Public Rhetoric and Practical CommunicationWhat Can We Teach with Social Media?

Lecture 2: CAT 125Elizabeth Losh

http://losh.ucsd.edu

Suggestions for Provost Naomi Oreskes

Questions for Provost Oreskes

• Why does Sixth College think an upper-division writing course is important?

• How does she use PowerPoint?• What does she think of reactions to her work

in the blogosphere?• Why does she think the university’s YouTube

video has received so many views?

September 6, 2006Howard J. Hall Lectures

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EviVliwAzk

A Recognizable Genre:Professors Who Lose It

The Originalhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuLaQoQP9oo The Remixhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bdu6rg3UR4

Popular videos also show professors smashing cell phones and laptops

Digital Diploma Mills

• John Noble’s critique of distance learning and corporatized learning more generally

• Worker alienation captured on video or recorded on the web

Hall on Institutional Organization

“University of Florida is a bureaucracy. I don’t need to tell you this. How many levels do we have? We go from faculty to department chairs to associate deans to deans to the provost to the president. I don’t know. I’ve lost fingers here. Six. Yeah. A bunch.”

Hall on Scientific Management

“I’m going to pick on myself . . . what about schools? What about schools? You know we had the model of the little red schoolhouse. How did we develop this. Hello, can you say scientific management. Straight rows. Everyone has their own book. Everyone has their own text. What’s the nature of work? We don’t work like that anymore. But that’s the way we work and the way we teach, and isn’t that baloney. We’ve had enough of this nonsense haven’t we?”

Distance Learning vs. Open Courseware

How do lectures with obvious scripting and stage managing better serve the university?

Professor Walter Lewin at MIT

DIY, Unschooling, and Wikipedia Culture

Learning and Reality TV CultureProject Runway vs. MTVu

Randy PauschThe Last Lecture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_2NAM4jWbw

Is This a Good Representation of a University Lecture?

What is Pausch’s Ethos?

• Does push-ups• Boasts of winning carnival animals• Highlights his appearance in a photograph

with William Shatner• Shows over a dozen childhood pictures of

himself• Leads the audience in singing “Happy Birthday

to You” to his wife

Pausch’s Confrontations with Authority

• Demands to be admitted to Brown University despite receiving a waitlist letter and to Carnegie Mellon despite a rejection letter

• Recasts himself as a “local media journalist” to join his students on the NASA project in violation of the rules

• Complains about his dean and calls him “Dean Wormer” and “our villain”

• Talks about people being “pissed off” and a “pissing match” • Wears a prop vest with arrows to represent his feelings of

persecution and resentment about not being rewarded for his “pioneering course”

• Takes the side of Disney against the university even though academics “are in the business of telling people stuff” and corporations are “in the business of keeping secrets”

Can One Pander Too Much to an Audience?

Alexandra Juhasz’s Experiment

“We are clearly living in a time where conventionalized methods must be re-thought because of the increased functions of the media. Teaching and learning are two conventions that will adapt in the face of web 2.0.

Now, I've been an advocate of critical pedagogy my entire career as a professor. In particular, I have been keen on refiguring power, expertise, and objectivity in the classroom attempting instead to create more collaborative, imaginative pedagogic interactions where there is a self-awareness about how embedded structures of power (race, class, gender, age, expertise) organize classroom participation, and access to learning.

That said, while trying to learn through YouTube, there were significant challenges posed to the traditions of teaching that both my students and I experienced as obstacles. So maybe I'm not as radical as I pretend!”

Juhasz: NicheTube vs. YouTube

“Popularity is the organizing structure of YouTube”

“What is popular on YouTube does what we already like in ways we already know”

“NicheTube functions by the rule of originality, critique, difference, and zaniness”

boyd: MySpace vs. Facebook

Hegemonic Teens

“The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college.”

boyd: MySpace vs. Facebook

Subaltern Teens

“MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.”

What Class Story Does The Social Network Tell?

What Do I Make of This Story

1974 2004

. . . if I Remember When Facebook Was a Book?

Harvard Graduate and Sixth College Faculty Member

James Fowler of Connected Might Also RememberWhat is Professor Fowler’s Online Persona?How Does He Think We Are “Returning to the

Village?”

Bogost’s Impressions of Facebook

• Designed for students not professors• A “Facebook friend” is an ambiguous term• LinkedIn has a specific use in mind: business networking• Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties”• Borrowing language from Heidegger: on Facebook, “one

collects relationships and keeps them dormant until needed”

• Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship from the Ethics: pleasure, utility, and virtue

Bogost’s Impressions of Facebook

• Time stamping and the problem of “backfilling” life

• How continuity affects privacy• Lives siphoned through a commercial sieve• Impressions created by game applications• The wrong kind of mundane• How should educators use Facebook?

For Next Time

From lectures to TED talks: how can we represent research on the Internet?

How do we understand credibility? Wikipedia vs. Britannica