Inspired by the season and by a wonderful day of reunion for our now-scattered families, I thought it would be good to say thanks to all of you who read, comment on, or otherwise interact with my writings here. When I began blogging over four years ago, I had no idea where the project would take me. All I knew was what I wanted to call my blog. Of that I was certain. I am grateful to all of you who’ve read what Gardner writes, and who’ve made my thinking clearer and my heart stronger with your responses.

As a Christmas present of sorts, I offer a podcast of the presentation Jim Groom and I did at EDUCAUSE 2008. The idea for the presentation was Jim’s. When he asked me to join him, I was honored to do so. I knew the collaboration would be something special: Jim’s an inspiring guy, and when he and I kick ideas around together, stuff happens. Jim’s the one who got me to try an alpha version of Lyceum back in the summer of 2006. When I returned to Mary Washington in the Spring, 2007 term, we had a hallway conversation in which I mentioned that WordPress Multiuser had gone to version 1, and I’d be interested in trying it out in one of my classes (as it turns out, my Film, Text, and Culture class). Jim installed it that night, I got going with it the next day, and within a few months our little experiment grew to several multiuser blogs in several of my colleagues’ classes in the department of English, Linguistics, and Speech. Over the summer, under the leadership of Martha Burtis the UMW Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies developed what became UMW Blogs, the initiative that continues today.

Doing the EDUCAUSE presentation with Jim took me back through all that history, and forward into the massive potential that still lies ahead for the whole UMW Blogs experiment. It also made me feel again the urgency of this effort to liberate students, faculty, and universities from the stultifying, even oppressive systems of “learning management” that continue to flourish in higher education, even when resources are disappearing and the prices keep going up.

For this presentation, fired up once again by Jim’s eloquence as he describes this oppression and the need for change, I hit upon the the idea of framing the Q&A in terms of an appeal to the audience, an “alter call” (pun and misspelling intended). Why not adopt an initiative like UMW Blogs? What’s stopping you? Why not abandon tired environments built around quiz builders and gradebooks and document delivery and find a way to bring the intellectual vitality of higher education, particularly as it is expressed in our students’ work, out into the world where it can find real audiences, spark real conversation, and serve as the foundation of a life’s work? Oh, and you can start the experiment for 6.95 a month, plus the cost of a domain name.

As you’ll hear, a set of concerns emerged from the audience: privacy, branding, risk, support, and so forth. These are legitimate concerns, every one of them. We must exercise due diligence in addressing them. Yet the larger concerns of authentic assessment, engaged learning, undergraduate publication, media fluency, and the like must not be overlooked. Indeed, these positive concerns–positive? essential concerns–should spur us to address and resolve the negative concerns. Instead, what happens all too often is that schools look for safety, scalability, sustainability (or at least that’s the logic) and try to fit the learning into the narrow spaces that remain between the circled wagons.

This can’t go on.

Whatever we do, whether it’s a campus-wide blogging initiative or something else equally ambitious, personal, and open, we must put learning at the center.  And that center must be designed to be shared. Easy to say, hard to do, and potentially glorious, as this season reminds us. 

Merry Christmas.

Photo by Bryan Alexander

Some scattered thoughts in response to Britt Watwood’s very thoughtful post summarizing and reflecting on the recent Electronic Campus of Virginia retreat:

Glad my tweets gave you a shiver! I miss all my Virginia friends and colleagues and I was certainly there with you in spirit.

Several near-overwhelming things emerged for me at the Engelbart fest (http://www.programforthefuture.org). I hope I can blog about them over the next few days. For now, I’ll just say that I’m more convinced than ever that education can fruitfully be considered as an Engelbartian “augmentation” / bootstrap experience in which innovation broadly considered–let’s call it the effective, inspiring continuation of the human conversation by means of significant new contributions to that conversation–is at the heart of what we think of as learning. After all, deep learning always presents itself to the *learner* as an innovation: “hey, I didn’t know that before!” Maybe another word for innovation is “discovery,” which Jerome Bruner writes about very eloquently in his essay on “The Act of Discovery” in the collection _On Knowing_.

In short, there’s a drama to learning, and that drama is connected with both a comprehensive understanding of the conversation and a deep intuition of one’s own power to contribute to that conversation. The many emerging technologies in what we call Web 2.0, and in the sorts of things the Horizon Report identifies, at their best enable both the understanding and the intuition.

Photo by Shutterhack.

Jon Udell and I talk about conceptual leaps from time to time. For me, Jon is both a consistent source of conceptual leaps, and a consistent inspiration for discovering my own. When we talk, though, we sometimes disagree, not so much about what the conceptual leaps are, but about which ones are reasonable to expect of people. When we’re talking, Jon tends to advocate a more incremental approach that emphasizes easy-to-use tools. I’m less patient with the incremental approach, and I worry that the ease-of-use argument, which undeniably valid in many instances, can actually throttle real innovation and underestimate human potential–at least, when that potential is properly pushed.

What constitutes a “proper push” is a question at the very heart of teaching and learning. Jerome Bruner has some very interesting things to say about such pushing–I keep discovering absolute wonders in his essays–but more on that anon, and back to Jon.

Two of Jon’s recent “Interviews with Innovators” (his podcast series on IT Conversations) make me think, again, that Jon and I are closer than either of us might believe we are. One was Jon’s interview with Nova Spivack about Twine (podcast here, blog reflection here), a service that aims to be a next-generation cross between social bookmarking and the semantic web. The interesting moment for me was this bit in the middle of the podcast (the excerpt is about four minutes long):

The exchange offers a very satisfying exposition of one of the biggest challenges we face in this area: how can we inspire, cajole, or otherwise persuade people to understand the value of sharing and the network effects sharing enables? This question, much more so than the question of complexity or difficulty of use, is at the heart of what’s most challenging as we try to urge adoption of these tools in higher education and elsewhere. A narrowly personal paradigm of computing means that for many people, perhaps most adults, computing is about individual affordances, and new Web 2.0 services simply add to the blades on an already comically jumbo Swiss Army Knife–for the individual. The idea of network effects is, as Jon points out, nearly impossible to describe, though relatively easy to grasp once one has experienced network effects for oneself. (This latter idea is one Alan Levine has explored many times in his talks about “being there.”)

But then my thoughts turned around on themselves again. Is it really so easy to experience network effects by being there? I suppose it depends on what one means by “being.” I think we’re really talking about a commitment here, a mode of being that is much more than a visit, or an anthropological study. The network effects have a strong effect on one’s very being, after all. Once I learned to speak (I was apparently a late talker, something most of you will find impossible to believe), and especially once I learned to read, I wasn’t simply the same person with another affordance. The very way I thought of “self,” and especially my own self and its horizon of possibilities, changed utterly. Forever.

I think RSS isn’t all that hard to learn or understand. I think network effects are indeed harder to grasp, perhaps impossible without direct experience. But most of all, I think it’s very hard to accept or embrace the transformative power of network effects because of the way those effects complicate our settled experience of identity. Not ideas of identity, but the experience of identity.

I think this is what people really fear most when they talk about information overload. They fear they will disappear, or that at the very least their experience of identity will be profoundly unsettled. Forever.

Sure, it’s scary to think about all the stuff people say, do, and know out there, and how much of it is available, hypnotically and perhaps damagingly, to anyone willing to spend their days hooked to a screen on a desk, or in a pocket, or wherever. But what’s really frightening is the experience of scale. It’s the fear of losing one’s voice permanently amid the din of all the competing voices.

I may not have this all right, just now. (I keep forgetting my blog is about the mistakes, not just the realizations–I should know much, much better. Witness the intractability of the problem!)  But I think I’m at least partially right. Because the more I thought about what Jon and Nova were saying in this little exchange, the more I realized that Jon was outlining the very process of education itself, especially higher education. What’s different about college? The experience of scale. Not just difficulty, though there’s that too, but extent. Think about a first-year writer going into a library and thinking about her or his own voice, competing with centuries of other voices, most of them more sophisticated and knowledgeable to boot.

Yet once that learner begins to understand network effects–let’s call them the ongoing intertwined records of human discourse–and that the scale actually makes his or her voice more rich, supple, and powerful, in fact acts as a kind of amplifier for that voice, the learner then turns what I’d argue is the most important corner in any educational experience, the one that shows that learner both the need and the possibility for making his or her own mark on that great tablet of civilization. What we see when timid freshmen at the end of four years transform themselves into uncertain but intent and brave seniors is not only the mastery of content (though some of that happens too, and should). It’s the dawning conviction that network effects are their allies, not their enemies. That it’s their civilization, too.

For this reason, Jerome Bruner’s observation continues to resonate with me: school is, to some crucial extent, always “consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity.” The word “collaboration” is far too weak for what I’m trying to describe here. It’s more the moment one realizes a calling, within community, to be oneself most deeply by joining in the conversation.

That idea is obviously counterintuitive on one level, since college is a daunting experience for almost everyone at one time or another. Yet the idea is also utterly intuitive for anyone who’s ever stayed up late, drunk on the wine of a marvelous conversation.

Too many of our current educational paradigms focus on individual affordances. I’ll get a better job. I’ll get a degree. I’ll get tenure. I’ll get promoted. I’m not saying these aren’t important goals. Of course they are. But education is most deeply personal when it’s inter- and trans-personal, just as high-speed computing becomes truly transformative only when those machines are networked and the network’s platform (where would we be without the World Wide Web?) supports robust development.

So tonight I’m thinking that education is the platform for the human network, and the World Wide Web gives us a very powerful way to demonstrate and understand that fact.

One of Jon’s subsequent interviews takes the analogy to an even higher level, as Jon demonstrates wonderfully. But that’s material for another post (especially because I’m not sure what to do with the Wikipedia argument there).