At EDUCAUSE 2007, outgoing President Brian Hawkins delivered heartfelt and inspiring farewell address in a special session on lessons of leadership. It was pure Brian, and it was marvelous. At one point in the talk, Brian gave us the stern warning to “avoid incrementalism.” I tweeted that moment, and Chris Lott, a blogger of tremendous depth and insight and a wicked sense of humor, tweeted back, “Hear, hear! Incrementalism is a wasting disease, the bovine spongiform encephalopathy of educators.” Or words to that effect. (See what creativity the 140-word limit inspires?)

I thought of Brian and Chris today when my Introduction to New Media Studies class wrapped up our three days with Engelbart and his Augmentation Research Center. We were discussing Engelbart’s disappointment with a personal computing environment that for the most part mimics paper and desks. In their introduction to today’s reading, the editors of The New Media Reader pointedly compared the ARC vision and the way things have actually turned out–so far.

A couple of students noted that the widespread adoption of the personal computer actually depended on a more incremental approach than Engelbart imagined, and persuasively argued that the kind of leap Engelbart advocated would have made for a very small circle of initiates, and blocked the great wave of adopters who have made the Web as rich and varied as it is.

That’s an excellent point, indeed. And I’m a committed traditionalist when it comes to preserving what’s worth preserving. I don’t want to immediately abandon something wonderful just because a shiny object has materialized in front of us.

And yet I’ve been thinking a lot lately about alternate means of composition, of how one might express abstractions and concepts and extended arguments and analyses in sound, image, video, and so forth. Language is still the foundation, I’d say, but I wonder what would happen if more writers ventured into the territory of an Alfred Hitchcock or a Stanley Kubrick in terms of conceptual montage expressed outside a language-only enclave.

Suddenly I had to show the students Croquet, and tell them something about how the ideas of “documents” and “communication” were reimagined in that environment. I went to the website and read the introduction with them:

Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, it features a peer-based network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation between multiple users on multiple devices.

I first saw Croquet three years ago in New Orleans. Since then I’ve been in intermittent contact with primary project honchos Julien Lombardi and Mark McCahill–more frequently with Mark, who has family near UMW and who actually came to our school in late spring, 2005 to do a demo for a small group of interested folks. Today, reading Engelbart, thinking about his vision, trying to give the advantages of incrementalism their due, I revisited Croquet and lost my head again to a vision worth having and a leap worth risking.

I know from my own little tiny bits of sad experience that leaps can break things. But once again, Engelbart and Kay and Lombardi and McCahill remind me that what’s needed is patience with the mending, not a reluctance to jump.

Image from Martha Burtis’s “Risky U” site.

I’ll share this bit of the story–more to come.

My Rock/Soul/Progressive class just finished James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin. At our last meeting, I decided we’d use what Miller says about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as a test case for a)  evaluating the idealism and folly of the Sixties, b)  evaluating Miller’s take on the Sgt. Pepper’s phenomenon (and by extension, the Sixties as well), and c) thinking about whether the current generation my class represents has anything in its experience of popular music to correspond with the Sgt. Pepper’s phenomenon.

My students argued intensely that Miller was disillusioned, bitter, dismissive. Better to dream than not to dream. Better to have a beautiful illusion than a paltry reality.

I pushed back. It was hard to do since I agree with them, but I felt I had to. They were answering too quickly.

They pushed back, harder.

We went back and forth. It hurt me to push the pain and cynicism of decades of post-Sixties withdrawal on them, but they needed to know what they’d have to invest to maintain their positions. I was as kind as I could be even as I bore down. They were kind too as they responded with passion and, at times, real soulfulness.

Finally I said to them, “If you think Miller’s all wrong, if you think he’s a bitter man, if you think he’s giving up on that dream too easily, write him. He’s a professor at the New School. Find his email address and write him. Be courteous, don’t be confrontational or mean, but tell him what you think and invite his response.”

They were silent.

Then one student said, “You know, there was an assignment in my high school that asked us all to write to someone who’d inspired us. One guy wrote to John Lennon–well, John Lennon was dead of course, so he wrote to Yoko Ono about how John Lennon had inspired him. And you know what? She wrote him back!”

I spread my arms wide: “I rest my case.”

“Well,” she went on, “he was a really smart guy, our valedictorian, a really great writer. He wrote three beautiful pages in that letter.”

I said, “If you’re worried your own writing isn’t up to that level, why don’t you all write a letter together?”

A young woman on the other side of the table looked up and said, “I’d like that. It sounds like fun.”

I said, “Great. Now, who’ll organize it for you?”

“You will!” they responded.

“No I won’t,” I said. “Do you know why?”

“You don’t want to be associated with student writing?”

“You don’t think we’ll do it right?”

“You don’t want to make Miller angry?”

“No, no, and no. Doesn’t anyone know why I won’t organize your project?”

Silence.

“Because this project needs to be yours, not mine. Organize it yourselves. When you’re done, if it’s ready to go, I’ll be happy to put my name on the document. But this needs to be your project. Get together, talk it over, set it up. I can help if you need it.”

Class was over. Folks headed for the door. One student said, “I’m going to take you up on that.”

Three hours later, I saw that she had.  She cc’d me on her email to James Miller. Her email was heartbreakingly beautiful.

Later that evening, I got an email from her telling me that she and Miller had been emailing back and forth.

Today, in another class she’s taking with me. I asked her if I could see the exchange when she was ready. She said she’d share it with me. A student from last year’s freshman seminar, also in this other class, asked what had happened. I explained it to her, and she was round-eyed with wonder.

Amazing.

Rangey stuff today. I hope it cohered. A partial list of what we discussed:

Several books–What the Dormouse Said, The Dream Machine, Dealers of Lightning, Tools for Thought.

The Engelbart Demo–GUI’s, alternate keyboarding devices (the five-key “chord”), display technologies, the various diegetic worlds inhabited by Engelbart during the demo (the text he was working on, the display showing him, the text, and the team supporting him), the mouse as a pointing device, alternate pointing devices (in particular, the light pen), the reception and influence of the demo.

The “Ease of Use” problem (aka, “did you ride your tricycle to work today,” as Engelbart likes to ask). Do we miss our best augmentation opportunities by concentrating on ease of use?

Categories and ontologies: is Engelbart more associative (a la V. Bush), or more hierarchical (a la J. C. R. Licklider)?

Fractals, microcosms/macrocosms, and the tripartite information architecture Engelbart imagines: Specification, Organization, and Content (each stage of which has its own similar tripartite structure–i.e., Specification has within it elements of Specification, Organization, and Content, etc.)

Alternate text-entry devices, which led us to a discussion of haptics (one student’s blogged about this already–found an interesting paper on the topic, too–very cool).

Collective IQ vs. Hive Mind (I desperately wanted to bring up the discussion at ELI 2008, especially Lanny’s very thoughtful blog post, but we ran out of time–maybe Thursday).

All of these topics grew out of their continued reading of Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect” and their watching the Demo (included on The New Media Reader‘s supplemental CD-ROM).

By the end, my mind was completely abuzz, all lobes singing.

Then came the afternoon class, Rock/Soul/Progressive, and a most surprising turn of events. To speak truth, it was overwhelming, deeply moving. It will take more time than I have tonight to tell this story, and I need to make sure the student involved is okay with my sharing the story–but I hope to be able to share it soon.

I’ve just begun listening to this audiobook, and so far it’s terrific. The book’s charming, poignant, and observant (not to say obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant), and Steve Martin’s delivery as a reader adds an extra layer of wistfulness and wonder that has me enthralled as I listen. This is really something quite special.

Martin’s career took off just at just about the midpoint of my undergraduate career. I knew him only from his records and a couple of SNL sketches (I pretty much stopped watching TV when I got to college). When he came to Wake Forest University in the fall of my junior year, I was excited, but not a big enough fan to understand just what I would be seeing. I soon found out.

It was an extraordinary show in every respect. Martin seemed able to transform anything he saw or heard in the moment into part of his comedy. At one point he spotted someone taping the show on a handheld cassette recorder. He chided him–“ah-aaaah-ah”–walked down to the man, got the recorder, went back up on stage, rewound the tape, and began playing back the recording. When the playback got to a big laugh on the tape, he looked up and said to us, “Hey, listen, that’s you!” The way he said it, as if he’d never seen the miracle of tape recording before, was funny beyond belief.

Something rich and strange in this man’s comic imagination. Hearing the autobiography doesn’t explain the gift, but it does tell a story of how gifts look and feel as they emerge. Steve Martin’s interior life is as full of yearning as Brian Wilson’s–and nearly as melodic. Highly recommended.

At last I’ve got the aggregation (or “dashboard”) site up: view it at http://rocksoulprogs08.umwblogs.org. Illness and travel slowed me down, but not most of the students, who are already busily exploring their musical lives, what they’re learning from each other, and what they’re learning from James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin, our first book. We finish Miller on Tuesday, moving to Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop on Thursday. With any luck, I’ll have a couple of podcasts to publish by then as well.

I’ve disabled comments on the aggregation blog. If you feel moved to comment on a particular entry, please click on the author’s name (at the bottom of the post) and comment directly on his or her blog site.

On our way to lunch yesterday, Jim Groom came by my office and gave me the last bit of official support on UMW Blogs: he showed me how to get the Spam Karma 2 self-promo banner out of the way of Pete Townshend’s smiling face. A wholly appropriate finale–though I know where Jim lives and will ask for the occasional “professional courtesy” as I get myself into snarls I can’t get out of. 🙂

Perhaps “nettled” is too strong, though I did detect a surprising and not unwelcome amount of challenge in the questions today.

“Introduction to Literary Studies.” Two sections, one at nine and one at eleven. During my travels to the ELI Annual Meeting, I scheduled films for the classes to watch during the two class meetings I’d miss. The early class watched Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, half each day. The later class watched Alain Renais’ Providence, though I found out this morning that they hadn’t quite finished it (they were about twelve minutes or so from the end).

Last Friday, I asked them to watch the movies with Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus in mind, and told them we’d spend some time talking about Longinus in particular upon my return.

Today, both classes wanted to know just what these movies had to do with our classes, and their questions were not just about curiosity. There was a bit of “hey!” in there as well. To be fair, they may have had their high-school busywork detectors up too high. I’ve seen enough of what my own children endure with substitutes and make-work assignments to understand the potential for cynicism. Yet I was truly surprised that they wouldn’t have trusted me more than that, or (more to the point) exercised their minds more fully to think about what connections might be there. Of course, the willingness to exercise the mind in the presence of a teacher derives from trust, so perhaps it all boils down to one’s willingness to suspend disbelief, if only for awhile.  (It did help that I was prepared for the challenges, having read the contributions to the class discussion forum.)

Though it made me a little sad that many of the students apparently started from the assumption that I had assigned them work that had no bearing on the course of study, it also helped to energize the discussion, as the many strong, searching, even urgent connections soon revealed themselves as we began to talk our way through the films and the philosophers. It took about ten minutes for the tone to turn positive, and by the time it did, we were working very ably toward detailed analyses and depth of understanding. In one class, I actually saw a couple of students punch each other in triumph when certain points emerged, as if to say, “see, that’s exactly what I thought!” That shared drama of discovery pleased my teacher’s heart.

So all’s well that ends well. Still, I think about how much time was wasted on skepticism, when acceptance of the enigmas, the challenges, even the oddities might have started the discussion much farther along–and without my having “prepped” the viewing to the point that the experience would be dessicated and contained within my own perspective.

An interesting day and some intense discussions. It would be churlish to complain.

Back in the office today after the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting, I met my first class at 9:30 this morning: Introduction to New Media Studies. Today was our first day on Doug Engelbart. In one moment, two-thirds of the way through the class, the synchronicities became unexpectedly piercing.

A student in the front row marvelled with disbelief at the intensity and complexity of mind Engelbart appears to imagine we should cultivate. The student insisted, with growing energy, that ordinary people couldn’t meet that standard, that it would be unbearably difficult to live in the integrated domain Engelbart eloquently describes. Could Engelbart really be serious in thinking we could and should be that alert, responsive, and focused? I replied that I’d never been in contact with anyone as serious about his vision as Engelbart was and is. I went on to say that Engelbart believed everyone should be striving toward just the capability and collective intelligence he outlined in his “Augmenting Human Intellect,” and he also believed that if we didn’t, we were surely doomed as a civilization. Completely possessed by Engelbart’s vision, I went on for another minute or so to evoke what I could of the depth and urgency of Engelbart and his mission. By now completely wound up, I stopped for breath. I was probably shaking a little.

At which point the young man paused for his own breath. His eyes widened. “But,” he burst out, “but if we’re supposed to live and think that way, our schools are set up all wrong!”

I was speechless.

When I recovered, I pointed him to Illich’s Deschooling Society, which he immediately Googled on his open laptop. The link’s appeared on the class del.icio.us aggregation sidebar, so either he or someone else in the class has bookmarked and tagged it.

I hope Doug Engelbart would be pleased.

A visual pun (or puzzle for shining morning faces)–and one of the few things I have time to post tonight. The joke is inside but may strike a chord for those of us at the final general session at ELI 2008. I have a good deal to say, and consider, regarding that session. But that anon.

For now, a quick note to say I’m back home, the flights were fine (American Airlines on my good list–let’s hope it’s a trend), and the meeting was a real corker this year. You could hardly get to the coffee and danish for all the talent, conversation, and creativity. I felt buoyed up by the energy of folks I knew, folks I was just meeting, and folks like Henry Jenkins, George Siemens, and Michael Wesch whose work I had followed for a long time but whom I met at the conference for the first time. I got to facilitate a discussion of Innovations in Faculty Development with a dynamic roomful of Learning Circle attendees. I got to eat delicious food with longtime colleagues and help out with the final assembly of the Citizen Journalist movie summing up the conference. I got to share two star students with a great set of committed educators. Bountiful opportunities in every direction–and with a broad and diverse range of people.

Something like real school, that is.

I have much more to say, but it will have to wait. In the meantime, I am deeply grateful to be part of this community. And I can hardly wait for next year.

Photo from this site, where the “about” tab says “The photographer doesn’t matter here–the photo does.”

I woke up this morning with one of my favorite pieces of music in my head. I take that as a sign that my brain is very happy. And why not? The ELI Annual Meeting is in full swing.

And swing it does. There’s a remarkable zest in the rhythm here, and enough finger-snapping beats to make Count Basie himself smile with delight. Henry Jenkins’ keynote got us off to a fine start. Plenty to think about, some things to take issue with, some things to embrace, and over it all, a feeling of gratitude that he’s doing his work and helping the academy understand the intellectual feast that lies before it, whether or not the setting is what we’re used to. (I was very fortunate to have the chance to talk to Henry some at dinner last night. He shared a wonderful old-time-radio resource with me–otrcat–and when the talk turned to film and Rod Serling and McLuhan and Guitar Hero it was tremendous fun to go exploring with this man. The phrase “thought leader” gets used a lot. It certainly applies here.) Later in the afternoon I went to a presentation on haptic technologies by two Purdue computer scientists at the Center for Data Perceptualization. We all had a chance to play with haptic devices at our tables. It was an eerie experience, almost synaesthetic, to be manipulating a piece of plastic struts-and-buttons machinery and feeling something akin to the weight and heft of a bowling ball, or (even more spookily) feeling the attractions and repulsions of atomic particles within an energy field. The potential for tapping new modes of understanding and expression is enormous. What might a haptic short story “feel” like? I’m reminded yet again of the “live it” in Simak’s “Immigrant.”

Next stop yesterday afternoon was the presentation I did with students Serena Epstein and David Moore from the University of Mary Washington. Serena and David had taken my Intro. to New Media Studies class last summer and done terrific work for their final projects. I knew they would have fascinating, provocative things to say and share, and they did not disappoint. In fact, it was a pleasure riding on their coattails. The audience was most appreciative. Best of all, or most dangerous of all, I found myself getting pretty caught up in the enthusiasm in the room, so much so that my wild notion of a first-year gen-ed experience based on New Media Studies started to seem less wild and much more do-able. I got the strong feeling that the idea really could fly. (Look out.)

But that’s probably what I treasure most about ELI: the strong and unshakable belief that runs through the entire organization and emerges magnificently in these annual meetings, the belief that we can and must put our heads and hearts together and figure out how to address these core questions. How should we teach? How should we do our scholarship so that research and teaching are truly symbiotic? How do we keep our chins up and our spirits high as we work within the often-frustrating processes and politics in our home institutions? Those are the tough questions, and ELI engages them directly, fearlessly, strategically–and with a tremendous sense of community and goodwill.

As I look around the room and see dear and enthusiastic friends and colleagues, along with all the new faces who reflect the energy and excitement of their first visit to ELI, I feel deeply re-united.

I feel like I can get me some dreaming done.