0Caveat: Much here is based on first impressions -- I hope people will point out where I am going astray.

0 Just came back from HASTAC III. It was a different kind of conference from what I've been going to for a while. I've gotten used to conferences with a focus on building and trying things -- here's how I put together a WordPress or Drupal or Omeka or whatever site, and here's what I've tried to do with it in my class.

0 HASTAC, at least the sessions I was able to attend, was decidedly not about the practical application of tools and technologies. Instead, it was doing various kinds of theory and criticism with respect to technologies -- doing body criticismof iPhone use, theorizing mind-body-technology relationships, interrogating narrative genres as they appear online.

0 Not a bad thing, of course. Every conference must have its own feel. And I liked kicking the dust off my theory training from grad school. There were some things, though, that quite surprised me, and troubled me a bit about the differences.

0 The thing that struck me most and started off this line of thinking was a passing suggestion that "Web 1.0" and "Web 2.0" aren't all that different. At the conferences I usually go to, and among ed. tech. folks in general, that'd produce a double-take at best, incredulity in the middle, and rioting at worst. The use of personal publishing spaces and RSS -- key Web 2.0 features -- is to my usual circle a fundamental, transformative, game-changing aspect of today's web. (And that doesn't even begin to think about Web 3.0/Semantic Web/Linked Open Data!).

0 So it was an eye-brow raiser to think that among all the high-level technology criticism being done in various domains, there wasn't much of it happening in the domain that's most important to many of the practitioners.

0 Case in point. Right now I'm not doing what was suggested/asked. At the closing session, we were invited to blog more thoughts, responses and ideas in the HASTAC blog. Cue "raise the other eye-brow." In general -- again in the conference circles I haunt -- I find it rare to suggest to a crowd to go to an organization's blog to write. Most all of us have our own blogs. Often enough, more than one (for example, I write here for technical stuff, broad reflections, and random whatevers, and have Semantic UMW as a project blog with a very different audience). And it seems really askew to write my thoughts in someone else's space. Ownership of that online space is an important aspect of my online identity, and something lots of us actively try to develop in our students. When content, especially from a controlled set of contributers, needs to come together, we aim for aggregating via RSS, with some sort of moderation system to keep it focused, like in the planet model. Seems like the two groups are in somewhat different worlds, though clearly with some good overlap between the two.

0Now, I think we need some of that high-level theorizing about syndication, genres of personal publishing, new epistemologies, notions of identity, etc. Especially when it comes to thinking about 'online identity' or 'digital' identity, we really need the help of those high-level critics.

0 Another distinction I noticed. The focus among ed. tech. folks is aimed very much at the question "what do we gain with this tool/technology/approach?". Always acknowledging things being lost, of course, but very much with an eye toward what's emerging. At HASTAC, I heard more attention being paid to what's being lost. The session that did have great focus on what's being gained seemed to be crystal-balling many years into the future, and was at a really, really, really high level (though I admit I had to miss much of it while trying to get the airlines to find my luggage -- another story for another time). And I think the majority of ed. tech. people are all about pushing the envelope now. So again, I worry that we're missing a real connection.

0 Looking back to my Ph.D. training, that doesn't really surprise me. I was a Medievalist, after all -- it was all about looking backward for study. And through that, we learn important things about where we are and how we got here. That, in turn, helps us to respond to new things. So, for example, when I look at a Drupal or Omeka installation, I'm looking at it through the lens of what I know about the transition from oral to written culture, manuscript to print culture, etc. Walter Ong comes up a lot among ed. tech. people. It's the nature of criticism to need to look at what's already there, if for no other reason than to be able to collect evidence. The critics are studying what's been done, generally not creating new material. That's why it annoyed me as a literature scholar when people would say, "Oh! I love writing poetry! Can I read some of your poetry sometime? Do you read your work at open mikes?". Umm. No.

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The distinction I see is hardly new. This is why Lady Philosophy in Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy has a θ and a π on her robe. Theory/Practice. (and note the priviledging of Theory at the top). Its part of why Plato points up and Aristotle points down in The School of Athens. Abstract/Grounded. HASTAC/THATCamp?

0I mentioned above that it's the nature of criticism to need to look back a bit for its evidence. In Medieval Studies, clearly. Literary Criticism, race/gender/body/culture studies most likely. But, when it comes to technology studies, not necessarily. And that's where I'd like to see prosepctive criticism, criticism that looks at soon-to-be released technologies and gets some of the high-level theory going on while its still in beta.

0I think that I would very much benefit from having some of the high-level critics interrogating the project I'm working on. It doesn't much exist in a traditionally studyable form, but getting some of the cultural critics in there to ask deep questions about implications would be a great set of feedback for helping me think about just what it is that I'm doing, anyway. Similarly, Web 2.0 is often talked about in terms of its democratizing effects. Let's get some higher level cultural studies looking at that, too, to tease out the details that we're too busy coding to think about.

0 So here's what I'd like to see. A richer mix of the people writing and releasing code and the people widely adopting it right now and the high level critics at conference sessions, maybe even as co-presenters in some sessions. The critics might not get to have the kinds of evidence they are used to -- that's what makes it prospective criticism -- and the practitioners might not be used to thinking about such abstract issues. But I think both groups would benefit from the discussion.