Syndicate and Hague

Here is where I ramble on about my academic struggles. Just a warning.

As most of you who know me IRL know, I’m doing the PhD thing with a peculiar blend of program areas: Learning Technologies (education + technology in its myriad incarnations) and Culture & Teaching. I continue to be pretty bullheaded about the importance of merging the two, but this creates an almost constant sense of intellectual tension for me that I suppose is healthy and (in the long term) beneficial.

The core of my tension is this: as a front-end developer type and tech geek who finds no small amount of joy in embedding myself in the tools and flow of the online community, I’m concerned with creation and application. If I’m not making, I’m not learning; if I’m not learning, I’m already behind. I think this is elemental to those of us who create online designs, presences, websites, environments, applications, etc. We are doers and constructors. The attitudes and perspectives that fuel this type of person inevitably pour over into how they think about and what they focus on in research. The kind of action-oriented passion that drives the LT program is what drew me to it - especially after a year of reading about research done on mediocre projects, I cannot tell you what a relief it is that I wound up choosing a program in which the faculty create brilliantly designed applications for education.

But I’m not only focused on design/application creation. I’m also a writer whose primary fascination is the deconstruction of the political complexities that underlie our daily existences and our systemic structures. This also means I have a particular fascination with how what we build reinscribes modes of power or how (and for whom) the space is defined. This is why I needed the CAT program in tandem with LT. That sort of work is hardly ever done in the world of education + technology.

The problem/issue that arises with this disconnect is that most of the people who are studying technology and the digital sphere from what I would call an “outsider’s perspective” study this area from an “outdated perspective.” In this, I’m classifying people who do not create/do as “outsiders” and alleging that their separation from development results in a lack of understanding of what our technology is moving towards and therefore their studies and research are retrospective rather than current.

Does this make sense? Or am I getting to hung up in my own mental space?

What I worry about is that the middle ground that I want to exist - doing and deconstructing - doesn’t really exist. I worry that I will inevitably fall into one camp or the other and lose something as a result.

Anyway, I could go on, but we have an out of town visitor who just arrived - so that’s enough of that!