Gardner Writes

I do not much like to take the tone of a moralist. But the danger of the baobabs is so little understood, and such considerable risks would be run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid, that for once I am breaking through my reserve. “Children,” I say plainly, “watch out for the baobabs!” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince.”

I’ve long thought of blogging as a way of unschooling or deschooling within the framework of schooling. Why not simply deschool entirely? Edupunk it all? For me, that’s a waste. The framework of school can be a helpful point of focus, and at its best can convey a sense of occasion that would not be so strong or inviting without the lovely intensity of an expert imaginatively convening a group of fellow learners, or a group of learners imaginatively convening themselves around an expert, a wise expert who knows how to prize students. I am painfully aware of how seldom one finds wisdom, love, intensity, strength, and prizing within the structures of school, especially these days with the almighty gods of assessment and accountability and so forth installed in a pantheon that has little to do with cognition or relationship. But the abuse of an institution does not necessarily mean the institution itself has nothing to offer. School at its best gives a shape and a collegial society to my yearning for betterment. “Do It Yourself” doesn’t mean “do it by yourself.” School ought to give one a way to find the former without concluding that the only way forward is the latter route.

But sometimes I wonder whether schooling’s distortions can be overcome–or to put it another way, whether school can create within itself spaces for deschooling, moments of release from the dead hands of “rigor” and professorial imitation. Where is the recess for the mind, the space in which freedom within a general sense of direction and purpose can elicit self-surprise, emergent phenomena, essayistic discovery?

For me, blogging has been that recess. Its rigor arises from the non-trivial effort it takes to focus on something while one is exploring it, to focus on it by exploring it, and then to try to create an enjoyable, interesting experience for the reader.  Joy, interest, and focus are rare in the land of college writing, even when one requests or invites them. Instead, at least in my experience, one gets book reports, meandering attempts to ape authoritative writing, or rushed slapdash vacuity that can’t have made much sense even to the desperate writer during the overnight frenzy it took to produce it.

I began using blogs in my classes because I was very tired of papers beginning like this: “For hundreds of thousands of years, men and women all over the world in society have….” I was tired of my best writers producing stilted academic prose. I was tired of my worst writers either stressing so much over the mechanics that their papers got worse, or paying so little attention to what they were thinking and writing that any spark of interest or joy or wisdom that lurked beneath the awkward diction and inept sentence boundaries was snuffed out long before the comma splices began.

To use blogs in this way, I have had to develop an entirely new vocabulary of encouragement, nudging, framing, and evaluation. I have had to examine my own allegiance to the academy (frankly, I find myself working harder to justify the academy surrounding me than I do to justify the blogging within it). And as I have worked within the academy to help my colleagues understand the value and nature of this essayistic endeavor–and to recall that the word “essay” means attempt, not accomplishment–I have had to meet, greet, and push back against many objections. How will I grade it? What justifies this terrible invasion of the student’s privacy? Why should I endure–even encourage–sloppy informal writing that’s not up to academic standards? These questions and their many kin imply assumptions I no longer share, a separation that makes it difficult for me to find persuasive replies. I find we may no longer speak the same language–and given the pervasiveness of these assumptions within school, I feel like the foreigner. But I still try.

Several months ago, I was talking with a colleague about an opportunity for his students to blog, and I tried to explore the new vocabularies and conceptual frameworks I’ve tried to develop as I seek the recess of the mind blogging affords. (Yes, I hear you: “recess” signifies both what I advocate, a kind of cognitive playfulness and inventiveness, and what my colleagues fear, or say they fear, which is a receding emphasis on rigor, formal argument, etc.) I advocated blogging as a place in which Carl Roger’s “freedom to learn” is vividly present as an ongoing source of strength and inspiration within the course of study, even over a lifetime of learning. The blog offers a space, I said, in which the teacher can exercise the humility and delight Heidegger recommends as the highest and most strenuous calling within education, the teacher’s willingness “to let learn.” My colleague replied, ”It may be learning, but it’s not academics.” I’d never heard that distinction made so sharply and explicitly. I was amazed by the implication that learning alone wouldn’t make the grade.

In my mind’s eye, I could see the baobabs of academics surrounding the little asteroid of learning, a little asteroid soon to be split into pieces, its fragments sent spinning through a void that must one day, in an ultimate irony, consume the baobabs themselves. But not until those sad and wandering little spheres are reduced to rubble.

Colleagues, I say plainly, and to myself as well: “Beware the baobabs!”

Last week two examples of these baobabs came into my view. In both cases, I’m sure that the professors meant well–and I do not mean that at all condescendingly, since not every professor does in fact mean well. Yet the awful pressure of academics upon learning is everywhere within these articulations, dismayingly so. Even as I write, I feel my own failures and struggles emerging, but I have to say it anyway: it’s probably better not to require blogs at all than to require blogs that are strangled by the baobabs of academics. Save the academics for term papers and other more formal assignments! Instead, preserve a zone in which we can “let learn,” in which there is genuine freedom to learn.  I won’t link to the authors’ websites, as I do not intend to attack them, and because what I believe to be the problems with these specific examples represent a far wider set of attitudes and practices. I single out these two assignments as examples only, ones I happened to run across. It would be unfair to hang the entire weight of my critique on them alone. I also want to salute both these teachers for actually putting their syllabi online instead of trapping them within a “learning management system.” But I feel I must speak plainly.

Here’s the first example.

Blogging (15%): One of the key aspects of your work this semester is our course blog, on which you’ll write frequently, using your posts to respond to our course readings, to draw your classmates’ attention to articles and artifacts you’ve found, and so forth. You are required to post at least one entry each week, which should directly engage with the week’s readings, before the start of class on Monday; this entry should be as formal as a printed reading response would be, paying attention to the quotation, citation, and explication practices involved in close reading. Other entries are greatly desired; these can be as informal as you like. You can explore issues that have been raised in previous class discussion, but you must significantly expand on that discussion and not simply rehash what’s already been said. You can skip two of these reading response posts with impunity. You are also required to read your classmates’ posts and leave at least two comments each week, before the start of class on Wednesday. (Note that you don’t have to post the the two comments at the same time; just make sure that week-to-week you get those entries and comments in.) This weekly requirement is meant as a minimum acceptable level of participation; I hope that you’ll all contribute more, creating an ongoing, engaging dialogue.

Some observations. The tone veers between encouragement and a kind of hectoring, with occasional instances of what feels like peremptory insistence on what the students “will” do, what “is desired” (by the teacher, presumably), and what kinds of behaviors will not be punished (skip two posts “with impunity”). I have no problems with requirements when it comes to blogging, as I’ve written elsewhere, but I do think it’s unwise to try to require commitment by specifying all the forms it must take; one gets commitment to specifications, not to values, and it’s almost certain that the fundamental desire for “an ongoing, engaging dialogue” will not be fulfilled. Instead, one is most likely to get, at best, a simulacrum of such a dialogue geared to what students believe the teacher will find engaging, not what the students themselves find engaging. There can be overlap there, of course, and I fully believe the teacher can and should lead the students into much deeper engagement than they are likely to encounter or realize on their own. But that requires detection and extension of what they’re already engaged by, and this blogging assignment doesn’t appear to be framed in that way.

To state it more simply, the item missing from the initial catalog of what students will use the blogs for is “to explore your thoughts, interests, and puzzlements in relation to this course of study.” Then the reader’s response is over-specified, and we end up with an academic assignment, not a blog. At what point is “what is desired” awakened within the learner, not simply imposed upon him or her? Such awakenings need canny nurturing and all the arts of intellectual seduction.

Even more seriously, the required reading-response post is a formal assignment whose strictures are so definite and school-familiar that I can’t imagine the completion of that required post will feel like an invitation to more informal posting afterward. That’s not to say that a formal reading-response exercise is not valuable. On the contrary. But I wouldn’t call it blogging, and I think the assignment inadvertently conveys a set of values and expectations that is antithetical to the real power of blogging within a course of study.

The professor must judge the difference between significant extension and rehash, between committed effort and lackadaisical coasting, between emergent insight and irrelevance. No question. But blogging provides a space in which that judgment can be rendered flexibly, lightly and joyfully, as an invitation to exploration and quality of commitment.

Here’s the second example. Given that there’s a list, I’ve commented item-by-item.

Blog Participation

1. Comments of 500 words or less on the class blog that are helpful to the class will be worth 10% of your grade.

 2. You may make as many comments per week as you like. However, you will only receive credit for up to two comments in any given week. The real goal of the blog comments is to help you internalize and think about the material on an ongoing basis. Cramming comments does not help you with that, nor does going back to comment on old subjects . I will have random cut-off dates for participation grading throughout the semester. They will not be pre-announced. Therefore, you should consider every day to be a possible cut-off date.

I understand that commenting doesn’t work if students either flood the channel with thin and thoughtless material just to get “extra credit,” or bunch their comments together after several weeks of ignoring the ongoing dialogue. I certainly agree with the “real goal” as it’s articulated above. That said, the idea of random cut-off dates brings in a note of surveillance and gotchas (every day’s a hangin’ day!) that doesn’t invite commitment so much as it inspires either a) dread or b) a desire to find another way to game the system. It’d probably be better to discuss these issues in the class meeting without trying to over-engineer an airtight system of discipline in this way. But then I’ve never agreed that a syllabus should be a contract. The commitment needed for a rewarding course of study is too big and too delicate to be specified exhaustively within a single document. If one tries to do so, the result is legalistic behavior on the part of the students, in my experience.

 3. I expect to see at least 5 well thought out comments, with links to other sources, posted over the course of the semester by each of you. Less than 5 that will result in a bad Blog Participation grade. , but sheer volume of comments will not get you a good grade either.

Along those lines, I also miss, here and in the first example above, any thought that linking to other bloggers and commenters is valuable and encouraged. That’s a shame, as such links are part of the soul of blogging. They demonstrate a valuable way to “think like the web” and participate in the care and feeding of the noosphere. They also encourage an ampler, more imaginative view of what libraries and books are all about in relation to that noosphere.

4. You must sign each comment with your first and last name. If you prefer to use another identifier, like a screen name, you may discuss with me.

Every time the teacher speaks or writes, the students encounter not only information but a meta-statement about the nature and purpose of the relationship between teacher and student. A syllabus loaded with lists of desired-by-the-teacher behaviors sends a powerful meta-statement that in the case of blogging robs the medium of its primary value for learning. Ditto over-engineered and over-specified assignments within a student blogging requirement. Once again, learning has been transmuted into academics. Sadly, that’s the philosopher’s stone in reverse. Or to return to my initial metaphor, it’s a growing asteroid done to pieces by the destructive, voracious root systems of School Baobabs.

For my students, I hope blogging will be that visible, share-able space that records and thus feeds their own curiosity–and that of their peers as well. Blogging should be like Steve Crocker’s “Request For Comments.” For a moment, the learner can think aloud without so much fear and without striving to be a bon élève. For a moment, we can remind each other that On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. There will be time for all the rest of what we should do or believe we should do in school. Blogging is a time for something else.

From "How To Build A Table." Click on the image to see the original website.

Hi John–thanks for stopping by and leaving such a long and thoughtful comment. Yes indeed, you should be blogging, man!  I’d read it, and I’d link to it, too. The blogosphere’s magical that way. Just saying. So here’s my response. Next time, I hope there’s a blog on your end so I can do some pingbackin’. Srsly.

First, thanks for the kind words about my leadership. One clarification: I’m currently Chair of the Board of Directors of the NMC. To say I’m “Chair of the NMC” makes my role sound bigger than it really is. Also, while I do hope I’m making some valuable contributions to the conversation about higher education, I take greatest pride and satisfaction in the students I’ve worked with over the years. I estimate, conservatively, that I’ve had over 3500 students come through my classes since I began teaching full-time back in 1990. I’ve tried to pay attention to what worked and what didn’t in the courses I led. I hope one of my own “instructor effects” was to encourage my students to take responsibility for their own learning, just as you say. But even there, I find, there’s an art to this endeavor, mostly in the manner and contexts in which I as a teacher try to encourage my students. I’m constantly thinking about the effect my best instructors had on me, and constantly trying to weave that into the tapestry of my own teacherly imagination. I had some utterly magnificent teachers. They were all different, except for the clear dedication they all showed to helping me find and nurture my best self. In my own journey, I keep trying to make myself worthy of the love (sometimes tough love) and commitment they gave to me.

I’m thrilled, of course, to hear of the successes of problem- and challenge-based learning in the introductory CHEM courses. This is great news in an area that sorely needs it. Of course it’s a great thing when a problem is noticed, the extent of the problem is demonstrated, and a solution is found. I’m not anti-research or anti-numbers by any means (and neither was Carl Brigham). In the talk I gave at the Fashion Institute of Technology last January, I had fairly sharp words for some of my Miltonist colleagues regarding their unhelpful sneers at quantitative data in the humanities. I so wish I were a neuroscientist–at least, one like Hillary Blakeley. My own “APGAR for Class Meetings” is a quantitative metric, and every day I used it I would calculate mean, median, and mode in front of the students–because it was fun, and because it offered three different portraits of how well the class had prepared. Is that analytics? If so, fine. But I understood “analytics” to mean something more specific, something along the lines of “business intelligence for academia”–a kind of data-mining of narrowly defined and measured behaviors in students, behaviors that as you note are only proxies for what we’re trying to investigate (and in my view, dangerously misleading proxies). *That* kind of analytics I have serious concerns about, as I’ve already explained in my blog posts. Are those data entirely useless? No. Do they carry the great risk of making mistaken assumptions about learning seem to be “facts”? Yes. When Chris Dede says our assumptions about learning are fundamentally flawed, what light does that shed on these questions? Yes, we know that time on task correlates well with better grades in most circumstances. But what tasks? And to what end? No offense to David Wiley, who’s done fine work in open education,  but I confess I was not delighted with that waterfall. I was, however, greatly nourished by Randy Bass’s presentation on “the problem of learning in the post-course era,” which analyzed the complexities of cognition much more successfully, in my view, especially in the light of our current cultural moment.

You say that my critique is widening. I don’t think so. I think the species of what I object to are proliferating, but they belong to the same genus.  What I object to, as I’ve explained, is a move away from cognitive and social approaches to learning and assessment, and a move toward more behaviorist models. I don’t object to course web sites. I object to the idea of “learning management,” just as I object to the widespread adoption of get-em-through Computer Aided Instruction, for all the reasons Ted Nelson outlines in “Computer Lib / Dream Machines.” I think people adopt behaviorist and “learning management” models because they yield more easily quantified results (the research is more focused, less messy, and thus more “convincing”) and can drive institutional decision-making more readily. These are not good reasons. These are reasons not connected with learning, at least as I understand the process. People may adopt them with the best of intentions, and genuinely care about student welfare. But in my view they’re also risking premature standardization and a kind of self-validating meaninglessness. In the midst of the “largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race” (Shirky), Blackboard demonstrated that what too many folks in higher education really wanted was a closed, neat, easily monitored environment that would preserve the worst of the transactional elements of education. These systems used to be called “course management systems,” but that wasn’t grand enough for Blackboard, so they became a “learning system” and then tried to assert (as I understand it) that they owned the patent on assigning different roles and permissions to various participants in a website.  EDUCAUSE itself protested when Blackboard sued Desire2Learn, a courageous stance given all the parties that Blackboard has helped to fund over the years.

I think a password-protected course website that helps to manage documents within a course has its uses, though I’d never say that such a site “manages” learning. I don’t think learning can be “managed”–as I’ve explained in my posts, it’s the wrong metaphor, and it does matter what we call things. What I see, though, is that such websites *become* the online presence for every aspect of the course, and thus furnish data on “student involvement” that form the basis for “analytics” that measure with fantastic precision an activity that occurs within, and perpetuates, a brutally reductive paradigm of learning. Some of my faculty colleagues resist working online because they’re Luddites or mulish or whatever, sure. (And faculty mulishness has its good side, too, though that rarely gets discussed.) But I also have colleagues who resist working online because “working online” means “using a ‘learning management system.’” Once they understand the other possibilities open to them, they get interested. Cole Camplese and the folks at PSU are exploring those other possibilities in ways I too admire. A large part of what I admire comes from their willingness to build within non-management paradigms of learning and expression. Obviously UMW Blogs is also leading in this area (and has also been an inspiration for PSU, as Cole will tell you himself).

Student cynicism about school breaks my heart, because that cynicism (except for the strongest, most rebellious of them) becomes cynicism about their own lives. Yet what I hear when I talk to students these days is a tremendous amount of cynicism. They know the game. They know the drill. Their “attention” is focused, all right; it’s focused on “getting through.” Stockholm syndrome comes next.

To cite Papert again: “Before the computer changed school, school changed the computer.” If you want to know why we haven’t gotten to the honeymoon (or even first base), that’s why. The promise of teaching and learning technologies, for me, involves changes in how we think about school. I’ve documented my thoughts in this area pretty widely over the last few years, so I won’t repeat them here. I’m not sure how to answer your question about my D or F students. I have had a few of those students, sure, and I try my best to reach them. I want all my students to succeed, to grow as learners and to attain the cognitive fluency that comes from hard work with intellection (which includes memory), experimentation, and articulation. The richness you kindly describe in my presentations comes from that desire, and the students’ answering commitment. I’m not sure what the control group would be for my “R&D,” or that it’d be ethical for me to design a class that deliberately impoverished the learning experience so I could get harder evidence of the effectiveness of my methods and the work we do together. (To be fair, I don’t think you’re asking me to do that–but the “control group” is a perennial problem in experimental design in education.)  I do know that I am regularly astonished by the quality and intensity of work students can do when they stop trying to “figure out what the teacher wants” and learn that the teacher wants them to be their best selves in a particular learning context. If you want more specifics on how to teach a huge intro-level course with those goals in mind, Mike Wesch would be the one to talk to. I’ve learned a huge amount from him, and I am particularly grateful for the example he sets of stubbornly insisting that the right kind of “instructor effect” can make a huge difference.

"Noise Professor" Zachary Dowell's cover for a book I keep trying to write....

When I starting talking about “love analytics” during an interview at ELI 2011, I was thinking of Mike’s beautiful story of his wife’s telling him to love his students and they would love him back. I am also inspired by what Mike has been saying about Erich Fromm’s book on the art of loving as a teaching/learning paradigm. Mike’s a social scientist who’s not skittish at all about data of any kind. But like James Fernandez and Grant McCracken, Mike foregrounds creativity as a mode of knowing, and has no truck with what Fernandez memorably calls “administered intellectuality.” Mike is also demonstrating how we as educators might come to grips with the principle of plenitude that Plato described long ago, a principle at the heart of transformative learning. Here’s how McCracken memorably imagines what might happen if Plato were alive today:

Plato, let’s say, returns to walk among us.   He becomes, inevitably, a figure of  controversy.  The talk show circuit demands his presence.  (“Today on Geraldo:  Plato—architect of Western culture or dead white male?  You decide!”)  There are doubts, of course.  Production assistants do not warm to elderly men who must be talked out of the wonder-struck examination of a parking meter.  (“You’re telling me any citizen may make a claim against this space by inserting a coin?  That there’s an implicit contract between the ‘motorist’ and other members of the polis?”)

But Plato is not entirely astonished by the contemporary world.  He has seen some aspects of our world before.  He would have no difficulty, for instance, with the blooming, buzzing quality of contemporary life.  He wouldn’t blink at poetry too diverse for a common theme or fashion dizzy with pluralism

Plato accepted the world as a place that bloomed and buzzed….

(Grant McCracken, Plenitude 2.0, Book One of Culture By Commotion. Available as a free “drafty book” download here. Don’t miss what McCracken says about “drafty books” at the end, as it’s the sort of thing Kathleen Fitzpatrick, HASTAC, NMC, and others have been working on in other emerging forms of scholarly communication. Also, God save me from such “production assistants” as McCracken describes above–and also from ever becoming one myself.)

If  ”analytics” means trying to assess whether something has worked or not, of course I’m fine with that–as long as we keep the questions of “what is that ‘something’?” and “what do we mean by ‘worked’?” and “are our measures really adequate to what we want to know?” as rich and complex as they need to be. From what I see and hear, that’s not happening. A disturbing amount of the talk I’ve heard about “analytics” simply ignores those rich and complex necessities. You write, “Higher ed needs to get more students through successfully.” Through what? And what constitutes success? The getting through? That seems to me like a tautology. You write, “we need evidence, not anecdotes of instructional technology’s effectiveness to get a seat at the resource allocation table.” I love the word “anecdote.” It’s such a polite cuss word. What about a learner’s self-report? An auto-ethnography? A work like Papert’s that tells the story of his own journey as a learner–this, mind you, a mathematician’s journey, a mathematician of the highest caliber who spent most of his career working on computers and education at MIT? Are these “anecdotes”?

Really, if the stories of transformative learning are not admissible evidence at the “resource allocation table,” then maybe we need to get our tools together and build a new table.

Norbert Wiener

I came across a striking sentence yesterday in one of the books I’m reading, Norbert Wiener’s Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas.

For a great period of invention, the artisans must become philosophers or the philosophers, artisans.

I think Wiener is right, and I have several thoughts following that statement:

• The moments of insight that characterize deep learning have, for the learner, the flavor, feel, and energy of invention. In other words, when learners “realize” something, they do not simply memorize the connection that the teacher has made for them. They feel, and rightly feel, that they have made this connection themselves–which means they feel as if they themselves have invented the idea or connection. The arts of intellectual seduction (as Bruner puts it) are closely linked to the arts of temptation and elicited curiosity, not as a mode of pandering to students, but in simple acknowledgement of the fact that the “a ha” moment does not mean “a ha, now I see what you have shown me” (though one may use such words) but “a ha, I have made a breakthrough, I have invented a new thing.” Of course the learner may or may not have “invented a new thing.” If not, then of course the learner should credit other learners and not cherish the illusion that he or she has in fact invented the wheel. But it is the feeling of having done so that matters, and that separates the pursuit of insight from mere studiousness. It’s important to have the discipline to be studious, but it’s more important to understand that every moment of deep learning feels to the learner like an innovation or an invention, and (thus) to frame the learning experience in such a way as to make that experience more likely. Repeat-after-me is antithetical to the experience of insight or innovation, though it may be a useful stage of preparation, especially if it’s in the context of play, not scolding. Otherwise, as Wiener writes (with the masculine pronoun that, alas, reflects 1954′s biases), “the scholar-workman is bound to a perpetual subordination to a prearranged order of things.” (Sounds rather like our current “curricular” strategies that culminate in “learning management” and teaching-to-the-test, but I digress.) Weirdly, I find that many people seem to think the feeling of invention I’m describing is relevant only to a) mavericks or b) very gifted students (and to the combination of a and b, of course). My argument is that this feeling of invention characterizes all deep learning, and is therefore relevant to all learners; all learning experiences should be designed and carried out with this in mind.
• The artisan/philosopher connection is at the heart of what we think and talk about in the New Media Faculty-Staff Development Seminar.  As the editors of The New Media Reader put it:  ”Understanding new media is almost impossible for those who aren’t actively involved in the experience of new media; for deep understanding, actually creating new media projects is essential to grasping their workings and poetics.” Or as Richard Feynman said, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Or as Alan Levine insists, it’s all about being there, and creating out of that being. Tanya Roscorla has captured this ethos very well indeed in this article in Converge magazine, for which my heartfelt thanks.
• The artisan/philosopher connection is at the heart of what Jim Groom and Martha Burtis are doing, brilliantly, with ds106.  I am frankly in awe of their conceptions and efforts, and equally in awe of what the students have created in response.

Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution

Finally, to time-travel backward just a bit, the artisan/philosopher connection was reinforced when the Royal Institution abandoned its plans for a separate stairway and entrance for the sweaty makers whose labors furnished the scientists with their instruments. The initial idea was to separate the artisans from the gentleman scientists. Thank goodness the Institution members thought twice, and thought better.

I spoke to this change of heart last January, in a talk at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. The occasion was the opening faculty convocation at the beginning of the spring term. The topic for the entire year had been “Faculty of the Future,” though I think it could equally well be described as “Faculty for the Future.” My hosts were extremely warm and generous. The audience was perceptive and receptive. The State of the Union address just the night before, which I watched in “enhanced” mode on the Web as I sat in my NY hotel room, gave me some key insights to share the next day. And some credit-where-it’s-due there, as well, since my daughter Jenny was also watching that enhanced version, and used a Twitter backchannel to let me know she was right there with me on that meta-level of understanding. That knowledge, in turn, inspired me to further invention.

For the other truth about invention is a mystery: it feels singularly individual, and in many ways it is, but at the same time it is fostered most completely in a society of mutual respect and support. Like a family. Like a community of best-selves whose highest pitch of being emerges from a great whole. Like the Beatles. Like a fellowship of invention. With all the agitation about education these days, I sometimes feel like Frodo, who in his small but stubborn naivete insists that if we carry the ring, we will find the way.

With thanks, then, to my ace librarian Alice and my hashtag artist Jenny, here’s the talk I gave at F.I.T. in January, 2011.

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