Catching up on my back blog reading, when what to my wondering eyes should appear than this magnum opus from Alan Levine. What’s one level up from alpha dog? Whatever it is, he is it.

For anyone who wants a thorough and wonderfully graded approach to customizing WordPress, look no farther. Alan’s come up with some gems lately, but this one combines all his strengths: storytelling, experimentation, encouragement, and sheer smarts. I’m overdue for a WP upgrade–and I need to fix that silly footer-spam issue so I can get my flickr badge back–but I’m going to study Alan’s post long and hard for ideas and inspiration as I work on Gardner Writes.

Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw Alan at a conference? New Orleans, 2005, ELI Annual Meeting. A truly fateful meeting for me, as it was also the first time I saw Croquet, the first time I took a team from UMW to an ELI/NLII meeting, and the first time I did live blogging from an ELI conference. I heard John Bransford at that meeting. It was Diana Oblinger’s first annual meeting as the new Director of ELI. Martha did a poster presentation on bots and intelligent agents, getting that gig after her wonderful participation in the Cyberealspace experience at EDUCAUSE 2004.

And where was Alan? In Phoenix, of course. But also at the conference, by way of webcam hookup, gloriously on display during the Horizon 5 minutes of Fame event. (I miss those.) Little did I know that this guy would play such an enormous role in my own development. It’s been three years since, and only two years since we finally met face-to-face at ELI, San Diego, 2006 Annual Meeting–but Alan’s the kind of teacher who can put thirty years years of education into three years of friendship and collegiality.

So I figure I’m embarrassing the CogDog right now, but them’s the breaks: when you’re doing the kind of work he’s doing, you’ve got to expect some fanboys.

Thanks, Alan. I’ve got a lot more to learn. I couldn’t ask for a better teacher.

The book arrived from ILL today. (Carla Bailey, Queen of ILL, comes through once again. Please do not hire her away from us.) I ran across the title in a Google Book search on “cognitive resonance.” I’m starting more or less from a dead start here, but from a quick read of the first chapter the book looks quite promising: education, intuition, experience, and reason are the four pillars of a theory of abstraction, learning, and communication author Ben Lieberman builds up from the beginning. Art and modeling are coming up in chapter two. I love the synthesis, the eclecticism, the boldness with which this writer moves through disparate fields to pull together a book that seems to be about software, but at a deeper level promises to be a treatise on human understanding.

More as I move along.  Here in the meantime is the summary printed in the book:

Modeling complex systems is a difficult challenge and all too often one in which modelers are left to their own devices. Using a multidisciplinary approach, The Art of Software Modeling covers theory, practice, and presentation in detail. It focuses on the importance of model creation and demonstrates how to create meaningful models. Presenting three self-contained sections, the text examines the background of modeling and frameworks for organizing information. It identifies techniques for researching and capturing client and system information and addresses the challenges of presenting models to specific audiences. Using concepts from art theory and aesthetics, this broad-based approach encompasses software practices, cognitive science, and information presentation. The book also looks at perception and cognition of diagrams, view composition, color theory, and presentation techniques. Providing practical methods for investigating and organizing complex information, The Art of Software Modeling demonstrates the effective use of modeling techniques to improve the development process and establish a functional, useful, and maintainable software system.

Interesting two days, in this respect anyway: I did a presentation on Brian Wilson for Elderstudy yesterday, then explored “I Get Around” all the way through “Caroline No” for my Rock/Soul/Progressive class today. From senior citizens (I really don’t like that term much) to 18-19 year-olds. Brian spoke to all of them. This of course reinforces my sense that yearning, vulnerability, and an awestruck sense of the divine origins of beauty are trans-generational in their appeal.

Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.

Don’t worry, baby.

The woods echo, and their answer rings.

Happy St. Valentine’s Day, everyone.

There’s a lot of great blogging going on in the Intro to New Media Studies class (always room for more, of course), much of it sparked by Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines. We’re moving from Nelson to Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg next Tuesday, but before we go, I thought I’d share a recent response that gladdened this teacher’s heart.

According to Nelson, “we live in media, as fish live in water.” According to my anthropology professor, “we exist in culture like fish in water.” So I guess this means that culture = media. I never thought of this connection before. To me culture always meant customs, vernacular, superstitions, and religion. But never computers or the Internet.

You can read the rest of this fine post at The Jeshire Cat.

ELI’s just published an interview with me and Serena Epstein at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting, held in San Antonio just a few weeks ago. Interviewer/producer Gerry Bayne did an amazing job of corralling me into coherence, both during the interview and (especially) in post-production. My thanks to him, and also to Serena Epstein (heard later in the interview) for joining me at the microphone. I’m also grateful to Serena for all the engagement, creativity, and inspiration she contributed to the New Media Studies class this summer. Equal thanks also to David Moore, our co-presenter at the preceding day’s presentation and another star from this summer’s class. It’s easy to do great work with students like Serena and David.

It occurs to me that the metaphor of “network” may be holding me (us?) back. I like to think about social networks, network effects, high-speed networks, and so forth. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But the metaphor conveys a set of telegraphic connections, criss-crossing lines with nodes at the connection points, add-a-beads, point-to-point contacts and correspondences.

When I think about resonance, something else happens in my brain.

I think about resonance effects, about social resonance environments, about sympathetic vibrations and overtones and timbres and chords. I think about symbolism, and suggestion, about most resembling unlikenesses and most unlike resemblances (the way Milton described the relation of husband and wife in a successful–and happy–marriage). I think about complexity calling to complexity, about models that simultaneously simplify and amplify the power of the original as the models make the original more present, more resonant, to our minds.

Clearly some of my enthusiasm here comes from my love of music. I don’t think that’s the whole story, though. Something about the idea of cognitive resonance (where is that book? I wish for instant ILL–or for cheaper books–or both!) helps to place the affective dimension of cognition in a resonant place in my own mind. I’m still thinking about combination and connection, sure, but now the links are not simply established or embedded or realized. They’re tuned, and moving, and exciting sympathetic motion in other links and in the crafters and perceivers and tuners of those links. Rather than elaborate telegraphy, I imagine something more like strings on an instrument, a world-instrument, that we create, tune, and play together. Intertwingling, but more.

I feel I am restating the obvious, at least for artists, for whom resonance is (often almost) all.  Or perhaps there’s no handle here. I’ll need to read and think more, and be advised more, to know.

I’m in the midst of A. S. Byatt’s Possession in my Intro. to Literary Studies class, working up to assignment one, which asks students to work with symbolism in Byatt’s romance. The idea of symbolism is quite complex (the etymology alone is intricate and fascinating). Students are accustomed to talking about imagery, themes, character, even the writer’s biographical and cultural context. Symbolism, however, is something new for most of these freshmen and sophomores.

Over the years, I’ve tried various ways of explaining symbolism to students. The most satisfactory ways I’ve found to depend on close reading that enacts the drama of symbolic suggestion as a kind of unfolding awareness of connections, of patterns, of possibilities of meaning. That kind of going-through works well. Yet I’ve always felt the lack of some more communicable conceptual language, one that would convey the complexity of symbolism and its effects without reducing symbolism to something like The Da Vinci Code or merely the kind of thing students are used to in high school English classes.

Courtesy of a brilliant linguistics colleague, I’ve become aware of the idea of cognitive resonance and its connections to meaning-making. I’m trying to follow this idea up, piecemeal, in my spare time between other tasks. I’m becoming intrigued. The idea involves networks of assocations that resonate between people because of shared models, or even shared modelling. I know about constructivism and ideas of scaffolding learning, but the metaphor of model-making makes deeper sense to me, as it involves a certain kind of abstraction that nevertheless can both resonate with the original concept or thing and create a kind of cognitive resonance with others in the same meaning-making environment.

What this means for Possession is that I want students to be able to make interesting models that represent (abstract, demonstrate, enact) networks of suggestion and resonance within the romance, particularly as those networks emerge from ways in which physical realities come to suggest immaterial or abstract realities. And I want them to build models that resonate with those networks of suggestion and resonance. I particularly want them to attend to (and respond to, and model in response to) the ways in which Byatt signals her own modelling, her own concerns with networks of suggestion and resonance. A tricky business, but aided immeasurably by the rich and often obvious ways in which Byatt trains the attentive reader to experience and represent those cognitive resonances. In many respects, the romance is the story of ultra-alert readers who come to a richer experience of cognitive resonance (symbolic responsiveness) in their own reading.

I’ve located a book called The Art of Software Modelling that discusses cognitive resonance in some very interesting ways. One sentence in particular caught my eye:

So for any system of sufficient size,  the rule of thumb is that for anything too complex to entirely encompass within one’s mind, it is necessary to sacrifice some accuracy in favor of understanding.

There’s a world of complexity and even paradox within that sentence. I suppose one thing I’m trying to teach my students is how to find that sweet spot where the model demonstrates understanding, while knowing that they cannot and should not strive for a simple 1:1 replication. Building the model prepares for resonance, and results from it; yet resonance always involves suggestion and resemblance, and is not merely a reproduction.

I’ve been meaning to mention this Washington Post article for several days now. In it, three disturbing things emerge right away. One is that terrorists are using metaverses like Second Life for easy, often untraceable communication and money exchange. A second is that there are predictable and troubling calls for increased surveillance within these metaverses. A third is that Linden Labs, far from protecting users’ privacy, is assuring intelligence officials that adequate surveillance is already built into the system.

Yet only at the end does the truly surprising observation emerge:

Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of IBM Entity Analytic Solutions, who has been examining developments in virtual worlds, which have attracted some investment from the company, said there’s no way to predict how this technology will develop and what kind of capabilities it will provide — good or bad. But he believes that virtual worlds are about to become far more popular.

“As the virtual worlds create more and more immersive experiences and as global accessibility to computers increases, I can envision a scenario in which hundreds of millions of people become engaged almost overnight,” Jonas said.

Looks like someone’s expecting a tipping point sometime soon.

There’s a lot I want to blog about, especially the fascinating distributed work on alterity, collective intelligence, and the individual being done by Alex Reid, Lanny Arvan, and Rafael Alvarado. Rafael and Lanny are working on Web 2.0 and teaching, with an eye on the way collectivism can turn either to thin gruel or to Kool-Aid. Alex writes on the issues raised in and around a recent book called Liberal Fascism. (More from Alex on other questions of collective intelligence and authorship here and here.) Each of these writers engages with crucial concerns in very thoughtful ways. I want to take up a very small part of the discussion myself, thinking about the market economies surrounding popularized notions of performative identity and contingent values.

But I have no time to do that tonight. Instead, I offer a quotation from e. e. cummings, by way of Steve Martin’s magnificent autobiography, Born Standing Up. Steve embraced this quotation for his development as an innovative comedian. Something here for teachers too, I’d say:

“Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.”

An abstract for an upcoming talk–sort of an extension of the “digital imagination” material I’ve been working on lately:

Emily Dickinson once wrote, “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Can that experience be true of computing as well? Can the experience of computing reveal metaphors, compelling forms, rhymes, even meter in our encounters with knowledge, virtual worlds, and each other? Do some people resist a deep exploration of computers for the same reason they shy away from poetry? In A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, Mary Kinzie writes, “I believe the craft of writing is actually to entice readers into the same domain as the creative imagination.” Is there a similar craft of computing, a digital imagination no less creative than the verbal, musical, and artistic varieties we have known for centuries?

I believe the answer to all those questions is “yes.”

I will share my thoughts with you, listen to your ideas and engage with your questions, take us through some opportunities for creativity, and seek some provisional conclusions with you. By the end of our time together, I hope you will feel the exploration has yielded at least a few valuable insights into learning, teaching, creativity, poetry, computing, and the schools we have built—and may yet build.