It's a Panopticon!

The title of this entry doesn't have much to do with what I'm going to say, but it is a fun phrase.

As fun as that phrase is, though, I hadn't thought of it in terms of education until just now.

Elizabeth and Ti both mention Bentham's hope that his design for the Panoptic prison/ work/ schoolhouse would be just as good for pedagogical training as for punishment (D&P 206), something that many of us fear about all the Panoptic institutions we can identify in modern life. Granted, part of the trouble in modern life is that everything seems to be a... hold on, have to turn off something.

XBOX SEES ALL

Everything in modern life seems to at least be part of a Panoptic system. I themed a 101 class on Privacy issues last Spring. It was pretty awesome until the second week, when we started talking about all the little ways we are watched and discussed how that watching can change our actions. Then, I hit the wrong button on a classroom computer and turned on the room camera. None of us had noticed the camera before, and that changed the mood of the class until they forgot about it a few weeks later.

I'm coming back to that. Or, I intend to. The fine folks at Vick's might have other plans.

You're welcome for the ad campaign.

Richard Ohmann's "Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital" (College English 47:7) raises the ire of Adam Sprague (note also Jacob's concerns in response to Elizabeth's blog post), and I agree with the primary concerns: in 101, we are expected to teach writing. The expectation might not be from the English department, but (and here's where Foucault re-enters the picture) other departments do expect us to teach the orderly arrangement of words to elicit a planned response. And, thankfully, that's what English scholars study. (Current arrangement of words notwithstanding.)

But, I come back to that camera accidentally turned on last Spring. I come back to the time-stamp on this blog post, woefully behind schedule. And, perhaps most importantly, I come to the greatest advancement and curse that computer technology has brought to writing instruction. Everything is open for viewing and held up to the light (D&P 200-202), possibly carefully scrutinized at any moment.

Supposedly, student texts make for great readings and course material in a writing classroom (Joe Harris' A Teaching Subject, 1996, makes some good recommendations if you're into that sort of thing). However, as Alfie Kohn has noted, the cooperative, collaborative document construction that these tools allow is rarely the product in the classroom. Instead, borne partly out of our testing culture, the final products are always individual. Like Bentham's factory manager or prison warden (because, really, they're all the same job, amirite?), the teacher is ultimately concerned with how well the individual performs on the given task. I'd love to do collaborative portfolios (if only for the reduction in grading), but as a link in this Panoptic chain, the slight chance of upper administration finding out is enough to scare me away from trying the idea out.

The worst part is, I don't even know if there's a rule against it. I just know a collaborative course project worth at least 50% of the final grade is deviant enough from the norm that I don't want to risk it.

Nope. Thoughts aren't quite organized yet.

The far-too-centralized power in any Foucauldian apparatus always relies on the belief that objectivity is possible. That one could look out through the central tower of the Panopticon, observe an individual in one of the outer cells, and know all relevant information (indeed, all information) based solely on behaviors or other external signals. For me, a major hurdle in teaching any sort of ultramedia is breaking with the old notion that group work is somehow practice for the "real" assessment down the road. The rationale for any media alternative to the traditional essay format is always that the job world expects proficiency in so many other modes. But, appealing to the grown-up world of jobs and business necessarily raises the point that Bentham's isolation chambers are not the norm. Group work is hard to teach, but if we're going to teach alternative media and the rhetorical awareness necessary to use it, then we're also going to have to take our hands off the wheel and let the inmates students spread their contagion ideas much more fluidly.

Yeah. That looks better.