(how's that for a colon-oscopy?)

I've finally started taking a look at StudyPlace, the Plone tool which our department is developing to support academic collaboration. I hadn't really gotten around to it until now for the same reason one doesn't usually get around to using any digital tool -- I haven't really needed it yet. But I'm re-entering the second half of Communication Theory and Social Thought (aka Frogmarch Through Western Thought) this semester, and the course is using it as a central place for discussion and notification. So I've been driven to it over the past few days to look up info on our first reading of the semester, Horkheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of Enlightenment.

I'd been warned independently by both professors McClintock and Moretti (bless them for taking care of my nerves, knowing I was feeling a little gun-shy about the class after a difficult time in its first semester... and probably remembering that I groused angrily the first time I was asked to read the Greeks in the interest of communication theory) that this first reading was one of the hardest of the semester. So far, though, I've found it has a few hooks connecting to issues very familiar and interesting to me.

First of all, I knew Adorno was in part responsible for The Authoritarian Personality, which I stole off my dad's bookshelf some years back to browse, so I knew what interested the man. That makes it easier to contextualize what he's saying than what the deal was with, say, Tonnies, who I'd never heard of before.

Secondly, it soon became clear that the project of The Dialectic was a very familiar one to anyone who's ever listened to Lester Mazor's description of the founding of Hampshire College. I had long heard that the founders of Hampshire College had been concerned with the direction that a blind faith in the goodness and utility empiricism had taken during World War II on both sides -- eugenics on the part of the Nazis, the development of the atom bomb by the US --but I hadn't known which thinkers were responsible for raising these concerns. I've never read this argument in its original form, so I'm more likely to be able to finish this and participate in class. I feel lucky to have gone to a college whose philosophical underpinning was so lively and accessible that you'd actually hear professors talking about it from time to time. Do Harvard students ever get that kind of living history?

This concern with blind faith in science is also in dialogue with the Bruno Latour I read a few summers ago. It's funny, I took him up because I needed him for work on actor-network theory, but I kept reading because I just needed Latour in general, as a graceful writer as well as someone who addresses the concerns with science I retain from my own childhood living at Caltech and trusting its scientists the way some kids might trust their pastors. Still wish I had time to pick up We Have Never Been Modern, which promised to speak even more directly to my questions than Science In Action.

So granted, I've not left the introduction yet (yes, I use blogging to avoid doing reading), but I'm hoping I'll weather this reading ok.

I'm hesitant about StudyPlace, though, much as I guess I was given pause by Robbie's piece Towards A Place Of Study In A World Of Instruction, for which it appears to be named. Perhaps I'm just seeing it too early in its lifetime; it debuted this semester, and I'm not sure what plans are for expansion. But it seems to me that the site has made the fundamental miscalculation many people with good ideas do: it looks like a great party which Robbie has thrown, at which a few students have made a courtesy appearance and then left.

I hope I don't come off as too ascerbic about StudyPlace in this post. It's a good idea, really it is, and it's set up more intuitively, constructively, and naturally to native Net users than Classweb is. (Though I find its categories opaque. So... some of the sections are just for papers you'd publish, while others are for bloglike thoughts and others are for papers for class? Which is which?) I love that Robbie cares enough about the philosophical underpinnings of education to craft a better site for better learning, supporting student dialogue.

I think the problem we run into here is the same one we see on Classweb; participation happens when it's assigned or encouraged by the professor. Maybe I don't know where to look yet, but I don't see much voluntary comment. I went looking for a place to stick a few casual thoughts about the reading and didn't find anything. The blog contains two posts from my peers, one of which is by Sarah, who is comfortable enough with blogs to maintain a "bloggy" feel even in academic spaces; the other of which is more bloggy than I'd expect, using the first person and all, but has a real I-wrote-a-paper-for-the-prof heft to it.

I don't know how to encourage voluntary, engaged participation in academic forums; that's really what Sarah and Dana look into with their work. Part of the issue is surely that people's attention is elsewhere. Classweb is the academic portal most TC classes use (if they use any at all), so it's not likely that people will venture into StudyPlace on their way to another class space.

And then, neither Classweb nor StudyPlace is the portal any of us use to get to our usual fun. My dock gets me to iChat and WoW and my IRC and Telnet servers. Yahoo currently gets me to some email and RSS feeds and the comics I read (cuz I'm too lazy to set up a more labor-intensive feed reader). My own site is the easiest way to get to friends' comments on my site, and then their sites. In terms of where I walk every day, these academic portals are off the beaten path. The only academic sites so far which work with my preferred means of navigating are the RSS feeds of TerraNova and Ulises' del.icio.us. I think. Does StudyPlace have RSS?

As a reader, rather than a contributor, there's also little to pull me in, here. The splash screen is a stuffy philosophical statement of purpose for the site. There's no highlights of recently posted material, no articles cited for being particularly interesting -- in fact, aside from the bloglike section, there's no text to read aside from titles. Would it kill the designers to put up some abstracts to whet the palate? This site reads like a library database. If this site is going to be a personal expression of Robbie as a scholar -- and believe me, it is -- it ought to have some personality, some editorial vision which shapes the entry to the site.

I mean, even though I'm in grad school, I'd like to retain a positive identity as a READER, you know? Someone who reads because they LIKE ideas and well-crafted sentences? Oh, all my years studying stylistics are WASTED on you people. E.B. White despairs of you! So do I!

(not that all that stylistic mojo isn't also wasted on this blog ;))

I'm looking forward to working on StudyPlace instead of Classweb, but it's still not someplace I want to hang out. For that, I'm heading over to the lively debates at TerraNova.