Lots of fraud allegations going around. I’m no Persia expert, but it seems that there is enough conservative, religious fundamentalist support (particularly in rural areas) to conclude that Ahmadinejad probably won, but these protests highlight a vexing governance problem. What to you do when a majority in a country support illiberal regimes and policies? Should the public be able to vote to curtail fundamental freedoms (speech, worship, assembly, etc.)? In our country, we say no. It’s hard to see these young people in the streets and not feel for their struggle.
Draw your own conclusions. Of academic interest to me is how long will it be before an “Obama’s depression” narrative begins to stick. The stabilizing of the stock market and the improved health of the banking sector has allowed him to control the framing of the economy as “on the way up” despite grim unemployment numbers.
The president has to be one of the most photographed in history. A look at his active Flickr stream will provide testimony to his ubiquitousness. This is a deliberate strategy by the white house to control message (and put the paparazzi out of business…two birds with one stone!)
But the downside of this visual feast of White House images is that your chin is exposed. Take this image of the president talking with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu:
Innocuous looking? It has apparently created a stir in Israel, presumably because showing the soles of your shoes in seen as an insult in the Arab world (i.e. the secret Muslim is thumbing his nose at Israel)!
Is this just acceptable collateral damage from an administration that bathes us in images? Or is this a signal that the administration needs to be more cautious about the POTUS’ presentation of self?
With apologies to REM and to Bill Paxson in Aliens “It’s all over man!” No more stodgy tweed-jacket with the patches lectures! It’s gonna be quick jump-cuts and machine gun guitar solos! Whoooo! Don Tapscott says so:
The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.
I take a backseat to no-one in my pedagogical “web utopianism.” Just in the past year I’ve used blogs, wikis, twitter, diigo, ning, slide rocket, netvibes, and any other Web 2.0 tool I don’t have to pay for. All this in the service of the “engaged classroom.” And when it’s good, it’s good. Students take control of their learning and blow me away with what they produce. But when it’s bad…look out!
But to me the more vexing question is whether we’re losing something profound when we lose an appreciation for the art of the lecture. I had a class this past semester where students had to sit through a lecture beforehand and to a person they came in jokingly desiring to “kill themselves” after having to sit through such drudgery. The faculty, on the other hand, loved it.
Throughout my life, I’ve gotten a lot out of lectures. I subscribe to a number of lecture based podcasts including UChannel and Big Ideas. To me, there is no substitute for someone who has mastered their subject area and can walk you through a topic in 60 or so minutes.
In all of our haste to embrace the learning styles of “digital natives,” we’ve haven’t adequately stopped to reflect upon what doing so means to education in general. For me, I’ve spend a lot of time emphasizing engagement…. but I don’t want to lose the challenge.
Bummer chart of the day….unless you’re in the military, or a devoted misanthrope. new data from the 2008 General Social Survey shows declining levels of trust for every institution in the United States except for the military and education.
What accounts for this mass scale institutional distrust? I think Robert Putnam has a book that talks about this stuff 🙂 One way of looking at all this is to weep for civil society and make the Putnam argument that this is evidence of a decline in social capital. If we all had each other over for dinner, we’d trust each other more and thus trust the public institutions in which we all have a stake.
I think there’s a lot to this, but I’d offer we also this of this cynicism as increased expectations. As society has become more inured to mass marketing appeals, we’ve become more desirous of more transparency and more effectiveness from our institutions. This increased demand that our institutions produce more can be damaging int that they may not be designed to produce at a high level (I’m looking at you California government). But they can also be the result of a sense of greater agency and efficacy amongst the public in general.
We’ve become a high standards people. That can redound to our benefit if people back up their high expectations with a sense of engagement. I fear that our “high expectations” culture is devolving into a flabby grousing about corrupt politicians without any real intention of addressing the problem.
It could likely be the “big sort” in play….(i.e. people who are more tolerant of gays and lesbians are more likely to live in urban/metro areas so their tolerance has little to do with knowing gays and lesbians). It would be interesting to unpack this one someday 🙂
After being on the road for a week, I finally had the chance to catch up on news and such, including the US Supreme Court appointment controversy of Sonia Sotomayor. The Meet the Press {NBC} soundbite that caused the maelstrom was this Sotomayor quote from 8 years ago::
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
David Gregory, host of Meet the Press, opted to provide a little more context this week, but he still failed to provide the widest context for her 2001 remarks. MediaMatters highlighted the parts Gregory omitted in bold::
“Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
[…]
Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”
Gregory added more context, but his spin still doesn’t give the full picture. I “get it” why Gregory chose to focus on the text he did, as it was controversial and generated buzz. {Don’t get me started on press coverage of the BC election, particularly the supposed “beer tax” [non-]issue.} I grow tired of journalists or this new breed of quasi-journalist, the commentator {read:: infotainment}, engage in ratings-grabbing soundbitery from both ends of the ideological spectrum.
I feel that Barack himself has thwarted to a certain extent being “soundbit” into a pigeonhole.
Is this because of a specific relationship that has evolved with the media -or- is this particular to his rhetorical skills that embrace complexity?
In contrast, the US has had 16 years of “bubbas” who made it a point to boil things down to a lowest-common-denominator vernacular. In other Sotomayor news, I saw this sociogram {below} of her present and past relationships. I haven’t verified this mapping, but I wonder if the Senate Republicans will try to go after her in the confirmation hearings based upon this type of “evidence,” which can always be used to trip people up. Given that Republicans are already backing off on the racism angle, I’m wondering how much of this racism angle will even be used. Why bother, when you can frame her as “dumb”?
Sotomayor sociogram on Muckety.com
Twitterversion:: Sotomayor soundbite framed as racism-wider context less damning. More journalism fail? Obama defies soundbites-why? WWSD? Whatwillsenatedo?
Apologies for the unannounced two week break. Had to do it!
Guess what? Americans are really into TV.
At least according to a new Nielsen survey on television viewing habits.
What’s interesting to me is the increase in the number of people viewing TV via a Digital Video Recording (DVR) device (my preferred viewing option). 80 million people use these devices to watch programs, a 37% increase from the previous year. Personally, I think the DVR is rewiring my brain. I mostly watch sports and documentaries on TV. Instead of tolerating the lulls in a sporting event (i.e. the 46 minutes of a basketball game you need to sit through to get to the final two minutes), I can zip through to the “good stuff.” I watched this past year’s SuperBowl on my DVR with my trusty “30 second skip” button. I didn’t have to sit through one huddle! Soccer? Fast forward until the ball is in the opponent’s attacking half. I call this the squirrel approach to media consumption where we furiously crack open and discard the shell to get to the nut.
What effect must this be having on our students? Why should they read original sources? Imagine Habermas with a 30 second skip! I had a fascinating conversations with my students who were upset that I had them read something “boring.” Their general point was that the author never got to the point. They wanted to know what was relevant from the passage so they could move on to the next nut… pursuit.
I wonder how much of this is affecting academia? Are we divorced from these larger social trends? Or are we reading more and more to “pull out the nut” rather than to be taken in new, unexpected directions from a provocative argument?
I remember how my parents said that RFK was accused of being a carpetbagger, coming to New York to become a US Senator in 1964. Now that Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, finds his Conservative Party down in the polls by 5% {35-30%}, attack ads are being run tantamount to accusing the Liberal Party leader, Michael Ignatieff, of being a Canadian “outsider.” The ads accuse Ignatieff of coming back to Canada after being gone for 34 years::
The Conservatives are really slipping in the polls in Québec, so you think they would come up with a more engaging attack ad than this one in French.
This one paints Ignatieff as a carpetbagging opportunist, living in the UK and referring to himself as American::
The Liberals may be further undermined by attacks from the Bloc Québécois in Québec, which has 24% of the population in Canada. Support for the Bloc is upwards of 40% in Québec, while Liberal support in the province is around 35%.
I find the anglophone ads to be rather effective at conveying the frame of Ignatieff as a elitist outsider. I agree with the pundits that Harper is fighting for his political life and managed to get into a feud with Brian Mulroney, a conservative blast from the past. Conservatism seems to be lacking cohesiveness on both sides of 49ºN.
Twitterversion:: Harper {Tories} attcks Ignatieff {Grits} on nationalism frame. H. fighting 4 political life, Grits gaining. Strange bedfellows in store?
