Before the Scantron, There was the Jacquard Loom

The Jacquard loom*, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, was one of the first machines to use punched cards -- making the loom an often cited processor/influence in many narratives of the history of computer hardware and computer programming.  Demonstrated in the above video, the loom allowed textile designers to "program" a sequence of mechanical movements via the punched card; the designed punched card could then be feed into the Jacquard loom to be read and executed.

Punched Cards

The loom operated on the basis of the same binary (yes/no, on/off) logic that remains fundamental to computers today, and with enough binary input the loom was capable of outputting a surprisingly complex range of patterns.  If the textile designer wanted to change the output pattern, all they needed to do was feed the loom a new punched card (i.e., punched card as software and loom as hardware).

What is striking to me about the Jacquard loom as compared with the standardized testing machines of the 20th century is the differences of their outputs.

The Jacquard loom read punched cards that were designed -- with a specific visual/material output pattern in mind --  in order to produce a textile such as a rug:

And standardized testing machines (and voting machines), by the same basic technical processes, read bubble sheets that are designed -- presumably without any pattern in mind -- in order to produce data visualizations such as bar graphs:

(*Thanks to Walton for giving me this lead.)

Waiting for Superman and SB 6

Davis Guggenheim's recent documentary Waiting for Superman provides an excellent "statement of the problem" concerning the present state of public education in America.  The film will no doubt serve as a constant referent in education policy debates for years to come, and it will probably be invoked to justify various (even competing) agendas--just like 1912 newspaper accounts of the scene of the Titanic's sinking were used to justify Anglo-Saxon heroism but also to support allocations of elitism).  This is because the movie names and appeals so strongly to a common desire to improve public education, and yet, it also points out positive and negative aspects of various agents/entities involved.  In other words, teachers are the movie's heros but they are also its greatest villains (eg., teacher unions, apathetic teachers, etc.); American kids are portrayed as ambitious if not bright, but they're also shown to be cocky and/or stupid at times.  Politically, the film could be used as "evidence" in any number of cases, depending on which part of the movie was being referenced.

Waiting for Superman changed my mind about one issue relevant to SB 6.  While I am a vehement supporter of tenure in higher education on the basis of academic freedom, the film it very clear that tenure for K-12 teachers is very different from university tenure.  Unlike college professors, K-12 teachers are typically granted tenure very quickly without having to show a high level of accomplishment and promise.  Moreover, tenure in K-12 doesn't seem to have much to do with academic freedom: there are no research requirements and the curriculum is generally predetermined and invariable.  One of the most shocking scene's of the film comes when the D.C. superintendent proposes a plan that would do away with K-12 tenure but enable "highly effective" teachers to earn a solid six-figure income.  The teachers of D.C., however, stage a protest by refusing to even cast a vote of the proposal.  The proposal disappears.  This moment of the movie acted as a "punctum," propelling me to my memories of the status quo, mediocre, "CYA!" demeanor that overshadowed my experience of teaching in a Florida public high school.  That demeanor--which pervaded the school and rubbed off on the students--was bar none the worst aspect of the experience, therefore I think a move toward a merit-based form of teacher pay is necessary.  And since K-12 tenure isn't really predicated on merit or academic freedom, its elimination is an entirely different matter than tenure in higher education.  In fact, if the elimination of K-12 tenure creates the conditions for a true meritocracy, then K-12 without tenure would be more like the highly competitive, accomplishment-oriented system of tenure in higher education.  

Of course, the big question still remains: how do you measure quality when it comes to teaching?  With a merit-based pay scale, the answer to this question has even greater stakes and consequences.  With an major incentive to be measured as "highly effective," those who are highly motivated to become the best in the profession must use the established measurement criteria as their guide to the top.  If the measure is FCAT scores, the best teachers (who would likely be the best teachers in any given evaluation system) will generally strive, above all else, to maximize their students' test scores.  And yet, the measure (once it becomes a meritocracy) will not only guide the best teachers--it will also guide the teaching profession, such that the very idea and activity of teaching will rapidly transform.  (Indeed, we can already see if we compare the best private school teacher with the best public school teachers: their teaching philosophies/styles are extremely different and will continue to be as public schools become more and more engrossed by standardized testing as their primary measure.)    

A formal/aesthetic observation: the film is premised on the animation of education statistics.  We see this in two ways:

(1) the arch of its narrative follows five real kids who hope to be accepted (via lottery) to better public schools--and the screen is constantly flooded with national statistics of very processes being lived through by these five kids (so we see the plain statistics, but we see them at precise moments when we are very emotionally invested in the kids' chances of accessing that better education--in this way, the statistics become animated through our interested in these kids by virtue the narrative);

(2) the personal narrative arch is occasionally interrupted by computer-animated sequences that display (inter)national statistics dealing with reading/math levels, teacher unions, and the cost of schools vs. the cost of prisons.

Obviously statistics and data are at the core of FCAT and the policy debates that surround it.  In this sense, Waiting for Superman's animation aesthetic provides a useful formal/tale relay for my project. 

Technics and the "Indirect Production of Science"

Connecting last week's lecture on technics with Virilio's writing on the accident, I'm finding myself more curious about the presence of technology in my disaster, which I hadn't really grappled with directly when making my video on Senate Bill 6 last spring.  A frequent translator of Bernard Stiegler's work, Stephen Barker comments on the vital role of technics in the shaping of (human) experience:

What is being “profoundly transformed,” according to Stiegler, is nothing less that the nature of the human itself, by which Stiegler does not mean some traditional notion of “human nature”: since for Stiegler technics and technology are temporally prior to “the human” (and obviously, therefore, to any “humanism”) our need to attempt to “understand the process of technical evolution” is a vitally important ontological (and existential) imperative.

And so, here's a question we could be asking: What is the ontological or existential significance of the technics at work in my accident/disaster? Or, more specifically, how does the disaster reveal the "indirect production" (those qualities concealed/obscured by narratives of progress and utility) of the technics involved?

In the case of my disaster (the rampant proliferation of mandatory standardized testing as stipulated by FL's SB 6), my next blog post will look at the technologies that underlay if not engender that thought of such educational policies/practices.  Indeed, if we accept Stiegler's notion that technics precede human subjectivity, then technologies like photocopiers and scanners become reframed as immensely significant from an ontological perspective, rather than (boring) machines that sit passively in the sense of a "standing reserve."  A survey of the history of standardized testing, for example, reveals that the very concept of a standardized, multiple-choice test was, at least in the West, unheard of (and unthought) until soon after the Industrial Revolution; furthermore, the concept and cultural place of standardized testing wasn't really developed until the 1930's--the same decade in which the first automatic scanner was invented: the IBM 805.

The IBM 805

Of course, after noting this relation between the evolution of copy/scan technology and standardized testing, we have to qualify the terms of relationship.  For instance, my video (ABCDE, see in blog below) critiques the FCAT education environment as an "evaluation machine gone crazy," and I use image repetition and audio looping to suggest the experience of teaching a standard, drill-based, top-down mandated curriculum.  Throughout the video, though, I am relying upon the exact same copy/scan technologies that underlie standardized testing; my engages these technologies to create an aesthetic and visceral affect, while standardized testing uses them to establish and enforce a disembodied/universal jungle-gym of utilitarian rationality.  So we cannot claim that the technologies of copy/scan (the bedrock of computational media) inherently foster the kind of dull repetition symbolized by standardized testing and other forms of bureaucratic paperwork.

If, as Virilio (a la Ulmer) suggests, we treat contemporary standardized testing--and its surrounding policy debates--as a sign of the coming metaphysics, then we need to approach this particular practice of copy/scan technics as an entry point.  Rather than interpret, critique, and condemn the situation (and then just complain about it as it persists), a heuretic encounter with standardized testing aims to learn something from it--something about how our society tends to conceive of and relate to copy/scan technics.  If we can learn something here about copy/paste technics, then perhaps we'll be in a better position to articulate an alternative strategy for governing or occupying copy/scan technics--a strategy that contrasts from the utilitarian rationality evident in the FCAT, but a strategy that nonetheless answers to the same historical, technological, and political conditions.