Sworn In

This past Sunday I was sworn in as as divisional staff officer for the USCG Auxilliary. With that I'm also now a flotilla staff officer and a detachment commander. I find this all a bit too much for me to handle sometimes. I'm about the least military person you can imagine and now I'm running around in a uniform that makes me look like a Lt.(jg) and people call me sir with a straight face. How did this happen?

I'm not too sure. I feel a bit like a drag queen sometimes when I put on the uniform, and my kids do laugh at me (which is good). Nevertheless I feel like I'm doing some good, I'm getting trained to do rescue work (playing with a helicopter was fun, BTW), am developing more proficiency with boats and I do feel like I've lifted a big burden of guilt from my shoulders. I still remember coming out of the subway on my way to the World Trade Center Krispy Kreme and thinking quite clearly that there was nothing I could do but go in the other direction. I've been feeling terrible about that useless realization ever since. Even with the training I still have a clear understanding that in a real emergency my primary contribution would be to walk away and not be another victim, but at least now I know I can do some good within some kind of structure at some point in a crisis. I also am getting far more comfortable on the water, which is a personal goal.

Why am I talking about this in the context of my dissertation? Well, in the context of the Coast Guard it seems that activity theory has a place. You learn to do things on the water and on land mostly through a social context. Our textbooks and training materials are not all that great, but the process of becoming crew or coxswain is one not of reading, but of being mentored and pulled along. With the auxilliary, where all is voluntary, this social aspect of learning is what makes it work. On a boat or in a flotilla you have a broad range of skill levels and expertise and you learn by sharing. It's really interesting to see how people with no boating skills become proficient and make crew by being crew. Quite encouraging.

As for me, you become an officer by taking on responsibility and putting on the uniform; the role comes before the knowledge or the expertise. Interesting.

A remarkable journey ends with dumping your dirty laundry on a table at Customs

Had the doctoral colloquium tonight. We now have a Plone site, so this might be obsolete or redundant, but we will see. It might not.

I've been thinking alot about Parmenides. Funny. I'm a technologist. Why do I always end up thinking about dead Greeks? I guess because I'm coming to the conclusion that the real problem with technology is the problem of ongoing change. Does change, or rather process, really come down to the idea that that is all there is? There are no fixed points, no "improvement" per se, but rather the simple fact that everything is different all the time and we have to find a way to make this process part of culture. We look for improvement, but what we really have to look for is culture over time.

Now I'm confused.

There is also some constancy as well, as the tension between progressive forces and traditional ones; between central control and local, those who value behaviour that conforms against those who respect the individual. There is change, but it can make sense because it happens in a context.

I better stop now.

No Difference

One of the problems with technology is that it is hard to prove that there are actual benefits to instruction, so I am making note of this website:

http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/

I actually think that part of the problem is that we don't really know what to look for or what to measure. I think that technology use does change education because it changes culture, but the problem is how to measure that? If you look at student outcomes using grades and the like or measure simple cognitive tasks or "understandings" then I would argue that a good teacher can use just about anything to do a good job of teaching. Good teaching is what good teachers do, just as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the law was what good judges do, not what prior principles happened to be. Teaching is a pragmatic activity that has a big toolbox available. It is the art not of what the tools are but how they are used.

But the tools can change culture. They are in fact a reification of culture, so that's what you measure or evaluate and look at for change. A different problem than "no significant difference" type studies can measure. George Gerbner is someone who used this approach for media studies, where again people claimed media use made no difference. So what do I look for?

Survey Tool

While I am not too crazy about doing a dissertation based on statistical analysis I probably will have to do surveys of some sort, so I'm making a note about this tool:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/home.asp

Survey Monkey might just do the trick for some things. I'll have to try it out.

Culture, History and All That

I've been very frustrated with most of my studies as the big argument in educational theories for the past century or so has pretty much boiled down to one between the Behaviourists and the Constructivists. Behaviorism had a great deal in common with the industrial theories of the early twentieth century, and as such was more interested in what people did and how well they did it than what they thought. Since we couldn't look into people's brains anyway and could only see how they behaved Behaviorism was a pretty powerful theory, and for technologists the ideas of people like B.F. Skinner were pretty compelling. Also most of us adhere not to scientific concepts of pedagogy, but rather a folk concept of it, which ends up being more about behaviour anyway. Look at all the nonsense with school uniforms and such. People want kids to "behave" more than they want them to learn and they understand instruments like tests more than they they can grasp ideas such as portfolios and authentic assessment methods. "Is the children learning?" Sure hope so.

Progressives were more focused on the progress of the individual, so whether we it's Montessori or Debbie Meier there is and has been a deep dissatisfaction with Behaviorism. The Constructivist approach is clearly more supportive, and with the innovations of Piaget, Chomsky and Gardner as well as the growth of cognitive science and the experimental concept that computers can model human thinking we've seen Constructivism come to the fore over the years. It works as a theory and, if you are into technology it actually allows for some pretty cool stuff. So it works on many levels. The problem of course is that folk pedagogy, politics and Mayor Bloomberg don't need a stinking theory of the mind. They need statistics. They DEMAND statistics. They love tests. And then there is the practical concern that Constructivism is about the individual and classrooms, work environments and the body politic are about groups. We need a bridge of some sort.

Activity Theory might be, for me at least, the answer, or at least the bridge. It certainly provides an alternative to the binary B vs. C argument that the B side seems to be winning. And any theory that can pull together Marx, Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Dewey has to have something going for it. Also, it looks like it is amenable to the kind of historical and ethnographic work I'd like to do. So here we go...

Working

Part of the problem is that you need time to formulate what you are doing, and I need the time just to think, but I'm getting there. Right now I want to figure out what kind of study I want to do. it's hard.

Reading now an interesting article researching the culture and training of US Navy quartermasters by Edwin Hutchins. He is primarilly concerned with how quartermasters learn navigation skills. This is something that I'm really interested in for a number of reasons. For one thing I not only sail, but I'm also learning Boat Crew for the US Coast Guard Auxilliary. Part of that requires that I develop the same competencies that Hutchins quartermasters have, albeit for much smaller vessels. In this context I'm fascinated by how people get assimilated to the Coast Guard. There is a culture there that embeds the skills. Part of becoming boat crew certified is just thinking of yourself as crew.

The other thing that is interesting is that this article predates the use of GPS devices. I think that the GPS does to charting and navigation pretty much what the digital video editing system did to film editing. It changes the task just about completely but it maintains the goals. What happens when the end is the same but the process different?

The article also makes me think I want to do a study that is not statistical but observational and more in an ethnographic vein than anything else. I don't want to survey 1000 people, but I do want to closely observe maybe 20 to see how they become film editors.

And I'm getting excited about something else. Do schools or formal training in the arts really do their job? That's a terrible question, but if you look at the films from 1920-1980 you see an art and "masterpieces" that were made without the film school. What do film schools, or for that matter conservatories, do for art? What do they impart? How can they be improved?

Back off the tracks again. Too many questions...

A Question, Continued

This development of a question is really tough. It looks like many people fall in love with theory or find some grand idea to fall into, and of course I'm no different. It's amazing how seductive the word "Wittgenstein" can be to just about anybody. Do all doctoral students fall into some "Grand Theory of Everything" trap? Do we all have the answers before we have the answers? It sure looks that way.

A question seems to me to be the primary building block of the dissertation. In nautical terms you could call it the keel. The "ship" gets built around it. The question has to be capable of supporting a literature review, a methodology and an experiment of some sort. This seems to be pretty basic, and if you consider your subjects, the college bureaucracy, your committee and your advisor as the seas, the wind and the current then the question is the keel and the lit review, methodology and experiment are the timbers, deck and rigging. They all have to fit together and they have to be capable of taking some pretty tough abuse, but one has to keep in mind the question is the basis of the whole thing.

So, I'm interested in a number of things that can become a question. One, how the introduction of new digital methods impacts on the craft of film editing. That's a question right there, but is it enough? And is it too broad? Then there is another, related question: how do you become a film editor? And, related to that, how do you support this in an educational setting?

So far, so good, but this has to be synthesized into something more. I'm also reminded of the Community Board meeting I just attended. Nobody seemed to be able to ask just ONE question. That might be a problem...

Answers are Easier than Questions

Yesterday I ended the entry by noting that it is easier to come up with a good answer than a good question, and the problem with that for me right now is that a dissertation is nothing more than a good question carried through to a conclusion. That is also, much to the frustration of the Creationists, the basis for science, which is why all the tortured attempts to push God into the science curriculum are doomed to intellectual failure. The basis for any good scientific idea is that it can be proved one way or another, not that it can be appealed to authority. Of course, cognitively most of us are Creationists. We want the answers, not inconvenient questions. If only God could do my doctorate for me...

Which gets me back to my problem. What is my question?

My question will have something to do with the practice of film editing. I see film editing as a social practice that has developed through history using technology. I'm also concerned that the introduction of digital technology was, to use the words of Stephen Jay Gould, something akin to punctuated equilibrium. It was highly disruptive and it severely disturbed the social structure of the editing process. The addition of data networks filled a somewhat suturing role, allowing the return of the assistant and the apprentice and adding potential for the inclusion of the sound editor, the special effects department and the musician. This idea of suture is pretty critical to me as it also brings into play the idea of social formation and education. How do you learn to be an editor? How do you become part of that community?

This also raises the question of what exactly is a film? I'd propose that it is the reification of the practice of filmmaking, where the editor plays a critical role.

More later.

Six Credits to Go and a Question

Well, here I am with a B.F.A. degree, an M.A. and an Ed.M and down to the last six credits of my long academic career. I am already paying back student loans and I'm not even started with the dissertation or the certification process. I am doing this all rather bass ackwards.

When I started this not-so-brilliant process in 1978 I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker, study with D.A. Pennebaker and work for CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. Well, that worked out! Pennebaker either quit or was fired before I could study with him, and then I took this long detour into academia and never made it to CBS, but I got the B.F.A. I found that I was a good administrator and that I was pretty happy doing that. Then, around 1994 or so, I decided to go back to school to learn about computers when it became clear to me that digital technology was becoming critical to filmmaking and got an M.A. at Teachers College in 1997, but then I lost my job when there was some academic cost cutting during the dire Moses years at CCNY. Still, the M.A. gave me the credentials to go to another school and I did manage to be one of the first people in the world to introduce digital non-linear post-production to an educational environement, including even digital ADR and sound effects editing. This experience and knowledge allowed me to build what is still the only networked digital non-linear post facility for education in the region, which says less about me than it does about the other schools that aren't doing it. And here is some video of me talking about it. I returned to school (the first day of classes was 9/11/2001, which is another story) to pursue the idea that somehow the combination of networks, or rather Metcalfe's Law, added something dramatically different to the ongoing increases in speed that we see with Moore's Law. Now, with the Ed.M. behind me it is time to attack this problem more systemically and come up with that bane of doctoral students: a question.

A question? It's actually much easier to come up with the answers first, isn't it?