Projectories

[via too
many topics, too little time]

Nearly all American universities have experienced tremendous growth in administrative
staff in the last 30 years.  At most schools the ratio of admins to
faculty has doubled. As this trend continues necessarily tuition prices
continue to outpace inflation.  Within our lifetimes it is likely that
the cost of a college degree will exceed the cost of a twin-engine business
jet airplane (in the 1950s four years of tuition cost about the same as a
new Chevrolet).

If colleges cannot get by without adding more labor per student why not
do as for-profit corporations do and add that labor in China or India?  As
noted in a
December 1, 2003 entry, MIT has had great success outsourcing OpenCourseware
programming and editing to India.  Think about all the jobs at a typical
university that are done primarily via phone and email.  Obviously the
entire IT department could be in India.  Why not the registrar?  How
about most of the coordinating and tracking functions of the alumni office?

American labor is wonderful but it is a luxury that most American families
can’t afford.

Business idea for the young readers:  Start a university ”back-office” service
bureau in India or China.  The folks who’ve done this for Wall Street
have been very successful (New Yorker magazine did a great article this summer
on Office
Tiger, started by two Princeton alums).  Most university administrations
lack the initiative to manage staff overseas (or do anything innovative,
actually) but they would all appreciate the potential cost savings.  So
they’ll need a contractor to do it all for them.

Outsource university
administration to India or China?

The last week I have been (among a lot of teaching) pondering Karen Barad’s article on Posthumanist Performativity that discusses a kind of “onto-epistemology”. She proposes that the concept of phenomena should be used to mark a joining of the subject and the object in scientific discourse. She bases this metaphysics on the Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s observations and theorizing on photons or light waves.

To me it seems somewhat related to Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges where the researcher must remove him-/herself from the “nowhere position”. The new
twist on Barad’s article seems to be that she includes the ontological dimension in the concept rather than leaving it on the epistemological level like Haraway or Harding.

Barad’s flirting with physics (she is a trained physicist herself so maybe it’s unfair to call it flirting) seems to mirror a “material turn” in social sciences where the dominance of the social level has been questioned by theorists like Bruno Latour or John Law. And although the article is an interesting read I’m a bit unsure if what she is saying is so revolutionary - material as
well as social reality matters.

[P]henomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

Tomorrow will be the first seminar in the seminar series that I am arranging for the Technology and Learning Project I’m a part of. In the seminar Patrik Hernwall is presenting the theoretical foundations of his research project Virtual Society.

The Virtual Society project tries to tie together educology (the scientific study of learning) with a number of other disciplines in an attempt to understand how digital technology affects our experience of the world.

Hernwall and his project team are interested in how “cyberspace generates new kinds of experiences, where the relation between body, space and technology might challenge established understandings on what it meansto be human” (Hernwall, Virtual Society - The emergence of everyday life in cyberspace)

The seminar will start at 13.00 in the Olympos room in the D-building, Link�ping University.

Great posters from a french bicycle and motorcycle manufacturer. Between 1893 and 1960.

Terrot Posters

I have looked a little closer at the concept of Disruptive Technology that I wrote about previously, with a focus on understanding it in relation to education.

What seems like the main emphasis in the theory about disruptive innovation is how organizations (expressed mostly as firms) can win market share by targeting customers with new and cheaper products. These products will then either undercut the incumbent company in the segment (type II innovation) or create a new market (type I innovation). In Disruption in Education by Clayton M. Christensen et al. I find that the concept of education and knowledge is to a large degree depicted as a commodity - hence it fits into the general framework of the theory.

This commodified view of knowledge is often used in conjunction with vocational training, and also when talking about distance education, and it seems like the view of education as a quest for commodifiable knowledge is dominant in the economic part of distance education discourse.

This knowledge-as-commodity paradigm clashes seriously with both enlightenment ideals as well as the Swedish tradition of peoples education where knowledge and schooling are seen as key routes to democracy and an egalitarian society - where education is seen as a political tool to shape society.

The question that arises is what role education should play in a democratic society. Should education be viewed as a democratic force in that it gives people the means to educate themselves to further their success in the workplace or should it be viewed as a democratic force that imbues certain values to the citizens? If education is seen as a means to attain economic success through skills acquisition disruptive innovation might serve as a useful concept for understanding dissemination of education. If education is seen in light of enlightenment traditions or people’s education the value of education lies not in its commodified value - rather it lies in a harder to measure democratic or egalitarian effects.

The principles that govern human behavior on the individual and collective levels have always been a major interest for the social sciences. To understand how human societies function, to chronicle their history, or to predict their future is a major interest of the social sciences.

In a classic televised debate from 1971 titled Human Nature: Justice versus Power Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky discuss their respective approaches to understanding the foundations of social structure. Since Chomsky and Foucault entertain partially contradictory views on human nature and society their exchange highlights the differences of their theoretical departure points.

Chomsky’s stance on human nature, mental structures and language shows how he interprets the human from a material point of view. It seems that our biological make up provides us with the raw material for constructing the structure of language - and this stance is also reflected in his view of human nature and politics.

Foucault on the other hand interprets human society from an intensely social constructivist way where he ascribes primacy to language interpreted as a discourse. And this discourse is formed by the power struggles that take place in society.

Although these positions have fundamentally different foundations for their knowledge claims their juxtaposition in the debate provides an interesting insight into how different views reflect on a political agenda.

Another point to which the discussion returns several times is that of the role of individual creativity - of the inventor, the speaker, the subject. Chomsky’s argument highlights the importance of the individual’s processes of creation while Foucault tries to de-emphasize the historical role of the individual genius.

The debate is an emblematic example of how different views on scientific inquiry embody different views on the subject, society, politics and knowledge. It reminds us of how important it is to reflect on our own scientific deed. Not only from a science perspective - but from the point of personal departure.

I have 6 gmail invites to spare. Send me a message if you want to be invited.

Last spring I read a passage from Mills in a course called the research process. Today I ran across the same passage on Alex Halavais’ blog. At the time when I first read it I felt burdened as to how I would ever manage to be so organized. But now I realize that a blog might just help me become a better academic. I sure hope so anyway.

Mills has described, far better than I ever could, why a graduate student should keep a blog. Of course, the piece that may be missing here is the public nature of blogging. That certainly changes things in many ways. But the central idea remains constant: blogging is the process of externalizing thought, of putting form to experience.

Mills on blogging

Via Relevant History.

Christensen’s concept of “disruptive technologies” has popped up two times during the last week. The first time was in my session at the EASST/4S conference. The second time was in this blog post on too many topics….

From a first look into the concept it seems to be a Schumpeterian concept to analyze the market effects of technology, and Christensen has used it to analyze technologies for distance education. The concept focuses on how companies (or universities) can steal market share from each other utilizing new technologies “to compete in a new way in new markets.”

The problem of this concept from my point of view is how it does not address issues related to the social aspects of technology. Rather it focuses on the adaption of technology on a large scale - leaving the effects of the technology out of the discussion. It becomes rather like looking at the spread of pollution without understanding the effects of the spread. It can be interesting, but it doesn’t tell you much about what is happening.