A non-apocalyptic view of MOOCs

Massive open online courses have been trumpeted as the death-knell of liberal education, eliciting elegiac murmurs from those who like liberal education, or think they like it, and generating euphoric shouts from those who do not like liberal education, or think they do not like it. I see things differently. For me, MOOCs are but the academic manifestation of Web 2.0. Remember that the standard model of online education came in during the late 1990s and was very much Web 1.0: platforms like Blackboard were static, hierarchical and only interactive insofar as their clear model, the USENET groups of the early 1990s and the listservs of a few years later, were interactive. MOOCs as a platform are attempts for the online modality to catch up with how multimedia our classroom are--rare is the class in which I do not show a video or at least check a fact on the Internet--and indeed how multimedia our research is. When I am researching a topic these days, I am as likely to look at YouTube or Netflix as JSTOR or Project Muse, and that is true even if say I am researching the fifth century AD. There are so many resources out there that are relevant to any given topic.

Furthermore, the 'massive' in MOOCs is a clear reflection of the impact of social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter. Platforms like Blackboard centered around small classes and direct instructor-to-student contact, assuming that would foster immediacy and engagement. On social media, though, one can have thousands of friends of followers without limiting engagement, indeed the larger one's train of online interactants, the more effective one's clout (or Klout). The importance placed on delivering the message and responding to those who are interested in it, rather than fostering a designated community of pre-culled individuals, constitutes a sense of the identity and ontology of the learner, which MOOCs have in common with social media. In other words, it is not a small size that guarantees a community but an atmosphere of active participation and solicitation of intellectual involvement.

Much like social media--where the people with the most friends or followers are already-established celebrity, and those who have had their reputation emerge organically form the medium itself may have substantial but in aggregate terms far smaller followings--there is no structural autonomy in MOOCs, the canonicity of the topics and teachers spill over from the anterior world. Much like an All-Star game in sports, MOOCs attempt to leverage the fame already attained by their participants within a practice to a far larger group of people in different places and contexts and attempt to make them interested in their allure. MOOCs will be a threat to the way academia has traditionally operated when they do not just utilize star professors but generate them. As it is now, the stars teaching in MOOCs were all generated the conventional way--through doctoral training, on-site classroom observation, journal and/or book publication, and peer review.

It is as if Latin America were not a place where baseball players were found but where they went to play for lucrative rewards once they had become famous. Indeed, MOOC professors are the David Beckhams of their 'game', in that what people are experiencing is not just their skill at their craft--which his undoubted--but the aura of fame, the social capital, they have already accumulated in their 'home', To take an example of what I mean, when cinema started around the turn of the last century the people who did it, the people who starred in the movies, were new, one did not just have theatrical performers transfer over, new people became famous and more importantly there were new ways to become famous that the movies provided. When MOOCs generate rather than channel celebrity, they will have achieved structural autonomy as a platform.

Moreover, the institutions sponsoring MOOCs are established brands, category leaders, who are providing MOOCs for free more or less as ways of extending the brand. The admissions elitism, the social capital which came from high selectivity--in other words from keeping as many people out as possible--seems to be less of a priority than garnering publicity and fostering brand awareness. One can posit that elite universities have gotten all they can out of exclusivity and are turning the wheel to inclusivity, and even if one posits this in a dark, Adornian way as a cynical admission that all the hegemony that can be reaped from the exclusivity has been, that the allure of high-stakes admissions is now played out (something gestured at laterally by articles such as this one) context. In a way this makes good business sense Apple or Microsoft did not become category leaders by only letting a few exclusive customers buy their products after a rigorous vetting process. In a way it is a response to globalization, as so many of the applicants to high-prestige US universities are now from abroad. In another way, MOOCs can be seen as a way of justifying the expense of college tuition to stakeholders such as parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents of traditional-age undergraduates, that what the younger members of their family is getting is good and worth the expense. On a higher level, MOOCs are kind of an answer to the culture wars' of the 1990s, or perhaps a symptom of their unexpectedly benign resolution, as much of the attacks on 'political correctness' and so on in that era came or were addressed to parents who were baffled by trends in contemporary humanities academia; perhaps MOOCs might bridge the gap and make these stakeholders feel more included in the approaches and methodologies at play in the contemporary humanities classroom.

There seems to me a clear age gap between the students in practically oriented MOOCs, who I see as 'young' adult learners, in their late 20s or so, whereas the students in humanistic MOOCs (and this is a totally anecdotal sample, based on the people I know personally who have mentioned enrolling in MOOCs to me) tend to be older, people in middle age or after, busy, working people too distracted to study full-time but who nonetheless desire intellectual illumination. When people in their late 20s are interested in this sort of thing, they will (again anecdotally) be likelier to watch/listen to YouTube videos or TED talks, material they can digest on the go and not necessarily have to interact with. Older adults on the other hand, further removed from literally being in school, might want some interaction, a feeling, however remote and indirect, of engaging with a professor of the knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and wise sort they remember from their youth. In addition, MOOCs do offer some sort of institutional apparatus or connection, whereas TED talks do not come directly from a university. Indeed, MOOCs and TED talks both flank, but in neither case directly embody, the Open Badges movement which allows credentialing of expertise without any sort of affiliation with an existing educational institution, no investment in storied tradition or category-leader prestige. MOOCs have this residual aspect, and this accounts both for their heft and their ability to make news, but also lead to questions as to whether, in an educational era that will inevitably be less elitist and more democratic, they will in their present mode have staying power. A third vector here is the Yale YouTube videos, which give lectures from actual classes again without any interaction. In my (again, personal and anecdotal) experience these are largely watched by other professors, interested to see in what their distinguished colleagues are up to in the classroom.

Thus I see MOOCs as not an apocalyptic but a transitional phenomenon, whose thrust is less to indicate that traditional liberal education is being put out of business but that the expertise and allure the traditional model has fostered now is considered worthy of export beyond the traditional (in both age and ‘space;) populations it has served. As we have known as far back as Newman's 
Idea of a University" whuch as fate would have it I am teaching today) the theoretical and the functional interplay in the coalescence of a liberal-arts ethos, and though the modality may change in this century, the underlying pertinence of the model will not. I suspect the specific configuration of MOOCs will change, and the name itself may not be used, but the phenomenon will certainly have impact. Until and unless online-only education can produce, can generate, stars, though, I think the traditional academic platform will still have the pride of place.

Moby-Dick. Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty

I finally watched the first few episodes of Homeland, and as many have noted registered the resemblance of the Claire Danes character with the Jessica Chastain character in Zero Dark Thirty, the female interrogator/agent determined to zealously pursue al Qaeda terrorists at which the establishment blanches. Many have commented how the idea of the female intelligence agent seems to sanction government brutality by wrapping it under the mantle of feminism, or act as if the old-fashioned idea of authority is renewed if feminized; there is also the angle of Islamism’s views on women making Western feminism an almost inevitable corollary of the war on terror even if those waging it are au fond not particularly feminist. What I am interested in is how both characters persist in their quests even though their co-workers and superiors doubt them.

This could be likened to the ‘monomania’ exhibited in Moby-Dick (which I am current reaching) where Captain Ahab pursues the Great White Whale heedless of countless warnings not to do so for reasons of prudence, caution, temperance, and karma. The intriguing aspect here is that Ahab’s monomania is universally (and, in contrast, correctly) assumed to be bad, at least other than a few children’s edition s of the book which e. g. speak of Ahab as ‘an intrepid Yankee sailor’. But—and whatever our doubts about governmental excesses—the Chastain and Danes characters are assumed to be good in that nobody watching wants another terrorist attack. The two contexts are curiously comparable despite the huge time gap, as William Spanos and others have analyzed the ‘state of exception’ present in Moby-Dick by virtue of Ahab’s defiance of his employers’, Bildad and Peleg, mandate to concentrate on capitalist exploitation rather than revenge, and the presence of the quasi-Islamic Fedallah and the citation in the first chapter of a ‘bloody battle in Affghanistan’ do place it within the purview of the Islamic world. Is a female monomania, because more novel or softened by the good looks or soothing disposition of the characters, more acceptable than a more obviously fearsome male avatar? (Interestingly, the Danes character is far closer to Ahab than the Chastain by the very reason that she is given more vulnerabilities, those vulnerabilities in turn being necessitated by the greater narrative length of the project). Or do we have to face the fact that, as readers of Moby-Dick, we cannot unilaterally condemn monomania as much as we would like to do on first understanding Ahab? After all, the writer’s quest to finish the book, the readers quest to understand it, are, on the discursive ear interpretive level, as potentially monomaniacal as Ahab's quest to capture the whale, and indeed Melville and his readers are often praised for attempting the very thing that within the book Ahab is roundly condemned for pursuing.

Moreover, one cannot say all monomania is bad. Certainly Southerners thought not only John Brown but also Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson were monomaniacs on the subjects of slavery; yet it is good they were all so monomaniacal (even, in my view, Brown). It is easy for us to denounce monomania in a cause we do not believe in or are not affected by; what is there is a monomaniacal pursuit of something we admire, but which generates a disagreement with the means of its pursuit A real opposition to monomania would be to say: I urgently want this goal to be attained but I reject a monomaniacal way of pursuing it. And this would be a very hard stand indeed for most of us to maintain. As Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty show, there are any times we meet the monomaniac—and it is us. 

Early thoughts on rereading Moby-Dick

I am  teaching a single-text course on Moby-Dick at Lang this semester,and as one would expect from such a great book (and given that the time of day and the specific aspects of the class are both very different) my thoughts are quote on another level from the last time I taught it (fall 2010), which produced this article. This time around, I am noticing the micro as much as the macro aspects, and more of the tonality of the book rather than its overall vision. For instance, one notices --given that the book is about a group of men at sea--how many women and female references there are in the book--including a 'these New Bedford chicks are really hot!" comment at the end of Chapter 6, which ishmael, or Melville, puts far more elegantly:

nd the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens.

and, no matter how homoerotic Melville's affect or sexuality--and there were obviously gay strains seen in Moby and in Billy Budd, and he was in a sense 'in love' with Hawthorne--there is also a lot of hetero-erotic feeling here, there is a female side to the book, Bildad's sister Charity, Ahab's 'sweet, resigned; wife, etc. The other thing I am noticing is the humor, how funny it is side by side with the sweeping epic aspirations.....some books are epic, like paradise Lost, some mock-epic, like Don Quixote. Melville';s novel--which refers to both anterior texts--has epic and mock-epic side-by-side, parallel, so that the reader can enjoy both at once.

My class is also enjoying listening to this marathon recorded read of the novel, one of whose readers is the current occupant of 10 Downing Street... see this site. Some of the choices for readers are quite inspired, such as Witi Ihimaera reading "BIographical" (about Queequeg). 

Melville and Powell?

In chapter 3 of Moby-Dick, Melville describes the painting hanging in the Spouter-Inn as "...a Hyperborean winter scene.—It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time." There is a clear resemblance here to the last paragraphs of A Dance to the Music of Time--I am inclined to take this more seriously because the Melville quote was in response to a painting which might well have betokened Powell's interest. I think I recall a copy of Moby-Dick being on the Chantry shelves. 

My Trollope society lecture on the 21st

Trollope Society Annual Winter Reception
Thursday February 21st, 2013
The Grolier Club
47 East 60th Street
New York, NY 10022
La Vendée: Trollope’s Early Novel of Counterrevolution and Reform
Speaker: Nicholas Birns, New School
Prof. Birns teaches courses in the history of the novel and related literature
in both the United States and Britain as well as on literary criticism and theory.
“I believe thinking about literature is a critical enterprise that calls
 upon our deepest intellectual reflection and discernment”
Drinks: 6:30     Talk: 7:00
$20  ($10 students or faculty)

RSVP: Midge Fitzgerald
trollopesocietynewyork@gmail.com
6 Pier Pointe, New Bern NC 28562
212-683-4023

Ambassador Barzun and multi-generation intellectuals

The news that former Ambassador to Sweden Matthew Barzun is likely to be appointed the next Ambassador to the UK by President Obama inspired various thoughts. Barzun is well-known as the grandson of the late Jacques Barzun, a distinguished (and long-lived) scholar and intellectual who, though not exactly aligned with me on many polemical issues, nonetheless was an exemplary homme de lettres. His grandson had a successful career in the tech industry before receiving his first diplomatic appointment. As admirable as that is, this stirred a soupçon of regret in me that Matthew had not gone into his grandfather's business. I thought of multi-generational baseball families like the Boones or the Hairstons; why can't there be multi-generation intellectual families? Wouldn't it be great if Matthew had written books in some way in a lineage with his grandfather? There are many families--like my own--where the child goes into academia as his/her parents had--but I cannot think of a single three-generation academic family. Maybe in the sciences...

Part of this, of course, is because academia, even at its most lucrative and rewarding, pays so little. My parents were able to enter academia, and to live lives as, respectively, a bohemian artist and a left-wing activist, because their parents had, for their time, a good deal of money, and this is indeed the sine qua non for many bohemian artists and left-wing activists. Equally, if your parents are such, the asceticism contingent on even the most laureled intellectual's life is no doubt seen as confining, and you want to go into business, make some serious money. One can see one generation sacrificing this urge, but less likely two...

In any event I wish Ambassador Barzun well on his likely next appointment, to the Court of St. James. 

The New York Society Library

My blog post on this wonderful library.