Credential or Certificate

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Gardo

I continue to think about what we mean by a “degree.” Or rather, I think about what a degree might or should mean, and what we in higher ed increasingly act as if it means, and how that disjunction (if it is one, which I think it is) plays out across our practices, our assumptions, our mission statements, and our civic life. (I’m sure I’ve left out several crucial areas there.)

My thoughts are spurred by a conversation I had several days ago with a colleague who wanted to know what kind of certificate we might offer as an incentive for open participants to complete a cMOOC. I started thinking about the difference between a certificate and a credential. I talked about credentials many years ago in a presentation I podcast here. At the time, though, I simply urged we recall the root meaning of credential, a word that derives from credence, the mark of believability and the grounds for trust we stipulate as a result of some experience or, perhaps, a formation of character we have collectively witnessed.

I didn’t then have the contrast, though, that would drive the point home. I think now the contrast is between “credential,” a condition of being, and “certificate,” something that is not of a person so much as about some specific competency the person has demonstrated. I grant that I am skeptical of any education that focuses narrowly on “competency,” as if skills could be divorced from contexts, or ideas, or personhood. I grant that my skepticism may lead me to exaggerate the distinction I’m trying to make. Yet the distinction may prove useful in articulating how two views might diverge, an what the consequences might be.

Incorrigible and largely unrepentant English professor that I am, I went on an etymology hunt. R. W. Emerson observed that language is fossil poetry, so it was time for some paleontology. I usually go to the Oxford English Dictionary for my etymologies, for there I will also find a useful set of historical definitions that help chart how early usage changes over time. Tonight, though, I had only my iPad with me at dinner. (I try to travel lighter at conferences when possible–I’m writing this post from the annual meeting of the AAC&U.) I have long known how to use Google to define a word: simply type in the search box “define x” (without quotation marks and with a word where the x goes, of course), and away you go. On a lark, and because Google is always introducing cool new things on the sly (aside from tracking its users, that is), I typed “etymology credential” — and here’s what came up!

Ah. The word was first an adjective, and only later became a noun. First a descriptor, then the thing it described. Alas, the thing described, a credential document, seems to have skipped the possible middle sense of a quality or virtue. Instead, a credential, a trustworthiness or recommendation, is typically reduced to that piece of paper we call a diploma–in other words, a certificate.

As “credential” moves toward “certficate,” “recommendation” becomes “document,” indeed an “official document” attesting to facts, records, achievements, ownership. I’m not arguing that facts, records, achielvement, and ownership are unimportant. Not at all. They’re vital. But taken outside the context of trust, of personhood, of recommendation, credentials edge toward a kind of “guarantee,” or a license. Something transformative becomes instead flat and transactional. Get a certificate, get a raise, get a job. Yes, and those are important, But what of the person?

I continue to mull these things over. A small shift in meaning may lead to a large and potentially regrettable shift in civic and cultural practice. I am especially struck by this possibility in the aftermath of the challenging and fascinating opening forum tonight at the AAC&U meeting.

And I think of the words we say at our higher education commencement ceremonies when it comes time to award to–or is it confer upon?–our students their degrees: we deans present our degree candidates to the President, and say that we are doing so upon the “recommendation of the faculty.” In that moment, deep within that phrase and yet still visible if one knows to look, we may still find what is most valuable about a truly credential education.

Loving the Engineers

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Gardo

Note: the title suggested itself when a melody from a certain song by the Roches popped into my head. That’s exactly the kind of thing that engineers might find puzzling or irrelevant, at least within an academic context, but it may tickle the funny bone of anyone who knows the Roches song I’m talking about.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Woodward and I had the privilege and pleasure of presenting the new Academic Learning Transformation Laboratory, ALT Lab, to the VCU School of Engineering at their undergraduate studies retreat. We were on a high platform, and our good friends and colleagues from Engineering were arrayed below us at circular tables, waiting respectfully for the cookies that would follow our talk. (The cookies were on the schedule already; we didn’t bring them, though in retrospect we should have offered.)

We came to the task with a little trepidation. As one of my Virginia Tech colleagues once said, “Gardner, you have to understand: these folks really are rocket scientists.” Just what a Miltonist wants to hear, though perhaps Miltonists are the engineers of those who study literature (I did hear of a senior Miltonist shouting out the correct date when a grad student got it wrong at a conference, so obviously we don’t make it all up as we go along). My VT colleague did have a point, however: engineers are smart, math-savvy, and makers of high precision and (sometimes) no small degree of monetizability. Engineers have to get the answers as right as possible, lest the bridge fall down or the pacemaker short out. Precision is an ethical imperative of the discipline. Not much talk about epistemology within engineering circles. A realist epistemology underpins the discipline’s work. So here we were, a history major (Tom) and an English major (me), talking about concepts and pedagogy and doing our best to demonstrate some core questions about understanding and some pretty nifty examples of new ways to represent and do math. And of course I led with the patron saint of ALT Lab, an electrical engineer (with patents!) named Doug Engelbart, and I shared with them Engelbart’s abiding vision of human capability, as well as the conceptual framework that supported and represented that vision.

I also worked in two film clips from The Right Stuff. I was very excited to do so, as you can imagine.

Time flew by, we fielded some questions about learning and digital technologies, and then we packed up our sample cases, so to speak, and left the platform. I found, as always, that my trepidation had turned to excitement. Don’t let this get around, but engineers are some of the coolest folks on the planet, even though some of them pronounce “blogging” as if it rhymes with [redacted]. Not to worry: I’ve known a couple of champion engineer-bloggers in my day. I know it’s possible.

My one regret is that there wasn’t enough time to get to the last three slides in our deck. These were slides that I thought might stimulate some interesting conversation, if not controversy. They also represented a little conceptual framework I was eager to try out, to hear what they might say in response.

Here’s the first slide:

The idea here was to identify four stages of engineering process. No doubt Montessori or Papert covered a similar idea somewhere. Nevertheless, I wanted to try out the idea that both unstructured and ultra-focused stages informed the particular kind of making that characterizes engineering. As I put the slide together, I realized the stages probably informed many other disciplines as well–perhaps all of them.

Play is pretty obvious. Both Huizinga and Bateson have written eloquently about the way play pervades culture, as well as about the way in which play is liberatory in terms of thinking. Some kinds of play involve very elaborate if-this-then-that modes of thinking, all counterfactual, and all on the edge of a dreamworld where everything can turn to metaphor. Here new ideas first emerge. I thought the idea of “play” might be challenging within an engineering context, so I wanted to see what they’d say.

Tinkering is playing with what emerges from play. Tinkering is a more focused and experimental version of play. I’m particularly drawn to the idea of “stochastic tinkering” much loved by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. And here I thought I’d have a slam dunk with my colleagues, since many of the engineers I’ve talked to are quite comfortable with the idea of tinkering. Indeed, many of them became engineers precisely because they love to tinker. Our station engineer at WFDD-FM was nicknamed “Tink,” and it was always a treat to visit him in his office and see all the pieces and parts carefully hanging on the wall or gathered into small plastic drawers in apparently endless organizers.

Practice comes in from music, for me, but stands for the deliberate repetition of any task until one can do it without thinking. Many learning theorists (and others) call this quality “automaticity,” and while human beings are not automatons (at least, not yet), it is still very useful to be able to perform precise motions repeatedly, and to focus on getting it right, whatever “it” is.

Make is as obvious as play, though I figured it would be the most obviously resonant and relevant element for this audience.

Then the next two slides were to explore more complex and, I believe, more accurate representations of the linear process, which even in its more radical moments (“play”) still resembles a standard design model, what project managers would now call a “waterfall” model.

Iterating upward in complexity, I had this slide for us to consider:

Now the line has become a circle, with the implied argument that the cycle cannot be considered complete when the make occurs. Whether one calls this iterative development, rapid prototyping, or the like, the idea is that “make” is more or less perpetual beta. I don’t think we can say that a bridge or a jet engine is itself in perpetual beta, in terms of the engineering that keeps the bridge intact and the jet aloft, but of course we can always iterate toward better bridges, better engines. I am especially interested in the notion that one should play as the next step of iterative development, not simply refine or troubleshoot what’s been made. This is a challenging notion and I could be wrong, but it seems to me that one danger of a thoughtless. automatic model of iterative development is that one can be confined within confirmation biases, iterating away on the polishing of the thing that cannot be polished without revisiting the essential question of “what are we assuming?” (In the article I linked to above, the dangers of too much automaticity are illustrated beautifully by the ham-in-pan story.) I should also say that I am continually saddened by how much “educational technology” is pretty much ham-in-pan thinking. But I digress.

Finally, the most complex of the slides I’d prepared:

The implicit argument here has to do with resemblances and analogies. How are play and practice related–indeed, how might they be versions of each other? Similarly, in what way do making and tinkering represent similar activities?

I’ll leave those questions as exercises for the reader.

And yes, I confess: still loving the engineers.

The Sweet Spots

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Gardo

I have been thinking very hard lately about the nature and value of focused learning, and especially the kinds of focused learning experiences we might explore and craft within school. I greatly admire the DALMOOC George Siemens and his research group at UT-Arlington crafted last fall, but I also worry a little about the binary structure. As a practical matter, the dichotomy makes a great deal of sense. Those of us who are trying to work on modes of openly networked learning continually struggle with the question of how to define, recognize, and reward multiple modes of engagement–or to speak even more precisely, multiple ranges of commitment. Yet I wonder if one can truly read a book, hear a symphony, or watch a movie without being all in. I wonder if being led and being leaders are necessarily always mutually exclusive. That’s not to say that what Tom Woodward calls the “energy inputs” of open participants who come and go during a course of study are of no benefit to the class. Quite the contrary. But I do worry. Are formal structures of what may amount to lesser commitment really a way forward? The opposite extreme, of course, is a formal structure of pedantic insistence–i.e., much or most of what constitutes school-based learning– that can bleach away all the energy of self-directed learning. But these are sad realities of misguided practice, not necessities. I just don’t think that “instructor-led” or “learner-centered” set up the deeper conceptual framework very well. And if I never again hear the grinding binary of “guide at the side / sage on the stage,” I will weep tears of joy. Even Ivan Illich, the great prophet of deschooling, recognized the role and importance of the genuine pedagogue.

For me the positive vectors are commitment, openness; a willingness to dwell in conjectures and dilemmas and to insist on precision (or the nearest aspirational approximation) when precise information and precise execution are needed to keep the spacecraft from disintegrating. I must also testify that experts lead in many different ways, and many of those different ways are not only important and eminently cherishable but have in fact changed my life. When I watch The Godfather, or read A. S. Byatt, or talk with a gifted and humane practitioner of the healing arts and sciences, I give myself over to the experts, not uncritically, but with commitment and a desire to open myself toward those talents, so long as they are not exercised with cruelty or in mere self-interest.

I too keep looking for the sweet spots.

Oddly, that search has also characterized much of my scholarly work as a Miltonist. How could it not, when one of Milton’s choicest lines is “the sober certainty of waking bliss”?

Here’s an anthology of sweet-spot readings, placed together with minimal commentary: bread crumbs along my wandering way.

[Jimmy Henderson] has been compared to Miller as a strict disciplinarian. Certainly he is an excellent leader. Jimmy sees the band as self-disciplined out of pride in themselves as artists and pride in being associated with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. “Discipline we do have,” he affirms, “but regimentation we do not. There is an enormous difference. Regimentation has no place in music.”

Patricia Willard, from her liner notes to The Direct Disc Sound of The Glenn Miller Orchestra, directed by Jimmy Henderson (The Great American Gramophone Company, 1977. GADD-1020).

Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond accepted models, patterns, or standards” — all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.

To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit. from the physical, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organization without becoming entombed it eh bureaucracy of the institution.

If you are interested (and it is not for everyone), you can achieve Orbit by finding the personal courage to be genuine and to take the best course of action to get the job done rather than following the pallid path of corporate appropriateness.

To be of optimum value to the corporate endeavor, you must invest enough individuality to counteract the pull of Corporate Gravity, but not so much that you escape that pull altogether. Just enough to stay out of the Hairball.

Through this measured assertion of your own uniqueness, it is possible to establish a dynamic relationship with the Hairball–to Orbit around the institutional mass. If you do this, you make an asset of the gravity in that it becomes a force that keeps you from flying out into the overwhelming nothingness of deep space.

But if you allow that same gravity to suck you into the bureaucratic Hairball, you will find yourself in a different kind of nothingness. The nothingness of a normalcy made stagnant by a compulsion to cling to past successes. The nothingness of the Hairball.

Gordon Mackenzie, Orbiting The Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace (Viking, 1996), p. 33. H/t @marianafunes. NB: I question that “it is not for everyone.” I believe Mackenzie is delivering a strong caution there, not a statement about eligibility or desirability. Or he may simply be trying to forestall objections.

By virtue of a privilege which he shared with the greatest creative artists, the composer [Maurice Ravel] never lost, in his obstinate determination to acquire technical mastery, that fresh sensibility which is the privilege of childhood and is normally lost with advancing years.

Alexis Roland-Manuel, quoted in Richard Freed’s liner notes to the original 1975 Vox Quad recording of Daphnis et Chloe (Ballet Suites Nos. 1&2) and Ma Mere l’Oye, as reproduced in the Mobile Fidelity SACD reissue of that recording in 2005. Ravel is one of my favorite composers, and I cannot imagine a sweeter spot than at the intersection of an “obstinate determination to acquire technical mastery” and “that fresh sensibility which is the privilege of childhood….” How to keep that intersection always in view and always yielding energy? Great teachers have a feel for those tasks.

And yes, such commitments are difficult to manage, especially when they take vastly different forms, experiences, and methodologies. Ironically, an obsession with standardization built out of superficial outputs, outcomes, and analytics will appear to ease the learner’s path, only to rob the learner of the very many-mindedness that leads to the deepest, most transferable, most enduring learning of all.

The changing values of the 1960s influenced the CMU [Carnegie Mellon University] drama department’s instructional program. A few faculty members explored innovative techniques, while others adhered to the acting methods they had learned, or passed along specialized skills like mime, dance, and diction. The diversity of their approaches was both helpful and challenging for the undergraduates. Leon Katz remembers, “There was no uniform attitude to the faculty. We had five acting teachers. All of them were tremendously good and they loathed what one another was doing. Each one had a totally different conceptual training. The students were confused. They would go to [department chairman] Earle Gister and say, “What are we supposed to believe? We’re totally confused!” He said, “Good, that’s your training. You sort it out and find the thing that’s right for you.”

Carol De Giere, The Godspell Experience: Inside a Transformative Musical (Bethel, CT: Scene 1 Publishing, 2014, pp. 21-22)

Teachers, Leaders

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Gardo

“May I have the power to exchange my best with your best.” —Nadia Boulanger

I have been mulling over this great and greatly insightful post for a couple of days. What follows is a slightly modified version of my comment there. Please go read it and share your own thoughts however and wherever you like.

I have many tangled responses that are a little painful to contemplate, so I’ll just leave this marker here for now: I think part of the subject here is leadership. I have had many spirited disagreements with a leader named Jim Groom about the role, necessity, and ethics of leadership. For me, a teacher is also a kind of leader. Ivan Illich, no fan of schooling or authoritarian structures of any kind, writes movingly about the role of the true, deep teacher. So does George Steiner, using language of “master” and “disciple” that would make many open-web folks cringe–or worse. Yet even the great and greatly democratic poet Walt Whitman salutes his “eleves” at one point. And I have experienced and been very grateful for the wisdom of those teacher-leaders who brought me into a fuller experience and understanding of my own responsibilities as a leader. What is “self-directed learning” if not an act of leadership?

One of the books that’s affected me most profoundly this year is Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky. In it, I find this wisdom:

And every day you must decide whether to put your contribution out there, or keep it to yourself to avoid upsetting anyone, and get through another day. You are right to be cautious. Prudence is a virtue. You disturb people when you take unpopular initiatives in your community, put provocative new ideas on the table in your organization, question the gap between colleagues’ values and behavior, or ask friends and relatives to face up to tough realities. You risk people’s ire and make yourself vulnerable. Exercising leadership can get you into a lot of trouble. To lead is to live dangerously because when leadership counts, when you lead people through difficult change, you challenge what people hold dear—their daily habits, tools, loyalties, and ways of thinking—with nothing more to offer perhaps than a possibility. Moreover, leadership often means exceeding the authority you are given to tackle the challenge at hand. People push back when you disturb the personal and institutional equilibrium they know. And people resist in all kinds of creative and unexpected ways that can get you taken out of the game: pushed aside, undermined, or eliminated. It is no wonder that when the myriad opportunities to exercise leadership call, you often hesitate. Anyone who has stepped out on the line, leading part or all of an organization, a community, or a family, knows the personal and professional vulnerabilities. However gentle your style, however careful your strategy, however sure you may be that you are on the right track, leading is risky business.

Perhaps everyone is called to some form of leadership as an ethical imperative. Perhaps for everyone, a moment or occasion of leadership will emerge, reveal itself, and call to us with the painful, necessary task of speaking up, patiently asking for alternatives, insistently rocking the boat … and lovingly organizing the celebrations and rites of passage. Not to mention keeping the tribe alert to the value and splendor of newcomers, and to the persistent value of encountering other tribes to work together in building the commons.

I think that leadership may be mostly a commitment to the constant mediation and care required by love, that place where both individuality and relationship must assert themselves and somehow walk and dance together.

Why I Teach

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Gardo

(Who knows how this will turn out. An impossible topic allows some latitude in the exploration, yes? I mean, what do I have to lose? )

To try to explain why I teach seems impossible to me for several reasons. I never set out to be a teacher. They told me (you know, those folks who tell you things) that teachers were patient. I didn’t know whether my teachers were truly patient. (Looking back, of course, it seems to me they must have been in order to put up with me as a student.) I did know, without a second’s hesitation or an iota of doubt, that I was not patient. Nor am I now.

I don’t teach because I like to manage learning, though I suppose there is some kind of management that does foster learning. I love to imagine and help build interesting experiences that conduce to learning, but unless one says that Abbey Road was the result of “management,” I don’t think I like to manage learning. I’m not even sure that’s really possible.

The terrible truth is that I never set out to be a teacher. If you had told me at age 12, or 16, or even at age 21 that I’d end up being a teacher, I would probably have laughed at you. The weird thing about my laughter is that the teachers I loved imprinted themselves indelibly on my entire being. To this day, I can imagine them so vividly that I can almost believe myself back in their presence. I guess I didn’t think of those teachers I loved as part of school, and thus I probably didn’t think of them as teachers, though I knew very well that’s what they were. Instead, I thought of them as extraordinary human beings who were deeply inquisitive and thus deeply knowledgeable in ways that seemed to me to amplify one’s being far past any degree I could imagine. And the particular mode of the extraordinary had to do with the intellect, somehow, even if the visible result seemed to be a “skill” of some sort.

Perhaps I could see they were teachers, but I could never catch them “teaching.”

One approached knowledge in the spirit of making it accessible to the problem-solving learner by modes of thinking that he already possessed or that he could, so to speak, assemble by combining natural ways of thinking that he had not previously combined. (Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education)

The teachers I loved did their work, as far as I could tell and as nearly as I can recall, by doing that. They weren’t covering or delivering content. They weren’t specifying learning outcomes on their syllabi. They weren’t prepping me for a high-stakes standardized test. They were doing that. And they seemed to be doing that because it was the precondition for the enlargement of being in this world full of people who live, talk, and work together and want to do that better.

So much of learning depends upon the need to achieve joint attention, to conduct enterprises jointly, to honor the social relationship that exists between learner and tutor, to generate possible worlds in which given propositions may be true or appropriate or even felicitous: to overlook this functional setting of learning–whatever its content–is to dry it to a mummy. (Bruner, op. cit.)

The first inkling I had that I might be a teacher, even if I generally disliked visible “teaching” in most of my classes, came in graduate school, when I led a small discussion (“recitation”) group in a large undergraduate class. I was reading some of the books for the first time myself. I didn’t think I was teaching anything. I thought I was asking interesting questions to which I was pretty sure I did not have the answers. The students responded very warmly. They said they had learned a lot from me. I found that puzzling, truly deeply puzzling, until much later when I read the second Bruner quotation above and realized that I apparently had a talent for fostering joint attention. I also realized along the way that “joint attention” meant much more than making sure all the students were paying attention to me. In fact, it probably didn’t mean that at all, though sometimes that kind of attention is warranted and handy. It meant, I think, that I was able to focus and make visible the purposeful attention any of us might bring to the learning moment, and with that focus and visibility strengthen and amplify its power and efficacy for all of us.

But it felt like being alight with delight. Together. And while I catalyzed it, it didn’t belong to me–which meant I could have it, too.

In the New Yorker‘s issue of May 19, 2014, there’s a strangely wonderful essay by Alec Wilkinson titled “A Voice From The Past.” In it, Wilkinson tells the story of a physicist who figured out a way to take very old traces of sound waves–traces predating phonograph records or even wax cylinders–and by scanning their visible marks, convert them back into sounds. By doing so, this physicist, Carl Haber, heard voices from farther back in time than anyone else had up to that date. (Yes, I’m messing with chronotopes again.) As Wilkinson tells Haber’s story, he veers into an uncanny moment in which the implications of Haber’s work–or I should say, the curiosity driving his work–suddenly grow very large indeed.

Silence is imaginary, because the world never stops making noise. A sound is a disruption of the air, and it doesn’t so much die as recede until it subsides beneath the level of the world’s random noise and can no longer be recovered, like a face that is lost in a crowd. In past times, people sometimes thought that all sounds that ever existed were still present, hovering like ghosts. Guglielmo Marconi, who sent the first radio message, in 1902, believed that with a microphone that was sufficiently sensitive he could hear Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount, and in 1925 a writer for the Washington Post speculated that a radio was capable of broadcasting the voices of the dead. A radio transmits vibrations, he wrote, and the voices of the dead “simply vibrate at a lower rate.”

“Teaching” might well address this conjecture with dispatch, so as to cover more content: the thing is impossible, the expression is fanciful, the conjecture is worthless. “In past times, people sometimes thought”: isn’t an essential part of critical thinking the way learners are schooled in the swift, efficient recognition that if people thought it in the past, it’s probably wrong? And if it involves metaphor or imagination in the hands of a non-expert, it’s almost certainly a naive mistake, at best. Yet that kind of critical thinking (yes, there are others) dramatically reduces the scope of one’s curiosity, one’s drive, the sense of possibility, the wild surmise that may lead nowhere but may also bring into being the very thing we all “knew” (because we were “taught’ it) was impossible.

I teach not only because I am thrilled to participate in most kinds of joint attention, but because I love the kind of idea Marconi had about the microphone, and I recognize that my love for that kind of idea is a love of enlarged forms and horizons of inquiry, and the energy released by that enlargement. I want that enlargement and that energy to be available to anyone who wants it. And I know from my own experience that this kind of idea is the most fragile of all, yet also one of the most valuable kinds of ideas we can have, because it can bring good new things into the world.

[Haber] said that what intrigued him about recovering relic sounds was the period and the figures who inhabited it. “Roughly toward the end of the nineteenth century, there were these early guys—I like to call them the heroic inventors,” he said. “Edison, Bell, Muybridge with his time studies, Marconi. They were not particularly well established academically; they were not trained as engineers, mathematicians, or scientists; they were very creative; and they did intuitive, seat-of-the-pants, trial-and-error experiments, whereas once you get into the twentieth century, and you have an understanding of the physics and chemistry involved in these original scientific gestures, you get engineers and academics doing this kind of work. They’re more cautious. No scientist would have thought you could hear Jesus. It violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

He shook his head.

“Anyway, they were the first to record the world as it was actually happening,” he continued.

To encourage others–and thus myself as well–to be creative, intuitive, heroic inventors who record the world as it is actually happening, and thus to build a world of incautious love for the possible good we have not yet imagined: this, too, is why I teach.

From Open To Connected

Posted on August 9, 2014 by Gardo

It’s been gnawing on me over the last couple of years that in our haste to open up schooling, we may well have missed the greater and more important aims that “open” strives toward. And while there’s no way to protect words from being twisted or co-opted, the phenomena of “openwashing” and the long long O in MOOC are troubling indicators that what initially seemed to be the language of openness may have fought shy of the question of what the openness was for. How otherwise to explain a world in which broadcast lectures are touted as innovations or disruptions?

Not that higher ed itself has not had its own complicity in the process, given that our practices of scaling and isolation have modeled much of what we see in the “content delivery” model of online learning.

I tried to explore some of these concerns at Open Ed 2012 in Vancouver in a talk I called “Ecologies of Yearning and the Future of Open Education.”

The yearning I tried to evoke is part of the higher aims I keep trying to articulate. Although I understand the ironies within and around E. M. Forster’s famous epigraph, I cannot help subscribing to the imperative:

“Only connect.”

So I’m honored to be part of a Connected Learning Alliance initiative called “Connected Courses,” and to be one of the facilitators of the “metacourse” that debuts in September. The course is completely open–but it is also about opening. The course is free in that participants do not pay tuition–but it asks for commitment, for participation, so that the free course can be truly freeing. Together we will explore the idea of connected courses, the ways in which connected courses can be built, and most importantly, why connected courses matter.

In fact, we start with the why, as you can see on the Connected Courses syllabus.

Just a few days ago, VCU’s first cMOOC, “Living The Dreams: Digital Investigation and Unfettered Minds,” concluded its formal work as a course of study for the summer of 2014. The connections, however, persist within the larger and more important paradigm of connected learning. That’s the goal, now and always: “Only connect.” This moment may be one of our best opportunities to reclaim what is best about higher education, and to recall higher education to its core mission and values. The task is fraught with many risks, and I’m not saying that connected learning is the only or even the ultimate answer–but this paradigm resonates so strongly with the reasons I became a professor in the first place, and the feelings of liberation and unbounded possibility that I felt when I began using the Web with my students twenty years ago, that I am invigorated and newly hopeful for the next part of the journey.

Check out connectedcourses.net. Switch on your electric blog. Turn up your radio and let us hear the song.

Caravanistas, I salute you. Turn it up!

Homophone trouble as a parable of learning

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Gardo

Klein Bottle: obliquity unbounded. Image cc Wikimedia Commons

This one is quite oblique, so if you’re not patient or inquisitive or morbidly curious, this one may not be for you.

Here’s the backstory. Students in my section of “Living The Dreams: Digital Investigation and Unfettered Minds” are completing their inquiry projects. I’ve been thinking a lot, and emailing a few folks with some frequency, about their drafts. I’ve been thinking about writing and language and how the inquiry’s focus and articulation chart a course for the creator. Along the way, I had the opportunity to interact with one of the students about one of the most difficult homophone (or near-homophone) combos of all: “affect” and “effect.” My email turned into something like one of Vi Hart’s famous “math doodles” (or it seemed so to me). By the end, it felt as if I’d arrived at something near the core of teaching and learning.

I’m confident that what follows is not original with me. The ending, though, is where I think there may be a small contribution. It’s the paragraph that begins “now the interesting thing educationally….”

Unfortunately, the contribution needs to have the homophone discussion for context.

That small contribution draws on Bruner’s “The Will To Learn” as well as Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the latter of which I am re-reading, as I do about every two years. The whole idea is to find the place where one must stand to start building. The will to learn. The idea or intuition of “quality” that precedes analysis or even conscious experience. The place that makes all possible, and without which we try to run our marathons on broken legs.

Now for the homophone affect-effect problem. You’ve actually got it wrong in your sentence (sorry). Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the differences:affect n. means “emotion.” Example: I could not read his affect from his face.
affect v. means “to adopt in a fake or pretentious way.” Example: She affects a scholarly air.
But now it gets harder.
affected v. *past tense* means “had an effect on” and is often used with the passive voice. (English is a hard language for these and many other reasons. I blame humanity.) Example: “Computing was affected for the better by Engelbart.” It’s a vague verb so I usually try to find a different way to put it. (My typical workaround for linguistic indecision.)
affected adj. means “fake.” Example: He had a very affected manner of speaking.

effect n. means “impact.” An effect is the thing that results from a cause, the thing the cause brings into being. Example: “Engelbart had a great effect on civilization, particularly with regard to computing.”
effect v. means “to bring into being.” Example: “Engelbart effected great change in society.” A vague sentence and not very useful for that reason, but the word is correct. 🙂

So: “The weather affects my mood” and “the weather has an effect on my mood” mean roughly the same thing. “I affect a moody disposition when it rains” means “I put on, or fake, a moody disposition when it rains.” “The weather effects my mood” means “the weather brings my mood into being,” which is not the same thing as “the weather changes my mood.”

Now the interesting thing educationally, for me, is that a) you knew there was a difference and b) you were aware that you may not have understood the difference. The fact that you used “affect” incorrectly is of secondary importance. If those first two conditions didn’t obtain, the incorrect usage would be hard or impossible to address. For decades I have continued to work on instilling the metacognitive loop of 1) and 2) in students without having that loop paralyze their writing. It’s no good trying to get one’s messy thoughts into a rough draft if one gets blocked by linguistic uncertainty. The key is to write and keep writing, then go back and revise later. Eventually one becomes more fluent and can therefore get a lot of this stuff right on the fly, but even then careful proofreading is helpful. I still get my its and it’s wrong in rough drafts, just because I’m going quickly. Same for typos, etc.

Apostrophes? Don’t get me started…. I was laughing with an English friend in Herefordshire several years ago about a sign he saw regarding “Christma’s toys.”

In the end, it’s all conventions, but the conventions matter even though they’re arbitrary. They represent a set of agreements. It’s also kind of fun, in a geeky way, to get it right and to know why–like being able to play a favorite lick on one’s guitar, or being able to draw a recognizable face, or being able to tell a joke well.

Sorry to natter on at such length, but I thought it might be fun to stroll along and think aloud.

All best,
Dr. C.

A research assignment for a radical course

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Gardo

A long time ago, but just up the road, a Shakespeare professor named Bill Kemp and I devised a freshman composition course like no other. Our reader was Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. Our syllabus had four assignments, the last of which was a final paper students published to the web. This course began in the fall of 1997. Early days, radical design, extraordinary results. I can’t remember now why we stopped. I guess after six or seven iterations the freshness had turned to slog, and neither of us could bear doing the course unless it was truly magical. I had to teach it by myself at least once, and it was much less fun without Bill. He was my alter ego in many ways, Barfield to my Lewis, Lennon to my McCartney (or perhaps, sometimes, it was the other way ’round). I’ve been meaning for a long time to blog about this course, my first truly open course in the way I’d mean it today. It’s the great-great-grandmother of this summer’s cMOOC, “Living The Dreams.” I learned a great deal by teaching this course with Bill. I learned just as much from my students as well. It really was something very special.

Now we’re closing in on the final weeks of “Living The Dreams,” and I thought I’d reprint the research assignment from the Stranded course. Some of it still seems very fresh to me, and wholly applicable to the kind of research I continue to urge students to do. It’s written Campbell/Kemp because I wrote the lion’s share of it. (Yes, we also had a Lennon-McCartney thing in our heads, or at least I did.) Strangely, the Wikipedia article on research is also quite good, and very well aligned with what Bill and I were trying to do. I’d not looked it up before tonight. Wikipedia continues to instruct and delight.

But back to Stranded. Here’s the assignment. Perhaps it will be useful. To Bill Kemp, my deepest gratitude. I remember our work together with deep satisfaction, even joy. You’re one of a kind.

ENGL 101 Assignment Three: The Research Paper–Campbell/Kemp

Assignment two was about personal engagement in the context of experience. Assignment three is about personal engagement in the context of information and the ideas it contains and inspires. That is, the “research paper” is not a simple “research report”–“What I Learned About Nine Inch Nails.” Instead, like Ellen Willis and Jim Miller and (with reservations) John Rockwell and in fact most of the authors in Stranded, you should incorporate background information and other people’s commentary into your own exploration of the music you’ve chosen to write about.

Research isn’t merely finding a few facts and quotations to back up ideas you’ve already developed. Research is listening to other people, learning from them, and using their ideas to sharpen your own. Think of your sources not as dictionaries or encyclopedias but as places where you can hear a conversation and prepare yourself to join in. Each of your sources, if it’s any good at all, represents a human being who’s done something very like the work you’re now doing. They offer you the results of their work: information, ideas, conclusions. You take what they’ve done and use it to shape, support, and interact with your own ideas and conclusions. Thus the conversation carries on, and we’re all the richer for it.

What is an idea? An idea is a “take” on something. An idea is a frame you generate out of your knowledge and experience (a distinction without a difference) that you use to make a new picture out of something you’ve seen before. Where do ideas come from? They can appear out of the aether, popping into your head–but we can’t always afford to wait for such happy moments. Remember that “chance favors the prepared mind.” Everything is potentially a frame, a source for frames, an idea waiting for YOU to frame it so. Stranded is full of ideas and therefore full of frames. So is every other book worth reading. And if you don’t find a particular frame within someone else’s work, you can certainly learn framing strategies (that is, idea-generating strategies) from other writers. That’s the big reason we read: to find ideas and the story of how our writers discovered them.

Your paper should use the MLA (Modern Language Association) style of documentation, which you may find in The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers. Note that MLA now has guidelines for citing online and Internet sources. Also note that Simpson Library has very informative links on their pages, including the essential sections on how to evaluate online sources. Point your browsers to library.mwc.edu/engines.html and take a look at what our wonderful librarians have assembled for you.

Remember: when in doubt about how or where to find sources, ask the reference librarian. When in doubt about how or whether to cite a source, ask your professor. Other guidelines:

You should have at least six separate sources on your Works Cited page.

At least one of these sources should be a book: either a monograph or a collection of essays. At least four of these sources MUST be print sources or online versions of print sources.

You must use at least two Stranded essays in some way. They do not count toward the “six source” total, though they should be cited on the Works Cited page.

THE WISDOM SECTION

Instructions: When you hand in your final draft, hand in this assignment sheet as well. On it, indicate which two of the “bits of wisdom” below you found most helpful, and rank them. Below this section, add at least one bit of wisdom you’d like to pass on to next term’s students.

BITS OF WISDOM FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT:

1. You have a right to be in this conversation. You are a scholar.

2. Tell us what you think, not just what you found.

3. Research is a way to explore your own emotions intelligently, and perhaps to find a friend.

4. It isn’t true just because it’s in print.

5. When in doubt, cite.

6. “A thing is psychedelic if it changes when you look at it closely”–Robyn Hitchcock.

J. C. R. Icarus: Nugget for “Man-Computer Symbiosis”

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Gardo

Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continuously. Perhaps the brain, like the heart, must devote most of its time to rest between beats. But I doubt that this is true. I hope it is not, because [interactive computers] can give us our first look at unfettered thought.
J. C. R. Licklider, “Computers in the University,” in Computers and the World of the Future (1962)

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto”

“I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”
Stanley Kubrick

Yes, it’s all about human intellect, that strange product of a decisive moment in our evolution in which we got just enough working memory to begin to generate counterfactuals, to imagine that things could be different, and then to invent symbols–language, of course, but also art, math, music–to be able to share those imaginings with each other. We even came up with a word for the concept of “symbol” itself, a way of talking about how we were thinking, and thus generated what Douglas Hofstadter calls “an infinitely extensible symbol set.” As we shared our symbols, we began to be intentional about what we could build together, and what might persist beyond our own deaths.

So much extraordinary capacity, and we take most of it for granted.

And now come computers, with the promise of helping us generate, store, retrieve, share, and more fully understand the rich symbols that form the record of our species.

In “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” Licklider talks about all of this symbol-use in pretty straightforward ways. The essay reads very much like a project outline, at times almost bureaucratically so. There’s the research (on himself), the conclusion, and thus the problem description. There’s the itemized analysis of what will be needed to realize the vision of intellectual augmentation he imagines. By the end of the essay, he’s outlined all the engineering and seems well on his way to putting a budget together. I’ve always found the end very abrupt, oddly so, given the highly metaphorical way the essay begins. It’s very different from Vannevar Bush’s poignant, almost plaintive ending to “As We May Think.”

The passage I’ve chosen exhibits both the project-oriented Licklider (he preferred to go by “Lick”) and the dreamer Lick. It’s interesting to see how they don’t quite go together:

In short, it seems worthwhile to avoid argument with (other) enthusiasts for artificial intelligence by conceding dominance in the distant future of cerebration to machines alone. There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association. A multidisciplinary study group, examining future research and development problems of the Air Force, estimated that it would be 1980 before developments in artificial intelligence make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance. That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and 15 years to use it. The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.

Lick simply assumes that AI will be developed, and that when it is developed, “dominance” in “cerebration” (meaning “thought,” I believe) will belong to “machines alone.” We will invent our own obsolescence. Yet the 15, or 10, or 500 years during which we invent our obsolescence “should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.” The note of excitement is familiar and thrilling. And we are living in that time as I type these words on my computer’s keyboard, which makes Lick’s pronouncement doubly thrilling.

Yet I hesitate to say with Lick, “I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.” Moreover, I don’t think he’s being very careful with his own argument. In the essay, he distinguishes “formulated” thinking from “formulative” thinking. The latter is more about problem-finding, about using the algorithmic powers of the computer in concert with the goal-setting and meaning-making activity of the human being to refine the human’s questions and enrich the scale and depth of the human’s powers of imagination and analysis. Does Lick believe that computers will eventually become superior meaning-makers? (Does the Netflix recommendation engine create meaning, or simply reveal it?) Does Lick believe that computers will identify problems for us to work on, optimizing the work for our messy associative brains? Does he believe that creativity itself will take on a new meaning independent of human input or judgment? Hard to say. I don’t think he’s consistent in the essay. And in truth, as John Markoff notes in What The Dormouse Said, the split between the AI researchers and those who, like Doug Engelbart, imagined that computers would augment human intellect, not replace it, was eventually unbridgeable.

And yet the dreams were similar, which brings me back to the epigraphs. From cave paintings to epic poetry, there’s strong evidence that ever since human beings became symbol users and symbol sharers (really two aspects of the same thing), we have found our minds to be spooky, paradoxical, oddly free, and strangely limited. And in the midst of that feeling, we aspire to greater heights of ingenuity and invention. It is our very minds that drive us to enlarge our minds, since somewhere in our minds we find we have not reached the end of what we can imagine grasping.

That’s a strange thought, a troubling thought, an exhilarating thought. Many cautionary tales have sprung up around this thought. Many dreams have emerged from it as well. Given the nature of our ingenuity, I’m not sure we have much hope of stalling this thought.

Might as well see what we can build with it.

As Pete Townshend once sang, “No easy way to be free.”

Letter to a learner

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Gardo

Our VCU summer cMOOC, “Living the Dreams: Digital Investigation and Unfettered Minds,” has finished its first week. 12.5% of the experience is behind us in time (though not in memory and certainly not on the Web). I’ve already learned a great deal from all aspects of the experience and, more importantly, from all the people who have worked and are working to make this experience go. Chief among these people are those students who have committed time and thoughtful energy to the work they’re doing already. I’ve seen some extraordinary work, much of it splendidly blurring the line between creativity and analysis in ways that should remind us that any such lines are provisional at best and damaging at worst. The work these students have contributed fascinates me and encourages me. I am grateful.

At the same time, there are the inevitable frustrations that come with learning experiences that differ from the norm, as this one most certainly does. it’s understandable (if regrettable) that there will always be some frustration when one wants a learning experience that’s clear, tightly scripted, and doesn’t require consistent participation. Many college courses are like this. Such experiences, even when the work is difficult, are easily managed and can be compartmentalized, even walled off, from the rest of one’s life. There are at least three principal problems with such transactional designs:

1. The learning typically doesn’t persist beyond the final exam, which itself is often little more than cramming and regurgitating.

2. The learning typically doesn’t transfer well into other domains, As a result, there are few connections and fewer insights generated in other learning situations. The learning isn’t made “strong,” to quote Richard Feynman, who used to be very puzzled when his fellow students at MIT couldn’t see that, say, a particular chemistry problem and a particular biology problem were really two versions of the same set of concepts and questions.

3. Related to both of the above, the compartmentalized learning design (as opposed to a connected learning design) typically does not rely on, or encourage, meaning-making, Without meaning-making, the human significance of an activity dwindles to nearly zero, or perhaps to zero (I try not to speak in dogmatic absolutes, but in my heart I believe “zero” is correct).

The idea of “connected” learning as opposed to “compartmentalized” learning has been on my mind a great deal lately, prompted in particular by a special issue of The International Journal of Learning and Media. I’ve written about this issue before, but the abstract from one article in particular keeps coming back like a haunting melody, or perhaps a trumpet call to action:

What Is Connected Learning and How to Research It?

Kristiina Kumpulainen
University of Helsinki kristiina.kumpulainen@helsinki.fi
Julian Sefton-Green
London School of Economics and Political Science julian@julianseftongreen.net

Efforts to understand the dynamic processes of learning situated across space and time, beyond the here and now, are presently challenging traditional definitions of learning and education. How can we conceptualize learning in a way that is able to respond to and explain the increasing complexity, connectivity, and velocity of our times? We elaborate on the notion of “connected learning” as a conceptual heuristic that has recently received recognition as a potential lens and a model through which to research and promote learning as a holistic experience that stretches beyond formal and informal communities. We reflect on the methodological challenges of describing, defining, and analyzing connected learning across young peoples’ everyday “learning lives” from the sociocultural and dialogic perspectives. We discuss such key notions for connected learning as understanding, tracking, and tracing learners; chronotopes; boundary crossing; intertextuality; and learning lives.

(I’ll put a marker here to say that I’ve gone back to my Bakhtin to investigate the connection with chronotopes, “time-space” as Bakhtin calls it, and the matter merits much further investigation.)

The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular have given us an unprecedented opportunity to experience, and to study and learn from, the “dynamic processes of learning.” At this stage of my career, I find myself pursuing these goals with greater energy and focus in all my work. I even find that my specialization as a scholar of verbal art, especially that of poetry, relates strongly to efforts to understand these dynamic processes. While these connections and the very idea of connected learning itself are exhilarating, they’re exhausting too, because they require a lot of work to make them intelligible, and a lot of persuasion to encourage people to dive into the experience and make something of it themselves. There’s a lot of apparently successful compartmentalized schooling going on, and while I find it deeply frustrating and more of a tragic failure of the human imagination than anything at all successful, it is easily managed and it is familiar. It can also narcotize both teacher and student in ways I find very troubling, though I do not doubt that in most instances everyone is trying to do the right thing.

Which brings me back to “Living the Dreams” and the cMOOC learning experience this summer. After one week, it’s becoming clear to everyone that this is a very unusual course. It’s taking a great deal of time and energy to attend to the network that’s sprung into being, to learn from and within that network, and to reassure ourselves that something extraordinary is possible here (indeed, is already happening) that could transform the way we think about research, research writing, and the power of an Engelbartian intellect augmentations, a true dynamic knowledge ecosystem (DKE), a networked improvement community (NIC). One student–to judge by the writing, a very fine student indeed–communicated her frustrations in an honest, searching, and self-aware fashion that I found rather inspiring, especially as she continued to interact with me and her section’s professor over the course of a comment string. I won’t link to that post directly, as I don’t want to try to single her out; I’m sure she speaks for many students. But I did want to share the comment I just left as I tried to respond to her honest and thoughtful struggles with a course built on “social media” (are there other kinds of media?) that’s a pilot course (meaning that it’s a work in progress itself) and that looks and feels so very different from any course she’s taken before. I salute her because she’s truly trying to make something out of what she’s experiencing. And I dedicate this post to her.

Here is the comment I just left. It’s a follow-up to an earlier comment from me, so I’l start with a bit of her reply for context. You should know that she’s a science student, and that in an earlier comment she was wondering about what this learning experience had to do with preparing her for scientific research. The words in italics are hers.

Thank you, Dr. C…. I think I just need some time to adjust to this unusual course structure. However, as this is a pilot class, I really do feel that it may be useful to some students if there were some consolidation on the UNIV website. Perhaps that will also just take some getting used to though.

You’re very welcome! Coordinating the information is always a challenge when there’s an emphasis on variety and yet also on connection. Most face-to-face courses de-emphasize both because of limitations that exist in the physical world (though there are great things in the physical world too, certainly!). Online kinds of interaction present new possibilities. Some thinkers (including many scientists) believe online communication represents a new stage in human biocultural evolution, one comparable to the invention of writing itself. The Web itself was invented to improve research by enabling scientists to be in better communication, which also means to be able to build and work together better. It’s all about communication in the end. Once human beings got language, everything changed.

I’m just now watching a talk Martin Hawksey recommended to us on the Twitter stream: https://twitter.com/mhawksey/status/477781704762216448 (each new tweet is a web page–you can get the URL as I did above by clicking on the date or the “hours ago” numeral–I find this v interesting). I immediately thought of you and your interest in science. I also thought you might enjoy a book by a physicist named Michael Nielsen called “Reinventing Discovery: The Rise of Networked Science.” Science is all about networks. And social media are about much more than Facebook “like”s (though these too can be interesting).

Anyway, sorry to ramble on–but obviously your thoughtful engagement with some core issues has continued to elicit thought in me, so thanks for that. I’m also glad to see you’ve been in touch with [your section professor]. I think you’ll find [the professor] quite an engaging and provocative thinker.

Sincerely, and with best wishes,
Dr. C.

Perhaps these thoughts will be helpful to others as well.

Oh, and here’s the splendid video Martin recommended. Many thanks to him for the recommendation as well as for all the crucial work he’s doing to contribute to the study and design of connected learning. Salute!

Gardner Writes

Aut Inveniam, Aut Faciam

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