American Gun: “Therapy”
How Not to Change
I’ve said before that I think the electronic textbook is both inevitable and desirable. In the long run, I think collaboratively run Wiki’s make the most sense for college learning, because they are flexible, collaborative, and cheap. They create dramatically collaborative models– symbols, really– of knowledge production. These new textbooks would signal a profound shift away from old models of intellectual property that continue to hinder both the production and the democratization of knowledge. It’s a tool with enormous potential.
Access can be tailored to need or to pedagogical or even national style. Some teachers might make editing the textbook a part of their curriculum; some not. Wikis can be modified and maintained, creating local or regional iterations of the textbook; or, if necessary, abandoned and relaunched at the start of each session. The textbook ceases to be an object and become a network of evolving knowledge. All that is well and good. What worries, me, however, is that, as in other industries, new technologies will promote disenfranchisement rather than power.
That’s what I thought as I was reading, “Early Finding of Cal State U. E-Textbook Study: Terms Matter.” It’s an instructive example. We should survey students about their preferences, but if 2/3’s of them are either neutral or unhappy about the technology, then I think it makes sense to develop some sort of hybrid strategy, combing print and digital technologies, at least for the near term. E-books, and my “dream Wiki” need to be easily printable in an attractive format. We just don’t know yet if digital is the future or a cognitive style or, perhaps more likely, both.
The Department of “While Rome Burns”
There’s quite a lot of discussion about crisis in my book, both in terms of the two historical crises (the Great Depression and World War II) that had such a profound effect on the teaching of English, and in terms of the contemporary crisis, which I argue is less about pedagogy than it is about institutional power. Academics have allowed others to control our professional lives.
There’s not a fundamental crisis in funding, or in the market for English majors, or the use of part time labor, or the rising costs of tuition. (See this “Redesigning Today’s Graduate Classroom” for a recent example of these misconceptions.) The crisis is symptomatic of working people in academia who no longer believe in the power of organizing together towards collective goals.
The attacks on unions in Wisconsin should be instructive to academics. The budget crisis wasn’t caused by the unions, and it won’t be solved by breaking their power. The attacks on the unions is about trying to shift power away from democratic control so that money and capital can be moved out of the public sphere and into private hands. It’s simply a redistribution of wealth.
Markets are not natural phenomena; they are shaped by more or less explicit policy decisions. We can’t reshape the market for liberal arts graduate students simply by teaching them differently. We have to seize control of the mechanisms of policy and create a market that suits our goals. The only way to do that is to organized ourselves into unions. Right now, the rest is fiddling.
Son Volt – Highways and Cigarettes