Course Management Systems

I think we can take it for granted at this point that most of what we can distance learning is really not as much concerned with distance as much as time; the students use the systems for convenience in time more than space. It also seems clear to me that most of the claims for distance learning that were so common during the Internet boom of the mid to late nineties were clearly overstated. The traditional college is a community of learners that serves multiple functions, including but not limited to socialization of the eighteen year old sub-urban spawn of the middle class, research on everything from art to zoology, economic development and, strangely enough, the provision of gladiatorial services such as basketball and football to alumni and others while generating programming for ESPN and the networks. While the primary function is the expansion of knowledge it is not the sole or even the most popular function as can be seen during the most aptly named March Madness period or any Sugar, Rose or whatever Bowl.

So, what is the role of a course management system? What do they do? More to follow.

Literacy

Well, literacy has come into the fore. Literacy is a very interesting word. According to Barton the word itself only showed up in a dictionary as of 1924 and is peculiar to English. it doesn't translate well into French, and is not part of the Japanese, Swedish or Greek vocabularies. It also is a word with baggage and other assorted ideological constructs attached to it that have little to do with writing or reading but alot to do with socialization, as though the literate will not be criminal, or if they are they will go to nice jails with tennis courts and not penitentaries like their illiterate bretheren. Literacy has unfortunately carried with it the notion of civility, which of course would be a suprise to Hannibal Lecter.

Barton also thinks that when we use terms like media literacy, computer literacy etc. we are using literacy as a metaphor for something that isn't literacy but gains credibility through association with such a powerful culturally laden term.

My personal definition of literacy is that it is too important to apply to any given physical technology. It is about thinking abstractly using a shared symbolic system that is capable of being depersonalized and stored separately from the reader/writer. Literacy is about the brain, not the book, TV, computer or fountain pen, but it gives motivation to use these things for storage, retrival and manipulation. There is one literacy; everything else is proficiency. Even the most "computer literate" need to know what to do with the RTFM files. ;)

Literacy: an Introduction to the Ecology of the Written Language
David Barton
Blackwell Press, Oxford 1994

The Internet & The Lack of Polity

Communications methods were characterized by oppositions such as hot or cold and democratic or undemocratic at earlier points this semester. All good, but there are other considerations as well. Traditional communications theory is also concerned with the idea of keeping a channel open. Jakobson described a phatic function to communication, something we see best in the word "hello" or dial tone. It is a simple recognition that the channel is functional.

CMC has the downside that we might just be communicating to the ether, ourselves, or only to like-minded people so the channel is functioning in a limited manner. Like the Deaniacs who were so convinced of their own virture they spiraled into irrelevance on the Internet we might not be effectively communicating or opening a channel. The phatic is sacrificed for the ideological. Agonistic communication is favored over the decentered. There are some lessons here from Robbie(p.65):

"Recognition that principles are the basis of historic change and continuity also illuminates the problem of nihilism in modern experiece. When men recognize that their opponents have principles, albeit ones that are different from their own, they recognize something independent of themselves and their opponents that can reasonably be discussed. A very different situation results when men deny that their opponents have principles..."

"... without principles of order, all innovations depend on self-confirming myths with which form can be forcefully imposed upon change. Both revolutionary and reactionary nihilists arbitrarily depict a golden age and use it to batter reality into its shape...As soon as principles of order have been denied there can be no discussion. The myth must reign over all, or all wil collapse into anarchy...ideologists have a penchant for terror, for they have no other means for resolving basic disagreements..." (Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator, 1971)

CMC is wonderful, but there needs to be some thought considering the following: a de-centering of communication so it is about ideas not personalities. This is also a problem we see in talk radio and the like. Second the building of community and consensus, a problem when people only read what they want to hear on the same websites everyday. And finally a de-mythological function that avoids violence and terror instead of allowing the spread of it. To some extent these are phatic functions: the keeping of channels open.

I will be starting On Dialogue today, which I hope addresses some of these questions.

Serious Stuff Later

It has snowed in NYC three days this week and Spring begins today. So much for Columbia's Spring Break.

"Everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it."
Mark Twain, A/K/A Samuel Clemens

The War

The war started exactly a year ago. In recognition of that event I give you the following:

You Ain't a Cowboy

A song that you might or might not like. Flame me if you want to.

Madrid

I've been trying not to write about this, but it keeps coming back. Last week in Madrid on March 11 two hundred and one people were killed on their way to work and many more were injured, some quite seriously on commuter trains coming into town for the morning rush. The weapons were ten bombs on the trains, all controlled by ordinary cell phones.

My thoughts on this are very personal. Two and a half years ago I was on my way to the World Trade Center as the first plane hit. Like those who were killed or injured I was on my way to do something quite mundane: buy doughnuts. Terrorism kills people simply because they happened to be doing perfectly ordinary things and aren't the least bit heroic. My wife believes the perfect memorial would be a giant marble Xerox machine to commemorate all the dead ordinary office workers.

I was very lucky. I didn't get hurt at all until I developed some lung and blood pressure problems later on. I consider myself fortunate.

In light of our readings it is interesting to see how terror uses those ordinary communications tools we so take for granted to communicate terror. Aircraft, commuter trains, cell phones. All a part of our normal lives. Terror is communication and uses the tools of communication.

I've been trying to reconcile all this for the past few years, an coincidentally just before Madrid I purchased Robbie's book on Ortega y Gassett. It's excellent, and for mental hygene reasons glad I had it. It discusses the idea of a social pedagogy and the idea of kinderland, or thinking of the future. This is not McLuhan, but more metaphysical and social. What do we want the future to be like? Are we even thinking about the future?

Will return to this in or near future. It is a mother lode of thought on terror, pedagogy and communication.

Architecture

In reading McLuhan and especially Innis one gets a broader perspective for communication, placing it into a grand historical basis. In my trip to Albany it became clear that their views on transportation as communication were particularly intriguing, but I find myself unable to get away from Innis ideas of communication in space and time. His idea of the gothic cathedral being a communication in time is particularly interesting. But where do computers come in?

Well, think of the former role of the cathedral or for that matter any of the great buildings designed for religious or state purposes: they were meant to be a permament expression of power and faith. The old Pantheon in Rome is almost 1800 years old, and while recycled as a church it is still a viable symbol that has survived. The Duomo in Florence, while not as old, is an equally viable and long lasting communication of Florentine patriotism; the Renaisance still lives.

What have computers have done to us in our post-modern tradition (or lack of it)? For one, buildings designed by computers are stunning, but fragile. Look at the recent buildings, like Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, a tour de force of computer generated design, but not something that can or will survive 1800 years without constant ongoing maintenance. In New York the Citicorp Center needs a computer to maintain a large internal damping system that shifts a giant weight at the top of the tower to compensate for wind forces. No computer and the building becomes unihabitable. Then of course there is the World Trade Center, which for all the apparent solidity and sense of permanence was destroyed in the matter of a few hours and with scarcely a trace. More has survived of the Roman Forum. It is of course interesting that the destruction was wrought by an airplane.
Computers, in the sense that I think Innis would have it, impact on processes of communication in time by speeding it up but for all this the message itself becomes more fragmentary and of lesser duration. You have big, disposable buildings, disappearing websites and broader control over space in episodic bursts of activity. Control over time, even with such impressive and "concrete" structures as buildings becomes fragmentary and illusive. See the treatise "Learning From Las Vegas" by Venturi and Brown.

Albany Redux

I began thinking of Lobby Day in the context of Innis, McLuhan and earlier discussions on co-presence. What is clear is that transportation is in a very clear way a means of communication as much as anything else. It's also clear that it supports, in a very clear sense a personal privlidged oral communication between people in power as opposed to a textual rule based system. Political power is to a large extent still one of access and personality. Oh, and lunch.

The idea of a train being a form of communication is an interesting one to me. Ironically, I went there to try and extend the electronic emergency manangement capabilities of the State. Could have had the same discussion by e-mail or phone, but it never worked because you need to establish a physical connection first. You need to show up in a suit with a proper introduction from someone they know before you get access. The Internet doesn't matter. Democracy doesn't matter. You have to take the train.

Lobby Day

Today I had to go up to Albany to visit a state agency I'd like to work with, and this actually does have to do with computers. And even education.

Much of what we have been reading has been in computers and how they have an inpact on the communications process, especially McLuhan and his idea of the global village. We've also discussed the idea of certain media being more democratic and acesssible than others. Sure all good in theory, and then you come face to face with Tuesday in Albany, which is Lobby Day.

You have to understand Lobby Day by understanding Albany. It's a port city and transportation hub that almost no ships visit and where the railroad station isn't even in the city. It's a university town where the students are all safely tucked away out of town in a virtual city. All that really seems to happen there is the mechanics of state. Sometime in the early sixties through the seventies Nelson Rockefeller built a huge central administrative complex or "mall" that looks like something that should be in East Germany, North Korea or Romania. People scurry underground because the plaza is a windswept mess that really has no convenient access. It's an urban nightmare, but Goverment is there through and through.

Well, back to Lobby Day, which I just discovered. The train from New York was packed. Almost no seats. The parking lots full beyond belief. And lobbyists all over the place, as thick as fleas.

In Albany, where people in power never leave and the typical Assemblyman or Senator only has a 2% chance of losing an election the only way to get anything is to go there and press the flesh. It's pretty shocking actually. Forget e-mail, phones, even letters. You have to be there to do business, buy people lunch (in terrible restaurants) and I hate to think what else. Forget the Internet, except to order the train tickets...

Printing Redux

I've been reading some work by Elisabeth Eisenstein as a supplement to the class, specifically her work on printing. It's interesting to say the least. One revelation is that the early printers became the center of diverse and heterogeneous communities that functioned something like businesses, households and research institutes. Printer's households became refuges for people with diverse viewpoints, even people who would normally disagree with each other. They sometimes, according to Eisenstein, identified as families. (As we all know, familes allow for a broad range of views.)

So, the print centers were also centers of tolerance, discussion and pluralism. While printing might have had large scale impacts as McLuhan notes it also had small-scall influences that were quite profound as well. It created a new kind of community based less on tribal/religious/national identity than ones based on shared values of knowledge, curiousity and dialogue. Of course, also that of profit generated by book sales.

McLuhan notes that print gave the power to act without reacting, which is, after all, the basis of our modern ideas of knowledge as a communal experience.

Metcalf's Law

We continue to discuss McLuhan and his theories of communication. It's been interesting to say the least, but we've also gotten to write about things like shared drives, a major interest of mine professionally.

Here's the URL for an article John Gallagher wrote on networks and shared drives in media production:

http://www.avid.com/education/NewModelsforMediaProduction.pdf

Jiri Auric Goldfinger likes John Gallagher. You might say we have much in common.

Metcalf's Law is something I hope we can discuss further. It is the primary theory behind telecommunications networks. It says:

"A network increases in value in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network."

In simple terms, the more telephones there are the more valuable each telephone is, but once you put a computer on a network it applies as well. And peripherals too. A networked printer is much more valuable than one that isn't. Servers with shared drives are also nodes, and information on a shared drive increases in value as well.

Hegemony

I'm finding it pretty interesting that we haven't had too much interest in class to Harold Innis and his idea of hegemony. It's a pretty interesting concept. Most societies, even the most oppressive, run on certain consensual assumptions that are created and supported through communications processes. Innis also notes that there is both a tension and a need between different competitive social institutions and their dominant communicative modes, such as state vs. church and state with church. The tension is part of the game.

In Nazi Germany it is clear that there was a real need to use what McLuhan would call hot media such as film, radio and live highly theatrical rallies to drive Hitler to power and keep him there. The opposition was to a large extent those who used text, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr from the text-heavy Protestant churches and such intellectual figures like Thomas Mann and Brecht from the worlds of literature and theater. The cool Mother Courage was no challenge to the hot Triumph of the Will.

The Internet today is also a potential means to create consent, and in some cases I'm sure it could. The problem is that it is so diffuse and individualized that it is used more a tool to create dissent or solidify the positions of subgroups. Look at Howard Dean's campaign for a good example. An analog analogue (did I just write that?) to this use of the Internet is direct mail, which looks for the specific rather than the general. MoveOn and Truthout are good example of this on the Internet. The Internet seems to be good at building hegemony within small groups while breaking it down in larger ones. It is, unfortunately, a perfect tool for the National Rifle Association.

As a card carrying member of an organization just categorized as terrorist by the Secretary of Education maybe I better stop now....

Hot, Cool & Warm

We are busy looking at all the stuff that's been thrown off of the whirlwind created by Marshall McLuhan with his famous formulation of the medium being the message. Most people don't get it, or if they do they get it wrong, looking at it as though our communications ecology has developed in a monocausal manner instead of a complex one. McLuhan is right, but he isn't the only one who is right.

We've been talking about hot and cool. Most of us seem to understand that The Matrix in IMAX is hot sensory overload and that in comparison TV is cool, but there is some argument about how to categorize the computer. I'm presenting the idea that computers are neither, but can be both. They have the equivalent of a hot and cold faucet. It can be either hot or cool, but most of the time it is warm, or a mix of both.

Otherwise, an interesting week...