Education between Humboldt and McJob

"Who would not want to sit at this conference table?" With this question the symposium on new media education at the University of Hamburg kicked off last Friday.

Following the description of the organizers, the title "Bildung im Neuen Medium" referred to 15 years of discussion about the "new medium." The singular "medium" could have been interpreted as a reference to the Internet but that was not made explicit.

"New media," in an anglophone context is often understood as a paradigm pointing to a shifting target rather than a specific emerging technology, exploring processes that accompany the emergence of any "new" media, from the telegraph and film to the Internet.

This intensive two-day interdisciplinary symposium was followed by one a one-day workshop. The focus of the symposium was not on educational tool building but rather on the broader implications that discourses in new media education (nme) exert on fields like cultural studies, the arts, communications, media theory, informatics, and the history of culture. The workshop provided a platform to introduce educational technologies.
   
Arriving in Hamburg I wandered through its streets under dark skies. Graffiti on campus called for a strike against the introduction of student fees. One slogan outside the cafeteria read, "Enjoy your lunch. What do the student fees taste like?" The students looked relaxed and untroubled. The fact that women make up the vast majority at most German universities was apparent also in the crowded campus cafe.

The symposium started in the former villa of Aby M. Warburg, the depressive art historian and creator of the Mnemosyne Atlas who famously responded to the question about his health with "All well - from the neck down." In 1925 the likes of art historian Erwin Panofsky and philosopher Ernst Cassirer gathered in this "cultural-scientific library," and called it a "laboratory of the sprit" before it was relocated to London during Nazi times. In this oak-paneled setting, walled in by books, it took me a while to get over the excitement of naked historical presence.

The eleven presenters, dressed predominantly in varying shades of black were seated around a massive oak table surrounded by an audience of around 50 people. There was exactly one woman in this circle of otherwise white male presenters, mostly well into their fifties. A second female scholar was invited but could not make it. I know all too well that organizing an event entails compromise, sweat, and tears. However, in 2006 there is absolutely no excuse for such gender imbalance. Looking harder, one could have surely found fantastically competent women in the named fields, even in the vastly male-dominated German-speaking academia. It'd have also been valuable to have a student present her perspective on new media education.

While the symposium was held in German, it was announced as an international event, which was related to funding obligations. The term "international," somewhat amusingly, stood for Switzerland, Austria, and Germany-- notably missing was Lichtenstein from the German-speaking armada.

Rumors of the demise of geography have been exaggerated. Language barriers are still solid walls. Connecting wires and online translation tools don't change this fact. A bilingual book publication will follow this symposium and if it will have broad distribution, it could help to build "air bridges" between these discursive archipelagos.

Despite these comments "Bildung im Neuen Medium" was an inspiring and thoughtful event. German language (germanophone) media theory and pedagogy has much to offer to international discourses. Present day media theory in German is distinct but little known outside Germany-Austria-Switzerland. (Also media theorist Friedrich Kittler speaks German at international conferences.)

International references at this symposium were mostly based on printed books that are available in German (Lovink, Manovich, etc). References to media theory or philosophy, art or pedagogical models from North America, Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, Finland or the UK were rare.  

An official of the federal ministry of culture, the symposium's sponsor, welcomed people and attended the entire event, frequently joining the discussion with humble curious questions (just imagine *that* in the United States). The ministry also funded the web initiative Netzspannung for many years.

Most presentations in these two days used "in-house" Floss applications like Studylog (developed at the University of Hamburg) or eMargo (Technical University of Darmstadt). It was utterly refreshing not to hear the American commonplace apologies for using Powerpoint, Keynote, or other proprietary tools at conferences. It is on the edges of media technologies where the most interesting things are happening.

Torsten Meyer, one of the organizers of this symposium, kicked off his topical introduction to the event by describing education as one of those never-ending disruptive construction sites on the German highway. He suggested visual equivalents to what he identified as the main themes of the symposium: 1) a sign of a construction site, 2) Magritte's pipe, 3) a filing cabinet, 4) a fish, and 5) a container box.

Meyer, in his engaging talk, conceptualized the Internet as being made up of container boxes. Guided by mighty machinery such containers think: packages are moved. (They are moved, for example, through the air in Hamburg's harbor). With a smirk, Meyer equated such conceptions of knowledge transfer to misguided ideas about so called e-learning. Only the most ill-informed would think of education as the transfer of knowledge packets, with a click of the mouse, from the brain of the "master" to that of the apprentice, or sophomore. Learning needs friction, conflict and lively debate. While there are a few exceptions to the rule, e-learning has mostly been a profit-driven broadcast model.

In German language, one refers to browsing "in" the Internet, not "on-line." It is this semantic base that allowed Meyer to describe net publics as moving like fish in water.

Meyer showed a video clip of the German tennis star Boris Becker who, a few years back, run an advertisement for AOL, in which he sat in front of his TV and recalled: "Even my wife said that we finally have to sign up for the Internet." The sexist connotation of his slogan ("even my wife") did not stop people to sign up for AOL's entryway to the Internet. Apparently it was an iconic event in the socialization of the German-speaking Internet.

Following his metaphorical box trajectory Meyer made reference to the blockbuster "The Truman Show" and proposed a parallel between Truman's world and the World Wide Web as a cage. Truman sailed the waters of his world until he bumped into the outer wall of what was set up as a make-believe stage. Meyer asked, where this fake horizon could be located online. Onto the painted blue sky with which Truman's boat collided, Torsten Meyer collaged Magritte's pipe (ceci n'es pas l'internet).

Peter Meyer's metaphorical bouquet was contextually rich and cross-disciplinary. He drew from Plato, René Magritte, Jean Lyotard, Lev Manovich, German media theorist Elke Bippus, Melvil Dewey (Dewey Decimal System), Howard Rheingold and Michael Hardt.

Winfried Marotzki of the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg presented a purposefully basic introduction to the Internet as social space. He is widely credited for introducing Sherry Turkle's work into German media theory. His well-structured and lucid talk addressed three central "Web 2.0" phenomena: 1) classical communities, 2) social networking, and 3) the recent transformation of networked sociality. Marotzki's deliberate "Web 2.0 for Beginners" approach was based on a good sense for where he had to pick up the audience.

Marotzki did not fail to problematize O'Reilly's term "Web 2.0" for its odd suggestion of complete novelty, but decided to use it for its communication value. His definition of "social networking" included not just weblogs and friends-of-friends environments but basically the full fleet of sociable web applications. Here I disagreed: social networking is merely one slice of the pie of social web media.

Marotzki reminded the audience that the sociable web (and blogs in particular) are not a fad. As part of a list of affordances of sociable web media (a term that I much prefer to Web 2.0) he included hit-and-run tactics using weblogs in authoritarian countries where a cyber-dissident can put a report online and then rapidly exit the net without leaving a trace.

After offering a brief historical overview of the sociable web (The Well, OpenBC, Friendster), Marotzki discussed the island nature of communities like Funcity.de or Second Life. He correctly ended by emphasizing the growing significance of the idea of weak ties and other core issues like trust or the de-contextualization of content through syndication. The personalization of content, instruments and tools was also picked up later by Frank Hartmann who talked about the difference between the shape of an American axe (s-shaped) versus the straight shape of the German equivalent. The farmer in Texas needs a slightly different tool than the wood worker in the Black Forest.   
 
Media theorist, philosopher, curator and former student of Ernesto Laclau, Oliver Marchart, highlighted what is old and what is new in the paradigm of "new" media. Like many presenters at this event, Marchart read his prepared essay aloud. His text, iterated with confident voice, was lucid and achieved what it set out to do.

The novelty of the "new," Marchart argued, relies on wonder and surprise. His research project concerned the use of a variety of media during labor day protests: protest media. Marchart pointed us early protest speeches of this century; photos of these events show an actuality, an embodied directness between listener and speaker. (I thought of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's speech in the Saint Petersburg train station after his return from exile in Finland or famed photos of Rosa Luxemburg). Like Christoph Spehr, Marchart seemed to suggest that protest movements are somewhat aided by technologies but that in the end social struggle is a face-to-face affair. 

Many counter-hegemonic social movements have demonstrated the political function of what Marchart called the "ideological state apparatus of information." Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe emphasized the importance of temporary commonalities and Marchart linked this notion to a proposal to educate the people who inhabit hegemonic structures. With Althusser he talked about the "stuffing" of the masses through TV and radio in order to achieve "compliance based on nationalistic and moralistic impulses." Educational institutions were characterized as the "pedagogical state apparatus," a place where people are forced into compulsory listening squeezed in between the state, the parents and a hard place.
 
Werner Sesink, professor at the Technische University (Darmstad), titled his talk "The culturization of the desert." As "door openers" of his inspiring, and somewhat experimental presentation Sesink introduced Hegel, Zizek, Flusser and Kant from a purposefully amateur perspective in philosophy. This approach opened up topics and connections rather than merely inscribing existing knowledge.

The desert is alive crawling with data in the borderless terrain of the digital with horizon that is red from wild imagination. According to Sesink, the Internet (while he never makes that link obvious) is a desert devoid of culture. It is a demolished even by education. As wrecking ball Sesink recognizes Immanuel Kant's power of conceit (Einbildungskraft). Referring to born-again cyber-expert Clifford Still he remarks that we loan our lives, ourselves, by giving our time, our lives really, to the digital. By introducing water into the desert we can give life to places where there is neither life nor culture. Sesink locates rain clouds in the "unbelievable power of the negative: the energy of thinking."

"Education, if it is education (Bildung) is always protest." - Vilem Flusser

Sesink continued with Flusser also arguing for a synthesis of technical worlds and the human. According to Flusser, numeric thinking leads to human downfall while at the same time opening up alternatives and new horizons.

I was most inspired by Sesink's idea of the relationship between the move from physical interaction to the virtual and the emerging neglect of physical spaces. The argument was not that dirty universities lead to more MySpace activity. But a neglect of physical space is evident in many educational institutions. Face-to-face collaboration is hardly encouraged. Just think of the factory-like rows of computers in labs that kill just about any opportunity for conversation. Such unpleasant environments redirect collaborative potential to the World Wide Web. Sesink describes (with Hegel but through Zizek) that emptiness is the freedom to take for ourselves: "freedom is what we achieve in protest against what exists." A somewhat ur-German Hegel reference followed: "the night of the world" (Die Nacht der Welt). The lack of embodied interaction leads to the dark night that you feel when you look the other in the eye. Our eyes become equally empty, just like the non-places in which we meet. One night gets translated into the other.

But this non-place, this blackness of the night also signifies possibility. It is the opportunity to reflect, to remember ("there was something that we have to carry on.") The "old" needs to be ported into the "new." We need to sing about the Internet with the voices of Homer.

Sesink observed a strong desire for reparation, an urge for reconciliation with the "old." The treasure of the Internet contains the possibility for multiple ways of thinking that embrace an understanding that preceded it.

After his university lectures, Sesink explained, he asks his students to take him apart. He calls it "tabula rasa" ("making a clean sweep"). However, afterwards he asks for reparation, an acknowledgment of the scholarship that was already there.

For Sesink, education is a risky business without guarantee for positive outcomes. While one can can shape spaces for education; and set up positive conditions-- in the end, the responsibility for education is with the learning subject herself.   
 
Sociable web media allow the learner to experience herself as speaker. In addition, it exposes her to new "reflection figures" (Reflektionsfiguren): competent people in collision with whom she can grow. These are not role models but people who function like sandpaper.  

During a short break Elke Bippus, professor at the Hochschule fuer Kunst and Gestaltung in Zurich, and I talked about fairy-tales, the brothers Grimm in particular. Later in her presentation she quoted Giaco Schiesser's essay about the obstinacy of the media that also builds on fairy tales. I argued that one should probably not let one's children anywhere near the bone chilling fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Bippus agreed that these tales are ultra violent but that they are meant as initiating material to open up the dialogue with the child about the cruelty of the real life world. The real existing brutality of the world is let loose in these fairy tales. In many repeated reading sessions with the child one can explain the stories and make them less intimidating.

In her presentation Elke Bippus (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Zürich) discussed the obstinacy of the media as structures of opportunity. In successful artworks the media step back. Apart from this topic, Bippus' current research focus is on art as research.

Markus Krajewski, professor at Bauhaus University Weimar and former student of the famed Sophien Straße School in Berlin (with Friedrich Kittler and many others), took us by the hand for a journey through media history. "I would like to tell you a story" he began and then framed his presentation as a tale that he read word by word from his prepared paper. From the library of Alexandria to Conrad Gessner's "Partitionum Universalium" Krajewski interwove his technical insight with historical reflections on the art of collecting and the archive as well as the history of thinking about databases. He elegantly knit a narrative that pulled us through the history of data collection culminating in the introduction of a small bibliography software application of his own design called "Synapse." 

 Dr. Phil. habil. Frank Hartmann (University Vienna) talked, in fiery fashion, about "mediology" in strong reference to Régis Debray. Universities have an enormous fear of technologies and a strong need to sustain the myths of book culture and its ideologies of hierarchical distribution, he argued. The medium of "message distribution" becomes the message.

Hartmann pointed to the historically repeated illusion that communication is a solution to the troubles of the world. Already during the advent of the telegraph, many attached the communication promise of this technology to hopes of permanent world peace. This is beautifully described in the book "The Victorian Internet."

Hartmann bemoaned the described overemphasis on textual cultures. Why could not you dance your Ph.D. thesis, he asked? Audiovisual media slowly replace book culture, which is a trend that can be traced back to Kurt Tucholsky who believed in the overwhelming political power of images. Do we need the verbalization of ideas from authors who carry words like rotting mushrooms in their mouths? (Not always will you find media theory in everything that is labeled as such.) Hartmann delineated a historical development of distrust toward text and a proliferation of images. For Jurgen Habermas, for example, media are "technical amplifiers of human communication."

"There is no Internet per se," he claimed. "It is all about context." Once you switch on your PC you are faced with the 20th century American office culture and this needs to be understood and taught. Hartmann proclaimed an anti-idealistic view.
 
In a continued trajectory he refers to Dieter Mersch who claimed that "Media art has more to say to media theory than media theory to media art." Hartmann agreed; mediology is not snake oil, it is not the silver bullet. "Media theory is bad for careerists" Hartmann summed up... "it is great for those who love experiments."

What should our students read, or, should they read at all? There is no need for a book canon! However, should we favor Lovink's idea of journalistic net critique?  "How can I write when I cannot write like Adorno or Luhmann?" Hartmann pointed to students and colleagues whose writing style smells of these authors.

In immediate response to this question one professor in the audience responded that "if you identify yourself with something closely (if you ate something) "you have to shit it out: tiny bit by tiny bit-- that's normal. That does not mean people write like Foucault or Luhmann, they just digest it."   

Hartmann proposed a large forum of many sharply fenced-off disciplines to work together intensely (also including non-academics such as plumbers). Hartmann ended his talk with a tribute to all DJs. He suggested that DJ Spooky's writing is not helpful as theory perhaps but it is still a useful interdisciplinary meeting point. 

Michael Giesecke, University of Erfurt, presented with quirky charm and questioned the idea of culture. He pointed to the centrality of triadic thinking. He started by projecting a lonely dove cruising through a grey sky and emphasized that his talk was not merely a summation of reflections of a few months but rather the result of ten years of thinking that he now dared to put into words. Michael Giesecke addressed the question of a post-typographical society while his smiling female student assistant clicked through his slides.

Over dinner Oliver Marchart and I discussed hierarchies in the university. The stiff hierarchies encountered there frequently surprise Americans visiting German universities.

"I don't have to be a nice guy in the classroom" he said, and "I definitely do not want to be their friend." Flusser's pedagogy of conflict (enacted like this) is, of course, not possible if you are friends with your students. I understand the idea that conflict is a positive pedagogical tool. Marchart argued for a Lacanian model as part of which "you *are* the knowledge in the room." It depends what type of knowledge is in question here. Students have experiential knowledge and can contribute this perspective (they experience themselves for hours on MySpace or in SecondLife, for example). To assume that there is nothing I can benefit from students would be misguided. What kind of example does this provide? It leads to a somewhat religious relationship with authority, which is only rhetorically questioned.

Ronald Feldman, the gallerist who introduced Joseph Beuys to America organized a talk for him at The New School in New York City. A few years ago Feldman screened the film that was recorded at this occasion. Beuys' face on the poster pulled students who had never heard of him. Beuys did his thing, drawing on blackboards and lecturing. Whip-smart students took his arguments apart and then jumped on the stage to correct his chalk drawings. 

The pedagogical broadcast model that I described earlier, and which Beuys attempted here, does not encourage dialogue. In the case of Beuys this is especially dopey as much of his work built on activating people. This discourse model encourages parallel universes: deeply disciplinary scholars following the inner logic of their research and terminology, however impenetrable that may be for their surroundings.  

Marchart argued that the seemingly flat American hierarchy only masquerades even more gruesome hidden power dynamics. The violence of power is hidden behind a casual demeanor. I'd argue that the German hierarchical pedagogical model of the whip discourages a participatory discourse model. Down from the lighthouse of knowledge a few titans are spreading their knowledge to the adoring student masses. This somewhat religious model suggests the idea of an all-knowing authority. Is discourse something that swirls through the head of the lone knowledge cowboy? Or, is knowledge better built as a drum circle of multiple voices each contributing her perspective? There is a difference, of course, between talkshow-type opinion culture in which each gut feeling counts as an argument and the open exchange of knowledge.

We quickly got down to the root: Alexander von Humboldt's model of "Bildung" (education) meets the American pragmatic model of education. The American consumer relationship with the student is in many ways hindering education ('My parents paid $ 40.000 so I deserve an "A"). For Humboldt education was explicitly about general education and not related to job prospects. To argue for this model in the North American context would be arrogant and elitist. Students have to pay student loans and therefore skills that are relevant to later employment matter. A useful mixture of Humboldt's insistence on "pure" education and a pragmatist model is the best solution.    

Remo Burkhardt gave an overview over 49 Floss software development projects that the ETH in Zurich financed and concluded that the emergence of sociable web media quickly pronounced most of theses in-house applications useless.

A debate about the centralization of attention-domineering tools like Itunes, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and YouTube ensued. These tools create monocultures. What if Youtube or SlideShare or Writely decide one day to start charging me for hosting the files that I uploaded in the belief that they'll be available there for good without charge? Complete reliance on centralized commercial tools is dangerous. Do I really want to trust Flickr (alone) with all my photographic memories? Proprietary tools and commercial sociable web applications need to be at least paralleled by small DIY FLOSS projects, however fragile and buggy they may be, simply in order to counteract the potential of future dependencies.

 The workshop on the third day was separated from the symposium. Many of the media theorists had left already. Here, the discussion became more practical. In the university computer lab, a researcher presented a complex three-dimensional environment that allows the trained user to navigate complex searches in VR land. (It looked a bit like Simon Biggs "Babel" project). A semantic search engine is planned that analyzes syllabi of faculty and clusters them topically.
    
A developer of the Floss software Metacoon presented this widely used educational tool. The state contributed about several million Euros for the project with the goal to make it one of perhaps two main Floss learning tools for all of German academia. However, studies showed that it took about 2 years to get even 2-3% of students and faculty to use Metacoon. In addition, people using it met several supposedly amazing features that project designers envisioned with complete disinterest.

Beat Doebli who developed Beats Biblionetz, which he introduced as "not Web 2.0, not downlodable, not social, not e-learning, and not well designed," demonstrated a very different, somewhat romantic approach.
Doebli designed the bibliographical tool entirely for himself over the past ten years. However, now it serves as a rich reference for his students and 45 "fans" bookmarked the tool in Del.icio.us so far.

Studylog is a cross-platform presentation and research tool that is Director-based. It shows QuickTime (QT) movies without the QT skin and offers a scrolling feature for pdf files in presentation mode. While there are many inconveniences about Studylog, I'll still use it alongside other programs.  

Most presentations at "Bildung im Neuen Medium" were deeply grounded in historical and philosophical reflections. The debate culture was stronger on the dialectical than on the dialogical side.

After having gone the stairs from Plato and Martin Luther up to Hegel and Gramsci, there was little time left to look closely at the "new." It is hard to talk about the way education is affected by technologies without getting down to the specifics of the technologies used.

Trebor Scholz

 

My presentation can be downloaded here.