If the exhibit at Baylor’s Mayborn Museum had it right, none of Leonardo’s flying machines actually worked. The notebooks in which he sketched them were untidy, disorganized to the point of apparent recklessness. Sometimes he was so far off in terms of scale or proportion that one has to wonder what he was thinking. To cite but one example: how could a parachute too heavy to carry up a hill ever be tested?

Yet Leonard’s breathtaking powers of invention and visual expression continue to inspire us. Such powers set the standard. In a way, they guarantee their own success, if not in their time, then certainly in the time that follows. If we take the long view, Leonardo’s inventions did in fact work. All of his flying machines flew. His vision would not let us be satisfied with anything less. We created to the standards he helped to set, and that’s one of the big reasons we remember him with gratitude, though I’m confident he was a pain in the neck to be around most of the time. Never content, always off in another galaxy, never facing facts.

If one thinks of Leonardo’s vision as a kind of song, a music that challenges us to shed our mannered attention to the grinding and broken processes of our wonderless calculations, it is a music that may well shake us out of our grim and measured comfort zones.

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,
It seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover’s vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.

In “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” Yeats reflects on the hazards of vision. Sentimental? Only if the emotion is out of proportion to its object. And who is to make such a judgment? Is a cabinet of wonders or a rag doll a waste of time? Are all matters of consequence obviously so?

You see where this is going. Stubborn visionary optimism can seem pretty naive, even dangerously so. Perhaps it is both naive and dangerous, some of the time. But I will say that the better part of our highest accomplishments as a species has been driven by stubborn visionary optimism, insistent hopefulness of Engelbartian proportions. Half measures and incrementalism just don’t seem to get us very far, certainly not when it comes to education. The “grammar of school” is simply too vigorous and resilient.

What am I advocating? Nothing in particular beyond  a commitment to the highest hopes and grandest ambitions. Within my lifetime I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe: if not quite C-Beams glittering off the Tannhauser Gate, then certainly wonders on a scale nearly as large. I type these words and send them to you in a blog-shaped bottle upon a sea of articulate connections that depends on daily miracles born of technological innovation. Many of those miracles need tending. Probably not all of them are sustainable, at least not in their present form. But I am grateful to live among them now and to be part of the effort to understand and use them in the central activity of any civilization: the transmission of culture, and the tools to modify that culture and innovate within it, through education.

Whatever we call this age we live in–the information age, the computer age, the network age–I think we do live in a great age, with the chance to be part of a world-changing moment. We may be forced in the circumstances of our various lives to work on smaller scales, but even a modest contribution may change the world if one is inspired by the vision of that possibility.

Sometimes in the middle of reading Paradise Lost or The Faerie Queene, or after we’ve watched Citizen Kane or Fast, Cheap & Out of Control together, my students will turn to me and voice their incredulity that a human being actually made that thing, imagined it and realized it in conversation and collaboration with others, to be sure, but nevertheless in a way that only they could do, and that no one else would have dared. Sometimes, overcome with wonder myself at the vast accomplishment of these artists, I can do little more than shake my head and say, slowly, “You know, there are extraordinary people on this planet. You’ve just seen something of what our species at its best can do.” And though I know these marvelous information and communication technologies we live with every day are fraught sixteen ways from Sunday, I believe they are also a kind of poem we have written together, a film we have made together, a medium that has enabled what Clay Shirky identifies as “the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race” (Here Comes Everybody). That increase happened because we wanted it to, because we have not yet found the boundaries of our ambitions for connection and expression. I have high hopes for the results of this increase in expressive capability, not because I am a techno-utopian (or any kind of utopian, for that matter), but because of what I have learned and will continue to teach of the great expressive accomplishments, in every discipline and domain, of humanity’s history.

I believe I am called to such hopefulness, though there are many days that call sounds faint or ridiculous. You may have a word other than “vocation” for your sense of your own answerability to this moment. Either way, a great age beckons, and I’m glad we can answer together.

Steve over at Pedablogy has an insightful post about note-taking, an activity that I find crucial for my own cognitive focus and ordering when I’m at any kind of presentation. Lately I’ve found that tweeting is a great form of social note-taking, as I can get back my notes *just from me* but at the same time enjoy the benefit of a kind of more-or-less synchronous conversation about the notes as I take them. I’ve even gotten great feedback about the clarity of my attention and articularion from the remarks of my Twitterfriends who are not present at the event. It’s an interesting exercise, like trying to describe a sight to someone over the telephone (that is, before we had the ability to just take a picture and send it along–which frankly, I prefer, even though I love the verbal challenge).

So given that experience, given what Steve says, given the Twitter experiment done by the history prof. at UT-Dallas, and given my own stubborn insistence on varieties and uses of collective and individual intelligence, I came up with an idea that I can’t quite execute, at least not the way I’d hoped. Perhaps you can help, dear reader.

My vision is to make a way for real time notes, observations, questions etc. to be posted to Twitter, and then to flow from Twitter (via a hashtag feed) into a wiki, automagically, and then be groomed, ordered, shaped, and begun to be answered by students in the class after the class is over. They’d probably be assigned as “wiki managers” or whatever on a rotating basis, but perhaps not. Back back back in the day, I was told that note-taking was the first step and note-revising was the second and even more important step, for there the mind began the process of review, consolidation, assimilation, etc. So my notion is that students will take notes individually and revise notes collaboratively. Not a new vision, really, but the cool part for me is having the aggregation take place more-or-less automagically as a demonstration of the resource we’re all building together whether or not we realize it. I’m convinced that Bruner’s “consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity” depends first and perhaps foremost on consciousness-raising about the fact that we are acting in a communal mental fashion at the same time we’re doing our individual cognitive projects. The automagic part may not work. We may have to rely on copy-and-paste. But it would be cool to do it automagically as a kind of object lesson in the one-and-the-many idea that I’m trying to convey.

Right now I’m stuck with embedded RSS readers within wikis. The readers will bring the Twitter stream in automagically but a) not display all the stream at once (RSS readers typically limit the number of entries shown, for good reasons of course) and b) not embed the Twitter stream within the wiki as clear text–i.e., not write to the wiki. What I’m imagining may well be impossible. My analogy is FeedWordPress and other republishing affordances that will aggregate and republish content. I do understand that writing to a wiki is a bit different–or is it? In any event, I’d be grateful for any leads, ideas, or cautionary advice. The one lead I’ve not run down yet is something with SimplePie writing to a MediaWiki instance. That one I’ll probably investigate this weekend, unless someone here tells me not to bother trying.

EDIT: It occurs to me that an open MediaWiki site can easily be written to by spammers, as I know to my sorrow. I wonder if there’s a way to use this openness for my own purposes–while of course I’ll need to be vigilant about the spam as well….

Hillary Blakeley, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience and the Academy for Teaching and Learning‘s first Graduate Fellow, has launched an interesting series of posts over at Blogging on the Brain. She’s working through the book pictured above, selecting thinkers she’d like to respond to, and blogging about them from her own experience as a student, a teacher, and a brain scientist. Think of it as a summer reading project we can all participate in, with Hillary framing the issues to spark the conversation. By the end of the project, which may well continue through the fall, Hillary’s posts will also be a valuable resource for the ATL and for anyone interested in teaching and learning.

Feel free to comment, or to link to Hillary’s posts in true distributed-conversation style, or to do both. If you’d like to get a copy of the book to read along, so much the better. There’s even a Kindle edition available if that’s your platform of choice.

Five years ago today I posted my first entry to this space. About a half-hour later I posted a second time. Testing one, two … then a day of silence. The following Monday I posted something a bit more substantive. And so it began.

At that point I’d been in my new role as Mary Washington College’s (we weren’t a university quite yet) Assistant Vice-President for Teaching and Learning Technologies for about a year.  Such a year it was! So many firsts: my first teaching & learning technologies conference (AAC&U) and my first visit to Cambridge and the Hotel @ MIT, my first EDUCAUSE conference (in 2003), my first National Learning Infrastructure Initiative annual meeting (the NLII later became the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative).   My first risky project (turned up to 11 by my boss, Chip German): turn a biology lab full of desktop-computers-on-wheels into a sleek, wireless learning environment with a tablet PC at every station.  My first Faculty Academy as leader of DTLT and chair of the MWC Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable.  For our keynote speaker, I recruited Dennis Trinkle, whose presentation with his DePauw cohort at EDUCAUSE 2003 (my first EDUCAUSE conference) had knocked me out.

The year felt very full to me. There had been many events, a bit of traveling, and an entire new way of life within the academy to get adjusted to. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, many of the new people I met that first year would be crucial for my professional and personal development: Vicki Suter, Cyprien Lomas, Dennis Trinkle, Brian Lamb, Bryan Alexander, to name only a few. Several colleagues I’d known over several years–some of them very well–would assume new importance in my life and work. For the first time I was managing a staff–not as well as I’d have liked, but one has to start somewhere–and attending administrative meetings on both the Academic Affairs and Information Technologies sides (a combination that would turn out to be of critical importance).

And in that first year, I began to learn what it was like to work for Chip German. That’s worth a blog post or ten all by itself. Suffice it to say that Chip augmented every single moment of personal or professional development in that year for me, and catalyzed most of them himself. We fell into the habit of talking for two or three hours most every Friday afternoon. Looking back, I’m astonished at the time and energy–and sheer patience–Chip invested in me. I knew I was green as grass, but Chip gave me the great gift of never making me feel that way. I was quaking in my boots many days in that new job, but never once did I feel that anxiety in his presence or as a result of any communication from him. I’m still not quite sure how he does that, but I can see how very important it was for me, especially that first year, when the big decision points were still beyond my ken.

Then came the real turning point.

Chip and I took a road trip to William and Mary to meet with another of my future mentors, Gene Roche, to discuss W&M’s recent move to Blackboard “Enterprise.” At the close of several hours’ conversation, Gene casually mentioned his experiments in a hosted web space, including a blog he’d just begun to keep. As I recall, the first entries had to do with W&M’s new laptop project. Gene was writing about his plans to go laptop-only himself in his daily work, and thus “eat his own dog food.” On the return trip to Fredericksburg, Chip and I talked about Gene’s blogging and about the hosted webspace. I asked Chip if I might purchase hosted space for each of my DTLT staffers and ask them to begin blogging. He readily agreed, turning it all up to 11 as is his wont …

… and that was that. I can’t remember for sure, but I think the trip was on a Friday, and that evening I signed up for my $5 a month hosted space. The next day, having installed WordPress by means of Fantastico, I named my blog (I knew right away it had to be “Gardner Writes”) and  published my first two blog posts. And here I am, five years later. Still at it, through fits and starts, through fat and lean, through exuberant and strained. Still in awe, really, of how this distributed conversation can work, and how it has worked in my own experience.

On this anniversary, then, 584 posts later, I thank all of you (whoever and however many you are) for following along, for commenting, for linking, for nurturing this space with me over these many years. Special thanks to those of you who blog: thanks for keeping at it, thanks for risking it, thanks for giving me something to link to, something to learn from, something to emulate, something to aspire to. Blogging lives. I take that lesson to heart and will do my best in the next five years to keep “Gardner Writes” full and frequent (and I’m sorry I’ve not always hit that mark this year).

By 2014, when we all have our lifestreams published, syndicated, and subscribed to by family, friends, and followers near and far, I’ll still have one of those lifestreams labeled “blog,” that silly-sounding word for a rich and rewarding medium that opened a new world to me in the middle of my life’s journey.

My colleague Carl Flynn forwarded me a link yesterday to a YouTube video documenting Professor Monica Rankin’s use of Twitter in her history class at the University of Texas-Dallas. (Yes, he used Twitter to do it–all about the recursion, folks.) I retweeted the link, and Derek Bruff at Vanderbilt sent me a link to his very thoughtful and extensive analysis on his blog. It’s worth considering just that layer of social-network interaction, which is still news to many people in higher education and which is also a great answer to the question of “why should I invest time in social media?” Even though I’ve been in this space for many years now–my fifth-year blogging anniversary is coming up on June 27–I still marvel at the ease and power of the social life of shared experience, let alone information, that this platform enables.

But back to “The Twitter Experiment,” which you can view here.

In addition to the many fine thoughts and questions Derek offers in his comprehensive analysis, two things stand out to me.  One is the way the work of the TA is positioned. As Derek notes, the TA really does become part of the instructional team. In fact, I’d say she’s almost a “research assistant” and “teaching assistant” at the same time, with the object of her research being the class itself. I can’t help thinking such an arrangement makes for an excellent apprenticeship in mindful teaching and the possibilities of research on classroom practice (aka “the scholarship of teaching and learning”). Another standout for me is the YouTube video itself, especially when it’s considered as an interdisciplinary project. As the videographer (Kim Smith, aka “kesmit3”) writes in the YouTube sidebar and in her blog post about the project:

She [Professor Rankin] collaborated with the UT Dallas, Arts and Technology – Emerging Media and Communications (EMAC) http://www.emac.utdallas.edu faculty and as a Graduate student in EMAC I assisted her in her experiment.

I documented the experiment for a digital video class with Professor Dean Terry, @therefore, and assisted Dr. Rankin in the experiment as a part of my collaboration and content creation course with Dan Langendor, @dlangendorf.

How do I cross domains with thee? Let me count the ways. The videographer collaborated with both the TA and with Dr. Rankin. Indeed, I’d say the videographer herself became a kind of TA for the course. The collaboration was part of her work for yet another course on “collaboration and content creation.” The documentation of the experiment was part of yet another course, this one in digital video. And these cross-pollinations were repeated at the professor’s level, too, as Dr. Rankin worked with experts in the Emerging Media and Communication faculty at her university to understand the potential for Twitter and to shape the experience for her students. Apparently the usual wrangling points of FTEs and who-gets-credit-for-what were resolved early on. Kudos.

And now the potential collaboration is taken to an even higher level, as the documentation is on the open web, on the most widely used platform for video, freely available for anyone wanting to understand, emulate, tweak, mashup, or otherwise adapt these techniques and ideas. Oh, and the video’s been viewed over 17,000 times since it was uploaded in early May.

Obviously, Michael Wesch’s example has been very instructive along these lines.  I’d like to see even more of these five-minute videos relating innovative practices using social media in the classroom (and in the informal learning outside of it). Perhaps these little videos could become the “learning objects” we’ve been waiting for: not so much reusable modules of course content as cogent expositions of provocative, innovative practices in teaching and learning. No matter what the public effects, however, I’d argue that the project has catalyzed and demonstrated exactly the kind of domain-crossing, interdisciplinary co-creations our schools need to invent, model, and propagate among our faculties, staffs, and students. I hope the Twitter Experiment goes viral–indeed, it already has in my own Personal Learning Network. But what I really hope will go viral is this kind of academic creativity and partnership. We’re only scratching the surface of the “uni” in “university.” This project offers us a glimpse of a way forward, inspired by some of the powerful ways in which new media can help form and spread communities of practice.

Now, what if a university’s official website, often a project centered on “branding” and and search-engine-optimization, were to be reimagined as a site for information sharing and social mediation? There’s a great example of just such a project going on right now, and I’ll be blogging it very soon. Stay tuned.

EDIT: Blog comments can be very rich, and some great stuff can emerge in a long thread without being very visible or findable. On Kim Smith’s blog post,  all the way at the end of the comments (so far),  Dr. Monica Rankin links to her full post-course analysis of the experiment. Great reading, and another great example of the way these social media work recursively: publish, subscribe, get responses, and let the responses elicit even more material. As I’ve said before, it’s very much like a library in a time-lapse photograph, all the books calling forth other books in response….

It’s also interesting, for me at least, that I’m about 22 days behind on this. Even when these experiments are reported widely, it takes a whole network of social media channels to keep the word going out. There’s no old news here, just network effects and continuing relevance.

Now comes the valedictory moment, the climax and the moment I’ve been dreading, too. I’m lousy at goodbyes. I feel the dark pull of leavetaking long before I rationally should. The “sense of an ending,” as Frank Kermode argues, can lend shape and meaning to the arc of a narrative. For me, that’s certainly part of the experience. But the sense of an ending also makes me mournful, both because it means saying goodbye to some dear, inspiring friends, and because I can’t help thinking that another week, another month, another year together could provide the breakthroughs we all seek. The sense of expectancy, of sheer possibility generated at a meeting like this make me so hopeful that we can be a force for positive change, that we can reach the transformative moment. That we can bootstrap ourselves into a better world.

Larry’s taking his leave by talking about what inspires us, what makes us proud. He’s getting ready to present NMC’s annual Centers of Excellence awards to three highly deserving schools. Just ahead of me on a darkened stage left sits Doug Engelbart, a thinker and human being whose vision has shaped more of our information age than any other single person’s. There sits a man who has inspired me as much as John Milton has. (That’s saying something–I call my friends to bear me witness.) Doug is watching full-screen, full-motion video projected on a large central screen. The man who in 1968 sat on a stage and projected the images of his vision and his team’s accomplishments–and in the words of one observer “dealt lightning with both hands”—is watching a video of Abiliene Christian University’s iPhone mobile learning project.

In 1962, Doug Engelbart, the father of interactive computing, published a seminal essay called “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The essay impressed one J.C.R. Licklider, the father of the Internet, who set Doug up with a research lab that would help bring the information age into being. Today, forty-seven years later, Doug listens as the team from Abilene Christian University talks about students having computers in their pockets that connect them to a universe of invention, innovation, and conversation, a universe that manifests the collective intelligence he’s devoted his life to describing and encouraging and empowering. My heart is full beyond the telling. The question he asked all those years ago at the Mother of All Demos is being answered. We’re answering it. What value could we derive in partnership with a computer that is always on, always connected to information, always connecting us to each other?

Doug, this is the value we can derive. This is the value you have empowered us to imagine and recognize. This is the value your life and work embody for our world. I am grateful beyond measure.

Now the Berkeley Center for Digital Storytelling is honored for helping us “understand what it means to be human,” in Larry Johnson’s apt words. The CDS’s work has inspired people around the world to share their stories and “lend their minds out to help each other,” as the poet Robert Browning wrote. We’re hearing one of those storytellers right now. She’s musing aloud about a time and place “where fists of fear don’t fly”–voices imagining and yearning for that better world. The voices and the images that illuminate their breath. Listening deeply and speaking our stories. Stories that unite us even as they portray the bleak and destructive differences that divide us–the fists of fear that do fly, that insist only a few voices can speak and only a few should be heard.

But there are alternatives. Instead of shouting and creating divisions, we share ourselves into being. With technologies–interventions in the natural and cultural world–that belong to us. “It’s not like talking about it–it’s like going into it.” See E.P. Thompson on the seven-year arc of an idea–an inspiration for Joe Lambert. Joe notes that in many ways YouTube is the triumph of digital storytelling, so now we must renew our efforts and refocus our attention to find even more innovative ways to inject meaning into our stories.

I thought the emotions were running high before. What did I know? These stories wring the heart and lift up the soul.

“Inside each one of our hearts is a life-changing narrative…. We have a responsibility for getting those stories out of ourselves and into the world.” Joe Lambert, Executive Director, Center for Digital Storytelling, Berkeley University.

And still Doug looks on, taking it in, watching and listening to the stories of a world in which we still try to bootstrap ourselves into community and innovation. Stories of a world he helped us create, and inspires us to re-create, co-create.

Now the Open University of Catalonia, the first institution outside North America to receive a “Center of Excellence” award, and a testimony to the growing global context in which the NMC does its work. (To take but one example: the Horizon Project–click here for the 2009 report, and please comment–continues to be shared with the world, and has been translated into Spanish and now Catalan.) The UOC has 47,000 students around the world. Their openness has extended over their 15-year life, from open to students to open to the world. “Our difference is the name … we are open to develop, to create content, and we are open to collaborate,” says the director of their Learning Technologies Center. Again I am struck by how Doug’s pioneering work in the augmentation of human intellect by means of collective intelligence and bootstrapping methodologies has blossomed in extraordinary, often unexpected ways.

As we continue, quite rightly, to identify and even to rail against what’s breaking and broken in our schools, it is good also to see and remember what school at its best can be, and is: a means of augmenting human intellect, a place for bootstrapping, a place for hearts and minds to work and play together. School’s not the only place that happens. But it can happen there, and I want to help make it happen there–to preserve the fragile magic that rests upon a flawed but vital infrastructure.

Now Larry Johnson has begun the tribute to Doug Engelbart. His testimony moves me deeply. He plays excerpts from a videotaped interview he did with Doug about ten years ago. As always, the clarity and poetry of Doug’s vision take my breath away.

I’ve got to stop typing now.

The rest here is from memory, as I was too overcome with emotion on that morning to write another word as the tributes rang out.

Lev Gonick, VP for Information Technology Services at Case Western Reserve University, and Kristina Woolsey, NMC Fellow and head of Woolsey & Associates, lead Doug onto the stage. The room is instantly on its feet, applauding and cheering. How many times does one get to thank, face to face, the inventor and visionary who has made a new vocation possible? For the work we do is a vocation, a calling, and we hear the voice of that calling through the stubborn insistence of this man’s efforts.

Doug was called many names during his years leading the Augmentation Research Center. Some were flattering, but many were not. He was thought by many to be (not to put too fine a point upon it) off his rocker. One early colleague warned him quite explicitly not to share his vision with anyone else lest he be fired or completely marginalized. This we know from the awed testimony of his colleagues’ speeches at last December’s celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Mother of All Demos. Those colleagues testified to the awe they continue to feel of Doug and his achievements. They are awed by Doug’s persistence, awed by how wrong his critics were, awed to know and to have worked with someone who despite “the loneliness of the long-distance thinker,” as Howard Rheingold so aptly put it in Tools for Thought, fought through the isolation and misunderstanding and, yes, at times even antagonism and hostility, to keep his vision alive and aloft.

The ovation continues as Lev and Kristina and Doug settle into their chairs at center stage. Finally, the applause subsides, and Lev and Kristina begin to speak. They speak of Doug’s accomplishments. They recall what it was like to discover Doug’s writings, many years into their own careers, and to read their futures in the work of his heart, hands, and mind. Lev and Kristina help us understand the scale and significance of Doug’s vision. They look at him with affection, with respect. With wonder.

Several times Doug covers his face in genuine humility. Can he be the person they’re describing? Certainly he did not do his work alone. But of all the great seers and doers of the nascent information age, Doug’s achievement is the most singular, the most to be driven by a single imagination. And yet his imagination was never the point. Always, the goal was to enable us to identify, harness, and raise our collective IQ. The idea was to augment human intellects one by one, but by means of a fine tracing of mental and spiritual connections from which would emerge a true “capability infrastructure” to prepare us for the dangers, questions, and opportunities we would encounter as civilization continues to develop.

Doug thought at scale. He understood that a car is not simply a faster tricycle. He had faith that an augmented intellect, joined to millions of other augmented intellects, could clarify individual thought even as it empowered vast new modes of thinking, new modes of complex understanding that could grasp intricately meaningful symbols as quickly and comprehensively as we can recognize a loved one’s face. For Doug, computers are the tools we have invented in our quest for a new language, even a meta-language. A manner of speaking that can move us through the enmiring complexities of our shared lives and dreams, and thus help us to use those complex lives and dreams wisely instead of being their puppets or victims.

Lev has spoken; Kristina has spoken. Now it’s Doug’s turn.

Doug accepts his NMC Fellows Award with these words:

Well this is, you know, a trite thing to say, “I’m overwhelmed,” but I sit here just feeling overwhelmed. You know, I wasn’t doing all of those things in order to sit here and get something like this. It’s been so many years … and I still have dreams about how the world could be … anyway, I appreciate this very much, so thank you, thank you.

Afterward, these photographs:

The four NMC Fellows: (l-r) Ted Kahn, Doug Engelbart, Kristina Woolsey, Carl Berger.

Christina Engelbart, Director of the Doug Engelbart Institute, and her father, Doug Engelbart

A family triumph