(Not Really) At The End of All Things

(Now that the Blogger site is up-and-running again--since it going under maintenance when I tried writing this post on Thursday and Friday--and now that graduation is complete, family has left, and things are slowly going back to something resembling "normal," I'm finally able to post!)

Another finals week--the last one of my undergraduate career--is over for me.  I think this is the time I should say I feel like I'm on top of the world, because college graduation is the big-time.  Or maybe I should say something like "it's bittersweet"--that it's a relief to be graduating after years of hard work but that I'll miss the college lifestyle and its late nights, walks on campus with friends, study groups, and "study groups."  But I'm not really feeling that college grad euphoria or nostalgia.  Maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet.  Maybe it's because I know that there's more to come after this in grad school, which in a way makes this feel more like like a brief respite or or a stopover.  Maybe it's because I'm a student/learner at heart and see the pomp-and-circumstance ceremony and the diploma, the official certification I'll be receiving that's supposed to prove...something, as no big deal compared to the deeper experience of having been baptized in inquiry.  Whatever it is, it's a unique feeling.

But it’s also exceedingly arrogant.  Not in that horrible outright way, but in that more subtle you-don’t know-how-good-you-have-it kind of way.  The other day I was talking about all this with someone who’s been like a mentor to me the past few years, and she pointed out that there are millions, billions of people who will never have the opportunity to go to college.  I guess it’s easy to forget that college isn’t just a “natural” part of life, like going through puberty or having kids or dying.  People don’t have to go to college—most people don’t even have a choice about it.  This thinking about college as just another thing (and something that’s treated as more of a nuisance than anything else) is such a Western, middle-class, GenMe phenomenon it’s almost not even funny.  And it’s not that I think of college as a nuisance—I love college, but sometimes I forget just how much of a cultural phenomenon it is, and that many of my baseline (i.e. not anthropologically critical) thoughts about it are a product of my cultural environment.  And altogether, it's been an incredibly enjoyable part of my life.  The best years yet, so they say (and so I say, too).  My friends, family, and faculty have all been amazing, and so have the ideas and the subject matter and all the rest of the experience.  So I probably should give myself a hard slap on the face and remind myself of how much of an honor/accomplishment/privilege it is to be a college graduate.

So, why all this reflection about graduation and college when I’m ultimately blogging to post my final video project of Digital Ethnography?  Well, I guess I could post the video without sharing these thoughts, and I might even been thanked for that.  But honestly my thoughts about education and its methods, its format, its non/effectiveness, its future have exploded since I started the class.  With the help of Dr. Wesch and all my fellow Diggies, I’ve been introduced to whole new ways of thinking about education, and I’ve been challenged (sometimes painfully so) in a lot of different ways.  I’d always considered myself a bit of a traditionalist (whatever that means) when it came to education.  I preferred (and in some cases still do prefer) the smell and feel of books, using notecards to organize research, listening to old-style lectures--the ones where a professor just stands and talks to you as one who knows so much about the material and is excited about it and talks about it almost as if it were a legend passed down over generations.  And I used to prefer it almost begrudgingly over the "newer" kind of methods, with professors using PowerPoints and interactive Clicker quizzes/sessions and all these various kinds of online/computer assignments   But I had never really asked myself why that was the case.  At some base level it almost felt like the new digital technologies were edging-out the older forms, and sometimes I’d get a bit defensive about it.  But over the last year, and especially over the last semester, I’ve realized that it’s not like that or about that at all.  Books and notecards are, like computers and blogging and video-editing, just a form of technology.  And yes they’re different and do different things—that’s a given.  But the real issue at hand isn’t the technology, but rather the learning process.  It’s more important to focus on trying to encourage the inquiry process and to help students get to the levels of procedural and constructed knowledge.  It's more important to get students excited about and engaged in the material, to the point that they're even talking about it outside of class (without having that being forced upon them by homework or stress/fear over not doing well on the test).  That’s really what needs to be reformed, far more than the infrastructure.

And that’s really the message I’m trying to convey in my video.  The “walls” of education don’t need to all be thrown down and replaced with bright new shiny tech-friendly walls.  I think the success of education reform in the future depends on focusing on the learning process and on being FLEXIBLE about how students get there, while of course being aware of all the other aspects about college students and education that my fellow Diggies have so wonderfully explored this semester.  Too often (and I count myself guilty of it), this whole old/traditional vs new/reformed/tech-friendly issue gets painted in extremes.  Too often it's set up as a false dichotomy--that one way is old and broken and should be discarded, or that another is too new, doesn't focus enough on fundamentals, is unfeasible in terms of access and unrealistic in terms of students putting in the necessary effort--when it seems that the reality of it is that we need a little of both approaches and more importantly that we need to be flexible about using them.

This semester has been a wonderful challenge for me.  I've learned so about how the "modern," tech-utilizing approach works and how it can be used to produce some incredible results.  I feel as if a whole new repertoire has been opened to me now that I'm capable of utilizing the video format and the other digital tools.  (For instance, I love my old notecards and I'll still use them in many cases--but think about how much I'll be able to do with a program like Microsoft OneNote, or something like Diigo?!)  I'm already thinking about ways I'll be able to use video and other digital technologies to work on research projects that I'm truly passionate about, and it's so exciting and there's so much potential there that I just want to write them all down right now--but I'll spare you from another tangent for the time being.  

In fewer words, what I want to say is that I think this class has been a resounding success on multiple levels (personally, academically, functionally), and I'm excited to get to use what I've learned for research in the future.  So without any further ado (if you've read this far, haha), here's my video:

The Old Future of Education Reform

Well.

After some serious work in the library, I think I've finally completed the first edition of my final video for Digital Ethnography!  There's probably some room for improvement, and I look forward to getting some feedback about it from Dr. Wesch and all the other Diggies.

If you've been following the videos I've been working on, you could probably guess from the title that this latest video is an extension of some of my previous work regarding this idea that the current cries for education reform aren't really all that revolutionary (in one sense of the word).  I play with the idea that these reform ideas are old and that they failed the first time around, and then look into some ideas (especially Postman's and Weingartner's) about how this failure happened.  The video culminates with some thoughts--greatly (and gratefully) influenced by Dr. Wesch--about how maybe this time around the reforms have the potential to stick.  If they're done right, that is.

It's a pretty drastic shift from my original vision for the video, but because some interviews fell through I needed to go a different direction.  I've also mellowed quite a bit in some of my older views about "traditional education," and thanks to everyone on the DigEth team I've come to see that there's plenty of room for the peaceful and complementary co-existence of traditional education methods and the new ones.

Maybe ;)

Walls - Ed Reform Failure and Beyond

With much dialogue about the problems with education today, there have been calls for progressive reform--to move towards freer and alternative forms of education, to put more control in students hands, to fundamentally alter an oppressive classroom structure.  But such a movement for education reform really isn't anything new.  These same ideas have been proposed before, and they failed.  Is there hope for lasting and meaningful education reform in our future?

Walls - Research Schedule

After spending a few class periods doing some seriously creative brainstorming, our big group project for Digital Ethnography has really started taking shape.  Collectively, we're embarking on a critique of the modern education system, with special emphasis (among other things) on how students are mediated and how this mediation affects their educational experience.  Each person in the class will be working on a certain section of the research "narrative" and eventually create his/her own mini-sode.  We've set the narrative up in a way that will allow each minisode to naturally flow into the next, leaving us with what will hopefully turn out to be a compelling and insightful whole.

The section I'll be working on deals with "walls" in the education system, and it will come right after a segment about "College Unbound," which generally refers to an alternative form of education that breaks from the "standard" educational experience (see Haley's post for a much better explanation).  The nature of my section, however, will be like a critique of the critique--in essence, a dialectical response to the main concept of the project overall.  While I wouldn't think of denying that there are serious issues with the system as it is, I want to explore the idea that there's a great deal of good in the traditional system--that its "walls" can be a boon instead of a bane and that they are worth saving.  The centerpiece of my minisode will be a story about a Topeka high school's unsuccessful experiment as a "school without walls," followed by my attempt to understand why altering the structure didn't work in this specific case.  Here's a more detailed breakdown of what I envision my research process/schedule to look like:

Week 1 (2/20/11-2/26/11)

• Read Dewey's "Education and Experience" (have completed by 2/23)
• Try to find recordings, video of Dewey speaking (?)
• Do a quick lit review of "radical" education reform (library catalog search; online databases)
• Contact Seaman High School alumnus (Caitlin's mom) and set up interview
• Use Evernote, note cards, Onenote (for now, the trial version) to document and organize thoughts, sources, material

Week 2 (2/27/11-3/5)

• Continue to research examples of "free school" and "school without walls" experiments (like the Free School in Albany, NY, the School Without Walls in Washington D.C., etc.) (hopefully have much of the research wrapped up by 3/3/11)
• Research Seaman High School experiment with education in the 1970s
• Contact SHS; attempt to find newspaper clippings about the story

Week 3 (3/6/11-3/12/11)

• Hopefully have interview with Caitlin's mom completed by 3/7/11; try to get old year books, contact information of other alumni
• Interview and/or tape record interviews
• Visit current SHS and get footage of school; try to find pictures of of SHS "without walls" (3/12/11 - tentative)
• Try to find solid and cooperative KSU professor who thrives on--and whose students enjoy--the traditional style (but of course slightly reformed)

Week 4 (3/13/11-3/19/11)

• Interview other SHS alumni (?)
• Interview KSU professor (possibly Dr. Wesch?) on benefits of traditional style education, complete with walls
• Return to literature; find information about benefits of traditional education, inquiry method (Postman), sacred "third" space

With a substantial amount of work--paired with a bit of luck--I'll hopefully have the research stage completed before Spring break, leaving time to compile all my materials into a video format during or immediately after break.  Any and all suggestions for improvements are welcome and would be greatly appreciated!

An Ode to Tradition

It's hard for me to believe that I've already managed to make another video!  It just goes to show that with a little hard work, some long hours in the media center (when it's open O_o), and a lot of support from my fellow Diggies, even tech novices can do some cool stuff =)

Anyway, this is the second video I've created for Dr. Wesch's Digital Ethnography course at Kansas State University.  Going in a different direction than I originally planned, I found my inspiration for the concept of this video after experiencing an especially heavy bout of academic apathy and overall laziness, and then reacting back against that.  Admittedly some viewers might find the message of this video a bit reactionary or old-fashioned.  Consider it a (hopefully) reasonable critique of the recent push toward educational reform, an "antithesis" to the thesis of the overwhelming majority of ideas being compiled by all the other incredible VOST2011 contributors.  (Speaking of which, look for the clip from liman1989's video "affect my learning"--I hope she will pardon my critique.)  You may not agree (I'm not entirely sure about my own agreement yet), but hopefully it will bring forth a strong ideological synthesis =)

This is a video "trailer" created for Dr. Michael Wesch's "Digital Ethnography" course at Kansas State University.  We're studying how we are mediated in our everyday lives and the impact that has on our education system.  Credits for the music belong to Strange Zero for the song "Mirteaux," on the album "Newborn Butterflies."  This video is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.  I'd be happy to let anyone remix it -- just drop me a message =)

Purpose

Hello =)

My name is Steven Kelly, and if you happen to be reading this--well, thanks!  This is my first blog, so take it easy on me.  I'm currently in my last semester at Kansas State University, having spent the last four-and-a-half years studying anthropology, political science, history, and international studies.  I must admit that the reason I started this blog is because it was an assignment given to me in one of my anthropology classes this semester, Digital Ethnography with Dr. Michael Wesch.  In essence, this class is about learning how to utilize digital technologies in performing ethnographic research--a form of anthropological research that involves studying a particular culture or subculture from that culture's point of view, on its own terms.  More specifically, Dr. Wesch will lead a small group of students and me to better understand how we are "mediated" in our culture (i.e. how the various technological/digital media that permeate virtually every level of our society affect how we live) and how others in other cultures are mediated as well.  It's going to be some adventure, one that will likely push the boundaries of my intellect as well as my (sadly, but not sadly) limited technological skills.  I hope you'll keep up with my blog and share in this adventure with me =)

All this being said, it's perfectly natural if you're a "smidge" curious about the title of my blog and my first post (the selection from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings), since the connection between them and this class is relatively obscure.  To start with, I'm a complete Tolkien nut.  Don't get me wrong--in virtually all other aspects I'm about as normal an almost-23-year-old college guy as you get (including my fondness for cold beer, late-night pepperoni and jalapeno pizza, football games, Ridley Scott films, and so forth).  But when it comes to Tolkien's fantastical realm of Middle-earth, my "nerd factor" is through the roof.  One of my informal life missions is to show that loving LOTR and fantasy fiction/film is not abnormal at all--but my thoughts on that matter is probably best left to another post (or another blog altogether, really).  For now, just take my word for it ;) 

To get back to the original curiosity, the reason I chose to lead off my blog with this particular passage from LOTR is that it is a great example of how people's lives in Middle-earth are/were/would-have-been mediated.  The palantiri, or seeing stones (trans. as "far-seeing" in Quenya Elvish), were about as close to the Internet as the denizens of Middle-earth got.  These dark spheres of crystalline stone, hailing from the ancient days of that fantasy realm, allowed the possesor/viewer to instantly communicate with the other stones and to see people and places far away.  If you're familiar with the story, you'd know that they are very dangerous and powerful tools that were exceptionally rare, exceptionally valuable, and used only by those of exceptional will and skill.  In that way they are very different from most digital technologies today, which are now about as common as table salt.  The principle, however, remains essentially the same.  The palantiri mediated the lives of people in Middle-earth just as many of our technologies mediate our lives in the actual world today.  In both cases there are also benefit and pitfalls of using these technologies--what matters is to determine how to effectively and responsibly use them.  

So, there it is.  I greatly look forward to exploring the methods of digital ethnography and researching how people are mediated in their daily lives.  Don't fret--I won't incorporate applications from Middle-earth in many of my posts from here on out.  It would be a disservice to force the two subjects together when the connection isn't substantially there.  (I would, however, expect to see me relate some of my interests in Middle-earth with a possible individual research project in this class: online fan communities.)  Feel free to comment on my posts and provide constructive criticism if you'd like.  Like I said, I'm new to this kind of thing and would appreciate feedback.  

And with that, I'll sign off and end with one of my favorite quotations that I think is wonderfully applicable here.  "'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your front door,' [Bilbo] used to say.  'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.'"