There have been numerous welcome curricular shifts in response to emerging cultural concerns over the last forty years, but no college or university has yet had the vision or courage to answer the call sounded in 1999 by the blue-ribbon Committee on Information Technology Literacy in their National Academy publication Being Fluent with Information Technology: “the committee believes that successful implementation of FITness [i.e., fluency in information technologies] instruction will require serious rethinking of the college and university curriculum.” Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Committee on Information Technology Literacy, Being Fluent with Information Technology. Washington: National Academy Press, 1999.

This committee did not advocate another set of tacked-on requirements, but instead a curriculum in which students, faculty, and staff could awaken and exercise their digital imaginations, working together from matriculation to commencement as each new cohort appeared to explore the rich conceptual possibilities of the digital age. What John Harwood (CIO Penn State) calls “Learning 2.0” is about much more than content delivery, e-books, or articulation agreements. We need to consider a world in which we can and probably will move beyond the credit hour, course and term boundaries, and geographical location into a world in which creation and learning become synonymous. The irony is that we’ve long known that creation and learning are intimately related. We’ve had to meet challenges of access and cost by scaling up along fairly crude industrial models, turning education into an assembly line. But if the Internet has shown us anything, it’s shown us that a distributed, loosely coupled model of creation and communication networks can trigger network effects on a startling and unpredictable scale.

We should learn from the Internet itself what a learning community can be like. When a small dialogue box inviting 140 characters of commentary, an affordance introduced in 2006 called “Twitter,” can play an integral role in global events ranging from a U.S. President’s State of the Union Address (Twitter hashtag #sotu) to ongoing revolutions in the Middle East beginning with Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, we are witnessing a symbiosis of creation and learning that far outstrips any vision of academic transformation based on quadrupling class sizes and outsourcing grading and instruction to poorly-compensated adjuncts and paraprofessionals. But to understand and leverage these changes, we must attain to a far deeper understanding of the computer itself than we have yet attempted. We must understand computing the way we seek to understand language itself. We must awaken our digital imaginations. If Virginia Tech seizes this opportunity for leadership in this vital area, that leadership will demonstrate that the noble democratic vision embodied in the concept of the land-grant university is the true mother of accomplishment, and a far more sustainable and equitable engine of economic prosperity than any other vision has yet realized.

How might we begin? We might begin with a curriculum that brings students into creative, challenging contact with the history and dreams of the digital age, perhaps in a first-year experience that asks them to reflect critically on their own digital lives as well as begin to shape and share their own digital creations, both intramurally and publicly. Research into the neurobiology of learning, building on decades of educational research, has shown that students learn deeply when they are asked to narrate their learning, curate their creations within the learning environment, and share what they have curated with a wide and, when appropriate, a public audience. As students understand that they are not simply completing an assignment at a professor’s behest, but in fact beginning their life’s work, they will necessarily become more engaged and produce more authentic work reflective of their own growing interests. By making that process as public and open as possible, Virginia Tech will create and share not only educational resources, but the excitement and engagement of the Hokie educational experience itself.

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Richard Feynman, Cal Tech

In the same way, we cannot awaken students’ digital imagination without intensive development opportunities for faculty and staff that will inspire their digital imaginations as well. Much has been written about “digital natives” and “digital immigrants.” While there are significant differences in experience between an 18-year-old and mature adults who are (let us say) farther along in life’s journey, labels such as these tend to pigeonhole the young and excuse their elders from the necessity of learning this new language fluently. Faculty and staff are overworked, it’s true. Demands of teaching, research, service, and continued learning are enormous and seem only to grow as the years go by. The moral is therefore clear: a university committed to digital leadership must provide time, rewards, and recognition to encourage faculty and staff to pursue development opportunities. But there must be more. There must be a clear signal of institutional priorities from the presidential level through the various tenure and promotion committees all the way down to the departmental level. And there must be a move away from “training” and workshops into deep, authentic intellectual and experiential engagement with the conceptual frameworks underlying our digital age. Faculty respond much more readily to ideas, inquiry, and discussion than they do to “training.” The training/workshop model may get us to skills of a sort, but it leaves capabilities and especially concepts almost completely untouched. By contrast, seminars and inquiry groups begin with the conceptual framework and do their work by means of deep, playful, and creative intellectual encounters. The “deliverable” should be a whole new mind, to borrow the title of Dan Pink’s book—a changed perspective on the digital world, as well as a renewed sense of curiosity and commitment to exploring its many wonders.

And what about staff development? It should be no different than the opportunities afforded faculty. Indeed, some of the richest, most diverse, most silo-busting and collaborative seminars are those in which faculty and staff learn and grow side-by-side, establishing synergistic partnerships that can transform entire schools and build strong, enduring networks of trust, respect, and encouragement.

C. P. Snow famously wrote of the two cultures of science and the humanities, and the great and widening divide between them. In many respects, the divide is just as wide between faculty and staff. Privileges rightly reserved for each community have contributed to an unhealthy and unwise separation of each group’s vital insights from the other’s. Often staff cannot understand or easily accept the flexibility of time and focus professors enjoy, let alone such concepts as tenure or “professor emeritus.” Sadly, many professors treat staff as lackeys to do their bidding, and cannot understand or easily accept the rich and essential insights staff bring to the learning community, or the intellectual weight of organizational life. Adjunct and other non-tenure-track professors seem to fall somewhere in between–or, as many would say, through the cracks entirely. Perhaps more mixed development opportunities emphasizing imagination and intelligence among both cultures can begin to ameliorate these unfortunate divisions.

Part three of a series that began here.  Part two is here.

This time, there’s a postscript.

[Education] ought to teach and reward initiative, curiosity, the habit of self-motivation, intellectual involvement…. Educators and computer enthusiasts tend to agree on these goals. But what happens? Many of the inhumanities of the existing system, no less wrong for being unintentional, are being continued into computer-assisted teaching.
–Ted Nelson, “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” (1974)

Alan Kay, the enfant terrible of Xerox’s fabled Palo Alto Research Center and the father of the personal computer, once observed that the best way to predict the future was to invent it. There is a promise and a warning implicit in that observation. The promise is that we can build a future together. We are not simply the victims of technological determinism. The warning is that the future we get is only as good as the future we invent. In other words, we must nurture our powers of invention, powers that depend on the depth and strength of our imaginations. How can we do this in a digital context?

We must awaken the digital imagination. Despite numerous “information literacy” or “digital fluency” initiatives, typically in the form of “swimming test” requirements or other bolted-on initiatives, no college or university has yet articulated this goal in its appropriate depth and scope. When the Committee on Information Technology Literacy published its own vision of 21^st- century education in Being Fluent with Information Technology (Washington: National Academy Press, 1999), it identified computing skills, capabilities, and concepts as the three essential areas higher education should attend to in its response to the digital age. So far, higher education has ignored the conceptual level almost entirely. As a result, students, faculty, and staff are much like the fish who don’t know they’re wet. We swim in an ocean of networked computers, but we do not have the conceptual frameworks we need to understand what that means or how to invent within it.

Yet those pioneers who invented the future we now inhabit understood the crucial role of the digital imagination in achieving the ultimate goal of augmenting human intellect. Early on, Alan Kay insisted that “a computer is an instrument whose music is ideas.” Not a faster typewriter or an information appliance,  but an instrument whose music is ideas. At Xerox PARC, Kay and his colleague Adele Goldberg wrote a widely influential essay titled “Personal Dynamic Media,” in which they recorded this essential observation:

[T]he ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided. Moreover, this new “metamedium” is active—it can respond to queries and experiments—so that the messages may involve the learner in a two-way conversation…. We think the implications are vast and compelling.
Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, “Personal Dynamic Media,” 1977

Computing as an active metamedium. Computers as as “universal machines” with the peculiar ability to simulate and model any other machine. Software, an entirely new human invention that Fred Brooks, author of the classic The Mythical Man-Month, called “pure thought-stuff.” Perhaps not everyone needs to learn to program, but certainly everyone needs to understand the implications of this invention. To read the ambitions and excitement of the history of computing, from Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” to Tim Berners-Lee’s “The World Wide Web,” is to understand just how dramatically and wonderfully new this invention is, how extraordinary its promise, and how far we have fallen short of realizing that promise.

In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad and proclaimed another revolution. Many writers compared the iPad to Alan Kay’s original conception of the “Dynabook.” Kay, however, was not optimistic that the revolution he and his colleagues had so yearned for had in fact arrived:

One way to look at what we were doing is that we were trying to make new kinds of books, and telescopes and microscopes, etc., to advance “seeing and thinking”, but if you give a microscope to a monkey they only will hold it up to admire their reflection in the shiny brass barrel. And I think this is what happened. Education never got on the bus and the “augmentation of human intellect” (which is right there) got completely overwhelmed by the mirror effect….
Alan Kay, responding to Alan Levine’s blog post “The Dynabook Pad” http://cogdogblog.com/2010/10/17/the-dynabookpad/ on October 21, 2010.

We should not let any technology make monkeys out of us or our students. Indeed, education is among other things our uniquely human culture of making the most out of our peculiarly human characteristics. Yet the augmentation of human intellect within the metamedium of networked, interactive computing has not yet become a priority in any significant way within higher education.

It’s tough to go through a paradigm shift. When the earth moved from the still center of the universe to the moving orbit of a heliocentric cosmos, massive intellectual and social disruption ensued. When Hamlet was in its first run at the Globe Theatre, no one knew that a déclassé public entertainment on the wrong side of the Thames would one day be called the primary catalyst of modern self-awareness. Note, however, that in both instances those who were agile and committed enough were able to be among the first not only to enjoy the fruits of these discoveries and accomplishments, but also those who could successfully exercise their own agency and creativity within the rapidly changing context.

Capital Gate, Abu Dhabi. Designed with Building Information Modeling software (BIM), now available for iPad. Photo contributed by Dr. Jack Davis.

POSTSCRIPT 2013: I still think that “awakening the digital imagination” is a far subtler and more complex task than is generally realized, at least on the order of discursive fluency in reading and writing. Going forward, I’d say it’s also at least that important. How long until we take seriously (and playfully, and creatively) the task of educating citizens to understand that “the computer is an instrument whose music is ideas”? We will pay a heavy price for this neglect. It’s not too late to change.

Lately I tried to describe “my work,” something I always find difficult because my projects and interests are pretty diverse. To my surprise, what popped out had my digital imagination efforts front and center. Here’s how it read:

I am a teacher, researcher, administrator, writer, speaker, musician, podcaster, audio engineer, and FOO Camper. For the last five years, I have built a set of open networks of learning and metacognition, made primarily of meetings and social media, and centered on readings that trace the philosophies informing the technical and conceptual architectures of networked, interactive, personal computing. Our primary anthology is The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003). Working in fractal, recursive patterns of looping self-similarity, I have created and refined two courses of study. One is a class that has been at various times a first-year seminar, an upper-level English elective, and a cross-listed undergraduate/graduate course: “From Memex to YouTube: Cognition, Learning, and the Internet.” The Spring, 2012 class’s aggregated blogs are here: http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/vtclis12. Of special note is the work of the class’s “meta-team,” who analyzed and synthesized the class’s work throughout the course. Their extraordinary final project is here: http://vtclis12.wix.com/insertcognitionhere.

The other course is a faculty-staff development seminar, “Awakening the Digital Imagination.” The aggregated blogs from Fall, 2012 are here: http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/vtnmfs-f12. The faculty-staff group has the additional layer of being in a networked community of seminars at schools ranging from U.Cal.-Berkeley to Houston Community College. I have a deep slow hunch that this networked seminar—a massive open online seminar—could provide a significant part of that self-sustaining meta-experience of learning, a true “ecology of mind” as Gregory Bateson puts it, that I yearn to nurture within school. I believe this networked seminar could also be a crucial breakthrough in digital citizenship for everyone involved in higher education.

I lead Virginia Tech’s Center for Innovation in Learning, funded by the offices of Undergraduate Studies, Graduate Studies, Newman Library, and Learning Technologies. (Another network.)  Current projects include the faculty-staff seminar above, the Honors Residential College blogging initiative (aggregated at blogs.lt.vt.edu/hrc), the VT Distinguished Innovator in Residence Program (see blogs.lt.vt.edu/innovator), an NSF grant exploring engineering as a liberal art, and separate faculty projects on altmetrics for scholarship, MOOCs, integrated science, and learning spaces.  I also direct the VT Faculty Development Institute, which I am trying to shift out of a computer training paradigm into a paradigm of computing as intellectual growth. I serve on the Advisory Board for the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, and have served on the Advisory Board for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative as well as the Board of Directors of the New Media Consortium. I have an active public speaking schedule, averaging twenty-four major presentations per year over the last four years. And I continue to work as a scholar of John Milton.

You can see what drives my work, what forms its character, on my blog, “Gardner Writes” (www.gardnercampbell.net). My blog also contains the fullest record and best expression of my ideas and experiments in educational reform and innovation.

I believe that Alan Kay is correct that “the computer is an instrument whose music is ideas.”  I seek to build what I call “real school” with that instrument and that music.

Alan Kay signs my New Media Reader. Instant preserved by Chip German.

Second in a series begun here.

We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.
–Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations (2008)

My personal view is we are observing the early emergence of the Meta University: a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.
–Charles Vest, MIT, 2006. For an example of Vest’s vision, see the National Science Digital Library, as well as the Computing Portal.

We live in extraordinary times. The Internet began as a communications link to enable information-sharing and collaboration between universities, research centers, and other institutions of higher learning. The World Wide Web began for many of the same reasons. Both are now the primary means of communication on the planet, with an unprecedented speed, reach, and multimodal capacity born of the computer’s inherent property as a “universal machine,” a machine that can simulate or model any other machine. These advances have come within an astonishingly short time frame. Interactive computing is about fifty years old. The concept of personal computing emerged a little less than forty years ago, at a time when the notion of a personal computer seemed to many people as laughable and irrelevant as the idea of a personal Saturn V.  Within the last thirty years we have moved from slow desktop computers with dual floppy disk drives to powerful laptops to sophisticated smartphones that are essentially full-featured, always-connected pocket computers that also do telephony, audio-video recording and editing, and geolocation.  Adrian Cockroft (http://perfcap.blogspot.com/) believes that soon we will be carrying web servers around in our pockets, context-sensitive machines that can seamlessly link us to varied peripherals in settings ranging from offices to trains, planes, and automobiles—and everywhere in between.

This recent presentation by Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, makes the elements and character of these changes very clear:

As both Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants) and W. Brian Arthur (The Nature of Technology) have recently argued, the pace of technological innovation, and the often disruptive change it brings, will continue to increase, and the rate of increase will also increase. This now-familiar “hockey stick” graph is born of the essentially combinatorial nature of technological innovation. If we appreciate the implications of this rate of change, we can see that, barring a major global disaster and a concomitant loss of records and knowledge, we face both extraordinary challenges and unprecedented opportunities. Our challenge and indeed our duty as educators is to do the very best we can to help our students thrive as citizens of this new digital world, equipping them with skills and learning, yes, but also with the meta-tools of rich, flexible habits of mind that will enable them to face the challenge of adapting to these changes as well as to develop their own capacities of creativity, problem-solving and problem-finding, and persistent, rigorous inquiry for a lifetime of learning.

There is one analogously dizzying and wonderful rate of change in our experience: the everyday miracle of human intellectual development. With more potential neural connections than there are particles in the known universe, the human brain has evolved to be, in Norman Doidge’s words, “the brain that changes itself.” The brain’s meta-ability of self-shaping, of employing meta-cognition to direct its own growth and development over a lifetime, is even more remarkable than the technologies our brains have invented. Yet those technologies are now strikingly similar to our brains in their growth and, according to many thinkers, in their very nature. As Kevin Kelly writes, “Our technological creations are great extrapolations of the bodies that our genes build. In this way, we can think of technology as our extended body…. If technology is an extension of humans, it is not an extension of our genes, but of our minds. Technology is therefore the extended body for ideas.” Certainly that “extended body” has implications for our bodies as well as our minds. Our senses are extended and enlarged by instrumentation and by telecommunication technologies. Yet such extensions and enlargements emerge from conceptualizations, and inevitably privilege mentation (albeit embodied mentation).

Ray Kurzweil’s provocative graph of computing vs. neural capacity and power.

Given this increasing resemblance between our neural networks, our communications networks, and our technological networks, as well as the computers that have propelled our world into its increasingly complex and varied digital future, what we call “instructional technology” has become a medium of understanding and invention at the very center of the educational enterprise. What used to be supplemental devices are becoming as fluid and essential as language itself. Indeed, it is not too fanciful to say that we are witnessing the emergence of a new language, metaphorically speaking, a new meta-mode of representation as important as the emergence of the phonetic alphabet. As Ed Fox astutely observes:

A key part of going digital is using computing approaches along with enhanced efforts to build more complete, comprehensive, and useful models in all other disciplines, so we can represent processes, phenomena, and other aspects of reality. Having representations allows us to discuss, analyze, simulate, integrate, and engage in all types of related processing. (Unpublished correspondence.)

How then should we prepare students to engage with these possibilities and thrive within them as productive citizens in a digital age? We can and should survey technological trends. We should carry out the most intensive and imaginative research to discover how our learning environments can most effectively support not only current modes of learning, but modes we can only imagine. More than anything else, however, we must think carefully and creatively about what computers represent as tools for thought, to use Howard Rheingold’s phrase. We must build a curriculum and organization that are answerable to the cultural moment we have before us. Given our heritage as a public, land-grant university, we have a special mission to provide access to the resources of a digital age for as many learners as possible, as well as access to the high-quality education that will equip them to take full advantage of these resources as participants in a democratic society.

Virginia Tech’s tagline is not a description or a wish. It is an imperative: invent the future. What are the conceptual frameworks in our cultural moment that will best answer that imperative? How can curriculum, leadership, and organizational structures and practices prepare us for what we can see ahead as well as what we cannot? Current learning technologies as well as the technological landscape we see before us inform this consideration, but the focus is on underlying conceptual frameworks and organizational practices. Lists and inventories are helpful, of course, but the real challenge, as always, is cultural much more than technological—unless one considers culture a technology as well, one we can shape, like our brains, to permit and encourage further growth and development.

Three sections follow, all related, implicitly.

Shakespeare often seems to me to be quoting himself. I once saw a stunning performance of The Tempest in which the director made certain scenes especially resonant by pointing out, in every way one can on the stage, the layers of internal reference, even obsession, this play demonstrates as it effectively ends Shakespeare’s long career.

Yet The Tempest is hardly unique in this regard. Many other Shakespeare plays pick up ideas, problems, hopes, and tragic repetitions in their corpus mates. One that’s always struck me comes in King Lear 5.2.8-12:

GLOUCESTER  No farther, sir: a man may rot even here.
EDGAR  What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all. Come on!
GLOUCESTER                  And that’s true, too. Exeunt

“Ripeness is all”: a compact, beautiful utterance in poetry. The note in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edition, the edition from which I’m quoting, says “Compare Hamlet 5.2.160.” Let’s do that now.

HORATIO  If your mind dislike any thing, obey it: I will forestall their repair hither, and say you are not fit.
HAMLET  Not a whit, we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes, let be.

For Hamlet, readiness is all, because of special providence–a divine care over even the tiniest of events, like the fall of a sparrow. His defiance is complete, stated in prose, ironclad. For Edgar, written into being by Shakespeare about four years after Hamlet, ripeness is all. Endurance is essential. Yet that defiant poetic ripeness, no less than Hamlet’s defiant prose readiness, is a call to action. “Come on!” And Gloucester replies, “That’s true, too.”

Why the too? Perhaps Shakespeare has Gloucester, a foolish but ultimately loving elder, affirm the mysterious blend of readiness and ripeness in any meaningful action. Perhaps this internal reflection, if it is one, can align with Doc Searls’ lovely and loving words at Aaron Swartz’ memorial service last week, as reported today by Dave Winer:

When you’re young you think life is a sprint.
When you’re older you see it’s a marathon.
And when you’re mature you see it’s a relay race.

The will to learn in an intrinsic motive, one that finds both its source and its reward in its own exercise. The will to learn becomes a “problem” only under specialized circumstances like those of a school, where a curriculum is set, students confined, and a path fixed. The problem exists not so much in learning itself, but in the fact that what the school imposes often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning–curiosity, a desire for competence, inspiration to emulate a model, and a deep sense of commitment to the web of social reciprocity. Our concern has been with how those energies may be cultivated in support of school learning.
–Jerome Bruner, Toward A Theory of Instruction (1966)

The aims and purposes of education demonstrate our most deeply cherished values, as well as our collective understanding of what it means to be human. Such values and understandings are no less powerful for being largely tacit. When we design our schools, however, we inevitably find that these values and understandings lead to conflicting ideas of how best to proceed, and with what ends in mind.

No single vision can decide these inevitable conflicts. Nevertheless, the guiding vision of a participatory democracy, our nation’s flawed and uneven and inspiring experiment in self-government, may at least suggest that maximizing human potential within a framework of tolerance and civic commitment can guide our many efforts to build the best educational experiences we can imagine. In The Culture Of Education (Harvard University Press, 1996), Jerome Bruner describes “mutual learning cultures” organized around principles of community and freedom, liberal learning and the specific competencies required to participate in the world of work:

Such classroom cultures are organized to model how the broader culture should work if it were operating at its best and liveliest and if it were concentrating on the task of education. There is mutual sharing of knowledge and ideas, mutual aid in mastering material, division of labor and exchange or roles, opportunity to reflect on the group’s activities. That, in any case, is one possible version of “culture at its best.” School, in such a dispensation, is conceived of both as an exercise in consciousness raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity, and as a means for acquiring knowledge and skill. The teacher is the enabler, primus inter pares.

Such a vision of “culture at its best” informs the founding of this nation at a very deep level.

One of the most important participants in that vision was Benjamin Franklin. A printer, publisher, artisan, scientist, writer, diplomat, and politician, Franklin was also, in biographer Walter Isaacson’s words, ““a consummate networker with an inventive curiosity” who “would have felt right at home in the information revolution.” Franklin also stands for the fascinating blend of worldly success and innovative genius that our schools seek to empower among our citizens. To have “Benjamins” on hand is a necessary part of American life. Work and success are important, to be sure.

Yet it is even more important to be a Franklin, metaphorically and etymologically speaking:

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, to be a “franklin” is to be a freeholder, a liberal host, a citizen with the freedom of the domain. The digital age offers opportunities of unprecedented depth and reach for participation in global innovation and conversation, for employing and weaving a World Wide Web of “social reciprocity,” to use Bruner’s term in the epigraph above. We owe it to our faculty, staff, and students to empower them all with the concepts, skills, and experiences that will make them free and full citizens of the digital age.

I’ve just finished reading Life, Keith Richard’s memoir, for the first time. It’s a book to cherish, a wild ride, an endlessly fascinating tale of Keith’s endless fascinations and adventures and very narrow scrapes. It’s also a wonderful extended meditation on creativity. Here’s Keith’s description of composing songs while standing in front of a studio microphone:

Composing a song like that, in front of a mike, is like holding on to a friend in a way. You lead me, brother, I’ll follow behind and we’ll sort the bits out later. It’s like you’ve been taken for a blind ride. I might have a riff, an idea, a chord sequence, but I’ve no idea what to sing over it. I’m not agonizing for days with poems and shit. And what I find fascinating about it is that when you’re up there on the microphone and say, OK, let’s go, something comes out that you wouldn’t have dreamt of. Then within a millisecond you’ve got to come up with something else that adds to what you’ve just said. It’s kind of jousting with yourself. And suddenly you’ve got something going and there’s a framework to work with  You’re going to screw up a lot of times doing it that way. You’ve just got to put in on the mike and see how far it can go before you run out of steam.

Kind of like jousting with yourself. Kind of like holding on to a friend. Kind of like blogging, actually. Something comes out you wouldn’t have dreamt of. Something I’m trying to find my way back to, myself.

Keef: thanks.

Words at the bottom of Aaron’s blog posts. Would that I could, now.

I woke up Saturday morning full of plans for the trek to Charlottesville. It was the day we’d take our beloved Jenny back to school at the University of Virginia.

I checked my New York Times feed on my phone and learned that Aaron Swartz was dead. The headline identified him as one of the key developers of RSS, the web info-feed architecture that has been, literally and metaphorically, both the glue and the fuel for most of my professional and intellectual development over the last decade.

I hadn’t heard of Aaron Swartz. And now, many of the RSS feeds I read at breakfast were lighting up with news of his death, with grief, with information, with analysis. I felt three essentially conflicted emotions. One was grief and sympathy for those who had lost a friend and loved one. One, strangely, was the intellectual rush I always feel when I find a new thinker whom I suspect, deep within my soul, I will learn a great deal from. And one was the deep, deep sorrow that I had not found him before, and now I would never meet him and be able to say “thank you” for what would clearly be the gifts that would enrich me immeasurably.

Since Saturday morning, I have been reading the memorials written by those who knew Aaron. They are emotionally and intellectually complex. Rather than describe them here, I’ll simply link to a few I found particularly resonant:

Dave Winer’s “Online Grieving,” the first memorial post I read, a wise and troubled meditation on the strange and shocking complexities of grief.

Cory Doctorow’s memorial on BoingBoing, an insightful and moving account of the extraordinary (and difficult) man Cory knew as a friend and fellow activist.

Larry Lessig’s passionate, precise denunciation of the shameful prosecutorial bullying that Aaron was trying to live through.

Quinn Norton’s deeply moving post on the love she shared with Aaron, and her publication of the post in which Aaron described his love for her. Love: made of hunger for conversation and delight in finding a partner whose stride matches yours. The fourth and fifth paragraphs of Aaron’s description of their meeting match my own experience of love so intensely and perfectly that I cannot stop thinking about them.

Matt Stoller’s post over on Naked Capitalism, one that makes me grieve even more for the deep, sophisticated faith Aaron retained in the power of organizations and “social institutions” to do good, even the world’s mightiest government was bearing down on him. (When I read the stories last Saturday, I realized I had heard of Aaron after all, though I didn’t remember his name, for of course I’d read about the JSTOR downloads at MIT. Odd that the story didn’t lead me farther, then. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.)

An elegy for Aaron, and a lament for those who left behind, from the man who invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee:

Via John Naughton.

John Naughton’s initial post on Aaron’s death linked to the memorial that moved me the most: Aaron’s own words in a talk he called “How To Get A Job Like Mine.”

It’s an extraordinary document in every way. I’ve read it over and over in the last 48 hours, thinking hard about the five stages he outlines:

1. Learn. 2. Try. 3. Gab. 4. Build. 5. Freedom.

This is a story of education. This is a curriculum. This should be the foundation of all curricula. Anything that interferes with any of these stages, or with their fruitful combination, should be abandoned, destroyed. And because these stages will look different for every learning, should look different for every learner, we must learn how to embed these practices within every course of study in a way that responds to, and nurtures, those differences.

His meditation on freedom also makes it clear that Aaron had learned Pete Townshend’s lesson: “no easy way to be free.” That one of the projects Aaron once considered was reforming higher education deepens my grief, and our loss. His single paragraph about his time at Stanford echoes in my mind over and over, in a shattering kind of mental/emotional feedback loop:

“profoundly unconcerned with their studies”–a phrase to ponder.

And then I left it all and went to college for a year. I attended Stanford University, an idyllic little school in California where the sun is always shining and the grass is always green and the kids are always out getting a tan. It’s got some great professors and I certainly learned a bunch, but I didn’t find it a very intellectual atmosphere, since most of the other kids seemed profoundly unconcerned with their studies.

That last sentence has sparked some intense meditation in me, especially the last phrase. More on that another time.

Aaron closes his talk with three rules:

1. Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
2. Say yes to everything. I have a lot of trouble saying no, to an pathological degree — whether to projects or to interviews or to friends. As a result, I attempt a lot and even if most of it fails, I’ve still done something.
3. Assume nobody else has any idea what they’re doing either. A lot of people refuse to try something because they feel they don’t know enough about it or they assume other people must have already tried everything they could have thought of. Well, few people really have any idea how to do things right and even fewer are to try new things, so usually if you give your best shot at something you’ll do pretty well.

At this too-late date, then, I find another kindred spirit, a person to admire and emulate. An unmet friend. A teacher. They say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. That’s often true, and a greatly hopeful thing, one that encourages readiness above all. Today, though, it feels like the student was ready and the teacher disappeared.

I know there’s still a world of Aaron online to explore and learn from. I echo Dave Winer’s hope that the web Aaron created, the words and images and links, the look of the sites themselves, will persist: “maybe we can do something to make sure that his blog remains online as long as there is a web, which hopefully is quite a long time.” I am very glad to see a memorial archive is already underway. The archive is within the Internet Archive itself, where on the front page of the Aaron Swartz Collection we read these small, poignant words: “This is a new thing for the Internet Archive: a memorial archive collection.” The location is just and right. Like Christopher Wren, whose tomb lies in the crypt of the St. Paul’s Cathedral he designed, Aaron Swartz can receive this epitaph within the awe-inspiring home for spirit he helped to build, a World Wide Web: Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

As I thought about what I wanted to say here, I thought about George Steiner’s haunting words in Lessons Of The Masters, words I blogged about many years ago that express my grief today:

We have seen that Mastery is fallible, that jealousy, vanity, falsehood, and betrayal intrude almost unavoidably. But its ever renewed hopes, the imperfect marvel of the thing, direct us to the dignitas in the human person, to its homecoming to its better self. No mechanical means, however expeditious, no materialism, however triumphant, can eradicate the daybreak we experience when we have understood a Master. That joy does nothing to alleviate death. But it makes one rage at its waste. Is there no time for another lesson?

Via Bryan Alexander, who knew I would be unreasonably thrilled:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/the-day-william-shatner-tweeted-at-an-astronaut-and-the-astronaut-replied/266824/

Can the Singularity be far behind?

Good evening.

In its way, this is a blog post about blogging–and perhaps about learning and creating, generally.

Dan Aulier has compiled one of those bedtable books that one can read for months, an anthology called Hitchcock’s Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock. It’s a great big festival of a book, a delight to roam through. It also has plenty of food for thought to carry into the new academic term that begins very soon. Here’s one table of the banquet, an excerpt from writer and actor Hume Cronyn’s memoirs as republished in Aulier’s omnibus. Cronyn writes,

“Early on in our working relationship, I discovered a curious trick of [Hitchcock's]. We would be discussing some story point with great intensity, trembling on the edge of a solution to the problem at hand, when Hitch would suddenly lean back in his chair and say, ‘Hume, have you heard the story of the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter?’ I would look at him blankly and he would proceed to tell it with great relish, frequently commenting on the story’s characters, the nature of the humor involved, and the philosophical demonstration implied. That makes it sound as though the stories might be profound or at least witty. They were neither. They were generally seventh-grade jokes of the sniggery school, and frequently infantile.

“After several days’ work together, punctuated by such stories, I challenged him–politely.

‘Why do you do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Stop to tell jokes at a critical juncture.’

‘It’s not critical–it’s only a film.’

‘But we were just about to find a solution to the problem. I can’t even remember what it was now.’

‘Good. We were pressing….. You never get it when you press.’

Cronyn concludes:  “And while I may have failed to appreciate Hitch’s jokes, I’ve never forgotten that little piece of philosophy, either as an actor or as a sometime writer.”

Compare Walker Percy’s endorsement of the “indirect approach,” as well as the phenomenon known to astronomers as averted vision. I’m particularly intrigued by a deeply paradoxical notion that emerges in every case, a notion that certainly rings true to my own experience: it takes practice to “not press” successfully. It’s not at all the same as slacking or snacking. Sometimes it seems that the art of “not pressing” is the hardest art of all to master, and also the most necessary to move from one level of expertise to another. And in another paradox, once one has a feel for not pressing, for the indirect approach, for averted vision, one can go to that zone almost immediately when a novel situation or a new level of learning appears.

These ideas form a constellation in my mind with several others. “Beginner’s mind” (shoshin). The third stage of learning that brings back wonder and self-motivated learning, a progression that Paulo Friere and Seymour Papert discuss.  Poincare and creativity.  I am struck by how often similar ideas recur in various guises. Knowing how to know to not-know. The vanishing light around the rim of the unknown unknown can be seen only through such practices, I think.

Brian Mathews’ latest Ubiquitous Librarian blog poses a question that may be obliquely related to some or all of the above (and fittingly so). I don’t know that early adopters who move through change more quickly and with greater joy have mastered the arts of not pressing, along with the arts of averted vision and the indirect approach, but it’s interesting to consider. Certainly those arts can keep us from falling into the trap of substituting elevator pitches for voyages of discovery.

Postscript: I have had to train myself over many years to answer direct questions (typically from administrators and other gatekeepers) about the character and value of a project, the specific plan for an exploration, the criteria for successful “outcomes” (and all the assessment apparatus that entails) (and I’ve learned it may be bad form to confuse “learning objectives” and “learning outcomes”), and so forth. One wants to be responsible, to be granted resources for action, to exercise due diligence, to act like a grown-up. Indeed, and no question. Yet I always hope, and in my own practice strive, to find a moment or two, or more, for the not pressing and the averted vision. An indirect approach, an open space, like a cup for Elijah, who might one day return to demonstrate the poverty and dessication of spirit that often conceals itself behind bullet points and elevator pitches.

One of my holiday books–a birthday present from my sister-in-law and her husband–is Keith Richards’ memoir Life. I understand I’m a little late to the party. I really did need to read Pete Townshend’s memoir first. But now I’m there, thanks to family and surviving another trip around the sun.

As many others have reported and experienced, it’s a terrific book. Those who are skeptical about Keith’s powers of recall after a life of storied dissipation have obviously neither seen him organize the ultimate Chuck Berry concert in Hail Hail Rock ‘n Roll!  nor thought very deeply about the Rolling Stones. The man is whip-smart, generous of spirit, albeit sometimes dangerous of mood–and obviously, attractively so. He’s also tremendously insightful. So in the midst of all the stories of glory days and decades on parade, thrilling as they are, there are also extraordinary moments that reveal a spiritual intensity, and devotion to music, not unlike Pete T.’s own. Keith is quite open and compellingly articulate about his own search for the music of the spheres.

And along the way, I found a passage that reminded me, very strongly, of much of what I value about large parts of the open-education movement, those parts in which the activists are large and generous of heart. The passage celebrates records.

I’ve learned everything I know off of records. Being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines. Being able to hear recorded music freed up loads of musicians that couldn’t necessarily afford to learn to read or write music, like me. Before 1900, you’ve got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan. With recording, it was emancipation for the people. As long as you or somebody around you could afford a machine,  suddenly you could hear music made by people, not set-up rigs and symphony orchestras. You could actually listen to what people were saying, almost off the cuff. Some of it can be a load of rubbish, but some of it was really good. It was the emancipation of music. Otherwise you’d have had to go to a concert hall, and how many people could afford that? It surely can’t be any coincidence that jazz and blues started to take over the world the minute recording started, within a few years, just like that. The blues is universal, which is why it’s still around. Just the expression and the feel of it came in because of recording. It was like opening the audio curtains,. And available, and cheap. It’s not just locked into one community here and one community there and the twain shall never meet. And of course that breeds another totally different kind of musician, in a generation. I don’t need this paper. I’m going to play it straight from the ear, straight from here, straight from the heart to the fingers. Nobody has to turn the pages.

Now of course there’s a great deal to criticize, modify, and otherwise nuance in this panegyric. And as a rock and jazz musician (barely, in most cases, but still) who can also read music and loves classical music as well as all the electrified (and otherwise popular) idioms, I do wish Keef were not so eager to trash the results of trained musicianship.

But still…. Listen to the melody of his words, and for “machine” think “networked computer,” and for “what people were saying, almost off the cuff,” think “blogging,” and for “how many people could afford that?” don’t contradict Keith with free concerts in the park so much as remember the nearly unavoidable class distinctions enforced by the experience of formal symphonic performances, and remember too that Keith was working-class and council-house through and through. Feel the liberation he’s feeling, and evoking. He’s honest enough to admit, readily, that not every note of recorded popular music is golden. But the care and thoughtfulness with which he evokes the experience of his own emancipation as a musician, and his deep gratitude for having this creative path, this mode of knowing and expression, opened to him–these, yes, are the deep and moving confessions of a person whose talent would not have found its glorious expression before this stage of technological development.

“And of course that breeds another totally different kind of musician, in a generation. I don’t need this paper.”

We are now at an interesting moment–yes, partly because of MOOCs and partly because of what web-builders and OER advocates and other educational activists have been doing for many years. And that moment could go in any number of good or bad directions. And “some of of it can be a load of rubbish,” and is. Yet I wonder if this interesting moment is like that moment in which recorded music began to breed another totally different kind of musician. I wonder if we have begun to see the beginning of a critical mass of varied open educational opportunities and experiences, and if we will breed another totally different kind of student, in a generation–or perhaps less. A student who doesn’t need this paper. A student for whom learning goes straight from the heart to the fingers, and back again. The formality of the experience isn’t necessarily bad. Keith’s story reveals his own hyperfocused, obsessive, diligent practice of his art. He is a scholar. But the scholarship was mediated differently, and his compositions too, and these would have been lost without the turn in the technology. This turn enabled deeply committed work to emerge. Musical notation can and does too, of course. That itself is a technology, like writing. Keith misses that. But he gets the need and the liberation, and the technology’s role in feeding both. He learned his music. And while music in its origins was learned without pages, it’s a  lead-pipe cinch that Keith wouldn’t have made the connection with a culture half a globe away, the connection that opened himself to himself, and to us. For him, the records were open educational resources, and conveyed an openness of spirit within the medium that could not otherwise be conveyed, or shared.

Not always, and no guarantees. But perhaps often enough, if we think with at least some of the spirit Keith shares with us here, and keep searching for the music of the spheres, wherever and however it may be sounding.

Life, p. 71.

A few days late, alas. I had this one done in time for Christmas, but with one thing and another it’s only now I’m posting it.

As Warren Zevon once sang, “And Johnny is my main man.” Of late, in addition to my other projects, I’ve been working steadily on a couple of scholarly projects involving John Milton. I’ll finish an essay on temptation this week. Well, I won’t finish it, as writing is never really finished. I’ll simply abandon it–but not until I’ve given it one version of my best shot.

To keep the mood going and the context fresh and vital, I thought I’d do a podcast of Milton’s first mature publication, “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” I describe it a bit in the first part of the podcast. Suffice it to say that, like all great art, this poem proceeds from many sources and emerges into many vectors. Some of these are exhilarating. Some are admirable. Some are worth wonder. Some are scholarly curiosities. Some represent the struggles of a believer in many things, not all of them consistent. You’ll notice that Milton lingers, very lovingly and harshly too, on the pagan gods the Christ child has come to banish. I think Milton had many mixed motives and ambivalent emotions as he did so. To believe in anything is to disbelieve in other things, no matter how broad one’s outlook. Milton knew and felt this reality more keenly than any other great artist I know. The struggle was costly, and revelatory, and complex. My own critical position is that Milton understood the struggle and the cost, and created astonishing art to represent these complexities out of both certainty and uncertainty, settled conclusions and wandering appetites. He tells us so, pretty explicitly and quite beautifully, in all his work–if we’ve a mind and heart to read it so.

But now I’m writing my essay, and time is my tedious post should here have ending. Wherever you are, geographically or politically or epistemologically or religiously, I hope you enjoy this example of a 21-year-old poet exulting in his newly fledged artistic powers and taking the measure of some of the best poetry ever written in English. As I read it, I felt again the sensation I had in the fall of 1980 when I read this poem for the first time–the sensation that here was a verbal imagination that could achieve any effect it wished to, an imagination whose wishes were born of the desire for human progress, human justice, and human community. A desire more fierce and visionary than that of any other poet. A desire that could also embrace tenderness, and poignancy, and order serviceable.

Happy birthday, 2013.

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