Category Archives: academia

programming an exam, teaching theory

My students’ final exam is due tomorrow. I’m actually quite proud of the design of this exam because it plays on every aspect of new media, even in the design. First, it’s combinatorial. Students write an essay for each artifact that they studied, choose two readings, two frameworks and one insight, write a question and answer it. It’s not like most essay exams because it requires so much creativity and piecing together all that they learned. Yet, it will show what they’re passionate about and help us see which readings mattered to them and which frameworks worked. Not only will it help us evaluate the students, it will let us evaluate the course itself. Conveniently, it’s also something that can be done in takehome fashion without too much worry about cheating (because goddess knows i never want to prosecute another cheating case ever again).

The biggest problem i’m learning as students ask me questions is that they do not really know how to engage theoretical frameworks in an essay. In trying to explain this to them, i discovered a good method (which was recently confirmed by a friend who uses the same method). Tell students to imagine having a conversation with an author or authors about a subject. Ask them to imagine how that conversation would go, how they would offer different insights in the dialogue. Students have a tendency to treat texts from an external perspective, as though they just have to quote things verbatim. It’s much more productive when they can think about how a theorist would deal with an issue and this results in much more interesting responses.

Students’ exams are starting to pour in which is a bit terrifying. There are 60 students, 4 essays each and each essay is 500-1000 words. Plus, there are 12 final projects to grade. By the end of tomorrow, i need to have semester-long grades for all students. Teaching has given me a new respect for professors. I used to bitch about exams and essays but i didn’t even consider how much work grading is. Luckily, the combinatorial final will mean that each essay will be new and interesting and i suspect that i’ll learn a lot about new media from my students tomorrow.

identity crisis: the curse/joy of being interdisciplinary and the future of academia

“Who’s the future?” It was a simple question that my friend asked but it has now bugged me for months. He wanted to know who the future of academia is, who will shift academia as the likes of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. We started thinking of current scholars who really made huge shifts in academia – Butler, Haraway, … There are some brilliant scholars out there, folks who have really dove in and clarified an area of academia, developed new algorithms, etc. but have not really exploded the intellectual sphere. The last big explosion was really the French scholars circling around in 1968. Of course, there was a lot going on that year, a lot of reasons to really rethink everything.

As the conversation unfolded, we started talking about interdisciplinarity being the key to the next intellectual shift. The problem with disciplines is that they’re too narrow and all you can do is improve in one little niche arena. The key to intellectual shifts is the key to creativity. Ronald Burt talks about how social network bridges are super creative because they draw on ideas from disparate parts of the network. Of course, this is why i love the idea of apophenia – making connections where none previously existed. It’s all about building synaptic connections between things that were otherwise unconnected.

So, i’ve attended 10 job talks this semester in two purportedly interdisciplinary departments. I have to say, i’ve been utterly disappointed. Each scholar talked about a very very niche body of research that, at best, simply didn’t fit into other disciplines. None were revolutionarily new ways of thinking, not even close. These were job talks at a premier academic institution and some of the candidates couldn’t even make an argument. Only one did i really think that i would learn quite a bit by (although i disagreed with the premise of his argument and thought that he was fantastically utopian in his understanding of sousveillance). Why aren’t there scholars right now who make my jaw drop?

I think that it’s hard to be interdisciplinary. I think everyone *wants* to be interdisciplinary but that seems to mean draw haphazardly from different disciplines, throw into the blender, add a few spices and voila interdisciplinary gazpacho. I want a chemical reaction dammit.

The problem with being interdisciplinary is it that means staying in a state of perpetual identity crisis. I think that this is fundamentally hard for academics. Many of us grew up as ostracized freaks and geeks and felt such glory in fitting in. There’s something desperately comforting about fitting it, about being amongst peers. Staying in-between, outside and perpetually bridging any dichotomous definitions is exhausting. I think about how many people i know who identify as someone in-between (fe)male but eventually chose to identify as one or the other. Alternatively, i think about inter-racial identities and how some of my friends happily proclaim the identity of hapa. When no identity out there works, you end up developing a new one. Of course, this happens in academia all the time. There are new interdisciplinary departments popping up daily in academia.

Of course, what does this solve? Most of the times, interdisciplinary schools spend years trying to resolve their identity. I’ve taken place in plenty of these conversations because they’re intellectually engaging – what is information? what is hci? what is performance? what is new media? They never actually get resolved.

I think that i relish staying in a perpetual state of identity crisis. Well, i go back and forth. Sometimes, i desperately want a cohort, a community. But every time a journalist asks me how to label me, i laugh. I’m certainly not a computer scientist any more. I’m definitely not a librarian and while i can swallow labels like sociologist and anthropologist, i’m sure that everyone who actually identifies as such rolls over in their graves when they see that label placed on me. Maybe my label should be a symbol – i can be the Prince of academia.

So, if i think about what the next revolution in academia will be, it will have to be interdisciplinary. It will not be possible to label the next round of revolutionary scholars and they won’t be trapped up in conversations and defining disciplines or securing methods. You still can’t really label Foucault and if you talk about his methods, it all gets very hairy. I like to say that he does hypertext. But seriously, who is the next Foucault? Who will help me see the world from an entirely new perspective? And what is the future of being interdisciplinary?

pedagogy of group projects

I have always loathed group projects, mostly due to personal experience in middle and high school. I was always the kid who knew what was going on and perennially pissed at those who didn’t or didn’t care. Pedagogically, i was always told that you needed to learn such a skill because it’s how the world works. I rolled my eyes at pedagogy (or, more accurately, at that age i gave it my finger). In college, i learned to appreciate group projects a bit more. My department was set up so that in the fourth semester, you had to choose a team for a huge final project. For the most part, we all knew each other by that point and there was a social cohesion that made such group work very manageable. Of course, there was always that one group made up of folks who didn’t know each other and inevitably got the lowest score.

I’ve always wondered about the pedagogical strengths and weaknesses of group project work in courses. How do you get past the rotten apple problem? How do you make group projects not have so much overhead that they take up a bazillion hours of negotiation? How do you help people contain their frustration? In other words, as a teacher, what do i gain/lose from group projects? And how do i overcome my own fears of them?

crash course in professing

At the request of my advisor and department, i took over his undergraduate class last week – “Foundations of New Media” (co-taught with another professor). I always knew that i wanted to teach and i absolutely love undergrads but this wasn’t quite how i envisioned myself beginning this process.

So, i spent a chunk of time last week trying to catch up on where the class was. I had only read a fraction of the actual texts before (mostly for fun when i was at MIT). Thus, i had to do a lot of catch-up. Luckily, i found that i was familiar with 95% of the concepts and that many of the texts were just overviews of things that i knew and loved – gotta love Open University textbooks.

I prepared lecture slides and gave my first lecture on Thursday. It was almost stunning how much i remembered about teaching. My years of teaching computer science at Brown paid off and it was fun to be in front of the classroom, particularly since some of the students were already accustomed to speaking up. We talked about culture, ethnography, bias, interpretation, etc. They had just come back from their first effort at interviewing (in preparation for doing truly user centered design).

And now i’m off and running, preparing assignments, grading and trying to figure out how to narrow down the gravity force field of a course reader to something manageable (since it’s kinda clear that the students aren’t actually reading the material since it’s far far far too much). The course is both completely in place and still at flux – a foundation i can work with but also changes that i can make. And conveniently, i’m not entirely on my own – there’s another professor and two TAs, all of whom rock.

As odd as this all is, it’s going to be a great learning experiment (although it will kill my time in unprecedented ways). This is certainly a trip of a way to start professing. One day, it will be real.

[Unfortunately, though, my brain is chewing on things like Foucault and Saussure instead of blogging and email so i don’t know when i’ll be back to dialogue again.]

why i’m in academia

Wow. I’m back in school. And overwhelmed in that way that only school can offer – more reading than is physically possible combined with a radical shift in discursive styles and output combined with the weight of feeling as though everything is overdue. Of course, everything *IS* overdue, including blog entries.

Because i’m back in school, what’s on my mind is why. Some of my dearest friends have left this semester and nothing makes me cringe more than being asked when i’m going to graduate. (I promise that until i do i will continue to say “3 more years” as i have since the beginning.) I’m trying to unpack why i believe in academia and why i want my PhD. Or maybe this is an annual reality check.

I love having a knowledge project, a philosophical direction to grapple with a core issue of humanness. I love being intellectually engaged with the end goal being knowledge above all else. I love learning and i love teaching.

Of course, i absolutely despise writing – it’s like pulling teeth and i seem to avoid it like the plague. There’s nothing fun about grant writing and the internal politics are brutal (although not as bad as in non-profits).

The irony is that the deeper i go into academia, the more i enjoy having one foot in industry. I really like helping people work out development problems, offering applicable critique in a way that they can move forward. Of course, my goal isn’t monetization so i can’t imagine actually being responsible for the development of a product inside a company, only for helping people who are motivated by monetization figure out flaws in their plot. Of course, my politics are still strong here and i cannot imagine helping projects that will monetize by abusing people in any form.

I am not invested in only communicating with other academics or people whose end goal is knowledge production. I’m happy to talk to developers, journalists, businesspeople. I find the conversations stimulating and the questions that are asked challenging. That’s part of why i read blogs not just academic papers – access to diverse views. I love thinking of my peer group as being broader than just other academics and i love getting feedback or having conversations outside of the academy. Unfortunately, peer reviewed papers in academia take forever and it’s really hard to motivate to get my ideas out that way when i can just throw things up online and get burnt at the stake and then rework my ideas. Somehow, the idea of not sharing until it’s peer reviewed feels so institutional.

Of course here is where i’m going to get myself into major trouble with academia. I don’t think that the institutional boundaries are the end-all-be-all and i do think that they’re quite limiting at times. I’ve never been one to appreciate rules for rules sake. I’m half terrified that my openness is going to get me into major trouble down the line (another reason why i’m terrified of graduating).

The other trouble is that by having feet in multiple worlds, i’m not doing justice to any of them. I’m not the best academic i could be and i’m not the best consultant or whatever that i could be. And i have a million things that i should write about here but never get around to. Worse: there are a million conversations that i would love to have but simply don’t have time for. My desire to have it all means that i can’t actually balance anything.

In the meantime, i feel like i’m moving forward at speeds far too fast for comfort, continuing to balance on the weeble wobble system and hoping that it will all work out. Am i naive as hell?

defining a discipline

Last semester, i took the first core PhD class in performance studies at Berkeley. This semester, i’m taking the second one. The structure of these core classes is brilliant and i’m still in awe of how valuable they are; i also admit that it’s making me addicted to that discipline. Performance studies, like information sciences, is a field defined by its interdisciplinary. It is still trying to define itself, express its meaningful contributions to knowledge and define its methodology.

Structurally, what they have done at Berkeley is set up a core methods + theory requirement. In the methods class, an overview is given that conveys how you address topics in performance studies methodologically. Attention is given to critical analysis, ethnography, oral histories, etc. The theory class throws you deeply into the roots of the discipline, asking you to constantly challenge the assumptions and terms put forward. From the onset, you’re asked to question the field and in doing so, define it.

The assignments prepare you to be an academic. You are required to do a book review (the typical first publication in the humanities) and a conference paper. You do a project built on a key methodology. You write a course syllabus for freshman. Finally, you define a term that is central to performance studies. (Note: defining a term is not as easy as it seems… this includes documenting its history, usage, applications, etc. Think 20 pages.)

What intrigues me about this process is that performance studies is doing an amazing job of asking its students to really define the field, to really think through the intellectual projects of the discipline and to come to terms with what it means for them. In essence, the discipline is active, constantly reflexive and redefining on a generational level.

This seems to me to be a brilliant way to actually indoctrinate students and i’m hoping to see this approach applied more broadly to interdisciplinary spaces. As a student of information, i’m still not entirely sure what we mean by information. Or more accurately, i’m not at all aware of what the different discussions are and have been. And the more time that i spend at CHI, the more i’m concerned that HCI isn’t entirely figuring out its identity either. And i never did figure out what the unifying knowledge projects of the Media Lab were. [I kind of wonder if performance studies is partially successful since it defines its discipline based on an active process rather than on a site / noun (performance vs. information).]

How do other interdisciplinary disciplines begin the process of scoping theory, methodology and site? Are there other good models out there that one should look to?

the performance of the public intellectual

In my performance studies class this fall, folks presented papers on a variety of topics. I was utterly floored by the caliber of them, even those that i was not topically invested in. One of my classmates – Rudy Ramirez – presented a paper that really made me think about what it means to perform being a public intellectual. I found this discussion especially intriguing considering the role of the blogger as a pseudo public intellectual. (Yes, i know that there are huge problems with this statement that i’m just not going to take up right now.)

Ramirez’ paper – Authorizing Activism: Arundhati Roy and the Performance of the Public Intellectual – discusses the topic through the life of Arundhati Roy (who is a most amazing public intellectual). It’s a fun read if you enjoy this kind of thing.

Of particular interest is the lit review discussion about the collapse of the public intellectual and the rise of the pundit, whereby professional standards are at issue as well as a concern that narrow expertise does not necessarily imply moral authority. All of this is highly relevant to the blogging community.

[I will take some of these issues up more later when i can think more straightly. Still, i wanted to offer the paper to those who are bored at work waiting for New Year’s.]

on being shunned by libraries

On the MEA mailing list, there was a discussion about this article: Students shun search for information offline. Generally, the article takes the stance that students are lazy and assume everything online is true. I’m not going to deny those claims, but i want to offer an alternative story.

I was first kicked out of a library in the 2nd grade (for reading inappropriate material for my age… “Flowers in the Attic” was not an appropriate “chapter book”). By middle school, i despised the library, having been kicked out many more times for talking, chewing gum, more inappropriate reading and what-have-you. There were rigid hours, limitations on what you could read and access. The library to me was a controlled space with authoritarian dictators. I was shunned by the library and i shunned it in return.

I’m in graduate school in a former librarian school. My advisor was a head librarian. I’m still afraid of the library. I visited the Brown library twice – to give out donuts naked. I never visited an MIT library and i have never been inside a Berkeley one either. I’m still afraid of the library. I visit the NYC Public Library to sit on its beautiful steps. I believe in the value of libraries, support efforts to rejuvenate them and make them public space. I’m still afraid of the library.

Combined with my book fetish, my fear of libraries has resulted in both a severe half.com addiction and a very acute ability to navigate material online to determine its validity. I order articles when i need them and ping professors for digital copies of their papers. Doing research online away from the controlling eye of a librarian makes me feel far safer, far more willing to explore new areas. Being always online, i’ve learned to figure out what makes something valuable and how to trace it to a source (and i lurve lurve lurve things like Google Scholar and Amazon Book Search).

I have no doubt that students are not equipped to do research. Then again, i think that our schools are pretty fubared, but that’s a tangent. I am not convinced that it is as simple as getting folks to get offline though. For starters, this invalidates the security of information exploration that these folks know. Instead, how can students be taught to value lots of different perspectives that come in lots of different mediums and how can they be given the skills to understand the different mediums? How can the value of offline sources be coupled with online tools? In this way, i’m definitely of the ilk that believes in cultural studies, media students and a deep understanding of the relationship between information.

the term ‘user’

I’ve always had an aversion to the term ‘user.’

First, there’s the negative drug connotation. When someone speaks of a drug user, it’s often under hushed breath or a code for an addict. No one who actually uses drugs refers to themselves as users, except perhaps in jest.

In the technology world, ‘user’ is the term given to one who uses technology. Well, actually, only certain types of technology. One is not a TV user, but a TV consumer. And business people often refer to those who use their technology as customers.

My problem with the term ‘user’ really resides in the fact that it doesn’t convey what i want it to convey. I use a hammer. There’s a prescribed usage pattern. I am at the whim of the tool; it has power over me by dictating what i can do with it.

When it comes to using blogs or wikis or Friendster, i’m not a user. I’m not following a prescribed usage pattern. I am a producer, a consumer, and a user. I may use a blogging tool, but i don’t use a blog; am i a blog user? I may use Friendster to surf profiles, but as i create one, am i a Friendster user? What happens when i fundamentally alter the tool and the content in my use of the software?

To be a ‘user’ feels so disempowered. There’s no creativity in that position, no positive output – i am simply taking, not giving. It also feels so inhuman, lacking emotion, passion, feeling. It is action-driven only.

The term ‘user’ grates at me, but i don’t know how to get around the term. I find myself trapped in it as i write. Are there other approaches to this?