The video seems to be a testament to the notion that if you just put a few sappy piano chords behind images of sad faced children you can pretty much rally people to any cause no matter the content. Here we have the now standard cliche that children must be prepared to become “global 21st century learners”. This goal is somewhat nebulous. However, the overarching meaning circulates around a variety of other cliches that almost all have their basis in workforce discipline. Why must students become global 21st century learners? The answer, no matter how it is dressed up in nice sounding jargon about connectivity or creativity, always seems to come back to economic competition. Education is thus reduced to a chess piece in a global labor war between American kids and India and China. Who are the internal villains in this war? The teachers. How do we win? Through technology, of course. Our educational dilemmas can be solved if we just get those anachronistic teachers and their professional knowledge and stupid books out of the way and “empower” kids to push around text and video on their Ipods. Then we can then give them a test and if they get most of the answers “right” then we will know that they have done something that we can call learning.

Read the rest.

The point about the heterogeneity of the university is really great. The needs and ways of operating among and between different areas, especially in large universities, are not always served by a one-size-fits-all digitisation strategy. Indeed, as he points out, there is an incredible amount of value in the ambiguities that are present in the classroom. Here, his point about “teachers are liars” is one that I have thought about quite a bit. Coming from a performance background, I have always endeavored to acknowledge the performative aspects of teaching. Teaching (and writing for that matter) can be about provocation; it can be about eliciting responses in dialogue; it doesn’t have to be about simply passing information gleaned from one source, through the larynx or the computer scree, to a willing (or not so willing) receptacle). The point made here about education not being simply a matter of information transfer speaks directly to the issue of the necessary presence of living, contradictory, ambiguous bodies in the process of educating.

A great watch!

Therefore, for me, my antagonist is the person who passively watches CNN all day long and says that’s the world. My ideal is the person who looks at CNN and says, no, that’s not the world, that’s a version of the world and my duty as a mind in society is to understand what alternative versions there are in order for me to make my choice and to go out and to change the world.

And this equally nice one from Giroux himself:

Unfortunately, the discourse of clarity appears to rest on a universal standard of literacy that presumably need not be questioned as well as a self-righteous and deeply anti-democratic suggestion that most people are just too dumb or indifferent to struggle with language and meaning. This approach to language suppresses questions of context – who reads what under what conditions? More importantly, it presumes that language is a transparent medium for the seamless transmission of existing facts that need only be laid out in an agreed-upon fashion. Such a position runs the risk of fleeing the politics of culture by situating language outside of history, power and struggle.

The Seminar Notes include links to the Google and Wikipedia documentaries.

2009 Seminar Notes 1
2009 Seminar Notes 2
PowerPoint Slides
Murali, et al. on the impact of FUTON bias

My thanks to all who attended, I hope it was as  beneficial for you as it was for me!

In other news, I am once again back in Halifax teaching the history of popular music course “The Rock’n'Roll Era and Beyond”.  The first week of classes is almost over and, as I expected, it has already been so much fun.  I just get a huge kick out of teaching.  It also helps that I have the privelege of teaching this particular course, I have been living with this music all my life, the only real difference is I get to talk about it at length with an interested group of students (and get paid for it!).

Today was one of those amazing Halifax days where one wakes up in a literal fog.  I couldn’t see three feet out of my window, such was the thickness of the fog over the penninsula.  And then, as suddenly as it had come late last night, the fog disappeared and I could see straight out of window across to Dartmouth.

Some links to lift the fog off the web a little:

• Claire works for cookthink now, and also has a good article up on blogcritics.
• danah boyd keeps putting out amazing stuff on social networking.
• It appears that Condoleeza Rice was, not surprisingly, involved in some pretty shady dealings with Chevron and Iraq.
• Tony Blair is stepping down, Gordon Brown likely to repalce him.  I don’t know what to think – Bush’s lap-dog is gone, which is good, but Gordon Brown is a pretty scary character too, responsible for many of the “administrative” (er…surveillance) aspects of contemporary British daily life. I also hate the whole “Prime-minister in waiting” bullshit. What does it say about democracy when we start assuming who will lead a country, and when the mainstream media simply fuels the “inevitability” by focussing on this one potential leader?

I admit, I’ve been a blog lurker for a few months now, mostly just seeing if there was anything that would inspire me to join the fun – those in the blogroll on the right are partially responsible for this inspiration, so really, don’t blame me…

So here’s what the blog will be all about…

(we’ll check in a year or so to see how accurate my predictions are, deal?)

So here’s the first little tidbit.

I have, for the last week and half, been teaching an undergraduate course called “Popular Music Since 1960: The Rock’n’Roll Era and Beyond.” This, for many years, has been my dream job. It really is a privilege (one I’ve worked for, mind you) to get to spend each day teaching young minds about the history of this music that has defined my existence. There’s also nothing like knowing that you know things, and that you can pass them on to others.

It was expressed to me once in an email: “Who goes to school to study pop music, when all you need are the recordings!?” I’ve heard similar opinions, many just in disbelief that one can have a job doing it, but just as many are thinly veiled criticisms which suggest that studying popular music (as a scholar, or just as an option for an undergraduate course) is somehow less important than say, math or science. Those who criticise in this manner are, I believe, suggesting that learning about culture is a pointless pursuit.

Because really, that’s what teaching pop music, and studying it is all about – the study of cultures, and the society which fuels it. That’s what I try to impress on anyone who questions the point of having pop music courses. Indeed, in this course the students learn how the music of the last fifty years had influenced and been influenced by key social events. Events like the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement, the Vietnam War (OK, Conflict), McCarthyism, and many others. They get to see the interrelations between the crucial changes of the twentieth century and movements in music like the explosion of Rock’n’Roll, Blues and Folk revivals, Motown, psychedelic rock, etc. The fact is, that a society and its cultural products are not mutually exclusive, and that the art produced by a society gives us as many clues to how it functions (and importantly, how it may better function) as its science.

I’d be last person to dismiss sciences outright. I love technology, am fairly adept at mathematics. More importantly I acknowledge that however one must, we should be involved in learning about our world and our place in it. I see very little reason for sciences and humanities to be opposed. However, it seems that those who are a little less thoughtful about it are willing to dismiss the humanities in favour of the sciences, seeing in the former too much room for “error” and interpretation, and in the latter the “hard truth” of numbers. In fact it was just recently brought to my attention that a former high-school math teacher (not mine) that I know is just confounded as to what it is that I do, and what use it may have. A retired high-school teacher! It wasn’t just the pop music, but also the lack of the requirement of a teaching certificate to instruct at the university level. Now I figure that anyone who spent 30-plus years teaching in the school system would understand that it’s a different world in the post-secondary institution. Not a better world, not a harder world, just different. I’m fairly new at this, and have never taught high-school, so I won’t begin to itemise the differences. I had also figured someone with this lifelong experience in education would understand the importance of the humanities in the moulding of a young mind. Of course, I suspect the teacher knows all this, and is choosing, like many, to passive-aggressively question and criticise the use of studying culture – and that, to me, is a clear signal of why we should keep doing it.

There it is, blog entry number one. OK, number two if you count my little tease from a month ago which Claire so rightly pointed out really wasn’t very nice at all…