Via The Googlization of Everything: Siva Vaidhyanathan makes some great points about the drive toward digitisation in post-secondary education in his lecture “The Classroom is Sacred” at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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!
@paaitken