In the otherwise uninspired 1985 film version of A Chorus Line (a wonderful musical when seen on stage), there’s a pretty good moment in which Michael Douglas as the director doing the casting yells at one auditioning dancer: “Don’t dance!” The girl’s face as she hears this shouted order and gradually comes to a stop as the other dancers onstage step away from her is probably what I remember best about the whole three-hour movie.
What brought this to mind right now is the analogy between what “the director” and what “the instructor” presumably want: order and organization in the controlled learning environment (onstage and/or online). People following a set routine of instruction, sharing a more or less common background, and a particular vision of the way the ultimate product (the production or the class) should look like. Have to have some, otherwise it’s chaotic. People expect things to be a certain way, especially if they’re used to it from many previous classes. (“What’s on the syllabus?”) And people feel more or less entitled to learn what they expect to learn in a class, and rightfully so.
Problem is, often the best “stuff” in a class is unchoreographed. You don’t notice so much in a face-to-face class, but the expectations for imposed “order” and “organization” are so very high online. How to pull it off without losing your most interesting “dancers” (even if they don’t fit right into your current chorus line?)
Hmmm….. let’s dance!
Someone who leaves a syllabus as open and open-ended as the one for his Information Policy course has my undying admiration, though I suspect many students prefer the “syllabus as contract” approach that has become increasingly popular these days. Lesk quotes Santayana somewhere in this syllabus as saying that it doesn’t matter what college students read as long as they all read the same thing. (Does that mean that Santayana would approve of TextBook Torrents? Hmm, surely not!) Does that mean he also intended his dictum to apply to grad students? Hmm, surely not….
Disliking Desire2Learn as I do, I’m always on the lookout for alternatives. This one, developed by graduate student Travis Brown in the University of Texas-Austin English Department and his colleagues, isn’t exactly that, but it would be especially useful in a class if you wanted to subject a text to communal, close analysis: “As We May Think 2.0″?
Sadly, I keep getting distracted from thinking about what I’m supposed to be thinking about this summer (competitive intelligence and knowledge management) by things like this, from noted psychological researcher Dr. Pawel Lewicki, who runs the Nonconscious Information Processsing Laboratory at the University of Tulsa. Not my area at all, but fascinating, fascinating…. and, come to think of it, how can this not impact on what I’m thinking of as my area of “codified knowledge”?
From the NISROE:
“Questionnaire Item 16. I often get so wrapped up in a stream of thought or what I’m reading that I become more or less oblivious to my surroundings.”
Ah, the graves of academe: I love this!
