The Dark Side of the Digital: Faculty Speak Out Against Technology at a Conference at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee!

Dear Commons Community,

This past weekend, faculty and scholars struck back at the unbridled enthusiasm for technology that is intruding many aspects of our personal and professional lives. As reported in The Chronicle of Education:     

“Companies, colleges, and columnists gush about the utopian possibilities of technology. But digital life has a bleaker side, too. Over the weekend, a cross-disciplinary group of scholars convened here to focus attention on the lesser-noticed consequences of innovation.

Surveillance. Racism. Drones. Those were some of the issues discussed at the conference, which was called “The Dark Side of the Digital” and hosted by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies. (One speaker even flew a small drone as a visual aid; it hit the classroom ceiling and crashed.)

After a week of faculty backlash against online education, including the refusal of San Jose State University professors to teach a Harvard philosophy course offered via edX, the down sides of digital learning emerged as a hot topic, too.

In a talk dubbed “Courseware.com,” Rita Raley, an associate professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, described how societal and technological changes had “reconditioned the idea of the university into that of an educational enterprise that delivers content through big platforms on demand.”

On MOOCs:

“The conference’s organizer, Richard Grusin, a scholar of new media, worried about the potentially “dire” consequences of massive open online courses, known as MOOCs.

Education, Mr. Grusin said in an interview, is about teaching people how to think, how to question, how to sit in a room with someone and express a different opinion. Equating it with simple content delivery “denudes” what it means to teach and learn, in his view.

What’s more, when colleges start to award credit for MOOCs serving thousands of students, the result could be a reduction in the need for faculty members to teach those courses, said Mr. Grusin, a professor of English at UW-Milwaukee with a history of tech experimentation. Much of that reduction, he added, would hit teaching assistants. Rather than teaching their own sections or classes, they may find themselves managing online discussions.

Online courseware could create inequalities among colleges, Mr. Grusin added, as he and other professors discussed Ms. Raley’s talk over lunch. “Power gets aggregated by elite universities,” he argued. “Because it’s not San Jose State professors or UW-Milwaukee professors sending their lectures to Harvard students. It’s Harvard professors sending their lectures here. And so, not only is there already a built-in inequality, but this technology is going to enable that to be multiplied and leveraged, to even create a further inequality.”

It seems we here at CUNY should consider such a conference or at least raise these issues in an appropriate forum.

Tony

Ray Harryhausen, Special Effects Genius, Dies at 92!

Ray Harryhausen

Dear Commons Community,

Ray Harryhausen, a cinema special effects genius died yesterday at the age of 92.  As a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, his movies were “must see” entertainment for my generation. At the time time I no idea  who he was but as a long-time devotee of Turner Classic Movies  (TCM) I came to learn of Mr. Harryhausen as the man behind many of the great movies of my childhood.  In his obituary, the New York Times mentions:

“Often working alone or with a small crew, Mr. Harryhausen created and photographed many of the most memorable fantasy-adventure sequences in movie history: the atomically awakened dinosaur that lays waste to Coney Island in “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms”; the sword fight between Greek heroes and skeleton warriors in “Jason and the Argonauts”; the swooping pterodactyl that carries off Raquel Welch in “One Million Years B.C.

Though his on-screen credit was often simply “technical effects” or “special visual effects,” Mr. Harryhausen usually played a principal creative role in the films featuring his work. He frequently proposed the initial concept, scouted the locations and shaped the story, script, art direction and design around his ideas for fresh ways to amaze an audience.

Mr. Harryhausen made use of many different photographic effects and often combined several in the same film. But he was best known for stop-motion animation, a painstaking process using three-dimensional miniature models that are photographed one frame at a time, with tiny, progressive adjustments made by hand to the models between frames to produce the illusion of movement….

The effects he achieved inspired the generation of filmmakers who produced the digital-effects-laden blockbuster films of the 1980s and beyond.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson all cite his films as crucial antecedents for their work, and modern animators often slip homages to him into their films.”

His innovations were honored in 1992 with a career Academy Award for technical achievement. At the Oscar ceremony, Tom Hanks told the audience that he thought the greatest movie of all time was not “Citizen Kane” or “Casablanca” but Harryhausen’s “Jason and the Argonauts.”

Thank you Mr. Harryhausen for the hours of great entertainment you gave us!

Tony