Like Alan, Marco likes to start with examples: partly because of nerves, partly because he’s aiming for balance between examples and ideas and the balance starts for him with examples.

Pretty good idea for this audience, which will say “awww” not only for puppies (Kathy Sierra did that for us yesterday) but for neat pieces ‘o gear, like the portable mini-keyboard from Korg he shows us as he begins his demo with GarageBand. He advises using the black keys (“you can’t mess up the songs”) and the string presets (“string instruments have great range”). He demos John Williams’ two-key melody from Jaws and shows how the iPhone can map the dissonance, then plays a perfect fourth for us to show how the story can have a happy ending (“Free Willy”).

He seems to be driving toward the idea of musical storytelling.

(Musicians have long debated the way(s) in which music might convey meaning, from the “program music” of something like Scherezade to something as remote and abstract as Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht (I hope I spelled that correctly). I actually went down this path in some research back in grad school, and found that musicians have widely varying ideas about the nature of musical expressivity. There are some interesting angles to pursue here with regard to the specific natures of particular media–films are not illustrated books, photographs are not the same as paintings, etc. It would be interesting to complicate the idea of creativity along these lines.)

Torres had an uncle who produced what he calls “some of the worst movies ever to come out of Mexico.” His mother was a photographer. These influences brought home to Torres (literally) the nature and importance of story. The relationships here also taught Torres that trust and collaboration were crucial to the creative process, especially with storytelling, because no one of us knows everything. Story gives stuff a purpose. The purpose isn’t in the stuff itself. (He connects this idea to material in Sierra’s presentation yesterday–a good connection indeed.) Narrative yields meaning. The search for meaning elicits narrative. (I wonder: is this true for music and the visual arts, always?)

Receive, create, produce, broadcast: here are today’s channels:

Receive, create, produce, broadcast: here are the channels we had when the average principal was in school:

What to conclude from this difference? Are we stuck on assessing the products of pen and paper? What should we do with the varieties of expression we have available to us now? How do we move from students as recipients of information to students as producers of information? Another important point: we may bring information in through one channel, but produce or make something with that information in another channel. We may be auditory learners but visual creators.

At this point the talk turns to what-do-we-need-to-know, and does knowing that stuff confer expertise? Einstein says “don’t ask questions that you can look up.” (True, but there’s more to truly knowing facts than simply being able to repeat them. Schools may not know this yet, of course. But I’m not sure that finding the fact on Google is exactly the same as having memorized the fact yourself. My own memorization, if it’s done well and in a meaningful context, will have assocational ties that stretch in many directions, the way a word has connotations even when I “know the meaning.” A complicated issue.)

Torres mentions in passing the need to teach the grammar of math and not just the facts of math, by which he means the context and uses of mathematical knowledge and procedures.

Now the talk turns to the need for school not to suck. Most folks in the room here think their 9-12 grade education was “boring.” Last year Torres worked with Alton Brown. He shows us a couple of videos, one an ad for the show itself. Great stuff. The melancholy bit comes when Torres recounts Brown’s production team’s description of their process: “we just do what you educators do.” Yeah, right.

Now to Mythbusters: Don’t watch guys teach you. Watch guys learn. They don’t know the answer. We’re in the journey together. Now the audience are participants. And we see not only the result but the process (which is the story).

Schools are trying to perfect routine cognitive skills, but what we need are complex cognitive skills. Learning takes place in a complex web of relationships. Schooling interferes with learning. Schooling is more like “Frogger” and learning is more like “Call of Duty.” He’s also going through the example of the learning networks that have assembled around Lost. (I need to see Lost and I’m looking forward to getting into it, but I do have a small concern that puzzles will become the gold standard for learning, the model by which we understand all aesthetic and narrative experiences. Seems a bit narrow. And having Gilligan’s Island stand in for all TV in the 1960’s is rather a straw-man argument. There are plenty of brainless shows on now as well, and some with much less charm than clumsy old Gilligan’s Island.)

Torres now plays us some excerpts from his students’ work reimagining songs from Star Wars in a mariachi mode. Very creative stuff, very funny. He observes it’s also helpful to be friends with George Lucas so he doesn’t sue you. The point is that it was important to provide the opportunity for students to demonstrate learning and mastery in multiple modes, not just in text and print. It’s important for students to find the channels for their greatest strengths to grow and produce. His student David wanted to learn; he was “desperate to learn.” The challenge is to find a way for schooling to nurture and encourage that desire, not to block it.

As I wrap up this post, I wonder if Torres’ frequent and heartfelt connections to Kathy Sierra’s presentation yesterday will help elicit and frame some of its more subtle depths. Just because someone is a dynamic speaker with a message they carry in much the same way from venue to venue doesn’t mean the person or the talk is superficial or inauthentic. If learning is self-help … or vice-versa … bring it on.

Alan Levine walks to the platform. “Hi there,” he says, confessing to his email habit, the one that’s filled our email inboxes. Then suddenly, in true CogDog fashion, he introduces the speaker and quickly takes a seat. A truly modest man, and also one who like the rest of us is delighted to have this remarkable woman here with us to open this conference.

The Kathy Sierra story. It’s a dramatic narrative that’s had its share of tragedy–but I’m not going to rehearse that here. The real Kathy Sierra story is more a romance, in the older sense of a narrative of wonders and marvels, as well as in the newer sense of a love story. In many respects, Kathy Sierra is in love with love–that is, in love with the loyalty, delight, and sheer enlargement of being that the sense of sheer mastery generates in people. The thing we want to be really good at.

Now Kathy’s asked us to discuss what we wanted to be really, really good at but never quite got there. Chris and I say “guitar.” Leslie sighed and said “oh, men” and confessed her husband had a similar wish. Obviously she married a good man. But I digress.

Kathy’s talking now about mastery generating “high-resolution experience,” exactly what I tell my film studies students they will have after they’ve learned the language of film. They report that they actually *lose* resolution on the way to that learning, which I think is true and not just whingeing. There is a loss of deep experience on the way to certain kinds of mastery. This may explain why I’m neither an astronaut nor a guitar hero.

Ah, now Kathy’s got a slide of our “legacy brain,” the brain that focuses pretty relentlessly on food, tigers, and sex. Ergo, “brain and mind are in an epic battle.”  Our legacy brain’s spam filter is just too relentless, too narrow. (Funny, this is what I was trying to persuade my students of in the New Media Studies class last spring–trying to get them beyond the undoubtedly good study habits that have blocked creative wandering and curiosity.) Can we find a way to work with our legacy brain to get cognition and affect to work together to get us to our goals?

I can’t help pointing out the John Donne connection here. T. S. Eliot wrote this about Donne: “To Donne, a thought was an experience: it modified his sensibility.” And I think the process will work in reverse.

Kathy notes that we must choose our cognitive/affect triggers carefully so we encourage relevant practice and not irrelevant personal tangents. I agree, though there’s real artistry needed here, as that legacy brain spam filter will skew “relevance” toward very narrow channels if we’re not careful.

Great point here: adopting a more conversational voice triggers the hold-up-my-end-of-the-conversation reflex in our minds. We feel we’re in a real give-and-take, not simply a one-way broadcast. Now, dear reader, a thought experiment from Gardner: to what extent is Blackboard a “conversation”? To what extent were we in search of a conversational encounter in our schooling to begin with? If we’ve gotten the LMS we deserve, can we change course and strive to deserve something better? The problem, dear Brutus, is not in our LMSs, but in us….

If you were here, I bet you’d be in a good state of “flow” right now, with Kathy’s provocative, conversational presentation making all sorts of thoughts emerge from your stimulated mind. This is great stuff: Kathy Sierra teaches us about our legacy brains while getting past them in fine style. That’s a teacherly triumph.

And now she goes one better: she makes us stand up and stand on one foot. Then she tells us “you just got smarter,” since exercise is better than any puzzle at getting our brains to work better. Guess I’ll take that walk tomorrow morning.

Here’s the “superset game”: find the larger concern and blog/tweet about that. A corollary: find the pattern and shorten the duration to Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to mastery.” A Campbell observation: helping students find the larger concerns, find the patterns, and shorten the timeline to mastery (or at least discovery) is one of the teacher’s highest callings, and one of the teacher’s most valuable contributions. I don’t know who said it, but it’s true: “I can’t teach you anything; I can just save you some time.”

Now the plot thickens: Kathy says we should always be practicing. And here’s an opportunity for creativity: how can we shape the utility infrastructure of our environments so that it’s always giving us practice situations. Kathy bought a “personal scaffold” from Home Depot and arranged her workdesk so she’s practicing saddle time and getting better at horseback riding. Ingenious–a learning environment, cannily designed. There are obvious connections with the growing emphasis on the value and importance of informal learning. Constructing opportunities for practice–but opportunities embedded in lived environments, not just practice rooms.

Circling back now to the notion that new learning involves loss. We all fear going down to the “I’m no good” level again, which is what we confront when we upgrade software or tackle any new phase of learning. There’s a slide up there right now with a face-palm and a thought-bubble that says “I’m an idiot.” Evoking this response is what we must avoid. (I have to say it: the culture of expertise in school can sometimes seem aimed at evoking that very response–and the great ironic payback is the “imposter syndrome” that dogs all our steps as we do our best to avoid feeling we’re idiots. Could we not change this game? If we stop making students feel small and submissive in those destructive ways, will we gradually grow out of our own faculty fears and nagging imposter syndromes? These are complex pathologies without easy answers, but it’s urgent to talk about them.)

Oh, here’s an interesting thought: Kathy says there are no dumb questions *and no dumb answers*. This idea aligns beautifully with what Ken Robinson says about how kids will “have a go” even if they’re not sure what they should say. (But the big pushback here comes from the sciences, and I understand the response–what to do here?)

I must disagree with Kathy at this point. She says experts don’t remember how they suffered to acquire their knowledge. I suspect the opposite is true: the memory is so vivid that it generates some of those complex school pathologies.  The focus is then on the need for suffering instead of the need for joy, for wonder. I’m certain that that’s reductive on my part, but I’m not sure it’s entirely wrong.

The grand finale: total immersion jams. Yes! Only total immersion gets to peak experience. That was a big part of the all-night Milton readathon idea. Total immersion alters consciousness–and the alteration persists. Kathy talks about the Ad Lib Game Development Society. The idea is ABC. Always Be Closing. At the end of the total immersion, you have to have the product you came in to make. The 24-hour filmmaking festivals are great examples of challenge, constraint, and ABC.  “The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it.” Kathy’s not sure who said that, but she loves it. So do I. Great and painful connections here to the pathologies of the culture of expertise. Expertise matters. It sure does. But the culture of expertise cannot be founded on the assumption that expertise means exact and final knowledge–or that school is a matter of transmitting that exact and final knowledge directly into legacy brains so they can spit it back at exam time.

Many thoughts, but even more yearnings after that keynote talk. Yearnings for real school. I’m not done with that hope. And a talk like Kathy Sierra’s keeps me pretty wound up about it.

Never sure if I have the sports metaphors exactly right, but I’ll toe the rubber and try the slider.

Hmm, that sounds weirder and weirder.

I’m sitting here next to Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Chris Lott, my fellow “designated bloggers” at the New Media Consortium’s 2009 annual conference. We’ll be live-blogging the plenary events. I’m in some pretty outstanding company at this table–in the room, too, as many of my favorite thinker-practitioner-imagineers are seated within an easy hailing distance, with the intellectual ferment and freewheelingness that implies.

The introduction is going on now, mentioning collective brainpower and the sessions ahead. I feel the Muses descend upon us. Hail Terpsichore! Hail Urania! Hail Euphrosyne! (Not a muse, but stay with me.) At last, back to metaphors I understand….

Excelsior!

It’s taken awhile, for which my apologies, but here at last is the podcast of Dr. Phil Long’s keynote presentation for the 2009 Baylor Scholars Week. Phil’s talk is very ambitious and comes at a great time as the two cultures meet again in the domain of undergraduate research.

I think Phil’s after some home truths here about human experience as seen through the lens of creativity, education, shared inquiry, and disciplinary methodologies. Listening to his talk again as I prepared it for publication, I was struck by the range of Phil’s thought and examples. History and neuroscience; academic research, teaching, learning, and administration; school reform (and the difficulties–or impossibilities–thereof); innovation and disruption. Most of all, I’m struck by Phil’s deep commitment to the encounter between teacher and student in which each learns from the other in true community, true reciprocation. The story of the Nobel Prize winner (about 41:45 into the podcast) brought me to tears when I heard it, and it still gives me chills to hear it now.

For me, Phil’s talk gets some key priorities in good order. First we must engage with and understand the environment in which we live, and imagine the possibilities with open minds and hearts. Then we must plan, execute, and afterwards, assess. Too often the assessment precedes the engagement, as we unconsciously, and sometimes with the best intentions, take fresh ideas and turn their gold to dross with habit, fear, and mulish resistance. We know the “no” before we make the effort. It takes courage, imagination, and a certain playfulness–maybe even what Keats called “negative capability”–to remain genuinely receptive to the opportunities before us and genuinely thoughtful about their benefits–and, of course, their liabilities.

For another great example of Phil’s thinking about these topics, see his recent article with Richard Holeton, “Signposts of the Revolution? What We Talk about When We Talk about Learning Spaces.”

But that’s enough from me for now. Time for Phil to speak.

Thanks, Phil.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (24.4MB)

It’s been quite a cavalcade of edtech stars at Baylor this spring. First Alan Levine, then Bryan Alexander, and then, in an unbelieveable hat trick, Phil Long. That’s got to be some sort of record for a February-March-April run of good luck.

Phil’s big moment for us was a deeply thoughtful and bracing talk on the “two cultures” divide in light of the new “imagination age” (cf. Dan Pink) and higher ed’s heightened emphasis on undergraduate research. Phil wove together Nobel prizes, Walt Whitman, C. P. Snow, students, teachers, curriculum–well, as soon as I’m back from Sweden I’ll put the audio up as a podcast and you can hear its breadth and ambition yourself. I was especially glad that three of my New Media Seminar students were there to hear Phil’s talk. One of the students blogged it here. The talk was a great keynote for Baylor’s Scholars Week event, a spring showcase emerging from our own Undergraduate Research initiative. We call it URSA, for Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Achievements. But we also call it URSA because at Baylor it’s all about the bears….

In addition to the keynote, Phil was generous with his presence and perspectives throughout his two-day residency. He interacted with my students at their presentation on Monday. He went to lunch with several folks from the library to talk learning environments. He accompanied me to the Phi Beta Kappa lecture Monday night, where we heard a fascinating talk on Chopin and the sublime, including a lovely piano performance that demonstrated the speaker’s thesis. A satisfyingly multimodal event, with philosophy, aesthetics, and scholarship combining in very persuasive mutual reinforcement.

The big events are important, and having Alan, Bryan, and Phil make their presentations at Baylor this spring has been a series of great opportunities to plant seeds and raise awareness. But it’s also those less formal moments that I treasure, those times when just having these amazing people walking around and interacting with us brings out great ideas and sparks innovation, sometimes right away and sometimes weeks or months later. To watch these people who are such inspirations for my own work spreading their light and creativity among folks at Baylor is such a joy. 

And the icing on the cake, aside from the requisite trip to Ninfa’s, was staying up late and playing with ooVoo–but that’s another story for another post.

Will Richardson writes yet another great post, this time on Kindles, social reading, social writing, social annotation–well, go read it yourself, then come right back.

Now, strap in for more ironies and connections.

I came to the Steven Johnson article myself yesterday, after a colleague in the Baylor library emailed me and another colleague–the Director of the Electronic Library, as it happens– a link (go ahead, peel that onion, dear readers). He was inspired to send me the link because we had been admiring my office’s new Kindle at a meeting yesterday morning. So I go to the article–a fine and unusually thoughtful article, in my view–and I’ve got Diigo and Zotero on, and I see all the annotations, and I look through a few of the comments, thinking all the while “my goodness, I’m reading about the transformation of reading and writing in a space that’s already *itself* demonstratively transformed–recursion rocks.” Then I see that several of the comments are from Will! One of them says something like “I want to have a conversation about this piece with everyone right now!” And I think to myself that in some uncanny, asynchronous, space-and-time-folding way, Will’s wish has come true even as I read it. As John Keats writes of his own reading,

Then I go to Bloglines this morning and read Will’s blog post, and began to comment, and realized the comment was far too long and would work better as part of a distributed conversation. So I quickly port the comment here. Another layer of marginalia–to Steven Johnson, to Will Richardson, to the world–for now the margins themselves become infinitely extensible, even at the risk or splendor of the margins becoming boundless. (Actually, they already are and always have been–all books are written in the margins of others, and those margins detach and become books themselves. But I digress.)

I hear my skeptical colleagues saying “wasteful and inefficient! how will you keep track of all the layers of commentary? how will you find your way back to all the places you found? what if a server goes down? where is there time for all this stuff?” And I know they’re partially right–but only partially. I know also that the passion to connect that Will expresses so beautifully and forcefully, the passion to learn, to grow and explore and report back from those prospects and “wild surmises,” finds such reinforcement and so many rewards in this environment that my only standard of comparison is the golden summer afternoons I used to spend in elementary school libraries while my father did his janitorial labors and my mother worked at her home-health-aide job. Those afternoons I simply flew through the infosphere of a library, all those books potentially lying open to each other and to me. Now those golden moments can be shared, built upon, reflected on singly and together–as always, but more so, for good and for ill and for good and for ill and for good.

And when I yearn for that library Donne writes of in Meditation 17, I can go there, journeying through time and space with my fellow readers and writers. My fellow human beings. As always, but more so, with new frustrations, but with even more new inspirations. Always good to keep the ledger tilted toward inspiration (“by any means necessary,” I almost wrote). Plenty to worry about, plenty to be deliberate about, plenty to shape and build. Plenty to celebrate. God’s plenty, and ours.

It’s fitting that these threads weave such a tapestry on Shakespeare’s birthday. Shakespeare:  not a “university wit,” but good enough to be mocked publicly by one who was. Shakespeare, whose works were so compelling that his friends and fellow actors (those lowlife rogues) were arrogant enough to collect his writings in this new technology called print, where works as common and public as *plays* became both *plays* and *works* … and “not of an age, but for all time.”

Even though everything that grows holds in perfection but a little moment.

A birthday wish, then, for our wills and imaginations: may we always engraft each other new.

This podcast comes from a presentation Chip German and I did at the ELI 2009 Annual Meeting earlier this year. Here’s the session abstract:

What if course portals, typically little more than gateways to course activities and materials, became instead course catalysts: open, dynamic representations of “engagement streams” that demonstrate and encourage deep learning? The session will begin with case studies in enabling and designing such course portals, from both administrative and faculty perspectives. Participants will then form groups to imagine and design their own catalytic course portals. Finally, the presenters will discuss action steps that can lead to effective innovation at participants’ home institutions. Presentation resources, including a record of the participants’ design work, will be posted to an online collaborative space for continued discussion after the session.

I haven’t made that last part materialize yet, for all sorts of reasons (none of them very good ones). This post is at least a step in that direction, I hope. The images from the group work are just below, arranged by group. No doubt the work will be hard to understand out of context, but perhaps there’s enough in the audio and in the photos that something useful could emerge. I know I was very impressed by the speed, thoughtfulness, and sheer copiousness of the each group’s work. The idea of visualizing student engagement in such a way that the visualization itself would catalyze further engagement seems to have energized some powerful “imagineering” in the room, whatever the deficiencies of the way I imagined or described the exercise. (One conferee described my bit as “abstract and hurricane-ish,” which seems fair to me, alas.)

At any rate, here’s what the four groups came up with–in ten minutes, mind you! If the formatting breaks in your browser, let me know and I’ll try to fix it. Clicking on the images will take you to Flickr, where you can comment on them and annotate them.

The real bonus round here is what Chip has to say about the role of the CIO in empowering faculty, students, staff, librarians, and instructional technologists/designers to get to these kinds of experiments and catalysis. Chip and I had both read Fred Brooks’ classic The Mythical Man-Month in preparation for our session. In my view, Chip’s words represent a profound and all-too-rare understanding of Brooks’ ideas regarding conceptual integrity and design–as well as a profound and all-too-rare understanding of the potential for real learning within an agile, responsive cyberinfrastructure. Most of all, Chip’s understanding of higher-ed administration encompasses both the strategic and the tactical/operational, but always in that order, and with a true scholar’s gift for learning the lessons of history while charting a path to the future–a future that in many cases, of course, is already here and only looks like “the future” to those who are enmired in the past..

All of which is to say that Chip German gets it. Those of us who have had the pleasure of working with Chip have known that for a long time, of course, but it’s a privilege to demonstrate and share that knowledge by showcasing his own remarks here.

Post-script: For what it’s worth, my own favorite bit of “imagineering” came from USC’s Susan Metros, who suggested a course portal that would demonstrate the many levels and connections within student engagement streams by means of a 3D “infosphere” that one could fly through, reflect on, and build within. Her explanation of the concept was fascinating. Alas, the audio didn’t come out well for the group work, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that Susan’s idea takes the idea of “visualizing learning” to a whole ‘nother level.

Oh, and one more very important thing: during my spiel you’ll hear me refer to a guy who has made the whole UMW Blogs thing hum like a top–and whose intelligence, drive, and sheer heart have been a constant inspiration. I refer of course to the guy the Chronicle of Higher Education persists in calling “James”–the mighty Reverend himself, Jim Groom.

For those who’ve asked: yes, I do continue to record my presentations, even though I haven’t posted any audio for a long time. I’m hoping to rectify that (if “rectify” is the right word) over the next few weeks. Fair warning!

Here’s part of the audio of a presentation I did recently at the University Continuing Education Association’s 2009 conference (which I blogged a little bit here. My first presentation at UCEA, appropriately enough, was on podcasting, back in 2006. This year the pre-conference workshop was on “Convergence-Disruption-Transformation: Digital Alchemy and the New Online Pedagogy.” Elizabeth Meyer, Director of Online Learning at the University of California San Diego, put the panel together. I’m grateful to Elizabeth for the opportunity.

As you’ll hear, I immediately disrupted my own talk (auto-disruption?), so inspired was I by Jon’s lead-off presentation. I get around to the talk I’d planned about a third of the way through. The “Janet” I speak of at the beginning of the podcast was a conferee I’d just met and spoken with during the break before my presentation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (20.4MB)

Phil Long has just written a very thoughtful and challenging post at EdTechTrends. As I typed manically through my comment and watched it grow, I thought that instead of breaking the Blogger comment box I’d record a few thoughts here and further the distributed conversation.

Dear Phil,

Wow. I must read this book right away (Innovation, the Missing Dimension).

The more I talk about Web 2.0, the more I’m convinced that the heuristic points to habits of mind and heart with two primary characteristics: they seek, welcome, create network effects, and they trust in–shoot, they expect–emergent phenomena. “Play” is another name for these habits, but “play” sounds trivial–unless one reads Vygotsky (where he argues play is the gateway to facility with abstractions) or Huizinga (whose Homo Ludens rocks my world). The quotation you cite from Rosalind Williams is an extremely useful corollary. The focus on creativity is just right, in my view. People may resist the idea of playfulness, but it’s hard to naysay the idea of creativity.

Yet there are those who believe that creativity can be had without the mess of “odd connections, wanderings, and daydreaming” and without the investments of “time and space to graze.” There are those who will not tolerate the ambiguities and uncertainties out of which real innovation emerges. This kind of misguided “due diligence” has also shaped forced-march large-section courses that are little more than bucket brigades in which assessment becomes a crude pour-your-bucket-back-into-mine exercise in self-certification. This isn’t education and it isn’t working, but the human capacity for denial never fails to astonish me (in myself as well, I hasten to add). Oliver Sacks tells a dismal story in Awakenings of showing his colleagues films of Parkinson’s patients restored to mobility by L-Dopa, only to have those colleagues storm out of the conference room denying that any such thing had happened. When I first read that story, I was incredulous. Now, not so much.

I have long thought that we should assemble case studies of the education of innovators. Which teachers really helped? How did they help? What teachers furthered the thought of an Einstein, a Boulanger, a Curie, a Lennon? What was the secret sauce? I think we’d find some fascinating commonalities. And I think that what works for the high achievers will work for the less gifted as well. Find a version of “teach to the top” that isn’t merely “teach to the most capable” but “teach to the top of what each student is capable of.” A top that by definition cannot be clearly visible to either learner or teacher. A real learning summit–the place where learning and innovation join–is always just beyond the farthest resolvable detail. A spiral pedagogy to match Bruner’s spiral curriculum?

I remember the article I read many years ago in the Columbia U. alumni magazine in which alumni reminisced about Mark Van Doren and other famous CU profs. What they recalled most vividly were the digressions…. 

Your post is a vivid reminder for me of why social media and online affordances are such powerful learning opportunities: structured well, they maximize serendipity (it’s built-in to the Web) and make the odd connections, wanderings, and daydreaming visible, persistent, and available for reflection and further serendipity. We can’t all have MIT’s endowment or prestige, but we all have access to the amazing affordances of the ‘Net. All it takes is imagination, innovation, a willingness to go beyond what’s given (again, quoting Bruner, on the nature of true learning). Faith in the power of “shared inquiry and transformative conversations,” to quote from the emerging mission statement of the Academy for Teaching and Learning.

Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” has been crucial for me in this regard, as a student and as a teacher. Every single English Composition class I’ve taught since 1990 has begun with this essay. Now my “intro to college teaching” workshops do as well.  I’ve long drawn on Percy’s vision of education for inspiration, guidance, disruption (it doesn’t resolve very neatly). At least one of my former students, now a colleague, is carrying on the tradition as well. So I’ll give Percy the last word here, gladly:  a benediction, a valediction, a charge to the innovation banquet committee.

In truth, the biography of scientists and poets is usually the story of the discovery of the indirect approach, the circumvention of the educator’s presentation-the young man who was sent to the Technikum and on his way fell into the habit of loitering in book stores and reading poetry; or the young man dutifully attending law school who on the way became curious about the comings and goings of ants. One remembers the scene in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter where the girl hides in the bushes to hear the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven. Perhaps she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside, who see the record, worry about scratches, and most of all worry about whether they are getting it, whether they are bona fide music lovers. What is the best way to hear Beethoven: sitting in a proper silence around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azalea bush?

However it may come about, we notice two traits of the second situation: (1) an openness of the thing before one-instead of being an exercise to be learned according to an approved mode, it is a garden of delights which beckons to one; (2) a sovereignty of the knower-instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer in the neighborhood of being who stumbles into the garden.

So much to blog about–SXSWi, talks from Boston to Tucson, many Baylor events–but before I get to all that, a moment to reflect on open educational opportunities and real audiences:

My “From Memex to YouTube” class is in full Final Projects mode, heading toward presentations in just a few weeks. Projects range from music and identity to social bookmarking (and organizing the infinite) to animating the Mother of All Demos. Lots of talent at work here. I’m eager to see what the seminar will create and share, and I’ll let you know when the live stream will happen (probably via Ustream again unless someone has a better suggestion).

This morning I’m especially jazzed to see that the “Tell a story in 5 frames” Flickr project is underway. I had an epiphany last week when discussing project ideas with the class: if you’re not sure what you really want to do for a final project, just read your blog posts to date. There’s probably a pattern of interest there. Look at the traces of your own engagement! Enjoy the strengths and predilections of your mind at play in the fields of study. Turns out that the photo project was right there all along, hiding in plain sight. And the results are coming in. The student (I keep saying “the student” in a doubtless misguided effort to preserve privacy) just posted the first “five frames” set to Flickr, and already two comments have come in praising the work.

Of course, I want the student to work hard and keep improving, but I’d be lying if I said the first outing was less than impressive. 🙂 Not to dote, or anything…. You understand.

Take a look, see what you think, and comment if you are so moved. More New Media Studies goodness on the way.