The blog ate my homework...Toward a Theory of Online Education's Marketing Rhetoric

I am becoming increasingly fascinated with the marketing rhetoric of online education programs, and though this topic will probably span several posts continuing well after 4347/5347 has concluded, this post will be my first attempt at an analysis of, among other things, the uses of amplification and exclusion (i.e. what things are emphasized and what things are left out). I may in fact be getting into some dangerous territory here, so please understand that my views only reflect, well, my views. And before I really launch into this, I want to mention that I have, for the past three long semesters, taught both sophomore literature and advanced composition online through Blackboard, with what I considered excellent results. I did not consider those courses to be qualitatively different in terms of student achievement (though my students did do quite a bit more writing than they would have done in the face to face classes, which I consider a plus). Courses taught solely online can be wonderful, and they can even sometimes allow students to enhance skills that would have been marginalized in a face to face setting. However, my interest here is in advertising strategies, which I often find crass in their reduction of online education into a product rather than a process.

I'll start with the seemingly harmless and amusing "Classinpjs.com"--I could not find the video on YouTube to embed, but if you check out the following url you'll understand the concept: http://classinpjs.com/. The actual commercial being 4-walled right now features a young woman talking about how great online courses are because one can take said courses in his/her pjs, and, really, isn't that just the bee's knees? (She doesn't really say "bee's knees," by the way--that's me ad libbing). That really is the crux of the ad--so here, the advantage of online education boils down to, "It's totally cool because we can stick it to the establishment by being all rebellious and stuff by not dressing up to learn." (As if the "establishment" is not in complete control of the distribution and marketing of online programs anyway.) As has been eloquently stated on several forums discussing this commercial, that really is a pretty weak argument, because students don't dress up to learn anyway. I concur with that observation--especially when I taught at Texas Woman's University, I had many students who would show up to 8and 9 am classes in pj attire. I drew the line, however, at their bringing donuts and coffee with them.

Another more "serious" but no less flawed representation of online learning comes courtesy of Kaplan University. The ad shown on t.v. comments that students will be taught by professors with "real world" experience, although just what that means is left unexplained. This ad has fascinated me for some time due to the obvious dig at the present incarnation of university faculty (people like me), who, according to the ad, must lack "real world" experience because we probably live in our offices and, though we hold advanced degrees (or perhaps because we hold advanced degrees) couldn't tie our shoes without written instructions. The approach is rather flimsy, not simply because of the thinly veiled ad hominem attack, but rather because Kaplan specifically refers to online education as a "product."

Another ad for Kaplan has a prof morphing into a digitized version of himself, delivering a message that literally apologizes for the greivous injustices (though just what these injustices are remains vague) that have been inflicted upon students by face to face education (and in case you don't get the oh so subtle warrant here, it is this: "Tradition is bad":



This commercial shamelessly panders its message to what is being pejoratively termed "Generation Me" by declaring, "Hey, universities need to change to suit your needs rather than the other way around" and stating, "It's your time," a comment that may be temporarily inspiring to some, but when the swelling music fades, they're still left wondering what that means.

The truth is, unless a course truly is weakly designed and doesn't demand much student participation, online education requires quite a bit of effort on the part of the student in terms of time management and drive. And it doesn't take much to see past the smoke and mirrors rhetoric of these marketing techniques to see that they are doing everything possible to eschew those issues.

She's not ugly enough!

For those of you in 4347/5347 who may be following this blog, note that the following post has no redeeming academic merit whatsoever--you may, in fact, lose IQ points if you read on. (Really--stick to Bolter and his ideas on refashioned dialogues for now.) It is simply a kind of warm-up for me to segue into writing something of more "substance" later on.

I have personally never seen "Ugly Betty", but I know enough about the show to get the gist--a young woman who, by some prefabricated, presumably Western, standard of beauty has been defined as conventionally unattractive (unconventionally attractive?) has a series of misadventures and somehow, even though our star is ugly, mind you, winds up with several friends and love interests. I'm bored thinking about it, because wasn't the ugly duckling dead horse already beaten to smithereens in the 80s with movies like Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful? But my point is not really to whine about how the idea behind of the show is not new...

Rather, my point is that someone picked up on the fact that ugly Betty is not ugly at all, and is quite miffed about it. "Ugly Betty," is, in their eyes, quite pulchritudinous after all (look it up, people). That someone is China. See, China has its own version of Ugly Betty, and apparently (here is the one aspect of this post that marginally relates to MultiMedia Media) the web has been taken by storm with young girls angrily shouting (and yes, I think shouting is possible on the web) that the eponymous character is "not ugly enough" and "is an insult to ugly girls everywhere." I agree, as I have always felt that "ugliness" in contemporary cinema or t.v. entertainment was shoved into uncomfortably simplistic categories by people who have no real interest in ugliness at all and are quite loathe and, at best, ill equipped to handle the myriad cultural ramifications the subject brings up. So, here's the breakdown (and note that males seem to be completely exnominated from the whole ugliness dilemma--I mean, where's the companion show, "Hideous Fred?") But I digress.

Here's the thing--"ugliness" for women/girls in Western society and film seems to come down to about four common denominators: glasses, bad clothes, weight, and, sometimes, braces. Note also that three of those four things have nothing at all to do with the actual body of the person--glasses can be removed, braces eventually come off, and one can, apparently through some sort of aggressive intervention and humiliation on national television (think "What Not to Wear"), develop better taste in clothes. Those things are, simply, prosthetic devices to give an illusion of "ugly" that really has more to do with ugliness as physically constructed rather than innate.

There's a great scene in "Not Another Teen Movie" where the token "good looking guy," when faced with the prospect of going out with the token "ugly girl," exclaims, in complete horror, "Janey? I can't go out with her! She's got......glasses! And a...pony tail!" It's one of those great self-referential moments (even though the rest of the film is pretty base in its appeal to a Gen X audience) that kind of encapsulates what I've just claimed.

So, I concur with China, and I would go one step further to say that not only is Ugly Betty not ugly enough, she is not ugly period.

Italics

this is an italicized phrase

And this is me using my test-in-class page as a springboard for another post. First of all, I am going to use my "invoked" audience of 17 Multimedia Media students for the first part of this post--so, you guys should feel superspecial. I am pretty impressed with the blogging so far (yours, not mine)--the voice, the style, the originality of ideas. Fantastic and entertaining stuff that I actually want to read and that, judging by the comments that are starting to emerge in response to your ideas, others actually want to read too. Whodathunk it? But how is all of this adaptation fo different discourses helpful to an English student? For one thing, being, as we are, in the "late age of print," we may not see certain beloved technologies "die" outright, but we will become more responsible for quickly adapting to engaging in multimedia discourses, the constraints and freedoms of which will be, as they always are, socially constructed. Am I trying to plug some kind of futuristic "All writing will be multimedia writing in five years! Bwahahahaha!" agenda? Not really, but from my observations of what kinds of writing are gaining popularity in the mainstream and in the classroom, blogs, wikis, and web texts are gaining currency in academe and elsewhere--these genres are becoming the norm, right along with their print ancestors. Oh, and just wait until you get into Donna Haraway! If you think Bolter's radical, you'd better fasten your seatbelts :).

Ok, end of message solely intended for 4347/5347 students.

Here's what I really wanted to talk about. If anyone has not yet seen the film Koyannisqatsi (1982), it's a pretty fascinating flick. In a nutshell (from the site that gives credible info about the film and the trilogy):

"KOYAANISQATSI, Reggio's debut as a film director and producer, is the first film of the QATSI trilogy. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance." Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds -- urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass." (http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/koyaanisqatsi.php)

The interesting thing about this film, to me, is that, although there is not one word spoken in it (it is all a montage of themed scenes of nature, man's impact on nature, and technology), most people have accepted the interpretation that this movie is presenting humanity as a negative force pushing nature to its limits (and I'm not going to deny that there are a few scenes that suggest this idea). True, Koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance," but is that all bad? Really? I'm too rushed right now to get out my Kate Hayles "Posthuman," but I think some of her theory on chaos would help to rectify the film from the facile view that it is simply saying "Nature=Good, People=Bad, Technology=Worse." I'm just sayin'...

Anyway, see a clip for yourself, if you wish...