[csaa-forum] New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies - Issue 10 of The Fibreculture Journal - online now

[Andrew Murphie]

New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies - Issue 10 of The Fibreculture
Journal

- edited by Adrian Miles

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/index.html

Towards and Algorithmic Pedagogy - Holly Willis
Composing and Compositing: Integrated Digital Writing and Academic Pedagogy
- Jamie 'Skye' Bianco
Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media - Cheryl Ball
& Ryan 'rylish' Moeller
The Digital, the Virtual and the Naming of Knowledge - Darren Jorgensen
Some thoughts on the evolution of digital media studies - Lisa Gye
Roundtable Audio Discussion - James Farmer with Anne Bartlett-Bragg and
Chris Bigum

---
by issue editor Adrian Miles ....

This issue of fibreculture journal is based on an invitation to respond to
the following provocation:

It is easy to argue that much of the rhetoric attached to "new media" and
the internet in relation to pedagogy has mistaken quantity for quality. It
has been a conversation that has confused the qualitative changes that our
new conceptions of media, knowledge, and networks afford with the
quantitative changes beloved of those who confuse teaching and learning with
instruction and consumption. These new qualities are the differences between
the vector and commodity, blogs and books.

 However, imagine if our universities had been invented now. What would
pedagogy be? What form would teaching and learning take? What would count as
knowledge? Expertise? What forms would this knowledge take?

 Taking this as a departure this issue of the Fibreculture Journal invited
those working in new media, internet studies, education, and cognate
disciplines to discuss the strengths and celebrate the possibilities that
new media and its networks affords teaching and learning. The emphasis in
this issue is not on the criticism or description of existing models and
paradigms but to invite the exploration and celebration of new
possibilities, real or imagined. What new knowledge formations should there
be? How would they be taught? How could they assessed (if at all)? What
critical academic work, and in what forms, would our students be producing?

Willis, in 'Towards an Algorithmic Pedagogy', takes a position from within
contemporary debates on multimodal literacies asking how to shift
traditional and institutional definitions of literacy to acknowledging not
only the changes wrought by digital networks but the epistemological changes
that have followed in its wake. These epistemological changes see
contemporary media from an ecological perspective where such an approach

allows us to take account of the multiply determining relationships wrought
not just by individual media, but by the interrelationships, dependencies
and symbioses that take place within the dynamic system that is today's
high-tech university. An ecological approach allows us to examine what
happens when new media practices collide with computational models,
providing a glimpse of possible transformations not only ways of being but
ways of teaching and learning. (Willis,
2007<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/issue10_willis.html>)


This is where Willis sees the consequences of the digital as productive of a
mode of practice, rather than in the production of objects or artefacts, and
so proposes a pedagogy that is "soft", process orientated, distributed in
regards to authority and allows for the unexpected.

Whereas Willis makes an argument through the essay, Bianco's 'Composing and
Compositing: Integrated Digital Writing and Academic Pedagogy' moves into a
reflexive mode where the writing seeks to perform as much as state its case.
Here we get the brio of writing that is beginning to treat text as a
material artefact with force in its own right, and not merely a semiotic
sign on the way towards an idealised sense. Here a liberal use of basic
typographic variation is employed to good effect. It is easy in work such as
this to misjudge this as only bravado, or even perhaps writerly vanity,
however the ease with which type is malleable in digital writing (a point we
have perhaps too easily taken for granted after twenty years of word
processing) and the resolute conservativeness of academic writing to eschew
these simple possibilities is something this work returns to with some
force. This is an exciting essay, crossing between classroom practice and a
critique of literacy and literacy education that is grounded in that
peculiarly North American phenomenon of the composition class. Bianco
argues:

The various generic qualities of academic writing in specific fields
provides strict design parameters through a shared and discreet legend
against which the future of manuscripted thought must tabulate itself to be
recognized as accountable literate writing. The medium is the message only
insofar as its formal excesses cannot transmit as anything but noise and
chaos. Intertextuality resides only at the level of readership and writerly
citation thresholding the full force of writerly signification in the
manuscript to remain expository, always-already exposed, and above all,
transparent and clear. (Bianco,
2007<http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/issue10_bianco.html>)


These are accurate points, and in the history of critiques of the normative
force of academic writing on discovery and experimentation perhaps not
novel. However, from this traditional critique Bianco quickly moves to the
qualities of movement and affect and their affordances for writing in
digital media. While remaining preliminary, I believe this slide towards
affect offers a manner of conceiving of the role of learning and literacy
that offers an alternative conception to that which we have inherited.

Unlike the first two essays Ball and Moeller offer a manifesto come
"webtext" that can only ever be online. It uses a very simple alphabetic
architecture as one form of navigation, but also uses typographic cues to
indicate writerly voice, as well as providing internal links. Hence
'Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media' can be read
traditionally, from beginning to end by following the letters, or
hypertextually by reading the internal links. They argue for the relevance
of rhetorical frameworks for the study of what is best thought of as a
digital writing, specifically identifying the value of "topoi" as places of
'negotiated meaning making' which allow for a variety of critical literacies
to be experienced. The arguments here are rich, variable, and splintered, as
they ought to be. It is a call to arms as much as a demonstration of other
academic forms in the humanities and is what I would characertise as part of
the first wave of such work.

These three essays together in their own right are of interest as they
demonstrate the extent to which problems of "literacy" and new media are
present in a North American context. These are not debates that one sees
very much of in new media, internet, or media studies in Australia (though
they are more common in technology and education communities) but for those
who are interested in finding a practice that lies between the studio arts
and design based model of making (with not a lot of critical thought),
versus the Bachelor of Arts model of critical thought via essay writing
(with not a lot of creative making) they provide a series of critical
possibilities and modes of practice. This cultural difference is evidenced
in the differences in the arguments introduced by the remaining, local,
contributors to this collection.

Jorgensen makes two major claims in 'The Digital, the Virtual and the Naming
of Knowledge'. The first is that the role of educators is to defamiliarise
rather than explicate, and the second is to validate the "virtual", in
particular via Lévy, as a more robust framework for research and teaching in
the realm of the digital. The first claim is made in an effort to shift the
larger project of digital studies (whether this be labelled new media
studies, internet studies, media studies or some combination of these is
largely moot) towards an engaged and critical practice and not merely an
instrumental teaching which prepares labour for a post industrial labour
market. This is compounded simply by the promiscuity of the digital as a
useful category since its role and applicability is hardly subject to
disciplinary constraint, and Jorgensen identifies an implicit determinism in
what has become a reactive educational agenda within our universities. On
the other hand the 'virtual', particularly in the sense he ascribes, has the
benefit of not being grounded within the digital, but offers a methodology
to consider technology in terms of actualisations. Jorgensen argues that
this provides a means of investigation and critique that is neither
technologically or socially determinist and allows us to view 'a
technological face on the virtual continuity of regimes of knowledge and
power' which allows the humanities to assume the critical role it ought.

Gye's contribution, 'Some Thoughts on the Evolution of Digital Media
Studies' is firmly located in the specificities of teaching in an applied
institution and offers a historical, critical and personal reflection on
Gye's history as a digital media studies educator. Here the contexts of
teaching involve as much a "doing" of digital media studies as a theoretical
analysis of whatever we may take digital media studies to be. In this
context Gye argues for the legitimacy and ethics of media as a "making your
own media", the sort of independent media production and distribution that
community radio developed, with its attendent technical skills which are
understood to be means towards an end, rather than the ends in themselves.
>From here Ulmer's seminal contributions to the broader field of critical
digital literacy are introduced from where Gye slides into the shift from
the digital as a mode for the production of different objects into networked
practice where the idea of object is problematised, which in turn becomes
the space of the mobile phone, the network, and the relations between the
individual, corporate culture, communication as social and commercial
imperative, and the role of education as a critical practice. Gye's
contribution provides a timely overview of the very rapid change in both the
object of study, and the same socio-technical changes that students and
institutions have bought to education in general. While Gye does not offer
specific answers, the questions are significant.

Finally, a mp3 roundtable conversation, moderated by James Farmer, discusses
the key questions posed in the original call for papers for this issue.
Farmer's respondents, Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Chris Bigum, provide an
intriguing and timely discussion around the possibilities and problems posed
by digital literacies. While arguing for a revolution, and criticising
existing practice as merely applying "band aids" to existing structures,
Bartlett-Bragg identifies the tensions between the demands of digital
learning systems as apparatuses of compliance, versus the affordances of the
digitally native student. Bigum, on the other hand, identifies the
resilience of the university, and education, as systems that in themselves
have much to offer and provides an intriguing, and very well argued counter
view that seeks a middle road between existing industrial modes of education
and the more utopian versions of digital liberation. That this was recorded
using Skype I think is of more than passing interest as it is a simple
example of the ways in which simple tools might shift and complement
traditional practices.

The essays and ideas collected here are diverse, at times disjunctive, but
each provides a point of view on the digital, broadly conceived, and
education. At this point, with digital media now ubiquitous in our
institutions, but also with the rise of highly centralised learning
management systems, it is perhaps timely to have a survey of this sort. This
lets us recognise where we have come from, where we have gotten to, and then
perhaps allows for debate on where we might go.

Adrian Miles 2007


-- 
"Take me to the operator, I want to ask some questions" - Barbara
Morgenstern

"Of course it is always possible to work oneself into a state of complete
contentment with an ultimate irrationality" - Alfred North Whitehead

"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast back again into the
open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Andrew Murphie - Associate Professor
School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, Australia, 2052
web:http://empa.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/staff.php?first=Andrew&last=Murphie
http://adventuresinjutland.wordpress.com/
http://researchhub.cofa.unsw.edu.au/ccap/
fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie at unsw.edu.au
room 311H, Webster Building
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