Without Apology

Dr. Zappala and I have thrown a lot at our Digital Civilization class: new tools, and a radically new approach to content, independent learning, and connecting students to their own passions, to other students, and to things bigger and broader than a semester and a Gen Ed requirement.

But no apologies! Sure, it's a lot, with plenty of kinks to work out. We'll get some things wrong. But we know where we are going, and that direction is not backwards to the status quo of higher education.

Speaking of which, the following video expresses our sentiments. Only, unlike the professor at the beginning, we will not shrug and say we have failed our students. We are giving this experiment all we've got.

Too many teachers, courses, and colleges proceed apace as though no radical revolution is underway in our society, This is not our point of view. We will not be teaching this course in the traditional way with a little bit of audiovisual enhancement to dress it up. No. We are challenging our students in a serious way precisely because the stakes are so high and the attention given to the change is so low -- even at first-rate universities like the one we teach at.

It isn't just that technology is increasing and media multiplying. All our institutions are being reformulated -- not just retooled -- as the revolution takes hold in how we communicate, think, solve problems, collaborate, persuade, work -- in how we conceive of the world and act meaningfully within it: government, business, family life, art -- the works.

It may appear to our students that their professors are a couple of geeks imposing their love of things technical upon their students. If so, they have missed the point. It is not about the tools, nor some naive attachment to gadgets and science fiction. It is about the principles upon which society is built (or rebuilt); it is about a lifetime of purposeful, educated, passionate involvement in the life of the mind and the lives of our neighbors across the planet. It is about the very purpose of an education. It is about realizing how to realize your potential in a world in which print literacy will no longer dominate. It's about catching up, yes, but it is more about catching the vision.

We have that vision, and it thrills us. And it scares us a bit, to tell you the truth. But we want to take our students with us, forward in the future. We want them to be brave enough to detach from the comfort and familiarity of  textbook learning and to pick up the challenge to dig deep within to the taproots of their passions, and to reach beyond themselves and their classrooms to the social networks and authentic issues and problems to which they need not wait to begin contributing their talents.

For all of this, we don't apologize. We hope our students are just crazy enough to stay with us for the ride.

Civilizing Us Digitally

Do our technological tools lead us toward or away from being civilized?

Daniel's recent post discussed simulations, through which parts of the world are modeled by computers in order to ask important questions about physical phenomena like weather or oil spills. In a way, this is how you can think about history or about literature. Stories (both the true and fictional sorts) are simulations. When we read Thomas More's Utopia, it models social phenomena, which might be as vital as those physically-oriented simulations Daniel mentioned.  Kevin Watson rightly pointed out that Utopia was not a place without problems (Andrew DeWitt noted that slavery was troublingly part of More's ideal place). Fine. The problems within a fictional utopia yield useful information for the real world. We can appreciate history and literature as a set of experiments from the past to color the present.

Our digital world is a richly experimental world, combining the data-driven world of science with various social sandboxes. Video games are often condemned as the end of civilization (or at least the end of reading). What about Sid Meier's famous computer game, Civilization? You start in 4000 B.C. and attempt to engineer a society to stand the test of time.

Video games are called antisocial, but if you are learning the various dynamic factors that influence the rise of nations across centuries, isn't that a kind of valuable knowledge? Maybe this sort of gaming could be the sort of "civic media" described in Dalton Haslam's recent blog post:

the use of media and information to help society function in the the way that it should. It helps foster democratic ideals and leads to greater awareness as citizens

Media advancing democratic ideals, greasing the wheels of society. Sounds like technology and media are definitely tools for advancing civilization. It's true that advances in communications technology have generally meant greater participation from more people within their societies. This is where social idealism and technological utopianism combine: if we can only get a laptop for every child in the world, we'll soon have global democracy (and the end of poverty, etc.).

Studying a bit of Thomas More's Utopia is a good place to begin our thinking through digital civilization. As Mike Lemon points out in his recent post, the narrator of Utopia speaks admiringly of Utopians learning from the Greeks, yet the constant ironic tone puts this admiration in question. As Mike says, "Is he truly admiring the idea of information dissemination, or is he poking fun at the current trend of rediscovery"? Maybe Thomas More was playing with readers the way we might play with Sid Meier's game, Civilization.

Part of Renaissance thinking was devoted to idealizing (especially over ancient civilizations), and part of it was devoted to skepticism. That's why you get something like More's Utopia -- literally meaning a place that is "not" (u-topia) and a place that is good (eu-topia).  That's probably a healthy place to be during this Digital Renaissance of today.

Civilization itself is an ideal, going back to Plato's Republic or to St. Augustine's City of God. But in contrast to what? The root word of civilization is the Latin civis, or "city." Are cities inherently ideal -- as opposed to rural places? That's very problematic. As writers like Thoreau and Wordsworth (or environmentalists like John Muir, Rachel Carson, or Edward Abbey) have illustrated so well, our connection with earthy, sky, and land may be more profoundly meaningful than the artifice and pollutions of city life. Are we aspiring to a dystopia by privileging "civilization"?

Nepalese women using One Laptop computers on the way to Mt. Everest base camp

And worse, by focusing on DIGITAL civilization, are we only distancing ourselves further from the authenticity of our physical environments and from friends and family? We've all known the scenario of technology sucking hours away, isolating us as we hover over screens, ignoring the flesh-and-blood people that are nearby. Is technology civilizing us or isolating us?

I've been interested by Kristen Cardon's musings about technology and education in her blog. She's studying Tibetans and technology, and she is asking some tough questions:

Why do we, along with Tibetans see a holy grail in classroom technology? Given that some technologies actually improve the classroom, which ones detract?

I honestly don't know how to answer those hard questions. Even as we construct this class, Dr. Zappala and I anguish over whether we are focusing too much on means (digital tools) and not enough on ends (course content).

Let's up the ante even more. Maybe we're just gearing up for oppression through our technology in the classroom (either being oppressed or being oppressors). One of my recent students, Allison Frost, used her research blog to study the ways that China is truly ramping up in the digital age into Big Brother -- the overlords of George Orwell's 1984. At first I thought this was a simplistic analogy, but her research was very convincing. In the hands of those who wish to monitor and micromanage, technology is a powerful agency.

And if you look at how gambling, pornography, terrorism -- or even just spam, uncivil discourse, bullying, and widespread idiocy -- have spread rampantly through technology, it's easy to see see digital civilization as an oxymoron. We've invented the means to amplify our own worse tendencies to the point of moral and physical self-destruction.

Photos: 1) flickr - graye; 2) flickr - One Laptop Per Child