Building upon the energy of our first bus tour — A Journey through the techno-utopian beginnings and environmental currents of the Silicon Valley — Free Soil would like to use this year’s gathering of artists and practitioners to think about how we learn. How can we use our tools and practice to reflect and engage with the world around us?

The early work done in Silicon Valley by people with visions of improving the world wasn’t isolated from their politics or what was going on around them. It was part of a broader movement and a profound cultural shift. “Technology is shaped by the prism of culture, politics and economics,” says John Markoff.

Through this bus tour and its related events, Free Soil will look at education as a form of cultural production and creative resistance.

In the text, Trebor starts off by discussing the triumphal rise of the Interactive Media Divisions the world over (variously called Media Studies,” “Game Studies,” “Media Ecology,” “Interactive Telecommunications,” “Software Art,” “New Media,” “Media Art,” Computation, Engineering,” and so on) before going on to lambaste these very educators, particularly in the United States, for not conducting a public debate about the values and methodologies in media art education.

Given the high cost of education here in the US, Scholz sympathizes with the pragmatic concerns of students to get jobs, but never-the-less emphasizes the need for an approach to Media Arts education that is more that “shopping for career skills”. He furthermore problematizes the model of Media Arts programs emulating the film-industry model, as he argues, “there is no monolithic industry which one could enter after graduation”. He also criticizes the corporate just-in-time knowledge approach that leaves out the history and politics of these tools regarding humanities or social as superfluous to the goal of vocational training.

No mere Pandora, Scholz devotes over half the paper to discussing alternatives to the current state of affairs. At the faculty level, one of his proposals includes a shift in policy whereby the development of new skills would become considered legitimate research for faculty. While at a more general level he suggests that programs consider organizing themselves around broader sets of issues rather than around specific technologies, criticizing the latter approach as tending to producing somewhat superficial projects as well as generally narrowing student’s perspectives.

You can download the pdf here [Posted by Marc Tuters on Marc Tuters]