[iDC] Education between Humboldt and McJob

[Trebor Scholz]

"Who would not want to sit on this conference table?" With this question
the symposium on new media education at the University of Hamburg kicked
off last Friday. 

<http://mms.uni-hamburg.de/blogs/symposion2006/?page_id=5>

Following the description of the organizers, the title "Bildung im Neuen
Medium" referred to 15 years of discussion about the "new medium." The
singular "medium" could have been interpreted as a reference to the
Internet but that was not made explicit. 

"New media," in an anglophone context is often understood as a paradigm
pointing to a shifting target rather than a specific emerging
technology, exploring processes that accompany the emergence of any
"new" media, from the telegraph and film to the Internet. 

This intensive two-day interdisciplinary symposium was followed by one a
one-day workshop. The focus of the symposium was not on educational tool
building but rather on the broader implications that discourses in new
media education (nme) exert on fields like cultural studies, the arts,
communications, media theory, informatics, and the history of culture.
The workshop provided a platform to introduce educational technologies.
   
Arriving in Hamburg I wandered through its streets under dark skies.
Graffiti on campus called for a strike against the introduction of
student fees. One slogan outside the cafeteria read, "Enjoy your lunch.
What do the student fees taste like?" The students looked relaxed and
untroubled. The fact that women make up the vast majority at most German
universities was apparent also in the crowded campus cafe. 

The symposium started in the former villa of Aby M. Warburg, the
depressive art historian and creator of the Mnemosyne Atlas who famously
responded to the question about his health with "All well - from the
neck down." In 1925 the likes of art historian Erwin Panovsky and
philosopher Ernst Cassirer gathered in this "cultural-scientific
library," and called it a "laboratory of the sprit" before it was
relocated to London during Nazi times. In this oak-paneled setting,
walled in by books, it took me a while to get over the excitement of
naked historical presence. 

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aby_Warburg>

The eleven presenters, dressed predominantly in varying shades of black
were seated around a massive oak table surrounded by an audience of
around 50 people. There was exactly one woman in this circle of
otherwise white male presenters, mostly well into their fifties. A
second female scholar was invited but could not make it. I know all too
well that organizing an event entails compromise, sweat, and tears.
However, in 2006 there is absolutely no excuse for such gender
imbalance. Looking harder, one could have surely found fantastically
competent women in the named fields, even in the vastly male-dominated
German-speaking academia. It'd have also been valuable to have a student
present her perspective on new media education.

While the symposium was held in German, it was announced as an
international event, which was related to funding obligations. The term
"international," somewhat amusingly, stood for Switzerland, Austria, and
Germany-- notably missing was Lichtenstein from the German-speaking
armada. 

Rumors of the demise of geography have been exaggerated. Language
barriers are still solid walls. Connecting wires and online translation
tools don't change this fact. A bilingual book publication will follow
this symposium and if it will have broad distribution, it could help to
build "air bridges" between these discursive archipelagos.

Despite these comments "Bildung im Neuen Medium" was an inspiring and
thoughtful event. German language (germanophone) media theory and
pedagogy has much to offer to international discourses. Present day
media theory in German is distinct but little known outside
Germany-Austria-Switzerland. (Also media theorist Friedrich Kittler
speaks German at international conferences.) 

International references at this symposium were mostly based on printed
books that are available in German (Lovink, Manovich, etc). References
to media theory or philosophy, art or pedagogical models from North
America, Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, Finland or the UK were rare.   

An official of the federal ministry of culture, the symposium's sponsor,
welcomed people and attended the entire event, frequently joining the
discussion with humble curious questions (just imagine *that* in the
United States). The ministry also funded the web initiative Netzspannung
for many years. 

<http://netzspannung.org/index_en_flash.html>

Most presentations in these two days used "in-house" Floss applications
like Studylog (developed at the University of Hamburg) or eMargo
(Technical University of Darmstadt). It was utterly refreshing not to
hear the American commonplace apologies for using Powerpoint, Keynote,
or other proprietary tools at conferences. It is on the edges of media
technologies where the most interesting things are happening. 

Torsten Meyer, one of the organizers of this symposium, kicked off his
topical introduction to the event by describing education as one of
those never-ending disruptive construction sites on the German highway.
He suggested visual equivalents to what he identified as the main themes
of the symposium: 1) a sign of a construction site, 2) Magritte's pipe,
3) a filing cabinet, 4) a fish, and 5) a container box.

<http://tinyurl.com/y4qyae>
<http://mms.uni-hamburg.de/blogs/meyer/blog/> 

Meyer, in his engaging talk, conceptualized the Internet as being made
up of container boxes. Guided by mighty machinery such containers think:
packages are moved. (They are moved, for example, through the air in
Hamburg's harbor). With a smirk, Meyer equated such conceptions of
knowledge transfer to misguided ideas about so called e-learning. Only
the most ill-informed would think of education as the transfer of
knowledge packets, with a click of the mouse, from the brain of the
"master" to that of the apprentice, or sophomore. Learning needs
friction, conflict and lively debate. While there are a few exceptions
to the rule, e-learning has mostly been a profit-driven broadcast model. 

In German language, one refers to browsing "in" the Internet, not
"on-line." It is this semantic base that allowed Meyer to describe net
publics as moving like fish in water. 

Meyer showed a video clip of the German tennis star Boris Becker who, a
few years back, run an advertisement for AOL, in which he sat in front
of his TV and recalled: "Even my wife said that we finally have to sign
up for the Internet." The sexist connotation of his slogan ("even my
wife") did not stop people to sign up for AOL's entryway to the
Internet. Apparently it was an iconic event in the socialization of the
German-speaking Internet. 

<http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=59536>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtTz8U_iDYk>

Following his metaphorical box trajectory Meyer made reference to the
blockbuster "The Truman Show" and proposed a parallel between Truman's
world and the World Wide Web as a cage. Truman sailed the waters of his
world until he bumped into the outer wall of what was set up as a
make-believe stage. Meyer asked, where this fake horizon could be
located online. Onto the painted blue sky with which Truman's boat
collided, Torsten Meyer collaged Magritte's pipe (ceci n'es pas
l'internet). 

<http://tinyurl.com/y5m76f>

Peter Meyer's metaphorical bouquet was contextually rich and
cross-disciplinary. He drew from Plato, René Magritte, Jean Lyotard, Lev
Manovich, German media theorist Elke Bippus, Melville Dewey (Dewey
Decimal System), Howard Rheingold and Michael Hardt. 

Winfried Marotzki of the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg
presented a purposefully basic introduction to the Internet as social
space. He is widely credited for introducing Sherry Turkle's work into
German media theory. His well-structured and lucid talk addressed three
central "Web 2.0" phenomena: 1) classical communities, 2) social
networking, and 3) the recent transformation of networked sociality.
Marotzki's deliberate "Web 2.0 for Beginners" approach was based on a
good sense for where he had to pick up the audience.

<http://www.uni-magdeburg.de/iew/index.html>

Marotzki did not fail to problematize O'Reilly's term "Web 2.0" for its
odd suggestion of complete novelty, but decided to use it for its
communication value. His definition of "social networking" included not
just weblogs and friends-of-friends environments but basically the full
fleet of sociable web applications. Here I disagreed: social networking
is merely one slice of the pie of social web media.

<http://tinyurl.com/ycnqll> 

Marotzki reminded the audience that the sociable web (and blogs in
particular) are not a fad. As part of a list of affordances of sociable
web media (a term that I much prefer to Web 2.0) he included hit-and-run
tactics using weblogs in authoritarian countries where a cyber-dissident
can put a report online and then rapidly exit the net without leaving a
trace.

After offering a brief historical overview of the sociable web (The
Well, OpenBC, Friendster), Marotzki discussed the island nature of
communities like Funcity.de or Second Life. He correctly ended by
emphasizing the growing significance of the idea of weak ties and other
core issues like trust or the de-contextualization of content through
syndication. The personalization of content, instruments and tools was
also picked up later by Frank Hartmann who talked about the difference
between the shape of an American axe (s-shaped) versus the straight
shape of the German equivalent. The farmer in Texas needs a slightly
different tool then the wood worker in the Black Forest.    
  
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatol_Rapoport>

Media theorist, philosopher, curator and former student of Ernesto
Laclau, Oliver Marchart, highlighted what is old and what is new in the
paradigm of "new" media. Like many presenters at this event, Marchart
read his prepared essay aloud. His text, iterated with confident voice,
was lucid and achieved what it set out to do. 

<http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200104/ai_n8944329>

The novelty of the "new," Marchart argued, relies on wonder and
surprise. His research project concerned the use of a variety of media
during labor day protests: protest media. Marchart pointed us early
protest speeches of this century; photos of these events show an
actuality, an embodied directness between listener and speaker. (I
thought of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's speech in the Saint Petersburg train
station after his return from exile in Finland or famed photos of Rosa
Luxemburg). Like Christoph Spehr, Marchart seemed to suggest that
protest movements are somewhat aided by technologies but that in the end
social struggle is a face-to-face affair. 

<http://www.t0.or.at/dublin/om.htm>

Many counter-hegemonic social movements have demonstrated the political
function of what Marchart called the "ideological state apparatus of
information." Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe emphasized the
importance of temporary commonalities and Marchart linked this notion to
a proposal to educate the people who inhabit hegemonic structures. With
Althusser he talked about the "stuffing" of the masses through TV and
radio in order to achieve "compliance based on nationalistic and
moralistic impulses." Educational institutions were characterized as the
"pedagogical state apparatus," a place where people are forced into
compulsory listening squeezed in between the state, the parents and a
hard place. 

<http://www.republicart.net/disc/publicum/marchart03_en.htm>
 
Werner Sesink, professor at the Technische University (Darmstad), titled
his talk "The culturization of the desert." As "door openers" of his
inspiring, and somewhat experimental presentation Sesink introduced
Hegel, Zizek, Flusser and Kant from a purposefully amateur perspective
in philosophy. This approach opened up topics and connections rather
than merely inscribing existing knowledge. 
  
<http://tinyurl.com/y74aek>

The Desert is alive crawling with data in the borderless terrain of the
digital with horizon that is red from wild imagination. According to
Sesink, the Internet (while he never makes that link obvious) is a
desert devoid of culture. It is a demolished even by education. As
wrecking ball Sesink recognizes Immanuel Kant's power of conceit
(Einbildungskraft). Referring to born-again cyber-expert Clifford Still
he remarks that we loan our lives, ourselves, by giving our time, our
lives really, to the digital. By introducing water into the desert we
can give life to places where there is neither life nor culture. Sesink
locates rain clouds in the "unbelievable power of the negative: the
energy of thinking." 

<http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snakeoil-Clifford-Stoll/dp/0333647874>

"Education, if it is education (Bildung) is always protest." 
- Vilem Flusser 

Sesink continued with Flusser also arguing for a synthesis of technical
worlds and the human. According to Flusser, numeric thinking leads to
human downfall while at the same time opening up alternatives and new
horizons. 

I was most inspired by Sesink's idea of the relationship between the
move from physical interaction to the virtual and the emerging neglect
of physical spaces. The argument was not that dirty universities lead to
more MySpace activity. But a neglect of physical space is evident in
many educational institutions. Face-to-face collaboration is hardly
encouraged. Just think of the factory-like rows of computers in labs
that kill just about any opportunity for conversation. Such unpleasant
environments redirect collaborative potential to the World Wide Web.
Sesink describes (with Hegel but through Zizek) that emptiness is the
freedom to take for ourselves: "freedom is what we achieve in protest
against what exists." A somewhat ur-German Hegel reference followed:
"the night of the world" (Die Nacht der Welt). The lack of embodied
interaction leads to the dark night that you feel when you look the
other in the eye. Our eyes become equally empty, just like the
non-places in which we meet. One night gets translated into the other. 

But this non-place, this blackness of the night also signifies
possibility. It is the opportunity to reflect, to remember ("there was
something that we have to carry on.") The "old" needs to be ported into
the "new." We need to sing about the Internet with the voices of Homer. 

Sesink observed a strong desire for reparation, an urge for
reconciliation with the "old." The treasure of the Internet contains the
possibility for multiple ways of thinking that embrace an understanding
that preceded it. 

After his university lectures, Sesink explained, he asks his students to
take him apart. He calls it "tabula rasa" ("making a clean sweep").
However, afterwards he asks for reparation, an acknowledgment of the
scholarship that was already there. 

For Sesink, education is a risky business without guarantee for positive
outcomes. While one can can shape spaces for education; and set up
positive conditions-- in the end, the responsibility for education is
with the learning subject herself.    
 
Sociable web media allow the learner to experience herself as speaker.
In addition, it exposes her to new "reflection figures"
(Reflektionsfiguren): competent people in collision with whom she can
grow. These are not role models but people who function like sandpaper.   

During a short break Elke Bippus, professor at the Hochschule fuer Kunst
and Gestaltung in Zurich, and I talked about fairy-tales, the brothers
Grimm in particular. Later in her presentation she quoted Giaco
Schiesser's essay about the obstinacy of the media that also builds on
fairy tales. I argued that one should probably not let one's children
anywhere near the bone chilling fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Bippus agreed that these tales are ultra violent but that they are meant
as initiating material to open up the dialogue with the child about the
cruelty of the real life world. The real existing brutality of the world
is let loose in these fairy tales. In many repeated reading sessions
with the child one can explain the stories and make them less
intimidating. 

In her presentation Elke Bippus (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst,
Zürich) discussed the obstinacy of the media as structures of
opportunity. In successful artworks the media step back. Apart from this
topic, Bippus' current research focus is on art as research. 

<http://www.institut-syn.de/macht/kunst-des-forschens>

Markus Krajewski, professor at Bauhaus University Weimar and former
student of the famed Sophien Straße School in Berlin (with Friedrich
Kittler and many others), took us by the hand for a journey through
media history. "I would like to tell you a story" he began and then
framed his presentation as a tale that he read word by word from his
prepared paper. From the library of Alexandria to Conrad Gessner's
"Partitionum Universalium" Krajewski interwove his technical insight
with historical reflections on the art of collecting and the archive as
well as the history of thinking about databases ... He elegantly knit a
narrative that pulled us through the history of data collection
culminating in the introduction of a small bibliography software
application of his own design called "Synapse." 
  
<http://www.verzetteln.de/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Gessner>

Dr. Phil. habil. Frank Hartmann (University Vienna) talked, in fiery
fashion, about "mediology" in strong reference to Régis Debray.
Universities have an enormous fear of technologies and a strong need to
sustain the myths of book culture and its ideologies of hierarchical
distribution, he argued. The medium of "message distribution" becomes
the message. 

<http://www.medienphilosophie.net/>
<http://tinyurl.com/yx4s6h>

Hartmann pointed to the historically repeated illusion that
communication is a solution to the troubles of the world. Already during
the advent of the telegraph, many attached the communication promise of
this technology to hopes of permanent world peace. This is beautifully
described in the book "The Victorian Internet." 

Hartmann bemoaned the described overemphasis on textual cultures. Why
could not you dance your Ph.D. thesis, he asked? Audiovisual media
slowly replace book culture, which is a trend that can be traced back to
Kurt Tucholsky who believed in the overwhelming political power of
images. Do we need the verbalization of ideas from authors who carry
words like rotting mushrooms in their mouths? (Not always will you find
media theory in everything that is labeled as such.) Hartmann delineated
a historical development of distrust toward text and a proliferation of
images. For Jurgen Habermas, for example, media are "technical
amplifiers of human communication." 

"There is no Internet per se," he claimed. "It is all about context."
Once you switch on your PC you are faced with the 20th century American
office culture and this needs to be understood and taught. Hartmann
proclaimed an anti-idealistic view.
 
In a continued trajectory he refers to Dieter Mersch who claimed that
"Media art has more to say to media theory than media theory to media
art." Hartmann agreed; mediology is not snake oil, it is not the silver
bullet. "Media theory is bad for careerists" Hartmann summed up... "it
is great for those who love experiments." 

<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Mersch>

What should our students read, or, should they read at all? There is no
need for a book canon! However, should we favor Lovink's idea of
journalistic net critique? 
"How can I write when I cannot write like Adorno or Luhmann?" Hartmann
pointed to students and colleagues whose writing style smells of these
authors. 

In immediate response to this question one professor in the audience
responded that "if you identify yourself with something closely (=if you
ate something) "you have to shit it out tiny bit by tiny bit-- that's
normal. That does not mean people write like Foucault or Luhmann, they
just digest it."    

Hartmann proposed a large forum of many sharply fenced-off disciplines
to work together intensely (also including non-academics such as
plumbers). Hartmann ended his talk with a tribute to all DJs. He
suggested that DJ Spooky's writing is not helpful as theory perhaps but
it is still a useful interdisciplinary meeting point.  

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h-RhyopUmc>
<http://web.uni-frankfurt.de/fb09/kulturanthro/d/inst/mafa.html>

Michael Giesecke, University of Erfurt, presented with quirky charm and
questioned the idea of culture. He pointed to the centrality of triadic
thinking. He started by projecting a lonely dove cruising through a grey
sky and emphasized that his talk was not merely a summation of
reflections of a few months but rather the result of ten years of
thinking that he now dared to put into words. Michael Giesecke addressed
the question of a post-typographical society while his smiling female
student assistant clicked through his slides. 

<http://www.kommunikative-welt.de/index2.html>
<http://michael-giesecke.de/theorie/>
<http://tinyurl.com/yajrd2> 

Over dinner Oliver Marchart and I discussed hierarchies in the
university. The stiff hierarchies encountered there frequently surprise
Americans visiting German universities. 

"I don't have to be a nice guy in the classroom" he said, and "I
definitely do not want to be their friend." Flusser's pedagogy of
conflict (enacted like this) is, of course, not possible if you are
friends with your students. I understand the idea that conflict is a
positive pedagogical tool. Marchart argued for a Lacanian model as part
of which "you *are* the knowledge in the room." It depends what type of
knowledge is in question here. Students have experiential knowledge and
can contribute this perspective (they experience themselves for hours on
MySpace or in SecondLife, for example). To assume that there is nothing
I can benefit from students would be misguided. What kind of example
does this provide? It leads to a somewhat religious relationship with
authority, which is only rhetorically questioned. 

Ronald Feldman, the gallerist who introduced Joseph Beuys to America
organized a talk for him at The New School in New York City. A few years
ago Feldman screened the film that was recorded at this occasion. Beuys'
face on the poster pulled students who had never heard of him. Beuys did
his thing, drawing on blackboards and lecturing. Whip-smart students
took his arguments apart and then jumped on the stage to correct his
chalk drawings.     

The pedagogical broadcast model that I described earlier, and which
Beuys attempted here, does not encourage dialogue. In the case of Beuys
this is especially dopey as much of his work built on activating people.
This discourse model encourages parallel universes: deeply disciplinary
scholars following the inner logic of their research and terminology,
however impenetrable that may be for their surroundings.   

Marchart argued that the seemingly flat American hierarchy only
masquerades even more gruesome hidden power dynamics. The violence of
power is hidden behind a casual demeanor. I'd argue that the German
hierarchical pedagogical model of the whip discourages a participatory
discourse model. Down from the lighthouse of knowledge a few titans are
spreading their knowledge to the adoring student masses. This somewhat
religious model suggests the idea of an all-knowing authority. Is
discourse something that swirls through the head of the lone knowledge
cowboy? Or, is knowledge better built as a drum circle of multiple
voices each contributing her perspective? There is a difference, of
course, between talkshow-type opinion culture in which each gut feeling
counts as an argument and the open exchange of knowledge. 

We quickly got down to the root: Alexander von Humboldt's model of
"Bildung" (education) meets the American pragmatic model of education.
The American consumer relationship with the student is in many ways
hindering education ('My parents paid 40.000 dollars so I deserve an
"A"). For Humboldt education was explicitly about general education and
not related to job prospects. To argue for this model in the North
American context would be arrogant and elitist. Students have to pay
student loans and therefore skills that are relevant to later employment
matter. A useful mixture of Humboldt's insistence on "pure" education
and a pragmatist model is the best solution.     

Remo Burkhardt gave an overview over 49 Floss software development
projects that the ETH in Zurich financed and concluded that the
emergence of sociable web media quickly pronounced most of theses
in-house applications useless.

A debate about the centralization of attention-domineering tools like
Itunes, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and YouTube ensued. These tools create
monocultures. What if Youtube or SlideShare or Writely decide one day to
start charging me for hosting the files that I uploaded in the belief
that they'll be available there for good without charge? Complete
reliance on centralized commercial tools is dangerous. Do I really want
to trust Flickr (alone) with all my photographic memories? Proprietary
tools and commercial sociable web applications need to be at least
paralleled by small DIY FLOSS projects, however fragile and buggy they
may be, simply in order to counteract the potential of future
dependencies.

<http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/e/>

The workshop on the third day was separated from the symposium. Many of
the media theorists had left already. Here, the discussion became more
practical. In the university computer lab, a researcher presented a
complex three-dimensional environment that allows the trained user to
navigate complex searches in VR land. (It looked a bit like Simon Biggs
"Babel" project). A semantic search engine is planned that analyzes
syllabi of faculty and clusters them topically.

<http://hosted.simonbiggs.easynet.co.uk/babel/>
<http://telenautik.hfbk-hamburg.de/cms/>
    
A developer of the Floss software Metacoon presented this widely used
educational tool. The state contributed about several million Euros for
the project with the goal to make it one of perhaps two main Floss
learning tools for all of German academia. However, studies showed that
it took about 2 years to get even 2-3% of students and faculty to use
Metacoon. In addition, people using it met several supposedly amazing
features that project designers envisioned with complete disinterest.

<http://www.metacoon.net> 

Beat Doebli who developed Beats Biblionetz, which he introduced as ³not
Web 2.0, not downlodable, not social, not e-learning, and not well
designed,² demonstrated a very different, somewhat romantic approach.
Doebli designed the bibliographical tool entirely for himself over the
past ten years. However, now it serves as a rich reference for his
students and 45 "fans" bookmarked the tool in Del.icio.us so far. 

<http://beat.doebe.li/bibliothek/>

Studylog is a cross-platform presentation and research tool that is
Director-based. It shows QuickTime (QT) movies without the QT skin and
offers a scrolling feature for pdf files in presentation mode. While
there are many inconveniences about Studylog, I'll still use it
alongside other programs.   

<http://studylog.de>

Most presentations at "Bildung im Neuen Medium" were deeply grounded in
historical and philosophical reflections. The debate culture was
stronger on the dialectical than on the dialogical side. 

After having gone the stairs from Plato and Martin Luther up to Hegel
and Gramsci, there was little time left to look closely at the "new." It
is hard to talk about the way education is affected by technologies
without getting down to the specifics of the technologies used. 

Trebor Scholz

My talk at "Bildung Im Neuen Medium" can be found at:
<http://tinyurl.com/y7lsm9>