Some three years ago, I wrote a short paper for a Unesco DigiArts workshop on art, technology and education, held in Linz, Austria. Although I was already in Denmark for a different but related event just a few days before the workshop, and my intention was to stay with Trevor in Amsterdam between Denmark and Austria, I was unable to attend the workshop because I was given only a 4-day valid Schengen visa, and it takes over 2 weeks to get another visa.
That year, 2004, was a very creative year for me, despite all the visa woes - it was the time I stopped teaching and decided to challenge myself with problems and situations outside the shelter of my university, my country and my home. My mind was full of ideas, and I was constantly mulling over many important issues around art, technology, culture and society.
Below are some of the things that had gone on in my mind on that workshop I missed in Linz. I wrote about it to Tereza Wagner/Unesco DigiArts who originally invited me to be there. Initially, in September 2004, I wrote to her about the visa problems, and how it might affect a Pacific Rim conference scheduled for 2006 in the US:
I told Roger Malina and Joel Slayton about a cultural programme in Armenia wherein the Armenian programme itself provides the visa to accepted applicants. There seem to be a cooperation established between the programme and the Armenian Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Perhaps such similar kind of government-institutional agreements might be made (for example between the US government/Foreign Affairs and the College Art Association (CAA) or the San Jose State University). Such an agreement can be made only specifically for the ISEA2006/Pacific Rim New Media Summit events and any preliminary face-to-face meetings. If UNESCO intervention will make such agreements easier, especially that several countries will be involved, then it would be a lot of help. It is true what Roger Malina said that if visa difficulties are not addressed (especially when entering the US which is very very strict with issuing US visas), then the Summit will definitely be a disaster.
On education, the subject of the Linz workshop, I proposed a concept I initially described as “culture and computing.” While the Linz workshop focused on the Mediterranean and the Arab States, I was conceptualizing the Asia Pacific experience. The first issue that I took was the issue of the dependencies between culture and commercialism.
Roger Malina talks about the “importance of well connected sub regions in driving economic development within the emerging new cultural practices that exploit information technologies” in his Linz presentation. I agree with this and but should add that stakeholders in information technologies also have the capacity to exploit cultural practices and therefore control and limit the economic development especially within the developing countries. The bigger the connected sub regions are, the bigger the market for commercial information technology vendors, and the greater the dependency created between commercialism and cultural practices. This would be opposed to the concept of sustainable development.
A specific example of this is our case at the University of the Philippines (UP). We started our information infrastructure with proprietary commercial software, particularly Microsoft Windows systems and applications software. This was driven by the visit of Bill Gates in the Philippines a few years ago, with pledges of support to the Philippine government. But now the president of the university said: “We need approximately P12 million to license the new MS Office 2000 in the entire UP System. In addition, we have to pay P8 thousand per computer for the latest Windows operating system. This enormous amount might as well be used to buy more computers.” So the president has issued an appeal to all units and colleges in the university to consider migrating to open source technologies, starting in February 2003. His appeal was received positively.
I also mentioned here a soft policy of FOSS for public institutions, ensuring that commercialism is never to be established as a default, just as FOSS is not to be fascistly imposed. In a soft policy, proprietary and open source systems are used depending on actual needs.
The second issue that I took was the importance of resistance and intelligence (and of intelligence as resistance) in the implementation of ICT in education. In this issue I took note of the remarks made by two people at the workshop, Mohammad Ayish and Derrick de Kerckhove.
Mohammad Ayish said, “Institutions of higher education in the Arab world need to adopt an integrated approach to the use of interactive multimedia tools by initiating strategic visions regarding the future of education in the age of the digital revolution. The issue here is not only about funding new e-learning projects, but also about creating a culture that is receptive to innovative instructional techniques on the part of both faculty members and students. Research has shown that the introduction of new innovations in traditional settings is likely to be faced with certain resistance.”I would like to add that the resistance, in my observation with my own students and with myself as a student in an e-learning environment, is very valid and should be listened to. I believe that the resistance is not only because of the introduction of something new to an old learning tradition, but more because we have not been able to reconceptualize and restructure the meaning of education thoughtfully enough to take the best advantange of our new technologies. Students and faculty have a valid reason to resist when they see that e-learning is used to compress the teaching and learning process. Often, the compression happens when there is a perceived need to deliver education to many. This could become a fatal mistake, when technologies are used in mass production and assembly-line type of education.
Derrick de Kerckhove said, “Another topic to examine is to what extent the Internet, the Web, blogs and other hypertextual practices lend themselves to an art of networking specific to different social associations in various parts of the Arab world. The art of networking on line stems from practices off-line. It is an art of intelligence.” I agree with this important point, and especially when we talk about e-learning situations, the use of on-line teaching tools, web-based databases, web-delivered course modules, and interactive learning objects. We design and develop these tools, databases, modules and learning objects always in consideration of the social practices from which they are inspired and for which they are used to augment. So it is good practice to conduct on-line learning with face-to-face meetings and develop their structure and content in a coherent and supplemental way.
The link that I (perhaps subconsciously) made between the remarks by Mohammad Ayish and Derrick de Kerckhove is extremely significant to me now. Resistance may indeed be seen as a form of intelligence, and that there has been very little resistance going on now, and that resistance has earlier been dismissed as ignorance and fear, we see how the context for the commercial exploitation of culture has been established.
The third issue I took was something I called an “iterative system of development” (which Trevor and a programmer friend of ours call bootstrapping), as the most desirable way of approaching the art, technology and education agenda.
An iterative system of development: I think that this system might be very useful in developing a (international) masters level course that is multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural in nature. The nature of the course demands a multi-lateral and multi-disciplinary/cultural approach to its own development. If it is an iterative system, then the courses are developed dynamically and will always be sensitive to the changes of the times. One way of implementing this is through an experimental pilot programme wherein the teachers themselves are also the students, and the student project proposals are selected and discussed in terms of how their deliberation and implementation will contribute to developing the content and structure of the final program.
I proposed an implementation of this system in a concept paper I submitted to a school in Sierre where I spent several weeks that same year. At that time, I naively described the concept as “a multi-disciplinary multi-site and multi-cultural project” and thought it similar to what Tereza mentioned about “digital aesthetics” (referencing a high level teaching in such a field as digital aesthetic, whereby “the intention is not to train digital artists or musicians but to introduce the artistic and aesthetic approach and skills to the computer science and computer technology degree”). I added:
However, in this proposal, there is not only the aesthetic implication on programming (or the computer sciences) but also on another discipline which I have identified to be very important in a country such as the Philippines - and this is the discipline of agriculture technology, in particular seedsaving and plant genetic diversity. In this project, there is a very “organic” (viral and ecological) way of seeing and working with the idea of computer languages (programming), and focuses on an important Philippine resource - agriculture - and the issues of seedsaving and plant genetic diversity. In this framework, it is also possible to articulate how programmers can overcome limitations set by meager tech resources - perhaps one can say that it is an aesthetic and ecological approach to computing and technologies. So here, not only are the cultural-historical roots important in defining the range of a multi-cultural cooperation in post-grad level education, but the economic strengths and needs are considered important as well.
Looking back at the thought behind these remarks I realize that I was patterning “aesthetics” with “agriculture”, in essence affirming that in my book and in my culture, the practice and theory of agriculture is an aesthetic, and that there can be numerous aesthetics with varying levels of significance to various communities. I was more interested in the many manifestations of these various aesthetics rather than the various expressions that one can make with digital technology.
Then I wrote about relocating to Europe, something that I would decide against a year later:
My plans for the next six months include relocating to Europe (on my own expense but I am also seeking work or a studentship or other form of cooperation to support myself) so as to have access to institutions, people and resources there in further developing my skills and knowledge and completing my researches within a reasonable time-frame. I have been teaching here for the past eight years and have had to struggle with bureacratic systems, numerous economic impediments to knowledge and resource access and creation, as well as visa restrictions that have severely limited my capacity to collaborate in international dialogues. While I seek to establish a base in Europe, I keep my contacts in the Philippines…
And from here I mentioned a whole load of Philippine institutions, both private and state, engaged in technology education and research, which in my naive optimism I described as “prominent and active” but now I realize they have always been monolithic institutions that only respond to market factors.
Given this, I - until now - have still chosen to remain in the Philippines because such “monolithic institutions” are after all a global tradition.
Then I went on with observations on the Arab States programme, and proposed the framework for the Asia Pacific: “So far, looking at how things develop in the Arab states programme, I think it would be good to approach the content and structure development with a synthesis of factors such as the learner’s profile, the subject matter/discipline factor (aesthetics, computing, etc), and societal factors. It’s a fairly basic design framework for education development which will need to be tailor-fit for the needs and demands of new conditions.”
In essence, now looking back, I had a strong but unexpressed objection to the phases of curriculum development that was being presented before me as this involved simply contributing content for a module with 3 parts: 1) a theoretical/philosophical/historian seminar to be launched through online self-study with assignment; 2) face to face creative workshop on sound and/or image digital thinking will then be organized for a selected number of students, and 3) the module will end with a final study project which will require online groupwork with assignments.
The process to me seemed ‘tutorial’ and top-down, signifying no philosophical reflection upon the process itself, and thus no opportunity for the learner to become a proactive part of the shaping of the process. It also had no bootstrapping or that thing I called “an iterative system of development.” As an alternative, I proposed a curriculum development process that was itself part of the learning and teaching process, in particular: “To enable a solid framework for curriculum development before any content or methods specification and implementation can be made. The framework is intended as a model on which curriculum guides for culture and computing (or art, design and technology) will be used in different parts of the region may be based. It would be good to invest in the development of a framework that allows adaptation to more local conditions by its (continuous) use on an experimental basis. The framework should also allow for studies of local needs to be used as context in which objectives are to be achieved and content developed locally through regional curriculum and learning centers.”
In implementation, I drafted the following process, many sections of which I may no longer agree with, thus reaffirming the theoretical and practical significance of the iterative system:
Phase I Defining the Culture and Computing Masters Programme
- Assembling and organizing information deemed relevant to curriculum building on: 1) Asian society; 2) the Asian learner; and 3) theories and trends in art, design and technology education at the postgraduate level.- Establishing the needs of the Asian learner, the demands of the society on this learner, and the possibilities which the social context and developmental level allow the learner.- Drawing up a set of guidelines that will link the framework to be developed to the established needs. These guidelines are intended as the necessary link between existing needs and the curriculum proposed to meet such needs. They are to serve likewise as a set of criteria for evaluating whether every factor that serves as a curriculum determinant has been considered in the framework.
Phase II Defining Content, Implementation Methods and Evaluation of the Culture and Computing Masters Programme
- Validating the guidelines for content with the help of at least three (3) experts from different countries within and outside the region in curriculum planning and development especially for the arts and technologies.
- Setting up the philosophy, the objectives and the content of the curriculum with Phase I as determinants and guide.
- Developing a system of evaluation that will provide clues for the further improvement and refinement of the framework. It must be found out how far curriculum guides that will be based on the framework will work. It must be found out if the objectives set are being realized. It must also be found out if the framework provides teaching content which represents reasonable choices of teaching materials that will be valid to the learner in terms of the objectives.
Phase III Implementation of a Pilot Masters Programme in Culture and Computing
- Implementation of an experimental use of the framework through a pilot programme on culture and computing at the postgraduate level through a sustainable network of selected universities and learning institutions, and invited teachers and students, through a strategic cooperation within and outside the region.
I would not, for example, separate the framework into three linear phases as what seem to be the case above. Perhaps I was seeking a means of ensuring non-linearity by embedding processes of “validation” between each phases every now and then. I would also be very careful in using the term “experts” or “masters course”, which carry with them fixed definitions based on external perceptions and therefore irrelevant to the learning environment and the learners.
My frustration is perhaps still there as these ideas never materialized nor even met feedback, although these frustrated feelings are less as I am essentially living out these ideas and processes in my everyday work. But a bit more feedback and encouragement or even resistance from other people would have been nice, as these allow me to move on with the development of the ideas faster and more efficiently. And they do in turn generate more energy for the next steps.
I hope to explore and develop these thoughts further if our projects push through in 2008. But even if they didn’t, I will still move on. I was just discussing this with Trevor, beginning with what I moodily called a cycle of luck. I thought that perhaps “bad luck” was when we expect too much of others, and “good luck” was not necessarily expecting less, but rather facing in the direction of those who make the most of the least in expectations. In other words, to simply keep flow with the good waters.
Her name is Mandy, and she was wearing a Tommy Hilfiger pink dress when she arrived. Here is a photo of Mandy, now wearing a diaper. 
Anyway, while there Trevor took a photo of me and Edward - especially to show off my new crocheted shrug. 