Schools, Web 2.0, and the specter of desire

I was thinking about Arnaud's  application of his Web 2.0 criteria to del.icio.us. It's a bracing and elegant approach.  We can join in celebrating the parts which meet his criteria, but note the glimpse of the near future in what does not:

• Data Outside - NO, there is no service to either import or subscribe to bookmark feeds. This would be useful;
• Single Identity - NO;
• MicroWeb - NO, the service does not integrate with other services;
• Wild MicroContent - NO;

Where does this connect with education?  If your head isn't full of Web 2.0ismo, go to my next post.
  Historically we've seen the established practices of edublogging by students, teams, classes, teachers as instructors, teachers as researchers, and multiblog seminars.  Politically Gardner and Will remind us to pay attention to continuous demographic shifts, as they push what are students bring to the table in their behavior, and what skills instructors need to catch up to, er, communicate with them.
  John Pederson gives us a glimpse into the complexity of the intersection between our two domains.  The new platforms and practices open up terrains for desire:

I spent 3 hours last night thinking about http://www.43things.com, only applying it specifically to education. Or a school. Or a region. Or something. It’s so simple. “I want to learn x”. Pretty soon, 10 other people are interested. “I’m interested in teaching x”.

  Yes, I do intend to evoke critical theory's desire school - but in a moment.  For now, note what a break this passage is for most considerations of technology in schools.  It's not about storing and delivering documents, obtaining and protecting content, reproducing the class and department structures, restoring the Ozymandian authority of the pedagogue, driving students back to books, adding a human dimension to the chilly mechanical, regaining their attention, or fighting for brand and relevance.  Pederson's rumination casts us back to some of the desires which knitted learners and teachers together in the first place, and still draw us into the same space. Listen to the fluidity of that swarm of desires, and think about how the Web 2.0 platform easily enables them to embody and proliferate.
  Such desires are productive, constructive.  We don't enter the classroom and await for Freire-free content to pour into our heads; instead we post, comment, search, and agglutinate into clusters aimed at getting knowledge.  We publish our thoughts and findings in venues more finely grained, rapidly responsive, and far more broadly accessible than the scholarly paper or presentation, from wikis in process to sequences of archived blog entries.  The open, social nature of the new Web means this experience is shareable, and hence replicable, and also driven by desire - I can point to a multiblog, multicampus discussion, then add to it in another entry, garnering feedback from still other audiences., a thing not at all possible with face-to-face classrooms or BlackBoard.
  Does this sound familiar?  Yes, it echoes many dreams for instructional technology from the Web, and the net before that.  This post deliberately echoes many liberatory strands of thought about learning, hence my Freire note earlier, and my emphasis on production (as construction, hint hint).  What's different is the combination of new architectures, practices, and existing examples.
  On that critical theory echo: I'm thinking Deleuze and Guattari, rather than Lacan.  Desire mobilizes materials involved in learning, building social machines.  And this is where we return to politics, and dangers, as these machines support and block desires... such as the massive eductional machines within which we now work.  This is a clear avenue for important work on technology, learning, and critical theory.
  And I probably don't need to do more than gesture towards well-known larger problematics of surveillance, copyright.  But I want be impatient about the discussion so far, and to throw open the real possibilities of Web 2.0 for the .edu world.

And back to today's child minding -

Comments

[Gardner Campbell]

Ah!

Back to desire. Or perhaps to the superset of desire, which is love.

Perhaps it is convenient for institutions to construct education using taxonomies of desire built on lack. You have something, I want it, I submit to your process to get it, even if "it" turns out to be little more than a certification.

What would an education built on taxonomies of desire springing from abundance, play, love look like?

Only when work is play for mortal stakes....

[Alexander Hayes]

Hi ya!

Posting here in sunny Sydney, Australia. Love the blog, love the rant and the riddles.

It's interesting is it not how far things have come in a year ! Looking forward to your posts for years to come.

Cheers,

Mobology

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The term is closely associated with Tim O'Reilly because of the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who called the term a "piece of jargon"— precisely because he intended the Web to embody these values in the first place.

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multicampus discussion, then add to it in another entry, garnering feedback from still other audiences., a thing not at all possible with face-to-face classrooms or BlackBoard.