How do I evaluate student analytical work?

What follows is what I told my students as I discussed the midterm assignment of analyzing a clip from Citizen Kane. I’m looking for these things, and asking these questions. I note that the questions are student-facing and address students in the second person, instead of (for example) “what did the student see?”

1. ATTENTION: What do you see?
2. PRECISION: How do you use the specific vocabulary and concepts of cinema to
   describe what you see?
3. INSIGHT: Why does your observation matter? What’s being communicated or
   suggested by the things you’ve seen and described?

What does Dr. C. want? What is he looking for?

Attention, precision, and insight.

Easier said than done, certainly, but that’s true of most worthy attempts. And the saying may help the doing–part of the teacher’s job, I think.

This is standard stuff, and the categories and questions reflect my current articulation of the standard stuff. That said, I wish someone had said this to me in something like this way when I was coming along. By the time I got to college I had more or less figured it out, and to be honest, I found that when I was really passionate about my topic I would almost certainly do exactly this. Yet it would have been good, even at that, to be more intentional about the categories and questions, and it might have saved me a few awkward, disengaged, or flailing papers.

Looking over my students’ analyses, I found insight to be the rarest accomplishment. I expected that, because it takes practice to get to that level, and we’re only halfway through the term (or we were when the exam was given). What’s more of a concern for me at this point is the work that reflects very poor attention. The clip was about two and a half minutes long, so it’s not the span of attention that seems to be the problem. Rather, it seems more like the practice of patient, focused, even ferocious attention that is unfamiliar or somehow thwarted, or even refused, in some instances.

It’s interesting to think about the difference between casually experiencing a stream of stimuli and concentrating on a stream of stimuli in an effort to find patterns and make meaning. The latter effort also requires some faith that the ardors of concentration will reveal patterns and meanings that are really there, and that the effort is not just performative because every interpretation is valid and it’s all subjective anyway etc.

Of course subjectivity can be shared, inquired into, self-corrected, improved in judgment, and so forth. Subjectivity and extreme relativism are not the same. But I wonder, often, if there’s some way to discuss such matters with greater sophistication earlier in my students’ education. Many attitudes ranging from cynicism to indifference to outright disbelief and hostility (sometimes in the guise of a kind of critical libertarianism) have already been cultivated before I see them.

Nevertheless, it’s often still possible to recognize, encourage, and share attention, precision, and insight. Given the difficulties of life in 2021, perhaps the miracle is that I see attention, precision, and insight as often as I do. But it is a challenge, and saddening, to see the work that can’t (or won’t?) attend precisely or with insight to a focal point of shared attention–especially because the explanation or commentary I offer will in many cases (not all) suffer the same fate as the original object of analysis.

So I try to say the same sorts of things in as many different ways and at as many  surprising times as possible. Brains, hearts, spirits are so distinctive that it can be impossible to know what will catch or when it will sink in. Though it seems many years now since we started our course of study, in truth semesters are short. Teaching must be content, often, with the long term and much that may forever be invisible to the teacher. After all these years, I’m not quite used to that.

Photo CC BY-SA-NC by Gardner Campbell

A couple of days ago I saw a modest little item on “Memex 1.1,” John Naughton’s web home. As I’ve noted earlier in this Lenten season, I’ve begun reading blogs again as well as writing them, and Naughton’s blog was one of the very first I re-subscribed to. The little item was this notice:

Memoir of a recovering Utopian

I was invited to give a brief talk on March 16 at a (virtual) symposium on the history of UK computing from the 1950s to the 1990s organised by the Royal Society. The video is here if you’re interested. It’s short — just under 5 minutes. (It’d have been longer if I had a Nobel prize, I guess.)

When I saw the title, “Memoir of a Recovering Utopian,” I felt sick at heart. Here would be another lament by an early celebrant of the Internet’s and the Web’s potential who who tell us about his gnawing disillusionment, or perhaps even his sense of shame for ever having promoted a hopeful view of this global lightspeed telecommunications network. I don’t like to read these, for lots of reasons; certainly one of the most powerful reasons is that from time to time I feel pretty gnawed and ashamed myself. But only sometimes. As I say, I’m a teacher: with regard to human capacities and ingenuity, I’m committed to hope, no matter how I feel on any given day.

Today I finally felt strong (or numb) enough to watch the video. I was delighted, comforted, and encouraged that the title was misleading. Naughton is not a “recovering” Utopian the way folks are recovering addicts. I’m not entirely sure why he gave the video this title. Perhaps the “recovery” in this case is the recovery of utopianism. I like to think so. I offer in support of my reading the way the video ends. The internetwork is still here. The technical framework we need to build a better Web are here. It may still be possible to tear down the inimically walled gardens and use this gift hopefully and justly and not in thrall to late-stage data-mining market capitalism.

I offer only one friendly amendment to Naughton’s list of what we underestimated as the Web turned toward toxicity: not just the somnolence of governments, but in the main, the somnolence of higher education, too. Or perhaps something worse than sleepiness, in both cases.

Nevertheless, as Naughton so beautifully says, without the essential hopefulness that underlies utopianism, we’re done for.

I do believe we can create the evidence to support our hopefulness by continuing to work to build that better world.

I’ve followed Naughton’s work for nearly twenty years now. I am glad to see there is a light that never goes out. A candle in the window, still.

Since many roads lead back to The Who for me, I’ve been looking through some of my collection and re-reading things I hadn’t looked at for some time. In the “Director’s Cut” edition of Quadrophenia, I found this striking observation from Chairman Pete Townshend, and it made me think about parts of my approach to teaching online during pandemic time:

In 1971, as the chief songwriter for The Who, I faced a new problem: our audience apparently hoped for another rock-opera. No one else had picked up the system, not properly; quite a few people thought it was a rotten system in any case. I was already running with it, and I felt there was more mileage in it. After a lot of scrabbling around with various other ideas, I landed on the dystopian Lifehouse that gathered a lot of the futuristic ideas that had bee presented to me when I had been at art college. This failed as a rock-opera collection, but produced Who’s Next, an album of separate tracks that with ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, developed the rock-anthem trick we had stumbled  on almost by accident in the finale of Tommy. The high energy presentation of songs like this soon made it possible for us to perform with some intimacy to much larger audiences in the open air as a matter of regular occasion from this album onwards.

I’m always intrigued by the counterintuitive, especially when it seems to describe a hunch or intuition I have had and am puzzled by myself. (Yes, my intuition is often counterintuitive, which you must admit is a genuinely puzzling state of affairs. Or a colossal failure of understanding.) So I’m drawn to that idea that going toward a high energy presentation of a rock anthem helped The Who maintain a sense of intimacy when performing to larger audiences.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been experimenting with in my larger classes (N>100). Not sermons, not lectures even, but learning-anthems. A way of taking all of us out of ourselves, if only for a while, and thus creating an opening for thinking, re-thinking, and hopefully that sense of nearness and empathy that conveys the feeling of community. If the feeling is there, the thing itself may follow.

Maybe I am trying to design learning experiences that are anthemic.

I do not believe that critical thinking [sic] and anthemic learning experiences must be mutually exclusive. Like Milton, I think “the sober certainty of waking bliss” is both desirable and possible.

Listening to you, I get the music.

Sometimes I get carried away in a comment and the comment becomes a post-disguised-as-a-comment. Then the comment is due for a promotion, herewith conferred.

For context, see this post and this comment.

My idea for archiving the Great VCU Bike Race Book was to use the Internet Archive’s “Archive-It” service. Something is a lot better than nothing, and I’m really very very happy for those PDFs in VCU’s scholarly repository. But I always wanted the web “book” to be a preserved website that could be encountered and experienced just the way it was when we called it a wrap at the end of the project. I had at least one or two conversations with a very friendly and helpful fellow named Jefferson (no, not that one–and hey, he’s now the director) at the Archive-It offices and had actually gotten some price-and-service quotes when I was called to the Tower of London on a spring Friday morning and beheaded. (Here’s your head; what’s your hurry?) Like the Green Knight, I was able to pick up my head and walk away, but unlike the Green Knight, I was not enchanted–rather the opposite–in fact so downcast that I couldn’t even bear to think about the GVCUBRB in any focused way for years afterward. Even now it’s tough. But do-able.

Anyway, if Jimmy Ghaphery had not been so honorable as to say “I told you I’d do it, Gardner, so I am going to do it,” there’s just be scraps and your archive today. Jimmy told me to feel free to come in and supply anything that was missing or needed changing, but I never had the heart to do it. Still don’t, yet.

All of that said, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever tried to do, and a model that could be widely emulated but, so far as I know, has not been. And as the true saying goes, I had an astonishingly talented and enthusiastic team to assign to the project. Just looking over the course we did makes me wonder how in the world we were able to pull it all off. Of course I know very well how we were able to pull it all off. In 2015, when the project ran, I had a sympathetic and supportive Provost. I had interested and supportive collaborators among my fellow Vice Provosts, especially Dr. Cathy Howard, who was then Vice Provost for Community Engagement, and whose initial brainstorming sessions with me took my ideas to a much higher level. I had a budget. I knew some amazing people and was lucky to convince many of them to come along for the journey. Just the usual success story, the lightning that strikes just a few times during a lifetime.

Moral: make projects while the sun shines, when the lightning strikes, when the Spirit moves, when the muses come to haunt you. There’s always an axe nearby with your name on the blade (not the handle).

By Unknown author – http://gawain.ucalgary.ca, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=621711

Continuing the idea of forensic work on my own project archives, certainly old enough now to deserve an “ancient” subdomain though I aspire to a “gems” subdirectory too (a fella can dream):

From 1997 to 2000 I taught a first-year composition course based on Greil Marcus’s anthology Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. The course was my first substantial foray into web publishing as a pedagogical strategy. You can read more about it here. I still think of this course as one of my boldest and most successful forays into what we would now call open education. It was Web 1.0, relied on the tilde folders on the Mary Washington College web server, and involved hand-coded HTML and software like Dreamweaver that, to be honest, I never really mastered. I had a partner-in-crime-and-creativity Bill Kemp, and together we pulled it off. usually with panache. In the process, we also co-created some great memories for ourselves and with our students.

When we published our students’ final papers to the Web, we included this statement, one that is breathtakingly naive in retrospect but was deeply and sincerely meant:

For as long as this College maintains a web site, your work will be out there with your name on it.

The whole idea was to do the very opposite of what David Wiley (whom I would not meet for another decade!) so aptly termed “disposable assignments.” In many respects, The Great VCU Bike Race Book (thank you, Jimmy Ghaphery!) was the spiritual descendant of Stranded–but that’s another blog post.

Now, of course, the Stranded site is gone. The College is gone too, and is now a University. And Bill Kemp is also gone, passing away in the late autumn of 2019.

The art of losing, as the poet wrote.

I thought, and still think, that Stranded, our first-year composition course, was a thing of rare beauty and intensity that elicited some dynamite writing out of our students. The web publication was also a thing of beauty, but that was down to Bill, who had a much keener interest in and talent for web design than I did at the time (or do now, I imagine). As I think about finding the original files to at least suggest what the site looked like, if not to resurrect it entirely, I recall that Bill made the beautiful home page for our course with a resource called “Moira’s Web Jewels.” There are still examples on Pinterest and elsewhere of what these “jewels” looked like. But Moira’s site is long gone, and doesn’t yield its treasures on the Internet Archive past a few fossilized impressions.

But I have a hunch I have saved these files somewhere, and that I might be able to piece something together, if only for my own satisfaction.

And in the meantime, I did find this benediction from Moira in an Internet Archive snapshot:

I’ve seen her name spelled Moira and Moyra. I don’t know which is correct.

I found great joy in the creation of Stranded, the course and the website and the conceptual framework. It deserves an archive. Perhaps once I step through the door into summer.

There’s a small but potent web-think-link that I’ve found myself in, one having to do with memories, digital archives, the intrusion of material reality, the comfort of material reality, the correction provided by materiality … I find myself somewhere between Emily Fox Gordon, Tommy, and Errol Morris.

This morning I read a fascinating story in the New York Times about a new series of web memoirs seeking to preserve web communities not by archiving the pages but by publishing the memories of those who were in those communities. I tweeted the story out:

Fascinating. https://t.co/80DNrhLCj1

— Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell) March 22, 2021

and Alan Levine responded:

Love this concept, balancing it too with Olia Lianlina's https://t.co/QlayFWu3Dn and Jon Udell's recent bit on archiving.

Is it "the" internet or "my" internet ? Each experience is its own. Print is a format to "preserve" but ought it not to live on the internet?

— Alan has x-ed to @cogdog@cosocial.ca (@cogdog) March 22, 2021

To which I replied:

I didn't know abt Lianlina's work. More fascination, and a key element in the compounding I'm doing at present: historical research, memoir, metaperspectives on my archives & the legacy I'm recording as I teach via Zoom. Most of all, the forgetting I'm trying to undo. Thank you.

— Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell) March 22, 2021

All the forgetting I’m trying to undo. Perhaps that’s the tagline for my Lenten blogging. I’m not just trying to recover the past, though I’m sure I’m doing that as well. What it feels like, though, is that I’m trying to let the memories reassert themselves, memories I’ve held in check because the pain of loss has become too great for me to process. That’s obviously a self-defeating strategy, hardly original with me–and there’s more where that came from.

The pandemic year has been a good time to undo things. Not to let them go, but to reverse course. Backtrack and take another fork in the garden. Or just find a garden again, or train myself to recognize one anew.

I’ve been making videos, little films that are ambitious workings of fairly crudely videoed family outings–typical dad stuff, I guess. I show these to my family every now and then. One of them explicitly concerns memory, in that it records and reflects on our family visit to Tintern Abbey in 2003, a spot immortalized by William Wordsworth in a poem about experience, reflection, and love. I should probably say experience versus reflection, and the many-layered loving that comes from years within a family.

Thing is, I remember shooting that video, back in the day, and thinking to myself as I did so, this video will be a great way to think about this day when what we have are both this document and our memories, including the memory of me walking around with this video camera. As with the Wordsworth poem, I will have these layers, and perhaps I can make something of them. 

Then, seventeen years later, I made something of those layers, with a reading of Wordsworth’s poem as the structural underpinning, with English string music as the score, and then a coda reflecting on the reflection itself to bring it to the present, the day (now months ago) when I shared the memories, the movie, and my current state of mind and memory and love with my family, my stars. That coda was all small, sweet moments of Alice, Ian, and Jenny walking about, talking with each other, with my eye looking on with love both in the moment and many years later as I cut it all together on my computer, to the song “Love,” by John Lennon.

Which brings me to the “Jon Udell’s recent bit on archiving” Alan referred to in his tweet, a blog post breathtaking in its poignant vulnerability and insight. Another layer, another coda.

Love is real.

I go walking in the neighborhood most days when it’s nice. The coming of spring this year has been even more welcome than usual for that reason.

When our schedules coincide–much easier to manage on the weekends–my wife Alice and I go walking together.

I walk mostly to gain stamina, listen to podcasts, and keep my weight down. (I’ve lost about 30 pounds in pandemic time and if I can lose 10 more I would be even happier.) I also walk to burn nervous energy that seems to accumulate in my mind, not my body; “brother mule” (as St. Francis called the body) these days seems to stay weirdly enervated, in a state of lassitude. Actually, my mind usually feels murky and enervated too, which does nothing to explain the store of nervous mental energy that finds me at about 2:30 a.m. every day. But I digress.

When I walk with Alice, she often suggests we vary from my usual regime of let’s-do-laps-and-feel-the-burn and take a left so we can walk down the road and not just around the cul-de-sac. It’s a grand idea for many reasons, and not just because it interrupts my looping. It’s a grand idea because the variety is good, and because about two blocks up the road there’s a home where the folks who live there have decorated their yard with splendid signs of all colors, shapes, and sizes.

I don’t remember whether the house had signs before the pandemic hit. Probably it had some. Alice will remember. But one of the odd ironies of pandemic time is that in all my mental murk some things are in much sharper focus than they were before. It may be something like what Walker Percy writes about in one of my favorite essays, “The Loss of the Creature”:

One can think of two sorts of circumstances through which the thing may be
restored to the person. (There is always, of course, the direct recovery: A student may simply be strong enough, brave enough, clever enough to take the dogfish and the sonnet by storm, to wrest control of it from the educators and the educational package.) First by ordeal: The Bomb falls; when the young man recovers consciousness in the shambles of the biology laboratory, there not ten inches from his nose lies the dogfish. Now all at once he can see it directly and without let, just as the exile or the prisoner or the sick man sees the sparrow at his window in all its inexhaustibility; just as the commuter who has had a heart attack sees his own hand for the first time. In these cases, the simulacrum of everydayness and of consumption has been destroyed by disaster; in the case of the bomb, literally destroyed. Secondly, by apprenticeship to a great man: one day a great biologist walks into the laboratory; he stops in front of our student’s desk; he leans over, picks up the dogfish, and, ignoring instruments and procedure, probes with a broken fingernail into the little carcass. “Now here is a
curious business,” he says, ignoring also the proper jargon of the specialty. “Look
here how this little duct reverses its direction and drops into the pelvis. Now if you
would look into a coelacanth, you would see that it—” And all at once the student can see. The technician and the sophomore who loves his textbooks are always offended by the genuine research man because the latter is usually a little vague and always humble before the thing; he doesn’t have much use for the equipment or the jargon. Whereas the technician is never vague and never humble before the thing; he holds the thing disposed of by the principle, the formula, the textbook outline; and he thinks a great deal of equipment and jargon.

I hope you will forgive Percy’s androcentric pronouns. I believe he wrote in good faith and were he alive today would aim to write less androcentrically–but that’s only one person’s judgment, of course. Still, the thought is worth thinking. What restores the world to us? What allows us to see our hand for the first time?

Maybe it wasn’t just pandemic time that made these signs so present to my mind and memory. I believe the signs are more profuse every day. I know that the people at the house are moving the signs around. I also know that today the light was especially beautiful, and the signs seemed to glow with meaning, admonition, encouragement. A yard full of sentence and solas. Messages from another planet, another home, for me.

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See you tomorrow.

There’s a splendid article by James Parker in The Atlantic: “End Meeting For All.” I hope it’s not behind a paywall. If it is, I’m sorry, but please do consider subscribing to The Atlantic, the journalistic and essayistic source that’s meant more to me during this pandemic than any other periodical (it’s hard to know what to call anything anymore).

Beginnings are important, and this one goes bang like a Christmas cracker:

Zoom, for most of us, arrived last year. And didn’t it feel right on time? Eerily on the button. As if the nine-foot locusts that run the universe, in a spasm of insect whimsy, had given us simultaneously a deadly, denormalizing virus and a new medium of human communication in which to freak out about it.

The rest of the article is even better.

Parker writes that there’s poetry in Zoom. Oh yes indeed there is. It’s my Magic School Bus. It’s my inner world, my radio studio, my theatre of the mind, the place where I can be Captain Trips and my students can too (and regularly are, in the chat).

I love it because I don’t have to use it very often to do things I really didn’t enjoy much in the before times, like meetings I wished would end very soon already. Instead, Zoom for me becomes a distillation of the inner life, made visible, brought forward into a participatory space. I know I’m lucky in this regard.

I invested in a ring light, a good webcam, a new audio interface, a very modest green screen setup. In a simple twist of fate, I had asked for a broadcast-quality microphone for my birthday in 2019. It’s a honey: an ElectroVoice RE20, the kind I’d worked with many times back in my radio days. (A great microphone tends to stay in style.) It was here just in time for 2020 … and all that followed.

Photo by Dan Lefebvre

For good measure, I hung a sign outside the little room where I Zoom, one I bought several years back on one of my irregular pilgrimages to Abbey Road Studios. Every time I go into the room to convene a learning community, I see this sign, and it reminds me that unexpected wonders may emerge, today, or any day.

Our learning portal. Welcome. Photo CC BY-NC-SA by Gardner Campbell

That’s the boost I get as I prepare to meet my students. That’s the sight that tells me it’s magic time.

See you tomorrow.

As long as I’m praising fine writers and thinkers whom I love to read, have I mentioned John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog lately?

I first encountered John Naughton when I found his extraordinary history of the early days of the Internet and the Web, A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime, in a used bookstore in Philadelphia (many thanks to my friend Kate Propert who took me there). Naughton’s a cracker-jack writer who had me at hello and kept me long after goodbye, as this blog post testifies. Here’s a sample of that book, a print artifact that was a portal not just to fresh revelations but also, and more importantly, a new revealer:

 [I]t’s impossible to read the history of the Net without being struck by the extent to which the genius of particular individuals played a crucial role in the development of the concept and its realisation in hardware and software. It’s easy to look back now and laugh at Licklider’s vision of “man-computer symbiosis,” or to describe Donald Davies’ idea of packet-switching, Wesley Clark’s notion of a subnetwork of message-processors, or Vint Cerf’s concept of a gateway between incompatible networks as “simple” or “obvious.” But that, in a way, is a measure of their originality. They are those “effective surprises” of which Jerome Bruner writes–the insights which have “the quality of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition following which there is no longer astonishment.” The fact that we live now in a packet switched and networked world should not blind us to the ingenuity of the original ideas. And the people who conceived the should not be subject to what the historian E. P. Thompson called “the condescension of posterity.”

This is not a fashionable view in some quarters, especially those lodged on the higher slopes of the history and sociology of technology. From that lofty vantage point, scientists, inventors and engineers look rather as rats do to a behaviourist–creatures running in a maze created by economic and social forces which they do not understand, and achieving success only when they press the levers which the prevailing order has ordained will yield success. It’s rather like the view famously expressed by Bertrand Russell that economics was about how people make choices and sociology about how they don’t have any choices to make.

Add to this the fact that Naughton’s follow-up, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, is every bit as compelling, personal, learned, and far-sighted; and the fact that this man was a friend of George Steiner; and that because as Tom Woodward reminds us “people still blog,” you can read his lucid prose on his blog every day, and that he used to teach with Martin Weller (I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall for that) … well, there’s much more to be said, but rather than say it, I’ll simply invite you to follow @jjn1, read his blog to learn from his associative trails, and find in every case what Chaucer called sentence and solas, meaning and comfort, instruction and delight. Those were the criteria by which the innkeeper would judge the best stories told by the Canterbury pilgrims. In his way, Naughton is also a pilgrim: one who views his own life as a journey with boon companions toward a fiercely imagined destination, one that may turn out to be real if we have the courage to invent it together.

I hope I will meet him someday.

Photo CC BY-NC-SA by Gardner Campbell

I’ve got a Gibson without a case,

But I can’t get that even tanned look on my face.

Ill-fitting clothes, and I blend in the crowd;

Fingers so clumsy, voice too loud.

But I’m one.

I am one.

And I can see that this is me,

And I will be,

You’ll all see….

excerpt from “I’m One,” by Pete Townshend.

From Quadrophenia (1973).