Good News, Maybe

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We’re haunted by a reactionary Republican party; it’s “reactionary” in a specific sense, too, unwilling to posit any ideas other than to resist the Democratic majority. No push to privatize Social Security or the public schools, not even a ‘balance the budget’ neurosis to push. All we got were Tea-bagging flash in the pans. I didn’t buy Reagan, either, but it’s hard to take Palin seriously.

So it’s impossible to see any mainstream political idea as unambiguously good news. Even if you are one of the 30 plus million slated to be helped with health care, the news is mixed. You have to wait, for one thing (hoping that you don’t get ill or die) and who knows what bureaucratic maze awaits anyone attempting to take advantage of the new laws. It’s three steps forward, and then two steps back.

Still, the idea that we might be able to take 87 billion away from banker-middle-men-confidence artists is very good news indeed. That’s just what Mr. Duncan, the current Secretary of Education, plans to do over the course of the next year or more. Apparently, even a lot of Wall Street Journal types see this as a good idea (“Banks Don’t Belong in the Student Loan Business“). That may be the best news of all.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

The Long March Through The Institutions

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Two recent posts– one on the Progressive Historian blog and one on Iterating Towards Openness— reminded me of Gramsci. (It’s interesting to do a search on the phrase, “The Long March Through the Institutions.” It seems to have become a key phrase in right wing Christianity’s paranoid fantasies.) What’s so striking is the lack of a discussion of democracy in either the historian’s blog or the open source advocate’s post.

In all fairness both posts are brief summaries of conferences, not fully developed critiques, so I don’t want to stretch my point too far. But it’s interesting that discussions of technology (as the writer on the Progressive Historian suggests) are so rarely focused on progressive goals. More typical, in his phrase, are “wide-eyed cheerleading for things that are not there.” Facebook, for example, is supposed to encourage civic engagement, for example, yet in practice it rarely seems to widen social networks.

We look for technological fixes to promoting democratization but democracy is dependent on institutions. It’s easy to see how Web 2.0 (or 3.0) might assist in that process but technology is no substitute for it. The technology is what David Wiley (on “Iterating Towards Openness”) calls “easy innovations.” What more difficult is Grasmci’s idea of trying to create a broader progressive change from within existing institutions.

I think the real problem is that the academic left– perhaps progressives more generally– doesn’t have a coherent, over-arching agenda. We have ideals, but we don’t like to think about the sorts of institutions we want. We equate specific goals– and especially institutional reform– with limitation. Our question is or should be simple: how do we create a university run by the people who work there? How can these new technologies help us democratize schools?

Posted in: Professional, Writing

Do the Right Thing

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Interestingly, Insider Higher Ed pitches this story as a survival story (“Survival — Through Open Access“) but I think that’s hardly the most interesting point. What’s interesting is that the Utah State University Press’ recent self-transformation brings us one step closer to a systematic embrace of open access as the governing principal in the U.S. academy.

I don’t like the “survival” label for the same reason that I don’t like the idea that “green energy” is going to “save” the U.S.– and world– economy. In some technical sense both of those things might be true but these are also things that move the economy in novel, more democratic directions. We don’t need the old ways to survive, we need to build something new.

The idea of open access in education is not to allow traditional academic culture to survive unchanged once the current fiscal problems have passed. The goal is to take the opportunity– created by technological change as much as the financial dilemmas– to make academia (and the energy sector) into something very different. Let the banks survive; we need a better higher education system.

The Utah strategy will be one of the important tests of the old status system under a new ‘open’ era. Will free journals become the “lower tier” of academic publishing, less valued as cultural capital by the upper tier of journals funded through paid subscription? Will we have two tiers of publishing, one for the wealthy research institutions, and another for the rest of us? Time will tell.

An addendum: I was just pointed (via the TechRhet list) to an “Inside Higher Ed” piece, “A Call for Copyright Rebellion,” which summarizes a recent talk by Lawrence Lessing, “the Harvard University law professor and renowned open-access advocate.” Lessing seems remarkably distant from political economics, given his subject, but I like the way the piece ends:

“We should see a resistance to imposing the Britney Spears model of copyright upon the scientist or the educator,” he said. “…But if you would expect that, you would be very disappointed by what we see out there in the scientific and and education communities.” Scholars, he said, have allowed the copyright conversation to be steered by lawyers and businesses who are not first and foremost to intellectual discovery.

To them, Lessig delivered a simple message: “Stop it.”

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Open Scientific Writing

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Arguably, we are witnessing the end of one era of academic cultural capital– I’d call it the proprietary era– and the beginning of another, which I think should be called the open era. In the proprietary era status was dependent, in part, on the possession of more or less rare forms of knowledge. The value of knowledge was dependent on keeping it secret until it was made public in a way which ensured that you would receive proper credit.

That’s one of the reasons that academic journals were so important: they were the gateway that allowed proprietary knowledge to become public without any loss of capital. The channels themselves, in fact, conveyed their own institutional cultural capital. It didn’t just matter what you knew, it matters where you worked and where you published. Slowly, though, for reasons that range from the political to the technological to the logistic, all of this is changing.

I don’t think it’s possible to know for sure what the new forms of academic capital will look like; there’s still too much turbulence in the system for any clarity. I think, though, that the open science and open notebook folks are the place to look for signs of the emerging paradigm. As a writing teacher, I am particularly interested in the open notebook projects, since they point to a very new model for audience and purpose in academic writing.

“Open Notebook Science,” Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel writes, “is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded.” It sounds simple, but it’s not; it’s also not as transparent and democratic as it might sound, either. It pushes scientists towards writing notes that others can understand, but that “other” might be other scientists more than the general public. The rest of us can read but may not understand.

How will academic capital change if academics begin to be rewarded for sharing knowledge openly rather than keeping it secret until it can be revealed via the proper channels? “Openness” will itself have to be defined: do we reward most who most fluently speak the technical codes of their disciplines, or do we reward those who find ways to subvert those codes so that science itself becomes more widely accessible? It’s still an open question (pardon the pun).

Posted in: Language, Professional, Writing