First, what do we mean by good? I usually hope to get something out of a class – whether it is an issue that now has my attention but that I never heard of before until the teacher pointed it out for me, or whether the teacher offered me a perspective on an existing issue that I never thought of before. So, you hope to hear things that will challenge your existing thoughts, that are provocative, or that make you think about things you never thought of before.

Second, what kind of tools does the teacher have to achieve these goals? Well, form matters, so it helps if the teacher is eloquent and charismatic. It’s like sugar coating the medicine. Then the teacher can also assign readings. Readings have to be manageable, interesting and they have to have a point (you would be surprised how often I read texts that try very hard not to have a point). Then there is also the relationship with the students to be managed: do we try to include every single student,including tolerating those that have not done the reading or love to talk but have no point?

I guess it also depends on what the goal or objective of a class is – is a good class supposed to primarily add to our knowledge, or make us enthusiastic about the topic, learn to think critically more in general, or encourage us to find out for ourselves?

What have some of the best classes you have had been like? What made them good classes?

Technically, the exams will be on Monday, Wednesday and Friday next week. I will start my exam each day at 10am and I will hand it back at 6pm. You are supposed to have roughly written 10 pages, well-structured, clearly argued, showing that you are in control of the literature and the field.

Am I nervous? I am strangely calm – a state not unlike being in the eye of the storm is perhaps an apt metaphor. But I know what I know, and I am who I am. That is a truism, but one that is useful to remember in the face of an important test. Another truism: try to enjoy it, and remember to keep breathing.

One thing that has pre-occupied my braincells a lot these days is the upcoming comprehensive exams I will be taking in the last week of September. What are these comprehensive exams? The ‘comps’ as we endearingly call them, are the last hurdle before I will start writing my dissertation – basically what happens is that in one week, we get questions on three days (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). We get these questions in the morning and are expected to return them with an answer by the end of the day. These questions are usually quite large and abstract – think of things like ‘explain the information society. you may consider defining information first as a conceptual building block so as to answer your question.’ or one of my personal favorites runs in the spirit of ‘what is culture and what is communication and what do the two have to do with each other?’.

As you can imagine, I have been reading like a mad man lately – trying to organize and make sense of literally everything I have read so far on anything remotely related to communication, media and technology. The hard part is really not the reading or understanding part (although some texts can be really *really* obtuse) but the hardest part is really trying to connect all the (billion) dots lying around in my head. I decided one good way to start connecting some of the dots is by writing things out – externalizing what’s in my head, forcing myself to explicate what I am intuitively know (or think I know). I won’t be doing that on this blog, but keep an eye out for my blog on lokman.org if you are interested.

We also have a blog together with Bill Herman at Shouting Loudly.

When we spoke with teachers and after school programs, it was clear that they recognized that their students were interested in new forms of cultural production that are enabled by new media technologies and new forms of cultural distribution supported by the web. They knew that their students were fans, bloggers, and gamers. But they faced a number of issues: they had no standards by which to evaluate work produced in these new and emerging media; they didn’t know enough themselves to give good advice to student media makers; the students lacked role models to help them understand future opportunities in this space; and the students were facing ethical issues that their teachers and parents didn’t really understand.

Does this reminds anyone of teaching parents how to use the VCR? Except that learning how to tape something is a whole lot less significant for matters such as civic engagement or even entertainment, than learning how to use digital media, especially to produce culture. The awful state of academic education in its ability to teach us skills (social, technical, digital literacy) that will enable us to grow and develop in the new media, participatory culture environment is highlighted by Henry Jenkins, and he suggests what to do about it as well!

What’s the point of a class? If you had to teach a group of people, how would you teach it? Using what kind of rhetoric, assisted by what kind of technology available to you? How often would you meet? Where would you meet? How often would you have to do the speaking? How would you let your students participate? What would you offer them? How would you engage them? Why do you make the choices you make?
As usual, the Berkman Center is taking a leading role in attempting to answer these questions. Professor Charles Nesson, as inspiring and charming as always, is co-teaching a class with his daughter on CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion – the class is not just restricted to Harvard students – anybody with an internet connection (and arguably a monster of a computer that can handle the requirements of running Second Life) and an account on Second Life can participate. Really, with this class and the earlier mentioned Berkeley class on Participatory Media, it promises to be a fascinating ride the coming time in terms of re-thinking how classes ought to be taught. Here’s to more classes that enable thinking outside the box!

I think it is great how they used a wiki to publish their syllabus online. It is sad to notice a trend where syllabi increasingly are hidden and not made public, and there is really very little reason to hide them, right? So this class syllabus is a great exception. In addition, Tim Armstrong of Info/Law found this great collection by Jessica Litman of online syllabi on the topics of internet law. Whereas these are bottom-up examples of what I see as attempts to free up education, Wikiversity is a more top-down driven example that just started and which I hope will be an aggregator of these online syllabi.

I mean, if education is not about sharing knowledge, what is?

EDIT: how could I forget mentioning MIT OpenCourseWare? (thanks Christina). On another note: bad bad bad Blackboard. IDEANT writes about how the blackboard patent issue makes him think of a much more serious issue: how education is being replaced/reinterpreted as information delivery. He could have been describing another example straight out of a chapter of Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

He argues how the transition paradigm inhibits our thinking and has long stopped being productive. The transition paradigm suffers from several flaws. First, a move away from authoritarianism does not equal to a transition to democracy. Any changes in the political system are only measured in terms of going nearer or further away from democracy, no alternatives exist.
Second, elections become predetermined and almost sacred, yet a lot of countries have held elections but have known little democratization. Third, the path-depedent paradigm insists that the transition is started by opening up, then breakthrough, followed by consolidation; several countries have contrasted this path, including Taiwan. The transition paradigm also marginalizes the social, economic and cultural context and subjugates state-building to ‘democracy’-building.

Thinking in such a linear path has led to the creation of a vast gray zone between authoritarianism and democracy – complexity rules in this space, we don’t know how to make sense of this.

Carothers offers us several notions to re-think this gray area: some countries resemble feckless pluralism, other dominant-power politics. Feckless pluralism is a situation where multiple parties shuffle power back and forth, while dominant-power politics is a situation where one party is almost equated to a state, but where ‘real’ political space exists. (what Carothers understand as ‘real’ political space, I don’t know). These two are not a station to the end destination democracy, but alternative destinations in themselves.

A lesson to be drawn is that political development should not be equated with freedom. Analogous to Sen’s lesson in Development As Freedom, freedom should be both the end and the means for political development, instead of being equated with it.