Today’s Social Research Colloquium at Mary Washington featured Tom Fallace of our Education Department talking about his research on John Dewey. I know a mere thimble-full about Dewey and was keen to learn more, and Tom certainly delivered: it was a fascinating and lucid talk and sparked many ideas and questions in my mind. The discussion was lively. I felt lucky to be there.

Afterwards I collared Tom for some more conversation, part of it about my experience with E. D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” project (thereby hangs a long tale), and part of it about Dewey and Tom’s work on his thought and influence. Tom said that Dewey would have been aghast at the way we use information technologies with no idea of where these technologies came from. For Dewey, ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny, and one could not use a hammer effectively without understanding something of the origins of that tool, the history of its refinements, and the techniques of its use through time. Of course I found myself in vigorous agreement with Dewey. (Tom may be a little skeptical of Dewey in this regard–further conversation is indicated.) I tried to explain some of my own work on the digital imagination, in very general terms, and I suddenly had a flash of insight that I wanted to record here. I didn’t articulate that insight in Tom’s presence–it was one of those bolts-from-the-blue that I couldn’t work into the conversation very easily–but the conversation was deep and intense and I’m confident the insight’s power was a direct result of our talk, even though it might not seem directly related.

So the insight? I was telling Tom that there was only a little bit more I wanted my students to know about their iPods, just enough that they wouldn’t think it was a magic box on which music resided and simply issued forth at the press of a button. (It occurs to me that I had echoes in my mind of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation about sufficiently advanced technologies seeming like magic, an observation that I was reminded of recently in a podcast featuring Rodney Brooks. But yes, I digress.) I wanted my students to know that there was a spinning disc in there, and that someone had decided to make the menu this way instead of that way, and so forth. Clearly I was working on the same ideas I’d elaborated in my digital imagination talk at JMU, and that I’d talked over with Alice and she’d taken up in her blog post here.

Then the flash came. I realized that without that little bit of extra knowledge of what was inside the box, and how human decisions had made the box and its innards and the ways in and out, students would never have these devices available to them as metaphors or analogies. A little knowledge of the genealogy and anatomy of the tool, a little understanding of the origins of that tool, the history of its refinements, and the techniques of its use through time, make that tool, that device, available to the imagination as a metaphor, and thus not as an empty user-endpoint but as one more link in a large web of further understanding and exploration and connection.

This, this is the reason we must not treat our computers as toasters. To follow Eliot’s dictum to “amalgamate new wholes” out of apparently disconnected experiences (reading Spinoza, falling in love, smelling cooking in the next room, as Eliot imagines), it’s vital to have something more than operational experience with on-buttons, GUIs, and DVD burners. It’s great when things “just work,” but make that “just work” too transparent and we lose our access to the metaphor-possibilities these new information technologies afford.

Lose those metaphor-possibilities and the jig is truly up.

These tools are almost nothing but metaphors, metaphor-makers, lodgings-for-metaphors.

Computers have become a major part of many human days. No part of any human day should be unavailable as metaphor.

Photo from A Different Voice, a thoughtful blog I discovered while searching for this image.

Here’s a poem I’ve treasured for thirty years. I remember vividly my first encounter with Hopkins, at the end of a Victorian Poetry class with Dillon Johnston at Wake Forest University. We’d gone through Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold–Arnold who left poetry for the world of literary criticism, alas–and at the end of the term Dr. Johnston had brought us to the most radical and experimental poet of them all: Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins’ ideas of “instress”–the vital, emphatic force that holds and moves all creation from within–and “inscape”–the irreducible uniqueness, the thisness of each created being–were deeply inspiring to a young man in whom a passion for poetry, some might say a passion for passion itself, was coming into its first full flowering. Dr. Johnston seemed to me to have a very deep, if somewhat guarded connection with Hopkins’ intensity. His explications of these poems were very influential for me. I subsequently did my M.A. thesis on Hopkins and music.

Hopkins’ poems can be difficult to understand. His own friends, one of them a future poet laureate of England, found them difficult. Hopkins did his best to clarify these works without watering them down. And now, 150 years later, we’re attuned to certain kinds of poetic experimentation that the late Victorians were not. Still, it may take two or three readings or listenings to begin to get what he’s saying. The rush of words and stresses in Hopkins’ poetry performs a specific mimetic function. Hopkins is not being difficult just for the sake of being difficult or precious. He’s trying hard, as all great poets do, to transcribe and enact the parts of experience that seem especially meaningful, where the rich implications of any event reveal not only the human activity of meaning-making but the essential meaningfulness of being itself.

Some notes about the poem may be helpful. Hopkins added the tag “To Christ Our Lord” to make it clear that the Windhover is a symbol or allegory for Christ. Whatever one’s own beliefs, the urgent particularity of Hopkins’ observations here have a special beauty and power, I think. Also, in my commentary following the poem, I neglected to define chevalier. A chevalier is a knight.

My recitation is in response to a request from Chris Gill, Chief Information Officer at Gonzaga University. Chris was one of my classmates at the 2005 Frye Leadership Institute. I’m over two years late responding to Chris’s kind request, but reconnecting with him at EDUCAUSE 2007 reminded me that I owed this colleague and friend a small token of my thanks for his support and encouragement over these years, years that have brought changes and challenges to both of us. So here you go, Chris. I hope you enjoy the results.

EDIT: As Jonathan’s comment indicates, I am mistaken in my commentary. The kestrel is a falcon, not a hawk. I regret the error, and I’ll fix the commentary as soon as I can. Thanks to Jonathan for that correction.

SECOND EDIT: Seems these things go in two-year cycles for me. It took two years for me to record this podcast, and then two more years to fix the commentary in response to Jonathan’s comment. But fixed it is. My thanks once again to Jonathan for setting me straight, even if the course correction took two more trips around the sun.

The John Milton Cottage, where Milton wrote the final parts of “Paradise Lost.”

From time to time, I teach a course called British Literature to 1800, usually with another professor or two so we can distribute expertise, keep the sections smaller, and do some tag-team lecturing at the Big Lecture Moments during the course. I’ve taught with some really smart folks who are also good performers, so the lectures are anything but dry. There’s also been quite a high standard for me to live up to as I write my own stuff.

Over the years I’ve tried to use my introductory Milton lecture to articulate some of what I find so compelling about his work, and to encourage students to engage with his work in ways they’ve probably not imagined. I start with what I hope is a vivid biographical narrative, during which I ask students to close their eyes and join Milton in his blindness. I then move to an overview of what I call Milton’s “energizing principles,” those things that sparked his imagination and creativity with unusual intensity. Every time I do this lecture I revisit the first stirrings of my own passion for Milton’s work. I feel that getting in touch with those moments, and remembering myself at 22 coming to all of this splendor fresh, gives the lecture an animation and urgency that sets it apart in my own work.

It’s been a few years since I’ve given this lecture, but the opportunity came again just last week, and this time I recorded it. I offer the results here, for your judgment and I hope your enjoyment. My thanks to the many inspiring students who called this out of me; they bear no responsibility for the errors, of course. And my thanks to John Milton, a fascinating, flawed, extraordinary human being who wrote prose and especially verse that still maddens me with wonder after all these years of working with it. I have not lived up to his rigorous example of total commitment, but I hope that at least a few of the things I say here might at least bring a smile to his lips, as a latter-day Miltonist from southwest Virginia does his best to take the measure of some part of his astonishing gift.

Thank you, John Milton.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (20.4MB)

A great day, beginning with the speakers’ breakfast, extending into an intensely inspiring opening session with Doris Kearns Goodwin (I read her Team of Rivals this summer–can’t recommend this book too highly), a great meeting devoted to online learning, at least two wonderful conversations in the afternoon … such a feast.

But aside from Goodwin, whose talk was really sui generis, the two high points today were Brian Hawkins’ valedictory address, “How I Learned To Drive,” and my dinner with my Frye 2005 colleagues this evening. Brian’s talk deserves a post of its own, and it will get it, too. But before I go to sleep tonight I’m driven to try to say something about this evening’s dinner. I’m tired and I won’t get this exactly right, but I want to blog it in the moment to see if the “iron-fresh odor of discovery” will emerge despite my fatigue.

My account begins and ends with a comment left by a Frye colleague on a blog post dated Thursday, June 16, 2005. This simple act has touched my heart in ways I cannot begin to describe. In this moment the long tail, the remembrance of things past, and the knowledge of a community still vital and essential, all combine to help me find what I never lost.

I know these words will be cryptic to some of my readers, and I am sorry for that, though I think that the 2005 blog post gives enough context for most to understand at least something of what I’m saying. Or trying to say. What I mean is that I’d forgotten I wrote that post, largely because I had a hard time dealing with the way in which that moment of utter clarity I had over two years ago, a clarity I have felt only a few times in my life, seemed to have turned to murk.

But of course it had not. Now I see that my own merciful former self wanted to tell me something tonight. Writing in that moment two years ago, that self committed its moment of clarity to me. And I could honor that commitment only when a colleague, a fellow time-traveler with the marvelous gift of encouragement, wrote a comment recalling this moment and looking out to the next ones.

The imperative was never clearer. Remember this. But to hear myself speak, I needed my gifted colleague.

One comment, one moment, one timely memorial. Thank you, Helen.

My fifth EDUCAUSE conference. Hard to believe. Anaheim, Denver, Orlando, Dallas, and now Seattle. Each year I’ve met extraordinary people and learned a ton.

This year is particularly poignant for me.

I’m on the program committee, which has given me the opportunity to see the event emerge from the ground up, and to work with creative, devoted colleagues to help make that happen. As this year’s EDUCAUSE unfolds, I have an even greater appreciation for all the work that goes into this event, especially all the ingenuity and dedication represented by the folks who are presenting.

I’ll be reconnecting with many of those extraordinary people I mentioned above, and renewing my own excitement and commitment to what I believe is our best hope for genuine educational transformation.

I’ll have dinner with many of my friends from Frye 2005, and draw encouragment, strength, and inspiration from that most marvelous cohort.

At the ELI Advisory Board meeting, I’ll have the chance to review this year’s accomplishments and contribute to the direction of this wonderful group as we move forward into our next phase (see below).

And I’ll have the chance to discuss the topic of “Millenial Faculty” with a small group of conference participants. Since 1990, when I first starting using these technologies as a college instructor, I’ve been hearing about how a generational change will bring the professoriate out of techno-reluctance into techno-fluency, and usher in a new age of IT integration into teaching and learning. Well, the “Space Invaders” generation has their Ph.D.’s and they’re applying for jobs. Has that shift occurred? If so, what are the ramifications of this change?

But the most poignant element of EDUCAUSE 2007, for me, will be a changing of the guard. Brian Hawkins is stepping down as President of EDUCAUSE after ten years of outstanding leadership. And Diana Oblinger, who has brought ELI through three amazing years of growth and innovation, is here for the last time as Vice-President, for she will become the new President of EDUCAUSE on January 1, 2008. Both Brian and Diana are extraordinary leaders. They are also exceptional mentors. It’s difficult for me to express my gratitude to both of them without leaking all over my keyboard and shorting something out. Suffice it to say that I try to channel them in everything I do as a leader and community-builder. I will always be their student.

I’ve been in many learning communities over the course of my career. The dream of a university, a place in which diversity and unity find a common purpose and, even more importantly, a common joy, has come true for me in a variety of ways, from those magic days in which a class meeting takes off for the stratosphere to those days when a conference presentation or even a chance conversation with a colleague propels my own learning into a higher orbit. To my great astonishment, however, it was not until 2003 that I began to see how all these many processes in higher education might be aligned, might realize the synergies that our civilization so desperately needs if we are to address our challenges successfully. If any proof is needed that information technologies are really civilization technologies, as fundamental and as exciting as reading and writing themselves, that proof is here at EDUCAUSE, in abundance.

I wish I’d found this community ten years ago. I’m very grateful and honored to be part of it now.

Just back from a driving marathon to take our son to Hampshire College for a College Day visit. Aside from a 2.5 hour wait to cross the Geo. Wash. Bridge northbound on Sunday, one brief lost moment in the Bronx (missed the southbound turn to the Geo. Wash. Bridge), and a lovely rear-ender when a small truck piled into us as we were trying to leave Hadley (no one was hurt, thank goodness), it was uneventful.

Both Ian and I were impressed by Hampshire, for a number of reasons I would like to explore here at some point. We also both had some concerns, I more than he. Worth exploring those too, particularly because, so far as I can tell, Hampshire was founded on a very brave, far-seeing attempt at real school. The attempt continues, forty years later, and it was interesting to see some of the history of that attempt firsthand.

Then we got home, and a brochure had come from Deep Springs College–another of the brave real school attempts I’ve thought about over the years. I remember getting a version of that brochure when I was a senior. I had tried out for the Telluride Program and failed. (I was a semi-finalist and got an interview with Robert Davidoff, a young asst. prof. of history at UVA; it was the first time I’d talked at length to a college professor–and thereby hangs another tale.) Still, Deep Springs was fascinating to me, for reasons I have trouble explaining, even to myself. The current brochure is even more interesting than the one I received thirty-three years ago.

All of which brings me to today’s punch line, which has something to do with the pleasures and perils of growing up as a faculty kid. At least waggish Ian, who wrote and posted this note on a door in our house, has still managed to get to the comic side of all these questions.

Those of us who work in technology and faculty development know that there are huge challenges if one wants to move beyond the “low-hanging fruit” (low-hanging? I practically jumped into the harvester’s lap) and get to truly systemic innovation and progress. The UMW Teaching, Learning, and Technology Fellows’ program is our effort to get to that kind of progress. Our 2006-2007 Fellows did some fine work, individually and as a cohort, ably led by John Morello and the DTLT team. Here’s a picture of the crew in the spring of 2006 as they began their efforts. A description of the program accompanies the photo. It was thrilling to see the results as the faculty shared them with us at Faculty Academy 2007. Marjorie Och’s (Art History) virtual Venice exhibit is beautiful and inspiring, and Marjorie’s blogs this year are a huge part of UMW Blogs’ success. Charlie Sharpless (Chemistry) persuaded his students that “Chem is Cool” with an imaginative re-thinking of the freshman chemistry lab. Steve Gallik (Biology), a longtime fellow-journeyer in teaching and learning technologies, continued his innovations in developing an online Cell Biology lab manual. Craig Vasey (Philosophy) put together an impressive online learning space to support his Logic course. For copyright reasons it’s password protected, but you can see the header here, and a few of Craig’s early thoughts here. Project leader John Morello even joined in the fun with his own “MiniTube” project.

Now a second season begins. The 2007-2008 Teaching, Learning, and Technology Fellows met two weeks ago for an introduction to Bluehost and blogging. Today we’re going deeper into the blogosphere with the University of Tennessee’s fantastically helpful “Anatomy of a Blog.”We’ll also touch on Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and RSS. The rest of the time we’ll make some space for shared reflection. (I’m always up for the conversation.)

Already there’s activity from this cohort. Sarah Allen (English, Linguistics, and Speech) has her blog up, educating us about Thoth (I’m a sucker for language-play), and I’m looking forward to her leading us into a deeper understanding of the way writing and rhetoric underlie the work we’re doing this year. Go Sarah! Steve Greenlaw (Economics), like last year’s Steve, is a longtime fellow traveler, and his blog is a treasure-trove for anyone trying to understand pedagogy, economics, or the process of inspiration and creativity. And the still-waters-run-deep winner is Donald Rallis (Geography), a colleague who started at UMW the same year I did, but whom I’ve never had the chance or pleasure to get to know. I am delighted to say that Donald too has the soul of a born blogger. The site he’s set up for his Geography 101 class is a stunner. I’ve already learned a ton from it, and I can’t wait to read what Donald writes in the weeks and months ahead. I hope Donald likes comments (what blogger doesn’t?), for he’s sure to get a lot of them Start anywhere–but here’s one of my favorites to date.

Watch this space for more dispatches as the Fellows program continues. And even more importantly, watch their spaces, and enjoy their stories–and of course, comment early and often.

I promise not to make all my blogs meta-blogs–but this story is too good to resist.

This morning I checked Bloglines, where I subscribe to my own blog (reassures me I’m there, don’t ask), my blog’s comments (quick way to see all the commentary), and a Technorati search on my blog’s URL that shows me incoming links. I can also see the incoming links from my blog’s dashboard, but the Bloglines subscription is more convenient for at-a-glance checking.

This morning’s quick check revealed an incoming link for a blog called Whole New Minds: English in the Flat WorldWhole New Minds: English in the Flat World. Intrigued as always by the fact someone’s linked to my blog (Brian Lamb calls this the “power of positive narcissism“), I clicked on the link and went to see the site. There I found that the incoming link was from Karen Stearns’ weblog for a course she’s teaching now at SUNY-Cortland. On this particular blog post, Karen had linked to my blog. It’s part of the magic of blogging that any such link generates what’s called a “trackback” or “pingback,” which alerts the linked-to blogger that someone’s linked to him or her. The result is a kind of distributed cognition, or what one might call a strongly implicit conversation between blogs/bloggers. I commented on Karen’s blog post (another kind of response, though more direct and less “distributeable”), and Karen emailed me very soon afterwards, surprised and delighted I had found her blog and wondering if a trackback had led me there. I emailed her back, briefly, with a promise to put the longer account in a blog post that would itself generate a trackback pointing to her original post. One of the very cool things about Web 2.0 stuff, and in fact about computers in general, is that explanations and demonstrations can often be accomplished in one creation. This is one reason I say that computers can be like poetry, for poetry also constitutes a uniquely blended instance of meaning and being. But I digress….

I remember very keenly the first time I was surprised by this kind of distributed cognition/conversation. Jon Udell noticed I’d linked to one of his blog posts, and began a distributed conversation with me that I noticed when he began linking to my blog. It’s a lovely symmetry that led eventually to our meeting face-to-face, and to a relationship that’s been one of my most vital sources of intellectual development over the last two-and-a-half years.

As it happens, though I’m not sure Karen intended this lovely bit of symmetry, the blog post in which Karen linked to me concerns James Gee’s idea of “shape-shifting portfolio people,” and as you can see from the comment I left, I quickly found my way via Google Books to an excerpt from Gee’s book on, yes, wait for it: “Situated Language And Learning: A Critique Of Traditional Schooling,” which discusses many of the very matters exemplifed by what just happened when Karen linked to my blog.

Recursion, and spiralling upward. Is it any wonder I get enthusiastic about this stuff? Oh yes, and the moral of the story: link out to other bloggers early and often. Something about casting your bread upon the waters….