Just back from a quick and intense trip to Boston, where I was on a panel with Jon Udell and Sarah Stein for a preconference workshop at UCEA 2009. I always enjoy my time with the UCEA folks. They’re open and inquisitive. They’re also entrepreneurial, a space that most university continuing education folks live in by necessity (and turn that into a virtue).

Jon spoke on computational thinking (with the specific example of calendar curation), I spoke on disruption (from millicomputing to the mother-of-all-funk-chords), and Sarah spoke on teaching and technology with a particular focus on the NCSU Virtual Computing Lab. It was a pleasure and an honor to share the podium with Jon and Sarah. Both entered my life in 2005 and both have been wonderful colleagues and friends since that time. I see them all too rarely. It was hard to say goodbye. (I’m never any good at that, anyway.)

On my way back down I-35 from the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, my mind full of the conversations and shared struggles I’d experienced at the conference, I listened to an emerging technology podcast featuring Tim O’Reilly. I was surprised and stirred by the passion in Tim’s voice, and by the complex joys and cautions he urged upon us. Then, about three minutes before the end of the podcast, I was startled to hear a poem.

The poem, and Tim’s presentation of it, resonated with me very strongly, as it obviously did with the audience at his conference. I thought of my colleagues at UCEA, and my colleagues on the panel, and my colleagues in the Twittersphere who responded so generously and insightfully to the tweets we generated during the panel.

I hope it resonates with you as well.

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

The King is gone but he’s not forgotten:
This is the story of Johnny Rotten.

I.

I’m not sure I’ll get any of this down the way I want to, but I need to try. If you hate long and rambling and essayistic blog posts, stop reading now. We’ll return to our regular program tomorrow.

II.

During the all-night Paradise Lost readathons, we’d always share a good laugh when we got to the part where Milton writes  “all hell broke loose.”

No doubt the folks actually in the epic battle were not so detached.

Lately it seemed to me that the Edupunk discussion had also broken loose in some troubling ways, and that healthy disagreement (and overwhelming agreement) had become polarized and politicized in all sorts of reductive ways.  I was afraid this might happen. I had a sinking feeling from the beginning, really, because I lived through the gobbing and contemptuous dismissals in many of the early punk days and dreaded a repeat of that moment.  When punk hit, it became impossible to profess love for The Allman Brothers Live at Filmore East or Heart Like a Wheel or Tommy or Blue or Waiting for Columbus or even Mott without risking sneers or worse. Cries of “muso!” blended with angry denunciations of “corporate rock” (usually meaning anything on the radio–which believe it or not, still had some good stuff on it in 1976) or “dinosaur rock” (this usually referred to Led Zeppelin, who even at their most bloated could lift the roof off those arenas) or “circus rock”  (which usually meant progressive rock from Yes, Rush, Genesis, etc.). I’m sure there were more such dismissals that I’ve simply blocked from my memory.

I sheepishly confess at this point that I joined with the punks and the mainstream rock fans in their emetic rejection of disco, a story I’d stick with until a few years ago when I finally watched Saturday Night Fever on the recommendation of a dear friend and suddenly, as they say, “got it.” It didn’t hurt that I’d also got it through my thick skull that the same guy who’d written Awopbopaloobop had also written the essay in New York that had inspired the movie. (Later, in a double-back-flip gainer of irony, I learned he’d made most of it up.) Now, to my astonishment, I hear those Bee Gees songs with new-found respect and enjoyment, though I still can’t quite go for the movie of “Sgt. Pepper’s.” Even midlife revelations can’t erase all my standards.

For the most part, though, I regretted both punk and disco, which I saw as mirror images of each other, two extremes that made such totalizing claims that there was no way to love rock-and-roll, especially the kind that reached for any kind of epic scale or complexity in its urgent deliveries. My rejection was reductive, too, and I won’t boast of it, but it was a response to rejection, not affirmation. Such a vicious cycle.

The bottom line for me is that any ideology, any movement, any slogan or fashion that crowds other worthy things off the stage is just not worth it. Peter Guralnick once wrote that he rejected all ideologies as groupthink. Ideology was the enemy. It sure crowded discussions of aesthetics, let alone the very idea of worthiness, off the syllabus in the days of high theory.  Talk about purgings and cleansings. I remember those days vividly, too. The withering cries of “formalist!” and so forth.

I love it when Guralnick tries to articulate his thoughts on ideology. (I can only imagine the arguments he must have with Greil Marcus.) Here’s a great excerpt from Sweet Soul Music.

From the time that I myself first went to Memphis in the fall of 1980, the picture that I got of the Stax Record Company, and then of the recording scene in Muscle Shoals, as well as the emergence of Otis Redding from the provincial reaches of Macon, Georgia, showed not so much the white man in the woodpile, or even the white businessman capitalizing on social placement and cultural advantage to plunder the resources of a captive people, as the white partner contributing as significantly as his more prominent–more visible certainly–black associate. I don’t mean to make too much of this, because partnership is a self-evident concept, it is the whole point of integration, after all; I was simply not prepared to see it happening here. Perhaps because a working union of this sort is so rare, perhaps because of my own cultural and political preconditioning, it took me a while to come to grips with the nonideological complexion of reality.

A working union of this sort is so rare. Indeed. More please.

III.

Last spring my friend, colleague, and collaborator Jim Groom said a specter was haunting education: the specter of punk. And Edupunk was born. The original post is amazing, troubling, white-hot and entirely compelling, especially when the comment trail kicks in. But the punk metaphor/meme/ideology still troubled me.

My worries persisted until I’d had a chance to talk with Jim, first at a regional EDUCAUSE conference, and then over the summer as we prepared for our UMW Blogs presentation at the big EDUCAUSE convention (a presentation Jim had applied for and graciously invited me to contribute to). As always happens when Jim and I talk, we hashed through mutual concerns and found our way despite enduring disagreements to some greater realization of the core commitments we shared. When we really get a chance to work together  (work is play for mortal stakes, or should be, wrote Frost), it’s magic for me.

I felt that magic as we debated Edupunk in the video interview hosted by Gerry Bayne of EDUCAUSE. I can’t speak for Jim, but from where I sat it looked like we were both exhausted and exhilarated when it was all over. I know I felt it was one of the great conversations I’d had, both because of the way Jim had pushed me to articulate my own position and also because of the way I’d had to dig deep into what I truly felt. What I said, or tried to say, finally went beyond the occasion of a debate. Sentimental as it may sound, I was trying to speak something at the center of my soul. I have little notion of whether I succeeded. What I do know is the way I felt when I was trying. I thought I could see it in Jim’s eyes too: this feeling that we were not fighting, and probably not even debating. Instead, we were sweating our way through close encounters with issues of longstanding and very urgent concern for both of us. What I left with was a feeling that we had disagreed about a few fundamentals–I don’t want to downplay that–but agreed about many, many more, including and especially the need for action and the opportunities for it. I felt we had tried to do something very difficult, and who knows whether we’d succeeded, but the attempt itself was of an intensity that surprised us both and united us in the effort. Our hearts were truly in the right place: together, caring passionately about the same things, knowing that mere school won’t get to real school without that kind of intensity and shared vision.

That’s the feeling I want to remember. That’s the feeling that spurs me to action. A working union of this sort is so rare.

At times over the last few days it’s been hard to hold on to that feeling. Some of the quick polarization and politicization I’d feared initially had come to pass in the responses on Jim’s blog to the videos. Then the Chronicle’s Wired Blog picked up on the story, and the write-up was pretty reductive, perpetuating a false polarity.  I greatly appreciate that Jim spoke up quickly to set the record straight. But whatever the responses, the videos are there, and when I watch them, I remember the feeling of digging deep, deeper than I wanted to, deeper than I thought was safe, inspired by my friend and colleague and collaborator Jim Groom to get to that rare working union no matter what.

That’s the feeling I want to remember. The one I will remember.

As for my stance on Blackboard and its ilk, on corporate and industrial approaches to education, and on the nightmare of our nimble, personal, protean computers being used as surface-learning drill-and-kill affordances, I think the record is clear and the evidence abundant for those who care to look.

IV.

A strong mutual friend commented on Jim’s first Edupunk video post and said he wished I’d reread Lester Bang’s essay on The Clash. So I did. I’d forgotten how wonderful and wonderfully ambivalent it was. It helped me recall not the contempt and dismissiveness of the nay-sayers and line-drawers but the spirit, drive, and moral urgency of those days. The Clash were special. They didn’t like the gobbing (Mick Jones calls it “disgusting”), and they didn’t forsake their roots or pretend they’d made music history irrelevant. Although Bangs makes his predictable pronouncement that rock had died in 1968 (I’m still not entirely sure why he hated James Taylor so much) and does the dissing he needs to do (I get that Led Zeppelin tours were monstrous, but hadn’t he heard Physical Graffiti?), the essay is clearly the record of a journey of discovery for him, and the Clash are clearly teaching him something about his own horizons, about the rewards and punishments of impossible yet essential idealism. It’s beyond exciting to experience that with Bangs, especially through the medium of his bash-it-out lyricism. By Part Three, where Bangs confronts the scale of his dreams and the compound fractures of their bitter disappointment, the scatological and profane romp turns a corner, and we get passages like this one:

At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they’ll be creative about it, and do something good besides. Realize their own potentials and finally start doing what they really want to do. Which also presupposes that peple don’t want somebody else telling them what to do. That most people are capable of a certain spontaneity, given the option.

My own belief is that “outrageous as they want” and “absolutely any fashion they can dream up” will typically turn malignant in one way or another. I agree with Milton that a cry for freedom on these terms usually means a cry for license. Bangs’ use of that very word indicates to me that he senses that undertow as well. The words “as they want” and “absolutely” are giveaways. In my EDUCAUSE conversation with Jim, I tried to explain a vision of leadership as a kind of stewardship we invest in those we trust to  empower our best selves, something our competing interests and dreams and fashions would otherwise render impossible. But I do understand Jim’s point that bad leadership might be worse than no leaders at all. I simply don’t think “no leaders at all” is ever an option, given that we will always have to delegate some kinds of authority to each other to live in community.

Back to Bangs:

As it is, the punks constitute a form of passive resistance to a slick social order, but the question remains as to just what alternatives they are going to come up with. Singing along to “Anarchy” and “White Riot” constitutes no more than a show of solidarity, and there are plenty of people who think this is all no more than a bunch of stupid kids on a faddist’s binge. They’re wrong, because at the very least all of this amounts to a gesture of faith in mass and individual unrealized possibilities, which counts for a lot when there are plenty of voices who would tell you that all human behavior can be reduced to a formula.

Of course this brings me up short–and how. That gesture of faith is at the core of teaching and learning, which means it’s what I yearn for and try, as best I can, to support, encourage, enact every single day. (That’s not to say I always succeed, but I do in fact intend to die trying.) And those voices those voices those voices. I hear them over and over. They chase themselves through those wakeful moments each night when I wonder how we could possibly have gotten ourselves into the fix we have when it comes to thinking deeply and responsibly about the holy transformational mission of real school. I listen for the other voices: Palmer, Kozol, Turkle, Murray, Goldberg, Bruner, Percy, O’ Connor, Buber, Dewey, Piaget, Papert, Kay, Engelbart, all the teachers who’ve inspired and challenged and shaped and prodded and lifted me. I listen for their voices to counter those voices Bangs describes, the voices of the high-stakes test agents, the voices of those who advocate academic transformation but practice scaled-up, outsourced, and uniformed delivery of “content” to all the heads of all those students whose precious inner outliers get boxed and forgotten in the meantime. Until the students, finally, forget to look themselves.

Yet even here Bangs’ honesty keeps him from editing out the rest of the story. 

But if anything more than fashion and what usually amount to poses is going to finally come of all this, then everybody listening is going to have to pick up the possibilities with both hands and fulfill ’em themselves. Either that or end up with a new set of surrogate mommies and daddies, just like hippies did, because in spite of whatever they set in motion that’s exactly what, say, Charles Manson and John Sinclair were.

There’s more to the essay, but at this point you should go read it yourself (just don’t let your Kindle 2 read it aloud at work, as the language is quite spicy). Suffice it to say that re-reading Bangs helped me frame the entire Edupunk debate anew for myself, not because he resolved it, but because he so clearly articulated what success at its best and failure at its worst would mean for this version of the dream of a just society. I truly get that this was the Clash’s dream, though I’m still not sure it was a punk dream, and neither is Bangs. Then again, he’s not sure it wasn’t, either. Fair enough.

V.

But I truly believe that the full extent of what Lester Bangs learned on that tour with the Clash didn’t emerge until a little later. The Clash essay comes out at the end of 1977. In 1979 Bangs published what I believe is his masterpiece, an essay for the volume Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. I want to end this post with a quotation from that essay, an essay that brings Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (Bangs’ desert island disc) into close contact with the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, a proto-punk album if there ever was one:

Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece–i.e., the rock record with the most significance in my life so far–no matter how I’d been feeling when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what’s more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. (My other big record of the day was White Light/White Heat.) It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison’s previous works had only suggested; but like the later albums by the Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive element in the  blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work.

Bangs’ vision loses none of its urgency along the way. He doesn’t back down one bit from the call to action. If anything, that call is even more intense when he writes about Van Morrison than when he writes about the Clash. But the important point is that the urgency is inclusive. Both-and. With pure beauty and mystical awe at the center of each pain-born song. The conversation is intense and unifying, forged out of hot iron at the center of the souls of a Belfast singer/songwriter, a New York rock critic, and a band of gypsys on a caravan through late 1970’s England.

That’s the conversation I want to be in. That’s the caravan I want to be on. I think leaders can help with caravans. Jim thinks the caravan does that itself. It’s possible to argue we’re both right, since no effective leader ever got far without remembering that a leader doesn’t make a caravan, without understanding that we all travel the long miles together as companions, a word that means “those who break bread together.” For me, the leader recalls the caravan to its companionship when the going gets hard and the way uncertain. And that’s one reason a leader has to be a diplomat too.

I do not think diplomacy always means “going slow.” It sure doesn’t mean backing down one inch when minds and hearts are at stake. It means breaking bread together, even and especially through the disagreements, as long as we possibly can. Thus I’m greatly disturbed by those who say that such dialogue is deadening.

So.

VI.

What? Let’s eat. Let’s travel. Let’s dance. Let’s turn it up, not rip it up, unless “it” is the barriers that get in the way and prompt nothing but entrenchment, Maginot Lines, and groupthink. The time is now. We have a moment. If you’ll sway to “Eyes of the World” with me, I promise I’ll pogo when you turn up “God Save The Queen.” And we’ll meet at “London Calling,” and yell for “Jackie Wilson Said” as an encore. People get ready. I want to work with you on those rare unions, the ones no one can sell us, the ones we know we can and must help to write into being. Real school is where we learn to do that writing.

And when we look on our rare and working unions, I hope we’ll see a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe cutting right through the heart of the work.

I’ve got a special volunteer teaching assignment tonight, an Honors Program event called “Colloquium” in which students enroll in a series of evening seminars, five all told, each led by a different professor, and each of them centered on a particular book or set of readings. This one’s my first (the second of the term for the students), so of course I decided on something a bit over-ambitious and assigned a long, rambling, urgent, personal, repetitive, provocative book called The Black Swan. It’s exhilarating stuff but who knows what the students will make of it. I’m not sure what I make of it all.

Actually, I think I’ve just described the makings of a potentially great discussion. But I digress….

I’m going through the book a second time in preparation for the seminar. As any teacher can tell you, reading a book with an eye to teaching it is a much deeper and more fraught experience than simply reading it. I guess the simplest way to say it is that I find I have to have at least three voices in my head as I go along: the author’s, my own, and the student voice I anticipate moment to moment as I think about how the discussion might–and sometimes I hope will–go. That’s an impressive number of voices in my head, one channel past stereo. Cognitive surround sound. Immersive, yes, and busy.

Then I’ll hit a statement like this one and suddenly the entire metaframe begins to glow: Taleb’s writing, my reading, my imagined colloquy, even the way I anticipate the room will look and feel:

Assuming there is something desirable in being an average man, he must have an unspecified specialty in which he would be more gifted than other people–he cannot be average in everything.A pianist would be better on average at playing the piano, but worse than the norm at, say, horseback riding. A draftsman would have better drafting skills, and so on. The notion of  a man deemed average is different from that of a man who is average in everything he does…. Quetelet completely missed that point. (242)

Taleb’s words resonate for me through many chords and along many soundboards. I think of David Berliner’s tremendous call-to-arms here at Baylor just a couple of weeks ago as he presented the research he and Susan Nichols have done on the damage caused by the current fashion for high-stakes testing, work recently published in Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools. Among the many tragic and nonsensical outcomes of this drill-and-kill approach  (many predicted with great accuracy for over thirty years by “Campbell’s Law,” one of the most astounding things I learned at Berliner’s talk) is a monomaniacal focus on the “bubble,” that is, the students who are just below passing and are brought up to just over passing by these tests. These success stories are touted by many advocates of these programs, none of whom seem to know about “Campbell’s Law,” and none of whom seem to have thought hard about what definition of “success” is content with getting students from just-under-mediocre to just-above-mediocre, if in fact the tests and the passing have even that much meaning. And then I think of the truly mournful set of comments on Cole Camplese’s justifiably outraged post about Pennsylvania’s “adequate progress” awards. 

I can’t stop dreaming of the day we educators turn the paradigm around. What if we had an education focused on the above-average in everyone, the place of the inner outlier? What if education, inescapably difficult and dispiriting in the parts that don’t come naturally, had as its clear and beckoning aim the hard work of setting up empowering contexts for each person’s excellence to attain its true force and maturity? We say words to this effect at the inspirational moments, at the great matriculation and graduation gatherings. What of the in-betweens? What of the walk we walk–or not?

Instead, we continue to generate models of “assessment” that consume themselves in a feast of invalidity. We generate models of education that boast of adequacy. We go for bell curves and standard deviations, not outliers and positive deviation. We push out the underperforming, ignore the top achievers, and do no justice to the inner outliers in every student, no matter what his or her general aptitude.

And we say we’ve done something worth doing.

Baylor University welcomed to its campus yesterday the CogDog himself, Alan Levine,  for conversation, tours, and an afternoon presentation titled “NMC 101, An Introduction to the New Media Consortium.” Baylor joined the New Media Consortium last fall, and yesterday Alan gave us a great overview of what the NMC offers. We learned how Baylor can not only participate in the work but be a vital contributor to it as well. Folks in the audience included deans, department chairs, faculty from Environmental Studies, English, Business, Social Work, Film & Digital Media, and other departments I’ve no doubt overlooked, There were grad students, as well as staff from IT and the Baylor Libraries, including many of my colleagues from the Electronic Library (which co-sponsored the event along with the Academy for Teaching and Learning). It was a great mix of people and a good turn-out for a Friday afternoon.

Alan’s presentation was comprehensive and engaging as always. We even got into Second Life for a bit, and talked with some folks who’d answered Alan’s call for help with a live demo. By the time the event ended, there was food for thought for many mental meals to come. There was also a sense in the room that our horizons had been expanded, with excellent opportunities awaiting for individual work and for fruitful collaboration.

 But was there ever a bonus round …

That bonus round was just having Alan here on the campus. We toured current digitization projects in the Baylor libraries. We toured computer labs, a neuroscience lab, and other sites where creativity and information technologies were melding in interesting and productive ways. (I learned a ton myself, seeing it all afresh through Alan’s eyes.) And during every moment, I could see Alan catalyzing conversation, putting people at their ease, showing genuine interest and a playful sense of expectancy in each encounter. I know it’ll embarrass Alan for me to say this, but I’ve got to do it: he’s got a tremendous gift (I’d call it both playful and soulful) for bringing out the best and happiest qualities in people. I listened carefully to the way Alan asked questions, to the way he made people feel good about their work and excited by the possibilities ahead. I could feel both energy and openness increase in every room.

I’m certainly feeling that way myself, and I’m also feeling very grateful to Alan for spending some time with us. 

When I think of the amazing people I’ve met over the last six years, I’m humbled. These are the people who’re heeding Doug Engelbart’s call to change the world. This is the caravan I want to be part of.

Blogging once a month isn’t exactly the frequency I want or imagine. I’ll try to step things up a bit. I’ve no lack of things to mull over here–perhaps the superflux is the problem–but the real answer, for me anyway, is just to do it.

So here’s today’s “just do it.”

January was an exceptionally full month for me, beginning with the trek back from Virginia, continuing with presentations at the University of Delaware, at Wheaton College (for NITLE) and two presentations at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative annual meeting, and concluding with a big push to get some more programs (and a website–stay tuned) launched for the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor. (Video from the Delaware presentation is online at the link above; podcasts are on the way for the other three presentations–again, stay tuned.) I’ve also begun teaching at Baylor: a first year seminar that continues my work in New Media Studies (course front-page blog here). Four intrepid souls who don’t know me from Adam signed up for the journey. It’s great to hear “Dr. C.” again–I always feel energized when I hear that call.

As I’ve carried on my work this month, I’ve returned again and again to the role of computers in learning. It’s not all I think about, but it’s a topic that grabbed me decades ago and never turned loose. I keep trying to understand not only the subject itself, but the sources of my own fascination. The presentation at Delaware was perhaps my fullest effort to date to get at the vexed question of what a computer is, or rather, what it symbolizes. The Delaware visit drew heavily from my experience late last year, when I was (and remain) captivated by the discussion at the Program for the Future, where I got to shake Doug Engelbart’s hand and tell him “thank you,” and where I saw visionary after visionary wrestle with their own fascinations and attempts at understanding.I saw yet again how passionate these visionaries are, not because they’re techno-utopians, but because they recognize the exhilarating, liberating potential of computers to represent ourselves and our world back to us in a way that will allow us to access the traces of our own engagement, to think about ourselves with both commitment and critical detachment. Most of all, these computers represent our own powers of representation, our endless curiosities, our troubling and hopeful attempts at communication and community. They are truly protean, as Seymour Papert observes in the wonderful collection Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. (Alice over at “Just Musing” blogs wonderfully about that book. It’s a magic book and I recommend it to everyone I talk to these days–but that’s another blog post from me.)

Protean. Yes, and in their protean nature, computers are proto-objects, meta-objects, emergence engines: not because they are intelligent, but because they are complex symbols of intelligence, of investigation, of making, of knowing. And when they are networked, either locally or via the Internet, they are communications devices that fold meta-layer after meta-layer onto our awareness of the very processes of communication, of “lending our minds out,” as the poet Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi says of art.

Why then are computers still used in education as document manipulation devices on steroids? They can be used for that, yes, of course they can. And often those uses are quite valuable. But that model only scratches the surface of their potential. Worse yet, that model diverts our attention, our resources, and our risky investigations away from the uses that most closely align with what we say we want for education: intellectual maturity; deeply considered interaction in words, images, sounds; innovation; invention; the joy of our communal mental processes; strategic leadership in a world that lives from one rushed tactic to another; a “capability infrastructure,” to use Doug Engelbart’s words.

As I taught J. C. R. Licklider’s foundational essay “Man-Computer Symbiosis” last week, it occurred to me that Licklider set us on the right course and the wrong course simultaneously. “Symbiosis” is right. His description of human cognition is pretty robust as well. But here’s his description of “computer,” one that is accurate for the time, perhaps, but not at all the generative paradigm he hoped for:

“It may be appropriate to acknowledge, at this point, that we are using the term ‘computer’ to cover a wide class of calculating, data-processing, and information-storage-and-retrieval machines. The capabilities of machines in this class are increasing almost daily. It is therefore hazardous to make general statements about capabilities of the class.”

The problem here, as I see it, is not Licklider’s confidence that the calculating, data-processing, and information-storage-and-retrieval machines will become ever more capable. History has certainly borne that confidence out. The problem is that Licklider’s classification downplays the role of computers as representation- or symbol-making devices, and ignores altogether the role of computers as a communications medium. The two deficits in his argument are closely related, and I’d say that the two deficits still characterize most of the way we think about computers. Yet if we think about symbols, representations, and the shared symbol-making, symbol-exchanging activities we call “communication” (and directed internally, “thought”), we open up a much richer, more complex, and more catalytic universe to explore.

This is where Engelbart diverges most profoundly from Licklider, I think. Engelbart understood that concepts are symbols, and also frameworks for those symbols. He envisioned computers as enabling more complex symbol-making and symbol-sharing. Engelbart maintains to this day that we will become more effective problem-solvers if we become more effective symbol-makers. I agree, though I’m not at all sure that the most powerful symbols emerge from hierarchical models of meaning and meaning-making. (Actually, I’m pretty sure they don’t.)

What’s most fascinating for me remains the ways in which computers allow us not only to make and share more powerful, complex, rich, and resonant symbols, but the ways in which the making and sharing become themselves the ghostly outline, visible most brightly when we like astronomers use our more-sensitive peripheral vision, of the consciousness and community we build together. That’s what I keep trying to get at, how humanity writes the poetry of its life into being, together. Now the question of whether we’re writing doggerel or an epic poem is another question altogether. Computers can augment our drivel as well as our most noble articulations. They’re a medium, not a silver bullet, panacea, or Miracle-Gro. But what’s important is the way they reveal yet another level, a proto-level and a macro-level, of what’s hidden in plain sight: our essential collaboration emerging from our lives together. You can see this in a library, in a gym, at a good meeting (they do happen), in a church or synagogue or mosque, in a fire-dance, even in a grocery store. What computers do is reveal the universes within a universe, the nested infinities, in the most complexly and dynamically symbolic medium we have yet invented (outside of poetry, that is).

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.)  That’s what we all need to know for that test. Insofar as computers can represent those universes and help those universes map and travel through and share the universe they all inhabit, they are extraordinary proto- and meta-objects. Insofar as computers reinscribe the clerical only, allowing us to store and retrieve managed, measured, and boxed-in lives and days, they are of limited worth, and potentially quite dangerous as they empower our most impoverished imaginations, our most stubborn wrongheadedness.

In the meantime, I hope it’s not another month before I arm-wrestle myself in this space, and I am most grateful to those who’ve invited me to explore these issues with them in their own communities. I always learn a ton and leave with many more ideas than I came with. Sometimes I even leave with way-cool swag!

It seems like only yesterday we were all partying like it was 1999. Now it’s 2009 and there’s not much left but hangovers.

Yet I must in all candor report that I learned a ton in 2008, and not all of it was via cautionary tales, either. In fact, a lot of what I learned was serendipitous, arriving like unexpected good news, sometimes even like winning the lottery. When that learning occurred, it was, as Frankie sings, a very good year.

Case in point: in early November I presented on my favorite podcast, the BBC’s “In Our Time,” for a New Media Consortium online symposium called “Rock The Academy: Radical Teaching, Unbounded Learning.” I’d long wanted to do a presentation on this podcast. When I learned that the NMC symposium would take place in Second Life, I found the opportunity irresistible and just had to submit a proposal. Presenting on an intellectual history program by the venerable Auntie BBC that was delivered to me by the new media channel of the podcast and then made the topic of a talk inside a virtual world–well, the ironies, paradoxes, and juxtaposability of it all were mighty alluring. When I got the good news that my proposal had been accepted, I was elated and honored to be on the program. Just look at the range and ambition of my fellow presenters, culminating with Jim Groom and flamethrowers at the finale. Need I say more?

The experience was every bit what I had hoped for. The audience was great, the interaction was truly stimulating (and preserved in a chat), and NMC were amazing hosts. Among the splendors, though, two particular moments stand out. The first was when Alan Levine walked me through the Cooper Coliseum during a preparatory conversation. As we walked along and tried out the voice chat, Alan (or his avatar, or both?) turned to me and said, “We can make you props if you want them.” Ah. Props for a conference presentation. Suddenly it was clear to me that the very notion of argument in a virtual world was infinitely extensible, infinitely mediatable (if that’s even a word), and that the props NMC would make for me–a table, four chairs, four microphones, and a set of monuments with the titles of “In Our Time” episodes over the years–could serve as drama, as conceptual aids, as prompts for audience participation. 3D Concept PowerPoint. It’s difficult to explain the affective side of this sudden clarity, but the feeling that came over me was very powerful. I felt a little like Orpheus, or a real magician, able to make thoughts into objects and objects into thoughts. You might think that virtual objects would not cause such a feeling. But I tell you, walking around the set that day, giving my presentation and seeing the scale of my avatar against the props, felt like breathing mountain air. I could see my ideas, and I knew others could as well. And in that knowledge, I saw more of what I was thinking than I had before. Just as I (and most writers) discover what I want to say in the process of trying to say it, I could see much more clearly what I was thinking while speaking and walking through the realizations of my thoughts. I think you can hear some of my wonder in the video recording of the presentation. Truly, it was a lucid dream–and more, as I’ll try to explain below.

The second experience was even more powerful. Toward the end of the presentation (it may even have been in the Q&A), I was trying to articulate something about the way I had come upon the idea of “In Our Time” as both an example and an allegory of deep learning. I kept returning to the idea of a meta-layer of understanding, one in which the very topic of understanding itself becomes part of a complex experience of deep and satisfying learning. As usual, I found this idea, one that I keep returning to over and over, very difficult to articulate. I typically end up mouthing things that seem like tautologies, or sometimes like nonsense. I’m groping toward my own version of Derrida’s “exorbitant,” I think, but I’m not entirely sure even of that. Growing frustrated by my halting attempts, I reached for the analogy of altitude, the metaphor of going “up” a level and seeing things from an elevated perspective. Up, to where the over-all, the big picture, reveals itself in a new way. As I tried to get these ideas to form themselves into words, I impulsively hit “F” on my keyboard, the action that causes a Second Life avatar to spring into the air and hover, preparing to fly. That was the loose association: strategic view, gestalt, up a level, bigger picture, hit “F” for fly. I don’t remember analyzing the train of thought. I just remember going for the key. When I did, of course, my avatar sprang into the air and hovered there, giving my audience a dramatic (perhaps over-dramatic) portrayal of the kind of thing I was talking about. But here’s where things got *really* interesting. In that moment of dramatization, my own point of view changed. My avatar went up, and so my attached viewpoint went up as well, and what I saw on my screen as a result was a precise and startling instance of the very thing I was trying to articulate. In short, I had an idea, and words weren’t conveying it as well as I wanted, and the action my finger took before my conscious mind was aware of the motion was a revelation to me that gave me even more insight into the insight I was struggling to communicate.

Insight into the insight. Does that make sense? Can that make sense? It seems to me to be at the heart of what we want to encourage in education. Insight into the insight means we can prepare ourselves for the next revelation, and perhaps even construct for ourselves an environment and a set of strategies that will make it more likely such insights will emerge. Insight into the insight means we can understand our own powers of understanding–quirky, indirect, intuitive, labored, instant, unpredictable, whatever–and thus find our own strategies of augmentation and self-evaluation. Insight into the insight releases a beautiful fractal structure of extensibility, of scale and wonder.

Alan Kay likes to quote Doug Engelbart’s description of interactive networked computing as “thought vectors in concept space.” My experience at the NMC symposium let me see those vectors and inhabit that space. I could share (portray, enact) what I was seeing with others, and to some extent see it through their eyes as well. There’s something here I will be pondering for a long, long time. Virtual worlds are immersive not simply because they are convincing simulations of reality, though they can be, and not just because they are like lucid dreams, though they can be that too, and very powerfully. They’re immersive in particularly compelling ways because they are like comics, because they are like symbols or allegories in an animistic universe. And in this case, I found a way to think that I did not consider before I acted upon it. In the action, I found the insight. There was a physical change for me in the real world as I acted via an avatar in the virtual world, and the gesture I found was both idea and action, with insight the result.

It’s late and I don’t know how much any of the above will cohere, but it was such a powerful experience that I wanted to at least try to work through it as 2009 begins. My thanks to NMC for a great, mind-expanding symposium.

Here’s to insight into insight, and a Happy New Year to all.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (63.5MB)

Inspired by the season and by a wonderful day of reunion for our now-scattered families, I thought it would be good to say thanks to all of you who read, comment on, or otherwise interact with my writings here. When I began blogging over four years ago, I had no idea where the project would take me. All I knew was what I wanted to call my blog. Of that I was certain. I am grateful to all of you who’ve read what Gardner writes, and who’ve made my thinking clearer and my heart stronger with your responses.

As a Christmas present of sorts, I offer a podcast of the presentation Jim Groom and I did at EDUCAUSE 2008. The idea for the presentation was Jim’s. When he asked me to join him, I was honored to do so. I knew the collaboration would be something special: Jim’s an inspiring guy, and when he and I kick ideas around together, stuff happens. Jim’s the one who got me to try an alpha version of Lyceum back in the summer of 2006. When I returned to Mary Washington in the Spring, 2007 term, we had a hallway conversation in which I mentioned that WordPress Multiuser had gone to version 1, and I’d be interested in trying it out in one of my classes (as it turns out, my Film, Text, and Culture class). Jim installed it that night, I got going with it the next day, and within a few months our little experiment grew to several multiuser blogs in several of my colleagues’ classes in the department of English, Linguistics, and Speech. Over the summer, under the leadership of Martha Burtis the UMW Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies developed what became UMW Blogs, the initiative that continues today.

Doing the EDUCAUSE presentation with Jim took me back through all that history, and forward into the massive potential that still lies ahead for the whole UMW Blogs experiment. It also made me feel again the urgency of this effort to liberate students, faculty, and universities from the stultifying, even oppressive systems of “learning management” that continue to flourish in higher education, even when resources are disappearing and the prices keep going up.

For this presentation, fired up once again by Jim’s eloquence as he describes this oppression and the need for change, I hit upon the the idea of framing the Q&A in terms of an appeal to the audience, an “alter call” (pun and misspelling intended). Why not adopt an initiative like UMW Blogs? What’s stopping you? Why not abandon tired environments built around quiz builders and gradebooks and document delivery and find a way to bring the intellectual vitality of higher education, particularly as it is expressed in our students’ work, out into the world where it can find real audiences, spark real conversation, and serve as the foundation of a life’s work? Oh, and you can start the experiment for 6.95 a month, plus the cost of a domain name.

As you’ll hear, a set of concerns emerged from the audience: privacy, branding, risk, support, and so forth. These are legitimate concerns, every one of them. We must exercise due diligence in addressing them. Yet the larger concerns of authentic assessment, engaged learning, undergraduate publication, media fluency, and the like must not be overlooked. Indeed, these positive concerns–positive? essential concerns–should spur us to address and resolve the negative concerns. Instead, what happens all too often is that schools look for safety, scalability, sustainability (or at least that’s the logic) and try to fit the learning into the narrow spaces that remain between the circled wagons.

This can’t go on.

Whatever we do, whether it’s a campus-wide blogging initiative or something else equally ambitious, personal, and open, we must put learning at the center.  And that center must be designed to be shared. Easy to say, hard to do, and potentially glorious, as this season reminds us. 

Merry Christmas.

Photo by Bryan Alexander

Some scattered thoughts in response to Britt Watwood’s very thoughtful post summarizing and reflecting on the recent Electronic Campus of Virginia retreat:

Glad my tweets gave you a shiver! I miss all my Virginia friends and colleagues and I was certainly there with you in spirit.

Several near-overwhelming things emerged for me at the Engelbart fest (http://www.programforthefuture.org). I hope I can blog about them over the next few days. For now, I’ll just say that I’m more convinced than ever that education can fruitfully be considered as an Engelbartian “augmentation” / bootstrap experience in which innovation broadly considered–let’s call it the effective, inspiring continuation of the human conversation by means of significant new contributions to that conversation–is at the heart of what we think of as learning. After all, deep learning always presents itself to the *learner* as an innovation: “hey, I didn’t know that before!” Maybe another word for innovation is “discovery,” which Jerome Bruner writes about very eloquently in his essay on “The Act of Discovery” in the collection _On Knowing_.

In short, there’s a drama to learning, and that drama is connected with both a comprehensive understanding of the conversation and a deep intuition of one’s own power to contribute to that conversation. The many emerging technologies in what we call Web 2.0, and in the sorts of things the Horizon Report identifies, at their best enable both the understanding and the intuition.