Brian Lamb’s latest post over at Abject Learning is clear-eyed, thoughtful, and more than a little poignant. Extraordinary, really.

All I can say to the first two bullet points is “right on.”

I’m going to be mulling over that third bullet point for a long time. It’s early here and I can’t vouch for the coherence of my response, but I want to try, so bear with me please. (I’m hoping to recover some bold bloggery over this holiday break and get back in this conversation–and Brian’s post is nothing if not inspiring in that regard.)

My first thought, maybe my most urgent thought, is that we must teach our students and our colleagues (and ourselves!) to be technology strategists. That kind of education ought to be one of our institutions’ top priorities. The range of options, the dizzying implications, the come-and-go services, the question (as Col. Tom Parker used to ask) “how much does it cost if it’s free?”: these are questions that education should address from an early age in the specific context of networked computing. There’s more to being a technology strategist than just being a savvy user. All digital citizens should be digital strategists. That’s going to take some significant curricular and attitudinal change–though I think we can take important steps in that direction without bringing all the current machinery of education to a screeching halt.

A bubble may well burst in 2008, but I feel the Web 2.0/3.0/x.0 landscape will continue to expand in all the ways Brian has described. There’s no going back. I understand the feeling of panic that can engender. I’d argue that that feeling is not different in kind from the feeling of having to mature and take one’s place in a very complex civilization that may well be eating itself, but which (as always with our species) holds enormous promise and often great joy and splendor.

I am no techno-utopian and am not always optimistic about the scalability of benign self-organization, but I do believe in the power of allegory, or at least extended analogy, and I see the emerging situation Brian’s outlined as no different from the basic questions that should always engage us with regard to schooling. I think we’ll look back on the last century or more of higher education as a time when we got sleepy and forgetful about the difficulties of creating and sustaining real school. I think the open web and its successors, with all their mess, peril, and promise, may force us to wake up. That’s my hope.

It’s the alternative that frightens me.

I’m always in the mood for rich analogies.

This one comes from the November 28, 2007 New York Times’ Arts section. I’ve been tempted to do a granular analysis of the entire section, as I was startled by how casually and completely it featured various computer-related stories, ads, etc. Alas, any such analyses will have to wait until the end of term when all the grades are in. For now, however, I would like to offer these paragraphs from a story about EVE Online. I won’t explain EVE here–you can read the article for that–but I will say that the dichotomy CEO Hilmar Petursson proposes is especially interesting to me from the point of view of education, or curriculum, or online learning, or even a course syllabus:

“There are basically two schools of thought for operating an online community,” Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

“There is the theme-park approach and the sandbox approach,” he continued. “Most games are like Disneyland, for instance, which is a carefully constructed experience where you stand in line to be entertained. We focus on the sandbox approach where people can decide what they want to do in that particular sandbox, and we very much emphasize and support that kind of emergent behavior.”

Substitute “educated” for “entertained,” and “learning community” for “online community.” Several things come to mind, ill-formed and in no particular order:

1. Most colleges and universities are more theme-parks than sandboxes. That trend is accelerating, given that theme-parks seem to be able to scale better. I say “seem to,” because EVE’s business model clearly indicates their belief that sandboxes supporting emergent behavior can scale as well. Yet we live in a time of dramatically declining public support for higher education in which one very popular solution to the problem is to make learning experiences as uniform as possible (guaranteeing more uniform outcomes), increase access by scaling class sizes (especially at the introductory level) to 300-500 students per professor, and cut costs by outsourcing grading and class management to various contractors. Bigger turnstiles and better oil for the gears. More people get in, more people do just well enough to get out. And we all drive home satisfied at the end of the day. That’s a theme-park, not a sandbox.

2. Assessing emergent behaviors in sandboxes requires much more imagination and rigor than assessing the results of a theme-park experience of education. The current (and worthwhile, in my view) resurgence of interest in thorough assessment unfortunately drives more theme-park construction than sandbox construction. Our answers are only as good as the questions we ask. Can we not devise imaginative, rigorous assessment of emergent behaviors, despite the fact that by definition we will have to think of “outcomes” and “value-adds” differently?

3. As I understand it, Ivan Illich’s radical view of “deschooling” does not devalue curriculum per se, but it does insist that only a sandbox approach results in authentic learning. That’s a bold claim and I’m not sure I agree entirely. Sometimes learners have to be brought through an experience, a course of study, a set of assignments, that will support more valuable kinds of emergent potential on the other side. In other words, sometimes rote memorization (think of the alphabet or the multiplcation table), or what my German teacher in college called “sitzen und schwitzen” (sit and sweat), are necessary admission requirements to the more interesting sandboxes. I also believe in the value of vertically-building curricula that recognize and support the unavoidable developmental aspects of education.

And yet I wonder if the passivity and lack of deep curiosity I see very often in my students would be different if Ilich’s vision were fully realized, or if they saw the ends to which the means directed them. But this is to say that I am not sure my students have a deep understanding of what school is good for. I am not sure schools understand that very deeply either.

4. I wonder if the dichotomy of theme-park vs. sandbox has certain false aspects. For example, one could put sandboxes within theme parks, and theme parks within sandboxes. Vary the experience, find a rhythm. Not every movie is a game, not every game is a movie, not every learning experience requires emergence within the experience to be satisfying. That said, without emergence, I don’t see how the core academic mission, and the strategies that follow, have much integrity beyond drill-and-kill.

Probably the most emergent, sandbox-type learning experience I ever had was writing my dissertation. In the humanities, especially in English, the Ph.D. dissertation can be (and often is) nothing but a bootstrapping operation. I remember feeling almost entirely alone, becalmed on vast sea with no landmarks or compass to steer by. On one level, that was clearly an illusion. I had a library full of landmarks, notebooks full of compasses. I had peers working on their dissertations. I had a director, a second reader, a third reader at another school. All in all, I had a deep and wide support network. No, I think I felt so alone and lost because I knew that this project, unlike any project I’d tackled before, was entirely up to me. It existed outside any container. I was the experience. I was the project. And that’s why it was truly transformative.

I understand that not everyone has that experience as a result of their dissertation, but in some respects I think that’s what the dissertation is for. I wish the loneliness and terror weren’t so bad, and perhaps they’re not that bad for everyone, but there’s also some useful authenticity there. The profound uneasiness I felt was not just neurosis. It was also a signal that something real was occurring.

I’ve come a long way from EVE Online, I see. But I sense certain connections that merit a mull or two. And the word “sandbox” has a special resonance for me.

It was an honor and a thrill, frankly, to be interviewed by Jon Udell for his “Interviews with Innovators” series over at IT Conversations. It’s taken me two weeks to blog about it because I couldn’t figure out quite what to say. Somehow “Look, Ma!” didn’t seem right, though it’s pretty much the way I felt.

When in doubt, give thanks. I was the voice on the other end of the telephone, but I wouldn’t have had much to say without a whole lot of other voices in my head, all of whom deserve much wider recognition.

I always need to thank my former boss, UMW CIO Chip German, and my old team of Martha, Jerry, Andy, Jim, and Patrick in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. Perhaps I can get some kind of widget for my blog that identifies me as “proud former coach of the Dream Team” and put the badge on blog posts like this one. (Can the TV contract be far behind?) I also want to thank Doug Kaye, Executive Director of the Conversations Network, of which IT Conversations is a part. Doug took me on as a post-production audio engineer for IT Conversations back in March of 2005, just as the podcasting revolution was getting underway. I learned a lot from Doug and got to work on some great shows, including presentations by Doug Engelbart and John Markoff (part one and part two). Doug’s done all of us a huge service with IT Conversations and the Conversations Network, and he’s influenced my own vision of what a truly beneficial information future could look like. The channel may be called “IT Conversations,” but a more accurate title would be “Our World–and get ready for it.”

And of course there are those colleagues here at UMW and elsewhere who keep me alert and moving ahead–you know who you are.

My biggest thanks, of course, go to Jon Udell. It was both daunting and exciting talking to Jon: daunting because the man is so quick and deeply thoughtful, and exciting, well, for the same reasons. And I have to say, with apologies for the tease, that the conversation after the interview was every bit as enjoyable and educational for me as the interview itself was, and that’s saying something.

The plain fact is that Jon’s a very, very inspiring fellow, and has been a tremendous influence on my thinking ever since Jerry Slezak told me about the now-classic Heavy Metal Umlaut Band screencast. If it’s not presumptious to say so, Jon’s a kindred spirit, even when we’re debating an issue, as we have been recently (and you can hear about it in the podcast). He’s also one of the few people I’ve ever met who can be in absolute full-tilt high persuasive gear in a conversation and then suddenly pause, look you in the eye, and say, “y’know, you’re right”–just at the moment I feel that my own argument is on very shaky ground.

I’d go into more detail, but I’m sure I’d embarrass him. I’ll save the rest of the encomium for another post (or ten). Instead, I’ll close now by thanking Jon for the chance once again to think through some questions, challenges, concerns, and dreams in conversation with him. That’s a privilege I do not take lightly or for granted. The fact is, talking to Jon is always what I call a great gig. We in higher education are very fortunate to have his voice, mind, heart, and spirit in company with us. I hope we can travel together for a long time to come.

At least, I hope so. It did make me laugh, though that’s no guarantee of anything right now:

I will tell you a philosophical joke. Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he began, ‘there are exactly 12 philosophical positions.’ A voice called from the audience: ‘Thirteen.’ ‘There are,’ the lecturer repeated, ‘exactly 12 possible philosophical positions; not one less and not one more.’ ‘Thirteen,’ the voice from the audience called again. ‘Very well, then,’ said the lecturer, now perceptibly irked, ‘I shall proceed to enumerate the 12 possible philosophical positions. The first is sometimes called “naive realism”. It is the view according to which things are, by and large, very much the way that they seem to be.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice from the audience. ‘Fourteen!’

From a review by Jerry Fodor in the London Review of Books, via The Philosophers’ Magazine Online, via the Chronicle quoting The Guardian. I was actually trying to find this quotation from Fodor:

Anybody who thinks that philosophers as such have access to large resources of practical wisdom hasn’t been going to faculty meetings.

The Guardian writer calls Fodor “the leading contemporary philosopher of mind.” Bingo, I say.

I still feel bad about missing UNESCO’s Fifth Annual World Philosophy Day, however.

Now I really must get back to the grading.

Gardner,

Thought you might find this 15 yr old young man’s music and mind amazing.

Mary-Kathryn at Surviving Winter emailed me the link to this story: “Driven to Music–A Prodigy at Age 15.” She was right about my response. Jay Greenberg is obviously an extraordinarily gifted young man.

There’s much to comment on here, but right now I have time for only a few passing observations.

The article says that Greenberg composes on computer. It gives no details, but I infer from what’s here that Greenberg not only writes the music on computer but plays the music back on the computer as well, just as I can write and read at the same time as I type these words on the screen. I’d be surprised if he didn’t, actually. Computers have made it possible for orchestral composers to realize their work, at least in a kind of rough sonic draft, with much greater ease than back in the day when all that they had was either a piano reduction or a hired orchestra, the latter at great expense and not at all conducive to any kind of editing or 50-bars-at-a-time spurts of inspiration of the kind Greenberg is prone to.

Later we learn that Greenberg can also write music on staff paper, so he’s obviously got his bases covered as far as technology is concerned.

I’m also struck by this bit:

Whose music does he like to hear? “In chronological order, Bach; Mozart; Beethoven; a little bit of Brahms, some of his later pieces, maybe; Prokofiev; Stravinsky; Bartok; some Copland; Ives. You can look at my iPod, there’s a lot of stuff in there.”

Yes: an iPod is a profile. That’s part of why it feels so intimate. Hey, mister, that’s me on that there iPod.

And amid all the other riches of this story, including a haunting photograph and a wonderful, uncanny self-awareness in which I detect depths it would be presumptuous to explore, I’ll close with a final highlight: the image of this young man shaking hands with the prodigy who played his violin concerto at Carnegie Hall: Joshua Bell, whose experiments in subway sublimity so captivated me and my Introduction to Literary Studies class last spring.

Listening to “Seven Stones” from Nursery Cryme as I write. Nearly undone. Don’t tell me beauty is only power in disguise.

May you be granted stamina, Jay.

In Acts of Meaning (1990), Jerome Bruner writes,

To be in a viable culture is to be bound in a set of connecting stories, connecting even though the stories may not represent a consensus.

When there is a breakdown in a culture (or even within a microculture like the family) it can usually be traced to one of several things. The first is a deep disagreement about what constitutes the ordinary and canonical in life and what the exceptional or divergent. And this we know in our time from what one might call the ‘battle of life-styles,’ exacerbated by intergenerational conflict. A second threat inheres in the rhetorical overspecialization of narrative, when stories become so ideologically or self-servingly motivated that distrust displaces interpretation, and ‘what happened’ is discounted as fabrication. On the large scale, this is what happenes under a totalitarian regime, and contemporary novelists of Central Eurpope have documented it with painful exquisiteness–Milan Kundera, Danila Kis, and many others. The same phenomenon expresses itself in modern bureaucracy, where all except the official story of what is happening is silenced or stonewalled. And finally, there is breakdown that results from sheer impoverishment of narrative resources–in the permanent underclass of the urban gthetto, in the second and third generation of the Palestinian refuges compound, in the hunger-preoccupied villages of semipermanently drought-stricken villages in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not that there is a total loss in putting story form to experience, but that the ‘worst scenario’ story comes so to dominate daily life that variation seems no longer to be possible.

These observations strike me as deeply insightful.

Too often within the academy I see interpretation displaced by distrust, precisely because of what Bruner intriguingly names the “rhetorical overspecialization of narrative.” I have seen less of that displacement in the community of teaching and learning technology practitioners than I have in my disciplinary community. I suppose some part of me has always hoped that the groups could find not only synergy but healing in each other’s company, and that we could help each other become our best selves. I suppose I still have that hope.

Today’s Social Research Colloquium at Mary Washington featured Tom Fallace of our Education Department talking about his research on John Dewey. I know a mere thimble-full about Dewey and was keen to learn more, and Tom certainly delivered: it was a fascinating and lucid talk and sparked many ideas and questions in my mind. The discussion was lively. I felt lucky to be there.

Afterwards I collared Tom for some more conversation, part of it about my experience with E. D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” project (thereby hangs a long tale), and part of it about Dewey and Tom’s work on his thought and influence. Tom said that Dewey would have been aghast at the way we use information technologies with no idea of where these technologies came from. For Dewey, ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny, and one could not use a hammer effectively without understanding something of the origins of that tool, the history of its refinements, and the techniques of its use through time. Of course I found myself in vigorous agreement with Dewey. (Tom may be a little skeptical of Dewey in this regard–further conversation is indicated.) I tried to explain some of my own work on the digital imagination, in very general terms, and I suddenly had a flash of insight that I wanted to record here. I didn’t articulate that insight in Tom’s presence–it was one of those bolts-from-the-blue that I couldn’t work into the conversation very easily–but the conversation was deep and intense and I’m confident the insight’s power was a direct result of our talk, even though it might not seem directly related.

So the insight? I was telling Tom that there was only a little bit more I wanted my students to know about their iPods, just enough that they wouldn’t think it was a magic box on which music resided and simply issued forth at the press of a button. (It occurs to me that I had echoes in my mind of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation about sufficiently advanced technologies seeming like magic, an observation that I was reminded of recently in a podcast featuring Rodney Brooks. But yes, I digress.) I wanted my students to know that there was a spinning disc in there, and that someone had decided to make the menu this way instead of that way, and so forth. Clearly I was working on the same ideas I’d elaborated in my digital imagination talk at JMU, and that I’d talked over with Alice and she’d taken up in her blog post here.

Then the flash came. I realized that without that little bit of extra knowledge of what was inside the box, and how human decisions had made the box and its innards and the ways in and out, students would never have these devices available to them as metaphors or analogies. A little knowledge of the genealogy and anatomy of the tool, a little understanding of the origins of that tool, the history of its refinements, and the techniques of its use through time, make that tool, that device, available to the imagination as a metaphor, and thus not as an empty user-endpoint but as one more link in a large web of further understanding and exploration and connection.

This, this is the reason we must not treat our computers as toasters. To follow Eliot’s dictum to “amalgamate new wholes” out of apparently disconnected experiences (reading Spinoza, falling in love, smelling cooking in the next room, as Eliot imagines), it’s vital to have something more than operational experience with on-buttons, GUIs, and DVD burners. It’s great when things “just work,” but make that “just work” too transparent and we lose our access to the metaphor-possibilities these new information technologies afford.

Lose those metaphor-possibilities and the jig is truly up.

These tools are almost nothing but metaphors, metaphor-makers, lodgings-for-metaphors.

Computers have become a major part of many human days. No part of any human day should be unavailable as metaphor.

Photo from A Different Voice, a thoughtful blog I discovered while searching for this image.

Here’s a poem I’ve treasured for thirty years. I remember vividly my first encounter with Hopkins, at the end of a Victorian Poetry class with Dillon Johnston at Wake Forest University. We’d gone through Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold–Arnold who left poetry for the world of literary criticism, alas–and at the end of the term Dr. Johnston had brought us to the most radical and experimental poet of them all: Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins’ ideas of “instress”–the vital, emphatic force that holds and moves all creation from within–and “inscape”–the irreducible uniqueness, the thisness of each created being–were deeply inspiring to a young man in whom a passion for poetry, some might say a passion for passion itself, was coming into its first full flowering. Dr. Johnston seemed to me to have a very deep, if somewhat guarded connection with Hopkins’ intensity. His explications of these poems were very influential for me. I subsequently did my M.A. thesis on Hopkins and music.

Hopkins’ poems can be difficult to understand. His own friends, one of them a future poet laureate of England, found them difficult. Hopkins did his best to clarify these works without watering them down. And now, 150 years later, we’re attuned to certain kinds of poetic experimentation that the late Victorians were not. Still, it may take two or three readings or listenings to begin to get what he’s saying. The rush of words and stresses in Hopkins’ poetry performs a specific mimetic function. Hopkins is not being difficult just for the sake of being difficult or precious. He’s trying hard, as all great poets do, to transcribe and enact the parts of experience that seem especially meaningful, where the rich implications of any event reveal not only the human activity of meaning-making but the essential meaningfulness of being itself.

Some notes about the poem may be helpful. Hopkins added the tag “To Christ Our Lord” to make it clear that the Windhover is a symbol or allegory for Christ. Whatever one’s own beliefs, the urgent particularity of Hopkins’ observations here have a special beauty and power, I think. Also, in my commentary following the poem, I neglected to define chevalier. A chevalier is a knight.

My recitation is in response to a request from Chris Gill, Chief Information Officer at Gonzaga University. Chris was one of my classmates at the 2005 Frye Leadership Institute. I’m over two years late responding to Chris’s kind request, but reconnecting with him at EDUCAUSE 2007 reminded me that I owed this colleague and friend a small token of my thanks for his support and encouragement over these years, years that have brought changes and challenges to both of us. So here you go, Chris. I hope you enjoy the results.

EDIT: As Jonathan’s comment indicates, I am mistaken in my commentary. The kestrel is a falcon, not a hawk. I regret the error, and I’ll fix the commentary as soon as I can. Thanks to Jonathan for that correction.

SECOND EDIT: Seems these things go in two-year cycles for me. It took two years for me to record this podcast, and then two more years to fix the commentary in response to Jonathan’s comment. But fixed it is. My thanks once again to Jonathan for setting me straight, even if the course correction took two more trips around the sun.

The John Milton Cottage, where Milton wrote the final parts of “Paradise Lost.”

From time to time, I teach a course called British Literature to 1800, usually with another professor or two so we can distribute expertise, keep the sections smaller, and do some tag-team lecturing at the Big Lecture Moments during the course. I’ve taught with some really smart folks who are also good performers, so the lectures are anything but dry. There’s also been quite a high standard for me to live up to as I write my own stuff.

Over the years I’ve tried to use my introductory Milton lecture to articulate some of what I find so compelling about his work, and to encourage students to engage with his work in ways they’ve probably not imagined. I start with what I hope is a vivid biographical narrative, during which I ask students to close their eyes and join Milton in his blindness. I then move to an overview of what I call Milton’s “energizing principles,” those things that sparked his imagination and creativity with unusual intensity. Every time I do this lecture I revisit the first stirrings of my own passion for Milton’s work. I feel that getting in touch with those moments, and remembering myself at 22 coming to all of this splendor fresh, gives the lecture an animation and urgency that sets it apart in my own work.

It’s been a few years since I’ve given this lecture, but the opportunity came again just last week, and this time I recorded it. I offer the results here, for your judgment and I hope your enjoyment. My thanks to the many inspiring students who called this out of me; they bear no responsibility for the errors, of course. And my thanks to John Milton, a fascinating, flawed, extraordinary human being who wrote prose and especially verse that still maddens me with wonder after all these years of working with it. I have not lived up to his rigorous example of total commitment, but I hope that at least a few of the things I say here might at least bring a smile to his lips, as a latter-day Miltonist from southwest Virginia does his best to take the measure of some part of his astonishing gift.

Thank you, John Milton.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (20.4MB)

A great day, beginning with the speakers’ breakfast, extending into an intensely inspiring opening session with Doris Kearns Goodwin (I read her Team of Rivals this summer–can’t recommend this book too highly), a great meeting devoted to online learning, at least two wonderful conversations in the afternoon … such a feast.

But aside from Goodwin, whose talk was really sui generis, the two high points today were Brian Hawkins’ valedictory address, “How I Learned To Drive,” and my dinner with my Frye 2005 colleagues this evening. Brian’s talk deserves a post of its own, and it will get it, too. But before I go to sleep tonight I’m driven to try to say something about this evening’s dinner. I’m tired and I won’t get this exactly right, but I want to blog it in the moment to see if the “iron-fresh odor of discovery” will emerge despite my fatigue.

My account begins and ends with a comment left by a Frye colleague on a blog post dated Thursday, June 16, 2005. This simple act has touched my heart in ways I cannot begin to describe. In this moment the long tail, the remembrance of things past, and the knowledge of a community still vital and essential, all combine to help me find what I never lost.

I know these words will be cryptic to some of my readers, and I am sorry for that, though I think that the 2005 blog post gives enough context for most to understand at least something of what I’m saying. Or trying to say. What I mean is that I’d forgotten I wrote that post, largely because I had a hard time dealing with the way in which that moment of utter clarity I had over two years ago, a clarity I have felt only a few times in my life, seemed to have turned to murk.

But of course it had not. Now I see that my own merciful former self wanted to tell me something tonight. Writing in that moment two years ago, that self committed its moment of clarity to me. And I could honor that commitment only when a colleague, a fellow time-traveler with the marvelous gift of encouragement, wrote a comment recalling this moment and looking out to the next ones.

The imperative was never clearer. Remember this. But to hear myself speak, I needed my gifted colleague.

One comment, one moment, one timely memorial. Thank you, Helen.