It feels like a little like a scene from a classic 50’s SF movie.  There’s a big oscilloscope in the center of the frame. On the screen, two distinct sine waves. Someone turns a dial, then another one, and the two sine waves move together into phase. Then the next plot point appears.

I’d gotten an invitation to Google Wave from Pumpkiny (thanks!) three months ago. I’d given Wave a quick look. It was mystifying for the most part. Ellen Filgo, Baylor’s E-Librarian and intrepid pioneer in all online matters, put a Baylor Waver wave together. There are about twenty of us on there, including a few of my students from last term’s New Media Studies seminar. But when I checked in today, most of the Wave activity was dormant, on that Wave and on the six or seven others I’d been added too. It looked like we’d all given it a try and then gone on to other matters. (The exception in my inbox was one Bryan Alexander had started, a Wave about Wave–a popular genre–with some extra Wave information resources and some typically trenchant commentary from Bryan.)

Today somebody turned the dials and got the waves in phase, somehow. A faculty colleague emailed me asking if I’d heard about Google Wave. I was cleaning up email and found the one that described the official EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Wave for the annual meeting in a couple of weeks. I finally read some entries in the Google Wave Blog. I re-read the ELI “7 Things You Should Know About Google Wave” with renewed interest and attention. One colleague in the Baylor marketing/communications division emailed me with a question she’d received. I replied with an overview and links to resources. Another colleague in that division emailed a colleague in the library, then the University Webmaster. The emails were crossforwarded. The flurry of interest sent me back to Wave again, where I began to add to the public Baylor wave and soon found myself in a conversation with a fellow from Spain about dragging and dropping pdf files into Wave. (Turns out you can do it, but only in Chrome natively; Firefox and Safari need Gears installed to do it.)

A closer look, a harder look, more people in the network, a little more conversation, a few more resources, and things begin to coalesce here. I haven’t gotten my head around it yet, but I think I know more of the “it” I’m trying to get my head around, if that makes any sense.

I feel that old spidey-sense tingling. A good feeling. Wave is ambitious, subtle and bold as well. It’s a version of Ted Nelson’s intertwingling.

I’m getting interested.

Jon Udell directed me to a very interesting Seb Paquet blog post today, “The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era.” I read Seb’s post with great admiration. Seb tells a disheartening story of his own education that resonates with some of my own experiences. To take but one minor example, as an undergraduate I had a professor who put tristram Shandy on the syllabus but said “I don’t really like this book very much, and you needn’t bother with it.” I’m sure many students shrugged it off, but the implications were disturbing to me. If the teacher intended a kind of wry irony in his pronouncement, he failed in my case. The message I got was that he was largely going through the motions and that keen, wide-ranging interests were subordinated to personal taste and casual dismissal. The worst part is that I didn’t read the book. A few years later, I had a much better teacher in graduate school, and I read the book with great relish. In fact, it inspired one of my better papers, one I’m still proud of, and one that elicited very witty and acute comments from the professor.

I’m sure many variables make it risky for me to generalize too freely about the differences between the two teachers, but I feel confident that a certain kind of studied superficiality, a kind of arch mock-urbanity, put me off the eighteenth-century novel for a long time, regrettably so given the great treasures these novels embody.

I flashed on this memory as I read Seb’s post. I kept reading. I arrived at the part where Seb praises a competent teacher, Sal Khan, who does his teaching not in a classroom but via YouTube. He’s got nearly 1200 videos up there to date, all free to the world (aside from those parts where YouTube is blocked, such as many public schools). They’re the product of a project he calls the Khan Academy. The videos are about 10-20 minutes long. Aside from some standardized test prep and some brain teasers, the videos concentrate in economics, finance/business, science, and math. Really quite astonishing stuff. I’ve only dipped in to a couple of the videos myself, so I’ve no considered evaluation of my own to offer yet, but the testimonials and the success of Sal’s efforts are very impressive. Jon’s right to say Sal Khan is “on fire.” And he’s also a great stovemaker for the fires of others.

Seb praises Sal for the clarity of his explanations. They’re “clueful” and “understandable.” So much to the good. Seb also makes these hard-to-refute observations:

Let’s not kid ourselves: within a school, the students know who is a good teacher and who is no more illuminating than a wet pack of matches.

The net takes that to a whole different level. Eventually everyone will know who the good teachers are, and will be able to tune into them. They will be rock stars.

But what will happen to the bad teachers then?

There’s a quote by Warren Buffett that I like to bring up from time to time: “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

Well, the incompetent teachers have indeed been swimming naked, and in a world where learners are free to tune into many other, competent teachers, it will inevitably show. When you have something to compare to, bad becomes tangibly bad.

No argument here from me, at all. Love that Buffett quote, which will scale in interesting ways as the tide goes out on all sorts of institutions in the networked intelligence age.

But questions still remain. What constitutes a great explanation? Seb’s answer is that students know it when they experience it, because they experience understanding. That’s part of the answer, certainly. But it’s also a tautology, in many respects, and deeper questions soon emerge. Some writers–Ted Nelson comes to mind–say that teacherly explanations are themselves part of the problem, as they encourage simple paraphrase, reductive teacher-pleasing spitback, and other all-too-familiar adaptive behaviors. More haunting questions follow. What makes a learner capable of understanding that he or she has “got it”? Is it possible for learners to think they’ve “got it” when they don’t? Is it possible for learners to think they haven’t gotten it when in fact they have? (Yes to both, in my experience, with the latter more frequent than the former.) And what demonstrates understanding? For that matter, what constitutes understanding?

These are very difficult, complex questions. At the same time, I think it’s true that most students respond to great teachers in ways that are qualitatively different from the ways they respond to average or poor teachers. But what are those qualities? And what qualities of mind in the teacher are needed for great teaching to emerge? Can those qualities be learned, or is the idea to nurture and encourage the growth and refinement of those qualities in those teachers who already have them, with the first order of business being to devise good tools to identify good prospects for this profession?

If Bruner’s right and to demonstrate understanding the student must be able “to go beyond what is given,” then great teachers are great givers, great framers of the opportunity to go beyond, and generously perceptive when the “beyond” is not what they would themselves have identified as a beyond before the going occurs–that is, the “beyond” is really a beyond, not just something the teacher has withheld in anticipation of eliciting it from the students in what’s often called the “Socratic” style of teaching.

Perhaps the truly generous and great teachers ares the ones who best prepare, inspire, and welcome their students to teach them.

And how does one assess that?

Much to continue to mull over here: some ideas to tinker with, and some practices to encourage, but still very much a set of “conjectures and dilemmas” (Bruner) to keep exploring.

I do think that great teachers exhibit a peculiar and peculiarly useful self-awareness of their own presence and approach as teachers. I’m not talking methodology here. I’m talking mindfulness. And this Sal Khan has in abundance. When I read his reflections on his work, I’m truly awestruck. This is the reason I always read the acknowledgements and dedications when I pick up a book. They offer their own “about”-ness, and at their best they demonstrate the author’s particular cast of mind and character of heart in relation to the thing he or she has made.

I’ll close this ramble with a very inspiring selection from Sal’s “Frequently Asked Questions” page, one that set me thinking most fiercely about the sources of clarity and intelligibility, qualities that are essentially communicative and cannot be understood outside the context of communication, especially communication with oneself and the willingness to enact the drama of one’s own cognition, wonder, and passion:

The conversational style of the videos is the tonal antithesis of what people traditionally associate with math and science instruction. The less obvious distinctions are, however, what make the site hard to reproduce.

I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him. The concepts are conveyed as they are understood by me, not as they are written in a textbook developed by an educational bureaucracy. Viewers know that it is the labor of love of one somewhat quirky and determined man who has a passion for learning and teaching. I don’t think any corporate or governmental effort–regardless of how much money is thrown at the problem–can reproduce this.

A lot of my own educational experience was spent frustrated with how information was conveyed in textbooks and lectures. There would be connections in the subject matter that standard curricula would ignore despite the fact that they make the content easier to understand, enjoy, and RETAIN. I felt like fascinating and INTUITIVE concepts were almost intentionally being butchered into pages and pages of sleep-inducing text and monotonic, scripted lectures. I saw otherwise intelligent peers memorizing steps and formulas for the next exam without any sense of the intuition or big picture, only to forget everything within a matter of weeks. These videos are my expression of how the concepts should have been expressed in the first place, all while not compromising rigor or comprehensiveness.

“An actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him.” A simple description with enormous depth. Can there be a true going beyond, a deep understanding, without fascination? And for the teacher, what are the most effective ways, given the teacher’s peculiar strengths and gifts, to convey fascination in a way that permits understanding, and also results from that understanding, in a recursive and never-ending process? My suspicion is that the highest-quality fascination, the kind that generates and releases the most energy, cannot be the result of method, though certain techniques may help. Instead, it must come from the readiness to be fascinated–and a gift for turning that readiness into a certain quality of mindfulness about the possibilities for fascination in others.

Let me try to elucidate that metaphor.

The 12/21-12/28 New Yorker has a fascinating story on stoves. Stoves, it turns out, are of the utmost importance for reasons of public health and climate change. The stoves in question are chiefly the wood-burning kind used in the Third World, that is, when stoves are used there at all. You’ll have to read the article to get the rest of the story. For now, I want to do three things: 1) register my amazement at this crucial piece of civilization infrastructure whose complexity and importance were entirely beyond me before I started the story, 2) register my wonder at the talents and commitment of the people involved in research, engineering, design, and organizational activity related to stoves for the Third World (many of those talented people are from the Island of Misfit Toys–even better), and c) quote a very striking moment early on in which the connections to education were too urgent to overlook:

Fire is a fickle, nonlinear thing, and seems to be affected by every millimetre of a stove’s design–the size of the opening, the shape and material of the chamber, the thickness of the grate–each variable amplifying the next and being amplified in turn, in a complex series of feedback loops. “You’ve heard of the butterfly effect?” one engineer told me. “Well, these stoves are full of butterflies.”

Substitute “learning” for “fire,” and substitute “learning environment” for “stove,” and you can take it from there. Sadly, most of the time our schools and their learning environments (read: classrooms) seem more like feedlots (or holding pens) than stoves.

Small wonder the sparks don’t fly and the fires go out.

Sales of e-books are surging, and the voices of those moaning at the bar (cf. Tennyson) are getting louder too. You’d think the Kindle police were going to knock on our doors and confiscate all the printed bits of paper we own. Sometimes the laments are more nuanced and playful: witness Dolen Perkins-Valdez’ puckish yet poignant essay at the Wall Street Journal–online, of course. Moreover (I’ve always wanted to use that word in a blog post), I saw the link in a news feed update from Dolen on Facebook, an update that soon trailed several comments pleading with Dolen not to give in to her newfound affection for the Kindle she received for her birthday. (The layers of irony here are large enough not to need pointing out, I trust.) It’s not enough to swear one’s allegiance to what “book” has meant since roughly the sixteenth century–or, if one’s talking about paperbacks, for the last sixty or so years. One must be vigilant to warn one’s friends away from their unwitting complicity in the destruction of this most loved of all media: the book.

That’s overstating it a bit, but not much. And speaking of irony, just two days ago I saw enough abandoned books in the Half-Price Books store to make a bibliophile weep.

I have a hard time rejecting any communication technology. When it comes to reading, I want it all. You can’t have my books, and you can’t have my Kindle, and you can’t have my PC screen, and you can’t have my iPhone. The first time I registered for college classes, back when one went to a large room and stood in line to register (a custom that had some interesting social mediation that’s been temporarily lost with online automation), I was advised to bring a book with me because I was likely to wait awhile. I’d never done that before, but once I did, I was hooked. Since then, I’ve tried never to leave for any appointment without some reading material with me just in case waiting’s involved. So you can see how I’d be especially excited by the idea of books on my telephone, if the book suits and the screen is nice.

Perhaps one day we’ll think about publishing media the way we think about cups, mugs, and stemware today: it all depends on the occasion, and some vessels are more apt for some libations than others.

In the meantime, I’m off to see if any more of those delicious 33 1/3 books are available for the Kindle. They’re perfect for those down moments in the orthopedist’s waiting room….

(By the way, I firmly believe we need to include “poignance” as an essential analytical and expressive skill, particularly for scholars.)

So I wrote, nearly a year ago. One commenter wanted me to elaborate on that aside. What did I mean? Here’s a little more context:

And so back to education. Are our students not universes within a universe? Are our faculty and staff not likewise? Are we not a university? If so, why all the talk of management? Why not more talk of exploration, of representation, of communal mental activity, of the exciting and taxing co-labors of symbol-making and symbol-sharing? That’s the test of life, as Michael Wesch has poignantly observed. (By the way, I firmly believe we need to include “poignance” as an essential analytical and expressive skill, particularly for scholars.)

The Oxford English Dictionary offers many definitions for “poignant” over the years, with an etymology tracing the word back to an Anglo-Norman word meaning “sharp, pointed, prickly, biting, stinging, jagged.” The meanings take some interesting turns, sometimes to the point of making “poignant” one of Freud’s primal words–a word that contains opposite meanings, like “cleave.”

But the meaning I had in mind when I wrote that passage a year ago was closest to the OED‘s last senses in definition 2a: “tenderly sorrowful, bitter-sweet.” Something like what I think my father must have meant when he said some words could go “clear through” him. Or perhaps it’s the feeling Dr. Ralph Stanley has when he hears some old mountain music and feels deeply touched, moved to his soul.

In the context of education, especially as one gains more sophisticated skills of analysis and expression, it seems to me vitally important that we maintain a sense of humility and shared tenderness in the midst of our uncertain journeys through the strange days we experience together. Working in academia for the last quarter-century, I’ve seen the ugliness and winced at the clanging cymbals of intellectual triumphalism. No doubt there have been times when I’ve contributed to the ugliness myself. It’s a great temptation, once one has a store of knowledge and a set of sophisticated argumentative strategies, to try to be the one to stop the conversation, instead of being the one to further it. We learn it in graduate school, or perhaps earlier, first as a survival skill, then as a set of career moves, and finally as a shield. And what do our students see? That learning is largely a matter of being overruled, of memorizing the lesson that beginners don’t know enough to ask intelligent questions (when in fact some of the best questions come from beginners). And that teaching is an exercise in providing answers and furnishing conclusions, not in guiding inquiries or (heaven forfend)  asking real questions.

Yet the subject always becomes more interesting in the context of leading a committed learner through what Bruner calls the “conjectures and dilemmas” that shape our own ongoing inquiries.

No, one doesn’t get the triumphalism or the sounding gong of ideological precision. One doesn’t get to play “first rank, second rank.” If that’s what one wants, that’s disappointing, of course.

But there are other things to want, especially in the context of the tender sorrow of our brief lives and maddening partings, those things we may enjoy and those things we must endure.

What will be on the test? Brevity, uncertainty, absence. Not only these, of course–but here Robert Frost, as so often, had it right: one of the most poignant questions we must frame in all but words is “what to make of a diminished thing.” That’s where the poignance lies, out of which we may learn, perhaps, love.

Not victory, scolding, surveillance, management, or proctoring.

Just love.

I was very fortunate this fall to be asked to interview Larry Lessig for the EDUCAUSE Now podcast series, produced by Gerry Bayne. Gerry produced a teaser for my piece as well as a full-length feature interview segment. He was also kind enough to supply me with the raw audio of the entire telephone interview I conducted with Professor Lessig. I’m podcasting that extended interview here because the last bit didn’t make it into the EDUCAUSE productions. I certainly understand why: for the last ten minutes or so, I took off in a different direction, probing Professor Lessig’s recent decision to put the Lessig Blog on indefinite hiatus. There were some puzzling statements in his valedictory blog post that I wanted to clarify if I could. I also wanted to register not only my disappointment but my dismay at his decision–and to suggest, as respectfully as possible, that his decision was a terribly ironic follow-on to his stirring defense in Remix of the importance of blogging, a defense that included a haunting passage on what blogging had meant to him because of, or despite, his own emotional vulnerabilities. As someone who’s lapsed into blogging silence far too often, I understand very well how draining it can be over the long haul, and I can only imagine the technical challenges–spam, chief among them–of an A-level blog like Larry Lessig’s. And a third child: yes, even with only two I can well imagine how number three would ramp up all the family responsibilities. The new job, ditto.  That said, I also feel very strongly that we’ve only begun to explore this medium, and that it’s vitally important to have voices like Prof. Lessig’s in the blogosphere to demonstrate that exploratory, essayistic, informal writing has academic worth–or should. Is it possible Prof. Lessig doesn’t realize how radical an act his own blogging was?

As you’ll hear, I wasn’t entirely successful in my quest for clarification, especially when it came to Prof. Lessig’s new job and the role it seems to have played in his decision. I hope I was successful, though, in conveying to him how important his work as a blogger continues to be to me and to many others. (The comments on his last post are quite moving in their gratitude.) And I hope his voice will emerge into the blogosphere yet once more, not within an omnibus site like the Huffington Post, but on a domain of his own. It’s the repeated, continued forays in those domains of our own that define us as bloggers, that tell our odysseys–and that offer a paradigm beyond branded pundit aggregation.

I’m grateful to Larry Lessig for taking the time to speak with me, and to EDUCAUSE for the opportunity to do the interview. It was a daunting and exhilarating experience. NB: the first ending is followed by a coda, so keep listening.

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Dr. Leslie Jarmon

This time, as it has several times before, the Thanksgiving season came with mourning, too. Wednesday I learned that Leslie Jarmon had passed away the night before, on November 24. The news shook me. I’d had no idea Leslie was sick. I had followed her progress with a major grant to develop areas in Second Life as distance education affordances for the entire University of Texas system, and I was looking forward to seeing the project get underway. Selfishly, I hoped I’d have a chance to work with Leslie at some point on the project. For I was, and am, a fan of Leslie Jarmon–after being in her presence for one day.

Here, in brief, is that story.

Last year about this time I went to a regional meeting of the Texas Faculty Development Network at Texas A&M. I’d been at Baylor about three months. Baylor had just joined the TFDN. The whole experience was new as new could be for me. The meeting was very cordial and the folks there welcomed me with fine hospitality. At the end of the day, at a public lecture, I got to hear a great Nobel-prize-winning scientist talk about teaching. A memorable trip in every way. But the climax was meeting Leslie Jarmon.

As I recall, the meeting was about halfway through when we took a lunch break. During the break, the talk turned to online education. Suddenly, I heard the words “Second Life.” Looking up, I saw a preternaturally alert woman at the end of the table. Her eyes had enough light in them to illuminate the entire room. She spoke with warmth, intelligence, and urgency about the opportunities virtual worlds presented to all educators–and to students too. I felt such a passion for creativity and connection radiating from her. And I felt a jolt of energy coming through me as well.

So we began to talk. I learned of her work, of her time with the Peace Corps, of her plans for innovation in faculty development at UT-Austin. The more we talked, the more energetic and inspired I became. I soon forgot all my newbie cautions and began to chatter excitedly (those of you who’ve been around me know that moment).

I forgot myself. A lovely, lovely forgetting.

At some point, I brought up Robbie Dingo’s “Watch the World,” one of my favorite works of video art (I’m not sure what else to call it). My bringing up something so dear at that moment testifies to the way Leslie put me entirely at my ease–but it also testifies to a rare gift for sounding the depths in a person she’d just met. Leslie’s animation matched with my impulsiveness led the meeting organizers to play the video for the group. By the end, I was teary, as is usually the case when I watch that video. Leslie just smiled at me, a smile full of shared understanding. An extraordinary smile.

The meeting rolled on after that. We decided on various aspects of the upcoming year for TFDN. We discussed other topics. The whole time, though, I was alight with the happiness of having met someone who not only understood, but who would also teach me.

At the end of the day, we said our goodbyes. They were cordial goodbyes, and a little weary as well, given that we’d been working away at the discussion all day long. I prepared myself mentally for the upcoming lecture and the ensuing drive home to Waco. And at that moment, Leslie surprised me again, this time with a big hug and a smile that could melt the ice caps on both ends of the earth. In short, she touched my heart and soul.

I looked forward to our next meeting and to the conversations ahead, but alas these were not to be. Yet regret is not the moral of this story. You know the moral as well as I do. A few hours in the presence of an honest, full-hearted, extraordinary person can mark one’s life forever. And for that I am very thankful.

As I see other tributes to Leslie on the web, I see that my story is far from unique. I can’t say that I’m surprised. Remarkable people are pretty much full-time. That her middle name is “Hope”–something I learned from her obituary–makes the poetry of her life complete. That I learned of her death from a comment on my blog makes the poetry of our meeting complete.

There’s a memorial to Leslie in Second Life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Educators%20Coop%205/63/98/44. Her avatar’s name was Bluewave Ogee.

I grieve for her passing and offer my condolences to all her family and loved ones.  And I give thanks for this remarkable person who made a shy newcomer’s heart swell with joy and excitement on a December afternoon one year ago.

I’ve got 389 tweets with the #lilly09 hashtag from last week’s Lilly Conference on College Teaching. I estimate that a little over 300 of those are mine. The rest are responses, queries, retweets, encouragement. No doubt a few are unaccounted for because in the heat of the moment I forgot to append the hashtag. Nevertheless, nearly 400 tweets from a three-day conference is still a pretty healthy number, especially since so far as I know I was the only one using that hashtag. (Nothing in the conference materials said anything about a conference hashtag, unless I missed it.)

I’m still not entirely sure what drove me to tweet the conference so extensively. Part of it was a habit I’ve gotten into from other conferences. Part of it was that there were very few tweeters at this conference, so I felt a little more duty-bound to get some stuff into the stream. Most of it was that the sessions were typically thought-provoking and valuable. (I lapsed into silence now and then, rather than post snark.) I’ve gotten way behind on my conference blogging, so I thought that micro-blogging with Twitter would be better than trying to blog about the conference weeks later, the situation I’m usually in these days.

There’s a lot more to say about the conference, of course, but for now, a Wordle created by Joe Fahs of Elmira College out of the many posts in that Twitter stream. As I’ve come to expect from Wordle, the distribution (and Joe’s artful manipulation of the visualization) tells its own tale of the experience. A tale that resonates with the truth of what I found there. My thanks to Joe, and to my wonderful PLN on Twitter who keep me thinking more about possibilities than about liabilities.

I tell myself that over and over. I’ve known real school. Real school exists in pockets, eddies, updrafts, sudden currents, all over the place. I’ve met several extraordinary people at the Lilly International Conference on College Teaching who are doing extraordinary things in the service of real school. Doing these things with next to no funding, with crippling teaching loads, with essential and inspiring support removed in the middle of new projects. The determination and fierce joy of these teachers takes my breath away. I hope my presentation this morning made some contribution to that spirit.

I’ve seen the continuing obstacles as well, including a weird, persistent impulse to name *recall* (as measured on tests) as not only a necessary component of education (I agree here), but as a sufficient definition of learning (I couldn’t disagree more). I’ve heard about curricular reform that ends up as little more than yet another list of requirements. Old stories that retain the power to depress. I also heard a wonderful teacher talk about a program to help students write academic papers, and then say he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to write that way. It was intended as a throwaway, a quip, a laughline, but I wish there had been time to entertain that thought with the seriousness it deserves.

And I’ve heard students say how they’d like more of their education to be like independent study, with faculty as guides and rich information habitats crafted within great library resources. Those desires came out as a result of the best question I’ve heard all week, a question a faculty member asked that student panel: if you could throw away all of what you now know as school and start from scratch, how would you like your education to be?

I wish I’d found the woman who asked that question. I’d sure like to shake her hand. She too is a member of the secret society for real school. Her question goes a lot farther with me than questions about “critical thinking,” a phrase that’s by now so threadbare as to be more hole than stocking. I tweeted my frustration over that phrase early on in this conference, and Mike Wesch tweeted back: “How about creative thinking instead of critical thinking?” I retweeted “Amen. +1.”

And then I listen to a PowerPoint-laden lecture that concludes with a call for banning technology from the classroom. By “technology,” I think the presenters meant information and communication technologies, aside from the instructor’s PowerPoint, presumably (I’m just about fed up with the sloppy shorthand of “technology”). We need to ban “technology” from the classroom, you see, so students will concentrate their attention on what the teacher is saying and do better on the test.

I hope they confiscate the books, too, and all the other distracting technologies: pens, pencils, paper. What could be more important than what a teacher is saying?

Right.

We’ve got to learn to ask better and braver questions about school. I’ve met people here who are doing just that. When will those questions take hold? Or if Seymour Papert’s right and school reform is impossible, where can the secret society for real school build a house where work is play for mortal stakes? Not a pillminder, not a feedlot. A real school.

I have to believe it’s possible.