Scholars’ Day is coming up at SUNY-Cortland, a college-wide faculty-undergraduate conference, and I will be presenting with students in the clock.speed learning community. I think I’ve figured out what I want to say about the experience: what clock.speed can teach us about the challenges of new media curriculum, and learning communities as well. It’s lessons about learning communities are probably not all that surprising. At some schools, learning communities work famously well. They have struggled at Cortland. The two I have participated in have struggled. At least one has been cancelled for lack of enrollment. Even paired courses can have trouble filling. The challenges are widespread. Program and general education requirements make enrolling in learning communities impractical for students, unless all the courses happen to meet with their curricular needs. The premise of a community is that the students are working together, but they all have so many other demands on the time (work in particular) that it is very difficult for them to meet outside of class. This defeats the benefit of the community. This is not only a problem for the students. My colleagues and I have found only a small window of time in our schedules when we can meet, and we do so infrequently. I could see how a learning community could or should work. Our learning community has 13 credits, 13 hours in the classroom each week. We need to add in another 12 hours a week out of class that the students work together. That’s five hours a day, say 10-3 M-F, the students are in-class and/or working together. Then they would be spending another 10 hours or so doing independent work for the community–reading, etc. Now on the faculty side, you would have faculty set their office hours across this time, so that one was always available. Faculty would rotate coming to other classes so that each week there was one class where the entire community was present. Finally, the faculty would meet for an hour every week. Now, that’s a tremendous amount of work and organization. As difficult for students to meet as it would be for faculty. Plus there are the intellectual resistances, again on both sides. I consider myself an open-minded teacher who is interested in innovation and collaboration, and yet, I find it difficult to compromise on my teaching. I like to be flexible and shift what I do, but in a community I have to keep in mind that shifts I make can affect other classes. You give up some of your “academic freedom” when you work in a community. It’s very difficult and requires a level of trust in your colleagues which is difficult to establish until you’ve worked with them for some time. Students in communities need an equal amount of trust. They need to relinquish their common classroom power, resistance, much like teachers must give up academic freedom. Often classrooms work in a kind of dialectic fashion between students and teachers. I’m not saying this is a particularly good model, but there it is. Communities, however, rely more heavily on collaboration and consensus. Everyone agrees to be there. Resistance, much like academic freedom, makes the process untenable. This is not to say that students cannot disagree with faculty, but rather that there must be, at the foundation, a consensus that we are moving together toward something, a faith in one another. I think this is all intensified with the addition of new media. Given the amount of labor and the diversity of skills required to produce new media, projects invariably require group work. It may be that some experts out in the field can produce new media on their own, but there are few, if any, students who can do graphic design, shoot video, write, and produce interfaces all on their own. This type of collaboration can be difficult to achieve, even among professionals. Producing new media demands a new level of work, and it challenges our mundane concepts about communication. As such, we are twice challenged: once by technical demands and again by philosophical issues. To be immersed in such an environment is not an easy thing. One of the clock.speeders joked he was going to make up a T-shirt that said, “I’ve been permanently scarred by clock.speed.” As hyperbolic as that might be, it might have some truth. In our times of warm and fuzzy pedagogies, we often occlude thoughts of learning as a painful process. Clock.speed: “we’ll teach you a lesson you won’t soon forget.”

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