derBlog

I’ve been meaning to write this post for over a month…ever since SIGGRAPH. I’ve titled it like a doctoral thesis, big words and colons, more to satirize the endemic navel-gazing of modern academia than anything, but the tension between making (knowledge, in this case) and teaching has certainly been at the forefront of my thoughts in the last several months. Questions of what an “instructional technologist” should be doing, wrestling with my own identity as a teacher and a trainer (two different things, I think), not to mention as an artist…all have made for an interesting ongoing–unfinished–inner dialogue.

One central question has been the place of technology in education. For years, I’ve explained my position as “teaching teachers to teach better with technology.” Aside from the obvious alliterative enjoyment of such a turn of phrase, what it really came down to was helping faculty members to communicate better with their students…or at least to communicate less badly…using technology (chalk to computers). Breaking it down further, it often came down to trying to rescue really bad PowerPoint presentations. However, at some point, even this had been done. I’d reached a level of audience saturation. This is common among all instructional technology groups at institutions of higher learning.

Of course, thanks to Moore’s Law…and Mr. Bill…there’s always another version of PowerPoint or some other new technology (blogging? Twitter? etc.) to keep us going. What we have going could be described as the technology-academia complex. We believe that we have to keep up with the ways in which our students communicate or somehow we’ll be left behind. In my opinion, the crisis is not in how we deliver our teaching as much as it is in what we are delivering and how we’re selling it, but that’s for another time…

Now, back to SIGGRAPH and the real reason for this post. Among the many mind-blowing things I saw at SIGGRAPH this year was a presentation on a project out of Ohio State University called “Synchronous Objects for One Flat thing, reproduced.” One Flat Thing was a dance choreographed by William Forsythe back in 2000. Working with Forsythe and a host of others, Maria Palazzi and Norah Zuniga Shaw, both from OSU, created “Synchronous Objects,” a project that takes the dance as data then analyzes and visualizes it in an effort to “reveal the interlocking systems of organization in the choreography.”

What this team has built though is more than just an analysis of a form; they’ve built a new way of understanding choreography, not just a visualization of data but new knowledge, new pathways of thinking. In other words, this is not just about teaching the dance (pedagogy) but about the production of new forms and new understandings (epistemology). And none of it could have been done without digital technologies.

I’ve come back to Synchronous Objects several times since SIGGRAPH. I think it offers a model for what “instructional technology” should be: an instrument of instruction. This gives instructional technology the latitude to be both pedagogical in the sense that it can be used as a tool for teaching, but it also, and I think more importantly, allows it to be a constructor of new knowledge from within that pedagogy.

As educators, we sometimes forget that the classroom can be a collaborative, productive environment. The sciences do this better than the humanities. University labs produce new knowledge. There is room for the production of new knowledge in the humanities as well. “Synchronous Objects” demonstrates this. What kind of change in academic culture would it take for such a goal to become widespread though? Is it the administration? the faculty? the students? all of the above?

And what role can instructional technology play? Certainly, it is not about better PowerPoint presos. Or at least, that is but a small part of the answer. Tulane has been involved in a couple of projects that begin to broach the possibilities although mostly from the perspective of a University service. As long as a project is defined in terms of a client relationship, the possibilities will always be compromised because it will be seen as a matter of content and delivery. Instead of synthesis, it will always focus on translation. “Synchronous Objects” isn’t about recording, display or demonstration. It is about revelation, a remarkable “Eureka!” of a moment where interdisciplinary collaboration has produced new ways of seeing. This one is going in the bookmark file, to be revisited often as a reminder of the possibilities.

/david