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Here is episode 02 of the Digital Dialogue podcast. In it I talk with Allan Gyorke, Ryan Wetzel and Matt Meyer about openness and how it is related to dialogue, digital technologies and pedagogy.
Digital Dialogue 02: Openness.
Please post your questions, comments or suggestions below to ensure that the dialogue we began on the podcast remains open!
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After our discussion of the impact of open technology on politics in Iran on the podcast, I read this article by Farhad Manjoo today in Slate in which he argues that the very technology we praise as open for grassroots political action can be used to close off dissent and communication.
It seems that the politics of force and control can use technology to dominate and repress as easily as those using it to open a space of community resistant to the operations of hegemonic authority.
Hey Chris. I listened to this podcast again and a couple of ideas came to mind regarding some next topics:
1) You have a meeting coming up with Stuart Selber. How do you think his work intersects with the idea of Digital Dialogue?
2) In theoretical terms, having someone produce a video to demonstrate their thinking and learning is more authentic than having them take a test using bubble-sheet forms. In practical terms, faculty may struggle with the workload of grading 250 videos from students in their course. So there seems to be a tension between authentic assessment and faculty workload/time. This is not necessarily a new problem since we run into the same issue with papers, essays, performances, oral exams, etc… versus the dreaded standardized test.
3) You control this blog and can delete my comments if you wanted. Perhaps Plato gave a less-than-accurate account of Socrates and his interactions with others. So I’ve been thinking of control both as a necessity and as an opportunity to shape a dialogue to your own ends. I’m interested to see what you think about this — and maybe see if Ryan has any comments on this in regard to the production of something like a documentary. I was just at the Open Video conference in New York City and a group of film makers were talking about how staged some of the “wildlife” scenes are to make them see more exciting.
One more idea — I’m intrigued by the way that people who have niche interests are able to connect with each other through social media. I have a little community of people who podcast about running and triathlons. There are groups of people who discuss raising children with autism, vegan cooking, building flamethrowers out of super soakers, etc… Physically, these people are probably too far apart to find each other and share what they are learning, but online, distance isn’t a factor.
Okay — one more. There must be a virtue around remixing content. One of the most popular videos on YouTube is “David after Dentist” with over 24 million views: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs
It’s funny, but what I REALLY love is a spoof of that video that shows Chad Vader (Darth Vader’s less-successful brother) after the dentist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGTAnXqn9Jc
The video dialogue, if the sort of mimetic remixing to which you point is in fact dialogical, is something I have been toying with since I first started thinking about this project. Perhaps Ryan can help with this, but I want to try first to articulate briefly the theoretical point that animates my thinking on this.
Socratic politics is, I think, rooted in the idea that although humans never have a determinate and concrete grasp of, let’s say, justice, still, in asking the question: “What is Justice?” we are turned toward the ideal and thus in a certain sense already on the move toward it.
So, with that, is there a way to use a simple, short video to ask this question in a way that invites responses? If this could be done, we would be performing a political act in the Socratic sense. By inviting people to respond to the question, they will be turned toward what Socrates called Justice Itself.