Today I was in IRC with David Weinberger and we were discussing various things - what the concept of leadership means on the Internet, whether or not leadership is in fact an American cultural point that's not as applicable outside of the US - and then the discussion turned to Hubert L. Dreyfus, the Heidegger scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. I then Googled and found that David had written about Dreyfus' On The Internet. I read Dreyfus a few years ago and shook my head in disagreement. Even if you take his Kierkegaardian presupposition of the authentic self seriously, I don't actually think that the Web is any more of a departure from the authentic self than any other medium, and it does have the ability to make us more accountable to one another and make us more honest and even slightly more human in the process.
All well and good. What do I found today, then? Nigel Warburton linked through to an article by Michelle Quinn in the LA Times about podcasting and philosophy, with reference to Dreyfus.
The LA Times article has a few nice quotes:
"We listen to relieve ourselves of mainstream television," Joe said.
He attended the University of Alaska in the 1960s and remembered only one thing from his philosophy class: the name Kant (which belonged to the 18th century German thinker Immanuel Kant). He worked as a wood and stone turner until the dust started bothering him. In 2002, he became a truck driver...
This spring, he found the lectures on iTunes. "I felt like I discovered the Fountain of Youth," he said.
Warburton also mentions that a Dreyfus fan blog has been setup. Nice. I'd count myself as a Dreyfus fan, even though I disagree with him about the Internet. I listened to his Existentialism and Literature lectures while I was studying Kierkegaard and found the alternate approach he brought extremely helpful. The University of California have published a new lecture series by Dreyfus on Heidegger and Being and Time. You bet I'm subscribed.
Now as for, as Warburton puts it, "[Dreyfus' argument] that face-to-face tuition is essential, particularly for Philosophy", I completely agree with it. Face-to-face tuition is a vital part of education, and something that - if available - should be taken advantage of - and that podcasting, blogging and all the other Internet media forms should be supplementary to a face-to-face education. This is why I think academia is important, and we need to think very seriously about how we are going to deal with academia in the future. The current model is broken!
It's broken due to bad decisions made primarily by politicians - namely the unification of academic and practical education. For me, practical education - learning some well-defined skill possibly with a craft or trade following - needs to be separated from ongoing, open-ended and exploratory education - like philosophy, literature, art or certain forms of science. It makes no sense to teach these side-by-side, and it makes no sense to see the latter as a gateway to employment. Instead, it is a process oriented towards making better people.
And that is what I think podcast lectures are doing. At the very least, they are transmitting knowledge. If they do this, they've succeeded. And if they go even a small way towards improving people's lives - then they are mission accomplished.
From the article: For their part, universities are experimenting to see what works. Mogulof said UC Berkeley had no plans to charge for the podcasts but acknowledged that the benefits were unclear.
And there's the nub of it. Universities should see podcasting their lectures as part of their public service remit - just as the BBC does for it's podcasts (and should for it's television, instead of wasting time and money arseing around with this iPlayer rubbish). While broadcast television and radio have sacrified themselves to a group-think producer class who think only in terms of ratings, the Reithian instinct has found a strong home online. Sometime in the future, administrators will try and fuck that up too by trying to come up with an objective measure like the Research Assessment Exercise to see exactly what 'value' there is in it all. Oh, wait, I don't speak too soon...
