Monthly Archives: October 2010

Free, as in Unfettered

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I do many presentations these days centered around the idea of openness and the value of teaching ourselves and our students the ways and means of digital citizenship, which for me inevitably includes publication to the open Web (there’s that “open” thing again) and subscribing (RSS or otherwise) to material published to the open Web. That’s why it’s the Read/Write Web.

Clearly my ideas have been influenced–I’d say “shaped” is more like it–by the resonance frequencies of Bush-Licklider-Engelbart-Nelson-Kay et al. As several folks have pointed out in the Baylor seminar, that resonance frequency is also present in McLuhan and in today’s reading, Bill Viola’s “Will There Be Condominiums In Data Space”? I confess: I chose the readings and ordered them as I did to find and amplify that resonance frequency. For me, it’s the music of the spheres, not just because *I* like it, though I do, but because it sets in motion complex individual resonances that lead, I firmly believe, to the imaginative leaps and awakenings that we need to make sense and use of our digital world (and perhaps our world, period–though they’re rapidly becoming synonymous).

Prepping for today’s New Media Faculty-Staff Development Seminar meeting, I re-read Viola. I re-read him yesterday too as I prepped for the First Year Seminar meeting. Each time I marveled even more at the extraordinary range and depth and quality of his thought.. His commitment to convergence-divergence, or is it divergence-convergence, is breathtaking, even if he sometimes doesn’t quite get the science entirely right (Hillary is characteristically on point in her critique but also characteristically generous in her final appraisal). He really is someone with McLuhan’s heart who also makes the kind of art Errol Morris makes, as Paige brilliantly notes, in which whole and part dance together in a wonderfully delicate yet amazingly powerful quodlibet. Or perhaps it’s a foxtrot, or a minuet. But I digress.

I hadn’t quite finished my Health Camp meal when I finished re-reading the Viola. I meditated for a bit, then flipped through the pages of the New Media Reader in search of another interesting nugget. I was, frankly, in the mood for a manifesto. I saw Haraway’s famous “Cyborg Manifesto,” but that was too direct for me at that moment, the glass of Dublin Dr. Pepper still half full. I wanted something stranger, or less direct. So I went to the next manifesto, on the very next page: “The GNU Manifesto.” I had a nodding acquaintance with the topic, and I was intrigued, since “open” as in “open source” has been a big topic of conversation at my workplace lately.

And then the tumblers aligned, the key turned into the lock, and the scales fell from my eyes:

Since “free” refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software…. Because of the ambiguity of “free,” people have long looked for alternatives, but no one has found a suitable alternative. The English language has more words and nuances than any other, but it lacks a simple, unambiguous word that means “free,” as in freedom–“unfettered” being the word that comes closest in meaning. Such alternatives as “liberated,” “freedom” and “open” have either the wrong meaning or some other disadvantage.

And that was in a sidebar, quoted from “The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement,” by Richard Stallman, also the author of the Manifesto. It pays to check everything: sidebars, captions, titles, epigraphs, copyright pages, acknowledgements, dedications, even the little SDG at the bottom of Bach’s scores….

So I’m thinking today that the kind of education I want to support, and to co-create, is unfettered learning. The trick is to understand when open means unfettered, and when it might be a closed platform that sets us free (and I mean in terms of learning, NOT in terms of copyright. The copyright “protection” of closed LMS’s is actually one of those weakening prosthetics, as it keeps us from agitating vigorously for our Fair Use rights and keeps the current copyright jailers in the money). When does a curriculum unfetter us, and when is it a set of handcuffs? When does a teacher unfetter us? When do our classmates unfetter us? A classroom, or a credit hour system, or an advising system? And so forth. These are very difficult questions indeed, and of course some oppressors believe most sincerely (it seems) that they’re keeping handcuffs on for the inmates’ own good–and of course Stockholm Syndrome means that sometimes people don’t want to lose their fetters, so thoroughly do they identify with their captors.

But these are the complications we should confront continually, lest we fetter ourselves and others. Kierkegaard tells us that the worst despair is not to know you’re in despair. Blake anticipates Kierkegaard’s aphorism by calling the worst fetters “mind-forged manacles.”

In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

Only the awakened imagination can make us aware of those mind-forg’d manacles, let alone help us to slip their bonds and help to free our colleagues and fellow pilgrims. Let alone help us desist from creating them for others, among them, horribile dictu, even at times our best beloveds. I take it that that’s why Blake was a poet, that’s why Bill Viola does his art. But that’s also why scientists labor to uncover new knowledge, and talk so passionately–and imaginatively!–to their colleagues and to all of us about the scale, scope, and importance (and excitement!) of their work. For we are all imagineers, and we are all in this together….

And while Pete Townshend was right that there’s no easy way to be free, loosing fetters and creating portals to realms of greater unfetteredness for all is, I believe, one of the highest, noblest, trickiest, most exhilarating aspects of this thing we call, simply, education.

In my experience, no human invention has had greater potential for that unfettering than the Internet itself. The pub-sub model that Jon Udell describes in the podcast I linked to in my previous post is right on target about how that can and should happen. That the Internet also has the opposite potential (and that’s what we hear the most about, unfortunately–man bites dog and uploads video to YouTube) should surprise no one. Every powerful human invention cuts both ways. But that’s the bad news and the good news too. Both ways. And I suppose we have some say in the matter, if we can loose the mind-forg’d manacles that keep us from the freedom of the Internet itself….

Awaken the digital imagination, then strengthen the heart, hands, and mind for digital citizenship.

In that spirit, then, I offer a podcast recording of my keynote talk last Friday at the E-Learn 2010 conference. I called it “The Great Internet Backlash,” and through that lens I viewed what seem to me to be both the manacles and the possibilities for unlocking them. I believe I am right, but I am not sure of it. That’s why I want to keep this conversation going.

Conference website: http://www.aace.org/conf/elearn/speakers/default.htm

Archive of the talk with PPT slides: coming soon, I hope.

And here’s the recording I made. I hope it resonates. Let me know.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (41.4MB)

The global nervous system worked like a champ

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One view of conceptacularity

I’m exhausted, so I won’t be able to do anything like even the most superficial justice to the experience–but I want to note it now, before this magic moment subsides.

I’m at OpenEdTech 2010, sponsored by the Open University of Catalonia. For the last two and a half days, thirty educators from around the world (India to Canada to the US to Spain to Jamaica–you get the idea) have been working, laughing, cooking, eating, and dreaming together about how we might help to build online learning spaces that support and inspire the joy of learning. We seek to co-create online learning spaces that are just as memorable and magical as those places on a physical campus that embed themselves into our experience and weave themselves into the texture of *alma mater*.

We just had our summary session. Tonight we will eat together once more, then disperse to our scattered homes. But not quite yet. There’s time for one more reflective journey before the miles come between our company.

As we were finishing the last intensive bit of group work before that summary session, I suddenly knew what I must do. I must contact my young colleagues at Baylor. These colleagues, as fine a conceptacular crew as one could wish for, had a perspective on this “joy of learning” question that simply must be part of our discussion in Barcelona. So I set about convening them, virtually, and put the question to them for their consideration and expression.

As a result, ten of the eleven students in the class (yes, students are my colleagues, and each others’–at least, that’s been my experience for twenty years) blogged their responses to the question. They were thoughtful, playful, energized, focused, imaginative. Our work together in the New Media Seminar had prepared them well to think about online learning in large terms, a la Engelbart, V. Bush, Nelson, etc. They made fascinating distinctions and ingenious suggestions. They got superbly artful with their linking (one strong mark of a master blogger, in my view). The quest was on. And mirabile dictu, they began commenting on each other’s blog posts just about as quickly as they could be written. They built out stunning examples of how individual depth and social breadth could also, and very quickly, become individual breadth and social depth. E pluribus unum–and the reverse, however that might look in Latin. 🙂

And then I shared the responses with my colleagues in the room in Barcelona, half a world away, yet intimately connected in the global nervous system Jon Udell so eloquently describes in this podcast. The room got very quiet. It was magical.

I confess to you: I love my colleagues, my students, my conceptacular fellow-travelers. I love how quickly they responded, how well they entered into the sustained conversation, how they conversed with me and each other and, today, the world. I am proud to be among them.

If you’re of a mind, please visit their blogs and leave some comments. Comment love, we call it, and not idly, either. Start with our motherblog to get the range of the conversation. Then click over to the individual blogs, listed here, to interact with the posts my colleagues contributed on this very special day:

The first time I saw the mother of all demos, indeed the first time I read Engelbart, I quickly intuited that days like today were made possible by his vision. More than that, I somehow understood–I honestly don’t know how–that days like today would be part of that same dream of augmentation, that dream of how the world could be that I first brushed against when I read of life in an integrated domain and the conceptual framework that could make it possible, even likely. This is my experience, no doubt not shared by all, but undeniably part of the fabric of which I continue to be woven. That noosphere Engelbart and others saw on the distant horizon, the summation that Jon describes so very beautifully and urgently, is ours for the asking, now.

So why not ask for it? No, that’s not strong enough. Why not insist on it? Look at my young colleagues’ work and the joy that carries it aloft like sweet incense. Can we not answer that joy with open hearts and minds of our own?