I have been reading Jenkins, Ito and boyd’s Participatory Culture in a Networked Era while doing the full catastrophe of the holidays and recovering from some nagging health problems. Alongside this I have been slowly working my way through a thought sparking video by David Snowden about complexity theory and narrative research. The close reading of text and video has made the barriers of each of these digital objects much more permeable. Synergies abound. Below is a clip that I see as a potent critique of the method that Jenkins, et al use. Or maybe it is just a revelation of my own cognitive biases after more than 20 years of working in institutional environments.
Snowden is an advocate for nothing less than the realpolitik of pragmatic action research…and lots of it. Jenkins and Company are trying to have more conversations about their academic work, trying to be more participatory, but it all seem so walled off and impermeable. Snowden’s approach in the video clip above is not about finding knowledge and coming to terms like Jenkins et al. He says over and over that you can’t do that in complex systems. You have to make knowledge through experiencing it. We don’t know what we know until we become it through lots of ‘safe-to-fail’ experiments. Compared to Jenkins, Ito, and boyd’s approach, Snowden’s is breakneck and breathtaking. And cheap. A term I have discovered for this is ‘pretotyping’–a pre-prototype.
I love how this approach is so contextual and practical and oriented toward making success happen in a very particular place. The story he tells about using this approach in Australia is instructive. Instead of having the University of Queensland soak up $250,000 of research money and taking three years to get to a place where one can “begin to commence to start” to answer the question in the real world, the aboriginal elders helped their folk create eight prototype hypotheses and began immediately to address the problem of Type II diabetes in their own communities.
It seems to me that this is way more of a participatory research culture where the researchers have skin in the game. I don’t get the same feeling from Jenkins, et al. I actually feel the pain of isolation from them. It seems to me that one of the ways they could have made their book more like what they advocate themselves, i.e. make the cultural conversation about partipatory culture more portable, would have been to sponsor a set of “safe-to-fail” hypotheses and experiments in sharing the book. Perhaps their publisher could have provided some small stipends or the three authors could have rewarded groups with some minimal amount of personal attention as an incentive to participate.
Shouldn’t a book that advocated for participatory culture also have helped make that conversation more likely?
Permalink //
Our slow reading has slowed to a crawl so I appreciate this post on many levels …. I need to see the video that you refer to in order to get a fuller sense of what you noticed but as to your sense that the discussion practice in the book itself seems walled in … I agree, at least for now … I appreciate their discussions but still feel as if there should be means of expanding that discussion to become, well, participatory in the wider world … and yet … I have not seen any evidence of that (is that because it is a bound book?) … maybe we can model a way forward … jump-start the discussion in 2016 …. peace …
Kevin
Permalink //
I don’t think fallow reading is slow. I think it is unshallow.
(Not sure what that means)
Permalink //
Love the metaphor of being “bound”. If it is a digital book, is it bound? I think perhaps it is bound by copyright and by our own cognitive biases about what being a book and an author and a reader entails, but it is not bound by physical limits.
I tried to get Mimi to join us and bring along a co-author or two, but I don’t think I hit the right channel for her. Or she didn’t remember me from Adam. I do think we have pushed back the metes and bounds of what an authored digital object is. I think annotation has moved from the margins to spaces between the lines. Interesting how our thinglink has marginalia but also the beginnings of ‘touches’ between the lines. It is shocking how few people dabble in these dark, participatory arts and it is equally shocking how those few who do keep pushing the ‘wheels in my head’ into new configurations. I feel like the sprockets have stripped a few cogs and that a quantum weirdness keeps the whole thing together.
I am keeping on and will keep inviting folks to keep on with me. The holidays are probably a good time for showing a movie online and inviting a few folk over. I thought maybe “Flatland” or scenes from the Big Lebowski or some edumication movie to angry up the blood. I will let you know. Hope you take digital Sabbath and connect with all the other important parts of your quotidian self. (I just love that word-quotidian.)
Permalink //
I find it somewhat apt or ironic that my “participation” in the slow “participatory” reading of the book has not been bound by the actual reading of the aforementioned tome yet.
I do feel that I am participating from a tangent.
I am at present probing the bounds of Dave Snowden’s “distributed ethnography”.
I am not altogether sure (as in not at all) what tangential or oblique participation might be.
I like the word oblique.
Permalink //
I’m stopping to think about your lines here:
“Interesting how our thinglink has marginalia but also the beginnings of ‘touches’ between the lines. It is shocking how few people dabble in these dark, participatory arts and it is equally shocking how those few who do keep pushing the ‘wheels in my head’ into new configurations.”
It is perhaps The Way – that few will come and yet are able to play with your directions.
Permalink //
I appreciate the connection you make to Dave Snowden’s work. I haven’t watched the video you embedded but I have read and watched other videos about the Cynefin Framework (“Cynefin” is Welsch. It means “places of your multiple belongings.”) Snowden’s advocacy for safe-fail experiments seems particularly appropriate for education reform, where we’re so habitually locked into the search for fail-safe solutions. Teacher inquiry as a professional learning structure can productively lead to safe-fail experiments in ed reform. Even if an inquiring teacher “fails” to find success, she often develops in her practice and gets to know her learners more deeply as a result… which is why inquiry is “safe.”
Also, cMOOCs are safe-fail experiments. When those leading them refine their approaches and learners discover their productive networks or new personal learning processes, a course can safely fail to achieve its aims.
As for Jenkins, Ito, and boyd, I appreciate the lens they apply to online networks but your critique of them is one that’s fair to make of so many groups of researchers. Though it isn’t apparent in the book, I do think the Connected Learning movement has conducted some safe-fail experiments, like Connected Courses.
Here’s a short Snowden video I really like and have returned to a few times: https://youtu.be/N7oz366X0-8
Here’s a short, funny video (under 3 minutes) where Snowden uses the hysterical example of planning a children’s party to explain three types of systems and to make a point about complexity.
https://youtu.be/Miwb92eZaJg
Permalink //
Great stuff to watch, Joe. I am still slow viewing that Snowden video on Vialogue–glacially slow viewing. I will respond some more, but the Sandman dusts me a bit.
Permalink //
A novel idea? Schools fail because the try to reproduce in others only what the person can do in themselves. Snowden argues that in complex adaptive systems there is no repeatable cause and effect. You can only ask how a given system is disposed to “act”. We cannot make learning in others but we can evaluate how well given systems are disposed to help learners create that learning for themselves. In other words any system that focuses only on what teachers do is doomed to fail.