My summer as a
Teaching and Learning with Technology Faculty Fellow began with a general sense of purpose without a clear idea of precisely how
the goals I set for myself would be achieved. The purpose was to perform scholarship using digital media. Specifically, I wanted to begin work in earnest on a research project focusing on the nature of Socratic politics as depicted in the Platonic dialogues. The idea was not only to begin reading and thinking about the enigmatic appearance of Socrates as he practices politics in the dialogues, but also to use digital media to expose my thinking to a wider audience early in the research program.
Happily, Cole Camplese, Director of Education Technology Services, surrounded me with a very talented team of educators -- Allan Gyorke, Matt Meyer and Ryan Wetzel. During our first meeting, we talked in some detail about the concerns I had that my nascent work might suffer by being exposed too early to a wider audience. We thought about the different sorts of communities I could reach with different types of media and we devised a flexible strategy to begin work.
The key to the success of the project was the decision to follow a suggestion made by Allan Gyorke that we make podcasting central to the project. My immediate reaction to this was, to be honest, negative. I had already done some podcasting on my own and, well, I just did not like to hear the sound of my recorded voice. However, once my team lent me the courage to speak without thinking about the fact that my voice was being recorded, I began to recognize the power of this medium for my project.
The Power of Podcasting
The reason podcasting turned out to be so important to the project was that it afforded me the opportunity to reach out explicitly to colleagues within Penn State and in the larger academic community and invite them into an safe and comfortable space in which ideas could be risked, challenged, discussed and revised without calcifying into written text. In short, with podcasting, I was able to tap into the dynamic dialogue between living voices that often fails to translate in written form. If writing allows us to reflect and formulate, edit and craft, oral expression allows us to play with ideas, to test and challenge them in dynamic relation to another.
In a way, by choosing podcasting as a medium, I was affirming something Socratic rather than Platonic, for Socrates spoke but did not write, while Plato wrote even if he chose a style (the dialogue form) that sought to articulate something of the play of spoken dialogue.
Once I began to recognize that podcasting offered me a medium through to practice dialogue with others even as I sought to think about the powerful political implications of dialogue itself, I focused my attention on developing the Digital Dialogue, a podcast dedicated to cultivating the excellences of dialogue in a digital age.
The Digital Dialogue
The Digital Dialogue began as an attempt to articulate the excellences or virtues that must be cultivated if dialogue is to have a politically transformative effect. While the podcast is rooted in the Ancient Greek tradition of virtue ethics and dialogue, it has expanded into the area of contemporary political and social theory. As it grows, I expect the Digital Dialogue to engage a diverse set of thinkers concerned with thinking about the political possibilities opened to us by dialogue facilitated by social media technologies.
I imagine there are many ways to measure the success of this podcast. One might look at the number of people who subscribe to it over iTunesU or the number who have visited the Socratic Politics blog looking for the link to a specific episode. Or one might measure the number of links posted back to the blog or the extent to which other universities have highlighted it on their website. Although I have not yet tried to track down the statistics, we have seen the podcast picked up by
Boston College, Colby College,
Rhodes College, and the
Institute for Conflict Resolution and Analysis at George Mason College.
For now, however, the way I choose to measure the success of the podcast is by the degree to which it has pushed my research in directions I had not anticipated. In dialogue with others, my own thinking has developed and changed and I am much further along in my thinking about the nature and practice of Socratic politics than I would have been had I spent the summer reading alone in the library.
For this, I would like to thank everyone in TLT at Penn State and especially Cole Camplese, Allan Gyorke, Matt Meyer, Ryan Wetzel, Brad Kozlek, Pat Besong, George Webster, Chris Stubbs and Zach Zidic.
In Plato's dialogue Gorgias, Socrates claims to be one of the only Athenians to practice the true art of politics. As is well known, Socrates haunted the public places in Athens looking for young people with whom he could converse. During these discussions, Socrates was intent on turning the attention of those he encountered toward the question of the good and the just. It is difficult to understate the lasting political power these dialogues have had over the course of time. Yet the emergence of social Web 2.0 technologies opens new possibilities for this ancient practice of politics, which Socrates fittingly called in the Gorgias, a "techne," or art.
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