There is no more hierarchical place than the university. My graduate course this semester is trying to bring some of the practice and theory of direct democracy into the classroom to see if we can build a different university within the ruins of the old.

I’ve been inspired to do so by the new teaching promoted by digital culture, such as Cathy Davidson’s experiments with peer-to-peer grading and Elizabeth Losh’s use of Twitter as instant feedback. So what might happen if you add the horizontal ethics of direct democracy to the hybrid learning space created by ubiquitous computing?

This will not be easy. The era of the league table, US News and World Report rankings and Research Assessment Exercises mitigates directly against the possibility of free, open, horizontal teaching and research. Let’s not even get into student debt.

Let’s just begin where we did today: at the beginning. I’ve mentioned before the politics of academic language. So I ventured to render the seminar into a workgroup, with a facilitator, not an instructor and an agenda, not a schedule. I distributed this proposal electronically in advance and today we broke down the various items that make up a “syllabus” into agenda items.

The workgroup now has three forms of meeting:

• actions, where we participate in or actively observe a political event, defined by group members, as long as no one endangers themselves or others.
• collective readings of key texts, where each person produces notes on a section of text, assembled into a Googledoc that is edited in the meeting to produce a collective in-depth reading
• thematic discussions–assemblages of readings and visualized materials on a theme for collective discussion.

If this had been an Occupy meeting or an unconference ThatCamp style, the group members would have set the entire agenda, I realize. I didn’t go that far because I was not sure it was fair or appropriate. Instead, I circulated a proposed agenda and a group of other items in each section that I thought were equally worthy of inclusion and invited other proposals. People broke into small groups to decide what they wanted to do and discussed their ideas in an animated manner. The result was a noticeably changed agenda with different themed discussions, key texts and actions. We blurred the distinction between the categories as well: which is sensible, as they are entirely arbitrary.

We then proceeded to consense on a collective agreement (what is usually called requirements). There was agreement on working collectively and forming writing groups within the overall structure. We agreed to table a decision about outcomes. Some students were already thinking about a collective action, others less sure what they wanted to do–it was interesting to see that adbusters today launched their call to #Occupy Chicago in May, just when the project ends. This could get interesting.

It’s worth noting that the entire effort was not helped by the typical cramped post-industrial classroom space that was made available, dominated by a large wooden podium, far grander than the small Dell computer it shields really needs. Doing break out groups in this space required people to sit on the floor.

You will be thinking by now that the implied logic of all this is that I should not be directing matters. Item one on the agenda next week: a proposal to rotate facilitation.