense of superiority behind much punk music and culture, and I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the edutech movement that I feel a part of. I’ve always been more of a funk and soul man myself, and think that the affirmation native to those genres, the love and depth of feeling at their center, are much more pleasant (and just as useful) rhetorical and political stances. A brilliant administrator I once worked with, wise enough to know what she didn’t know and to defer to folks like Jim and Zach Davis on all things digital, once said, “we want to use technology to seduce students to our pedagogical goals.” That seems more Barry White than Johnny Rotten.
In that spirit, I present: edufunk.
photo(shop) credit: skywaltzer
Or, how about yet another metaphor: edujazz.I sense in the discourse around edupunk an appreciation for messiness, even a distaste for form. I’m not sure this lends itself to the best teaching. The pedagogy that I’ve been exposed to and have practiced as a teacher of history is much more like jazz… lay down a structure, and leave plenty of space for improvisation. This allows a variety of types of learning to happen in a classroom, acknowledges that both facts and the skills to interpret them are important areas to work on, and encourages our students to explore from within material that we’ve laid out with a set of goals in mind. I’m all for the “guide-by-the-side” approach to teaching… but the work that went into the Ph.D. I’m about to earn does qualify me, I think, to do a bit more than that at times.
This metaphor is translatable to how we, as instructional technologists, nurture critical approaches to online learning, particularly in how we can “seduce” talented teachers to experiment with new forms. Our Institute is incredibly lucky to have the autonomy to deploy and develop whatever software we deem pedagogically appropriate, so to a certain extent we are isolated from Blackboard. Baruch’s IT shop also recognizes that an institution of higher learning should offer a range of solutions to its community, even if those solutions compete with one another. BCTC blesses and supports our experimentation.
Yet Blackboard still runs wild at this university, and we are constantly engaging with faculty members and administrators who refuse to see the differences between the solutions we promote and what BB offers. BB’s appeal is in its antiseptic pre-fabrication, in the very fact that it doesn’t force faculty to take the extra steps to really consider how Web 2.0 and distributed learning open up new pedagogical possibilities. As a result, many faculty graft onto it existing modes of learning, fearful of allowing technology to “get in the way.” They get on Blackboard, get off, and move on.
Some faculty members do use Blackboard quite successfully, particularly for collaborative projects. Good teaching is good teaching, no matter where it happens or how it happens. Our job as instructional technologists, I think, is to explore the new possibilities and modes of learning that Blackboard happens to work against. If that software gives faculty members what they need to accomplish what they want, then so be it. But if faculty are interested in making full use of distributed learning, in continuing to learn themselves, and especially in truly empowering students, they need other solutions.
Edujazz, emphasizing structure and improvisation, can help reach out to faculty who are reticent to give up their control and jump into the pit with the edupunks. This argument evolves from my work in an academic service unit, where my job is to help a wide-range of faculty members experiment with this stuff. Such work requires, and benefits from, sensitive responses to their concerns. An anti-authoritarian, anarchic response will ultimately accomplish little. The DIY approach of edupunk is a great goal, but often times DIT– Do It Together–is necessary, and even preferable. Helping faculty members translate their pedagogical structures to a new environment goes a long way towards mollifying their concerns about the impact of technology on their students’ learning. The students, if the structure is sound, can handle the improvisation.
Now, behind the scenes, hell yeah, I’ll cavort with the punks. Jim’s named a movement, even if the contours of that movement still haven’t yet been fully defined. The politics of this stuff and the consideration of the logic of capital are deeply important, and should constantly be a part of the conversation. If a university is going to spend millions on a limited and problematic application, it should probably be able to explain why that solution is better than cheaper alternatives. I haven’t seen that done yet.
Until it is, there’s work to be done. So, edupunks, edufunks, eduheads, or whomever: keep doing your thing.
Students upon whom we try to impress the importance of clear communication would not have been able to look for an example to the roster of current presidential candidates last night.
The Democrats spend time talking about Bush’s expansive notions of presidential power, the mistakes of the war and the dangers and illegalities of Guantanamo and waterboarding. Republicans tend to stress the importance of stability in Iraq and the necessity of adjusting the legal posture of the US in the face of the threat of terrorism. Most on both sides agree that the Justice Department needs some serious rehaabilitation after Attorney General Gonzales’s politicization of that department and his eager, crass participation in efforts to legalize torture.
All these issues were central to the debate over the confirmation of new A.G. Michael Mukasey. He was confirmed last night by a slim but comfortable margin. But the following Senators/candidates decided not to weigh in officially, and simply did not cast a vote either way: Clinton, McCain, Biden, Obama, Dodd. To me that silence speaks volumes.
One of my favorite methods of procrastination is contemplating what I’ll do whenever the project that I’m not working on at the moment is complete. Luckily, some of my work at the Institute has involved trying to anticipate where instructional technology will go in coming semesters, and what kinds of demands for support this will create.
In that spirit, I’ve been thinking that next Fall I’d like to build a blog that aggregates coverage of the 2008 Presidential Election and uses it as a jumping-off point for a current events course about politics and convergent media.
I think such a course would work well as a first-year seminar, and could expose students to rigorous engagement with contemporary issues while helping them critically examine the quickly changing processes by which we produce and consume information. Students would be asked to learn about the policy issues at play in the election, and the blog would provide a tool for the teacher to guide their inquiry through directed readings of more in-depth pieces of analysis as well as selected reportage. The presentness of the topic would infuse the course with energy. Students would write regularly to better understand the rhetoric of presidential politics, to debate issues, and also to examine role of the media in the electoral process. Once the election is complete, students would then be asked to place the events in a historical context and to produce a final paper on some element of the election or its coverage.
Anyone know a faculty member interested in teaching this class?
A few weeks ago, the democrats debated each other in front of a live audience, as usual, but also on millions of computer screens via You Tube. The format of this event, co-sponsored by CNN, was a bit different than usual. The internet users were invited to submit their questions on video as well, and those were played on a large screen and then the responses of each candidate were also posted online.
Is this format really a revolutionary new approach? I am sure it was meant to attract young voters, and offer a “fresh” approach to an old, tired way of doing things. But was this a successful attempt or simply a rehash of “same old” with a new technology attached to it? Jon Stuart’s Daily Show had a rather harsh critique of the idea and its execution.
More recently, the LOGO, LGBT channel, hosted a democratic presidential debate as well.
This was a live debate, where a couple of moderators asked the candidates questions about issues that the LGBT community cares about. It is also an innovative way of doing things, and certainly this type of event would probably not be possible 10 years ago. But there were no technological gimmicks here, and yet I think I learned more about the candidates’ opinions about a few specific things. In this particular case the technology of the You Tube/CNN debate did not contribute to providing information or clarifying the issues.
Ampelmann, or “street light man”, is a figure that appears on street lights in East Berlin, in green or red. He wears a wide brim hat and seems to be freeze-framed in the midst of a jaunty stride.
While the nostalgia for all things East German (Ostalgie) seems to have passed, Berliners vociferously opposed a project to homogenize all the street signs with the more boring looking West German design. The Ampelmann not only survived, but became an icon of the city and a popular tourist souvenir.
It seems that the street signs represent not only the right of way for pedestrians but also a way of life, a collective memory and a need to preserve a cultural heritage. Even though the street light man is a remnant of the old regime, he is also a part of the collective identity of East Berliners. People don’t necessarily associate the Ampelmann with the Stasi secret police or the DDR government but with their city and with their everyday lives.
Certainly Germany is in a very particular situation because the country had been split in two. After reunification, there was a trend to erase all remnants of the old regime and create a united national identity. Unlike the countries in the rest of the Soviet block, East Germany simply stopped existing. The people who lived there became Germans, but yet they are not simply Germans, not entirely. They had an entirely different history for the past fifty years and there was a feeling that a lot of the changes were imposed by the west. The Ampelmann is, in a sense, a way for East-Berliners to hold onto a part of their identity and resist the rush to erase the past as quickly as possible.
In Poland, the country found different ways of dealing with its past. Most of the Soviet era street names have been rapidly changed, and many monuments to the Soviet solders or prominent communists were destroyed. There is now some remorse for this rush to erase so many memories.
I read this morning that Atty. General Gonzales prepapred in mock questioning sessions from Monday to Saturday for his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday this week. Call me crazy, but you don’t need to spend over a hundred hours preparing just to tell the truth or remind people of earlier truths you’ve told. Poor guy — he’s going to have to respond to a interrogation as intense and long as Justices Roberts and Alito did, except without the communicative skill or clear conscience that served those two so well in their performances.
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