Wisdom Wants to be Free
Welcome to the home page of The Disseminary.
February 25, 2003
Trevor and I got the good news this afternoon that Prof. Wes Avram of Yale Divinity School will lead one of our Disseminary seminars, on “Spirituality and Technology.” We had been hoping for this; the topic seems a natural for us, and Wes is a brilliant scholar of these questions. We’ll have more details in a while; we are still, after all, trying to pick out the web hosting service we’ll use. But this is a great first step for us, and we can’t wait to turn Wes loose with the seminar as soon as we line up the fixings.
We’re still waiting on our legal advice. I’ll follow up with a couple more alternatives.
Shades of Green
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February 21, 2003
This week, we began working on elements of the configuration of the Disseminary web pages, and names of participants we’d like to rope into leading off our articles and seminars. We’ still pinning down the whos and whens. We’re still waiting to hear from the learned and generous counselor who may turn out to be our lawyer. On the positive side, we’ve made some initial design decisions.
February 14, 2003
Funding for the Disseminary came through today. Right away, we began putting together the resources for our transforming flanking maneuver in theological education. We even have a prospective lawyer to set up our intellectual-property arrangements.
Our self-introduction on this page
The Disseminary has its origins in a proposal AKMA first made in 1995 or ’96, if memory serves, for a site where theologically-interested inquirers might begin the work of putting into practice a different model for learning and teaching. At the heart of the project lies the premise that institutional infrastructure—not only the physical infrastructure of buildings and supplies, but also the information infrastructure of grades and credits—and the costs of maintenance do not simply make education possible, but also inhibit education in important ways.
Most obviously, the costs associated with education keep many interested learners at arms length. A building costs large sums whether to buy or rent; salaried faculty cost a great deal, and they expect certain prerogatives associated with their academic vocation. Beyond that, the physical space of education limits the number of students who can participate (those who can get to the location, those who can fit into the facilities). Even further, the institution’s attitude toward education warps toward its perceived necessities of physical plant and faculty, and these begin to displace the original educational goals.
Moreover, the social function of education often presupposes goals that do not themselves serve the interests of teaching and learning. People look to educational institutions to issue warranted certification that learners have attained particular levels of proficiency. Institutions that accept such a social function—in other words, the vast preponderance of them—need to slice, dice, and quantify the pedagogical endeavor so as to determine which students attain the degree, diploma, or certification. The exigencies of quantification and standardization oblige schools to squeeze all areas of study into terms of uniform duration, testing students to ascertain their progress, assigning a one-dimensional evaluation of a student’s accomplishment, and so on. These all serve the purpose of upholding the social function of the teaching institution—but not necessarily the purposes of teaching and learning.
The Disseminary stands for an approach to education and educational materials apart from the constraints of institutional education: credits, fees, restrictive copyright limitations, grades, and other limitations. The project envisions a variety of educational resources offered at no charge, for no formal credit. Such resources may in the long run include publications, asynchronous seminar discussions (kept available in archives), chats, interviews, audio and video recordings; we’ll post a fuller sketch of an ideal Disseminary on another page. Our present Wabash Center grant proposal includes plans for generating one online textbook and one online seminar.
This version of The Disseminary draws on ideas discussed in a conference paper from the Garrett Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace Conference (subsequently published in Teaching Theology and Religion), then further discussed at a Wabash Center Teaching and Technology Conference during the summer of 2002 (scheduled to reconvene in September 2003).
At the 2002 Wabash conference, one of our colleagues proposed the following manifesto for what she called “open-source” pedagogy:
These points resonate with the Disseminary sensibility; where we don’t anticipate emphasizing them all, we support the outlook that they bespeak.
For the time being, The Disseminary exists mostly as plans and possibilities; we await word on our pending grant proposal. But when the grant is approved, or even if it isn’t, we may get impatient and see what we can get rolling on our own. Until then, you’re welcome to bookmark AKMA’s weblog, where there’ll be the most frequent updates, and where he’ll be sure to mention any significant changes to this site
Thanks for visiting. . . .