I’m designing two new classes that are headed to curriculum review. If approved, I’ll teach them fall 11. I’m a little nervous because mine don’t look like the syllabi I read of classes offered this spring in the same unit. Those syllabi are analog. Most of them require papers and maybe an oral presentation. My classes are 75% online, 25% face-to-face: predominately digital, with some experiments in turning off our devices when we’re f2f to track how and where we spend our attention. (Yes! Meditation & mindfulness. Namaste, Howard Rheingold.) We’re meeting synchronously, during class time, but we’re also working asynchronously via various social media platforms. Lots of feedback loops, big and small, whenever and where ever students want them. Then, when collectively we roam out into that great urban lab that is Los Angeles, we’re wired, of course, but also physical, proximate to each other: walking, exploring, collecting digital objects we’ll assemble later into finished products. Tagging things as we go. Open to serendipity and chance.
As I envision it, we’re doing the opposite of what one does in, say, directed search: plunge in, hunt for the treasure, then swim back up again, like the Tahitian kids Rupert Brooke observed diving for oysters. Directed search is the way most of us learn things today. This isn’t any less true for students than it is for you and me; it’s just that students are too young to have acquired the larger, paradigmatic frameworks on which to hang those facts and examine them from multiple angles. That is potentially worrisome, I grant you. But is Google making us stupid? Of course not.
We’re sucking at the firehose of information. We’re not yet teaching students how and when it might be appropriate to put the hose down.
Online learning is not inherently bad; in fact, online resources are the best thing to happen to education since the pencil, another remarkable, lightweight tool that made student learning mobile but was pretty much abandoned as a tool for innovation. Why did the pencil get deployed in ways almost identical to the fountain pen? Because people saw it as a cheaper version of the old thing, and didn’t look beyond that. Why is online learning perceived to be a poor man’s version of f2f? Because people are treating it as a massively scalable (read: cheaper) version of the old thing.
And what is that old thing, exactly? It’s not college as you and I experienced it, dear reader. (You and I were in graduate school when cell phones went mainstream, weren’t we? Didn’t I see you with that ungainly shoe-sized thing pressed to your ear as we loitered outside before the Milton seminar?)
Check out Mike Wesch’s first remix (released today) of early submissions to his new project “Voices of Students Today (2011).”
Disconnected. Programmatic. Will this be on the test? If somebody sez in my class they might as well be at home on the couch, I’m not educating them. I have to provide what Google can’t: judgment, wisdom, skepticism, compassion. A unifying vision they’re at liberty to pull apart, rebuild. Tell me a better story, a truer story. Explain. It’s not just the facts, ma’am. Stay on the couch if you like. We can chart new terrain from there. But drop a pin to mark the start, because we’re not going to stay on your couch for long.
Stalwarts say students today want to be entertained, coddled, coaxed into learning. If we’re approaching students with shoe-sized phones pressed to our ears, pretending things haven’t changed, how will we be able to hear them?
At the end of this post, I’ve added a movie I made here in PDX upon my return from MLA. I rode my bike, thought about DH and what it means at this cultural moment in our universities, sat on a rock in the rain and talked into a camera. Voila! Scroll down if u don’t want to be bothered by WORDS.
MLA 11 exceeded my expectations in every way.
Moving chronologically through the happy surprises:
1. Blazing fast, ubiquitous wifi. The first thing I did upon arrival at at the JW Marriott at the L.A. Convention Center was to grab Tweetdeck. The columns allow one to watch hashtag streams (#mla11, plus tags for particular sessions), responses, those one follows, and direct messages. It’s a very functional interface. Yummy. And I was never disappointed by the Marriott wifi. Never got booted, was never slow. Which goes to show how few of the 8K MLA attendees were sucking broadband: at Brad’s dig conferences, they truck in extra bandwidth and even then, it’s a struggle to match demand. But as you’ll see, broadband demand may go way up at MLA12 in Seattle. This conf was just too exciting to be missing the digital “backchannel” (not sure it was a “backchannel.” Think it pretty much *was* the channel.)
2. Had my first f2f encounter w someone I follow on Twitter. Off to my first panel, I opened up the laptop and started Tweeting. Noticed that Brian Croxall, oh he of Profhacker fame (& Emerging Media Librarian at Emory), was also tweeting. I discreetly examined the room from my mid-room row. Nobody looked quite like that tiny icon I was accustomed to. Then: @kathiiberens The wallpaper in this room is like being trapped inside a Louis Vuitton bag. I laughed. He saw me laugh and located me. @kathiiberens I’m sitting right next to you. I glanced to my right and scanned the room. Nothing. Turned my head to my left and–gasp!–inches away–waved Brian Croxall. F2F? More like elbow2elbow.
3. New Tools Panel; or, The Ghost of MLAs Past It was waaaay too early in my MLA11 experience to gauge how contestatory were the remarks of Marc Bousquet. He was describing an MLA org I recognized all too well: complacent, in denial about market realities, etc., etc. MLA11 Executive Director Rosemary Feal tweeted: “Marc Bousquet looking back, rehashing old history, while the ppl in the room seem to want to look forward”; and “So imp’t to stay focused on what we can DO, how we can progress, n not to live in resentment. Bousquet’s talk inspires me.” Like I said, it was too early in the conf for me to believe her. I didn’t even listen to all of Marc’s talk (rude, eh?) b/c I felt like I’d heard it, and lived it, all before. Others in the room who hadn’t lived through it were alive to the generational differences playing out agonistically on the Tweetstream: “the river runs deep,” said Natalie Houston of the old resentments that weren’t hers, but were on full display. Remarkably, #newtools didn’t get mired in this morass. Urged along by Marilee Lindemann‘s show-stopping use of humor and political indignation, a strong case was made for unity and action in a time when the humanities are under forthright attack by universities that expect more work (digital plus traditional) for equivalent or less pay. Chris Newfield, whom Lindemann extolled as a hero of political action and careful thought, was the moral center of this panel.
4. Talking w/ the Tweeps I Follow Parked in the back of #newtools on “iPad Alley” sat a few of the (mostly) guys who had taught me a lot about DH before I came to MLA: Dave Parry, John Jones, Matt Gold, Ryan Cordell & Erin Templeton. Met up with all of them. Didn’t have to fumble for conversation, b/c I knew what the heck was going on. Inquired after Fun Run meetup space. Chatted abt the panel. And we were off. To Cork Bar, as it turns out:
Here I met Katherine Harris (who loved that wine so much she’s hunted it down for a DP this weekend), Stephen Ramsay, George_Online (argh! forgot his last name but can tell u how John Wesley and Methodism figure into his dissertation), Matt Kirschenbaum, Jason B. Jones, and Mark Sample–who on his fantastic blog SampleReality published all the DH panels, thus enticing an outsider like me to haul myself onto a plane. 41 panels, I think it was? It became the de facto guide to the conference for many of us. I kept the paper program for access to the maps.
This was the first afternoon and evening. At Cork, I split a bottle of wine with Dene Grigar, the electronic lit artist, mythologist, and MM program director extraordinaire. We exhorted John Jones and his wife Amy to have a little charcuterie and cheese as Amy told us about teaching music to kids, and preparing to do a doctoral program in astrophysics. Someone showed up, and I wondered if she felt a little bit like a celebrity when I looked her in the eye and said, “You’re Amanda French.” She was dazed, having conferenced all day with little break for food (an exhilaration I was to experience each subsequent day for the rest of the MLA: too much to see and hear to bother much with eating.) After we’d all hung out in the delicious air, the rectangular fire pit doing its job of making us feel cozied around a hearth, but outside, towered over by the deco downtown LA buildings and wrapped up in the wail of sirens and cars whooshing by, I walked back toward the Marriott alone, chatting with my husband on my Bluetooth. Mark Sample and Matt Gold were ambling the same way, so I signed off and we walked together. Matt lives in NYC. Mark and I took turns telling stories about teaching our kids to walk city blocks without getting run over. (Key: don’t stop at the kerb, b/c it’s too close to speeding cars. Stop at the edge where the buildings end.)
There’s so much more to tell, of course; that’s the nature of the new MLA. Pleasure! Who’da thunk it? When I’d told my grad school pals on FB that I was going to MLA for fun, they crinkled their noses as if someone had wafted stinky cheese: “Whhhhyyy? Too much stress!”
Maybe so, maybe so: hard for me to tell, b/c the only job seekers I hung out with were DHers, who generally all had multiple interviews. Nerve wracking always, to interview at MLA; but so much worse if you have only 1 or 2.
I’ll end with some reflections about what it all means. Nothing like a bike ride in the rain to extract that from you. Check out the biblio at the end of the vid: blog posts and some panel talks that caught my eyes and ears. Can you name the bands at the head and tail of the vid b4 the music cred rolls?
As I prepare to visit my first MLA since 1996, I’m reflecting on the people I know who stayed in the field, and those who left, and what influenced their decisions to leave or to stay.
I was cheered that my friend Cynthia recognized herself in the previous post as the friend who left UCB to attend rabbinical school: but actually, she’s one of two. When it comes to why we leave English, it’s as if a tiny vacuum of shame or ambivalence sucks us in. We generally keep quiet about it. I haven’t found a community of people sharing firsthand stories about this. Maybe we feel isolated. It’s embarrassing to dwell on a “failure.”
Those articles, and the dozens you’ll find like them, are the context in which the conversation about humanities Ph.D.s is situated. The one read by all your relatives who worry over why the hell you did this degree in the first place. Note, in this excoriating May 24, 2010 New Yorker cover, how iconically the blithe Ph.D. is drawn compared to the lined, worried faces of his parents:
That’s the dominant story, but I don’t think it’s the truest one.
I think that if we were to ask a lot of people why they left and what they’re doing now, we’d find a heartening story.
Afterall, there are some significant benefits to leaving. You can choose where you want to live. You may change jobs at your discretion, because the job market is perpetual and more porous–even in this economy–that what goes down at the MLA. You might even earn more money, and/or have other kinds of flexibility that you value (weekends? travel to places other than conference locations? the freedom to live with your life partner instead of hope for the same time zone?)
Does this mirage exist?
It does for me, for my husband, Brad Berens (also a Berkeley English Ph.D., 1999), and for many of our friends. But more broadly than our group?
We won’t know until we ask. “We” being us. Being MLA.
The MLA could do something bold and wonderful. It could expressly invite the stories of Ph.Ds and ABDs who chose to leave the profession to its “Narrating Lives” project.
MLA President Sidonie Smith (Prof of English and Women’s Studies, UMichigan), has created a YouTube channel and has invited all people–not just MLA members–to post their stories about transformative reading, teaching and mentoring moments. I should think this might also be a place to house stories of the sort I mention.
Smith’s project “Narrating Lives” uses new media to gather and distribute stories about why the humanities is vitally important at this cultural moment. It’s a wonderful idea, and I hope that many many people post their stories there. I intend to. Whenever I’ve asked student to write blog posts about transformative reading experiences, it’s some of the most powerful writing of the semester. I could see posting one vid about opting out of English, and one about reading, teaching, mentoring or being mentored.
I see this as a kind of “It Gets Better” vid series aimed at helping those who are struggling with their decisions to leave or to stay in the profession. Some of the emotional resonances are similar to the situation of gays deciding whether or not to come out, or figuring out how to cope with being gay in a still largely homophobic society: the fear of how one’s community will react to the decision, the shame of wanting something different, the way in which coming out punctures the normative story of success and happiness.
I don’t know if others who left the profession would wish to share their stories. But I’m pretty sure those stories would help people currently trying to find a place in the field.
If the “Narrating Lives” project were officially broadened by President Smith to welcome autobiography from those who left the profession, MLA would demonstrate its commitment not just to the humanities, but to the full range of people who have devoted many years of their lives to studying and teaching it.
Another advantage: the mainstream stories peddled about brilliant-but-foolish humanities Ph.D.s would be met with a morally authoritative corrective. The “Narrating Lives” project would trump the petty spectacle of the “cream of the academic crop” (in the words of the Dec. 16 Economist article) “clinging like limpets before eventually falling off” the academic career track.
There’s nothing to stop me or anybody else from posting an autobiographical vid about leaving English. The platform is open. (Yay!) But MLA can increase this openness by broadening President Smith’s video invitation to include multivalent, autobiographical stories of what it means to find work with a Ph.D. in English.
Thank you, Dr. Feal, for responding to my post about lack of openness and transparency at the MLA11 site.
You are right that $220 for non-member registration is a low conference fee. The fee is even less for MLA members.
But the convention fee is not the point of my post.
Instead, I suggest that both the MLA and MLA non-members might benefit from more openness and clarity about the content of the upcoming convention Jan. 6-9. Access to information, not fees, is at issue here.
I registered as a nonmember with the MLA site, but was not given access to the schedule chronologically, as it appears in PMLA. Instead, I was offered three ways to search: by Participant, Subject, and Meeting Type.
If I happen to know exactly what I’m looking for (e.g., a talk by a particular person), then the search options function.
But if I’m browsing and want to control my own progress through the panel information, I’m out of luck. The user interface is unnecessarily fragmented. For example, I found session #331: “The Open Professoriat: Public Intellectuals and the Social Web” by wading through 261 “Special Sessions.” If I hadn’t known of its existence from the Digital Humanities sessions posted on Mark Sample’s “SampleReality” blog, I doubt I would have found it on the MLA site.
“The Open Professoriat” certainly seems like it ought to be open to the public, but neither the session description nor general information on the MLA site indicate whether non-registered guests might attend. I’m inclined to think “The Open Professoriat” is CLOSED to the public.
Walling off content is a sure way to limit its influence.
On Sat. Jan. 8, David Parry will present “Be Online or Be Irrelevant” (at 606: Methods of Research in New Media). The subhead on Mark Sample’s SampleReality blog says: “Own your ideas. Make them free.” Cory Doctorow, the fiction writer, Boing Boing co-founder, and net neutrality activist, gives away large chunks of his intellectual capital and has found that free access to his ideas spreads them and, counterintuitively, earns him a tidy living.
What might happen if MLA convention information were published in the open, not behind firewalls?
The MLA might find a population of unaffiliated experts who collectively possess a vast, diverse range of opinion and skill.
It’s a little more than 10 years since I filed my dissertation in English with UC Berkeley. In that last decade, I’ve seen some friends from my cohort (and from similar departments) scatter into fields far from the Ph.D. training we engaged in during the 90s. I haven’t done a survey, but I would guess that about 50% of my cohort got jobs in the field (defined broadly to include jobs like mine, an NTT composition position). The other 50% are working in digital media and advertising, selling products in small storefronts, attending rabbinical school, working as college admins, writing commercial books, making commercial videos, staying at home with kids, teaching adjunct, founding independent theaters, directing plays, teaching K-12, and the like.
These are people Ph.D.s and ABDs who may well have interesting things to contribute to the MLA, but who lack the information to even know what’s happening in the field, let alone judge whether they’d wish to participate.
The MLA doesn’t have to permit everybody to attend its conference. It’s a professional organization with specific work in the field to be done. But opening its information–starting with a clearer, more transparent website–could only vitalize the MLA.
I walked the red carpet once in L.A., when the movie Practical Magic premiered, in 1998. I don’t remember why I was brought there.
[Img: Steves2cents.blogspot.com]
I was writing my dissertation 6 days a week, scuttling from my office only for yoga and the occasional swim. I remember thinking I might see Stockard Channing, or Nicole Kidman, or Sandra Bullock. But they didn’t show. The premier was in Century City, a red carpet unfurled over what looked like a law office courtyard. Freestanding Kleig lights blazed. Jennifer Beals, who did not appear in the movie, walked the carpet. Paparazzi shouted her name. Autograph hunters/vendors huddled behind a velvet rope and awaited her scrawl. I walked the carpet, to no one’s notice whatsoever. Then I took my seat in the dark alongside everybody else and watched a forgettable movie.
In L.A., not every premier is a grand event.
MLA 2011, this year’s annual convention for professors and advanced graduate students in English, comparative literature, romance languages and ancillary fields, is new in one respect: a date change places it well after the Christmas holidays.
But transparency would really make this MLA “new,” and transparency and openness are glaringly absent. The MLA has always walled its convention against outsiders. This year’s non-member registration fee is $220. Just to search the titles of the 800 convention panels, one must be a paid-up member or guest, which means that intellectually curious non-initiates are shut out of even learning about the event, let alone participating in it. [Exception: anybody on Twitter can follow the tweetstream at #mla11.]
Like a castle under siege, the MLA looks even more cloistered now than it did before new media radically increased our expectation of access to information.
How out of step is the MLA? Check out this Dec. 17 tweet from the well-meaning Rosemary Feal, MLA’s Executive Director, who manages the tweetstream:
Are you blogging about what you’ll be speaking about at #mla11? Put link here for all to see: http://www.mla.org/conv_listings_mysessions
I clicked delightedly. Finally, to be able to see what people are talking about. But the link redirects to a membership log-in page. As does the page that invites one to “Exchange Collaborative Session Ideas.” MLA’s notion of “all” is just a tiny fragment of people in the field–registered participants–let alone the broad world.
The happy oasis in this desert of information is Mark Sample‘s reprint of MLA’s digital humanities panels on his blog, SampleReality. Reading those titles, I thought: something cool may well go down in L.A. I am less sanguine about the other 650 MLA panels, which eluded my open search. I got a full list when I accessed the November issue of PMLA via my university’s firewalled databases.
I’ve been toying with the idea of attending MLA for the first time in more than a decade specifically to hear what’s going on in digital humanities. I’ll follow the Tweetstream whether or not I attend, but of course I’d rather have the full experience–particularly as someone studying how information is conveyed and absorbed in face-to-face settings. Having just returned from LeWeb in Paris, and seeing firsthand the feedback loop created by f2f & Twitter right up on the mainstage, I know how quickly the social media/f2f combo platter can advance and spread the conversation.
As compared to previous MLAs, which I attended in the mid-90s with my husband before I was ABD, the emotional stakes this January would be low. I don’t have to worry, for example, whether one tweet might kill my interview prospects–as actually happened at last year’s MLA. See the 34 comments following the roguish “MLA 09 Survival Tips” at SampleReality (co-published at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker column; scroll down to see specific discussion of the fatal tweet.)
The self-consciousness of job candidates (and those who evaluate them) is both excruciating and merited. You hear horror stories, or just plain silly-slash-tragic ones: the candidate who learned through the grapevine that offering a Kleenex to a sneezing interviewer was perceived as “too forward”: the Kleenex drew unwelcome attention to the interviewer’s body. Another strategized a jaunty way to toss her winter coat on the bed as she walked into the interview. (After a fruitless two-year search, she left the academy, turned her dissertation into a commercial biography, and won a Pulitzer.)
During my sabbatical year, on leave from teaching advanced composition at the University of Southern California, I’ve been developing more new media skills and connecting with literary & media critics who attend to the vast landscape of user-generated, DIY content. My progress seems slow, but it’s steady enough. I can’t conceive of a more exciting time to be making stories, analyzing them, and teaching/collaborating with students.
Is it any wonder that the English professoriate frets over its diminished cultural influence, and runs MLA panels about the “crisis” in its profession? Explicitly, untenured faculty and graduate students are warned to filter all digital traces of their personae, combing them through and through and through for any little nit that an influential someone, somewhere might find objectionable. This extreme caution is at odds with the way most of us behave on social media platforms. Social media has vastly extended my intellectual reach, and is facilitated by the immediate, open, casual tone of exchange.
At a premier, Hollywood can make any product look good. But it’s actually word of mouth–crowdsourcing–that determines whether a movie makes money or fails.
Will there be WoM about this “new” MLA?
How could there be, with all the goodies locked away from anybody hungry for a taste?
MLA already has its answer about how vitalize the field, but it doesn’t want to know. This “new” “premier” isn’t a fresh beginning, but a sequel. MLA’s survival depends on openness and transparency. Other disciplines–communications, emerging media, composition, digital literacy, various interdisciplinary hybrids–are spreading themselves across the digital marquee.
At least there are many people in the field trained to recognize an elegy.
In America, we believe in “bank error in your favor,” as it says on a Monopoly “chance” card. We believe in good luck, in getting away with it. In doing what you want with or without the law on your side.
In Amsterdam one does not.
At a restaurant, I made a small faux pas: a waitress brought me turkey on my salad when I asked for salmon. I pointed out the error. The cook added salmon on top. But I did not set the turkey aside: I ate it. Bank error in my favor.
Later that evening, I realized it must have looked vulgar to eat the turkey I’d pointed out as a mistake. Social decorum here would suggest that if the error meant so much that I requested it to be rectified, then the least I could do is leave the turkey aside. It is crass to have profited from their mistake.
I pieced this together reviewing tiny clues in body language. Social decorum here is subtle, but palpable.
Anybody in America can get drugs whenever they want. Just ask the cops who visit elementary schools to warn children away from drugs. Amsterdam’s allure is not about access to drugs, which is what I assumed was the case before I visited.
Amsterdam is about the freedom to consume marijuana and hash, and then hang out. In public. Where lots of people can watch to make sure you’re doing as you ought.
You can see a similar principle at work in Amsterdam’s attitudes about graffiti. Beautiful graffiti decorates some old buildings in Amsterdam. Graffiti infuses new aesthetic energy into the old buildings, allowing them to reflect the people living in the city right now. That’s a really different notion of history than, say, the Parisians’.
Amsterdam calibrates the tension between civil rights and social decorum well, but still, I’m American. I’m surprised when I smell marijuana at the train station, or when I walk by a mostly naked woman seated on a stool in her dark, tidy booth in the Red Light district.
At first I was unsettled to see prostitutes vulnerable in their glass storefronts, illuminated only by the red rectangle of light framing their stalls. I would try to catch their eyes and offer a smile or business-nod, but they almost never looked in my eyes. They didn’t want my solidarity. They wanted another client.
Then I realized: these women are probably the safest prostitutes in the world. They are protected. They have a union. I’m a NTT [non-tenure track] professor. I do not have a union. Sometimes I sit in the dark in my little stall, grading papers late into the night, illuminated only by the rectangle of light flowing out of my screen.
Amsterdam is forthright about its pleasures and the social limits on that pleasure.
It doesn’t promise that what happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam. It doesn’t wink and look away.
We’re sucking at the firehose of information. We’re not yet teaching students how and when it might be appropriate to put the hose down.
