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zomg these guys are so racist

Feb 14th, 09 / 1 Comment

I just found out about American Renaissance Magazine, a ~~disgusting neo-conservative platform for justifying loathsomely cretinous attitudes toward race~~ clearinghouse for neo-conservative articles that support white supremacist beliefs. I’m finding it impossible, actually, to describe this site in a way that could be remotely considered unbiased, so I’ll just let it speak for itself:

American Renaissance is a monthly magazine that has been published since 1991. It has been called “a literate, undeceived journal of race, immigration and the decline of civility.”

Well played, American Renaissance. The phrasing of this description completely conceals the fact that the praise you’re quoting comes from the founder of the magazine himself, white supremacist Jared Taylor.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY3Z0XYuSog&hl=en&fs=1]

This site positions itself as a kind of lone voice of reason on race-related issues. A key argument championed by American Renaissance, for example, is about race and IQ:

One of the most destructive myths of modern times is that people of all races have the same average intelligence. It is widely accepted that genes account for much of the difference in intelligence between individuals, but many people still refuse to believe genes explain group differences in average intelligence. This blindness leads to futile attempts to eliminate “learning gaps” between the races and forces whites to accept the view that if blacks and Hispanics are less successful than whites, it is because of white “racism.”

I got through the site’s article on Wikipedia’s leftist bias before I just couldn’t bear it anymore. As the article explains,

Wikipedia’s origins go back to 2000, when Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, then a pornographer, and Larry Sanger, a doctoral student in philosophy at Ohio State University, founded the online encyclopedia “Nupedia”…. Some critics believe Wikipedia is a personality cult built up around Mr. Wales, but the leftist slant of the encyclopedia does not reflect his own politics. He is said to be an “objectivist,” or admirer of Ayn Rand, who opposed federal help for New Orleans after Katrina and hates gun control. He probably settled for whoever would work for free, and just lets the leftist cabal have its way. Only by dropping editorial standards could Wikipedia get a massive force of volunteer labor.

Actually, all you need to know about this ~~execrable collection of hate-inspired diatribes~~ magazine comes through loud and clear in the article’s outrage at the Wikipedia entry on Brown v. Board of Education:

The 5,900-word article…would have readers believe it was a popular, constitutionally and scientifically grounded decision, and that its few opponents were all practitioners of “scientific racism.” It fails to mention that Kenneth Clark’s social science, which formed the basis of the court’s decision, was fraudulent or that Clark’s testimony was essentially perjury. Needless to say, the article cites no books by conservatives such as Raymond Wolters or Paul Craig Roberts that correct the liberal myth. Nor does the article mention the Harvard Law Review’s (vol. 100:817, 1987) extensive account of Solicitor General Philip Elman’s illegal, back-door collusion with Justice Felix Frankfurter to twist the court toward desegregation.

These guys must be so mad all the time. It must be downright painful to be a white supremacist these days.

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The Professor Is Sorry: Or, earn a degree on your iPod in just two months!

Feb 13th, 09 / 1 Comment

I was recently directed to the following TV commercial presented by Kaplan University:

On the one hand, I kinda love the message of this commercial. On the other hand, I want to kill the messenger. Kind of. I think.

The commercial is for Kaplan University, which bills itself as an institution of higher learning dedicated to providing innovative undergraduate, graduate, and continuing professional education. The site proclaims with pride:

Our programs foster student learning with opportunities to launch, enhance, or change careers in a diverse global society. The University is committed to general education, a student-centered service and support approach, and applied scholarship in a practical environment.

What you don’t get from this description is the fact that Kaplan is an online university, also known in some circles as a distance learning institution and in others as a <a href=”http://us.bbb.org/WWWRoot/SitePage.aspx?site=113&id=193afce4-b86b-4e84-adf9-30bfadbe5445&art=4865
” target=”_blank”>diploma mill. Through Kaplan, you can earn degrees ranging from a professional certificate to a master’s degree. You can, for godsake, earn a juris doctorate through Kaplan Online.

In many important ways, of course, this is worrisome. Aside from the fact that a student could ostensibly become, say, a police officer with no field training, there’s also the question of fraud. Fraud. Fraud. Fraud.

On the other hand, the rise in popularity of online universities points to a shift in how we think about expertise. While web 2.0 technologies increasingly allow us to offer expertise in a variety of areas, with or without educational credentials, the desire for evidence of expertise lingers in our collective psyches. Ultimately, we still believe that when our cat’s kidneys start to fail, the single veterinarian who spent 8 years in school followed by years of field experience can provide better advice than the two thousand cat owners on a devoted forum.

There is something to be said for the apprenticeship model of learning, one in which an aspiring neurosurgeon trains under the watchful and caring eye of a senior and more experienced expert. At the same time, however, one of the enormous affordances of participatory culture is that it enables us to tap into collective knowledge and collaborate on continuing to build that knowledge. We might call this collective expertise: All of us are more expert than one of us (especially if we can get the vet to join the forum).

This doesn’t mean I would trust two thousand pet owners to perform surgery on my cat, of course. Collective expertise does not always, after all, exchange at the same rate as apprenticeship, especially when the field requires a high degree of specialization and an intricate web of skills, mindsets, and practices. It does mean, though, that the meanings of “expertise” and, therefore, “credibility” have gotten just a little broader. And it means we need to reconsider what it means to be an “expert,” in professional domains as well as those defined by personal and social affinities.

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It already happened; nobody noticed

Feb 12th, 09 / 4 Comments

This is one of my favorite quotes in the universe:

“There won’t be schools in the future…. I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum– all of that. The whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible with the presence of the computer… But this will happen only in communities of children who have access to computers on a sufficient scale.”–Seymour Papert

My deep, deep sense is that Papert is right. In all significant ways, computers have exploded our established understanding of the cultural value of schools; the only problem is that administrators and policymakers don’t know it yet. The issue runs deep: Given (and I believe it is a given) that school as structured is incompatible with the participatory cultures enabled by digital technologies, what sorts of structures and frameworks can replace the antiquated, industrial-era setup of the school?

It beggars the imagination to think that Papert made the above statement in 1984; 25 years later, we are awash in technologies that must have seemed to him, at best, like glints on the horizon: tools that enable communication, collaboration, and circulation of ideas and creative works. Yet the school as an institution looks very much like it did during the rock ‘n’ roller cola wars and the first term of the Reagan administration. Students still sit in rows, are still required to memorize facts and spit them back out in the form of standardized tests, are not encouraged–and often, not permitted–to access the information and expertise that’s distributed and available across a vast range of media platforms.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP0APvTSMMw&hl=en&fs=1]

Meanwhile, report after report identifies technology trends and highlights innovative new technologies, without spending a lot of time considering how these technologies may be leveraged to shift the educational landscape. As my colleague Caro Williams exclaims, “If we only talk about what’s available, we aren’t paying enough attention to how technology is re-situating students and people in this strange blend of real and virtual–and THAT’S where this all gets exciting!”

It’s easy enough to identify trends, harder to figure out how those trends mean in the classroom. In many ways, non-school spaces (like news media, transmedia entertainment, and so on) are leading the way in terms of responding to the new affordances of new resources. Perhaps that’s because the question in any production space contains a dependent clause: “What is this new trend, and how can we use it?” Oh! I know–maybe we should turn schools into for-profit spaces where funding is tied to performance! Bwahahahaha brb sobbing over NCLB

ok back

Okay, so if these technologies really are changing what education may mean in the 21st century, why haven’t schools caught on? Pretty simply, because change involves risk; and because when it comes to education, the stakes are really freaking high. What parent, what educator, what researcher would risk tossing children across the gulf between what schools are and what they could–what they must–become?

Yes, a risk is involved (though not necessarily, of course, the risk of dropping kids to their deaths in a bottomless gulch; there is something to be said for hyperbole in moderation, after all). But I believe a risk is what’s required, here at the end of all things.

It’s the struggle of our society, and one that John Dewey pointed to back at the end of the 19th century, when he proposed development of a laboratory school where educators could try out new approaches to teaching and learning. In setting forth a series of arguments about new ways to think about knowing and cognition, he conceded that

[i]t is… comparatively easy to lay down general propositions like the foregoing; easy to use them to criticize existing school conditions; easy by means of them to urge the necessity of something different. But art is long. The difficulty is in carrying such conceptions into effect—in seeing just what materials and methods, in what proportion and arrangement, are available and helpful at a given time…. There is no answer in advance to such questions as these. Tradition does not give it because tradition is founded upon a radically different psychology. Mere reasoning cannot give it because it is a question of fact. It is only by trying that such things can be found out. To refuse to try, to stick blindly to tradition, because the search for the truth involves experimentation in the region of the unknown, is to refuse the only step which can introduce rational conviction into education.

Long revolution, indeed.

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If you’re reading this, you’re my public

Feb 11th, 09 / 4 Comments

I’m obsessed with my new blog. I spend hours devising tactics for directing traffic to it, then I pore over the results over at Google Analytics, where, for example, I can learn that on the first day in the existence of sleeping alone and starting out early, my site had 16 unique visitors and a total of 33 visits (I assume that the 17 extra visits all came from me). I’m aiming upward, upward, upward, and directing my energies toward herding the cats my way.

Why do I care? I mean, other than for the obvious reason that if I’ve spent all this time carefully and lovingly crafting a blogpost I want people to read it? The short answer is that social media makes us consider, and target, our intended audience in more complex ways.

New media guru Howard Rheingold has written about the participatory potential of blogging, explaining that “[b]ecause the public sphere depends on free communication and discussion of ideas, it changes when it scales—as soon as your political entity grows larger than the number of citizens you can fit into a modest town hall, this vital marketplace for political ideas can be influenced by changes in communications technology.”

As bloggers are well aware, the potential is enormous for scaled-up communication via digital technology–but in a real sense, the true potential is never fully realized. It can’t be: Among the constraints and affordances of new media technology is the fact that it enables nearly anyone to become a mediamaker. Cutting through the noise, reaching all members of one’s potential public, is possible in theory but futile in practice. We don’t any of us live anymore in a world where we can expect the person living, working, or studying next to us to have read the same news stories as we have, even though we all have increased access to the news.

That doesn’t mean we can’t try; and, in fact, Rheingold and others point to the “generative” power of public voice in a new media context. He writes:

In one sense, public voice can be characterized not just as active, but as generative—a public is brought into being in a sense by the act of addressing some text in some medium to it. Michael Warner has argued that any particular public (as distinguished from “the public”) comes into being only when it is addressed by a media text, rather than existing a priori—“it exists by virtue of being addressed.” By writing a blog post about an issue, a blogger brings together people whose only common interest is the issue addressed, bringing about “a relation among strangers” that would probably not otherwise exist. Creating a wiki about a local issue has the potential to precipitate a public that can inform itself, stage debates, even organize collective action.

So far on this blog, I’ve published a poem, written about boobies, spoken to my hope for the future of academia, and, now, pleaded for readers. I’m not yet sure who my public is; not yet sure what type of action I’m interested in engaging my public in, other than alerting them to my take on some things that have attracted my attention.

I wonder if I’ll experience this blogging thing like I experienced teaching when I was new to the profession. Often, especially in my first few semesters, I would bluster into the classroom with some vague idea of what I wanted to do, what I wanted to teach; it was only after the class was over that I was able to work out what I was doing and how well I’d done it. I’d go back in the next day armed with just that tiny bit of extra awareness and confidence, which led to increased awareness and confidence, and so on.

For now, I’ll just settle for readers. Please read my blog. You can also comment on it if you like.

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Plan B for the grad school set

Feb 10th, 09 / 1 Comment

Colloquial wisdom says that during economic recessions, more people turn to graduate school as a way out of the battle over fewer and less savory jobs. It’s not clear whether this is actually happening during our current downturn; some reports show applications on the rise, while others suggest decreased interest in accumulating debt or losing out on years of earning potential.

For those who pursue graduate school–and especially doctoral study–in the hopes of one day securing an academic or research position in their field, the question hinges more on what effect the current downturn is having and will continue to have on the academic environment. The news, grim as it is, isn’t all bad.

First, it’s no surprise to anybody that universities have been trending away from tenure-track positions for years. Recent studies show that up to 70 percent of faculty at public and private universities are either adjunct instructors or non-tenure track full-timers, and this was before the recession led to faculty hiring freezes at major colleges and universities nationwide.

It’s still too early to tell what long-term impact this will have on academia, though even in times of plenty there are more superbly qualified newly minted academics than there are available positions. Institutional reaction to the recession is likely to widen the disparity. As William Pannapacker, an Associate English professor at Hope College, explains,

Universities (even those with enormous endowments) have historically taken advantage of recessions to bring austerity to teaching. There will be hiring freezes and early retirements. Rather than replacements, more adjuncts will be hired, and more graduate students will be recruited, eventually flooding the market with even more fully qualified teacher-scholars who will work for almost nothing. When the recession ends, the hiring freezes will become permanent, since departments will have demonstrated that they can function with fewer tenured faculty members.

May the Fates forgive and protect me for saying this, but it’s possible a more “austere” academic environment will have a positive impact, if not on emerging academics, then on the pursuit of scholarly research and the progress of Big Ideas. Academics who want a secure place in the ivory tower will increasingly need to rely on their ability to network and, more importantly, collaborate with other researchers. They will need–and want–to provide regular evidence of valuable scholarly work, and they may work to present themselves as innovators and crafters of important work. It’s even possible that the days of the ivory tower are over, for good, for real this time.

At the same time, there will be a new crew of public intellectuals and entrepreneurs built out of those who choose (or, all right, are forced) to leave academia; these people, we can hope, may find ways to parlay their research into innovative and useful products across a variety of disciplines.

There is, of course, a real danger that this need for academics to present themselves as creative and resourceful–and able to produce–could lead to a corporate mindset across research environments; that researchers would be pushed even harder to produce results instead of ideas; that instead of risking their careers with a shift in focus or research interests they stick with the more familiar path. During times of recession, however–and this recession in particular–there is a sense that the CEO mindset isn’t working. A real sentiment exists that whatever we did to keep America on top for so long, led by production-oriented CEOs in almost every corporate domain, led to our economic downfall.

The political climate does seem prepared to support a pro-intellectual move. I was recently discussing the inauguration of President Obama with a friend from the UK who came to America after completing his own doctoral work at Oxford University. “It’s going to take years,” he said, “to undo the damage Bush did to your country. You can see the effect he had on businesses, on schools…in almost every area.

“But this is the ‘new America’,” he continued, trailing off as he looked off into the distance. The new America! I think he’s right, though I suppose only time will tell.

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Gearing up for Operation Feel Your Boobies

Feb 9th, 09 / 24 Comments

I’ve just learned about a breast cancer awareness organization called “Feel Your Boobies.” As the name probably suggests, the target demographic of this group is young women. Here’s what you learn by visiting their website:

Feel Your Boobies® is a breast cancer awareness non-profit organization whose mission is to utilize unexpected and unconventional methods to remind young women, to “feel their boobies.”

I learned about Feel Your Boobies through Facebook, when a friend joined the cause online. The upside, I guess, of using the name is that it piques interest; while I normally pay little attention to similar notifications, I did notice this one. I checked out the Facebook group, then I went to the website. Then I started writing.

I gotta say, I’m not a fan of the name, however positive the effects. After all, isn’t the fetishizing and sexualizing of female body parts a piece of the problem? Let’s face it: We’re really freaking immature when it comes to talking about breasts. Culturally, we treat them as dangerous; unless they’re on display as sex objects, we don’t want to see them at all (for more on this, google “breastfeeding in public”). We’ve imbued the breast with so much sexual power that serious cultural conversation about diseases and dangers is difficult, at best, to carry on. It was only through great struggle and the loss of many great women to breast cancer (and, I suspect, a parallel rising awareness of the dangers of prostate cancer) that we got to the point where we could begin having frank discussions about tactics for diagnosis and prevention.

That’s why calling a campaign “Feel Your Boobies” doesn’t quite work for me. I get the point, I really do–kind of a ‘reclaiming,’ a ‘taking back,’ a clever usage of the language of the target audience. The organization and its name may even have some impact, raising awareness among young women and perhaps leading to some early diagnoses (the site provides some testimonials to this effect). I do wonder, though, what the longer-term effects may be. No matter how “postfeminist” we believe our society to be, the reality is that we’re walking around in a heteronormative culture designed through a partriarchal lens. We continue to agree to think and talk about the world in male-friendly ways. On the one hand, “Feel Your Boobies” may make men (and lots of women, I’m sure) productively uncomfortable: Sexualizing breast self-exams, increasing awareness through the promotion of a kind of autoerotic call to action. On the other hand, the name seems to perpetuate the kind of socio-sexual power breasts have in our society. “All hail the great Breast,” right?

I’d rather see us take the sex out of self-exams. I’d rather see us work to divorce breast cancer research and breast cancer awareness from the cult of the breast. My sense is that Feel Your Boobies may increase awareness—and that’s good—while continuing to worship at the altar of the breast—and that’s not so good.

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About sleeping alone and starting out early

Feb 9th, 09 / 2 Comments

Scientific Breakthrough

The snow whipped around so fast last night
it outashed ash. A dry stew shuttled over
rough-edged brick and rattled the window
until this morning dark rain tamped it
and all the riot down to the ground.

There were long grassy evenings but the light
slants blue lately and my only strategy
entails sleeping alone and starting out early.
My hands are red nested birds for now
and preliminary tests indicate only that I may
be fine. Soon noses will tumble out
on rumpled leashes and then and then and then.

They will never find their task
completed. They will never name it.

They have pressed too hard on the hood
and then paced indifferently away.
They have stepped wrong
against someone’s ankle,

snapping it twice. (The eaves
lean gracelessly toward the road,
revealing too much.) They want
to learn the meaning of each gesture.

They live elevated lives. They live
elevated lives. They adhere to a list.

In the park, a legion of ancient
women sprint shouting and
splashing for the slide. They screech
and crumple across a hidden swath
of ice, thin hair ribboning across gray
snow and mud, primary mittens
clutching for branch or hand.
A tinny wail lifts across the surface
and slides over the rise.

Someone has volunteered
to recall every bird and try again.
What happens next does not depend.

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