Elizabeth Losh · UC San Diego
Designing the Digital University: Telepresence, Ubiquity, and Mess

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What would it mean to design the digital university with the understanding that existing practices, values, and users would have to be accommodated? What if the transparency and access promised by networked computational media platforms inevitably create conflict and confusion? This talk explores the assumptions currently shaping the most ambitious efforts to remake higher education from Massively Open Online Courses to DIY Us and analyzes some of the central analogies that define their approaches. Rather than presume that rhetoric is somehow extraneous to these reform efforts, constituting mere salesmanship or boosterism, Losh asserts the value of rhetorical attention as a fundamental design principle.

Elizabeth Losh is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009) and the forthcoming The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press). She is the co-author of the forthcoming textbook Understanding Rhetoric (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013) with Jonathan Alexander and is co-editor of Tweeting the Revolution: Networked Media, the Rhetorics of Activism, and Practices of the Everyday with Beth Coleman. She is Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College at U.C. San Diego and a blogger for Digital Media and Learning Central. She writes about new forms of learning, institutions as digital content-creators, the discourses of the "virtual state," the media literacy of policy makers and authority figures, and the rhetoric surrounding regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices.