It might seem like a waste of brain cells to complain about Fox News. I used to think that even though they were little better than cheese mold, a few million people watching it didn’t mean the end of the world. Yet, as the News of the World scandal has shown, Fox’s parent company, News International, is neither innocuous nor ethical in its broad influence on world politics and debates. It has a disproportionate influence on shaping the symbolic power relations of particular discourses. It’s remarkable, for example, that Obama fired Van Jones based on the lunatic rantings of Glenn Beck. Since when do insane people wield so much influence on reality?

Anyhow, this is certainly masterful propaganda. The pundits argue that schools can’t even teach kids math and reading, why in the hell should they teach about the environment using a ridiculous cartoon like Sponge Bob? (Unless, of course, Mike Huckabee does it.) What do teachers know? Perhaps Fox’s newsreaders could apply a little critical thinking to their own claims. Which science journals are they reading to make their argument? What proponents of anti-climate change scientists are a percentage of the nearly universal scientific consensus supporting the human-caused climate change thesis? Yes, some people claim the Earth is flat, but does that make discussing Earth’s shape controversial? Apparently they fail their own test: anti-science pundits should not complain about the lack of science education in schools.

But, they doth complaineth too much. Education policies like No Child Left Behind have largely produced the ignorance and lack of critical thinking Fox so cherishes. They act like abusive patriarchs, treating teachers like scum of the earth, meanwhile making sure they don’t have the tools to do their job well.

Murdoch has certainly muddied the climate change debate. For example, he made his company “carbon neutral,” seemingly contradicting the anti-climate change rhetoric of his minions. It took me a while to figure out why, until it dawned on me that there was a shrewd strategy afoot. First, is the carbon neutrality claim really verifiable? According to whom? Given the parent corporation’s ethical standards and normal use of doublespeak, I find any claim of verifiability dubious (kind of like S & P giving Goldman Sachs AAA credit rating at the peak of the derivatives bubble). Secondly, how are they defining carbon neutrality? The meaning of the term is not objective. Just because there is a pledge to plant trees doesn’t mean that the real carbon footprint is offset. Moreover, getting electricity from a wind farm does not compensate for the ecological “mindprint” of Fox’s magical thinking. Likely this is actually a model of the kind of climate remediation that will be pushed by Fox (when they have no choice but to actually acknowledge that something has to be done). They will point to themselves and say that we can do it without government regulation. We can make any claim we want and it’s acceptable because we say it is so.

Yeah, just like the claim that they are “fair and balanced.”

You see, these are very tricky people. Shape-shifters, if you will. Pay close attention because they are modeling the reality of fascism that they claim to rail against. In this sense, they offer us an excellent case study for how this works. The trick is to defuse their influence, which is tough. I don’t have all the answers, but maybe the case to revoke their broadcast license based on ethical and legal violations could ultimately do them in. This seems like a vague and distant future, but then again, the swift collapse of News of the World was as sudden as the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Additionally, a few months ago I wrote a media manifesto on greening media education. As you can see, no one commented on it. I don’t know if it is because of a lack of interest, or that I failed to communicate the ideas in a way that makes sense to people. I think the current piece at the New Media Literacies site is better developed and easier to understand. I’m still trying to simplify the language, which is difficult for a subject that is so complex. Any feedback here or at the respective Web sites where these recent articles are posted would be greatly appreciated.

My first blog post in a while. I hope to post more soon. Here goes….

I’m pretty convinced that the iPad (or something like it) can be effectively utilized for education. In particular I think it will be a great media literacy device since it offers a good mix of interactivity and multimedia. However, the vision offered by Blackboard in this ad is hardly the kind of innovation that I imagine. For one, Blackboard is a proprietary system. It is a closed system. Though it offers additional interactivity than a traditional classroom Web platform, you are stuck with their service and would be dependent on their pedagogy and architecture (check out Douglas Rushkoff’s great rant about it here: “Blackboard is brilliant… it is written for the Blackboard company to dominate education in a particular way”).

As a grad student I really hated Blackboard. It has been a few years since, so it may have improved, but the video depicts a technological bandaid for the traditional educational approach–it is very mechanical. The interactivity shown in the ad is very limited and repeats the top-down cliches of the one-to-many educational model. If multimedia is to be incorporated into education, it should be more interactive, hackable and open to the outside world. The medium is the message.

I used to use Ning for my courses, but they switched to a paid service, so I could no longer use its platform in my classes. It was modestly good– I didn’t like the fact that it had only few plug-ins (the plug-ins that did exist were pretty bad and lacked any community or tech support). The free version required displaying google ads. The paid version is ad-free, and though not priced too exorbitantly ($19 a year per site), if you are running a site for each class, the bill can add up (I had seven sites). I didn’t qualify for the sponsore-free service for educators because I’m not based in the US.

In the end, Ning pissed me off because I learned that my students like to access course Websites after they finish the class, and now they can’t access the sites. I have some students who continue to use the sites for several years in order to access videos, notes, links and articles. In one case a student needed coursework evidence to justify a transfer credit. Unfortunately, even as the site creator I have to pay to access the site. Imagine the situation with Blackboard. What if the company were sold or went out of business? What is the access for adjuncts and students once they leave the university and no longer have registered accounts? What about the symbiotic relationship between Blackboard and expensive textbooks? Would students be locked into both?

The solution is open systems. I have always been a big fan of the open source blogging platform, WordPress, and have been relatively pleased with the BuddyPress plug-in that turns WordPress into a social network. I host my education site myself, so that means I pay for it. But I don’t pay extra because it is covered by the fees I pay for my other Websites (such as this blog), and every time I create a new course blog it doesn’t cost me anything. The only additional cost is the domain name registration. My hosting service, BlueHost, uses SimpleScripts, which makes installing sites really easy.

Using BuddyPress for my main site (Open Media Education–note I’m still building it out, so it is not that sexy–I can launch Websites for each additional class I create. I can manage all my sites through the parent network, which is a great advance made by WordPress. I can upgrade and install plugins across the network for all my course sites with the click of a mouse. The other reason I love WordPress is that there are so many fantastic plug-ins and an amazing community of support. BuddyPress also has a great community of users and developers. I have usually gotten my tech questions answered within six hours.

One strategy is to combine the power of Wikis with BuddPress. The folks at University of British Columbia have built their entire system around this formula.

I’ve been using WordPress since the early days, so for me I find it quite intuitive and easy to use. The current version (3.1.1) is very simple to use and much more powerful and flexible than previous versions. It’s also mobile and has multilingual support. I hope more educators will discover the power of WordPress. It will empower them and their students. And you don’t need to depend on the whims and business strategy of Blackboard to develop your online classroom.

File under this shit has gone too far. As a severely underpaid teacher, I find it laughable that we are now the evil force behind the economic crisis. In a way, I hope Wall St. keeps pushing on this. I don’t think people will bend much further.

Incidentally, I read somewhere that folks in the UK are holding teach-ins at banks by entering and holding classes inside their lobbies.

Then there are the environmental educators who refuse to engage technology because of its perceived corrosiveness. At the Bioneers conference, for example, I met with anti-TV crusader Jerry Mander to discuss the possibility for incorporating media literacy into environmental education. He told me that it was a good idea but that he was against it because it would make media more interesting. But that is exactly the point: we want people to get more interested in media, not as passive consumers but as a means for understanding the “system” (however broadly we want to define it) and for learning how to be empowered practitioners.

I’m a fan of the idea that media are “institutions-to-think-with.” Play with and use them to understand human communications, technology, economy and perception. In this sense, media literacy can be a kind of homeopathy. By engaging it holistically, mindfully and holistically we stand to gain amazing insights. We can learn how the system thinks.

For those unfamiliar with homeopathy, it is a kind of healing practice in which people take small doses of the very thing that ails them in order for the immune system to learn how to adjust to the ailment. Granted, I am nervous about using medical metaphors for the “problem” of media. In many ways the kind of media literacy I’m opposed to is the kind that takes the medical approach by viewing “bad” media as a disease that needs to be excised like a cancer tumor. This is an industrial kind of medicine that views the body as a machine needing to get fixed. It lacks a holistic dimension that looks at illness from multiple perspectives, such as the mental and spiritual state of the patient. Nor does it take into account the person’s environment, including diet, pollutants and stress.

Media literacy as homeopathy has the same unintended consequence of a college degree. We forget that an education is not just about learning the liberal arts, but its also learning how the system wants us to think and what is appropriate intellectual practice. In my Peace and Conflict Studies program at Cal, the best undergrad course I ever took was on epistemology. In it we read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and studied how the university mirrored the global economic infrastructure.

It is so meta. You can walk around UC Berkeley’s campus and see the embodiment of the world system (by this I mean the economic, political and military design mechanisms of neoliberalism). There’s the law school that trains the lawyers who draw up the biz contracts; the engineering school (named after Bechtel) that trains the dam builders; the physics department that works on weapons systems; the ROTC that prepares military officers; and so on. You can also see how the UC regents have deep ties to the military industrial complex and global petroleum oligopoly. All of a sudden the university’s image as a bastion of “free speech” becomes a misleading ruse. Sure, in a university with over 40,000 students there is a niche for peace studies, but when I graduated, there were only 12 of us in my class. There’s always a space to keep the dissidents happy.

The point is, I learned more than I bargained for when I got my degree. I learned not just the content and grammar of the liberal arts paradigm, but its form as well. This is not to say that most well-meaning university professors and administrators don’t believe in the enlightening benefits of the liberal arts. Indeed, there are many good aspects to the democratic and humanistic traditions of education, but can this structure as it exists today adequately confront the challenges of a structure encountering its material limits, poisoning its living system and gutting its social fabric? Is the university up to the task of challenging the prevailing “wisdom” that education should be reduced to a business paradigm that views itself as a factory that manufactures students to reproduce the same destructive logic that has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe?

Going back to the discussion of media literacy as homeopathy, what I’m getting at is that there is tremendous benefit to learning media’s “cultural form” (to barrow from media educator David Buckingham). Being a literate media practitioner enables us to be “bridgers.” After all, “media” really mean something “in-between”: they mediate. To bridge a sustainable world, we will need to mediate the past with the future. Media education, in my view, is one technique for doing so for it enables us to map paradigms in order to change them.

This is the latest salvo from Michael Wesche, who has done extraordinary work with his Digital Ethnography program at Kansas State University. I find this to be his least interesting video because it mostly hypes feel-good jargon about the digital environment without offering as much insight as his earlier work, which prompted so much attention (see his YouTube channel for more– in particular check out The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version) and An anthropological introduction to YouTube).

Wesche’s video does make the important, if not redundant, point that the digital environment is changing knowledge dissemination and education. For how this impacts academics, I’m a big fan of the Hitler Down Fall mash-up by Digital Humanities. I also highly recommend Ken Robinson’s RSA* animated talk about the disconnection between old knowledge hierarchies and the reality of contemporary students.

These are more concept-oriented videos, and barely touch upon the abundance of how-to videos that proliferate YouTube, leading some to argue that it’s possible to get a free education on the Web in the way that Ivan Illich imagined DIY education in his book Deschooling Society. I think it is a little of a stretch to presume that one can be educated in complete isolation from a learning community– there is great value in having a community of learners interact with each other. So it may work well to learn how to play guitar with Web tutorials, but it can’t teach you how to play in a band or how to jam. One Web experiment that is building learning communities of practice is Howard Rheingold’s new project, Rheingold U. (I’ll be participating to see how it goes.)

How this plays out for sustainability education remains to be seen. I think these videos make powerful arguments for how the traditional system is failing our students. You can also read into them the problems with the environment and how the old systems and its industrial models of education are closely related to the ecology crisis. There needs to be a way to reconcile the new media environment with the need for promoting sustainable behavior. This video of Lawrence Lessig’s Green Culture talk is a good start.

* Many of the RSA animations are truly amazing, in particular Jeremy Rifkin’s talk on the empathic civilization. My only complaint is that they really need to diversify their offerings– too many white guys. Why not invite Vandana Shiva? She would be perfect.

I’m posting here the complete text of the manifesto. It is a very simplified version of my current research project. More on that on a later date. Please let me know what you think.

Greening Media Education



Though there is increasing interest to guide education towards sustainability issues, so far there are very few examples of green approaches to media education. In spirit, though, many of the goals and aspirations of media education are in perfect alignment with the cause of sustainability. As John Blewitt argues, media literacy and environmental education have in common the goals of participation, action and critical engagement.

But in order to truly green media education there needs to be a radical rethinking of many underlying premises that have lead to a deficit in sustainability discourse among media education advocates (for example, take a look at the tag cloud of this Website). Part of the problem has been the lack of a sufficient bridge between ecoliteracy and media education. In important ways their approaches are epistemologically different. For example, the traditional divide between the biological sciences and the social sciences and humanities is well-reflected in the history of media studies. With the exception of Raymond Williams and the newly emerging field of environmental communication, the problems of the environment generally have not been linked to the other social justice issues taken on by media studies and cultural studies. So though racism, sexism, homophobia and postcolonialism have been tackled by media education, the environment has not received similar attention.

Another part of the problem is the assumption that environmental education is “nature”-based and is outside the task of media education. The critique of technology, which should be a primary job of media educators, is generally assumed to be the territory of so-called Neo-Luddites. I concur with Jaron Lanier who recently argued that media users, engineers and producers should be allowed to discuss the merits of media technology without being ostracized by digital utopians. It’s possible to be a media user and a critic simultaneously, as Ivan Illich’s discussion of tools for conviviality shows. He argues that there is an appropriate human scale and application for communications technology while also recognizing their limits.

While experiential nature initiatives certainly remain an important aspect of ecoliteracy, the environmental crisis, in particular climate instability, is primarily a cultural crisis. As eco-educator David Orr has argued, “all education is environmental education,” meaning our cultural attitudes and beliefs about ecology are embedded into education in the same way they are integral to economics, in particular non-sustainable beliefs. The problem is that rarely do fields like education or economics acknowledge the ecological dimension of their models of reality. Same goes for media studies. So riffing on Orr, by extension we can argue that all media are environmental education, picking up on the critical pedagogists who talk of media as a kind of cultural pedagogy, but then expanding this notion to promote a green critique.

Part of the solution is for social sciences, humanities, and media studies to take seriously the environmental implications of their work. Remaining silent about the role of culture as a primary aspect of global ecology will only further the ecological crisis. But it’s not merely a matter of changing the information. In other words, simply applying traditional media literacy tactics to environmental issues won’t be sufficient, like doing discourse analysis of news coverage of climate science or policy. Of course approaches like these are very important, but they are incomplete.

Rather, there are fundamental shifts that need to take place concerning how we engage the world. As Gregory Bateson argued, trying to solve problems with the thinking that created them results in double binds, or what CA Bowers calls the colonization of the present by the past. In this regard, media education is not immune. For instance, there is a major epistemological difference between what Bowers refers to as “ecological intelligence” and standard mechanistic educational approaches derived from Enlightenment thinking. Whereas Bateson defines a person as not simply an autonomous “self” but part of an interconnected “thinking system,” a lot of media studies still assumes the Cartesian model of the mind. The Cartesian view regards the mind as a repository of symbolic representations based on a machine metaphor: representations move through space from person to person, and as a result individuals construct an individualistic identity that is disconnected from living systems.

An example of mechanistic thinking is the magic bullet or syringe theory of communication derived from Shannon-Weaver. Though this model has been widely discredited, in my review of media education literature, there is still a large body of thought that has internalized the assumption of media effects that presumes media program human minds. They are exemplified by many of the “content analysis” approaches that assume that media literacy is a matter of changing and improving information through the deconstruction of media texts. Theories of the public sphere and democracy retain this concept of rational communication between autonomous beings, and are central to many media education strategies.

The concepts of “memes” and media “viruses” are another way mechanistic thinking enters into media education. Though the definition of a meme is contested, it is largely based on a biological view of information that assumes that ideas and concepts are like DNA: they can be copied and replicated between people. What this approach leaves out is how ideas grow from a cultural commons that draws on intergenerational dialog, specificities of place, and intercultural diversity. Moreover, as James Carey argued, thoughts are not private, but are public. Language, which comprises thoughts, is organic. Our culture is based on a complex feedback system, not the isolated musings of an autonomous character in an Ayn Rand novel.

In contrast, Bateson argues that the mind is a thinking system, eminent in the environment. A rough parallel of this concept is the theory of intertextuality, which approaches texts as communicative “utterances” that make sense based not on the meaning of a specific work, but how they dialog with other cultural artifacts. Their meanings are connected to various cultural contexts that comprise a larger “thinking system.”

The classical concept of communication has been critiqued by Carey who differentiated between a “ritual” and “transmission” view of communication. The transmission metaphor, he argued, derives from the 19th century notion that communication is moving things through space, whereas ritual places communication in real time within a cultural setting.

Mechanistic thinking—or a machine model of the mind—leads to what Bateson called an “ecology of bad ideas,” in which techno-scientific progress is viewed as part of a linear path of history, and that whatever the autonomous thinking self can invent is independent of its consequence on the environment. Consider how this has played out in terms of our communications technology. Though there is considerable evidence about the danger concerning electromagnetic pollution from our wireless devices, there is very little discussion or debate for how the use of these gadgets impacts living systems (humans included). I imagine that some reading this are prepared to dismiss this concern as irrelevant to the purpose of media education which is supposed to celebrate the creative uses of media. However, this doesn’t mean we should eschew such a critical and important discussion. After all, if the culture at large won’t engage in this discussion, who will?

There are signs that a new paradigm is emerging. The cultural studies model of the “circuit of culture,” which views media production and consumption as an interrelated circuit of representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation, is a step towards a systems approach to media. Why not extend that model to incorporate a green perspective? So if we take the example of the “Story of the Sony Walkman” and green it, perhaps updating it to look at the Blackberry or the iPhone, we’d want to include as part of the inquiry those aspects that directly concern the environment, such as the production and waste cycle of electronics, social justice issues related to resource extraction, the relationship between consumerism and the ideology of growth, and the political economy of globalization. On this last point it will be necessary to challenge the assumption that our communication technologies are necessarily a form of progress. Not all communications approaches are appropriate for all cultural contexts (ditto media literacy). Here I like to draw on Vandana Shiva’s concept of monoculture versus biocultural diversity in which she argues that many cultural attitudes emanating from the global economy are actually provincial and evolved within a specific cultural and historical context that is not applicable to many cultures in the world. Think Avatar.

Additionally, it would be important to look at the phenomenological experience of electronic gadgets and how they impact our perception of time and space. Finally, it would mean a close examination of language and concepts that emerged from the Industrial Revolution, and how they continue to carry over through the metaphors we use to describe communication and cognition today.

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller has begun tackling some of these issues through his discussion of green cultural citizenship. My hope is that as advocates for media education that we don’t relegate sustainability for other educators to tackle. I would like to see media education be green to the core so as to not force yet again another division that makes “sustainable” or “green” approaches mere specialities or subfields. The danger is that if we simply change the object of study without challenging the double bind thinking that has brought us to our ecological crisis, then we will simply be “green washing” our field.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Blewitt, John. 2009. The new media literacy: Communication for sustainability. In The handbook of sustainability literacy : Skills for a changing world., ed. Arran Stibbe, 220. Totnes, UK: Green Books.

Bowers, C. A. 2009. The language of ecological intelligence. Language & Ecology 3 (1): 1-24.

Carey, James T. 2009. Communication as culture, revised edition: Essays on media and society (communication as culture)Routledge.

Cox, Robert. 2009. Environmental communication and the public sphere. Second Edition ed.Sage Publications, Inc.

Du Gay, Paul. 1997. Doing cultural studies: The story of the sony walkman. London : Sage, in association with The Open University.

Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for conviviality. Open forum. London: Calder and Boyars.

Lanier, Jaron. 2010. You are not a gadget : A manifesto. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. 2009. Talking rubbish: Green citizenship, media and the environment. In Climate change and the media (global crises and the media)., eds. Justin Lewis, Tammy Boyce, 17-27. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Orr, David W. 1994. Earth in mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Shiva, Vandana, and Third World Network. 1993. Monocultures of the mind: Perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. London; Penang, Malaysia: Zed Books; Third World Network.

Like the word “community,” when we hear the term “education” we feel warm and fuzzy. It can always be good, right? This attitude might not be too productive as demonstrated in a recent New York Times piece railing against social media (check out this nice rebuttal from the Nieman Journalism Lab). In the NYTimes article school came across like a hapless victim of smart phones and Facebook. It compared recent brain research showing how our gadgets and social software hurts school performance, yet the article never challenges this very idea of “performance.” In particular the story featured a young man who’d rather edit a video on his Mac than study Latin. Think about it: making media versus learning a dead language, who’s gonna win that battle? The problem with the article is that it gave school the default position of all that is “good” about schooling and made youth media practice the foil. Sound familiar? I don’t want to equate Facebook with rock and roll, but this is a 50 year-old polemic, with roots going as far back as Plato.

With that said, I don’t want to give social media and wireless gadgetry a free pass. But it also shouldn’t be an either or discussion. By contrast, it needs to be argued that literacy of media gadgets and network usage is ever more necessary. But will it be taught in school? Most likely not. Rather than be confronted in a meaningful way it will just be banned, made forbidden and a non-topic. This is a shame, because if there ever was a place for young people to become literate of the tools that are shaping cognition and impacting culture and economics, school would be a logical site for it.

Unfortunately, “school” is broken. Which puts me in an awkward place, because I am sympathetic to the protests against ed reform policies, but in other ways I’m against school. In light of the financial restructuring taking place in Europe and North American, these policies are part of a general re-feudalization of the world. These reforms are actually a logical progression of education policy going back for decades which has sought to reduce learning to a technocratic and mechanistic activity designed for the information economy. Reforms are designed to break the public gains of the Enlightenment, while preserving the more nefarious benefits of the past 500 years for the “elites” (banking, finance, captains of industrial-scientific “progress,” etc.). There are lots of problems with Enlightenment thinking, especially in regards to ecology, its idealogical co-dependence with capitalism, and the belief in an isolated, autonomous self. Yet cosmopolitanism should be considered a good side-effect, and at one point this was one of the goals of liberal education.

Three books I’ve been reading lately confront this problem. Deschooling Society (Open Forum), written in 1970 by Ivan Ilich, is a remarkably prescient book. Hard to believe it is 40 years-old, because almost every word is a prophesy for the present moment. He argues that schools are an expensive means for conditioning people to accept the institutionalization of learning, and to learn how to be institutionalized (see video pasted above). Learning can only be decided by experts and paid professionals, reinforcing a dependence on the irrational inner-logic of bureaucracy (a la Kafka)* without regard to that which is required or practical for daily life, as is the case with the disconnect between standardized testing and the skills necessary for being global citizens. Though I should have read this book years ago, in a way it is the right book for the moment because many of the solutions he envisioned–DIY education using networks and open source tools–have become reality. Several of the ideas he has for deschooling can be facilitated by the likes of YouTube, Craigslist and alternative educations projects sprouting up all over the net (it would take a much longer post to list them all– you can start by typing “open education” into your search engine and see where it takes you).

Illich differentiates between open (“learning Webs”) and closed networks (“manipulative institutions”), which sounds a bit like the struggle between open education and the privatization of learning. To apply an ecological metaphor, maybe education can be more like a rhizomatic network of mushrooms instead of a monocultural crop of soy beans. I could exhaust my fingers covering the array of ideas in Deschooling Society, but suffice to say it is a tight little polemic at 116 pages and can be read in a day.

Unfortunately, open education has the danger of being a trojan horse for the neo-feudalization of education. DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, a recent book about self-education, features an assortment of advocates for open education that range from artisons, monks to entrepreneurs. Many of the ideas are inspirational and well intended, but their motives don’t all agree. Anya Kamenetz has a valid argument that most students should not have to go deeply in debt for an education which is increasingly suspect. I, for one, am guilty, and will end up at least 50 K in debt by the time I get my PhD. And that is a light load compared to many whose post-graduate debt tops 100 K. For my credential I’ve indentured myself to the banks with little chance that it will pay back my investment. And this is the kind of thinking that Ilich rails against: education should not be about turning students into customers. But the reforms being proposed in the UK use that kind of language, and as a college professor it is well known that we are being asked to deliver a product to the students. But I digress. Going back to DIY U, creating our own education via an assortment of open access resources (including those driven by corporate driven incentives) sounds kinda cool, but the implications for society are complicated. Are we saying that credentialing should be done away with, or even privitized? Are we saying that education is not a public good or right and should be left to the scavenging of the marketplace? This is where anarchism and libertarianism can sometimes feed off each other, which makes for strange bedfellows, for sure.

The last book I want to mention is EduFactory Collective‘s Toward a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory. The book is a little of a cross between Deschooling Society and DIY U. It is a savage critique of the economics of university, and also proposes alternatives of the punk rock variety. This is certainly more critical of the system than DIY U, and is written in a much different format (and tone) because it is presented from the perspective of a collective enterprise rather than as a journalistic foray in the magazinespeak of FastCompany (as is the case with DIY U). In this sense, the book models the kind of approach it advocates.

I wish I had time to write a more in-depth analysis of these books and their implications, but unfortunately I’m out of time and must get back to work. Consider this some outloud thinking as I work through these ideas. I apologize for their incompleteness.

* A good example is getting a drivers license in Italy. The Italian bureaucracy is so complicated that you are forced to pay a driving school to handle the paper work for the license. Meanwhile, the horrendous and godawful test takes months to prepare for through rote memorization with a net result that no one follows the laws. In my case it took five months and 500 euros to do what normally takes half a day in the United States for a fraction of the cost.

David Gauntlett, who coined media studies 2.0, has moved far beyond old school thinking about media. His forthcoming book, Making is Connecting, looks like it has great potential for bridging media education with sustainability. Why? The primary axiom of sustainability is “everything is connected to everything else,” with the caveat that not all things are connected equally. I recently enjoyed reading Gauntlett’s book, Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences, which explores the use of Lego building for understanding identity creation.

Based on the snippets from his Website and this video, my impression is that he’s on track to combine three essential skills I see necessary for a sustainable world: putting things together (material and immaterial) in a socially context that engages the world. I don’t know if Gauntlett is an old punk, but this sure reminds my of what DIY was/is all about. Though he’s active in Web 2.0 tools, Gauntlett also is interested in guerrilla gardening, knitting, crafting and home electronics. He gets bonus points for drawing on the work of Ivan Illych.

Thanks for all the love and support, and if you are so motivated, please share with likeminded folks in the network. Peace! Antonio

Mediacology: Green Media Education Website:

The Mediacology: Green Media Education Website connects media literacy with ecoliteracy. By filling a gap between media and environmental education, this resource offers sustainable and ethical media education tools for educators, community activists and cultural citizens engaged in transformative planetary change. In the spirit of sustainable communication, the final product will be open source and freely available to the global community via a Website portal. The resource will consist of free downloadable curricula, community space, online multimedia lessons and access to online trainings. This project requests help in developing a unified identity for all its materials: logo, print and Website.