Concluding Thoughts from Online Education, Circulation, and Information Economies of the Future (2019)

When I deposited my dissertation on Online Writing Instruction and the economic and labor issues connected to it last Summer (July 2019), I opted to delay database availability to have time to publish the data. Unfortunately for us all, the time of that research came suddenly and without warning. Not that I think folks are clamoring for my dissertation specifically, but while I continue to work on those pubs with the data, I have decided to post some excepts here to, if nothing else, comfort myself that I am circulating the work that may make a difference to someone else out there. May any reader here find some solace, clarity, or inspiration in these words.

The following is the conclusion of my last chapter (results of my third and final empirical component of a study of two different Online Writing Classes at two different institutions) and the conclusion of my dissertation itself, edited for clarity and context.

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5.3 Broad Conclusions

The relationship between teacher and students is the biggest difference-making factor in this inquiry. Teachers, regardless of experience level or expertise at teaching online, lament the design of LMSs for some reason or another, ultimately because they are more effective information platforms than communication platforms. LMSs could be improved, but the most efficient way to improve OWI and OE, based on this inquiry, is to enhance the relationship between teacher and student and improve their ability to interact through dialog. LMSs, as circulation platforms, contribute to this, but one-to-one communication modes are ultimately more effective, based on teacher testimony and student surveys. 

Part of why communication between teacher and student is so effective is because it teaches the knowledge-making steps of DIKW (Data>>Information>>Knowledge>>Wisdom) through practical mentoring and collaborative problem solving between the teacher and student in accordance with Merrill’s (2002) five principles of Active Learning: 1) students perceive a problem, in their work or in their access/comprehension of the class, 2) communication between teacher and student assesses and invokes past experiences of each other to determine the specifics of the student’s inquiry (as opposed to general principles in mass communication), 3) the teacher models action or advice to the student, which 4) the student must apply on their own, resulting in 5) the student practicing something new based on a relationship that connects it to previous experiences and can be applied in the future.

In practical pedagogical terms, this means that educational resources should be focused on supporting student-teacher relationships in online classes: teachers and students do the labor of ‘online education’ (i.e. teaching and learning), and therefore their labor should be supported as much as possible. The key labor they do, dialogic interactivity, is invisible, so it is not likely accounted for well in measurement metrics. As Clinefelter and Aslanian (2016) report, students need more financial support for education, even if it is online, and Busch (2014) and Hall (2016) find that emphasis on numerical metrics buries knowledge-making relationships with students under verifiable research spread and student evaluations that often function as consumer satisfaction reports1. What is being de-skilled in teaching is dialogic interactivity, and what is being de-skilled in learning is extended thought on problems (because students are pulled in many economic and social directions at once). These other realities cannot be displaced (students will always have lives, research is always beneficial to academic inquiry and pedagogy). Therefore, a readily available and easy to implement solution is to shift funding to education for teacher pay and to students for financial support: both teacher and student will be recognized for the invisible work they must do to succeed in the end, and the increased economic support will ease tension around the other factors that pull them in other directions. This is especially important on the more precarious end of the higher educational spectrum, community colleges, state schools, part time instructors, contingent faculty, and faculty teaching higher course loads instead of being given research time: these teachers and students should have more financial support because it will make much more proportional difference to the quality of work they can do together. Part of what makes John Locke’s tutor-student model both elitist and effective is that the bond of the teacher and student is supported financially and institutionally (i.e. by the place they meet) so that both groups feel security in their work and have less to fear about their future. Teachers andstudents can focus on the work of teaching and learning when their place of work is non-exploitative.

Moving to the broad context of the inquiry, the critical component working against prosperous communication, knowledge-making, and education, seems to be the pervasive market logic that guides its operation over other imperatives. Circulation platforms supercharge the economic experience of information, making information-sharing and knowledge-making seem to be the same as managing supply chain and logistics to have a package delivered on the same day someone orders it. This focus on expediency puts the emphasis on information-as-commodity, with knowledge-making as a second thought. Circulation theory is a very effective lens to critique the market model of knowledge-making by providing insight into the rhetorical processes that transform data into information and information into knowledge, seemingly automatically. DIKW logic has lots of clear utility in explaining how knowledge is made ecologically, and provides a metalanguage framework for disciplines to cooperate.

In practical terms, this inquiry finds that teachers and students both see their relationships with each other as the most beneficial things, and that their relationships are best facilitated by direct communication, which usually happens asynchronously. Based on teacher and student data, this inquiry concludes that students are not satisfied by mere information and want to have knowledge-making skills; students recognize that being critical and skilled at knowledge work is a valuable skill and will pursue it in the venue most cost effective to them, whether that be through formal education or ”free” information markets that push them toward radicalization.

The largest flaw of neoliberal market models of information distribution, knowledge-making, and education are that they produce short-term knowledge, incentivize indirect goals over the stated missions of these pursuits, and rely on asymmetries through the assumption that asymmetries galvanize further market actors. Market asymmetries, in practice, allocate more power to a small group of capital-rich people who fight against relinquishing it. Furthermore, the major social, cultural, and ecological crises we face stem from asymmetries: of wealth, of power, and of knowledge. An increasing amount of data science experts and sociologists2 are laying this at the feet of economic policies that have empowered economics over democratic will. As with all these asymmetries, the problem is not a lack of enough to go around, it the lack of a mechanism to equitably distribute it. Public institutions should reinforce the public’s claim to things like knowledge, and online education represents a unique opportunity to extend knowledge-making and mentorship to people living their lives in situ, to network together their places and problems, and to move beyond classrooms.

Conclusion

A New York Times article (published March 23, 2019) makes the case, as the article is titled, that “Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good,” arguing that it is harder to find parts of life not mediated by screens and that the wealthy horde those increasingly rare opportunities to themselves through their ability to outbid ordinary folks for undivided, usually in-person, human attention (Bowles 2019). The reasoning behind this commodification of screen interaction is that it is cheaper than stationing a human in one place, and one human’s labor can be divided amongst multiple portals if the systems are not automated outright (Bowles 2019). Among the institutions counted as experiencing an explosion of screen-driven service are care-work sectors like schools, healthcare facilities, and social work (Bowles 2019). As the article points out, rich people reject these screen-driven services whenever possible. Whereas owning a computer used to be a sign of affluence and success, being accompanied by a smart device at all times is increasingly something that rich people have the luxury of avoiding. Just as in the time of Locke (the turn of the 17th century), rich capital owners are turning to personal, interactive, and tactile modes of education (Bowles cites the Waldorf School of silicon valley as the most popular elementary school) that emphasize human contact and mentoring relationships between the teacher and student (Bowles 2019). 

The ubiquity of technology also makes data collection and advertisement targeting something that disproportionately affects less wealthy people, making them the fuel for the surveillance economy driving commercial production of worldviews in competition for the fate of our collective future (Zuboff 2019). The luxurification of human-to-human interaction has to be reversed3 because it represents the rise of another asymmetry. Based on this inquiry, and others, what students value in an effective OWI instructor is the dialogic interaction they have with them, likely for the same reasons that affluent people cite in seeking to avoid digital mediation: authenticity, attention, emotion, and individualization. Human interaction in online classes may not be less screen-mediated, but by keeping class sizes low, investing financial resources in teachers, students, and the connection between them, and reducing the layers of abstraction they must go through to meet each other, it can still be democratic.

In Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “Wealth” essay, now referred to as his “Gospel of Wealth,” he sets out a guiding principle for philanthropy: wealthy people must have social and cultural impact on the poor. In Andrew Carnegie’s case, he built countless libraries, a school, and music hall among many other philanthropic projects. In “Wealth,” Carnegie argues that philanthropic projects, such as these, should support cases that “help those who will help themselves,” hence libraries provide opportunities for poor people to gain information that they can self-engineer into a way out of their put-upon lives. The problem Carnegie implies, with this line of thinking and action on his part, is that people suffer under inequality (he starts “Wealth” by accepting that inequality is a fact of life) because of lack of motivation. The people employed in Carnegie’s own mills worked well over eight hours a day for very meager wages. Carnegie’s proposition to these people, in particular, was that they, after a day of back-breaking labor morning to evening, go to a local library and invest their remaining waking hours in reading one of the books available there. There is no doubt that Andrew Carnegie’s libraries, school, and other institutions that make information available to the public have improved countless lives in invaluable ways, but it is also worth wondering if that positive impact might have been accelerated by Carnegie also committing to paying his workers more and reducing their workloads so they had more time to benefit from this availability of information. Similarly, we must wonder if the impact of online education might be accelerated by investing in the humans who do it as much as the technologies that have driven information accumulation, data collection, and social connection.

As long as the levers of control are driven by capital demands, those controlling capital will roll back any reforms that benefit those they do not consider to be themselves. The renewed emphasis on digital and robotic automation in the 21st century—a century also characterized by global conflict, social discord, and ecological crisis at this early stage—likely signals the end of the post-World War II progressive period (such as it was), offering proof that it was an exception in the history of capitalism (the short-term) and of power (history-spanning). Precarious neoliberalism is not an anomaly, it is the norm that preceded the mid-20th century, and seems poised to retake its position. Overcoming these obstacles will require cooperation, technology, and policy that is driven by knowledge-making that addresses these problems in long-term ways. Online education has a pivotal opportunity to be part of networking people together to bring their experiences to bear on how global war, social inequality, and ecological destabilization have affected them, will effect them, and what we can do about it. Students and teachers that appreciate online education appreciate the ways they can invest time and labor in connecting with each other in non-transactional ways, though they suffer the transactions when they are necessary. This lack of cynicism is rare, and it must not become extinct.

References for this Excerpt

Bowles, N. (2019). Human contact is now a luxury good. The New York Times. March 23.

Busch, L. (2014). Knowledge for Sale: The Neoliberal Takeover of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Carnegie, A. (1889). Wealth. from The Gospel According to Andrew: Carnegie’s Hymn to Wealth, HistoryMatters.org

Clinefelter, D. L. & Aslanian, C. B., (2016). Online college students 2016: Comprehensive data on demands and preferences. Louisville, KY: The Learning House, Inc.

Hall, G. (2016). The Uberfication of the University. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Kindle ed.

Locke, John. (1693). Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: Cambridge University Press, 1895 edition.

Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Education Technology Research & Development, Vol. 50, No. 3, pp 43–59

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York, NY: PublicAffairs.

  1. Which admittedly could capture students’ flat reactions to the quality of relationship they have with their teacher, but often do not, partly because they assess class “content” or preserve racial and sexist biases against the instructor, like in Sharing Economy user reviews. ↩︎

  2. Cathy O’Niel, Shoshana Zuboff, Safiya Noble, for instance. ↩︎

  3. Likely through removing incentives to make digital communication an opportunity for data harvesting, increasing investment in social infrastructure, and giving the public more direct, democratic control over institutions. ↩︎

What I'm Watching for in Twin Peaks: The Return

As a shameless fan of the original Twin Peaks show and movie, the ongoing Return series on Showtime gives me a lot to think about. The 5th episode aired/was released for streaming last Sunday, and I have to admit that up until that episode, I hadn't been all that happy with The Return. Showtime, in its streaming app, officially calls the show "Twin Peaks: The Return," and lists it as "Season 1," an important distinction I appreciate. The first four episodes reminded me more of David Lynch's movies than Twin Peaks itself. As a David Lynch fan, that excited me, but as a Twin Peaks fan, it disappointed me. Now that episode 5 has aired, I see that this series is following the pace of the original: the first 4 episodes, released in one dump together, act as a long pilot movie setting the table and now the weekly releases are going to build and pay off events and arcs. Moreover, it seems that show isn't just going back to Twin Peaks, it's moving on--and that's a good thing. I think Twin Peaks is a pivotal moment in the David Lynch's canon. Discounting Dune (which is a good idea--everyone involved gets a mulligan for Dune), Blue Velvet and Eraserhead were distinct movies structured around small casts of players, with their stories and themes built out of concentrated time with a few important people and their associates. Twin Peaks, on the other hand, forced Lynch (with Mark Frost) to work with a large cast and multiple stories, and their solution was to layer them soap-opera style. The characters, combined with fantastic mystery and creeping ickiness, of Twin Peaks drove it to smash-hit (then cult-hit) status and made it the oft-cited reference point for the new golden age of TV beginning in the mid-2000s. The large cast, I believe, made lasting impact on how Lynch's stories came together. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire all feature larger casts and stories, and all of them, even The Straight Story, feel connected to larger things outside the plot. Until The Return, Inland Empire, to me, was Lynch's masterpiece and the culmination of his philosophy-in-art. So Twin Peaks: The Return is both revisiting old friends, but adding another stone to Lynch's narrative path--perhaps the final one (or maybe not).

It does, however, make following and anticipating the show even more challenging--not because the show is changing the mythology or increasing the weird factor for its own sake, but because The Return is David Lynch iterating not just on his ideas but on a past version of communicating them. In that sense, there are important things I've come to recognize in Lynch's work and Twin Peaks thematically that I'm keeping tabs on to help myself understand the wonderful and strange journey we're on this time:

Externalized Suffering: Lynch's films, regularly feature external entities, usually a  mysterious character, representing the suffering of the other characters. The baby in Eraser Head could be an early example of this, but that one isn't quite as simple. The caricature of the mother in Wild At Heart, The Man in Mulholland Drive, and The Phantom in Inland Empire are prime examples of this trope in action, and Bob is probably the most prolific and terrifying incarnation. Making terror and suffering a character allows Lynch's films to explore the other characters' relationships to it, and demonstrate how, while one person may see a friendly face or nothing at all, other people see monsters and horror because of what they've been through. Twin Peaks doubles up this trope with "garmonbozia," materialized human suffering most often represented as creamed corn (outside the Black Lodge) and tar-like oil (inside the Black Lodge). These manifestations don't absolve their character counterparts of wrongdoing; Bob, for example, is a parasite in his hosts driven by, as Mike says, "appetite and satisfaction." A parasite can't outright control a host (with rare exceptions), but it can thrive off what the host does and drain their ability to do other things. In Bob's case, his appetite for suffering manifests in the actions of his host, but the host is the one fulfilling the appetite by doing the bad things. The trope makes a metaphor of abusive relationships: the abused is trapped with a monster only they can see, and the abuser justifies their actions through an internal appetite they don't question. It also means recognizing that abuse isn't magical or excusable: Leland Palmer is the monster who did those things to Laura, and now "Cooper" is one too. Bob is in possession of Cooper outside the Black lodge, but bad Cooper was always there to begin with. DoppelCoop is not a construct like Dougie. A doppelgänger is the side of yourself most people don't acknowledge, but Bob preys on it. Dale's doppelgänger is a part of him he thought he left behind. He couldn't overcome his shadow self, as Hawk calls it, in the Black Lodge and now he's broken into pieces that have to be reassembled into the complex Cooper we know and love. The monster of DoppelCoop will have to be confronted to keep suffering at bay for the time being.

Bob and Doppelgänger Cooper conspire with terrifying delight

Bob and Doppelgänger Cooper conspire with terrifying delight

Bob and DoppelCoop's plan fulfilled in the product: Mr. C

Bob and DoppelCoop's plan fulfilled in the product: Mr. C

People In Need of Help: David Lynch's worlds are often bleak and depressing: desolation is at the highest point it can be while still being bearable, and the dream-like quality of his art style and dialogue calls attention too it as well. Something is always wrong, but what is it? The audience can see it, and the characters suspect something, but how can we be sure? The dreamlike quality ramps up especially around trauma. Sherilyn Fenn's cameo in Wild at Heart is a good example: Sailor and Lula arrive too late to save Fenn, but she knows she needs help even though she can't express it directly. In The Return, parts 3 & 4 see Cooper walk up to people and ask them to "call for help," repeatedly. They respond by directing him through the casino to the next stage of the gambling apparatus, assuming nothing is out of the ordinary. Sure, he wins the jackpots and is adorable doing it, but the joy is mortifying cover for his helplessness. David Lynch gave one of his trademark strange interviews after rejoining production of The Return wherein he said that conflict isn't natural for humans and that 'we're supposed to live like puppies playing with each other all day.' I think that sentiment is at the heart of Lynch's focus on people in need: it's rarely within our own power end our own suffering because the world does so much to us we can't stop, but we do have the power to stop contributing to others' suffering by helping them, if we have the courage to do so when faced with the opportunity. Lynch's foundation work addresses this as well.

Electricity: David Lynch loves this mysterious energy force. In his first appearance of The Return, Albert calls the unfolding events "An absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence." This is a subtitle for Ronnie Rocket, an unmade film written by David Lynch about, among other things, electricity. Electricity, as established in Fire Walk With Me, is how Black Lodge inhabitants travel when they don't take physical form, and blinking or flashing lights are typical of crime scenes or other disaster scenes in Lynch's films. The flashing lights are creepy in their own right, but it also means current is being interfered with. The flow of energy is broken intermittently, as if something else is in the wire, trying to get through. Maybe Lynch's interest in electricity stems from its existence as a natural, primordial phenomenon transformed into industrial future. As it stands, the new show has seen Dale escape through an outlet and DoppelCoop violently control all the electricity in a prison. Whatever we're learning about the new world of Twin Peaks, electricity is part of it.

It's my belief, based on what I've seen and heard from David Lynch, that his view is that while we are usually powerless to stop our own suffering, because it's most often visited on us by forces external, it is within our power to stop causing others to suffer by the same token. That's what makes Special Agent Dale Cooper so special: through the original Twin Peaks, he's been the unrelenting bastion of good, and now the bad within him is in the driver seat. That's the first thing people new to Twin Peaks find surprising: Cooper is not dismayed to be trapped in Twin Peaks with strangers, he's delighted, and those people are not eccentric wacko's, they're the people we meet and have known for years.

David Lynch's worlds are dreamlike and terrifying, but that is what makes them realistic. New viewers of Twin Peaks are often caught off guard by the campiness and melodrama. Part of what appeals to me about Twin Peaks, and Lynch's worlds in general, are that the melodrama on screen is the real drama of life. People are weird, dramatic, and scared. Some of them are monsters, and some live in fear of what people will do to them. How Lynch's latest monster, Dale Cooper, is stopped will be the new wondrous and strange journey.

Super Mario Run Review and Nintendo’s App Store Aspirations

this post originally appeared December 16th, 2016 on my Medium page found here

Yesterday, something remarkable happened. In 2016, I found myself sitting in a movie theater waiting for a new Star Wars movie and playing Super Mario on my iPhone. Of course, in true 2016 form, everything was a little askew. The Star Wars wasn’t episodically numbered (and likely one of the few remaining highly anticipated Star Wars debuts in my lifetime), and the Super Mario was an endless runner (spinoff?). In the spirit of 2016 (i.e. trying to enjoy it somehow), I was devoting myself to both. And, honestly, I’ve been waiting 10 years for a Mario game I can truly carry in my pocket (not in a bag or backpack). In my opinion, the game delivers what it promises: an experience with the addictive, frustrating “just one more try” charm and personality that Mario is known for, and that’s good for both players and Nintendo (and Apple).

I’ve been a gamer and Nintendo loyalist my whole life, but my first console was not a NES or Super Nintendo, it was a Gameboy. For me, my Super Mario Land, Link’s Awakening, and Donkey Kong Land were my introductions to iconic series. Games like Super Mario Land succeeded because they captured the essential Mario-ness in “less” rather than more. The story of Mario — the story of Nintendo — is doing more with less, through complementing solid mechanics with personality and understated-yet-captivating narrative. These qualities are especially appreciable in their portable offerings, as the limitations are more apparent to both player and designer. Nintendo has been the only company in the history of video games to do portable, or “mobile,” right because they have learned these lessons well. In many ways, the Gameboy is the grand progenitor at the start of the iPhone’s lineage, and we still value in smartphones what was valued about the Gameboy: portability, responsiveness, interactivity, and battery life. My smartphone supplanted my Gameboy’s (DS, really) place in my pocket the day I got it, and I’ve been missing having the Nintendo experience always at hand ever since.

Super Mario Run may be late to the mobile game party (in more ways than one), but it’s still a welcome sight. While mobile gaming isn’t necessarily the rotten dumpster fire many would have you believe it is, Nintendo’s presence is a welcome influence. As I look back on my favorite games of the past 6 years of mobile gaming (it’s been six years! That’s a console generation!), I find games that built on old experiences while carving new niches: Radiant, Battle Cats, and most recently Downwell found their way into my regular rotation for their exponential learning curve (easy to start, challenging to master) and personality. Mobile-first or mobile-adapted hits like Oceanhorn, Bastion, Herstory, Heathstone, and Never Alone are raising the stakes of mobile mechanics and storytelling while starting to blur the lines between home and portable console. Still, there are those who won’t take mobile gaming seriously without physical buttons or photo-realistic graphics. And while I’ll gladly defend free-to-play mobile games for the ways they’ve brought gaming to a whole group of new people, I’ll just as quickly agree that they’ve cheapened gaming by bait-and-switching the price of admission and incentivizing slot-machine style game design that Vegas (and Ghosts ‘n Goblins) would envy.

Enter Super Mario Run. This mascot-driven platformer enters a market of free-to-play with a fixed-price experience (the game is free to start and $10 grants access to the rest of the game content) that, at face value, mimics the mechanics other mobile games have adopted to approximate original Mario mechanics on a touch screen (we’re full circle, in some ways). Mario runs automatically toward the right in Super Mario Run with screen presses triggering jumps and other special moves — what long time mobile gamers will recognize as an “endless runner.” From that perspective, a mechanics-focused macro view, the game can look like a “me too” moment for Nintendo. After a log absence, they arrive late to the party with a safe bet. What makes Super Mario Run so much fun, however, is what’s always set Mario apart: scalability, accessibility, and personality. The game is easy to pick up (you run, you jump, you avoid enemies, you grab coins, you grab the flagpole), but provides staggered challenges for different appetites. There are 6 worlds of 4 levels each (plus whatever else may be hidden behind them or released in updates), but each level offers 3 challenges of collecting 5 coins in increasing difficulty, turning 24 levels into 96 levels and allowing players, in true Mario form, to scale their own difficulty up as they play. There’s also competitive racing modes and a pseudo-Clash of Clans kingdom building mode. Instead of micro transactions fueling these aspects, coins and tickets are awarded from playing and beating challenges in the main game mode.

But more important, Super Mario Run has the heart of Mario and Nintendo at its core. As recently as last year before the release of Mario Maker, Shigeru Miyamoto discussed with Eurogamer the importance of personality to Mario in particular, explaining how the physics of the original Super Mario Bros game (which are tweaked in every iteration) were designed to give the player the impression of weight and danger — to give the impression that Mario, despite being a cartoon, is a real guy and the player’s directions and decisions have consequences for him. It’s that personality that has sustained Mario to the heights of recognizability rivaling Mickey Mouse, and Super Mario Run has it in spades. Sure, running straight through the levels may be easy for a veteran player, but the challenges, whatever you decide they are, inspire iterative problem solving like all Mario games do: “… shoot, gotta jump one second earlier;” “…damn how does that guy always hit me?” “…if I can just figure out how to get that last coin!” Despite it’s linear focus, the game still offers the branching path exploration and problem solving Mario is known for. Part of the appeal this time is putting together everything you learn about a level into a perfect run (lest we forget going backwards is not a part of the original Super Mario Bros, either). Plus, later levels play with the “always right” mechanic with wrapping levels and spatial reasoning tuned for constant running.

Most importantly, this game is Nintendo putting the mobile game market on notice. Just Nintendo being there signals to the digital slot machine games that they’re not going to have the market to themselves anymore, and if Super Mario Run is successful it will prove that success on mobile app stores can come from a single-purchase game based on solid content. With the Switch doing the heavy lifting for Nintendo as their all-in-one high-power console in the new year, Nintendo is free to make the phone their secondary platform where they can do what they’ve always done: experiment with fun experiences despite what the game industry traditionally considers constrains. Touch screen gaming likely needs the influence of the innovative minds that brought us the control stick, haptic feedback, wireless controllers, motion controls, the concept of 3D gaming, and touch screen gaming itself. Most important, if Nintendo proves there is a market for games at the $10 price point, that raises of the bar of what we can expect in quality overall, establishes a new market between free-to-play and premium remakes, and provides a model for other developers to do the same. What might seem inauspicious and “it’s about damn time” in Super Mario Run’s release is what makes it worth watching. If Super Mario Run is successful, we may have a revolution in mobile gaming on our hands.