Saturday 6 June 2009


H800 Week 17 Activity 1a



Week 17 1a video

We look at this video

This is a video with which I am very familiar, I used it as a student on E891 (educational research) to challenge the consensus view on what research was.

The suggestion is that you try listening to the video without the sound:

It had never occurred to me to mess with the medium: though as someone who believes there is a useful message in ‘The medium in the MassAge’ it should have occurred to me. It would have been interesting to start with just the sound track and see what response that evoked (but then that is the musician in me).

The messages for me in this video are:

1. The ‘traditional distributive’ approach to HE (and by implication economics) in particular is something less than perfect

2. That these students are in a time of change (but they are ethnographers I think a interesting group of people who think carefully about evidence and behaviour)

3. That technology does have an impact, some students study times seem very short compared to the hours I put in a just computerised era. (I was not a ‘hardworking’ student)

4. Technologies might be used to address some of the real world problems but we have seen other technologies as being the saving of the world before.

With the sound off the message for me is about anachronistic approaches to learning. The hall is empty, stripped of any feeling, sad lonely isolated damp like the main hall in a great old castle (see above). Imagine if you can what this space would have been like packed with a mass of smelly, raucous humanity with all the injustices and glories, the victories and defeats, joys and pathos that comprised Medieval Society. SO different to the Heritage sanitised, empty soulless space neatly presented on for you to view.

I can remember the first time I got to university the thrill of sitting in a large lecture hall and listening to some very distant (quite eminent) professor…profess. Then as now I can fall asleep almost anywhere and did so at about 40 minutes, 2/3 of the way through the opening remarks. SO even full of life the lecture hall (now replaced by the podcast?) was dead in the water.

When we come to the student messages to whom do they think they are speaking…’the establishment’? If so who are the people who make up this group (some sort of special tribe?) or is the group created by the on looking students themselves, their own social construction. Or is this addressed to the world…if so it means the connected world since this video demands an internet connection.

The messages seem to say this is my life and I do not like it much, but it is better than the lives of many (many of whom will not see the message). That this is how I live and it is not always so good.

Then in the final ‘chapter’ technology shows how the rescue of the students and the world (by implication) can be made, but this is irritatingly contrasted with a 19th century quote from Josiah Bumstead. Of course all the students were doing was writing on their own ‘chalkboards’ and then using video to display to a worldwide audience.

I assume lots of us will find this mirror of the first video

All this casts my mind back to the 'disestablishment' of my youth. It might be worth thinking about what is said in Illich's introduction to 'De schooling Society'


It may also be interesting to compare the sensible and careful ethographic research in the given video with 'another brick in the wall': this is of course not 'research'.


I hope this will evolve and plan to post to my blog I have already made this post 3 times and it is getting boring constantly deleting and adding to it. There will also be the notes I was supposed to write.





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