You want me to what ?!
On the Importance of
Failing Gloriously
Shawn Graham,http://j.mp/sg-apr20
My Name Is Shawn Graham
and I am a Failure
the hook- why is he a failure? what does that even mean? note training as roman archaeologist vs my actual work history. note that blogging in the early 00s was a way for me to feel less like a failure - on the internet, in those days, no one knew you were a dog... so I let it all hang out there. but I want to focus on two particular failures, and why they failed.
Two Fails:
The Parable of HeritageCrowd
The Parable of the Welders
HeritageCrowd
explain what it was, and what went wrong
explain that i was to teach mad skillz. kill and drill. etc.
Failure is not the end.
my training, as a teacher. If i can do this, untenured, contingent, and still survive then there is hope for everyone. I will discuss later how my despair at the loss of heritagecrowd taught me something profound about teaching. But I will tell you now that I'm still wrestling with what the wrestlers taught me - about empathy, about kindess, and about expectations. These two experiences are perhaps the most formative of my evolution as a scholar. What are the stakes?
"In DH we often valorize failure and what can be learned from it, but it can be difficult to know how to deal with the feelings associated with it...""
He goes on to say: Beyond the content we teach and the act of learning it - our students are living in states of continual anxiety. To say nothing of the personal, social, or systemic traumas to which many of them have been subjected about which we may never know
this is how I failed Marc in the welding class. re my current students - "If I wanted to study computers I wouldn't be taking history". How do I deal with the anxiety now? By focussing on process, rather than product. By insisting on full documentation of what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how they see it intersecting what they read, and their other classes. But I'm Not Techy!
confession time
shawn as undergrad student with snarky paper. Doing digital work, thinking digitally, does NOT mean you have to be 'techy', whatever that means. Digital Work is about
failing in public goes against all your training. So why bother?
how do you do that productively ?
how do you do it safely ?
and how do you teach it?
It means that you are actually aware of the processes surrounding the context(s) of your work, and being critically reflective about them. White guy on the internet warnings. Everyone Screws Up.
Some are better at hiding it
Framing fail in research & professional practice. tendency to spin, frame as win ; leads to inflated claims of success; to value fail means to not play the academic game as we currently find it. Croxall and Warnick's
1 - Technological Failure
taxonomy. a strategy for productive fails. move from types 1 & 2 to types 3 & 4. continue the parable of heritagecrowd, the welders: the reporting back, the warts-and-all!
Croxall and Warnick, working from the perspective of digital pedagogy, identify 4 kinds of fail
1-4, with examples - one thing not mentioned in any of this is the whiteness and maleness of the internet, and of internet culture. It might be that everything Iâm saying is impossibly tainted by the fact Iâm a white guy in tech: and I donât have the necessary perspective to work out whether or not what Iâm saying is dangerous or not.
-The first two refer to what happened; the second two refer to our response and how we react to the first two (if we react at all). Perhaps there should be a 5th category: 5 - failing to reflect.
set up your learning so that fails 1 and 2 happen, but the real learning happens if you can move 'em to 3 and 4! In what ways have we failed?
How did I fail?
How did you fail?
digital work is a team sport btw Process over Product
keep process notes, document blind alleys. cite your notes in your papers! surface the hard work of going down blind alleys 'But We Already Knew That!'
Matthew Lincoln
digital work suffers from this problem, of differentiating what sounds reasonable from what we already knew. let's take a look at what matthew lincoln says... it's a similar approach to what is being proposed in science papers, of 'preregistering' (there it's to combat fraud and p-hacking) What I've learned about
or, 'productive failure as pedagogy'
frameworks and scaffolds
physical/digital spaces for explorations
appropriate eyes and audiences
uncoverage rather than coverage
digital work suffers from being seen as 'cool' or the 'next big thing' or the 'saviour of the humanities'. Lots of people get their knickers in a twist over this. This goes back to what Alan Liu argued about the laws of 'cool' in 2004, of how 'knowledge work' was the 'cool' work, in that it couldn't really be defined. We only know cool when we see it. Hence, 'cool' is the aporia of information: 'cool is information designed to resist information'. Thus, it's also shallow.
students - go see how your artist peers deal with their work. study how artistic practice offers models for dealing with the problems of tech - we need to fold artistic ways of knowing into our practice - to my mind, an experimental process based, fail based, way of knowing. that's how we deal with the 'cool' of tech.
To 'Fail Gloriously'
Anxiety is a feature; embrace the disorientation, and use the technology to find each other! that is to say,
Meaningful Play
