As a postscript to “Structures and Emergence,” I offer a recent story in the New Yorker about intensive care, checklists, executives and practitioners, and a stubborn practical expert visionary. (The story is also about nearly intractable institutional and professional dysfunction, but neither of those qualifies as news or deserves more than a sad acknowledgement followed by the next several steps in the long trek onward and upward.) It’s not the first time I’ve been inspired by Atul Gawande, the article’s author. Gawande gave me the idea for an APGAR for class meetings, and I see from a random spam trackback (a kind of shuffle-playback for the blog?) that my first Gawande reference came way back in December, 2004, when he wrote about the “focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness” that characterize the pursuit and achievement of excellence, even more than skill or knowledge.

Once again Gawande’s exploring the idea of excellence, and again the exploration is by way of a story about a perceptive, inventive, doggedly committed professional who’s able to realize a vision, glimpse by glimpse. To use current jargon, the “outcomes” seem easily described: more patients live and leave the ICU. The real lessons are deeper, however. They concern the space between innovation and standards, between experimentation and automaticity, and how expertise, or more particularly a culture of expertise, can lead to a sometimes fatal detachment from the necessary routines of effective practice.

A physician named Peter Pronovost (not unlike Virginia Apgar) has established a basic checklist of ICU procedures designed to minimize infection, to manage pain effectively, to limit complications linked to mechanical ventilation, and in general to remind nurses and doctors of what should happen routinely to give patients the best chance of surviving whatever disease or trauma had brought them to the ICU in the first place. His physician colleagues resisted the checklists at first. Some of the arguments bordered on the absurd: “spend time with patients, not on paperwork,” though the paperwork was short, focused, and designed to keep patients healthy, not satisfy bureaucracy. However, by concentrating on a single metric, infection rates, Pronovost was able to sell the idea. (I am reminded that a tactical gain can be the legs that push a strategic imperative over the goal line.) The results were interesting:

The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

Thus checklists need not be a reductive substitute for complexity, but can instead serve as vital first step in complexity management that actually frees up time and attention for the more idiosyncratic or urgent needs. In their explicit articulation of “minimum, expected steps in complex processes,” checklists also turn information into knowledge by expecting (even compelling) a certain kind of attention. A checklist is not just a list, after all. It’s a script; it anticipates a performance.

It seems to me that our students often deal with complexity by reducing it rather than managing it. Who can blame them when much of the schooling they experience obviously and maddeningly does exactly the same thing? It also seems to me that all of us in school tend to confuse lists with checklists. This is a subtler distinction, and I may not be making it well, but to keep the implicit stage analogy going, it has something to do with the difference between repeating lines and acting them out.

For me, the most provocative bits of Gawande’s essay come at the end in a restatement of his mighty theme:

We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that’s what rankles many people.

It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.

There they are, beautifully pulling against a tensile center: expert audacity and the virtues of regimentation. The tension is beautifully recursive, for to manage this tension expertly, one must establish and manage–perform?–another instance of it. Like a rosined bow pulling across a violin string.

The essay’s subtitle, presumably invented by an editor, asks a haunting question that effectively concludes the piece: “If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?”

The new term begins in ten days, and I’m thinking about how to prep the sandbox for the fifteen weeks that follow. Truthfully, “thinking” is too mild a word. “Yearning” is more like it: yearning for the inspiration and insight into form, tempo, and activities that will give my students their best chance at surprising themselves and me with the depth and quality of their work.

For this post, rather than try to work out that yearning in my own prose, I want to experiment with some quotations, both audio and text. The two audio quotations come from KCRW’s “The Treatment,” in which host Elvis Mitchell does weekly interviews with actors, directors, writers, and other creative personnel from film, music, television, and other media. The two text quotations come from two Jerome Bruner books I’ve just started. Together, these four quotations fuel my yearning. I see the character of what I aspire to. That’s a good thing, though it certainly sharpens the yearning.

I hope you find them provocative too.

1. Director Paul Greengrass, from KCRW’s “The Treatment.”

2. Jerome Bruner, from the Preface to the 1977 revised edition of The Process of Education:

Let me turn finally to the last of the things that have kept me brooding about this book–the production of a curriculum. Whoever has undertaken such an enterprise will probably have learned many things. But with luck, he will also have learned one big thing. A curriculum is more for teachers than it is for pupils. If it cannot change, move, perturb, inform teachers, it will have no effect on those whom they teach. It must be first and foremost a curriculum for teachers. If it has any effect on pupils, it will have it by virtue of having had an effect on teachers. The doctrine that a well-wrought curriculum is a way of “teacher-proofing” a body of knowledge in order to get it to the student uncontaminated is nonsense.

[An aside: Bruner’s assertion, which I agree with, runs counter to much of what I heard at the humanities session of the NCAT “Learning By Design” day last November in Richmond.]

3. Director Sarah Polley, from KCRW’s “The Treatment.”

4. Jerome Bruner, from “The Shape of Experience,” in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand:

What is characteristic of the great work of art is that its metaphoric artifice, its juxtapositions have not only surprise value but also illuminating honesty. The two combine to create what we shall later refer to as “effective surprise.” The work of art also has a cognitive economy in its metaphoric transformations, which make it possible for a seemingly limited symbol to spread its power over a range of experience.

I yearn for that effective surprise and for the cognitive economy of powerful symbols, for the structures and the illuminating honesty, the theme parks and the sandboxes, to make of courses of study episodes of buildable wonder. In posts to follow, I’ll try to articulate some of my efforts to do so last term, and to be as candid as I can about what worked and what didn’t, and insofar as I can tell, why.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (340.6KB)

I resolve to blog at least once a day. Short or long, ill- or well-considered, focused or rambling, a post is better than silence, and I have learned to my cost how difficult it is to sustain momentum when I skip a day, or two, or ten. This blog has been a crucial part of my own teaching and learning for over three years now. It deserves more care and feeding than I’ve been giving it. Nothing against slow-blogging and its magnificent practitioners–but I feel I need the daily discipline.

I resolve to comment on at least one blog each day. Comments that grow into blog posts of their own don’t count. 🙂

I resolve to prune my Bloglines list and keep current with my personal suite of trusted and inspiring experts.

My thanks to my readers, and to those whose blogs have played, and continue to play, a crucial role in my work. Now more than ever, blogging matters, and I claim the humble, silly-sounding word “blogger” as a badge of honor.

Happy New Year.

On December 2, Brian Wilson received one of five Kennedy Center Honors Awards for 2007. The ceremony will be broadcast by CBS on December 26, 2007 at 9 p.m. EST.

It’s impossible to know what Brian is thinking in this photograph, and impossible not to wonder. We know he struggles daily with what they’re now calling a schizoaffective disorder. We know that despite these struggles, he’s managed to initiate and complete some astonishing work over the last decade, including 2004’s release of the completed SMiLE. Over the years it’s become increasingly apparent that even after his 1967 meltdown over this project, Brian continued to be productive. There’s great Beach Boys stuff coming from him, even with diminishing returns and increasing disability, right up through the Holland album and even up to the strangely compelling The Beach Boys Love You, as close to a punk album as Brian ever made, and in its way every bit as psychedelic as “Good Vibrations.” Yes, Brian Wilson was an acid casualty, with collateral damage all over the place, but even that story is not simple or straightforward.

More to the point, the story of Brian Wilson is far from over. Look at Brian’s website and you’ll see an artist still at work–vigorously. In fact, just a couple of days ago he went into the studio to craft a birthday card for his late brother Carl, who would have been 61 this year. The song, and a slideshow honoring both Carl and the bond between the two brothers, are both on the website. The tribute has a special poignance for those of us well-steeped in the Beach Boys’ music and history, for we know that Carl stepped in and took over the group’s musical direction when Brian could no longer carry that weight. We also know that Brian thought Carl the best singer in the group, and asked him to sing lead on both “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations.” Carl was the one who did much of the arranging and mixdown production for the Beach Boys after 1967. And Carl was the peacemaker in a group that badly needed one. So Brian’s tribute to Carl resonates on multiple levels, and the fact that it’s also a performance by Brian makes it all the more affecting.

The work continues. Brian’s recently completed and performed his second song cycle, and SMiLE collaborator Van Dyke Parks contributes at least some of the lyrics: “That Lucky Old Sun (A Narrative).” Here’s a review from a listener in the audience at the UK premiere. Obviously Brian has found the group of sympathetic, sophisticated collaborators he lost when his first band couldn’t or wouldn’t follow him any more. Not that they were averse to raiding what they thought was his tomb time and again, notoriously in the “Brian’s Back” debacle of the mid-70’s but periodically since then, most recently in Mike Love’s nuisance suit claiming that Brian was “shamelessly misappropriating… Love’s songs, likeness, and the Beach Boys trademark, as well as the ‘Smile’ album itself.” This from the man who more than anyone rejected and reviled Brian’s most ambitious work.

What is Brian thinking in that photograph from the Kennedy Center? What is he feeling? His survival and continued creativity are a triumph for all of us. Can he share that feeling of triumph? That this genius regularly hears not only beautiful music in his head, but also voices that tell him he’s terrible, is cruelly faith-shaking. It’s beyond unfair, whatever that means.

Maybe in another universe, along another timeline, rock-and-roll was never invented, and the Beach Boys never formed. Those boys in Hawthorne never pooled the money their mom and dad left them when they went on vacation, never bought those instruments, never recorded a local hit that led to almost half a century of extraordinary music.

But maybe there’s yet another timeline, another universe, in which Carl, Dennis, and Al (or maybe a time-traveller from the 90’s?) rally to Brian’s side and help him finish SMiLE, in which the acid, cocaine, and other drugs (like money, say, or familial approval) don’t cripple Brian. A universe in which Brian hits a rough patch but grows strong because of it.

Maybe. Back in the universe we live in, and the timeline we live on, there’s not nothing, and there’s not everything, but maybe there’s something in Brian’s survival to age 65, continuing to make music and perform it, and living long enough to understand, at least a little, what he’s done to make us fall in love with him. J. Freedom du Lac’s sensitive piece for the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago outlines all the troubles Brian’s seen, but closes on a note that brings deep gladness and hope to me. Perhaps to you too.

He’s willing to agree that he is “in some ways” a musical genius — but, he adds quickly: “In other ways, no. I sometimes don’t come up with music when I should. I’ve been called a genius, but I don’t know. People admire me, and that makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I have a purpose. I could not express how thankful I am to have that kind of thing in my life.”

This is all something of a revelation, apparently.

“Brian didn’t really have an understanding of what his music means to the world,” Melinda [Wilson, his wife] says. “He’s finally understanding that. He totally gets that now, and he’s accepting who he is. It’s getting a little bit easier. From time to time now, he’ll even accept a compliment.”

Merry Christmas, Brian, to you and yours. Thank you. And Melinda, special thanks to you for saving his life.

Brian Lamb’s latest post over at Abject Learning is clear-eyed, thoughtful, and more than a little poignant. Extraordinary, really.

All I can say to the first two bullet points is “right on.”

I’m going to be mulling over that third bullet point for a long time. It’s early here and I can’t vouch for the coherence of my response, but I want to try, so bear with me please. (I’m hoping to recover some bold bloggery over this holiday break and get back in this conversation–and Brian’s post is nothing if not inspiring in that regard.)

My first thought, maybe my most urgent thought, is that we must teach our students and our colleagues (and ourselves!) to be technology strategists. That kind of education ought to be one of our institutions’ top priorities. The range of options, the dizzying implications, the come-and-go services, the question (as Col. Tom Parker used to ask) “how much does it cost if it’s free?”: these are questions that education should address from an early age in the specific context of networked computing. There’s more to being a technology strategist than just being a savvy user. All digital citizens should be digital strategists. That’s going to take some significant curricular and attitudinal change–though I think we can take important steps in that direction without bringing all the current machinery of education to a screeching halt.

A bubble may well burst in 2008, but I feel the Web 2.0/3.0/x.0 landscape will continue to expand in all the ways Brian has described. There’s no going back. I understand the feeling of panic that can engender. I’d argue that that feeling is not different in kind from the feeling of having to mature and take one’s place in a very complex civilization that may well be eating itself, but which (as always with our species) holds enormous promise and often great joy and splendor.

I am no techno-utopian and am not always optimistic about the scalability of benign self-organization, but I do believe in the power of allegory, or at least extended analogy, and I see the emerging situation Brian’s outlined as no different from the basic questions that should always engage us with regard to schooling. I think we’ll look back on the last century or more of higher education as a time when we got sleepy and forgetful about the difficulties of creating and sustaining real school. I think the open web and its successors, with all their mess, peril, and promise, may force us to wake up. That’s my hope.

It’s the alternative that frightens me.

I’m always in the mood for rich analogies.

This one comes from the November 28, 2007 New York Times’ Arts section. I’ve been tempted to do a granular analysis of the entire section, as I was startled by how casually and completely it featured various computer-related stories, ads, etc. Alas, any such analyses will have to wait until the end of term when all the grades are in. For now, however, I would like to offer these paragraphs from a story about EVE Online. I won’t explain EVE here–you can read the article for that–but I will say that the dichotomy CEO Hilmar Petursson proposes is especially interesting to me from the point of view of education, or curriculum, or online learning, or even a course syllabus:

“There are basically two schools of thought for operating an online community,” Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

“There is the theme-park approach and the sandbox approach,” he continued. “Most games are like Disneyland, for instance, which is a carefully constructed experience where you stand in line to be entertained. We focus on the sandbox approach where people can decide what they want to do in that particular sandbox, and we very much emphasize and support that kind of emergent behavior.”

Substitute “educated” for “entertained,” and “learning community” for “online community.” Several things come to mind, ill-formed and in no particular order:

1. Most colleges and universities are more theme-parks than sandboxes. That trend is accelerating, given that theme-parks seem to be able to scale better. I say “seem to,” because EVE’s business model clearly indicates their belief that sandboxes supporting emergent behavior can scale as well. Yet we live in a time of dramatically declining public support for higher education in which one very popular solution to the problem is to make learning experiences as uniform as possible (guaranteeing more uniform outcomes), increase access by scaling class sizes (especially at the introductory level) to 300-500 students per professor, and cut costs by outsourcing grading and class management to various contractors. Bigger turnstiles and better oil for the gears. More people get in, more people do just well enough to get out. And we all drive home satisfied at the end of the day. That’s a theme-park, not a sandbox.

2. Assessing emergent behaviors in sandboxes requires much more imagination and rigor than assessing the results of a theme-park experience of education. The current (and worthwhile, in my view) resurgence of interest in thorough assessment unfortunately drives more theme-park construction than sandbox construction. Our answers are only as good as the questions we ask. Can we not devise imaginative, rigorous assessment of emergent behaviors, despite the fact that by definition we will have to think of “outcomes” and “value-adds” differently?

3. As I understand it, Ivan Illich’s radical view of “deschooling” does not devalue curriculum per se, but it does insist that only a sandbox approach results in authentic learning. That’s a bold claim and I’m not sure I agree entirely. Sometimes learners have to be brought through an experience, a course of study, a set of assignments, that will support more valuable kinds of emergent potential on the other side. In other words, sometimes rote memorization (think of the alphabet or the multiplcation table), or what my German teacher in college called “sitzen und schwitzen” (sit and sweat), are necessary admission requirements to the more interesting sandboxes. I also believe in the value of vertically-building curricula that recognize and support the unavoidable developmental aspects of education.

And yet I wonder if the passivity and lack of deep curiosity I see very often in my students would be different if Ilich’s vision were fully realized, or if they saw the ends to which the means directed them. But this is to say that I am not sure my students have a deep understanding of what school is good for. I am not sure schools understand that very deeply either.

4. I wonder if the dichotomy of theme-park vs. sandbox has certain false aspects. For example, one could put sandboxes within theme parks, and theme parks within sandboxes. Vary the experience, find a rhythm. Not every movie is a game, not every game is a movie, not every learning experience requires emergence within the experience to be satisfying. That said, without emergence, I don’t see how the core academic mission, and the strategies that follow, have much integrity beyond drill-and-kill.

Probably the most emergent, sandbox-type learning experience I ever had was writing my dissertation. In the humanities, especially in English, the Ph.D. dissertation can be (and often is) nothing but a bootstrapping operation. I remember feeling almost entirely alone, becalmed on vast sea with no landmarks or compass to steer by. On one level, that was clearly an illusion. I had a library full of landmarks, notebooks full of compasses. I had peers working on their dissertations. I had a director, a second reader, a third reader at another school. All in all, I had a deep and wide support network. No, I think I felt so alone and lost because I knew that this project, unlike any project I’d tackled before, was entirely up to me. It existed outside any container. I was the experience. I was the project. And that’s why it was truly transformative.

I understand that not everyone has that experience as a result of their dissertation, but in some respects I think that’s what the dissertation is for. I wish the loneliness and terror weren’t so bad, and perhaps they’re not that bad for everyone, but there’s also some useful authenticity there. The profound uneasiness I felt was not just neurosis. It was also a signal that something real was occurring.

I’ve come a long way from EVE Online, I see. But I sense certain connections that merit a mull or two. And the word “sandbox” has a special resonance for me.

It was an honor and a thrill, frankly, to be interviewed by Jon Udell for his “Interviews with Innovators” series over at IT Conversations. It’s taken me two weeks to blog about it because I couldn’t figure out quite what to say. Somehow “Look, Ma!” didn’t seem right, though it’s pretty much the way I felt.

When in doubt, give thanks. I was the voice on the other end of the telephone, but I wouldn’t have had much to say without a whole lot of other voices in my head, all of whom deserve much wider recognition.

I always need to thank my former boss, UMW CIO Chip German, and my old team of Martha, Jerry, Andy, Jim, and Patrick in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. Perhaps I can get some kind of widget for my blog that identifies me as “proud former coach of the Dream Team” and put the badge on blog posts like this one. (Can the TV contract be far behind?) I also want to thank Doug Kaye, Executive Director of the Conversations Network, of which IT Conversations is a part. Doug took me on as a post-production audio engineer for IT Conversations back in March of 2005, just as the podcasting revolution was getting underway. I learned a lot from Doug and got to work on some great shows, including presentations by Doug Engelbart and John Markoff (part one and part two). Doug’s done all of us a huge service with IT Conversations and the Conversations Network, and he’s influenced my own vision of what a truly beneficial information future could look like. The channel may be called “IT Conversations,” but a more accurate title would be “Our World–and get ready for it.”

And of course there are those colleagues here at UMW and elsewhere who keep me alert and moving ahead–you know who you are.

My biggest thanks, of course, go to Jon Udell. It was both daunting and exciting talking to Jon: daunting because the man is so quick and deeply thoughtful, and exciting, well, for the same reasons. And I have to say, with apologies for the tease, that the conversation after the interview was every bit as enjoyable and educational for me as the interview itself was, and that’s saying something.

The plain fact is that Jon’s a very, very inspiring fellow, and has been a tremendous influence on my thinking ever since Jerry Slezak told me about the now-classic Heavy Metal Umlaut Band screencast. If it’s not presumptious to say so, Jon’s a kindred spirit, even when we’re debating an issue, as we have been recently (and you can hear about it in the podcast). He’s also one of the few people I’ve ever met who can be in absolute full-tilt high persuasive gear in a conversation and then suddenly pause, look you in the eye, and say, “y’know, you’re right”–just at the moment I feel that my own argument is on very shaky ground.

I’d go into more detail, but I’m sure I’d embarrass him. I’ll save the rest of the encomium for another post (or ten). Instead, I’ll close now by thanking Jon for the chance once again to think through some questions, challenges, concerns, and dreams in conversation with him. That’s a privilege I do not take lightly or for granted. The fact is, talking to Jon is always what I call a great gig. We in higher education are very fortunate to have his voice, mind, heart, and spirit in company with us. I hope we can travel together for a long time to come.

At least, I hope so. It did make me laugh, though that’s no guarantee of anything right now:

I will tell you a philosophical joke. Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he began, ‘there are exactly 12 philosophical positions.’ A voice called from the audience: ‘Thirteen.’ ‘There are,’ the lecturer repeated, ‘exactly 12 possible philosophical positions; not one less and not one more.’ ‘Thirteen,’ the voice from the audience called again. ‘Very well, then,’ said the lecturer, now perceptibly irked, ‘I shall proceed to enumerate the 12 possible philosophical positions. The first is sometimes called “naive realism”. It is the view according to which things are, by and large, very much the way that they seem to be.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice from the audience. ‘Fourteen!’

From a review by Jerry Fodor in the London Review of Books, via The Philosophers’ Magazine Online, via the Chronicle quoting The Guardian. I was actually trying to find this quotation from Fodor:

Anybody who thinks that philosophers as such have access to large resources of practical wisdom hasn’t been going to faculty meetings.

The Guardian writer calls Fodor “the leading contemporary philosopher of mind.” Bingo, I say.

I still feel bad about missing UNESCO’s Fifth Annual World Philosophy Day, however.

Now I really must get back to the grading.

Gardner,

Thought you might find this 15 yr old young man’s music and mind amazing.

Mary-Kathryn at Surviving Winter emailed me the link to this story: “Driven to Music–A Prodigy at Age 15.” She was right about my response. Jay Greenberg is obviously an extraordinarily gifted young man.

There’s much to comment on here, but right now I have time for only a few passing observations.

The article says that Greenberg composes on computer. It gives no details, but I infer from what’s here that Greenberg not only writes the music on computer but plays the music back on the computer as well, just as I can write and read at the same time as I type these words on the screen. I’d be surprised if he didn’t, actually. Computers have made it possible for orchestral composers to realize their work, at least in a kind of rough sonic draft, with much greater ease than back in the day when all that they had was either a piano reduction or a hired orchestra, the latter at great expense and not at all conducive to any kind of editing or 50-bars-at-a-time spurts of inspiration of the kind Greenberg is prone to.

Later we learn that Greenberg can also write music on staff paper, so he’s obviously got his bases covered as far as technology is concerned.

I’m also struck by this bit:

Whose music does he like to hear? “In chronological order, Bach; Mozart; Beethoven; a little bit of Brahms, some of his later pieces, maybe; Prokofiev; Stravinsky; Bartok; some Copland; Ives. You can look at my iPod, there’s a lot of stuff in there.”

Yes: an iPod is a profile. That’s part of why it feels so intimate. Hey, mister, that’s me on that there iPod.

And amid all the other riches of this story, including a haunting photograph and a wonderful, uncanny self-awareness in which I detect depths it would be presumptuous to explore, I’ll close with a final highlight: the image of this young man shaking hands with the prodigy who played his violin concerto at Carnegie Hall: Joshua Bell, whose experiments in subway sublimity so captivated me and my Introduction to Literary Studies class last spring.

Listening to “Seven Stones” from Nursery Cryme as I write. Nearly undone. Don’t tell me beauty is only power in disguise.

May you be granted stamina, Jay.

In Acts of Meaning (1990), Jerome Bruner writes,

To be in a viable culture is to be bound in a set of connecting stories, connecting even though the stories may not represent a consensus.

When there is a breakdown in a culture (or even within a microculture like the family) it can usually be traced to one of several things. The first is a deep disagreement about what constitutes the ordinary and canonical in life and what the exceptional or divergent. And this we know in our time from what one might call the ‘battle of life-styles,’ exacerbated by intergenerational conflict. A second threat inheres in the rhetorical overspecialization of narrative, when stories become so ideologically or self-servingly motivated that distrust displaces interpretation, and ‘what happened’ is discounted as fabrication. On the large scale, this is what happenes under a totalitarian regime, and contemporary novelists of Central Eurpope have documented it with painful exquisiteness–Milan Kundera, Danila Kis, and many others. The same phenomenon expresses itself in modern bureaucracy, where all except the official story of what is happening is silenced or stonewalled. And finally, there is breakdown that results from sheer impoverishment of narrative resources–in the permanent underclass of the urban gthetto, in the second and third generation of the Palestinian refuges compound, in the hunger-preoccupied villages of semipermanently drought-stricken villages in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not that there is a total loss in putting story form to experience, but that the ‘worst scenario’ story comes so to dominate daily life that variation seems no longer to be possible.

These observations strike me as deeply insightful.

Too often within the academy I see interpretation displaced by distrust, precisely because of what Bruner intriguingly names the “rhetorical overspecialization of narrative.” I have seen less of that displacement in the community of teaching and learning technology practitioners than I have in my disciplinary community. I suppose some part of me has always hoped that the groups could find not only synergy but healing in each other’s company, and that we could help each other become our best selves. I suppose I still have that hope.