Last night was a late night as I neared the end of Last Second In Dallas, the book that prompted yesterday’s reflection. As a long-time audiophile and occasional audio engineer, junior grade, I was fascinated by the acoustic analysis that informed the book’s conclusions, and just as enthralled to see all the connections, mutual respect, and sheer determination lead to satisfying conclusions about not only the assassination but also the value of that determination and the possibility of real trust. Of good faith and its partner, the joyous humility of self-correction.

Two particularly stirring moments bring me to this postscript. One comes with Josiah Thompson’s analysis of complicity as opposed to conspiracy. The distinction was new to me. I found it deeply insightful, and painfully relevant to our times–well, to all times, obviously, though the pain is acute right now.

Here’s Thompson on the Ramsey Panel that in the early 80’s succeeded in dismissing, high-handedly and with extreme bias, what Thompson maintains is now revealed as conclusive acoustic evidence of multiple gunmen that day in Dealey Plaza:

Had [the panel’s] members conspired to discredit the validity of the acoustics evidence? Had they sat down at an initial meeting and decided to invalidate the acoustics evidence, no matter what they found out?

No. This all came about through no conspiracy. What happened here was much more complicated, more nuanced, and more human–indeed, all too human.

It was a complicity.

And this complicity had much to do with who these men were and what they had experienced earlier in their lives…. Bound together by decades of association and commonality of belief, many looked back over long years of aiding their country and saw serving on the Ramsey Panel as an extension of that service. Perhaps this was why the internal documents of the panel show no internal debate whatsoever. Most of the panel members had little to do with sculpting the final conclusions but instead simply approved what [the leaders] approved. In such an atmosphere, and in the absence of any panel member whose field was acoustics, it was easy for a powerful few to dominate. (349, my emphasis)

A panel studying acoustic evidence with no trained acousticians on the panel? Yes, and anyone who’s ever worked in an organization can probably guess how such a thing would happen.

Notice also, however, that training in an appropriate field–that is, specific expertise–is something Thompson believes could have made a difference in the Panel’s report. Not would, necessarily–plenty of experts are silenced or silence themselves in the face of power–but could. That’s the faith that underlies all investigation: faith in expertise that can identify and interpret relevant data while always checking itself for confirmation bias.

Looking for the truth, not just looking for a mirror.

Of the evidence and his conclusions, Thompson writes,

This truth emerged slowly, but once cracks in the facade were uncovered, it seemed that everywhere we looked, we found more evidence of what the [Ramsey Panel] report really was–an elaborate papier-mâché facade of science-as-revealed-wisdom assembled by a body of distinguished scientists, including one Nobel laureate and one soon-to-be-laureate, supported in its entirety by marvelously baroque but silly arguments.

See how complicated and difficult all this is? Imagine how hard it would be to be the one in the room constantly pointing out flaws in the argument, data that weren’t examined or acknowledged, bringing up and then examining all the details, proliferating details that can keep a committee from writing its report in a timely manner. You know, getting to the deliverables. It wasn’t a matter of science failing, but of scientists failing, but not just of scientists failing, but of a panel assembled (for a variety of reasons) without care and rigor in the selection of members. And yet all was not lost. Several investigators, Thompson chief among them, worked the case for decades to satisfy themselves that despite al these obstacles and minefields, an answer could be found to the question what happened.

The mix of provisionality, perspective, bias, reason, logic, and faith in truth is a stronger, weirder experience than most of us can imagine undergoing at all, let alone steadily and unwaveringly over weeks of uncertainty.

It’s hard, really hard, to say that you know you don’t know, and you know you may never know, and that you also know you might know, and that you know you must try to know–most of all, that there is something to know, whether you find it or not. In that committee room, it takes courage to insist, with charity yet persistently, on that kind of integrity and humility. And by the same token it takes complicity to keep that courage at bay, to prevent it from interfering with the “task at hand.”

Thompson concludes his book with an Epilogue, with this still moment.

I sat down on the steps where I had sat in 1966 and watched the cars go by [Dealey Plaza]. For a moment, the traffic flow stopped, and there was an almost perfect silence. Perhaps it was the silence that brought it on. For sitting there in the plaza–where it is always twelve thirty–I felt, for the first time in years, a sense of calm. It was done. It was my case, and now, finally, it was finished. I could leave it. (361)

The entire book supplies the silent response: but not a minute sooner.

No easy way to be free.

Reading Josiah Thompson, "Last Second in Dallas." For those who liked "The Umbrella Man," this is Thompson's latest and definitive book on the assassination. Three gunmen. Not one.

— errolmorris (@errolmorris) December 25, 2020

On Errol Morris’s recommendation, I’m currently reading Josiah Thompson’s Last Second In Dallas, his epic sequel in 2021 to Six Seconds In Dallas, the 1967 volume that influenced a generation of truth-seekers and investigators (categories that overlap but are not identical) fascinated, and sometimes obsessed, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (See also Morris’s “The Umbrella Man,” in which he interviews Thompson–as it happens, just as Thompson’s investigation of the assassination is nearing a crucial turning point. Now, a decade after Morris published that short film, the Arvo Pãrt score is all the more poignant and fitting.)

The Kennedy assassination of one of my earliest vivid memories, one in which I recall not only an event but also, to a considerable extent, the context surrounding it, including the weirdly pervasive feeling that “Dallas” was a kind of curse word. I recall an overwhelming sense of sadness. I recall a sense of shock, and a renewed sense of shock when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. I recall my mother weeping at the funeral procession, and again as the bugler played “Taps” at the graveside ceremony in Arlington Cemetery. My mother’s beloved younger brother had been seriously wounded in World War II, and as Mom explained to me when I became upset by her weeping, she always cried when “Taps” was played as she thought of how close her brother came to never coming home at all.

Like other Americans old enough to remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. (I had just come home from a day at Mrs. Wills’ first grade. As I recall, the ride home was oddly silent. I was told of the killing only when I entered my house.) I can also remember the long aftermath of the 1960’s, seven years in which Kennedy’s vow to land an astronaut on the moon and return the astronaut safely to Earth drove an effort that has since come to define any heroic quest that focuses time, energy, expertise, and resources on a matter of great national and, eventually, human aspiration. We call those “moon shots.” I also remember all the related haunting 1960’s questions: would we have suffered as we did if Kennedy had not been assassinated? Would we have become enmired in Vietnam? Would Nixon have been elected? among many other questions.

I lived in Waco, Texas for several years, just about two hours south of Dallas. I visited Dealey Plaza several times, taking my family and then out-of-town guests to the Sixth Floor Museum, a place that always brought me back to my childhood and to my mother’s grief.

Now, as I read Thompson’s book, I think of those things. And I am surprised when even more intense thoughts come to me. I realize that this book speaks to me, resonates within me, because it is also the story of truth-seekers and the obstacles they face. It’s hard to amass evidence. It’s hard to sift the evidence, to evaluate the worth of this piece versus that piece. It’s hard to avoid confirmation bias. And it’s hard to ignore the fact that various organizational and institutional pressures work not to avoid confirmation bias, but to reinforce it, for ends that are sometimes nefarious and sometimes just plain self-protective or vain, or cussed. Sometimes all of these.

And so I realize that Last Second In Dallas is my latest book in a series I have read, over the years, about damaging or deadly personal and institutional failures in the search for truth. Investigative committees and authorities that are too lazy, greedy, narcissistic, afraid, or riven with political conflict to pursue the truth. Expertise that leverages reputation to evade or deny the truth. Evidence that’s mishandled. Often, sheer stupid incompetence. Often, people afraid to speak truth to power (and if you’ve ever encountered real power, you’d find it hard to blame them for their fear). Often, whistleblowers who are ignored, or dismissed, or scorned, or condescended to, or threatened or smeared and slandered and libeled. (My mother, in a very quiet small way, was once a whistleblower, another moment of deep grief for her.)

So now I see that this book by Josiah Thompson on the Kennedy assassination is also, and most importantly for me just now in this season of Lent, the story of someone who will not let the investigation go, who still wants to know what happened, and who has faith that the truth is discoverable. Thompson is not a conspiracy theorist. Early on he disclaims any interest in who did the shooting and why, and I believe him. His quest is to discover the truth about what happened. How many shots? When? How can we discover that from the evidence? What can we discover about ourselves and our institutions as we study the story of the investigations over the years. As Morris puts it in “The Umbrella Man”:

I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?

But first: What happened? Second: How and why did this happen. and who did this? The order cannot be reversed, lest What happened? be answered not by reason, but by desire. (When the cop says in Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, “we didn’t want [Randall Adams] to tell us what he thought; we wanted him to tell us what we knew,” the cop inadvertently but unerringly tells the truth of his own delusion.)

And so now I understand also that Thompson’s book is like other books I’ve read about organizational failures to identify, agree upon, and act on the truth. Or even to look for it in good faith, not because the investigators committed the very crime, but because they keep committing the enabling crimes that follow, that hide the truth in ways that characterize a much larger failure. Events and decisions and coverups and snafus (or the variant I learned from Thompson, the JANFU) where the first order of business is the denial of reality, and the next item the denial of the denial, either through bureaucratic means or, as I’ve often seen in academia, rhetorical hijinks I’d call sophistry.

So this book joins books I’ve read on the Challenger and Columbia tragedies as stories in which moments of intervention and potential revelation have come and gone, in which preventable disasters became inevitable. The Columbia tragedy, of course, is also the story of how NASA failed to learn from the Challenger tragedy, a failure foretold by Richard Feynman in part 2 of What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the section titled “Mr. Feynman Goes To Washington.” Strangely, in my mind these stories also connect with Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month,  as well as with a haunting essay on education reform I read a decade ago, “The Culture of Resistance,” by Robert Evans.

In my soul Thompson’s book also connects with Errol Morris’s magisterial The Ashtray. Like Thompson, Morris spend decades on a quest for the truth, in this case the truth of Thomas Kuhn’s denial of truth, and the truth of Thomas Kuhn’s unjust and immoral judgment, or rather, summary narcissistic self-exculpatory dismissal, of Morris’s arguments regarding truth.

There are questions I keep asking myself, questions that reappear as I read Thompson’s book.

I think of the end of Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. Was Willie Stark persuading Jack Burden of a hard truth, or was he reaching for a last chance to act the part of virtue, of valor?

I waited, but it began to seem that he wasn’t going to say any
more. His eyes were on the ceiling and I could scarcely tell that he
was breathing. Finally, the eyes turned toward me again, very
slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painful creak
of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again. He
said, “It might have been all different. Jack.*’

I nodded again.

He roused himself more. He even seemed to be straining to lift
his head from the pillow. “You got to believe that,* he said
hoarsely.

The nurse stepped forward and looked significantly at me.

“Yes,” I said to the man on the bed.

“You got to,” he said again. “You got to believe that.”

“All right.”

He looked at me, and for a moment it was the old strong, prob-
ing, demanding glance. But when the words came this time, they
were very weak. “And it might even been different yet,” he whis-
pered. “If it hadn’t happened, it might— have been different— even
yet.”

He barely got the last words out, he was so weak.

And that’s where I stop. Could it have been different? Might it yet be different? If it couldn’t have been different, if one can never make a difference, then neither the what happened nor the why matters all that much. But it might have been different, even yet, even now.

I’ve got to believe that sometimes, it might yet be. Then I have to figure out what I am prepared to do.

A long snow-day ramble follows.

I’m putting my blog network back together, and to do that, I’ve been looking at RSS readers. Along the way, I’ve also been looking at RSS feeds, as in “does site xyz provide an RSS feed?” Used to be that one would look for the RSS-beacon logo as a sign that syndication was available. It was a pretty logo and an exciting sign of one of the read-write web’s most attractive features: the ability to construct one’s own virtual “newspaper” in a way that would deliver to you all the daily writings you wanted to read, easily and automatically. When in the pre-paywall days the New York Times began providing RSS feeds for each of its sections, I and other RSS boosters thrilled to the idea, and the demonstrable value, of assembling our own customized newspapers and having them delivered to us each day, perhaps even in updated versions throughout the day. Part of the idea was that one would save time, but an even better part–for me and for others–was that the whole process of choosing, curating, assembling, etc. would inject another layer of mindfulness and intentionality into one’s information regime.

The beautiful radioesque RSS logo

Now the sea-change has come, but RSS is still here, even if it’s not talked about as RSS. For example, here’s the way Feedbro, a contemporary RSS reader, describes the benefits of using a feed reader:

Why Feedbro?
We believe time is our most valuable asset.

We believe it is waste of valuable time to spend minutes or even hours every day to go through dozens of websites, blogs, social media sites etc. manually.

We believe that all the new information that you are interested in, should be automatically aggregated into one place from various sources you care about (both Internet and intranet) into easy-to-read format and automatically filtered based on the rules you define.

We believe that the faster you learn, gain new knowledge and information the better you will succeed in life as an individual and as an organization. Therefore it is vital to learn new things every day and follow relevant and valuable sources of information effortlessly.

We believe privacy is important so that only you know what sources you follow.

[Emphasis mine.]

It’s strangely heartening to read in 2021 what so many of us were preaching back in 2005. Still here! Of course, sadder but wiser, we know that following information effortlessly is easier than ever, as is following disinformation, as is just plain following … and the real struggle is best encountered in moral philosophy, where questions of relevance and value are front and center and, at least in theory, debated in ways that seek to expose the faults in one’s own argument rather than conceal or deny them.

But I digress.

Here’s the statement I wasn’t expecting : “We believe privacy is important so that only you know what sources you follow.”

I’d never considered an RSS reader as potentially invasive, as tracking what I was reading. I’m sure that was and is naïve of me, but really, were RSS readers back in the day tracking the sources I followed? I don’t remember any talk about that. Maybe Google Reader was? They track everything. But even at that, I’m not remembering any privacy warnings from folks who’d know.

I’m accustomed to seeing earnest statements of care about my privacy all along the Web nowadays. I take them all with a grain of salt, just as I do with the recording that tells me my call is important and will be answered in the order in which it was received. Yet lately I’ve found myself clicking on the privacy statement more frequently, partly as a defense, but more so as a way to see the range of methodologies and rationales included in the “we care” sentiments.

Here’s the Feedbro privacy policy as articulated on their website: no, that’s too easy; you can’t find the link to the privacy policy until you go to the Add-On Store, where you can download and install the browser extension. Here you find a repeat of the website statement, but over on the left under “more information” you’ll also find a link to the privacy policy, which to my amateur eyes looks complete, specific, and reassuring:

Privacy policy for Feedbro

Feedbro fully respects your privacy.

Feedbro feed reader
– stores data only locally on your hard drive using chrome.storage.local API and HTML5 IndexedDB – it does not store anything on servers on the Internet
– does NOT share any data about your feed reading habits, subscriptions or any personal information
– does NOT access or change any information on the pages you visit (except to find RSS links on the page when you request it)

Required extension permissions:
– “Access your data for all websites”
This permission is needed so that Feedbro can read feeds from the URLs that you subscribe to.

– “Display notifications to you”
This permission is needed in order to display desktop notifications of new feed entries when a Rule is matched with an action to show a desktop notification.

– “Access browser tabs”
This permission is needed in order to enable “Find Feeds on Current Tab” feature which helps you to quickly find RSS/Atom feed links on the page that you are looking at. This is only done when the user requests it.

– “Store unlimited amount of client-side data”
This permission is needed to ensure that chrome.storage.local can hold all the feed subscriptions, rules and settings data.

I still can’t find substantial information about the company that makes Feedbro, Nodetics, as their home page simply describes their other extensions (all of them interesting) and general pitches for how these extensions will make my online life better and me more productive, etc. But right now, I see that Feedbro will work well for me as an RSS reader, and most importantly, it will not track me, which means it won’t be sharing that tracking data with third parties. Such tracking is usually excused on the basis of all the good relevant useful things that such tracking will be able to recommend to me. That’s as may be. Such tracking, as we should all now recognize, is almost always primarily about selling user information that enables better targeted advertising on behalf of third parties.  By contrast, from what I can tell here, Feedbro isn’t trying to automate or even nudge my own curation, nor are they tracking my activity and selling my tracks. Instead, Feedbro is helping me curate what I want with a modest side-benefit of simplified discovery of feeds.

How are they monetizing their business? That, too, I don’t know. I suspect there’s some kind of freemium plan–give “lite” versions for free and sell “pro” versions–but I really don’t know. I haven’t looked at the other extensions; the answers may be there. I don’t like not knowing how the business plans to make money, because I don’t want to become their product. But as of right now, that doesn’t seem to be a risk with Feedbro. (If you find it is, please let me know!)

Reader, I installed it.

I like Feedbro, quite a bit really. It has OPML functionality if I want to go to the next level and install Tiny Tiny RSS on my shared hosting. But for now, it’s moving me where I want to be, and it looks to have robust privacy protection.

Then I got to wondering what RSS feeds might still be out there. I thought of Substack, the new and lauded platform that’s essentially freemium blogging. If you like a writer, you can subscribe to a free feed and then pay more to get more from that writer. If you are a writer, now you can give away substantial samples of your work and build a readership without committing to a life of writing for free or trying to find a congenial employer who’ll pay you so long as they think they can sell your work.

I subscribe to a few Substack writers. I receive their newsletters via email, a surprisingly popular platform (email, that is) for that kind of reading. Tiny Newsletter was first across my radar, but now Substack seems the logical level-up for the same idea. But: could one read Substack in an RSS reader instead of an email inbox? All the usual advantages would apply.

Each Substack newsletter is an HTML email, so that means it’s a website. Every Substack writer has their own subdomain (e.g., https://zeynep.substack.com/ for Insight, which is Zeynep Tufekci’s Substack site). Substack is much like WordPress.com that way, but with specific writer-centered monetization benefits you can read about here.

So far so good. No charge until you make money, and Substack takes a cut as the platform provider, meaning, in essence, the distributor enhanced as a brand. The store you’d like to shop at.

But because I go in the side door sometimes, either out of sheer cussedness or (more often) location-based impulse, I didn’t go to substack.com to check for information about Substack and RSS. Had I done so, I’d have seen a fair amount of copy telling me that email newsletters were the New Thing and were actually cooler than feeds (even though an email newsletter subscription is itself a feed). I also didn’t just go to a newsletter site and enter the URL into my new Feedbro extension to see if Feedbro would detect an RSS feed. Instead, I googled Substack RSS, and I found a news article on The Verge about (wait for it) the RSS reader Substack has launched.

Why would Substack want to launch an RSS reader? “The goal was to ‘create a distraction free space’ for people whose email inbox isn’t their ideal reading experience, Substack CEO Chris Best told The Verge.” Oh. Okay, nothing wrong with that, though it’s strange to see that most routinely reviled of Internet phenomena, the email inbox, suddenly described as perhaps not the “ideal reading experience” for some people.

But here comes the punch. Substack has developed an RSS reader with the goal of enhancing the user experience by means of, you guessed it, recommendations:

“I think one of the reasons that we think an experience like this could be really good is it could be a way to discover new writers you want to subscribe to,” Best said.

As Substack adds discovery features, Best said the service will stay away from putting “a bunch of clicky stuff in there that’s super tantalizing,” and stick to the platform’s existing goal of fostering a relationship between readers and writers they can trust.

So no clickbait. Just relationships based on trust. And, as The Verge  notes, “Longer term, the service may finally give Substack a space to start recommending different newsletters to existing users.” Nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that such recommendations must rely on Substack tracking reading patterns–and employing algorithmically-generated targeted advertising for their own brand as the place you’ll find the only platform you’ll ever need to have machine-based cognitive autocompletion. (My words, not theirs, but isn’t “machine-based cognitive autocompletion” the zero-latency ad-to-consumption corporate dream?)

Oof.

All that’s left is to examine the Substack Privacy Policy, which I got to when I went to the Join Substack Reader Beta page and clicked on the link to the Terms of Service I’d have to accept to join that beta. I won’t describe the policy or even try to summarize it beyond stating that the writing is clear and the news is almost entirely bad. And here, as always, we find the enhanced-experience rationale:

“We may use this data to customize Content for you that we think you might like, based on your usage patterns.”

“Through cookies we place on your browser or device, we may collect information about your online activity after you leave our Services.  Just like any other usage information we collect, this information allows us to improve the Services and customize your online experience….”

And so forth. (It gets worse when it comes to privacy and third parties, but you see the idea.)

I know that I’m being tracked pretty much all the time. I know it’s hard to minimize it and probably impossible to evade it altogether unless I go off the grid entirely, and that’s probably not ever going to be an option. More to the point, I don’t want to go off the grid. But this idea of “customization” is something like the semantic web of Hell, and we’re all living with the consequences.

So I will not be joining the Substack Reader Beta. For my experience of reading writers I trust, one of the core experiences in my life and the basis of much of what I am about professionally as well, I want to be the person in charge of customizing my experience, and if I want a recommendation from my RSS reader, I’ll ask for it.

And now I have to think about whether I should be subscribing via email to any Substack newsletter, as it’s clear that what I thought to be a sustainable business model–take a distributor’s cut off the earnings of writers, a fair deal it seems to me for the benefits that accrue to the writers–is going down that slippery sewer pipe of “stand still and please wear this lovely bullseye so we can make you happy.” And I resent the way the language of experience, trust, and relationships becomes coarsened by a platform with a professed mission of supporting writers.

I can’t say that I feel better now, but maybe I’ve learned a little more than I knew at the outset.

See you tomorrow.

I used to have a consistent regimen every morning: read the news, then read the posts in my blog network.

What’s a blog network? Yes, well, that’s part of what’s broken for me right now.

In 2003, I began my thirteen years (give or take) in formal leadership jobs related to teaching and learning technologies. (“Administration” doesn’t quite describe this, for me, but will be a useful if damning shortcut for many.) Right away I met some inspiring people, at conferences and elsewhere, who were blogging. I learned about various flavors of blog code, domains, shared hosting, and the surprisingly low cost for it all. I could see right away how powerful this combination could be, and indeed already was for those inspiring people I was meeting. When I found WordPress and saw its motto Code Is Poetry, I knew I’d found my platform.

I’ve always done my best writing under the influence of other writers. When I wrote my dissertation, my favorite environment for writing always included a semicircle of six, eight, or even ten open books around me. (Yes, I was not always careful with their spines, and all I can say is that prior readers hadn’t been either, so I don’t think I added any damage.) I tried to bring all the voices in those books into a networked conversation I could weave together with my own voice to arrive at new insights. I could forget myself and find myself that way, and keep going–always the hardest part for me, just to keep going.

It was that way with blogs, too. Reading other blogs inspired me to start keeping my own blog. When I started blogging, back in 2004, I relied on something called a blogroll to guide me. The inspiring bloggers I’d begun to meet in my new role at work would usually have a list of blogs they habitually read right there on their sites’ front pages. Nothing algorithmic about it. I liked blogger X, blogger X read blogs A, B, C, D, and just like that, I had some trusted recommendations I could follow up on. (We would sometimes talk about the danger of echo chambers, but as we now know, the real echo chambers would be built, maintained, and expanded by the machines that would make “connection” into a business and, now, into something very treacherous and destructive.)

Of course I also had something to aspire to, which never hurts. As I started out, I hoped to keep a blog that would be interesting enough for those bloggers I admired to add my site to their blogroll. And sometimes, that happened. I always found that moment deeply affirming. I guess anyone would.

Soon I discovered the RSS reader–I don’t remember my first one, sadly–and I found I could not only expand my daily blog read, but import other bloggers’ expanded blogrolls via OPML, a meta-list format I could import into my reader, just like that. OPML became essential as I added more blogging to course requirements and found myself with many student blogs to read every day–which sounds daunting, but was in fact an almost uniformly joyous experience, as I could suddenly see into the process of my students’ learning in a depth and detail I had always yearned for but never quite achieved.

Eventually I would spend an hour, maybe more, each morning reading blogs. I had my reading nicely curated, and I came to rely on trusted, varied, enlightening, and provocative voices in my head every single day as I began my work. And I would always have those voices to bring to my own blogging, in one way or another.

I still ask my students to blog, depending on the course of study. I still read every one of their posts, carefully and thoughtfully. But that morning sweep of my expanded, RSS-driven, OPML-augmented blog horizons? That’s been gone for several years, to my own detriment I believe.

There are still some reliable, trusted voices in what we used to call the blogosphere, voices that I now hear only intermittently. Some of those voices have themselves become intermittent now, but even at that, they’ve kept the faith all along–and my broken good habits mean I lose the thread, to my detriment, and to my regret. So part of my Lenten blogging resolve must include once again the discipline of reading some of those blogs every day.

Reading those blogs will be painful at times, because for almost five years I have had no formal leadership role in the area of teaching and learning technologies. Since those roles brought me into the blogging world, trying to re-enter the blogging world brings with it a keen fresh sense of absence and loss. Obviously withdrawal only worsens a sense of isolation–the vicious cycle anyone with depressive tendencies will recognize right away from their own experience–so there’s no real relief from pain, only a set of welcome and even undeniably important distractions. But a chronic ache is still painful, and can demolish hope just as surely a sudden crisis can.

The more I stopped reading, the more I stopped writing. And it’s only a blog, and who reads that anyway, and this is 2021 and even the word “blog” starts to sound like “victrola” and “picture shows” and maybe even “daguerreotype.” At best, perhaps “retro-cool,” which carries more than a whiff of hipster with it.

And to be honest, I also stopped reading because the conversation around what we might call “edtech” (but I hope we won’t) became more and more polarized, and the grandstanding became harder to avoid, in others and also in myself. Too many rallies, too much theater, too little reflection, too few good-faith conversations.

There were also my presentations to colleagues that would leave me slack-jawed with amazement at the anti-blogging frenzy that could emerge at a moment’s notice. At Mary Washington, a dean told me (in a meeting) that if I had asked her to reflect on her learning when she was an undergraduate, she would have “punched [me] in the nose.” (That stopped an early conversation around e-portfolios.) Many years later, at VCU, a colleague assured me that asking students to blog would inevitably lead them into contacts with dangerous strangers in chat rooms and a cascade of assaults would follow.  That the real risks came from algorithmically-driven, advertising-supported platforms–what we now call “social media”–never entered these conversations. But here we are.

Now as it turns out, RamPages happened anyway, and is one of the things I am proudest of having helped to bring to pass as a leader. (Roll credits: a congenial and far-sighted CIO at VCU was very supportive, a crucial ally in fact; and by far the lion’s share of the credit for RamPages’ success goes to a lion named Tom Woodward, a truly gifted writer and thinker who’s equally talented on the bridge and in the engine room. Tom’s a real thought leader, one who for me conspicuously rehabilitates that shopworn phrase, as you’ll see right away on his epic account of the RamPages odyssey.) And it’s true that one of my failings is that I can’t always take “yes” for an answer. But I tell this story to try to articulate why and how, over the last few years, I’ve lost both nerve and heart when it comes to blogging. I’m also trying to explore the simultaneous breakdown of my blog reading and my blog writing, as I think they’re both part of the same heartsick hunkering.

And while it was very encouraging to see some heartfelt responses to my blog post yesterday, I’m also trying not to think about responses, but to think about telling the story of my learning, Even and especially if I’m only talking publicly to my public self. I’m trying to rediscover the deep and challenging value in that discourse. It’s always right here, and by the end of a post, I’ve always found it again.

Now to keep going, and to renew the reading.

See you tomorrow.

Epiphany’s past. Now 40 days in the wilderness, with the last seven veering from triumph to catastrophe, then to eucatastrophe.

What will I give up for Lent?

Plenty left to give up. I am privileged, fortunate, well (so far), warm, dry, not hungry, able to telework. Power’s on, larder’s stocked. Movies and music and books in the queue. Many pleasures to consider as candidates for my mortifying, the process of remembering that I come from dust and will return to dust.

Then I remember all that I, even in my privilege, have given up, many of them things we have all given up. Hugs. Visits from our children, our kin, our friends. Holiday gatherings. Outings. Varied possibilities for gathering to listen to music, or make music together. (So cruel that singing together stimulates contagion–what fresh hell that is.) Seeing a movie in a cinema. Not being hyper-careful.

Given up: Trust. Relaxed non-vigilance. Loud convivial shared meals in restaurants. Browsing in bookstores and record stores.  The pizza slice I’d buy each day at a pizza place near my office at school, where I’d enjoy the added deliciousness of greeting the cooks and the staff, who would sometimes ask me what I was reading that day, and who other times would tell me of interesting conferences they’d attended the week before. All these infinite worlds of folks I’d see in a workaday world who’d stand revealed, moment to moment, as portals to a multiverse of infinite interest and human kindness.

Hard to stop once the list gets going.

And then the losses that were on the way, anyway: I’ve lost a friend and mentor and colleague who died a few months before the pandemic, a beloved father-in-law who died just before lockdown, a mentor and a complicated, flawed teacher-scholar-hero who died just after.

My sense of time is blurred, less reliable than usual, sometimes deceptive. I begin and end many days feeling murky.

And then there’s democracy, justice, equity. Good faith. All fragile. All torn.

So what will I give up for Lent?

What will be suitably mortifying in a season of such death already?

I want to give up silence for Lent.

I have gradually hidden myself behind all the things I must not, should not, dare not, had better not write about. To write anything would be to bring it all to mind in a way I believed to be dangerous to my ability to do the things that had to be done, carefully, deliberately, consistently, vigilantly, especially during a pandemic when it seems that literal and metaphoric contagion would blast their way into any opening–especially the openings here, on Gardner Writes.

Better to keep quiet, better not to write, better to be very careful indeed. Better to hunker down.

Looks like the English-speaking world is approaching peak hunker. I’m glad to think it’s not just me.

At times I think my hunkering has been like that second definition, at least I hope so. But today, Ash Wednesday, I must also say that I have, for several years, taken shelter in a defensive position of silence. And I want to give up silence for Lent.

I don’t know exactly what that will mean, except that I will do my utmost to write in this space each day during this season. That’s as far as I can see right now. That’s probably enough.

And now that I’ve said what I’m giving up for Lent, perhaps I have made a little vow, here where you’ve heard it. Perhaps it will help.

A special thanks to Jon Udell, who inspired me to stop being silent, and to Tom Woodward, who sealed the deal with his post on Shrove Tuesday.

See you tomorrow.

Over the summer I corresponded frequently with a colleague at another school who was intrigued by my use of a phpBB discussion forum platform for my online classes. I’ve come to rely on the discussion forums as the primary community builders and hubs for these classes. (I still use blogs and Hypothesis and often Wikipedia as well, but that’s for another post.)

Along the way I thought aloud about my conceptual frameworks for these learning spaces. My frameworks seem in some respects radically different from the frameworks I see in other discussions about online learning. Perhaps they’re not so different as I think, but then again, I’ve been to enough conferences and heard enough talk about uber-LMS next-gen “learning engineered” approaches that I suspect my frameworks are indeed atypical.

At any rate, some thoughts on discussion forums as learning environments:

For me, the biggest question is one of environment and what the cog-psych people call “appraisal“–i.e., the message the environment and affordances send to the user about what sort of thing happens in that environment. That has to do with look and feel, with what’s out there on the Web that resembles the environment, what you can do with the particular affordances the environment provides. In short, what has the environment’s designer (or the platform’s installer, or the course’s instructor) imagined this experience might be like, or should be like?

So in these respects, the choice of what goes where on a platform is less about technical considerations that it is about social, affective, and cognitive considerations. Less like building a house, and more like hosting a great dinner party.

So, do you want your students to be in an environment in which other class discussions can be viewed if they choose–or where they see that these discussions are present, even if they never look at them? For me, that answer would be yes, as the space (in a theatrical sense almost) communicates that Here Fellow Learners Are Building Communities, Working Hard, And Having Fun While Doing So.

I wouldn’t myself put a faculty forum I’ve used for other business in there, because I don’t want the site to be “Dr. C.’s phpBB installation where he takes care of all his business.” Even if the students can’t look at the discussion itself (assuming they’d even want to of course), they see that the forum is there, and for me that subtly communicates that this is not a student learning site but a site that serves my needs first.

These are subtleties in some respects, but they’re all tied to my longstanding dissatisfaction with Blackboard’s transactional design for everything, including their “blogs” and “discussion forums.” I’ve peeked at Canvas, which is now being rolled out at VCU, and while it’s much sleeker and friendlier and web-savvy, it kind of amounts to the same thing.

And getting back to my original point, using something that’s NOT a designed-for-school platform helps the students’ appraisal shift a bit. Think of it as something like the beloved class meetings where you get to go outside. Same lesson, same students, same teacher, but not an environment that says SCHOOL quite so firmly. Another way to think of the forum is as a class-related “third place” or “third space.”  (Yes, the distractions can be a challenge, but so are ants at a picnic. The joy is worth the pain.)

At this point, my colleague asked if students would use a “just chatting” space if they had three spaces available on the forum, with another for guided online discussions and a third for questions and answers (student questions and teacher answers, presumably). I responded with the following thoughts.

In my experience, students typically want things in school to be transactional most of the time. That’s not always bad, but it’s mostly bad, because “transactional” rules out the real vulnerability and communal efforts and conspicuous commitment required for authentic learning communities. So if you create two spaces that are pretty much transactional, with one that’s a social space, they’ll likely say “spaces one and two matter for my utilitarian purposes of getting through this class and earning a good grade, and the rest is just fluff, and I’ve got a million other things to do, and I don’t even know these people, so forget it.”

A common teacher remedy would be to require the students to socialize, which is even more disastrous. (The beatings will continue until morale improves.)

My strong recommendation is to combine those three spaces. They’re all valuable, and they’re related. It will be the students’ responsibility to pay attention and to use the forum to find the information they want (a very easy thing to do, with a search box). You can nudge them along the way by making FAQs, making some threads into “stickies” or “announcements,” etc.

I do require that student posts be “interesting, substantive, and relevant.” My experience has been that there’s enough good socializing in the “interesting, substantive, and relevant” posts to make the forum lively. I’ve also made some recent tweaks, such as creating an “introductions” thread as I did for my summer class. Students need not provide any info they’re uncomfortable providing. They don’t have to use photos of themselves–any polite (i.e., NOT “nsfw”) avatar will do. Having that thread was a great way to start the class.

In my class sessions, I also repeat over and over what I consider to be the value of the forum. I regularly mention posts I’ve found particularly interesting and insightful. And very often, my approach to the next class will be shaped and inspired by the threads and enthusiasms I see on the forum.

I hope the above makes some sense even without the context of the original conversation. I’m happy to elaborate on any part of what I’ve written, either in the comments or in another post.

In subsequent posts, I want to reflect on my own Great Online Pivot last March, and what I learned as a result. I also want to explore some of what I did over the summer–including teaching a fully online asynchronous class–to prepare myself for my online teaching this fall. As a look ahead, here’s an example of one thing I learned to do, something I’d always wanted to try: I made course trailers. I’ll share one now.

Note: I wrote and posted this work to Facebook on Father’s Day 2020. Although I have many reservations about Facebook these days, and I suspect that “many” may well become “too many” before too long, it is a place of gathering and I depend on it for encouragement and solidarity. Responses come quickly. The news is often timely. The ties that bind are visible and sometimes surprising. Still.

But my first and best online home is still this blog, which I have sadly neglected for all sorts of reasons neither you nor I have the patience for me to recite.

The response to this memoir on Facebook made me think I would do well to reproduce it in an open space. I also know that every post to this good old home keeps the blog from going dark forever.

So another candle in the window, for my father.

I think of my father today, and remember the one place where he was always confident, happy, and full of wonder: his garden. He grew up on a subsistence farm, and worked for the Forest Service before he came to Roanoke for a new life of difficult and often menial physical labor. He complained about many things, and often, but in my hearing he never once complained about the work he had to do to make a living, whether it was grinding centerseals at the N&W shops, or cleaning schools as a day custodian, or, as he once did for a short while, handling what I’m sure were toxic substances in a local biochemical plant.

It always seemed to me that the work he was born to do was farming. I recall hearing him and my mother talking about selling our house, buying some land in Vinton (near Roanoke), and setting up a farm. But someone else would have had to manage it all–my dad was emphatically not a manager–and the idea didn’t last long, though I still remember the conversations.

Later in life, my dad always had a pretty large garden, large enough to hire a horse-driven plow to till the earth at planting time. We ate delicious vegetables from that garden. I thought all vegetables tasted that way until I had to rely on a grocery store, long before groceries had begun to care about better-tasting vegetables. Even today, though, with the right kind of grocery store tomatoes tasting very good indeed, it’s not at all like what my father helped to bring out of the ground.

Neither I nor my brother had any interest in farming, and to this day I’ve never had a garden of my own. But I remember my father in his garden, and I have him on lo-res videocassette explaining his garden to me. I’ve included a still image from that video below.

I’ve also included what to my knowledge is the only letter my father ever wrote me, a postcard he sent to me during the Governor’s School in 1974. He would sometimes jot a note on the bottom of a letter from my mother, but this was unique in being from him only. I was away from home for a month, longer than I’d ever been away, and for our close-knit family it seemed a very long time indeed.

You can see from the handwriting that my father struggled with a tremor pretty much all his adult life. It may have been the result of a bad concussion he suffered as a teen when he stepped out of a moving car, fell and hit his head, and lost consciousness for a few days. Whatever the cause, it was something he dealt with and typically sought to hide as he moved through his life.

My father was a complicated man and sometimes difficult, but he loved his family and he had a strong and fruitful way with the land and its bounty. I’m not sure he ever quite understood the life I ended up pursuing. He did say he hoped to live to see me finish my Ph.D. so he could call me Doctor. I finished in May, 1992, and he died just a few months later.

For those few months he did indeed call me Doctor. And he knew, though I’m not sure either of us recognized its significance, that I had written a dissertation primarily concerned with Paradise Lost and, in particular, a garden planted by God.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Gardner Writes appeared fifteen years ago today.

Well:

I’ve told the story in many other places of how I began blogging, inspired by Gene Roche and Bryan Alexander and Mary Donnelly and Brian Lamb and Barbara Ganley and Jon Udell and no doubt some folks I have overlooked in that list (my apologies). There are also stories to tell of how and why my blogging has waxed and waned over the years. Some of those stories are about work, some about stress, some about worry, some about insecurity, some about anger, some about exhaustion. Many of the stories combine all those factors.

Every time I blog, now, I find myself avoiding those stories. And since blogging for me has always been about telling my stories–the stories of my learning, my dreams, my hopes, my work–I find myself avoiding blogging, too.

But none of that will be forever, Deo volente. I don’t yet feel able or willing to tell those stories yet, but I will one day. And I hope the very fact I wanted to contribute another thread, today, to the ragged but still thrilling tapestry of the Web indicates I’m still committed to the project. And I always have the splendidly encouraging example of my friend and colleague and fellow blogger Alan Levine before me. (Now there’s a light that’s never goes out.)

I still think about leadership, and positive change, in higher education and in teaching and learning generally. I still think computers are a fascinating invention, and that networked computing as a platform for communication and collaboration can be extraordinarily effective in our efforts to go up Bateson’s levels of learning together. I’m still enthusiastic about the idea of connected learning. It’s been a thrill and a revelation to work with Wiki Education in my courses and to see the difference it’s made in my students’ work and in their lives as learners. Hypothes.is has become an essential part of the learning ecosystem in every class I craft; I can’t imagine teaching without it. Each of these affordances and ideas is also a movement, a culture, a set of ideals and commitments that for me continue to represent the spirit of Web 2.0 I found all around me in 2004, when I started blogging.

I still require blogging in my classes. I still think that telling the story of one’s learning in a public blog post offers decisive opportunities for the metacognition that’s essential to deeper learning. Some of my greatest joys as a teacher still come from reading the stories of my students’ learning, particularly those blog posts in which they link to, credit, and encourage each other. To watch a class become a community of learners is a deep delight. It’s just about the most hopeful thing there is, in my experience.

I’m working on a book on Doug Engelbart and helping to convene a conversation around his research report cum manifesto Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. I still meet astonishing people whose lives and work humble and inspire me. I’m still traveling around to speak with folks at various conferences and events, and to learn from them. I’m still an English professor, still in love with film and music and poetry. I’m still a Miltonist, with three new essays out in the last fourteen months. There have been some losses over the last several years, some of them very painful. Yet, and still, there remains much good work to attempt.

And Gardner Writes is still here, and I still believe in blogging.

Andrew Sullivan describes some great reasons to continue the work of blogging, reasons that I still find compelling and true:

Blogging is a different animal. It requires letting go; it demands writing something that you may soon revise or regret or be proud of. It’s more like a performance in a broadcast than a writer in a book or newspaper or magazine (which is why, of course, it can also be so exhausting). I have therefore made mistakes along the way that I may not have made in other, more considered forms of writing; I have hurt the feelings of some people I deeply care about; I have said some things I should never have said, as well as things that gain extra force because they were true in the very moment that they happened. All this is part of life – and blogging comes as close to simply living, with all its errors and joys, misunderstandings and emotions, as writing ever will.

Those words appeared over four years ago, in a post that appears, ironically, to have been Sullivan’s penultimate blog post. But the words are still there, as of this writing, just as promised. The link still connects. So there’s that.

And here is this, a little anniversary celebration for the space that opened up a part of me that badly needed the air and sunlight and companionship all those years ago. My thanks to all of you who have been a part of these fifteen years. It’s been harder for me lately to get to the “letting go” that Sullivan aptly describes as a sine qua non. It’s not a complete letting go, of course. I still believe in personal, not private. But a sequence of losses can make one grab onto whatever’s left very, very tightly. Too tightly. My own irony is that I have not held on to the freedom that this blog brought to me, and still brings to me. I have not held on to the letting go, at least not consistently, and not here. It feels like I’ve nearly forgotten about that note, pure and easy, playing so free like a breath rippling by.

Nearly, but not completely. I still hear some music in the distance.

Time to find that merry gypsy and rejoin the caravan.