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Today I spent the day at an Innovative Learning Environments conference in Hilliard, Ohio (just outside of Columbus).  In the first session I attended, there was talk of 21^st century skills, not a new discussion, but it made me want to articulate what I think is important to understand right now regarding technology in education.  In the session, the theme seemed to be focused on how to use technology to get at the content standards as well as the new “21^st century skills” like communication and collaboration.  This was from a group of “integration coaches for 21^st century skills” in a nearby school district whose primary role was to encourage teachers to use 21^st century skills (which apparently are best learned via technology?).  Although, I do think that there are skills that students need and that technology affords an avenue to many of those skills, what I think is most important is that the availability of new technology (alongside our current economic, political, and cultural situation) is changing the way people function, but more than that it changes our ways of being, of seeing ourselves, of understanding our place in the world.  This opinion that I have is due to my work and thinking about blogs and bloggers, but I think it goes beyond that.  When teachers ask, or provide the conditions for students to communicate or collaborate in conjunction with a technology, and if this is done well, skills are built; that is true.  But, what I’m most concerned about, or what matters most to me, is how putting ourselves online, how collaborating with these tools is changing our being in the world.  Our bodies are extended in new ways.  We are all presenting ourselves to the world in new ways.  In this process, mediated by a little box and a screen, there is an opportunity to rethink that being.  But, this is not the agenda for schools, who are primarily concerned with content learned or with producing skilled citizens that can contribute to our economy… future workers rather than future human beings.

It might help if I use my blog as an example.  As I write and record my daily activity, thoughts, musings, etc., as I select images, respond to comments, and write (or rewrite) my about page, I am, via an internet-connected machine, putting myself, my being out to the world in a way that I would not without that internet-connected machine.  I’m making decisions about how to put myself out there, reflecting (though also forgetting to reflect) on what these sorts of things mean and say about my being.  Even now, as I type this paragraph, I am carefully choosing my words and wondering (worrying) that I might now know exactly where I’m going with this blog post, this post, which will be archived in perpetuity.  This doesn’t happen in the physical world.  I might get into a conversation with someone, but my words are directed only at that person and they disappear into the ether.  In addition, her words back to me are also gone, stored perhaps in my memory, but mostly kept between the two of us, likely to be forgotten.  My thoughts here on this blog post are different, in the mediation, the typing, the editing available, the ability to add images, video, links, etc. and then in the ability to put it on the web, potentially accessible to people around the world.  This not only expands the meaning of communication, but it changes my role in the process.  I’m more apt to think carefully about what I put on a blog than what I spout to a friend or colleague.  And what I hope is that as I think carefully, that I’m more likely to think, who am I?  What is what I am putting “out there” saying about who I am and my place in the world?  Often, I think about this in terms of gender, wondering if I am reinscribing traditional gender norms or if I, or others, are somehow rethinking those norms and creating new spaces for a of rethinking gender and personhood.  Although I think that this rethinking of who I am, or my subjectivity, could also have to do with race, class, a sense of agency, power, etc.  As I put myself online, as my body merges with hardware to extend and function differently, how am I sure to use this opportunity to better understand myself, my role in the world, the world and a possibility for being otherwise?  Therefore, as we put students online to learn by communicating and collaborating, we should not ignore or forget that in this activity, there is an opportunity for students to understand themselves and the world.  There is an opportunity to think otherwise.  And, if we are so focused on content and skills, we forget that as our students create a profile that tells the world that their favorite television show is the Bachelorette or that a sexualized image of themselves is a representation that “who they are,” that they are telling the world and themselves about being.  If we teach students to pay attention to what they want to tell the world, perhaps they might wonder as they type… why is my favorite show the Bachelorette?  Why am I choosing this image?  Is this how I want to be perceived?  Is this who I am?  Am I who I am because of what has surrounded me, almost on accident?  What else might I be interested in?  Who else might I want to be?

So, I guess my point is that students and internet-connected computers working collaboratively, is changing communication and ways to learn, but more importantly it is changing what it means to be a person.  Students and teachers need to pay just as much attention to that (if not more) as to the content or skills that they might be learning.  This mediated self is an opportunity to rethink personhood and that’s a big deal.

Wow, these past three days have been a whirlwind.  ICQI is a conference I will attend again (and again and again, I hope).  It’s good like Bergamo.  My summary of this conference: think, care, and be open.

I began with a pre-conference workshop with Laurel Richardson, a professor emeritus at Ohio State, who travels often and whom I have never met.  You wouldn’t believe the amount of times throughout the conference that she was cited by other presenters.  She’s a famous lady, someone I look up to, and it was great to get three dedicated hours with her guiding an interesting writing/sharing activity.  My last three posts were the result of the workshop.  I blogged them as I wrote them and what I found funny was that she specifically mentioned the joy of writing on paper with a pen (not me) and writing just for yourself (not me either).  Still, I find blogging something that I am able to do and enjoy more than any sort of diary that I began and then never followed through with.  There was a moment in the workshop, just before the first writing time, where she asked us to close our eyes and be with ourselves for a moment, to reflect over our lives and to see if a period of five years stood out for us.  I had already decided that I would write about my five years teaching, but what was most vivid about this activity was that I had been watching her intently, so when I closed my eyes, her image was there under my eyelids as though I had been looking at the sun.

That evening, Dan went with me to the opening keynotes.  Another well-known woman from Ohio State was speaking, Cynthia Dillard.  She told the story of her work in Africa, a place that had shaped her identity as an African American woman.  What she didn’t expect was for an elder African woman to stare at her and ask, “What is she?  Is she white?”  It was something that troubled her deeply and that made her think about the identities that we form and how they are not truths, but memories situated in different times and spaces.

Dan and I got dinner, went back to the hotel, got some ice cream, and I browsed through the program to decide on sessions the next day.  I noticed a session on blogging, but it was slotted for the same time as my poster presentations.  This was not good.  I considered leaving my posters for a bit…

The next morning, I attended a session with my advisor, Patti Lather, and her former student (whose dissertation Patti has told me to read), Bettie St. Pierre.  They were members in the audience with me, at a session on using poststructuralism in research.  I walked into the session and Patti greeted me with, “Did you see the session on blogging?”  I told her it was at the same time as my poster presentations and she said, “Oh, just leave a sign that says, ‘Email me if you have questions!  Love, Lauren.’”  Haha.  She cracks me up.  And I was glad she gave me permission to do that.  It was amazing to me how even though Patti was not presenting, she clearly owned the room.  She “mmmed” audibly when she agreed, vigorously nodding her head.  Three of the four presenters cited her work while eyeing her with nervousness (?).  At the end of the sessions she conducted the Q&A admitting to having given up on reading an often-cited author and asking for strategies to begin to read him (Bryan Massumi, she also leaned back at the end and told me to add him to my list).  Bettie talked about being bored with representation and Patti interjected wondering what else there is besides representation.  Bettie: There must be something else we can do.  Can we talk about the issue rather than representing?  I’m bored with the stories.  Patti: Is there anything else?  What else would it be but representation by another name?  I’m paraphrasing, but it was a glorious moment for me.  Two women I look up to hashing it out right before my eyes.  They both don’t have it all figured out and they both are still seeking.  Of course, they carry the weight of their impressive publications, which precedes their ability to have this exchange.  Still, awesome.

I also had a minor epiphany at this same session.  This is why I have been having such a hard time writing this journal article on my blog study.  It’s because I don’t want to do straightforward coding and storytelling type of research.  I want it to be something else.  I don’t want to represent my participants in a certain way, but it’s difficult to think of doing this any other way, so I wrote and wrote and wrote until I had 50 pages of something that I wasn’t that interested in.  The next session (well, I jumped between two) I went to was on more traditional types of qualitative research and I realized that the more traditional types of qualitative research (even the kinds that are more reflexive) rely on certain categories and assume that there is such a thing as a bounded body, a subject, an object, a truth.  In order to do work like that, you have to assume these things, otherwise you spend lots of time (like poststructuralists do) pointing out that these things are fictions and how these things are and become fictions.  Though this can be tedious work, it doesn’t seem just to ignore the taken-for-granteds of research.  How can you say, for example, that the blogger is just an individual who writes her life story, with intention, with agency, of her own accord and then theorize from there?  The blogger is part of a network of human and nonhuman actors, she is not an individual acting freely in a world to be acted upon.  So, in that case, can I interview?  Is there a point?  What does my collecting of data say about the phenomenon of the blogger?  It can never tell the full truth and will always tell partial fictions.  So, where can I even begin?  These are the fun questions, the important questions that must precede any research (in my opinion), but are seen by the dominant research culture as self-indulgent and unproductive.  Alright then.

I took a break during the next session and sprawled out in the grass on the quad, under the shade of a nearby tree.  It was blisteringly hot in the sun, but in the shade it was lovely and warm and the cool grass felt good against my bare feet.  I decided to write in my journal an idea that I had during that first session.  I wrote a story of what it feels like to do “fieldwork” without presence in a no-place without time… a blog.  When a researcher goes to Africa to do fieldwork, she describes everything, the smells, the sounds, the feeling of the breeze against her skin, the side glances of strangers.  And then there’s me, “entering” a blog with only my sense of sight.  The experience is very different, less sensual, less exciting, but still, it’s a place that I “go,” that I seek to understand.  So, what does a description feel like without four of the five the senses?  I tried it out, and I like what happened.  Maybe I’ll share later (if you care… if you are still reading).

The last session of the day was on the use of QDAS (Qualitative Data Analysis Software), which I teach to graduate students in my little lab every Fall and Winter.  What I mostly took away from the session, were some new tools to share with my class on my course blog.  Woot.

And on a foodie side note, we went to this awesome place called Zyggyz for dinner and I had the craziest, most delicious Indian burrito (made with paratha instead of a tortilla) filled with curry seasoned potatoes and onions.  It was delicious.

Today was the last day of the conference.  I started with a session by more Ohio State students I hadn’t met.  They are all Art Education students and their research was so interesting and full of… art.  It made me kind of jealous.  One lady sang, another created Lolita images with pieces of the book and drawings of her own.  The one I thought was the most interesting though was a girl who talked about anorexia and had her and her participants look at images of anorexia by an artist and then discuss their thoughts of the images.  She told a really powerful story of her own battle with the disease.  This is qualitative research, baby.

Then, I went to a session on Facebook (well not on Facebook, but about Facebook) and the session on blogging.  I was underwhelmed for the most part, but I did meet two other women studying blogging and they gave me their cards.  And, one of them told me about another woman’s dissertation on female doctoral student blogs.  Sound familiar?  I’m sure that will be an interesting read for me.

And the last session of the day, just before Dan and I busted a move to Zyggyz for some carryout before hitting the road, was a session led by Patti that included Bettie!  It was on POST qualitative research.  So, what now, now that it has been “established” (though still ignored by Those Who Give Grants), how do we unsediment, keep it messy and delight in what Patti calls “stuck places?”  It was the greatest session.  For some reason, the organizers decided to stick it in a classroom with 20 desks.  About 75 people squashed in the space, filling the desks, lining the walls and sitting on the floor.  Yeah, that’s my advisor.

Fully of Ziggyz and on the way home now, somewhere in Indiana, my mind is all abuzz with thoughts of how to do this research differently.  And, I love it.

Yesterday, I went to the Digital Media in a Social World conference on OSU’s campus.  It was a good conference.  I was a little nervous for my presentation.  Only four people came and one was a friend, so that ended up being good.  It turned into an interesting discussion and I’m glad I did it.  The conference wasn’t my favorite one ever (too many vendor presentations), but it was decent.

Flash forward to today, I’m actually in Oxford right now at the grad student conference.  There wasn’t anything I really wanted to see during this session, so I decided that I would take a break.  The past few days I’ve been on academic overload and I think I can stand to miss one little session.

*Warning, feeling nostalgic, but may change my mind tomorrow.*

I drove into Oxford this morning and it felt so strange.  I haven’t been here for about three years and every time I come to visit, I feel like I am communing with the 19-year-old-Laurie that was here as a happy-go-lucky undergrad.  It’s strange that a place can make you feel an old part of yourself.  When I got to campus, I parked on a side street, walked past the houses, almost forgetting the tradition of naming houses and posting a sign (the one I can remember from this morning was Morning Wood.  Nice.).  I walked into McGuffey, that houses the school of education, for the first time since I graduated and my mind was sort of blown.  When I was here, McGuffey was the crustiest building on campus and since then, they have completely remodeled and it is actually very nice.  Not as nice as the business school, but still, I was impressed!

The conference is full of interesting people that care about social justice and like Bergamo, I will be back.  This is my kind of conference.  And, it helps immensely that it’s a grad student conference.  I felt much more at ease.  My presentation was the first session and it went pretty well.  I talked too fast, but I was trying to cram a 45 minute presentation into 20 minutes.  Ah well.  I got some good feedback and made at least one contact.

After lunch, I was spent and decided to walk around campus for awhile and take the aforementioned break.  I headed uptown and walked past the Fiji house, St. Mary’s, Dubois’, Follett’s, the old First Run, the old Attractions, the Princess theatre.  Every spot had memories associated with it and I started to feel kind of emotional.  Things seemed simpler then.  And more fun.  Since it’s Saturday afternoon, the town is pretty quiet.  I saw a few students walking their parents around uptown.  A few alum back with strollers and babies.  I decided to take slant walk down to King Library to relax and write my blog.  The town feels so peaceful next to the big city madness of Columbus, with its city buses, busy streets, and the necessity for the constant surveillance of your surroundings.  Here, it was so easy to cross the street, that it was kind of surprising.  It made me wish that I was here again for graduate school.  I feel like I could think better in the peace of it all, in the tiny town in the middle of cornfields.  Maybe someday I’ll be back again as a professor.  Right now, that sounds grand.