Reflections on a year of Zoom University

The spring semester is drawing to a close, bringing an end to a year of remote teaching and distance learning. For me, it’s been a fascinating and often challenging experience. The sudden shift to mediated modalities prompted by the pandemic forced a reckoning with questions about the continued relevance of traditional higher education.

For years I’ve posed the following proposition to students in my Argument classes: “It is important to get a college education.” In their initial response students can only affirm or negate the proposition. During subsequent discussion we unpack the implicit variables and ambiguous terminology that complicate any simple or straightforward “yes/no” response: how is “importance” being defined, and just what exactly constitutes “a college education”? Every time I have conducted this exercise it is the economic valuations that win out: the interrogation of the proposition tends toward a cost-benefit analysis of the price of college tuition weighed against projected lifetime earnings. 

In arguing against the importance of a college education students occasionally cite famous examples of entrepreneurial outliers who made their fortunes after abandoning their collegiate studies. Another common talking point is the widespread availability of free information. The classical model of university organization developed in an era of information scarcity. The vestiges of this model have provided an implicit justification for tuition as the price of admission for exclusive access to specialized information and instructors. In an era of information abundance, access to information no longer seems like sufficient justification for exorbitant tuition and years of student loan payments. As my students have rightly pointed out, the knowledge commodity is less “valuable” when specialized information is readily available through web sites, YouTube videos, or free educational platforms like Khan Academy.

In these exchanges with my students I have attempted to gently undermine the premise that the “value” of college as represented by tuition costs is not linked to the “value” of information or knowledge. I’ve suggested that their propagation of the “value of education” line was hollow lip service to an ideal that they didn’t truly hold, an almost ritualistic recitation of an interpassive belief that no one really believes (sort of like my own semester abroad experience in college when I feebly tried to convince my parents that my interest in visiting Amsterdam was solely motivated by a profound desire to visit the Van Gogh Museum). No, the students’ implicit yet unstated understanding of the “value” of a “college education” was closer to the truth: a social experience tied to expectations of lifestyle affordances and class status.

This is the underlying reality that Ian Bogost elaborated last fall in an article discussing how the pandemic had revealed that the dilemma facing universities was not about providing education, but sustaining the college lifestyle:

Without the college experience, a college education alone seems insufficient. Quietly, higher education was always an excuse to justify the college lifestyle. But the pandemic has revealed that university life is far more embedded in the American idea than anyone thought. America is deeply committed to the dream of attending college. It’s far less interested in the education for which students supposedly attend. [...] Joe College and Betty Co-ed became archetypes, young and carefree models of American spirit and potential. Going to college, Thelin writes in his book A History of American Higher Education, “was a rite of passage into the prestige of the American upper-middle class.”

From an instructor’s perspective, I was grateful that the transition to remote learning was as readily available and easily implemented as it was. From the perspective of May 2021 -- bolstered by the benefit of hindsight and the preliminary reassurance provided by the vaccine rollout -- the anxieties over a forever-changed public life that pervaded in the early days of the pandemic seem overblown. It now seems that most campuses are prepared for a return to normal (or at least the “new normal”) this fall, but a year ago the fate of higher education (along with many other institutions and spaces) seemed very much in doubt. Last summer I was deeply appreciative for both the continuity of employment for myself and other staff as well as the broader educational continuity for students that distance platforms provided.

I’ve now taught both synchronous and asynchronous mediated courses. My synchronous Public Speaking classes were relatively well-suited for a video-conferencing format; the audio-visual medium could easily accommodate the fundamental activities of speaking and listening. Yet the “space” of the Zoom room presented certain restraints and affordances that led me to reconsider the inherent limitations of a traditional classroom space.

Your brain on Kindle; 21st Century media literacy; how Disney shapes youth identity

• Radio program New Tech City from WNYC interviewed Mike Rosenwald on his research into the effects of reading from a screen as opposed to print. Article and audio from the interview available here:

Neuroscience, in fact, has revealed that humans use different parts of the brain when reading from a piece of paper or from a screen. So the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards "non-linear" reading — a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page.

• Henry Jenkins recently posted a conversation with Tessa Jolls, President and CEO of the Center for Media Literacy, on the value of Media Literacy education in the 21st Century:

Using the technology approach, the iPhone is the “school” and anyone who uses it adeptly is the master and anyone over 30 is, well, handicapped at best.   New technologies enable this approach because now, hardware and software are available and production has been democratized — everyone is a producer, a collaborator, a distributor and a participant.  While experiential and project-based learning is truly exciting and an important component of media literacy, it is not synonymous because the outcome of the technology approach is often limited to technical proficiency without critical autonomy. Whether using an iPad, a pencil or a videocam, pressing the right buttons is important but not enough!

• In a Truthout op-ed, Henry Giroux explores how Disney magic and the corporate media shape youth identity in the digital age:

The information, entertainment and cultural pedagogy disseminated by massive multimedia corporations have become central in shaping and influencing every waking moment of children's daily lives - all toward a lifetime of constant, unthinking consumption. Consumer culture in the United States and increasingly across the globe, does more than undermine the ideals of a secure and happy childhood: it exhibits the bad faith of a society in which, for children, "there can be only one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one kind of social relationship, markets."

Gamification: educational applications and the rise of engagement

• This EdTech article by D. Frank Smith showcases an app designed by a UW-Madison professor to teach campus sustainability through gamification:

One of the app's games lets students practice waste sorting to reinforce good habits in distinguishing waste from recyclable materials. Different objects scroll down the side of the screen on a conveyer belt, and students click and drag to sort them into the proper bins.

Work on the app was funded in part by a Sustainability Innovation in Research and Education (SIRE) grant from the UW Office of Sustainability. It is being designed by the Mobile Learning Incubator (MLI) team at the Madison campus. Sustainable U is the team's follow-up to Waste Eliminators, an interactive, environmental tour of campus which was also created with the help of Middlecamp and two graduate students in 2013, according to a university news release.

• Michael Logarta at GMA News reports on the expansion of homework-helping social platform Brainly to the Phillipines. The article touches on the value of 'play' for students, the challenges of gamifying education,  and why playing is the future of learning:

“When lessons are delivered in a game-like manner – that is, interactive, challenging, with instantaneous feedback – students easily remember them,” said Christine Rom, Game Developers’ Association of the Philippines (GDAP) board member and CEO of educational games developer PODD. “If we harness the elements that make these games interesting and integrate them into education, we get the opportunity to enhance the learning process.”

Gamification improves motivation. “By giving students a sense of achievement (through exciting rewards and recognition), students will be encouraged to learn and progress more,” explained Rom.

• Amanda Schneider at HuffPo considers gamification and the shift from "productivity" to "engagement":

In a recent Mashable article Gabe Zichermann, the author of Game-Based Marketing and the CEO of Gamification.co states that one of the reasons for the increase in gamification is that long-standing marketing techniques are now failing. "They're failing because people today are seeking more reward and more engagement from experiences than ever before." Younger generations may be even more in tuned with gaming because they have likely never known a world without computers. Specifically, "Today's youth mandates a more engaging experience. Gamification is required to bring those things into balance, and to make things engaging enough so people will pay attention to them and stay focused on them for a longer period of time."

A ticklish subject: Decrying, defending Žižek as teacher

• Slavoj Žižek's pedagogy became a topic of debate among critics and supporters of the philosopher after video of an interview with Žižek was posted to YouTube. In the 10-minute video, recorded in April at the 2014 Žižek Conference in Cincinnati, Žižek discusses his loathing of office hours, among other subjects. Regarding classes he has taught in the U.S., Žižek recalls telling students "If you don't give me any of your shitty papers, you get an A". Here is the video on YouTube:

I even told students at the New School for example… if you don’t give me any of your shitty papers, you get an A. If you give me a paper I may read it and not like it and you can get a lower grade.

• And regarding office hours:

I can’t imagine a worse experience than some idiot comes there and starts to ask you questions, which is still tolerable. The problem is that here in the United States students tend to be so open that sooner or later, if you’re kind to them, they even start to ask you personal questions [about] private problems… What should I tell them?

• The interview video, particularly the comments about grading and office hours, were the subject of a post by Eugene Woltgers on Critical-theory.com:

Zizek has always been vocal about his general disdain for students and humanity writ large. He once admitted in 2008 that seeing stupid people happy makes him depressed, before describing teaching as the worst job he has ever had.

[...]

On a personal note, I was once told at the New School by a senior faculty member that Zizek would fill up his sign-up sheet for office hours with fake names to avoid student contact. I still wonder if that story is true, but now it doesn’t seem so out of character.

• At Slate, Rebecca Schuman implored readers to "please stop worshiping the superstar professor who calls students 'boring idiots'":

I have no idea what a superstar like Žižek gets paid, and I don’t know if he actually fills his office-hours sign-up sheet with fake names so that none of the “boring idiots” come and bother him with their stupid problems, as one New School faculty member has apparently claimed. But I feel safe in guessing that he earns more to not-grade one “shitty paper” than many professors do in a semester.

The real problem with Žižek, in any case, isn’t that he feels this way or that he says these things aloud. It’s that he does so and people think it’s hilarious. It’s that his view is, believe it or not, a common “superstar” view of students—so common, in fact, that if you work at a research university and actually like teaching, you should maybe pretend you don’t, lest you appear not “serious” enough about your research.

[...]

The academy is in crisis. The humanities’ relevance is questioned obnoxiously on a near-daily basis. Humanists need to think carefully about who our heroes are, and who should represent our disciplines to the public. Maybe, just maybe, this Ži-jerk has finally proved himself unsuited to the task.

• In a post at An und für sich, Adam Kotsko applied Žižek's comments to the id of the academic mainstream:

I’m sure all of us have stories of colleagues basically slandering their students, and there is no more common complaint in the academic world than about the tedium of grading. I would venture to say that much of the resentment of Zizek’s attitudes stems from an unacknowledged desire to do exactly the things they’re castigating Zizek for. Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to tell the students what I really think of them? Wouldn’t it be great not to have to deal with their crappy writing? Wouldn’t it be amazing to finally take the university at its word, valuing research absolutely and exclusively while making at best a token gesture toward teaching?

Indeed, it was disdain for teaching that made it so tempting to outsource pedagogical labor to grad students and underpaid adjuncts so that real professors could have the space to do real academic work. Zizek’s opinions aren’t some crazy outlier, they’re the structuring principles of our system of academic labor.

• Writing at HuffPo, Dave Harvilicz responded to Schuman with a defense of Žižek:

That I have met Zizek personally and can attest that he is no jerk is a minor point. That I personally witnessed him reject dinner with established professors and instead choose to sit with undergraduate students at a University of Rochester event is also fairly trivial but instructive about his actual attitude towards students.

[...]

No one has been more outspoken, or effective, about combating this "crisis" [in academia] than Zizek. He is dogmatic in his steadfast criticism of the Bologna reforms in Europe. Rejecting globalization's call for experts instead of critically-thinking humanists cannot be accomplished through office hours and friendly teaching styles.

The risk of losing liberal arts is indelibly linked to the intrusion of unfettered (ostensibly) "market" mechanisms throughout human life. Where there used to be at least some sanctuary, now there is none. Education is just one of the last to fall.

• On his web site, Simon Gros also responded, saying "please stop bashing the superstar professor without engaging his work":

Mrs. Schuman also uses the basic strategy that is usually employed by politically right-wing authors who try to dismiss Žižek’s political engagements, more specifically taking one of his jokes out of context. I have followed some comments of various professors online about this specific Žižek’s statement of ‘not reading and examining student papers’ and most of them have shared some sympathy with Žižek’s joke, agreeing that doing such work actually consumes a huge amount of their time for which they don’t receive much gratification. Mrs. Schuman fails to notice that Žižek is employed as senior researcher and not as a regular professor, at least at his faculty in Ljubljana and to attack him for not grading papers there is simply absurd, since it’s a formal post and it’s quite rare that he appears to deliver a lecture there at all. She also, like most of the people bashing him, fails to notice the statement was a joke, like many of phrases like this mainly produced in recorded interviews to provoke a media response, so in a way Mrs. Schuman’s text could have said to have been expected before it was ever written.

But anyone who is familiar with how he develops theory should notice that he is also the International Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birbkeck in London, where he annually holds very serious ‘masterclasses’, which consist of multiple successive days of lectures followed by discussions with his students, where there is more than enough opportunity for those who are genuinely interested in his work to provide their comments and criticism, and more importantly, get a first-person perspective and a chance to collaborate on the development of his theory; his lectures there have often ended up as important parts of his big philosophical tomes later on. So he does teach classes, very important classes which have philosophical consequences, and Mrs. Schuman repeats the accusation against him simply because she doesn’t seem to be very familiar with his work. Those that are obsessed with Žižek’s place in the employment scheme of academia usually harbour resentment and envy due to their personal lack of luck at getting a satisfying job in the academic machinery and are just searching for quick attempts at dismissal.

Critical Pedagogy and Imperialism; social media and commodity fetishism

• Counterpunch published an interview with Peter Mayo on education, imperialism, and critical pedagogy:

Gramsci has had a huge impact on critical pedagogy especially because of the importance he attached to the role of culture, in both its highbrow and popular forms, in the process of hegemony which combines rule by force with rule by consent. His discussion on the role of intellectuals in this process also infuenced discussions centering around educators as cultural workers in the critical pedagogy field. Henry Giroux has been particularly influential here. One issue which deserves greater treatment in critical pedagogy, in my view, is that of ‘powerful knowledge’ which, though not necessarily popular knowledge and also needs to be problematised, should still be mastered for one not to remain at the margins of political life.

[...]

Following Freire, I would say: the commitment to teaching is a political commitment because education is a political act. There is no such thing as a neutral educaton. We must always ask on whose side are we when we teach?  More importantly we should ask, with whom are we educating and learning? I ask this question in the spirit of Freire’s emphasis on working with rather than for  the oppressed.

• This older post on Digital Solipsist looks at alienation and commodity fetishism in social media:

In tying Marxist ideology to social media, there are a number of things to clarify, as the comparison is not a perfect one. Perhaps the most questionable caveat is the ownership of the modes of production. In the social media model, it can be said that the proletariat themselves own the modes of productions since they typically own the computer or devices that they are using to channel their intellectual labor through. Additionally, almost all popular social media networks today allow users to retain the copyright of the content that they post  (Facebook, a; MySpace, n.d.; Twitter, n.d.). Thus, it would seem that making the argument that users are alienated from the results of their intellectual labor power is a moot point.

[...]

I humbly suggest that in the social media model, owning the output or product of intellectual labor power has little if anything to do with Marx’s species being. Instead, I feel that it is the social connections created, broken, strengthened, or weakened that feed directly to the worker’s species being. Since the output of the intellectual labor power in this case is not a tangible good, the only “finished product” that the worker can place value in and not be alienated from is the actual social connection that their output generates; not the actual output itself. This allows for a supra or meta level of social connection above that of the social connections embodied in physical outputs outlined by Marx.

Graeber on labor and leisure; the perils of hipster economics; and the educational value of MOOCs

• Following last month's post of David Graeber's views on "bullshit jobs," this Salon interview with Graeber discusses the failed forecast of universal leisure time:

Right after my original bullshit jobs piece came out, I used to think that if I wanted, I could start a whole career in job counseling – because so many people were writing to me saying “I realize my job is pointless, but how can I support a family doing something that’s actually worthwhile?” A lot of people who worked the information desk at Zuccotti Park, and other occupations, told me the same thing: young Wall Street types would come up to them and say “I mean, I know you’re right, we’re not doing the world any good doing what we’re doing. But I don’t know how to live on less than a six figure income. I’d have to learn everything over. Could you teach me?”

But I don’t think we can solve the problem by mass individual defection. Or some kind of spiritual awakening. That’s what a lot of people tried in the ‘60s and the result was a savage counter-offensive which made the situation even worse. I think we need to attack the core of the problem, which is that we have an economic system that, by its very nature, will always reward people who make other people’s lives worse and punish those who make them better. I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.

• In an article for Al Jazeera, Sarah Kendzior surveys the politics of gentrification and the perils of hipster economics:

Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it "cleaned up the neighbourhood". This is often code for a literal white-washing. The problems that existed in the neighbourhood - poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services - did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.

That new location is often an impoverished suburb, which lacks the glamour to make it the object of future renewal efforts. There is no history to attract preservationists because there is nothing in poor suburbs viewed as worth preserving, including the futures of the people forced to live in them. This is blight without beauty, ruin without romance: payday loan stores, dollar stores, unassuming homes and unpaid bills. In the suburbs, poverty looks banal and is overlooked.

In cities, gentrifiers have the political clout - and accompanying racial privilege - to reallocate resources and repair infrastructure. The neighbourhood is "cleaned up" through the removal of its residents. Gentrifiers can then bask in "urban life" - the storied history, the selective nostalgia, the carefully sprinkled grit - while avoiding responsibility to those they displaced.

Hipsters want rubble with guarantee of renewal. They want to move into a memory they have already made.

• At Mute, Dominic Pettman writes about the rise of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) in higher education, and how commodification affects the value of learning:

In the pedagogic trenches, MOOCs are considered a symptom of wider economic patterns which effectively vacuum resources up into the financial stratosphere, leaving those doing the actual work with many more responsibilities, and far less compensation. Basic questions about the sustainability of this model remain unanswered, but it is clear that there is little room for enfranchised, full-time, fully-compensated faculty. Instead, we find an army of adjuncts servicing thousands of students; a situation which brings to mind scenes from Metropolis rather than Dead Poets Society.

[...]

For companies pushing MOOCs, education is no different from entertainment: it is simply a question of delivering ‘content.’ But learning to think exclusively via modem is like learning to dance by watching YouTube videos. You may get a sense of it, but no-one is there to point out mistakes, deepen your understanding, contextualise the gestures, shake up your default perspective, and facilitate the process. The role of the professor or instructor is not simply the shepherd for the transmission of information from point A to point B, but the co-forging of new types of knowledge, and critically testing these for various versions of soundness and feasibility. Wisdom may be eternal, but knowledge – both practical and theoretical – evolves over time, and especially exponentially in the last century, with all its accelerated technologies. Knowledge is always mediated, so we must consciously take the tools of mediation into account. Hence the need for a sensitive and responsive guide: someone students can bounce new notions off, rather than simply absorb information from. Without this element, distance learning all too often becomes distanced learning. Just as a class taken remotely usually leads to a sea of remote students.

[...]

Marshall McLuhan was half-right when he insisted that the electronic age is ushering in a post-literate society. But no matter how we like to talk of new audio-visual forms of literacy, there is still the ‘typographic man’ pulling the strings, encouraging us to express ourselves alphabetically. Indeed, the electronic and the literate are not mutually exclusive, much as people like to pit them against each other.

• Pettman also quotes Ian Bogost's comments on distance learning:

The more we buy into the efficiency argument, the more we cede ground to the technolibertarians who believe that a fusion of business and technology will solve all ills. But then again, I think that's what the proponents of MOOCs want anyway. The issue isn't online education per se, it's the logics and rationales that come along with certain implementations of it.

Google settles over privacy violations, Social media segregation, the era of big data, and more...

• Google is reportedly reaching a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over an incident in which the Internet search giant violated an agreement with the FTC by tracking Safari users' data. From the Associated Press:

Google is poised to pay a $22.5 million fine to resolve allegations that it broke a privacy promise by secretly tracking millions of Web surfers who rely on Apple's Safari browser, according to a person familiar with settlement.

If approved by the FTC's five commissioners, the $22.5 million penalty would be the largest the agency has ever imposed on a single company.

• Adrianna Jeffries at BetaBeat covers a BBC report on how users of specific web sites break down along racial demographics. The article misleadingly refers to "segregation" in social media, but the information and analysis by danah boyd is interesting:

Pinterest is 70 percent female and 79 percent white, according to the BBC. By contrast, black and Latino users are overrepresented on Twitter versus the general population.

Ms. Boyd theorized that there was an exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook similar to white flight to the suburbs when the U.S. desegregated schools. Facebook, the vanilla of social media sites, was approaching the makeup of the U.S. population at the time of an analysis done in 2009. That was the year that white users stopped being overrepresented and black and Latino users stopped being underrepresented.

• Tom Silva writes about the Era of Big Data in this HuffPo piece:

Among companies of more than 1,000 employees in 15 out of the economy's 17 sectors, the average amount of data is a surreal 235 terabytes. That's right -- each of these companies has more info than the Library of Congress. And so, why should we care? Because data is valuable. The growth of digital networks and the networked sensors in everything from phones to cars to heavy machinery mean that data has a reach and sweep it has never had before. The key to Big Data is connecting these sensors to computing intelligence which can make sense of all this information (in pure Wall-E style, some theorists call this the Internet of Things).

• This short post at Kethu.org presents survey data and rhetorically wonders whether social media behaviors negatively impact life enjoyment:

Consider this: 24% of respondents to one survey said they’ve missed out on enjoying special moments in person because — ironically enough — they were too busy trying to document their experiences for online sharing. Many of us have had to remind ourselves to “live in the now” — instead of worry about composing the perfect tweet or angling for just the right Instagram shot.

• In this piece at Business Insider CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis offers insight into journalism education:

I’m coming to believe that classroom time is too limiting in the teaching of tools. At CUNY, we’ve seen over the years that students come in with widening gulfs in both their prior experience and their future ambitions in tools and technologies. My colleagues at CUNY, led by Sandeep Junnarkar, have implemented many new modules and courses to teach such topics as data journalism (gathering, analysis, visualization) and familiarity with programming.

Note well that I have argued since coming to CUNY that we should not and cannot turn out coders. I also do not subscribe to the belief that journalism’s salvation lies in hunting down that elusive unicorn, the coder-journalism, the hack-squared. I do believe that journalists must become conversant in technologies, sufficient to enable them to (a) know what’s possible, (b) specify what they want, and (c) work with the experts who can create that.