Lessons learned from doing two 2-hour seminars with AKMA at Vanderbilt on the Internet and teaching (with blogs as a special focus in the second session):

Don’t overstate the case against “experts.” Scholars and teachers are likely to find the idea wrong and the rhetoric obnoxious.

Don’t be a dickhead about having to walk for ten minutes in the rain.

It was a stimulating day and a privilege to participate in. In the morning, I talked for 15 minutes (i.e., 25) about the effect of the Web on self, conversation and knowledge/authority. On the last point, I talked briefly about knowledge as arising from human voices in conversation and about the new ability to have multiple subjectivities do the job that objectivity used to have to struggle to do on its own.

Then AKMA gave a grounded talk on introducing technology into educational systems, a sort of lessons-learned piece. He made three key points: 1) Change happens so fast that academics shouldn’t be responsible for staying on top of it; it’s more or less a full-time job. 2) Teaching well comes first and we still have lots to learn there. 3) We should learn from the technology how it can help us rather than make enormous top-down decisions with preconceived ideas about how the technology will be adopted and adapted. Find neat stuff, AKMA says, and fiddle with it.

That left a little over an hour for discussion. It tended more towards the broad questions, bouncing back to the practical and useful. Is the Internet primarily about information? Are information and conversation separable? There was some discussion of the nature of Web selves as written. (Afterwards, John Rakestraw, our host, pointed out that the characteristics of Web selves I’d mentioned – written and intermittent – are also characteristic of the selves college professors see if there is little classroom interaction.) We talked about the nature of reputation and authority. We talked about the reliability of information coming from strangers, some of whom might be marketing malefactors.

In the last ten minutes, three faculty members played back what we’d been saying in the Worst Possible Understanding mode: we’re advocating “cults of personality” that determine what is to be believed according to how entertaining it is, resulting in a dumbing down of “knowledge” to a pre-fifth grade level. We only had a few minutes left, which concentrated the conversation but didn’t let us get much past marking out territory: this is about whether knowledge is independent of human situatedness and whether expertise is an inner quality or has value only in play. It is, in short, an epistemological question. And AKMA, one of the very best expositors of Post-Modern hermeneutics, was champing at the bit to run with it. But then time was up. Aaarrggghhh.

The afternoon session was less formal and much more focused on practical issues. We showed a wiki (which one of the session members updated on his own as we were demo-ing it) and talked about how it might be used in a course, either having multiple contributors to a single page or having each student create and own pages that contribute to the overall topic. But mainly we talked about blogs. Lots of interest and lots of great questions. Particularly striking to me was the discussion about whether it’s fair to require a student to publish a blog on the big, open Internet. Remember that Permanent Record your school principal used to threaten you with? Well, it’s real and it’s called Google.

It was, I thought, an excellent discussion that drew particularly on AKMA’s strengths and experience with tech in the classroom. (Will someone please find him a job that combines theology, preaching, scholarship, teaching and being a tech guru for a college? Oh, and stand-up comic and candidate for political office.)

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