Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Dewey on the Web 2.0 pitfall. Will Richardson recently pointed to Jim Cuene's Powerpoint of the traits of Web 2.0 and captured a portion of slide three as a highlight that contrasts the authority and passivity of 1.0 with the active and democratic potential of 2.0.
This slide came to mind yesterday as I started reading a chapter by Kurt Spellmeyer, "Travels in the Heart of the Forest" from Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century. Though not speaking of the Internet, Spellmeyer, my former boss, identifies a risk that Web 2.0 faces from the academics who profess to love it:
If knowledge is 'produced,' as we academics like to think, and if it therefore lends itself to production by different people for different ends, then we might ask why the university has failed to produce forms of knowledge affirming the non-specialists' capacity to act. (233)
For Spellmeyer, academics are far too often tempted to reserve the final say for themselves, silencing the non-specialists who make up much of society. Our scholarly search for
hidden structures or lawlike rules, on the level of the sentence or the level of the state, is always, as John Dewey argued more than once, an act of domination by other, covert means. (234)
Spellmeyer then turns to Dewey, who in a 1927 publication called "The Public and Its Problems" nailed the issue:
A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all. (In Spellmeyer 234)
The crux of the matter seems to be, then, that teachers, as a class of experts, may be a substantial threat to Web 2.0, even if we are all the while hoping to extend it. Teachers need, instead, to pass these tools over to students and to members of our community, to stop speaking only to other teachers, to stop behaving as an expert class, and to find a way to have a stake in the interests and knowledge of the community.
This relates, I believe, to my recent post about the need for a school to reflect its region rather than some distant and generic model of excellence.
The Powerpoint slide is right -- Web 2.0 does not serve as a veil hiding the authority of teachers. It is, instead, much more radical than that. [0 & P]
This slide came to mind yesterday as I started reading a chapter by Kurt Spellmeyer, "Travels in the Heart of the Forest" from Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century. Though not speaking of the Internet, Spellmeyer, my former boss, identifies a risk that Web 2.0 faces from the academics who profess to love it:
If knowledge is 'produced,' as we academics like to think, and if it therefore lends itself to production by different people for different ends, then we might ask why the university has failed to produce forms of knowledge affirming the non-specialists' capacity to act. (233)
For Spellmeyer, academics are far too often tempted to reserve the final say for themselves, silencing the non-specialists who make up much of society. Our scholarly search for
hidden structures or lawlike rules, on the level of the sentence or the level of the state, is always, as John Dewey argued more than once, an act of domination by other, covert means. (234)
Spellmeyer then turns to Dewey, who in a 1927 publication called "The Public and Its Problems" nailed the issue:
A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all. (In Spellmeyer 234)
The crux of the matter seems to be, then, that teachers, as a class of experts, may be a substantial threat to Web 2.0, even if we are all the while hoping to extend it. Teachers need, instead, to pass these tools over to students and to members of our community, to stop speaking only to other teachers, to stop behaving as an expert class, and to find a way to have a stake in the interests and knowledge of the community.
This relates, I believe, to my recent post about the need for a school to reflect its region rather than some distant and generic model of excellence.
The Powerpoint slide is right -- Web 2.0 does not serve as a veil hiding the authority of teachers. It is, instead, much more radical than that. [0 & P]