The Importance of Colleges

I began my career as a teacher in a two year college in Montreal. Vanier College was the second English language institution created as part of the CEGEP system in Quebec after Dawson College. (CEGEP means, College of General & Vocational Education or Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel) I consider those early years to have been among the best, at least at the level of learning both for myself and for my students. Recent tragic events at Dawson College have reminded me of the richness of my experiences and the need to understand the importance of the colleges to the educational system in Canada.

Colleges (particularly two-year institutions) are generally looked down upon by universities for reasons that have little to do with their importance, indeed the centrality of colleges to a variety of communities. Here in British Columbia, colleges are crucial to so many communities that I often wonder (perhaps I am being naïve) why they are not celebrated not only for their histories, but for their achievements. College teachers have larger workloads and are not expected to do research, although it is impossible to teach without staying current within your field. Most post-secondary educational systems are characterized by tremendous diversity, in large measure because colleges respond in a more direct way to the needs of their constituents. It is a difficult balancing act — be responsive and yet provide contexts for learning that enhance and enrich not only the lives of learners, but allow them to develop the skills to go to university or into a profession.

I mention all of this because of a wonderful column by T. F. RIGELHOF entitled How we'll heal in the Saturday, September 16, 2006 edition of the Globe and Mail newspaper about the Dawson shootings. Unfortunately, the article is not available on the web. In the piece, Rigelhof celebrates the love that he has for the college and for its students. And for me, this is about the wonder that he feels at the engagement that is required to teach and learn.

In an earlier piece of mine, I wrote the following: "Ignorance is about resistance. It is about the desire to think and act in certain ways, most of which are rooted in a conscious refusal to engage with processes of inner reflection. The problem is that some pedagogical strategies try to anticipate what students need to know, as if teachers have already solved their own contradictory relationship with learning. The result is that teachers create (if not imagine) an ideal student and then make judgements about the students who are unable to attain the standards set by their instructional methods. If there is to be some equality of exchange here, then the teacher has to be learning nearly all of the time. This can then set the stage for some linkage and visibility between the foundational assumptions of the instructor and her own past, as well as her own history of learning. This may then return the teacher to a closer understanding of what it means to be a student."

I still stand by what I said and Rigelhof exemplifies why a strong emphasis on students changes not only their lives, but the lives of those who teach.

Dawson College Shootings

Today, the violence of our times hit home quite personally with a terrible shooting at Dawson College. The link in the previous sentence summarizes a personal view of this tragedy.

I know the college very well having started my teaching career at another similar college in Montreal. Many things will be written about this event. Nothing can explain the sense of loss that many of us feel, not only for the lives of those who were victimized, but also for the problems that the shooting reveals about our society. This is not a time for generalizations, but for contemplation and thoughtfulness.

Those of us who have dedicated our lives to teaching, learning and building the educational system in Canada can only strive to do our jobs even better in the hope that rationality and optimism will overcome the pain of moments like this.

Community

“Community suggests a place and a space of commonality — sharing. Community also suggests difference — characteristics which distinguish one group from another, one individual from another. As Anthony Cohen has put it, community expresses a “relational idea that allows social groups to define and create boundaries between themselves and others.

Community, the profound sense of attachment that we have to place and to people, is as much about geography as it is about imagination. The maps we draw produce borders that we cross with our minds even as we defend the more closed and shadowy concepts of nation, province or locality.

Jaron Lanier and The Hazards of Online Collectivism

Jaron Lanier, who is famous for having coined the term virtual reality and the concepts that go with it, wrote an essay in late May that has provoked discussion all over the internet. Here is a quote from the piece. The complete article can be found at the EDGE website. The essay is entitled, "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism."

The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It's been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that's actually interesting information.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

The EDGE also has 28 pages of responses to what Lanier says.

The essence of his argument is that collaborative work on the net has become increasingly hive-like. This leads to a "group mentality" approach to ideas and the notion that the "collective is all-wise." The result is a tyranny of the majority with a simultaneous loss of value both to intellectual depth and the way democracies operate. He is particularly critical of wikipedia— the online encyclopedia which is being built by individuals from all over the world in much the same manner as open source software. I have commented on wikipedia before. Some of Lanier's fears are well-founded, but for the most part, his comments don't explain or clarify why networked forms of knowledge contruction are any more hive-based than most intellectual projects. Generally, irrespective of the type of knowledge or information produced, there are communities of interest that define and reinforce the concepts, categories and arguments that they support. This has been discussed in great depth by people like Bruno Latour and Elias Canetti wrote an important "Crowds and Power," in 1962 on the phenomenon of mass hysteria and the tendency to a kind of viral effect when large groups of people operate in tandem.

Lanier's points need discussion, not the least because networked forms of interaction on the scale that we are seeing at the moment are still very new. That said, there is not much to his analysis of conventional media. He is too skeptical of Popular Culture and gives too much weight to the role of sites like Wikipedia. His concern, that the aggregative role played by the many sites that are about sites is overstated. He is worried that these meta-sites will play an overly powerful role as arbiters of taste and choice. I think in this, he underestimates the intelligence of Internet users. Nonetheless, an important article to read.

The context for learning, education and the arts (5)

(Please refer to the previous four entries for this article. (One, Two, Three, Four, Five)

My point here is that although computers are designed by humans, programmed by humans and then used by humans, this tells us only part of the story. The various dimensions of the experience are not reducible to one of the above instances nor to the sum total of what they suggest about computer-human interaction. Instead, most of what makes up the interaction is not predictable, is full of potential errors of translation and action and is not governed by simple rules of behaviour.

Smith puts it well: “…what was required was a sense of identity that would support dynamic, on-the-fly problem-specific or task-specific differentiation — including differentiation according to distinctions that had not even been imagined at a prior, safe, detached, “design time. (Smith: 41)

“Computational structures cannot be designed in anticipation of everything that will be done with them. This crucial point can be used to explain if not illustrate the rather supple nature of machine-human relations. As well, it can be used to explain the extraordinary number of variables which simultaneously make it possible to design a program and not know what will be done with it.

Another example of this richness at work comes from the gaming community (which is different from the video game community). There are tens of thousands of people playing a variety of games over the internet. Briefly, the games are designed with very specific parameters in mind. But what gamers are discovering is that people are grouping themselves together in clans to play the games in order to win. These clans are finding new ways of controlling the games and rewriting the rules to their own specifications thereby alienating many of the players. In one instance, in response to one such sequence of events, a counter-group got together and tried to create some semblance of governance to control the direction in which the game was headed. After some months the governing council that had been formed grew more and fascistic and set inordinately strict rules for everyone. The designer of the game quit in despair.

This example illustrates the gap, the necessary gap between the “representational data structure (Smith: 43) that initially set up the parameters of the game and the variables that were introduced by the participants. But it also points out the limitations of the design process, limitations that cannot be overcome by increasingly complex levels of design. This is in other words a problem of representation. How can code be written at a level that will be able to anticipate use? The answer is, that for the most part, with great difficulty. It is our cultural investment in the power of the computer that both enhances and changes the coding and the use. We have thus not become extensions of the machine but have acted in concert with it, much as we might with another human being. This is hybridity and it suggests that technology and the practical use to which we put technology always exceeds the intentional structures that we build into it.

It is within and through this excess that we learn. It is because of this excess that we are able to negotiate a relationship with the technologies that make up our environment. And it is the wonder, the freshness, the unpredicability of the negotiation process that leads us to unanticipated results, such as, for example, Deep Blue actually beating Kasparov!