A Pedagogy for Original Synners
Anne Balsamo
University of Southern California
Opening address: Symposium on Multimedia Across the Curriculum, Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California, March 31, 2006.
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Welcome
I have an imperfect technology that allows me to time travel. It’s more than a prototype, but its still pretty buggy—I can only travel 10 years at a time.
Its 2016, I’m meeting the first group from the class of 2020. I entered the class to meet my year-one students, 40 of ‘em floating in front of me in null-zero gravity. I quickly scan the space: pleasantly surprised to see the first (as far as I know) Human-Onkali mutant. I heard that the kids refer to them as “HuMonk-a-Li.” I think: how clever! Not surprisingly I also see a retro Lara Croft, a couple of Akiras, the predictable slew of Ender Wiggens, and a smattering of glyphs I don’t yet recognize. I see the first new version of the NeoNinja Turtles….animals are back in vogue, how quaint! And a couple of them…the quintessential overachievers….have done their homework on me: I see a ValJean and a Visual Mark….and a Dr. Fish. They never cease to amaze me.
My IM-patch starts to heat up; and darn, one of them has already hacked my earring. I’ve just logged on! My favorite pair too, maybe it will be worth it to get it reprogrammed this time.
I take a deep breath and think, “Let the Games Begin!”
The challenge of course is to get them to play the game that I want them to play, rather than the one they want to impose on me. Here’s how their game works: They trick me into wearing an 80’s style head bobber with a sign that says: “Stump the teacher.” Their head bobbers say things like: “Why should I care?” “Make me” and “Who R U?”
Some things never change. We start off on seemingly different sides. My goal is not to get us on the same side, but simply in the same universe. This takes time.
I turn on my left side to get their attention. They’re going to do the game grid assessment exercise, the by-now “best practice” for evaluating gamers’ learning potential. I give them the instructions:
www.urbin.net/t20pbem/Gwerf.html
Enter your persona data—name, race, species, gender, special skills, goals, and connections/friends
This takes them a few minutes because the list is long
I’ve already got their SIN—single identification numbers—from my class roster. They’re not supposed to be asked to enter it in an unsecured space; but I’ll have to check their names against the registered SINS to make sure there aren’t any non-paying hackers lurking in the class.
www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=484
Then I tell them: Pick your Medium: Physical, Mental, Chance, or Arts
The students are always limited to the same choices: those on the vertical axis of the game matrix.
Simultaneously my evaluation bots randomly select from the characteristics along the horizontal axis: a) naked, b) tool, c) machine, d) animal. These identify the modes of “assistance” that determine the game play. Naked means without anything; just what you walk in with; tool assisted means simple tools like markers, dice, picks, hammers, pens, what have you. Machine means the full range of digital devices and applications, as well as engines, robots, biolution devices (you know, the organic chip-based things), flickercladding, and other nano gadgets. Animal includes assistance from typical companion species such as dogs, horses, and dolphins, but also bush robots, gmo’s, tracer-birds and micro-mice.
As you all know, the combination of the student selection and the bot selection determines the game that they will play from the matrix of possibilities that are generated randomly each time the game grid is activated. I note with a chuckle that Lara Croft will play an A4 game (Naked Arts): Extemporaneous Poetry—no implements, no notes, just random word assignment. One of the Ender Wiggens ended up on B3 (tool assisted chance game); this time the game is dominoes.
I’m very interested in the game grid selection of Akin (the HuMonkali) mutant. Looks like he (?) chose 1) physical, and the evaluation bot chose b) tool-assisted. The game grid determines that the B1 game is an ice-climbing race. My bets are on the HuMonkali—three-arms will be extremely useful in this contest.
I remind them that the assessment game gives them a chance to test themselves against my evaluation bots that have been programmed to perform my minimal expectations for the achievement of a “B” in the course. If they can beat my bots, then they have some reliable probability of getting a “B” or better in the course. If they can’t beat my bots, then they should rethink the settings on their persona profiles. Maybe they want to allot more time to their “Average Time to spend on this course” setting. I suggest they check their “IQ Point” setting that establishes the average amount of brainspace they want to allot to learning course material. I remind them that a simple recalibration of their “Attention Intensity” setting can do wonders for their grades. But it remains their decision about how they will calibrate their persona for their performance in the game known as this class.
ai-depot.com/BotNavigation/Avoidance-Evaluation.html
I also remind them that after each game round concludes, they will have the opportunity to reset their profile preferences for the next set of inter-activities. We limit their profile changes to in-between inter-activities, because we learned early on that students could outsmart game bots by changing their profiles on the fly. The bots are programmed to “learn”—which means that they can’t change profile characteristics unless they have acquired experience through repeated encounters with course materials and exercises. Pedagogically we believe that it is important for students to be constrained by the same rule. Thus students have to play their profile preferences through the duration of a single inter-activity. This guards against the temptation to acquire extra-factual memories.
www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=439
Students are actually encouraged to “reflect” on their inter-activity performance in-between sessions, and to change their profiles and calibrations. We call this part of the “learning-process.”
www.redcolony.com/art.php?id=0008150
As I watch them play their games, I wonder which ones have signed up to participate in the make-space practicum. I know that only the wealthiest students can afford to enroll in the reality-based course work where we will meet face-to-face and work side-by-side on hand-made projects: paper writing, multimedia presentations, geo-caching exercises, and digital prototyping. Their socio-economic class predilections will become evident at some point, no doubt, so that by the time they show up in LA, I’ll know where they are coming from geographically, economically and cosmically. This course is the first to enroll ship-schooled students, the children of the first colonists enroute to UBIK4. These students won’t be in LA in the flesh, obviously, but will send tele-controlled “ditto blanks” that they’ve imprinted themselves onto. Only the really wealthy and the military can afford them: the colonists are neither; it was one of the perks used as an enlistment incentive. Still it leads me to wonder where in the world are they really?
Flashback, five years earlier, which is of, course 5 years from now
I’m thinking about an MLA address I just delivered called: “A Pedagogy for Original Synners.” While I was delivering it I didn’t know if people were actually listening. Listening is an elusive character of mind in the context of the technological sensorium, but the reaction that followed told me that I had hit a nerve.
I remember saying: “The era of academic reproduction is finally over.” We, the professors, are the “last remnants of humanity,” or put another way, the “last remnants of the humanities as we knew it.” Looking back, looking forward, I can’t believe that I was surprised by the outrage I encountered. Of course people would be upset to hear me making pronouncements like this. I was being IRONIC, in my best imitation of Haraway. But of course the irony was lost because the fear had already taken root. I’m sure there were many in the audience that had already felt their relevance waning, and along with it their cultural authority. They were deeply invested in the preservation of specific cultural values and a mythology of education that had long outlived its usefulness. And here I was pronouncing the “game over.” But for them, and for me, this was no mere language game; I knew the stakes were high. I was wrong to make light of it, I realize now.
www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/Turse_Over-There.htm
To make matters worse, I then went on to refer to the students we were now seeing in our classrooms as bastard children spawned within the industrial-military-entertainment complex of the early twenty first century. I meant the term “bastard” in the best possible sense. But again, my choice of words and rhetorical strategy was a bit off that day. What I was trying to get at is that our students have no brand loyalty—how could they? Why would they? Globalization does not support the development of brand loyalty. Cheaper, faster, smaller were the dominant influences on commodity acquisition. But their lack of brand loyalty also extended to us—as those who teach the values of the parent culture, the literacies of history, and the archive of culture. Why should they care if they learn to read and write, communicate eloquently, understand history, or acquire interpretive methodologies?
This lack of brand loyalty, I argued, confounds our educational philosophies.
headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/03/motivated_to_le.html
While we were busy experimenting with the implementation of a two-tiered university educational system: 4 years of undergraduate work for degrees that are really just employment credentials, 6 years of undergraduate work for those who really need to learn something (i.e., the engineers, the science students, the student scholars), the students persisted in presenting themselves as just-in-time learners: confident that when they need to know something, they’ll know where to find it.
They are used to relying on affiliation networks for their information. You know, the Delphi Pools: the large group of people who are sampled on a various topics, and who, just by virtue of being enculturated to different degrees, display remarkable intelligence.
www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=661
The use of Delphi Pools was taking off in 2011—the natural evolution of the “folksonomy” phenomenon and the growth of Google as a cultural design methodology. A Delphi Pool is a large group of people used as a statistical sampling resource. Delphi groups reveal that even if the “correct” answer is not known to each and every person within the sampled group, the aggregate mapping of responses tend to cluster around the correct answer.
This produced a vexing paradox for us as educators: where none of the students really know what’s going on, but everyone sort of knows what’s going on. It was a far more complex phenomenon than it first appeared. Where initially we thought it was a simple breakdown in the dualistic concept of expert and amateur—and a contestation of the relative cultural capital of each—eventually we began to understand the real ramifications. Professors were no longer the experts in the practice of knowledge production. It didn’t’ help that students came in with a level of technological familiarity that swamped that of their professors. What was worse was that they also believed that knowledge could be separated from the act and practice of thinking. Data=information=knowledge was their taken-for-granted epistemology.
www-personal.si.umich.edu/~nsharma/dikw_origin.htm
Digital networks circulate “knowledge claims,” in the process the status of the concept “knowledge” was thoroughly reworked. As we, the professors, were forced to rethink the very notion of knowledge itself, we also realized that the entire edifice of the educational industry needed critical interrogation and re-visioning: the role of universities in the knowledge production industry, the cultural authority of the professoriate, the notion of education versus credentialing, the professionalization of the faculty, graduate students, etc.
And yet, as we also learned, our students hold no brand loyalties to a particular group either. It’s the belonging that they are loyal to, the having affinities, the making of affinities, and the ability to be networked. This makes them interesting bas….hybrid subjects with fluid identities and social investments.
In 2011, we knew that we couldn’t think of students as “empty vessels” into which we, the professors, would pour knowledge and wisdom. What we didn’t know is what exactly they were, and more importantly, how to teach them to be “all that they could be” versus teaching them how to be like us.
I wondered specifically about their sense of temporality. Not simply due to their youth but rather to the pace of their lived experience. How do we discipline them to be productively creative and thoughtful and critical and analytical and intuitive and passionate and playful and responsible and compassionate when we get their attention in 30-second increments? That’s why the learning game paradigm seemed so promising: we knew that their sense of temporality totally changed when they interacted with game worlds. For many students, (although not all) the bounded nature of a game world captivated them, and more importantly, held their attention in a way that we couldn’t. It was an initial insight into the paradox of fluidity: these students were simultaneously capable of sustained attention to the point of near social autism when they participated in a gaming world, and incapable (or perhaps unwilling) to pay attention to single-channel communication in the body-based world. It was clear: the classroom and all participants had to get out of the single-channel communication world if we had any hope of sustaining the educational project on a broad scale. This meant that we had to figure out how to think about education that happens across multiple modes. The shift for me was that I started thinking of the educational process as involving creative and critical synthesis, rather than dutiful replication and expressive reproduction.
www.humancloning.org/~abstracts/3985.htm
Using more measured language, I suggested that we think of them as mutant hybrids; new versions of humans who take form in a world age thoroughly saturated by technology, decentered subjects who are criss-crossed by differing intensity flows and shifting affinities, with imaginations structured by partial knowledge and temporal compression. I suggested that focusing on their hybrid nature might help us design more effective pedagogical strategies. That instead of thinking of them as younger versions of ourselves, where we would seek through our teaching to reproduce in them the qualities of mind that we embodied, I thought that we should try to imagine how we might teach them to be mutants, and to acknowledge and embrace their essential mutability.
www.opentopia.com/hiddencam.php
In short, I suggested that we start thinking about how to teach them to be original synthesizers of the knowledge claims that they would harvest from multiple and diverse sources. In harping on the identity of students as “original synners” what I hoped to do was to create a fictional subject status that kept their mutability present in our thinking about them. The question for educators became: how do they synthesize information that comes to them in different media forms (in print, text, images, animation, simulation, personal experience, augmented experience, virtual experience, displaced experience); how do they learn to form new ideas, new insights, both on their own, and as part of collaborative groups? How do their differentiate themselves from others as part of the maturation process? How do they interact with institutions that reify the values of the parent culture? How should the institutions change to address their mutability? How will they be taught to be the stewards of culture for the future? How do I answer their question: why is it important to remember?
I know that I as a teacher was wrestling with similar questions: how do I give them what they need to succeed versus what I know had worked for me? I realized that no single college course maps the path for success for any particular student; but certainly we still believed in 2011, that the curriculum that we developed in “General Education” –as well as the curricula that we offered as majors and minors—would provide the necessary skills, literacies, values, and knowledges that would serve as the foundation for their success in the future.
www.twbookmark.com/books/92/0446603783/index.html
What we didn’t know, or realize so fully, was how to teach them to proactively create the world that they would inhabit which was, of course, going to be vastly different from the world in which we took shape. The major challenge is to capture their mattering maps, which determine their memory paths. Imagination was no longer the problem; memory and remembering was disappearing from their lives. I finished that MLA address with a rhetorical question: What Adulthood Rites need to be created for this new species of students who hold no brand loyalty to us or the educational process in general?
Back from the Future
I remember the reason we were going to get together today and tomorrow: to catch up on the nation-wide experiment in creating educational activities and programs that are attendant to changes in the mediascape and to the availability of new digital technologies. I remembered that I also wanted to talk about the changing nature of students in the age of networks.
We know that paradigm shifts happen because of changes in institutional practices. While it is true that individual courses, textbooks, or doctoral programs can have an impact; the impacts don’t accumulate change velocity until they are institutionalized in the form of new curricula, new applications, new frameworks, new methodologies, and new apparatuses.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn
Single institutions can rarely try out multiple models because of the investment that must be made in infrastructure. Thus the purpose of our meeting is to compare efforts: USC compares notes with a new course at UIUC; The Virginia Approach informs institutional arrangements at USC; University of Baltimore uses materials created at Michigan Tech, etc.
www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/scifi/cyberbib/Titles/Synners/SynnersOV.html
Is there a single correct way to address the new literacies required of Original Synners? Probably not. Just as there is no one mode of literacy, but rather the multiplication of basic skills needed to perform adequately within a given context. Literacy is a community construct; like obscenity, perhaps. The definition of literacy must be determined by the community within which people are situated and seek to inhabit. The challenge for us in a networked culture is that the boundaries of the community are difficult to discern, as is the authority of institutions within that community, and our role in those communities and institutions.
To take on the project of creating a program that integrates multimedia teaching and learning across the disciplines involves several challenges.
For one: faculty who are expert in a disciplinary domain, are not necessarily experts in the technological domain of new modes of expression. We have based our educational practice—and indeed our curricula—on an assumption that faculty are literate in the dominant forms of communication required of disciplines. For most disciplines this is the literacy of text based reading and writing; for the social sciences and technical disciplines we would include the literacy of numeric reasoning. But as we contemplate the changing nature of students, and the changing nature of the knowledge-making landscape, we understand that the base literacies we teach have to be expanded to include other modes of communication: the visual, the animated, the dynamic, the networked, and the interactive.
In fact, the multiple groups that will participate in these efforts each have different needs and relationship to the material being presented.
The USC program, now called “The Multimedia Core” will begin with 10 General Education Courses to be offered during the 2006-2007 academic year. Our challenge now is to find the ways to inspire (and educate) three groups of participants, who are differently located within the institutional structure:
1) Experienced faculty members who teach general education in different disciplines;
2) Graduate students who will serve as teaching assistants for these courses who themselves come from a wide range of disciplines, and for whom this TA assignment requires additional training above and beyond their previous disciplinary studies. We need to think about their professional socialization and pedagogical preparation; And
3) The undergraduate students who will now be required to take a 2-unit “Practicum in Multimedia Authorship” when they enroll in a one of a select list of General Education courses.
The issue of technology-assisted teaching and learning is critical to this effort. We are committed to creating learner-centered pedagogies—which offer the opportunity for faculty and students to learn from one another, and to engage in a dialogic give and take in the production of new insights. In this configuration, who takes responsibility for technology instruction? How do we ensure that all participants learn what they need to learn? How do we determine what each group “needs to learn?”
I am a self-taught digital designer; I won’t know everything that students need to know to create their multimedia projects. How do I stay relevant to them? How do I shape their mattering maps? How do I inspire them to care about what I care about? Does it matter if they do?
I’d like to end by listing some of the questions that I hope will be discussed during these two days:
Community Questions:
If indeed literacy is a community defined metric of inclusion and participation, how do we determine what the community deems important as base-level skills and knowledges without resorting to a merely instrumental notion of literacy? What kind of communities do students belong to, and what are the base-level skills and knoweldges valued and reproduced within those communities? How do we encourage them to participate in the scholarly community at our universities? How do we inspire them to acquire the literacies that this community deems important? How do we teach them to be critical of their own performance and base level literacies? How do we teach them to use other members of the community as teachers, i.e., their peers, their affinity groups, their teaching assistants, and their professors?
Relationship Questions:
Literacy is acquired in the context of relationships among people. Acquiring literacy skills provides the means to reproduce relationships: of class, of belonging, of access, of expression, of communication. How do we constitute the relationship between students, faculty, teaching assistants, amateur networks, and affinity groups to be in dialogue and not in competition? How can difference be the foundation of respect and not of disregard?
Activities Questions:
Literacy is not simply defined as a collection of facts or even of methodologies. Nor is basic literacy a “stage” that is achieved and then somehow transcended. We all engage in learning to read and write over and over again. How is the process of cultural reproduction parsed into meaningful exercises, activities, and skills, as well as into domains of knowledge and insight? What are the specific activities through which new literacies are learned? How are traditional literacies—of reading and writing text, of the use of rhetorical strategies, and the ability to critically evaluate communicative acts—relearned over time and in different contexts? How has the expansion of visual culture—of the increasing dominance of film, television, simulation, and animation—reconfigured the notion of literacy? How do people learn new modes of expression? How do new modes of expression get institutionalized? How do multimodal forms of expression (that involve text, image, sound, dynamic media, interactivity, virtuality, simulation) shape human consciousness? What new ways of thinking are expressed and made available through the development and reproduction of multimodal forms of expression?
Media Questions:
Literacy involves understanding the possibilities and constraints of the medium of communication; it involves understanding the social context of communication, the form of communication, the purpose, and the desired impact. As the dimensions of the medium change, so do the skills necessary to use the medium effectively and expressively. How have digital technologies changed the nature of basic literacy? After formal education ends, how do people learn about new communication forms and possibilities? For example, how will faculty become expert in these new forms? How will they acquire technological expertise? How should we train graduate students in these new communication forms? How will these new communication forms change pedagogical practices? What are the pedagogical possibilities of new communication forms: i.e., of gaming, of SMS, of simulation, of new forms of visualization?
Genres Questions:
Genres of communication are constructs that mediate among individuals, audiences, documents, modes of expression, and culture. What are new genres of scholarship? How can new genres of scholarship be enhanced with the use of digital technologies? How do we develop critical, analytical frameworks for the assessment of new genres and works of digital knowledge production?
As Phil Agre writes:
Discussions of new media are often framed in terms of "where things are going.” The idea is to predict the future and then to accommodate oneself to it, hopefully to maximum advantage. This kind of reasoning leaves a great deal out. The future is not a deterministic outcome of a mechanical procedure; it is a consequence of human choice making where the outcome may be constrained and biased but is not settled in advance. Only when we believe we have choices do we start articulating our values and figuring out how they apply to the situation at hand.
Our project today and tomorrow is to explore informed choices, as created by the people I admire most in the profession, those who have been friends for years, and those who are new colleagues. I look forward to this more than anything.
Thank you.