Posts com a Tag ‘GRIFFITH Bryant (Res)’
The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University – RASCHKE (CSS)
RASCHKE, Carl A. The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003. 129. Resenha de: GRIFFITH, Bryant. Canadian Social Studies, v.39, n.2, p., 2005.
There is a definite disadvantage to writing an academic book concerning the future and a double disadvantage if it concerns the internet. It is almost always wrong. Such is the case with Carl Raschke’s The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University. When I first read the text I kept looking at the publication date wondering if Raschke had written it before the 2001 crash of hopes and dreams for a wired world; but he did not, or at least it was not published until 2003.
Despite these rather serious drawbacks the book deserves to be reviewed to draw attention to what can happen when we choose to dream about possible futures without remembering where we are and how we got here. That past, as R.G. Collingwood reminded us, is a reenactment of both the insides and the outsides of ideas, or to put it into ordinary language, the fusion of how my mind makes sense of minds in the past. This understanding is a way of knowing one’s self so it is not a minimum ontological claim. We make sense of the past by constructing analogies based on the way that we make rational decisions about our own actions, so one could argue that the past and present are fused in a continuous process of self understanding. Knowing who we are right now and what we think is tied to that process.
I believe that Raschke needs to be reminded of this. Far too often his ideas are much like Collier’s magazine, which presented fantastically utopian ideas about space travel and the colonization of distant galaxies. By that I mean these ideas, like most futurism, seem destined to the bin of what might or might not happen rather than a reasoned argument based upon the presuppositions of our present.
Let me examine some of Raschke’s thoughts and comment upon them. He states the architecture of digital communications necessitates a new understanding of the structures and ‘space’ of knowledge itself. This new knowledge space is consonant with the philosophical slant on the theory of representation, language, and symbolic exchange that has come to be called ‘postmodernist'(p. viii). I think Raschke is right about some of this. To understand digital communications it helps to see the world in the way that some postmodernists describe, that is a non-linear, fragmented narrative. Modernists, as a group, have tended to view history as the unfolding of a grand narrative with definite causes and effects. This has led to the critique of exclusionary voices as Other and to the attack on concepts such as ‘progress’. But this is hardly news. I cannot think of a school district, even in the state of Texas where I presently live, that has not abandoned the Eurocentric school of thought and which does not acknowledge, even implicitly, the concept of difference. Also, even though I think Raschke is right here, I am not sure there is the necessary connection to which he alludes. It might be the case, for instance, that a breakdown in modernism, or a paradigm shift, has occurred allowing us to perceive a different set of presuppositions to make sense of the world.
Raschke claims that such knowledge may be called ‘hyper’ knowledge, because like hyperspace in post-Newtonian cosmology [it] extends the directions and dimensions of knowledge per se in ways unanticipated even a generation ago (p. viii). The matrix for these new extensions of knowledge is what we call the ‘hyper’ university, which in no way resembles the ‘physical’ university (p. viii). The necessity to accept these two points escapes me completely. I would suggest that Raschke’s use of Wittgenstein’s category mistake, of thinking that a university is comprised of grounds and buildings rather than a term to describe the relationship between entities, really applies to Raschke himself (p. ix). Let me explain. For most of us the university is, like the word ‘curriculum’, the totality of experiences which occur both on and off campus. Ask anyone who has been to Oxford about the Friday pub sessions where serious academic conversations occur over much beer. I believe that most graduates from there would tell you that these have been some of the best learning moments of their university experience. In short, I am not sure that there are many universities which define themselves by their grounds and buildings.
Raschke claims that the new university is no longer a school. It is a place of distributed leaning, wherein communication takes place over content, inquiry is prior to instruction, results rule over rules (p. 11). He argues that both the postmodern economy and the postmodern university are built on mobile capital, mobile work forces, and mobile or ‘just-in-time’ inventory and distribution systems (p. 11). I believe I am correct in understanding this to be an argument for a post-fordist educational system where critical thinking is replaced by just-in-time adaptability. If I am correct then I completely disagree with Raschke. My understanding of a wired university is one with infinite possibilities to extend what Robert Putnam has characterized as the growth of social capital. In Bowling Alone Putnam (2000) expresses his concern with the digital revolution’s ability to foster truly open conversation. He feels that Information Technology might make us more private, passive and possibly exclusionary instead of open, conversational and community based. Putnam describes the breakdown of social capital through an analysis of civic engagement in a range of activities in the twentieth century. The fact that we bowl alone, learn alone and spend far less time in human interaction has led to a growing sense of distrust in contemporary society. Surely what our universities need to do is to remember that they have historically been the repositories of social capital, or the ways in which we have interacted to build an intellectual community. Most of us probably went to university to make friends, learn content and get a job in that order. In the process we became the embodiment of the presuppositions that define who we are as a society.
In the past 900 years, the approximate age of the university in western society, the institution has served as the birthing place of several revolutions and paradigm shifts. I see this process continuing in a form quite distinct but not separate from the present. The future, although new and unseen by us, is an ongoing process based upon understanding ourselves and the ideas upon which we have constructed our sense of what we call ‘real’. When one looks back over the shattered IT dreams of the last four or five years one might think that Raschke would have done better here to skip his ‘big picture’ claims and concentrate on the smaller but more significant bits that fit in between them, such as how the neo-modern university can retain its independence from business and government, or how IT enhances problem-based constructive learning. One hopes that Raschke will take his interesting and challenging ideas and apply them to more concrete and historical contexts. Perhaps those are topics for another book.
References
Collingwood, R.G. (1946). The Idea of History. London: Oxford University Press.
Putnam, R.D. (2000). Bowling Alone. New York: Simon Schuster.
Bryant Griffith – College of Education. Texas A University, Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi, Texas, USA.
[IF]Tropics of Teaching: Productivity, Warfare and Priesthood – TOCHON (CSS)
TOCHON, Françoi. Tropics of Teaching: Productivity, Warfare and Priesthood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 163p. Resenha de: GRIFFITH, Bryant. Canadian Social Studies, v.38, n.3, p., 2004.
The Tropics of Teaching is not an easy book to read. In fact, it is a difficult text, full of intricate philosophical language and argument. It is not a book that I would recommend for recreational reading neither for teachers nor for students. However, is it important to the social studies education community? The answer is absolutely yes, and this is why. Tochon argues that educators have constructed a culture of niceness around the act of teaching that negates the ethical nature of what happens in good classrooms with experienced and caring teachers. This culture of niceness prevents teachers and students from understanding the problems associated with teaching and learning as they try to make meaning of the world of education.
In order to understand why Tochon believes this I’m going to take you on a brief, and I hope clear, description of what I understand to be his philosophical position. Tochon employs a semiotic analysis to teaching. Semiotics is, I think, another one of the inexact ‘sciences’. It is inexact because there are many interpretations of what semiotics is; yet it is a science because it does have a definite set of precepts, or sets of precepts. The shortest definition of semiotics is that it is the study of signs and its most notable practitioner is Umberto Eco, who is probably most widely remembered for writing The Name of the Rose. Eco describes semiotics as being concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign (Eco, 1976, p. 7). I take this to mean that semiotics not only studies signs of everyday life, like language, but also anything which stands for something else, namely words, images, sounds, gestures and objects.
Another major figure in the field of semiotics is the anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss. I think it may be easier to understand how semiotics relates to teaching and learning if one thinks about how an anthropologist tries to make meaning of the world he or she happens upon. In each case understanding is constructed by making sense of signs presented to them in various textual forms.
Let me illustrate, Lvi- Strauss creates a dialogue with his materials and how best to use them. He asks how the process of discovery leads to making meaning, and then he tracks that process. What he does not do is lay down the path of what that meaning will be beforehand. So semiotics calls for teachers, anthropologists and students to construct personal meaning from actions. This is a reversal of the traditional curriculum process, and of traditional teaching and learning practices. In semiotics learning becomes a creative act shaped by the intentions of the learner and also by language and social and psychological factors. In Tropics of Teaching, Tochon describes semiotics as the ethical element of teaching. It is what good, experienced teachers do when they care for their students. They become flexible in their pedagogical practice. This ethical quality is highly prized by our society but for the most part it has not been addressed in faculties of education or in school classrooms. The reason for the split between theory and practice, Tochon says, is that we have forgotten that teaching is the mirror to the soul and not based upon the rational reflection of how to make things fit (p. 132).
Tochon says that we have further confused the meaning of such key concepts as word and actions, ideology and change, economics and education, and that we have lost touch with what is most important: contact. Contact occurs during a conversation between teacher and student when it is based upon a bottom-up discovery of the learning process. It is not a prescribed path to defined ends. Tochon is telling us is that teaching is the art of translating signs from art to poetry and beyond. This world is not just found in books, computers or audio-video material.
In the same way meaning is not simply transmitted to us. We actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes, of which we are unaware. I think this point is vital. University education, in particular, is often accused of not preparing students for the real world. Given my description above I think we could say that too often teaching does not touch base in order for us to understand signs. In many cases if signs are learned they are not made explicit and therefore no real meaning is made. Too often students pick up meanings implicitly and the pedagogical moment has been lost.
Tochon calls the process I have outlined Humanist reflection. So that we can understand how this differs from much of what we traditionally do in our schools, he has organized the book around three metaphors: ‘productivity’ or output and standardization, ‘warfare’ or strategy and expertise, and finally ‘priesthood’ or the enlightened subject. He argues that we can by-pass these three concepts by employing a semiotic methodology he calls his counter- methodology. This counter-methodology would be learning activities based upon lived experiences as opposed to top-down, plan oriented activities.
Tochon gives us an example of such an activity in action poetry. Tochon believed that the city of Geneva had lost touch with its soul and this was exhibited by the lack of public interest in poetry. He took advantage of a local grant and had students write original poems about matters of personal interest to them. Each of the twenty-seven original poems was then inscribed by hand in acrylic by a professional painter and then mounted on billboards all over the city. The reaction was just what Tochon had hoped for: a public conversation in all the media about the poems. This initiated new and giant poems on billboards; many are still visible in Geneva. Thus action poetry became a process whereby the people of Geneva made meaning from the poetry in acrylic on the public billboards. It began a shared public discussion of the value of poetry, art, civic pride and much more. This is how Franois Tochon conceives of the school curriculum and of the nature of teaching and learning.
Let me leave the last words to him: In action poetry, performance produces a metaphoric message, which may take a narrative dimension. Action, which before all else is abstract, erects a set of values into a set of metaphoric symbols. These values cannot be separated from the context and the field of action, and yet they present the poetic sign as a means of reaching beyond the symbolic connections usually promoted by the city. Through poetry, the city appears to be
refigured and rejuvenated (p. 113).
It would be nice to think that educators could present such an argument about the nature of teaching and learning when asked for it by those who pay our way. Take some time and read this book. It is well worth the effort.
References Eco, E. (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Lvi-Strauss, C. (1972). Structural anthropology. Hammondsworth: Penguin.
Dr. Bryant Griffith – Texas A University. Corpus Christi, Texas, USA.
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Hyper Texts: The Language and Culture of Educational Computing – ROSE (CSS)
ROSE, Ellen. Hyper Texts: The Language and Culture of Educational Computing. London, ON: The Althouse Press, 2000. 210p. Resenha de: GRIFFITH, Bryant. Canadian Social Studies, v.37, n.2, 2003.
The last decade has seen a number of books on the subject of the use and benefit of computers in education. Ellen Rose’s Hyper Texts attempts to fill the much needed gap between Dan Tapscott’s Growing up Digital and Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil. By focusing on language, Rose hopes to enable a serious consideration of what it really means to learn with a computer or to think about learning in terms of digital technology(p. xi); but does she succeed? The answer for this reviewer is both yes and no.
Although Rose cuts through the hyperbole she criticizes, she creates her own set to replace it with her use of poststructural language which is often even more dense than the arguments she rightly criticizes. Too often Hyper Texts reads like a religious tract to support Foucault’s insights and this is a pity because there is much good clear thinking buried beneath the metaphors. I also take issue with the planning of this book. If Rose intends her audience to be those educators and parents she addresses on her first page, I then wonder not only why she relies so heavily on poststructuralist language, as I have mentioned above, but also why she includes an in-depth study of ‘The McKenna Experiment’? I think the issue of linkage should have been addressed in the Preface. As a result, Hyper Texts attempts to do too much. It addresses a very important educational issue by using a complex, but appropriate epistemological lens. It also offers a case study, not uninterestingly, but one which becomes a diversion from the central argument. My guess is that the educators and parents who buy this book would have preferred a shorter and more accessible book on the former while the latter, the McKenna chapter, would have been a nice journal article.
Having said all that, let me present some of the well-made points in the book. First, and perhaps most importantly, Rose is correct in trying to find a way between the extreme positions, to try getting beyond the hype by not focusing upon the computerized classroom, but between the linesthat is, the discourse of educational computing itself, as found in cultural texts(p. 4). She is also correct, in my estimation, in pointing out the contrast in language claims between the modernist and poststructuralist positions for her intended readers because they need her to be clear about what these opposing views bring to the table for both her and them. Although not new, Rose’s claim that poststructural analysis involves recognizing that language is far more complicated than the neutral conduit of modernism, but is indeed constituted of multiple, continually shifting meanings in which power, truth, and knowledge are inextricably entangled(p. 7), is very much to the point. It is a pity that in far too much of this book this clear point is often obscured by language often found in doctoral dissertations.
Rose is also right in claiming that her task is all the more important because of the extent to which IT has, to use her modernist adjective, infiltrated our world. This task is not a new one. Certainly since the introduction of technology in European society, thinkers have tried to make sense of it by using a variety of different models. It might have strengthened Rose’s argument to point out that poststructuralism is just another lens to make sense of this on-going process.
I think that one of the real strengths of this book is the claim that IT offers itself as the virtual site in which our utopian dream will be realized(p. 28) and a good discussion follows on this point, drawing nicely on the literature. This is a good segue for the much argued points of whether technology equates to progress and who controls it. It is true, as Rose argues, that modernists tend toward a single authoritative perspective and that wiring the world helps that cause. What is not clear to me, and I expect for many of Rose’s intended audience, is how the multifaceted and extremely complex poststructuralist world is an improvement. One could argue, after all, that the modernist position is so easy to state that one could simply subvert it when it is inappropriate. A poststructuralist world is full of ‘as if’ multifaceted and complex contexts. That may be the way it really is, but Rose needs to use language in a manner to convince us of this.
Rose’s great contribution is the discussion of the issue of control. One wishes that this book was half the length and that this discussion was far more prominent. On page 58 she makes the insightful comment that The way in which one believes computers should be used in the classroom in turn has much to do with personal understandings of what constitutes knowledge and learning. If we believe that what we can do in the classroom is limited and defined by the limits of technology then we are in trouble. Rose suggests that the IT revolution privileges the stories of technocrats over those of other individuals (p. 73) and that we must be clear to distinguish between the desire to use computers from the desire to learn (p. 75). She says: the child may be drawn to computers in the first place because they offer an entertaining alternative to books and school-learning, in which case computer use constitutes an implicit rejection of scholarship (p. 75). This is an important point, and one addressed recently by Robert Hassan in his article Net results: knowledge, information and learning on the Internet. We really know far too little about how children learn in computer rich contexts and Western society is making some massive assumptions about unknown outcomes. Rose is correct in arguing that individual learner needs, not the limits of technology, must drive our use of technology in the classroom. In the end it is the teachers and parents who must participate in the construction of the meaning of information technology and educational computing(p. 177). She correctly argues that we must confront our own individual responsibilities as members of a society increasingly given over to the imperatives of technology (p. 177). The new intellectual which Rose describes in her last chapter is one who welcomes the challenges of our complex world and actively participates as an equal in the decision making about the place of technology in our lives. This too is not a new argument, and one not the sole prerogative of the poststructuralist, but it is one worth making again and again.
Let me end this review with a quote from the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) in the Federal Republic of Germany:
Information technology is already changing how we teach, learn and conduct research, but important research challenges in the field of education remain. We know too little about the best ways to use computing and communications technology for effective teaching and learning. We need to better understand what aspects of learning can be effectively facilitated by technology and which aspects require traditional classroom interactions. We also need to determine the best ways to teach our citizens the powers and limitations of the new technologies and how to use these technologies effectively in their personal and professional lives (PITAC 1999).
References
Hassan, R. (2001). Net results: Knowledge, information and learning on the Internet. Journal of Educational Enquiry, 2(2), 45-57.
PITAC report (1999). Ten critical national challenge transformations.
http://www.ccic.gov/ac/report/
Stoll, C. (1999). High-tech heretic: Why computers don’t belong in the classroom and other reflections by a computer contrarian. New York: Doubleday.
Tapscott, D. (1998). Growing up digital: The rise of the net generation. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bryant Griffith – Faculty of Education. Acadia University. Wolfville, Nova Scotia.
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