Or, more accurately, Hugh Blackmer on a powerful enabler of real school:

It’s not that we need to find the one best way of presenting information, but that the presentation should be easily [re]configurable to suit the user’s needs, preferences, purposes. User Interface is surely as much a conceptual problem as a design problem or a matter of hardware contingencies.

The intersection of pedagogy/cognitive science with UI: X marks the spot, or one spot … a place to start digging, or building … arrange the metaphors like facets in a diamond, both to gather and scatter the light.

Can we find a Theory of Everything that preserves both the One and the Many? That’s the kind of question that makes a few of my readers gnash their teeth, and perhaps even charge me with “being literary.” Well, guilty: You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. (And I’m not even sure that’s a good song–but it’s salutary to have that line juxtaposed with another bit of truthtelling from Lennon’s work: “No one I think is in my tree; I mean it must be high or low.”)

Or maybe I need Walt Whitman: “Failing to find me at first, keep encouraged.”

Or perhaps Doug Engelbart, again, and always:

We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

I repeat myself to remind myself: a liberal arts education ought to be the best opportunity for imagining and crafting, privately and in community, just such an integrated domain.