Education as a project

For about a year, maybe two, the education project seemed to languish. In fact, since I first thought of the project, in Crete, several years ago (after a fine dinner of goat and resin wine and olives, animated by the conversation of friends, inspiration came easily and fluently), and even after, when I formed it with Sophie Gautier. There was a lot of interest but little public action. I would make contact with all sorts of education officials--professors, administrators--but nothing came of, and I think my co-lead, Sophie, was finding the same; and nothing was appearing on the public project pages or lists. This was our fault. Thus, if at the Symbiosis society of colleges in Pune, India, I may have been warmly received and heard from faculty and students alike keen interest in including OpenOffice.org coding in classrooms, there was, in the end, no evident result. It seemed all a show, or perhaps there was something simply missing I wasn't aware of. Being invited to give yet another presentation or workshop on the same topic is just not enough. What I wanted was for students to start working on OOo and even begin appearing on the public lists, and that was simply not happening.

There are several reasons that come to mind for the lack of continued activity. One is that any community formation, especially one of this nature, where I am asking students and professors to work on complicated code with little obviously in the way of payoff, does not come easily. It's hard enough to form participatory communities among those interested in participating and in participation's outcomes. It's even harder when both what counts as participation and outcome challenge the status quo.

And that challenge to the status quo in the make up of curricula and their basis is from one perspective what I was (and am) asking for. (Although my suggestion is by no means as radical as Eliot's in 1885, when he proposed the free elective system at Harvard.) Curricula are established--accreted--over decades and implicitly represent a culture's very idea of knowledge, practical or abstract. They do not change immediately, at least not those supposedly teaching fundamental, canonical, truths. And how could they? The very notion of a truth is that it's not susceptible to change. So if from one point it seemed I have been asking for professors to relinquish not just control over the class's pedagogy, replacing her with the community, but also the very content to be taught, it's no wonder that there has been little traction.

But, no, I was and am not asking for a big change, just a small one with big effect, and one that, for that matter, trades on what is already going on. My notion is not a Toffler-eaque merging of the the academic with the industrial and commercial, or more accurately, the replacement of academic knowledge with trade school skill. That would be a replacement of, say, truth and theory and principle with effect and how to produce that effect: a loss of knowledge and the very substance of innovation and newness, or the logic underlying the effect. (I won't enter into the interested/disinterested debate here, though it is of course relevant, especially as large companies increasingly determine the coursework in areas that are costly to maintain, such as the sciences.)

But what then do I mean by including OOo and other Foss code in education? It means to me as much the teaching of software collaboration and open source tactics of communication as the canonical teaching of code using Foss in classic (obligatory) and elective programs. It can also mean the inclusion of Foss in certain vocational college programs, as at Seneca College, in Toronto, where students are instructed on how to work on Firefox extensions as part of their basic instruction in coding and where collaboration is taken very seriously. In short, it means involving students and professors in Foss projects as a means of teaching collaboration and code. The satisfaction to be gained by this is immense, or so I believe, as students will learn not only how to code better but how to work with others in more or less real-world environments. They will not be abandoning the perimeters of the classroom; not at all. They will rather be including, in certain cases, the dynamic of Foss participation.

An example could be writing papers and giving presentations in the humanities. At one point, it used to be thought that the student's presentations--at whatever level--were essentially empty exercises and not at all related to professionalizing the student. That is, what the student learned could be thought of as being useful, but more in the abstract sense of becoming a better citizen and abler at presenting his views. The idea that a presentation given in a classroom could actually be a means of professionalizing the student and making her abler to get a job, say, or otherwise perform in real world situations, has only in the last generation become more present. When I was in graduate school, it simply wasn't clear, for instance, that my presentations were actually a kind of practice, or could be thought of as such, nor that I should be thinking about presenting at real conferences. All that was over the horizon.

But had it been on the horizon.... well, I would have been far better prepared, and I would have had a far better understanding of the process. Would I have lost out on the liberal luxury of learning at my leisure anything I chose? I don't think so. One learns best discursively, by talking and thinking about something with others, by engaging in dialogues and by taking what one thinks seriously. I think I would rather have been more serious about learning in general.

And I think that including Foss in classrooms will have a similar effect of encouraging students to take what they are learning seriously--not as empty exercises in abstract learning but as something that has real effect, both for them and for the world.

Bengaluru and foss.in and airplane movies

Tomorrow is party time! Well, at least its OOo Project Day time, at foss.in. I've posted the presentations and urge everyone to attend who can--the talks, workshops promise to be immensely interesting. If you cannot attend--and despite India's valiant efforts to change this, the majority of people won't be able to, I recommend my colleague's Frank Peters and Jürgen Schmidt's presentations; mine can be ignored, though it does tell newbies how and gives incredibly useful links...

Sankarshan's is special (I can't speak to the others unsent because I have not seen them.) I met Sankarshan several years ago, at LinuxAsia, in Delhi, when I was developing the idea of regional mentors and thought that he should be one; I still do. But he especially impressed me and many others at LinuxAsia with a brilliant presentation on community management issues. In his talk, he detailed the problems that befall a real project in India: the attrition of members, the problem of keeping things going, communication; and also the successes: foss matters not just for computer savvy elites (those who actually attend our talks) but for farmers and others who are taking to computerized systems in order not just to compete but to survive in this neoliberal world. And foss, with its emphasis on the commons (is that a universal concept in agriculture?) works best. Or would one rather the Monsanto model, locking users into proprietary dependencies for that which they need?

So I'm looking forward to Sankarshan's talk, and the others, and trying my best to fully understand Jürgen's,for what he lays out is both important for new developers (and old) and also stimulating. I'd like, in fact, to video Jürgen's presentation and make it wide available, if he's in agreement, as we need such material for all.

As to Bengaluru: I arrived late last night (early today), around 02:30 and slept about three hours. The flight was long--about 20 hours, altogether, though pleasant, however much I didn't sleep. I spent the time working, but.... At some point I ran out of battery power and tried changing batteries but was foiled by a jammed battery and so watched the latest Bourne movie (not as good as prior [or as Die Hard or Live Free] but has tidbits of political relevance, with episodes damning waterboarding, Bush's totalitarian ambitions, and so on) and part of Ratatouille, which is decidedly not as entertaining (or at least not in the same way) as Flushed Away, and for interesting reasons.

Briefly (and how can I speak of Bengaluru when I have only ventured out for a short walk today and am ensconced in a colonial palace with the reminders of colonial past, its dream, nightmare, memory all around? A lovely hotel, a whiplash of history), Rat foregrounds the commitment of identity cartoons assume and put under erasure. For that reason, it's very smart. Oh, it's also smart because Pixar has gone beyond technology here: we no longer watch the film as geeks marvelling at what computers can do but at what artists can imagine. So, just as Disney at their prime pictured the imagined forest of Bambi or Snow White lushly, as if every leaf was the adamic first and not something already seen, a meaningless brusstroke subtended to the action before us, so to does Rat picture the world: it's glorious to gaze upon, it's a world of sense not simply sound and fury.

And the rats are rats. I heard an interview with the director and one of his concerns was to represent rats as rats, not humans more or less rat looking. He succeeded. (Once, as a student, I unrolled my futon late at night and a little family of roof rats panicked out, fleeing for the window; I fled down the stairs. But this little family looked just like those pictured in the film.) And that's where the movie was interesting. For in foregrounding the ratness of the rat, its correspondingly difficult to take the same naive pleasure that one takes in Flushed, which is really about humans dislocated to an exotic but all the same familiar environment. There is no real ratness, no perceptual snag to arrest the grace of mimetic transfer. But there is in Rat: one is reminded of the rat and of ratness. Of course this is the point of the film, and when the airplane landed, that point was being explicitly enunciated. But that point alters the equation of entertainment (mimetic transfer) to a more Brechtian position, and for a cartoon of this nature, that's quite interesting.