There’s a splendid article by James Parker in The Atlantic: “End Meeting For All.” I hope it’s not behind a paywall. If it is, I’m sorry, but please do consider subscribing to The Atlantic, the journalistic and essayistic source that’s meant more to me during this pandemic than any other periodical (it’s hard to know what to call anything anymore).

Beginnings are important, and this one goes bang like a Christmas cracker:

Zoom, for most of us, arrived last year. And didn’t it feel right on time? Eerily on the button. As if the nine-foot locusts that run the universe, in a spasm of insect whimsy, had given us simultaneously a deadly, denormalizing virus and a new medium of human communication in which to freak out about it.

The rest of the article is even better.

Parker writes that there’s poetry in Zoom. Oh yes indeed there is. It’s my Magic School Bus. It’s my inner world, my radio studio, my theatre of the mind, the place where I can be Captain Trips and my students can too (and regularly are, in the chat).

I love it because I don’t have to use it very often to do things I really didn’t enjoy much in the before times, like meetings I wished would end very soon already. Instead, Zoom for me becomes a distillation of the inner life, made visible, brought forward into a participatory space. I know I’m lucky in this regard.

I invested in a ring light, a good webcam, a new audio interface, a very modest green screen setup. In a simple twist of fate, I had asked for a broadcast-quality microphone for my birthday in 2019. It’s a honey: an ElectroVoice RE20, the kind I’d worked with many times back in my radio days. (A great microphone tends to stay in style.) It was here just in time for 2020 … and all that followed.

Photo by Dan Lefebvre

For good measure, I hung a sign outside the little room where I Zoom, one I bought several years back on one of my irregular pilgrimages to Abbey Road Studios. Every time I go into the room to convene a learning community, I see this sign, and it reminds me that unexpected wonders may emerge, today, or any day.

Our learning portal. Welcome. Photo CC BY-NC-SA by Gardner Campbell

That’s the boost I get as I prepare to meet my students. That’s the sight that tells me it’s magic time.

See you tomorrow.

As long as I’m praising fine writers and thinkers whom I love to read, have I mentioned John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog lately?

I first encountered John Naughton when I found his extraordinary history of the early days of the Internet and the Web, A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime, in a used bookstore in Philadelphia (many thanks to my friend Kate Propert who took me there). Naughton’s a cracker-jack writer who had me at hello and kept me long after goodbye, as this blog post testifies. Here’s a sample of that book, a print artifact that was a portal not just to fresh revelations but also, and more importantly, a new revealer:

 [I]t’s impossible to read the history of the Net without being struck by the extent to which the genius of particular individuals played a crucial role in the development of the concept and its realisation in hardware and software. It’s easy to look back now and laugh at Licklider’s vision of “man-computer symbiosis,” or to describe Donald Davies’ idea of packet-switching, Wesley Clark’s notion of a subnetwork of message-processors, or Vint Cerf’s concept of a gateway between incompatible networks as “simple” or “obvious.” But that, in a way, is a measure of their originality. They are those “effective surprises” of which Jerome Bruner writes–the insights which have “the quality of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition following which there is no longer astonishment.” The fact that we live now in a packet switched and networked world should not blind us to the ingenuity of the original ideas. And the people who conceived the should not be subject to what the historian E. P. Thompson called “the condescension of posterity.”

This is not a fashionable view in some quarters, especially those lodged on the higher slopes of the history and sociology of technology. From that lofty vantage point, scientists, inventors and engineers look rather as rats do to a behaviourist–creatures running in a maze created by economic and social forces which they do not understand, and achieving success only when they press the levers which the prevailing order has ordained will yield success. It’s rather like the view famously expressed by Bertrand Russell that economics was about how people make choices and sociology about how they don’t have any choices to make.

Add to this the fact that Naughton’s follow-up, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, is every bit as compelling, personal, learned, and far-sighted; and the fact that this man was a friend of George Steiner; and that because as Tom Woodward reminds us “people still blog,” you can read his lucid prose on his blog every day, and that he used to teach with Martin Weller (I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall for that) … well, there’s much more to be said, but rather than say it, I’ll simply invite you to follow @jjn1, read his blog to learn from his associative trails, and find in every case what Chaucer called sentence and solas, meaning and comfort, instruction and delight. Those were the criteria by which the innkeeper would judge the best stories told by the Canterbury pilgrims. In his way, Naughton is also a pilgrim: one who views his own life as a journey with boon companions toward a fiercely imagined destination, one that may turn out to be real if we have the courage to invent it together.

I hope I will meet him someday.

Photo CC BY-NC-SA by Gardner Campbell

I’ve got a Gibson without a case,

But I can’t get that even tanned look on my face.

Ill-fitting clothes, and I blend in the crowd;

Fingers so clumsy, voice too loud.

But I’m one.

I am one.

And I can see that this is me,

And I will be,

You’ll all see….

excerpt from “I’m One,” by Pete Townshend.

From Quadrophenia (1973).

I heart Frank Bruni.

I first encountered him at an AAC&U conference in early 2015, in the days of my role as vice provost for learning innovation and student success at Virginia Commonwealth University. Bruni was on a panel discussing the character and value of a liberal arts education. He was so eloquent, open, unaffected, and precise that I instantly became a fan. He eventually wrote a column on the topic (likely behind a paywall for you, alas), and it’s well worth reading. You can find a summary here.

I’ve subscribed to Bruni’s weekly newsletter for the past year or so, and he never disappoints. Today, though, was exceptional. He summed up, and emphasized, many of the things I’ve been mulling over, things I bet many of you have been thinking about too. As is often the case with great writing, even the thoughts or sentiments you’ve encountered before appear more vivid, and more intelligible, as Bruni articulates them.

I was so struck by Bruni’s column today that I wanted to share this part of it with you. There’s a link at the end of the story that will let you subscribe to his newsletters if you wish. I hope you will. His words are always insightful, and very often, a balm for my soul.

March 17, 2021

Max Whittaker for The New York Times

By Frank Bruni Opinion Columnist

Now these people brace for a resumption of social overkill, activity bloat, rush hours, staggered dinner times and airport metal detectors. They seem to regard that as inevitable.

But it’s not. At least it doesn’t need to be. From the unfathomable loss and grinding horror of this pandemic, shouldn’t we wring some positives, including a recognition that we don’t have to do everything as we once did, that bits of what was imposed on us over the past 12 months amounted to improvements and that some of the alternate routes, contingency plans and risk-conscious behavior that we latched on to have lasting merit?

I’m talking about big stuff like remote working — and the flexibility that it affords — but also small stuff, like hand washing. It shouldn’t take a pandemic to prompt us to do that repeatedly throughout the day, just as it shouldn’t take a pandemic to make us more conscious of our ability to spread illness. Why not wear masks when we leave the house with bad and contagious colds? (This has long been customary in parts of Asia.) Definitely, we should stay away from the office if we have any sort of potentially communicable bug and retire the idea that it’s stoic — valorous — to show up and soldier through our sneezing, coughing and such. No, it’s inconsiderate. Bosses must make that clear.

Did you find that extended contact and deep conversations with a tiny bubble of people was more fulfilling to you than brief contact and shallow chitchat with a huge, rotating cast of them? You can structure your life that way by choice going forward.

Did you discover that daily walks outside and more quiet, contemplative time did your soul good? Then don’t jettison them when the world whirls back into frenzied motion.

Did less fussing over your appearance feel not like a surrender but like a liberation? No rule compels you to fuss anew.

Most of us have made significant sacrifices during this extraordinary and harrowing period. Some have made profound, acutely painful ones. There may be more of those to come.

But while the trade-off isn’t in the vicinity of equal, we’ve also learned something (I hope) about our responsibilities to one another and what matters most to us. It would be a shame not to heed those lessons.

Forward this newsletter to friends … … and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s free and it’s published every Wednesday.

By Giovanni Carnovali – Own work, user:Rlbberlin, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2168686
Not a portrait of Frank Bruni.

Chip:

Every so often I cross paths with a magician, and everything changes.

My first English professor was a magician and I became an English major. My graduate school Milton professor was a magician and I became a Miltonist. In the spring of 2003, a magician named Chip German appeared and I became a leader.

Chip, I am humbled by your generosity, your support, your candor, and above all your integrity. I continue to be inspired by your insights, your creativity, and your indefatigable curiosity. To have you as a mentor has been utterly transformative. To be your friend is to have a custom portal to the multiverse.

But the most astonishing thing is not how you have changed my life for the better and continue to do so. The most astonishing thing is how many lives you have touched and transformed in just that way. If I read about it, I’d think it hyperbole–but I’ve witnessed it, and experienced it, and you my friend are the real deal.

Now it’s time for you to touch us all again with a new phase of your essential artfulness. Get yourself all jabbed and light up that DAW! (I will buy all your records, preferably as hi-res downloads.)

Your friend and fan forever,

Gardner

By Pieter Brueghel the Elder – 1. Web Gallery of Art2. The Bridgeman Art Library, Object 3675, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11974918

More thoughts on Tom’s Long Goodbye-Biology post.

A substantial part of what Tom narrates either began or flourished while I was a vice provost and leading what became ALT-Lab, the Academic Learning Transformation Lab. Much of the work I helped to initiate or encourage or fund or somehow influence at VCU continued after I was stepped down. I was of course glad to see that work continue and grow–delighted–and continue to be very happy I could help with the first part of it … but it’s not like being there, and would never again be like that. So reading about the work, especially the parts I was there for, has been bittersweet. All of that said, Tom’s posts have also been bracing and wonderful reminders of just how much ground we covered in those early years, just how idealistic our aims truly were, despite some pretty withering opposition from time to time.

There’s a lot I could have done differently, and better, to answer criticisms and modulate (not moderate, necessarily) the tempo and reach of our initiatives. It takes time to assess the political landscape. The trick is always to assess that landscape but not to lose one’s ambition for substantial change where that’s warranted and where change can be fairly and openly worked on. I wasn’t successful, ultimately, but many successes came out of the work and endure today. I take great comfort in that, and I am grateful to Tom for writing about the projects. It was always about the projects.

Several things struck me in particular in Tom’s post on his biology and environmental science projects. I want to cite them here and offer a few words of commentary from my perspective.

Tom writes,

Field Botany

This site was good. It could have been world changing in the way I’d hoped back in 2014. It ran for a semester or three but then another strange political thing happened and the course didn’t run any longer. At least one student reported getting a graduate school job based on the work they did as part of this class. I got to go out in the field and learn all kinds of things about field botany. One of our interns did the art work for this parallel site and then ended up getting his drawing of a fern leaf tattooed on his arm.³

I remember well when this project emerged and the site came online. It was a very exciting time. We talked a lot about this project in our weekly meetings. I was convinced that the site pointed the way toward a genuinely innovative model of online learning, one that was closely aligned with VCU’s emphasis on experiential learning (the 1.0 version of which is the slogan “Make It Real”). The site combined crowdsourcing via mobile technologies with open learning with citizen science–you get the picture.

We all did in fact think that this project could be world changing. That first year, 2013-2014, we had embarked on several such projects, including the first iteration of our Digital Dreamers research-writing sections of UNIV 200: “Thought Vectors in Concept Space.” (Not much to see there anymore.) That spring Molly Ransone joined us to head up our video production department, and we experienced yet another enormous increase in creative reach and opportunities. We really did believe that these projects were fully aligned with what my leadership title stipulated: “Learning Innovation and Student Success.” I saw these two things as connectable and mutually reinforcing. I still think we were right about the potential. What I didn’t understand is that the emphasis on genuine learning innovation via the Internet and the Web would not last beyond the first eighteen months and my first two bosses. I was not fully aware, or couldn’t fathom, that the “learning innovation” was primarily envisioned at the top to be a robust set of revenue enhancements from a suite of online graduate programs. There were signs, but I didn’t see enough of them in time or understand what I was seeing. Do I wish I had? Yes and no. Yes, because I think I could have maintained some innovative approaches even as the momentum bled into the online revenue engines (assuming we could actually have managed the latter). No, because I honestly don’t believe it would have helped, or that I could have worked as a broker for some online course platform provider, which was the direction we were headed when I arrived. (I recall a lot of talk about Deltak, which is something else now of course.)

I don’t know what the strange political thing is that Tom mentions above, and he may not either. There were strange political things all over, as there always are. VCU’s may or may not be more diverse and strange than other institutions. Difficult to say.

Back to Tom:

The field botany site continues to have all sorts of interesting comments and questions from the community. They are identifying unidentified plants. Asking about plants they’ve seen. But those questions sit there unpublished. Maintaining sites like this takes time and energy. It’s also a tricky thing about giving the site away. It’s not my place to go in an approve comments or respond unless we make that part of the deal and do I really know enough about the topic to play that role? I don’t and have to let it go but is sad to see it come so close to being absolutely amazing.

I felt very strongly that VCU was poised to lead the way toward something far beyond SME-ID course templating. It makes me hyperventilate to explain what “SME-ID” means, so I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader. The kind of leadership I envisioned and hired toward, however, was just too far away from what I hadn’t quite ever been told was the real assignment I had more-or-less unwittingly accepted.

It is worth looking at the online experience site. It was made for the VCU board of visitors as something to try to get a flavor for how we were conceptualizing online. It didn’t seem to go over well. There might be lots of reasons for that. It tried to explain the choices and show examples. It tried to blend real-world data gathering and make interactive components that got you outside. I think what they wanted was a slightly polished Blackboard shell. It was pushing an audience too far. They didn’t want a thing different from what was. It would have taken a real investment of time and energy from a lot of people to make this work and we didn’t have that much political backing. Still, we swung for the fences and I remain glad we did.

Once again Tom reminds me that there is no need to regret our ambition. So I will regret something else on my part, something I feel is worth regretting. I am naturally a fairly expansive and exuberant person. At the same time, like anyone else I have my insecurities. Maybe more than some, though I’m told we’re all carrying similar burdens in that respect unless we’re completely covered by the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Yet I do regret that my own fears and insecurities kept me from pounding the pavement more effectively with faculty, with staff, with senior leadership, with alumni, with the entire audience. Too often I sought shelter with allies instead of working to build connections with people who were skeptical or resistant or downright hostile. I can try to forgive myself for this, but my regrets teach me that bravery does not mean not being afraid.

I once asked a wonderful leader how I could grow a thicker skin. He simply looked at me and replied, “Never, ever lose your passion.” I understand the wisdom in the response. This blog and these posts indicate that I have not lost that passion entirely. But I would be perfectly okay with a thicker skin, too.

I’ll let Stanley Kubrick have the last word on this one.

Today is the fourth Sunday of Lent. I have blogged every day during Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday, February 17. Tonight I reflect on the time past in this season that continues. Tonight I apologize to my regrets for not hearing what they have to tell me.

My Lenten discipline to give up silence is paired with my Lenten discipline to start reading blogs again. Both parts have been liberating, but painful too. Committing to feeling both of these things at once, again, has been the discipline. Part of that discipline is not to surrender to diminishment, whether by pandemic or otherwise. Part of that discipline is to maintain my own momentum despite the painful parts. All of that is worth doing, though I have to be careful.

All the emotions get going full-strength as I read Tom Woodward’s series of long-goodbye posts. The feelings emerge because of memories, but they also emerge, with unusual clarity, because of the strength of Tom’s writing.

As Tom tells the story of his biology and environmental science VCU projects, he expresses regret and a sense of frustrated or blocked ambition in ways that help me learn from my own past, a past that, in this very large area first publicly represented by this very blog, I have worked pretty hard to set aside. Now I want and need to do something else, something better. I’ve known all along that my past can be accepted, and then built on, but it can’t be ignored or avoided. Now I decide. That’s a big reason I’ve taken on this Lenten practice.

Tom writes,

If these regrets tell me one thing it’s to get moving and do the things while you can. Time and people move on so swiftly. None of this is wasted though. The ideas and conversations come back around. They shape future conversations and enable future possibilities.

I don’t think I’ve read a more succinct, articulate, and bracing statement of regret, and determination, and hope. I seek to emulate all of that, because it’s part of the way back, and because I owe it to the self I look back on, the one who tried so hard in those few years to make a positive difference and to empower others to do the same.

I do have regrets and I don’t trust people who say they don’t. My Lenten discipline is to listen to those regrets, to sit with them. They tell me what Tom’s regrets tell him. I need to hear that, and learn a stronger way forward.

The original uploader was Ancheta Wis at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by SchuminWeb using CommonsHelper., CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15595569

As I’ve continued my Lenten discipline of giving up silence here on Gardner Writes, I’ve realized all along that I’d need to tell some stories, somehow, about my encounters with third rails. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

• scolding adults for playing with matches in a dormitory during a summer program
• expressing my serious doubts about whether there should include an entry for “God” in The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (to be sure, a microcosm of many other concerns I had during that project)
• trying to fix an Apple Talk network in a writing center computer lab (no, I wasn’t electrocuted–these are figurative third rails)
• accepting a promotion
• trying to figure out if a non-profit organization was actually chartered or not (multiple times) and trying to figure out why it was hard to get that information from the staff (multiple times)
• trying to encourage a “well-oiled machine” to become more of a site for innovation and program development
• getting a leadership certificate from a program designed for chairs of boards of directors for non-profit organizations
• leading an effort to revise a general education curriculum

There are others.

The point here is not that I’ve been unlucky. I’ve been very lucky, and very unlucky; on balance, the lucky breaks have been far more numerous. But touching the third rail is always a shock, and I seem to have an instinct for it (if “instinct” is defined as “moth-to-flame”). I know better now, but that’s not much use really, though I do try to forgive myself for all my blunders, and above all, for not knowing better at the time. All of that said, the things I tried to do, I believe I tried to do in good faith, and I believe they are things well worth trying to do. If I have grown skeptical about whether, finally, there is anything to be done … well, some days I’m more hopeful than others.

Milton once wrote that not everyone is fit to be a champion for the truth, and Johnny boy, I feel that, yes I do, and I’m not even sure it was the truth, though I tried to be discerning. On the other hand, as Jerry Garcia said, “Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.” So there’s that.

Always good news and bad news.

Good news: many of my students are doing top-notch work, and many of my students who aren’t quite to that level of accomplishment are nevertheless diligent and engaged and often very playful and insightful and inspiring. Every semester I get to watch those blooms emerge, try to encourage the flowering, and try to stay out of the way where that’s appropriate.

Bad news: some students will have that day of reckoning that will define how well they will do by the end of term. Some are in denial; some will stay that way. A few will give up, and a few of those will just ghost me. I try everything I can think of, short of knocking on their front doors. (That seems invasive and maybe even enabling, to me, and it’s out of the question in pandemic time, certainly.) Some have lives that are spinning, or have spun, out of control. For them, I often advise taking the term off if possible. Anything is better than losing time and money while digging oneself into an ever-deepening hole that no ladder can reach down into. At the same time, I always hope and I always encourage hope when it’s warranted–and it’s a tricky business indeed to know when to say “cut your losses.”

Part of the way school is structured today, however, works against the student’s own agency in these matters. There have always been parental pressures, financial pressures, life upheavals, and the sheer uncertainty of so much of what a college degree problem can entail. (Where else are you asked to devote time to study, to reflection, to reading and writing? These are not simply instrumental goods, but they can seem horribly beside the point when one has pressures and upheavals.) Now, however, I do see a change in the way coursework itself is understood by some of my students. Some, by no means all, maybe only a few, but a number that seems to be growing, expect that a course of study will have a prescribed bolus of work that may be completed on any schedule and turned in at any time–or rather, made up at any time. I get students near the end of term who’ve been running out of runway for weeks suddenly asking me if I have any extra credit work they can do. No, I reply: I have work for credit, and I’ve assigned it all along, with a design principle that holds that learning is not about filling my wheelbarrow with what I’ve asked them to bring to me. No, my learning design is curriculum writ small: these activities, in this order, with this duration or persistence or consistency, so that the learning is introduced, consolidated, extended, re-introduced re-consolidated, further extended, and brought into the realm of understanding, which Jerome Bruner defines as “going beyond the information given.”

When high schools put together “credit recovery” packets that allow students to be absent for weeks and then complete the class by plowing through a set of worksheets, the expectation generalizes, and some of my students think that’s what classwork or coursework is. (My skepticism about “competency-based learning” is largely liberal-arts driven, and particularly dubious about the worksheets, tests, and other means of assessing “competency.” But that’s another blog post.)

So I don’t know. But I’ll tell you: the thing about my courses that seems hardest for the students who’re used to delivering packets of coursework in this manner is my requirement that students post to our discussion forum and blog on our WordPress multisite platform: RamPages. This requirement is purely a class participation requirement. I do not grade the forum posts or the RamPages reflections individually. I have no expectation for length, and I’ve told students that they don’t need to spend more than fifteen minutes a day, if that, posting the forum. Maybe a half hour on the weekends for the RamPage reflection. But the amounts don’t seem to be the problem. It’s the character of what I’m requiring. What I am looking for–and I tell this to the students over and over–is consistency of participation in ways that are interesting, substantive, and relevant to the course. I tell them that I understand “relevant” very widely, though it’s a good idea to use the opportunities to post about what we’re discussing in class at least some of the time.

It’s the consistency throughout the semester that stumps the students who want to give me work instead of commit to a course of study. It’s the pure ungraded class participation with a very wide definition of what constitutes participation that seems most difficult, that moves against the grain. It feels as if they don’t want to be in a learning community, or don’t have any real, lived sense of what it means to commit to a course of study over the term. Even if it’s so easy to do so that the only way to fail is just to not show up at all.

I ponder these things. But I know this: when we do a course of study together, it’s a journey, an experience, a life, not a landfill.

See you tomorrow.