(2017-09-05) Caulfield Students As Creators And The Theology Of The Attention Economy

Mike Caulfield: “Students as Creators” and the Theology of the Attention Economy. A piece of what I hope is an emerging critique of how connectivism and constructivism has been practiced and sold in past years, and how we might reorient and reposition it knowing what we know now.

I have become deeply skeptical over the past four or five years about the “students as creators” rhetoric

I believe in making stuff, and still align myself with constructivism as a philosophy, most days of the week

But the rhetoric around “students as creators” is unbelievably bad.

As I said a few years back, the idea that universities should value “producers” and push our students towards “production” is actually the least subversive idea you could possibly have at a university. The most subversive idea you could have at a university these days is that you might think a few connected thoughts without throwing them into either publication or the attention economy. That you might think about things for the purpose of being a better human, without an aim to produce anything at all.

I’ve moved from the question of “How do we express ourselves on the internet?” to “How do we be better people on the internet?” Or maybe most importantly, “How do we use the internet to become better people?” Sometimes that involves creating, of course.