Here’s the idea. Comments are not only welcome but coveted.

The sequence of learn one, do one, teach one is well known. The process seeks to shorten the path between study, practice, and understanding, if understanding is demonstrated at least in part by the ability to master an explanation and customize it (and a demonstration) to address new learners in an unpredictable learning situation. The process also propagates learning very rapidly, as each teacher helps to build many more teachers.

I’m thinking that learn one, do one, teach one describes not only three steps in a process, or even three modes of learning, but one high-level activity in which each mode or step must be present at every other step. The activity is characterized by attention and articulation (these concepts may also be distinct but not separate). The steps are distinguished by the relative proportion of attention and articulation vectors: what things am I attending to, and in what mixture? what is the nature of my articulation, and what is my audience?

Learning involves a proportionally more intense vector of other-directed attention, but at the same time the learner’s attention must be self-directed enough to engage in an ongoing re-articulation that responds to the teacher. The learner must “follow along,” and that involves at least in part a kind of auto-hypnosis that makes the lesson appear to be created by the attending self.

Doing involves a proportionally more intense vector of self-directed attention, along with an ongoing self-directed articulation that serves as a feedback loop monitoring progress toward the goal. At the same time, the doer’s attention must be other-directed enough to make that feedback loop truly critical and useful. That is, the doer must be ruthless in his or her self-critique, making the I into an other.

Teaching involves a proportionally more intense vector of other-directed attention in which the work is narrated. This narration also bootstraps the process into metacognitive areas in which students witness the teacher engaging his or her own zone of proximal development (acting as one’s own coach) and thus can learn how to access their own ZPDs themselves. This phase involves the most dynamic cognitive apprenticeship, on the part of teacher and learner.

All of that said, each of the steps must include some measure of the other to be effective. The learner must engage in a kind of self-education and re-articulation for the experience to be active and useful instead of passive and illusory. The doer, however much flow and automaticity he or she enjoys in the work, must have a feedback loop in there somewhere, and that loop is made out of attention vectors that are not obviously part of the doing. The teacher must have elements of self-directed learning and doing that are active during the other-directed articulation and narration.

If I haven’t vexed him beyond his patience, Bakhtin is hovering here somewhere.

This is very cool: thanks, Andy.

Spell with Flickr.

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And every refresh gets a new set:

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loves

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Obviously leaving the “make it fit” behind for now….

Technology Review‘s Wade Roush has been publishing a fascinating set of blogs over the last few days: “10,000 Brainiacs: Let’s Write a Social Computing Story, Socially!” As you’ll see from some of the comments I’ve left, I’m still not convinced that transparent computing is the only paradigm we should consider or work toward. (Doug Engelbart’s vision won’t let go of me.) But the writing is spirited, the imagination fully engaged, and the conclusions at the end of part 4 are beautifully articulated, especially for someone like me who’s been wearing glasses since age 6.

And this is what’s truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we have never really loved them. They’re like toasters and VCRs: We’ve used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that’s changing. When computing devices are always with us and always helping us be the social beings we are, time spent “on the computer” no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn’t: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are, in fact, becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software may never become invisible, but it will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses. The rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets he has them on–even though they’re the only things making the world clear.

Thanks, Wade, for your voice and your efforts here.

Today’s Donne is particularly interesting, as it combines great dramatic urgency with considerable complexity. Its diction is rough, tender, hyperbolic, minutely observant. Its sentiments are both inflated and moving. “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”–a very strange beginning for a love poem, more a line for the stage than the outset of a lyric poem.

My post-poem ramble does little to unpack the philosophical argument at the center of the poem, one that includes the implausible assertion (more like wishful thinking) that male post-coital depression has been overcome in the fiery intensity of this love. I do try to get at one of the more confusing parts of the poem, the final stanza in which the voice shifts from the poet to the voices he imagines will petition him and his lover after their deaths to intercede with God to allow their love to become a paradigm for all succeeding lovers. The scandalous, even blasphemous assertions in the poem are blunted by our secular sensibilities, but they were notorious among Donnes’ coterie in his own time. This poem, like most of Donne’s work, was not printed for widespread reading until after his death. During his life, they circulated in manuscript.

Here’s “The Canonization.”

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Business Week just published an interesting and useful cluster of articles on podcasting. I was particularly intrigued by the slide show of their top podcasts. I listen to a few of these regularly, and one of them has proved so consistently useful (an understatement) that several weeks ago I answered a call for volunteer post-production audio engineers: Doug Kaye’s amazing ITConversations. It’s been great collaborating with Doug and Team ITC. I’ve been privileged to work on some fascinating audio, including my most treasured assignment: editing, mixing, and mastering a presentation by Doug Engelbart from last fall’s Accelerating Change conference. When I cast my vote on the Business Week site for my favorite podcast out of their top picks, I of course voted for ITConversations. When I saw the results, I was surprised and pleased to see that Doug’s podcast came in first, followed by Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. No doubt the geek vote drove the results, but still: a nice surprise.

And how. I’ve admired his phrase “active resume” for a long time (which these days means about two months). Now I read his blog of May 24, and I understand his understanding even more deeply. Blogs are about “narrating your work.” That phrase isn’t Udell’s, but the analysis of what that means in terms of professional life is Udell all the way.

The writing we’ve always urged our freshmen to learn, writing that articulates a knowing self in a community of human experience both past and present, can now explicitly become what it always implied. And at the heart of it all is storytelling, an account of our works and days. That’s not self-indulgence. It’s oxygen.

I’m just getting into full-on del-icio.us mode (I guess I’m becoming del.icio.us–couldn’t resist), and before moving on to other errands (errants?) I tried out the “popular” page. Just a little roll of the dice, or what Eno would call an “oblique strategy.” What to my wandering eyes should appear but a very fine piece by Dave Pollard that successfully distinguishes collaboration, cooperation, and coordination. This is one strong essay, and it comes with a nifty matrix that provokes much thought. There are all sorts of ramifications here for what I do as a supervisor, leader, manager, teacher, and student.

Another good one here.

Thanks, Dave. This grey day is starting to look up.

Thanks to Robert McFarlane, who taught me a new word today: katascopos. The lesson emerged from his recent Guardian article on Antoine de Saint-Exupery, an author I admire (and was just discussing with my colleague Dan Hubbard–synchronicity indeed):

In Saint-Ex’s writing, we are always seeing down on to the world, and reinterpreting it as a consequence. “A person taking off from the ground,” he once remarked, “elevates himself above the trivialities of life into a new understanding.” The Greeks had a name for the person who saw from above. They called him the katascopos – a word which later came to mean spy, or explorer – and for them, the sight gained from height was close to god-like. Saint-Ex was a katascopos in every sense of the word, and to read his prose – terse, epigrammatic, visionary – is to share in some part that salutary aerial view, that fresh cosmic perspective.

I love the sound of “salutary aerial view.” Perhaps if I say the words over and over again, I will keep alive the possibility of becoming a katascopos, of preserving what Milton calls the “empyreall conceit” (heavenly or cosmic imagination).

From Saint-Exupery’s The Wisdom of the Sands:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.

Saint-Ex, Milton, beg from above / A pattern of your vision!

Thanks to ALDaily for the Guardian link.

Usury is moneylending at interest. Donne accuses the God of Love of being “usurious” (note to self: check OED to see who else uses that adjective) and tries to strike a bargain with his “love broker.” Because it’s Donne, unpredictable results ensue.

I’ve been mulling the poem over since I recorded the commentary yesterday and I’m confident there are many depths I haven’t plumbed in my brief chat … but the red light’s on and I’m going for it. Here’s “Love’s Usury,” by John Donne.

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However, the growth of plagiarism is not just a result of the internet, or of American students’ laziness – it also comes from students’ new perception of education. Most American students do not attend university to embrace knowledge; university is just a gateway to a successful career.

So writes Jessica Durkin in a column for Spiked. A UK citizen currently enrolled at Boston College, Durkin goes on to argue that knowledge has “intrinsic value–in broadening [students’] minds and expanding [students’] horizons,” and she insists that “society needs to promote the value of learning over a degree’s increased job potential.”

I agree with Durkin. The catch here is that we are society. We need to compose a petition, sign it, and deliver it: to ourselves. And we need to find a more rigorous and profound way to describe the intrinsic value of education. Behind the loosely inspiring talk of self-actualization must be an ethical argument that will stand scrutiny and opposition, especially when education could soon become merely a commodity.

And speaking of commodities, what of our own ideologies? What exactly is the value of learning if one believes that discourse is nothing more nor less than the circulation of power? Perhaps our students have learned from us all too well: cf. Lennard J. Davis’s article titled “The Perils of Academic Ignorance,” in Friday’s Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, I think). Davis writes:

But our attempt to balance the misleading objectivity of earlier scholarship has probably created too strong a tilt toward the purely personal. Students have become so focused on their personal likes and dislikes that they tend to discount the importance of objective reality and the wider world. We’ve put the “moi” back in memoir and taken out the “liberal” from liberal arts.

Objective reality. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen those words without scare quotes around them. Without some notion of objective reality, however, it’s difficult to see how knowledge can exist to be embraced, unless it’s the absurd (and poignant) embrace in Waiting For Godot:

ESTRAGON:
(giving up again). Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR:
(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.
ESTRAGON:
Am I?
VLADIMIR:
I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.
ESTRAGON:
Me too.
VLADIMIR:
Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
ESTRAGON:
(irritably). Not now, not now.

Ah, Estragon. Ah, Vladimir. Ah, humanity! But if not now, when?