#edcmooc – Tales from the front…

Some thoughts on edcmooc, three days in…

• the huge number of postings in the forum are almost as frustrating as postings on a sports or politics blog.  Hell, Reddit is more interesting and intellectually challenging.  
• the huge number of postings in the forum also means that I don’t have to worry about my job (with no more than 20 students in a class) any time soon…most college students would hate this format, I’m guessing…hell, there are times *I* hate this format, as I don’t know if the professors are even looking at the class anymore.
• the most interesting place in my mind is the Twitter channel, with the hashtag I listed in the title to this post.  In it there are a bunch of folks who are linking to their own blogs, and the blog writing in general has been compelling.
• I’m really curious about how quickly established borders for discussions got set.  Everyone seemed to want to critique everyone else’s choice of Wall-E or The Matrix as either dystopic or utopic, and the critiques were definitely not talking about films in interesting ways. There was almost no mention of literature, and very little mention of games.
• There was very little (until today) critique of the dialectic at all. The professors primed the pump by linking to a brief rundown technological determinism, but the resulting discussion became more about placing films along this continuum rather than questioning the binary at all.  Do people automatically fall into being good students? Does being a good student mean that folks simply go along with the established boundaries set up by the professors?  Are students who drop out the sort of folks we actually want in?
• Are professors like me elitist douchebags?  I think the answer is probably obvious – yes!

While I can’t say whether I’m enjoying this or not, I find myself checking it more than I thought.  Because I opted to have an email sent to me every time someone comments on forums that I posted in, I’m getting regular reminders to check in on the class.  These have prompted me to, well, check in.

I’m not sure of the ramifications for other e-learning classes.  MOOCs are definitely their own cup of tea, but there are possibilities in them.  Interestingly, this type of content might not be the best – I’m wondering if science classes are actually perfect content for MOOCs, and I can see possibilities for math and statistics. The openness of the questions asked might not be the best approach for MOOCs, because the conversation is so wide-ranging, from banal to interesting, but without a chance to make compelling arguments of any sort, or at least in a way that starts a discussion. I’m guessing that some of the best conversations will be small ones, possibly ones happening in Google hangouts or + sessions.

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The Ancient takes shape…

As I imagine the binary that seems to form the narrative of technology and the Ancient, I started to think about the various incarnations of the Ancient that came to mind.  Some include

1. nature as cleansing, purifying force, one that somehow relieves us of the symptoms caused by modern society (the paleo diet is an interesting example)
2. nature as primal, amoral force that is ultimately terrifying – bugs in Starcraft and Halo are the most obvious examples…
3. nature as something not to be messed with (nature as warning) – Bioshock, especially when the steampunk aspects are considered…

As I piece this thing together, the threat of technology becomes more apparent in some sense – technology as steamroller, driving us from our natural selves, technology as a way to crush the revolt of the primal mother, technology manifesting a desire to escape from our natural boundaries (and providing the means to do such).

#edcmooc, Day Two

The edcmooc still fills a bit like trying to get a drink from a fire hydrant, but there are simply so many people and so many posts to enter, all of us frantically trying to get paid attention to.

So far, the descriptions are

1. “overwhelming”
2. “like sitting in a class with every student shouting and putting their hand up at once”
3. “feels more like a massive multi-channel chatroom than a course. It’s more AOL than MIT>”

Those are pretty accurate.  Folks have also noticed how the edcmooc seems like a meta-mooc, a comment on moocing in general.

That’s probably not a verb.

Today I added my $.02, agreeing with one person about a couple of literary dystopias (and utopias), and noticing that everyone wants to write about the same couple of films, except for the annoying folks like myself who try to one-up everyone with films or books no one has ever heard of.  I also brought up computer games, a subject obviously near and dear to my own heart as I try to understand what the hell the Ancient is in a world obsessed with making the future happen as quickly as possible.

I’ve also followed the Twitter hashtag (#edcmooc for those playing at home), and that’s much more manageable thanks to the magic that is Tweetdeck.  That conversation has been fun to follow, and some very smart folks are saying some very interesting things.

So, is this what moocs mostly involve?  Figuring out what the best media is for being to digest a bit of the information?

#edcmooc

Hah – it turns out that the online course I’m taking through coursera is going to talk about some of this same stuff, in an albeit more roundabout way.  The course starts out by giving us a brief introduction into technology as a phenomenon, familiar territory to geeks like me but perhaps new stuff for those who aren’t, and then quickly proceeds into a discussion of utopias and dystopias.

This is an interesting turn, and one that the course designers and facilitators don’t take a lot of time to justify. I’m not sure that they need to, but I’d have appreciated a bit more discussion, because while there are complex approaches that can be taken in setting up this dialectic, using it to drive a discussion might well be reductionist (in a way they accuse others of being).

The first film they showed is called Bendito Machine (we watched the third one), and it immediately dove into these issues I’ve been obsessing about, including matching ancient rites and worship with machine technology.  I’ve written more about it in class, but the way it approaches technology felt utopian/dystopian in a Herland or Lost World sense, but with machines replacing the dinosaurs and big mammals and other scary critters, complete with a sole person (who is John Galt?) climbing onto the peninsula where all this is happening.  My guess is that these folks (the course designers) know exactly what they’re doing, and that pushing of boundaries fits in with their themes, which focus relentlessly on education.

As I type this, though, I’m reminded of that scene that keeps going through my head from Neuromancer. While there are a bunch of scenes that stick with me, in ways that are almost seared in my mind (and I’ve only read these books twice), the beach scene with Case and the junkie that he fell in love with is a powerful one, as it invokes loneliness and basic needs (companionship as well as sex, shelter, food, warmth) and yet it happens completely in Case’s mind, even with the woman being completely and utterly believable. Meta-fictionally, Case *knows* that this is happening in his mind, and yet the scene keeps unfolding and he can’t completely escape it, at least until Wintermute needs him again.

I see that scene as one that is dark, stark, and a bit too cool for a geek like myself.  The sci-fi fascination with ruins goes back to Bradbury, with his Mars one that is full of civilizations that were far greater than we ever hope to be, and that have left for reasons we’ll never discover.  And yet, the sadness that those thoughts evoke come to seem as sci-fiish as any of the techno-utopians counter-images of endless bright lights and food pills.

Ruminations on the Ancient and the Other (and points in between)

As I thought about my Albuquerque presentation, I tried to actively figure out just what the hell I mean when I say that Ancient (for sci-fi) equals the Other. I don’t wan to use and abuse the term as some sort of blank placeholder, so I’m trying to identify exactly what I mean by it, or just find some questions that I can ask. I do know that on at least one level, I think of the Other as one half of a binary, a way that we define ourselves by what we’re not. This is easy, in some respects, to do among cultures – for a long time Westerners defined themselves as modern, progressive, prosperous by identifying those in the rest of the World as *not* that – savage, regressive, poor (by their lack of industry). This discussion is a massive one, of course, and one that someone interested can easily jump into by reading pretty much anything by Said (or Fanon). Still, in some sense, that dichotomy works – we put characteristics we don’t want on someone else.

The Ancient, though, doesn’t fit so nicely into that binary, especially where science fiction is concerned.  The caveat that in some computer games (like some pulp fiction, or comic books) the binary does work, because the Ancient takes the form of an enemy to be defeated, a bug-like creature (not only Starcraft or Doom not the first, Heinlein wasn’t the first, hell, four of the first six covers of Amazing featured lizards or bugs as enemies) that threatens our women, and/or civilization.  Still, that incarnation of the Ancient isn’t what drew me to this discussion (if discussion it is), even if I like it for the horror aspects I find in these creatures.  Instead, what drew me to this originally were folks like Gibson and Bear and Sterling, with their recreations and metamorphoses of the Ancient into something that we almost longed for in our sci-fi worlds, glimpses somehow of something that perhaps we lost.  Gibson’s prose routinely sent delicious shivers down my spine when he invoked the ‘ancient arcologies’ located in cyberspace, ones that we responded to on what seemed to be the level of our lizard brains. The scene where Wintermute locates Case and the dead girl on some sort of abandoned beach still resonates in my head, even though it was fiction for the character as much as it was for myself. And those responses felt good, necessary, primal, and transitional in ways that made sense.

 
So, thinking about binaries in this discussion can’t be made too easy, even when I think of one of the possibilities of a binary of tech being Nature.  In either (or any) sense nature has often been used as the anti-tech, whether in terms of the primitive or of opposition to technological progress or of something we somehow need.  Instead, I’m moving a bit to thinking  more about the Ancient/the Other as some sort of trauma, thoughts perhaps triggered by my just having completed Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson, a novel in which Robinson tells the story of Galileo but adds in a weird little side plot of some Jovians from the year 2700 who are convinced that if Galileo was burned at the stake in the Inquisition (instead of being banished to his house) our culture would have suffered less trauma from the subsequent split of religion and science.

GoT

I had to go with the geek-cool acronym for this post, because I keep wondering when George R.R will finish. I’m starting to think that maybe we (fans of GoT) should approach this like Dickens and Edwin Drood, and write the damned thing ourselves…

Persona Poetry

Wow. From Rebecca Dunham, the first three stanzas of “Mary Wollstonecraft in Flight”:

“So many rivers. Blood churning
through the veins, rain’s

roped course down my wet
and unbound hair, the Thames’ cold
body below. His forked

voice licked my mortal ears
clean. Men are strange machines.”

Of course, I was lured in by the references to rivers and strange machines, but what Dunham is doing here is fascinating, aside from the fact that the language itself is spectacular. It makes me wonder if part of my attraction to specific poets comes from the way that I identify with their subject material, an identification I assumed to be caused by the sharing of interests, obsessions, and passions. Wollstonecraft (and Anne Putnam, who also appears in this collection of poetry) is for me such a compelling and powerful figure from a time period that I have a bizarre fascination with, and I (perhaps mistakenly) believe that Dunham does as well.