A few days ago, Steve Greenlaw sent me to Will Richardson’s excellent PowerPoint presentation on new Internet literacies in the Web 2.0 world. As is often the case with me these days, I’m just now moving from skimming to perusing. (Often this move accompanies a desire to procrastinate on some other job–but I digress.) The presentation is excellent, hitting all the right bases, pressing all the right emphases, when all of a sudden the bright line shines as I read this slide:

“Natives need immigrants.”

In one sentence, Will articulates something so profound that my head spins (and my heart leaps up). Digital natives, those who have grown up in the Web, need the strategies of defamiliarization, wonder, and revision that only an immigrant can bring. An immigrant, not an outsider: those who emigrate are committed to a new culture, but they also have a “beginner’s mind” that allow them to see gaps and tensions and undiscovered treasures that the native’s mind has long been accustomed to filling in, dismissing, or overlooking.

Now this metaphor leads us into even deeper waters. One of the things education must convey to students is the ability to make oneself an immigrant, to step back and defamiliarize the context in which one operates, but use that defamiliarization not as a gesture or location of cool, critical, detached, and potentially arrogant superiority (which is why I like Shklovsky better than Brecht and the verfremdungseffekt) but as a stage on the journey to even greater intimacy, community, collaboration, and effectiveness. Perhaps I am unfair to Brecht, but the role of the affections in his thought has never been clear to me.

The Russian formalists, including Victor Shklovsky (cited above), articulate not only a theory of art but one pole of the educational continuum: to “make the stone stonier,” as my friend Terryl Givens was so fond of quoting. Or to pull another Shklovsky quotation from the Wikipedia article:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.

I do not accept Shklovsky’s remarks as definitive of art, mostly because I believe art can convey knowledge, not just perception. Or maybe it’s that I believe communicated perception is a form of knowledge. But I do think that a move toward defamiliarization, an unknowing, is always a part of what we feebly call “critical thinking.”

Not just skepticism in its usual connotations, for ardent commitment has its own defamiliarization to offer as well. Or as Van Morrison once sang, “I’m just a stranger in this world.”

Read all about it. I’ll be following Steve’s experiments very closely, and I hope you will too. I’m also curious about how information technologies might further his aims. The automated quizzes are a good start. Visit his blog, offer encouragement, and share strategies if you’re of a mind.

In an effort to discourage vandalism, Wikipedia will soon begin to freeze pages with “stable contents … whose quality is undisputed.” Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, revealed his plans in an interview with a German newspaper, reported in turn by Computerworld.

Wales’ comments focus on the issue of credibility, a reasonable concern, although it should be noted that his plans trade one form of credibility for another. As it now stands, Wikipedia’s credibility rests in part on the commitment of those who combat the vandalism, fix the pages, and contribute to its content. That form of credibility, however, relies on some fault tolerance and patience among users. If one encounters vandalism on a page and is annoyed, as Wales fears, Wikipedia’s credibility does suffer for a moment, but the larger credibility of a culture working together to fix broken windows is not necessarily impaired. On the other hand, if the contents of a page are frozen, one will always find the page in a credible state, but that credibility no longer testifies to the larger faithfulness of the culture that supports the experiment.

It’s a classic dilemma. I’m not surprised Wikipedia has at last decided it needs to pull back on its openness. But I am disappointed, especially that it’s come so soon, and I hope that there are no commercial factors driving Wales’ decision.

David Pogue notes that water cooler talk these days is as likely to center on new Web content as on TV shows or movies, and he links to a CNET story on the “top ten goofy Web cultural phenomena.” Looks like my Gilligan’s Island analogy wasn’t so far off after all.

CNET’s list is a strange one in many respects–I’d like to see one compiled by a teenager, and I’m not sure I agree with their implicit definition of “meme”–but the point is worth making nevertheless: more and more of our shared experience comes from the Web, and whether it’s good, bad, or ugly, it’s ours.

So let’s make some good stuff, and teach our students to do the same. They’ll teach us, too, which suits me fine.

My boss Chip German and I have had many enthusiastic conversations about serendipity, and about the possibilities of making a methodology of serendipity by using the speed and connectedness of our online world in constructing teaching and learning spaces and processes.

Today I’m getting my daily dose of inspiration from Jon Udell in a fantastic post called “Blog Biology” (the cell metaphor leads to a slight awkwardness about touching extrusions, but that’s of little moment here), and what do I see but the phrase “manufactured serendipity.” Plato would be proud: memes antedate their transmission, or perhaps this is a distributed meme that a certain cultural moment brings into focus in a new metameme. Not only that, but the phrase in “Blog Biology” is itself a link (thus enacting something of its own meaning–a hyperpoem?) that takes me to a long and early (2002) essay on blogs called “Manufactured Serendipity” on Sam Ruby’s “Intertwingly” blog. Sam writes,

Jon Udell labels this phenomenon, manufactured serendipity. Serendipity is all about making fortunate discoveries by accident. You can’t automate accidental discoveries, but you can manufacture the conditions in which such events are more likely to occur.

As you can see, Sam links “manufactured serendipity” back to an essay by Jon Udell, which is apparently where the phrase began its life, at least in this particular conversation.

What does this cross-linking mean?

I don’t think it’s merely an example of A-list bloggers reinforcing each other’s Technorati profiles and perceived authority by obsessively linking to each other.

I do think it’s an example of a persistent conversation that tries to document both process and product, and thus blurs the distinction usefully.

I think it’s an interesting way of taking the reader through the history of the unfolding drama of an instance of manufactured serendipity that retains what Frost calls “the iron-fresh scent of discovery” in his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.”

I think it’s a way of demonstrating and empowering a long personal tail (wow–and I thought “contacting extrusions” was a chancy metaphor) by enabling a kind of recursion with one’s own earlier and still vital thoughts, something like the spiraling upward that Jerome Bruner uses as a figure for education. (A long pigtail? Someone call the metaphor police, quick.) One is constantly going back over the same ground, intellectually speaking. Progress comes not from novelty, but from altitude and perspective–and from the trickiest form of altitude, the kind that allows for up-close and far-back perspectives simultaneously. That’s apparently what Bruner means by narrative thinking vs. paradigmatic thinking, though I do not know whether or not he envisions their marriage as I do.

EVDB is The Events and Venues Database, and it’s a Flickr/Furl/Del.icio.us/blogosphere kind of a thing. The idea is that you’ll find more events you’re interested in, and get timely reminders about those events, more consistently and effectively if we’re all keeping track of cool stuff together. I just finished doing post-production audio on an IT Conversations “Opening Move with Scott Mace” interview with Brian Dear, the founder and CEO of EVDB; you should be able to hear that piece sometime in the next few days.

If we’re all keeping track of cool stuff together, perhaps there’ll be less time for doing ugly stuff to each other. I’m reminded of the urban legend (or maybe it’s true) that no crimes were committed in New York City when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.

Can’t hurt to try.

Ernie posts today on a recent and very disturbing NY Times article. The first paragraph of the op-ed Ernie quotes is positively Swiftian in the hilarity and accuracy of its sarcasm, and the rest of the post notes a ray of hope. Don’t miss it!

So much research, so little time: My Odeo Channel (odeo/52b27e7ec884eae7).

Thanks for listening.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (48.5KB)

Don’t know why I’m just hearing about this, but today’s NY Times (registration required) reports on a free Second Life service called “Campus: Second Life” that allows educators to build virtual learning spaces that last for a semester. Obviously the desire for persistence will drive users to paid subscriptions, but the trial edition seems fair and a good opportunity, as well as an effective marketing strategy. Thinking about it also makes me think about how important persistence is to real school, even as it embraces serendipity.

Thanks to Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed for linking to another NY Times story that led me to this one. (Department of Compulsive Citation … amazing how grad school can prepare one for the blogosphere, if it doesn’t kill off the impulse to write….)

Fred asks where Lewis makes the distinction between Bards and Actors with regard to the recitation of poetry. As quoting from memory is a hazard with me, I went to find the original source, and discovered that that distinction is between Minstrels and Actors. Close … ah well.

The citation is Lewis’s essay entitled “Metre,” which I have in a volume called Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge UP, 1969). I had hoped to find it reprinted in the recent (2002, paperback) essay collection Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, but it isn’t, at least not in the British edition (HarperCollins). We really do need a uniform scholarly edition of the complete works–but I digress. Here’s the relevant passage from the Cambridge UP volume:

Unfortunately, even after we have ruled out gross barbarisms, there remain different and defensible ways of reading poetry aloud and they do not coincide with differences of opinion about metre. The two main schools may be called Minstrels and Actors. They differ about the proper relations between the noises they make and something else; that something else being the thing we are looking for, namely metre. Minstrels, singing or intoning, make their utterance conform to this, leaving you to imagine the rhythm and tempo which the words would have in ordinary speech. Actors give you that rhythm and tempo out loud, leaving you to imagine the metre. Yet both may be fully agreed as to what the metre is. They differ by deliberately making, or refusing to make, an imaginary archetype or paradigm actual. This paradigm is metre. Scansion is the conformity, made audible by Minstrels and concealed by Actors, of the individual line to this paradigm. (280)

In ADAD 16 (below) I attempt to move back along that continuum in the direction of the Minstrels.

I may simply claim a scholar’s prerogative and change Lewis’s terms to what my faulty memory originally produced, since the word “minstrels” does not connote the same thing in American English as it does in other English-speaking cultures.