Web 2.0 and the Classroom

September 4, 2007

Today Lawrence University hosted a NITLE workshop on the use of social software in an academic context. The workshop was led by Bryan Alexander (you can visit his blog here). The focus was really on introducing faculty and staff to tools such as Del.ic.ious bookmarks, RSS feeds, Flickr photo sharing, and YouTube videos. In the past I have written about my philosophy of using these internet tools in an academic setting, but I would also like to set down some further thoughts on this topic.

During the workshop we got a chance to poke around on different sites.. and I searched for Mecca on YouTube. I came across the following video:

There is nothing too special about the video.. it appears to be a participant's view of the circumambulation of the Kaabah. Portions of professional videos (by National Geographic, for example) are also available.. but these personal non-professional videos I find the most interesting.

Such participant videos and photos are some of the most important contributions of social sites such as YouTube and Flickr. People whose experience would otherwise have gone unnoted and unrecorded are now available. The camera is jumpy and the creators are uncritical.. but that is the point of participant views. When sites like YouTube are critiqued it is often because the information peddled on them is unreliable.. somehow students might get the wrong facts. But this misses the point of the material: it is not direct a purveyor of information.. no, the material itself is an object of study.

In my class on the Hajj we found representations of pilgrimage on YouTube, on Flickr, and on personal pages hosted by FaceBook. All of these presentations of personal experience can be read and interpreted. In other words, they represent a mountain of raw cultural material to be digested and worked through by a critical viewer. This requires a fundamentally different way of approaching internet content.. but it is much less worried about factuality.

On a different point.. it sometimes seems a certain level of dissonance between the stated goals of Old Roads (to reinvigorate and preserve old ways of thinking and perceiving) and the medium of the internet. I feel this same dissonance in discussions about the role of the internet in higher education. What could be more inimical to the academic goals of reading and writing than the mushy and multiplying content of the internet?

My internal riposte to these questions runs something like this:

1) critical thought and argument is a cognitive process that infuses oral cultures, written cultures, hybrid cultures, and our own (perhaps) growing digital culture. We must keep our eyes on the cognitive process and not the media skin.

2) I am a bibliophile.. I might as well admit. I don't believe there is any way to study the past without engagement in primary written texts. I acknowledge that for many people the internet is a tug away from books.. but for those of us who still love books the internet can teach us something about our love.. and allow us to approach books with more respect for their place as physical artifacts of cultures that inevitably change.