Forty-five years ago today, Alice Woodworth and I were married by her father the Reverend Robert Woodworth, my uncle the Reverend Fred Gardner assisting, in the amphitheater at what was then Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

As David Byrne once asked, in slightly different language and with a very different purpose–after all, Alice is my beautiful wife–well, how did we get here?

That story now stretches back not forty-five but fifty years–half a century, an appropriately monumental phrase. For it was in 1974 that I met Alice, a day and a moment I remember clearly.

It was the evening of the first day of the Virginia Governor’s School at Mary Baldwin College (now University, as most all colleges have become). June 18, 1974. 151 of us rising high school juniors and seniors had moved into our dorm rooms, gotten our orientation and schedules and other vital information, had our first dinner together, and been released for some social time before curfew. The girls were in Spencer dorm, while the boys were in Woodson, a much less elegant domicile. (Seems fair.) Spencer had a terrace, an airy shaded place for folks to sit and chat and, being 1974 and all, hang out and play guitars. Many of us had brought guitars. Being 1974 and all. Mine was in my room, as I’d wanted to reconnoiter before committing to revealing my own music-making.

Others were braver. As I walked toward Spencer’s veranda, I mean terrace, I saw a young woman with long straight brown hair and a nylon-string guitar talking to a fellow with curly hair and an interesting t-shirt depicting a broken heart with a river gushing out of it. As I approached, they both looked up. The guy’s name was Rob, but that’s a story for another time. The story I’m telling here is of the first moment I saw Alice, during “social hour,” which began at 8:30 p.m. on June 18, 1974. I figure it was thus somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m. when I met her. I’m thinking the planets were mighty propitious.

Three years later Alice came to a Governor’s School reunion, her first since the fall of 1974. Aside from one exchange of letters, we had not been in touch since the end of the Governor’s School. She was sitting under a tree, by herself this time, and once again I walked over to her, this time to say not hello but hello again. We began our conversation. That conversation went on for at least five or six hours, probably longer–I just can’t say for sure, as it seemed like five or six minutes.

I’m told that when, in the afternoon, Alice and I went for a walk to continue our conversation, several of our fellow reuniters noted we were gone for a long while. I had not noticed so much time passing myself. At any rate, return we did, still talking, with what I hoped might be a growing intensity. (A boy can dream, right?)

So now our story has come from June, 1974 to August, 1977. Shortly after that August reunion, I’d written Alice with an ardent profession of my romantic interest in her. I felt it was the only honest thing to do. (Always good to know about ardor right away.) To my great relief and delight, Alice agreed we would do well to explore our possibilities as sweeties. Our correspondence continued as we returned to our respective schools for the fall semester and arranged for some visits. Two in October, one in December, one in February, then one in April.

Now the intensity was by golly growing. The sweetie story had begun well and was steadily developing. Dreams do come true.

April 22, 1978, on that fifth visit, I asked Alice to marry me. She said she thought she’d like that.

And July 14, 1979, we were married.

And 45 years after that, here we are.

We’ve been back to the site of our first meeting a couple of times, once on our 40th anniversary, and once with our children a couple of years later. I felt they should see where the story began. Ours, and so theirs, too.

Happy anniversary, Alice!

Courses make up a curriculum, but neither should be just one thing after another. To be memorable, a course of study, a semester, a degree program should have a shape, just the way a good story has a shape. That way, study becomes an experience, with particular aspects of the experience that can stay with you long after the last class meeting, long after the term is done, long after graduation.

Alumni associations know all about this. Class reunions are typically organized by year of graduation. Why? What does a class of 2024 engineering major have to do with a class of 2024 English major? Alumni associations understand the power of we were in this together.

That sense of togetherness can be cultivated in all sorts of ways: athletics, Greek life, residence halls, clubs, co-curricular activities, and many others. If the degree program has a capstone course requirement–for example, a senior seminar–the sense of shared experience is often heightened in this particular course as well.

Obviously, online learning presents some challenges in this regard. With an asynchronous class, the sense of shared experience is potentially diminished. Without that sense, it can become harder to stick with the course when the workload mounts up. There’s little sense of a beginning or ending, aside from deadlines along the way. These are large generalizations, I know, but the research on retention in online learning suggests they’re not without a basis in fact.

Synchronous online learning, the modality I vastly prefer, offers a better chance of finding and amplifying that sense of shared experience–indeed, a chance for a real meeting with learners present to each other. Yet the virtuality of it all, webcams and chat back-channels notwithstanding, can devolve into “we’re all brains in vats here,” with a corresponding diminishment of a sense of real presence upon which shared experience can be grounded.

The challenge, then, is to give a shape to each meeting, then give a shape to those shapes as the course of study continues. And as any storyteller will testify, the ending of the story makes the story not only complete but enduringly influential. It doesn’t just … stop. It ends.

I do many things in my teaching to help shape the experience, class meeting by class meeting. When the pandemic hit, though, and classes went fully online, both the crisis and the modality inspired me to make the last day of class truly memorable, an ending that would bring the entire shape of our experience before our eyes. I’d structured my synchronous online class meetings as little dramas, little podcasts or radio shows. Why not do a “highlights reel” for the last day? And why not make my “digital farewell” gift to my students the climax of an entire “digital gift” session in which, one by one, students brought some kind of “farewell” for the classmates who’d been on the journey with them. A kind of show-and-tell, but one that capped an entire semester of shared experience, most of it synchronous.

I’ve described the process elsewhere in some detail, but for the first time here I’m sharing one of those farewell “movies.” I made this one for my Reading Film section in the Fall, 2023 term, but I’ve made similar farewells for my other online classes. Students generally respond with great enthusiasm, and sometimes with tears (they tell me). I too find the tears coming as I assemble the elements, especially the images from the students’ forum avatars or blog sites.

No tears in the teacher, no tears in the learners, to paraphrase Robert Frost. Maybe you had to be there. I hope, though, that the little gift below illustrates some of what I try to do in this area of what we call “learning design.” My design aims to be a movie we’ve made together, with the opportunity to look back at the end and say, look where we’ve been, look what we’ve done.

I hope you enjoy it.

Note: Although most students choose pseudonyms and meme-style images for their Forum identities, I’ve taken care to redact any personally identifiable information.

What a delightful surprise it was to be invited to be the keynote speaker for the rebooted Baylor University Educational Technology Showcase event at the end of March. Although I left Baylor for Virginia Tech over twelve years ago, I still keep up with several Baylor colleagues, and I credit my time at Baylor with some of the deepest and most transformational opportunities I’ve been offered as a professor and as an administrator. That topic deserves its own blog post (which I plan to write as soon as my final grades are in for this semester at VCU). For now, I’ll share the talk I gave for the recent event, as it reflects not only some Topics Of The Day (as Charlotte Bronte once termed them), including of course generative AI, but also ideas I’ve been working on even before I came to Baylor in 2008.

The conference’s theme was “RE:Connected: The Future of University Culture and Technology.” I found the emphasis on university culture inspiring, and I wanted to honor the organizers’ vision by doing something big and a little audacious in my talk, so I cast a wide net that brought in not only generative AI but influencers, the name-image-likeness stats for big-time college athletics, Jane Jacobs, and a Roman Catholic philosopher named Alasdair MacIntyre. Oh, and news coverage of the “information superhighway” from thirty years ago, too.

I am very grateful to Baylor for inviting me back, after lo these many years, to share my thoughts with colleagues yet once more. It was an honor and a privilege.

I just left two long comments on Tom Woodward’s April post about Domains and cPanels and such. The first comment vanished, so I immediately thought “operator error,” in other words, “I messed up.” So I left another version later on, but in the meantime Tom had responded to say that the spam filter was not used to comments and was particularly afraid of long comments, so the first comment is now posted. But the second one is also long, even longer, and I was glad to have written it, too.

So I’ll post both of them here, because I can. Think of them as two coyotes howling at the October moon. Or maybe just Oblio and Arrow, strolling companionably through a blasted landscape. You know, a boy and his dog.

Comment, take one:

I thought hard but strangely (perhaps) about choosing WordPress. Everyone else on the team formerly known as the dream team chose B2Evolution. (Remember that?) I’m not sure why and given that I was supposedly in charge perhaps I should have asked. On the other hand, I was just starting our Bloghost experiment (later we moved to Bluehost, another story) and maybe I was right just to cheer them on without asking too many questions. Anyhow, even though it was theoretically multisite, B2Evolution rubbed me every wrong way it could. It was clunky, buggy, ugly, and didn’t have a very helpful community. In the environment, I always wanted out. For my own blogsite, from the get go, I chose WordPress. It was, by comparison, sleek and eminently tinker-inviting with themes, widgets, etc. It looked like the Web. Most of all, when I read “code is poetry,” I said “these developers are kindred spirits and I’ll have what they’re having.”

Which brings me to two thoughts about the project now known as DoOO.

For me, the idea has always been that the interface is not a commodity but a learning environment, or should be. That’s Alan Kay’s line, and I think he’s exactly right. He also said, in another instance of his tremendous insight, that there should be invitations in the environment. Little things that say, implicitly, “would you like to tinker with this?” I don’t want people to understand Cpanel. What I want them to do is tinker with the Web, and Cpanel makes that tinkering pretty easy in terms of installing and uninstalling. But Cpanel has no generally attractive invitations. (I see invitations everywhere but I’m a known gate-crasher, or was once.) So anything that puts a little “would you like to tinker with this?” invitation into Cpanel, or any interface, is a Good Thing in my (pedagogy and digital fluency) book.

All of that said, I find nearly zero faculty who want to tinker with the Web. They’re all too busy, many of them with genuine Matters of Consequence, some of them with the MoCs that are discussed in The Little Prince. Of course, I think that being able to tinker safely and easily within a global lightspeed telecommunications network during the greatest increase in communicative capacities in all of human history is not only a good but a necessary thing. I’ll never stop thinking that, though I am increasingly suspicious that it’s too late to make much of a difference in this matter.

I am entirely confident, however, that any DoOO project needs to have faculty operating and tinkering within their own domains. Otherwise it’s faculty dropping off projects at the Kinkos (or ALT Lab, or DTLT, or whatever) or it’s more of the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do instructor demands that end up sounding like trombones going wah-wah-wah.

Somewhat along these lines, I cried real tears when I read this blog post written this semester by one of my students, for my Rise of Social Media course: Media Literacy

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

Comment, take two (not yet on Tom’s post, and maybe it doesn’t have to be now):

Who knows. I’ll try again. It won’t be as good but it might be shorter. 🙂

When we started our cPanel experiments at DTLT in the fall of 2004, everyone but me chose B2Evolution. I had already chosen WordPress. So much for leading by example. 🙂 I found B2E clunky and ugly. When I was in there, I wanted out. I had chosen WordPress because it looked more like the Web and was eminently tinkerable. Most of all, when I saw their motto was “code is poetry,” I said, “I’ll have what they’re having.” So I thought hard about my choice, but strangely too. And as it happened, it all worked out. (Eventually everyone at DTLT switched to WordPress, which is pleasant to recall.)

Now about cPanel and the Conversation That Never Ends (not that it should, I guess): I don’t want people to learn cPanel. I want people to tinker with the Web, because we’re in the middle of the largest increase in human expressive capability in the history of civilization. That’s what Clay Shirky wrote in 2008 and it’s true today, too. I also vehemently agree with Alan Kay that a) every interface should be a learning environment and b) in every learning environment there should be an invitation to tinker or explore or figure something out. Interface plus invitation to tinker/explore/figure something out = learning environment. And we desperately need more professionals in higher education to regard the Web as a learning environment. I mean <b>the Web</b>, not Canvas or any other LMS.

cPanel is a potential learning environment. I see invitations everywhere in cPanel, but I’m wired up that way. So maybe cPanel needs to be pruned or shaped or otherwise massaged or tinkered with so there are invitations visible and attractive here and there, the way a botanical garden immerses the visitor but also stimulates curiosity, the desire to know more. (I don’t find automobile analogies very useful anymore, if I ever did. Treasure, or gardens, or the music of the spheres, I’m there.)

But the bigger problem is not cPanel. The bigger problem is that most faculty do not have any desire to tinker with or on the Web. Most faculty are consumed by Matters Of Consequence, either real or the kind discussed in <i>The Little Prince</i>. So they drop their projects off at a “Kinkos” (ALT-Lab, DTLT, etc.) and expect to get something back that they do not understand or need to understand beyond How To Fill Things In The Blanks. Now the students see that their faculty have no real depth of understanding about the interface or learning environment, and so they comply and fill stuff in but the conceptual frameworks are missing, and so it all becomes Just Another Online Assignment. That’s a worst case, which means it’s the rule, rather than the exception, in my experience.

The dismal experience many students have had during the pandemic of “asynchronous online classes” that are simply infodumps from an absent professor, facilitated by sleek autopilot LMS environments, is probably more common than anyone wants to know about, much less admit. I love the Canvas phrase “Express Capture,” which means straight-to-Kaltura lecture recording but suggests No Due Process Needed, pedagogically speaking. (Scales well, though, right?)

Unless the faculty themselves are invested in Domains Of Their Own [which name seems increasingly misleading to me, for all sorts of reasons], the students will readily perceive that it’s all just wah-wah-wah from the trombones.

I know Web Workshops Of Their Own has no Virginia Woolf vibe, so I won’t propose it as an alternative, even though I think it’s more descriptive at this point. I also like Ted Nelson’s “Thinkertoys” but that’s obviously a non-starter for folks involved with Matters Of Consequence of the Little Prince variety.

And in conclusion, I shed real tears when I read this blog post, published as a weekly reflection in my Rise of Social Media course this semester: <a href=”https://rampages.us/onlineinrealtime/2021/10/09/media-literacy/”>Media Literacy</a>. I don’t think college is much better than the high school environment this student recalls.

I sometimes think, late at night, that it would be interesting if every single LMS went down, and every single person developing web-facing learning environments of any kind went on a semester-long paid leave, and faculty actually had to learn a few things. Shocking notion, but it does make me stare at the ceiling for awhile.

(Sorry, not shorter; if you made it this far, thanks for reading.)

Afterthought: we all have time for cars, but do we have time for learning just enough to play just a note or two in the music of the spheres?

No, I don’t know where that professional activity would go on an annual report or CV.