First, a travel update as the westward trek continues.

This is the last night on the road for me and daughter Jenny. (Alice and Ian are coming later, after house stuff in Fredericksburg is complete or as complete as we can get it.) The trip has been interesting, enjoyable, and only occasionally fraught. We’ve connected with friends and loved ones along the way. We’ve eaten at Lefty’s BBQ near Crossville, a gift from our GPS’s “nearby food” listings at lunchtime on Monday. We reasoned that a place named “Lefty’s” was worth a look. Our reasoning was sound and the food was delicious. We’ve driven about 200 miles on the Natchez Trace Parkway between Nashville and Tupelo, Mississippi. On the parkway we visited Meriwether Lewis’s grave site, saw one of the more impressive bridges we’ve ever seen, and cruised through countryside so brilliantly sun-drenched that the green turned to gold on the trees on every side. In Tupelo we stayed at a pretty ratty HoJo Express (not recommended) but began our Tuesday with a visit to Elvis’s birthplace. That pleasant morning outing was followed by over three hours baking in the flat hot afternoon outside an Atlanta Bread Co. in downtown Tupelo, where the free wifi and my trusty cellphone meant I could continue to transact various kinds of business as we sell one house and buy another. Then, a drive by Faulkner’s Oxford in a driving rainstorm, more rain on the road from Batesville to Vicksburg, and an evening meal of perhaps the blandest Chinese food I have ever tasted.

But we’re here and safe and on our way to Waco today, where we will pause in our travels and make a  new home. On Sept. 1, I begin a new job at Baylor University–of which more anon.

What have I learned since I arrived at Mary Washington in 1994? I’ll be mulling that answer over for the rest of my life, and thinking aloud about it from time to time here in this space. To begin, I offer this presentation from the UCEA pre-conference on distance learning last March. I was a bit nervous about this talk. I was on a panel of pretty high-powered folks, including the redoubtable Phil Long. I was going to say some things about metaphor and disruption and deschooling and reschooling that might not cohere or make sense. The whole thing was in a bit of a roil in my mind, especially because (in a neat synchronicity) I was going to Baylor later that morning to begin two and a half days of interviews.

For some reason, though, the whole thing just … came … out. It was a strange but welcome experience, as if the talk was giving me instead of the other way around. Whatever its merits, it felt right.

I hope it resonates with some of you, too. What you hear in this presentation represents at least some of what I learned at Mary Washington.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (32.6MB)

Just about the length of a good pop song.

At the wonderful NITLE Summit back in April, Steve Greenlaw and I did a poster session on what since 2005 the dream team at UMW has been calling “The Bluehost Experiment.” More than anything else that happened on my watch as Asst. VP for Teaching and Learning Technologies, this experiment (a perpetual pilot, and darn proud of it too) proved transformative. Not only that, it has been a constant source of inspiration and a wonderful opportunity for learning throughout the entire community: students, staff, faculty. I think it’s an example of positive deviance, though I’m hardly an unbiased observer.

There’s plenty of stuff floating around the ‘net about our adventures in the sandbox. Here, in the grand tradition of “Minute Shakespeare,” is the abridged version, presented for the “Three Minutes of Fame” poster-session advertisement at the NITLE conference. The most ingenious part of the presentation was the slide template we were furnished, which was set up to advance automatically every thirty seconds. A very clever person thought of that–and I’ll probably nick the idea for something to try in the classroom someday soon.

Special thanks to Steve Greenlaw for, well, everything, but particularly for his help in thinking about this presentation.

As I prepare for my new job at Baylor University, I’m even more alert than usual to the many analogies, metaphors, and parables out there that help me think about education.  My reading this summer has been unusually rich in that regard. Over the last few days I’ve been deep into Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. I don’t think I can recommend this little book too highly. Parts of it are expanded versions of essays that originally appeared in The New Yorker. Parts of it are new to me. All of it is insightful, inspiring, thoughtfully cautionary.

Two parts I’ve blogged about before, in their New Yorker incarnation: the story of Virginia Apgar and her scoring system for assessing newborns’ health, and the story of Warren Warwick and his zealous devotion to the best possible outcomes in treating cystic fibrosis.  Both of these stories strongly influenced my work in the classroom over the last eighteen months, and both have helped me think more complexly and imaginatively about the vexed issue of assessment in education. I suppose that’s one reason I bought Gawande’s book earlier this week: I had just finished working with a colleague on a conference proposal for a seminar on assessment and I wanted to revisit Gawande and test my current thinking against his. I was inspired anew.

At an even deeper level, though, Gawande’s book strikes me as perfect reading material for all of us who live in what Nassim Taleb calls, with haunting precision, “the antechamber of hope.” Why do we struggle? To what end? With what hope of success? Why do some intense efforts yield extraordinary, lasting results while other lead to muleish opposition and setback after setback? To cite just one of Gawande’s examples: why have the enormous strides in antisepsis in the operating room not been matched by widespread, thorough habits of handwashing in doctors? Why are some simple, basic barriers to dramatic improvement so immoveable?

The Virginia Apgars and Warren Warwicks of the world seem to breathe a purer oxygen than most of us do. They are awake, and indefatigable. They also love the idea of improving our processes of improvement, what Doug Engelbart calls the “bootstrapping” level of augmentation. Most of all, they are curious, game, scrappy, always thinking, always pushing. They are what Gawande calls “positive deviants”: outliers who make change possible, and life better, for everyone.

Here’s how Gawande sums it up at the end of his story of medicine in India, where truly dire conditions have not blocked great innovations among the doctors there:

True success in medicine is not easy. It requries will, attention to detail, and creativity. But the lesson I took from India was that it is possible anywhere and by anyone. I can imagine few places with more difficult conditions. Yet astonishing success could be found. And each one began, I noticed, remarkably simply: with a readiness to recognize problems and a determination to remedy them.

Arriving at meaningful solutions is an inevitably slow and difficult process. Nonetheless, what I saw was: better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.

And as Gawande notes in the story of Warren Warwick and the treatment of cystic fibrosis, it takes a willingness to be open with one’s efforts and candid about one’s failures.

So there’s the adventure: become a positive deviant. The two words describe the task well, for they suggest the tension and difficulty inherent in making true deviation truly effective, and not simply an exotic nuisance (or worse, a scapegoat).

I haven’t quite finished the book. I see the Afterword approaching: “Suggestions for Becoming a Positive Deviant.”

I’ll report back.

Inspired (nudged, prompted) by a recent e-mail from Janet, I’m trying to catch up with that builder and curator of a cabinet of wonders who calls himself Michael Wesch. Watching him and his work is like watching a time-lapse photograph of the Empire State Building going up. Every morning a new story appears. Amazing.

So this morning I got onto his blog entry about “Context Collapse,” actually an excerpt from a paper he’s submitted to a journal, and by the time I realized what was going on I’d composed a rather longish comment. I then wrestled with whether I should leave the comment there, or just post my thoughts here and link to the post. Tired of wrestling, I decided to do both.

This isn’t the blog post I’d planned to write–I need to do a follow-on to the one on blogging, where the comments have been truly mind-blowing and have added immeasurably to my thinking (as well as filling my heart). But I post it here in the hopes that some account of my response to Michael’s post will perhaps add a little to the conversation and, if nothing else, encourage a few more folks to go take a look at what Michael has written and the comments that have followed. And add their own.

Michael,

Fascinating stuff here. I’m eager to read your article and grateful you’ve shared part of it with us here.

Three things come to mind immediately:

1. The idea of “face-work” (great phrase) jibes interestingly with the arguments in Goleman’s “Social Intelligence.” Far from being opaque to each other, in f2f contexts we are almost comically transparent as our brains work below awareness to stimulate complex physical signals that share our subjectivity with each other. The sharing induces synchrony: heart rate, brain rhythms, etc. Massive social benefits emerge from this kind of synchrony, which blurs the lines between physiology, affect, and consciousness. But of course lower-bandwidth connections (webcams, writing, etc.) make these kinds of synchrony more difficult–though also more interestingly concentrated at times, a true paradox. (Call it the “stick-figure” paradox, in which a few bold suggestions of form can be more compelling than complexly realized CGI, perhaps because of the “uncanny valley” effect?)

2. In some respects, what I do when I teach students how to write more effectively is not so much to teach them a set of self-correcting techniques (I do that too, sure) as it is to teach them what it means to do “face-work” in the medium of prose. Language is both highly supple and highly resistant in this regard, difficult to master but capable of intense synchronicities when writer and reader are well-practiced in the varieties of “face-work” available to prose. Sometimes the goal of this practice is called “finding your voice” (necessary for the reader as well as for the writer, I think) which of course is also a kind of “face-work,” one even more intimately connected with the magic land between deliberate action and upwelling response. (Much to say here as well with regard to aesthetic arrest and altruism.)

3. It occurs to me that Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal essay on “Speech Genres” could be mapped onto webcams/vlogging in interesting ways. I’ve always been haunted by his concept of “addressivity,” which he defines as “the quality of turning to someone.” Imagining addressivity, combining it with what he calls “internal dramatism” in which one might say the notion of “face-work” becomes part of the very dynamics of self-presentation and self-expression, a canny nod to the reader that generates not irony so much as a shared awareness of the heroic joint effort in that moment to create a context that, however provisional, will not collapse (at least for now), offers some philosophical/linguistic models that might prove useful.

Thanks, as always, for the work you do.