Yes, in case you are wondering, I am blogging alot recently. MLA panels prodding thoughts, which I think is a good thing. So an excellent panel this morning with some winners of the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media Competition (hub.dmlcompetition.net): Howard Rheingold (Social Media Classroom), Todd Presner (Hypercities), Greg Niemeyer and Antero Garcia (Blackcloud). These are all really interesting projects. I can't do them justice here so I'll just invite you to check them out.

I want to talk a little about the conversation between the projects and the audience. There is, on the one hand, a clear sense of the humanities central role in emerging technologies. Many of the key figures in social media/web 2.0 have come out of the humanities, which might be surprising to some. There was consensus, at least in the room, the many of the challenges of social media fall squarely within the purview of humanism: they are, in a sense, human problems. On the other hand... there remains a suspicion about social media in terms of critical thinking and its value in doing "serious" intellectual work.

Oh good, an argument we've never heard before, *sigh.*

Still, it bears with saying (again), that such skepticism is necessary, but the question might be more productively phrased in terms that were not tied to moral judgments about technologies. The question is not whether or not this or that technology is "good" or "bad." The question is not whether or not this or that technology can replicate what the scholarly essay does.

Instead, the first question/task is to uncouple one's intellectual mission, purpose, agenda from a particular technology (e.g., the essay). If you can't uncouple, then maybe you've wandered into an interesting realization about your work. Then you begin to ask questions along the lines of

• how can I accomplish my intellectual goals through other media?
• how are my goals reshaped by this remediation?
• what new goals/possibilities emerge that were not previously available?

In the end, our sense of what it means to think critically or do serious intellectual work changes. I believe it is quite relevant (and critical-thinking-ish) to wonder what it means if a certain kind of critical work cannot move from one media to another. Do we imagine that the journal article is some kind of divine mechanism that offers us special insights into the universe? Or might we instead begin to recognize how historically contingent our notions of intellectual work have been?

Please note, btw, that I am certainly not suggesting that we abandon the essay.

For example, take MLA (insert Catskill comedian joke here). You all know the drill. What if MLA had a massive backchannel and thousands of participants that knew how to use it. E.g. twitter comments hashmarked by panel number and linked to a discussion forum. People could do something similar to what some of us do in live blogging a conference. Except now that work would be better connected. One could take that corpus and do some interesting data mining. Shapes would emerge, I am willing to bet. The conference would become a giant, highly differentiated, intellectual project, but you could get some pictures of the scope and trends. You could also drill down to localized projects and conversations among dedicated participants on a particular issue sharing links, research, ideas, proposals, etc. All of the things you might wish would happen but rarely do at a panel.

How might one's intellectual goals be pursued/reshaped by this kind of social media activity? What value might a database like this have for graduate education?

Anyway, I've gone very far afield from what the panelists were talking about, which were all unique and interesting projects dealing with mapping in time and space, tracing environmental pollution, and building social media into classrooms. Check them out. When I get a chance I'm going to spend some time on the DML Hub as well and investigate the other winners' projects too.

Charles asked a pertinent question in a comment on my last post, and as I thought of my response, I realized it would probably be better to answer it in a another post. He writes:

Not surprisingly I've been asked some version of this question several times at MLA. So here are a few short considerations.

1. In part this is another way of posing the question that Bolter asked about what "the teaching of writing" wants to do. So in part, my answer is the same. It depends on how one wants to approach the gamble about if/when the social media hammer is going to fall on rhet/comp. Will it be 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Never? My bet is the 5-10 year range.
2. Another important answer to this question is that these answers have to be formulated locally. As we know, FYC is difficult institutional territory. There are any number of hurdles to incorporating new media into FYC: faculty professional development, available technology and support, and the response of the rest of the institution. There is no universal answer. That said, social media is a largely common phenomenon for all of higher education, so we all will have to develop some response.

However Charles asks a slightly different question about what gets taken out of FYC if new media gets put in. I understand this perspective. You look at your syllabus and say, "if I am going to have students make a movie/podcast/website/etc, which assignment am I going to take out? Which pedagogical goals that were attendent to that assignment will thus also be left behind?"

So here's an uncomfortable, maybe radical, answer to that. Maybe the answer is that you take out everything that you did before: all the assignments, all the goals. Maybe new media isn't another mode in the "multimodal" classroom. Instead, new media redefines what composition and writing might be in a fundamental way. Put quite simply, the essay isn't an essay anymore, even if one continues to assign it in just the same way as it has been done for decades. In a sense, the "something else" has already been taken out.

I see FYC this way... Students need the opportunity to become writers. By "writers" I mean people who write on a regular basis with some sense of connecting to the world for some reason. By "write" I mean composing in any variety or combination of media that might be appropriate. That's the best way we can "prepare" students for the compositional and rhetorical challenges they will face as students, professionals, and citizens. In part this can still mean the fundamentals of rhetorical philosophy--of audience, purpose, and so on--applied to a variety of media. It means seeing how compositional practices are shaped by material, technological, discursive contexts, but also seeing compositional as an embodied process of distributed cognition. To do this, I think students will have to engage in the practice of new media composition.

I guess that's as close to an answer as I'm going to get this morning.

So I just returned from a curious panel on "multimodal literacies" featuring Ethna D. Lay, Ann Jurecic, and Jay David Bolter. And as was germane to the presentations, and with all due humility about (indeed specific statistical awareness of) the size of this blog's readership, I am certain more will learn of what was said there through reading this post than actually witnessed the presentation (which is not to say that it wasn't a typical session audience: it was).

Bolter made an interesting observation about the split between contemporary literature and social media, with the former remaining firmly in the realm of print despite the brief flirtation with hypertext in the early 90s. As we all know, literary studies has largely followed the same path. So here's the question: what happens if/when the rest of the world leaves the "writers" and their professorial readers behind? Whither composition in the wake of this? Does composition remain faithful to the essay or not? Yes, it is a question that has been asked before. But Bolter put it in a rather curious way. He asked,

What does the teaching of writing want to do?

So this got my thinking about the polymorphously perverse organism that goes by the name of "the teaching of writing" and what desires/wants it might cook up. How do the flows of desire that activate this set of assemblages hook into discourses on literacies, educational institutions, departments, faculty, teachers, etc? How are "we" empowered by our linkage into this circuit?

Then I recalled Victor Vitanza asking whether or not CCCC could have as its theme "Should writing be taught?" (and suggesting this is a question rhet/comp cannot entertain). Of course at the time that was written, I think he meantnthat rhet/comp could not ask a question for which one answer would put the discipline out of business. Now that is not so much the case. Today (or someday soon) the answer could be, "No, we shouldn't teach 'writing;' we should teach 'new media.'" 

I tend to look at this differently. Of course, we are well aware of the moralizing that accompanies literacy, going back to Plato.... All those "shoulds." I think in some way that is what Bolter was getting at in asking this question: that what the teaching of writing would want to do would reflect some moral obligation to literacy or students or discipline or something.  In a related way Ann Jurecic talked about the difficulty as a scholar in developing multimodal literacies when departments and the discipline tell us we "should" be doing more traditional writing. And Ethna Lay, focusing on FYC, considered how one should respond to new media compositions that elude the conventions and expectations of academic prose.

If for a moment we were dispassionate about it, we could see something quite interesting. That is, if we don't care about the fate of English as a discipline or the fate of literary practice or even the fate of cultural literacy, we could look at the rise of networked culture (and the response of the hyper-literate world of MLA and elsewhere) with some fascination. Is it possible to imagine a history composed in the 22nd century that remarks on how this hyper-literate community steered the world away from the emergence of a network culture? Uh, not really. So where exactly do we think we are going?

In answering the question I think Bolter was asking, I would say this. In the 19th century, the novel was generally a degraded literary form, suitable primarily for women to read. I think it would be hard to imagine, at that time, an arcane intellectual literacy founded largely on the reading of novels. Today things move more quickly. 40-50 years ago, the American auto industry was a world leader and a centerpiece of our economy. Now we are prepared to toss the dirt onto its grave. That's not to say that "we" won't still make cars somehow, but it will be different. Don't imagine for a second that the same thing could not happen to a higher education industry that styles itself as somehow immune. If it could happen to all of higher education, it could certainly to English and certainly to rhetoric/composition. That's not meant as a threat or warning or admonition. It's simply a recognition. That doesn't mean that we "should" embrace new media either.

As I have said before, it comes down to a gamble. I would say that 20 years from now there will still be books and writing genres appropriate for books. As Bolter noted, TV did not replace stage theater. Though I would add that theater, Broadway in particular, has been remediated by the Hollywood blockbuster and special F/X. However, books will become like theater or painting or many other wonderful and important media.

Meanwhile someone in higher education will take on the responsibility of teaching students to communicate in networked media environments. Maybe it will be some future version of English. Maybe rhet/comp will split from English and become that entity. Or maybe a third entity will emerge out of rhet/comp or from a completely different inter- or post-disciplinary space. But whatever that entity may be, it will take on the role that English played in the 20th century as teacher of cultural literacy.

And 100 years from now, I imagine folks will look back at this time. They will not see the millions/billions/trillions of banal blog posts, bad YouTube videos, and status updates. They will see something different. They will create a history of the rhetorics and poetics that forged a new, not-yet-discovered discourse.

But the question isn't about 100 or even 20 years from now. It's about 5 or 10 years. We know we don't have a realistic picture of the distant future; we know things will be quite different. We expect that we know where we will be in 5-10 years. We expect things to remain the same, or at least we expect that it is a safe bet, that no one will punish us for carrying on with business as usual. For individuals in an institutional context like this, inaction is almost always the safest bet. That is, until the hammer falls one day.

I guess I'm betting on the hammer... Not that I want to see it fall on anyone in particular ;-). I just think that it is going to come down. And all the shoulds in the world will be rewritten. And "the teaching of writing" will find a new way to get its fix.

Plane travel and various appointments has me thinking about being "on time" quite a bit today, in the conventional sense. Then this morning I encountered so less conventional ways of thinking about the issue. As I've now made a regular practice, I was listening to Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time," where this week's discussion was on the physics of time. I then attended a panel with Dave Parry, Matt Gold, John Jones, and Brian Croxall on microblogging.

One of the points discussed there, in a wide-ranging conversation, was that microblogging changes our relationship with time, the whole instantaneous nature of the tweet and (for the haters) the potential for a slavish dedication to daily minutiae. Bragg's guests were having a different conversation. There can be some question, in terms of physics, as to whether or not time exists as an independent phenomena. Newton imaging a divine clock ticking away outside the physical universe. From Einstein, as I understand it, we get the merging of space and time. Time is relative to things like position and speed. Then one can go further. Looking at sub-atomic particles it is possible to say that time doesn't really function as part of the equation of their behavior. One of the speakers made an analogy to temperature. Temperature is a measure of a system of molecules moving about. The more they move, the hotter they get. But if you look at just one molecule moving around, it doesn't make sense to say that it has a temperature. Time could be like that, an emergent quality of complex systems, like our consciousness for example.

During the Bragg conversation, there was much talk about stars and how when we look at starlight we are seeing events that happend millions and billions of years ago, depending on the distance of the star from earth. The same used to be true of human events. If something happened on the other side of the planet, it used to take weeks or months or years to reach you. Of course one can go back far enough to where such events never really reached you. If we understand time as wedded to space (a la Einstein) then we must say that such experiences of time are quite different from our own and that technology/networks have the power to reshape space-time.

This means a very different notion of being, I would suggest.

During the panel, there was talk of the danger and potential of mobs emerging from the political use of twitter. As we worked through that idea though, it seemed that perhaps the idea of the mob (smart or otherwise) is no longer entirely useful. I was thinking that twittering might be a spiky activity (a la Richard Florida) and that twittering is part of a new literacy that leads toward a new economic class, but it might likewise by that the idea of class is likewise troubled by the reformation of space-time. Perhaps this is like the "wranglers" Bruce Sterling suggests we will become in the age of the spime.

Regardless, it seems clear that time is not constant (I know for sure that the departure time of my plane is not constant!), but that I better be "on time" for my next appointment. And that means finishing up quickly here. It does seem to me though, that thinking about this reshaping of time is another way of getting at the cognisphere and "whatever" we may become.

An interesting question on the WPA list regarding the publication of research involving human subjects in composition courses. Typically, what we are talking about here is something like the following: students in an FYC class interview people or do a survey; they include the results in a research paper; and then publish their papers on the public web and/or send the results to a relevant public official (e.g., an administrator at the college, their political represenatives, etc.).  It's not hard to imagine research that would be unethical and damanging, but then again it's not hard to imagine essays that would not be "research" that would still be unethical and damaging. For example, hypothetically a student could write an essay about his/her roommate's sexual activities. And maybe the student would get an F on the paper, but the student could still publish that paper online on his or her own.

What we have here is a clash of two competing sets of ethics. The IRB approaches its ethics as a categorical imperative to be applied universally to all "research" undertaken under the auspices of the university. So there are your two limits. What constitutes research? And what activities are undertaken as part of the university? For example, if I did some large scale survey for my research, I would need IRB approval. If, as a citizen and parent, I organized a survey through my PTA and wrote a report to the school board, would I need IRB approval because I am an employee of the university? I don't think so. How about if I put a poll on my blog about who you think will win the Super Bowl? What if the poll is about which kind of cell phone you use or what social media you like? If I get close enough to my research area do I suddenly need approval? Or is my blog beyond the auspices of the university? (n.b. Since an online poll like that is wholly unscientific, I don't think it could ever be considered "research." Certainly no journal would ever accept such a survey as evidence of anything.)

But that's just one side of the ethical clash. The other side is disciplinary ethics, where we recognize the value of writing to real audiences and we encourage students to participate in the public sphere (problematic term, I know). From this perspective, the requirement of approval from an IRB threatens this ethical committment by making this goal of publication practically unachievable (unless an IRB is going to be able to approve 1000 research proposals in a two-three week span). While every IRB is different, I think in general their intentions are good (no need to complete the homily). They would like to teach students about ethical research practices. I think writing a proposal to an IRB would make for an interesting, real world writing assignment. The IRB would have to have the logistical resources to make it possible for students to propose and carry out research within the scope of about half a semester. That would probably mean establishing a subcommittee to deal specifically with these requests.

What's interesting to me though is how social media really intensifies this whole matter. Suddenly it becomes so easy for students to publish their research outside of the classroom. Suddenly the hypothetical goal of having students participate in the public sphere as writers becomes easily achievable. It raises interesting questions about the limits of the university to review their students' speech acts. If a student does research for a paper in a class, and the professor has no intention of publication as part of the course, then general practice states that no IRB review is necessary. But what if that student, after the course has concluded, decides to publish that paper on a blog? Should the IRB start reviewing every research project in every course?

The definitions of public and private, as we know, are starting to blur, as is our conception of publication. There are research practices that undeniably can benefit from IRB review. But the grey areas are growing rapidly.

On the Human Network, Mark Pesce blogs about "Inflection Points" where he notes that

To a certain extent, the network is simply dissolving the institutional relationships that have maintained formal educational practices, so we do not exactly have a choice about addressing our changing environment. But without seeking to be overly cynical (not during the holidays!), there are several key challenges that arise from the pursuing the vision Pesce describes. Mostly they come down to issues of ethics/ideology (depending on how you like to see such matters).

This is primarily a matter of motives. When we look at the classes of participants in higher education--students, faculty, administrators, staff--as well as those who invest in higher education or have a stake in the outcome of the process--parents, politicians, trustees, corporations--we see many conflicting agendas. The university has evolved as a way of managing those agendas (to no one group's satisfaction). The answer to Pesce's final question is simple. For the most part, students are not in the business of getting an education; they are in the business of getting a degree. And we shouldn't view that as a negative thing. It simply is what it is. If students were in the business of learning for the sake of learning, then they might be able to proceed as Pesce suggested. This would certainly change the business of teaching as well: students would say we want to learn x, y, and z, and a teacher would then accommodate that.

But that's not what higher education is about for students, at least not primarily. Students want to be vetted and certified. Faculty, administrators, accrediting bodies determine the definition of a particular degree. Students who earn the degree attain a particular identity. Are we going to allow students to determine their own curriculum and then at some self-determined end state that they are now certified to be public school teachers or lawyers or doctors? I suppose we could, and then we would leave it up to the employers (school districts for example) to determine if students were qualified. But I don't really see anyone wanting universities to abdicate that responsibility.

That said, social media does alter our ability to organize. We can build a greater degree of flexibility into education. One has to begin with recognizing there is a core disciplinary identity to any major, but even given that, there remains flexibility about particular readings, assignments, and methods of evaluation. We might have to alter the ways in which we assess programs and count credits. In doing so, we have to realize that our current methods are a product of historically-contingent conditions that are now changing. As we change our relationship with students, we need to build a new ethos and new set of rhetorical practices. For example, in teaching many general education courses, I typically find students have a great deal of antipathy for that segment of their education. I don't imagine general education is going away any time soon. I do think that social media can provide a means for discussing this disconnect between student and faculty-institutional expectations. Since GE courses are often intended to address very broad educational goals, I think they can be shaped with student input.

In any case I think Pesce's post does indicate that something is changing. It may be that a whole new avenue of education will be opening up, one where students to pursue learning for its own sake, or seek out post-graduate education as a kind of professional development. Maybe a new generation of web savvy retirees will eventually emerge who will want to take such classes online. At that time, there will be a secondary market for tertiary education. Maybe that's what we're seeing here.

Stories right now on Huffington Post and Salon.com about the backlash over Obama's selection of Rick Warren to speak at the inauguration. Thousands of posts on the change.gov site the Obama team has created are just the tip of the furor. Of course the idea of the change.gov site was/is to bring Obama's supporters, and other Americans, into the conversation about reform and thus to capitalize on the advantages of social media during the election for Obama.

Will it work? Who knows.

I'm pretty sure about this however. I think Obama is a moderate, particularly on the kinds of social issues that really get people angry: gay rights, abortion, etc. However, I also think that we may have reached a historical moment where it is no longer possible to have it two ways. It is appropriate that Obama is always quoting Lincoln. And it may be true that Lincoln had a cabinet of rivals and was open to hearing the voices of those who differed from him, but Lincoln obviously presided over a civil war. Assuming that the outcome of the war was not certain (which of course it couldn't have been), Lincoln was willing to risk the destruction of the US rather than allow the status quo to continue. For Lincoln it was a matter of declaring that certain practices and values, certain ways of life, would no longer be acceptable as part of American culture. And Americans killed each other over the matter, and in many ways, we remain divided.

So Obama is happy to say that change is necessary. But at what cost? What will he be willing to risk? What you can see on change.gov is what you can see on 1000s of other sites, which is that Americans who could be bothered to write anything at all have very strong disagreements. They have absolutely nothing to gain by trying to come to an agreement, and if anything, there interaction on sites like these seems only to harden their respective resolves. Maybe at some future point we will achieve some ethos that compels us to try to get along online, but I doubt it. Would we ask the 19th-century abolitionist to get along with the plantation owner?  I don't think so. At some point, something has got to give.

If Obama is going to be a president of the network, who listens to the network, he is not going to discover his mythical "united" states. If he looks closely enough, he might see the post-human, dissensual state of America and the many apparatuses of capture working to map dissensus onto an ideological map. What one does with such knowledge as a president I have no idea.

UPDATE: David Weinberger has an interesting take on this on the NPR site defending Obama's choice.

It's been about 18 months since my book came out. I've been writing articles and of course writing here, but at the end of the year my mind is turning toward my next book length project. I've been thinking about the following things.

Audience: I'm happy with my first book. It is, at least at time, a difficult, theoretical text. I worked hard, with my editors' support, to make the text accessible. There were many other dimensions that could have gone into that book, but I think there was more than enough to deal with as it was. As I think about my next book, I think about trying to write for a larger audience. While I would hardly say that I have a large audience on my blog, I do think I have a fairly diverse audience, more diverse than one would find in the readership of an academic journal for sure. I've been reading and teaching books by folks like Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, and so on; these are smart texts by smart people and yet quite accessible. I'm not necessarily aspiring to write a book like those. I think I still want to speak primarily to a professional-disciplinary audience.

2012: for some reason, this year comes up in my posts, but today it comes up because I think it's an optimistic, but reasonable goal for a publication year. I'm not setting a deadline for myself so much as trying to think my book forward into that year, to anticipate as much as possible. At some point, the idea of a "computers and composition" specialist will make as much sense as a print specialist does now. That doesn't mean that everyone will be doing what I am doing! It means that all of our intellectual work will be digitally mediated and networked. It means that it will be increasingly multimodal and collaborative... increasingly to the point where it will be obvious that every grad student in English Studies will need to know how to do these things, both for research and teaching. It also means that our work will be undertaken in environments largely alien to our professional work now: mobile networks, virtual worlds, smart environments, etc. Just take a look at the Horizon Report, for example.

I am thinking about a book that will speak to that audience and to the techno-social condition. As a WPA or technical-professional writing faculty or really any faculty in a digital English or Writing/Rhetoric department, what will you need to know? How might I anticipate and speak to the exigencies of that situation? Obviously in many ways that's impossible. The particulars of the technologies keep changing. Local conditions are certainly too varied. However, I do think that there can be a conversation about methods for addressing the challenges of emerging technologies.

Institutions/departments/research: currently I've been thinking about examining three different spaces. The first, which I've shorthanded "institutions," concerns how the "big boys" deal with these issues. How do conglomerates of universities, governments, and education/technology corporations shape classroom experiences? Think Blackboard as the obvious example, but there are many others. How does something like the aforementioned Horizon Report shape institutional practice? If you are a WPA, for example, how does one intercede in this space to shape a writing curriculum in relation to technologies? We can't just accept institutional technology policy as some techno version of the weather! (not that I'm suggesting anyone does that, btw).

Departments have related problems. They clearly work within the "institutional" context. They deal with the expectations of accrediting and profesisonal bodies. English departments do not typically concern themselves with technologies beyond books and chalk, though increasingly faculty want smart classrooms. But if an English major (variously defined) is going to become a place where the subject of "digital literacy" is addressed, then the shape and practices of the department will need to change. I don't presume to know the answer for how they should change (of course I have some ideas, but the point is that we should all have ideas).

Oddly, I think the most talk about this subject has been in the area of research, of faculty using emerging technologies in their scholarly work. However I see this as a crucial aspect of this whole process as I believe that as academics we won't really figure out how to teach and use emerging technologies in our curriculum until we make use of them for our own intellectual work. So part of me thinks that this is a project which ought to take some new media form, but then I wonder if that will contravene my efforts to reach a broader audience.

I suppose that if I have confidence in my own arguments I should anticipate that my audience will meet me where I am going... maybe.

I've started reading Lev Manovich's in-progress book Software Takes Command (PDF available from this site). The book begins with the articulation of an emerging field Manovich terms "software studies." This term emerges in The Language of New Media where Manovich writes

Transcoding was one of the five main principles of new media discussed in that book and was Manovich's approach to mapping the intersection between new media technologies and culture. Interestingly, it also proves to be the concept that moves Manovich beyond "new media studies" into "software studies," which he seems to see as a broader project that looks into the processes by which new media is produced. As he notes in his new book:

Manovich recruits a wide range of traditional disciplines into the work of software studies, including the humanities. Who knows if the term will catch on, but it is certainly clear that the explosion of participatory media and mobile networks has dramatically redefined what new media might mean in comparison to what we were discussing at the beginning of the decade. This is clearly a challenge for any discipline, as technological change outpaces the disciplinary-institutional apparatus.

As with any interdisciplinary project, we each have to bring the strengths of our perspectives and methods to bear on the subject. In the case of rhetoric, we continue to struggle with the inclusion of "multimodal" composition, drawing on language from Gunther Kress that hails from the first new media ago. In the trenches of first-year composition classroom, faculty offices, and hallways, we can certainly still hear the debate of whether such instruction is necessary or appropriate; the point is probably moot in that most instructors nationally don't have the technical skills to teach such material, and even if they did they may not have access to the technology to make such things possible. Still we continue to engage in these conversations about students building web pages or making videos.

And certainly the rhetorical skills and knowledge behind multimodal composition remain germane, just as the long history of print rhetoric remains germane. At the same time though, in some ways we are fighting the last war. We are now in the midst of a very different new media environment from the one that spurred the conversations we largely continue to have. This is Manovich's argument, or at least part of it. Manovich takes up the concept of remix as the familar, integral component of software studies, and looks to deepen that idea (more on that later as I get further into the book).

To offer just one final snippet along these lines, Manovich notes

What does this remix culture mean for the way we think about composition? What does it mean for how we understand invention and the use of existing information in compositional processes? What implications exist for design or organization when we realize that our audience might encounter our work in an atomized way, through any number of devices? Software studies suggests the examination of such concersn.

I was listening to NPR yesterday on my brief drive to the gym and heard part of the discussion surrounding Obama's selection of Arne Duncan as education secretary. As we know, the crossfire discourse of education pits teacher unions against those who call themselves reformers. The latter group tends to support testing, merit pay for teachers, and similar measures, which the unions generally have opposed. The unions call for increased funding for schools, but opponents say that throwing money at the problem isn't a solution.

The guest on the show, from the "reformer" side, suggested that in the classroom one must balance the interests of the adults and the children, but that in the end we must come down on the side of the kids. The obvious suggestion there is that the union position is self-interested in protecting the adult teachers in the schools whereas reformers are doing it "for the children" (if we could only strike that tired rhetorical ploy from the human conscious!). I would hope NPR listeners are savvy enough to see through that pathetic tactic. This is an ideological conflict.

First of all, you'd have to be fairly dimwitted to think that the "problem" of education is "in the schools." For example, in Onondaga county, when you look at the suburban schools, basically 95% of high school students are passing the state's math regents exam. Go into the Syracuse schools and that number drops below 60%. Do we really think that the teachers in the city schools are that much worse? Is it really a lack of new textbooks or computers or school supplies that are creating this difference? I am not suggesting that we shouldn't do everything we can to make these schools as good as they can be. I just think we are overlooking the obvious broader socio-economic conditions.

Second, I would think that anyone with kids realizes that "teaching to the test" is simply destroying our schools. My kids are in one of these suburban school districts were 90+% of the kids are passing these tests. It seems like they have a high stakes test every year, starting in first grade. My kids rank in the 99th percentile on these tests (yea from them). But they would probably do about the same with zero test-prep. It's difficult to gauge how much time they are wasting sitting in that classroom, but it's a lot.  My daughter does her math at home through an online program from Stanford, and she moves at about triple the speed of the class (and that's spending only 20 minutes a day, five days a week doing it). Sure, maybe there are only 2 or 3 kids in each classroom that are having an experience like this, but on the flipside, there are probably only 4 or 5 kids in the classroom who are in any real danger of not passing the test.

That of course brings me to "merit pay." If it goes through, I will be auctioning off my kids to the highest bidding teacher.

As a professor, I know well enough to not take responsibility for the great successes of my students. I also know not to take responsibility for students who fail. So what exactly is it that teachers do then? When someone can actually map the socio-cultural-cognitive network of learning, I will let you know. I do know that the classroom is not a factory, that students are not products, and that you can't quality-control the classroom-factory by testing the products. Sorry. In a way I wish it was that easy. But on the other hand, as a member of the human race, I'm glad I am not subject to the kind of psychological domination that would be required to make the classroom-factory model really work.

As I stated at the outset, the problems are ideological. Culturally we don't value education; we don't like "smart people;" we don't trust or like teachers; we certainly don't trust or like professors.  Furthermore, as Ken Robinson has suggested, we have a limited view of intelligence and creativity. We conceive of learning as a rational process, when rationality is clearly a poor articulation of how cognition actually works. In terms of these issues, teachers and reformers are equally parts of the problem. 

Addressing the challenges of education will require as large a cultural shift as moving Americans toward a sustainable culture.