All Tomorrow's Cultures

(previously published in Anthropology News ) As the brief, terrifying passion for  MOOCs  slowly dissipates, your university administrators may be casting around for some other technologically enhanced pedagogy.  Might I suggest  gamification ?  It’s not a new idea, by any means—people have been applying game-based mechanics to learning for some time, but its latest incarnation focuses on online games, from single player to collaborative, multiplayer experiences. Of course, there’s a good deal of potential for gamification to follow on other technologically-driven changes in university teaching—ie, towards another wave of expropriation as public universities “partner” with private capital in order to undermine the autonomy of faculty.  But I believe there’s subversive potential here for anthropology. A screenshot of Manic Digger image courtesy Pierre Rudloff and wikicommons I’ve been thinking a lot about games and subversion recently, mostly bec...

At the moment I write this, a creeping group think has saturated both higher education (The Chronicle of Higher Education), and popular media (New York Times, Huffington Post, etc.).  It's that moment when public debate constricts to a terrifying one-dimensionality--when all manner of unwarranted assumptions attain hegemony and become the scaffolding for etiolated prognostications.  And, in this case, where we enter a time-warp and return to the 1980s.    Take, for example, an April 30 article from the front page of the New York Times , "Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden". Here, the President of San Jose State University, Mohammad Qayoumi, discusses his enthusiastic adoption of MOOC modules from MIT: "Traditional teaching will be disappearing in five to seven years, he predicts, as more professors come to realize that lectures are not the best route to student engagement, and cash-strapped universities continue to seek cheaper instruction" (A1)...