Mike---I've wondered whether writing people, and maybe tech-friendly
writing people in particular, are not generally people who "march off into
an implementation stage." Certainly that characterizes our work here with
our computer-equipped classrooms. Let's get these things up and running,
and then we'll figure out what we can do with them. I think that's good and
necessary---otherwise we'd never get anything moving at all.
Gunther Kress has written a lot about "design" and "critique." As I
understand Kress,"design" builds with the available materials, while
"critique" reflects on existing structures. His thesis is that "critique"
should be the dominant mode in times of relative stability, because
critique questions existing structures and makes movement possible; whereas
"design" should be the dominant mode in times of rapid change, so that we
may take hold of our rapidly-changing world and shape it as it changes.
Kress sees us in a time of rapid change, and in an era when design should
be in the ascendant.
To be sure, he is himself a curriculum-design specialist, but we're always
arguing for our own thing, right? And I think he's on to something.
I've been watching the humanities, the home of critique, become less
important over the past 40 years, and in particular the last 15-20 years;
and other aspects of the academy that might be connected to *design* become
more important---urban planning, landscape architecture, schools of
management, some aspects of engineering. And our Chancellor seems to spend
his entire day attempting to engage us in "strategic planning." We were
told by an alum/dot-com CEO that in today's work world there's no value to
reflection, at all.
Now "design" is not exactly *implementation," but I know that our various
tech programs and labs have been carefully designed and then implemented,
so I'd say that we're doing what Kress says we should do---creating
programs from available materials, moving quickly into implementation. I
know that if I'd taken the 'bean-counter' approach when we first brought
technology in, we'd still be doing cost-benefit analyses!
Off to teach my first-year writing class. I asked them to do some
cost-benefit thinking about our lab---that if we could take lab-money and
spend it on TA's we could reduce class size across the program by 1.4
students---and they all said that we should get more computers, fire some
teachers, and increase class size!
Charlie
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