1. 7 June 2010
The Future of Text and its Implications for Higher Education
Guest: Matt Barton
Cloud Computing: social media/very spatial metaphor - how else?.
Decentralized model of sharing (?)
Not sure what it is; seems like something so simple but hard to understand
definitionally.
Metaphors of knowledge: guild (not anyone); myth of everybodiness, but not really.
Connect to article on Slate (?).
Master/apprentice.
Rizone? Crazy connections. Wikipedia. rhizomatic. Deleuce and Guattari
**Check spelling.
Reinvigorate metaphor(ish).
Learning outcome is epistemological: reflective activity? Yes.
Has the use of wikis been exhausted? Should we acknowledge itʼs limits?
Make this a blog post: Jeffʼs ideas - connect to capitalistic concerns.
Charlie Lowe - extremist advocate.
Socialist way of viewing knowledge.
License for derivative works.
Maranto and Barton
“Itʼs putting aside that useful dichotomy of “us and them” that so many teachers depend
on for their authority in the classroom” (37).
Kemp: social networking sites provide sites of discussion and connection and can
circumvent the force-feeding of children.
Creating a profile is immediately undermining teachersʼ ethos / or friending students
undermines ethos.
Conflating the public and the private as one is a very conservative stance.
Although the courts have not decided on such cases, Simpson (2008) writes that schools can discipline employees
when their actions outside of work may have an “adverse impact on the school or the teacher’s ability to teach. And

2. it wouldn’t be too difficult to make that showing if the teacher’s blog includes sexually explicit or other inappropriate
content and is widely viewed by students” (para. 14). Nor would the First Amendment likely provide protections,
given the precedent of a 2004 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding San Diego’s firing of “a police officer for
posting a sexually explicit video of himself on the Internet. The unanimous Court said that such speech was
‘detrimental to the mission and functions of the employer”’ (para. 15).
Unsurprisingly connected to identity formation - why do we care about their identity?
Yes, linked to rhetorical awareness - I get it. Still though...
Jürgen Habermas (1998), of course, wrote a great deal about this question in The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, in which he claimed that rational-critical debate is only possible in societies whose members enjoy a
carefully preserved wall between their private and public lives. If the wall breaks down, so does the possibility of
social and cultural critique; without diaries, there are no editorials. A Habermasian approach to social networking
sites would likely be concerned with how they demarcate public and private, group and individual. He wrote,
“Nonpublic opinions are at work in great numbers, and ‘the’ public opinion is indeed a fiction” (p. 244). True public
opinions are possible only in cases where the “exercise of social power and political domination is effectively
subjected to the mandate of democratic publicity” (p. 244). If students seem to place more credence in social
networks such as Facebook (or Ratemyprofessor.com, for that matter) than the professor’s lecture or university
brochure, it’s precisely because the opinions they find there are (supposedly, at least) unmediated, subject to
publicity, and open to frank discussion.
Q: Facebook is all about identity formation; yet, we are given a limited amount of
resources to choose from, or at least very structured ways to choose them. Does this
enhance the facilitation of identity formation by raising critical questions of power and
identity determination or does it muddle the discussions because it limits the extent to
which identity formation can be discussed? (cf. p.43)
There is no “design,” which is crucial for identity formation. So, this is limited in
terms of that as well.
Although there are differences, both MySpace and Facebook privilege a type of discourse based on the construction
and representation of personal and shared identities. Rather than assert that everyone is unique, these sites ask users
to apply dozens of labels to themselves (religion, hometown, political affiliation, relationship status), and choose
favorite books, movies, and bands. These are the sorts of biographical factoids Habermas might call “the refractory
results of socialization shocks that have again become subreflective” (p. 245).
In The Concept of the Political, legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1996) argued that “the specific political distinction to
which political actions can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (p. 26). For Schmitt, the enemy “need not
be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be
advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the
stranger. . .existentially something different and alien” (p. 27). Schmitt’s comments about the possibility of political
action seem especially relevant when discussing social networking sites that claim, above all, to help one make
friends. When we as educators force ourselves onto Facebook, requiring that students add us to their networks as part
of a routine assignment, surely we are “something different and alien” than their other “friends” in the network.
Furthermore, when we support administrations that attempt to ban Facebook or MySpace, we are in effect
recognizing our own strangeness and otherness and trying our best to destroy a friend network—there is
strength in numbers, as it were, and it’s not to our advantage (economic or otherwise) for students to feel too
safe—particularly when they make fun of us in public.
Perhaps the people we choose not to befriend on Facebook and MySpace are just as significant, if not more so, than
those we do.
One day they might face a dour-faced job interviewer who has seen that picture of them slurping bong water, and
they might not get the job. They might wonder where the authoritarian regime (i.e., their teacher) was when they

3. needed it. But, chances are, one of their friends on Facebook will know another place they can apply. And isn’t that
what friends are for?
“Is There a Wiki in This Class?” || Barton
As Bruce Thyer points out in his book on scholarly
publishing, “Generally speaking, the higher the
rejection rate of a given journal, the more
prestigious it is seen to be.” [2] In the academy, an
individual’s prestige may partially be determined by
how well he is able to suppress other voices.
Knowing how to change a wiki page is one thing;
knowing how to make an appropriate change that
will be accepted by a wiki’s community is another.
Here is where the true challenge of integrating wikis
into the classroom lies, and since it involves the
verbal negotiation of authority within a given
community, it is clear that this challenge is more
rhetorical than technical.
Addressing the when of using wikis.
Transforming vulnerability of wikis into an asset.
Taking public service angle to the Wiki issue.
Assign Larry Lessigʼs Free Culture.
Carr:
The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to
scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds
of media coming at us simultaneously. There’s also the fact that numerous

4. studies—including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed
people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two
academic databases—show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly
as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of
distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check
automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people
routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office
workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each
glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the
cognitive penalty can be severe.
The penalty is amplified by what brain scientists call switching costs. Every
time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our
mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just
two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking
and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important
information. On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the
switching costs pile ever higher.
There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and
pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them,
and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of
a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading.
The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply
and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our
dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify
information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred
method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we
are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even
our culture.
What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early
trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal

5. knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the
process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so
interesting.