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

Pity the Poor Adjunct

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The Dylan reference is probably unfair. But whenever I read a piece like this (“Value Students? Then Value Adjuncts“) I can’t help but feel more than a little frustrated. Academics– not just adjuncts– just don’t seem to understand the basic paradigms of power in a capitalist economy. I know that in part it’s just a figure of speech, but it’s absurd to ask the university to “care.”

It just does not work that way. No capitalist institution, no matter how rooted in the liberal arts (or organic foods or solar power or anything else) is going to willingly give up power over something as basic as labor costs. Adjuncts, especially in writing programs, like the author of the piece, are money making machines. Too often (but not always) they are very compliant money machines too.

The real problem, in the end, is that academia needs to give up its genteel notions of power and influence exercises through persuasion, specially in a written form. It borders on a kind of fetish– this notion that the way you change the university is by writing texts to persuade them that your cause is just. Writing is fine, but power comes from organization.

Posted in: Writing

Cultural Capital at the Top

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My educated guess is that the class divide that seems to have become so normalized economically is going to become ever more sharply reflected in the cultural capital of education. I think this will first happen in the institutional capital of universities, particularly in the way they represent learning. These new emerging class divisions will turn on technology.

More and more, I think, online education will come to be seen as analogous to the large lecture halls of the public research universities and the community colleges. That is, as cost and labor saving techniques by and large inappropriate to the higher reaches of the hierarchy. Elite institutions will use distance education, but only as a supplement to their experiential pedagogy.

It won’t be perfectly clear cut– what social phenomena ever is? — but increasingly the class divide will be reflected in the relative pedagogical weight of experiential, ‘hands on’ education, and distance education. At the top, cultural capital will be accumulated in small workshop seminars and in various forms of professional collaboration; at the bottom, via online courses.

I think you get a hint of this in Yale’s ongoing attempt to redefine its Architecture program to reflect what the American Institute of Architecture Students calls “a culture of optimism, respect, sharing, engagement and innovation” (“New Blueprint for Architecture” Inside Higher Ed, October 19, 2009). The reforms are understandably oriented towards undoing the old “work until you drop” model.

That’s a good thing, no doubt. Most subtlety, though, the changes all seem to suggest an emphasis on the sorts of educational work that can only be accomplished in person. “Students will be able to spend a semester in New York City taking courses,” says Dagmar Ritcher, architecture chair, “working at internships and “networking with alumni who are very active in practice there.”

As an online teacher I have to be concerned about the ways that new communication technologies tend to magnify, not simply reproduce, socioeconomic inequity. I think we can teach writing online as well as the traditional classroom. More and more, though, elite institutions will distinguish themselves by the social cultural capital we cannot provide our students at a distance.

Posted in: Writing