Digital Ethnography

As an alternative to the idea that we teach “subjects,” I’ve been playing with the idea that what we really teach are “subjectivities”: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be “taught” – only practiced. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one’s self-esteem.” You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self. (I wrote more about this here.)

Some of these “subjectivities” are clearly named within different disciplines. For example, in anthropology we simply call it “The Anthropological Perspective.” Sociologists have “The Sociological Imagination.” When I first considered this distinction between “subjects” and “subjectivities,” I realized that for me the content is really just a means to an end – the ultimate end being “The Anthropological Perspective.” For a long time I did not even realize this, and I constantly struggled to pile on content to make sure that I “covered the ground” necessary. It was only later that I realized that if I could inspire the proper perspective, the students would be gathering “content” to serve this powerful perspective for the rest of their lives.

So here’s my question to everybody: Within your own particular field, is there a particular “subjectivity,” perspective, or way of seeing and interacting with the world that you are trying to inspire in your students? In your mind, is this perspective more important than the “content” or “subject-matter” of the course? I would really be interested in hearing more about how this resonates or conflicts with ideas from other disciplines. If you have time, let me know what you think, and how you approach your own class.

“My notion of the threat is different today,” former Prime Minister Tony Blair explained at the Future of State Universities conference. When he entered the war, he saw the conflict as a simple process of knocking out old regimes and supporting democracy. He now recognizes that the ideologies behind terrorism run deeper and broader than he once thought. It isn’t just terrorists that hold these ideologies, and it isn’t just Muslims. He sees the real war as one of closed vs. open worldviews, and the long term victory will be won through education, not warfare. To this end he proposed an internationalization of education, presenting a refreshingly broad vision for the ultimate purpose of education that goes beyond the “help students find a job” mentality that seems so prominent today, and challenging us to create empathic global citizens with open minds.

Today I am at the Future of State Universities conference in Dallas. The event calls together university presidents, provosts, state governors and other key institutional players to rethink the future of higher education. No expense has been spared … everybody invited attends for free, the schwag is top-notch, our agenda is on an iPad handed to you as you enter, its at the Four Seasons where they have put me up in a fancy “Villa”. It feels a bit icky and elitist to my small-town Nebraska blood, but I guess this is how you get really busy and important people together for a couple of days. The organizers, Jeb Bush and Jim Hunt working along with Academic Partnerships, have framed the event as a chance to re-invent the university in the face of a long list of challenges and problems we are all too familiar with: budget cuts and diminishing state support (while demand is growing) … poor results (“The US is falling behind”) … high youth unemployment (“even as employers complain that they can’t find qualified workers”) … and decades of rising costs that leave many wondering whether or not college is still worth it. The goal is to brainstorm how to increase access to higher education by lowering costs while raising standards. The speaker list is phenomenal and a key reason why I just couldn’t say no to the opportunity. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair kicks things off followed by talks by innovators like Arizona State’s Michael Crow and Sal Khan (founder of the Khan academy). Interspersed with the innovators are key policy makers like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and key institutional leaders like the president of the American Association of Community Colleges and the presidents of various accreditation boards. I don’t speak until late afternoon, so I’ll try to keep you all posted with summaries, since I don’t think this is live-streamed or available in any other format.

a post in honor of the 20th Anniversary of the public launch of the World Wide Web

Every year at this time I do a little soul-searching. I ponder the semester to come – the 400+ young minds I will encounter – and wonder, “What do they really need to learn?” I try to look beyond the textbooks and standard curriculum (i.e. “what I am supposed to teach”) and think deeply about what students really need to be significant, intelligent participants in today’s world. It does not take any miraculous feat of reflexive speculation to find that the question pertains to me as much as it does to them. And so I’m really sitting here wondering, what do *I* need to learn, and indeed, what do *any of us* need to learn in order to lead happier, healthier, richer, more ethical, and more meaningful lives.

The question is all the more pertinent today because our communication tools have dramatically altered how we learn, how we connect with one another, and even how we think. In the past 2 weeks the release of new research on the Internet’s effect on memory has re-invigorated the question asked by Carr, “Is Google making us stupid?” as well as Kevin Kelly’s clever response, “Will we let Google make us smarter?”

But such debates have only hinted at the core issues I tend to think deeply about as I prepare for the semester. The question of “what we really need to learn” has become almost all-consuming for me in the past 10 years since I started teaching, and virtually every research endeavor I have embarked upon during those years has had this question at its core.

In answering this question, I am not interested in what “information” or “skill sets” we need to learn (though that is, unfortunately, how most of us professors feel compelled to proceed due to various social, physical, and mental structures). Skills and information fade into obsolescence . They are the metaphorical fish handed to you by the guy who should have taught you how to fish. More importantly, skills and information alone do not help us lead happier, healthier, richer, more ethical and more meaningful lives.

We need a vision for who we and our students need to *be* – not just what we should know. I’m not sure what that is, but I do know that it would help to know who we are, and to know who we are it would help to know who we were . . . and that’s why I’m sitting in my office reading a bag full of books written in 1991.

Who we were: 1991

On August 6th, 1991, the Web debuted as a publicly accessible service on the Internet. Almost 20 years later to the day, I’m sitting here reading five books released in the year before that momentous occasion: Charles Taylor’s “The Ethics of Authenticity, Kenneth Gergen’s “The Saturated Self,” Harvey’s “Condition of Postmodernity,” Anthony Giddens’ “Modernity and Self-Identity” and Jameson’s “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Each of them presents a brilliant perspective on who we were at that moment just before the web was born – and all are (despite their depth and perceptiveness) charmingly and innocently unaware of Tim’s little invention that would start to reshape how we live, work and play.

Even a cursory read quickly dispels certain myths about the effects of the Web. Here are three observations that immediately stand out:

1. We were already distracted.

In 1991 we worried that our kids were narcissistic, disengaged, and not easily impressed … that their attention spans were no more than 4 minutes, the average link of an MTV music video. Our kids (and all of us) were already distracted by what Gergen fancifully calls “invitations to incoherence”. If Gergen were to re-write today he would undoubtedly include in these “invitations” the persistent e-mailing, IM’ing, status-updating, texting, tweeting, etc. that invite us into other worlds and thereby make every moment a bit incoherent. But in 1991 he settled for the ability to receive a call or fax from anybody in the world and instantly be transported into another social universe. Gergen went so far as to suggest that such activities “engender a multiplicitous and polymorphic being who thrives on incoherence.” In 1991 he could temper such remarks by noting that few had taken the leap into this polymorphic state, but followed up such caveats by noting that “there is good reason to believe that what is taking place within these groups can be taken as a weathervane of future cultural life in general … in the longer run … the technologies giving rise to social saturation will be inescapable.”

Gergen prophetically notes that “We enter the age of techno-personal systems,” but he was not imagining the World Wide Web. By “technologies of saturation” he simply means roads, cities, cars, planes, cities, phones, computers, newspapers, radio, TV that collectively “saturate” us with information and connections that surpass our capacity to manage effectively.

2. Our education system was already “in crisis” and out of step with the times.

Drop out rates were high. Psychological drop out rates were even higher. As Harvey notes, the Fordist big business-big labor-big state alliance that had brought decades of prosperity to the West had given way to globalization and “flexible accumulation.” The US de-industrialized and by 1991 nearly half of all Americans were working in “information.” We were already a knowledge economy in a globalizing world, but our schools were not keeping up – still teaching in an industrial model.

And there was no shortage of reformers. Canons were falling. Interdisciplinary was all the buzz. New departments – especially Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Culture Studies – sprung up and took aim at the traditional, stodgy, power-laden, white-male-centered educational system. (i.e. Wikipedia did not invent challenges to traditional models of authority.)

3. We thought our kids were self-obsessed, overly-self-important narcissists.

There were already persistent complaints about our kids being disengaged and narcissistic. Students were feeding off of the revolutionary energy of the reformers, reading the postmodernist challenge to authority as an ally in elevating their own opinions to the status of experts. Alan Bloom voiced the concerns of those who were concerned about these developments in “The Closing of the American Mind,” ranting about the self-obsessed “anything goes” attitude of our youth. The book struck a chord and enjoyed a run atop the Times Bestsellers list. (Lasch’s excellent “Culture of Narcissism,” originally published in 1978, had also come back as a revised edition in 1991).

Familiar Themes

Twenty years later the same complaints abound. Jean Twenge has called our youth “Generation Me” and worries that we are facing a “Narcissism Epidemic.” Nicholas Carr has eloquently argued that multi-tasking is merely distracted thinking and that without adequate awareness of how the Internet effects our brains we are destined for the “Shallows.” And blogs, tweets, bookshelves, and conference programs abound with complaints and proposed solutions to our current education crisis.

If the themes seem familiar, perhaps it is simply because these 1991 authors were perceptive enough to identify fundamental persistent tensions in our culture rather than simply identifying the “trends.” They are not hung up on these three simple observations. They are seeking the roots, and what they dig up is as relevant today as it was in 1991.

Taylor calls it “an act of retrieval.” Most cultural commentators miss the mark by failing to recognize the underlying moral ideal at work that is producing the apparent problems. What appears as distraction, dissolution, fragmentation, and self-indulgent, self-important narcissism is, at a deeper level, an expression of our pursuit of the authentic self.

The ethic of authenticity was born in the late 18th century and persists to this day. Being “authentic” requires us to “find ourselves,” “get in touch with our inner lives,” and act from our “core.” It springs from what Taylor calls “the massive subjective turn of modern culture.” “Identity” is so important to us (and especially our students) because we live in a world in which identity and recognition are not givens. They must be achieved. It is our “core project” as Giddens says.

But there are tensions at work within this quest for identity and recognition. Authenticity demands an entirely original creation – which frequently involves opposition to society. Yet at the same time our creations cannot be meaningful without being open to the meaning systems created and sustained by society. We never quite feel like we have “found ourselves.” Just when we think we know who we are the doubts start to creep in: Is this really the real me? Or have I been duped by society? Or we find ourselves so on the margins that we feel a loss of meaning and purpose. Most of us sway between these poles, always struggling to find who we really are. The “technologies of saturation” only amplify these issues by providing us with countless options, so that each self we portray or become “cries out for an alternative, points to a missed potential, or mocks the chosen action for its triviality … the postmodern being is a restless nomad” (Gergen).

Two “slides” (as Taylor calls them) result from this process. First, like a chinese fingercuff the quest for identity squeezes in on us ever harder as we try to escape it. We start focusing more and more on ourselves and our own self-fulfillment, often to the detriment of deep and lasting relationships. (Note: this is not something the internet created. In fact, some would argue the internet was created as a correction to this (and it has worked and failed in dramatic fashion depending on the person and context).) As a result, we become increasingly disengaged from our communities and public life as we focus more and more on ourselves. (Giddens and Harvey would want to point out that this is amplified by the “disembedding mechanisms” of modernity that hide the many connections and relationships that allow us to survive.)

Secondly, there is what Taylor calls “a negation of all horizons of significance” which is a fancy way of saying that we no longer share the same beliefs and values across the whole society, and that there can be little or no ground on which to stand to claim that your beliefs and values are true while others are false. Society becomes increasingly fragmented.

The two slides feed back into the process itself. The first slide makes us feel more disengaged from society so we increasingly seek meaning, recognition, and identity. The second slide creates more and more options for us to try out on the journey, while taking away the possibility of ever finding the “right” identity or being universally positively recognized because there are too many diverse viewpoints and possibilities.

As a society, we continue trending toward individualism and superficiality even as we value connection, community, and authenticity. We disengage from community, social action, and politics. We amuse ourselves to death. And the most amazing collaboration and creativity machine ever created celebrates its 20th anniversary as a distraction device.

What to do?

Taylor is not shy about noting that what we have here is a “vicious circle.” But he also sees the potential for creating a “virtuous circle.” Successful common actions can breed a sense of empowerment and connection that can spread to other domains. That’s where we come in as teachers. We have an opportunity, not just to teach our students “something,” but to be part of their journey and help them find meaning and purpose in an over-saturated, fragmented, and distracting world full of self-indulgent temptations.

I won’t spend the rest of this blog harping on about how I try to do this, but diving into this work of 1991 has re-invigorated my passion for project-based learning in which students engage in real and relevant problems that excite them, work together to approach these problems as a learning community, and harness and leverage digital technologies while also critically reflecting on how those technologies mediate and change their lives.

I know this has been a long post, but how we understand society, and our capacity to imagine how society might change (or if it can change) can have a dramatic effect on how we teach. In 1968, Warren Bennis and Philip Slater made many of the same observations I have put forth here in “The Temporary Society.” Imagining a radically more flexible social world, they suggested that “we should help our students … (1) Learn how to develop intense and deep human relationships quickly – and learn how to “let go.” … (2) Learn how to enter groups and leave them. ”

While I agree with their observations, and the spirit of their suggestions, I take a slightly different approach. If community, social action, and empathy levels are down (as research shows them to be), then I think it is our responsibility to help create more socially conscious and empathic students/citizens.

I don’t want to help make students for the world.

I want to help make students who make the world over.

Today the Digital Ethnography Research Team of 2011 is proud to announce the release of the Visions of Students Today: a “video collage” about student life created by students themselves and presented using the wonders of HTML5, allowing us to “cite” books and videos that are being presented in the remix as they are being shown.

Since the call for submissions went out in January we have received hundreds of submissions. The remix in the middle of the screen is in many ways a video of my own experience viewing these videos, shot from my own point of view. You see me sifting through videos, putting them in piles, checking resources, reading and re-reading the lines that have informed and inspired me. It took me 3 months to sift through these materials; you get to race through them in 5 minutes.

But stick around. There is so much more than what can be seen in my little 5 minute remix. Each of my students (“the Diggies”) has been working for months to put together their own vision, and each one is remarkable in its own way.

In the upper left-hand corner, Caitlin Reynolds starts us off with a 5 minute remix of “found footage” demonstrating the industrial age mentality of efficiency and production from which our schools were born. Derek Schneweis then brilliantly demonstrates that this mentality is still with us today, built right into the structures (physical, social, and mental) of our school system.

And what about the students themselves? Lindsey Iman uses statistics from Twenge’s Generation Me to bring us her beautiful and stirring vision of today’s generation, showing us that most students are primarily concerned with “finding themselves” … searching for identity and recognition in a world in which identity and recognition are not givens. Nate Bozarth courageously lets us into the depths of his questioning mind, taking us through his own existential journey. Rebecca Norman follows with a story of her own transformation (sparked by her favorite professor warning her that she was going to end up “a toothless hooker in South America”). And then there is the story of Maria Snyder, a non-traditional student in the full sense of the word (a 30-something lesbian grandmother of “what ethnicity are you anyway?” descent) . Joseph Savage, our class philosopher, reflects on the broader implications of these stories, mining the works of Charles Taylor, Thomas de Zengotita, Brene Brown, and others, and coming to some stirring insights like:

The artificial environment steers us to learn to meet artificial requirements and bureaucratic regulations. It isn’t an option to read or do homework. But we always have options- that’s how we understand the world. So we “read” and “do homework.” We couldn’t get rid of the words so we put them in scare quotes, scaring away all the meaning with irony. Students, mediated and inauthentic and numb and invulnerable, put course requirements in scare quotes and laugh a hollow laugh of an impossibly pyrrhic victory- not as a joke, but as a lifestyle.

There is a wide gulf between the static stale world of traditional education and the visceral emotional worlds of our students, and there is no shortage of revolutionary ideas now being pursued to close this gulf. Haley Marceau explores a couple of the more radical visions, reporting on her own studies of North Star, Unschooling, Big Picture Learning including interviews with Kenny Rodriquez, Ken Dadford, and others. As she reports from her interview with Kenny Rodriguez, “Traditional education needs to die. It needs to go away.” But as Steven Kelly points out while calling forth Dewey, Friere, Illich, Postman, Weingartner, and others: “These revolutionary ideas, they’re not so new.”

Bringing this all together and providing the stirring conclusion is Blake Hallinan’s “Cracks and Fissures,” a slam poem set to video:

in the awkward silence following a teacher’s simple question

answered only by the blank stares of students too afraid to speak,

meet the boy who finds his voice through hiphop and poetry,

lyrical liberation, salvation

a success story not measured with an a, b, c, or d,

but rather with every continued heart beat

…

let’s go towards a world where we can meet citizens sisters & scholar brothers in the public paradigm

let’s construct libraries among sofas, turns homes into hand built-schools

lets speak a community into existence as we teach vocations with our hands

lets watch the pages of books flutter like birds wings scrawled with incantations of knowledge

let’s play games, exercises patterned entirely on principles & metaphors,

let’s stream podcasts crafted by us, for us, with tools stolen from hands of gods

let’s read blogs, words, written daily, by people like you, like me, that have no other choice but to share what they know with someone, anyone, everyone…

to complain of over-determination gives power to the walls that did not exist before we believed in them

why should we submit to an explanation that denies agency?

look around and see ways to make things work, to subvert imposed expectations.

The Birth of the Project

Last October I started a talk at the Open Video Conference by pointing out that the very issues we were discussing, while of tremendous importance to people’s basic freedoms of expression, were virtually unknown among college-educated youth. A quick survey of my own class of 400 students at Kansas State revealed that fewer than 5% were familiar with terms such as “Fair Use,” “Open Video,” “Royalty-Free Codec,” “Device Freedom,” or even “Net Neutrality.” As we race toward an increasingly digital future, where “code is law”(*) many of the basic freedoms we have become accustomed to while speaking or writing may be stripped away without the public even noticing.

After the talk, Mark Surman of Mozilla approached me, wondering if I might have some ideas about how we might “move the needle” a bit on new media literacy. His challenge left me thinking for some time. I kept searching for the spark that could ignite change, the societal injection that could heal our malaise, the magic beans that would sprout a new media literacy revolution … but none were coming. I came to the conclusion that the only way to create new media literacy is to go the way that all learning goes … the hard way. New media literacy, like all learning, requires an intellectual throw-down in the mind, a challenge of taken-for-granted assumptions, and a transformation of the self from a passive recipient to an active creator of new information, knowledge, and of the world itself.

The best I can do … the best any of us can do … is try to inspire one another and share what we know from our own journey, hence the call for students everywhere to share their own visions, and the collection of those key texts and ideas that have inspired me.

How we did it

HTML5 adds a “video” element, allowing video to be shown on a website without the use of Flash. Leveraging the new possibilities, an event framework called Popcorn.js has been developed, creating a simple API for synchronizing interactive content with video events.

Our lead developer, Garrett Pennington, used Popcorn.js to create the basic framework, and then provided me with two data files where I could enter the thumbnails to be used, their links, where they should be placed, and a timecode for when they should appear. If you are interested in doing something like this yourself, feel free to download any of the source code from our own project, and visit Popcorn.js for more code and ideas.

Special Thanks

We are grateful for all of the submissions. Some professors also need to be thanked for encouraging their students to contribute. We received multiple submissions from courses taught by Stephanie Jo Kent at Umass Amherst, Antonio Vantaggiato at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico, the Social Media Computing class at De La Salle University in the Philippines and from another class at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

As soon as the vision for the project came to my mind I knew I would want to team up with some of the talent at K-State’s very own Office of Mediated Education, (home of Axio, a Blackboard alternative). They did not disappoint. Under Scott Finkeldei’s leadership, Kate Erdozain provided a visionary design while Garrett Pennington took the lead on the project and delivered far beyond expectations, continuously brainstorming and implementing new features.

None of this would have been possible without the global collaboration that is bringing together the popcorn.js library that was essential to this project. Brett Gaylor is an inspiring leader of the project, and all video creators should be sure to check out the amazing potential of creating Open Video with some Popcorn and Butter.

And finally, a special thanks to the MacArthur Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation for financial support, and to National Geographic for providing the “collaboratory” space in which we work.

Here is the video call for submissions and some more tips and guidelines below:

Tag your video VOST2011 and it will automatically appear here and in this feed. It will also appear at our project basecamp, which will feature ongoing posts, comments and links from our core research team (my 2011 Digital Ethnography class)

Tips:

• Think of this as “A Vision of Students Today” inverted. Watch that video to see how we created a commentary on the classroom and different media by using the classroom and those media as part of the commentary itself. (For example, if you want to comment on texting in class, make a video of yourself texting in class and type something in the text that makes a comment about texting in class.)
• If you find powerful and interesting statistics (like “45% of students don’t learn much in college”), you can then find clever ways to express them in video form. Make sure you cite your sources in the video description.
• Since this is about all learning, not just learning in the classroom, consider how, when, and what you are learning outside the classroom. Think about how you encounter, shape, and are shaped by various media forms (TV, Google, Facebook, texting, books, magazines, etc.). How are you learning with these devices? *What* are you learning with these devices? Don’t just think about the content you are learning. We learn what we do. What habits of the mind are you learning when using these media? How might they be changing the way you think about, and act within, your relationships with others? Another way to frame this project would be to call it “My Mediated Life.”
• If you use Twitter, include your Twitter ID in the video description or send it to me separately. We will be embedding the video on a page with additional resources, credits, etc. and this would allow people to find you (if you want to be found!). We will also be experimenting by embedding the video in an interactive website that uses some of the new capabilities of HTML5 that will allow other resources on the page to “interact” with the video, and may be able to use live Twitter feeds as part of this project.
• When you submit your video, add a Creative Commons License in the video or in the video description that clearly indicates to others that your footage is available for remix. (I use the CC by-nc-sa which allows people to remix my material as long as they give proper attribution, do not use it for commercial purposes, and share what they create with my material with the same license.)

We are all super-excited to see what you come up with. Please submit by February 15th and then join us in the remixing! Grab other people’s videos and make your own. We’ll continue to post tips here on this blog, including where to find good music that is free to use, and how to create a compelling and powerful video.

We’re working on a new video, tentatively titled “The Visions of Students Today.” We are hoping that a few students all over the world will be willing to show us how they see their world and how they learn. If you are a student, or even better: a professor or teacher trying to come up with a great way to start off the semester, we hope you will consider submitting a 2 minute video showing us scenes of what you see in your everyday life during your most critical learning moments. Importantly, these critical learning moments may not be in the classroom. They might be with friends, online, watching TV, playing videogames, or playing other games. They can be anywhere with anybody (or nowhere with nobody). For students, this is your chance to really show us how you learn. And of course, feel free to show us how you don’t learn as well. Critique us. Show us what doesn’t work. And most importantly, try to find clever ways to show it.

To submit, submit your video on YouTube with the tag: VOST2011. Submissions will be due by February 15th (a great way to kick off the semester, reflecting on learning and learning to edit video at the same time!) We’ll take all the submissions, remix them, and publish them all together in a final video along with a website showcasing all the submissions along with additional materials where teachers and students can find more information and resources.

As you may know, the working title is a play off of a video we produced almost 4 years ago: A Vision of Students Today (below). This project inverts the scene, putting the camera in the hands of the students. We hope that this vision from the students point of view will give us all a better vision of how to make better learning environments for all of us.