Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:635] Cogito De Prosum and collaboration
From: Helen Beetham (H.Beetham@plymouth.ac.uk)
Date: Fri 03 Nov 2000 - 18:31:49 MET
From: "Helen Beetham" <H.Beetham@plymouth.ac.uk> Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:635] Cogito De Prosum and collaboration Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 17:31:49 -0000
I'd like to disagree with both Corrie and Muhammad. Corrie wrote:
>We must discriminate between content expertise, designing and developing
the
content for presentation, and facilitating the learning experience. In
times past the teacher had to play all three roles (and in much of the world
still does). Today we can separate those roles.
There is a lot of clear water between 'we can' and 'we must'. Surely it's a
matter of specific cultural history (and politics) that learning 'content'
seems to Corrie so obviously distinct from 'design' and 'presentation', and
distinct again from 'facilitating the learning experience'. This may be so
from the perspective of an educational sector which uses graduate teaching
assistants as cheap labour, has strict hierarchies of academic staff,
regards 'instructional design' as a rigorous cybernetic process which makes
the pedagogical cultures of different disciplines irrelevant, and divides
the educational experience into bite-sized modular 'chunks' in order to
compete more effectively in a standardised global marketplace. (Forgive the
implied assumptions about your own educational sector, Corrie - they are
only what I see as the dominant context of contributors on this list.)
Corrie's analogy with print was an interesting one. I see print technologies
as making the dissemination of knowledge much more accessible - compared to
a scribe's labour, a print run represented a relatively small outlay. The
early pamphleteers *did* get their fingers inky, and they were using the new
technology in much the same way that the majority of web authors are using
the internet today. No doubt their productions were equally 'low quality'
from the perspective of the modern book. But since knowledge is power, it
shouldn't surprise us if democratising knowledge technologies are
appropriated by powerful institutions in ways which make them less
accessible. To publish nowadays you don't only need access to a printing
machine (relatively cheap) but to the whole apparatus of production and
dissemination available through a publishing house (fantastically
expensive). The university presses were one attempt to wrest the means of
knowledge production away from commercial publishers for the use of nice,
liberal academic institutions, though somehow they seem to have ended up in
bed together at the end of the day.
What's my point here? The academic who uses a web authoring package to
publish his or her research findings on the web is behaving like one of
those early pamphleteers, and acting against the interests of the journal
publishers who hvae the academic information market sewn up (on paper at
least). The academic who creates web-based teaching materials, however quick
and dirty, is acting outside of institutional structures which insist that
such materials go through a lengthy process of quality control and
standardised design. In both cases I think the author is asserting a very
immediate relationship with the reader and the student - the publication is
less a finished product than a contribution to an ongoing dialogue. The
author is also asserting ownership of his or her own ideas - a deeply
contentious act. Of course there are good reasons for producing high
quality, high production value teaching materials, but they are usually
based on institutional logic. There are equally good reasons for producing
low budget, quick and dirty materials that meet the needs of the moment i.e.
the dialogue between learner and teacher, which are the reasons that seem to
dominate for me.
My own experience of team teaching has thankfully been very different from
Muhammad's. In this case I am talking about a collaboration of colleagues,
not a fordist production process. I'm convinced that if the producers of
academic knowledge are to keep the web as a radical new means of knowledge
production it will only be through collaborations at all levels of the
research and teaching process, e.g. small scale development projects,
locally hosted online journals, discussion lists, subject groups sharing
teaching and learning materials, virtual teaching teams...
At least I hope it goes that way.
best wishes,
Helen
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