Intimate, connected, open

scooby dooOver the last few weeks, our cMOOC team has continued to articulate and explore the dreams we’ll start living with our students on June 10. Some of the living’s already started in fact–the #thoughtvectors hashtag continues to light up the Twitter stream, and we’ve already got one playlist going, courtesy of our Creative Paradox. Shortly our course porch will be ready at thoughtvectors.net. Tom Woodward and Alan Levine are our prime porch wranglers. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

A couple of weeks ago, the team discussed the idea of intimacy in learning. The discussion was set in motion by one of my favorite quotations from my favorite learning scientist and philosopher, Jerome Bruner.

Man’s working image of himself is anchored in his sense of intimacy–in the events and relations that are the fabric of his immediate experience and make up his way of life. Change in the individual is a function of how much and in what manner an intimate way of life is altered.
“Fate and the Possible,” in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, 160 (1979), emphasis mine.

Several fascinating and wondrous responses emerged from our discussion, responses I am belatedly but gratefully recognizing here: Laura‘s, Bonnie’s, Jason’s, Patty’s. I am humbled by their commitment and thoughtfulness. And I do not believe I am alone in feeling that in the meetings that have followed, we have found a greater ease and playfulness, as well as a deeper sense of adventure, in our work together. Bruner’s words struck a chord. I would hazard a guess that they did so because we are all vitally interested in the transformative potential of education–of school at its best, what I have long called “real school.” I would further speculate that each of us has had some experience of that transformative potential in our own lives as learners. (I don’t have to speculate with Bonnie, as she’s already blogged about it–and my associative Bonnie trails are now even more richly complex–thanks, Bonnie).

I will speak for myself, without speculation, and swear on a stack of Bruner’s collected writings that the primary reason I keep slogging on, trying to make something out of my own stumblings and hallucinations, and trying to navigate the shoals and shoot the rapids of contemporary higher education, is that my college education altered me forever, and I believe for the better, and I am sure because of the devoted ingenious efforts of professors who also roamed the halls of wonder and “exuberant discovery” in the real school that Bruner so magnificently limns.

Can this intimacy be risked? Much of contemporary education at all levels resists the question itself, let alone the risk. My answer is that it must be risked. Can this intimacy be found online? My answer is that my own personal learning network, linked to again and again on these virtual pages, demonstrates my yes.

Can there be rigor in the learning in real school, or is this a cheap fairground Scooby-Doo, the kind where the neck wobbles and the fake velour wears off by the end of a sweaty superficial amusement-filled day?

A 2012 article in the International Journal of Learning and Media helps me keep my eyes on the prize of real school, the self-generated, self-rewarding goal of connected learning. Here’s the abstract:

Efforts to understand the dynamic processes of learning situated across space and time, beyond the here and now, are presently challenging traditional definitions of learning and education. How can we conceptualize learning in a way that is able to respond to and explain the increasing complexity, connectivity, and velocity of our times? We elaborate on the notion of “connected learning” as a conceptual heuristic that has recently received recognition as a potential lens and a model through which to research and promote learning as a holistic experience that stretches beyond formal and informal communities. We reflect on the methodological challenges of describing, defining, and analyzing connected learning across young peoples’ everyday “learning lives” from the sociocultural and dialogic perspectives. We discuss such key notions for connected learning as understanding, tracking, and tracing learners; chronotopes; boundary crossing; intertextuality; and learning lives.

“Learning lives”: this phrase stirs me very deeply. At the micro level, it was what college helped me discover that a life could be: a learning life. I had always hoped to find such a thing. The very word “college” had always sounded to me, a first-generation college student and the son of working-class Appalachian parents, as if something like a “learning life” might just be possible. At the macro level, college also taught me that “learning lives” was the story, hopeful at times and desperate at others, of the species homo sapiens and what we have both built and destroyed, together, on this lucky little life-filled planet called Earth.

“Connected,” then, becomes for me an even more powerful word than “open,” for it speaks of relationship, the exuberant discovery that personhood is both irreducibly unique and inevitably interwoven. We are open so that we may become more powerfully and profoundly connected. Our learning lives are ours, a manner of speaking  that can be read in both ways: they belong to us, as well as to each of us. Each of us writes our selves into being, and thus each of us writes our selves into being.

“Efforts to understand the dynamic processes of learning situated across space and time, beyond the here and now” (my emphasis)–efforts to conceptualize: good enough for a peer-reviewed research-focused article published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but too “mushy and subjective” to guide learning outcomes? My fragment-question echoes like old Fred Neil once sang, sadly and a little angrily and most of all plaintively.

Connected, intimate, and open, through this course of study we call our works and days.

Who is this for?

She left the Door open

Image by Hartwig HKD

And through the door
What do I see? 
Something is happening
Is it for me? 

At our last Thoughtvectors/UNIV200/Living The Dreams meeting, I asked the team to start blogging our work together. After the logistical questions–where, how, etc.–the bigger, most Internet-mystical question came up: who is this for? Is it for us, as a record of our work? Is it for the students, as a model of the work we want them to do? Is it for the audience of onlookers, well-wishers, resisters and skeptics and nay-sayers? Who?

I’m always puzzled by this question, but I recognize there are at least two reasons for my puzzlement. One is that I began blogging by understanding that this was my blog, so it was for me, but the work I do for me has the potential to be of interest to others as well. I knew that without being able to explain it, largely because my experience of reading other bloggers had made that impression on me. This is his blog, or her blog, and they write out of their own experience, narrating their work, wondering aloud, bringing things to light the way a good late-night conversation will–anything, really, so long as the origins and purposes had something to do with what Dave Winer has called the defining characteristic of blogging: the unedited voice of a person.

Since I began, nearly ten years ago, my blog has been the main place for me to try to work things out for myself. Almost all the time, I write my posts in one sitting and publish them right away, going back to fix typos as I see them later or as people point them out to me. Sometimes I’ll rephrase a thought or two, or try to clarify a murky point. I fix any factual mistake I catch. But there’s really not very much of that, and because my blog is fairly essayistic, I don’t do much editing here at all. Given that the value of editing is deeply embedded in academic culture–for many good reasons, of course–for a scholar to commit to trying to work things out for himself or herself in public in this way can be very daunting. My longing for connection finally overcame my fear of humiliation, though that’s a constant struggle. More to the point, I discovered very quickly that working things out for myself in this way, with the fresh provisionality of the thinking still clinging to the thoughts, had the magical property of bringing other people who were doing the same thing into a distributed conversation that took on a life of its own far beyond anything I could have imagined.

I don’t try to work everything out here. I recognize the difference between personal and private, and I need that difference to exist. But to a greater extent than I had ever dreamed, working things out for myself with a questing, probing, sometimes halting voice brought me to a community where collegial inquiry and most of all connected learning became the norm, not the exception. Something like what I’d always thought a university could be.

Which is the second reason for my puzzlement–though I recognize that a university can be a very difficult thing to imagine.

Our Summer cMOOC: Living the Dreams

Actually, that’s the short title. If this were a book (which it is, kind of), and it had a full title (which it does, broadly considered), it would go like this::

UNIV 200: Inquiry and the Craft of Argument. Digital Engagement Pilot. Alternate title: “Living the Dreams: Digital Investigation and Unfettered Minds.” Organizing principle: Thought Vectors In Concept Space. TLT (top-level tag): thoughtvectors (on Twitter: #thoughtvectors — see also @thoughtvectors — coming soon, thoughtvectors.net).

Many books in the Renaissance had such long titles, so why not our course?

There’s a lot to the story of how we got here, but here’s a quick timeline for now:

1. The initial idea came to me during a solitary lunch at Chipotle in late August, 2013. I brought the idea right after lunch to Jon Becker, VCU’s Interim Director of Online Academic Programming. Jon tweeted the after-lunch conversation. I think that tweet’s flying around here somewhere–I’ll have to ask Jon for it, so we can have it for the archives.

2. Now comes a long incubation time. The big haunting unresolved question: what course is the best way to get at, share, frame, experience the idea? That choice is recursive, obviously, as we were about to discover.

3. The next big refinement comes during lunch again. (Moral: eat lunch every day, at least once a day, more if possible–a corollary to the put-a-shower-in-your-office idea generator I’ll call Kay’s Law, after Alan Kay’s strategy–but I digress.) This time I was lunching with three brilliant colleagues: Chip German, Shelli Fowler, and Derek Bruff. They asked me to explain the idea behind the summer cMOOC. They kept asking good questions, collegial questions. I never felt trapped, set up, “critiqued,” or “examined.” Because of their curiosity, friendship, intelligence, and openness, I could find a moment of “beginner’s mind,” indeed a moment in which I had “a mind lively and at ease.” And I realized: this could be a course in research. This could be a course in inquiry and the craft of argument. UNIV 200. Many miles to cross after this, but now I had a compass. An exciting, daunting moment. Time for more incubation, more thought. (And time here to record my deep gratitude to Chip, Shelli, and Derek for their generous brilliance–when the student was ready, the teachers appeared.)

4. From November through February, I’m talking to as many stakeholders as possible, exploring possibilities, learning about complexities and complications, being patiently tutored in the many things I had to learn. Among my many generous teachers to be named in future posts, I must here name two key teachers who emerged for me at this moment. One is Tom Woodward, who joined Online Academic Programs in November. As the ‘net well knows, if Tom joins, many possibilities appear. “Many” roughly equals “infinite,” give or take a few. (I could say more but he would fix me with icy stares at our next staff meeting, so I’ll leave off. For now. You hear me, Tom? For now.) The other is Patty Strong, Director of Core Writing, who oversees UNIV 200 in University College. Patty patiently mapped out both the shoals and the shipping lanes, and I’m convinced this project would never have gotten into the sparkling blue water without her guidance.

5. Sometime in February or March–I’ll have to consult my calendar for a date–we began to put the core team together. In alpha order, the instructors of record are Jon Becker, Bonnie Boaz, Ryan Cales, Gardner Campbell, Jason Coats, and Jessica Gordon. Chief unindicted co-conspirator (oh those Watergate memories) and lead innovation cook: Tom Woodward. Archdesigner, Meme queen, and SCUBA officer: Alana Robinson. Gold-shod mediation engine by digital nonfiction yarn spinner Molly Ransone.

AND architectural consultant and chief musher: Alan Levine.

And many others to be named in future posts.

And if I may be permitted one more allusion to the past that maps our future …

On the back of the Jefferson Airplane’s epic and epochal Surrealistic Pillow, there’s a credit for “Spiritual Direction” given to Jerry Garcia. For the back of the album cover of this cMOOC (there will be a vinyl version of our course, someday), the credit for “Spiritual Direction” goes to Christina Engelbart, Executive Director of the Doug Engelbart Institute. We’ve just spent three days with Christina, and I assure you that the spiritual direction she has provided has taken this whole project to a new level, just as her father’s work did for my own thinking ten years ago–and has continued to do in all the years following.

What is this course? What do we hope will happen? How have we described it to the 120 VCU students (20 to a section, all sections visible to and interacting with each other) who will take it for credit, and to the potentially global network of participants who will follow along, contribute, and learn with us? Here’s the back of the flyer we distributed at registration time:

thoughtvectorsVBush_Page_11 Here’s the action item: wake up and dream.

And here’s an obverse for one of the flyers:

thoughtvectorsVBush_Page_10

And here, yesterday, is most of the core team, gathered in VCU’s new Learning Studio (an incubator classroom):

Digital Engagement Pilot core team

L-R: Jessica Gordon, Jason Coates, Bonnie Boaz, Gardner Campbell, Jon Becker, Christina Engelbart, Tom Woodward, Ryan Cales. Not pictured: Patty Strong (get well soon, Patty!)

Why “thought vectors in concept space”? Because that’s how Doug Engelbart envisioned the mental environment that personal, interactive, networked computing would make possible, an environment in which our “collective IQ” could realize itself and rise to its full and necessary potential. For me, “thought vectors” are the lines of inquiry, wonder, puzzlement, and creative desire emerging from individual minds. We launch our thought vectors into “concept space,” the grand commons of human invention and communication, the space in which we build our symbols and work toward mutual intelligibility, mutual hope, mutual inspiration. If the thought vectors are weak or stunted, the concept space will be too, and vice-versa.

For me, the meta-inquiry that the course considers is this: can school in a digital age help to strengthen thought vectors and concept space in uniquely effective ways, especially at this developmental moment in our students’ learning?

I think so.

I’m excited to try.

More soon.