Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 02, 2009, 10:39 AM
This is a continuation of ?Digital Media and Learning and Twitter at MLA? (http://www.hastac.org/node/1866 and http://www.hastac.org/node/1867). In the first two postings, I wrote about the Twitter/Microblogging session and my presentation on HASTAC and on the MacArthur Foundation?s Digital Media and Learning Initiative at the session entitled ?Humanities 2.0: Participatory Learning in an Age of Technology? that featured three winners of the MacArthur Foundation Competition in Digital Media and Learning. The session was chaired by Zita Nunes and featured Howard Rheingold (Social Media Classroom), Todd Presner (Hypercities), Greg Niemeyer and Antero Garcia (Black Cloud). You can chart the progress of these and all of the Digital Media and Learning Competition projects on the Winners Hub at http://hub.dmlcompetition.net/.

As I wrote in an earlier post, I misplaced my notes from the MLA so all of these comments are from memory. In a way that is a good thing since you will hear what I?m still thinking about and was inspired by, even three days later, with many events, a long trip, and New Year?s Eve in between. I invite Howard, Todd, Greg, and Antero to correct any mistakes that result from doing this by memory.

First up was Howard Rheingold, the media visionary (Smart Mobs) who has been prognosticating and analyzing media since the 1970s. In this presentation, he began with two salient cautions. First, technology is only important insofar as it makes a difference in our lives and learning?and it takes our combined insights to understand exactly what difference it is and isn?t making. Second, despite all the clichs about ?digital millennials? and ?digital natives,? students come into the higher education classroom with radically different levels of comfort and interest in new technologies. We cannot simply assume that all of them are customizing and inventing astonishing new forms of participatory learning on line all the time.

It?s with both cautions in mind that, as one of the four parts of his prize-winning project, Howard worked with a team of developers to create an open source, Drupal-based Social Media Classroom that any of us can download for our own courses. Here?s the url. http://socialmediaclassroom.com/community/forum. His goal with the Social Media Classroom was to create a one-stop location where anyone could set up a media classroom for a class that would offer a Wiki, Forum spaces, a Blogging platform, and a Chat room. It is easy to use, easy to customize, easy to download. Try it! It?s free, and if you have questions you will find a community of users willing to help.

But Howard kept emphasizing his main point. Simply throwing a bunch of technology and gizmos at students does not work. It?s silly, a waste of time?as is any course that throws things at students without thinking through the deep issues of why the material is important. He cautioned that no one should be teaching digital anything without thinking through, with students, a range of issues in our technological era such as how attention works, what participation really means, how one can be both collaborative and preserve one?s individual creativity, and how forms of knowledge mutate at particular historical moments. These ?ur-questions? precede any social media as well as any classroom setting.

Todd Presner next presented the latest iterations of his HyperCities project. Here?s the project url: http://www.hypercities.com/. HyperCities allows for 3-D mapping of cities (the four they are doing now: Berlin, LA, NY, and Lima). You can literally click on a map of a present-day Berlin and then go back in time hundreds of years, to find out what was on the exact same site in the past. But, more than just a time-capsuled ?google map,? HyperCities Based on digital models of real cities, "HyperCities" is a web-based learning platform that connects geographical locations with the narratives of the people who live in these cities and who have lived there in the past. The project is a collaboration with universities and community partners in the different cities and participants can upload photographs, family stories, memories, as well as official historical accounts about specific locations. So this is both a historical resource for scholars and a living history museum for anyone, as well as a geo-spatial interface between two different modes of doing professional and ?citizen? history.

I was especially excited to hear Todd talk about a new project that the LA-based group is doing on Filipino town, in a collaboration with the Filipino Workers? Center as well as students in an upcoming course at UCLA. Students are already (even in advance of the course) uploading family histories and photographs to document an enriched history of Filipino immigration, labor movements, social movements, and legislation for the city of LA. The result will be both a remarkable new resource for historians (professional and amateur) and a community-building tool for multi-generational users, with students as the leaders in the development of this part of the project. To return to the ur-question of ?why??: because whatever forms of analytical, critical discussion one wants to promote of history depends on the archive and, as we know from Foucault and many others, the archive is a politics. The archive preserves disparity and invisibility. A project such as HyperCities maps, as Todd noted, what is usually not ?monumental,? what is typically not preserved in the overt, celebratory history of place. This is not just archive-based history this is reconstructing which is to say constructing a new archive.

The final project, Black Cloud: Environmental Studies Gaming, was introduced by its principal creator, multimedia artist Greg Niemeyer and his collaborator, Antero Garcia, a public policy doctoral student at UCLA and a full-time teacher at Manual Arts High School in South Central LA. Here?s the url for the Black Cloud website: http://www.blackcloud.org/. The game is a mixed-reality game, with some components on line but other components that happen in the neighborhoods themselves. Sophisticated but simple (and quite adorably designed) Black Cloud censors are hidden throughout the neighborhoods and at environmentally important locations in the city. The kids who play the game learn literacy, science, citizen journalism, social organizing, community activism, web-based skills, chemistry and ecology, and also have a great time finding the sensors, analyzing the data, and then reporting on the data and acting on it. This is all in an English class taught largely to immigrant kids (80% of the students are Latino/a and do not speak English as a first language, 20% of the kids are African American).

What was most compelling in this demonstration was hearing that the students learned that their classroom was the single most polluted place that they tested in LA. No windows that could open. Particle board. Toxic cleaning compounds. Terrible ventilation. The students then documented the state of their classrooms and wrote proposals to officials about improving this quality. Citizen journalism at its most pressing. They investigated such issues as asthma as well as drowsiness increasing inside this compromised classroom?as well as at the dry cleaners after school where several of them worked.

The students also learned other important lessons. Here?s one I remember: the parking garage outside LA?s symphony hall was actually less polluted than the hall itself. The students analyzed the data and found the reason. Perfume. Theater-goers douse themselves in it and perfumes are filled with toxicity, especially in compound and in aggregate.

Here?s a great line from the Black Cloud website: ?Black Cloud is inspired by Alternate Reality games such as World without Oil, by dramatic collaborative performances such as Continuous City and by teaching transformation rather than information.?

I?ll vote for that. Anyone who says that ?digital learning? isn?t ?real learning? (yes, we had such a comment from an audience member) isn?t paying attention. Or, more accurately, is so busy defending the assumptions of the field into which they were delivered as young graduate students that they do not see, cannot see, do not wish to see, the contours of a changing world in which their field is shrinking, not because it is irrelevant, but because far too few people in the profession represented by the MLA are willing to do the deep, difficult, engaged work of thinking through what it means to be a field (any field) in the twenty-first century.

I do not believe that the dreary decline in English majors that the MLA duly reports on every year is inevitable. But I do believe it is inevitable if we, as a profession, refuse to go through the work that so many of our peers in the arts, social sciences, and natural and biological sciences have gone through of carefully examining our assumptions, our goals, and our decline in light of the Information Age that should be our finest hour, the moment which, as a profession, we are trained to attend to most sensitively, acutely, historically, rhetorically, and critically.

If we are missing the boat of the Information Age as teachers trained in the art of close reading, compelling writing, and critical thinking, then, well, sorry folks, we deserve to sink.

The three projects presented at this MLA session are thriving, not because of their digital affordances but because their participants are deeply engaged with the project of thinking and rethinking in this complex and changing world.