New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies - Issue 10 of The Fibreculture Journal <br><br>- edited by Adrian Miles<br><br><a href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/index.html">http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/index.html
</a><br><br>Towards and Algorithmic Pedagogy - Holly Willis<br>Composing and Compositing: Integrated Digital Writing and Academic Pedagogy - Jamie 'Skye' Bianco<br>Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media - Cheryl Ball & Ryan 'rylish' Moeller
<br>The Digital, the Virtual and the Naming of Knowledge - Darren Jorgensen<br>Some thoughts on the evolution of digital media studies - Lisa Gye<br>Roundtable Audio Discussion - James Farmer with Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Chris Bigum
<br><br>---<br>by issue editor Adrian Miles .... <br><p> This issue of fibreculture journal is based on an invitation to respond to the following provocation: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It
is easy to argue that much of the rhetoric attached to "new media" and
the internet in relation to pedagogy has mistaken quantity for quality.
It has been a conversation that has confused the qualitative changes
that our new conceptions of media, knowledge, and networks afford with
the quantitative changes beloved of those who confuse teaching and
learning with instruction and consumption. These new qualities are the
differences between the vector and commodity, blogs and books. </p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>However,
imagine if our universities had been invented now. What would pedagogy
be? What form would teaching and learning take? What would count as
knowledge? Expertise? What forms would this knowledge take? </p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Taking
this as a departure this issue of the Fibreculture Journal invited
those working in new media, internet studies, education, and cognate
disciplines to discuss the strengths and celebrate the possibilities
that new media and its networks affords teaching and learning. The
emphasis in this issue is not on the criticism or description of
existing models and paradigms but to invite the exploration and
celebration of new possibilities, real or imagined. What new knowledge
formations should there be? How would they be taught? How could they
assessed (if at all)? What critical academic work, and in what forms,
would our students be producing? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Willis,
in 'Towards an Algorithmic Pedagogy', takes a position from within
contemporary debates on multimodal literacies asking how to shift
traditional and institutional definitions of literacy to acknowledging
not only the changes wrought by digital networks but the
epistemological changes that have followed in its wake. These
epistemological changes see contemporary media from an ecological
perspective where such an approach </p>
<blockquote>
<p>allows
us to take account of the multiply determining relationships wrought
not just by individual media, but by the interrelationships,
dependencies and symbioses that take place within the dynamic system
that is today's high-tech university. An ecological approach allows us
to examine what happens when new media practices collide with
computational models, providing a glimpse of possible transformations
not only ways of being but ways of teaching and learning. (<a href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/issue10_willis.html" class="sidenav2">Willis, 2007</a>) </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This
is where Willis sees the consequences of the digital as productive of a
mode of practice, rather than in the production of objects or
artefacts, and so proposes a pedagogy that is "soft", process
orientated, distributed in regards to authority and allows for the
unexpected. </p>
<p> Whereas Willis makes an argument
through the essay, Bianco's 'Composing and Compositing: Integrated
Digital Writing and Academic Pedagogy' moves into a reflexive mode
where the writing seeks to perform as much as state its case. Here we
get the brio of writing that is beginning to treat text as a material
artefact with force in its own right, and not merely a semiotic sign on
the way towards an idealised sense. Here a liberal use of basic
typographic variation is employed to good effect. It is easy in work
such as this to misjudge this as only bravado, or even perhaps writerly
vanity, however the ease with which type is malleable in digital
writing (a point we have perhaps too easily taken for granted after
twenty years of word processing) and the resolute conservativeness of
academic writing to eschew these simple possibilities is something this
work returns to with some force. This is an exciting essay, crossing
between classroom practice and a critique of literacy and literacy
education that is grounded in that peculiarly North American phenomenon
of the composition class. Bianco argues: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The
various generic qualities of academic writing in specific fields
provides strict design parameters through a shared and discreet legend
against which the future of manuscripted thought must tabulate itself
to be recognized as accountable literate writing. The medium is the
message only insofar as its formal excesses cannot transmit as anything
but noise and chaos. Intertextuality resides only at the level of
readership and writerly citation thresholding the full force of
writerly signification in the manuscript to remain expository,
always-already exposed, and above all, transparent and clear. (<a href="http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/issue10_bianco.html" class="sidenav2">Bianco, 2007</a>) </p>
</blockquote>
<p>These
are accurate points, and in the history of critiques of the normative
force of academic writing on discovery and experimentation perhaps not
novel. However, from this traditional critique Bianco quickly moves to
the qualities of movement and affect and their affordances for writing
in digital media. While remaining preliminary, I believe this slide
towards affect offers a manner of conceiving of the role of learning
and literacy that offers an alternative conception to that which we
have inherited. </p>
<p>Unlike the first two essays Ball
and Moeller offer a manifesto come "webtext" that can only ever be
online. It uses a very simple alphabetic architecture as one form of
navigation, but also uses typographic cues to indicate writerly voice,
as well as providing internal links. Hence 'Reinventing the
Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media' can be read
traditionally, from beginning to end by following the letters, or
hypertextually by reading the internal links. They argue for the
relevance of rhetorical frameworks for the study of what is best
thought of as a digital writing, specifically identifying the value of
"topoi" as places of 'negotiated meaning making' which allow for a
variety of critical literacies to be experienced. The arguments here
are rich, variable, and splintered, as they ought to be. It is a call
to arms as much as a demonstration of other academic forms in the
humanities and is what I would characertise as part of the first wave
of such work. </p>
<p> These three essays together in
their own right are of interest as they demonstrate the extent to which
problems of "literacy" and new media are present in a North American
context. These are not debates that one sees very much of in new media,
internet, or media studies in Australia (though they are more common in
technology and education communities) but for those who are interested
in finding a practice that lies between the studio arts and design
based model of making (with not a lot of critical thought), versus the
Bachelor of Arts model of critical thought via essay writing (with not
a lot of creative making) they provide a series of critical
possibilities and modes of practice. This cultural difference is
evidenced in the differences in the arguments introduced by the
remaining, local, contributors to this collection. </p>
<p>
Jorgensen makes two major claims in 'The Digital, the Virtual and the
Naming of Knowledge'. The first is that the role of educators is to
defamiliarise rather than explicate, and the second is to validate the
"virtual", in particular via Lévy, as a more robust framework for
research and teaching in the realm of the digital. The first claim is
made in an effort to shift the larger project of digital studies
(whether this be labelled new media studies, internet studies, media
studies or some combination of these is largely moot) towards an
engaged and critical practice and not merely an instrumental teaching
which prepares labour for a post industrial labour market. This is
compounded simply by the promiscuity of the digital as a useful
category since its role and applicability is hardly subject to
disciplinary constraint, and Jorgensen identifies an implicit
determinism in what has become a reactive educational agenda within our
universities. On the other hand the 'virtual', particularly in the
sense he ascribes, has the benefit of not being grounded within the
digital, but offers a methodology to consider technology in terms of
actualisations. Jorgensen argues that this provides a means of
investigation and critique that is neither technologically or socially
determinist and allows us to view 'a technological face on the virtual
continuity of regimes of knowledge and power' which allows the
humanities to assume the critical role it ought. </p>
<p>
Gye's contribution, 'Some Thoughts on the Evolution of Digital Media
Studies' is firmly located in the specificities of teaching in an
applied institution and offers a historical, critical and personal
reflection on Gye's history as a digital media studies educator. Here
the contexts of teaching involve as much a "doing" of digital media
studies as a theoretical analysis of whatever we may take digital media
studies to be. In this context Gye argues for the legitimacy and ethics
of media as a "making your own media", the sort of independent media
production and distribution that community radio developed, with its
attendent technical skills which are understood to be means towards an
end, rather than the ends in themselves. From here Ulmer's seminal
contributions to the broader field of critical digital literacy are
introduced from where Gye slides into the shift from the digital as a
mode for the production of different objects into networked practice
where the idea of object is problematised, which in turn becomes the
space of the mobile phone, the network, and the relations between the
individual, corporate culture, communication as social and commercial
imperative, and the role of education as a critical practice. Gye's
contribution provides a timely overview of the very rapid change in
both the object of study, and the same socio-technical changes that
students and institutions have bought to education in general. While
Gye does not offer specific answers, the questions are significant. </p>
<p>Finally,
a mp3 roundtable conversation, moderated by James Farmer, discusses the
key questions posed in the original call for papers for this issue.
Farmer's respondents, Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Chris Bigum, provide an
intriguing and timely discussion around the possibilities and problems
posed by digital literacies. While arguing for a revolution, and
criticising existing practice as merely applying "band aids" to
existing structures, Bartlett-Bragg identifies the tensions between the
demands of digital learning systems as apparatuses of compliance,
versus the affordances of the digitally native student. Bigum, on the
other hand, identifies the resilience of the university, and education,
as systems that in themselves have much to offer and provides an
intriguing, and very well argued counter view that seeks a middle road
between existing industrial modes of education and the more utopian
versions of digital liberation. That this was recorded using Skype I
think is of more than passing interest as it is a simple example of the
ways in which simple tools might shift and complement traditional
practices. </p>
<p> The essays and ideas collected here
are diverse, at times disjunctive, but each provides a point of view on
the digital, broadly conceived, and education. At this point, with
digital media now ubiquitous in our institutions, but also with the
rise of highly centralised learning management systems, it is perhaps
timely to have a survey of this sort. This lets us recognise where we
have come from, where we have gotten to, and then perhaps allows for
debate on where we might go. <br></p><p>Adrian Miles 2007<br></p><br><br>-- <br>"Take me to the operator, I want to ask some questions" - Barbara Morgenstern<br><br>"Of course it is always possible to work oneself into a state of complete contentment with an ultimate irrationality" - Alfred North Whitehead
<br><br>"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)<br><br>Andrew Murphie - Associate Professor<br>School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2052
<br>web:<a href="http://empa.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/staff.php?first=Andrew&last=Murphie">http://empa.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/staff.php?first=Andrew&last=Murphie</a><br><a href="http://adventuresinjutland.wordpress.com/">
http://adventuresinjutland.wordpress.com/</a><br><a href="http://researchhub.cofa.unsw.edu.au/ccap/">http://researchhub.cofa.unsw.edu.au/ccap/</a><br>fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: <a href="mailto:a.murphie@unsw.edu.au">
a.murphie@unsw.edu.au</a><br>room 311H, Webster Building