I ended up becoming a disc jockey (DJ) at around the same time that I was hired to teach English at Clovis High School. I basically took up DJing as a hobby—something to keep me busy during the summers when I wasn’t teaching. At the time, I had little idea how much this side project would influence the way I understood and approached my role as an educator.
Like many aspiring DJs, I first became aware of the art form when I heard Grandmixer DST scratching a vinyl record on Herbie Hancock’s classic single “Rockit” in 1983. Not realizing that DJs used specialized equipment to perform these maneuvers, I tried to mimic Grandmixer’s moves on my parents’ stereo system. It was a disaster: I ended up ruining my mom’s Billy Joel record and breaking the needle on the turntable. After this misadventure, I gave up the possibility of learning how to DJ for the foreseeable future. The main reason was that, although I remained interested in the art form, I never found anyone who could teach it to me.
This all changed in 1999.
As the internet continued to make its way into our homes, I availed myself of a dial-up connection and started researching things online that interested me—things that I had never been able to learn about in the physical world (due to a lack of available teachers, limited access to the necessary books, etc.). Eventually, I hit upon a DJ tutorial at www.recess.co.uk and the rest, as they say, is history. After studying DJ Recess’s tutorials, I went out and bought two (professional) turntables and a mixer, and began to practice. Before long, I learned how to mix two songs together by synchronizing their tempos. Soon I was able to transition seamlessly from one record to the next while maintaining a constant rhythm for the dance floor. Within six months, I had my first paying gig. By the time I retired from DJing thirteen years later, I was commanding two- to three-hundred dollars per hour for my services.
At the time, I sensed that a momentous change was occurring in the culture at large, but I didn’t have the language to explain what it was. Now, after looking back many years later, I can see that the internet was removing a number of boundaries that had prevented me from participating in the culture and the economy of the time. Whereas I had always wanted to learn to be a DJ, I had never been able to gain access to the necessary knowledge or instruction. However, once I had an internet connection, I was able to overcome this obstacle. By linking up with someone who lived thousands of miles away in a foreign country (the United Kingdom), I managed to learn a marketable skill. And I ended up making a decent amount of money as a result.
In the years that followed, I watched as technology continued to lower the boundaries to participation in the DJ industry. For instance, at the turn of the millennium there was almost no place to buy vinyl records in California’s Central Valley. Therefore, those of us in Fresno could only keep our music collections current by making regular trips to the Bay Area or Los Angeles. This, obviously, gave big city DJs a significant advantage. With a record store in their hometown, these individuals had immediate access to the latest music. As a result, they became the big names in the DJ world. However, as time went on, record stores began to show up online. Pretty soon, those of us who lived in smaller cities were able to instantly purchase the same cutting-edge music that had long given people in larger cities a leg-up on the rest of us. Little by little, I watched as the world started becoming post-geographic. It no longer mattered where you lived. Everyone with a computer and a modem had access to the same musical resources.
This eventually led me to a profound realization. In April of 2003, I went to see a pair of DJs named Deep Dish perform at the Coachella Valley Music Festival. During their set, I remember thinking to myself, “What’s the big deal? I can do that. I even have all the same records. Why are they on stage and I’m not?” And then it occurred to me: the members of Deep Dish owned a record label. At the time, it was rare for serious DJs to play music on compact discs (or any other medium). This meant that you had to press a song on vinyl if anyone was going to play it (a very expensive process). Because Deep Dish owned the means of production (a record label), they were able to publish all of their own songs. They were also able to act as taste-makers for the industry by deciding which other artists got published. In retrospect, I can see that this hierarchical distribution model only allowed for a small percentage of the population—people like Deep Dish—to act as producers of culture. The rest of us (who didn’t own record labels) were relegated to the role of consumers. As a result, we had less visibility—and therefore less power.
However, as technology continued to grow and spread, we eventually witnessed the “death of vinyl” and an even greater leveling of the playing field. Although DJ purists had always sworn that they would never play anything other than vinyl records, the invention of software programs such as Serato Scratch Live and Traktor actually made it preferable for DJs to use mp3s. These programs allowed DJs to carry a massive collection of songs on a laptop computer, which they then controlled by using a single pair of coded vinyl records. When this happened, the floodgates opened. Now anyone with an internet connection could instantly develop a music collection that would have taken years (and thousands of dollars) to amass during the vinyl era. Budding DJs also gained the ability to make their own remixes—and play music that they themselves had created in front of a crowd. Not only that, but around this time we witnessed the birth of several online mp3 stores (such as crooklynclan.net and acidplanet.com), which allowed everyday people to upload and sell their own remixes online. In a relatively short matter of time, the hierarchical publishing model that had long kept most of us from getting our music heard had been all but eradicated.
Still, not everyone in the industry benefited from these changes. While the internet may have been a source of empowerment for many of us, those individuals who failed to develop the necessary computer skills often ended up being put out of business. Because the internet had given DJs greater access to an almost infinite library of mp3s, club owners grew to expect that they would have a much wider variety of music than before. They also came to expect that DJs would have a collection of innovative remixes that set them apart from the crowd. As a result, DJs who were stuck buying their music on CDs or vinyl couldn’t keep up with the competition. Lacking access to the internet, they fell behind the curve. Even if they did try to catch up later on, they frequently discovered that they were too late. Just as they were attempting to learn how to navigate the online realm, the rest of us had moved on to more sophisticated practices: modifying DJ software, remixing songs, and promoting live events with social media.
What Does This Have To Do With Education?
Witnessing all the revolutionary changes that technology had wrought in the DJ industry got me thinking about the way that schools were preparing students for life in the twenty-first century. In less than ten years, I had seen the internet create a platform where:
- A worldwide community of people could link up with others who shared the same interests and exchange ideas in ways not previously possible.
- The boundaries to participation in the culture and economy were lowered.
- Everyday people were able to act as producers of culture—rather than mere consumers.
- Those without internet access found themselves at a significant disadvantage.
However, brick and mortar schools had done little or nothing to adapt to these changes. In many ways, it seemed that they had even become impediments to learning. Whereas people are now able to collaborate with others who shared their interests, and draw upon the vast amount of information stored in virtual networks in order to solve problems and develop new skills, traditional learning institutions are still organized according to an antiquated, hierarchical, assembly-line distribution model. Consider, for example, how the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has reduced the national conversation about education to nothing more than raising scores on multiple-choice tests. This has turned schools into places where teachers are supposed to “fill” students with knowledge via lectures and direct instruction. Multiple-choice tests are then used to measure the efficiency of data transfer. As a result, students are never given the opportunity to develop the types of skills that will be valued in the modern world.
This is not to say that schools haven’t done their best to try and find ways of augmenting instruction with technology. Indeed, many educational institutions have spent a great deal of money outfitting classrooms with things like SmartBoards, laptops, and LCD projectors. The problem is that they almost never consider the epistemological dimensions of this new technology when designing curriculum. In other words, because they fail to appreciate how networked computing is fundamentally altering the way that knowledge is produced and distributed in the world today, they usually end up using today’s technology in order to prepare students for yesterday’s world. For instance, a 2008 study from Ohio State University (published in Science Daily) describes how hand-held electronic devices called “clickers” were being used to help college students learn physics. These clickers are basically small remote-control devices that students can “click” in order to answer multiple-choice questions projected on a screen. After the students choose an answer, the screen presents a bar graph that quantifies the percentage of individuals who chose A, B, C, or D. In the article, it talks about how, “Ohio State University students who used the devices to answer multiple-choice questions during physics lectures earned final examination scores that were around 10 percent higher . . . than students who didn’t” (online). On the surface, this would seem to be a victory. Of course we want students to score higher on exams. However, when we look a little closer, we can see that the technology is being used as nothing more than an enhanced means of banking information in students’ minds. In this instance, the students are still being positioned as passive consumers of information delivered by an authority. They have not been empowered to engage the vast resources of knowledge available to them online. They are also not collaborating in order to produce new knowledge or skills. Therefore, regardless of how much more they are able to memorize, they are not being prepared to compete in the world of today.
If everyone had their own computer and internet connection, this wouldn’t be as great a cause for concern. At least then we could hope for students to gain the necessary skills by simply spending time online. Yet according to a 2012 Pew Internet and American Life study, only 41% of people living in households with an income of less than $30,000 a year have broadband access at home (Smith and Zickuhr). What this means is that the majority of students from low-income families are only able to gain use of computers while they are in school. This makes it imperative for their teachers to implement curriculum that will give them the ability to remain competitive in the future economy. Thus, rather than using technology as a means of more efficiently “banking” information in student minds, educators need to think critically about how new media requires a new set of literacy skills—and design pedagogies that take this into consideration. Otherwise, we will not be able to offer students the type of educational experience that leads to empowerment. In this case, much like the DJs who failed to embrace emerging technologies, underprivileged students will continue to find themselves on the wrong side of the Digital Divide.
While several professional organizations have attempted to address this issue by offering general guidelines for integrating technology with instruction, they almost never offer any epistemological insights or justifications for the practices they espouse. For example, the “NCTE Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment” states that students should:
- Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
- Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
- Design and share information for global communities that have a variety of purposes
- Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneously presented information
- Create, critique, and evaluate multimedia texts
- Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by complex environments
Although these may appear to be admirable goals, at no point does NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) offer an explanation as to why these activities are being recommended. This overlooks the fact that our nation’s high school teachers cannot produce desirable outcomes simply by following a list of standards or procedures. There must also be an underlying theory to give them a sense of direction and to help them make informed pedagogical decisions.
Due to this perceived lack of theory, I decided to take up this project as a means of more fully exploring how new media is restructuring our social and intellectual worlds. After establishing these initial insights, I offer an example of pedagogy that is grounded in an understanding of the epistemology of new media. With these goals in mind, I have structured this thesis as follows:
Chapter 2 traces the evolution of communications media from the oral period through the age of print. Rather than attempting to understand the epistemology of new media by examining this recent phenomenon in isolation, I felt that it was important to first establish a historical framework that would throw these recent changes into greater relief. Therefore, the purpose of Chapter 2 is to illustrate how each change in Western society’s dominant communications media has brought with it a new set of social formations. This provides the necessary context for understanding how the internet is, once again, changing the way that knowledge is produced and legitimated in our world today.
Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on exploring the epistemology of new media. Here I argue that, because the internet provides a de-centered textual environment where everyone’s voice has an equal chance to be heard, it is undermining many of the long-held notions about expertise and authority that we inherited from the print era. I maintain that knowledge production in the online realm is beginning to look less like a hierarchical assembly-line process and more like Kenneth Bruffee’s ongoing “conversation of mankind.” In order to make this argument, I present Wikipedia, and an internet community dedicated to “spoiling” the television show Survivor, as examples of how people are producing knowledge online and solving problems independent of traditional experts.
Chapter 4 considers how—despite the democratizing effects of new media—the Digital Divide continues to prevent underprivileged students from participating in the economy and culture of today. I begin this chapter with a discussion of how the Clinton administration implemented the “Technology Literacy Challenge” as a means of encouraging schools to help stimulate the economy by focusing on technological literacy. I then examine how this program has inadvertently created an underclass of people who—because they lack access to technology—still fail to develop the necessary computer skills to compete with their more affluent peers. I also look at how this problem is being exacerbated by a national testing regimen (NCLB), which forces poor communities to use computers in order to raise test scores rather than to help students develop the skills needed to thrive in the modern economy.
Finally, in Chapter 5, I attempt to offer a pedagogical framework that takes into account the epistemology of new media. I first present the results of a study from Mizuko Ito et al., which illustrates how young people are gaining a number of tacit skills from “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out” online. I then use these insights—as well as others from James Paul Gee, and Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown—to argue that it is no longer possible to prepare students for the world of tomorrow by focusing on the distribution and memorization of “content.” Instead I maintain that, if we wish to narrow the Digital Divide, then schools have to offer all students the opportunity to participate in online knowledge communities where they function as producers of knowledge (rather than merely as consumers). Toward this end, I offer an assignment sequence that combines ideas drawn from Robert F. Cummings’ Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia and Asao Inoue’s “Community-Based Assessment Pedagogy.”