Today’s daily Chronicle focus on MOOCs is on place. Author  Scott Carlson writes:

But will campuses and traditional teaching disappear because we now have MOOCs? No, because that defies the human yearning for meaningful places and the real benefits that come with them. We see it in the migration to cities and in walkable neighborhoods. We see it most of all on college campuses.

Place is a brand. Physical intellectual space (a campus), physical space of idea exchange (such as Steven Johnson’s interest in 18th century coffee houses), physical book storage (libraries)  all have served as brand markers of a specific type of academic space. I’m also thinking about the issue of the brand when we discuss MOOCs. When Berkeley put its courses online at the cost of almost $5 million to Blackboard, it found its offerings  under-enrolled despite the strength of its brand (Berkeley is a well known university). Coursera, on the other hand, has stopped taking clients; they have too many involved universities. They have too many students already enrolled  - estimated at 2.5 million. Launched in April of last year, Coursera is not even a year old.

We’re seeing the brand shift from university to something else – in this case , to some extent, Coursera. How, though, did Coursera’s brand value get to be so big in such a short period of time?

Are there, at least, three layers to success when we discuss online learning?

• Small colleges that have done really well already in online eduction whereas large, research universities struggle  (i.e., schools like Columbia College in Missouri)
• For profits (though enrollment at Phoenix is down)
• Aggregates of brand name university education (i.e., Coursera – though no profits have been made yet)

And will the third online brand triumph the others? How does the physical space oriented brand compete when it is also contributing to the aggregation brand (there is no Coursera without contributing brand name universities)?  We might be confident that physical space will not vanish (it can’t, of course, unless we blow up the world), and the response to the online issue at hand is often that fear. Recall initial concerns that bookstores will never go away (They haven’t) or bricks and mortar stores won’t vanish despite the threat of online shopping (Have you ever been to the mall in mid-December? Those stores still exist). There are thousands of American universities and colleges. They are not going away, though maybe not for Carlson’s reasons.

Brand is playing a role in recent developments. Remix is as well. Those who celebrated the remix as THE essential art form of the late 20th and early 21st century now cringe at how remix may play out in higher education. Coursera is offering the possibility of a remixed educational experience. Imagine, for a minute, a degree offered not by The University of Pennsylvania or The University of Virginia, but by Coursera (an additional, different degree, not a replacement degree). The student who earned the Coursera degree took some courses from Penn and UVA (and many other universities), but did not complete a degree at either. She mixed and remixed courses from all of Coursera’s offerings, paying for credits affiliated with these universities, and earned some kind of remixed Coursera degree. Coursera takes a big piece of the tuition pie; the aggregated and remixed universities share their various negotiated cuts.

Remix, of course, has always meant more that art. What interests me most in this scenario is brand. We already know – via the hundreds of thousands of students who have enrolled at the University of Phoenix and other for profits – that brand does not resonate the same across the educational perspective. Some people have to attend Penn in person. Some don’t care. What percentage of 2.5 million would not care about the brand name recognition of Coursera printed on their degree?  The 10 percent figure of completion circulated suggests 250,000. It will take the University of Kentucky, where I teach, 10 years to enroll that many students. It has taken Coursera one year.

Scary? An outrage? A revolution? A utopian future? Probably none of the above. But a possibility, for sure. Brands must be sticky – as some writers argue. Coursera has stuck very quickly, far quicker than mainstream research universities – such as the one who employs me – have. We should be fascinated by such potentiality because beyond its financial consequence, it is a rhetorical problem. “The human yearning for meaningful places” Carlson argues for is a rhetorical issue. Meaningful places are meaningful because of how they are framed, presented, organized, attached to reference points and markers, circulated, etc. In other words, they are meaningful for how they stick (Starbuck’s sticks in the way the cafe sticks, in general, for academics, for instance). In one year, Coursera has become a meaningful place – 2.5 million people are finding some variation of meaning in this space regardless of its actual make-up. There are supposedly 21 million students enrolled in degree granting universities right now – not all of these universities are physical or 100% physical. Still, Coursera has almost 10% of that number. 10% of a market is significant. Craft beer, for all its attention, expansion, and hype, only has 6% of the beer market, and most of that percentage is held by one brewer, Sam Adams.  In less than a year, who wouldn’t want their brand to be able to capture almost 10% of a market? Who wouldn’t want that kind of sticky rhetorical meaning?

MOOCs come to writing. In the short time we have been discussing MOOCs, and among the 55 articles I have saved in my Diigo (hardly as many as have been published on the topic), I notice that writing is now interested in MOOCs as well. Ohio State announced its writing MOOC recently. WRAC at Michigan State has announced a forthcoming writing MOOC. Despite the collapse of one class recently, Georgia Tech will have a writing MOOC.

“We’re very conscious our MOOC will not duplicate the face to face experience of a writing class,” Rebecca Burnett states in the WRAC webinar about Georgia Tech’s writing MOOC. “The goal of our MOOC,” she says, “is to develop expert  like attitudes and behaviors in the communication processes.”  Self motivation is one topic students will look at. Creativity and Intellectual Risk are two others. Apparently, Duke, too, will roll out its version of this online experience.  Though, a great deal of its writing director’s thoughts seem to be on how the MOOC is restricting teaching and the wearing of ties when recording video lectures.

These are not typical academic responses to MOOCs. At least not among the Facebook friends I have in rhetoric and composition and other Humanities based disciplines. Among my friends, MOOCs are dangerous to our future.  MOOCs, we  are told, will destroy tenure, Gen Ed, and everything we cherish. We can identify this other, positive position as either yielding to the hype (the cynic position) or taking advantage of a moment of opportunity (the invention position).

Most of our responses to MOOCs, these days, are speculation (disaster or riches) or anecdotal (what I learned in school). I like anecdotes. The first chapter of my next book will be about the anecdote as a craft beginning. I want to tell a first year, working online anecdote from when I was a graduate student teaching first year writing courses. Around 1999, I asked the IT crew at the University of Florida’s Networked Writing Environment (NWE) to install php and MySQL on the server so that we could install and run  advanced CMS platforms. The NWE was an exciting place to teach and an early adopter of open source technologies for the teaching of writing. But the crew would not install these languages. I was running Greymatter off of my NWE space, but I knew more powerful CMS platforms for blogging existed, and that they needed PHP and MySQL. “It’s a security  issue,” we were told. Yet, every main webhost provided both. They handled security without a problem. A disconnect existed between how webhosting worked outside the university, and how – even in an advanced, enlightened state, it worked within.

This is not a critique of the NWE IT staff. No doubt, they were concerned about security. But also, no doubt, they were not connected to webhosting outside of the university.  One of McLuhan’s main points was that there always exists a disconnect between pedagogy and technology.  Technology teaches one thing (let’s say, pattern formation, interconnectivity, the fragment), pedagogy in the university teaches another (thesis statements, linear ordering, cohesion, etc). With MOOCs, this point is not hard to imagine. The problem, as my Facebook friends come back to time after time,  is not the disconnect from face to face teaching or the corporatization of online spaces; the problem is the continuing disconnect with how online work functions. No platform with a “2″ in its name or an “e” as prefix, or a play on the word “learning,” has solved this issue. Message boards. Uploaded video. These are, indeed, features of many online spaces. I use two message boards regularly (though they are variations on message boards with additional social media functions: Ratebeer and Beeradvocate. But these are specialized spaces catering to specific interests (craft beer). In the big scheme of online work, how many people congregate to a message board to participate in a given specialized discussion? In academia, few. Blogora, as much as I like it, does not attract such participation via its commenting. That is also not a critique but rather a recognition of a limited specialized audience (rhetoric people are not congregating en mass on a site to comment on ideas).

That Georgia Tech will teach Self Motivation is a red alert. Citizenship. Everything’s an Argument. Community problems. These are not the spaces of exigence for writing. Or: these are not the spaces for all of us or all of the students we work with.  In fact, no content driven writing course can capture the exigence for writing – even if I try every semester to do so by offering food, music, media or something else as content that I think will motivate interest in writing. It is impossible to guess what a given group of 25-20,000 people will want to write about or feel the need to writing about. It is possible to teach method.

The webinar showcases folks thinking about method. And because many of these folks have already been innovative and led the way in writing pedagogy, I’m interested in where they go with this new project. With that interest, I have another anecdote: this morning, I’m in my office at UK listening to a webinar recorded last month at MSU. The Grateful Dead’s “Truckin” is playing off of a live stream from WUKY on one computer. The webinar is playing on another computer. I add a tweet to my first year class’s hashtag (they are supposed to tweet twice a week – a requirement I gave, but I’m still not sure about since, I, too, have little to say on Twitter about the course content, music). I blog about MOOCs and writing while listening. Some Facebook updates are showing in a tab on my browser. In the webinar, Steve Krause offers a rebuttal to the participants in the webinar. Later today, I need to stop at Bluegrass Baking and pick up some bread.  Some books next to my computer while I type: Into the Universe of Technical Images, Switching Codes, Lagunitas The Story. All of these items aggregate in a conceptual and physical space this morning.

I see my writing and teaching moving into this type of realm of aggregation. From my early publishing to my current book project, I have been aggregating. I ask students to do so as well (though, I don’t use that word). Research, writing, learning, these are moments of aggregation. “The relationship between learning and teaching….” I hear Steve say in the background. The relationship between learning and teaching is aggregation: bringing together the conversation. The conversation exists when we bring it together (as I start to do with these listed items). It exists in 55 bookmarked essays in a shared space. It exits in Ratebeer where aggregation is more than the message board (internal email, articles, ratings, following users, etc).  It exists in numerous online spaces outside the university. To me, aggregation is the expert attitude and behavior in the communication process. In the current Elearning and Digital Culture MOOC I am enrolled in, there is an effort to do that (video, links to articles, forums). But it doesn’t feel like this experience I am having this morning. It feels like an aggregation limited by taxonomy (digital) and that is more textbook than online aggregation (“compare and contrast the items we have gathered here…”….”what do you think about….”). The aggregation experience is the moment, for me, of writing, the space where ideas come together across a variety of media. Writing hasn’t been too good at that in face to face pedagogy, as McLuhan might say; why would it be in a massive online space? Or would it?

(the beginning of an article? early thoughts or draft idea)

A family anecdote claims that when I was four or five, I loved the film Mary Poppins. This anecdote states that I often would dance and sing to the film’s songs. I have no proof regarding the validity of this claim other than it’s made by my parents, whose anecdotal accuracy is always suspect (they think I’m some kind of left wing hippie, for instance, because I pierced my ears at 13). I’m not saying I never watched Mary Poppins; I’m only saying that as a 43 year old man, I may not want to own up to the anecdote. I don’t want to because I am sick of this movie.  It plays too often (and over a winter break, almost every day) on our TV. That said, I can prove that my five year old daughter has watched Mary Poppins close to 50 times. I can prove it because I tend to be the one who streams it from my laptop to the Apple TV. As I write this, she is yet again watching the film, a film she has memorized to the point that she not only enjoys the film’s narrative, she also enjoys reading both the opening and closing credits. The other day, she asked me to show her pictures of Dick Van Dyke on the Internet, a desire created out of her interest in his portrayal of two characters in the film, Burt and and Mr. Dawes Senior. I am sick of this movie. The roles fascinate her.

The interface, Alex Galloway tells us, is a series of effects. “An interace is not a thing, an interface it always an effect. It is always a process or translation” (33). An obvious question for me, via my own background and my daughter’s current obsession, would be: how is a film like Mary Poppins an interface, and for what type or types of effects? The easy answer, via cultural critics such as Fredric Jameson, would be to map the political narrative as allegory (whether in the very literal suffragette question expressed in the film, or the problematic capitalism expressed by the children’s father – Toppins! –  or Mary’s labor in child care in early 20th century England). I’ll leave such readings aside (they are predictable, commonplace and banal). I would like to know more about the visual interface’s effect on my daughter (and consequently on me). I want to know how Mary Poppins is an interace of sorts, a digital text, a digital humanities’ interest, or even the digital humanities itself.

It is easy to reduce popular culture, of course, to hyperbolic analysis and hermeneutics. Mary Poppins is the digital humanities! In the realm of some sort of non-representational writing (i.e., I don’t want to do an algorithmic scan of the film as many digital humanities’ approaches treat the non-print text; this would be representational methodology), to call Mary Poppins the digital humanities would seem absurd. How can a film about a nanny with magical powers who teaches a family to appreciate one another be the digital humanities? I’m sure digital humanists would be more comfortable with a critical representational question such as: How does Mary Poppins exemplify some sort of digital problem, or how does X pattern in Mary Poppins discovered by our search teach us something about 20th century England and some type of cultural representation? But no, I don’t want to know the answers to such questions. I want to know, instead, how the film is the thing we call digital humanities.

I want to know, in other words, its effects. In 2012, all effects are digital. But the only way for me to perform this knowing is not to totalize the film’s narrative or meaning (to paraphrase Barthes, as if things shuddered with meaning), but to treat the visual (the film) as being something it doesn’t claim to be nor express desire to be. Objects, current philosophical trends teach us, want (Mitchell), are alien (Bogost), withdrawal form relations as much as maintain relations (Harman), or are part of traces within networks (Latour). A film is an object. The digital humanities is an object. Narrative is an object. Visuality is an object. I am one, as well, I suppose.

Much of this philosophy maintains that as much as humans desire objects, objects desire as well. Since it plays so often in our house, I might assume, indeed, that Mary Poppins desires me, my daughter, or our Apple TV. I can’t prove any of that of course, but I can sense the effects of this film. One such effect is the narrative of the favorite. For some reason, my daughter tells me that the penguin scene is my favorite scene in the film. I don’t remember if I ever relayed that information to her (do I have a favorite scene in a movie I am sick of? I doubt it…). The scene mixes animation and real time performance. Her favorite scene (though it may change from time to time), is the laughing scene. The characters laugh so hard they float to the ceiling. She navigates the film by favorites.

 

My daughter asks me: What is your favorite scene? She insists it is this one.

As a practice of hermeneutics,  the digital humanities is a practice of favorites. I have felt that way about literary studies as well (and a great deal of the digital humanities is an extension of literary studies). A text is beautiful. Loved. Read. Interpreted. It is favorited for these readings and then studied. Such is the process of identification – critique identifies as artist (or by extension, as favorited political movement, favorited ideology, favorited film, favorited cause, favorited comic book, favorited game, favorited image of resistance, etc). My daughter joins in this effect: she asks about favorite scenes. This is her favorite movie. When my daughter watches Mary Poppins, though, her sense of identification is not entirely artistic driven (the beautiful text) but is also something more akin to McLuhan’s notion that in the age of new media, the youth occupy R-O-L-E-S. When watching the film (or even when not watching the film – over dinner, getting dressed, taking a bath), she tells me who I am in the film, and who she is. She is Mary Poppins, she says. ”You have to be the dad,” she tells me. “You’re grumpy, and he’s grumpy.” This sense of identification is the role. We play it. For a time. Then we move on.

My role of academic often dictates exigence. What might be the exigence to write about the 1964 film Mary Poppins in 2012 and to call it the digital humanities (as opposed to a contemporary or even more digital text)? I might reply, as I have done previously, that my exigence is the digital logic of I don’t care. The moment Barthes pisses in the garden and tells us that he has no reason to share this anecdote other than he enjoys pissing in the garden, we are privy to an I don’t care logic. There is no investment on my part (nor on Barthes’ part either). There is no sense of the literary favorite (i.e., isn’t X a great writer! isn’t Mary Poppins a great film!). In a logic shaped more by fragmentation, updates, tweets, posts, my exigence is likely more aligned with the response. This film plays all the time in our house. Now, I feel the effect of response (an interface effect). I don’t care. I recognize my daughter’s care, of course, but that is why the effect is digital humanities. It is a care based effect.

(enough for one blog post….maybe I’ll work on this some more; the notes, too, are driven by exigence….a post… of course, tomorrow I may decide I hate all of this anyway…and then another post takes its place)

• Traditional critique. Match the object with the discussion; i.e., to talk about Digital Humanities, one must engage with an analysis or reading of the digital object. Critique or promotion are often engaged. Sometimes, in this writing, we are reminded of a digital divide or problematic representations or practices.
• Non-representational critique. Objects of study are not necessarily best discussed via direct representation; i.e., to talk about the Digital Humanities, I will  talk about Billy the Kid. Typically, this approach does not go over well (as I see with my Billy the Kid example). I have also done this kind of digital writing with cool and Detroit and now beer.
• Definitional. What is new media? In a text I may have written, I might suggest it is nothing more than a series of stories we tell about new media; i.e., it is a folksonomy (not a taxonomic definition debated or circulated).  The definition,then, is meta and somewhat tautological:  new media is new media (folksonomy). Definitions shift. May should be the keyword, rather than is.
• Becoming digital without the digital. I like to eat food. I like to discover food. I like to read about food. How do I do this today without becoming digital? I can’t.
• Tangents. We live at the very edge of Fayette County. In fact, the Kroger located three -four blocks from us is in Jessamine County.  Around the corner from us, in another neighborhood in Jessamine, the houses are separated by large tracts of undeveloped land with for sale signs on them. All the trees have been cleared so that houses may be built there one day. As we have come to expect in development, no one cares about the trees razed. In the corner of one cul de sac in this neighborhood, someone owns a cow.
• Obsession. I spent my 43rd birthday touring three beer spots I know well in Lexington – Beerworks, Country Boy, West Sixth. I came home and did not fulfill my birthday plan: consume a bottle of Fou Foune. The bottle is still unopened. Instead, I blogged the day. The post, like most of these posts I do, obsesses over a pattern (in this case, numbers). The more proper way, it seems, to discuss beer (or food) in the digital sphere is to review. The review, a familiar genre of writing, tells an audience what something is like (good, bad, tasty, expensive, etc.). I have never done a review. I rate in a social media space, but only because my obsession is also riddled with forgetting (“have I had this before?”). Rating is merely digital memory. It is a way to keep my expectations in check (“Ooooh. I want that. Wait. Ah. I have had that before”).
• Location. Florida. I spent some time a week ago trying to retrace the second Kendall home we lived in on Google Maps. For the CCCC presentation I did on Florida a couple years back, and for my own contribution to my volume I’m editing, I found the first home. I took a screen shot of that home. But what was our second address? I believe it was 115th st. That street on Google Maps, however, yields nothing that is familiar. I remembrer the house. I lived there during high school. I don’t remember moving into it, but I remember it. Where is it, though, on the digital map?
• Expectation. Too much remains expected. Digital Humanities writing is a way to recreate the expected. But so is all academic writing, more or less. We expect certain gestures and are upset when they are not presented. Can a volume on Florida be digital, about networks, about Florida, and not be critical, argumentative, or even online? I engage the may as a way to respond to this question, not the is.
• Personal. I have friends on Facebook who I grew up with in Miami, but who I lost touch with over the years until we reconnected on the social media site. This is an expected story. It is a common story. Most of us who are on Facebook can tell this story. I wonder, though, what do they think if (and they likely don’t) they read the links to this blog I post on Facebook from time to time so that somebody will know this blog is updated and perhaps read what I write? It likely would only take one or two reads to be bored or uninterested and to move on. I know I do that with much that I collect on my RSS feed. Florida remains personal to me because I grew up there and went to college there. But it’s also not personal to me in that I don’t care about the state. I only care to write about the state. In this sense (as I have tried to do with Billy the Kid whose pardon I also didn’t  care about, but wanted to write about), I embrace a Digital Humanities whose focus is not care (i.e., representation, ethnic access, digitized text, promotion of literacy practices, fear of hegemony, better education  etc.). I choose, instead, a career of not caring. I went back to Coconut Grove in ’97 or so and saw the commercialized and hip areas. Upscale shopping had replaced much of the head shops and porn shops. I think Rocky Horror was long gone. Did they still run bed races in the Grove? I didn’t care. And then, at that moment, I wanted to write about it.
• Discipline.  There obviously is an area of study whose discipline (taxonomy) is called Digital Humanities. MOOCs, we are told, are disciplinary approaches that can relieve much of the academic fiscal crisis. The disciplinary critique of MOOCs is that they are not personal (face to face teaching is the discipline approved pedagogy). Discipline is expectation. We expect teaching to be a certain way (face to face, for instance, and not the impersonal 10,000 students in an online space). I’m trying to go to Bikram three days a week in order to make the monthly fee I pay worthwhile and affordable. Every time I go to Bikram, I get the expected. The script the teacher runs through is the same (lock your knee, you have no knee); the postures and their order are the same. Nothing changes. There is no surprise. With yoga, I get the reason why: discipline. Routine generates discipline. With discipline, one masters a task.  In education, the reverse happens: routine generates boredom and complacency (i.e, critique, promotion, representation, power, etc.).  I understand it’s an easy critique to call the Digital Humanities “complacent” (and then I become meta).  I’ll avoid that definition. But it is what I feel. It is what generates a sense of “not caring” what it is, but rather wanting to write what it may be. I don’t care what Coconut Grove is now. I want to write about its may status, its imaginary, rhetorical location, its folksonomic subject. In that sense, expectation is replaced by what is personal. Writing is personal. It is the subject of the digital.  It is the digital’s location.

When we did Keywords in Markup, I wrote a chapter for our collection entitled ”English <A>”.  The move from Harvard’s English A to contemporary <A>, I wrote, rested with new media logics (as opposed to the print logic of English A), among them aggregation. Cathy Davidson writes recently that “We have a potential for a learning mash-up of the loftiest, most creative, learner-centered kind.”  Davidson is interested in a merger of logics: MIT’s highly productive Media Lab and MOOCs. “In the future, merging a Media Lab 2.0 with some form of MOOC’s might prompt traditional educators to think seriously about new learning models, methods, and audience.” Davidson suggests the mashup as focus of online learning, a new media logic that, in fact, has been with us for some time (only now highlighted by new media). In addition to mashup thinking, there is also aggregation.

Typically, I spend parts of my morning reading over aggregations. My RSS feed – where I browse sites’ posts, Facebook – where updates vary from the comical to public mourning, Twitter – where I catch a remark or two centered around my focused interests, Google News – where summaries are assembled from the day’s headlines. This morning, my kids are up – as usual – before 7 am. As part of their weekend ritual, they watch Arthur, the cartoon about an aardvark and his school friends. Today, Arthur begins with a scene that features Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” and a bow and arrow allusion to Apocalypse Now. Mashup of two or more unlikely texts (cartoon and canonical movie scene)? Or aggregation (cartoon and canonical movie scene)? Both, more than likely.

Some aggregations, such as Facebook and Twitter, assemble the everyday into one space. A local brewery has new fermenters. A friend’s kid said something funny. Newspaper headiness. Local restaurant’s menu. Another friend’s daily recap. A sports update. Of course, these are my aggregations prompted by my interests and emerging worldview of the everyday.  There are writers who draw upon the banal or everyday for scholarly inspiration. Geoff Sirc is among our most notable figures – proposing the A&P and the Sex Pistols as inspiration for writing pedagogy. My career began with the proposal of hip hop as composition pedagogy. And long before us, Benjamin and de Certeau explored the everyday. In the Parisian arcades, we were supposed to find the allegories of contemporary life. Jameson thought The Godfather explained capital (as part of the larger project of cognitive mapping). Ulmer reminded us that popular culture sits at the nexus of identity formation (along with personal anecdotes).

The problem with the everyday in higher education is that  its study often is reduced to decoding. As James Berlin demonstrated for composition pedagogy so long ago, a popular TV show like Roseanne merely shows us the struggles of labor or class.  Stuart Hall really wasn’t interested in James Dean as heuristic; instead, he set forth a form of study whose focus was largely meant to reveal the way the everyday (ads, popular culture, politics) is meant to dupe or deceive.  Instead of aggregating Dean into a larger network of references and shows and music and moments, Dean is reduced to a decoded message that, when read, will allow us opportunity to resist future coded messages (Barthes never bought into such logic, recognizing that decoding does not provide enlightenment).

When I enrolled in the World Listening MOOC, I was completely bored. Any sense of aggregation was ignored by the pre-recorded vide lecturers and message boards. Blackboard, a typical university online CMS, resists aggregation as well; its gated course sites prevent the streaming of information by students, teachers, or the system itself. I would watch a lecture in World Listening, and when I wanted to click on a link in the video, I couldn’t. I’d have to stop the video, go to the syllabus site, find the lecture listed on the syllabus, and check if the link was there to either click on or copy into a browser tab.  There was no aggregation of course material with participants with current events with online media, etc. The awkwardness of the MOOC is not surprising. Any given course in the university typically treats its subject matter accordingly – the narrow lens through which to study influence, context, support, connectivity, etc. I once sat on a dissertation committee in which the director told the student to remove non-academic studies of hip hop (such as Nelson George’s work). “Not scholarly enough,” she said. And yet, those texts sat in a larger field of aggregation. To not read them would mean not participating in the larger network of meaning at play. The key to any moment of aggregation is the identification of patterns and points of connectivity among the assembled texts, sites, moments. Digital aggregation provides the site to do so.

Of course, a MOOC is not built on that logic, and there is no surprise there since most of our face to face courses are not either. I enjoy the keywords genre for how it aggregates a variety of meanings into one space (volume). Despite Williams’ legacy as a central figure in the cultural studies decoding methodology, his keywords has demonstrated how aggregation exists within any body of study. If I had done a better job aggregating disciplinary interets as a kid, I now might be able to take some of the more advanced MOOCs offering science and math courses. Unfortunately, I was the perfect product of public school education: I saw the world through the very narrow lens of one interest (in my case, that was English). It took me a long time to understand the value of aggregation. To take a MOOC now, I’m pretty limited to courses that don’t require math or advanced science. As a high school student, I never understood how to draw connections among subject matter (even if I wanted to remain focused on the study of English). Humans, by nature, are limited in their focus. They don’t aggregate well on their own. As McLuhan showed is in the 1960s, we see subject matter through very narrow bars. Digital media has provided a necessary prosthesis (and so has popular culture) for aggregation.  Yet, even with so much aggregation around us currently, we build even more narrow worlds through which to build academic study. Administrative love of MOOCs (from university presidents to Boards of Regents)  is confirming this claim.

Recently, my five year old daughter checked out Mary Poppins, the book, from her Montessori school’s library. As she flipped through the pages, she grew upset.  The text and pictures did not mesh with the film she watches at least once a week. “There aren’t four kids!” she yelled showing the book to me. “There are only two! And where are the penguins! And what’s this!” For her, aggregation has meant viewing the film and book in the same space, and then noticing the differences. I’m amazed that a five year old can do this (but, as her father, I’m probably amazed all the time at her – as is any father of his kids). And what she is doing should be familiar to any contemporary Humanities course – online or in person. She compares and contrasts an object in a space to decode it. The problem is, she’s five. It’s impressive that a five year old can handle aggregation as decoding. For a university course, it’s banal. It’s everyday. And in that, it’s not very impressive.

The thing is, I never took first year writing. I showed up to freshman orientation in the summer of 1987 (my father took me along to a business trip he had planned in Gainesville), and went to see my advisor after skipping a great deal of the orientation. “I don’t want to take 1101,” I said. “Why not?” he asked. “Because I already can write.” “Ok,” he said. The idea of a writing course didn’t interest me; I had always done well in writing. I took a 2000 level America Lit survey instead (I had already read all but one of the required books on my own in high school), and on the first day of class, the professor said, “I see some of you have not taken first year writing and are freshmen. You should drop.” I didn’t. I got an A. That was the sum of my knowledge of first year writing until 1997 when I enrolled in graduate school. When told that there were no jobs in American Lit (what I thought I would study), I switched to Rhetoric and Composition even though the only Rhet/Comp person on faculty had just arrived as an Assistant Professor. I had no clue what Rhet/Comp was, but I knew that I liked to write, I never bought into the interpretation game that dominated all of my literature courses in college and high school, and I wasn’t going back to school to not get a job after four or five years of study.

I’ve wondered what this anecdote means for me today. I wonder, in particular, what it means within the negative and positive hype surrounding MOOCs and other online proposals that offer higher education an imagined future. The easy answer is: nothing. There were no online classes in 1987. There was no Internet for me to use. The largest class I may have taken was an intro Biology course in which I sat near the front and enjoyed the professor’s lectures (I remember him showing up to class sweaty form his bike ride to work; he used his sweating as a moment to explain how the body cools off when overheated – now I understand why I sweat so much!). Most medium sized classes – maybe 40-50 students – were lecture courses. I took notes. I read the notes daily before class. I seldom studied for exams since I had already absorbed my note taking throughout the semester. College was mostly taking notes, reading them over daily, and answering a blue book question at the end of the semester based on those notes.

The thing is, most of the MOOCs discussions I read are highly non-personal. Since we are all (mostly) academics commenting on a very academic moment (online education), I wonder why the responses are highly impersonal and cold. There are, of course, limitations to personalizing critical responses (making everything about me, denying larger context). But since we have such a strong familiarity with the subject matter (we went to school for a long time and still are involved in schooling as teachers), why the distance? Nigel Thrift finds a response in an article he read in the New Yorker. Kris Olds reduces MOOCs to the abstract issue of territory. Bogost responds to Thrift by wondering what the McDonald’s of higher ed might be. I, instead, am thinking about that moment during orientation. I’m thinking about the advisor who easily accepted my refusal to take first year writing. I’m thinking about my arrogance in believing I didn’t need any further instruction. I’m thinking about that first English course at a land grant university, a course I was told would be above my head, and yet, I had read all the novels already in high school. My first day of university education, and I was already with the familiar, the impersonal. I had barely ventured far from home.

MOOCs suggest distance made near. Social media is all about making the distance near. The status update re-imagines McLuhan’s sense of total involvement by making all news and information personal. We are all bound to one another. But we aren’t as well. Our desire to understand the nature of a possible or even existing online educational apparatus is limited not by personal insight that some anecdotes provide  (“I never took first year writing”), but rather from the dependence on hermeneutics. In other words, we scramble as educators and critics so that we can interpret what this MOOC stuff is all about.  Only a couple of voices, a far as I can tell, have registered for or even completed a MOOC course. And few voices contextualize the online experience with an experience outside of romanticism (“I cherish seeing students” “computers cannot replace face to face interaction”) or generic critique (“the corporatization of the university”). Maybe we need a mix of “when I was in college” stories as well. Maybe we need more anecdotes.

The thing is, MOOCish writing might benefit from anecdotal writing. My discipline reacted in the 1960s against criticism and research by embracing the personal. And then, twenty years later or so, rejected the personal altogether. And this rejection, it seems depersonalizes academic writing and understanding to such an extent that we are forced to always, as Barthes writes, reflect on how everything must shudder with meaning. Not everything, of course, does. Meaning takes time to develop. A MOOC means something, but it does not necessarily mean, as we are often told, the end of higher education. Not all meaning is grand in gesture, as Barthes also reminds us regarding his love for pissing in the garden (he just likes it). Impressions, emotions, pleasure, etc. play roles as well in how we interact with moments. We don’t all have to be Thomas Friedmans or Slavoj Zizeks pretending to understanding everything political moment in the world all the time.

I found my experience in a MOOC boring. I also found my three years or so pursuing a B.A. at two different universities fairly boring as well. As much as I love teaching, I didn’t enjoy being a student. When we attended CPR classes in State College prior to our daughter being born, my wife was flabbergasted at how bad a student I am. I paid so little attention (on such an important issue) that I had to retake the test at the end of the class to earn the certification. I’m sure the college student running the course thought I was a moron or bad parent to be.

Steve writes that he’ll probably sign up for this course. I probably will as well. It sounds relevant to what I do for a living. It’s likely I won’t do the assignments again (as I didn’t do in the World Listening course).  When we didn’t have phones or laptops and I was an undergraduate, I drew. I drew all over my notes. I was bored. I anticipate being bored in any situation in which I watch videos of lectures, write two to three paragraph responses, and go to a message board to post.  I get bored too quickly, at times, with the never ending predictions of dool and gloom or “the other” is out to get professors (out to get us with online education, part time labor, corporate influence). Academia suffers from what any organization that has to hire thousands in order to function but can’t figure out how to make a profit to do so would suffer from. And now, some have an idea that they believe will help solve the revenue stream dilemma. They may be wrong. But the idea sounds more plausible than what I hear locally (Value Based Budgets).

A conclusion (a solution, a resolution) suggests that the distance has been shortened.  It suggests that everything shudders with meaning. “I conclude,” we might say, “that MOOCs are merely an extension of the fast fooding of higher education.” I suppose that statement feels good to utter because it claims, as Colbert might say, truthiness. Instead of a conclusion gesture, I’d rather see a series of anecdotes, incomplete fragments that don’t necessarily lend themselves to larger (and supposedly, more important tales), but rather stand as unconnected narrative moments.They might shed light on some aspect of being in a MOOC or not. I’d rather we unbundle critique and grand gestures of summation and knowing. We can unbundle the shuddering of meaning. Anecdote  Anecdote. Anecdote.  Fragmented moment. Fragmented moment. Fragmented moment. Or some other variation of the personal. The MOOC may be a gesture toward the grand (10,000 student courses, imagined profits), but online writing often goes in the other direction: the tweet, the status update, the blog post, the filtered photograph, all of which shorten the virtual distance somewhat.

My other anecdote these days comes from Indiana University where, as a senior in 1991, I was given an email account. I had no idea what email was. My computer in my apartment wasn’t hooked to anything but the wall. But I knew that if I went to a campus lab and sent an email to my girlfriend, she would get it and could respond. I didn’t know that there was a world outside of campus I could write to as well. So, I wrote silly notes that were of no consequence. She got made at me for not being personal.

About a month ago, Clay Shirky posted a short piece on MOOCs entitled “Napster, Udacity, and the Academy.” Beyond his defence of MOOCs (and that defense critiqued in InsideHigherEd), Shirky writes:  “The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled.”  We might – beyond Shirky’s love of hyperbole and over enthusiasm for social media – take that unbundling seriously.

We live in a period of unbundling. The newspaper has been unbundled into RSS aggregation (Google News a prime example, but Huffington Post, Aldaily, and others, as well, aggregate so that you don’t have to read one bundle). Pinterrest unbundles interests into appropriated items. The Weblog unbundles events and ideas into posts. Facebook and Twitter unbundle our day into short statements. The university – which Shirky alludes to – bundles learning into majors or departments. We don’t really need a complete unbundling, but we might consider types of unbundling that more properly address a given situation or moment or object of study which cannot fully be accounted for without unbundling.

I’m drawn to unbundling stories. Unbundling makes visible the components of larger items in order to either utilize those items or learn how there is no whole, only a series of aggregations . I used to reference this profile of Will Wright in the New Yorker because it unbundled The Sims as a number of disciplinary moments juxtaposed as invention: a family moment, architecture via the book Urban Dynamics,  the Game of Life biological simulation, the book A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” and Charles Hampden-Turner’s Maps of the Mind. Invention is unbundled. The Sims is a video games (bundled) but also a process of other moments brought together by Wright (unbundled). The unbundled items are distributed (in various ways) as broken pieces until aggregated by Wright into something called The Sims. Wright picked and chose among the parts of influence he was exposed to.

I often feel the need to unbundle. I see the world and its various moments as parts in constant distribution and circulation. Rather than say I wrote a book about Detroit (bundled), I’d rather say, I wrote a book about

• Detroit
• Networks
• Rhetoric
• Myself
• Decision making
• Interfaces
• Maps

and so on. In this way, I present the unbundling (the items that make up the thing) rather than the bundle (the grand narrative or the thing). I pick and chose among the parts of Detroit to do so (Woodward, Maccabees, Michigan Train Station, 8 Mile). Both Digital Detroit and The Rhetoric of Cool were organized as unbundling moments networked (the ways I performed the chapters). The thing about Napster, despite Shirky’s enthusiasm, is that it didn’t totally unbundle music. To use Napster, I had to download a song – as is – from someone else. It wasn’t a complete unbundled process even if the song was removed from the album.  Eventually and post-Napster, bittorrent broke that song into little pieces and unbundled the process from a complete object sent from another, complete individual to a bunch of pieces sent from a bunch of pieces.The pieces are reassembled at the user destination (unlike the Napster song which was never broken apart, and, thus, took longer to arrive as is).  It’s still not clear how MOOCs unbundle education. From what I’ve seen so far, those classes offered through MOOCs are mostly reproductions of lectures (how else to accomodate so many people at once). The Coursera course hyped by professor X is not really unbundled either since its presence is based on the reputation of the professor’s university (a complete, unbundled ethos). Coursera is promising a type of educational aggregation – a course from School X, from School Y, from School Z – but it’s not a complete aggregation since the courses are basically individual pieces meant to stand as is and on their own (instead of part of a whole). That’s not to say that an unbundling won’t happen; but it really hasn’t occurred yet.

There is no doubt that university education resists unbundling. I come from a discipline, after all, whose pedagogical gestures are typically interpreted at the first year level as having students bundle an entire idea or concept into a single sentence strategically placed somewhere in a first paragraph. Ideas are taught as unbundled moments, unfortunately. When I wrote “I am McLuhan,” I imagined a type of homage unbundling, a process of unbundling those items that construct me as McLuhan. Of course, I am not McLuhan. I am an aggregation of various items (pick and choose) that cause me to relate to McLuhan, to see a type of heritage in myself (a gesture I’ve written about again with Jim Corder for an upcoming Rhetoric Review).  Critics of MOOCs have tried to perform a critical unbundling – pointing out the economic issues, the business creep in higher education, the legacy of distance education that precedes the MOOC. But critical unbundling is not what Shirky is after, and I often find – in the spirit of Latour –  that it has run out of steam. I don’t need to critically unbundle MOOCs.

In pedagogy, we usually turn to critical unbundling over any other kind of unbundling activity. We have always, it seems, been bundled structurally and ideologically. .

• Our semesters HAVE to be 16 weeks (not 4, 8, 10, or any other staggered study).
• Our areas of study are bound to the fixed major (and now that we shift more to Value Based Budgets (or whatever the new phrase is), there is no incentive to have students enroll outside of that bundled object for learning purposes.
• We are bound to place (classroom place or campus place as opposed to non-places such as online environments or even Auge’s vision of places without apparent relationships or history).
• We are bound to Distribution of Effort models.
• We are bound to majors in terms of as is learning.
• We are bound to General Education.

To bundle, we can add, is to gather, to assemble, to group together. Tighter. And tighter. And tighter. And in this tight gathering, we assume convenience instead of unwarranted pressure (the tightness hurts). All of the items listed above are easy to perform and are convenient. They are manageable. If there is some value in Shirky’s romantic and hyperbolic vision of digital music distribution, it is in the image of manageability. When record labels had difficulty managing their products – the move from as is to broken pieces – they panicked. Steve Jobs rescued the labels – to some extent – by offering a novel managed product (Napster was difficult to manage; iTunes is not). If we yield a bit on the manageability aspect of bundled education, we will experience a bit of the online distribution (“I CAN”T FIND THE SONG”) and a bit of a novel experience (picking and choosing parts). Unbundling, in other words, may have more to do with a vision of manageability than with the points Shirky raises.

Incentive based budgeting is hardly a new concept. It has its success narratives, which, in turn, justify a general university move toward integrating the logic into how departments and programs receive support. Though I don’t know the details yet, the University of Michigan has been touted as one such example. As a UC-Davis working paper acknowledges, the basic principle of incentive based budgeting is to “allocate tuition between the unit of instruction and the degree major” based on enrollments.  Whereas budgets, in other models, cam remain ambiguous and opaque to departments (i.e., how much will a department have on a year to year basis to spend), and whereas departments typically have to return unspent money from a given year (and thus create the image that they don’t need so much money after all and can receive a smaller budget the following year), incentive based budgeting is meant to create a more transparent system and to encourage fiscal responsibility (if you want to save money for a later project, you can).

This model is attractive to many campuses because, in some ways, it alleviates some of the financial responsibility from the campus itself and places most of the burden on the individual department or unit. Some of the logic is based on entrepreneurship and the idea that providing incentives based on enrollments will inspire departments to be more novel regarding curriculum development and teaching (and thus attract more students), but in some cases, and more specifically, what we are quickly seeing at the University of Kentucky, this logic fails because:

• Faculty with no training in entrepreneurship  suddenly are expected to be entrepreneurs. This is like asking us to do all of our on plumbing repairs even though we have no training in plumbing. Particularly in the humanities, if we were good at being entrepreneurs, we probably wouldn’t be professors. Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, among others, are notable exceptions. But even in our business schools, faculty have not chosen the life of entrepreneurship. They write and teach. They don’t seem to have a solution for university woes, and they are the “business” experts.
• Unnecessary competition. No matter how many students a department at the University of Kentucky attracts, the overall student body will remain around the 25,000 mark. Thus, the overall revenue from tuition is the same. But as departments fight over enrollments, they resort to tricks and attacks, they go beyond agreed upon caps, offer too many online courses and oversaturate the local market so that other sections don’t fill, work to prevent other departments and programs from developing majors or minors, and try to steal students. Where two or more departments might benefit from some semblance of cooperation or where students might benefit from taking courses across the curriculum, neither may occur out of fear of losing precious enrollments.
• Most efforts at entrepreneurship merely mean taxing students. Higher fees. New textbooks to purchase. More required courses. Our efforts at generating new revenue often mean asking students to pay more.

Obviously, local conditions determine everything. But what incentive based budgeting does with competition, distribution of effort has already done as well. The official breakdown of teaching, research, and service, whose percentages depend on one’s responsibility, is meant as an accounting system: how to keep track of what a faculty member is supposed to be doing. Its basic problem is that anything that appears to not fall into that breakdown may not be done. There is simply no incentive to do so. Thus, when the director of composition asks someone in Theater to assist with preparing graduate students to teach speech (since speech is alien to English TAs and since Theater understands performance better than we do), the answer might be: “I can, but I won’t. There is no reward for me to do so.” Or when a project is proposed that might benefit the department or unit as a whole (provide additional revenue, bring national recognition, earn campus goodwill), there may be no reason to participate if it does not fit neatly into teaching, research, or service percentages. Or one could say:” I’ve fulfilled my 33.3% service. I’m done.”

The variation on this model is student to teacher ratios; the imaginary number by which the university believes it will turn a profit on a classroom. This variation of DOE assumes that tuition revenue is based on seats per instructor even though it is common knowledge that instructors are not paid per student nor per teaching: they are expected to do research, run the university’s activities by serving on appropriate committees, advise at times, teach graduate students and oversee graduate work, oversee undergraduate research and thesis work, handle internships at times, present at national events, network, secure grants, and so on. We are paid to be employees. DOE is a response against that logic. It says: “You are not an employee who is paid to do a variety of things; you are instead paid by taxonomies.” DOE is a variation of being paid by the hour. When the hour is up, one goes home.

Thus, when I write about frozen garlic bread, I’m also writing about the DOE problem. Every major university has the talent to produce its own online delivery system (IT, Computer Science, Engineering, Education, Writing) and to promote it (Business, Marketing). Yet, the work is outsourced. It is outsourced based on the notion of being cheaper (but faculty are already being paid, so now two groups are being paid in place of one) and because of DOE logic (“I am paid/We pay you to only do these other things, not develop in house projects). That logic makes no sense. To pretend the university is a business, and then to hire individuals because of their specific talents, and then to outsource work to groups with less or equal talent is illogical. The university already has people to do the work.  That’s why they were hired. The university, however, tells these employees otherwise.

Such is the real logic of WTF. WTF, as we know, is the shocked declaration when something absurd or stupid occurs. A man drives his car into a telephone pole? WTF! A drunk kid throws up in the street? WTF? A university hires a bunch of experts and then tells them they are not useful for project development (instead, teach 40% of the time, write 27.5 % of the time, do service 12.5%, of the time do administration 20% of the time)? WTF!

Those  numbers above, by the way, are my DOE breakdowns. I’m not sure how I manage to write 27.5% of the time as opposed to 27.8% or 27.9%. If I were to follow current incentive based logic, there would be no reason for me to engage with any of the many projects I take on. WTF tells me otherwise. Do your 27.5% writing, no more. WTF lets systems like Blackboard thrive. WTF causes departments to compete to be the big fish in the little pond, snagging one more student at the expense of another program because of the perception of competition (but the university makes the same amount of money regardless).

I have more to do regarding understanding incentive based budgeting as an offshoot of DOE. but for now, I say: WTF.