Retiring

Posted on by
17

Today is my last day of work as associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Although my official date of separation from employment by the Commonwealth of Virginia is September 1, today is my Rikki Lee Jones Day, i.e., “is this the Real End?” Yes it is.

I started school in Mrs. Wills’ first grade class in the fall of 1963. I’ve been in school for sixty-one of the sixty-two years since that fateful first matriculation. Primary school student, secondary school student, undergraduate student, graduate student, graduate teaching assistant, visiting instructor, assistant professor, associate professor (first tenure: 1998), professor, associate professor (from teaching institution to research institution), and after today, retired faculty. Sixty-one years of of first being in school then, in the fullness of time, being school.

That missing year was the year I worked full-time as a radio announcer (what we used to call a disc jockey) at WFVA AM/FM, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Another story for another time, perhaps.

While I was not surprised to find myself in graduate school, I confess I was quite surprised to find that I not only greatly enjoyed teaching but was actually pretty good at it, if student testimony can be believed. I was told teachers needed the gift of patience, a gift I do not have, so I never really considered I’d end up in the classroom as well as the library, or lab, or some kind of school-adjacent location. But if I go back to that first discussion-group-leader experience in grad school, I’ve been teaching since the spring of 1981, with a hiatus from 1988-1990 while I worked to put my wife through library school–a welcome respite from my near-crippling dissertation anxiety.

In the fall of 1990, at last embarked upon serious, sustained dissertation-writing, I got a gig as a visiting instructor of English at the University of Richmond. Two years later my wife and our toddler moved to San Diego for my first tenure-track job as an assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego. In 1994 we returned to Virginia for my job (same rank and role) at Mary Washington College. Aside from one brief and unhappy interlude in the fall of 2006 when I gave up faculty status to lead a teaching-learning technology center, I was at Mary Wash until 2008. Then on to Baylor University for 2 1/2 years, then to Virginia Tech for 2 1/2 years, then in 2013 to my appointment as associate professor of English and vice-provost for learning innovation and student success at VCU. The administrative role ended in April, 2016 and I’ve been full-time in the English department here since then. One day perhaps I will write my memoir, Professor: A Life In Higher Education. Or maybe I’ll just blog it all here. Or both.

I’ve saved a lot of things from that sixty-one year run. Well, my mother saved most of the early stuff, until I left home for college. I saved the undergraduate and graduate work I was most proud of. I saved all my graduate school notebooks (some of my undergrad notebooks too, I think–I haven’t cataloged everything). There are some things that saw print and I have copies of those of course. I have some presentations up on YouTube. And I saved most, perhaps all, of students’ evaluation of my teaching.

Here today, at one of the Real Ends, I record for posterity one of the earliest evaluations I received as a full-time faculty member. It’s from that first gig, the one at the University of Richmond. It’s not dated, but I believe it’s from that first semester of full-time teaching, in the fall of 1990.

The page is torn from a spiral-bound notebook and folded in half. On the outside, in large capital letters, the student, obviously concerned that the words not affect any grading, wrote DO NOT OPEN ‘TIS CHRISTMAS. (Editing is hard: I’d read TILL until just now.) Inside, the student wrote the following (note: English 251 was a one-semester survey of British Literature from Beowulf to Swift, or thereabouts):

Evaluation      English 251     Campbell

Brit Lit was really good. I learned alot.

I came to the class with no expectations. I was not disappointed.

Seriously, folks, 251 was one of the best classes I’ve had in my three years at UR. Campbell was amazing – it was like being taught by a whirlwind. He was gushing with energy, so mixing the metaphor, he was like a lawn sprinkler gone mad. Together with Rilling in the history department. Campbell was the best teacher I’ve ever had. He had the material cold, could think on his feet, and always was accepting of student input. This last attribute is important, for crushing a student causes all the others to clam up, ending debate.

If I could change the class, I’d get more discussion, as good as the lecture was. Also, my penmanship didn’t improve much during 251.

Anyway, thanks. Good class.

That’s obviously the kind of encouragement any teacher would love to get, especially from a student. At the same time, I can assure you that I have received student evaluations on the other end of the spectrum, some of them diagnosing my numerous shortcomings quite accurately. And of course sometimes there’s just a bad mismatch between teacher and student. Not every student responds well to whirlwinds or lawn sprinklers gone mad.

That said, I’ve always thought that the student at UR described my classroom temperament quite well and identified the strengths I wanted to have and hoped I might. (The student was also probably right that I needed to speak a little less. I’m not sure I improved much in that regard, alas.) In the thirty-five years since I taught that class, even at my lowest points I kept trying to improve my mastery of the material, to think on my feet more beneficially as I responded to student input, and turn my gushing energy into a shared experience of joy that would lift the classes’ spirits no matter what they thought about me or the course. School at its best was always a place of great joy for me and sharing that joy was always essential to my vocation as a professor.

Sometimes over the years I’d be asked about my teaching philosophy. I’d usually respond by quoting a line from Citizen Kane. Kane’s guardian asks him, “what do you know about running a newspaper.” Kane responds, “I don’t know anything about ?running a newspaper. I just try everything I can think of.” The answer is a little disingenuous: Kane clearly knew something about running a newspaper, and I think I retire knowing something about teaching. But trying everything I could think of seems a just description of how I made my way through this essential part of my life’s work.

My thanks to my family for loving and supporting this whirlwind, my colleagues for at least tolerating it, and my students for constantly inspiring me to think of new things to try. Adieu!

Summer 2007, Combs 103, at the University of Mary Washington

Postscript: courses taught

Graduate Courses

Virginia Commonwealth University: Form and Theory of Poetry; Studies in British Literature (Milton), Intertextuality. MA directed studies in weird fiction, Milton studies; directed study in form and theory of poetry; MATX Ph.D. directed study in film adaptations of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House

Virginia Tech: Cognition, Learning, and the Internet (cross-listed with Honors).

Undergraduate Courses

Upper Level (300-400 or equivalent)

Virginia Commonwealth University: Milton (ENGL 403), Form and Theory of Poetry (ENGL 445), Mythology and Folklore (ENGL/ANTH 364), Senior Seminar: Errol Morris (ENGL 499), Early Modern Literature (ENGL 325), The Rise of Social Media (ENGL 391. AMST 391, NEXT 383), Fiction into Film (ENGL 385).

Virginia Tech: Cognition, Learning, and the Internet (cross-listed as a graduate course, GRAD 5984); From Memex to YouTube: Introduction to New Media Studies (Honors Colloquium).

Baylor University: The Art of Film /Film, Text, and Culture.

Mary Washington College/University of Mary Washington:  From Memex to YouTube: Introduction to New Media Studies; Milton (seminar); Studies in Poetry (seminar); John Donne (seminar); Renaissance and Baroque Literature; Sixteenth-Century British Literature; Seventeenth-Century British Literature; Film, Text, and Culture; Shakespeare’s Early Plays; Shakespeare’s Late Plays; British Literature to 1800; individual study projects in digital film production and editing, Milton, Donne, Atom Egoyan, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and “neo-Hitchcockians,” Internet Writing, Screenwriting, and Film Editing: Theory and Practice.

Advanced Studies In England (Bath, UK): “The Lives, Times, and Works of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick” (2000); “Rock/Soul/Progressive: Transatlantic Currents in Popular Music, 1955-present” (2003).

University of San Diego: Milton, Survey of Shakespeare, Sixteenth-Century Studies, Seventeenth-Century Studies.

Lower Level (100-200 or equivalent)

Virginia Commonwealth University: Inquiry and the Craft of Argument (UNIV 200: special digital engagement pilot titled “Living the Dreams: Digital Investigation and Unfettered Minds”), Reading Film (ENGL 250), British Literature to 1800 (ENGL 203).

Baylor University: From Memex to YouTube: Introduction to New Media Studies (First-Year Honors Seminar).

Mary Washington College/University of Mary Washington:  Introduction to Literary Studies; Introduction to Poetry; Introduction to Film Studies; Narrative Form in Fiction and Film; Global Issues in Literature–International Science Fiction; The Art of Literature; Myth in Literature; Literature in Performance; Writing Workshop; Rock/Soul/Progressive: Transatlantic Crossings in Popular Music 1955-Present.

University of San Diego: American Fiction and Film; Freshman Composition; Poetry; British Literature to 1800.

University of Richmond: Introduction to Film; British Literature to 1800; Freshman Composition.

Smithsonian Institution Continuing Education Program

“The Literary Face of Evil,” six-lecture series, January 29-March 5, 2002. Lecture schedule included Beowulf, “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1984, and The Silence of the Lambs. (I got the gig in part because in my application I asked regarding Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, “why didn’t they just pull his teeth”)

Commonwealth Governor’s School (Spotsylvania and Stafford Counties, as well as Colonial Forge)

“Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.” Guest lecture, September 19, 2024.
“Reading Film.” Guest lecture, January 27, 2025
“Film Studies.” Guest lecture, January 29, 2024
“Film Studies.” Guest lecture, February 6, 2023
“Introduction to Film Studies,” Guest lecture, July 8-12, 2002
“Creative Expression Workshop” (writing, music, web authoring), July 9-13, 2001

Number 46: A Husband Remembers

Posted on by
6

No, this isn’t a memoir. Rather, it’s an account of how conspicuous I was at the local emporium while buying some celebratory items for my wife on this our 46th wedding anniversary.

In my childhood, one of the “marital vaudeville” tropes was that of the husband who forgets that today is our anniversary, dear. Many husbands on 1960s sitcoms were at best adorably befuddled, at worst cold and uncaring, when it came to remembering such things. I wasn’t watching sitcoms much after the early 70s, so I don’t know if that trope continued, or continues. But I’ve never forgotten it. Silly husbands!

So early on I resolved never to forget that today is our anniversary, dear. What I didn’t know until it happened was that the day would be so entirely unforgettable that I’d have to be in a coma to overlook it. The unforgettable part is, of course, all about the woman I married. But you knew that.

Still, I suspect that even if the befuddled husband trope isn’t entirely absent in contemporary culture, there’s still some, shall we say, ambient admiration for the husband who obviously is not forgetting. (I pass over in silence the question of whether I am befuddled in other areas–I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)

Today, our 46th wedding anniversary, I was obviously not forgetting. My cart had a colorful bouquet on board and a HAPPY ANNIVERSARY balloon floating above it. The floral department lady commented on how gorgeous the bouquet was–“like a meadow with such variety”–and the self-service checkout lady wished me a happy anniversary and asked if Alice and I were going out to eat tonight. I replied that we’d done that last night because the forecast called for rain tonight. I then reassured her that we’d be going out for gelato tonight. “Oh, so you’re celebrating over two nights, then,” she said. “Indeed yes,” I said, “and when we come to our 50th, we’ll celebrate for a full week.” (You heard it here first.)

Encouraged by all the support I’d received, I finished checking out and wheeled my cart into the parking lot. Coming up on my right, walking quickly past with his own cart, a fifty-something man called out, “you’ll get some brownie points for that!” His cry made me think of all the sitcoms of my childhood. Had he suffered because of his befuddled anniversary mistakes? Or was this just a pat on the back from a fellow husband? Perhaps posterity will judge.

But enough with the anecdotes and speculation. Instead, I close this post with certainty:

Happy anniversary Alice, with all my love!

 

A brief history of us

Posted on by
10

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!

 

 

The sense of an ending

Posted on by
1

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.

44 Huzzahs

Posted on by
6

Today I’m thinking about the 17th century–I’m at the 13th International Milton Symposium–but also, and even more intensely, about July 14, 1979, when Alice and I were married.

The beautiful Lady Alice

This is popularly known as Durham Castle, but of course for these 44 years it’s been how I imagine my own good fortune in wooing and winning this lady.

Eventually even commoners like me may ascend if they “marry up,” as I certainly did.

No wonder I’m smiling

Yes, it’s the Yeats Tower, but it does serve to illustrate my ongoing glee.

Happy 44th, m’lady! I pray for many more.

The Universe and Universities in a Digital Age

Posted on by
1

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.

 

 

43 Cheers

Posted on by
12

Today my wife Alice and I have been married forty-three years. We greeted each other with a hug this morning, as is our wont. After we wished each other a happy anniversary, Alice leaned her head toward mine and said, “Nevertheless, we persisted.”

And in fact, my friends, that’s what she said.

So tonight I salute our persistence, and I publicly state, not for the first time and not for the last either, that I am a very, very lucky man indeed.

Pictured below is a scene from early in our marriage in which Alice’s loving gaze carries just a hint, just a casual warning, of the exasperation I was no doubt busily eliciting at that very moment.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for whatever I was doing, or about to do, in the moment pictured above. Still, she is adorable, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Here’s another photo from our salad days, when we were about to make the second big move of our young lives: from Charlottesville and graduate school (and the dissertation I had become expert at not writing) to Chapel Hill, NC and Alice’s dazzling one-year-and-a-summer progress through a two-year Masters of Library Science degree program.

And here, earliest of all, is Alice holding a cake made for her bridal shower. The cake reads “Three Cheers for Alice and Gardner.”

Cake saying Three Cheers for Alice and Gardner

Today, it’s forty-three cheers for us. A cheer for each year.

And here’s to many more.

It takes some gumption to share a life for a long time–or at all, for that matter.

Nevertheless, we persisted.

And I hereby declare: Gardner loves Alice. Still, and always.

Happy anniversary!

An Advent Meditation

Posted on by
3

My meditation follows the reading from the Gospel.

From the Lectionary for December 22, 2021:

Luke 1:39-56 (New Revised Standard Version)

Mary Visits Elizabeth

39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. 45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

Mary’s Song of Praise

46 And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
47     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
    Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
    and holy is his name.
50 His mercy is for those who fear him
    from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
    and lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
    and sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
    in remembrance of his mercy,
55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
    to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

56 And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

I came of age in the mid-1970’s, a few years past the initial wave of enthusiasm for encounter groups, but there was still enough of the 60’s in the air that I actually participated in some belated versions of these meetings. The basic idea involved sitting  in circles (or occasionally, standing) and committing to earnest, candid, and vulnerable conversation. Such sincerity is easily mocked. Along the way, most adults learn the survival value of a kind of jovial guarded irony, a way to deflect the risks of encounter by making smart remarks and joking about kum-ba-ya. I do it too, especially if faculty colleagues are nearby (we’re typically an irony-dependent bunch).

But I remember the encounter groups that worked, the sincerity that took root deep within my being and blossomed into correspondence, into revelation. I still yearn for such encounters. A real meeting: not the office kind we have too many of, but an encounter in which my heart leaps up, challenged and transformed by the surprise of the other. A new piece of music. A movie I had almost skipped. The “unmet friend” who also yearns for earnest, candid, and vulnerable conversation, whose yearning, in a welcome surprise, sometimes exceeds my own.

The miraculous enwombed encounter of two new lives, one a prophet and one the Messiah, strengthens and comforts my yearning. Their faithfully expectant mothers greet each other, and their encounter fills them with the Holy Spirit. I imagine Elizabeth’s husband, Zechariah, standing nearby. His disbelief is entirely reasonable, but the angel who stops his tongue had greater things than irony to announce. And though he does not yet know it, Zechariah is even now preparing for the encounter he will one day welcome, sincere and open-hearted: when he meets his son and finds his speech restored, just in time to say his name.

The Embrace of Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary

By Unknown author – http://faq.macedonia.org/images/embrace.jpg, Public Domain

(For the story of Zechariah’s priestly skepticism, see Luke 1:5-23.)

cPanels and domains: two takes

Posted on by
3

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.

The Odyssey Project: Further Discoveries

Posted on by
Reply

First Page of Change article

Nearly two years ago I wrote about “The Odyssey Project,” in a post outlining a grant proposal submitted to the MacArthur Foundation in 1997. The proposal was not funded, but the idea lived on, and became what Jim Groom would later brand “A Domain of One’s Own.”

Turns out my idea emerged even earlier than I had remembered, in fact just before I left Mary Washington for a brief sojourn at the University of Richmond.

I’d completely forgotten that I’d described the essence of the idea in my essay “Education, Information Technologies, and the Augmentation of Human Intellect” (Change, The Magazine of Higher Learning, 38:5, 26-31, DOI: 10.3200/CHNG.38.5.26-31). The article appeared in the September/October 2006 issue. To the best of my recollection, I’d finished the revisions by June or July of 2006, or early August at the very latest.

Here’s what I wrote at the end of that essay:

What About an Odyssey?

Do all these new opportunities add up to something greater than the sum of the
parts? I believe they can. Imagine a project called “Odyssey,” named after Homer’s great epic. Upon matriculation, every student would be assigned a certain amount of Web hosting space that would act as a virtual server, containing open-source tools that would allow blogs, wikis, image galleries, content management, discussion forums, and even survey generators to be installed, maintained, customized, backed up, and uninstalled easily and quickly. (Such tools already exist at inexpensive web hosting services such as Bluehost.com.) By creating, revising, and modifying the resulting Odysseys—supported by teachers, fellow students, information-technology designers, and any expert or fellow learner with whom they come into contact—students would consider what an education is (or might be) and master the tools of its construction.

Although it would include coursework, the Odyssey would take the learner, not the course, as its central organizing principle (my thanks to Martha Burtis for this idea). All of its elements would thereby pull together an otherwise fragmented, connect-the-dots education into a set of integrated experiences. The Odyssey, begun upon matriculation, would not end at graduation but would reflect the education one creates for oneself during a lifetime of learning. More than a narrowly academic exercise, this Odyssey would contain meaningful links to social networking sites such as Flickr, Facebook, or whatever the student virtual hangout du jour happens to be. And of course Odysseys will link to other Odysseys.

The Odyssey could be an education’s foundation and capstone. Colleges and universities would distinguish themselves by the resources, guidance, and enriched contexts they place at the service of these Odysseys and their writers. Others could read it; the evidence of the work we do in a community of learning would be plain to see. But the learners would control access, deciding for themselves, with the guidance of advanced learners, which kinds of growth are served by sharing the narratives of process and which by proceeding privately until the curtain is ready to go up. The work students chose to display as evidence of the quality and extent of their education could be routed to potential employers or used as data for university outcomes assessments.

What would be the focal point for this Odyssey, the metaassignment that would give it some overall shape and purpose? To reconceptualize the self in view of civilization and civilization in view of the self and its unique agency. That, I take it, is the implicit goal of all education and the ongoing task of civilization itself.

I look back at these words from fifteen years ago and I wonder at the energy, ambition, and hopefulness they express. I remember being that person.

I can also see how exuberantly wide-ranging my “resources” were, even then. I’ve always wanted to discover, demonstrate, and use these complex connections. I’ve always thought that the Web encouraged and empowered this connectivity.

Resources for Change article

Most importantly, I still believe that “odyssey” is an apt metaphor, and that these ideas take the notion of e-portfolio (itself an archaism … but I digress) and raise it to a much higher and more interesting level.

The context for the Change article was a moment in which participatory culture offered a glimpse of ways in which creation, communication, reflection, and awareness might be part of the same complex web of activity, a kind of mindfulness that would gain purpose and direction from opportunities for creation and sharing. That mindfulness would not happen automatically. Participation in itself (like the term “interactive”) does not necessarily lead to good outcomes. A “like” button increases participation; where has that led us? But participatory culture within environments rich with integrated domains and structures encouraging reflection and mindfulness can set up all sorts of lovely feedback loops, reciprocalities, and serendipitous encounters.

I still think that, in spite of everything, even as my optimism continues to ebb.

My heartfelt thanks to Executive Editor Dr. Margaret (Peg) Miller for the opportunity to write the essay for Change.

My thanks also to André Craeyveldt, whose “Internet Doorway” was the lovely image that accompanied my article. (You can find the image at the article link, above.) I’m grateful as well to the editorial and design staff at Change in 2006 who worked with me on the article and presented it so handsomely in the magazine.

And my thanks to the “dream team” at Mary Washington, along with our leader Chip German, for the odyssey we shared for a little while, all those years ago.