A point made over and over at both the Digital Media and Learning (Humanities 2.0) and Microblogging (Twitter) session at MLA was that, unless some new way of thinking, some different possibility for knowing is offered by the technologies being used, then it is not worth doing. Would that we had such a high bar for all the courses we required in formal education!

I begin with that punchline because it was fascinating to me to attend the Microblogging session in which some HASTAC Scholars participated, the Humanities 2.0 session in which three of the winners of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition presented on the progress with their work, and then another session on "Teaching or Research?" and find that, in the first two of these, scrutinizing the implications of the pedagogy for learning itself was key. In the third session, sometimes it was assumed that English Departments, as they have existed for the last several decades, deserve, intrinsically, to exist in that same form into the present and into the future, and thus deserved (again intrinsically and implicitly) to be propped up by requirements in their present form to compensate for dwindling enrollments occasioned by incursions from the social and political sciences. I'm not saying that is a false argument. I am saying that I wish every English Department subjected its curriculum, its individual courses, its operating assumptions (or "mission") to the same kind of introspective, rigorous, scrutiny that I witnessed in the Microblogging and the Digital Media and Learning sessions.

Wouldn't all formal education be better off if we all had to perform a thought experiment in which we had to ask if this course or this discipline really made a difference. And how? And why? We ask that of contingent fields, new interdisciplinary fields, and, in this case, of new forms of learning supported by new technologies but rarely do we extend that same level of inquiry about ourselves to that which has existed long, traditionally, and centrally within formal education.

This will be a two-part blog, the first on the Twitter session and then the second on the Digital Media and Learning Session.

Here are some things I left the two sessions thinking about. Unfortunately, I misplaced my notes so this is from memory. Actually, let me restate that. Fortunately, I misplaced my notes so this is from memory. (In other words, here are a few things I am still thinking about several days and many events later).



First, I learned I am part of a movement called "Slow Blogging." I'm not just loquacious, I am resisting the ?above the fold?/?what fits on a screen? 140-character or less microblogging by a whole new genre. This is satisfying. To know there is a label for ?liking to write too much even if it is annoying to read.? Yes, I am a Slow Blogger and, like my friends in the Slow Food movement, I savor every word.

I also heard about an aphorism of Barbara Ganley's that Dan Cohen passed on in his blog and in a tweet, asking others to "discuss": ?Blog to reflect, tweet to connect.? That is fascinating. Because the ?ambient intimacy? (another fantastic term) of Twitter does feel to me like connection, and I was fascinated to hear about the different ways the panelists used Twitter not only to connect with one another, but to gain a snapshot into forms of group knowledge. One panelist talked about following all of the Twitter feeds using the word ?Michelle? during Michelle Obama?s convention speech, and what that was like, reading it all, left and right and everywhere, as it was happening, a shower of opinion, and a far more sophisticated slice of audience response than the CNN sliding audience monitor on the bottom of the screen.

I was also fascinated by the function of Twitter as political discourse in David Parry?s paper. He raised Ian Bogost?s concerns about tweets as a source of data for Google and the unclear monetizing, in the future, of all of our use. This is an issue I and many others have also raised in other contexts (?Digital Youth and the Paradox of Digital Labor?; HASTAC YouTube video is at http://www.hastac.org/node/1696). The whole business model is confusing. Should it really be free now? That seems impossible to sustain. But if it isn?t free now, what is the potential worth of what we are contributing for ?payment? later and what is the cost of that participation.

One of the panelist argued that Twitter was a way to ?follow the collective consciousness?not unconsciousness.? He may have been quoting someone else (remember, this is from memory). But that is a fascinating idea. If 50 percent of the world?s population now has a cell phone, as someone suggested, then perhaps Twitter is a way to gain a snapshot of what half the world is recording.

Twitter is also, we learned, a way of organizing. Twitter Mobs. Will these Twitter Mobs, organized by cell phone, be smart mobs or not? At the Digital Youth East Asian conference I attended last summer in Tokyo, we learned about the impressive social organizing that South Korean students were able to conduct through cell phones.
Twitter is an affordance that seems designed for on-the-spot organizing.

Another panelist looked at Twitter as a literary form and asked why we wouldn?t consider it that if we can be thinking of seventeenth-century broadsides or medieval tomb epigraphs as potentially literary forms worthy of study not only for the historical information they convey but for the forms of expression that they allow. From Twitter?s haiku linguistic forms to its asymmetry of follower and following to its potential for Rickrolling (always a high art form!), it has genre qualities that are worth thinking about not only in their own right but for what they illuminate about other forms.

----

Special thanks to Flickr community member diceliving for this image; if you click on it, you will find more of the photostream and full documentation.