So write Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg.
Corollaries:
An introduction to New Media Studies is a metacourse.
The third pitch we throw had better be a metapitch.
The metalevel is the most generative level, the most frustratingly inexact level, the most emergent level, the level where experts and beginners can have interesting meetings. It can be a wide-eyed level, an untethered level, a level where imposters run amok by asking pseudo-profound questions. But each level has its irresponsible party-crashers. The levels below the metalevel have their own versions of irresponsibility, not least the droning mediocrity of lockstep apparatchiks.
I always thought the metalevel was where professors lived. Sometimes we do, I suppose. Other times it seems the level that professors protect for ourselves or our disciplines. Still other times it seems the place that “theory” pretends to go while always already stopping one step short. And finally, it seems the place that goes away in the press of academic production day-by-day. Articles must be written, courses must be managed, service must be done: who has time for the metalevel? And isn’t there something terribly unsophisticated about anyone getting excited about the metalevel? Self-awareness is more useful for sophisticated self-congratulation than for readiness to go out onto that unknown plain with the Red Crosse Knight, Una, the dwarf, and the donkey.
I want to extend the metaphor, but that will need to wait for tomorrow.
Gardner –
Thanks for taking my questions so seriously. Yours was a good response.
Yesterday I was at a meeting about a College Honor Code written by some of the students. Their complaint is that cheating is ubiquitous and while we nominally make claims to be educating the students in ethics, in fact we’re doing the opposite. I was very disturbed after that session, first because of the climate we find ourselves in but mainly because the proposed solution is for the students to police themselves. Some of my colleagues believe that will do the trick because it has worked elsewhere – University of Florida was cited. I’m very skeptical. So I think these questions are as important for the students as they are for the faculty.
When I was in College these type of questions were asked and talked about extensively, but outside of class in a context unrelated to courses and only and with other students, not the faculty. Perhaps there is a need now to bring this more full circle. Blogging might be good for that.