On being more interesting

Over the last few days, I have been looking at sections of my PhD to help me understand some of the processes that are happening with attempts to censor/filter the Internet as proposed by the Australian Government.  One of the particular issues I have is not so much whether censorship is bad (I believe it is) or whether free speech trumps it (perhaps in a limited way), but what opportunities we forego in an attempt to protect children from ‘inadvertent’ exposure to ‘stuff we don’t like’. I use ‘we’, there, to mean society in general or at least the vocal portions of it.

My thesis is concerned with our limited understanding of the social processes of learning within the ‘newer’ online environments and why they do not map directly onto face-to-face scenarios.  One of the key things I noticed while attempting to focus my research was a tendency to find the latest technology and just use it.  I think something I wrote for ACIS in 2002 sums up some of the problems that we are still encountering today.

Much of the published material dealing with online learning provides justification for what people are using – a kind of “that’s cool technology, let’s use it” (Lane and Shelton, 2001) and implies ‘gee it let’s me get away from the classroom’ (Roberts, 2002) attitude.  The lack of a theoretical framework in this literature results in what Bridges (1998) calls “a fascinating clash of epistemologies” where thinking about ‘knowing’ disappears within attempts to define a ‘comfort zone of teaching’.  This comfort zone reflects what McWilliam (1997) believes is an attempt to do away with the teacher’s body, relieving the need to ‘perform’ in a class and placing the academic in a kind of ‘student free space’.

It seems that a lot of what I read now shows a similar kind of attitude – we still really like new stuff.  But I think we often don’t think too deeply or theoretically about what we are doing.  I’m sure there’s a psychological explanation for that – it takes a significant amount of training to get to that level of wankery, but I do believe there is value in some of us doing that.

Think of it this way: Some of us love riding the roller coaster and will ride again and again and again. Some of us hate the roller coaster and would rather do anything else.  And then there’s a small proportion of us, who will ride the roller coaster to see what it’s like, but then wonder what the attraction is, but also why some people are outright petrified of it.  I’m in that latter group.

Of course, the beauty of roller coasters is that they provide a relatively safe environment for people to feel the thrill of fast and unexpected movement.  It satisfies a particular need.  Knowing this, I start to wonder why other people don’t also have this need.  That’s the beauty of the human condition.  We are all different. [1]

This leads me to the conclusion that while I may be fascinated by the forms of communication we are developing through the affordances of technologies, I will try most of them[2] and then try to figure out what exactly people are doing by both being involved and not being involved.  That’s a Burkean process.  Burke (1969 p xv) pays specific and detailed attention to the question

“What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?”

That’s a question I will be attempting to address in future posts as I did in my thesis[3].

References

Bridges, D. (1998). The construction and organisation of knowledge in the university curriculum. British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Belfast.
Burke, K. (1969) A grammar of motives, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Lane, D. R. and M. W. Shelton (2001). The Centrality of Communication Education in Classroom Computer-Mediated-Communication: Toward a Practical and Evaluative Pedagogy. Communication Education 50(3): 241-255.
McWilliam, E. (1997). No body to teach (with)?: The technological makeover of the university teacher. Australian Journal of Communication 24(1): 1-8.
Roberts T S (2002), Academics in Academia: The Forgotten Resource in the Rush to New Technologies, Educational Technology & Society 5 (2): 164-171, April 2002.
Schlotzer A and Ruth, A, 2002, Reflecting on the need to Evaluate Courses Using ICT within a Pedagogical Framework, Enabling Organisations and Society through Information Systems: Proceedings of the 13th Australasian Conference of Information Systems, pp1209-1218 Melbourne, 4-6 December, 2002.

1. Perhaps we should not contemplate why some people like roller coasters, they may be banned by people who just don’t get it [↩]
2. Facebook is a notable exception [↩]
3. which you can read here if you need anything to cure insomnia [↩]

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