A dear colleague passed away suddenly last week. We are immeasurably poorer.

Pat was one of the first colleagues outside the department I got to know on my arrival in 1994. Our shared interest in music, particularly medieval and Renaissance music (one of Pat’s specialties), was one of our first strong connections. Oddly and regrettably, it’s a connection we never explored in the depth we’d have liked. One of the great ironies of working in a university is how little time or occasion there is for sharing the life of the mind. That said, there was another connection that did bring us together again and again, a connection I wouldn’t have guessed right away. Pat was devoted to exploring the uses of information technologies in teaching and learning, and that shared passion  was the subject of many conversations and a fair amount of collaboration as well.

Here’s at least part of what I want to say about Pat. Using IT in her work didn’t always come naturally to her, but  she never lost heart, never ever let fear or uncertainty deter her from continuing to push ahead with no small measure of delight as she thought about how computers could make her a more effective teacher. In this way she was an extremely rare colleague. Her insecurities (I’m sure she must have had them) and the many false starts and cold trails all of us working with these tools endure never made her bitter or brittle or cynical or defensive. She took it all in stride, and continued to innovate. In fact, she was scheduled to be her department’s Teaching, Learning, and Technology Fellow for 2008-2009. It didn’t matter that she was nearing retirement, or that computers were recalcitrant things, or that the investments of time and energy seemed only to increase as the equipment got more sophisticated. Pat wanted to learn, and she loved to teach.

Farewell, Pat. Your example humbles and inspires us all. Thank you.

There’s a thread here I’d like to pursue, or at least snarl with elan.

Today in my “Introduction to Literary Studies” class we were discussing Aristotle: the Poetics mostly, with a fillip of the Rhetoric. Our text, the redoubtable Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, had an especially observant introduction to the Aristotle selections, one that contrasted the way Plato “explores paths of thinking” with the way Aristotle focuses on “categorization [and] definition” by means of “propositional statements.” The contrast made me think of the document/data continuum (I almost said dichotomy) that Eric Miller was speaking about yesterday.

I think there’s a strong streak of Aristotelian propositional method in the idea of a data-driven web. Read the Poetics and wonder at Aristotle’s indefatigable defining, analyzing, parsing, specifying. The man never tires, never even hesitates in the face of the enormous task he sets for himself. And even the most breathtaking propositions–his firm assertion about the end [purpose] of life, for example–are just more confident statements in the long march of sureties. Of course he’s right to insist on the need for clarity, specification, definition. Yet even Aristotle has to pause at metaphor, declare it essential, a gift, the peculiar possession of the poet and madman. Even Aristotle stops for genius.

Perhaps I’m simply besotted with the genius of the web of documents, the genius that has given us this astonishing communication medium, this palette, canvas, and never-ending subject. As I told my students today, I certainly wish for an Aristotelian as my surgeon. No time or place for allegory when you’re trying to find and stitch together those delicate, fungible parts.

Yet when I describe my symptoms, and try to communicate what it’s like to be the subject inside this body, with these pains and these hopes and these anxieties, I hope for a Platonist, someone just a little more mad, creative, and patient with the human drive to narrate, to inhabit. Someone who will try not just to classify, but to understand, to be illuminated.

Aristotle is the king of disambiguation. He’s consistent (for the most part), tirelessly logical, clear-headed as the first chill breath of autumn. Plato is all over the place: contemptuous, mystical, enigmatic, condescending, allegorical, itchy for revelation, mad with yearning, consumed by love (in The Symposium, anyway).

I suppose my highest hope is a synthesis of the two. But if I can have only one, give me Plato.

Courtesy of the University of Mary Washington Computer Science Department, I and an SRO crowd of students, faculty, and staff got to hear a fascinating talk today by Dr. Eric Miller (CSAIL, MIT). There’s no questioning the depth, intelligence, or intensity of his commitment to a data web; he made the best and most inclusive case for the semantic web I’ve yet heard. Inclusive, because his vision is not just about normalizing descriptive vocabularies or getting everyone firmly in the RDF camp. As I understand it, his vision is more about taking the data already implicit on the web and making it explicit, reusable, mashup-able. It’s a persuasive vision, one strongly reminiscent of Vannevar Bush’s and Douglas Engelbart’s desire to find a way to get ahead of our own information-generation and make good, timely use of the knowledge we have already discovered, knowledge that often languishes unread and unremarked because there’s no machine-readable associative trail to lead us there or to answer our queries comprehensively.

That said, and coming from a non-CS point of view, I do continue to have questions about the idea of the “semantic web,” particularly as it seems to me to downplay the semantic energies of the document in favor of the clearer and more specifiable semantic energies of data. My training in the humanities locates meaning in documents, at least in the sense that documents are the things that make the case for meaning, and invite a response to meaning. Data, by contrast, is measurement and observation. Crucial activities, to be sure–I want my physician’s decisions to be data-driven, make no mistake about it. And unlike many contemporary humanists, I do believe in fact, in empirical reality, and in our abilities to be in touch with it (though those abilities are problematic). And yet, I do believe that our documents, particularly our discursive and creative documents, are the things that make the data meaningful. Once I’m cured and hale and hearty, no set of data can ascribe meaning to that condition.

There’s a lot more to my questions, and a lot more to the argument, on both sides. I asked Dr. Miller to specify the distinction between “document” and “data,” and he replied “in the eye of the beholder.” He was being witty, of course, and later on we talked a bit and he admitted that the matter became “philosophical” when one looked into it closely. He invited me to email him with my question, and promised to respond with some links to resources discussing this distinction and its difficulties. He also insisted that his vision of the semantic web was not trying to isolate one vocabulary, but provide a framework for specifying identity, equivalence, and similarity in digital, physical, and conceptual resources. (He also said that the idea should never have been called “the semantic web.”)

The good news is that he very much supports the idea of document/data symbiosis as the web moves forward. The even better news was his advice to us all: don’t try to figure out what all this will be used for, he insisted, because doing so cripples innovation. Trying to specify all the outcomes and uses would have prevented the Web’s emerging at all, much less its fantastic proliferation. There’s a lesson there for the way we think about education as well.

Postscript: I was pleased that several of my Introduction to New Media Studies students were in the room for Dr. Miller’s talk. Their blogging is well underway and has already begun some wonderful exploration. You’ll find the aggregation blog (in its first iteration) at intronewmediastudies08.umwblogs.org. We’ll be building out this site during the term, but at least I’ve got a one-stop for the class’s blogging activity to date. Stop by and enjoy–and if you leave a comment, be sure to leave it on the student’s original post. You can get there by clicking on the author’s name at the bottom of the post.

Have I said yet how glad I am that Gene Roche (“Techfoot”) is blogging again? I really should pony up some tuition dollars–reading his stuff is like being in a great seminar….

Gene’s latest post comments on a very thoughtful and timely article by a former colleague. I’ll direct you to Gene’s post for all the details. Here I simply offer a little comment responding to Gene and to commenter QueenAnne’s point about longitudinal assessment. It’s an obvious point, but one worth making: look what our institutional silos have done to distort the very idea of mission, let alone assessment.

Student experience: that’s the purview of Student Affairs, right? The people who schedule the mixers and dances and res-hall activities? The people who get the pool tables and climbing walls together for student recreation? Yet how many rich, unexplored opportunities are here for creative informal learning encounters, among students and faculty and staff. Instead, we seem to have independent, centrally funded catering operations–credit catering, activity catering, etc. Where’s the academic mission situated within a view of the whole person? A part of me still thinks, stubbornly, that the traditional 18-22 undergraduate experience is best carried out in a true academical village, just as Mr. Jefferson imagined it. And as long as we’re on my stubbornness, I continue to think that information technologies can help knit and strengthen academical villages in the larger sense–but here too, silos often intrude, including the silos that separate students’ gregarious lives online from the way we imagine and foster online learning and interaction at the “enterprise” level.

And what about alumni affairs? We say that part of the core mission of liberal arts undergraduate education is to prepare our students for lifelong learning, as well as give them the tools they need to fulfill their own emerging potentials throughout their career(s). Yet assessment rarely includes any effort to encourage our students to take the measure of their lives after graduation, and reflect on the difference–good or bad–that their time at college has made to their lives. It’s often struck me that there’s a weird, wide divide between some of the work alumni associations do most naturally and the work we say we want to do in outcomes assessment, but fight shy of.

No solutions, here, but some persisting questions.  I wish I heard such questions asked more often and more pervasively throughout the institution. Thanks to Gene and Dan Chambliss for keeping them alive and urgent.

but only just. Thanks to all for the get-well wishes. They’ve worked, though I’m still pretty weak. Odd how flu makes for such lethargy.

I’m trying to tie up a few (thousand) loose ends as I get ready for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative 2008 Annual Meeting. This meeting is the one that feels like “home base” for me. It’s where I came in, back in 2004. Lots has happened since, and I’ve at last been to the New Media Consortium Annual Meeting and found out that all the wonderful things folks said about that meeting were also true. Chalk it up to pure slavering greed on my part: I treasure and need them both.

My thought for the evening as I try once again to think through my half-baked ideas about metaphor in the metaverse: perhaps what I’m trying to articulate is something like what Stanley Kubrick tries to do when he portrays abstractions in action. Or like what Hitchcock meant when he talked about “pure cinema.” I think that if we manage to avoid killing the planet or each other, or both, we may soon be able to tap into and explore an entirely new world of discourse and analysis, one that takes what we already know about cinematic grammar, semiotics, semantics, just plain expressiveness, and puts it into practice on a hitherto unimagined, unexperienced scale. What would happen if we educated our students to be sophisticated moviemakers, just as we now educate them to be sophisticated writers? What if those capacities were used not just in the service of narrative film, but as a means of conversation, analysis, etc.? The semantic metaverse–that gives our meaningful world back to us? Worth a thought, even if it’s half-baked.

Pretty little critter, but appearances are deceiving in the case of the influenza virus, as I can testify after two days on my back with it. “Gardner Writes” will be back as soon as my lovely visitor has been shown the door.

This isn’t a great movie–in fact, it’s pretty formulaic and manipulative in spots. But I still like it. It’s a treat to see Denzel Washington act in his role, and several of the supporting players also do a fine job.

But the real reason I finally bought this film (Blu-ray version, on sale at Amazon) was that the story it tells is part of my personal history. From 1970-1975 I was in the Pride of Salem, the championship marching band at Andrew Lewis High School in Salem, Virginia. When the T. C. Williams’ Titans won the State AAA Football championship in 1971, they defeated Andrew Lewis for that title. The game was played at Victory Stadium in Roanoke on a bitterly cold day in December. I was there that day, playing in the band down on the sidelines.  Our prize quarterback, Eddie Joyce, Jr., was running a fever with what we were told was strep throat. He had done a superb job all season, including a thrilling comeback victory over E. C. Glass High School, but this day was not his: he never could find his rhythm, and his tremendous arm had very little precision, in part because the defense started blitzing and our offensive line just couldn’t hold them.

The game was never close. T. C. Williams won 27-7 [EDIT: it was actually 27-0, as the ALHS touchdown, the first of the game, was disallowed–see comments below] after putting in their second string to avoid running the score up. I had never seen such large, fast, strong players. Over and over our quarterback was sacked, our receivers were smothered, and their offense ran over us. We gave it our best shot. We were completely outgunned. I think their second string could have beaten us that day. So it goes.

Now, many years later, I don’t mind so much that we were drubbed by the number two team in the nation, though it was very painful to witness. What I do mind is that Remember The Titans changed the name of my high school to “Marshall” and wrote it out of the drama. I don’t mind that they changed the game from an afternoon game to a night game, or even that they made it sound like a close game with a last-minute trick play pulling out the miracle win. But I sure wish they’d left the name unchanged. The “Marshall” coach they cast is a lookalike for Eddie Joyce, the head coach for us that year. The “Marshall” quarterback was number 12, as was ours. So why change the name? I can’t find a definitive answer to that question. I wish they’d left us in there.

That’s my Friday night story, and I’m sticking to it.

Day two of this semester’s Introduction to New Media Studies class, and the meeting went in some directions I hadn’t quite anticipated.

We didn’t discuss the readings for the day in a very systematic fashion. In no small part this was the result of the readings themselves, particularly Borges’ “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” This is the second time I’ve used this text (The New Media Reader) and thus the second time I’ve begun the term with the Janet Murray introduction, the Lev Manovich introduction, and the Borges’ story. This time, though, I found myself more vulnerable to the Borges that I was the first time through. That’s not unusual for me. The first time I work hard to achieve enough mastery to make a decent guide for the class’s work. The second time I’m more relaxed as I read the material. The result is usually more engagement, not less. Today I found that when a couple of vocal students brought the story up in the context of our discussion of techno-utopian and techno-dystopian possibilities, I fell immediately under the Borgesian spell, so much so that I found myself trying to explore the ideas in the two introductions not in terms of, but within, the very strange, beautiful, dissociative world of the Borges story. Oddly, that approach seemed illuminating–perhaps only to me–as it made the connections between computing and consciousness sudden, explicit, and intense. But of course the experience also felt labyrinthine, recursive, elusive, refractory: not the kinds of adjectives that typically make for clear instruction or any kind of closure.

At a couple of points I felt my own mind becoming quite webby (sounds strange, I know) and my awareness of emergent possibilities felt heightened as a result. But the time was over all too soon, and I could feel some stamina ebbing away as the students tried to hang on to an experience that had few handles. And as always, I wonder about the silent ones. Several students were passionately involved in the discussion, committed to the “swarming feeling” Borges’ protagonist describes as multiple layers of time and possible outcomes co-inhere within a narrative moment of awareness. Many more sat there silently. Some of them seemed engaged. Some seemed confused. Some seemed engaged and confused–those are the ones I’m usually the most hopeful about. And I felt that to honor the multiplicity present in the texts before us, I had to experience some aspects of that confusion myself, while at the same time being careful not to let every single rendezvous point disappear into the meta-fog.

For a few moments after class was over, I worried that the entire session had been too much of a mess for learning to have occurred. Oddly, I found I could remember most of the things that had happened in the class session, and found also that many of what seemed to me to be the most important points in the two introductions had in fact come up for discussion as we worked through the webs of connections. What I don’t know yet is how many of the students were able to detect, note, mark, learn, inwardly digest those important points without the more explicit scaffolding I usually supply (without lapsing into merely “going over the material”–I shudder even to write the phrase).

Sometimes I feel the drama of such an explosive and unstructured discussion becomes an important design element in the course experience, or at least a microcosm of the real, raw work of cognition that genuine learning entails–the real, raw work that is often hidden or evaded by usual schooling practices.

Other times I feel quite differently. I wish more students had chimed in. I know the things I could have done to elicit more participation, but today that felt like too much intervention–in fact, a bit stilted, and not at all true to the Borgesian spirit. Next time, I imagine I’ll be ready to move in another direction.

There’s a tension here that I can see I’ve been exploring in several recent blog posts. Today, Borges brought that exploration and that tension into sharper focus for me–and I hope that focus somehow made itself useful to my students as I guided them or at least tumbled before them. Very hard to say. What I do know is that the editors of this textbook are canny alchemists for placing that short story next to those introductions, and immediately before our next reading, Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think.”

The connections here are truly overwhelming–but such oxygenation!

Prepping for the Rock/Soul/Progressive class tomorrow, and these words in James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin once again got my attention:

Meanwhile, most of my friends (discounting those who have continued to make their living by writing about, or recording, popular music) long ago stopped listening to rock. As they settle into middle age, their old albums gathering dust, their current musical tastes are now attuned to quite different styles of music, from country-western to classical, from show tunes to patriotic women’s choruses from Bulgaria–almost anything, in fact, but the once beloved soundtrack of their adolescence and early adulthood.

Okay, Dr. Miller, here’s my confession. I’ve never understood the behavior you say your friends exhibit. I feel as intensely about this music now, in my middle age (I don’t remember “settling” into this phase, but sure, I’ve arrived here), as I did when I was an adolescent, or even as a child. I was grabbing a quick bite at a local fast-food joint today when “Ticket to Ride” and “In the Midnight Hour” came on back to back on the store’s music system. I did not flashback to my childhood, relive a primal scene, or even feel the delicious memory of my first kiss. No nostalgia need apply. (Some music does make me powerfully nostalgic, but that’s not why I love it. Sometimes it’s a reason why I avoid it.) No, I thought about the musicians, in a space, making those sounds, sounds I can inhabit and sounds that inhabit me, a set of sounds whose structure in the passion and urgency and agency of their delivery connects me to a wild surmise about the possibilities of meaning, joy, and deep embodied insight in our mortal lives.

Then again, I was moved in exactly the same way by Bach and Hank Williams and Rodgers/Hart, too. From the first.

Why would one stop listening to anything one has loved? Unless one didn’t truly love it, but simply got rushed along in the herd, it makes no sense to me. And it makes me skeptical about James Miller’s argument that “unlike every other great genre of American pop, rock is all about being young, or (if you are poor Mick Jagger) pretending to be young.”

Maybe I didn’t get the memo telling all those poor intense saps that all the passion they felt in adolescence would one day gather dust, just like their old rock records. Me, I’ve got my old rock records filed right next to my new ones, by format, in alphabetical order, and I play them all regularly. Methinks Miller doth protest too much.

I’ve met all four of my classes once now. This semester it’s two sections of Introduction to Literary Studies (gateway course for the major–theory and criticism and genre and close reading and a partridge…), one section of Introduction to New Media Studies, and one section of Rock/Soul/Progressive. Each beginning was different. Some of the classes obviously came with their game heads on. They were ready to go, or got to that stage after a very short while (and mercifully little stand-up comedy from me). One was very sluggish until the very end, when things suddenly caught fire. In every case, there was at least one fascinating moment. I try very hard to elicit those moments, and once they’re there, try very hard to give them just the right mix of attention and restraint to get them to grow. Perhaps that’s why class always feels like an intense conversation to me–but the kind of intense conversation in which one has to stare and look away at the same time.

I continue to marvel at how these fragile moments can very quickly become seismic (to mix my metaphors well). Or to put it another way, at one point I’ll feel as if I’m trying to carry a very full cup of coffee up a flight of stairs without spilling it, and immediately thereafter feel as if I’m a kite thrown aloft by a roughly playful gust. Pedagogical agency is such a varied experience. Small wonder some people find it too dizzying to enjoy.